Despite Lockdowns, L.A. Has Worst Year in Decades for Smog
Los Angeles has suffered its worst year in decades for smog and air quality, despite coronavirus lockdowns and stay-at-home orders that kept many residents off the roads.
Heat waves and wildfires, combined with other natural factors, turned the air a yellow hue that hearkened back to the bad old days of the 1990s, when the air in L.A. was practically visible.
The Los Angeles Times reported Sunday: “In all, this year there were 157 bad air days for ozone pollution — the invisible, lung-searing gas in smog — across the vast, coast-to-mountains basin spanning Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. That’s the most days above the federal health standard since 1997.”
Ironically, the Times noted, it is precisely because of the shutdowns that air pollution has become worse, thanks to “non-traffic emissions” like volatile organic compounds in disinfectant, and quirks in atmospheric chemistry:
It is also possible that the response to the pandemic altered the mix of pollutants that generate ozone, which is not emitted directly, but forms when tailpipe emissions and other pollutants react in the heat and sunlight.
Reducing ozone requires carefully balanced cuts in two main smog-forming pollutants — combustion gases called nitrogen oxides and chemical vapors and solvents called volatile organic compounds — and regulators have long known that cutting them in the wrong proportion could bring no ozone reductions at all or even increase smog levels.
The coronavirus shutdowns provided a rare experiment in what happens when cars stop emitting pollutants. While many environmentalists hailed the opportunity to restore nature, by midyear scientists were already noticing increases in air pollution in some cities, and only modest reductions in others.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
LEGALS FLEE THE LA RAZA WELFARE STATE!
MEXIFORNIA: The Globalist Democrat
Party’s Vision of America
Missouri Senator Claire McCaskillhas identified California Senator
Kamala Harris as the party leader on issues of immigration and race. Harris
wants a moratorium on construction of
new immigration-detention facilities in favor of the old “catch and release” policy for illegal aliens, and has
urged a shutdown of the government rather than compromise on mass amnesty.
Migrant enclaves already are at the
top of the U.S. lists for bad places to live - 10 of the 50 worst
places in America to live according to this list are in California, and all of
them are famous for their illegal populations. MONICA SHOWALTER
*
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-rich-flee-bankrupt-california-who.html
*
California—not Mississippi, New
Mexico, or West Virginia—has the highest poverty rate in the United States.
According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure—which accounts
for the cost of housing, food, utilities, and clothing, and which includes
noncash government assistance as a form of income—nearly one out of four
Californians is poor. Kerry Jackson
*
California’s de facto status as a
one-party state lies at the heart of its poverty problem. With a permanent
majority in the state senate and the assembly, a prolonged dominance in the
executive branch, and a weak opposition, California Democrats have long been
free to indulge blue-state ideology while paying little or no political price.
The state’s poverty problem is unlikely to improve while policymakers remain
unwilling to unleash the engines of economic prosperity that drove California
to its golden years. Kerry Jackson
*
As Breitbart News reported, if chain migration is not ended — as President Donald Trump
has demanded — the U.S. electorate will forever be changed, with between seven
to eight million new foreign-born individuals being eligible to vote because of
chain migration, and overall, an additional 15 million new foreign-born voters.
*
No Justice for Taxpaying
Americans
By Howie
Carr
But the real double
standard kicks in when the undocumented Democrat gets to the courtroom. A
taxpaying American can only dream of the kid-gloves treatment these Third World
fiends get.
*
Illegal
aliens continue overwhelming the state, draining California’s already depleted
public services while endangering our lives, the rule of law, and public safety
for all citizens. Arthur Schaper
*
The costs of illegal immigration are
being carefully hidden by Democrats. MONICA SHOWALTER
*
The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California
spends $22 billion on government services for illegal aliens, including
welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs. STEVEN BALDWIN
*
Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a
Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for
murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles
County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s
largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens.
Is
Feudalism Our Future?
It’s
increasingly clear that one-party polities are corrupt, badly managed and serve
the interests only of those at the top and their courtiers. I think that if Biden
and Harris win, the entire country will devolve to a kingdom
of state and regional duchies composed
of often semi-hereditary rulers in the pay of the rich, donor
class, the clerisy (media scribblers, complaisant judicial appointees and
academic rent seekers who promote favored policies and shut out the
dissenters), an impoverished, smaller, and powerless middle class and a vast
layer of muzzled, docile poor serfs. They will rule by fiat (often
inconsistently and illogically) as they have been in dealing with COVID-19. Because they can, the
Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding.
In
a lengthy essay, Michael Anton details why he thinks the leftist
dream (which, in essence is a feudal form of tyranny) is within reach if Trump
loses. I urge you all to read in its entirety this thoughtful
article at your leisure. At best, I can only highlight some of the many salient
points he makes.
1. Since the 1960s policies and
practices have enriched the ruling class and “erode our natural and constitutionally
guaranteed rights and liberties” as they degraded our culture and dishonored
our heritage.
2. At present the office of the
presidency is seriously weaker than the unitary executive described in the
Constitution intended as an entrenched bureaucracy undermines, flouts and
disobeys the president at every turn if he dares to advance policies “unpopular
with the deep state.”
3. The benign phrase
“public-private partnership” is no less than “the use of state power to serve
private interests” and the relationship is one in which the senior partner is
always big business.
4. Congress, he argues “is a
joke.” Our government is run by “The cogs and lickspittles in the bureaucracy, led
by a small elite in corporations, above all in Big Tech and finance, will
determine all important policies, foreign and domestic.”
5. The COVID lockdowns and mandates
engineered by governors and mayors without laws to permit them based on
“expert” lies continue even as we know the virus is definitely not the plague
we were told it would be.
He
argues that should Trump lose we can expect increasingly anti-democratic
governance “committed to social engineering and grievance politics” and a
continued undermining of virtue and promotion of vice.
Anton
talks about the undermining of the right to self-defense and the outrageous
prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse, who in Kenosha did just that against three
attackers whose marauding had been encouraged by the Wisconsin governor’s
and local mayor’s refusal to enforce the laws to maintain order.
Attorney
Lin Wood, who successfully sued on behalf of Robert Jewell and Nick
Sandmann and who this week volunteered to
represent Kyle Rittenhouse (the hero of Kenosha) for
defamation says we are facing a revolution and need to prepare ourselves for
the fight.
Lin Wood @LLinWood
(1) Republicans are talking “policy differences” while focusing on upcoming
election. They are not taking the current situation serious or they are just
plain stupid. They need to face truth that our country is under attack.
(2) The
former President, Barack Obama, is calling for sustained protests. The leader
of the resistance movement, Hillary Clinton, is saying that we should not
accept the results of the next election.
(3) The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is describing our President,
@realDonaldTrump, as an enemy of the state. Many radical members of Congress
are openly calling for the overthrow of our government.
(4) 1 + 1 + 1 = Revolution.
#FightBack
5:55 AM · Aug 29, 2020
The Duchy of Newsom as the Template of the New Order
No
better example of what Anton describes as our future can I find than the
sad state of California under the governorship of Gavin Newsom. I’ve written
elsewhere of the Green New Deal disaster he helped birth and which now plunges
much of his state into darkness and misery.
Victor David Hanson has written extensively on
what has brought his home state so rich in natural resources to its knees.
Here’s but one of his latest reports.
It begins (and then extensively documents): “Power outages, fires,
water shortages, rising taxes, crumbling and congested highways, dismal
schools, lawlessness…”
At
the Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins, Jr. notes that
California politicians obsess about things like “climate change” they are
powerless to do anything about while ignoring serious problems they could do
something about if only they had the skills and will to govern. In that
one-party state there is simply no accountability for failure of vision and
execution:
Unfortunately, the people running the state,
including Joe Biden’s prospective veep, have been mostly meme-chasing, pose-striking
calculators. Their only career plan: nurse their standing with Hollywood green
activists, trial lawyers and public-sector unions. In a one-party state,
there is no serious clash of policy prescriptions. That’s how Kamala Harris
could reach middle age with a giant vacancy in her résumé where one would
normally find some connection to policy ideas.
If the state is to dig out of its deepening hole,
it will need something else. It will need, you know, ideas. In fact, only a
revolution of ideas can save it from the path it’s on. And the first idea is
easy to see. The state will have to wake up from the sheer ludicrousness of
devoting so much of its politics to a problem its politics can’t fix at the
expense to those it can.
So
why do the citizens of blue hells not rebel? That is the question -- Anton and
Hanson and Jenkins, like so many of us, know they must.
My
online friend “The Infamous Ignatz” sees it in psychological terms:
I don't think the people living in urban blue
hells want to live in hell, but irrationality on a mass scale is made up of
millions of little individual irrationalities collectivized.
An irrational person has a very, very difficult
time choosing the rational option because it involves so many self-negating
decisions, not least of which is stopping the magical thinking and the blaming
of others for the problem.
That's why I equate irrational society with
personality disorders. It's not that people in urban hellscapes aren't
miserable, they just don't see any way out. For those outside looking in,
American cities' electoral habits fit Einstein's apocryphal definition of
insanity better than anything I can think of.
What makes it even more incurable and persistent
is the very people the voters think they are hiring as their therapists not
only come themselves from the ranks of the disordered but they have very
powerful incentives making sure the patient never gets well.
Maybe
that’s part of it. I do think that the movement in the direction of feudal,
tyrannical governance is being aided by the influx of millions of illegal
immigrants from places where this kind of government is the norm. It gained
force when civics education was dropped in schools in favor of less significant
subjects, and the hollowing out of our higher education
institutions, including law schools, which since the 1960s have
increasingly become there-oughta-be-a-law schools which encourage future judges
and law clerks to imagine themselves as legislators and executives. Nor can we
forget the role being played by the tech giants, who are using IT as a weapon
for social control and the destruction of privacy. In any event, November will
have us in the fight of our lives. Be prepared.
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