More California Dreamin’

It’s not enough that California starts a high-speed rail project that will never be completed and that almost no one will ride even if it was, or that it wants to make California into the nation’s largest used car market by banning the sale of new gasoline powered cars in the year 2035. Now the geniuses who run the state think Californians should pay reparations for slavery:

California task force will consider paying reparations for slavery

With Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature, California became the first state government in the country on Wednesday to adopt a law to study and develop proposals for potential reparations to descendants of enslaved people and those impacted by slavery. . .

The new law creates a task force to recommend appropriate remedies to the state Legislature and determine who should be eligible to receive compensation, which advocates hope will become a model in a country where movements to make amends for centuries of slavery have failed to gain traction at the federal level.

California was never a slave state, having been admitted to the union as a free state in 1850. Slavery had been outlawed in its territorial constitution, and slavery was prohibited by Mexican law prior to California’s accession to the U.S. A number of slaves were brought to California during the gold rush years by migrants from the south and held in bondage against the law, which means at most that descendants might have a private claim for restitution (leaving aside the immense legal hurdles to such a claim after 170 years). Someone will need to explain why today’s citizens of a state that was always a free state should be on the hook for reparations, although if the commission concludes that Democrats should pay reparations—as they should—I might support it.

Moving on, normally I wouldn’t post up a gratuitous headline like this except perhaps on Saturday morning: “California police bust ‘cult’ party with 4-foot model vagina.” But then there’s this detail buried down in the article:

Just hours later, police found another group of 60 people listening to the climate change recordings huddled around the giant facsimile of a vagina in a dock building nearby.

The group was listening to recordings about climate change and Mother Earth while assembled around a 4 ft. model of a vagina,” Richmond Police Chief Al Walle wrote on Facebook. “The group was identified, warned for trespassing, and escorted out of Point Molate.”

Walle said the second group had no affiliation but instead was “some type of cult gathering,” without giving specifics. Inside the dock building, police “located some items (that won’t be further described) that led the officers to believe this was some type of occult group or activist group since this event was in close proximity to the Chevron refinery,” the police department said.

Or, as we call it in California, Monday.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses