Personification of the state of California that’s autistic and constantly talking about the things he knows to cause cancer

thejohnsu:

The California state flag features this terrified bear who I cannot get out of my mind.

I simply cannot see how this Supreme Court upholds anything California is claiming to do to be a “refuge” from red states re: abortion and trans kids as consistent with the Full Faith and Credit Clause, long-arm doctrine, or hell, the Interstate Compact Clause

If you were just going off the state’s reputation, you would not guess the two postwar Californian presidents were Nixon and Reagan

h-dgp:

California is weird cause like, it’s California! And yet more than anywhere the deportation of its inner-city black surplus population to rural prisons was explicitly the basis of its politics for decades.

California politics make most sense when you understand the state understands itself as the shining future as seen from 1974

Xavier Becerra at HHS, like Hilda Solis at Labor before him, is about installing a good state party machine loyalist atop one of the most machine-potential departments and is mostly significant for how it affects California politics – as he was state AG this opens up a new statewide office for climbers.

With a huge population, a term-limited state legislature, only two senators, one set of constitutional offices, and waiting lists for every federal district, the musical-chairs aspect of just providing enough places for ambitious pols to go is getting to be an important way the national Dems service the state party.

In theory, the California Dems should be the party of everybody. And, they are, that’s kind of the issue, they’re the party of Scott Weiner and of everyone who hates Scott Weiner. Keeping promises to retirees that they can always live like it’s 1966, established yuppies that they can always live like it’s 1978, immigrants that they can always live like it’s 1995 (Texas took over the promise that the white get-er-done class could always live like it was 1984)

Meanwhile no one really wants to live in 2020, but addressing that threatens to upset the state Dems in a way that the national party sees no advantage in over a stable one-party state

In defense of SB827 being shot down in committee, “detached single-family housing in sunny, leafy, small town-like neighborhoods with middle class-level services and amenities” was very explicitly the California Dream, in its postwar boom the state legitimated itself as a settled core of the US on the promise that every vector of public agency would be directed towards creating that experience, and the established recalcitrants are just holding the state to that promise

furtho:

Edward Weston’s Tomato Field, 1937 (via here)  

This is Ron Unz reposting a thorough 1999 article of his about the development of racial politics in 1990s California, framed around 3 high-profile, racially relevant ballot initiative campaigns.

It’s fascinating because it very clearly foreshadows and leads into where we are now, right down to its terminal predictions (the attempt to put racial issues in politics to rest and realign around a cross-racial citizenship faces difficulties and cannot be assumed, there is a real risk the system will continue on current logic with whites developing a conscious political identity in response), and yet as Unz depicts them - and he was in the weeds here - the actual motivations of the players involved are near-completely incomprehensible from a modern standpoint, a measure of how fast things change.

That is one critique I have, on how fast things change, Unz puts the 1992 “Rodney King” riots as the moment that put Californian whites on notice that their comfortable paradise was threatened by racial unrest.

Now, I really do want to emphasize the scale of this shift - as I’ve mentioned before, California during most of the 20th century was a white middle class bastion of conservative Republicanism. For all its Summer of Love, hippie, surfer girl, Black Panther mystique, it was a reliable Republican presidential vote from the end of the FDR-Truman New Deal Dynasty all the way up through Bush the Elder in ‘88 (excepting the Goldwater/Johnson landslide).

Like, if you’ve got a modern sense of what “California” and “Los Angeles” mean, that’s a bit jarring, and the shift was jarring as hell to live through. This explains Steve Sailer. If you’ve ever wondered what explains Steve Sailer, this explains Steve Sailer.

But, for all that I find Unz’s depiction of the ’92 riots as an end to innocence a bit wishful. For one, the Watts Riots of 1965, Hunter’s Point ’66. But closer at hand than that, I can off the top of my head think of several prominent artistic depictions of a racially tense California that were produced just prior to this, indicating that the tensions were on thinking people’s minds.

There’s White Men Can’t Jump, which basically shared Unz’s “no illusions, but this might just work out” tack, released almost exactly a month before the riots. Falling Down, an elegy for white middle class LA, was released almost a year afterwards on an accelerated production schedule but still written prior.

Closest to my heart, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash is a fantastic projection of period SoCal, gated communities and franchised everything, and its looming specter of the “The Raft” threatening to arrive and swamp the locals is drawn partly from the Mexican immigrant wave that usually gets dated contemporary to the ’84 Summer Olympics, and partly from the Asian “boat people” refugee wave all the way back in the 1970s.

So, maybe up to that point it registered as “nothing LAPD nightsticks can’t solve”, but the idea that racial tensions weren’t noticed as a threat strikes me as a bit of a stretch.

(corrected from previous)

I just got that

theskybehindtheflag:

nemfrog:

Recreation and camping areas in California. Ford treasury of station wagon living. 1957-58.

It’s really weird how this map shows US 91 just sort of ending in the desert, when wikipedia documents that it went all the way down to Long Beach. This just came to my attention because as this map is constructed, there was no direct federal route between LA and Vegas, which is again like really weird 

There was a big renumbering of highway routes in California in 1964 to deal with the way that a history of road construction by multiple authorities left absurd disjunctions and redundancies between named, numbered, and natural through-routes.

I spend a lot of time noticing how everything in Los Angeles is exactly like it’s stereotyped to be, so let’s take a special break to note something that isn’t like I was told: the DMV.

I was afraid of this one. Because everything you know about the world and haven’t directly experienced comes from people living in Los Angeles, and the DMV as portrayed on TV and movies is terrible. And even in real life: people were like “oh, go to AAA instead of the DMV anytime you can, they’re awful!” and “oh, make a reservation if you have to go to the DMV, it’s awful!”

The only thing I heard that’s held true is that it’s largely staffed by women in their 30s and 40s.

I heard that they were apathetic and brusque and slow in processing your affairs, not at all, they’re friendly and hella efficient, though I do take the effort to know what I’m doing before I show up, so that probably helps.

I heard that they would give you the wrong form and then cycle you through the line several times, that they would be sticklers about ridiculous things on filling out the forms and then cycle you through the line several times, quite the opposite. They’ve always given me the right forms, and when I’m confused about something or make an error or can’t fill in a blank they’ve freely volunteered that oh, this isn’t necessary in your case, and ah, don’t worry about that I got it, and oh hm, I can fill in this information that you didn’t have at hand.

I heard that on top of working slow (which they don’t), they would close down and take breaks on strict schedule and leave everyone waiting in the lurch - actually they just stop taking new people through the inprocessing line but stay around until everyone there’s been taken care of.

Also you can make appointments if you want and even if you don’t their auto-estimate waits (available online or as tickers on site) are rarely more than an hour and I’ve always experienced that as an overestimate by half.