And how many of those crimes were committed by illegal Mexicans?

A Cali ex-pat tells me it is so bad that Compton has gone from black to Latino in the last few years.

Sounds about right.

My job takes me to cement plants in Cali daily. Not a single plant hasn't either laid people-off or is 'temporarily' idled.

California's government should be placed in a burlap bag with some heavy rocks and thrown in a very deep lake.

You get what you vote for. Hopefully the limo-liberals will sink soon.

Too bad the Obamination will bail them out.

Remember too that California is the movie making capitol of the world (or maybe Bombay?) and I haven't gone to the kind of movies they now make for over a year. and before that, maybe, at most, twice a year. Their TV industry is pumping out some of the grossest garbage imaginable I say, let it sink now before the "big one" hits.

Juxtapose !! The catalyst, the two by four over the head that drops the dots. The dots that need to be connected in order to bring society to it's senses.

Sooner or later, all socialists, even the ones with the best of intentions, run out of other people's money to spend.

Well with no DNA tests, there'll be no convictions, no convictions the prisons will soon be empty; empty prisons and the empty Sheriff's offices can be closed and converted into the concrete structures California used to require.
They won't need any new concrete.
Viii- ola !

Why don't they just make rape and sexual assault illegal and look for a company with a larger limestone quarry?

Los Angeles County Sheriffs Dept

..."thousands of rape and sexual assault cases"

From *ONE* County !!!!!!!!!!

What the hell's going on down there!

I thought Toronto was bad.

Why don't they just make all those accused of rape and sexual assault break rocks at the limestone quarry.

Just think how "earth friendly" and carbon free that would be. That's if the prisoners don't breathe or fart.

Serious troubles brewing in Cali.

SEE! SEE! Do you see why my state can't balance a budget. The word "priority" is either completely unknown or means something completely different to the politicians.

Government places unreasonable demands on private company - private company shuts down - government no longer recieves tax dollars from former company - government can't afford policing...

That about right Kate?

I don't think Californians have anything to worry about. The state is now in such bad shape that Even Illegal Immigrants Don't Want to Live In California Anymore

Remember in the olden days when California was fun and hip!
Now the place is ruled by snarky, finger waving scolds.

I guess the Greens don't know that tons and tons of cement are used to make foundations for their windmills. So eventually CA will have to get all of its concrete from out-of-state, too, just like most of their electricity. Is it possible to have schadenfreude in sunny California?

I think I picked this up at WWT
In the early nineteenth century, the British colonized Southeast Africa. The native Xhosa resisted, but suffered repeated and humiliating defeats at the hands of British military forces. The Xhosa lost their independence and their native land became an English colony. The British adopted a policy of westernizing the Xhosa. They were to be converted to Christianity, and their native culture and religion was to be wiped out. Under the stress of being confronted by a superior and irresistible technology, the Xhosa developed feelings of inadequacy and inferiority. In this climate, a prophet appeared.

In April of 1856, a fifteen-year-old girl named Nongqawuse heard a voice telling her that the Xhosa must kill all their cattle, stop cultivating their fields, and destroy their stores of grain and food. The voice insisted that the Xhosa must also get rid of their hoes, cooking pots, and every utensil necessary for the maintenance of life. Once these things were accomplished, a new day would magically dawn. Everything necessary for life would spring spontaneously from the earth. The dead would be resurrected. The blind would see and the old would have their youth restored. New food and livestock would appear in abundance, spontaneously sprouting from the earth. The British would be swept into the sea, and the Xhosa would be restored to their former glory. What was promised was nothing less than the establishment of paradise on earth.

Nongqawuse told this story to her guardian and uncle, Mhlakaza. At first, the uncle was skeptical. But he became a believer after accompanying his niece to the spot where she heard the voices. Although Mhlakaza heard nothing, he became convinced that Nongqawuse was hearing the voice of her dead father, and that the instructions must be obeyed. Mhlakaza became the chief prophet and leader of the cattle-killing movement.

News of the prophecy spread rapidly, and within a few weeks the Xhosa king, Sarhili, became a convert. He ordered the Xhosa to slaughter their cattle and, in a symbolic act, killed his favorite ox. As the hysteria widened, other Xhosa began to have visions. Some saw shadows of the resurrected dead arising from the sea, standing in rushes on the river bank, or even floating in the air. Everywhere that people looked, they found evidence to support what they desperately wanted to be true.

The believers began their work in earnest. Vast amounts of grain were taken out of storage and scattered on the ground to rot. Cattle were killed so quickly and on such an immense scale that vultures could not entirely devour the rotting flesh. The ultimate number of cattle that the Xhosa slaughtered was 400,000. After killing their livestock, the Xhosa built new, larger kraals to hold the marvelous new beasts that they anticipated would rise out of the earth. The impetus of the movement became irresistible.

The resurrection of the dead was predicted to occur on the full moon of June, 1856. Nothing happened. The chief prophet of the cattle-killing movement, Mhlakaza, moved the date to the full moon of August. But again the prophecy was not fulfilled.

The cattle-killing movement now began to enter a final, deadly phase, which its own internal logic dictated as inevitable. The failure of the prophecies was blamed on the fact that the cattle-killing had not been completed. Most believers had retained a few cattle, chiefly consisting of milk cows that provided an immediate and continuous food supply. Worse yet, there was a minority community of skeptical non-believers who refused to kill their livestock.

The fall planting season came and went. Believers threw their spades into the rivers and did not sow a single seed in the ground. By December of 1856, the Xhosa began to feel the pangs of hunger. They scoured the fields and woods for berries and roots, and attempted to eat bark stripped from trees. Mhlakaza set a new date of December 11 for the fulfillment of the prophecy. When the anticipated event did not occur, unbelievers were blamed.

The resurrection was rescheduled yet again for February 16, 1857, but the believers were again disappointed. Even this late, the average believer still had three or four head of livestock alive. The repeated failure of the prophecies could only mean that the Xhosa had failed to fulfill the necessary requirement of killing every last head of cattle. Now, they finally began to complete the killing process. Not only cattle were slaughtered, but also chickens and goats. Any viable means of sustenance had to be destroyed. Any cattle that might have escaped earlier killing were now slaughtered for food.

Serious famine began in late spring of 1857. All the food was gone. The starving population broke into stables and ate horse food. They gathered bones that had lay bleaching in the sun for years and tried to make soup. They ate grass. Maddened by hunger, some resorted to cannibalism. Weakened by starvation, family members often had to lay and watch dogs devour the corpses of their spouses and children. Those who did not die directly from hunger fell prey to disease. To the end, true believers never renounced their faith. They simply starved to death, blaming the failure of the prophecy on the doubts of non-believers.

By the end of 1858, the Xhosa population had dropped from 105,000 to 26,000. Forty to fifty-thousand people starved to death, and the rest migrated. With Xhosa civilization destroyed, the land was cleared for white settlement. The British found that those Xhosa who survived proved to be docile and useful servants. What the British Empire had been unable to accomplish in more than fifty years of aggressive colonialism, the Xhosa did to themselves in less than two years.

Western civilization now stands on the brink of repeating the experience of the Xhosa. Since the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, Europe and North America have enjoyed the greatest prosperity ever known on earth. Life expectancy has doubled. In a little more than two hundred years, every objective measure of human welfare has increased more than in all of previous human history.

But Western Civilization is coasting on an impetus provided by our ancestors. There is scarcely anyone alive in Europe or America today who believes in the superiority of Western society. Guilt and shame hang around our necks like millstones, dragging our emasculated culture to the verge of self-immolation. Whatever faults the British Empire-builders may have had, they were certain of themselves.

Our forefathers built a technological civilization based on energy provided by carbon-based fossil fuels. Without the inexpensive and reliable energy provided by coal, oil, and gas, our civilization would quickly collapse. The prophets of global warming now want us to do precisely that.

Like the prophet Mhlakaza, Al Gore promises that if we stop using carbon-based energy, new energy technologies will magically appear. The laws of physics and chemistry will be repealed by political will power. We will achieve prosperity by destroying the very means by which prosperity is created.

While Western Civilization sits confused, crippled with self-doubt and guilt, the Chinese are rapidly building an energy-intensive technological civilization. They have 2,000 coal-fired power plants, and are currently constructing new ones at the rate of one a week. In China, more people believe in free-market economics than in the US. Our Asian friends are about to be nominated by history as the new torchbearers of human progress.

Did the Xhosa give rise to the Jehovah Witnesses?

"California's government should be placed in a burlap bag with some heavy rocks and thrown in a very deep"

That, sir would be pollution and whatever they have might be transmitted in the water. Don't even think it. Cremation. Or burial in a airtight vault, please.

I love governments, they have a money crunch and what do they do: stop witht he things that people need. low level law enforcement, fire stations that sort of thing. Cut staff? Cut stupid regulations?

Watch for more of this, services like garbage collection and water testing and pot-hole fixing get curtailed first...to put pressure on tax payers. Pay cuts, staff reduction, actual reform? Hah~!

What Sasquatch said.
People are the authors of their own destruction. This is the case of California. They spent and wasted and allowed the unthinkable to occur.
Sow and ye shall reap, as is said.

Legalize rape and sexual assault, and then tax them. The resulting cost reduction and revenue ehancment should provide us the means to really crack down on those greenhouse gas gangsters.

sasquatch - yep that about sums it up I think.

Cement plant eh? Shut 'er down until the state comes begging on hands and knees for cement to fix the broken roadways.

Take about six months, I figure. State of Californiastan isn't going to be able to afford to go too far for their cement and stone pretty soon, and more to the point they won't be paying their inspectors pretty soon.

So, there should be an amazing lack of enforcement on a whole range of greenie regulations any time now. Death of socialism caused by too much socialism. I love it.

I'm always surprised that Californians demand all the leading edge treehugger environmental taxes, regulations and just plain sillyness.

Air conditioners are for personal comfort, not survival.

Let them show their sincerity by outlawing them first.

On this subject, do y'all realize there is a company in BC that ships -gravel- to California? California the desert state which is mostly mountains? Which are made of rock?

There is! See here: http://a100.gov.bc.ca/appsdata/epic/documents/p225/1065460340574_7d1c4dd350cf4b3fba31e87ef19a7610.pdf

Thanks to the insanity of the Greenies and state legislators, it is cheaper and easier to ship gravel in a seagoing vessel from a foreign country than it is to stick a shovel in the ground in Californiastan.

I'd sell my Polaris shares pretty soon, because the people of California are going to be crushing their own rock again pretty soon I bet. Inspectors being laid off and all, y'know.

On the latest incarnation of the "Gong Show", they had a guy who could jump up and kick himself in the head.

Never thought I could see an entire state do it, though.

They will shut down the cement plants, then they will start a nationwide media blitz accusing neighboring states of gouging them for cement when the price goes up do to drop in capacity.

That is what they did in electricity, but they didn't learn. They deny that is what happened with electricity, but their actual response to the crisis was to build more power plants, which had been held up by enviromentalcases.

Nihilism has arrived and the climate luddites rule. A state inhabited by unemployed bankrupt nitwits plagued by crime and poverty where they cannot even fart; shame, shame.

Bypass the greenies. Close the cement plants in California and move the operations to China or India (or buy the cement from those countires). Everyone else is doing it.

On to the inevitable:

Who are the primary holders of California debt? And can they force the state to sell valuable assets (e.g. current state park land, state owned landmarks, etc.) should the state face bankruptcy? Does anyone know?

I REALLY want this (California bankrupt) to happen as it would provide very valuable learning lesson, and a lot of stunned Cal lefties saying: "You mean we can't get a free lunch?"

Whenever there is a disaster movie threatening California, I cheer for the disaster ;-) Let Arizona become a seaside mecca for a change.

I love the so-called journalist's grasp of basic arithmetic in the second article:

"The state of California says the [Mount Slover limestone cement facility] must reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 12 percent per ton of cement."

12 percent per ton? Does the plant get a deal if they produce in bulk, say a cut of only 10 percent if they make 1000 tons, 5 percent for 20,000 tons or more?

To those of us who don't have to take off our shoes to count to twenty, 12 percent per ton is 12 percent - period. Moron.

(Of course, if production goes to zero, CO2 reductions go to 100 percent. And that, no doubt, is the idea.)

Thousands of sexual assaults...cement...ocean...
no room in prisons...

Having lived through the expulsion of a middle of the road California manufacturing enterprise (wood products) I'd just offer one point. It's generational. We got along just fine until the Boomers took over. They all had lot's of letters behind their names and the common sense of houseflies. Took 'em 5 years to bury a profitable 95 year old company. And every time I tried to warn them they showed me their coffe cups from summer programs at Harvard. The chief malfeasant is selling real estate. So there is a God after all.

I wonder how many jobs (and, therefore, people paying state income taxes and not receiving unemployment checks) the Mount Slover plant provided?

Wow.. They play with Cement and they may get to meet Jimmy H.. Hope thats a NJ/NY firm