California vs. Iraq
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California vs. Iraq
While this is now a couple months old, I thought it was an interesting read. I believe it's from Victor Davis Hanson. Interesting commentary on how the media reports...
War-torn Iraq has about 26 million residents, a peaceful California perhaps now 35 million. The former is a violent and impoverished landscape, the latter said to be paradise on Earth. But how you envision either place to some degree depends on the eye of the beholder and is predicated on what the daily media appear to make of each.
As a fifth-generation Californian, I deeply love this state, but still imagine what the reaction would be if the world awoke each morning to be told that once again there were six more murders, 27 rapes, 38 arsons, 180 robberies, and 360 instances of assault in California yesterday, today, tomorrow, and every day. I wonder if the headlines would scream about Nearly 200 poor Californians butchered again this month!
How about a monthly media dose of 600 women raped in February alone! Or try, Over 600 violent robberies and assaults in March, with no end in sight! Those do not even make up all of the state s yearly 200,000 violent acts that law enforcement knows about.
Iraq s judicial system seems a mess. On the eve of the war, Saddam let out 100,000 inmates from his vast prison archipelago. He himself still sits in the dock months after his trial began. But imagine an Iraq with a penal system like California s with 170,000 criminals an inmate population larger than those of Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Singapore combined.
Just to house such a shadow population costs our state nearly $7 billion a year or about the same price of keeping 40,000 Army personnel per year in Iraq. What would be the image of our Golden State if we were reminded each morning, Another $20 million spent today on housing our criminals ?
Some of California s most recent prison scandals would be easy to sensationalize: Guards watch as inmates are raped! Or Correction officer accused of having sex with underaged detainee! And apropos of Saddam s sluggish trial, remember that our home state multiple murderer, Tookie Williams, was finally executed in December 2005 26 years after he was originally sentenced.
Much is made of the inability to patrol Iraq s borders with Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey. But California has only a single border with a foreign nation, not six. Yet over 3 million foreigners who snuck in illegally now live in our state. Worse, there are about 15,000 convicted alien felons incarcerated in our penal system, costing about $500 million a year. Imagine the potential tabloid headlines: Illegal aliens in state comprise population larger than San Francisco! or Drugs, criminals, and smugglers given free pass into California!
Every year, over 4,000 Californians die in car crashes nearly twice the number of Americans lost so far in three years of combat operations in Iraq. In some sense, then, our badly maintained roads, and often poorly trained and sometimes intoxicated drivers, are even more lethal than Improvised Explosive Devices. Perhaps tomorrow s headline might scream out at us: 300 Californians to perish this month on state highways! Hundreds more will be maimed and crippled!
In 2001, California had 32 days of power outages, despite paying nearly the highest rates for electricity in the United States. Before complaining about the smoke in Baghdad rising from private generators, think back to the run on generators in California when they were contemplated as a future part of every household s line of defense.
We re told that Iraq s finances are a mess. Yet until recently, so were California s. Two years ago, Governor Schwarzenegger inherited a $38 billion annual budget shortfall. That could have made for strong morning newscast teasers: Another $100 million borrowed today $3 billion more in red ink to pile up by month s end!
So is California comparable to Iraq? Hardly. Yet it could easily be sketched by a reporter intent on doing so as a bankrupt, crime-ridden den with murderous highways, tens of thousands of inmates, with wide-open borders.
I myself recently returned home to California, without incident, from a visit to Iraq s notorious Sunni Triangle. While I was gone, a drug-addicted criminal with a long list of convictions broke into our kitchen at 4 a.m., was surprised by my wife and daughter, and fled with our credit cards, cash, keys, and cell phones.
Sometimes I wonder who really was safer that week.
War-torn Iraq has about 26 million residents, a peaceful California perhaps now 35 million. The former is a violent and impoverished landscape, the latter said to be paradise on Earth. But how you envision either place to some degree depends on the eye of the beholder and is predicated on what the daily media appear to make of each.
As a fifth-generation Californian, I deeply love this state, but still imagine what the reaction would be if the world awoke each morning to be told that once again there were six more murders, 27 rapes, 38 arsons, 180 robberies, and 360 instances of assault in California yesterday, today, tomorrow, and every day. I wonder if the headlines would scream about Nearly 200 poor Californians butchered again this month!
How about a monthly media dose of 600 women raped in February alone! Or try, Over 600 violent robberies and assaults in March, with no end in sight! Those do not even make up all of the state s yearly 200,000 violent acts that law enforcement knows about.
Iraq s judicial system seems a mess. On the eve of the war, Saddam let out 100,000 inmates from his vast prison archipelago. He himself still sits in the dock months after his trial began. But imagine an Iraq with a penal system like California s with 170,000 criminals an inmate population larger than those of Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Singapore combined.
Just to house such a shadow population costs our state nearly $7 billion a year or about the same price of keeping 40,000 Army personnel per year in Iraq. What would be the image of our Golden State if we were reminded each morning, Another $20 million spent today on housing our criminals ?
Some of California s most recent prison scandals would be easy to sensationalize: Guards watch as inmates are raped! Or Correction officer accused of having sex with underaged detainee! And apropos of Saddam s sluggish trial, remember that our home state multiple murderer, Tookie Williams, was finally executed in December 2005 26 years after he was originally sentenced.
Much is made of the inability to patrol Iraq s borders with Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey. But California has only a single border with a foreign nation, not six. Yet over 3 million foreigners who snuck in illegally now live in our state. Worse, there are about 15,000 convicted alien felons incarcerated in our penal system, costing about $500 million a year. Imagine the potential tabloid headlines: Illegal aliens in state comprise population larger than San Francisco! or Drugs, criminals, and smugglers given free pass into California!
Every year, over 4,000 Californians die in car crashes nearly twice the number of Americans lost so far in three years of combat operations in Iraq. In some sense, then, our badly maintained roads, and often poorly trained and sometimes intoxicated drivers, are even more lethal than Improvised Explosive Devices. Perhaps tomorrow s headline might scream out at us: 300 Californians to perish this month on state highways! Hundreds more will be maimed and crippled!
In 2001, California had 32 days of power outages, despite paying nearly the highest rates for electricity in the United States. Before complaining about the smoke in Baghdad rising from private generators, think back to the run on generators in California when they were contemplated as a future part of every household s line of defense.
We re told that Iraq s finances are a mess. Yet until recently, so were California s. Two years ago, Governor Schwarzenegger inherited a $38 billion annual budget shortfall. That could have made for strong morning newscast teasers: Another $100 million borrowed today $3 billion more in red ink to pile up by month s end!
So is California comparable to Iraq? Hardly. Yet it could easily be sketched by a reporter intent on doing so as a bankrupt, crime-ridden den with murderous highways, tens of thousands of inmates, with wide-open borders.
I myself recently returned home to California, without incident, from a visit to Iraq s notorious Sunni Triangle. While I was gone, a drug-addicted criminal with a long list of convictions broke into our kitchen at 4 a.m., was surprised by my wife and daughter, and fled with our credit cards, cash, keys, and cell phones.
Sometimes I wonder who really was safer that week.
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From:
California sucks worse than NJ. It's a freaking shame too. It is definitely one of the most, if not the most beautiful states in the union. To bad it's an off the scale weirdo freak show. ANY PLACE that's more corrupt than NJ is out of the question. Any place that has worse laws than NJ is out of the question. Any place that has higher housing/property taxes than NJ is out of the question. Traffic, crime, illegal immigration, drugs, etc, CA sucks.
A grizzled old 30+ year reservist once told me something very appropriate. He spent his entire career at either Travis AFB, CA or McGuire AFB, NJ. He said "There's nothing wrong with CA or NJ that getting rid of 90% of the F'n idiots that inhabit them wouldn't fix over night." Truer words never spoken...
KC-10 FE out...
A grizzled old 30+ year reservist once told me something very appropriate. He spent his entire career at either Travis AFB, CA or McGuire AFB, NJ. He said "There's nothing wrong with CA or NJ that getting rid of 90% of the F'n idiots that inhabit them wouldn't fix over night." Truer words never spoken...
KC-10 FE out...
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From: Western Massachusetts
I can't for the life of me, understand why this stuff doesn't make it to the presses. This would give people perspective! I have thought this stuff all along. This country is in the situation it's in now, not because of Bush, but because people don't see the reality of the day. They have improper perspective. It drives me nuts! Can we be suckers, to this extent?
This doesn't just apply to California either. Though the numbers will vary, the circumstances are the same accross this country. Iraq would seem pretty tranquil compaired to the things that go on in the states that make up our country. That is if we were told about it regularly.
This doesn't just apply to California either. Though the numbers will vary, the circumstances are the same accross this country. Iraq would seem pretty tranquil compaired to the things that go on in the states that make up our country. That is if we were told about it regularly.
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Joined: Sep 2005
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From: San Diego
Originally Posted by wittom
I can't for the life of me, understand why this stuff doesn't make it to the presses. This would give people perspective! I have thought this stuff all along. This country is in the situation it's in now, not because of Bush, but because people don't see the reality of the day. They have improper perspective. It drives me nuts! Can we be suckers, to this extent?
This doesn't just apply to California either. Though the numbers will vary, the circumstances are the same accross this country. Iraq would seem pretty tranquil compaired to the things that go on in the states that make up our country. That is if we were told about it regularly.
This doesn't just apply to California either. Though the numbers will vary, the circumstances are the same accross this country. Iraq would seem pretty tranquil compaired to the things that go on in the states that make up our country. That is if we were told about it regularly.
It's so completely overwhelmingly left that people literally have no idea. Take Yahoo.com for example. Anyone every go there? I sadly share an email account with someone that is from Yahoo so I log in there almost daily. If you read the top 10 news stories, you almost guarantee 7 out of 10 (or more) are negative about the GOP, or positive about the left. It's amazing.
And given that the founders of Yahoo are such extreme leftist tree huggers they won't even buy cars with leather, I'm not surprised.
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From: Fort Valley, Ga
Dang I never realised California was that bad. That makes Georgia look like a great state. I did hear on Opie and Anthony about a year ago that a guy went to the emergency room having a stroke and had to wait like 8 hours. The guy said that the hospital systems are shutting down because of illegal immigrants. Thats really scary if you ask me.