Before we begin:  Check out the finale of Fire and Ice over at Glibertarians, and my Ninth Annual Commencement Speech has appeared again at the American Free News Network.

Now then:  National treasure Dr. Victor Davis Hanson weighs in again, this time on the well-named Absurdities of Our Age; in a section on California’s fiscal stupidity he states:

How could a dysfunctional state like California even contemplate $800 billion in reparations?

The state currently faces a $31 billion annual deficit—and it’s climbing. The state’s $100 billion high-speed rail project is inert, a veritable Stonehenge of concrete monoliths without a foot of track laid down.

California’s income tax rates are already the highest in the nation. Its sales taxes, electricity rates, and gas taxes and prices are among the steepest in the country. And for what?

Crime, homelessness, and medieval decay characterize the once great downtowns of San Francisco and Los Angeles. It is now not safe to walk alone in any major California city after dark.

Shoplifting and smash-and-grab theft are no longer treated as real crimes. The result is the mass flight of brand stores from our downtowns and inner cities, with all the accustomed cries of “racism,” even as racist public prosecutors pick and choose whether to indict the arrested on the basis of race.

California infrastructure, once the best in the county, is now among the worst. Decaying and crowded freeways, inadequate water storage, and pot-holed streets are the new norm. Once robust gas, oil, mining, and timber industries are nearly inert.

The state’s public schools are dysfunctional. Once premier public universities are spiraling headlong into decline—junking scholastic tests for admissions, using illegal racial quotas to warp admissions, and institutionalizing racialized dorms and graduation ceremonies.

Read it all, obviously.

California, as I am wont to repeat endlessly, serves as an object lesson in the evils of one-party government (such examples are legion, but this is a relevant one at the moment) and every day they seem to descend farther and farther into lunacy.  Oh, and the Democrats are fond of pushing California Governor Gavin “Hair Gel” Newsom as a Presidential candidate, in case you were wondering how the occupants of the Imperial Mansion could go from bad to worse.

But Dr. Hanson has much more to discuss than California.  And he’s right in his assessment; the Imperial City is only a long step (maybe not that long) behind California in fiscal stupidity.  We have mortgaged our great-grandchildren’s futures, and history will rightly damn us for it.  Equal treatment under the law is a dead letter.  Congress has been using the Constitution for ass-wipe since about 1860.  The nation is “led” by a senile incompetent, and that faltering heartbeat is the only thing protecting us from having a cackling imbecile running the Executive Branch.

We could escape all this by returning government to within its Constitutionally defined limits.  But nobody – nobody – in either major party is putting this on the table, and granted, it would involve unpacking a hundred and fifty years of unconstitutional malfeasance.

So, where do we go from here?  Dr. Hanson doesn’t seem to  have an answer.  Neither do I.  We live in interesting times, True Believers.  Interesting times indeed.