You Can't Spell California Without FO

<![CDATA[After a week of vacation on an Alaskan cruise out of Vancouver, my adorable wife, along with two other  couples that are very good friends returned to Southern California Sunday. We had not seen a lick of news, the first time I've unplugged like that in years. We saw orca whales, humpback whales, dozens of otters, a leopard seal feasting on the remains of one of the first salmon returning home to Ward Creek in Ketchikan, three glaciers, one that was calving a little bit, and all sorts of fun and food. We spent most of the day Saturday back in Vancouver waiting for the flight home, and hadn't had a burger all week. So I Googled the best burgers in the city, and the top two were immediately ruled out. They were both hotel restaurant brunchy burgers, not a true burger joint. In third place was DownLow Burgers in a joint called the American Hotel. If there was a hotel there, I didn't see it. It looked like a pool hall that made burgers to help wash down the beer. But we decided to be adventurous and took the Sky Train a couple stops east, and walked a couple blocks. We definitely were on the seedier side of town, but kept our eyes on the prize. And we hit paydirt. The burgers were out of this world, our waitress was absolutely adorable when we told her we came all the way from California to try these burgers. She was astounded, until I admitted truthfully it was the burgers...and an Alaskan cruise. On the way back to the train, we passed a couple cannabis dispensaries, which seemed to be the congregation point of some of Vancouver's residents without access to either housing or bathrooms. Urine has a familiar smell in all seasons, but takes on a special pungency above 70 degrees, which is normal for the city this time of year. We meandered over to the Gastown district, featuring the world's first steam-powered public clock by the waterfront, and noticed that it was also not as gentrified as previously advertised, because of the predictable results of the ubiquitous cannabis stores on every other street.Which brings me to California. The societal decay from the legalization of pot is on display in the Golden State, along with every other state that has decided to legally partake, despite what federal law has to say about it. There is simply no place in America that has legalized pot that can honestly report that crime, drug use, and homelessness has gone down. It hasn't. In the decade preceding legalization of pot in California, homelessness statewide decreased from 140,000 to 110,00. But post-2016, when the Golden State began going up in reefer smoke, there has been a 42% increase in people living on the streets. Mental illness cases have skyrocketed, and there are 53% more emergency room visits that are cannabis-related. Youth use of pot has increased, and the black market legalization was intended to wipe out has more than doubled. It's been a disaster everywhere you look by any measure, unless you're Governor Gavin Newsom and the Democrats. It's been pretty good for business and political donations. When Border Czar Tom Homan began appearing on television during the transition period of President-Elect Trump in late 2024, he promised he was going to do three things beginning on January 20th - he was going to close the border, he was going to round up and deport the most violent and dangerous of the illegal aliens Joe Biden let wander all across the country, and he was going to begin to locate the hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors the Biden administration lost. Many of those minors were feared absorbed into the illicit sex trade, while others were being used as forced child labor. Here's what Homan said was coming back in December. ]]>