Mark Cuban (undoubtedly a resident of California) speaks out on behalf of the permanently infantilized.

When I started MicroSolutions I was 24 years old. I had just gotten fired from my job and was sleeping on the floor of a 3 bedroom apartment with 5 other guys living there. I didn’t have a closet or a bed, but I had 2 suits.

I bought both of those polyester wonders, one Grey pinstripe, the other blue pinstripe for a total of $99 dollars plus tax. To go with those fashion forward wonders, I had several white polo button downs that I had purchased used from a re-sale shop, and a couple ties that I had bought on sale or had gotten as hand me downs from friends.

I wore those babies when it was cold. I wore them when it was 100 degrees plus. I ironed them and when I could I got them dry cleaned…

Someone had once told me that you wear to work what your customers wear to work. That seemed to make sense to me, so I followed it, and expected those who worked for me to follow it as well.

After I sold MicroSolutions I decided that I never would wear a suit again…

With our new business, I decided that I would have to wear a suit, but would modify the rule so that I would only wear a suit when someone I was selling to was wearing a suit…

When Broadcast.com was sold, the suit went out the window completely.

The gentleman has obviously never owned a real suit, only hideous and inexpensive ersatz imitations thereof. Suits equal discomfort in his mind, because he has only worn cheap, ill-fitting articles of clothing made of intrinsically uncomfortable materials.

Beyond that, the gentleman fails to understand that dignity and formality are becoming to adults. And it is not simply a matter of convention and form; men wear suits fundamentally because any man looks better in a good suit.

T shirts and blue jeans or bermuda shorts have intrinsically limited capacities for both beauty and self expression. Adults wear adult clothing in order to express as fully as possible the possibilities of aesthetic expression in attire.

Suits have been de rigeur in business (outside the California playpen) since time immemorial, since it is impossible for most serious adults to imagine entering into a substantial relationship of trust or business with an individual too slovenly, too undignified, or too badly educated to know how to dress.

Obviously, people began making the rare exception for the eccentric scientific genius working in the most arcane outer reaches of technology, whose thoughts were so abstracted and unworldly that he couldn’t possibly understand how to live normally in the world, and the next thing you know every clod and lout in the Sunshine State of Self-Entitlement decides that he, too, is some kind of genius, operating at Olympian levels beyond normal civilization.

You Californians are wrong. You are operating far below the conventional levels of ordinary civilization, and you are not Einstein, you are Beavis and Butthead.

Back in April, Victor Davis Hansen published an editorial titled Eye of the Beholder which really puts the MSM’s reporting on the level of disaster in Iraq into perspective. With the Fall election approaching, I think more potential voters need to read it.

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 bank rupt, 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.

Coastal California is made up of either Redwood forest or what is basically a desert nicely cooled by fogs from the Pacific. The non-forested portion of the California landscape had little to offer the eye beyond a modest variety of native weeds, and European settlers got right to work planting trees and flowers.

Today, the cult of extreme Environmentalism flourishes the length of the left coast, and purists in California have come to regard non-native Holland grass (originally planted to keep the sand dunes from eroding), Eucalyptus, wild rose and other non-native trees, plants, and shrubs as sacrilegious human affronts to Mother Nature’s original perfection.

San Francisco is going to spend a lot of money deliberately de-foresting the Presidio and other parks.

While in Southern California, botanical vigilantism is being prosecuted.

California Governor Schwarzenegger has signed a Republican-sponsored bill, acceding to the wishes of the Vietnamese community-in-exile in California, which will allow the flag of the fallen Republic of South Vietnam to be flown in California displays of the flags of world nations, instead of the Communist flag of North Vietnam.

California state buildings and parks now have the governor’s blessing to fly the former flag of South Vietnam during holidays and special occasions.

At an impromptu stop in Little Saigon on Saturday morning, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the long-awaited symbolic measure that gives the yellow flag with three red stripes the state’s official recognition.

About 10 states and over a dozen California cities and counties already have done so.

Schwarzenegger praised the Vietnamese immigrant community for its courage, vitality and cultural and economic contribution to the state.

Most Vietnamese immigrants fled their country after the communists’ victory and feel contempt for the country’s current red flag.

Vietnamese leaders have pushed for the traditional flag’s recognition for years, said Assemblyman Van Tran, R-Westminster.

The move gained momentum last month when Assemblywoman Lynn Daucher, R-Fullerton, who is running for state Senate in the district covering Little Saigon, appealed to the governor for help.

Both Schwarzenegger and Tran endorsed Daucher in her bid.

Among registered Vietnamese-born voters in Orange County, Republicans outnumber Democrats 2-to-1.

On Friday, the word spread that the move was final, and hundreds of Vietnamese gathered at the Rose Center in Westminster to cheer.

The spectacular scenery, a typically booming economy, and a climate which permits you to grow lemons and avocados in your backyard makes Californians seem rather spoiled to the rest of us. Californians typically express their appreciation for all their good fortune by the cultivation as a local art form of cloaking an unlimited sense of entitlement in the rhetoric of idealism.

How do you keep the other fellow (who actually owns the land) from doing anything with it that might deprive you of the pleasure of looking at it undeveloped? You just come up with an appropriate worthy cause: protecting some purportedly endangered amphibian, rodent or weed; avoiding sprawl; maintaining open space; and voila! You get to keep out the riff raff, and be spiritually enlightened too.

Today’s Wall Street Journal describes the plight of the Mexican immigrant worker in Monterey County renting out a room in the 1000 sq. ft. house that cost him half a million dollars, and still spending 70% of his income on his mortgage payment.

Meanwhile, Reuters describes the accelerating middle class exodus from idyllic coastal California to the baking hot interior Central Valley (renowned for its 110 degree temperatures) in search of affordable housing.

OAKLAND, California – Father Mark Wiesner has grown accustomed to wishing parishioners bon voyage as they flee the San Francisco area’s high housing costs for California’s Central Valley, where developers are increasingly transforming farms and ranches into a new suburbia.

“So many young couples I marry have to go to Modesto or Tracy to start their married lives,” said Wiesner, a Catholic priest in Oakland on the San Francisco Bay. “They simply can’t afford to stay here in the Bay area and to buy a single-family dwelling.”

Tracy and Modesto are 50 and 80 miles east of Oakland respectively. Both have seen blistering growth in recent years amid a middle-class exodus from California’s famed coastal urban centers in search of affordable housing.

Analysts say the middle-class flight will press on even if coastal home prices sag amid a national housing slowdown. Home prices near the state’s coastline would need to collapse to make buying a home there possible for many households.

Barring a collapse, ever more Californians will call the state’s Central Valley home because homes there are relatively affordable. July’s median home price in San Francisco was $771,000, compared with $438,000 in San Joaquin County roughly 60 miles to the east, according to real estate information service DataQuick Information Systems.

Southern California is seeing a similar exodus to Riverside and San Bernardino counties, known as the region’s Inland Empire, from Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties.

“Having been in the house market in Los Angeles, I can tell you a house with little bit of privacy and space to call your own is pretty hard to come by,” said economist Christopher Thornberg of the consulting firm Beacon Economics. “For many people getting out to that Inland Empire is the only way to really have a backyard for the kids.”

The ultra-wealthy, ultra-liberal community of Santa Barbara, just north of Los Angeles, (known locally as “Snotty Barbara”) has found the impact of its own regulations and restrictions on development sufficiently dramatic that it has decided it needs to build affordable housing for people making up to $160,000 per year. Not only firemen and policemen can’t afford to live in Santa Barbara. The town fathers are starting to worry about the lack of availability of housing for doctors and lawyers.

The City Council is considering whether to use the property to build affordable housing, a condominium complex called Los Portales for families earning up to $160,000 a year.

Now, “it’s hard to get sympathy for people making $160,000 a year if you’re down in Texas or something,” said Bill Watkins, head of the UC Santa Barbara Economic Forecast Project.

Any household with that kind of money is in the nosebleed section of American earners, and “most of the country would think, ‘You’re going to subsidize that person’s house? You’re kidding me.’ ”

But in this city — where the median home price is around $1.2 million — that person needs help. And the Housing Authority of the City of Santa Barbara is about to become the rare public housing agency to assist the well-heeled along with the poor, to build shelter for those whose business cards come in designer leather cases and include words like “doctor,” “lawyer,” “director.”

The tallest building here is the eight-story Granada Theatre, built in 1924.

It could never be replicated today, in part because the City Charter strictly limits buildings to 60 feet, about four stories.

And even four stories is a hard sell.

Two teen-age girls expelled last September from California Lutheran High School in Wildomar, California for indecent conduct filed a lawsuit seeking readmission, along with unspecified damages and an injunction barring the Riverside County school from excluding gays and lesbians.

Last Wednesday, the California Supreme Court unanimously declined to review an appeal brought by the school, allowing the case to proceed to trial.

Down at Newport Beach in the OC, the problem of anchored sail boats being swamped by an excess of pinniped avoirdupois has recurred this Sprng. A male California sea lion can weigh 600 lbs.

AP reports:

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. – Authorities hope to deter sea lions from boarding boats by — get this — spraying them with water. The mischievous pinnipeds have returned to the bay after wreaking havoc last summer by trashing boat cabins and decks, swamping a vintage yacht and barking all night.

So far this spring, they’ve ransacked one craft and nearly scuttled a 20-foot sailboat, which was submerged to the rooftop before shipyard workers intervened, said Justin McCarthy, manager of Hill’s Boat Service.

“As soon as one is up, three jump on,” McCarthy said. “And it only takes four to tip one of these boats.”

Seeking to avoid a repeat of last year’s mayhem, harbor officials are testing a motion-activated sprinkler they hope will shoo the animals away from boat decks. Sea lions sunbathe to raise their body temperature and don’t like being squirted with cool water, said Chris Miller, the city’s harbor resources supervisor.

“It’s hard to control nature,” Miller said. “But we’re doing our best.”

The high-tech effort has one observer scratching his head.

“It’s funny because people don’t realize the old trick is you just put a little dishwashing soap (on the deck) and they slide right off,” said Hank Wiessner, co-owner of Fun Zone Boat Co.

My wife found the mental image of frustrated sea lions wallowing on board anchored boats, only to slip right off again, hilarious.

Red-backed Jumping Spider (Phidippus johnsoni)

Yesterday, I was working at my desk, when a large spider, sporting impressively bright-colored markings, descended down a filament of web, and landed with a noticeable thud on top of a television remote control, languishing unused at the far left corner of my monitor stand.

I debated for an instant between hand-to-hand combat, with me employing a handy ruler; or chemical warfare, involving a nearby can of Raid House and Garden. I decided to go for the high tech approach, and reached for the can of Raid. My alert opponent, however, cleverly divined my arachnocidal intentions, and dashed over the edge to the preferred refuge of all outlaws: the terra incognita between desk and wall. My hunting instincts were aroused. I had no intention of letting the quarry get away, but my search was unavailing.

I couldn’t nail the spider, so I figured I could at least entertain the wife a bit, so I sent the little woman (who is out of town on a business trip) an email, informing her that we had acquired a new roommate, and urging her to say hello for me, when she found the same spider on her desk some day(we share an office). My wife was not amused.

Well, Karen actually does get to come home, after all.

At pretty much the same time of day today, clearly the same uppity spider landed directly in the center of my desk with an even louder thump, erected its feelers, and advanced rapidly and purposefully in my direction. I could practically hear its thoughts: “Dare spraying bug spray at me, will you, villain? I see that can of Raid is out of reach, so let’s settle things here and now.” Further threats, and the arachnid’s further advance were prevented, however, by the rapid descent of a Paulownia wood Japanese box, containing a very nice Kaneiye sword guard.

I, of course, then proceeded to identify the specimen.

So perish all our enemies.

Hamaseh Kianfar

Not far beneath the haute bourgeois facade of “America’s dystopian future” lurks the primeval savagery of the frontier West of the cannibal Bender family, combined with the latest form of decadent perversity the New Age can invent.

Thomas Lifson at American Thinker reports a criminal case illustrating the propinquity of the Californian Utopia of Good Living to the American Heart of Darkness

A 75 year old woman and her husband were walking along Euclid Avenue, where it runs between the Rose Garden and Codornices Park. It is one of the most spectacularly beautiful urban scenes in the world, with panoramic views of San Francisco, the Bay, and its bridges on one side, and a hillside of architectural landmark houses and public spaces, including Bernard Maybek’s classicist masterpiece Rose Walk and the modernist Greenwood Common.

The elderly couple were walking home from a continuing education class at the University of California. The North Gate to its campus stands at the foot of Euclid Avenue, (Berkeley) less than a mile away. They moved aside to make room on the sidewalk to allow a pair of girls to walk by them. Suddenly, one of the girls grabbed Kate around the neck and slashed her throat with an 8-inch butcher knife all the way to a bone in what police say was an apparently random attack. Kate struggled briefly with her attacker, who released her. Then she reached up to her neck. “It was spurting blood,” she said from a hospital bed Friday. “It was just astonishing.”

Fortunately, the knife narrowly missed the important veins and arteries in the victim’s neck, and she survived the brutal and senseless attack. The area usually has many people enjoying its parks and views, and witnesses were able to see the attackers drive off in a very expensive car, a BMW M-3 convertible. Unless the car was stolen, these were not underprivileged children. Police relied on tips and arrested a 16 year old Oakland girl.

So, over a year later, Lifson follows up:

The wheels of justice have been grinding very slowly. The alleged assailant, Marilyn Webster, was a juvenille at the time. She has been found to be severely mentally impaired, and authorities have not been able to find a facility adequate to house her.

The alleged accomplice, Hamaseh Kianfar, was a county-employed mental health worker who had worked with Webster in an official capacity. Following the attack, she drove Webster from the scene, allegedly lied to police about the crime, and now her attorney expresses herself to be “incredulous” that her client is to stand trial.

Kristin Bender of the Oakland Tribune has been providing the best coverage of the bizarrae and shocking case. Here is her account:

As the woman laid on the street “bleeding profusely,” Kianfar drove the girl away, bought her clothing to wear following the assault and did not notify police about the incident for roughly 15 hours, said prosecutor Carrie Panetta. The woman recovered from her wounds.

Panetta said Kianfar also did not tell police where the girl was staying and later “warned” relatives there was a warrant out for the teen’s arrest.

“She knew very well where the juvenile was,” Panetta said. “She gave statements to police, but they were untruthful statements.”

Kianfar met Webster while the teenager was serving a sentence in Juvenile Hall. Kianfar’s supporters have said the mental health worker befriended the girl in an effort to help her.

Judge Jon Rolefson ordered Kianfar to return to court May 18 to begin routine court proceedings for the trial. She remains free on $15,000 bail.

Several aspects of the case remain mysterious. In the early aftermath, there were reports of a ritualistic aspect the crime, supposedly involving an occult practice called “blood-feasting.” Kianfar’s precise relationship to the mentally-impaired young woman has also not been detailed for the public.

Kianfar is entitled to a fair trial with the presumption of innocence. But her alleged behavior disturbs me deeply, as does her attorney’s apparent belief that one can leave a victim to die, spirit away the alleged perpetrator, buy clothing to disguise the evidence and lie to police, all without being charged.

California definitely features America’s most colorful crime. On Monday, a 68 year-old Sonoma former gaming executive grabbed his .357 Magnum revolver and dispatched an intruder who had pursued his 64 year-old wife into the house. The intruder was armed, and apparently dressed as a ninja.

Police investigators looking into the shooting death of a ninja-style assailant at a semirural home in Healdsburg say they have not yet been able to identify the masked intruder or establish a motive for his actions.

The intruder was shot dead Monday morning by Louis J. Phillips, a former tribal and Nevada gaming executive, shortly after the man attacked Phillips’ wife, Sandra, outside their home on Sunset Drive, police said. The man struggled with her and chased her inside, where Louis Phillips opened fire with his .357-caliber Magnum handgun.

“We don’t have a motive for the attack,” Police Chief Susan Jones said. “And we’d feel a whole lot better if we could identify the intruder.”

Jones described the dead assailant as a white man, about 35 to 40 years old. He was armed with a revolver and carried no identification. The man was dressed from head to toe in black, including a black mask and black leather gloves, Jones said.

The attacker’s motives, and identity, remain unknown, but Mr. Phillips’s former occupational associations might just possibly have had some connection with the attack. SF Chronicle

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has among its supplies significant quantities of plutonium, potentially useful to terrorists. Consequently, the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration are installing a defensive battery of Dillon Aero M134D Gatling guns, six barreled, electrically driven machine guns chambered in 7.62mm NATO (.308 Winchester) able to fire at a fixed rate of 3000 shots per minute.

The SF Chronicle, in characteristic MSM fashion, feigns neutrality, but gives prominence in its coverage to the clueless and the cowardly.

Word that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will install a battery of machine guns capable of spitting out 66 rounds a second with a range of nearly a mile was met by relief by some who think the weapons will deter terrorists but fear by others who worry they’ll be caught in the line of fire…

“I don’t think that’s cool at all — it’s going to be hitting my roof while I’m sleeping,” 23-year-old Daniel Cross said Friday after learning that his home on Shelley Street is within range of the weapon’s 7.62mm bullets.

His friend, Justin Blake, 21, let out some expletives as he tinkered with a Jeep Cherokee outside his friend’s home, where an American flag flies prominently.

“I ain’t seen nothing like that at the lab,” he said, marveling at the weapon’s firepower with a laugh and a shake of his head. “That’s pretty sick. I don’t think anyone’s gonna come into Livermore. I don’t think they need those Gatling guns.”

The leftwing paper throws in enough hints for the discerning reader to get the point:

The thought that Livermore, population 80,000, has an arsenal capable of shooting down a helicopter seems at odds with its motto of being “a friendly, dynamic community.”..

As for those concerned about bullets raining down on their homes, (Livermore Vice Mayor) Leider laughed.

“If they were firing something, I’m sure they would aim correctly and not just spray the rounds all over the place,” Leider said. “I have pretty good faith in that.”

CNN reports similarly, “balancing” the rational explanation:

“What we want to do is equip our protective force with the capability that will leave no doubt about the outcome,” said Linton Brooks, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration.

with the local moon bat activist perspective:

Lab critics questioned the wisdom of putting such powerful guns at the lab, which is across the street from suburban homes. They say the real problem is that the lab site, which is relatively small at 1 square mile, is not a good place for nuclear materials.

“If you don’t have the firepower, that’s one kind of security weakness, but if you do have the firepower, you potentially endanger nearby workers and community members because it’s such a compact site,” said Marylia Kelley, executive director of Tri-Valley CARES, a Livermore-based activist group.