California

Increasing immigration has led to a diverse set of ethnic groups within California itself and at the 2010 Census, 57.6% of the population claimed to be white, while 40.1% were non-Hispanic white. 13% were Asian and 6.2% black. The remaining ethnic groups consisted of Native American, Hispanic, Latino and others. These numbers had changed significantly by 2016, with estimates putting 73.2% of the population as white, 38.5% as non-Hispanic white, 14.4% Asian, and 6.5% black. In 2014, estimates showed that the Latino and Hispanic population surpassed the population of non-Hispanic whites. According to those estimates, taken in June 2014, 14.99 million Latinos resided in the state, compared to 14.92 whites. California has the largest minority population and the largest Hispanic population in the country. The most populous state is also one of the most racially diverse, boasting the largest population of whites in the US, the largest number of Native Americans, and the fifth largest population of African Americans. The Asian population, which is approaching 5 million, makes up about one-third of the nation's total Asian American population.

The State of California is a state located in the western pacific region of the United States. The state was the 31st admitted to the Union, and currently ranks as the most populous. It is bordered by Oregon to the north, Nevada to the northwest, and Arizona to the southwest in the United States, as well as Baja California in Mexico to the south. California's capital city is Sacramento, with the four largest cities being Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco. The state has 58 counties.

California sits on the San Fernando Fault which makes it susceptible to earthquakes. Serious earthquakes have hit California in the 20th century including 1906, 1933, and 1971.

History

Before becoming a part of the United States, Alta California its colonization by the Spanish Empire commenced in 1769. In addition the Imperial Russian Government held numerous settlements, forts and enclaves on the California coast from about the same period which were administered by their Russian American Company. In 1820, the Company petitioned the Spanish Government for free trade agreements for their outposts in California. After Mexican independence in 1821, California remained as part of Mexico until 1846, when it was the independent California Republic for one brief week. In 1841 Russia sold her Californian coastal enclaves. Following the conclusion of the Mexican-American war of 1848, California was annexed by the United States of America and was admitted to the Union as the thirty-first state on September 9, 1850.

California is the third largest state by area in the U.S.; it's size gives it a diverse geography, which ranges from sandy and rocky beaches of the Pacific coast, to the rugged snow-capped Sierra Nevada mountains in the east, to desert areas in the southeast and the forests of the northwest. The center portion of the state is dominated by the Central Valley, one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world and the largest of any U.S. state.

The Sierra Nevada mountains contain Yosemite Valley, famous for its glacially-carved domes, and Sequoia National Park, home to the giant sequoia trees, the largest living organisms on Earth. The state is home to Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous United States, as well as the second lowest and hottest place in the Western Hemisphere, Death Valley. Many of the trees located in the California White Mountains are the oldest in the world; one Bristlecone pine has an age of 4,700 years.

The Californian Gold Rush began in 1848, dramatically changing California to accommodate an influx of population and an economic boom. The early 20th century was marked by Los Angeles becoming the center of the entertainment industry, in addition to the growth of a large tourism sector in the state. Along with California's prosperous agricultural industry, other industries include aerospace, petroleum, and computer and information technology. California ranks among the top ten largest economies in the world, and were it a separate country, it would be 34th amongst the most populous countries, just behind Poland.

Economy

California is known as the multi-billion dollar hub of the English-speaking media world, best known for the Hollywood film studios, all renowned for their Jewish ownership and nepotism and Left-wing political output which ultimately brainwashes viewers and listeners. It has been described as "the most powerful medium for mass communication in human history which has become a propaganda tool for the left."

The economy of the State of California is the largest in the United States, with a $3.8 trillion gross state product (GSP) as of 2023. It is the largest sub-national economy in the world.

Boasting of his state’s robust economic growth, California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently declared that “California’s values and entrepreneurial spirit have powered this ascent to becoming the 4th biggest economy in the world.” [...] Now we’re hearing that California ranks number four, overtaking Germany’s spot after the US, China and Japan. That sounds good, but it is not correct. The latest California GDP data published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis places the size of California’s economy at $3.701 trillion as of the fourth quarter of 2022. Official German data from Statistiches Bundesamt show that 2022 GDP totaled $4.125 trillion in U.S. dollars (at the then current exchange rate of $1.0666 per Euro), well above the California figure. The gap may continue to grow when Q1 2023 figures are available because the Euro has risen against the dollar, closing at $1.0875 per Euro on March 31. So how did anyone get the idea that California had passed Germany? It originated with a Bloomberg opinion piece entitled “California Poised to Overtake Germany as World’s No. 4 Economy” by Matt Winkler. In the October 24, 2022 article, Winkler only claimed that California was about to pass Germany, and not that it had already done so.

Politics

California was one of the first American States to pass a Eugenics Statute, in 1909, and became the third state in the United States to enact a Compulsory sterilization law. By 1921, California had accounted for 80% of sterilizations nationwide. There were an estimated 20,000 forced sterilizations in California between 1909 and 1979; however, that number may be an underestimation.

Why Woke Nihilism Destroyed California (2023)

For roughly 100 years, California was America’s synecdoche: the part of the country that best represented its whole. It was town and country, coastal metropolis and interior farmland, opportunity and freedom. It was Hollywood, the defense industry, and the high-tech economy. Its people were both high-achieving and laid-back, able to enjoy the state’s natural bounty, from the beaches and cliffs to the forests and Sierras. California boasted a pioneering public education system, in which every child, no matter how poor, could receive a good education. It had affordable suburbs, built around nuclear families. It was growing, quadrupling its population after World War II. In a word, California represented progress.

Now the state has become America’s shadow self. True, it is more prosperous than ever, surpassing Germany last year to become the world’s fourth-largest economy. But Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, and smaller cities are today overrun by homeless encampments, which European researchers more accurately describe as “open drug scenes.” Crime has become so rampant that many have simply stopped reporting it, with nearly half of San Franciscans telling pollsters that they were a victim of theft in the last five years and a shocking one-quarter saying that they had been assaulted or threatened with assault.

These pathologies are just the most visible manifestations of a deeper rot. Less than half of California’s public school students are proficient in reading, and just one-third are proficient in math (with a stunning 9 percent of African-Americans and 12 percent of Latinos in L.A. public schools proficient in eighth-grade math). Education achievement declined precipitously in California in 2021, as the state kept children studying at home well after kids in other states had returned to the classroom.

Californians pay the most income tax, gasoline tax, and sales tax in the United States, yet suffer from electricity blackouts and abysmal public services. Residential electricity prices grew three times faster in 2021 than they did in the rest of the United States. And the state government, dependent on income taxes, faces a projected $23 billion budget deficit that will only grow if the nation’s economy enters a recession. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given these trends, California’s population stopped expanding in 2014 and has slightly declined since, resulting in the loss of a congressional seat after the 2020 Census.

Homelessness and disorder loom as the biggest problems. Most of the assaults and threats that San Franciscans reported came from the city’s large number of homeless and mentally ill addicts, who are allowed to sleep, defecate, and use drugs in public. Los Angeles is in even worse shape, as the city is so much larger than San Francisco and the local government is, against stereotype, even more progressive. Skid Row can no longer contain its massive population of street homeless; the city’s government has all but legalized open-air drug dealing and use. Over the last decade, homelessness increased 43 percent in California, even as it fell 7 percent nationally.

Some signs of hope seem to have emerged on this front. Since taking office in December 2022, the new mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, has worked to shut down drug markets and tried to move people into shelter and housing through a program called “Inside Safe.” Venice Beach voters elected as city council member a moderate named Traci Park, who worked with Bass to move street-dwellers inside. San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, closed an experimental government-funded drug-consumption site in June, responding to complaints from residents, business leaders, and mothers of homeless addicts. In November 2022, San Franciscans elected a majority of moderates to the city’s governing board of supervisors, who, like the mayor, favor stronger action to remove self-destructive addicts from the streets. Those changes followed a voter recall earlier that year of a radical district attorney, Chesa Boudin, whose policies of de-prosecution encouraged disorder.

But there is less than meets the eye to these developments. Bass’s office reports that just 31 homeless people in Hollywood, and fewer than 100 in Venice, had been moved inside between December 11, 2022, and January 21 of this year. For context, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, there were 41,290 total homeless in Los Angeles in 2020, of whom 70 percent were “unsheltered”—living in tents or cardboard boxes on sidewalks and underneath overpasses. Voters increased the progressive majority on the Los Angeles City Council and tossed out the sheriff of Los Angeles County, who had advocated a tougher response to crime, drugs, and violence, in November 2022.

In San Francisco, a judge halted efforts to move the city’s vulnerable homeless indoors before torrential rains pounded the state for weeks; the judge had sided with a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the city. And six months after closing the drug-consumption site, Mayor Breed and the Board of Supervisors announced in early January that they intended to open 12 new sites across the city. In the state’s two major cities, significant improvement on crime, drugs, and homelessness is unlikely under current political leadership.

External links

Encyclopedias

• Encyclopedia.com: California