When government finishes something - even in California!

There have been some raised eyebrows and a lot of commentary over a statement by Los Angeles mayoral candidate Nithya Raman about finishing a recent infrastructure project:

The Los Feliz Neighborhood Council alerted our office in late 2025 to the need for a crosswalk at Sunset Dr. and Bates St., which has just been completed!

Thank you to our incredible CD4 Field Team for continuing to problem-solve, push for solutions, and make our streets safer.

Mary Katherine Ham gave what is perhaps the most personal comparison:

I am the worst procrastinator and I can make a whole-ass human in 9 mos https://t.co/bI88w5z7XB

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) August 28, 2026

Meanwhile, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass orders cops to stop cracking down on illegal street vendors. To me, this invites a comparison to Mayor Mamdani in New York being sued by "multicultural" bodega owners for his plan to drive them out of business by opening government-subsidized grocery stores.

And Adam Carolla points out that:

Once cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles do this—once you essentially look the other way for the homeless, junkies, illegal immigrants, criminals, or whoever it is, while shining a spotlight on taxpayers with over-regulation, over-permitting, and trying to manage every grain of their lives, versus saying to illegal immigrants, ‘Go do whatever you want,’ or to the homeless, ‘Go shoot up wherever you want or sleep wherever you want’—then you’ve lost it. L.A.’s there. San Francisco’s there.

Sleep wherever you want and don't worry about setting fires . . .

How's that high-speed rail coming along?

Yesterday we drove over a fancy new overpass which is intended to allow cars and trucks to easily make their way over the future high-speed rail tracks. It looks a lot like a smaller version of a similar overpass over a highway a few miles to the north.

Traffic crossing the nearby existing freight and Amtrak rails must still stop the old-fashioned way. The new overpass does not look particularly safe for pedestrians or bicyclists. Perhaps some new local bus routes between neighborhoods and country towns are planned for the future.

Some neighborhoods no longer exist, having fallen victim to eminent domain.

There won't be a high-speed train station nearby. So the promise of "local jobs" was kinda temporary.

The pretty new overpass does keep people from getting lost like they did for months on the previous very confusing detours which changed periodically. And some cars fell into ditches during the many months of detours and degraded roads, as well. So, in one small part of the future high-speed rail route, some progress has apparently been made.

I wouldn't be surprised if traffic over the newly finished infrastructure is restricted when work on the rails begins. If it does.

Shafter Shafts plans for high-speed rail

This is not too far to the south of the pretty new overpass:

California’s high-speed rail boondoggle, which is already a $128 billion joke that has been decades in the making with not a single mile of track carrying a single paying passenger, has managed to find a brand-new way to embarrass the state’s “visionary” political leadership.

This time, it’s not federal funding cuts or blown deadlines doing the damage, but a Central Valley city and a major homebuilder simply refusing to get out of the way, greenlighting 1,200 new homes smack in the middle of the rail authority’s approved route.

California’s beleaguered, over-budget high-speed rail line now has one more thing to worry about: A city and housing developer wants to build homes right in the train’s projected path.

Shafter, a city near Bakersfield, and developer Lennar Homes are plowing ahead with 1,200 homes in the same area off Highway 99 where the state’s rail authority plans to build tracks. . .

Well. This seems rather late in the game to be changing the route on the already truncated high-speed rail line. See more details at the link.

New California High Speed Rail video for you. Based on a new report by the CAHSR Office of the Inspector General and developments in the city of Shafter, the project is at serious risk of not being able to open an Initial Operating Segment. At all.

So confusing!

Call Shafter’s move poetic justice for a project that has spent over a decade steamrolling farmers and small property owners with eminent domain and political entitlement.

Sacramento’s fantasy train may get ” shafted” by the plucky citizens of a small town that California bureaucrats chose to ignore. . .

As an added bonus, given the state’s “housing shortage,” it’s going to be very hard to make Lennar homes a villain in this story.

You've likely heard that Newsom's wife has ties to California energy interests. Another reason to watch the politics around data centers and such:

Chew on this:

Your power in Reno and my power in SLT Calif both come from the same source -- NV Energy.

My electricity bill is routinely over $500 a month in the summer time, and it's rarely over 85 degrees during the daytime. https://t.co/DorJbqPaxf

— Shipwreckedcrew (@shipwreckedcrew) August 26, 2026

And in current news, California lawmakers block Gov. Newsom's push to limit wildfire liability for utilities. The stock at PG&E, the special friends of Newsom's wife, has gone down.

WEEKEND

THE MOST WOKE SENTENCE EVER?

"Real" papers that are indistinguishable from this are published almost daily. https://t.co/Q8ec0kcNRL

— Colin Wright (@SwipeWright) August 22, 2026

Founding Fathers - Alexander Hamilton and Money

In this week's Grumpy Economist Rant, @JohnHCochrane revisits Alexander Hamilton's approach to the large public debt left by the Revolutionary War and explains how honoring contracts built America's financial reputation.

Full video on Freedom Frequency: https://t.co/VUT3OXxX0D pic.twitter.com/O8GbpHT8A1

— Hoover Institution (@HooverInst) August 23, 2026

King George VI was at war with Nazi Germany as King of the UK, yet at peace with it as King of Ireland, formally accrediting German diplomats.

After the war, he was technically at war with himself as King of India and Pakistan, during the Indo-Pakistani war of 1947. pic.twitter.com/IVUMzkg6co

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) August 24, 2026

The Week in Pictures: Goodbye Dolly Edition

Dolly Parton’s music was never my taste, but somehow I always had only favorable impressions of her when she came into public view over the last 50 years. And just now I recall that a big Broadway play of my youth was “Hello, Dolly!” The film version would have been so much better with Dolly Parton instead of Barbra “Strident” Streisand. And so just now we need to improvise “Goodbye, Dolly.” Is it true that she’s the last figure in the country that everyone loved? Maybe. But let’s not overlook Tim Curry while we’re at it. And let’s salute America’s newest Great Lake!

Music

Think everybody listens to the same music all the time?

First time hearing Dolly Parton

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, August 22, Mascots of The Anointed - This Story Isn't Going Away

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.

Update:

Worst of all, by far, is "autoethnography"

It’s hard to convey to people who haven’t seen this stuff just how rife it is in the humanities and social sciences today. I remember going to Cambridge to study anthropology and thinking I would be asking big questions about human nature and bizarre rituals and customs, but all… https://t.co/zSVBEIBJ2b

— RAW EGG NATIONALIST (@Babygravy9) August 24, 2026

posted by K.T. at 11:06 AM

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