Before California slips into the ocean after a massive earthquake, as some predicted decades ago that it would, it looks like it will first become America’s very own undeveloped nation.

California has endured its share of Old Testament calamities in the modern world. Yet at times it seems that it will surely succumb to disasters created by its own hand.

There are real monsters loose in the streets. Rats, “an army” of them “millions strong,” reports KOMO News, have “overthrown” Los Angeles. Not long ago, “officials briefly closed part of City Hall after reporting that rodents had invaded the building,” said California Healthline.

“And where there are rats,” says KOMO reporter Eric Johnson, “there is disease.”

Norway rats and roof rats, neither native to California, carry infected fleas and spread typhus, a disease “that ravaged populations in the Middle Ages” and has now “flared” in Los Angeles. There were a record 124 cases there in 2018, according to the California Department of Public Health.

“A medieval disease,” explains Gov. Gavin Newsom. “In California. In 2019.”

Maybe the rats were attracted to the “garbage mountain” that has bloomed in the city and produced quite a few unflattering, but deserving, comments.

Hepatitis A, which is spread through feces, and can be prevented through healthy hygiene and modern sanitation, is also enjoying an afterlife, sickening more than 1,000 in Southern California, which includes San Diego, in the last two years.

It’s been suggested by one physician that the bubonic plague is lurking somewhere in all this.

Native Victor Davis Hanson has designated California as “America’s first Third-World state,” noting in National Review that “Third World” is no longer a “geographical term of the old Cold War” but now “simply denotes poor failed states all over the globe of all races and religions.” That description well fits Los Angeles, the second largest municipality in the country and “the city that gave us the modern freeway system.” Yet today, Hanson reminds us, it resembles “Justinian’s sixth-century Constantinople.”

Vodkapundit Stephen Green has expressed similar thoughts. He believes California is turning into a “Third World Hell Hole.“

“In your typical Third-World megalopolis,” writes Green, “basic city functions fall into disrepair, while once-eradicated diseases run rampant — and the local bigwig boasts about saving the world.

“Los Angeles is quickly becoming a typical Third-World megalopolis,” adds Green, “and the rest of the state isn’t far behind.”

Los Angeles is overbrimming with its owns problems and probably doesn’t care much about San Francisco. But the City by the Bay, too, has regressed to another time. Human feces and urine litter the streets and sidewalks. The city’s public spaces are also dumping grounds for used hypodermic needles.

Both cities have enormous homelessness issues to contend with. The homeless population has grown by 16% in Los Angeles and 12% in Los Angeles County over last year. San Francisco’s homeless population jumped 17% in the last two years.

At the same time, Santa Clara’s homeless population climbed by 31% and Alameda’s spiked 43%. In mostly rural Kern County, the number of homeless rose 64% over two years, and in affluent Orange County, there are 43% more homeless.

Though it makes up only about 12% of the nation’s population, as much as one-quarter of the country’s homeless were found in California a year ago. Given the increases listed above, there’s every reason to think that portion is even higher now.

Other difficulties piling up on Californians are housing prices so high that many families have little to nothing left over each month after making their mortgage or rent payments; a tax burden so heavy and so punitive that it drives people out; and state and local governments so hostile toward businesses, they’re leaving, too (if they can make the state line before their moving vans are torn apart by the crumbling California roads).

Another increase in motor fuel taxes is making gasoline prices unbearable; public education, once the nation’s best is now in decline, while crime is on the rise, and a summer of blackouts is on its way. Tyrannical policymakers are bent in stealing consumer choices by banning all plastics, automobiles that run on gasoline and diesel, paper receipts, and electricity that isn’t generated by the sun and the wind.

Legend tells us ancient cartographers wrote “Here Be Dragons” or “Here Be Monsters” on their maps to mark the dangers they suspected prowled uncharted waters Not so, says the Atlantic. But the Hunt-Lenox Globe, cobbled together around 1510, does carry such a warning.

Modern travelers could use similar advice. Their cell phone maps and GPS systems should point out that “here be monsters” as they approach California.

Alternatively, the State Department could issue travel advisories for those headed to California, as Hot Air’s Jazz Shaw has so cleverly suggested it should for those going to Baltimore and Chicago.

But it’s not the visitors who are at the greatest risk in California. It’s those who live there and are not among the small core of coastal wealthy elitists who can insulate themselves from the deteriorating conditions. They know where the monsters are because they see them every day.

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