Give Me Bacon, or Give Me Death

On the other hand, power shortages are probably not the worst thing that could happen. I’d rather run out of electricity than bacon, which is probably also about to happen in Cali. And if the folks out there don’t vote to replace Newsom with Larry Elder over that, there’s no hope for humanity.

The bacon shortage is set to begin right after the first of the year. The reason for the bacon shortage is that our constitution allows pretty much any old citizen to vote, and citizens are some of the dumbest people on the planet. So when Californians go to their local supermarkets in January and can’t find any bacon, they’ll have only themselves to blame.

What happened was, back in 2018, Cali citizens resoundingly voted in a statewide proposition on animal welfare that included rules on minimum space requirements for pork producers. No pork will be allowed to be sold in Cali if it comes from a hog farm that doesn’t meet the rules. At present, only about four percent of the hog farms in the U.S. meet the space requirements specified in the law. I don’t know, exactly, or even vaguely, how much space a hog needs, but it seems the people of Cali figure they don’t have enough. So there’s that.

To be fair, Cali voters may not have really understood what they were voting for. And if you’ve ever tried to decipher the lawyerese on one of those referendum ballots, you know why. So maybe they didn’t realize they were voting away their bacon rights, which are guaranteed in the constitution, right at the beginning, under the pursuit of happiness. Because nobody fights a revolution without securing the really important stuff up front.

Regardless, considering the fact that it’s a citizen’s duty to know what he, she, or it is voting for, confusion over ballot verbiage is no excuse for giving up bacon, not to mention pork chops, honey-glazed ham, and pork rinds. It’s often said that you get what you pay for. You also get what you vote for.

But I think Cali voters kind of knew what they were doing. They expected hog farmers to say, ‘Well, hey, we won’t be able to sell any pork to California if we don’t build bigger hog pens. Guess we’d better pick up several thousand dollars’ worth of new fencing on the way home, eh Marge?’ Most of the hog farms are in Iowa, which is why the women are named Marge. Just sayin’.

Well, the hog farmers haven’t done that. I’m not real sure the ones in Iowa even know about the law, what with the internet being down out there since about 1852, and all. I doubt they’ll spend the bucks to meet California’s requirements. So either Cali will have to compromise their precious hog space principles, or do without bacon. Tough call. Not for me, but, you know.

And that’s not even the dumbest thing Cali has done lately, making bacon illegal. San Francisco has that beat. But then, San Francisco is to California what California is to the rest of the country. Even the rest of Cali thinks the folks in San Francisco are crazy.

The city of San Francisco has figured out a fool-proof plan for fighting crime. They’re going to start paying people not to shoot one another. In case you’re wondering, the going rate for not shooting anyone is $300 per month. You might also wonder where a state that’s so broke it can’t pay attention is going to get the money for this brilliant plan. That’s easy. They’re taking $120 million out of their police budget.

Sacramento did the same thing a while back, and reported that it worked very well. Advocates said, ‘only 44 percent of participants were subsequently arrested on new charges.’ Which is true, as long as you don’t count the one-third of participants who dropped out or were arrested in the first six months.

As Thomas Edison said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting not to get hit in the face with an alligator . . .

Kendal Hemphill is an outdoor humor columnist and minister who never eats bacon on a full stomach. Unless it’s there. Write to him at [email protected]