It's time for another episode reporting the death spiral of California, this time sharing a Daily Mail (U.K.) story about the "beautiful people" bailing out of greater LA - Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Brentwood. DM does a reasonable job of making today's la-la land sound darn grim. Seemingly only Malibu has the mental toughness to kick the homeless and the stoned out of their enclave.
Included in those leaving SoCal, according to DM, are Nicole Kidman and husband Keith Urban, Tom Hanks and wife, Lou Ferrigno and wife, podcaster Joe Rogan, and Elon Musk, plus other show biz types whose names aren't famous.
Here is a near-perfect quote summing up the mess:
British-born Danny O'Brien runs Watford Moving & Storage. 'There is a mass exodus from Hollywood,' he says. 'And a lot of it is to do with politics.' His business is booming. 'August has already set records and we are only halfway through the month,' he tells me.
'People are getting out in droves. Last week I moved a prominent person in the music industry from a $6.5 million [£5 million] mansion above Sunset Boulevard to Nashville.' O'Brien, 58, who moved to LA from London 34 years ago, is also planning to move to Tennessee.
'Liberal politics has destroyed this city,' he says. 'The homeless encampments are legal and there's nothing the police can do. White, affluent middle-class folk are getting out. People don't feel safe any more.'
LA is beginning to resemble the future depicted for it in the Matt Damon, Jodie Foster film Elysium. In that depiction, for those who haven't seen it, LA resembles a squatter slum in Ensenada with open sewers, dirt streets, and tarpaper shacks.
Remind me, why don't we warehouse the mentally ill in asylums as we did when I was young?
