California once stood as the envy of the nation.

Now a new study reveals exactly what decades of nation-changing immigration levels actually cost the state — measured in lost farmland, vanishing water, and gridlocked roads.

And the numbers are the kind that pro-open-borders politicians will not want their constituents to read.

What the Paving Paradise Report Actually FoundNumbersUSA published a research analysis called Paving Paradise that examined the loss of California’s agricultural and natural land due to development driven by rapid population growth. The September report measured city expanse data from 1970 to the present and found that 91% of land development was caused by steady population increases — mostly driven by immigration.

California’s population doubled over the past five decades. That doubling required an enormous physical footprint to house, move, and serve.

From 1982 to 2022, 3,740 miles of California’s natural lands were eliminated. In total, 2.4 million acres — an area three times larger than Yosemite National Park — were converted to build housing and infrastructure.

Researchers linked immigration-driven overpopulation directly to water shortages, loss of wildlife, an increase in wildfires, an overabundance of traffic, and rising housing costs statewide.

Jim Robb, Vice President of NumbersUSA, put the traffic picture plainly when he told the Daily Caller News Foundation: “There’s been a huge amount of population growth since we were looking at California last and one of the biggest issues is the length of commutes and constant jamming of all the highways.”

 

California infrastructure initiatives for alternative transportation solutions still have not solved the problem.

What Californians Themselves SayCalifornia was once the cradle of the Republican Party.

Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan hailed from the Golden State.

But importing mass numbers of foreign migrants changed everything.

NumbersUSA commissioned Noble Predictive Insights to survey 1,030 California residents in August. The results track closely with what the land data shows.

Seventy-eight percent of respondents expressed concern with growing commute times. Eighty percent worried about future water supply. And 93% said they believe protecting California’s remaining farmland, forests, wetlands, and open spaces from further development matters to them.

That last number is worth sitting with. Ninety-three percent. That is not a fringe position. That is a near-universal consensus among the people who live there — and it sits in direct tension with the state’s political class, which has spent decades welcoming unlimited immigration without ever bothering to ask what a doubling population does to the land, the water, and the air.

Twenty-four million California residents have left for other states because the steady climb of immigration drove up housing costs, flooded labor markets, and lowered working wages.

And the ones who stayed are telling pollsters they are worried. Deeply worried.

The Sanctuary State Problem at the Center of It AllCalifornia carries the highest concentration of illegal aliens in the United States. Between 400,000 came to the state between 2021 and 2023 during the Biden administration alone, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

The state made itself a sanctuary jurisdiction, which functions as an open invitation for anyone willing to show up and collect the welfare benefits that the Public Policy Institute’s own data shows are a major driver of California’s appeal.

Robb spelled it out: “There’s a lot of reasons California is a big draw, its a beautiful state with a gigantic economy, and major welfare benefits but there’s also limited land and limited jobs so it puts pressure on the people who are already there.”

Limited land. Limited jobs. Unlimited immigration.

That combination does not produce a thriving middle-class state. It produces a state where 24 million people eventually give up and leave — and where the ones left behind are watching their water supply shrink and their commutes grow.

But legal immigration carries exactly the same consequences at high volume. It is not the paperwork that strains a road or drains an aquifer. It is the number of people. When a state imports a population without a ceiling, it imports the physical and economic pressures that come with it. The legal designation on a visa does not change the demand on a water table or a freeway interchange.

Sacramento has never reckoned with that. The political assumption has always been that more people means a bigger economy, more tax revenue, more political power in Congress. What the Paving Paradise data shows is that it also means millions of acres of lost farmland, wildlife corridors scraped flat for subdivisions, and a wildfire environment made worse by the development creeping into terrain that used to buffer communities from fire.

What This Actually Means Going ForwardThe people running California have spent decades treating immigration restriction as a moral failing rather than a policy question. Paving Paradise puts the physical cost of that posture into acres and miles.

And here is what makes the poll numbers so striking. The 93% of Californians who want to protect remaining farmland and open space did not answer a question about immigration. They answered a question about land. But those two questions have the same answer. You cannot stop the conversion of natural California into asphalt and rooftops while continuing to import population at nation-changing levels. The math does not allow it.

This is the argument that California’s political class refuses to make. Not because it is wrong — the data in this report makes it inescapably right — but because making it requires acknowledging that immigration volume has consequences. Real consequences. Measurable ones. Consequences that show up in the water table, in the commute clock, in the acreage lost to sprawl since 1970.

Twenty-four million people left the state. The ones who remained are watching wetlands disappear and worrying whether the tap will still run. They told pollsters they want protection for what is left.

But what politicians in Sacramento have delivered, year after year, is more of the same: sanctuary policies, maximum welfare benefits, and a studied refusal to connect the dots between immigration volume and the physical degradation of the place they were elected to govern.

NumbersUSA’s work here does something Sacramento has avoided doing. It counts the cost. Three times the acreage of Yosemite, gone. Ninety-one percent of land development tied to immigration-driven population growth. A water supply that 80% of residents are already worried about.

Those numbers belong in every conversation about what California used to be — and what it will look like if the next 50 years look anything like the last 50.

Source: Daily Caller News Foundation, “Mass Immigration Drastically Altered California’s State Landscape, New Study Finds,” September 24, 2026

 =========================================================

 1,000 protesters are camping in Madrid after an 87-year-old woman was evicted

 Around 1,000 housing protesters have camped for the past week demanding stronger protections for tenants. The protest was sparked by the eviction of 87-year-old María del Carmen Abascal from the home where she had lived for seven decades.

María del Carmen Abascal, 87, was forcibly evicted from her Madrid apartment on September 23, 2026, after living there for over 70 years. She was removed on a stretcher following a 230% rent increase demanded by the investment fund Urbagestion, which had acquired the building in 2018. The incident triggered massive nationwide protests in Spain over the housing crisis, with tens of thousands marching in Madrid and other cities.

  

https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/1000-protesters-are-camping-in-madrid-after-an-87-year-old-woman-was-evicted/

 =====================================================================

 

“The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.” -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

 ======================================================================================

 

 

Black Smoke Reported Over Critical Aramco Refinery As Saudis Weigh Major Assault On Houthi Rebels

 

Unverified reports and footage circulating on X early Saturday morning appear to show smoke rising from Saudi Aramco's Riyadh refinery. The cause and any impact on operations remain unclear. Separately, Axios reports that Saudi Arabia is preparing a major offensive against Iran-backed Houthis in the coming days. President Trump's comments last week that a bombing campaign against Tehran could resume after the midterm elections add to signs that the Gulf conflict remains far from any near-term resolution.

Turkish news outlet Türkiye Today cites NASA's FIRMS satellite monitoring system, which shows higher-intensity VIIRS thermal hits across Aramco's Riyadh refinery, one of Saudi Arabia's most important refining assets, with a capacity of about 130,000 barrels a day.

 https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/black-smoke-reported-over-critical-aramco-refinery-saudis-weigh-major-assault-houthi-rebels

=======================================================

 

Washington Loses Up to Half a Trillion Dollars Every Year to Fraud

 The Government Accountability Office estimates that the federal government loses between $233 BILLION and $521 BILLION every year to fraud. We are not talking about total government waste, unnecessary programs, bloated agencies, or interest on the national debt. This estimate is specifically FRAUD affecting federal programs and spending. At the upper end, that works out to more than $1.4 billion every single day.

This is the same government that tells you it desperately needs more revenue. Politicians argue over raising taxes, closing loopholes, increasing enforcement, and extracting another dollar from the productive economy while their own watchdog estimates that hundreds of billions could disappear annually through fraud. If a private corporation told its shareholders that somewhere between $233 billion and $521 billion was being lost every year and management could not narrow it down any further, the board would be thrown out.

 https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/corruption/washington-loses-up-to-half-a-trillion-dollars-every-year-to-fraud/?awt_a=1JPVU

===============================================================

 

 

France burns: Migration-background students rampage across the country, teachers doused in gasoline, schools set on fire, and hundreds of arrests reported

 

Images of burning schools, buses, and vicious assaults, along with a report of attempted murder, have once again hit France this morning, Oct. 1, as high school blockades mark their second week across France. What began as protests demanding better conditions for students and teachers has devolved into violence at dozens of locations, concentrated at schools with large immigrant populations

This morning, Oct. 1, further clashes, burning buses, and arson attacks have been reported. French news outlet BFMTV is even speaking of murder attempts being carried out by certain students in one incident where the leadership team of one school in Marseille was doused in gasoline. In response, French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu is convening an interministerial emergency meeting at 1 p.m. to contain the crisis.

 https://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=331689

=============================================================

  

 A 16-Year-Old Athlete Took the Shot for School—Then Lost Her Mobility

 

 

 

================================================

================================================

   

Why Every Starlink Satellite Is Slowly Falling

  

 

 

 

The Eight Stages of Civilizational Collapse

 

I’ve been watching things fall apart for a while now. Not in a dramatic way, not with explosions or sudden catastrophes, but in that slow, grinding manner that characterizes how societies actually end. You read about the Maya abandoning their cities, or Rome’s legions becoming unable to defend the borders they’d once patrolled with ease, and you imagine some singular moment of realization. But that’s not how it happens. It happens in increments so small that people living through them can always tell themselves it’s temporary, it’s cyclical, it’s going to turn around.

Still, after enough years of reading the data—wealth concentration figures, climate reports, debt statistics, biodiversity indices—you start to see a shape emerging. Not prophecy, just pattern recognition. Civilizations that collapsed in the past didn’t do so randomly. They moved through recognizable stages, and those stages tend to share common features regardless of whether you’re looking at Bronze Age Mesopotamia or twentieth-century industrial powers.

What follows is my attempt to map those stages as I see them operating now. I’m not claiming expertise I don’t have. I’m just someone who’s spent too many evenings comparing archaeological studies with contemporary news reports and finding the parallels impossible to ignore. Eight stages seem to capture the trajectory that historical societies followed on their way to transformation—transformation being the polite word for collapse, though collapse itself is just another kind

 https://johnwalter25.substack.com/p/the-eight-stages-of-civilizational