Artist of the Year 2023 for film and TV: Magdalena Aparicio

• April 30, 2023

Magdalena Aparicio changed her mind several times about what she wanted to be when she grew up.

Elementary school: author. Middle school: painter. High school: photographer.

Meet other Artists of the Year

Dance: Jonah Smith, Orange County School of the Arts
Theater: Selma Elbalalesy, Aliso Niguel High School
Instrumental music: Lucie Kim, Orange County School of the Arts
Vocal music: Adrianna Tapia, Santa Ana High School
Fine Arts: Alexandra Hernandez, Costa Mesa High School
Media arts: Zachary Cramer, Fountain Valley High School

But in her junior year at Yorba Linda High, she took a video production class that most kids at her school sign up for as freshmen. She’s now determined to be a filmmaker — combining all three of her previously imagined careers.

Her teacher and the panel who judged the film submissions of 15 would-be Artists of the Year for Film and TV seem sure she’s got a good shot at her dream.

Look how far she’s come in such a short amount of time.

Last year, Aparicio wrote and directed the film that won Best Music Video at the Orange County Film Festival. Before signing up for the school video production class, she said she had “not even an ounce” of film experience.

This year, for a high school competition that gave students all of 24 hours to create a music video, Aparicio repeated her dual role with the same stellar results — her class won Best Music Video.

Magdalena Aparicio, a senior at Yorba Linda High School, is the 2023 Artist of the Year in film and TV. Magdalena is shown at the Argyros Global Citizens Plaza at Chapman University in Orange on Sunday, April 16, 2023. (Photo by Leonard Ortiz, Orange County Register/SCNG)

In his advanced video productions class, teacher Richard Cadra said, “She is very skilled with all of the equipment and software, and she also has wonderfully creative ideas for short films and always comes through with her deadlines.”

Aparicio is a young woman from a family of immigrants, a large household in which she grew up around a dozen family members.

She is anything but traditional and wants to flip the script on film stereotypes.

Consider her award-winning music video from last year, “Portrait of Adolescence: Entre los Dos.” The main character is a teenage girl who is queer, but not one with the all-too-common tragic ending Aparicio said is depicted in films.

“My main character finds pain and insecurity in self discovery, but pushes past it to see that she deserves love,” Aparicio wrote. “I make films for those who don’t really get the spotlight in film and TV. Queer and Hispanic people like me.”

She chose a Spanish-language song as the music for the video so her family could better understand it. Her parents attended the film festival where it debuted. Their reaction was along the lines of “Huh, so that’s what she’s been doing.”

Aparicio, who turns 18 in May, hopes to someday have the kind of signature style that will be recognizable, like that of one of her favorite filmmakers, John Hughes.

“I want somebody to say, ‘That’s a Magdalena Aparicio film.’”

Film and TV finalists

Film and TV is divided into five specialties: cinematography, film directing, promo/commercial making, TV/broadcast journalism, and visual effects and editing. (Due to the small number of nominees in promo/commercial making and TV/broadcast journalism, those specialties were combined this year.) In addition to Artist of the Year, the judges selected finalists in each category.

Winston Verdult of Santa Ana, a senior studying at St. Margaret’s Episcopal School, was selected as the finalist in the specialty of cinematography for Artist of the Year in 2023. (Photo courtesy of Suzanne Verdult)

Cinematography: Winston Verdult, 18, senior at St. Margaret’s Episcopal School. In February, Verdult won the YoungArts Gold Medal Award, which came with a $10,000 prize. He’s had to work with limited resources and time, shooting the film he submitted, “When the Clock Strikes,” in one-day, with no crew and the challenge of working around all the reflection from glass items in an antique store. He pulled it off. “You got creative in the space where you were filming,” said Victor Payan, co-founder of the OC Film Fiesta multicultural film festival.

Charlotte Quintanar of San Clemente, a senior studying at St. Margaret’s Episcopal School, was selected as the finalist in the specialty of film directing for Artist of the Year in 2023. (Photo courtesy of Lisa Renee)

Film directing: Charlotte Quintanar, 17, senior at St. Margaret’s Episcopal School. She was a finalist last year. She is still creating student-oriented explanatory videos that NASA uses on its website to instruct young minds. Last year she made a documentary on bees, “just a summer project” that she shot in Orange County and in England. “I was running around like a maniac, chasing bees around with a camera.” The judges expect to see her work on PBS someday.

Hunaina Hirji of Yorba Linda, a junior studying at Yorba Linda High School, was selected as the finalist in the specialty of promo/commercial making for Artist of the Year in 2023. (Photo courtesy of Ameerah Hirji)

Promo/Commercial Making, and TV/Broadcast Journalism: Hunaina Hirji, 16, junior at Yorba Linda High. She produced a PSA about mental health and anxiety, a subject made personal to her through the struggles of family members and friends. She also made a video message on school finals that had a more lighthearted horror film feel to it. Hirji likes to tell her stories through sound design. If she can’t find the sound she wants, she creates her own. “Once I got into it,” she said, “I couldn’t stop.”

Tyler Hom of Irvine, a senior studying at Beckman High School, was selected as the finalist in the specialty of visual effects and editing for Artist of the Year in 2023. (Photo courtesy of Meena Senapathi)

Visual Effects and Editing: Tyler Hom, 18, senior at Beckman High. He showed the judges a documentary on the making of a musical that his school puts on every few years to involve all its arts students. After three months, Hom ended up with 13 hours of footage to condense into a six-minute film. “Not an easy task,” he said. Hom, who is headed for Boston University, likes to focus on realism. “It’s real people. It’s real stories. I don’t think there’s a better story than a true story.”

​ Orange County Register 

Orange County vet who volunteered in Ukraine, survived rocket attack: ‘I would do it again’

• April 30, 2023

In the dark, there was a staccato beat of sound — a thundering, unplaceable boom. Then there was the pain, sudden and unyielding.

Giovanni Roman was hit.

It was just before midnight on a frigid February evening in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine when the 29-year-old Marine veteran from Garden Grove was struck by an enemy Russian rocket while inside a Humvee on the frontlines.

Blood soaked through his vest. Pain electrified him. The impact shattered part of Roman’s skull, claimed his right eye, and jettisoned shrapnel into his arm and hand. But somehow, Roman stayed awake. He remembers it all.

“I’ve always believed as a man you should be willing to die for something,” Roman said. “I have no problem dying helping someone out and helping the defenseless — and that is exactly what was going on there.”

The hours leading up to the attack were as normal as they could be in the embattled country, where Roman volunteered twice as a medic and soldier.

On a second trip that began in December, Roman was volunteering with the International Legion of Ukraine — stationed in the oblast, or region, annexed by Russia in September. As the only medic in his unit, Roman said he would sometimes insert IVs while staving off enemy fire.

Hours before the attack, Roman had booted up DoorDash to send his girlfriend Valentine’s Day flowers and made a call to his mother. But those were some of his only communications back to Orange County from Donetsk, where his unit spent each night sleeping in muddy foxholes with nary a bathroom or proper meal. Temperatures frequently dipped below zero. Often, Russian drones could be heard buzzing overhead.

As also alleged by Ukrainian president Volodymr Zelenskyy, Roman said white phosphorous — a weapon outlawed by the Geneva Convention — would fall from the skies, threatening to burn through flesh. The acrid smell of it still lingers on some of his gear today, he said.

Before the war began, Roman had never been to Europe, nor had he seen combat with the Marine Corps, which he joined in 2014, not long after graduating high school. He was in third grade when 9/11 happened; from then on, he’d wanted to be a soldier.

In the Marines, Roman served as an infantryman and achieved the rank of sergeant. He won a Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal, among other awards, before he was honorably discharged in 2020, according to military records.

A photo of Giovanni Roman, a Marine Corps veteran from Orange County, on the frontlines with the Ukrainian army in the war against Russia. He was badly injured when the vehicle he was traveling in was hit by a rocket, smashing his face and resulting in his losing an eye. He is now back at home in Orange County and recovering from his injuries. (Courtesy Giovanni Roman)

Although Roman was in the early stages of becoming a Navy corpsman last February, leaving his burgeoning Naval career and a day job as an ER technician felt necessary. Russia’s invasion, he said, seemed as consequential a moment as the early days of World War II.

A flicker on the TV screen during a night shift at the hospital was enough to convince him.

“It didn’t feel right that I’m over here comfortable with my hospital scrubs, clean and living a good life, knowing there are civilians getting bombed,” Roman said.

Those close to him weren’t surprised. Roman has long been drawn to public service, his friend Scott Caceres said, recalling their first meeting seven years ago while working as EMTs.

Early in their friendship, Roman convinced Caceres to join him in the Marine Corps. They were stationed together in Japan; Caceres refers to Roman as a “brother.”

While Caceres knew there would be no stopping Roman from volunteering in Ukraine, he described a “mix of emotions” about his friend’s choice.

“I felt proud of Gio for serving the victims of the Russians’ assault, but also worried about his safety,” said Caceres, a Santa Ana police officer. “I tried my best to support him.”

For Roman, going to Ukraine didn’t seem complicated — as a trained soldier, he figured there was a way he could help. In a matter of days, his plan was in motion.

“(The invasion) happened on a Thursday, I bought my ticket Sunday night, and I flew out Wednesday,” Roman said.

Gear and medical supplies in tow, he began an odyssey that took him from John Wayne Airport to Switzerland, then Poland, and finally on to Ukraine via car.

As refugees poured out from the Ukrainian-Polish border, Roman drove toward the conflict with someone he’d met on Reddit. In a video shot by Roman, hordes of people, mainly women and children, are seen surrounding their vehicle.

Soon, they were at a crowded base camp near the western city of Lviv. Roman declined to sign a contract with the Ukrainian government, which asked for a three-year commitment. He offered instead to help where he could.

Amid the hubbub, he found a colonel ready to give orders — before asking a question:

“Are you here to kill people?”

Roman said he wasn’t — and still insists that he went to help, not to get a thrill out of the violence.

“The colonel goes, ‘Well, Russians are bombing the hospital. And they’re bombing schools. So if you want a chance to live, I recommend going to fight with the Ukraine special forces.’ And I was like, ‘Done,’” Roman said. “And I’ll never forget, he shook my hand and he goes, ‘Happy hunting, my friend.’”

Soon, Roman and a motley bunch of international volunteers — one American, several Brits, a Spaniard, and a few Mexican men — began their work in a rural village, doing tasks ad hoc to prevent Kyiv, the capital, from falling. Near-constant bombings punctuated their days; sometimes, artillery fire would come every 10 to 20 seconds. In three days, Roman said he saw an entire forest leveled.

“It was so unorganized. They were taking (volunteers) and just throwing them in the front because we’re trying to buffer the attacks with the Russians,” Roman said. “I didn’t eat for maybe seven days. I couldn’t go to the bathroom … We got these Ukrainian rations, but they were frozen because it was so cold.”

On the frontlines, Roman saw horrors. He declines to get into specifics about what he did and witnessed, but alleges that serious crimes — from rape and torture to extrajudicial executions — were committed by Russian forces.

Although they were never used, Roman kept extra magazines in his breast pocket, planning to take his life and destroy his cell phone if he were ever captured. He feared what the Russian forces would do to an American, much less a former U.S. soldier.

Though the war was far from over, as April approached, Roman’s month of paid time off was up. He’d funded his Ukraine volunteering out-of-pocket and needed to work again. For the second time, he crossed the Atlantic.

Back in Orange County, the normalcy he once knew turned surreal. With but a few plane rides, Roman was out of the battlefield and back into what he called the “Orange County bubble.” Inside, it seemed no one could relate to what he’d seen. But life carried on. Unlike a military deployment, there are no official periods of post-combat rest for volunteer soldiers.

“I literally flew back and it was right back to work the next day. Patients are coming in because they’re drunk … meanwhile, I just got flipped by an artillery round. I was dragging dudes, putting on tourniquets while they were screaming,” Roman said. “It’s hard because I come back here and people are talking about other things, (like) what the Kardashians are doing.”

It became challenging to work while he knew civilians, Ukrainian soldiers, and fellow volunteers remained in a warzone. So in December, he took a leave of absence and returned to Ukraine.

Ten months of war had given Ukraine some time to improve its volunteer coordination, Roman said. But even with the better organization, a sense of foreboding brewed inside him.

Giovanni Roman, a Marine veteran, after he was injured while volunteering in Ukraine. He survived a rocket attack but lost his right eye. (GoFundMe)

He told Caceres that he thought his luck might run out sometime soon.

Then it did.

It was morning in California when Caceres learned what happened.

“I felt a strong desire to go to Ukraine to help my friend,” Caceres said. “(But) I had responsibilities to my daughter and wife that I couldn’t ignore, and I didn’t have the resources or training necessary to carry out a rescue mission.”

Alone in a hospital bed more than 6,000 miles away, Roman said he didn’t dwell on the attack.

“I don’t regret going,” he said. “I would do it again in a heartbeat.”

While Roman is proud nobody he treated medically died, several others he knew have been killed. Some are among the signatories on the Ukrainian-American hybrid flag that now sits on the cerulean wall behind his bed. Most of the messages are written in Ukrainian. Roman and the Ukrainian soldiers had no lingua franca other than a few words — the “You best” scrawled in the middle of the flag among them.

The flag was a gift from his colleagues-turned-friends, Roman said — the same ones who called him “Doc” and made sure the bloodstained gear that now sits on his bedroom floor got back to him.

Sitting on the edge of his bed, he surveyed the gear: a torn-up glove from the hand hit by shrapnel, a vest emblazoned with American and Ukrainian flag patches, and a helmet reading “Medic.” Next to Roman sat a pile of patches, most of them mementos from his unit, others from Russian uniforms.

These are the only items that made it back with Roman, who returned home in March. Still bloodied and bandaged, he took a commercial flight home after weeks in a Ukrainian hospital that was bombed while he was still a patient. Upon arrival, his mother shuttled him to the emergency room.

Now, even in the ostensible security of Orange County, Roman worries about his and his family’s safety. He has received death threats from pro-Russian social media accounts, he said.

They began after Roman’s social media appeared on a Russian Telegram channel calling out “Nazi activity” in Ukraine — a debunked notion that has its origins in Kremlin propaganda. It was only a matter of time before his face and name were out there, Roman said, adding that other volunteers, including those in his unit, have faced similar doxxing.

An X-ray of Giovanni Roman, a Marine Corps veteran from Orange County, who was severely injured when the vehicle he was traveling in was hit by a rocket, smashing his face and resulting in his losing an eye while fighting on the frontlines with the Ukrainian army in the war against Russia. Roman is now back at home in Orange County and recovering from his injuries. (Courtesy Giovanni Roman)

The online threats are just one of many new elements in Roman’s post-Ukraine life.

Most of the time, Roman is working on recovering — gaining back his strength after losing thirty pounds and a recent surgery that removed seven pieces of additional shrapnel from his right hand. Last week, he went to the gym for the first time in months. He’s focusing on his girlfriend and lives on a placid, palm tree-lined street near family. On Instagram, he’s keeping a diary of his progress, for those here and in Ukraine.

Sometimes, he gets frustrated when people don’t seem to care about a war that doesn’t touch them directly. Roman keeps it in, though, because as he puts it, he does not want to come across as the “stereotype of an angry veteran.” Still, he can’t shake the knowledge that people “just like us” have lost their homeland for no good reason — that even now, the war continues.

Roman has a Go Fund Me page but is still trying to figure out how to cover his medical costs. The pain lingers, and probably will for a long time. There are fragments of shrapnel, he said, that will remain in him forever.

In a few weeks, he turns 30. He doesn’t yet know what his career will look like moving forward, and what the new shape of his life will be.

With his dream of becoming a firefighter seemingly dashed, some days he considers going to nursing school.

And on others, for a brief moment, he thinks about going back to Ukraine.

​ Orange County Register 

Biden mortgage lending policy punishing people with higher credit scores is ridiculous

• April 30, 2023

A new Biden administration rule requiring lower mortgage fees for riskier borrowers, paid for by higher fees for less risky borrowers, has stirred up a hornet’s nest of opposition.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency, the “safety and soundness” regulator of mortgage-lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, directed the two government-sponsored enterprises to make changes to the upfront fees they charge borrowers beginning May 1. FHFA director Sandra Thompson said fees will be eliminated for “certain groups core to the Enterprises’ mission, such as first-time homeowners with lower incomes,” while other borrowers buying homes or refinancing loans will pay more.

In a statement released Tuesday, Thompson complained about “misconceptions” and insisted that “higher-credit-score borrowers are not being charged more so that lower-credit-score borrowers can pay less.” She said fees are being eliminated “for borrowers with lower incomes, not lower credit scores.”

However, Thompson neglected to mention that last October, the FHFA changed the way it calculates credit scores, replacing the traditional FICO credit score model it had used for decades with FICO 10T and VantageScore 4.0. Thompson called the new models “more inclusive” and said they would provide the market with “an improved understanding of risk.”

Not everybody thinks it’s an improvement. House Financial Services Chair Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-North Carolina, and Housing and Insurance subcommittee chair Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, sent a scathing letter to Thompson on Tuesday warning that legislation may follow unless the administration calls off the new pricing rules.

“These changes cannot be justified from a risk management perspective, and amount to a tax on all creditworthy GSE homebuyers to subsidize borrowers with riskier loans,” the lawmakers wrote. They added that there is “no doubt that lenders will pass on the new LLPA (loan-level price adjustment) costs to borrowers, which will result in higher mortgage rates and reduced access to credit.”

On the other side of the Capitol, 18 Republican senators sent a similar letter to Thompson, demanding details of how the policy decision was reached. The senators wrote that it “establishes a perverse incentive that punishes hardworking Americans for their fiscal prudence.”

The FHFA’s loan-level price adjustment varies according to the type of loan, type of property, loan-to-value ratio, debt-to-income ratio and credit score. The agency chose to make cash-out refinance loans and mortgages for second homes more expensive. Thompson said these higher fees will support the “targeted” elimination of fees to borrowers with lower incomes.

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The pricing redesign has many critics. The Mortgage Bankers Association told the FHFA that the debt-to-income component is “unworkable and should be replaced,” but the agency would only agree to delay that component until Aug. 1.

Thompson said the first objective of the new policy is to support borrowers who are “limited by income or wealth.” But if large numbers of buyers are coaxed into home loans they can’t afford, waves of foreclosures can result, especially when interest rates are rising. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are still in conservatorship following their rapid expansion that led, in 2008, to a nearly $200 billion taxpayer bailout.

This time the Biden administration wants to subsidize higher-risk borrowers by openly raising costs for all other borrowers, as if it’s the government’s job to force some customers to pay more so others can pay less.

It’s not. The sooner they figure that out, the better.

​ Orange County Register 

10 things to know about older workers and the labor shortage

• April 30, 2023

This week’s column addresses older workers, who are often perceived as an undervalued segment of the labor force. This lack of recognition was recently upended by a Wall Street Journal headline: “Bosses Want Hard Workers – So They are Hiring Older People.”

This sounds like a new discovery. It is not.

Let’s go back to 1970. In that year, Harold L. Sheppard wrote a book, “Towards an Industrial Gerontology,” considered a new field of social research. It focused on the employment and retirement problems of middle-aged and older workers. Although published over 50 years ago, the book’s Table of Contents reads like it’s 2023 with chapter titles such as “Retraining and Job Redesign,” “Older Workers in Pursuit of New Careers,” “On Age Discrimination” and “The Second Career.” 

So why is the older worker finally coming into vogue?

A significant labor force shortage may be part of the answer. Compared to 2020, 3 million fewer Americans are in the labor force. Yet currently there are more than 10.4 million job openings with about 1.2 million adults in their 40s, 50s and 60s who make up half of the long-term unemployed. 

Let’s try to understand the problem. We’ve had the pandemic and the Great Resignation. Now we have the “quiet quitters” who typically complete minimum work requirements to keep their jobs. Some folks no longer want to work because they aren’t paid enough, don’t see opportunities to advance and feel they are not respected. And many want to work only on their terms. Add to that, workers 65 and older generally value hard work more than their younger counterparts, according to research studies. Note, there always are exceptions.

Older adults may face several obstacles in securing employment such as mismatched skills, technology challenges, long commutes, the value of youth over age and more. However, there may be a more subtle underlying reason: Ageism

 What do we know about older workers? Take the following quiz to check myths vs facts. 

1. Older workers tend to stay in their jobs for a shorter amount of time, compared to younger workers.

False. Older workers generally stay in their job longer than younger workers. In 2022, the median tenure for men ages 55-64 was almost 10 years compared to almost three years for those 25-34. 

2. Older workers are consistently more productive than younger workers.

True. A study found that among 65 to 80-year-olds, their performance was more stable and less variable from day to day compared to the younger group. 

3. Older workers take more sick leave compared to younger workers. 

False. Older workers generally take fewer sick days than younger workers. However, their length of sick time may be longer. 

4. Age is one part of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) as a category for inclusion. 

False. DEI efforts most often do not include age as a consideration. Yet over 80% of people ages 50-80 experience ageism every day. 

5. Older workers tend to have lower health care costs. 

True. They tend to have lower healthcare costs since most do not have children as dependents on their plans. Additionally, those age 65 and older are eligible for Medicare which also can reduce employers’ health care costs. 

6. Older workers consistently cost more. 

False. Older workers often cost less than younger coworkers because there is less need for costly recruitment and training.

7. Older workers have more workplace accidents than younger workers.

False. In fact, they have fewer accidents. However, the causes are different. Older workers often have accidents related to speed and reaction time while younger often have accidents due to lack of experience and often judgment. 

8. Beginning at age 55, workers are legally protected from age discrimination in the workplace. 

False. The legal protection for workers begins at age 40. It is illegal for employers to fire or refuse to hire someone on the basis of their age for those aged 40 and older, according to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. 

9 Mandatory retirement is allowed in some cases. 

True. These are called BFOQs, or bona fide occupational qualifications. They usually pertain to jobs that involve public safety such as police, firefighters and airline pilots. 

10. Older workers are less productive than younger workers.

False. At best, they are equal or slightly ahead of younger workers. According to the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy, “On balance, older employees’ productivity and reliability is higher than that of their younger colleagues.” 

The current workforce shortages and the availability of qualified older workers may change some age-biased stereotyped thinking. For now, ageism may be taking a “second seat.” Hopefully, this relatively new recognition will endure. 

Stay well everyone and note: “Kindness is free; sprinkle it everywhere.” ~unknown

Helen Dennis is a nationally recognized leader on issues of aging and the new retirement with academic, corporate and nonprofit experience. Contact Helen with your questions and comments at [email protected]. Visit Helen at HelenMdennis.com and follow her on facebook.com/SuccessfulAgingCommunity

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​ Orange County Register 

Sacramento legislators prefer grandstanding over serious governing

• April 30, 2023

We’re deep into the legislative session and it’s prime time to look at what lawmakers are hatching.

Perhaps the biggest debate this session has centered on fentanyl — the synthetic painkiller that is many times more potent than heroin and has led to more than 5,700 overdose deaths in California last year. Lawmakers have proposed a package of measures that mostly are about grandstanding — and epitomize the “throw everything at the wall” legislating common during other Drug War panics.

The fentanyl problem is real. Yet the state already has a “master plan” that ramps up funding. Police agencies and DAs already have plenty of powers to arrest and prosecute dealers. The proposals would create a task force, call for new warnings to drug dealers and enhance prison sentences. Fortunately, the Assembly Public Safety Committee has resisted these efforts.

Meanwhile, California lawmakers continue to move forward noxious bills to expand rent control and to bring back eminent-domain-abusing redevelopment agencies. Those proposals present a direct threat to Californians’ property rights.

What would a legislative session be without a major tax-increase proposal? Senate Democrats have introduced a plan to close the budget deficit by raising taxes on large corporations “to pay for tax cuts for small businesses, renters, low-income Californians and union members” and boosting social spending, as the Sacramento Bee reported.

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Even when the state enjoyed a $97.5-billion budget surplus, Democrats pushed for tax and fee increases. Large numbers of businesses and wealthy Californians already are moving elsewhere. Gov. Gavin Newsom — as he considers a presidential run — already threw cold water on this tax proposal. At least the governor got one thing right.

No legislative session would be complete without some lawmaker offering a silly bill that seems designed to become a late-night TV punchline. This session’s winner is the “Skittles bill” that would ban the use of red dye No. 3 used in some candies. Unbelievably, it passed out of committee.

On a more serious note, Assembly member Phil Ting proposed a measure to limit police use of creepy — and inaccurate — facial-recognition systems. However, the ACLU argues that the bill will actually expand their use. Until this year, California had outlawed the government’s use of such technology. We agree that law enforcement can’t be trusted with it.

Californians should wonder why the Legislature fails to address California’s most-pressing problems — as it focuses on expanding government power.

​ Orange County Register 

California’s regulatory labyrinth makes it hard for Californians to get things done

• April 30, 2023

California was once the powerhouse of American growth and innovation, a place that let people pursue their dreams without inhibition. Its latitudinarian attitude toward builders and entrepreneurs made the state a magnet for migrants from around the world. It grew to become the world’s fifth-largest economy, and its population exploded from 1.5 million in 1900 to about 18 million in 1964, when it became the largest state in the nation, to almost 40 million today.

Yet that expansive, optimistic era is now over. In 2020 and 2021, for the first time in its history, California’s population shrank. Early indications are that it shrank again in 2022. The main reason: the state makes it increasingly hard for people to do a great many things. Indeed, few places in the Western world today make it tougher to construct a new house or launch a new business. When Mercatus Center researchers ranked the states on the number of separate demands in their regulations, California had by far the most, with almost 400,000 rules. California is dead last on the Cato Institute’s and the Pacific Research Institute’s state rankings on regulatory burdens.

Regulations are choking California, transforming a dynamic center of innovation and job creation into a place where pettifogging bureaucrats besiege citizens and entrepreneurs with demands covering even the minutest actions. It’s no surprise that people are leaving.

California has become notorious for its stratospheric housing prices, and nothing has done more to sap the state’s entrepreneurial energy and drain its citizens’ pocketbooks than restrictions on new building, which drive up those prices. In many places developers need to pay for extensive archeological, paleontological, and biologic reports on their property, written at great cost by academic experts. Even when a development meets all the planners’ reporting and zoning demands, bureaucrats and politicians in many cities have “discretionary review” of proposals, enabling them to reject projects based on vague criteria or no criteria at all. 

The state’s building standards account for more than 75,000 of its 400,000 regulatory demands. Many of these attempt to make every home an environmental mecca. For instance, most new homes must have solar panels and those with garages must have a 208- or 240-volt electric-vehicle charging space. State and local codes mandate that housing developers add costly water-saving features, such as using only “climate adapted plants,” and provide the government with a “Landscape Documentation Package” describing all the ways the building limits water use. 

If someone wants to build in lots up to five miles from the ocean, he can be subject to the tender mercies of the California Coastal Commission. A developer will need to obtain a Coastal Development Permit from it, filling out a 24-page application and paying up to $10,000 per house for the privilege. All these impositions increase the cost of new buildings—and reduce the likelihood of their getting built in the first place.

California’s high housing costs drive away many skilled workers, but even if such workers could afford to live in the state, it is often illegal for them to practice their craft. According to the Institute for Justice, California is the second-worst state in the nation in terms of occupational license regulations. The state has found myriad other ways to make it hard for businesses to find and employ good workers. Measure AB 5, passed in 2019, forbids companies from using independent contractors unless they meet numerous state rules. 

California was once a shining example of how to attract good manufacturing workers and businesses, once boasting some of the most advanced silicon chip “fabs” and aerospace engineering facilities on earth—but government overreach ended that. From 1992 to 2002, the state passed an average of 15 labor-law changes yearly, four times the national average, with technical and heavy industries feeling the harshest impact. Since the early 1990s, the state has gone from having almost 16 percent of its workforce in manufacturing to less than half that and is now far below the national average.

For almost every national regulator and attached code, California has its own stricter regulators and codes. The California Environmental Protection Agency and the California Department of Industrial Relations compete not just to enforce but to layer more requirements on top of federal environmental and labor rules. The California Office of Administrative Law supervises more than 200 state agencies and commissions with the power to issue regulations, including the Bureau of Household Goods and Services, the Naturopathic Medicine Committee, and the Department of Pesticide Regulation.

California often pronounces onerous new regulations, and then allows almost anyone to sue if businesses don’t abide by them. Residents of the state are familiar with signs on products and in businesses about chemicals “known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.” Proposition 65, passed in 1986, established this labeling rule. The current state list contains more than 900 chemicals, used to make every imaginable product, from shoes to cars to computer parts. Just to ensure your safety, some trees for sale in the Golden State feature Prop. 65 warnings.

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If firms ignore the labeling rule, they better watch out. Since 2000, businesses have paid more than $300 million in legal settlements for failure to post warnings, with attorneys garnering nearly three-fourths of the total. The combination of Prop. 65 and litigation means that many companies, such as BJ’s Wholesale Club, now refuse to ship products to California, worried that they might send an improperly labeled item. California also uses lawsuits to enforce federal rules against businesses. For instance, the Americans with Disabilities Act lets people sue businesses to make them accessible to the disabled, but in California a plaintiff can get special monetary rewards for suing successfully. One plaintiff filed more than 100 lawsuits in a year. 

In our federal system, if businesses and people don’t like your rules and your demands, they can move. A recent Hoover Institution analysis showed that 352 company headquarters left the state from 2018 to 2021, including 11 Fortune 1000 companies. Hundreds of thousands of people, including this writer, have departed, too. If California’s politicians and bureaucrats think that businesses and people will abide by ever more rules and pay ever more for housing and services, even as other states roll back regulations and mandates, they’re dreaming.

Judge Glock is the director of research and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, as well as a contributing editor of City Journal. This piece is adapted from City Journal’s special issue “Can California Be Golden Again?”

​ Orange County Register 

This film reminds us that fun, friendship and new adventures are ageless

• April 30, 2023

I thought I was doing my daughter a favor when I agreed to watch the movie “80 for Brady” with her. But it turned out to be the other way around. Although I’m not much of a sports fan, and, unlike my daughter, definitely not in love with football star Tom Brady, I do understand why one of the 80-year-old female characters in the film described him thus:

“What a beautiful man. So well hydrated.”

Based on the true story of four, 80ish lifelong friends who are die-hard Brady fans, Lily Tomlin, Rita Moreno, Jane Fonda and Sally Field melt into the characters. The four women travel to watch Brady play in the Super Bowl and laughable, crazy chaos ensues as they live out the adventure of their lives. Although it’s not the first time these actresses have made me laugh and cry in their performances about aspects of older age, this story hit home.

They could have been me and my three closest friends — we called ourselves The Four Squares, a name created one day while we were having lunch in Pasadena at the now-defunct Beckham Place. Louise outlined our table with her hand and declared “just like this table the four of us are a perfect square.” The name stuck. But not the “Squares.”

Although I am now the only remaining Square, I always refer to us in the plural. Sometimes I take the “Squares” with me when I go shopping for clothes. I can still picture the three of them circled around me fussing over the wedding dress I bought when I married George.

I still ask their opinions, especially if I’m thinking about doing something I’m a little unsure about. “Do you think it’s okay for me to have dinner with a man I met in my grief class?” Three heads nod yes in unison.

Though some have referred to “80 for Brady” as an exaggerated piece of fluff, I applaud the message it sends that having fun is not something you grow out of. Fun and friendship and new adventures are ageless. When my mother was 100 she said she still felt like a 26-year-old woman inside. I think that’s something to look forward to.

Email [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @patriciabunin and at patriciabunin.com.

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​ Orange County Register 

Dear Gov. Newsom: If addiction is a brain disease, where are all the doctors?

• April 30, 2023

Fourth in a regular series. See Dear Gov. Newsom: People are dying in the Rehab Riviera. Do something, Dear Gov. Newsom: Their daughter’s been swallowed by California’s rehab monster and How did Frankie Taylor overdose in a state-licensed addiction treatment center?

Dear Gov. Newsom: Today we’ll take a break from harrowing tales of tragedy and death in California’s (poorly regulated, private-pay, 12-step based, insurance-money fueled) addiction treatment system to visit with Dr. Walter Ling, a neuropsychiatrist who’s worked in addiction medicine for nearly as long as you’ve been alive.

Please listen to what he has to say. For thousands of people, it’s a matter of life and death.

Ling has the remarkable gift of clarity, frequently quotes his mother’s wisdom, has an infectious optimism — and will be the first to tell you that his formidable foray into addiction treatment was entirely by accident. The plan was simply to finish neurology and psychiatry training at Washington University in St. Louis and return to the Chulalongkorn University Medical School — he was born in China and grew up in Thailand — but then he met May, a local teacher volunteering at a children’s hospital. Wedding bells rang. May felt that pull west, dearly wishing to raise their kids in California, so he took a job at the Sepulveda VA Hospital in Los Angeles in 1971.

We’ll jump ahead a bit to tell you that Ling has had a hand in studying every major medication for opiate addiction in the United States, is founding director of UCLA’s Integrated Substance Abuse Programs and a keen chronicler of how addiction treatment cleaved from mainstream medicine and was schluffed off to its current, expressly non-medical, silo.

Over there, it’s oft overseen by “recovering” addicts who may or may not be recovered.  “Medication-assisted treatment” is still widely shunned. And detoxification — the initial weaning off substances — is tragically mistaken for treatment itself.

“The most common outcome of detoxification,” Ling has written, “is relapse.”

Here are a few of his Mama Ling-esque pearls of wisdom you should memorize:

• Detoxification may be good for a lot of things, but staying off drugs is not one of them.

• The difference between getting off drugs and staying off drugs is the difference between a wedding and a happy marriage. The wedding is a big deal, but it has nothing to do with a happy marriage. Right now, our entire treatment system is targeted to the wedding.

• You can’t get a life if you can’t stay off drugs. And you can’t stay off drugs for long if you can’t get a life. Taking medication is the best guarantee that you don’t die from an overdose and actually stay off drugs.

• The term “medication-assisted treatment” itself is puzzling. What is the medication assisting? It is the treatment.

• If addiction is a brain disease, where are all the doctors?

Gold standard

Shortly after the young Ling family arrived in California, the good doctor was helping out on the general psychiatric ward at the Veteran’s Administration hospital. Nixon was president. Veterans were returning home from Vietnam with troubling heroin addictions. Something had to be done.

Sepulveda had one of the VA’s first methadone programs, and Ling was asked to fill in for a few of weeks when the chief of psychiatry and research was out of town.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Ling worked with these rattled and traumatized young people to find out how best to help them. He helped run myriad scientific studies of medications designed to address addiction, publishing hundreds of papers that have been cited thousands of times.

All three medications approved to treat opioid addiction had to endure Ling’s watchful gaze: methadone, naltrexone, and buprenorphine. These drugs can bind to the brain’s opioid receptors, foil opioid highs, manage cravings, head off overdoses and, generally, pave the way for that happy marriage.

Buprenorphine, in particular, is far more convenient, and thus effective, at keeping people off drugs for the long haul than its medical cousins. And most any medication is more effective than the ubiquitous 12-step approach alone. That, Gov. Newsom, is why medication is an integral part of California’s push for better treatment in its public addiction treatment programs.

But not so much in the private sphere of California’s addiction treatment system.

“Look around the treatment industry and ask whether things have really changed,” Ling writes. “We have studied addiction as a science for more than 40 years, but we treat our patients the way we did 40 years ago.”

In 2023 — after decades of research showing that medication is the gold standard for getting a life — much of California’s treatment system continues to shun it.

• Just 22% of California’s outpatient facilities — where most treatment happens — offered methadone, buprenorphine or naltrexone treatment, according to federal data. 

• Only 59% of programs transitioning people back to their regular lives offered overdose education and Naloxone, a drug that can reverse opioid overdose and practically bring people back from the dead.

• Overall, a tremendous chunk of treatment facilities in California — 41% — didn’t provide any “pharmacotherapy services” for their patients at all, despite skyrocketing overdose and death rates.

A buprenorphine implant. Photo courtesy of Jerrey Roberts, DAILY HAMPSHIRE GAZETTE

“We know that medication plays a critical role in keeping addicts off drugs but we insist on assigning medication a secondary role,” Ling writes. “We call addiction pharmacotherapy ‘medication-assisted treatment’ even though there is nothing that the medications are supposed to assist that works. …

“Even when we reluctantly tolerate the use of medications, we want patients to get off them as soon as possible. Nationwide, detoxification is still the most common, most profitable and least effective treatment offered; it has an over 90% relapse rate. We expect detoxifications to return patients to their old non-addict self, ignoring the fact that once addicted, they can’t turn back the clock of their body and brain to before addiction. We act as though we believe contraceptives don’t just keep you from getting pregnant but make you a virgin again.”

Historically, addiction has been viewed as a criminal offense and a moral failing. Medical intervention took a big back seat to behavioral approaches.

“Counseling by counselors who themselves had a history of addiction was based on the premise that counselors’ shared life experiences could uniquely help patients enter into recovery,” Ling writes. “This hypothesis was never tested or proven true, despite becoming a routine component of treatment. Instead of serving to extend patient care, counseling grew into a parallel service often in conflict with the physician’s treatment goals.”

Alcoholics Anonymous uses sobriety coins to represent how long members have remained sober. (FILE PHOTO BY, BRUCE CHAMBERS, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER/SCNG)

We require doctors who prescribe medications to connect patients to counselling, but we don’t require abstinence-based treatment facilities to connect patients to medical treatment.

We don’t want to go against the abstinence treatment industry, and we let the regulatory agencies become symbiotic with the system they regulate.

And that, Gov. Newsom, is the crux of it.

“We don’t need more treatment that is not treatment,” Ling has told us. “If we want to find sensible solutions, we should stop doing things that don’t work.”

California has the resources and compassion to make such changes, Ling believes. We’re slated to get more than $2 billion in opioid settlement money for fighting addiction. And you, governor, are trying to reform our system and readying an initiative for the 2024 ballot “to build state-of-the-art mental health treatment campuses to house Californians with mental illness and substance use disorders.”

Please. Build a system that treats addiction, first, as a medical issue. Of course, doctors are not all angels — we’ve chronicled the surgeon accused of building a luxurious life on the backs of often-desperate drug users, and the doctors getting kickbacks for ordering gazillions of unnecessary drug urine tests — but I’d rather put my life, and my kid’s life, in the hands of someone with eight years of schooling and three to seven years of residency, instead of the guy who dropped out of high school but has cycled through seven behavioral treatment programs, relapsed as many times, and has been triumphantly sober for five months.

“Yes, we can do better,” Ling writes. “We need to support the use of prescribed medications like buprenorphine and provide the resources to help patients live a life without drugs. We know what we must do, and we have the tools to do it. It’s been said that we Americans love reality shows because if we put things on TV, we don’t have to face them in real life. But if we want to succeed in fighting opioid addiction and reduce overdose deaths, we must have the courage to look in the mirror, resist our biases, acknowledge where we fall short, and find the gumption to make real changes to finally end this crisis.”

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​ Orange County Register