Climate Change? Nahhh ...

I was quite careful not to attribute that mindset to him personally, because I don’t think that’s the issue. But if you don’t think that view exists in the Magnolia State overall, I don’t know what to tell you. Christ knows Alabama has a deeply racist past that is far from solved in the present, but the social attitudes of our next door neighbors are still noticeably steeped in American apartheid.

I don’t recommend it myself but there’s a statewide network of radio stations called Supertalk Mississippi that can give you a pretty good glimpse of that mindset. (Plus pretty decent local sports talk radio because the South is forever a Falknerian tangle.)

 

LOL, don’t question my backroads cred.

 

Well, when has anything of this scale - of what we're talking about - not come with pain? It's going to be a pain in the ass.

The question: Is it worth it? Because we're not doing it because fossil fuels don't work. They work.

The argument is, fossil fuels will kill the planet in a way that ends the world and kills us all. And soon, according to some.

So if Americans believe that, they'll put up with what's the come. If they don't, they wont. Because this initiative is not something you'd do because it works better than fossil fuel. It doesn't. It won't, much like Tylenol does not address immediate pain the way morphine does. But morphine can kill you, and Tylenol almost certainly won't, so we accept a muted pain instead of an alleviated pain. (Even if millions of people got hooked on something close to morphine and eventually died because of it.)

So this green revolution is probably gonna suck. But it might save the world. Presuming the world is at stake. Which, we are told daily it is.

 

We're not prepared, so let's dont even try. I have maybe twenty years left to live, barring some disastrous illness. Climate change may make me uncomfortable, with higher temperatures and stronger storms. My son is 41. He'll probably live to see parts of major American cities become flooded and unlivable. New Orleans. Miami. Parts of Houston. Likely many others.

We can start working the problem, or we can wait until disaster after disaster forces us to start. Procrastination is not a plan. You can write a term paper over time, in stages, or you can write it the weekend before you have to turn it in. Which one gives better results?

 

I'm not even really talking about backroads, but noted.

 

Failed might not be the best word to describe California. I think it's dysfunctional in a lot of places. I think its statewide politics are misguided, if not dangerous — especially since other states seem eager to blindly follow their lead. I think certain local governments are in deep, deep denial about how their policies have hurt their rank and file citizenry, and I think a lot of those citizens being hurt are starting to notice it. I think its impenetrable Democrat super majority in the state assembly is not healthy for a state (nor would it be healthy for a state if Republicans had that; it allows the worst impulses to go unchecked).
But it's also a huge state, so I'm sure there are plenty of places that are doing things well, which would make it hard to call it a "failed state." You never hear much about San Diego, for example, having the sorts of problems with homelessness and crime that San Francisco and Los Angeles are having. I'm sure San Diego does have those problems like any huge city does, but they seem to have managed it a little bit better where those other cities have not.

 

State highways, county roads, gravel, dirt … I spend more time driving on those than interstates.

 

Which makes me wonder why, because I promise: I've never seen more homeless people than I have in San Diego.

Two points:

1. If I was homeless, I would choose to be homeless in San Diego, because it's glorious.

2. The homeless people in San Diego are ... different. In D.C. or even here in the suburbs, if I walk by a homeless person, I'm going to get hit up for money. In San Diego, the homeless are in their own world. You can walk right through a park covered with the sleeping spaces of homeless people and they're going to act like you're not even there.

C. Anecdotal: But just about every Uber driver in San Diego is convinced flyover states are putting their homeless people on busses and shipping them to California.

IV. Partisan media grossly overstates California's "woes" because ... I don't know. I lived in Arkansas. I lived in Mississippi. I've spent time in West Virginia. If you live in one of those states and you're pointing and laughing at California ...

 

Damn liberal!

https://www.npr.org/2023/06/13/1181868291/georgia-a-gop-led-state-courts-clean-energy-jobs-without-harping-on-climate#

 

They're also finite.

 

When I was visiting San Diego, homelessness was pretty bad. I walked from Petco back downtown after a game and there was a two block stretch with homeless camped out for the night. I went to the USS Midway and there were multiple people passed out on benches in the middle of the day. But, as pointed out, they didn't bother me.

 

1. Wasn't there a homeless program under Kevin Faulconer that had at least some modest success? Something where they were basically building trailer parks for them, and it worked out a bit better than the L.A. idea of buying up hotels to put them in?

2. Attitude and culture probably do have a lot to do with it. Everything I see about the L.A. and San Francisco homeless is that the majority are either insane, drugged out, or some combination of both, and very brazen and violent. Then that kind of behavior is excused by the authorities or tolerated by the populace, and it feeds on itself until you get a doom loop going. Maybe San Diego has somehow managed to keep that cycle from growing, either with a better support structure, better policing, or simply a different community vibe.
I used to visit New Orleans regularly and for a long time it was like you described in D.C. You could walk past people on the street and they were just part of the landscape and not threatening at all. Then around 2010 something changed. They got a little more aggressive, had a different look in their eye that was unnerving. The last few times I was there, we passed people on the street at 3 p.m. that I was very glad I did not pass at 10 or 11 p.m., if that makes sense.

C. I don't know if the flyover states are shipping them out there in an official capacity, but from what I've seen of news coverage a lot of the sweeps show that many of the homeless are not from California. Could be that California has always been the place to go.

IV. I think the reason people in those states point and laugh is because California has a high and mighty attitude about the way they do things. We know Arkansas, Mississippi, West Virginia, etc. have warts. Progressives love to paint California as a picture of Utopia, some sun-drenched paradise where the weather is always perfect and everybody is a millionaire and the streets are paved with gold because of how awesome liberal politics have made it. Its "woes" reveal that it is far from that. Some of its biggest cities are apocalyptic hellscapes where they've created an app to track the human feces on the sidewalks.
Poking fun at California's problems is poking fun at unwarranted arrogance.