The Bay Area was a beautiful place to live in the late seventies and early eighties.
Unfortunately that didn't last.
I suspected that the culprit was not so much smugness as immaturity. People were content to live off the sacrifices and foresight of those who'd made SF such a wonderful place to begin with.
I understood that when I encountered a thirtyish man on roller skates. I frowned as he passed by with a smug smile.
I returned to Des Moines soon after.
California's downfall was that people cared only for themselves. They refused to recognize their obligations to others.
JK, I humbly disagree with you on the point of “immaturity” because that suggests California residents can grow up. There is no growing up going on there. It is more like a bad marriage with a spouse beating you. The only way out is to get out. Those with power are tyrannical socialists sucking the life out of the once beautiful and prosperous golden state.
I no longer live in Texas. Government and judicial system is very corrupt. What I saw in family courts, politics, etc. would curl your toes. I regret ever saying anything negative about Texas, but many of the people there are not much better than Californians, just less sophisticated in their ability to disguise.
I lived in SF and Marin County for 26 years during that time, left in 2002 and moved to Texas. Most of the time there I could not see myself living anywhere else. You’re right the 70s and 80s were a glorious fun adventure, not without some bumps in the road. However, getting married, having children and seeing the complete decay of schools with not enough books available and bathrooms so grotesque, the kids would wait till they got home was illuminating. I plopped my kids in a private school and to my horror they weren’t much better and the politics were gruesome. I saw the infrastructure crumbling and knew enough councilmen, public board members and projects that seemed never to accomplish anything yet required more and more taxpayer dollars. When I realized employees for Costco, Target, etc. were being bussed in and doctors, etc. living in million dollar run down 50’s style homes, I realized people in these communities didn’t seem to care about the infrastructure as long as they had their piece of paradise. This attitude was so prevalent, their attachment to their piece of the pie so unrelenting, their unwillingness to bake more pies and believing with all their heart and dumbass brains that there was only one pie they fought long and hard to keep everyone else out. This (NYMBY) not in my backyard, attitude stopped growth (schools, soccer fields, small businesses a new home) and improvements from happening, giving those that could afford it and those in power the excuse to become so corrupt and locked in while the citizens became trapped in their own ragged existence with gorgeous views. It was absurd and I could not live in this “reality” supported by the power and wealthy elite. We had our piece of paradise, but I refused to raise my children in this narcissistic, corrupt and blinded environment, even my more conservative friends bought into this zeitgeist. The decision to move was easy and after the first year, rarely looked back. Even now my Republican friends, “Well it’s not their fault, fires happen”. I can barely talk to them. Very dug in, cognitive dissonance reduction at an all time high.
I remember an SF newspaper columnist saying the dirty little secret about the city was that no one cared enough about the place to maintain it, much less improve it.
Much later, I worked for papers in Bryan-College Station and Fort Worth.
The Texas attitudes toward government were oddly similar to what I saw in California.
Texans were openly hostile toward government, which somehow seemed more honest than the apathy in California.
Growing up in Iowa I absorbed the civic mindedness that was part of the culture then. After living in other parts of the country I believe that places like California and Texas suffer greatly from their lack of that civic mindedness.
My mother used a term when I was a teen, ‘stupidly stubborn’ or ‘stubbornly stupid’ and either applies to the US Marxists; oh, in addition to blind ignorance.
This is an extract from a National Review article by Ryan Mills that explains much about the causes of the devastating LA fires:
“And while the topography is different - the fires around L.A. are burning the chaparral landscape in the mountains and foothills around the city, not in forests — the lesson is the same, said Edward Ring, director or water and energy policy at the conservative California Policy Center: The L.A. fires have gotten out of hand largely due to poor land management.
"Historically, that land would either be deliberately burned off by the indigenous tribes or it would be grazed or it would be sparked by lightning strikes," said Ring, an advocate of continuing to manage the chaparral land's oaks and scrub brush with grazing animals, mechanical thinning, and controlled burns.
But that hasn't happened, he said, due to public policies, bureaucratic resistance, and pushback from environmental activists. The result: The L.A. foothills were primed to burn.
But Ring and others say the biggest problem that has allowed the fires to do as much damage as they have is tied to a lack of land management in the L.A.Basin. He blames the problem on state and local government bureaucracies, lawmakers in the pocket of environmentalist and renewable energy lobbyists, and legal challenges from activist groups that can grind the ability of landowners to manage their property to a halt.
Environmental groups, including the California Chaparral Institute, the Sierra Club, and the California Center for Biological Diversity, have aggressively fought against thinning and burning that state's chaparral landscape. In a 2020 letter to lawmakers, they argued that "adding even more fire to native chaparral shrublands" is not an acceptable policy.
"They make it virtually impossible to do controlled burns of any kind. They make it virtually impossible to do mechanical thinning. And they make it very difficult and in many cases impossible to even have grazing on your property," Ring said.
"Everything requires an environmental impact statement, and everything requires permits from the [South Coast] Air Quality Management District," he continued. "All of these things are just impenetrable bureaucracies. They just tie everybody up in knots."
Ring said a focus on single-species management, rather than total-ecosystem management, makes it easy for environmentalist lawyers to find a single bird or lizard that could be affected by a land management project to put the project on hold.
"The Endangered Species Act and the California Environment Quality Act have both turned into monsters that have not only prevented any kind of rational land management, but they've actually had the perverse, opposite effect in many respects," he said.”
I Agree with Victor Hanson. There are those that want that entire land mass to return to its original pastoral state. They saw this coming. No way you can convince me otherwise. The state has been on fire for the past 10 years straight it seems. Criminal.
Dave, I think you would really be interested in reading the following article by Elizabeth Nickson. It gives more personal and heartbreaking detail about the deliberate destruction being engineered by powerful, insane, leftist climate activists.
Many of California’s native ecosystems evolved to burn. Modern fire suppression creates fuels that lead to catastrophic fires. So why do people insist on rebuilding in the firebelt?
by Longreads
December 4, 2018
“Less well understood in the old days was the essential dependence of the dominant vegetation of the Santa Monicas—chamise chaparral, coastal sage scrub, and live oak woodland—upon this cycle of wildfire. Decades of research (especially at the San Dimas Experimental Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains) have given late-twentieth-century science vivid insights into the complex and ultimately beneficial role of fire in recycling nutrients and ensuring seed germination in Southern California’s various pyrophytic flora. Research has also established the overwhelming importance of biomass accumulation rather than ignition frequency in regulating fire destructiveness. As Richard Minnich, the world authority on chaparral brushfire, emphasizes: “Fuel, not ignitions, causes fire. You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he’ll never be arrested.”
A key revelation was the nonlinear relationship between the age structure of vegetation and the intensity of fire. Botanists and fire geographers discovered that “the probability for an intense fast running fire increases dramatically as the fuels exceed twenty years of age.” Indeed, half-century-old chaparral—heavily laden with dead mass—is calculated to burn with 50 times more intensity than 20-year-old chaparral. Put another way, an acre of old chaparral is the fuel equivalent of about 75 barrels of crude oil. Expanding these calculations even further, a great Malibu firestorm could generate the heat of three million barrels of burning oil at a temperature of 2,000 degrees.
“Total fire suppression,” the official policy in the Southern California mountains since 1919, has been a tragic error because it creates enormous stockpiles of fuel. The extreme fires that eventually occur can transform the chemical structure of the soil itself. The volatilization of certain plant chemicals creates a water-repellent layer in the upper soil, and this layer, by preventing percolation, dramatically accelerates subsequent sheet flooding and erosion. A monomaniacal obsession with managing ignition rather than chaparral accumulation simply makes doomsday-like firestorms and the great floods that follow them virtually inevitable.”
Your description of the seriously unserious progressive (sic) Californian reminds me of Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters in The Jerk, where, now that they are wildly rich, they need a totally useless hobby so they decide to take up martial arts.
There is within California a universal nihilism based upon a bastardized Shakespearean soliloquy “to be, or not to be.” Just look at the Holy-wood loons. These irreligious people are modern day druids. They pretend they are gods and goddesses of this world because that is the only way they can be assured of an eternal existence. They believe they are called, self-selected due to superior intellect and talent, to stand at the top of our social hierarchy as a beacon of light and wisdom in a world of ugly, selfish, smelly, unfortunants.
Great article. My only request is to substitute the word ignorance/willful ignorance for blindness. As the mother of a son, blind from birth, the use of that term in such a negative way perpetuates negative stereotypes of that physical condition. And no, I’m not being woke -just practical and a touch considerate.
I spend a lot of time with a blind friend. When I am with him I realize just how often people use the word blind metaphorically. My friend shrugs it off, but he is nearly 40. I'll be careful in future.
And so does my son. He never takes it personally. But the constant slight, though unintended insults like people raising their voice or talking to the person next to him, he does find irritating. Blindness as a disability is poorly understood. Capable blind individuals amaze people. Blindness on its own is a nuisance. Not a yoke. Anyway thanks for your consideration.
The Bay Area was a beautiful place to live in the late seventies and early eighties.
Unfortunately that didn't last.
I suspected that the culprit was not so much smugness as immaturity. People were content to live off the sacrifices and foresight of those who'd made SF such a wonderful place to begin with.
I understood that when I encountered a thirtyish man on roller skates. I frowned as he passed by with a smug smile.
I returned to Des Moines soon after.
California's downfall was that people cared only for themselves. They refused to recognize their obligations to others.
JK, I humbly disagree with you on the point of “immaturity” because that suggests California residents can grow up. There is no growing up going on there. It is more like a bad marriage with a spouse beating you. The only way out is to get out. Those with power are tyrannical socialists sucking the life out of the once beautiful and prosperous golden state.
You may be right.
Californians are like spoiled children spending Daddy's hard-earned money on parties and drugs.
I no longer live in Texas. Government and judicial system is very corrupt. What I saw in family courts, politics, etc. would curl your toes. I regret ever saying anything negative about Texas, but many of the people there are not much better than Californians, just less sophisticated in their ability to disguise.
Texas and California are similar in the sense that the people who live in those two states are selfish.
Californians try to hide their self-centerdness behind a veneer of woke attitudes.
Texans are shamelessly greedy. There's a certain honesty in that. But that doesn't make them any less reprehensible.
I lived in SF and Marin County for 26 years during that time, left in 2002 and moved to Texas. Most of the time there I could not see myself living anywhere else. You’re right the 70s and 80s were a glorious fun adventure, not without some bumps in the road. However, getting married, having children and seeing the complete decay of schools with not enough books available and bathrooms so grotesque, the kids would wait till they got home was illuminating. I plopped my kids in a private school and to my horror they weren’t much better and the politics were gruesome. I saw the infrastructure crumbling and knew enough councilmen, public board members and projects that seemed never to accomplish anything yet required more and more taxpayer dollars. When I realized employees for Costco, Target, etc. were being bussed in and doctors, etc. living in million dollar run down 50’s style homes, I realized people in these communities didn’t seem to care about the infrastructure as long as they had their piece of paradise. This attitude was so prevalent, their attachment to their piece of the pie so unrelenting, their unwillingness to bake more pies and believing with all their heart and dumbass brains that there was only one pie they fought long and hard to keep everyone else out. This (NYMBY) not in my backyard, attitude stopped growth (schools, soccer fields, small businesses a new home) and improvements from happening, giving those that could afford it and those in power the excuse to become so corrupt and locked in while the citizens became trapped in their own ragged existence with gorgeous views. It was absurd and I could not live in this “reality” supported by the power and wealthy elite. We had our piece of paradise, but I refused to raise my children in this narcissistic, corrupt and blinded environment, even my more conservative friends bought into this zeitgeist. The decision to move was easy and after the first year, rarely looked back. Even now my Republican friends, “Well it’s not their fault, fires happen”. I can barely talk to them. Very dug in, cognitive dissonance reduction at an all time high.
I remember an SF newspaper columnist saying the dirty little secret about the city was that no one cared enough about the place to maintain it, much less improve it.
Much later, I worked for papers in Bryan-College Station and Fort Worth.
The Texas attitudes toward government were oddly similar to what I saw in California.
Texans were openly hostile toward government, which somehow seemed more honest than the apathy in California.
Growing up in Iowa I absorbed the civic mindedness that was part of the culture then. After living in other parts of the country I believe that places like California and Texas suffer greatly from their lack of that civic mindedness.
Sadly, I agree.
My mother used a term when I was a teen, ‘stupidly stubborn’ or ‘stubbornly stupid’ and either applies to the US Marxists; oh, in addition to blind ignorance.
This is an extract from a National Review article by Ryan Mills that explains much about the causes of the devastating LA fires:
“And while the topography is different - the fires around L.A. are burning the chaparral landscape in the mountains and foothills around the city, not in forests — the lesson is the same, said Edward Ring, director or water and energy policy at the conservative California Policy Center: The L.A. fires have gotten out of hand largely due to poor land management.
"Historically, that land would either be deliberately burned off by the indigenous tribes or it would be grazed or it would be sparked by lightning strikes," said Ring, an advocate of continuing to manage the chaparral land's oaks and scrub brush with grazing animals, mechanical thinning, and controlled burns.
But that hasn't happened, he said, due to public policies, bureaucratic resistance, and pushback from environmental activists. The result: The L.A. foothills were primed to burn.
But Ring and others say the biggest problem that has allowed the fires to do as much damage as they have is tied to a lack of land management in the L.A.Basin. He blames the problem on state and local government bureaucracies, lawmakers in the pocket of environmentalist and renewable energy lobbyists, and legal challenges from activist groups that can grind the ability of landowners to manage their property to a halt.
Environmental groups, including the California Chaparral Institute, the Sierra Club, and the California Center for Biological Diversity, have aggressively fought against thinning and burning that state's chaparral landscape. In a 2020 letter to lawmakers, they argued that "adding even more fire to native chaparral shrublands" is not an acceptable policy.
"They make it virtually impossible to do controlled burns of any kind. They make it virtually impossible to do mechanical thinning. And they make it very difficult and in many cases impossible to even have grazing on your property," Ring said.
"Everything requires an environmental impact statement, and everything requires permits from the [South Coast] Air Quality Management District," he continued. "All of these things are just impenetrable bureaucracies. They just tie everybody up in knots."
Ring said a focus on single-species management, rather than total-ecosystem management, makes it easy for environmentalist lawyers to find a single bird or lizard that could be affected by a land management project to put the project on hold.
"The Endangered Species Act and the California Environment Quality Act have both turned into monsters that have not only prevented any kind of rational land management, but they've actually had the perverse, opposite effect in many respects," he said.”
I Agree with Victor Hanson. There are those that want that entire land mass to return to its original pastoral state. They saw this coming. No way you can convince me otherwise. The state has been on fire for the past 10 years straight it seems. Criminal.
A return to Eden and a ‘Heaven on Earth’ for the irreligious and sanctimonious Leftists.
Dave, I think you would really be interested in reading the following article by Elizabeth Nickson. It gives more personal and heartbreaking detail about the deliberate destruction being engineered by powerful, insane, leftist climate activists.
https://substack.com/@elizabethnickson/note/p-154552308?r=19qxhb&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
The Case for Letting Malibu Burn
Many of California’s native ecosystems evolved to burn. Modern fire suppression creates fuels that lead to catastrophic fires. So why do people insist on rebuilding in the firebelt?
by Longreads
December 4, 2018
“Less well understood in the old days was the essential dependence of the dominant vegetation of the Santa Monicas—chamise chaparral, coastal sage scrub, and live oak woodland—upon this cycle of wildfire. Decades of research (especially at the San Dimas Experimental Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains) have given late-twentieth-century science vivid insights into the complex and ultimately beneficial role of fire in recycling nutrients and ensuring seed germination in Southern California’s various pyrophytic flora. Research has also established the overwhelming importance of biomass accumulation rather than ignition frequency in regulating fire destructiveness. As Richard Minnich, the world authority on chaparral brushfire, emphasizes: “Fuel, not ignitions, causes fire. You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he’ll never be arrested.”
A key revelation was the nonlinear relationship between the age structure of vegetation and the intensity of fire. Botanists and fire geographers discovered that “the probability for an intense fast running fire increases dramatically as the fuels exceed twenty years of age.” Indeed, half-century-old chaparral—heavily laden with dead mass—is calculated to burn with 50 times more intensity than 20-year-old chaparral. Put another way, an acre of old chaparral is the fuel equivalent of about 75 barrels of crude oil. Expanding these calculations even further, a great Malibu firestorm could generate the heat of three million barrels of burning oil at a temperature of 2,000 degrees.
“Total fire suppression,” the official policy in the Southern California mountains since 1919, has been a tragic error because it creates enormous stockpiles of fuel. The extreme fires that eventually occur can transform the chemical structure of the soil itself. The volatilization of certain plant chemicals creates a water-repellent layer in the upper soil, and this layer, by preventing percolation, dramatically accelerates subsequent sheet flooding and erosion. A monomaniacal obsession with managing ignition rather than chaparral accumulation simply makes doomsday-like firestorms and the great floods that follow them virtually inevitable.”
LA is preparing for both the 2028 Olympics and the implementation of 'smart city'-regulations; the destruction of existing properties might be tied to that - https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/where-governed-policed-ai-smartla-2028-smart-cities-conspiracy-erupts-internet-reacts-viral-fires-claim
ABETTO
ABETTO. That will be my new tag to all thing "woke". Thank you for that.
Your description of the seriously unserious progressive (sic) Californian reminds me of Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters in The Jerk, where, now that they are wildly rich, they need a totally useless hobby so they decide to take up martial arts.
There is within California a universal nihilism based upon a bastardized Shakespearean soliloquy “to be, or not to be.” Just look at the Holy-wood loons. These irreligious people are modern day druids. They pretend they are gods and goddesses of this world because that is the only way they can be assured of an eternal existence. They believe they are called, self-selected due to superior intellect and talent, to stand at the top of our social hierarchy as a beacon of light and wisdom in a world of ugly, selfish, smelly, unfortunants.
From your pen to God’s ears on the tough love, Jack!
Excellent
Spot on👌
👍
Great article. My only request is to substitute the word ignorance/willful ignorance for blindness. As the mother of a son, blind from birth, the use of that term in such a negative way perpetuates negative stereotypes of that physical condition. And no, I’m not being woke -just practical and a touch considerate.
I spend a lot of time with a blind friend. When I am with him I realize just how often people use the word blind metaphorically. My friend shrugs it off, but he is nearly 40. I'll be careful in future.
And so does my son. He never takes it personally. But the constant slight, though unintended insults like people raising their voice or talking to the person next to him, he does find irritating. Blindness as a disability is poorly understood. Capable blind individuals amaze people. Blindness on its own is a nuisance. Not a yoke. Anyway thanks for your consideration.
https://x.com/hotshot_movie/status/1878794288277893314?s=46&t=U7laPY1hHEa798qtlcpDpA
https://x.com/Hotshot_Movie/status/1878794288277893314