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Atlas is Shrugging in California

Posted by $ Abaco 5 years, 4 months ago to Entertainment
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Here were I live in California we have experienced months of air so smoky that visibility often drops to a mile or less. We've probably lost hundreds of people - old people who burned in their trailer park, people who got stuck in their cars trying to flee the fires, etc. Multiple massive blazes have been apparently started by a huge pseudo-governmental utility company who, after many years of charging us 30 cents/kWh in order to maintain their system, failed to do so - resulting in many blackouts and failures resulting in fires. The dam that starts our water system was almost lost due to the state deciding not to spend the money they taxed to maintain it. So, as I drove to work today on roads that are turning to potholes and gravel (after gas tax laid over gas tax revenues, resulting in the highest gas prices in the nation, was not spent on the roads it was intended for) I decided to start my audio book of Atlas Shrugged. Tomorrow, my kids' school is closed because our schools (the most tax-expensive school system in the nation) are such old technology that the air in the classrooms isn't nearly as safe as the air in my 40 year old house. Within the next year we'll have the most expensive health care system in the world, with revenue collected at the business end of a gun. Traveling on these crappy roads, while my kidneys get jarred, is much more enjoyable listening to Atlas Shrugged. It puts it all into perspective.

Thank you Ayn Rand. And, thank you Galt's Gulch Online...


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  • Posted by ProfChuck 5 years, 4 months ago
    Atlas Shrugged makes a marvelous argument that you should never expect competence from liberals. They march to a different drum where while they expect competence from others they are never required to exhibit it themselves. California, where I live, is a textbook example of this. When "good thoughts" are more important than ability to perform only disaster can result and people will die.
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  • Posted by DrZarkov99 5 years, 4 months ago
    You'll soon be able to welcome the thousands of migrants from Central America, who will welcome Governor Newsome's free medical care, paid for by you working stiffs. Is it any wonder why the migrants don't want to cross into Texas?
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  • Posted by coaldigger 5 years, 4 months ago
    Ignorance of nature is deadly. It has taken 50,000 years for humans to adapt to, or change, their environmental conditions. Millions and millions died while learning by trial and error. Some humans studied relationships between materials and living organisms which they recorded to be taught saving millions and millions. There ARE natural laws which cannot be broken without consequences and if through carelessness or in defiance of these laws, we die, so be it.

    With no "management" of forests, trees survived forest fires, insects, logging and invasion by humans. Nature adjusted. Our management based on ignorance has the expected result. It is consistent, however with our modern approach to science, economics and politics so we will just have to standby while nature thins the herd.
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  • Posted by $ 5 years, 4 months ago
    Oh, I forgot to add that a lot of people have probably died because it's almost impossible to get government approval to cut a tree down on your own property....due to, wait for it....global warming. Yeah...in Cali we specialize in global "warming"... Tried to take a walk today and my lungs burned for hours.

    Who is John Galt?
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    • Posted by $ allosaur 5 years, 4 months ago
      Me dino hopes to read about you moving your family a better state.
      Sounds like there's 49 of those for you to pick from.
      My Alabama ain't bad. Tennessee and Florida has no state tax. .
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      • Posted by $ gharkness 5 years, 4 months ago
        48 maybe? (Only guessing from what I've heard...could be wrong.) While the air quality conditions in Hawaii aren't as bad - it's only because they are lucky. I think, though that Hawaii may be even more liberal than California, which is saying a lot. Too bad, too, because I'd love to live there!

        One thing that put me off while I was visiting a few years ago was a tour guide telling us that they have MAX 7 days of supplies there. And then.... it's full-on chaos.
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  • Posted by exceller 5 years, 4 months ago
    The smoke is so thick here (several miles South of the Camp Fire north location) that it is like being blanketed by white air. We can't see the surrounding hills only a few miles away. This condition is expected to last for a long time with no possible dissipation of the smoke: the cold nights push the layer to the ground and the daily sun is not strong enough to warm it so it could rise to the atmosphere.

    Moonbeam doesn't think he is accountable (was anyone made responsible for anything under Hussein?). He is still chasing his high speed train to nowhere that will put the State in permanent red for a long time.

    But hey, we welcome the South American migrants now in Tijuana with open arms! Harris went as far recently that she saw similarities between ICA and the KKK.

    These rabid leftist are trying to outdo each other: who can come up with a more unbelievable or outrageous lie. The tragedy for the people that eventually they believe their lies and try to steer the country to this false direction.
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  • Posted by Herb7734 5 years, 4 months ago
    I assume your post is a "thanks" to revelation rather than a suicide note. Death by fire is up there in the top ten worst ways to die. Be that as it may, it is obvious to us that the fires are due to the mismanagement of the forestry service. Allowing millions of dead trees and dead bushes to stay in the ground in vast areas that rarely see a drop of rain. Governor Moonbeam apparently doesn't realize that running a state is more than societal adjustments.
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    • Posted by bobsprinkle 5 years, 4 months ago
      I think it was a 60 minutes interview with gov brown where he showed the 60 minutes host around the "ranch" that brown plans to retire on. I seem to recall lots of open and cleared areas.
      The un-capitalized names and titles in the above text are an intentional lack of respect.
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  • Posted by Owlsrayne 5 years, 4 months ago
    I have one big fear is that the fire burnt citizens will start moving to Az. Many that have moved here bring with them the same ideological philosophies that have burned down California also their fear of people carry firearms on them and then what to change the laws in Az.
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    • Posted by ewv 5 years, 4 months ago
      They're already into Arizona. The leftist ideology in general is spreading everywhere, not just carried in by migrants. The misanthropic viro nihilists in particular are already active in Arizona. There aren't as many forests there, but the same preservationist eco-socialist mentality has been destroying ranching and grazing of cattle for decades. All natural resource extraction is under attack everywhere.
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      • Posted by Owlsrayne 5 years, 4 months ago
        They're even here in northern Arizona and known as fluffy bunnies or neo-luddites. They want to turn back time to dirt roads and no city government.
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        • Posted by ewv 5 years, 4 months ago
          They're worse than a joke. They have done a lot of damage to ranchers in Arizona and New Mexico. Particularly in urban areas and the halls of power they are taken seriously, not laughed at.

          Look up Ron Arnold's Trashing the Economy, 2nd edition, for a summary of all the major viro pressure group lobby organizations, what they have been doing, and the enormous sums of money they have been spending on it. The book was published in the 1990s and the money and power has increased a lot since then.
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  • Posted by bobsprinkle 5 years, 4 months ago
    California aint seen nothin yet. In a year or less Gavin Newsome will have doubled down on the ignorance. Free healthcare for all is only one nail for the coffin.
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  • Posted by $ 25n56il4 5 years, 4 months ago
    Hey dear, come to Texas. I pay 0.056000 KWH for electricity. My entire home (8,000 square feet) is electric. I do have a natural gas 20KW Generac. I called the new city manager yesterday to welcome him and told him I wanted a street bordering my property to be a 4-way stop sign because I live in a School Zone and there is no sidewalk on that particular street. He's working on it!
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    • Posted by LibertyBelle 5 years, 4 months ago
      If addressed to ewv, I supposed it's all right, if ewv's one of us. But don't invite the Californians to go be with you in Texas! Do you think they'll change their ways once they get there? Ha ha! Very likely they'll try to turn it into another California! Seems like it's that way elsewhere! People leave the cities to go into the country, and I hear that, once there, they try to bring their city ordinances there, against the animals in the fields, etc. And people have been coming from D.C. into northern Virginia, and it looks like they're trying to change this state into another D.C.!
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      • Posted by ewv 5 years, 4 months ago
        Yes they are doing that, but it's more than people migrating and bringing bad ideas with them, the bad ideas are spreading from being broadcast everywhere in books, teaching and the media.
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  • Posted by mccannon01 5 years, 4 months ago
    About twenty years ago I read a very interesting book titled "Two Years Before The Mast", which took place around 1830. It was an autobiographical work written by a new Harvard graduate who, for health and adventure reasons, signed up to be a merchant seaman and sailed from Boston, around South America, to California, and back. In the book he describes massive forest fires in California and was told they are frequent during the dry season. Therefore, it appears there were huge fires in California at least 200 years before AGW came onto the scene and were part of the natural landscape long before that.
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    • Posted by ewv 5 years, 4 months ago
      Freezing weather in the winter and heat waves in the summer are also "natural". But what happens "naturally" with weather and results like these fires depends on what phase the changing climate is in between ice ages, etc., and "natural" is not the standard of what humans should tolerate. Forests should be managed to avoid out of control fires. The viro left likes fire as "natural" while simultaneously blaming the destruction on Globulwarming (one word, now made obsolete by "Climutchange" to cover everything) allegedly caused by man.
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      • Posted by mccannon01 5 years, 4 months ago
        "Globulwarming" and "Climutchange" has me smiling, ewv. Thanks, I'll keep those terms in mind and perhaps you won't mind if I use them on occasion.

        "...and "natural" is not the standard of what humans should tolerate." Agreed as my area and home are now covered in ice and snow and yet I'm sitting here in a t-shirt typing away as the gas furnace turns on automatically when required.

        I do, however, don't believe millions of acres of forest can be managed to the point where these fires will be totally avoided. Perhaps some management around populated areas could reduce the magnitude of disaster, though. Forest management is far from my field of expertise so my comments may not be worth much regarding same.
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        • Posted by ewv 5 years, 4 months ago
          Mismanagement through wilderness non-management is the direct source of the problem.
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          • Posted by ewv 5 years, 4 months ago
            Daily Wire: "TRUMP WAS RIGHT: Jerry Brown Eased California Logging Rules Back In August" https://www.dailywire.com/news/38520/...
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            • Posted by Lucky 5 years, 4 months ago
              The way I read it:

              Gov Brown proposed changing the rules to allow more tree cutting so as to thin out the forests. ( so presumably to reduce fire risk).

              The enviros objected, they wanted more restrictions to reduce cutting.

              So, Brown had proposed some measures in the right direction (inadequate perhaps? ), there were 'ardent environmentalists' who may have agreed with Brown, but there were even more ardent enviromentalists who were able to stop the change.

              Can you confirm?
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              • Posted by ewv 5 years, 4 months ago
                The historical context is that this controversy is now very old. The viro activists, i.e., wilderness preservationists, have consistently been against logging and have been doing everything they could to interfere with rights of landowners (nationally). They have been openly trying to stop all logging on public lands including all National Forests since the 1990s, and for much longer stopping as much as they can on both public and private land through government controls and acquisition of private property. (For example in the late 1980s they began a big push to "greenline" 26 million acres of northern New England with a Federal takeover for new National Parks with strict controls over whatever would have been left of private property.)

                In some states, such as California, they have gotten away with more of this than others. The restrictions and forced wilderness preservationism has led to the wild fires such as the current disaster, but this isn't the first time; it has been happening for decades. It is worse in places like California in part because of the worse restrictions and in part because of the dryer and more windy conditions there.

                Against that background and the threat of worse fires, Brown gave in and partially reduced existing restrictions on cutting trees despite opposition to the reform from the viro pressure groups, who want even more restrictions. Obviously the partial reduction in wilderness controls has been too little too late to stop the wild fires.

                The sentence in the article, "Brown urged state lawmakers to loosen restrictive logging regulations put in place to appease environmentalists", means the restrictions were originally imposed to appease the viros, not that loosening them was to appease the viros.

                The viros are forced through public embarrassment and fear of losing political power to now "admit" that "some thinning" is required, but they want complete control over what is thinned and where. The "admission" is like their concession that some energy production is necessary -- they just won't approve of any that is practical on a large scale.
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  • Posted by jimslag 5 years, 4 months ago
    Get out and get out NOW!!!!!!!!!! The Land of Fruits and Nuts is dead and it is from the head on down. Governor Moonbeam and his protege, Gavin Newsome are the liberal's liberal> You think California would have learned the first time Moonbeam was Gov but no, they stupidly elected him again. I lived in that state for 3 years in Northern CA and a year in sunny San Diego but I left in 1996 and have not been back since except to fly through LAX. Better keep quiet about that though or they might tax me for my plane landing there and then on to Hawaii.
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