Category Archives: Politics

Have you noticed how often the “Politics” category gets flagged on the same post as the “Freakin’ Idiots!” category does?

Somewhere down the road in three years, five years, ten years, whatever, the Castle Of The Willetts will be relocating out of Los Angeles for sure, and almost certainly out of California. Ronnie’s still got her job here and career to finish out. I’m looking for my next job and for practical reasons it’s most likely to be in the area here (but I would take a decent job out of state in a heartbeat if it came along). But when the day comes for us to retire, it will be someplace else.

In looking at where that “someplace else” will be, I’ve been keeping track of places that seem to have a preponderance of freakin’ idiots, particularly in the political area. I would really prefer to not voluntarily move to some place where my first reaction to every move made in the state capitol is to go there and start yelling at folks and asking what kind of freakin’ idiot they think they are!!??

That could make retirement…unpleasant. For everyone.

But these days, it’s getting harder and harder to find places that aren’t full of freakin’ idiots, particularly ideologically right-wing, sanctimonious, Faux News watching freakin’ idiots. Whether it be Texas and their little thing about banning abortions no matter how many special sessions it takes, or Ohio today with their move to do the same no matter how irrational or unconstitutional, or North Carolina and Mississippi and other states trying to re-write the Jim Crow laws, or any one of a couple dozen states not being satisfied with simply denying marriage rights to a significant chunk of the population but instead insisting on making those rights actually illegal in the state constitutions – it’s getting tough to find anyplace that doesn’t suck from some political or social standpoint or another.

I’m not saying that California’s any better – it’s not! It’s not just the fact that more than 50% of the voting public allowed their common sense and their souls to be purchased by the religious right’s bullshit campaign and vote in Prop H8 a couple of years ago. The entire ballot proposition concept in California today is so totally corrupt that it’s not even funny, with 99% of the Props being corporate sponsored and corporate opposed and signatures gathered by political machines, to the point where any actual citizen-based reform via ballot proposition is almost inconceivable.

So many places look like such nice places to live, if you ignore the politics. I look at places like North Carolina, Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, Kansas, Missouri, and I would love to move (or move back) there for so many reasons.

Seasons. Small towns. Mountains and rivers and landscapes. Weather.

And then I see something about their politics or social mores that just infuriates me and I don’t see how I could ever live there.

Thinking about it today, I was wondering how other folks do it. For example, I follow and admire John Scalzi but I don’t actually know him. I know that he lives in Ohio and appears to love it there, yet he appears to feel like I do about the politics of the place. How does he do that? How does he reconcile that?

North Carolina seems to be a lovely place, lots of nice mountains, a good climate, some great places like Raleigh. I have a high school friend who’s a lawyer there and she loves it. But I know her political views and I see things like North Carolina passing constitutional amendments prohibiting gay marriage and passing laws in their legislature that make some incredibly bone-headed and backwards educational choices – and I don’t know that I could live there despite all of the other good things. So how does Maria do it?

While turning all of this over in my mind today a new thought occurred to me. Kind of like the revelation that the Grinch had as he heard the Whos singing in the village below him.

Maybe if you find a place that you really love except for some facet of outlandish and outrageous political or social disconnect, the trick is to live there anyway and fight to change the things that you find wrong about it. Accept that no place is perfect and even that there may be a major issue, but embrace what is good and then with determination and confidence and courage stand up in the minority for the things that you believe in and try to change things.

OK, so if the “major issue” is something like cannibalism, perhaps you need to keep looking for a starting point that’s a little closer to your own position. But if it’s the fact that 55% of the legislators are boobs who are trying to legislate pi to equal 3 just because, or legislate that third graders be taught that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, then perhaps you can work to get them replaced with better legislators. Maybe?

Is that the answer? To realize that Nirvana doesn’t exist and you can’t fly far enough away to ever find it, but that you take your best shot and fight to make it better? Or do you avoid the angst and grief that lies in that fight and keep flying, hoping that Nirvana or Shangri La is just over the next horizon?

It’s a thing to think about.

In Southern California, brush fires are a way of life. This year the fire season has started early and looks to be bad.

The Castle of the Willetts is close enough (a half-mile or so) to some open brush and parkland areas that we’re occasionally packing the critical documents, computers, and irreplaceable items and making sure that the cars all have a full tank of gas should we get the order to bug out.

There’s currently a big fire burning up north of the Santa Clarita Valley, about twenty miles due north of us. Here’s how it looked on Thursday afternoon at 1,000 acres (from the KTLA helicopter):

And here’s a picture of the smoke cloud going up to about 40,000 feet, as taken from our front yard this afternoon, now that the fire’s up to 3,600 acres (and it’s over 100 F out there):

Note that those aren’t normal, water vapor clouds – it’s all soot and smoke and ash. Billions of cubic yards of it I would think, if not more.

On a related note, a controversy here in Southern California surrounds the beach fire pits that have been iconic landmarks for decades here in Southern California. Several cities, particularly Newport Beach and Huntington Beach, are trying to get the beach pits shut down. The reason given by the California Coastal Commission is that the smoke from the beach fire pits is a source of pollution.

Does the Coastal Commission want to know why the average Californian think’s they’re a bunch of freakin’ idiots? (I’m sure they don’t know and really don’t care, but let’s go through the math anyway.)

Look at those pictures of the natural brush fires. Look at all of that smoke for days and days and days, and multiply it by the dozen or two dozen or three dozen or more fires per year.

Now let’s think about how much smoke can ever possibly come from the beach pits, even if every single one of them is used (they aren’t) every single day (they aren’t) for six or eight hours a night (in reality it’s less).

As an order of magnitude comparison, the total amount of “pollution” by the beach fire pits has to be a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent of the 100% natural “pollution” being caused by the brush fires. It’s a drop in the bucket, a teeny-tiny squiggle in the data, a blip lost in the noise, statistically insignificant.

So why are our tax dollars being spent on this political kerfuffle?

Buried in the articles are comments from the local beach residents about how they are being exposed to the smoke from the beach fires. The people complaining to the politicians are the multi-millionaires who live along the beach in Newport Beach, Huntington Beach, Santa Monica, Malibu, and Santa Barbara. The people who will be unable to enjoy a BBQ on the beach are the middle and low-income families who occasionally get to visit the beach for a day.

Obviously the Coastal Commission can’t get any support for banning the beach fire pits base on that obvious truth, so they spin the argument into one of “pollution”. Yet they do it while clouds of smoke from brush fires rise up over the horizon and think that we can’t or won’t notice.

How stupid do they think people are?