Timothy Birdnow

The incomparable Victor Davis Hansen looks at the California fires and both makes the same observations as did I but draws the same conclusions.

Good company to be in.

VDH calls it "a DEI–Green New Deal hydrogen bomb." He's right.

And he's right when he says:

"what we’re seeing in California is a state with 40 million people. And yet the people who run it feel that it should return to a 19th-century pastoral condition. They are decivilizing the state, and deindustrializing the state, and defarming the state, but they’re not telling the 40 million people that their lifestyles will have to revert back to the 19th century when you had no protection from fire, you didn’t have enough water in California, you didn’t have enough power, you didn’t pump oil."

He's absolutely correct; if you dismantle First World industrial society you wind up with third world problems. California is showing itself to be third world now.

It's not just there. Here in St. Louis we had a winter storm, not a bad one, but there was both snow and freezing rain and then it got cold. That was about a week ago and many of the roads are STILL impassable. I expected that here in the city itself; St. Louis doesn't plow the side streets and for good reason - they are too narrow. Last time they tried they just buried people's cars and took off mirrors or sideswiped cars. But the more major streets used to get done. Last night I looked at down to the corner and the main streat was largely blocked. My brother drove to see my father and the roads were awful he tells me - and he got stuck. AAA came and almost hit the neighbor's car trying to pull him out.

Our northern tier editor Dana Mathewson is probably laughing at such incompetence on the part of St. Louis (he's up in the Twin Cities) but the point is this wasn't even a bad snowstorm, it's just the authorites aren't dealing with it. I'm not sure why but I have my suspicions. I suspect it's the same things (more or less) than have led to the California fires - DEI and poor planning and probably some sort of environmentalist stupidity added to the mix. Maybe they aren't using regular salt anymore in favor of "environmentally friendly" snow remover? I'll have to try to dig into it more deeply. Certainly the city is lousy with DEI and also not spending on the fire department or street department.

We've had worse storms in bygone days and at most they have taken three or four days to clear. But this time we've been snowed in and, given the fact it's snowing as we speak, we'll likely be snowed in for a few days more (thankfully it's supposed to warm up.)

The point is this is what third world countries look like, and it's what Democrat-controlled areas do as well these days. Basic services fail first.

California is a huge experiment in reordering civilization, and thus far it's failing miserably. They have turned the golden state into the tarnished state and seem to want to double down on that.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:51 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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