Lately I’ve become an awful old woman. My reaction, during the con, to the little card hotels leave in your bathroom, in the hopes that you’ll save them laundry money — you know the one that says that if you want to help save the Earth or the Environment (I don’t remember which, precisely, these pagan divinities all run together in my head) you’ll hang up your towel and use it another day — was to sigh and say: Deary, the Earth has been here for billions of years before I was born. It will be here for billions of years before my very atoms have been dispersed in its general Earthness. I can’t save it. There isn’t a tupperware large enough. And besides where would I put it? Who would dust it?
In the event, the only audience for my musings was my husband who consented to chuckle at it, as he went on. And we didn’t hang up the towels. We might have, had they made a sensible business appeal “if you save us money, we’ll be able to keep our prices lower” but we’re not at home to religious pandering to religions not our own. As far as I’m concerned they might as well ask me not to use electricity so as to spare the feelings of Zeus, god of thunderbolt.
So, yes, you see, I have become an awful woman. Or if you prefer, I’ve become a fool or a sadist in Heinlein’s definition of such: Someone who tells the truth in social situations.
But you see, I am so very tired of all the genuflecting and bowing to the doom du jour, as well as the market distortions, worsening of problems and outright damage to people and deaths or grievous arm (not to mention not being born) while trying to avoid largely imaginary dangers and issues.
What do I mean? Well, how many people had no children because they were pounded about the face and head with the impending doom of “overpopulation”? How many of those people, now nearing their last decades, bitterly regret the childlessness? Worse, how many people in how many third world countries were encouraged to be sterilized due to both the “coming doom” of overpopulation, and the horrific mid-century misapprehension that children caused poverty? How many women in China were forcibly aborted? How many toddlers confined to dying rooms? How many women in India were strongly persuaded to abort female children, or expose unwanted ones newly born? (Yes, I know it might have happened anyway, but the westerners were encouraging people to have fewer and fewer children, which only fed that nonsense.)
Other dooms? So many dooms, so little time to catalogue them. When I was little, I knew I’d probably starve or die of thirst due to overpopulation. What was worse, it was overpopulation far away, since most people near me couldn’t afford more than one or two kids, if they ever hoped to live a middle class life. (Spoiler: it was taxes, requiring work from both parents that caused poverty, not an excess of children.) I also expected to freeze in the coming ice age, caused by all the pollution, from people making things in factories, having cars, and using electrical light. Also, as it happened, in the seventies we were told fossil fuels were running out, so while we were freezing, we wouldn’t even be able to take a flight somewhere warmer, to escape the advancing glaciers. But that was all right, because we were all going to die in a nuclear exchange that would happen any day now, in a conflagration between the USSR and the US, whom we were assured were absolutely equal in morality, and both just wanted supremacy for…. no reason really.
Of course, the things urged to stop all of this ranged from criminal — the aforementioned forced abortions and killing of children — to the merely dangerous — urging the nuclear disarmament of the West (mostly propaganda from the Soviet Union, mind) which we were assured would bring about peace and not world communism (which in the way of such things would shortly after be followed by world famine and world depopulation.)
By the time the Gaia cultists flipped from a fear of freezing to a fear of boiling, I only half went along, and only until I realized once more it made no sense whatsoever.
Fossilized bits of these nonsensical panics — Ehrlich the anti-prophet claiming wed run out of potable water in the…. late seventies? eighties — stay around, because of the cultist needs to be seen to be doing something, even if the something is utterly silly. Hence all the reduction in flushing capacity, the energy saving, low water dishwashers and washers, and the endless genuflecting about not washing towels. (I’d maybe be less salty if eczema flare ups didn’t require me to use freshly laundered towels every day, even at home, lest they get much worse) which granted aren’t killing us but are swelling our water bills, and making us smelly.
What do I mean by that? Well, our current low flush toilet does a passable job, but previous ones, over the last twenty years introduced me to a new hobby, called Flushing Your Toilet for half an hour. The minimum flushes for anything beyond liquid ranged from five to ten, plus waiting for refills in between. This was compounded by our living in Victorians, which, of course, have smaller pipes and are more likely to clog, but still. Low water washers? Well, until we bought the current one, which has a button that defeats that setting, I was stuck washing my clothes as much as four times over. (Even in the current one, I wash twice. Its not low water, but its not the water quantities of the seventies, and I have ridiculous skin.) Which meant my entire life — MY ENTIRE LIFE — was devoted to wash, whatever else I was doing at the same time. It got to the point we were running the washer whenever I was awake. Which, oh, yes, btw, also added to electrical bills. And btw, I have an eighties dishwasher in this house. When we moved in, it broke, and we’d bought one of those home warranty things, which meant someone came out. He was somewhat frustrated by very old parts, so he decided to order all of them, basically building me a brand new dishwasher in the shell of the old. I can’t begin to tell you how happy with it I am. It’s not just that it actually washes. I don’t have to wash the dishes before they’re washed. And it’s not just that it heat dries, instead of popping open to let the dishes air dry — a thing that in a house as blessed with cats as we are makes the mind run cold. How much cat hair do I want wet dishes coated in, exactly — but I’d forgotten how much SPACE there was in these old dishwashers. Nowadays, because of requirements for lower electrical use, there’s so much insulation that there’s hardly room left for dishes. In our last house in Colorado, after both kids were on their own, even with just the two of us, I found I often couldn’t fit all the prep and eating dishes in the dishwasher, and as an alternative to running the dishwasher all the time found myself doing dishes by hand. Here, even when we have younger son and his spice (Long story, but its my new name for their spouses) over for dinner, and even if I made something complicated AND baked dessert, I can fit it all in one load, or at most two. The difference really is that dramatic, and again nothing is saved in the “energy saving”. When a load becomes two, becomes three, becomes ten, you’re actually using more. More water, more energy, and certainly more human time and frustration. But, ah, it passes new government tests, installed to appease the cult members.
Then there is the stinky part of our program. While I have in fact escaped this by buying a machine where I can turn the water-saving features off, the multiplication of deodorizing this that and the other for your clothes hasn’t escaped the keenness of my int elect which — I don’t say this to brag — can read print when its in letters of fire, six feet tall, and right in front of me.
The point is, right now our doom is likely to come through a multiplying of doomsayers, rather than through anything else.
None of the dooms were actually dooms, and the attempts to avert this imaginary doom are the actual harmful actions.
So, please, before you preach doom by AI (rolls eyes) or excessive computer use, or the heartbreak of vitamin abuse, or whatever silly thing they’ll come up with next, do consider what horrors the mitigation of such imagined doom might bring upon us. And how little necessary all of it is unlikely to be, in light of previous panics.
And anyone saying anything about plastic in the ocean shall be hit with a carp, because frankly those “islands of plastic” only seem to exist after tsunamis (and the photos are carefully cropped.) So you might enjoy sipping your drink from soggy paper straws, but leave the rest of us alone.
Yes, sure, human actions have consequences, and sometimes course corrections are needed. The amazing thing is that we — as clever apes — tend to make those course corrections as soon as a superior solution is viable.
Unless you scare us with doom and gloom, and cause us to embed in our normal life things to avert this imaginary doom. Things that themselves cause problems and suffering. I mean, do you see any other reason we aren’t using nuclear energy more widely? Or that places like Germany and France should be DISMANTLING their nuclear plants and …. burning wood?
Proclamations of doom seem to do nothing but cause people to do stupid things while patting themselves on the back.
Little known fact, Atlantis sank beneath the waves because their doomsayers were convinced it was at risk of bringing about an ice age if it didn’t dynamite its seawalls and destroy its flood control devices.
What? It is far more plausible than the others.
Next time you see a raving lunatic telling you the world is going to end due to some innocuous or pleasant human activity, chase them down the street, hitting them on the head with their The End Is Near sign. (In minecraft.) It will relieve your frustrations, and maybe it will rearrange his ideas enough to make them somewhat useful.
Doom will come. Eventually. Probably not through anything you — and unlikely through anything we, in aggregate — did or failed to do.
Stop saving the Earth. Where would you keep it? Who would dust it?
According To Hoyt 
The plural of ‘spouse’ has long been ‘spice’, as the plural of ‘house’ is ‘hice’. A single grain from a selection of ‘rice’ is, of course, a ‘rouse’, no doubt attractive to a Rodent Of Unusual SizE.
We also escaped all of the “economic disasters” that were “going to destroy the US”.
Of course, the EU was going to surpass the US in power as was Japan Inc.
For a while there, China was said to become the New Economic/Military Master of the world.
Remember when Japan, Inc. was going to take over everything and we’d all have to learn Japanese to talk to our new overlords?
Good times, good times…
Yep. 🤣
I read a short story set in “that world” where a Japanese gentleman was in the market for purchasing “American Landmarks” to take back to Japan.
An American actually sold him the Brooklyn Bridge. 🤣
I remember that one! And the punchline was the Japanese guy sent a brick replica cast in gold to the salesguy. (I figured it must’ve been hollow, because even when I was in my teens I was aware the gold is heavier than lead.)
Otherwise known as the plot/background of every 1980s/1990s dystopian cyberpunk novel, movie, or game ever made. Even the recent Cyberpunk 2077 is set in a future where Japan is dominant (or at least a couple of Japanese megacorporations are) because the source material comes from the 1980s. But I guess “street hussar” isn’t as cool-sounding as “street samurai.”
Games now seem to think space will be Chinese. (ROLLS EYES)
British! (plays UFO theme….)
(grin)
I’m not the only one who remembers that?
Not a Bad Show from the people who later created the idiotic Space 1999. [Grin]
I misremember. which one of those was it that had aliens who suffered from “hereditary sterility”?
“UFO” was aliens harvesting us for spare parts. A small secret org fought them (SHADO). Kinda grimdark.
HQ was hidden under a movie studio lot, as cover for weird hardware. A tiny moonbase launched interceptors.
“Space 1999” was originally going to be “UFO 2000”, but got a silly rewrite as “runaway moon travels the universe”. Kinda dopesmoke on the handwaves.
don’t remember “hereditary sterility” in either, but “sentient mules” has been done by R.A.H.
The first book novelization of Space 1999 was actually a pretty good if pulpy SF read.
Wonder if X-COM borrowed some elements from that or maybe just from UFO lore in general.
UFO had those aliens.
Well, every Imperial officer has a British accent, so…
With the way their real estate economy is going, and the *very freaking worrying* engineering issues with their major dams, I have a feeling that the level of posturing vs reality that the ChiComs are doing makes the USSR look grounded in reality.
“BUT THE CHINESE ARE GOING TO THE MOON AND WILL HAVE A PERMANENT SPACE STATION AND AND AND”
Said half the government space guys at Libertycon.
Almost like they don’t want to admit that SpaceX is eating their lunch.
China hasn’t figured out how to field and run a decent aircraft carrier.
They have managed throwing a man around the earth. That is not the same as a winning colonization.
Oh i agree, but this is what we had to listen to all weekend…. Guys getting paid very nicely by the government that are absolutely convinced China can and will beat us in space…
My running joke is and has been that’s not what they’re worried about. They’re worried they’re going to get to Mars, and a Tesla rover is going to pull up to their capsule, and drive them over to the McDonald’s that opened months before…
“The Man Who Sold Mars” could be a thing….
If our NASA cant get its shit together better than the one-and-done Project Apollo, The ChiComs are more likely to wreck themselves than colonize the Moon or Mars.
Well, aerospace engineers are not necessarily automatically good intelligence analysts.
I read wikipedia about samples from previous PRC missions to the moon.
I’m suspicious that they are simply fabricating the results, and for internal consumption.
They weren’t all engineers, some of them are supervisors, as in ‘in charge of X at Y faciility’
Yep.
Remember when Arabs were going to take over the world through OPEC, and being Muslims was incidental?
Nieces haven’t bought into the overpopulation hype. Already have 5 great and one great-step, and that is just on my side. Know only one isn’t planning on a 3rd. Would like another, but it depends on her ongoing health, she is 35. The other two that have children, have babies < year old but are already planing the next. One because she is 35, the other because they still have 2 or 3 viable frozen embryos. They will not destroy or donate the embryos. Whether they decide for multiple on the last round? IDK (She is 32. She has 2, plus the stepson).
IDK what the deal is with our son. He is not sharing. I suspect it is the dating scene.
Then there is hubby’s side. There are at least 6 *great. Two are old enough, mid-20’s, to start on the great-great generation. Not that we’ll likely to know. One I see FB posts from niece, so if her grandchildren come along I’ll see it there.
(* great-nieces/nephews)
The dirt goddess demands stinky damp towel use as an act of contrition.
And low-flush toilets do not take into account that waste pipes installed in prior unenlightened ages were placed in the dirt with a certain downward pitch, such angle calculated, without supplications or sacrifices to the dirt goddess or reference to the holy books, to successfully convey that which was flushed from a full-flush toilets all the way out to its next destination. The lower flush volume might (potentially, possibly, sometimes) clear the toilet bowl, but will it get all the waste all the way out to the main sewer line or septic tank? Given it’s now a close call, random chance and quantum uncertainty now have a vote.
There is no uncertainty to sewer lines. the base physics of transporting a load of solids through a pipe of a proper diameter, (Even though only the bottom third of the pipe is ever actually in use other than in the vertical, which doesn’t count) requires a certain amount of water, traveling down hill due to a pitch in the pipe that forces the solids to move with the water, without the water flowing past them leaving the leavings behind. Politicians are not plumbers. They are however, quite made up of the right stuff for a plumber to deal with.
Ten years or so ago, the government of Berlin was begging people to flush and shower, because the system wasn’t getting flushed, and the lack of flow caused sanitation problems. “The water shortage isn’t here, Germany’s not running out of water, you can flush” was the gist of the official plea.
Ok, that’s funny as hell
The plumbers aren’t upset over it. Over the last 20 years, the local price for a “roto rooter” visit has gone from $50 to $500. It takes them about 15 minutes on-site.
Our most likely doom is to be strangled by government bureaucracy.
and even that tends to come to a natural or unnatural end short of doom.
So, if it’s tree limbs it’s natural, and if it’s lampposts it’s unnatural? Either works for me, but asking for a friend. (That one gets used so often it should probably have its own accepted acronym: AfaF. 😁)
died of natural causes
hemp rope and tree limb
Nylon rope and a lamp-post would be unnatural, then? 😛
Artificial Government Improvements. Rather common, but that one might work.
Nylon stretches too much. Hemp is better, but braided poly is also good. The dock lines from the boat that was ‘lost ‘ along with your arsenal in that tragic boating accident would be ideal.
Part bungee jumping, part hanging. That New River Gorge bridge could get some really cool use.
The -long- drop…
Even supernatural, if you consider Santa such
“I’m dreaming of a Romanian Christmas, just like in 1989….”
Yes, but the real question is how many die needlessly before it ends.
The seeds of a dystopian future only spread like weeds if we ignore them. I’m far more concerned for our Liberty than any glaciers or seawalls.
I take considerable pleasure in knowing that the free and prosperous future we envision and build is a despair-inducing dystopia for the Leftroids.
Doooooooooom! (Grin)
People that worry about “global warming” don’t understand astronomy, volcanoes, or how “scientists” get grants.
And those that get paid by the party follow the party line. On another blog, I’ve been battling with someone who has proclaimed he works on electric vehicles and that CO2 is the most evil of all emmissions.
I’ve hit him with Water Vapor – mostly from the Hunga Tonga volcano, as the reason for recent temperature spikes, along with solar activity.
I’ve hit him with the truth about rainforests and them being net CO2 and CH4 producers and how grasslands are actually better at producing O2.
I’ve hit him with the sorry state of electricity production, transmission and distribution, and the lack of metals to support the infrastructure and the EVs – something known about since the 1980’s.
Yet he fires back as any good religious convert does, by ignoring all facts and calling what facts I and others use to support our viewpoints as blasphemy and moral corruption and stupid because ‘he’s a scientist, dur-hur…’
I bet the mindless leftist also objects to CO2 emission free nuclear power; most of them do for the stated reason that large scale CO2 emission free energy from nuclear reactors “doesn’t advance the cause of social justice”.
It’s not about climate, CO2 or anything else; its about grabbing at any pretext possible to impose global totalitarian socialism “by any means necessary”.
“Nuclear power is bad because Godzilla™ and Chernobyl and hurr durr.”
Watermelons – green on the outside and Reds in the middle.
Don’t forget Three Mile Island: The Doom That Wasn’t; that “disaster” faded fairly quickly from the news. Maybe it’s no accident that TMI came to mean “don’t tell me any more about it”…
A good friend worked for General Atomic at the time. He took an afternoon off and saw The China Syndrome, mostly for the hell of it. On his way home from the movie, the TMI news came out.
Hmmmmm.
Chernobyl: the best reason ever to NEVER LET COMMUNISTS BUILD ANYTHING!!!!
More of a reason to never let communists operate anything. The cause of the disaster was a Party apparatchik with the authority to make the plant operators violate multiple safety procedures for political reasons.
Was it political reasons or just for the hell of it? Since it was The Ukraine, they were probably drunk.
The guy had tried the same thing at a different facility and got stopped. Then he also got transferred. It was supposed to be some sort of “test” of systems. Done without warning, without safety back-ups if something went wrong (because the design of the reactor didn’t allow for “What if someone does something blindingly stupid and there’s a problem” resistance). And so …
The -root- cause was building a reactor with a positive void coefficent.
As it heats up and voids form, the reaction speeds up. That means the reactor was inherently prone to runaway. With a negative coefficient, the reaction dampens if voids form in an overheat.
That choice of a “positive” was done, deliberately, to get enhanced Plutonium production for weapons, as well as greater power output for the given size.
Lunacy.
Yes, you can melt a reactor with a negative coefficient. It has been done. But it is -much- harder and much slower, and much less energetic. Not Communism proof, but much less of a mess when they wreck it.
.
How about
“Emissions from lithium battery fires”
“Child slaves mining cobalt for batteries”
(grin)
I have been contemplating a retirement gig. Apparently there would be a market for rule-beater or outright black-market appliances and fixtures.
Decorative high-back toilet. Not my fault if someone removes the plate that effectively doubles the size of the tank.
Decorative oversize SpaceAlien dishwasher. Not my fault if some figures our the lower “safety” water limit float can be pinned with an ordinary cotter pin. The upper float prevents total overflow. Gee. Runs in half the time, too…..
Adapto-kit shower 2000! (how to dig out the restrictor from any “green” fixture)
…
Heh. The I-95 corridor might be full of passenger vehicles pulling utility trailers full of appliances smuggled into the Florida keys. “No really! These aren’t new. They are salvaged. Bought at a yard sale.” “You forgot to remove the Mexican mall tag. Can I buy one of the dishwashers? The spouse hates ours. (waves c-notes)”
hmmmmmm
The last one has already been invented – I use it whenever I change them out (hard water here, so about every other year). A rag, a pair of pliers, and a flat screwdriver.
The washing machine I can defeat, although it isn’t often necessary. Since it determines how big the load is by wiggling the drum a few times and measuring the weight, I turn it on, let it fill as much as it thinks it needs, hit the “add garment” button, and then turn it off. When I turn it on again, and start the cycle, it thinks there’s a LOT more in it.
Dishwashing is still by hand. I’ve NEVER liked the performance of them, even forty years ago.
I don’t change out shower heads because of hard water. I soak ’em in white vinegar for a few hours every couple of months. Time to do that, as a matter of fact.
And of course the water limiters have all been removed. Years ago.
Y’all know, you’ve all just confessed to crimes against Nature. (Sarcasm(?) off).
What, reversing the interfering with the Natural Water Cycle?
So how do you remove water limiters?
Ensure water is fully off.
Remove the shower head. Probably will need a wrench, and if stuck a pair.
Disassemble the shower head. (tools needed will vary by design).
Identify the chunk that is restricting flow. Discard it.
Re-assemble the shower head.
Re-install the shower head. Dry off the pipe and showerhead. Carefully wipe all debris and moisture off the pipe threads. Wrap the pipe threads with a bit of Teflon tape. Screw the head back on and snug it up with a wrench. Test for leaks.
Enjoy the full-blast of a proper shower whenever you want.
You want to wrap a rag around the joint before using the wrench, too. Even the metal ones are rather flimsy these days.
TONS of videos on youtube
Thanks for all the suggestions!
I do that myself (a bit past time for that, I’ve been distracted by roofing). They still slowly degrade, I think the acid doesn’t quite get all the way through the scale in the tiny little holes.
Oh. Four people, one shower currently working. The ladies take two showers a day, too, so that’s seven times it gets a chance to add more crud.
I learned to wash my dishes before putting them in the dishwasher from my grandmother, 40+ years ago
Dishes are scrape and rinse really, really, good, before going in dishwasher. Probably because unless big dishes used in cooking (spaghetti, chili), dishwasher doesn’t get ran every day, or even every other day. Cloths washer, the new washer has not only an extra rinse option, but deep fill, and deep rinse, options. All of which defeat the “minimal water” environmental features. I do miss our original Kenmore washer we got in 1979. It had the audacity to die in ’96.
I always do dishes by hand – for me it is a comfort chore and keeps my hands supple. I can wash up to four days worth of pre-rinsed dishes for son and myself, including any pots and pans, in twenty minutes or so. I let them air dry in the over-the-sink rack.
Spouse uses the brand new dishwasher (old one finally stopped cleaning after 23 years). He can wash two days worth of his dishes in about – four hours – plus leaving the door open to air dry. I will admit the thing is very quiet compared to the old one. If it weren’t for the various lights on the door I would hardly know it was – still – on.
When we moved here in 2021, we bought a large-capacity GE clothes washer because it allows ME to select the water volume – usually High and sometimes Max. And I always use the Deep Rinse second rinse feature. So far it has been an excellent machine.
Sounds like the GE top loader, no central column agitator, that we now have.
Getting rid of hard water stains is the worst. I still haven’t found a good method, especially for the bathroom counter.
Vinegar soak. For vertical surfaces, this can be a bugger, but for horizontal either puddle it or lay a dripping rag over the area.
(I got a teakettle very cheaply in 2018 because it was caked with what must’ve been fifty years or more of hard-water mineralization. Not kidding, it was over half an inch thick. So I filled it with PURE white vinegar and soaked it for a few days. Voila, clean stainless.)
Also whitens yellowed fiberglass.
If it’s not stone (or quite old), concentrated vinegar works fairly well.
Sadly, it is stone.
Ugh. I think there are products out there that will attack the (mostly) calcium compounds of the hard water, but not the (mostly again) silicon compounds of the granite. But I think they are rather expensive.
Very important to keep the surfaces dry as much as possible. We have the cheap counter tops, but I still dry them thoroughly after wiping them down, and especially the glass stove top. (The shower walls are a different story, and a constant battle. Which we’re losing…)
Sigh. Someday we will get to remodeling more than just one room (the wife’s office). If only repairs of what is here would hold off for a while.
Smuggling appliances. You’ll need a fast ship.
“Hi, we’re your friendly water company. We’ve got a meter that broadcasts your meter reading every hour back to home base. Want to see your hourly consumption? Here’s the link.
If your water consumption goes over X gallons, you can’t possibly be using the required appliances, so unless you allow us to inspect them, remove the offenders, and name the supplier, we’ll just have to shut off your water at the street. Permanently. Oh, and have a nice day, citizen.”
Already in use in TX. Same for electricity, BTW.
Happening in Oregon too. At least our little slice. EWEB (Eugene, don’t know about EPUD, also Eugene) now requires smart meters. They’ve upgraded everyone. Even ours despite the fact our yard was no longer at the original grade (we raised it about 30″ or so). We were among the last to have it get done, but they did finally put it in. We are being told that they can now detect and warn about “leaks”. Sure. Yes they will do that. They didn’t in ’97 when we had 4 months of 6x+ normal usage. Not happy that that water usage went into the new sewer usage calculations either.
I used to know a guy who had a sideline in old-style overhead-tank toilets from the pre-WWII days. Not only did they hold a full five gallons, but the extra “head” from being five feet above the bowl gave a lot of oomph to the flush.
He’d clean and restore the toilets and sell them on to people in McMansions who wanted something better than the pitiable 2-quart device their million-dollar house came with.
Not sure why Pale Moon is crashing so much. OTOH, it’s a new revision. Doom! 🙂
I’ve been used to pre-rinsing dishes since Dad first got a portable machine in the mid ’60s. We hand-wash the pots/pans/plastics, and do a run every other day. The 2014 Frigidaire will air dry a load overnight (with the door closed!), and since I’m the early bird, no problem for $SPOUSE. Dishwasher ready for use by the time she’s up.
Clothes washing frequently needs a second rinse, but we don’t have serious skin issues. Mileage will vary. Haven’t diddled much with flow restrictors; I do have to remember that we can only count of 7 gpm from our well on a continuous basis. Short sprints, no problem, but it’s not a high powered well.
IMHO, California started a lot of the water crap because Jerry F’n Brown and his un-merry crowd got the Save-the-Earth bug back in his first two terms. Bait fish have more rights than people, so everybody gets screwed. Here, it’s the salmon and a suckerfish, which are supposed to miraculously thrive once the dams on the Klamath River are completely removed. Along with much of the agriculture in south central Oregon, but the California tribes are happy. Meanwhile, deer that used to go to the river for a drink of water are bogged down in the mud and the muck. Hell of a way to go.
I live in California, nearly every fucking year we burn because the retard greenies who run this state are criminally incompetent at forest management, then they blame the fires on global warming. Happens in Australia too.
It happens everywhere that Smokey the Bear (may his name live in infamy) was a cult hero.. i.e., everywhere in the US: “Whaddya mean, forests have to burn occasionally to clear the deadfalls and brush, preventing catastrophic wildfires, and have been doing it for thousands of years?!?” (Actually, millions. And they’re still there! A miracle!) 😡
Happens in Oregon, Washington, Canada …
Actually surprised that large private timber owners like Weyerhouser, etc., don’t setup a class action suit with the smaller land owners against the greenies, BLM, and USFS. Once a fire gets roaring in the overgrown un harvested public lands, it overruns the managed forests.
Admit that saw in Jasper they were taking the beetle kill serious. Everything dead and dying around the township. A lot of trees on the mountains under the Jasper Tram would take helicopter logging (slopes are steep). Reason why? They are terrified of a fire from the west (prevailing winds are from the west), seen what a fire further south starting in BC with same wind pattern in Waterton, in 2017. The damage is eye opening. Waterton township got lucky. Jasper also got a taste summer 2022 when Jasper evacuated all the tourists from a fire east of them. While the fire came relatively close, inhabitants weren’t evacuated. Tourist evacuated because power and water infrastructure was lost.
The National Park Service is quite a bit worse than either the Forest Service or BLM. The Forest Service fire people complain a lot about NPS when the fires cross the line between Park and Forest.
BLM?!? Oh, you mean the other BLM, not the one that burns cities rather than forests! OK. 😉
The other BLM doesn’t have a lot of forests outside of Alaska. Mostly sagebrush.
??? Kidding right? BLM (land) has a lot of timber sections in Oregon and Washington.
Some sure, but the Forest Service got most of the trees. Plus there are state and private and Rez with trees.
Around 15.7 million acres, or 25% of Oregon. 61 acres or 53% of Oregon is in public lands, which includes BLM, Federal, State, and Tribal. BLM has not quite half of the total. A noticeable portion is in the coast range, which is not sage brush country.
I think NV is about 85% Federal but the BLM stuff is mostly sagebrush with junipers at most. CO actually has some BLM high mountains which have trees but there are also big National Grasslands which are actually FS. AZ has a lot of FS which are actually cacti.
I am fond of BLM campgrounds since they are not highly used and regulated even compared to FS. NPS I just stay away.
I can see the white spots on the map of OR in the Coast Range which I assume is your BLM trees.
*Southern Oregon Coast Range, mostly Lane County and south, yes. Some east side Cascades where the pine merges into the sage lands. (Roseburg Lumber/old International Paper, timberlands is riddled with BLM borders.)
Er, not in S Central Oregon. We had maps that covered “what agency owns what” when I was on a rural fire outfit for a few years. In much of the area, it’s a patchwork between USFS and BLM. No sagebrush there, depending on the precise area, juniper or (Ponderosa) pine was the dominant species. (Lodgepole had been extensively logged since the early 1920s.)
Yeah, wilderness fires are a royal pain. (Didn’t have any in our area, but west of the Cascades has a huge amount of parcels. With all the restrictions, I’d half expect the ground crews to be forced to use all-stone Pulaskis for cutting line. (Note: a Pulaski is sort of like a weapons-grade mattock. The axe blade is normal-ish, while the cross blade is small, but sharp. Very handy if you need to cut line fast.)
Serious about the patchwork. Some portions resembled checkerboards.
…and even “mostly sagebrush” tends to burn quite vigorously given the right (wrong?) conditions; it happens here in southern AZ on a regular basis. It’s just not as prone to the buildup of flammable trash via fire suppression as forests are.
Not surprised. National Park Service, unless threatening infrastructure, is “let it burn”. They close areas first. So is Wilderness designation USFS/BLM.
The examples I have to go off of locally don’t involve National Park Service because Oregon only has a few. Lot of USFS/BLM but limited NPS.
Was surprised that Jasper was in the process of clearing out so much dead because Jasper township is in the national park (have to have a national park pass to stay in a hotel or campgrounds). Campgrounds no longer have any shade.
You’ve only got Crater Lake, Oregon Dunes, and some small national monuments, if memory serves.
I’m not in the loop with respect to fire details, but the Crater Lake people I met (er, 13 years ago) were pretty serious about fire suppression. And, as Nat’l parks go, it’s fairly small. The killer is that there’s some wilderness just west of the Park. No mechanized help for fires. Don’t know if air tankers are allowed. And certain politicians just love to make more Wilderness out of FS land.
Couldn’t reply to you comment about the checkerboard pattern so I will reply here. Usually when you see the checkerboard, at least over in the Rockies, it is the legacy of the great giveaway to the railroads back in the 1800s. There it is BLM and private though with some FS (with trees) mixed in places like Idaho.
Recalling from US history, the rail checkerboard was a section at a time. In our area, it was a plateau that formed the west wall of a valley. In that case, it was alternating between FS and BLM land. North of where we live, BLM butts up against the National Forest. Similar situation south of us.
(Much of the FS land used to be reservation, until the rez was terminated back in the ’50s. The tribes were restored later, but without reservation land. OTOH, they got a lot of political power, partly due to quirks in Oregon water law.)
Oregon, Washington, and northern California, BLM is a little different. Still somewhat checkerboard, but other places many sections combined. Because the railroad wasn’t built so the lands reverted to the US government into the BLM allotments. But the old RR lots became eventually International Paper, Weyerhauser, Willamette, Roseburg, and other timber companies. Now International Paper western timberlands in Oregon is owned by Roseburo Lumber, and Weyerhauser owns Willamette, etc. Timber companies like Georgia Pacific, and smaller land owners, are long gone, absorbed in to larger companies.
Wyoming has a checkerboard bigger than most states but the private sections are largely mining and petroleum now, there being no trees.
Wyoming. Yes. Railroads actually built through Wyoming. It was the N/S route, through N. California, Oregon, and Washington, where they stalled out. No good routes. Even the southern trail route (Applegate Trail), that I-5 overlays major sections of, goes right through/over streams. That long of a railway bridge is sub-optimal. It was well into the late 20th century before I-5 sections were stabilized. The area route wanted was even worse.
The Lochsa River valley in Idaho has the railroad checkerboard of NF and private with the private being timber companies because there are lots of big trees. The railroad was never built but the companies got the land anyway. If you have ever been there, it is easy to see why as the valley is very narrow and rugged. Lewis and Clark almost starved to death there. I suppose that you could do it with all the dynamite in the world but it wouldn’t be cheap, especially with easier routes to both the north and south. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover corruption.
Some of it was originally probably homesteads that later got bought out by the timber companies. I know certain parts of a homestead were sold for back taxes in the ’30s. Grandma was not happy (the word she used was “pissed”, but she toned that down in her book) that great-grandpa went to her brothers, and male cousins, but never approached the daughters. Granted her sister couldn’t have paid the back taxes, but she had a profitable pullet to turkey seasonal business, and grandpa was a working civil engineer. I think Roseburg has it now. Wasn’t who had it through the ’70s.
Depends on the National Park. Current experience is being at and following Yellowstone and Tetons. Tetons, valley/plains, where most the visitors are, is pretty speedy on suppression. Yellowstone? They close roads, and geyser basins, if needed. 2020 Fire burning not that far from the road. Except for smoke, most visitors wouldn’t notice, unless road closed because of smoke incursion over the road (wind direction). Hubby and I could see flames through the trees. OTOH we knew where to look for all that it’d been 40+ years since either of us had been on a timber fire. (Hubby was on a USFS fire crew dispatched to big fires. I was never on anything bigger than local district small fires, an acre if that. Got me on a helicopter a couple of times. For an 18/19 year old, fun times.) Yellowstone is trying to prevent the ’88 fires. Wags hands. Given the density of the Lodge Pole Pines? IDK if they’ll succeed. They get kudos for efforts. Right now Yellowstone Lake has large swaths on of standing and down dead. OTOH great place to see bears. Hubby and I, given our background enjoy the diversity that the fires create. Not like the timber was ever going to be economically viable in the boundaries of Yellowstone. Others? Not so much.
The trees were mostly dead before the 88 fires. After the fires, they were still dead but charred. The wildflowers were awesome.
I know.
We were there in ’90. By then all that nice little green “grass” (baby Lodgepole) was thick amongst the wildflowers. Which makes the newer fires around Yellowstone Lake results awesome. Wildflowers, check. Can see distance, check. Can see bears tearing up the dead and down trees, check.
Compare that to the 2003 recovery for the fire around Big Lake on the Santiam Pass. Pass itself has brush recovery. But no visible trees. West side into the drainage below Hoodoo Ski area, south of the highway? Recovery is finally starting, now, after 20+ years. Thin rocky soil at elevation.
Yes. A number of smaller monuments, including the John Day Dinosaur and Newberry (Obsidian/Paulina Lakes) Volcanic National Monuments
Newberry is actually Forest Service designated as a National Monument. One good thing that Clinton did was to break the link between National Monuments and the NPS. A lot of his designations are managed by the FS or BLM. Last time I checked Escalante NM which is huge was a BLM site. It would be good to return all National Parks back to the agency that they were carved out of. Mostly FS but some of the newer ones are BLM. Reduce the crazy in National Parks that way.
Well that’s what we get for listening to a bear with a silly hat.
Not Smoky’s fault. Human caused fires are bad. Lightening, other natural caused fires, or human methods of patch clearing forests mimicking wildfires (clear cuts, partial cuts, subsequent slash burns) where the undergrowth is removed (i.e. practicing forestry), are not. What the dang fools, idiots (sorry for the repetition), is take away the forestry practices, and let fuels build up. With good forest practices there is more carbon locked up in trees than when the European pioneers first settled on the west coast in the Oregon country. Or were. Now that the fires get let burn until they are too big to get out.
Regarding the 2020 fires? Anyone who has driven Hwy 126 (Holiday Fire), Hwy 20 (Detroit Fire), or North Umpqua Hwy (Umpqua Fire), knew that none of those fires were going out until the wind turned the fires east onto themselves and rain fell (snow better, but not as far west as the fires came). These are mountain river valleys and the mountain slopes these fires were burning on. Anywhere equipment could contain the fire, the fire could just leap past and around …. Who am I kidding, those fires burned, at least the Holiday and Detroit fires did, both sides of the highway and the respective rivers.
Aye, the 2021 Bootleg fire (attributed to a lightning strike several days before, smoldering for a while, but I have my doubts) started on a large butte/mountain, then went east-ish for miles. It finally ran out of forest, but that one burned 400,000+ acres, maybe a thousand homes, and a lot of overgrown forest. It should have gotten one bad beetle kill area; Lord knows, USFS ain’t gonna get rid of random trees beetle killed.
I see a dozen such alongside the road when I do my weekly shopping trip. That’s all of 5 miles, and I’m not looking for the trees. All of these could be gotten (might want a helicopter, but nooo.) A further complication with that is that ODF has some of the responsibility for USFS lands in the area. They’re pretty good at fires, but Bootleg was a disaster within an hour of ignition. I don’t know if ODF or FS is supposed to deal with dead trees, but the effective answer is “neither”. I’ve had a few on my land, and I try to get them dealt with ASAP. (Missed one that shed its needles. Cut it down when I realized. We’ve thinned some groves, but the state seems to discourage small scale logging. A lot. We still have a lot of trees on our 13 acres…)
With Bootleg, I got the shopping duty for Covidiocy. I can barely tolerate a mask, and could use the stupid face shield, while $SPOUSE has trouble with both. Coming home from shopping, I saw a weird cloud, and wondered what it was. Once I got to the road leading the $TINY_TOWN, had a better view, and I figured it out. Massive smoke, then a cloud above it. My first pyrocumulus cloud. (To become a fixture over the next several days.) Much profanity ensued. Got home, told $SPOUSE, who was in a spot where the origin was blocked from sight. We moved to get a clear view, and O-chit. Sucker was 10 miles from us. This was about an hour-90 minutes after the start, and it was clear none of the ground forces were going to make any difference. FWIW, that fire was in the top 5 worst fires for Oregon. We didn’t have to evacuate, though people living a bit north did. Most of those homes were safe, but areas a little bit east were wiped out.
Thousands of acres of Forest Service (and BLM) land, all suffering from Smokey the Bear syndrome. At least one large patch of beetle killed pines, all left sitting.
That’s a 5 mile stretch of forest service land. Most of the private land is better maintained, though an old tree farm (originally owned by Jeld-Wen, and sold off* when the company’s owner died) really needs to be harvested, or at least thinned out in a couple of years. OTOH, I don’t notice any beetle-killed trees in that private land. Curious how practicing Forestry actually benefits. /sarc
((*)) Not sure, but I think it ended up in one of Bill [spit] Gates’ farmland grabs.
I don’t know what the policy is now, but in ’80s we could get permits to take down and standing dead timber for firewood (cost of permit, fuel, and sweat). We’d go over and get 8 to 12 loads (our truck, BIL’s truck, inlaws truck and truck bed trailer x 2 or 3). Loads for inlaws, SIL, BIL, and then two loads (truck with the trailer) to bring home. When we moved from our rental in ’88 we had my cousins (who came with parents to help move) load and unload 12 chords of wood. That is all the cousins did. Took us forever to go through the pine.
After the Sept ’20 “242” fire (Antifa arson) that got a lot of forest near Chiloquin, there was a lot of standing dead trees. Permits for cutting were dirt cheap, and I believe it was something like a 10 cord limit. My neighbor and a friend took full advantage of that. Contractors cut the trees that were above OR 62 on the way to Crater Lake, since they were on really steep slopes, but a lot of flatter land had wood ready for harvest. (Not sure how it happened, but the usual Greenie obstructions for salvage logging/firewood cutting never seemed to happen.
OTOH, it didn’t help the Green cause when a massive wildfire near Brookings was burning in the scar of the 2002 Biscuit fire, where the Greenies applied lawfare to block logging until the trees were useless. They did make for fantastic fire fuel. I got te impression that both Greenies and Fed people* were endangered species.
((*)) The fire got a NIMO team at first, with a Let it Burn policy. After that proved to be a disaster, the fed crews were still prone to let houses burn, even if they could have been saved with minor work.
Only -you- can prevent collectivism.
P.S. Point out to the greenies against brush clearing/burning that the natives (in California and Australia) did that regularly to prevent the kind of catastrophic super fires we’re seeing today. Are you more knowledgeable about the ecology of a region than the native peoples who have lived there for thousands of years? Really tears at their lefty white guilt.
And in the PNW. Prairies on Westside WA don’t STAY prairies unless they’re maintained. The natives burned them off regularly to KEEP them maintained. (Trees. They creep in wherever you let up your vigilance.)
Every valley west of the Oregon Cascades, and Oregon Coast Range. Every high meadow in the Cascades and Coast Range. Must be burned to keep grasslands. Wild rhododendrons, vine maple, salal, and other brush, close in the understory quickly on the west side (now it includes scotch broom invasive).
I have to patrol periodically for juniper seedlings. (Usually found next to a pine tree courtesy a bird eating berries.) We’re in a transition region between pine and juniper. Where it’s a bit warmer, juniper. Where the microclimate is cooler (raises hand) it’s pine. But it’s still a battle.
They don’t care . It’s also been pointed out in the halls of government in Sacramento that certain native trees (IIRC, the famous redwoods) only seed when there’s enough heat to burst the seed pods. And that only happens when there’s a fire.
Falls on deaf ears. The Dems in power don’t care.
Late MIL lived in Paradise, CA. Like other cities in Cali, there were serious penalties if you cut down a tree without official permission. (Which was damn-near impossible to get unless you had pull with TPTB. Corrupt burg, that.) She passed away a few years before the Camp fire destroyed the town, but it was obviously a disaster waiting to happen. (Looks over at Ashland, OR. I only need to be there on very rare occasions for a half day at a time, but it’s nervous making. It has worse egress routes than Paradise. And an even more absurd level of tree-worship than them. Yikes!)
(What had been her house joined all but three others on that block that burned to the ground. And one of the survivors was destroyed when fire/drought-weakened trees fell on the house.)
Right now I’m following two Oregon fires.
(* For all that it was sold 37 years ago (we couldn’t justify owning it, or afford it back then) would hate to see the house that FIL and the boys build as the inlaws retirement home in the ’70s. Given the area, not a matter of IF, but probably WHEN.)
Local conditions are now just getting to high season. (Went from Moderate to High, and Industrial level went to II.) This morning, it looked like there was some precipitation and cloud cover over LaPine. I don’t like that it went from 2000 to 3800 acres in a day, but we’ll see. Looks like it’s SE of the town, so a long way to hit near the park. Fingers crossed.
The NOAA mapping seems to be getting updated perimeter lines daily. https://www.wrh.noaa.gov/map/ For some reason, Inciweb isn’t covering it, though the centraloregonfire dot org has a top level summary. Slightly better at NWCC. I don’t know the regional site for SW Oregon. NWCC might have links.
True, the ones in power don’t care, because letting things burn furthers their agenda. Oh we’re having more forest fires? It’s because of global warming! Give us more money and power to fix it. Oh our cities are burning because of our of control criminality? Well we need this security state to control crime!
However the regular everyday leftoids who have tried to argue against deliberately setting small fires now so we don’t get big fires later have been stunned into squirming uncomfortable silence by me pointing out native burn practices and asking if they think they know better than them just cause they’re white. A delicious scene.
Test comment.
Odd…it ate the other which I’m not bothering to retype on a phone.
I’d like to blame the moon phase or something, but it’s WordPress. WPDE in saecula saeculorum.
Word press is unfathomable.
WordPress is asshoe.
It’s too many fathoms above the seabed?
No biggie. Was an argument that computer overuse and AI would doom us, not via climate but as a force multipliers for stupid and government regs based on my recent conclusion that, while not the cause of 2008, computer usage was the reason 2008 was so large and widespread.
Just like LLM required orders of magnitude increase in computing power (and data collection), the various insane derivatives that let the bad mortgages infect everything required computing power to become that widespread.
I’m old enough to remember so many kinds of dooms.
From ice ages to acid rain to a hole in the ozone layer to no more drinking water to a runaway greenhouse heat…
That Japan, Inc. or the Soviet Union or Frankenreich or the PRC would rule the world because they had everything working right and us silly Americans wouldn’t do the Right and Proper Things…
That we would all starve because of crop failures or overpopulation or the big cities would become urban hells…
(Okay, maybe the last…)
And yet, none of them ever seem to quite come to pass.
The Spring isn’t silent.
Manhattan hasn’t been turned into a high-security prison.
We’re not buying our air to breathe (yet…).
“Manhattan hasn’t been turned into a high-security prison.”-At this point it would probably be safer it had been. NYC, particularly Manhattan, is doing its best to emulate a noxious stew of 1930s Germany, A Clockwork Orange, and the Warriors (I am sure there are a couple of urban dystopias that can be added in). It has government officials that support and promote pogroms against Jews, along with the total corruption, chaos, and rampant crime.
You forgot the obvious, “Escape Fron New York”. 😉
Left that one out deliberately precisely because Manhattan is a high security prison in that one.
Point…
Only democratic blue ones. Granted there aren’t many republican large cities, even in the republican thoroughly red states. At least those who want to escape can. “Urban hell” myth implies the urban cities are prisons.
I’d guess that’s because the ones who want freebies, don’t want to work, and pay no taxes, gravitate to cities where they vote leftist. Sort of the demographic version of Pournelle’s Iron Law.
It’s even simpler than that, Bob. Cities are based, at bottom, on labor specialization. No one person CAN have all the skills they require to keep the city going, and so you have to depend on others to do certain things.
And once you have a specialist who’s mastered a particular skill, there’s a natural tendency for that specialist to insist that he be the one to perform the tasks, because only he really knows how.
Bottom line: people quickly get the idea that it’s someone else’s job, and they must accept their dependency on someone else to do it.
Our current system has come from refusing to insist that people are expected, required, and allowed to provide all they actually can for themselves.
Yeah, protectionism; tell me about it: “I don’t care if you are an EE with 30 years experience in radar and power systems, and have a current copy of the NFPA (NEC) which you actually understand, you can’t change that [outlet, switch, wiring] unless you’re a licensed union electrician!”. Uh-huh…bite me, Sparky. Rewired both the water heater (to move it ~15ft) and the front-wall outside outlet (replaced AWG14 with AWG10 to reduce line drop so my compressor wouldn’t cut out or trip the breaker; same 15A breaker so all OK per code).
The equivalent rule, with even less justification, applies to plumbing; replaced all the water lines in my last house. (Acidic water, ~pH 5; replaced all the prone-to-pinhole-leaks Type M copper with CPVC, best weekend I ever invested 😉).
I’m sort of amazed I’m allowed to buy any of the materials to do this stuff.
Well, not entirely protectionism; just because YOU know what you’re doing doesn’t mean Joe from next door does. Now, a Mastery test could solve the problem…. but do YOU want to keep up with testing out all the prospects? And inspection after the fact doesn’t stop old Joe from setting his house and yours on fire during the changes…..
Now multiply those odds by something the size of say DFW….
Like most things, the Devil is in the details.
Agreed in part, but the point was that unless you got your Master ticket, and either belonged to a union (this was in MD) or owned your own (licensed) business, you had no way to legally do your own electrical or plumbing work; no testing out by the hoi polloi allowed. As I noted I can sort of see the electrical part, but plumbing? Straight protectionism; I can’t flood my neighbor’s house by doing substandard work on my own. And even electrical isn’t rocket science; it’s mostly common sense and the ability to read the Code.
If the Reader were Jewish and lived in NYC, he’d have escaped by now.
“And that’s when the C.H.U.D.s came at me…”
“And that’s when the C.H.U.D.s came at me…”
Today it would be C.H.L.P. – Cannibalistic Humanoid Legislative Parasites.
I remember huddling under a desk when the doomsday horns would sound. It was our practice for the purported “inevitable” nuclear holocaust. When that “certain” event didn’t happen, the newly created disaster turned from an ice age, to the poles melting, to the diseases just waiting to decimate the entire human population. Meanwhile, expensive mansions are purchased by those that profit most from the panic they create, and too many people feed at the trough of ignorance.
I peripherally knew a guy in HS that used that as his main line for inducing, well, date base furtherance, shall we say. “We’re all going to be immolated in the inevitable nuclear holocaust, so there’s really no reason to wait.”
Yes, a jerk, but hey, high school male in the jock cohort.
On further thought I doubt he used as long a word as “immolated” but you get the idea.
That’s…. genius. Evil genius, but still…
According to those I knew in the 20th who were young adults in WWII the same type of line was used extensively by troops heading overseas. I suspect it’s been a commonplace since Ur of the Chaldees. Maybe since Og of the Caves.
My late father had a similar card to this pic:
Hmmm… The IRS could use that, with only minor changes. 😉
Jess- not only do I remember the school drills, but I keep an antique school desk in my attic, and in case China attacks us with nukes, I plan to simply crawl under it for the duration, then emerge unscathed to pilfer the belongings of all the other former humans, and gather a treasure trove of glowing artifacts!
Aftermath!
or
Morrow Project
(RPGs)
…depending on how long you stay under the desk, and whether you have a pick-up team or a planned team….
Screw it – go full on Gamma World
Well, having been around long enough to have been walloped successively with global cooling, global warming, future-shock, nuclear annihilation, the hole in the ozone, and about every other panic that the activists could generate for headlines and grant money … I reserve the right to be rather cynical about the whole thing.
And to yawn in their faces and tell them to get a f***king life and leave me and mine alone.
Hey, AlGore had to get that DuPont stock up somehow, so Hole In The Sky it was.
I am astounded at how often I must remark – in absolute honesty- that you have outdone yourself with another spectacular rendition of deep thought, hard truth and beautifully engaging honesty! This is superb. I would only add two random thoughts, well, one thought and one mildly amusing anecdote.
First- cat hair has been accepted by the USDA as a great source of dietary fiber and Pfizer is now working to produce an enhanced version of cat hair for those individuals not blessed with a natural source. So keep that dishwasher door open, for the good of your digestive and eliminatory processes!
And, on a related note- in a town near my own, there is a small museum which displays artifacts of local indigenous culture as well as historic items from the Civil War battlefield in the area. When a visitor from a northern state asked the elderly lady who gave tours, “Do you have a bathroom here?” the lady gave a straight faced reply, “No, we just shit in a paper sack and throw it out the back door.” Salty, but funny.
I’m really glad I wasn’t taking a drink when I read that… 🤣🤣🤣
I know what was meant, but I have been places where that would be all too believable.
I prefer Pohl/Kornbluth dystopiae – Gladiator at Law or Space Merchants.
Search the Sky, The Marching Morons, Preferred Risk, The Syndic (not sure that one counts as a dystopia, but it’s one of my favorites), etc.
None of them are the “hopeless” sort.
“The Syndic” reads like three unrelated short stories crudely munged together, but yeah… just the first chapter is enough to carry the rest of the book.
“The Syndic” seemed pretty unified to me; it’s “Search the Sky” that seems to better fit your description. Oh, well… 😊
I don’t think I’ve ever believed any of these horrible fates, even as a kid. It’s all lies to take away freedom of choice or action.
TOMORROW! TOMORROW! THE DOOM IS, TOMORROW!
IT’S ALWAYS A DAY AWAY!!!!!
I hear your earworm and raise you …
GIR is my spirit animal.
You have taught the 7 year old to sing the Doom Song.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Ms.+Bitters+Doom+doom+doom+go+home+now&client=ms-android-bird&sca_esv=456661df481d90bc&sxsrf=ADLYWIIklLOfdt8b-8KWo5N4dkxo8Tw9QA%3A1719450994922&ei=cr18ZrCIOIDxkPIP9LuN2A0&oq=Ms.+Bitters+Doom+doom+doom+go+home+now&gs_lp=EhNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwIiZNcy4gQml0dGVycyBEb29tIGRvb20gZG9vbSBnbyBob21lIG5vdzIFECEYoAEyBRAhGKABMgUQIRigATIFECEYoAEyBRAhGKABMgUQIRirAjIFECEYqwIyBRAhGKsCSPUfUOMMWPIccAF4AZABAJgBiQGgAbcIqgEEMTAuMrgBA8gBAPgBAZgCDaACxArCAgoQABiwAxjWBBhHwgIFECEYnwWYAwCIBgGQBgiSBwM2LjegB_g_&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:979a62f7,vid:EjNBzyLqDPM,st:0
I now believe in doom loops.
I always respond with a dismissive “Yeah, yeah we’re all going to die. What’s for dinner?” Never fails to piss the watermelons off. I grew up watching Captain Planet, I’ve heard it all before.
If I ever get my Superhero universe written down, I’d love to have a supervillain based on Captain Planet. [Very Very Big Nasty Grin]
I wrote a fanfiction that became a wee bit famous, it was told from the prospective of Eywa, the Nature Goddess from the Avatar movies. She was the unabashed villain of the piece. Nature is Not Nice.
Dude, you can’t say that and not provide a link. I wanna read it!
https://m.fanfiction.net/s/6035126/1/Eywa-is-a-Mother
sequel!
https://m.fanfiction.net/s/6250072/1/Too-Spicy-For-Eywa
Wonder Watermelon!
Right up there with
Impotent Rage! The Liberal Superhero.
Is it really a superhero if it fits literally all of them? 😉
If you haven’t looked up videos of “Impotent Rage” from the Grand Theft Auto franchise (in-game TV shows to watch while waiting for the “heat” to cool down), prepare to guffaw. Its brutal. Their spin on the right side of the spectrum is also amusing.
GTA, so also NSFW.
Newsletter?
I just got bits-and-pieces of “concepts” and some “characters”.
Not enough to create a newsletter.
As for an evil “Captain Planet”, there’d be hundreds of heroes in just the US who take him (individually or teams of heroes).
Just remember, there is no environmental problem so bad that the Greenies can’t make it worse.
and ruin multiple other things totally unconnected with the problem
I don’t have all the lyrics in mind, but I can just see (but not yet hear), with apologies to Johnny Paycheck: Take This Doom and Shove It!
“I am going to save the Earth.”
“Yay!”
“…for my personal collection!”
“UHhh….”
Sarah–had to replace my washer unexpectedly. It has a quick cycle that washes in 15 minutes. So if you did need multiple washes, you could cram 4 wash/rinse cycles in an hour.
Or pause it to add a garment and pour an extra gallon or 2 in by hand 😉
That won’t work on a ‘modern’ washing machine. The water sensor will detect the ‘too high’ level and pump water out.
Uh. Never saw one of those.
just got it in March. Its an LG ThinQ. Front loader. Sings a happy little tube to announce the end of cycle.
We have an LG WM4370 that defaults to “Turbo Wash” (i.e., very low water), but it’s controllable. I tried it once and the sheets didn’t get wet all the way through; no more, thankyouverymuch. Using normal wash it cleans fine.
“We paid for this room and this stuff,” my wife reminds me, as she tosses the used towels on the floor, and stashes all the little toiletries in her stash bag. I haven’t bought shampoo in years, and my little patch of The Planet is just fine.
We use new towels everyday too. I am really bad. Long hair, so at least two towels.
I don’t pack shampoo or conditioner (leave in conditioner, that I pack), but also don’t take what I don’t use. Now hand cream OTOH, that I stash. Rarely need it at home, but always need it eventually, when we travel. I do pack the OTC “medicated” foot cream (hand lotion just doesn’t work for the feet).
Also no doom occurring locally.
You work the same way my wife does. She uses her own shampoo and conditioner, so I’m the beneficiary of whatever she stashes.
Hubby and son (not that son travels with us anymore) just use whatever bar soap there is. Found it interesting that some facilities are not stocking rooms anymore. It is available, tucked in a corner near the lobby, but not stocked. Europe, doesn’t even do that, or so it has been hinted at by family members who travel to Europe (I wouldn’t know). Started packing some from home, JIC, but don’t usually use it. The leave in conditioner? Don’t leave home without it.
The first thread of Covidiocy I encountered was in Feb ’20 at the Hilton in Medford. Previously, they’d swap out the towels daily (yeah, leave on floor, etc). Suddenly, daily cleaning went away. I went out to the cleaning cart and snagged fresh towels. By the next time I had a medical trip (June, I think–the joys of post-op followup appointments), the “we’ll clean your room only if you beg for it” was officially posted for the Hilton chains.
Gave up on the Hilton when they closed the restaurant section for the duration, and went to the (Hilton-owned, but rather cheaper*) Homewood Suites. Their breakfast buffet was gone in favor of brown-bag breakfasts–pretty much useless since I know what gluten does to my system, but I’d happily snag the shampoo. OTOH, now they’ve gone to wall-mounted liquid dispensers, both in the shower and in the vanity area. They haven’t gone back to daily cleanup, though if memory serves, they will do such automagically for longer stays. I’m usually there two nights, so don’t trigger the set time. However, there’s enough towels for two people, and I’m solo…
((*)) Plus, I could buy the Costco chickens, stick them in the hotel fridge and take them home cold. Much better than transporting hot food the hundred miles home. I’d rather the meat not fall off the bones, thank you.
Cleaning we see garbage removal and wipe downs, towel replace daily. Bed made daily, but bedding changed every 3 days and between guests. We try for king bed rooms, but too often end up with double queens. We end up using both beds. Between a 6’2″ hubby, who ends up sleeping diagonally, a *dog, and the over night hot furnace (me, toss turn, blankets on, blankets off) … We use both beds.
(* She’s small but she takes her share. Because she’s small she has to be on the bed to reach me for alerting without barking. She can’t get up on the bed by herself.)
I always go for the single King. I’m more used to the Cal King, but the 49 state version works fine. (Cal is a bit longer and narrower. Queen width? Maybe.) Being able to set the temp in the room is helpful. I like medium toasty while sleeping, then I’ll let the room cool off in the morning. $SPOUSE thinks I’m nuts. Can’t disagree. 🙂
For the Medford trips, I know the doctor’s appointment a year in advance, and the Hilton system lets me do reservations that far out. I’ve booked a room at a local Shilo for a few days around knee surgery. Reserved the end of May for mid July, so they should have a King. Haven’t been there since a doc got a good look at my colon in Jan ’20. At least the night before the procedure will be less, er, interesting. 🙂
We’ve kind of switched over the last 45 years. I used to be cold, hubby warm. Now he is cold and I’m warm at night. We prefer King too. But can’t always get what we prefer.
Doom. Doom. Doom.
Drums in the deep. Scared hobbits.
We’re not hobbits and we have a job to do.
Let’s roll.
To be fair, the hobbits weren’t doomed either.
That’s the other point, yes… 🙂
RE: “Doom:” I have come to the point at which not only do I not have any objection to Doom as long as it is applied to The Right People, I’ve positively embraced it.
None of whom seem to have figured out that ‘Doom” is an inevitable conclusion.
As to “water,” last time I checked Earth is a closed system – what we have is what we have if there is an issue, it’s probably more with distribution rather than volume, and maybe, contamination, so unless you’ve devised some new way to mine hydrogen and oxygen from elsewhere to produce more, relax, it will, over time, self-recycle, just try not to contaminate it with stuff that’s difficult to extract.
I don’t see much wrong with wise use of any resource as long as it doesn’t descend into flagrant abuse; unfortunately that point was passed decades ago.
As to hotel towels (and, by extension, sheets, not to mention plates, glasses and silverware) I’m surprised there wasn’t some admonition suggesting “carefully hanging it up for the next guest to save the planet.” All just more Greenwashing for corporate profits.
We have made more water. When we refine Steel, we are converting iron oxide from ores into oxygen-free metal. We pump hydrogen-laden hydrocarbons out of the ground. We burn hydrocarbons, consuming that oxygen producing CO2 and H2O.
And stuff infalls to Earth all the time. Many meteors are stony, with significant oxides. We get all sorts of comet debris, including ice, flakes or chunks. We get hydrogen direct from the solar wind. As long as our magnetic field holds up, preventing major atmosphere stripping, the Earth (and Earth/Moon system) are still at “net gain of mass over time”. (Luna is just -loaded- with recoverable helium three from solar wind. This could be fusion fuel.)
Earth is not at all a closed system. Not even close.
Not a closed system. It evaporates apparently out of the atmosphere, but we also get pelted with water asteroids.
A stable system, though.
Well, stable enough for us, anyhow, and we could deal with far more instability and still be fine.
We’re very adaptable Great (Or at least Pretty Good) Apes.
pretty damned good apes, to be sure
There’s a short story – Asimov, I think – with a political movement that grows around the idea that rockets (which apparently use water for propellent in this story) are slowly taking all of the Earth’s water into space. One of the characters in the story notes that the claim is nonsense (the water used falls back to Earth), but the movement dominates politically regardless. When a push starts to bring the spacers back to Earth to “save water”, the spacers finally spring into action. They slip off to Saturn, fit some rockets to a massive chunk of ice in the rings, and haul the chunk back to Earth orbit.
Then they offer to sell water to Earth. 😋
I remember that story. IIRC it’s called “The Martian Way”.
Better they offer the Footfall treatment.
You all haven’t even touched on the plethora of religious doom out there…. in addition to the usual Evangelical/Fundamentalist Protestant speculation on the Antichrist, Tribulation and Rapture, there’s a lot of chatter in the Catholic blogosphere of late about alleged messages from the Virgin Mary predicting imminent divine chastisement and possibly nuclear war. I see these mainly in You Tube videos.
However, for every video touting these claims as true or at least credible there are others (from equally devout Catholics) claiming they are horse hockey. In any event, at least some religious folks (Catholic and Orthodox, and I’m sure many Protestant/Evangelicals) will point out that whether these prophecies of doom are genuine or not, the appropriate response is simply to be right with God (or in Catholic terms, be in a “state of grace”) and carry out your daily duties well. IIRC Jesus said the master expects when he returns to see his servants at work doing the stuff they are supposed to be doing anyway.
Only the Father knows the day, I believe, was the gist of what He said about “when”.
And Americans have had this streak of “imminent doom!” since at least the early 1800s. It was a huge part of the Great Awakenings.
Probably because “frontier”. You just know suck is going to happen. The bear gets in the buckwheat. Or, peels the wall off your larder. The mice get in the grain. The cat decides she likes chicken. Endless dooms….
And we get by.
There are “signs of the times” that can be used to track that things are getting closer. But yes, it’s quite clearly stated that only the guy in charge knows exactly when it will happen.
I’ve yet to see a religious doomsday prediction that wasn’t heavily based on wishful thinking. I can somewhat relate though since I also want Jesus to come back.
Sometimes when I fantasize, I imagine a constitutional amendment to limit the power of all govt to tell private business what to do – dishwashers, laundry, etc. Basically, their bureaucratic power only ratchets in one direction, and we have very few mechanisms to roll back that effect. I can think of a few instances where I think standards should be set and followed – baby crib slats should be close enough so a baby’s head can’t fit, etc. – but most of them fall into the “immediate danger if not followed” category. Some others are probably also needed – some zoning – residential, commercial, industrial, etc. – but with controls greatly rolled back. I don’t want my town board determining all sorts of details (not safety) for a construction project. Should a town be able to enforce the ‘look’ of a new building to fit in? Unsure – there will always be a gray area but that should not deter the great rollback. In one sense, when you tell me how I must use my own property for the good of society, you’ve done a bit of eminent domain – ‘takings clause’. Maybe another avenue to pursue is to apply eminent domain to these types of regulations and insist that compensation be provided. That may also serve to limit it.
10th Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
It was a nice idea, but I don’t think it worked out as the Founders intended.
It didn’t, but mainly because it’s ignored by the power seekers. Sort of like our latest (“I’m not a biologist”) USSC Justice, who complained that the 1st Amendment “hamstrings the government”. Dunno if anyone pointed out to the ignorant twit that that’s its purpose. 😡
The Bill of Rights should have included an explicit death penalty for abuse, a highly unpleasant one.
i so feel you on this one, i am sick and tired of the “energy star” BS and all the greenwashing BS
our local area is awash in solar, all its done is make the grid more unstable and the local power company engineers loose their minds trying to keep things from not melting down.
we have one of those washing machines that doesnt really wash anything, just spreads the soap around.
im sorta sick and tired of all this liberal BS and the people too
As you’ve suggested before, the best thing we can do is laugh at them (and keep them from controling who goes to jail.)
I’ve heard that the Supreme Ruler* of Latveria is annoyed by his name being used in vain.
*Victor Von Doom [Grin]
And now for something completely different:
The debate is going to start at 9 PM? Seriously? That’s past the zombie’s bedtime! Biden will be lucky to make it 10 minutes before face-planting on the podium.
The Reader is NOT watching!
I’ve got it recording. Whether I watch it or not, especially with a delay, IDK. 9 PM EST is 6 PM here, so not the time.
Going now. Biden’s handlers didn’t figure out how to cancel.
I’m watching “important” stuff. Like “The secret of Skinwalker Ranch” and “Beyond Skinwalker Ranch”.
I might watch if
Since nobody did those things, I’m not watching. [Crazy Grin]
The Biden-zombie sounds like it’s got something stuck in its throat. Gross.
I’m reading Stephen Green’s drunkblogging.
The Reader intends to browse that this morning.
Just a late comment, maybe off-topic (but maybe not). I didn’t watch the debate (I downloaded a copy of the livestream to watch later), but from the comments it was a complete clusterfark. Not really surprised, given Brandon’s condition, but apparently worse than I imagined it would be. Comments like “elder abuse” and “I couldn’t keep watching” and “I cried” were common. I watched Reagan tear Carter a new orifice (and cheered all the way), but this one…well, let’s say I suspect I won’t cheer much; “elder abuse” seems an appropriate evaluation. His handlers need to be introduced to a different form of hemp from the one they usually use. 😡
Just watched recorded version. Now watching the Fox digest. They are saying “go online and watch the CNN, NBC, analysis, it is bad for Biden.” (I haven’t looked, yet.) The democrats mouth pieces are panicking. Oh, and apparently Biden has a “cold”. Even the usual Fox democratic representatives agreed with the rest of the panel, bad. That rarely happens.
Trump held it together. There was sniping, on both sides. That is the only thing that Biden got lively at. Didn’t stop the lies, word slurring and stumbling, but he was more lively. There was one Trump reply where he had to say (paraphrasing) “I don’t know what he just said, I don’t think he knows what he just said.” A lot more of that from Biden happened but Trump didn’t say anything. Trump didn’t have to. He started out bad at 10 seconds, 1:13 (one minute thirteen seconds) Biden fell apart, he went down hill from there. Elderly abuse sums it up. Worse? Biden cannot be replaced on the ballot. That is by several state supreme courts. The puppet-masters were spinning low expectations for Biden. Sorry to say he didn’t even come close to reaching up to that low mark.
IANAL, but just using straight precedent, that won’t be a problem.
So Bribem can and will be replaced; when and by who is still in question.
IANAL either (had to look that one up), which is why I quoted what the talking hats are saying.
Or. Agree. DPTB (or is that IPTB?) will figure it out, one way or another. Democrat talking hats have said “with Biden’s permission”. With Mrs. Wilson 2, that might be difficult. Now if they manage to get Biden declared senile but then they have Kamala. Rock, Hard Place. Will they figure it out? Being the toxic pond *slime current top crop of DPTB are? Yes.
(* As much as I don’t like snakes. I refuse to insult snakes that way. Snake serve a purpose.)
If you carefully read Section 4 of the 25th, as long as the President repeatedly asserts in writing that he’s not incapacitated, after the multiple iterations of “Yes, he is” and “No, I’m not” it reverts to Congress. And it requires a two-thirds majority of both Houses to confirm “Yes, he is”. If it gets that far and the Republicans are smart (yeah, no guarantees there 😒) they’ll block it, ensuring Brandon stays on the ballot and almost ensuring the best result for Trump. 😈
The Reader isn’t sure that even a minority of the Republican congresscritters are that smart. And he expects Biden to leave the stage via a funeral so that all the 25th Amendment messiness is avoided.
Cue Biden getting shot by a ‘Ultra-MAGA-Right-Wing-White-Supremacist’ in 3…2…1…
Why a ‘White Supremacist’ would shoot a rich old white dude is not to be questioned.
The Reader hopes that they aren’t that reckless (admittedly that is a hope). They could always have the Secret Service let Hillary into the White House.
Nah, Bribem will just suffer his third brain aneurysm while being medicated.
The MAGA assassination will be to get Kamala out of the way. For that raaaaacist cherry on top.
Besides, that way they can accuse the House Speaker of being involved.
About 2 seconds after declaring MAGA republican shot Kamala and Biden had a fatal coronary and brain aneurysms, it’ll be discovered that Kamala’s trans secret service agent shot Biden as he was beating on Kamala in a dementia rage. Then the whole thing disappears into the ether and their body doubles magically show up to show their deaths were false news.
What? About as believable as the crap the demorats want us to swallow.
–
I dunno, The Biden-Bot managed to get through the whole shit-show without falling down. That was a concern.
I’ve mentioned Bret Devereaux and A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry before.
Today he has posted what seems to be ‘”All is not lost!” where he starts
Ozone, AIDS, crime, others … (I’m not so sure about light bulbs, but at least we’ve mostly moved away from CFL tubes, which pretty much needed Hazardous Waste Disposal if broken, not that I ever heard of anyone actually calling for HWD in that circumstance.)
and concludes