“How bad is California’s electrical grid?”
“It’s worse than you know.”
“It usually is….”
Steve Green brings a California where the future’s so dim, you’ll need a solar-powered flashlight to find your way from the bedroom to the kitchen.
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37 replies on “Lights Out L.A.”
No Back Stage this week?
I’ve been wondering the same thing. All day yesterday I kept coming back here to see if a new Back Stage had posted. It would be nice if there’s a problem with the regular schedule or the site or whatever if someone would post something to let us know.
I can live with the fact that this is a small enterprise and not everything works perfectly all the time. I’m not upset a bit by that kind of thing in this context. I don’t feel like “I’m not getting my money’s worth” because I don’t pay that much anyway and I’m here mostly to support getting out the Conservative message not to be entertained. I get it but …
A little consideration would be nice. I’m not happy about wasting my time checking the site all day. As of the time I’m posting this I still don’t know if I need to check the site all day today or if this week a Back Stage episode just isn’t doable. If I know what’s going on I can use my time accordingly. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.
All of this insanity just makes me glad we moved our family out of that shithole almost 30 years ago. You couldn’t pay us to move back.
I and my family left 11 years ago. We waited too long and could have been living much better lives much sooner. I lived in Los Angeles County for 15 years. It took me almost ten years of that to persuade my family to get out of that dung hole. I’m single so I’m talking about my Mom, sister and her family. It wasn’t my call, I could have left them behind but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. I knew if I left that they would never leave until it was too late and they couldn’t get out.
In the meanwhile the damage would be done and it would be irreversible. My mom died in California before I could finally convince everyone else that we needed to get out. My mom’s health had deteriorated to the point that even though we had made the decision to leave and were in the process of accomplishing that, we didn’t get a chance to move her before it became too late. Had we started earlier my mom’s last years would have been much more comfortable, healthy and happy.
The ‘frog in a slowly heated pot of water’ analogy is accurate except for the fact that frogs don’t really behave that way. Frogs are instinctively smart enough to relocate when their environmental conditions become sufficiently unfavorable. A frog will hop out of a pot of heating water if he can clear the rim. People take a lot more effort to pull out of a slowly boiling pot.
Eleven years later they are all still thanking me for my efforts and foresight. Getting them out of California saved my family and is one of the major accomplishments in my life. If you really, truly love someone you have to do everything you can to get them out of California. “Too late” is rapidly approaching and life is too short to waste it living in a shithole hidden under glitter and glitz.
My wife and I both grew up in Burbank. I lived there for over 35 years before deciding to leave in ’94. In January of ’94, I was laid off of my job after over 13 years with the company, then the Northridge earthquake hit. Add in the OJ Simpson fiasco and the Rodney King riots, and we said the hell with it.
Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, and IN-N-OUT Burger weren’t enough reason to stay there, so in September we moved north to Washington state. It’s not nearly as bad up here, but this state is way too ‘frickn liberal for our tastes.
If I may ask, what state did you relocate to?
I’m in Virginia and in a particularly Red enclave in this state. Where I live there are an awful lot of retired and ex-military people.
Even though I’m in VA, an historically Blue State, life is far, far better here than it was in the Los Angeles basin. Which sort of tells you how bad things are in CA too. If VA is a paradise by comparison then things de facto must really have gone to hell in CA.
When I lived in LA County I was in San Pedro, down on the Harbor Strip south of Torrance and Lomita, just across the Vincent Thomas Bridge from Long Beach.
At first it wasn’t too bad there, it’s a big city and I’m not a city boy but I could live with it. I’ve lived in a lot of other big cities at various places around the globe so it’s not like I was a hick country kid that just got dropped into Los Angeles.
San Pedro used to be a sleepy little bedroom town for the Port of Los Angeles. As things go in Greater Los Angeles metro area ‘Pedro wasn’t too bad and pretty quiet. It’s not a particularly poor area, especially on the uphill side of Gaffey which is what the main street in downtown ‘Pedro would be if it had a main street. Or an actual downtown.
By the time Ieft there were killings and robberies nearly every day. There were gang tags everywhere. There were over 500 reported crimes every week within a mile of where I lived. We had a drive-by shooting on the street where I lived one morning about 02:30. The cops wouldn’t even come though I and several neighbors called them.
At first ‘Pedro was pretty nice actually. There was Ports o’ Call and some really good restaurants and not unreasonable driving distances to things like Disneyland, Knott’s, and Universal Studios.
In the time I lived there it went from tolerable to terrible to abominable. This is what’s in store for most anyplace that still seems decent in the Los Angeles basin and surrounding area. If it can happen there it can happen anywhere so for all you Californians out there thinking that where you live it’s not that bad yet … It’s coming soon to a neighborhood near you.
One more time…this stuff isn’t about ideology or political bias.
The underlying cause is STUPIDITY.
No one with any kind of functional, analytical intelligence could embrace ANY of the policies or dogma espoused by the left.
NO ONE WITH A WORKING BRAIN.
It’s time to identify and accept the ROOT CAUSE, and get past the manifestations of it.
So OK, let’s just stipulate that stupidity is the root cause. Considering that you can’t fix stupid — What are you going to do about that? What can anyone do about that? What’s the solution to the stupidity you think is the root cause? If stupidity is the primary root driver for the other side then there’s nothing to be done because there is no fix for stupidity. Unless you’ve come up with a way to eliminate everyone you think is stupid. Which is an even worse solution than the problem.
The root cause is EVIL, which works on the stupid and the smart alike. Surely you’re not stupid enough to think that the leadership on the other side believes in it’s own policies and dogma? It’s unfathomable that you think they’re not lying to promote their own self-serving agenda. That they honestly believe in the crap they pull because they think it’s the right thing to do? Just because they’re too stupid to realize what they’re doing? Are you sure you want to credit them with that much honesty? Because I’m not.
I refuse to believe you’re that naive.
What’s stupid is to think that your enemies are all too stupid to see things your way. They may be dishonest, they may be vile bottom crawling self-serving vermin but they’re not all stupid. They don’t care about what the functional, analytically intelligent best course of action is because that doesn’t get them what they want and they’re at least smart enough to make that work for them. The proof is in the pudding. They care about what serves their own purposes and if promoting dysfunctional un-analytical stupidity accomplishes that then they’re not stupid, they’re EVIL.
Always remember that 50% of the human population has a below average intelligence. It’s a statistical fact.
Reality is worse than Bill’s assertion that Progressives are anti-middle-class. Progressives are anti-human. They want everyone else to be extinct.
On this you and I agree completely with minor amplifications.
They want everyone ELSE to be extinct is the key fault in their reasoning.
None of them really want to go back to living in caves without modern conveniences and picking fleas off each other. They divide humanity into two camps and they are in the ‘desirable’ self-loathing camp. They are tribalists who want to see the other side exterminated. They hate humanity, despise their own species, except where that applies to them. They do not consider themselves to be members of the humanity they despise. They even distinguish between ‘natural’ and ‘man-made’ as though somehow magically mankind is some artificial, unnatural organism.
A yeast culture that eats the sugar produced by grapes and excretes ethyl alcohol until it poisons its own environment, to make the box wines they love, is to them ‘natural’. While mankind which takes steps to clean up and improve its own environment so that more people can thrive is to them ‘unnatural’. This is absurd.
They advance anti-human policies believing that humanity is a disease infesting their precious Mother Gaia. They see themselves as antibodies to that disease. In reality they are the pathogens who want to destroy their own species while still enjoying all the benefits and security of modern civilization bestowed upon them by their own species.
This is a form of insanity. It is a mass psychosis.
It’s also self inflicted and despicable.
Lightbulb moment.
Bill talked about how the California elites want the middle class to leave so that the elites could lord it over a poor, poorly educated, easily manipulated underclass.
Isn’t that pretty much that is happening in Gaza now?
Sort of, I suppose. Just like CA, in Gaza the fools voted in the people who are using their dismemberment and deaths as a propaganda weapon while those they put in power hide behind them as human shields. So yeah, now that you mention it there are some similarities. If you live in CA don’t think for one second that Gavin Newsom and his cronies wouldn’t use you for a human shield too.
This “shield” bites.
… A fact that is at this moment in time likely all that stands between us and what’s happening to people in Gaza and the surrounding Israeli lands.
I just learned yesterday that there were no firearms at the locales where the Israelis were attacked and slaughtered. Something I find astonishing. I don’t know what has changed over there but when I frequented that neighborhood IDF personnel all took their issue weapons, with ammunition, home with them. Every Israeli was armed to some degree. Bus drivers had a holstered pistol on them, that sort of thing. If nothing else they had a military grade small arms weapon in their closet.
To be fair to somebody, the National forest service began in Spring of 2023 to get back to ‘raking the forest’. I sometimes vacation up in the high(ish) Sierra Nevada of California, and low and behold, this July when I went up, thousands of Calfire and Nat forest fire fighters were taking a page out of Farenheit 451, and going though vast tracts of the forest burning the low lying vegetation down to the dirt. Raking the forest. Hell, they were even out there knocking down trees and mulching the limbs. When I drove though 20 miles of CA Hwy 108, healthy trees, healthy ground and really unhealthy air as it was filled with smoke from the “fire starters”. The scale of the work in the Sierras was honestly huge. It’s still going on today. I’m actually impressed.
Might as well get some work out of all those people CA puts in prison. Only the mostly harmless, more fit prisoners get to go to Fire Camp so let ’em earn their keep even when there’s no forest fire crisis.
Much as I love you guys, at some point you all really need to step back far enough to see the forest, rather than focusing on the individual trees.
There IS a rational explanation for EVERYTHING that makes no sense going on in today’s world, and it’s not ideology or political orientation or any kind of fanaticism or power-seeking or greed…though those are all symptoms of the underlying disease.
It’s declining intelligence, pure and simple. People on the lower end of the intelligence spectrum outbreed those on the top end by significant margins, and stupid people vote for stupid people to lead them. Explain to me how anyone with two functioning neurons could vote for AOC or Maxine Waters or Presbo Joe.
Ah, but what about the vocal middle and upper-class liberals? They must be pretty smart because they make money, right? Well, sorta. The truth is that they mostly fall into the “midwit” category, capable of functioning at a moderately high level, but they achieve their success primarily by going-along-to-get-along, rather than by any great effort or outstanding performance. When they get in positions of power they hire the like-minded rather than anyone of exceptional ability, who they perceive as a threat to their comfortable status-quo. And that inevitably leads to management bloat, where several not-so-bright folks are on staff to do the job one smart guy could handle easily.
This is undeniably true in government, academia, and the corporate world, and all anyone has to do is step back and open his eyes to see the parallels.
Midwits are loosely defined as being in the 105-120 range on the IQ scale, above “average”, but those folks are generally NOT adept at independent thought, problem-solving, analysis, or thinking-outside-the-box. They’re team-players and blame-spreaders. Nor are they representative of the kind of people responsible for building enduring institutions, like Western Thought and Civilization. And no matter how well paid they may be, they just can’t function at the level of their forbears. Mary Barra, for instance, simply does NOT have what it took to start and build Chevrolet (or any of the other companies that merged to become GM), period.
People with outlier high intelligence built pretty much everything encompassed by the notion of “civilization”, and it’s withstood ceaseless attempts to discredit and tear it down. But there just aren’t enough really smart people still playing the game to keep a complex technological society running smoothly. The devolution of American education, America’s declining industrial capacity, and California’s failing electrical grid are simply manifestations of too many stupid people running things.
I would argue that while most of what you say is true it’s not that simple, this is nothing new to the human condition and thus it has always been.
Intelligence is not the sole marker of potential achievement and never has been. Neither is it a required constant for achievement and does not scale algorithmically. If that were true then in statistically significant numbers the more native intelligence someone has the higher up the ladder he would climb and we’d always end up with the most intelligent at the top no matter how many stupid people were under them. Clearly this is not the case.
It’s not because there aren’t enough intelligent people to go around either. Intelligence follows a bell curve with the most extremely intelligent people at the top and the most stupid at the bottom. Both ends are rarified and the curve is about equal on both sides of average.
Just because someone is smart doesn’t of itself mean that he’s going to always do the smart, correct, moral, civilization advancing thing. Intelligent people can talk themselves into, or be talked into fallacies and fantasies just like less intelligent people and this usually happens when manipulated by other intelligent people.
If anything, in the broadest sense intelligence is a matter of horizons. The smarter someone is, the broader their horizons and conversely the dumber they are the narrower their horizons. The thing about that is no matter which end of the spectrum you’re looking at, those ARE the horizons that apply. A stupid person doesn’t KNOW he has much narrower horizons than a really intelligent person because he cannot see past his own horizons. If he could, he wouldn’t be a more stupid person than his counterpart with broader horizons.
What any of them, really dumb or really smart, do with those horizons is the crucial factor. Take Bill Gates or Steve Jobs for example. Both are/were inarguably well north of average intelligence. They built the personal business empires you’re talking about when you referred to Chevrolet and GM and both of them are/were toxic in a lot of other ways. Being smart didn’t make them right or anything approaching good people. Being smart didn’t prevent them from embracing the stupid policies of the Left either.
BTW, that fact blows your “it’s all the fault of stupid people” declaration out of the water. You don’t have to worry about stupid people, they’re largely ineffective unless they’re manipulated by smart, evil people. Because they’re stupid they’re easier to manipulate but it’s the manipulators that are the problem. It’s the smart but evil that cause all the trouble.
Cronyism, nepotism, fear of losing out to a superior mind or greater ambition and all the rest of that are as old as mankind itself. There is nothing new under the sun. The Left always makes the mistake of thinking they’ve discovered something new and amazing that if they just had enough power to implement would bring on a temporal utopia. Because they cannot be bothered to apply the lessons already learned by humanity they do not realize what they’re advocating for has been tried already and failed miserably before. Their horizons are limited and exclude applying that kind of knowledge.
This is how stupid people on the Left are manipulated by smart people on the Left. The smart people know there’s no such thing as a corporeal utopia and they don’t care. Because if they can manipulate enough stupid people they can create their own elitist paradise by climbing the pile of bodies they create. This is also nothing new, it’s just the modern angle that some smart people are using to attempt achieving total political power.
It’s a mistake to think that something “new”, for instance an increase of stupid people with convergent lack of intelligent people, is a driving factor. The bell curve is still there and it’s still roughly the same proportions as it has always been. In fact, if anything due to the abundance of food and better nutrition the scale average has moved somewhat towards the intelligent end. Saying that stupid people are the root cause and ignoring the actual driving manipulation by smart people is the other side of the same coin that the Left applies. Failing to realize this is a limitation of horizons also.
I said “I would argue” and that’s what I’m doing. I’m arguing my viewpoint and stating my own opinion based on my own reasoning and observations. I’m not attacking you, it’s far too common for people to think anyone who doesn’t agree with them and says so with their own counter arguments is belittling them.
That’s not my purpose.
I do not agree with what you said and I’m stating why that is. I’m inviting you to present your own counter argument to support your declarations because declaring something means nothing if not supported by facts and logic. That’s something only a stupid person would think is valid. Assuming you’re not a stupid person is why I present my argument and invite you to supply your own. That’s how discussion works.
It’s pretty damned counterproductive for ostensibly intelligent people to think anyone who doesn’t agree and states the reasons why not is picking a fight. This is a discussion not a contest to see who can ‘own’ who.
So please don’t go there.
Where you won’t be able to cook anything anyway because they have taken away your LP/propane burning stove and forced you to use an electric range that has no electricity.
Welcome to the cold, dark future the Left has planned for all of us.
the cold dark future Gavin Newsome has for us. Except Gavin, and Uncle and Auntie Pelosi…and Obama’s chef – whoops, he’s dead.
Yeah, you’re right saying except for the fact that they have absolutely NO intention of sharing that cold, dark future with us.
To be fair, California didn’t fail as bad as Maui.
Tis sad what the lowlife elite Cornyafelons are doing…
Steve’s quip at the end is perfect. I am a refugee of Gary, IN, and we always said that about Gary decades ago. “Will the last person out of Gary please turn out the lights?” LOL (This was in the 70’s when Gary was 3rd largest city in Indiana, and had more murders than Indianapolis [1#] and Fort Wayne [#2] combined.)
One of the nuclear programs my father worked on was developing breeder reactors which would have provided enough electricity to power the whole US for the next three centuries without mining another pound of uranium. Bill Clinton killed the program over concern about shipping spent fuel rods for reprocessing and that enriched uranium could somehow fall into hostile hands–and general anti-nuclear sentiment from the flat-earthers. This was despite the fact that a group of engineers had designed a system that would allow for on-site reprocessing for minimum risk and cost. Another Clinton fail.
Those might have been the reasons the Clinton administration gave for crippling the future of nuclear energy but I find it doubtful that those were the true motivations. The Democrat Left is great at coming up with plausible excuses for their behavior.
There was a time in my life long ago when the work I was doing at any given time required concealment of both my identity and purpose. To accomplish this we built up a “pretext” when a full-on legend wasn’t called for. A legend is an identity meant to hold up under close scrutiny all the way back to your fictitious date of birth. A pretext is much like that but much simpler and not intended to survive that kind of scrutiny. A pretext is a lot cheaper to establish too.
For example; If I had to be somewhere in the great outdoors with a sophisticated, powerful camera I would have a “pretext” that identified me as a wildlife photographer. Complete with bogus “wildlife journalism” ID’s. There is no such thing as a blanket journalism ID for something like that. There are IDs issued to bonafide journalists by the organization they’re covering, like for instance the White House Press Corps has ID issued by the White House. A freelance wildlife photographer would have no such ID but …
Having that ID worked just fine when dealing with civilians who might stumble across me and back then even worked well on actual local and state law enforcement officers too. It was a hole in LEO training and I don’t know if it’s been since plugged or not. LEOs just naturally accepted official looking identity documents, especially if corroborated with real but fictional government documents and back then it was pretty easy to produce a fake driver’s license. They didn’t have pictures on them and the people I worked for had piles of blank stuff like that. The electronic means to “run” a license had not yet become ubiquitous either. The pretext was plausible and logical but in reality made up out of whole cloth spun from thin air. If played well it was almost never discovered.
The reason I’m telling you this is having lived this experience it’s pretty easy for me to spot a pretext when I see one. The knowledge gained in this sort of thing allows a person to apply a pretext as well as recognize one when it’s encountered.
That’s what the Democrat Left does with pretty much everything. As a single example among many — Their “compassionate” border policies result in vastly more horror, suffering and death than would otherwise exist. The people they claim to be ‘helping’ are being raped, robbed, enslaved and killed because of their policies. Still they insist their “compassion” makes them the good guys. Thus compassion for other human beings is not the real motivator. It is simply a pretext to allow them to do what they actually want and keep doing it.
This pretext of preventing the loss of nuclear materials or a spill as an excuse to abandon nuclear energy stinks to high heaven to me. YMMV
And Newt Gingrich was around, so it makes you wonder. Hindsight being what it is, we sure could have used those reactors now. The power company in my area just added a nuclear reactor on line recently, with massive cost and time projection overruns which will be born by the energy users among us and future reactors will be prohibitive to purchase.
A large factor in cost overruns and project delays has been environmental lawsuits. Also, having a standardized design would drastically reduce costs rather than each reactor being unique. More, smaller reactors would be a way to go.
As Cali goes so goes the nation. It is truly terrifying that someone as malevolent as Nancy Pelosi’s nephew could be installed as our next President in 2024
I’ve heard that phrase many times but I can’t find a citation for the original quote. It’s mostly a thing only Californians believe and repeat because they think they’re the epitome of social and political ‘progress’ in the U.S. The phrase is mostly self-aggrandizement with very little substance.
I don’t think it’s true, I don’t think it was ever true. California wants to lead the way and says it leads the way but it does not. That’s sort of like an urban myth. Even back in the 60’s and 70’s authors like Robert Heinlein were mocking the Californian political system. I think that’s one of those things that people say because other people say it a lot.
Hollywood was once upon a time a significant trend setter but I don’t think that influence is anything like what it used to be. Mostly because Hollywood shat upon itself to the point where a lot of people just don’t want to absorb the foul smell generated thereby.
I think, and I’m not criticizing you this is just my opinion, that California has nearly zero social impact on the rest of the nation. The danger is that as California goes ever further off the rails its influence in the Electoral College and Congress is the main threat. Even so, California isn’t alone in that, New York and other Blue enclaves are just as dangerous.
But no one says “As goes New York so goes the nation” and there was a time when that was probably more true than ever applied to California. There was a time when the money, power and influence of New York City made it an unofficial shadow second capital of the U.S. California has never achieved that.
California has always been a lot of noise and fury signifying nothing and now they’re a prime bad example of what a state should not be.
That said, I’m happy to admit a strong bias. I hate California with an unending passion.
There’s a recent article in The Heritage Foundation’s The Charge entitled “Virginia Should Make Its Own Decisions About EVs”. Here’s the first paragraph:
In 2021, “as part of Governor Ralph Northam’s (D) aggressive climate agenda, the Virginia General Assembly voted to apply California’s vehicle standards and electric vehicle (EV) mandates to the commonwealth. As a result, Virginians’ choice of new cars and trucks will now be dictated by California’s regulatory policies,” writes Heritage Foundation distinguished fellow Steve Bradbury in The Virginian-Pilot.
California may not be dictating national policy, but it’s certainly swaying a few states to become Californicated.
That’s true and Virginia just today had an election of the General Assembly in which I voted for the people who will hopefully put an end to that nonsense. I hope anyone else in Virginia who would want to stop that sort of thing also voted.
The Pilot is a local paper to me, BTW. I don’t live in VB but close by. I stopped buying newspapers years ago so I didn’t see that article.
Northam is no longer the Governor, Glenn Youngkin won the last gubernatorial election. He’s a Republican and a conservative so I hope he stomped that policy flat when he took office. I haven’t heard of it being applied so I don’t know either way.
You prove my point for me though … California is a leader in bad policies. That a legislative member would vote to adopt any California regulations is a “tell” that they’re following the bad example California sets.
Oh, and BTW, Northam was an idiot.
Well I voted, but it did not go well for us or Youngkin. The fear mongering on not be able to kill babies in the womb at will seems to have worked, especially on the coast. Caught a few ads and fliers for people running against R incumbents and the main thrust on all was if you don’t vote for a D, abortion in VA will cease to exist.
Looks like Youngkin won’t have a house or senate in his support. Hopefully Winsome Sears funs a really good campaign next time out.
Having one time lived in Ohio, what happened there yesterday is truly embarrassing for humanity.
I live in Ohio. The abortion side hammered on the bad part of the existing law:.no exception for life of mother or rape. For me, you want to kill the rapist, in general, go for it. But no exception for real life endangering (like ectopic pregnancy) is wrong. The life side pointed out some glaring holes, but the other side said “We can fix that in laws”
No you can’t. You would have to have another amendment. And why didn’t they plug the holes in the first place? I think the holes were the goal.
In answering both you and Ron SAE, this thing with eating our own to our own defeat because someone isn’t ideologically pure enough is a big part of the problem. I’ve said before, if we don’t win we can’t change a damn thing. In making an issue of zero prenatal baby deaths under any circumstances whatsoever our side is resourcing our enemies with everything they need to defeat us.
So we lose and then instead of zero abortions under any circumstances we get even more abortions under a much broader set of circumstances. But hey, we were ideologically pure as the driven snow and do our best to destroy anyone who doesn’t meet that standard. So the real world application is a lot more babies die than would have otherwise AND there are those among us who congratulate themselves on what righteous, virtuous people they are for aiding and abetting that.
The is EXACTLY the same thing as Democrats being all smug about “helping” illegal immigrants get into the U.S. and ignoring the real world consequences of their policies. Consequences that have created more rape, robbery, slavery and murders than at any time in modern history. While the people the Left is “helping” are the victims of all that.
And it’s not just the issue of abortion either. It’s all across the policy spectrum on the Right. Hell, there’s even one nematode in here that called ME a “Leftist mole” because I wasn’t ideologically pure enough for his NAZI-like brand of politics. He advocated for killing people and hated that I would call him on doing that. After all, he’s such a genius that just like Adolf Hitler he knows exactly which and how many people need to be killed to solve all our problems. As if that weren’t bad enough, he took in a lot of people here with his nonsense and NO ONE BUT ME called him on it.
A heck of a lot of the problems we as Conservatives have are rooted in other people who call themselves Conservative as an excuse to promote their own phony virtues and to spew their bilious anger at any target of opportunity.
Funny thing is, those same pseudo-Conservatives would be the first to agree with the old saying — “Sweep your own doorstep first”. They would also be the last to realize they’re the ones in need of being swept.
Agreed. Note the Left started small and worked up. They had a goal in mind and took baby steps to do it. We need to do the same.
” Never let the perfect be the enemy of the good”.