Thread Before the Gardening Thread, September 10

California, Energy and Gavin Newsom

Babylon Bee:

Newsom Promises There Will Be Enough Electricity For All Californians After Everyone Moves To Florida

Governor Gavin Newsom has declared a power grid emergency due to energy usage being at a 5-year high. Still, Newsom has assured everyone that they will have plenty of electricity to spare as soon as everyone leaves the state to live in Florida instead.

"Everyone, I understand your frustration, but by the end of the year with everyone leaving California, we're gonna cut our energy usage in half!" explained Governor Newsom. "In fact, so many are headed for Florida that the few of us who remain will be able to do cool stuff like use air conditioning and charge iPhones!"

But he had just been campaigning in Florida!

Newsom invites Floridians to trade their affordable energy for

*checks notes*

Rotating power outages pic.twitter.com/MAOwvh03br

— John Hasson (@SonofHas) September 6, 2022

Gavin Newsom REALLY wants to be president. Back at the end of August, Joel Kotkin warned conservatives not to dismiss the potential national appeal of this guy, because he is willing to change his positions to fit any political occasion.

Conservatives often see prospective presidential contender Gavin Newsom as a tool of the far Left--and, as such, politically doomed by the seemingly endless crises afflicting California. Yet the Golden State governor is a more formidable candidate than this portrayal suggests. Rather than being a progressive windup doll, the 54-year-old is in fact a skilled political opportunist, with far less dogmatically left-wing views than most of his party's legislative delegation. He would have no qualms abandoning unpopular progressive stances to pursue the goal of succeeding a doddering President Joe Biden.

In just the last week, Newsom provided two indicators of his flexibility. He vetoed a bill that would have legalized "shooting alleys"--so-called safe drug-injection sites--in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Oakland. Many of his progressive allies, who favor such programs, denounced the veto. They may be untroubled by rising street crime and drug overdoses, but Newsom knows that disorder in California's major cities offers a devastating talking point for his opponents--especially those to his right.

Even more striking was Newsom's recent turnaround on California's last nuclear plant, and even its gas plants. The green constituency in California detests both forms of energy production and even seeks to ban gas stations, gas heaters, and anything else tainted by fossil fuels. California's green policies have helped make its energy prices among the nation's highest and have created conditions likely to cause massive energy shortages on the power grid. Large-scale blackouts and brownouts could also become fodder for anti-Newsom political ads in 2024.

Newsom's recent moves on public safety and energy have outraged California progressives, particularly the powerful green lobby, which denounced his energy move as "incredibly dangerous." (California's greenhouse-gas emissions are statistically meaningless next to those of China, which emits more carbon than all other industrial countries combined.) Newsom knows that green pronunciamentos about the distant future--for example, the recently announced ban on the sale of new gas cars after 2035, and the goal (set in 2018 by his predecessor) of relying on a zero-carbon electric grid in 2045--make better politics than trying to shut down an economy that still depends on fossil fuels today. Newsom spokesman Anthony York suggested that the alternative policies proposed by greens "feels like fantasy and fairy dust."

Yet none of Newsom's recent moves should be surprising. He is, after all, not the product of the radical social-justice crowd but the anointed candidate of the Bay Area's uber class. . .

Speaking of changing positions:

Joe Biden Applied Pressure On Gavin Newsom Over Farmworker Union Bill

“(I) cannot support an untested mail-in election process that lacks critical provisions to protect the integrity of the election…”
—@GavinNewsom https://t.co/0J5x8GvYnE pic.twitter.com/oFcxvNNzaw

— Larry Elder (@larryelder) September 10, 2022

But some things stay the same:

I've been warning for years: this is NOT a contradiction. The hard Left knows perfectly well that our power grids could not support massive electric vehicle use. They're COUNTING on it. They don't want you peons moving around so much. https://t.co/yuWBmcSU7n

— John Hayward (@Doc_0) August 31, 2022

Queen Elizabeth

I liked this piece by Brendan O'Neill:

I am a republican, always have been, and yet I now feel a great sense of loss. And not only because a 96-year-old mother, grandmother and great-grandmother has died, which is always an occasion for sadness, whether the deceased was a monarch or an 'ordinary' member of the public. No, also because Elizabeth II represented something incredibly important. She embodied values that are at risk of extinction. She represented history in an era of anti-historical hysteria, forbearance in a time of narcissism, and public service in an era of self-worship and self-regard.

That was the great irony of Elizabeth II: she was the pinnacle of the establishment and yet she bristled, with every fibre of her being, against the values of the new establishment. She was accidentally countercultural, a traditionalist rebel, and I, for one, loved her for it.

This is the end of an era in so many ways. . .

Several interesting and specific examples are included. This is one of them:

I will remember her for representing a connection with the past when we were so often instructed to feel ashamed of the past. For being the personification of history in a time of frenzy, when statues were being torn down, and buildings were being renamed, and shade was being cast upon virtually every era of Britain's past.

In the midst of this turn against history, the Queen provided people with a connection to yesteryear. She was history made flesh, a quiet one-woman revolt against the idea that the past was entirely terrible and that we must sever all links with it.

In contrast to the piece above, there's this:

George Floyd had four full funerals, several cities were ritually burned in his memory, and the ceremonial revenge murders are still dragging on. pic.twitter.com/x5J7uBNrdC

— Dr. Benjamin Braddock (@GraduatedBen) September 9, 2022

Quotes

Mark Hemingway:

Regarding the BYU incident, there's no getting around the fact that huge swaths of the media have completely abandoned all reasonable standards.

And these news orgs are going to eagerly keep smearing people until they're aggressively made to pay for it.

Richard Fernandez:

Almost none of the crazy people or movements I knew got better. All you could do is survive them so you wouldn't get caught in the wreck. I think its like that with decadence.

Run.

James Lileks:

On hold with a multi-billion dollar financial institution whose hold music is apparently piped through a Mattel Speak-and-Spell with dying batteries. Also, they cannot afford more than 12 bars of music

James Lileks again:

Watching childhood fave "Fantastic Voyage," in which a USSR defector has a brain clot, and the natural reaction is not "Walter Reed Hospital, and step on it" but "drive to the secret place where we will inject a bacterium-sized Raquel Welch into his vein"

Music

Sweet Georgia Brown

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's Thread, September 3, Maybe we should be teaching kids to read

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.

Addendum from Dr_No:

And especially for Californians:

posted by K.T. at 11:04 AM

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