It hasn’t been government for the people for a long, long time. It’s governance OF the people. As Carlin said, it’s a big fucking club and we ain’t in it.
Timely post! I was just reading about how many cities are simply dumping trash and 'recyclables' together into one truck -- presumably because 'staffing shortage because covid'. Yet they're still charging residents for 'recycling services'...........
My grandmother swore they always did that in Brooklyn. I think she was right. She said the same truck would make two passes down the block, first dumping in the trash, then dumping in the recyclables. It made sense to me, given that (this was 2000) no one at my Manhattan office recycled a damned thing. Bins did not even exist in the office, which generated a boatload of paper on a daily basis. Recycling is--other than aluminum and glass--a farce on a foundational level.
For a little while, China was buying the trash and dealing with all of it over there. They've since halted buying the junk, but our cities and towns aren't going to give up the program.
But realistically, if recycling made economic sense, they would be paying us to do it instead of the other way around.
It takes more energy to make new plastic than to make plastic from old plastic. It never made economic sense to recycle plastic. A person could argue that using the extra (evil fossil fuel!!) energy was a good trade-off to reduce plastic waste in the environment; however, even to do that, you have to get the plastic really clean, and I think that was part of why China stopped buying it... Who rinses every iota of ketchup out of the awful squeeze bottle? I buy nearly everything in glass.
"They" want all plastic containers recycled, but only certain plastics are recyclable. So, you put everything in, then it gets separated and the unrecyclable stuff is trashed, but "they" don't tell the little folks that part.
Recycling was ‘invented’ in the 1970’s, by the petroleum/packaging/beverage industries. In the 1970’s, people began feeling guilty about buying so much plastic stuff, so recycling was invented to make them feel less guilty about it. Remember the 1971 Keep America Beautiful ad with the American Indian (Iron Eyes Cody, who was actually an Italian actor named Espera de Corti) with the tear running down his cheek due to people littering? That ad was created by the beverage/packaging industry. This follows the pattern of corporations always blaming individual citizens for everything. Turn off the lights! Take shorter showers! Turn down your water heater! Drive less miles! Recycle! Not that hardly anything really gets recycled. I recycled my whole life, thinking I was being a ‘good citizen’. A year ago, I stopped. Not playing the game any more. Go and research all the new plastics manufacturing factories currently being built in the USA by the petroleum industry- they’re huge monstrosities, all over the country.
I agree with you on mostly everything you're saying. Me, I don't WANT my food in plastic. I don't LIKE plastic. But they know how to make EDIBLE plastic, they just don't do it.
I'm kind of sick of the greedy, polluting, ugliness of all this trashy trashy trash.
I'd like to undo the corporate thing altogether and restart everything after we've decided what WE THE PEOPLE really want. Fuck letting MONEY be the decision-making factor, I say.
It's like at the grocery store. My family always used paper bags, but stores got rid of them because plastic bags were cheaper. Now people are persecuted for not carrying a (usually plastic) reusable bag. Just give me the paper bags back. We always reused them, and paper is renewable. I buy as little in plastic as possible, especially food. It can't be healthful.
Seems like everything comes in plastic, or aluminum... I want to scream.
I use cloth bags for my groceries, but I know a lot of people use plastic bags for various other uses, except now you have to pay for them... They should be paying US, and we should be insisting on NO plastic...
But I have been to our dump on several occasions; there's different bins for different recyclables... Of course it could all be a scam, who knows. Seems like a LOT of work (and expense) to go to just to do something stupid, but there ya go... Lots of THAT, lol.
When I lived in NYC, there were two different colors of bags: transparent blue for one kind of recycling and transparent colorless for another kind. Lots of places have "single-stream," where you just dump all your stuff (corrugated cardboard, glass jars, plastic soda bottles, etc.) into one bin, and it's supposedly sorted (including the plastic being sorted by number via OCR, which is hard to believe). Other than aluminum and glass, which have for a very long time been able to be made into new products, though, I'm just not seeing any evidence that any of it ends up being actually *recycled.*
Many years ago, when my child was little, I complained to another mom about how crummy (thinly spread, worn out, etc.) the wood chips were at the local park. Basically, there is a wooden-framed area with a jungle gym and slides, and the ground there is dirt, covered by wood chips. The wood chips were in a sorry state. The other mom said--and I almost couldn't believe anyone's brain worked this way--that she supposed the town measured the depth of the wood chips on a regular basis and replaced them or refilled the play area when the level got below a pre-set number of inches. I asked her if she had read that in the paper or heard it at a town meeting or seen it online, and she said No, but that it was just what she had assumed. I don't know whether she was in the minority as far as imagining a detailed process of park maintenance that absolutely did not exist, but I do think that a lot of people (maybe most people) assume that the government is managing and maintaining everything within its purview according to an optimized plan. The truth? As my dad once said to me about workers in the post office, They don't view their job as getting any particular thing done; they view their job as showing up for eight hours. The only way out of this is to take things out of the government's purview. Buy back parks. Vote for private garbage pickup. etc.
But they're not maintaining them. Imagine buying back all the county parks, then electing enough decent people to county council to eliminate the park budget. Or my other suggestion: Go ahead and use the park, regardless of whether it's "open." Just do it with enough associates that arrests will be newsworthy.
The main benefit of private garbage pickup is that the pricing isn't a black box, and you can switch vendors to get a better deal. I have city pickup now, but I've had both in the past, when I lived in different places, and private pickup is much better. We also picked a hauler who employed actual people and didn't force us to use the big nasty can that could be picked up with the arm. As far as anything being recycled, I'm sure it's the same BS game regardless of the hauler.
The recycling programs in Texas cities is a joke. Yeah they’ll take it somewhere to sort for photo ops, but after it gets loaded into trucks and sent to the landfill. Mind you the landfill has a blue section. But, it’s still a landfill.
I once asked the question where the recyclables are taken once sorted. To a recycling center was the response. What facility as there are no railways which tie into the recycling center, so it’s all trucked? Silence. Sixth largest city in the US and we are trucking all the recyclables somewhere because there aren’t any facilities in the state which do that. Silence. I’m just curious where my tax dollars are going. After which they ignored me and proceeded to move to the next topic.
I’ve known the answer all along. It goes to the landfill. Just like where the brand new fleet of garbage trucks went right before the collectors decided to complain about can weights during pickup routes because they had just negotiated a raise and new truck fleet.
Once the pickup item weight thing came about, the city decided it was in our best interest to go to a single person truck with a robotic arm that grabbed the cans and dumped them into a truck. Only drivers were kept, and those were cut by 1/3. The new fleet. Underneath metric tons of dirt and composting refuse.
There hasn’t been recycling for 3 or more years. The recycling receivers worldwide, most in China, shut down then. All your recyclables go into landfill.
In San Antonio recycling has ALWAYS gone to the landfill. He it’s received federal funding to promote recycling that we paid for through taxation in our water bill. We pay for the can we HAVE to use. Plus a fee each month. I’m ok with that. What I’m not ok with is being charged for a service that I am not getting. Yet we are all paying to have our plastics etc. recycled, yet never get a reduction in any of the fees. All of the benefits we were sold (helping the environment, recycling was to fund expansion of city parks as well as overall improvements to them. Since the program starting, only one new additional park has been made. Paid for through bonds because it’s for the children. Any improvements the parks have gotten were paid for with bonds floating upon bonds. There has been no transparency regarding the funding. Not to mention the millions the city receive for promoting it. If you do not separate your trash, you are fined as well as the trash isn’t picked up.
It’s a fraudulent program. Just a revenue stream for the city politicians. That’s my whole complaint on the matter. It is used as a means to force compliance to orders they have no right to.
A similar phenomena here in Australia. We used to be able to rock up to a campground in any NSW national park for free. Then during Covid you had to ‘notify’ national parks of your arrival via a website to ensure campgrounds could accomodate social distancing?? They charged a $7 administration fee that still exists today. I’m still in the foetal position trying to understand the need to socially distance in the Australian bush on 3 million square miles of island!
A century ago the San Gabriel mountains were a mecca for people not only from America's four corners, but also globally. 1.5+ million annual visitors ... And contrary to what well-intentioned "rangers" (aka lazy-ass, government, entitled-for-life employees) would like us to believe, back then -- when Thaddeus Lowe's Railway was still ferrying folks up to the Alpine Tavern and Lodge -- the Angeles Crest Forest THRIVED. Wildlife was abundant and forest fires were less lethal to to the area because forest management wasn't an obscure concept taught at hippy-dippy colleges where "forest use" is branded into young minds to be "abuse". 100+ years ago, forest management was actually a trade--not a radical ideology... It was profession-with skilled people who knew HOW to be environmental stewards, caretakers and goodwill ambassadors. And the people came and came and came... because back then, they'd heard first-hand stories about the beauty of the San Gabriels, instead of the GLARING message of today that NO ONE IS WELCOME -- unless... of course, you're a mountain yellow-legged frog. <https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/angeles/news-events/?cid=FSEPRD585136>
The campgrounds you describe were maintained by a government that existed to serve the public. The government today believes that it exists to rule the public. The bureaucrats who run the government are not going to give up their power. They need to be defunded and replaced with the public servants that you remember.
Terrific observations. The same is true of campsites in Colorado, many closed during COVID and just never re-opened. They did find the time to put up no-parking signs. We have more Mall Cops, and fewer public servants.
Many years ago I remember riding the peak-to-peak highway in CO on my bike and stopping at an empty park for a few minutes to refill water and rest. Turns out it was a State Park with a ranger who drove up to tell me I couldn't be there without paying the fee. Ugh.
I wonder how many citizens it would take to reopen the campsites by simultaneously disregarding the signs. A mass arrest of, say, 100 families would look pretty bad on TV.
It's been a looong campaign of turning us OFF Nature, so they can more easily techify our lives... like "metaverse" camping... cool, huh? Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. I say it's time for govt's to exit stage left.
You know, in this mad rush to automate everything ("Ve need less people in der future"), to "improve productivity", to introduce wretched AI, the *essential* thing, human presence and companionship, gets thrown out of the window. I remember, in England, in the 60s, civic amenities like parks had their own park keeper. Buses had a driver and a conductor. Trains had a driver, a guard, and several conductors. There was a human presence everywhere, from policemen on the beat, men sweeping the street (always men) to the friendly shop assistant in the corner shop. Some people were happy with these so-called lowly occupations, and they were appreciated by the people they served: people like people. Money was short, but not so important as now.
In France, where I live now, there's still a semblance of civic pride. The parks and streets are well maintained, there are people employed by the local mairie to do this, and this is appreciated by the townspeople.
We are, mostly, people who like people, and if we could somehow get back to valuing presence and companionship in the workplace and the community, the world would be a better place.
I also grew up in Pasadena, and my family moved even closer to Henninger Flats (Altadena) right after graduation from High School. Spent a lot of time there as a teen, but less so after moving out of the area. Some of my siblings still live close; my sister would hike up there often until covid stopped the world from functioning....yeah, I know...makes all the sense in the world. Very sad state of affairs.
There was a period at the height of the madness when hikers had to have a time-specific hiking reservation and check in with the hiking monitors posted at the gate in PPE. Laugh-out-loud funny, in a dark way. Still really pretty up there, if you're ever back in the neighborhood.
Yes, my sis would tell me about that. She’s pretty left, and was completely on board with the PPE requirements and reservations. Go figure. (We agree on almost nothing political, but we get along great.) She and my brother are very talented artists who have both done paintings of that area and Eaton Canyon. I wish I had even one hundredth of their talent.
this old farmer says: Sorry there Chris, - - you are braying again. There is the beast coast and the left coast, where a bunch of folks, or bots, keep whining about the various atrocities they endure, while the 'fly over' country folks are trying to make a few changes. If you didn't notice,- - there was an election a short while ago. How many changes were made to the 'tyrants' that have been writing your viscous laws. Those same 'tyrants' are writing laws for we 'fly over' folks too. So we changed a few. Just imagine how many we would have changed if they went back to the system where a person had to walk into a voting booth and the counters, of all parties, had to count the votes in that evening and night. I will feel some empathy towards all of you sheeple when you quit following the Judas Goats you keep putting in control. You MUST be CRAZY. You keep doing the same thing but expect a different result. The nice thing about Russian Roulette is that only the fool who pulls the trigger gets hurt. If you don't like the scenery or the smell or the rules where you are, and you don't change the shepherds, you better move the flock to a different meadow. You take care now .......
Hey!! I didn’t vote for ANY OF THE TYRANTS CURRENTLY in office- in California the Hollywood Democrats and elites run over all of the stupid, lazy, ignorant’s who keep these tyrants in office. Most too lazy to read ANYTHING BEFORE VOTING. It appears that every vote is based on advertising or “well, they have been in office, so I’ll just vote for them again”.......
That's what I'm talkin' bout. The sheeple are going to sheeple. If you don't like the shepherd and you don't like the flock, - - get a new meadow, - - - - while you can. Musk moved, and so did many others who have tried to effect a change, but were overwhelmed by the sheeple and their choices for shepherds. I lived in South Bay area from '41 until '74. THAT was when it was BEAUTIFUL!!! But realized then, that the sheeple were taking control, no matter how bad it got, they wouldn't change. So I did. Take care
If you can change, so can they. It took decades to bring us to this. It's not going to change overnight, in the midst of a giant pandemic hoax, with everyone freaking out. We need to organize and think and talk about these issues. Not just type to each other online. Substack is great, but we are spread out. We would do well to locally gather, IRL.
People/Life/Nature is not STATIC. Change is a given.
Where I live, people flocked en masse to the mountains to escape house arrest. The government said it had to introduce new user fees to control the numbers, and so it did. But it gives me hope that the desire to "be in nature" still exists in most people -- hope that we haven't completely lost our societal compass.
When the getting of power; feeling of power;keeping of power; grabbing of more power...when this obscene and malevolent feeling first occurred to someone, so,too,concepts that we were raised with and loved and honored,like honor itself,began to die.
It hasn’t been government for the people for a long, long time. It’s governance OF the people. As Carlin said, it’s a big fucking club and we ain’t in it.
This succinct observation ought to be the motto of our government.
Timely post! I was just reading about how many cities are simply dumping trash and 'recyclables' together into one truck -- presumably because 'staffing shortage because covid'. Yet they're still charging residents for 'recycling services'...........
My grandmother swore they always did that in Brooklyn. I think she was right. She said the same truck would make two passes down the block, first dumping in the trash, then dumping in the recyclables. It made sense to me, given that (this was 2000) no one at my Manhattan office recycled a damned thing. Bins did not even exist in the office, which generated a boatload of paper on a daily basis. Recycling is--other than aluminum and glass--a farce on a foundational level.
For a little while, China was buying the trash and dealing with all of it over there. They've since halted buying the junk, but our cities and towns aren't going to give up the program.
But realistically, if recycling made economic sense, they would be paying us to do it instead of the other way around.
It takes more energy to make new plastic than to make plastic from old plastic. It never made economic sense to recycle plastic. A person could argue that using the extra (evil fossil fuel!!) energy was a good trade-off to reduce plastic waste in the environment; however, even to do that, you have to get the plastic really clean, and I think that was part of why China stopped buying it... Who rinses every iota of ketchup out of the awful squeeze bottle? I buy nearly everything in glass.
I understand there's a way to turn plastic BACK into fuel. THAT might be a good thing with these gas prices...
"They" want all plastic containers recycled, but only certain plastics are recyclable. So, you put everything in, then it gets separated and the unrecyclable stuff is trashed, but "they" don't tell the little folks that part.
Recycling was ‘invented’ in the 1970’s, by the petroleum/packaging/beverage industries. In the 1970’s, people began feeling guilty about buying so much plastic stuff, so recycling was invented to make them feel less guilty about it. Remember the 1971 Keep America Beautiful ad with the American Indian (Iron Eyes Cody, who was actually an Italian actor named Espera de Corti) with the tear running down his cheek due to people littering? That ad was created by the beverage/packaging industry. This follows the pattern of corporations always blaming individual citizens for everything. Turn off the lights! Take shorter showers! Turn down your water heater! Drive less miles! Recycle! Not that hardly anything really gets recycled. I recycled my whole life, thinking I was being a ‘good citizen’. A year ago, I stopped. Not playing the game any more. Go and research all the new plastics manufacturing factories currently being built in the USA by the petroleum industry- they’re huge monstrosities, all over the country.
I agree with you on mostly everything you're saying. Me, I don't WANT my food in plastic. I don't LIKE plastic. But they know how to make EDIBLE plastic, they just don't do it.
I'm kind of sick of the greedy, polluting, ugliness of all this trashy trashy trash.
I'd like to undo the corporate thing altogether and restart everything after we've decided what WE THE PEOPLE really want. Fuck letting MONEY be the decision-making factor, I say.
It's like at the grocery store. My family always used paper bags, but stores got rid of them because plastic bags were cheaper. Now people are persecuted for not carrying a (usually plastic) reusable bag. Just give me the paper bags back. We always reused them, and paper is renewable. I buy as little in plastic as possible, especially food. It can't be healthful.
Seems like everything comes in plastic, or aluminum... I want to scream.
I use cloth bags for my groceries, but I know a lot of people use plastic bags for various other uses, except now you have to pay for them... They should be paying US, and we should be insisting on NO plastic...
In NYC, they go through your garbage and fine you if they find recyclables in there. Not kidding.
I believe you... When I lived in SF, when Newsom was mayor there, he wanted to do the same and everybody screamed, so it didn't happen.
Formerly from Queens, can confirm. They have not been separated for many years.
She is correct. The "carting" companies made those deals long ago.
In my town, it's two different trucks. Or, it used to be... I'll have to watch this week and check.
We still have two different trucks, but the trash ends up in the same place.
Yeah, that would be easy to do.
But I have been to our dump on several occasions; there's different bins for different recyclables... Of course it could all be a scam, who knows. Seems like a LOT of work (and expense) to go to just to do something stupid, but there ya go... Lots of THAT, lol.
Here all recyclables go into light blue PLASTIC bags, so "they" can separate them out easier.
When I lived in NYC, there were two different colors of bags: transparent blue for one kind of recycling and transparent colorless for another kind. Lots of places have "single-stream," where you just dump all your stuff (corrugated cardboard, glass jars, plastic soda bottles, etc.) into one bin, and it's supposedly sorted (including the plastic being sorted by number via OCR, which is hard to believe). Other than aluminum and glass, which have for a very long time been able to be made into new products, though, I'm just not seeing any evidence that any of it ends up being actually *recycled.*
Many years ago, when my child was little, I complained to another mom about how crummy (thinly spread, worn out, etc.) the wood chips were at the local park. Basically, there is a wooden-framed area with a jungle gym and slides, and the ground there is dirt, covered by wood chips. The wood chips were in a sorry state. The other mom said--and I almost couldn't believe anyone's brain worked this way--that she supposed the town measured the depth of the wood chips on a regular basis and replaced them or refilled the play area when the level got below a pre-set number of inches. I asked her if she had read that in the paper or heard it at a town meeting or seen it online, and she said No, but that it was just what she had assumed. I don't know whether she was in the minority as far as imagining a detailed process of park maintenance that absolutely did not exist, but I do think that a lot of people (maybe most people) assume that the government is managing and maintaining everything within its purview according to an optimized plan. The truth? As my dad once said to me about workers in the post office, They don't view their job as getting any particular thing done; they view their job as showing up for eight hours. The only way out of this is to take things out of the government's purview. Buy back parks. Vote for private garbage pickup. etc.
Buy back parks? These are OUR parks, and maintained with OUR money. Just sayin'.
But they're not maintaining them. Imagine buying back all the county parks, then electing enough decent people to county council to eliminate the park budget. Or my other suggestion: Go ahead and use the park, regardless of whether it's "open." Just do it with enough associates that arrests will be newsworthy.
We have private garbage pickup. Nothing is recycled. The blue recycle bags are what the city garbage collection uses.
The main benefit of private garbage pickup is that the pricing isn't a black box, and you can switch vendors to get a better deal. I have city pickup now, but I've had both in the past, when I lived in different places, and private pickup is much better. We also picked a hauler who employed actual people and didn't force us to use the big nasty can that could be picked up with the arm. As far as anything being recycled, I'm sure it's the same BS game regardless of the hauler.
The recycling programs in Texas cities is a joke. Yeah they’ll take it somewhere to sort for photo ops, but after it gets loaded into trucks and sent to the landfill. Mind you the landfill has a blue section. But, it’s still a landfill.
I once asked the question where the recyclables are taken once sorted. To a recycling center was the response. What facility as there are no railways which tie into the recycling center, so it’s all trucked? Silence. Sixth largest city in the US and we are trucking all the recyclables somewhere because there aren’t any facilities in the state which do that. Silence. I’m just curious where my tax dollars are going. After which they ignored me and proceeded to move to the next topic.
I’ve known the answer all along. It goes to the landfill. Just like where the brand new fleet of garbage trucks went right before the collectors decided to complain about can weights during pickup routes because they had just negotiated a raise and new truck fleet.
Once the pickup item weight thing came about, the city decided it was in our best interest to go to a single person truck with a robotic arm that grabbed the cans and dumped them into a truck. Only drivers were kept, and those were cut by 1/3. The new fleet. Underneath metric tons of dirt and composting refuse.
Perfect example of how government ruins everything it touches.
Recycling is a big scam.
Garbage is garbage.
There hasn’t been recycling for 3 or more years. The recycling receivers worldwide, most in China, shut down then. All your recyclables go into landfill.
In San Antonio recycling has ALWAYS gone to the landfill. He it’s received federal funding to promote recycling that we paid for through taxation in our water bill. We pay for the can we HAVE to use. Plus a fee each month. I’m ok with that. What I’m not ok with is being charged for a service that I am not getting. Yet we are all paying to have our plastics etc. recycled, yet never get a reduction in any of the fees. All of the benefits we were sold (helping the environment, recycling was to fund expansion of city parks as well as overall improvements to them. Since the program starting, only one new additional park has been made. Paid for through bonds because it’s for the children. Any improvements the parks have gotten were paid for with bonds floating upon bonds. There has been no transparency regarding the funding. Not to mention the millions the city receive for promoting it. If you do not separate your trash, you are fined as well as the trash isn’t picked up.
It’s a fraudulent program. Just a revenue stream for the city politicians. That’s my whole complaint on the matter. It is used as a means to force compliance to orders they have no right to.
A similar phenomena here in Australia. We used to be able to rock up to a campground in any NSW national park for free. Then during Covid you had to ‘notify’ national parks of your arrival via a website to ensure campgrounds could accomodate social distancing?? They charged a $7 administration fee that still exists today. I’m still in the foetal position trying to understand the need to socially distance in the Australian bush on 3 million square miles of island!
A century ago the San Gabriel mountains were a mecca for people not only from America's four corners, but also globally. 1.5+ million annual visitors ... And contrary to what well-intentioned "rangers" (aka lazy-ass, government, entitled-for-life employees) would like us to believe, back then -- when Thaddeus Lowe's Railway was still ferrying folks up to the Alpine Tavern and Lodge -- the Angeles Crest Forest THRIVED. Wildlife was abundant and forest fires were less lethal to to the area because forest management wasn't an obscure concept taught at hippy-dippy colleges where "forest use" is branded into young minds to be "abuse". 100+ years ago, forest management was actually a trade--not a radical ideology... It was profession-with skilled people who knew HOW to be environmental stewards, caretakers and goodwill ambassadors. And the people came and came and came... because back then, they'd heard first-hand stories about the beauty of the San Gabriels, instead of the GLARING message of today that NO ONE IS WELCOME -- unless... of course, you're a mountain yellow-legged frog. <https://www.fs.usda.gov/detail/angeles/news-events/?cid=FSEPRD585136>
And now you know how the lights went out in Rome.
The end.
The campgrounds you describe were maintained by a government that existed to serve the public. The government today believes that it exists to rule the public. The bureaucrats who run the government are not going to give up their power. They need to be defunded and replaced with the public servants that you remember.
The government doesn’t have enough money to keep Henninger Flats open so you can surveil Los Angeles at night, it’s all being used to surveil you.
Fuck that. It's time to get those damn cameras down, and get the damn 5G down, too.
And who watches the watchers?
Terrific observations. The same is true of campsites in Colorado, many closed during COVID and just never re-opened. They did find the time to put up no-parking signs. We have more Mall Cops, and fewer public servants.
Many years ago I remember riding the peak-to-peak highway in CO on my bike and stopping at an empty park for a few minutes to refill water and rest. Turns out it was a State Park with a ranger who drove up to tell me I couldn't be there without paying the fee. Ugh.
Having to PAY to visit a state or national park is vomitous.
Maybe if Congress could stop raiding every damn wallet and do what WE, their bosses, tell them to do, we'd all be a lot better off.
I wonder how many citizens it would take to reopen the campsites by simultaneously disregarding the signs. A mass arrest of, say, 100 families would look pretty bad on TV.
Well...TPTB want us to sniff a swab with poison on it and jab ourselves to death.
Many of “us” said 🖕. And God has taken them under His Wing. FAITH.
It's been a looong campaign of turning us OFF Nature, so they can more easily techify our lives... like "metaverse" camping... cool, huh? Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. I say it's time for govt's to exit stage left.
You know, in this mad rush to automate everything ("Ve need less people in der future"), to "improve productivity", to introduce wretched AI, the *essential* thing, human presence and companionship, gets thrown out of the window. I remember, in England, in the 60s, civic amenities like parks had their own park keeper. Buses had a driver and a conductor. Trains had a driver, a guard, and several conductors. There was a human presence everywhere, from policemen on the beat, men sweeping the street (always men) to the friendly shop assistant in the corner shop. Some people were happy with these so-called lowly occupations, and they were appreciated by the people they served: people like people. Money was short, but not so important as now.
In France, where I live now, there's still a semblance of civic pride. The parks and streets are well maintained, there are people employed by the local mairie to do this, and this is appreciated by the townspeople.
We are, mostly, people who like people, and if we could somehow get back to valuing presence and companionship in the workplace and the community, the world would be a better place.
I also grew up in Pasadena, and my family moved even closer to Henninger Flats (Altadena) right after graduation from High School. Spent a lot of time there as a teen, but less so after moving out of the area. Some of my siblings still live close; my sister would hike up there often until covid stopped the world from functioning....yeah, I know...makes all the sense in the world. Very sad state of affairs.
There was a period at the height of the madness when hikers had to have a time-specific hiking reservation and check in with the hiking monitors posted at the gate in PPE. Laugh-out-loud funny, in a dark way. Still really pretty up there, if you're ever back in the neighborhood.
Similar nonsense on the Mt Wilson Trail from Sierra Madre. <sigh>
Yes, my sis would tell me about that. She’s pretty left, and was completely on board with the PPE requirements and reservations. Go figure. (We agree on almost nothing political, but we get along great.) She and my brother are very talented artists who have both done paintings of that area and Eaton Canyon. I wish I had even one hundredth of their talent.
But you got all the SENSE... xo
😂
this old farmer says: Sorry there Chris, - - you are braying again. There is the beast coast and the left coast, where a bunch of folks, or bots, keep whining about the various atrocities they endure, while the 'fly over' country folks are trying to make a few changes. If you didn't notice,- - there was an election a short while ago. How many changes were made to the 'tyrants' that have been writing your viscous laws. Those same 'tyrants' are writing laws for we 'fly over' folks too. So we changed a few. Just imagine how many we would have changed if they went back to the system where a person had to walk into a voting booth and the counters, of all parties, had to count the votes in that evening and night. I will feel some empathy towards all of you sheeple when you quit following the Judas Goats you keep putting in control. You MUST be CRAZY. You keep doing the same thing but expect a different result. The nice thing about Russian Roulette is that only the fool who pulls the trigger gets hurt. If you don't like the scenery or the smell or the rules where you are, and you don't change the shepherds, you better move the flock to a different meadow. You take care now .......
We didn’t vote for these tyrants. I was living in Commifornia when Reagan was POTUS, and Reagan was my Governor as well.
California is becoming quite common throughout the USA...it’s not the state, it’s THE PEOPLE. Leftists have infiltrated the entire USA.
Because “We” allowed them to. Political Correctness has its drawbacks.
Many, many drawbacks!
Hey!! I didn’t vote for ANY OF THE TYRANTS CURRENTLY in office- in California the Hollywood Democrats and elites run over all of the stupid, lazy, ignorant’s who keep these tyrants in office. Most too lazy to read ANYTHING BEFORE VOTING. It appears that every vote is based on advertising or “well, they have been in office, so I’ll just vote for them again”.......
Disgusting.
That's what I'm talkin' bout. The sheeple are going to sheeple. If you don't like the shepherd and you don't like the flock, - - get a new meadow, - - - - while you can. Musk moved, and so did many others who have tried to effect a change, but were overwhelmed by the sheeple and their choices for shepherds. I lived in South Bay area from '41 until '74. THAT was when it was BEAUTIFUL!!! But realized then, that the sheeple were taking control, no matter how bad it got, they wouldn't change. So I did. Take care
If you can change, so can they. It took decades to bring us to this. It's not going to change overnight, in the midst of a giant pandemic hoax, with everyone freaking out. We need to organize and think and talk about these issues. Not just type to each other online. Substack is great, but we are spread out. We would do well to locally gather, IRL.
People/Life/Nature is not STATIC. Change is a given.
Where I live, people flocked en masse to the mountains to escape house arrest. The government said it had to introduce new user fees to control the numbers, and so it did. But it gives me hope that the desire to "be in nature" still exists in most people -- hope that we haven't completely lost our societal compass.
I love crawling around in the woods with a "sniper" rifle.
Thousands, tens of thousands of us do it all the time!
these "Elite Overseers" ought to be concerned!
They probably don't go to the woods... Scared to. Might be some bunnies or something. ;)
Oh, and germs! Lots of germs! And disease carrying critters! Eew, where's my mask?
It’s theirs, dammit! What don’t you understand??
Also, "lone," not "loan." But you knew that. ;)
Ohhhh, that's a bad one. Thanks! Fixed!
When the getting of power; feeling of power;keeping of power; grabbing of more power...when this obscene and malevolent feeling first occurred to someone, so,too,concepts that we were raised with and loved and honored,like honor itself,began to die.
Those kinds of things don't DIE, they go dormant for a time.
They will come back.
I think they kind of die off in one generation, maybe not a complete die off, only to come back in later ones.
Well hell Ukraine needs more money to cycle back to politicians. Got to cover for SBF pipeline shutting down.