The Little Limbaugh Dryas

Ice ages come and go. There was a mini ice age from approximately 1300AD-1850AD. Betcha didn’t know that didja. Ever wonder why women wore so many damn layers of clothing up until the 20th century? Now you know.

The Little Limbaugh Dryas is a phenomenon local to Texas. If there had been models developed 40 years ago, they would have been predictive. Weather is something humans have little control over (unlike climate change). It’s winter, therefore, there shall be cold weather. Everybody knows that. Come to think of it, the coldest Christmas I can remember was spent in Houston when we all ended up huddling in front of the gas fired fireplace in a lovely but oddly under insulated house. Conversely, the most miserable summer humidity I ever experienced was when visiting that same house so, I don’t know, maybe just stay the Hell away from Houston is my advice.

You know, just avoid the whole state if you can help it. Texas appears to have bought into the entire Rush Limbaugh worldview. It’s the one where “survival of the fittest” reigns supreme, people value their “freedom” to walk around maskless during a pandemic, and zoning laws are appalling and stupid. Deregulation of the energy biz followed by an almost clairvoyant Brexit-esque detachment of Texas from the energy grids to the east and west have lead to some really interesting images.

Like this one:

Give it up for Texas for winning the Darwin Award of the Week. Kentucky and West Virginia can barely compete and they have the excuse of being mountainous terrain complete with hollers. Actually, given West Virginia’s efficient vaccine rollout, we should just stop making fun of it.

But Texas. Amazing. You can almost outline the entire state. El Paso is an exception. It decided to join the west grid.

It gets better. Let’s zoom in on where in Texas the problem is most severe:

This heat map (no pun intended) shows where the lights are out. In this case, the warmer the color, the fewer the lights. Houston looks screwed. As usual.

All the cities in Texas appear to be taking a hit. Maybe that’s ok by Texas. City folk should know better than to live, well, in a city. You know, cities are dirty and full of undesirables. If they freeze to death every 10 years, it’s to be expected. They should move out of the cities. Texans can’t be expected to save everyone who lives in town, dependent on each other, not drinking from their own wells or chopping brush for kindling. Texans are not Canadians (I’ll get to those smug tweeters in a future post).

What’s it like where Texas touches other states, like Arkansas? Let’s take a look, shall we?

Arkansas, this is just mean. https://t.co/IXF785LyRL

— David Fahrenthold (@Fahrenthold) February 17, 2021

See the cleared roads and safely moving traffic? That’s Arkansas. It probably offered to clear the road for Texas, considering some Arkansans might have trouble getting back from whence they came but you know Texans. They’re rugged individualists, not pussies, feminazis and Arkansans. They can just tough it out until the temp gets above 32°F.

I mean, Texans should get with the program and fend for themselves. Like Mayor Tim Boyd of Colorado City patiently explains to his whiny ass constituents:

I might take issue with Boyd’s assertion that the power company you PAY to deliver POWER doesn’t owe you POWER or YOUR MONEY BACK. That’s usually how the free market works. So, he’s not the brightest mayor in Texas.

Still, I think Mayor Tim has summed up beautifully what the Little Limbaugh Dryas is all about.

It is libertarianism on steroids. It’s everyone for himself. It’s tolerant of greed, lack of preparation and foresight, kneejerk deregulation, incivility, inhumanity and hypothermia of little children. Golly, what could Texans reasonably expect from their elected officials?? Weren’t the guidelines for winterization delivered to energy producers after the 2011 ice age enough? Energy companies are entitled to a profit you know, as big a profit as they can get. Some Texans may pay a steep price both literally in spot energy market pricing and figuratively in frozen grandmas. THOSE people should be looking out after themselves. Are Texans other Texans’ keepers? Give me a break.

Especially the ones that live in Houston. I mean, can we talk?

Anyway, if Texans are teachable, this little Limbaugh Dryas might be the beginning of the slow decline of black and white thinking. Sure, it’s possible to screw over your neighbor in order to protect the exploitative profits of ERCOT. It’s also possible for everyone in Texas to prep a bit in case this happens again. You know 3 days to a week of water, food, propane, solar backup batteries and sleeping bags for the whole family. Or they could help each other out. Or require that power companies winterize their equipment. Or a combination of several of these things. It does puzzle me though that Texans seem so committed to independence that they stubbornly refuse to collectively learn from their mistakes – that happen approximately every 10 years. They don’t just talk slow.

Still, there’s no need to just kill off the entire state for having a few dumb as f{}# mayors and lying opportunistic governors.

That is, only if you find something redeeming about Texas. I’ve heard Austin is nice. And San Antonio. And El Paso sounds like a lib’s dream. If I were in Houston though, I’d consider moving to New Orleans.

One last map to leave you with. It’s self explanatory.

Electricity consumption in Europe in 1507 pic.twitter.com/9YFlFkeGJO

— Terrible Maps (@TerribleMaps) September 11, 2017

It just goes to show you that either by screwing their neighbors or altruistically helping them out after a century of war, famine, cold and plague, the human species managed to survive.

I’m betting there were plenty of bleeding heart liberals and progressives amongst our ancestors and that 500 years hence, we’re still going to be singing merrily about Wenceslas bringing pine logs to a poor man while no one will remember who Rush Limbaugh was.

Take it away, Roches:

Et Tu, Bruin?

I was catching up on the news last night, and I was shocked to see that a UCLA student had been arrested in connection with the Capitol insurrection. His name is Christian Alexander Secor. There is video footage of him pushing through a door blocked by three police officers, getting into the Senate building, standing on the Senate floor, and sitting in the chair occupied by the presiding officer, who was of course Mike Pence on that day.

Secor was arrested on various serious charges of assaulting, resisting or impeding officers, violent entry and remaining on restricted grounds, civil disorder, and obstructing an official proceeding. The article from Newsweek indicates that Secor, who also goes by the alias “Scuffed Elliot Rodger,” defines himself as a fascist, has posted threats online, and has openly posted calls for America to be a Whites-only nation. The court document says that Secor “is known to follow an extreme ideology, and invite white nationalists to speak at engagements on campus.” “A trawl of Secor’s Twitter account shows that he has described fascism as ‘epic,'” the document says.

Well, this is very upsetting to me for more than just the awfulness of the insurrection. I attended UCLA, my parents did as well. In fact, I spent many years as an undergraduate and graduate student there. I was always proud of the school. I think it is currently listed by college ranking publications, as the top-rated public university in the country. It is not Harvard or Yale, but it is a very good academic school. And of course I grew up as a UCLA Bruin sports fan, and followed all the exploits of the unparalleled basketball program coached by the greatest coach of all time in any sport, John Wooden. We had some fine football programs back then, too; and UCLA has more national championships in sports than any other school, due to some notable achievements in the so-called Olympic sports, including many great women’s teams and athletes.

At UCLA, sports success was inextricably linked with diversity and progressivism. The Olympic Decathlon star of the early 1960’s, Rafer Johnson, was elected student body president at UCLA, and he may have been the first Black student at any major university to be elected to to that position. When I started school there, I think we had another student body president who was African-American. Ralph Bunche, the U.N. Ambassador, went to UCLA. Jackie Robinson did, and played three sports there. Arthur Ashe, the legendary tennis star, also active in civil rights, played for UCLA. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Lew Alcindor when he attended UCLA, was not only one of the greatest basketball players of all time, but one of the reasons he came to UCLA was because of the ethnic diversity, and progressivism at the school.

UCLA was not a hotbed of activism like our sister school UC Berkeley (some students liked to refer to UCLA as “Berkeley with mothers.” as UCLA was much more a commuter school, so people went home at the end of classes, and there was not the kind of communal solidarity that Berkeley had in the 1960’s and later). But I always thought that most of the students at UCLA were liberal, I certainly do not remember any right-wing people, certainly no fascists. They might have lurked around but I never heard anyone in a class (and there were classes where sometimes a professor would deviate from the course material to engage in a discussion of current affairs) express any right-wing positions, certainly not fascist ones. We had a professor of philosophy there, Donald Kalish, who was very active in the anti-war movement. There were campus demonstrations against the Vietnam War, and later on for other progressive issues.

So it is shocking to me that there is someone like Secor who not only attends UCLA, but is an active supporter of what he calls fascism, and tries to invite fascists and white nationalists to speak on campus. It really is hard to conceive how absolutely incredible and depressing this is to me. Yes, a campus is supposed to be a melting pot of ideas, but surely not including fascist ideology. UCLA had always been a very beautiful, upscale campus with students of a diverse amount of ethnicities, and probably the largest number of foreign-born students of any school in the country. Never a hotbed of radicalism, but always progressive. The new Athletic Director is Black, we have had two Black basketball coaches, a Black football coach, and had the first Hispanic Athletic Director in our conference. It is not a place for white nationalists, and Secor must have supporters there among other students, which is disheartening and worrisome.

Of course, there is this “chic” that sometimes goes with college years, where people think it is cool and hip to have philosophies that go against the grain. At any large campus, certainly at UCLA, you could stroll around, and see people handing out leaflets for this or that organization or club; there were always people standing up and speaking about this or that in Meyerhoff Park on campus, when I went there. That is part of university life. But I never saw any avowed fascists or white nationalists speak or hand out anything. I find this all both disconcerting and appalling for many reasons,, not the least of which is that many people are now going to associate UCLA with this kind of ideology. It is a national trend which must be stopped. Stupid and juvenile people who think that avowing fascism is fun. My father fought for five years, and so did so many other millions of Americans, to defeat fascism and Nazi ethno-nationalism. Secor, who undoubtedly thinks he is smarter than everyone else, is a fool, and a dangerous one. Meanwhile, his chief inciter and idol sits at Mar-a-Lago plotting his next move.