…travels to the west coast to learn how to fail bigger.
These Democrat officials are demented.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
Bicyclists
How do we get them to obey traffic laws?
I almost hit a guy in my neighborhood this week driving Patricia to the bus stop. I was in a four-way stop intersection, about to pull out, when I catch him coming from the left out of the corner of my eye. He didn’t even slow down for the stop sign, let alone stop. It would have been Darwinian if I’d hit him, but I’d still feel terrible.
Nutrition
Why everything you know about it is wrong.
Not news to readers of this site.
Group Loyalty
Thoughts on identity politics versus reductionist politics.
As someone who is often called a racist because I disagree about a policy issue, I am enjoying the hell out of Nancy having the race card pulled on her.
Portlandization
It could happen to a town near you.
I could understand why Nancy left Los Angeles, but not why she moved to Portland.
The Epstein Case
It’s unlike anything Ken White has seen before (which is saying something).
I don’t know whether to be amused or appalled at the degree to which the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) are trying to simultaneously hide all of the Democrat/Clinton connections (including Wikipedia), while trying to pin it on Trump.
[Update a while later]
Was Epstein running honey traps to blackmail the power elite? It seems like the most-likely explanation.
Climate Scientists
…and their pre-traumatic-stress syndrome.
These people are certainly full of themselves.
Meanwhile, are we or are we not heading for a grand solar minimum?
The “Dirtbag Left”
An interesting interview of some non-woke feminists.
Plant-Based Burgers
No, they’re not healthier for you. They’re probably worse. And the myth of red meat and cancer, and saturated fat and heart disease, persists.
The Big One
Is Los Angeles ready for it? Probably not. There’s still a lot we don’t know about how structures will survive in such an event.
I found this interesting, from the perspective of my book:
Structural engineers point out that no building will ever be 100 percent safe.
We don’t know what’s going to happen to the ARCO Towers, or any of the other steel moment-frame buildings across Southern California. They could be OK when the Big One hits.
Or maybe the ground motion, soil composition and brittle welds will cause some of them to collapse or partially collapse.
How much of a risk, as a society, are we willing to take? And once we determine that a type of building could be dangerous in an earthquake, when do we act?
I posed this question to Bonowitz, the structural engineer who didn’t think a mandatory retrofit program for WSMF buildings is necessary.
“It’s a little bit crass, but suppose I told you that 99.9 percent of anyone in greater Los Angeles is going to survive the big earthquake. Is that acceptable to you?” he asked.
I told him I thought we should probably try to do everything that we can to save every life.
Bonowitz pushed back.
“I think to posit a large earthquake in an urban environment like Los Angeles and say it’s unacceptable if anybody dies in that earthquake, I think that’s unreasonable,” he said. “Especially if you have limited public money to put toward reducing the losses.”
Yes, we have to make a rational assessment. It’s the price of having a major metroplex in an earthquake zone.