I’m beginning to think that White House staffers should have their names and perhaps a number on the back of their jackets to make it easier for all of us to keep track of who is in and who is out. Apparently, to get hired into the Trump White House you have to look the part, and say something that the boss likes (preferably on Fox News, making you the new, fair-haired boy or girl). The problem is that you get your exit notice just about as easily and everyone appears to be about one tweet from out the door. Just ask John Bolton. Is this any way to run a government?
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There was a large, nasty accident this Tuesday down at PCH and Chautauqua that held up traffic for hours. Fortunately, there were no fatalities, although one of the cars looked like it had run into Godzilla. A very large truck, an SUV and two cars were involved. Karen and I were at that intersection over the weekend trying to make a left-hand turn onto Chatauqua. If you’re headed south on PCH and want to turn onto Chautauqua to get to Sunset, you take your life in your hands because traffic seems to be coming from every which way and it’s almost impossible to know where you are supposed to stop whether you’re going up Chautauqua or heading into Channel Road. So please, be especially cautious.
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5G installation is starting. Apparently it is the newest, latest and probably unnecessary upgrade to a communication system that appears to work fine for most of us as is, unless you’re planning on launching your own rocket into space. I read somewhere that 5G radiation causes brain cancer, or sterility or something else bad, according to an Oxford Study. The problem today is, how do you know what to believe? There is so much on the internet that is pure garbage, or is simply just paid-for fake news or just bad science. It can be very difficult to know what’s real. To cite just a few examples:
Charge: That vaccination causes autism in children. The overwhelming opinion in the legitimate scientific community is that this charge is totally untrue and wrong. But, try and convince those parents camped out in the halls of the capitol in Sacramento that the government isn’t trying to maim their children. The problem is that those parents have never seen an epidemic. They also want a 100 percent guarantee and there is no such animal.
Charge: That using cell phones causes brain cancer. None of the scientific evidence supports this but lots of people believe it’s true; however, they still use their cell phones and just feel bad about it.
Charge: That climate change is a left wing hoax and is not real. This is where it starts to get hairy. You don’t have to be a graduate of MIT to notice that our summers are hotter, the winters seem colder, the hurricanes are more frequent and more violent and the ice packs appear to be melting at an accelerated rate. Still, in the history of mankind we’ve had several major and minor ice ages, the planet has heated up and cooled off a number of times, the Sahara Desert once bloomed and the arctic was once a temperate zone. The question is, how much of these changes is transitory that we will adapt to over time, and how many really present an immediate danger that we must absolutely do something, or face major negative economic, climatic and biologic consequences? That question is not so easy to answer. I, for one, am deeply skeptical of people who give me projections into the year 2100. They’re now saying that our sea level in Malibu is going to rise 17 inches—or was it 17 feet, I forget—by the year 2100 and therefore we should retreat now, while there is still time.
That’s what the Coastal Commission would to love have us do. They just love retreat. But it is just possible that in 2100, all beachfront homes will be on floating foundations, and we won’t need PCH anymore because we will all be traveling on skimmers or perhaps using helicopter services that will run like buses. Septic systems will seem as primitive for waste treatment as jungle drums are for communicating (perhaps they already are).
I don’t know what the future holds, but I have a secret: neither do they. It doesn’t matter where they got their PhDs. When it comes to predicting what the world will be like 80 years from now, I suspect they’re all full of crap. Just imagine what the world was like 80 years ago, 1940. If you made predictions then about what the world would look like today, how accurate would you have been? Now go back another 80 years to 1860. Railroads were the big new technology. Do you think they could ever have imagined jet travel or rocket ships that land on Mars?
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But, to return to the here and now. Given our now never-ending fire season, can you believe our Board of Supervisors will soon seriously consider a motion allowing people to camp in the environmentally sensitive habitat areas (ESHA) in Malibu and the Santa Monica Mountains? This seems to me to be the height of recklessness.
I’ll keep you posted.