Here’s an omnibus post on different Dakota issues.
First, as in most one-party rule states, the primaries, held yesterday, are more important than the general election. Dollar Store Sarah Palin, Governor Kristi Noem, easily defeated her batshit crazy challenger, Steven Haugaard. Steve’s deft political touch, which included referring to a woman he knew as a “wrung out whore” in a speech to the SD House, led to a 76/24 whupping by Kristi, who I would argue is not as popular as that result would indicate. The surprise primary result, at least for me, is that Rep Dusty Johnson, who is relatively moderate by state standards (which is to say that he refrains from MTG and Boebert-type pronunciations), only beat his daffy opponent Taffy Howard by 18 points.
The bright spot was the defeat of a Amendment C, which was sponsored by Koch-funded “South Dakotans Against Higher Taxes”. This amendment would have required any ballot measure that involved appropriation (not just taxation) to pass by a 60% margin. This is essentially every ballot measure, as you might imagine. Those Koch assholes put this measure on the primary ballot to give it a better chance of passing, but it still failed, hard: 67/33.
Amendment C was an effort to stop Medicaid expansion by ballot, and also to thwart marijuana legalization. Voters in SD passed a constitutional amendment to legalize marijuana in 2020, but Noem was able to get it struck down on a technicality. (Again showing why her national political aspirations make her less popular in the state.) There’s going to be another run at legalization in 2022, this time by initiated measure, which is not subject to the legal requirements of a constitutional amendment.
Sen John Thune is up for re-election this year, and, like Kristi, he breezed by his two primary opponents. Yesterday, Thune claimed that South Dakotans need AR-15s to shoot prairie dogs, which is bullshit on stilts. Prairie dogs weigh a couple of pounds at most, so a .22 or even a pellet rifle is sufficient to kill them. Also, people hunt prairie dogs on land that is near cattle (they ruin grazing land and ranchers believe that cows break legs by stepping into their holes). Nobody wants someone firing a rifle with a round that can travel up to a mile near cattle, especially someone stupid enough to hunt prairie dogs with an AR-15.
Finally, a comment on bison. Both Dakotas have them on their badlands, and South Dakota has a big herd in Custer State Park. Bison are also raised by some of the Lakota tribes in the area, as well as by some ranchers. They are the most dangerous animal on the prairie. Every year, usually in Yellowstone, some tourist gets maimed or killed by one. This year, a woman in that park was gored by a bison but apparently did not die, though some national news outlets claimed that she did. She almost certainly approached the bison. A couple of the scariest moments in my life were when I inadvertently got close to bison that were resting in some tall grass. I can’t imagine approaching them on purpose, but I’m not an idiot tourist from Ohio.
Anonymous At Work
With regards to bison:
Are bison like Mungo from Blazing Saddles? AR-15 bullets would only make them mad?
Benw
@Anonymous At Work: bison are pretty scari. My sister was bit by a bison once…
debbie
@Anonymous At Work:
I’ve been on the other side of a very sturdy fence. Still way too close.
As I recall, Mungo was Alex Karas, not a bison.
trollhattan
When bison wander out of Yellowstone, ranchers want them shot on account of they might infect their cattle with brucellosis. The gummint is happy to oblige [bam!] Brucellosis is not endemic to North America nor to bison, it was introduced to the bison from…cattle.
Baud
Pretty decent primary results for such a Republican state.
trollhattan
@debbie: Mongo just pawn in game of life.
He famously rides in on a longhorn.
NotMax
‘@trolhattan
“Mongo? Santa Maria!”
Mel Brooks has no shame.
;)
mistermix
@trollhattan: Yeah, there have been big court cases in SD about Bang’s (brucellosis) in bison raised commercially. There’s a vaccination for Bang’s in cattle, but not for bison.
trollhattan
@NotMax: Yup. His lack of shame is why they’re worth rewatching the eleventieth time–still a few zingers to catch in such a zinger-rich landscape.
Redshift
I saw bison from a safe distance on Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake, and they are easily the scariest animals I have ever been around. (The herd there was shipped in to film a Western in the early 1900s, and then set loose because they didn’t want to pay to ship them back!)
Not too long after we were there, a tourist was injured by a bison there, and claimed it just “charged for no reason.” But the story was illustrated with a vacation photo with the bison in the background from shortly before, and you could tell just by looking at this guy that he’d gotten too close and was the kind of person who would try to get it to look the right way for the picture.
(And even if not, “charging for no reason” is the why sensible people stay the hell away from them.)
Mathguy
“Governor Kristi Noem, easily defeated her batshit crazy challenger, Steven Haugaard.” Disturbing that someone could be crazier than COVID Kristi.
Hilbertsubspace
@Mathguy: Corpses Kristi
Dorothy A. Winsor
Noem thinks she’s heading for the White House someday. Or at least the VP residence. She’s deluded. (I hope)
opiejeanne
@NotMax: I didn’t get that joke until we found a pile of LPs someone had left in the garage of the little cabin we used to own, and one of them was by that artist, Mongo Santa Maria.
Mathguy
@Hilbertsubspace: I bow to a far better nickname for her and a great nym (my research work is on operator algebras over a Hilbert space).
realbtl
I was having a lunch break out on a back road in Custer SP in the early 70s when a grazing herd approached. Into the 1969 beetle as they slowly came up and around maybe 15′ away. Old beetle vs buffalo, not sure who would win.
RaflW
Considering that Dusty Johnson voted to uphold the election results and for the J6 committee, winning by 17% seems to me like a rebuke of Trumpism, but YMMV.
NotMax
‘@opiejeanne
Yup. If it weren’t the basis of a set-up for that jest the character’s name could just as well have been Lloyd. Or Forsythe.
;)
Hilbertsubspace
@Mathguy:
I have a ordered pair of questions for you. Have you ever used Infinity to approximate a large number? If so what was the smallest “large” number you’ve ever done it for?
Evinfuilt
I have friends who live up on Lookout Mtn here in Golden Colorado. They see lots of idiot tourists with the Buffalo herd up there, who think it’s a petting zoo. Why people think an animal bigger than their SUV with lots of warning signs around is safe, is something to approach and get a selfie with, well. Guess I’ll never get a Darwin Award.
opiejeanne
@realbtl: In Yellowstone we stopped to take a photo of a buffalo on the other side of what we thought was a deep pond. There was no traffic when we stopped. I had the long lens on my camera, and was looking through it when I realized that said bison was wading through that pond as if it were a puddle, and was quickly getting closer to us. Too close.
We went back to the car really fast. I got some photos that still make me shudder, one just before I got into the car as it walked toward us between a line of cars that had all stopped because “Buffalo!” and one idiot got out of his car and walked behind and alongside it.
Later, one posed for us at the entrance to a parking lot and in the background there’s a little kid who is way too close to it, and her mom was sitting in her car doing something and not paying any attention.
Wrigley introduced a herd of bison onto Catalina Island, and they are still there.
Central Planning
@Benw: No realli! She was Karving her initials on the bisøn with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush
Ruckus
@realbtl:
The bison.
Baud
I will have to put “viewing buffalo from a safe distance” on my bucket list. I’ve never seen the magnificent beasts in person.
topclimber
My brother tells the story of being on a road in Yellowstone when a herd of bison suddenly started crossing. He rolled up the windows and was cool because he figured my mom and he would be safe in the car, based on his prior experiences.
Suddenly he feels a breeze. Dear Mom has opened her window and is petting bison as they walk by! The critters seem to be fine with it. This goes on for 10 minutes until she runs out of buffalo to pet.
Some might call it dumb luck that nothing bad happened. But my dear departed Mom was famous for being friendly and making contact at a personal level with every person she met. I like to think her charm worked on the bison too.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Me neither. I have seen elephants, who are bigger but much more gentle than the bison.
TriassicSands
Yeah, but the AR-15 will atomize the diabolical critters, thus making clean-up easier. It’s all about convenience.
Spanky
Because everyone read that name as “Howard Taft” and dimly recalled something positive about him.
debbie
Bison seem more massive than elephants, I think because their heads are lower their shoulders and that posture makes it look like they’re about to spring at you (which they can do very speedily).
Spanky
@NotMax: And that one throwaway line was the entire reason for naming him “Mongo”.
Ken
I thought that was the prairie dog?
TriassicSands
Ahem, a distant second to Homo sapiens.
TriassicSands
Only when “armed” with bubonic plague.
JWR
@topclimber:
I had an uncle like that. There’s a “famous” family snapshot of him sitting on a park bench petting a wild racoon. And it wasn’t a one-off. With wild critters, he was… just like that.
Cameron
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Ron DeSantis’ running mate.
JCJ
I made a trip to Yellowstone many moons ago and took quite a few photos. In school I had a friend from Taiwan who aske to see my pictures. When I showed her a picture of a bison she asked what the English word was for it. She said the translation from Chinese was “wild American cow”. I often still refer to them as that. On my honeymoon trip my wife and I went camping in the western US and Canada. We were driving a Honda CRX (a very small two seat car). We were stopped in a bison traffic jam. we were looking up at them. They are huge.
Villago Delenda Est
@NotMax: On the subject of Mel Brooks’ shamelessness, this didn’t make the final cut, was just too over the top for the suits at Warner Brothers:
“Is it twue what they say about your people?”
Lili feels around a bit
“Oh, it’s twue! It’s twue!”
Bart: “Ma’am, you’re sucking on my arm.”
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Me too. Elephants are awesome.
Ken
@TriassicSands: Fear of disease is so 20th-century. Red states have moved past that.
oatler
I know an Arizona woman who scares off feral pigs with a BB gun, God love her. “The well regulated militia moves in mysterious ways!”
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Bison attacks and tourists; Grand Canyon National Park has a lot of videos talking about people falling in the Canyon. The Ranger’s opinion is the tourist think National Parks are like Disneyland with everything made super safe and ignore the posted warnings.
scav
Idiot tourists in Southern California were petting a wounded bear they’d hit with their car. Then when it started groggily to get off the road they tugged on it to get it to wait for the Forest Rangers who were just arriving (who, not being complete flatlanders, didn’t even get out of the cab. Source my father who arrived with the rescue biologist, who also didn’t get out of the damn truck, essentially leaning out and yelling “He seems fine! Let him go!”)
JCJ
@topclimber: I went to Banff one time and just outside of town took a gondola up Sulphur Mountain. A short trail led to the summit. I took a picture of a baby mountain sheep. All of a sudden a bighorn ram started to approach me. I was quite scared, but a park ranger saw this and told me the ram wanted to lick me for salt and to stick my arm out. I did, and the ram started licking my arm. Then a couple of his friends showed up and I had three bighorn sheep licking my arms. Other people offered up their arms, but they kept coming back to me. By the end I was rather slimy with sheep saliva.
Elizabelle
Proud of South Dakotans for seeing through Charles Koch’s 60% scheme.
That jackhole cannot shuffle off to Hell soon enough.
Ken
@JCJ: Save it for Balloon Juice After Dark.
Redshift
@Villago Delenda Est:
That story has always amazed me, because with the last line edited out, the rest of the dialogue seems much dirtier.
But studio execs are not known for their brilliance…
Ken
@scav: Sounds like they were just seconds away from a Darwin Award nomination.
tam1MI
Speaking of primaries Out West, anybody have any thoughts about the results of the California primaries? Analysis I am reading in the MSM says it shows California swinging Right, is that a correct take or are they talking out their ass as usual?
bjacques
@Central Planning: it was no laughing matter
trollhattan
@JCJ: That is a hoot.
Mountain goats were introduced to what’s now Olympic National Park and while they have to occasionally relocate some when they overpopulate their range, they are nonetheless delightful to encounter. The terrain they can navigate seems impossible and their little ones are adorable.
The park elk are very used to humans and rather approachable, but that’s not recommended during rutting season. Elk seem Very Big until you see a moose.
pacem appellant
I need a good-news thread. Even though I live in the liberal bastion of California, the day after an election, even a primary, still depresses me.
For my California peeps, this one’s for you: Juck Howard Jarvis.
Aziz, light!~
I once watched a guy in Yellowstone walk up to a 2,000-pound bison bull and poke it in the hindquarter with a stick. He was trying to get it to turn around for his wife who was standing a safe distance away (as was I) with her camera raised. I thought “OMG I am going to see a man get killed by a bison.” Very luckily for him the bison grunted and walked away instead.
This behavior is seen in every national park with big animals because people don’t understand that wildlife is wild.
Alison Rose
@tam1MI: Swinging right?? In what sense? I mean, if you look at the governor’s race, it sure as shit ain’t swinging right. Some of the most conservative counties have gone for Newsom this time. The only major race I see with a Republican leading is for Controller.
pacem appellant
@tam1MI: Out of their ass as usual. The only “rightward” thing that happened was Boudin losing his recall in San Francisco. If you read into that—25% turnout, police-led smear campaign, no “base” constituency—then congratulations! You can get a job as a D.C. pundit.
Alison Rose
@pacem appellant: Yeah, any state-wide extrapolations based on that one are ridiculous.
trollhattan
@Villago Delenda Est: Link to a Brooks interview where he tells the tale.
pacem appellant
@Alison Rose : And that’s only because the left had an amazing field of qualified candidates. All four Dems in the primary are great in their own right. Since Malia Cohen (D) is the second candidate on the ballot, she and Lanlee Chen (R) will advance to the November general, where Chen will be easily defeated by the fantastic Cohen. (Larger turnout + no split Dem allegiances in CA at statewide election == Democratic victory)
eclare
@Redshift:
I remember that clip of the news reporter, I think outside Yellowstone, when bison started approaching. He said “oh no” and a few other things, and quickly packed his equipment in his car and left. The reporter’s fear was palpable.
TriassicSands
“…elephants, who are bigger but much more gentle than the bison”
Elephants kill about 500 people a year. Not exactly gentle. Also, one should differentiate between Asian and African elephants.
And, of course, mosquitos are the deadliest animals on the planet (excluding human beings).
Alison Rose
@pacem appellant: Agreed. Our primary system is weird, but so are all of them, I guess.
TriassicSands
@JCJ:
It’s best not to approach or interact with wild animals. The ranger was irresponsible to encourage that.
Some years ago, a hiker in Olympic National Park was killed by a mountain goat (not sheep, goat). It apparently slashed his femoral artery and he bled to death.
Love wild animals from a distance. It’s better for them.
Roger Moore
Not to be that guy, but Thune knows a bit about killing prairie dogs. Quick summary: 5.56 is actually a pretty common round used to shoot them, but it’s more frequently used from a bolt action rifle than an AR-15 clone.
Prairie dogs are pretty small and could be killed with a .22 round, but they’re also extremely alert and don’t let people get within easy range. It turns out that the standard choice for killing prairie dogs is a small caliber, high velocity round like 5.56. The high velocity gives it a flat trajectory and good accuracy from far enough away not to spook the target. It’s possible to use an even smaller round, but 5.56 is very common and works OK, so it makes a good choice.
That said, an AR-15 pattern rifle is not the best choice even if you’re using 5.56. It’s not like prairie dog shooters are trying for a high rate of fire, so they don’t need the big magazine and rapid-fire capability of an AR. Accuracy is far more important, so a heavy barrelled, bolt action rifle is a better choice.
Baud
@Roger Moore:
How does one sign up for the Prairie Dog Facts newsletter?
The Moar You Know
@tam1MI: utter and absolute bullshit. Arises to criminal misreporting in my book.
ONE successful recall with a guy who won with only 36% of the vote is not California “massively shifting to the right”
feebog
So maybe a stupid question (s), maybe not. Ranchers are concerned about prairie dogs because they dig holes. Holes their stupid cattle may step in, presumably breaking a leg and rendering them useless for anything other than, well steak and chops. But does this really happen? What about the bison, who are also four legged, not so bright critters? How many of them step in prairie dog holes each year? Are there three legged bison limping all over Yellowstone?
CaseyL
I’ve been to Yellowstone twice. The second time, my Aunt and I had a retired Park Ranger as a guide. One day we were in a parking lot, readying to go hiking. A herd of bison were also in the parking lot, looking calm and picturesque.
Then a gaggle of tourists showed up, and people immediately started getting close to the bison, taking pictures. I think at least a few tried to pet them.
In a perfect example of “You can take the man out of the Rangers but you can’t take the Rangers out of the man,” our guide went thundering over to the tourists, telling them quite sternly (but not too loudly, so as not to spook the bison) to get their dumb asses away from the bison. The few who didn’t move away fast enough, he all but shoved.
My Aunt and I enjoyed the show immensely.
Later on the same trip, we were in the park’s main “town,” walking to a restaurant for dinner. A large herd of elk had also come to town, with the lady elk all taking it easy, laying on their bellies on the sidewalks and the street. Then the herd male came running up the street bugling at all the humans wanting to steal his girlfriends (who, in immemorial fashion, paid him no attention at all). I had to step quick between a couple of parked cars to avoid being run over by an elk.
Roger Moore
@tam1MI:
They’re talking out their asses as usual. Closer to correct would be to say that California has never been as liberal as its reputation, so idiots who are comparing the reputation to reality will always see things that way.
Baud
@The Moar You Know:
This should never happen. Either ranked choice voting or a runoff, but I hate when we have elected officials who don’t in some way command a majority because of a wide field.
Scout211
@tam1MI:
That seems to be the national news’ current take, but the voting results don’t actually show that. All the national news sites are so into the horse race that they seem to be rooting for the Dems to have a huge fight to maintain a super majority. That may happen in a race or two as often happens in local politics. But are the Dems in danger of a Republican takeover? The primary results from yesterday say no.
Benw
@Baud: Fermilab, about 1 hr drive west of Chicago, has public access to the lab site. It has a herd of buffalo you can see through a big fence, and the view of the accelerator complex from the 15th floor of Wilson Hall is also pretty cool. I recommend it if you happen to be in the area.
Roger Moore
@Baud:
I would recommend reading up on varmint rifles instead.
CliosFanBoy
In one of the preview videos for the new Jurassic World movies, there is some large carnivore sleeping by a pool and a bunch of locals with their kids are standing a few feet away taking photos with their phones. I thought “Yeah, they’d really do that.”
Baud
@Roger Moore:
VR-15 > AR-15
Baud
@Benw:
Why does a particle accelerator have a herd of buffalo?
JCJ
@Baud: I think their aspirations include accelerating a bison to near light speed. The LHC will beat them to it.
Jager
@Baud:
I did a 2 day hike in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, herds of wild horses, prairie dog towns, and several herds of Bison. The best thing is almost no people hike there. I was grunting up a ridgeline on my last afternoon, as I came over the top, there was a Bison Bull in a dust wallow rolling around like a puppy, he sniffed me and was on his feet in a split second. I retreated, got downwind of him, and gave the big boy a wide berth. One of the rangers said, a bull got pissed off at a tourist’s pickup and smashed the hell out of it.
Baud
@JCJ:
The buffalo race is the new space race.
Baud
@Jager:
Cool. Never even considered going to ND before.
oatler
@Benw:
I lived in the area at the time and can remember when they were building the “cyclotron”. It was in the early-70s era of monorails and dome-houses that never appeared…
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Benw: That’s one of the places Mr DAW and I take visitors. It’s very cool
Ken
@Baud: The real question is why does a herd of buffalo have a particle accelerator.
Baud
@Ken:
Probably trying to one-up the bears and their space telescope.
scav
@Ken: To take out prairie dogs?
Elizabelle
I wondered where mistermix took the name for this post.
Song by Orville Peck; music video looks like a bunch of outtakes from Tarantino’s Django Unchained or The Hateful Eight. Haunting song. Often eerie video.
Alison Rose
@Ken: I think it’s in the second amendment
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I recall hearing rumors in the 90s that there was some kind of nebulous taxation/accounting reason for the Fermilab bison herd, but as far as I can tell it was a purely symbolic move designed to cement Fermilab’s image as a Midwestern institution and make it seem less scary and abstruse. They have the land.
Baud
@scav:
Good answer. Maybe they use the particles to fill the holes.
Old School
@Baud:
Instead of a canary in a coalmine, they use a buffalo in a particle accelerator.
Roger Moore
@Baud:
Because particle accelerators are huge and have to be located on huge plots of land in rural areas. For practical reasons, they don’t want the land used for something like farming, so they keep it for grazing animals.
Mathguy
@Hilbertsubspace: Not sure of what you mean without some context. My current work is on quantum information theory, which is almost always in a finite dimensional realm.
Baud
@Roger Moore:
What do they do at the LHC?
Roger Moore
@Alison Rose :
No. The 2nd Amendment is about arming bears, not bison.
Alison Rose
@Roger Moore: THAT’S RACIST
Roger Moore
@Baud:
I’m not sure. I would guess they let people graze their livestock there, but that’s just a guess based on the location.
Geminid
South Dakota votes reliably red in federal elections now, but Noehm’s first election for Governor was very close. In 2018 she beat Democrat Billie Sutton by only 11,500 votes out of over 330,000 votes cast. Her Democratic opponent this year is a former state legislator who was unopposed in the primary. Noehm’s tenure as governor was somewhat rocky, and her obvious national ambition will cut both ways, so I don’t think her reelection is a certainty.
Benw
@Baud: basically for fun!
https://ed.fnal.gov/entry_exhibits/bison/bisnwhy.html#:~:text=The%20Fermilab%20bison%20are%20a,the%20natural%20environments%20of%20Illinois.
@Dorothy A. Winsor: nice. I was just there in March and there were baby bison!
JWR
@tam1MI:
Wishful pundit-think BS, as far as I’m concerned.
Baud
Well, Fermilab is now on my bucket list too.
Benw
@Baud: @Roger Moore: the LHC is on the French/Swiss border, so half the livestock are extremely rude, and the other half neutral :)
Srsly, the LHC is around 175 meters underground (contrasted to Fermilab’s (now defunct) Tevatron being just under the surface) so it just goes under everything, without requiring land set aside. The French CERN site does have a nice croquet pitch, however.
Michael Cain
@Anonymous At Work:
You can get AR-15 style rifles chambered for pretty much any caliber round you want. The most common is 5.56x45mm NATO, with light-weight bullets (common because so many rounds are manufactured that it’s cheap). Many states require a heftier round than that even for hunting deer, let alone for bison. Keep in mind the 5.56 round was designed for one purpose: a light-weight solid bullet, full metal jacket, high initial velocity, seriously wound humans at a range of 50-200 yards. As others have noted, you can use it as a cheap varmint round over that same sort of range.
Jager
@Baud:
I camped one night by the Little Missouri River. Around dusk, a herd of 25 wild horses came down off the butte for a drink. The stallion kept watch while the herd drank, he sent them back up the draw, had a long cool drink, and off he went. I was slack-jawed. I grew up in Eastern ND on the Minnesota border, I flew out from Boston to see my family, borrowed my mom’s car, and went to the park on my own. Well, worth the time and drive. I flew back the next day, that night I was having drinks with my girlfriend at the old Ritz Hotel Bar in the Back Bay. Culture shock!
trollhattan
@CaseyL: Stayed in Estes Park one spring and the place was stuffed with elk, waiting for the RMNP high country to open up for their summer feeding and calving grounds. The locals are used to them but as a tourist I had dozens of “gorsh” moments. Much fun.
Hiked into the park despite the snow and encountered the most fearless animals I’ve ever been around. Everything wanted to be your friend or get a handout.
trollhattan
@JWR: Proof: that Newsom recall changed everything!
Turnout here yesterday was very low. Think everybody’s just relieved to not have Trump in office so they don’t have to think about him daily.
trollhattan
@Baud: Wouldn’t that be “Vaporized Prairie Dog Gazette”?
Van Buren
10 years ago I was in Yellowstone sitting in a parked RAV4 when a small herd of bison strolled by, probably about 40 yards away. I felt very vulnerable, they are ginormous.
persistentillusion
@realbtl: Old Beetle would not prevail. Had a friend who grew up on a cattle ranch and he said: “Watching a bull bison flip a Ford F-250 while you are in it is not much fun at all.” He was a famously understated guy.
Scout211
Speaking of the primary yesterday in California, the results in the newly formed 5th congressional district made me a teensy bit hopeful that the odious Tom McClintock could possibly be beaten this time. The Democrat, Mike Barkley, got 39% of the vote vs. 44% for McClintock.*
*I chose to ignore all the other Republicans on the ballot who split the Republican vote because one can dream, right?
Scout211
@Van Buren:
Yes. They are huge and scary up close. We were tent camping in Yellowstone and a whole group of them walked right through the campground. We all took shelter in the restrooms. It was over in minutes but was not fun.
Jay
@feebog:
yeah, no.
Prairie dogs rotate the soil, big time.
But their towns are bad for tractors, alfalfa cutting and hay cutting, for a couple of years, ( they move on), but if a moron driving a tractor doesn’t notice the dog town, they are stuck for a while.
Prairie dog hate is rooted in western colonialist domination culture.
In Septewimic culture, marmots, ( a largish groundhog) are known as “starvation pigs”. They are as “destructive” as prairie dogs, but tend to nest under large boulder piles, ( these days, concrete sidewalks, etc), so bears can’t easily root them out in the spring.
In Interior Salish culture they are seen as “those who maintain the meadows”, which provided so much food (carbs) for the Salishan. The last thing you do when starving in a bad winter, is kill and eat a marmot.
Prairie dogs are the same thing for a wild prairie. They are the natural rototillers.
Elizabelle
Prairie Dog Lives Matter!
Another Scott
People are stupid in state and national parks.
I remember a time out in Yellowstone, pulling into a parking lot, and seeing 3 bison walking past some parked cars. A bunch of kids and their parents started running after them wanting to get some pictures. That spooked the bison and they took off running. Those gigantic things are fast! It’s fortunate that nobody else was trampled or gored in that case.
It’s not just a US thing either.
I remember a time in Banff when a Japanese tourist (apparently familiar with the tame deer in Nara) started running up to big male elk that was grazing in a yard. Enough people started yelling at him to stop that he did so in time, and lived to see another day.
(sigh)
Cheers,
Scott.
NutmegAgain
@trollhattan: I have a moose story that resonates with this thread. Many years ago I was was up in the wild part of Aroostook Co Maine (hey it’s where Susan Collins is from). It used to be all forest, owned by paper companies, where they didn’t grow potatoes. I was in the front of a canoe, with a big telephoto lens on the camera, ogling wildlife, as you do. We saw a moose in the river and kept paddling towards it. All seemed fine … until the damned moose stood up. Holy crap! Big animal.
It wasn’t rutting season or anything, so some quick backward paddling took us away just fine. That was enough moose viewing for me.
JWR
@trollhattan: “Turnout here yesterday was very low. “
In SoCal, I heard one report that turnout was fairly high, especially for midterm primaries. In any case, I’m guessing a lot of people were maybe freaked out by Villanueva’s “Anti-Woke” turn to the right. Also, Caruso’s $40 million attempt to buy the mayor’s office. But again, I’m just guessing.
NotMax
‘@trolhattan
“It’s not a
clipgazette, it’s a magazine.”// :)
Alison Rose
Speaking of how wrong any “California is shifting right” claims are, this headline cracked me up:
California Republicans Send Latest Sacrifice to Gavin Newsom
ian
@tam1MI:
I’m looking to see where I found this, but apparently one super red district has two democrats moving out of the primary, the R vote split 7 ways.
trollhattan
@Scout211: The new district makes it hard to game whether McClintock might be unseated. The old district–Doolittle, McClintock–had Dems come close but could never close the deal.
MisterForkbeard
OT, but NPR is running articles about how concerned they are with the “the distrust in the Supreme Court” and how justices just have good faith disagreements sometimes and also conservative justices (whom we MUST respect as neutral arbiters of the law) are angry that their partisan conservative actions are being questioned.
Sigh.
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/08/1103476028/after-the-leak-the-supreme-court-seethes-with-resentment-and-fear-behind-the-sce
Urban Suburbanite
There’s a drive-through game park/zoo in Washington where you can feed yaks and some other large mammals stale bread – the yaks will just stand in front of the cars until you roll the windows down and give them snacks.
And I think someone on the site posted a video of a driver talking shit to a male elk until the elk took out a tire (and that was a practiced move, too).
surfk9
@Alison Rose : Article in the LA Times
Did fed-up California voters really rebuke the left on election day? Not Exactly
Alison Rose
@surfk9: I mean, the “fed-up voters” are just a bunch of whiny ass babies in Newsom’s Instagram comments screeching about gas prices like they were screeching about kids wearing masks before. They’re a very loud and very stupid minority.
The Moar You Know
Having debunked the MSM narrative on this election in CA in my above post, I will say this: California’s government needs to take massive, immediate and effective action about the homeless problem in this state or CA Dems (and the national party by extension) are going to find themselves in a world of hurt. The current state of affairs here cannot continue.
James E Powell
@tam1MI:
The “California is swinging to the right” people are the same as the “Newsom in danger of recall” people. They had Larry Elder measuring the drapes.
In opposite irrational speculation, my insurrection-supporting, winger congresscreature only has about 44% of the vote in an R+4 district (new 41st).
Elizabelle
@The Moar You Know: Agreed. But how? Homelessness in expensive cities with temperate climates is a problem from hell.
JWR
@MisterForkbeard: Did you see the breaking news that some guy armed with a handgun and a knife was arrested outside Barf Kavanaugh’s house?
Betty
@mistermix: Can/Do they test the bison for brucellosis before they kill them?
Calouste
We were driving into Yellowstone one day when there was a bison walking in the opposite lane. Just taking a leisurely stroll with a long tailback of cars behind him and a park ranger vehicle in front. So it was about 10 feet away when it walked past our car.
The Moar You Know
@Elizabelle: I’m the wrong guy to ask. I suspect voters are the wrong people to ask; very few people are trained to deal with the homeless even on a one to one level, and I’m guessing as a state we probably have a quarter million of them.
But action will need to be taken, all up and down the West Coast (it’s a huge problem in coastal Oregon and Washington state as well) or our party is going to eat the consequences.
I think the proposal that Newsom put before the legislature is a good starting point: involuntary commitment to drugs/alcohol/mental hospitals. I know the history of this and I know it can go bad, but most of these folks are sick one way or another and just allowing them to die on the streets is no more humane than locking them up.
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
There’s this classic video of an elk that somehow got into one of the touristy shops in Estes Park. It’s amazing how calm it is and how little damage it did with its antlers. ISRT there was a Mythbusters episode on a bull in a china shop, and the bull was very careful not to damage anything.
The Moar You Know
@JWR: GOP paid crisis actor.
If the Republicans call pull that shit so can I. I’ll say it again: GOP paid crisis actor.
germy shoemangler
@Elizabelle:
JustRuss
One of my earliest memories is being in a crowd of people chasing a bison on Catalina. Must have been 3 or 4 years old–me that is, not sure about the bison. Fortunately no injuries resulted.
germy shoemangler
Roger Moore
@The Moar You Know:
No matter what you think the causes of homelessness are, dealing with it means finding a place for homeless people to live, which means dealing with NIMBYs. Unfortunately, very few CA Dems have the courage to do that.
JWR
@The Moar You Know: GOP paid crisis actor.
Could be! According to NPR:
“The Supreme Court statement did not note the reason the man made threats against the justice, but the Post report cited two sources saying he was angry about the potential overturning of Roe v. Wade.”
Kay
@MisterForkbeard:
I feel like this is a Right wing problem. Not the public’s fault that they can’t get along with anyone.
Baud
@JWR:
The dude doesn’t want to pay child support. Typical wingnut.
Matt McIrvin
@James E Powell: Trump’s fans were convinced he was going to win California in 2020. (And I’m sure many believe he did.)
Eolirin
@The Moar You Know: You know what the most effective anti homelessness policy has been when it’s been tried? Giving people money with no strings.
That’s it.
Turns out if people can afford to have places to live and there are no conditions on that, surprise surprise, a lot of them turn their lives around pretty quickly. Provide enough stability so that people don’t need to be in the streets and most of them won’t be.
That plus more affordable housing, which will require rezoning for density and probably subsidized construction (which is going to be a fight) will massively drop homelessness numbers.
Homelessness is not that much more complicated a problem than gun violence, it’s just that the solutions are unthinkable politically so we end up circling bullshit constantly.
And involuntary commitment *is* bullshit, especially when a *lot* of your homelessness population is not in fact mentally ill. Or to the extent that they are it’s being generated by the homelessness and the causes of it, not the other way around. It’s no better a solution than mass incarceration, and does nothing to fix the housing problem that’s precipitating a huge amount of the homelessness problem.
Alison Rose
@The Moar You Know: Project Homekey has done some great work, but it’s a massive undertaking involving dozens of factors. The administration is trying, but to a lot of voters, if he doesn’t just snap his fingers and make all the unhoused people disappear, then he sucks and is a failure. And of course, most of them are also NIMBY types who don’t want to spend a single cent on anything that would help.
Roger Moore
@Eolirin:
This. The main cause of homelessness in California is lack of affordable housing, and the main reason there isn’t enough affordable housing is single family zoning. Unfortunately, eliminating single family zoning won’t be enough to fix the problem quickly. If we had eliminated it back in the 1980s, maybe new home construction could have kept up with rising population, but just changing the zoning and waiting for the market to catch up won’t fix the problem within a reasonable time. We desperately need to start building housing now, now, now, and to build enough we either need subsidies or have the government build it directly.
Omnes Omnibus
@The Moar You Know: You are making an assumption that all homeless people are incompetent to handle their own affairs. Homeless people are homeless, that’s it. Perhaps creating places for them to live or providing money for that purpose would be a better solution. Help of other kinds for those who need it should also be available. Mass incarceration of the homeless is too 1930s Germany for my taste.
Roger Moore
@Alison Rose :
I think the problem is less with the money than it is with the construction. People here in LA were willing to vote for new taxes to pay to help deal with homelessness, but the same people who were willing to spend their money aren’t willing to put homeless shelters or new housing in their own neighborhoods.
opiejeanne
@JustRuss: OH geez! Chasing a buffalo?
My husband and some of the other dads in our Boy Scout troop went to summer camp with their kids on Catalina, and the bison stayed away from the camp area, but when the dads decided they needed to hike to a bar one afternoon because they all desperately* needed a beer, they had to pass a fairly large herd. They made sure to walk very quietly and carefully, both going and coming back.
The wild pigs on the island were a little bit of a problem in camp, but it was mainly that the boys kept trying to leave food out for them.
*They felt they had earned that beer after nearly a week of HS boys and their nonsense, the extreme nonsense of another troop from our neighborhood where the adult left a bunch of boys with their capsized canoe and they had to rescue them, and an incident in which mr opiejeanne nearly drowned because he didn’t realize he was in trouble until it was almost too late. A neighbor who was swimming and diving with him recognized the symptoms and helped get him onto a boat, where the owners let him rest and warmed him up.
louc
re: wild animals in the western national parks. My husband and I visited Glacier Park in Montana and went for a hike while on high alert for grizzlies. A family of deer (Papa, Mama and baby) appeared in the creek below. They stood there for a good long time, drinking the water. I got impatient and decided to keep on walking the path above the creek. Papa deer stepped up to the trail and lowered his antlers. I backpedaled real fast.
Re: oblivious tourists. I notice that while living in a tourist mecca. They ignore traffic lights and all safety considerations. It’s a mindset of “I’m on vacation so I must be in a safe bubble that will protect me from all harm!”
opiejeanne
@Matt McIrvin: I remember seeing the delusional posts by RWNJs, some of them celebrities, stating that Trump would win California. I thought at the time that it was an attempt to drive down voting in general, but also to discourage Democrats from voting. We see this going on right now, and a lot of it is coming from the MSM horse race narrative. Concern trolls everywhere.
JoyceH
@JWR:
And McConnell takes to the Senate floor demanding that action be taken about this threat ‘before sunset’! Does this FREAK even realize how privileged and callous he sounds demanding action because a guy with a handgun said threatening things in the vicinity of a SC justice, when he intends to do precisely nothing about kids being butchered in their classrooms?
Of course, Twitter is full of suggestions, including blocking up all but one door to Kav’s house and give everyone weapons, along with some highly valuable thots n prars.
WhatsMyNym
I was going to climb onto a rock on the beach, until it looked at me. It was a male elephant seal and I was about 10 feet away. It was the only seal on the beach so I didn’t expect to see one.
hueyplong
@JoyceH: I like it. Tell McConnell he can have gun control by sunset if he’ll allow it.
Roger Moore
@Omnes Omnibus:
This. Part of the thing with homelessness is that most people base their beliefs about it on the people they see who are in obvious distress. Yes, there is some fraction of the homeless population who fit the stereotype of dirty people pushing shopping carts and talking to people who aren’t there. But there are far more people who just can’t afford a place to live and are couch surfing or living out of their cars and doing everything they can to avoid the social stigma of being homeless. They’re usually doing a good enough job of it that you wouldn’t know they’re homeless unless they tell you, so people just completely miss that part of the homeless population.
This gets at the real reason involuntary commitment is such a terrible idea. Maybe it would help some of the hardcore homeless who are on the streets because they have severe mental illness, but that isn’t where most of the problem is. We really need to do something for the people who are homeless because they can’t afford housing.
It also treats homelessness as mostly an aesthetic problem: the dirty, stinky homeless people are making life unpleasant for the rest of us. It’s a disgusting attitude that we should do everything we can to avoid.
Ohio Mom
@Eolirin: You got here before I did, there’s research and data that giving homeless people a place to live — a home! — can be a very effective first step in helping them get their lives together.
I think it’s a reflection of that deep Puritanical streak in our country that too many see providing housing as a reward. “Sober up and you’ll be worthy of a place to live,” is exactly backward. When you think of the sleep deprivation and poor nutrition that comes with homelessness, it’s amazing most of them function as well as they do.
On another note, all this talk about wildlife makes me realize I haven’t seen Kent (former Fisheries staff, current science teacher) in the comments for a while. Hope he’s okay, wherever he is.
Martin
Keep an eye on this story about the guy who was arrested as a threat to Kavanaugh.
I suspect there’s going to be a lot more of this. A democracy where the courts and legislature are advancing policies where are opposed by the majority of voters is not a stable state. At some point you look at the risk of being a victim of gun violence and recognize that you cannot take on the entirety of gun owners, but you can take on the judges and lawmakers that enable those people, especially if you internalize that the democratic institutions have failed to hold those government officials accountable to the will of the people. At some point some people will see this as an anti-fascist act.
This is why I’m worried we’ll emerge from this state without violence. The right is almost demanding that the left take up arms. Some people will oblige them. The risk of not holding people accountable is that the state loses control.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
This seems like part of the right’s long-term project to prevent democratic government from being an effective force for good.
Just like they’re actively working to make public schools unsafe.
They WANT these institutions to fail.
worn
@Roger Moore: Absolutely. I can tell you without hesitation that in my 25+ years of living in Portland there has always been a bit of a homeless problem, but it has absolutely exploded in the last few years. In my observation this has tracked with this city’s transition from the only reasonably affordable major metro area on the West Coast to another enclave of the wealthy. All of my blue collar friends – each and every single one of them – has been priced out of this city and compelled to move away. At least they were able to find a place to go that wasn’t the street. Many other individuals, people who do not suffer from mental illness or substance abuse problems, have not been so lucky. This is a long way of saying that people who attribute all homelessness to the two reasons above have a pretty fucking heavy lift to convince me that these problems suddenly began manifesting themselves here at another order of magnitude simply out of the blue. Occam’s razor would suggest otherwise.
And to those who say that part of the concern is aesthetic, I would broadly agree if “unsanitary ” is also included. The explosion of encampments (many large & sprawling) have all the attendant problems of trash & bathroom facilities that one can imagine. I have taken to calling our burg “Garbage City USA” mostly in ironic bemusement about how clean Portland used to be.
As one of the other commenters said, it really is a problem from hell. Being in the building industry I think the solution lies (or at least partly does) in modifying the types of housing that are allowed. You can go down to the first couple of blocks by the waterfront and see all the old ‘sailor’s hotels’ that have now been turned into hipster lofts, bars, etc. But it’s interesting to have seen what was contained within the shell of this one prior to reconfiguration: many small, one room apartments with a small lav sink & wardrobe cabinet. Bath/toilet were locatede facilities down the corridor (much like college dormitories). For the record the number of dwelling units were halved in the redevelopment of this property.
ETA: Watergirl help! I guess the revival of the site tossed my nym back into the ‘needs approval’ bucket…
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
More complicated than that. Rising living costs and declining employment push individuals and families into the street. And also out of California. The exodus is not high income conservatives fleeing liberal California, but people leaving because they can no longer afford to live here. You also see this in the decline in school enrollment and the closing of schools. Raising a family here is expensive.
Income inequality is stark. There is a large gulf between lower income groups and the upper middle class. It is much more difficult to rise to the higher income levels as more mid range jobs are eliminated. There is a fight to raise the minimum wage, but that still would not be a liveable wage for many people.
I see a lot of multi family housing starts in the San Gabriel Valley. None of it is lower income or affordable housing. And in some cities, it is not just single family zoning, but bullshit historic preservation rules and deliberate opposition to affordable housing that is part of the problem.
There is also gentrification. The real estate market is hot for people with money. Those who are fortunate enough to have jobs in high growth high income job sectors push up the cost of housing. No one is going to ignore these people in order to build more affordable housing.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
I agree the problem is a little more complex than I said, but the core is still lack of affordable housing. Expensive housing is the core component of higher cost of living, and many of the other aspects of high cost of living boil down to needing to pay other people more money so they can afford housing. If housing prices were as cheap in California as they are in, say, Texas, most of our cost of living problems would disappear.
And yes, there are other tricks NIMBYs use to prevent affordable housing, but it just isn’t going to be possible to build affordable single family homes in California’s big cities because land prices are so high. If you’re in favor of single family zoning in California, you’re against affordable housing, no matter how much you argue otherwise.
cain
@Elizabelle:
Hell wouldn’t want them either – they’d just take over the joint. Nobody wants the kind of evil flatulence that comes out of their pie holes.
billcinsd
My favorite part of the SD Amendment C vote was the legislator that got the Amendment on the ballot claiming it was out-of-state money that sunk the amendment, but the largest single contributor to either side was the big money ($836,000) from Americans for Prosperity, which was ~92% of what the yes side received. The no side received money from the NEA and a couple of SD hospital chains, Averra and Sanford which were about 33% of the no side money. So less than 10% of the yes money came from in state and at least 33% of the no side money came from in state, but it was the no side that represented out of state interests.
https://news.ballotpedia.org/2022/06/08/amendment-c-defeated-in-south-dakota/
DKinSD
I was an undergrad at Oklahoma Univ. back in the late 70’s and as a member of the rock climbing club we would pretty regularly go down to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife refuge in SW Oklahoma for climbing. The refuge has a herd of Bison along with other animals and there was one morning pretty early when a small herd just casually walked through our campsite – fortunately before anyone was really up and around so we just waited in our tents until they had passed through.
Barbara
@Roger Moore: It’s very hard for some people to accept this, especially in Northern California. It’s as if people in SF have this vision cemented in their brain of SF in the 1950s of what it should be like, even though its population has probably tripled or more.
Urban Suburbanite
The anti-homeless politics in Seattle have really escalated (and in a couple other cities). The undistinguished council member (who defended Ed Murray, the former mayor who resigned when multiple allegations of him sexually abusing children came out) turned mayor has gone all in on sweeps, having police and city workers (Parks Department, specifically) do one just about every day. There was a lot of adoration among the local hate groups (Safe Seattle is one of the worst), but that’s starting to wane. It turns out having cops sit around on corners and kick homeless people down a couple blocks means police aren’t doing much else, and sexual assault cases have been piling up for years (this is nothing new for SPD, but the local media sycophants finally got around to paying attention). There was also an incident where a guy made his way into a school while the cop responding sat on his ass in his car, or cops ignoring calls to take a long breakfast. And it turns out kicking homeless people around doesn’t magically make them disappear, so the camps aren’t going away.
Omicron
“Bullshit on stilts.” Stealin’ that one!
Roger Moore
@Barbara:
I think there are really two separate but overlapping things going on. One is generic NIMBYism. People bought their houses in the neighborhood they did because they wanted to live there and liked it as it was. They are very resistant to any change unless it’s obviously a change for the better (e.g. replacing a vacant lot with a pocket park). Even then, they may take some convincing.
Related to that is the very specific attachment to the post-war suburban development style. Some people really act as if the only acceptable way to live is in cookie-cutter houses on cookie-cutter lots in cookie-cutter residential-only neighborhoods. These are the people who turn into petty tyrants enforcing rigid conformity when they take over their local HOA. They can’t stand the thought of people building granny flats, small apartments, or even houses that don’t precisely match the architectural style of the neighborhood.
germy shoemangler
@Roger Moore:
I wonder if an unconscious part of this is a hatred of (other people’s) cars. More development means more traffic, which IMO is the real thing that destroys a neighborhood’s character. They may love their own cars, and see them as essential, but they don’t want to live around more cars and trucks and noise. They may or may not realize this, and instead believe it’s the buildings they object to
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Roger Moore: Dang – now I’ve got that damn “little boxes” song stuck in my head.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
California housing prices are never going to be as cheap as in Texas. There are still sizeable swatches of vacant land in the Dallas Ft Worth metropolitan area. There is absolutely nothing remotely like this in Los Angeles County.
And gentrification is affecting Texas as well. Some distant relatives there recently sold a modest property for 4 times the original cost and the property will be torn down and rebuilt as commercial property. Lots of mixed zoning in Texas. For now, people displaced can find affordable housing elsewhere.
Housing in Southern California and in some parts of Northern California is not affordable because the land values are high and people with money can outbid people with lower incomes.
Wages have been stagnant across the nation, and especially in Southern California. The problem feeds on itself. People who lose their homes have a harder time hanging onto their jobs. Even if you magically had more affordable housing you would have a hard time getting people into these homes without also giving them substantial income subsidies. We are a long way from that kind of society.
Again, I have seen property kept vacant in the San Gabriel Valley for years and then used to develop upscale mixed use housing. But I also see empty lots and closed commercial property near Light Rail Metro stations. These parcels have never been single family and would be ideal for affordable housing. There is zero interest and lots of opposition.
Brachiator
@germy shoemangler:
People in South Pasadena killed a needed extension of the 710 Freeway. This just guaranteed that traffic would increase in adjacent cities.
These people then fought unsuccessfully to kill the light rail Gold Line. They couldn’t kill it, but they were able to get walls built to supposedly provide noise abatement. Then they fought to have trains reduce speed, hoping that this would make the trains less attractive to riders.
Despite all this, light rail has been a success.
But some people are fanatical about preserving what they perceive to be the character of their neighborhood even if it brings economic stagnation. They figure that they will be okay so to hell with everyone else.
ETA. True story. A train breakdown resulted in the use of replacement buses that had to travel along South Pasadena streets. People came out of their houses just to hate stare at the busses. It was the craziest thing I ever saw.
Roger Moore
@germy shoemangler:
I think most people recognize that it’s bad to have lots of cars driving by your house. The difference is the method people take to deal with it.
The urbanist approach is to try to try to reduce car traffic in general by making it easier to get where you’re going without needing a car. That means walkability, good cycling infrastructure, and lots of public transit, even when those things make driving more difficult.
The suburbanist approach is to keep cars as the main mode of travel but to make it so people won’t want to drive near anyone’s house. That means having residential-only neighborhoods that are hostile toward through traffic, so only people who live there (or their visitors) will ever drive on the streets.
ColoradoGuy
This ain’t gonna be popular, but look at the West Coast states’ homelessness problem from a supply and demand perspective:
* Millions have moved to these three states because of the best year-round weather anywhere in the world, natural beauty, cultural attractions, and lots of employment. These draws will continue to attract people for the foreseeable future.
* Housing stock is relatively static due to lack of land near population centers. An array of NIMBY laws prevent conversion to multi-story apartments, and prevailing market prices make low-cost housing uneconomic to build, except as tiny demonstration projects.
* Homeless people are attracted by the possibility of year-round outdoor living, and availability of public services from city and state. Once started, encampments grow. These encampments become public nuisances, aggravating voters, who outnumber the homeless by 100:1.
Decreasing housing prices seems like a Utopian solution considering the demand. If housing prices magically fell by half, many more people would be attracted to the West Coast, until equilibrium would be reached at another price point. This is the same quandary as increasing freeway capacity; more freeways attract more cars, and lower housing prices attract more people.
If all NIMBY laws were removed to tomorrow, it would take decades for single family neighborhoods to be replaced by rows of apartment buildings. With no building restrictions, high-demand areas in the cities would start to look like Hong Kong, building as high as the market would allow. Millions more would live on the West Coast, and prices in the long run might not be that much cheaper in an unrestricted building environment.
None of this does anything for the homeless population. Direct state or Federal subsidies, if applied to the entire homeless population (not just a small test group of a few hundred), will in the short run solve much of the problem, but over the longer run will attract homeless from the rest of the country. What then? Means testing, which has its own costs? Residency restrictions, for a transient population with no fixed address?
I agree NIMBY laws are pushing up housing prices, but striking them down does very little in the short run, and will do nothing for the homeless crisis. Homeless people are not affected if a $2 million house can be replaced with a $300,000 apartment. Public housing only makes dent on the problem if it is done on a massive scale, hundreds of thousands to millions of units. Where do they go? Are they Hong Kong style high-rises? If they are low-density low-rise, like the US public wants, where?
germy shoemangler
@ColoradoGuy:
Will boarding houses ever make a comeback?
germy shoemangler
@Roger Moore:
I’m an urbanist
Calouste
@ColoradoGuy:
You’ve never been to Seattle, have you?
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
Tell me about it. My current bugaboo is the Space Bank storage site near Sierra Madre Villa Station in Pasadena. It’s currently a run-down business that’s a blight on the area. It would be nearly ideal for redevelopment into dense housing. It’s close to public transit, and the street it’s on is fully of shopping, so it wouldn’t necessarily need a lot of cars. I don’t think it’s going to be super-high priced housing because it’s right by the freeway, but it would be a good place for moderately-priced apartments or condos. Unsurprisingly, there is someone eager to develop there.
Also unsurprisingly, the neighbors want nothing of it. The main excuse used to fight it is that the site used to be a naval weapons testing area, so there’s groundwater pollution on the site. This literally makes negative sense. That groundwater pollution is there today, so it’s potentially bad for the neighbors who are exposed to it, but the development plans include mitigation that satisfies the state environmental quality agency. I think the neighbors’ real objection is that they don’t want a big residential development nearby, but that’s not a viable argument so they’re sticking with the environmental nonsense.
This kind of thing happens for any proposed development. Even when the developer wins, it adds a bunch of time and expense to the process, and that accomplishes most of what the NIMBYs want. If they make any kind of development more expensive, it will make it less likely to happen. Any development that does happen will have to be expensive and cater to people with the money to pay for the added litigation and time.
Elizabelle
@ColoradoGuy: Agree with all your points.
Again, a problem from hell.
surfk9
@Roger Moore:
San Diego has the same problem. Lots of proposals to build some dense housing by the trolley tracks. All of them seem to get shot down.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Walkability is a worthy goal. Cycling is great for young single people, not so hot for anyone else.
The pandemic really hurt public transit, although ironically the ability of people to work from home helped disguise the problem.
Transit agencies are now reeling as they try to recover from the pandemic. Metro, serving Los Angeles County, has been cutting back service, which makes public transit unreliable and kills its future.
Sadly, the rise of homelessness is starting to tip over into significantly increased violence on trains and bus lines. Not too long ago I was on a bus where the driver warned that a man who got on might expose himself to passengers. Assaults in stations have increased.
On top of this, we have political insanity. There is the sheriff who is threatening to remove enforcement if other politicians don’t kiss his ring and also ignore charges ranging from corruption to abusive behavior. And then there are the activists who seem to believe that if you flood busses and transit stations with angelic social workers, then crime and assaults will magically disappear.
The transit agency even suppressed a report about the increase in crime, and because local newspapers are struggling to survive there has been little news about this. A local radio station which reported the story was heavily biased in favor of law enforcement.
A lot of people who don’t have to use public transit stay away, even though a safe and reliable system would easily work for them.
MisterForkbeard
@JWR: And did, and I honestly don’t care.
The Republican method that this justice champions says that he’s safe if he and all his kids are constantly armed with semi-automatic rifles, so I guess he should just arm up and deal with the consequences of his own actions.
But hey, if Republicans would actually like to take this seriously and lower the amount of guns in the wild and provide regulation around them, this would be a great moment.
MisterForkbeard
@Roger Moore: In my town (bay area, California) there’s a couple of mixed-use apartments near downtown that have been pending basically since forever and finally got started. You know, a couple of shops on the bottom floor, apartments on the top 3 floors.
There’s a lot of simultaneous whining about housing prices AND about the water shortage, while ignoring the apartments are much more water efficient than the condo complexes with huge lawns. Fuck ’em. It’s all NIMBYism.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
Actually I use the Metro system reasonably regular. Yes Covid has screwed it up but then what didn’t Covid screw up? It is, like a lot of things, getting back to normal. Or at least new normal.
Is it fantastic? No. But then dealing with all of the public in close quarters rarely is. Most people are reasonable, some not so much. Or even close. But it normally takes me the same amount of time to get 45 miles across LA county on the Metro as in my own car, because of traffic. And it costs a hell of a lot less these days. The big problem is that it is not all that convenient for a lot of people. It happens to be for me
ColoradoGuy
@Calouste:
I lived on the Kitsap Peninsula for five years, so yeah, I know Seattle weather. Look at it from the perspective of a homeless person; in most of the country the weather will do its best to kill you, for part of the year, if you have no shelter. Compare Seattle weather to Chicago, Denver, Phoenix, Boston, or New York. You need both A/C and good heat to survive the summers and winters. The West Coast is the only part of the USA that has gentle European weather.
Unless states can close their borders, people will keep pouring in to the West Coast, first the cities, then the smaller towns. I used to live in Portland, Oregon, which for decades was the only reasonably priced city on the entire West Coast. Word got out; cheap no more. Now the smaller towns are getting pricy, too.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
I had a single family home at the west end of the 210 freeway and there was a valley on the north side of the hill we lived on that was being developed for light industry and many of the homeowners in the subdivision were almost violently against it. None of it could be seen from any house and the noise was blocked by the same hill that took the sight lines away. After it was built out no one could ever tell it was there. But the not in my neighborhood BS was deafening. The concept that everyone needs a green lawn and space is at best BS and at worst just plain wrong.
It goes along with the concept that we need guns and we need 20 acres and 20,000 sq ft of home and 2 vehicles that get 15 mpg at best. (I wonder if the gas companies are just trying to make a profit before the electric car revolution takes over completely as people realize how much they actually spend trying to show how much money they don’t actually have.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
Was that when the overhead power cable failed and shut down the entire Gold line?
Roger Moore
@MisterForkbeard:
Yeah, the water thing is just an excuse. There’s a proposed development near me that’s facing huge opposition. It’s on the grounds of a
monasteryPassionist retreat center that is getting a lot less use than it used to. The religious order that owns it would like to sell some of their land that’s currently a meadow to developers. It really ought to be a bunch of apartments, but the local NIMBYs have fought against that with a somewhat reasonable complaint that it’s on an ordinary residential street that couldn’t handle the traffic. So the Passionist fathers have gone back to the drawing board and proposed about 40 single family homes.Even that is too much for the NIMBYs, who are now complaining about where the water will come from. That sounds like a reasonable complaint, except the land is currently a meadow that is only a beautiful meadow because it’s irrigated. Converting it into houses could actually save water if their yards were drought-tolerant local plants instead of grass. But “where will the water come from” sounds like a reasonable complaint, so it’s what they’re going with.