Yesterday evening I was cycling up into the foothills, when a very progressive looking gentlemen slowed down his progressive looking car and started yelling “lightning” at me. I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about because I hadn’t heard or seen any lightning. A few minutes later I got up to the top of the hill and could see lightning about 20 miles to the east.
Last summer, a few days before the floods, I was playing soccer behind an elementary school on the east side of town, when the principal called all the students off the playground because of lightning. There wasn’t a cloud anywhere nearby, but there was some lightning up in the mountains about 30-40 miles away.
The desire of progressives to make the world completely safe, infringes further and further on freedom and common sense every day. Obviously you don’t want children playing in the path of lightning, but two counties away?
Reblogged this on CLINGERS… BLOGGING BAD ~ DICK.G: AMERICAN !.
I am investing in rubber rooms. As long as they are in charge.
Yesterday NextBigFuture posted this article: Sweden’s roads have 1/3 the death rate of US because of smarter planning and prioritizing saving lives over speed or convenience.
Although I didn’t delve into to the details of Sweden’s apparent gains in car safety, I left this comment: Personally I got to say that I value the American way of speed and convenience over a sterile safety-ized boring world full of slow little regulated eurocars. I’m not saying that saving lives shouldn’t be a top goal, but you can’t make it the priority and sacrifice the open road and the freedom that makes life worth living.
Of course a warmist (I’ve seen his comments on NextBigFuture AGW threads) replied to my comment: Cars are not regulated for speed or performance in Sweden, other than a yearly checkup for safety and emissions. The fuel is heavily taxed though, which leads to people favoring efficient and smaller vehicles, and the poor not being able to afford owning one at all. The measures discussed here however are mostly sensible an not really infringing on personal liberty (lower speed limits in residential areas, keeping the sides of freeways clear of obstacles etc).
Yeah right. What does heavy taxes have to do with safety? And cutting speed limits down on all roads to school zone speeds is sensible? And the poor can’t afford to drive. Is that where the supposed safety gains are had? As always, it’s the progressives that end up screwing the poor.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/05/swedens-roads-have-13-death-rate-of-us.html
And another thing, I heard that some in the European Union want to mandate that cars can’t go faster than the speed limit (tied to mandatory GPS readings). Insane. A friend said “I think they are joking about that.” No, they’re serious. Imagine that there was a GPS error and the speed limit was coming up as
5mph5kph, and your car is crawling along as an old man with a walker passes you by. Not fun.Making driving illegal would lead to even fewer road deaths.
Two words: “Bus deaths.”
Germany’s autobahn is safer than the US Interstate system. Why? It’s a system designed around competence. The system in the USA is designed around incompetence. The last many decades of driving safety ‘improvements’ have served only to build better idiots. More laws, more central control, more complication, more reliance on government, lower competence.
The latest big fad is graduated licensing and delayed licensing. Instead of teaching kids how to drive properly, keep using fear and blood on the highway films and use more limits and more control. Want to make kids better drivers? Take them to a track, take them to a skid pad. Show them how to find the limits of a car and what happens when they exceed them where it won’t kill them. f’in’ safety culture. tired of it and its limits.
Speaking of the safety culture, when I am biking I get these people who yell at me to wear a ‘helmet’. Some slow down and bring their giant SUV a few inches from me to preach their helmet gospel. Sorry, I don’t worship at the alter of the foam hat. It’s not going to save me from the real danger, idiots driving SUVs and getting way too close to me.
Yeah, that’s horrendous that someone would do that in an SUV. And I don’t know how many times I’ve driven out to the trail area and forgot my bicycle helmet. At least around conservative Big Bear Lake I don’t think the “authorities” care about that even with the CA helmet laws. But in Pasadena, like I’d driven 15 minutes to get to the Rose Bowl area, and biking around there with a forgotten helmet I’m thinking I got to expedite my ride so I don’t get ticketed. A couple times it was a bit chilly and I had a dark cap that could at quick glance look kind of like a helmet, so I wore that.
Oh, and also this. I was talking to a cousin who lives in Europe about motorcycle helmet laws, and he seemed to sound so reasonable in saying “if it saves just one live, it’s worth it.”
I see, what about the people that the law affects? Why don’t you ask them how they feel about it? Namely motorcyclists, who should be allowed to use their discretion.
Also the argument could be made that in some cases the obstruction of vision that a helmet may cause could in effect reduce safety is some congested urban areas. Further, now with the motorcyclists feeling seriously pushed around by the elitist lawmakers they often, in defiant reaction, wear facsimile style “helmets” to appear to meet the legal requirements but that would actually cause greater neck injury if they got into a crash. Regardless, the effete do-gooder “smarter than everyone else” (TM) progressives feel sanctimoniously impelled to mandate everything and usurp the freedoms that are forebears fought and died for.
Also, my cousin from Europe, at dinner here, somehow was talking about the badness of conservatives or their politics, and took as the most objectionable thing to be those that “don’t believe in global warming.” Now he was stunned by that apparently, and I was silent as I don’t think I had broadcast my own views, though they have may have reached him some way. But there you have it. You have to believe in global warming. Like otherwise you are some kind of climate atheist or something.
When “health care” is socialized then everything you do is the business of everyone else.
Given that government anything is about cost control so the political office holders can have more for themselves, motorcycle helmets can be counterproductive in allowing people to live at great cost instead of simply dying. After all government sees us all by how much wealth it can extract from us or use us to extract wealth from someone else.
climate atheist, I like the sound of that.
Climate Atheist? hehehe. More like Central Taxing Authority Atheist. All this has nothing to do with “Warming” or “Change” and everything to do with “Taxing”. If one had a truth filter AddOn for Firefox, it would automatically change “Global Warming” to “Global Taxing” and “Climate Change” to “Climate Taxing” and “Sea Level Rise” to “Wealth Extraction Rate Rise”.
All one has to do to expose the agenda is say this, “If stoping [insert aformentioned taxing ruse] is a good idea, lets just show everyone that its a good idea and pay them incentives to do the right thing!” …and watch them melt down before your eyes. Even those who think they know the [pseudo]science start convulsing with 4 letter words. When was it that we MUST TAX THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF PEOPLE to get them to follow a good idea? Oh, yeah! It happened when it wasn’t a good idea but would make a certain few big money.
Its all a con perpetrated by the folks who brought you LieStealMurder: Government and their handlers (Big Corporations). Funny how that works. The Columbia Act Of 1871 and them 150 years later you’ve got corporations controlling The Corporation, er, uh, I mean The Government. Wake up folks, before its too late.
Also, speaking of the federal takeover of education involved with Common Core, Master Resource has a good article: Common Core’s Climate Indoctrination. http://www.masterresource.org/2014/04/common-core-climate-indoctrination/
Generally speaking, you get ‘charge separation’ with the formation of precip above the ice (the freezing) line … I’m hearing a couple of my receivers (one BCB and one LW) ‘tick’ owing to corona off a couple higher antennas from small several small showers within 15 miles … and one little area of precip just 2 or 3 miles away, but no lightning discharges yet.
I expect the formation and continuation of T-showers in the mountains to follow a little different formula owing to the land/mountain’s uplifting or ‘forcing’ of same, termed orographic left or effect from what we see here in flat-land country.
Steve –
Well, the driver gave you ample warning to get home. He had no idea if you were headed to or from home. I’ll give the driver a pass, and in fact commend him for his concern.
And never underestimate the trial lawyers, who are bound to sue if people in authority do not err on the side of safety.
We can thank technology for giving us warning times before dangerous conditions arrive – this has reduced deaths and injuries from things like tornadoes.
As a metals geologist I was caught several times in t-storms above timberline with hair standining
straight up and rock hammers buzzing. We got down the mountain post haste.
Once while working out of the Ruby Marshes in NV a fisherman was struck and killed in an aluminum row boat with no storm in the immediate area. His son in the boat with him wasn’t injured.
When I inquired what the victim did for a living, the answer was “he was a lawyer”.
he was a lawyer
Lol. That just goes to show you that there is Poetic Justice in this world.
And before I get complaints by lawyers or the lawyer lovers out there I should be clear that I was just kidding. It’s a joke. I love lawyers just as much as the next guy.
Here in the UK, we have Common Purpose.
It’s basically a Marxist front organisation being used by the 1%s to infiltrate the top echelons of our civil service, police, politicians, judiciary, social services & legal system. They’re Govt funded of course.
There are horribly strong pointers that the many child abductions by our secret family courts, secret ostensibly to protect childrens’ identities, are to provide entertainment to lock these “people” into the NWO agenda.
We have coppers so brainwashed by “Health & safety” rules they refuse to swing their leg over the crossbar of a bicycle, for a photo opportunity, because he hadn’t been on a bike training course.
We’ve had trainee coppers so cowed by these idiot rules, they’ve stood by & watched someone drown in 18″ (450mm) of water, preferring to call for a trained & authorised rescue team.
It’s totally filthy.
http://www.ukcolumn.org
See the Common Purpose & children’s section. put in the names Hollie Greig & Robert Green.
Where there’s no common sense, there’s common purpose.
The objective of the Left is to perfect life.
Hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats toil in Washington figuring out what’s best for you. And y’all don’t appreciate it. You think perfecting life is your choosing what you want to do, not what someone else thinks is best. Well, you can’t be allowed TO BE WRONG.
I grew up in the mountains and live in the mountains today. I have been hit three times by lightning.
ONE bolt was nearly 20 miles away! It wasn’t raining, there were no clouds, the thunder was dim!
Yes, you can be hit from very far away.
Hint: Bates Motel
As a storm spotter in the foothills south of Horsetooth Reservoir in the 70s- 80s, it is rare for a thunderstorm to move westward. Storms in the foothills could almost be guaranteed to increase in intensity as they moved eastward into the plains. The only storm I remember with abnormal movement, stationary, was the one in Estes Park in ’76, resulting in the Big Thompson Flood.