I think it’s about to get above freezing here. If it goes above freezing at noon today, we will have gone 214 straight hours below freezing. That blows the previous record by a long shot.
If it gets below freezing again tonight, we will have gone 10 straight days of sub-freeezing temps. The previous record is five.
I know this sounds like tiddlywinks to you people from Minneapolis, but we’re not built for this kind of weather. I’d rather have 100 days of 100 degrees (which is not uncommon) than three days of thirty degrees.
Yeah, I couldn’t resist the urge to post something about that to Facebook. To absolutely nobody’s surprise, I live in a pretty deep red part of a pretty deep red state. The prevailing attitude around here is “free market capitalism rock, socialism sucks, and government regulations only make things worse”. (For the record, I agree with all that.)
But now, all of our leaders in the state (and locally) are complaining about how there should have been more regulations, and now they’re saying that the government should implement price controls on energy prices (temporarily, of course. But we know that there’s nothing more permanent than a temporary government regulation.). Greg Abbott (our esteemed governor, who made claims that his job was to "wake up, sue the Obama administration, and go home) is now enfuriated at the leaders of our power grid, and is demanding that somebody’s head rolls.
What’s it going to be, deep red, laissez-faire, “from my cold dead hands” Republicans? Do we want government intervention or do we not? I guess we all hate big government–until it behooves us to NOT hate big government.
Once read a book that talked about a “deep south” county in Florida where big companies had dumped their toxic waste into the fragile marshes and shallow rivers, essentially destroying the livelihood of local fishermen and farmers. Yet the people insisted that the massive environmental damage was not due to lack of regulation BUT the consequence of the minimal regulation that was still in place. A really bizarre train of thought. I’d categorize that as some kind of cognitive dissonance but it seems to be such a wide spread attitude that I don’t really know what to think of it.
People who claim to be free market people often don’t know enough economics to understand issues such as externalities. The same sort of surface level understanding leading to weird beliefs occurs on the left as well, just on different topics. For example, attributing every extreme weather event to global warming despite no established link in the research. People are just lazy thinkers
