I've been trying to warn you by posting about Vance and his admiration of and probably connection to Curtis Yarvin, and the people that influence those guys, like Julius Evola. I tried to tell you that this is not just the usual conservative bigotry.

I was apparently unclear. You need to be thinking of names like Pol Pot and Idi Amin and Joseph Kony, not Newt Gingrich or Ronald Reagan. You need to be thinking of public executions and Handmaid's Tale shit as an aperitif before the entrée. You need to be thinking Randall Flagg here.

I'm fucking sick of the whining. You've got an actual goddamn fascist on one side and probably a black chick on the other and you think enough of your fellow Americans are evil enough to let the fascist win? Maybe America is just not worth saving then. Really and truly. America is the only civilized nation where the gender and race of a candidate is an issue. Why? Because America is a racist, misogynist country, where more than half the inhabitants believe fucking angels are real. It's a backwards country, you dig?

I grew up in Texas around people like the ones Vance writes about in Hillbilly Elegy, and they really are the most self-pitying, self-defeating jackasses the world has ever seen. They got nothing to em but resentment and rage, it's all they've had since Reconstruction. Everything is someone else's fault: minorities, "elites", foreigners, anybody but themselves. They are incapable of adapting to a changing world and hate anyone who is capable. Most entitled motherfuckers I've ever met anywhere in the world. They think America owes them.

Two books I recommend everyone owns: The New Complete Book Of Self-Sufficiency by John Seymour and the Reader's Digest Complete DIY Manual. Both are widely available in English probably anywhere books are sold, new and used. Get them. Read them. Keep them safe. 😂❤️ I also recommend getting your hands on David Gingery's series on how to build a working machine shop from scratch. I've just ordered a used copy of The Complete Manual Of Woodworking, I'll let you know what I think of it, but I've heard excellent things.

Someone asked me what my solution to all the climate stuff is. I have no solution, I don't think there is *a* solution, but I have ideas. Just ideas. Here's one of them.

Imagine with me a village or neighborhood, maybe even your own. Imagine some upgrades. 🧵 Every roof of every building - single family house, apartment building/estate, commercial building - is covered with solar panels that store energy in a battery array in the building itself, and then can pass it to the grid if necessary as long as the batteries are full.

There is no scenario where unmitigated climate collapse does not cause massive worldwide civilizational disruption, particularly as our civilization's economics and supply chain is globalized rather than localized. And there is no mitigation without disruption of fossil fuels. There's no scenario where we keep burning fossil fuels at the rate we are and our civilization survives it. None. Carbon credits are a scam, artificial carbon sequestration is a non sequitur. There's no free lunch in physics or in nature, only in economics, which is fantasy.

The problem with AI is that computer scientists have spent decades to perfectly artificially create a gullible, hapless cretin who believes everything it's told without critical reasoning faculties, and the world was really not short on those to begin with. They've also managed to prove that literally any idiot can code by making artificial idiots that do, thus undermining their own self-appointed position as the technological priesthood of our age. It's an incredible self-own if you think about it.

Got a source who works for the airlines who's telling me that flights into the southwest are getting canceled due to heat. A lot of planes aren't certified for above 119°F/48.3°C so they get canceled or diverted.

Source says this: I've talked about this before, of course, but it's not just people who can't handle extreme heat. It softens roads, warps railroad tracks, screws up planes' ability to get lift, causes engines to overheat and tires to blow, and makes power lines sag and transformers blow.

Something that worries me: whenever I have to go anywhere with lots of people, I am absolutely astonished at how completely oblivious most people are to their surroundings.

I'm not talking about screens here; most people simply have the situational awareness of a Hereford cow. Nobody believes this of themselves, of course. And yet they will stand blocking a narrow sidewalk or grocery store aisle or stop in the middle of a crosswalk like complete muppets, with no apparent sense that they exist in a universe with other people, cars, anything.

You see this headline and you probably think they mean other people, not you.

But you're wrong. It's not just some vaguely imagined poor brown people in some desert or jungle who are gonna die from climate collapse. It's gonna be people like you and me.

Why? Capitalism. How does your food get to your grocery store? Do you know? On boats, mostly and most likely. It comes from California and Guatemala and Zimbabwe and lots of warm places around the world.

But what if it didn't?

What would you do?

They're not better. These are better. The covered porch keeps the sun off the front and the whole house is designed to let a breeze travel through. You open the front door and the back and have fans ushering air through, shady side to sunny side.

https://twitter.com/Annawatton/status/1806052106710778341

It's why in the American South and places with similar climate, they have screen doors and porches, to keep the sun and mosquitos off but allow a breeze. In the summer you sleep out on the porch with a ceiling fan, especially on rainy nights.

I haven't seen em in England.

I'm gonna explain to y'all why Britain considers 78°F/25°C hot. I know hot because I grew up in Texas and spent half my life in Las Vegas. So I am absolutely qualified to explain this to the rest of you who laugh at UK "heat waves". First of all, most people don't really seem to get how far north Britain is. If I flew due west I'd hit northern Quebec. If it wasn't for the North Atlantic Current, this island would look more like Iceland. So it didn't used to get *hot* here really at all.

Ok. *cracks knuckles* 😂

First of all: I think that the future is clearly electric vehicles. One of the best things about EVs that people seem to ignore is that they're totally fuel agnostic. This is going to be important as resources are harder to get and afford.

https://twitter.com/MsLingonberry/status/1804847052695781560

You can charge an EV directly off solar or wind or hydro, or you can generate electricity from combustion in a billion different ways, depending upon what's available. Batteries are getting smaller and charge faster; this seems to be on a path to continue no matter what.

Sure. I think it's going to be one of the big hot button cultural issues of the century - people who can afford to just up stakes and move trying to predict where to go so they get there before the peasants and can enjoy their own prescience behind fences.

It won't work. 😂

https://twitter.com/DellaLuna/status/1804686651496562878

A few years ago, a buddy paid me a small sum to "climate consult" on a property in Minnesota or Wisconsin or some such place he was thinking of buying. He sent me maps and photos and I looked up relevant information in public records, tried to get a feel for the area.

That job interview thing has got me thinking now about all the blind spots I must have as a 6'3" burly cishet white dude with resting murder face - the things I'm totally oblivious to. I mean, at least I know I have em, which is maybe more than a lot of cishet white dudes. I remember my ex telling me that if she sat at the bus stop, dudes would pull up and ask her how much and shit like that, and I was astounded, because I'd never once seen that happen. Or rather, I'd probably never noticed it. It was genuinely shocking to me.

You'll often hear pundits these days say the public have "lost their faith" in politics, as though it's a character deficit on our part.

But the truth is that the public has lost our faith in politicians for the same reason Catholic altar boys have lost their faith in priests. The majority of Americans of any party support universal healthcare. Most Brits think power, water and public transport should be given back to public ownership and that Britain should rejoin the EU.

And yet these things are largely off the table for politicians.

So let's talk about where people should and shouldn't live, because it's something people have said to me a lot for years: "Nobody should live in Phoenix/Las Vegas in the first place."

It's an extremely silly thing to say, of course, even if it's true. When the Paiute discovered the tiny oasis that gives Vegas its name (The Meadows), I'm pretty sure they didn't think "One day white men will come from across the ocean and millions of them will move here because it's cheaper than California, which also doesn't exist yet."

If you're in a place facing heat waves right now and you're not sure what to do about it, here's what's kept me alive in over twenty years running around in the Mojave, in equatorial Africa, and even on the London Tube in summer. 😂 The danger creeps up on you. It's not like being in the cold. You'll think you're fine, then you'll just feel a little weird and light-headed and then you'll pass out or stroke out. Do not assume you can just power through it. Baby, you absolutely can't. You need...

I'm not one to belabor a clever metaphor, but I just keep thinking about my riff on how money is the magic that changes No to Yes, and I keep thinking about collapse and chaos and who will really be harmed the most by it... because I don't think it's as obvious as it seems. Whenever I'm in one of my depressive nihilistic moods, I'm fond of saying things like: fuck it, let it all fall down, the economy, the political systems, all of it. Let it crumble and let's sack the ruins and salvage a better future from it.

This always results in a scolding.

I wanna expand on something I told Martin Shkreli last night. He asked me if I thought rich people couldn't understand life from anyone else's perspective, and I said: after a certain point, yes. I quoted @Richard_Kadrey at him: "Money is the magic anyone can do." Money is a magic that turns No into Yes. That's really it. The richer you are, the more No turns to Yes for you, until eventually your entire existence is pretty much entirely made of Yes. And after a while, you think Yes is what the whole world is made of.

You forget No.

The funniest part about that post you're all so mad about is that I randomly picked pharma as an industry. It could have been widgets. Life-saving widgets. Doesn't matter. Most of you seem to have missed the point entirely. Capitalism has no duty to anyone but capitalists. And just because you wanna suck off a capitalist in hopes of being one, if your income is derived from a salary instead of your capital gains, you're labor. You're a laborer, same as me, same as my dad the retired carpenter, same as your plumber.