The Witness Chronicles June 2, 2023
Russia boiling over, State Farm pulls out of California, and DeSantis wages culture wars, but why else should people vote for him?
Moscow got hit by drones in a symbolic penetration of their air defenses. Home insurance is a turning point in climate change. DeSantis announced his candidacy but what does he really stand for?Â
Yes, politics and controversies ahead, but that’s the stuff I write about on Medium daily and The Witness Chronicles is a sample of recent stuff. You don’t have to agree with me, but give it a read- we all need to listen to both sides.
Is Russia Boiling Over? The Rumors Get Weirder Every Day
Anyone who tells you they know what is going on is full of it
A place on the Ukraine Russia border named Belgorod apparently was invaded last week by a group of Russian dissidents fighting for Ukraine. Belgorod is in Russia and there are multiple military support locations there. Ammo dumps, staging areas, etc.
How do I know this? To be honest, I don’t. But the Russian rumor mills are rife with the story and you know it is not from their military because it looks really bad. So there must be a kernel of truth behind it.
The story goes further. This seems to have freaked out the leadership so much they are moving seasoned troops out of Ukraine and back into Russia to defend their borders. They are being replaced with green recruits, cannon fodder.
If you pay attention, you hear more. Trains and their signaling systems are being derailed and blown up. Trains are Russia’s primary way of moving troops and equipment around.
Then there are the political things. It looks like various power groups, like Wagner, are taking up positions to take power when Putin fails. Please note, I said when, not if.
What is the end game? The better question is what was the beginning game? Was Vladimir Putin really that clueless when he invaded? Did he know how gutted his military was as oligarchs enriched themselves? Did he really think Ukraine was run by neo-Nazis and his troops would be welcomed as liberators?
The entire thing defies belief. It also tells us how insulated from reality a world leader can be. Donald Trump is our example here. He has operated outside of the law, thinking he was the law.
Putin is, for now, the law. Trump never was. It was just his colossal ego and his lackeys who convinced him he was. Putin seems to only hear news that satisfied his need to be right, to win. They claim they won Bakhmut, but at what cost and what gain? More rumors say 20,000 casualties for a small city blown to bits with zero strategic value?
History is going to have fun with this one. A war fought for no reason, that achieves nothing, and costs everything. That shows the world clearly that Russia is gutted and has not been a world power for decades. And their leader with an iron hand is clueless and increasingly powerless.
But, please remember, these are rumors, nothing more. Anyone who tells you otherwise is full of baloney.Â
As a writer who looks at global events among other things, I wince at the authoritative things my fellow writers publish as though they are the God’s truth. But I guess it makes good copy. Most of what you just read may be true. Most of anything you read may be true.
Or not. In a world where widely available AI software can write anything, all truth is questionable. The only truth you can know is real is what you see in life. So get out there and look for it. It’s getting rarer by the minute.
This was written by a human.
State Farm Just Pulled Out of the Home Insurance Biz in CaliforniaÂ
This is the business of climate change, and it's bad
Actually they are no longer issuing policies for new homes. In a state with a chronic housing shortage and a median (not average) house price of $850,000, buying a first home or building one could become almost impossible without significant cash. Banks don’t issue mortgages on homes without insurance.
State Farm probably won’t be the only major insurer to pull out of the state. All the insurers use actuarial tables to judge their exposure to risk and once a big one decides it’s too high the others are likely to follow in rapid succession.
This could be the start of a domino effect in areas of the country prone to climate-driven disasters. All the major companies have pulled out of Florida and many whose homes were destroyed in Hurricane Ian are having a hard time getting checks out of the smaller insurers who are left.Â
And there are stories of independent insurance adjusters having their estimates slashed with no explanation, which may be a crime. Buyer beware.
We have a rebuilding problem and it’s growing. The forest fires that are a primary reason for insurers pulling out in California are not going away. Years of mismanagement and insect infestations moving north as things warm, are leaving huge numbers of dead standing trees and brush. Add in the recent drought years, strong dry winds, and the formula for fires is virtually unstoppable.
And any Californian will tell you that there’s a cycle: a forest burns, the soil becomes unstable because the plants are not there to hold it together, you get one of the periodic deluges, aka climate rivers, and that soil collapses in mud slides, wrecking more homes and things like roads and bridges.
At least California politicians are less likely to pretend climate change is not a calamity, unlike their Florida counterparts who know how bad it is but are addicted to growth at any cost. But they are not paying the bills. We are.
None of this is a US phenomenon, it’s called global warming for a reason. But the forces of denial are extraordinarily well-funded going back decades as big oil started buying politicians and flooding us with fake science they knew was flawed.
Every place is going to have their version of that California formula for cascading disaster, but very few are dealing with it realistically. Governors love to immediately assure voters that they will build back and build back better, but it’s simply not true.
The government cannot continually fund growth in the path of disasters. Flood insurance maps that determine a homeowner’s ability to get flood insurance from the federal government (no private insurer will touch it) are outdated and inaccurate. Areas are flooding regularly that rarely experienced flooding in the past.
The notion of a 100 year flood or disaster event now sounds quaint and outdated.
One of the big questions is where will people go who can no longer live in certain areas. I suspect the insurers could easily tell us where the best bets are and they are almost universally in northern states with the winters that chase snowbirds away.
Writing about this can be pretty frustrating as huge swaths of the population are in major denial, denial manufactured by the fossil fuels lobby, the car business, and politicians sweeping up big money donations from the industry.
In the last year we watched gas prices skyrocket, while oil companies showed massive profits far beyond normal, and there was barely a peep in the halls of government. That’s called price gouging and it hits the regular folks the hardest. Yet we don’t seem to be concerned about those astronomical profits.Â
Big oil knows their years are numbered so they are grabbing all the profits they can without regard for decent business practices. This gouging should be seen as another form of climate disaster, this time eminently a human made one.
You can’t blame the insurers for getting out. Profits mean something to them too. But they, like all of us, are caught up in a feedback loop and there may be little we can do to break it.
We’d have to start by wanting to.
DeSantis Has Nothing, Nada, Zero
What are you offering us, Ron?
Governor Ron DeSantis, now officially a candidate for the Presidency in 2024, doesn’t seem to have a clue what being President actually entails. In his very strange announcement interview with equally strange ranger Elon Musk, there was no discussion of policy, issues, or even the debt crisis that may be about to bankrupt the country.
His ‘ideas’ consist of a war on wokeness, which is not an actual thing. It has something to do with northeast-style political correctness where woke people insist on understanding things the Governor does not like including gender issues, liberal education, women’s rights, black history, and other bad stuff.
The irony of Musk, the self-proclaimed champion of freedom of speech in every case, including misinformation, racism, and hate speech, introducing the most famous book banner in the country, is too absurd to contemplate.
But the absurd is what these two man babies have in common.
DeSantis, who served in the military in Guantanamo Bay and has been accused of torture in that prison, doesn’t seem to have a clue about global events like the invasion of a sovereign country, Ukraine, by Putin’s Russia, an event that has the potential to destabilize the entire region or even erupt into a Third World War.
He dismissed it as a territorial dispute.
Given that he is Governor of Florida, you might think he has a pragmatic approach to climate change as his state teeters on the brink of environmental disaster. But no, the word climate doesn’t seem to be in his vocabulary. Another undoubtedly woke thing.
He signed a draconian (the word applies to his every action) ban on abortions after just six weeks, a period when many women don’t even know they are pregnant. But, following the unwritten Republican playbook, he won’t mention the subject.
Presidents deal with all these issues and many others on a daily basis and their actions affect lives materially depending on how successful they are. They don’t get to focus everything on culture warfare and when they try, they fail, vis a vis Nixon and the man DeSantis must defeat, Donald Trump.
Presidents also have no guarantee they will have a rubber stamp Congress the way DeSantis has in the Florida legislature, which is the only way this shallow man managed to achieve any of his limitations on education and human rights in the state.
His personality has been described as brittle, humorless, and vindictive by those who know him, all traits that don’t fly too well with Americans. We like Presidents who can laugh like they mean it.
I often wonder why anyone would want to be President. It’s a thankless job and includes being on the defense constantly and the offense when needed. Trump was a terrible President and a terrible human, but he reveled in those things. DeSantis’ reaction to any criticism is to order his pet government to silence the critic.
He is very good at censoring people.
Sounds like the guy we need in Washington, a robot with a thin skin who doesn’t get along with anyone. And who has no interest in the outside world. After all they’re all woke out there, but he’ll get them in line eventually once the voters see the light and make him king.
Ok folks, be nice to each other…Martin
Did you write today?
A paid subscription or upgrade gets you access to a year’s worth of my writing on writing, a growing archive of over one hundred stories and ideas. Please consider supporting this work financially. A few dollars a month is all it takes. Thank you.
If you want to show support but don’t want to commit to a subscription, you can always buy me a coffee!