Who wants to be President?

US politics is sometimes referred to as a clown show. Ask little kids what they want to be when they grow up and you will get answers like: fireman, policeman, clown, President. Who knew that the last two are synonymous? I certainly didn't, at least not before I became a grumpy old man. This explains the quality of the presidential candidates we've been seeing. H. L. Mencken had a few words to say on the subject:

H. L. Mencken on the President, July 1920

Things are getting worse for a substantial portion of the population. Things are getting better for some people. Nobody seems to have any idea of how to reverse our slide. The government certainly doesn't. I doubt big business is going to save us. All the people who are complaining about how the 'system' is unfair are just trying to carve off a piece of the cake for themselves, they aren't making any more cake and in fact have no idea how to make much of anything, much less more cake.

On my way home from lunch on Tuesday I decided to swing by the house re-siding project in St. John's which, I quickly realized, meant I needed to reverse course. I'm on Highway 99 in front of Buster's Barbeque. I pull into a side street to turn around. There's a no outlet sign, I've never been down this road, I wonder where it goes? So I follow it around a couple of corners, past a couple warehouses, and down a hill through what I can only describe as a shanty town. There are small houses along one side, the other is an embankment that supports an on-ramp onto I-5 South. Dead cars, piles of trash, dilapidated houses. A very sad looking place.

SW 64th Avenue Streetview

When I got home I took a look at this same street using Google Streetview and got a completely different view: nice, well kept houses. Not a prosperous neighborhood, but not a friggin' disaster either. How long ago was that Streetview recorded? August 2019, not quite two years ago.

Electrical Substation

It's a short street, I pass a half dozen houses before I get to the bottom of the hill where the road goes around the corner and dumps into a giant electrical substation.