Trying To Do Calculus When You Cannot Add or Subtract

Thursday, August 6, 2026

Right now, the eastern half of the state of Washington is ablaze in a scene eerily reminiscent of the Los Angeles wildfires of January 2025.  These coastal states, California and Washington, share in common very liberal politics dominated by Democrats.  Democrats so focused on creating equity, and other quite tempting sounding liberal ideals, that they have forgotten to do things like maintain their ability to prevent and fight fire.  Then, as LA is demonstrating rather dramatically, they become so focused on their ideals, and the bureaucracies they create to enforce them, that they simply cannot rebuild from such a disaster.  It is as if they are graduate students in literature that cannot spell.

California has more billionaires than any place else in the nation, but they cannot give away their wealth to save their life.  They hoard those donations for their politics, which are corrupt.  They seem not to need any stinking due process for the next generation of wealth makers.  They let it burn and then they let it rot.  As if they did not already have a significant vermin problem in the area.

Simply put these liberal places have abandoned the basic functions of government that we elect them for in order to pursue their impossible, utopian dreams.

What is amazing to me though is that no one is noticing.  The Washington wildfires are largely a local story.  And so, primary after primary, we see Democrats tilting up ever more left-leaning candidates with ever more utopian and ever more impractical policies.

These policies and ideas are not new.  They have been tried on national scales in both the Soviet Union and the PRC – and they have failed miserably. The Soviet Union no longer exists.  In point of fact its existence lasted less than a century, a fact rather unique given its extraordinary reach and power.  There is no way to describe it other than utter failure.  China no longer functions in accordance with those ideals, it is a capitalistic, totalitarian state with but a thin veneer of communism pasted on top.

China, despite its claims to the contrary and the appearance in its big cities, is a place of immense poverty.  Things that every American takes for granted – basic sanitation facilities and electrical power, for example, are rare or non-existent in large swathes of that nation.  And this while residents of Shanghai live like kings.  The ideal simply does not exist.

The Soviet Union, so proud of its ability to keep pace with American technological advancement, could not maintain the safety of its nuclear power station.  This failure was born of exactly the same tendencies that have driven the fire disasters out west – the triumph of ideology and bureaucracy over actual necessary function.

Make no mistakes Democrats – these candidates you are putting forth may be cool, they may be unique.  They may be promising you everything you ever dreamed of – but they cannot and will not be able to deliver.  History has proven this to be the case.  Disastrously so.

I fear that if Democrats get their seeming way, Molly Hatchet were prophets.