Smoke from the Cedar Creek Fire in the sky and it’s not even unpleasant but I remembered that time I tried jogging in similar conditions in LA and just… couldn’t, and this creatine comeoff week’s been showing that my aerobic energy generation continues to get better but it’s still not where it was before the 2nd COVID case, so I’m not gonna do any yard work today.
hey is Seattle going to get wiped off the map by the tsunami that follows the big one or is that just Portland?
Just Seattle.
Portland’s 100 miles inland and in a way so is Seattle, but it’s on the Puget Sound.
This is not my understanding. Tsunamis can’t make hard right turns, so there might be some water level rise and the boardwalk might eat it, but most of Seattle is not a tsunami hazard. Our real concern is all the landslides and soil liquefaction from a major earthquake. A lot of Seattle is on top of what’s basically a mud flat and it will become very unstable when the shaking starts.
Red area = fucked
Yellow area = also fucked, but for other non-tsunami reasons
The narrowness of the Columbia’s path through the Coast Range means a tsunami might make the river surge all the way back to Portland but no, our main concern in an earthquake is all the structures built before we realized Cascadian mega-quakes were a thing – including the bridges across the river dividing the city – collapsing. The Oregon coast, though, is gonna get scoured.
Guys, “what if a bunch of people moved to Portland who weren’t aligned with the preexisting culture as it stood” is the subtext of like everything in the real Portland for the last decade
Which involves things like “Portland identity involved elements of both working class AND petit bourgeois idealization; after new arrivals shifted the economy there was a reaction against them in the name of working-class Portland, in response to which bourgeois forces have been co-opting them with the understanding of defending Portlandishness.” That’s how these things go.
It also involves things like “the Oregon Democratic Party never went through the ‘70s-'80s realignment because the state was so white that race wasn’t relevant as a cleavage and Christianity/family traditionalism wasn’t enough to power a Republican relaunch, but the national party did, and new arrivals come from state political traditions that did and so replicated those practices by habit, while state Republicans out of power were drawn by national trends to a niche, but this election the whole thing is rupturing and it’s legitimately unclear what form state political coalitions will take for the next few decades”
So I never particularly felt like a Pennsylvanian (Philladelphia/Pittsburgh/“Alabama in between” were always different identities, and that’s just white Pennsylvania before accounting for Great Migration ah, motownphilly, or the reactive white flight suburbs which are really their own thing.)
And I was just passing through Ithaca, and NYS-not-NYC identity was weird and thin
And LA well, California identity is still tied up in what it was at midcentury and isn’t anymore
I absolutely consider myself an Oregonian now, though, a Cascadian too.
when a film or tv show takes place somewhere where you have been, it is your sacred duty as viewer to say “i’ve been there” every time you recognize a place
When a film or TV show claims to take place somewhere but you been there and it is your sacred duty as a view to say “no the hell that is not there.”
when a film or TV show claims to take place somewhere, but it’s actually not there, but you’ve been there, and it’s your sacred duty as viewer to tell everyone how the “german government building” is, in fact, a dead mall in Cleveland
So extending the insight that *I* never saw the Manscaping ads, should I take it that those of you elsewhere aren’t seeing the Oregon Country Beef campaign?
If you’ve ever taken a road trip through the pacific northwest, you’ve probably seen a bumper sticker for a place called “Gravity Falls.” It’s not on any maps, and most people have never heard of it, some people think it’s a myth. But if you’re curious, don’t wait. Take a trip. Find it. It’s out there somewhere in the woods. Waiting.
HAPPY10thANNIVERSARYGRAVITYFALLS! first episode date: June 15th, 2012
That map of Oregon with those locations marked is basically the most chaotic you can get while remaining 100% accurate
Made
this map as a figure for my research. Data was collected from U.S.
Census, Washington State, Idaho, Oregon, and Montana GIS portals for
waterways and lakes. Canada streams and lakes data was collected from
British Columbia GIS portal.
Nameplate
capacity was gathered from the U.S. Army Core of Engineers and British
Columbia Hydro and Power Authority. Presented at 8 different even
percentiles.
Map was produced with Python and the Geopandas, libpysal, and mapclassify libraries.
As a note, this is not a comprehensive map of all the dams or hydroelectric facilities in the CRB.
For
those interested there’s 13 dams on the Columbia River in BC, along
with the headwaters of the whole river system which has led to a lot of
negotiations between us and the the Americans and the creation of the
Columbia River treaty.As well as a
community trust has been established with proceeds from the sale of
hydro to fund community infrastructure, culture and other initiative to
residents of the Columbia basin. I believe this only available to those
on the Canadian side but I am not 100% on that point.
Man, I just read the UnHerd article “Fall of Seattle” and it’s a reminder people are insane and Americans are violent bastards, that it’s not just a black thing. The US is just another part of the Americas, atomized, displaced, violent.
Eh one thing about the Pacific Northwest is the area was actually pretty depressed from the 70s through the 2000s, the cities hollowed out by suburbanization of the period – the “Will the last person leaving SEATTLE please turn out the lights?” billboard. (Thoroughly white Oregon spawned an “urban growth boundary” instead of white flight, but also had the timber collapse to face)
And had big down-and-out wreckage scenes that you’ve personally been exposed to. Remember “grunge”, and how heroiny and despairing it was? That was Seattle! Portland had the “heroin is so passé” Dandy Warhols, and remember “Faces of Meth”? That was the Multnomah County Sheriff, so us.
And eventually those problems were kinda solved with each other – all the taxpayers move out, so we give vouchers to rent the houses they left to functioning addicts. We lean into federal food and healthcare programs so crackheads with a pickup truck full of scrap metal get fed and cared for, and local stores (and farms! Cascadia was kind of a backwater of national supply chains) get paid, and local kids with the aptitude get trained as x-ray techs and anesthesiologists, and the pharmaceutical industry that’s kind of a decades-on development of unlimited fresh water from the Columbia for chemical plants has a medical research sector to articulate with…
And it was all held together by low cost of living, prices, and rent, essentially by how far the area was operating below built capacity. It’s not obviously capable of containing that much wreckage at merely a bit below capacity, let alone over.
"Public nudity is protected speech" is more or less the law of the land in Oregon. As long as you're doing something that can be construed as a form of speech or expression, it's protected under the state constitution. Strip clubs count.
You know I’ve abortively sketched it out elsewhere but here let’s fill out
The Portland Suburbs Cardinal Direction Representation Scheme
In which each quadrant of the suburbs around Portland, Oregon, takes on the physical form, character, and even similar history to those characteristic of regions elsewhere across America. Let’s explore:
West (Hillsboro, Beaverton) – The Northeast
As the streetcar suburbs stretched east across the river, the more established yet green residences of the Southwest quadrant (Portland has five quadrants centered on the rivershore in Downtown, the river cuts what would be “Northwest” in half radial-diagonally so that the half on the far bank from downtown, contiguous with Northeast and Southeast, is “North”) started making an automobile-enabled stretch up over the hills and into the far valley. Commerce and industry followed, in successive waves of residue-leaving modernization. The abundant hydro and power of the Columbia River, and a comfortable area to attract college-educated executives, scientists, and engineers to promoted chemical and chipmaking industry, and the area is now the “favored quarter” of the region, with best schools and incomes. (The regeneration of the city over the 1990s-2020s first started substantially as a dining/nightlife/culture destination for these types and then lured them to buy fixer-ups) This area greatly reminds me of the northern suburbs of Philadelphia.
East (Gresham, Troutdale) – Florida
The streetcar suburbs made it out east around to Mt. Arleta at about 50th, stretching past in patches. When, post-WWII, the built-up hunger for new housing met the automotive Mass Middle Claas this working-class area (I’m pretty sure The Simpsons “Evergreen Terrace” was Northeast) stretched out past the border of the city at 82nd and kept going until by the 230s they banged into the outlying towns of Gresham and Troutdale where the foothills to Mt. Hood start making the Gorge part of the Columbia River Gorge obvious. The area was built out on an uninterrupted shopping center/minimall road grid with less attention to amenities like parks or sidewalks, but the city had to annex it in in the 70s after the feds required sewage system improvements they couldn’t afford.
Some of the most Cascadian suburbs (traditional Oregon culture isn’t farmers, it’s forest laborers). When the Oregon timber industry fell apart in the later 80s and the city emptied out it got cheap, methy and criminal now increasingly brown and immigrant.
South (Oregon City, Clackamas County) – The Sunbelt
In range to the farming-based Willamette Valley, and having the most “country”-as-defined-since-the-1980s culture. Clackamas is where the guys driving lifted pickups to their construction jobs live. Oregon City is the first capital of Oregon, along waterfalls that required portage but also offered rapids for water power, and apparently a major center of white power for a few decades. Expanding in recent years, development tends to be commuter stuff built around freeway exits with first shopping centers with big box stores and restaurant chains, and “drive til you buy” housing developments beyond.
North (Vancouver, State of Washington) – The Northern Plains
You have to take a tedious route to get there and then they do stretch on, though you’ve never heard of anyone from there. Navigated by freeways for any distance though within a locality the existing farm roads do fine as arterials between some mix of cul-de-sac developments and old-fashioned “someone subdivides a plot into street lots”. Vancouver is a town, cause they did that once. Substantially puffed out by the kind of business park guy who would move anywhere if it gave him a few percent edge on a spreadsheet (WA has lower income tax and makes up for it with a sales tax Oregon lacks).
Like to contextualize Nick Kristof’s Oregon governor thing you have to know about Tom McCall, the legendary 1967-75 governor who’s considered the founder of modern Oregon, like you’ll hear he was a newspaperman but it was like if Mississippi or maybe California had elected Mark Twain, or somewhere had elected Steve Sailer in 2002
The Secretary of State just ruled that NY Times columnist Nick Kristof is not particularly Oregonian enough to run for governor, which still sets us up for a Republican-mainstream Dem-good ol’ fashioned Cascadian Dem general next year, in a state with no contribution limits
So this governor race is shaping up to be {best of two Democratic Salem bigs, one county commissioner and Nick Kristof} vs {best of a reasonably strong Republican field} vs a state legislator running as the old, rural white working class Cascadian Democrats, as a reminder there are no maximum limits on Oregon state political donations
Reminder that Oregon’s rural heritage is more working-class lumber than smallholder farming and the Democratic Party (which never really faced Civil Rights-era realignment in thoroughly white Oregon) still retained a lot of old-school loyalty there, this one could be the one where that snaps.
This in particular constrains governor Kate Brown from pursuing any further COVID restrictions or even slowing the lifting of existing ones in reaction to this “Omicron” variant if she wants to leave the mainline Democrats with a positive reputation outside Portland
So this governor race is shaping up to be {best of two Democratic Salem bigs, one county commissioner and Nick Kristof} vs {best of a reasonably strong Republican field} vs a state legislator running as the old, rural white working class Cascadian Democrats, as a reminder there are no maximum limits on Oregon state political donations
So in the restive eastern drylands of Oregon things kinda simmered down during COVID (in part cause Gov. Kate Brown threaded the needle well) but restrictions stirred up the small business base of the Rogue Valley. Brown’s termed out and as a promoted Lt. Gov didn’t have a strong machine, this was already looking like the best pickup chance the GOP was likely to get, and now apparently we’ve got a moderate Dem legislator running independent and whatever the fuck is up with Nick Kristof – outside the sex work sector I expect Oregon will at least hear him out, but no one was asking for him – so this one might get pretty interesting.
