Solar panel array in Irwindale, California. (photo: Ringo Chiu/Zuma)
Here I am with another piece on the ongoing and grotesque burlesque show in my native state of California. This one is about the inevitability of oppressive central planning that grips the progressive mind in the state. There seems to be this fetish for the power to control everything and everyone to get to the ruling claque’s rapturous end state. They need a cataclysm to stampede the state’s hoi polloi into their arms. For them, nothing better fits the bill than their fixation on “climate change” and the companion thought that the Golden State and, if they capture DC, the US will lead the way to the nirvana of Sierra Club policy papers.
I was reading Kevin Williamson’s fairly balanced essay in National Review’s October issue, “The Heart of California’s Darkness”, and it dawned on me that the political power-hunger in the heart of every California progressive (or liberal, or leftist, or whatever) is, in some ways, more complete than anything that came out of the old Soviet Union. The USSR was a contraption that couldn’t run because it combined two incompatible things: complete equality in all things material and a prosperous life filled with conveniences. The former undercut the latter, and down it came after about 80 years. The crazies that run Sacramento are after something more sweeping.
Frankly, they don’t care so much about conveniences as they do about their religious-like adherence to an arbitrary sense of environmentalist purity best articulated by the immature utterances of people like 17-year-old Greta Thunberg and her ideological soulmate, Ocasio-Cortez. They won’t even make allowance for the desire for comfort in life. One of the greatest additions to comfort, alongside the automobile and balloon housing construction (makes the ‘burbs possible), was air conditioning. All of them are on the hit list for eventual elimination.
Ocasio-Cortez and Thunberg
The only problem is that the peasants would be seeking their pitch forks if the zealots shocked them with a huge and immediate dose of their vision. So, the fanatics seek to slowly strangulate our conveniences under think layers of regulations and edicts emanating from a politburo of the ruling party’s elders and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).
The Party has supportive cadres in affiliated institutions such as publicly-funded universities to help them invent new schemes to herd the masses in the desired direction. One such contributor in the achievement of the Party’s goal is comrade Severin Borenstein of UC Berkeley’s Energy Institute at the Haas Business School. He’s an enthusiast for tying electricity rates to the time of day when their most needed. If you don’t find ways to cut back on air conditioning, you’re deserving of bankruptcy in the fevered imaginations of people like Severin.
Severin Borenstein
And this comes at a time when the air is fouled by earlier escapades into environmentalist utopia that turned the forests into a blanket of matchsticks. So, if his wish comes to pass, you, my fair resident of the state, will have the privilege of coming home to a hot and stuffy house to sweat and bake in. That’s what you get for not desiring to live in a cramped and over-priced hovel in the narrow band of real estate hugging the coast. The abject inhumanity at the heart of the worldview is what’s so appalling.
The fact is, California’s version of Lenin’s vanguard elite is trying to shoehorn reality into an unreality. It won’t work any more than the Five-Year Plans of Lenin and his descendants. See, the sun and wind don’t cooperate so you must be made to cooperate. According to the California Energy Commission (another Party affiliate), energy capacity has indeed increased in the past 20 years as the activists in power shifted to renewables. But not so fast. “Capacity” – which could be another one of those statistical fairy tales – must not be confused with “generation”. Generation of electricity has been flat, even declining slightly in the face of population growth. Accepting energy from hydrocarbons from inside or outside the state to make up the difference between demand and supply gives the ruling class the willies, and nuclear power conjures visions of old monster movies. What you end up with is blackouts and/or personal bankruptcy – not exactly an open-arms invitation to move to the state.
This is no way to live. Not surprisingly, 800 businesses have jumped ship in one year from 2018 to 2019 to join thousands of others in the diaspora. California is not the future, so long as its goofy vision is quarantined within its borders. That’s an open question given the fact that California acolytes of central planning are auditioning for national promotions in the new Biden administration.
If left alone, California will suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union. One can only hope . . . and pray. The death of the hot mess is the only thing that’ll keep the rest of us safe and secure. Now that’s real herd immunity.
Gov. Whitmer of Michigan (D) announced the status of the lockdown order in March 2020. Gov. Newsom (D) of California extended his lockdown order in June 2020.Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti gives his annual ‘State of the City’ speech at City Hall in Los Angeles, Calif., on April 19, 2020. ( photo: Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times)Ibram X. KendiBlack Lives Matter organized protest in Washington DC on June 6, 2020.Black Lives Matter protest with the usual Marxits slogans.
The Totalitarian Temptation
In 1977, Jean-Francois Revel, a man of the French left at the time, came out with The Totalitarian Temptation. He was repulsed by the Euro-left’s unwillingness to shed their deeply embedded reflex for totalitarian control.
Jean-Francois Revel
In the vein of Rahm Immanuel’s (Pres. Obama’s Chief of Staff in 2010) famous maxim, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste”, “progressives” and powerful Democrats have exploited COVID, riots, fires, and blackouts to express their inner totalitarian. Revel would not be surprised if he were alive today. It appears that once you cradle the left’s belief system, you develop affectations for centralized control down to the intimate details of a population’s lives.
I put progressives in quotes because it is the moniker of choice for a wide range of control freaks from Mayor Garcetti of LA to Gov. Newsom of California to Ibram X. Kendi of Boston University – though I’m a bit tentative about Kendi for a number of reasons. I shouldn’t be. He is a man of the left and the possessor of a powerful drive for power. They all do. It’s in their political DNA.
Control Freaks in California
Gov. Newsom (D) of Califonria delivers report on the status of the state’s fires on August 24, 2020.Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. (Photo: Kevin Sanders)
Right now, California is burning up. Of course, for the state’s overlords, it can’t be the outgrowth of the decades of environmentalist policies that are the favorite of the ruling party. And the Democratic Party is THE ruling party of California. The state has become such a Democrat Malta among the states that it can swing the national popular vote by millions in a presidential election to the loser, thereby giving the Party a tiresome talking point for at least the next four years.
Indubitably, with the tedious boast comes the incessant demands to rig the system to allow Big Urban to run the country. How would Big Urban run the country? Look at California. Mayor Garcetti tweeted, “Time to turn off major appliances, set the thermostat to 78 degrees (or use a fan instead), turn off excess lights and unplug any appliances you’re not using. We need every Californian to help conserve energy. Please do your part.” The state’s energy system can’t deliver the goods – electricity that is – after Democrat politicos piloted the state to the “future”, the future of the Book of Eli (see the movie).
A map shows potential power outages by PG&E in California October 9, 2019.Scene from the The Book of Eli.
It turns out that greenie energy is expensive and unreliable energy. The decrees for solar panels on your roof, flim-flamming the rate structure to punish the dissenter from the Party line, the tomfoolery of net-metering, and Byzantine utility regulations that forcibly shift resources from the delivering of electricity to the construction of the greenie utopia have translated into blackouts, the grid becoming a force multiplier for firestorms, and rates running from 15₵ to 50₵ per kWh depending on a labyrinth of time-of-day, season, and “tiers”. Thus, a resident receives a bill that reads more like a grad school dissertation or one of those Big Tech privacy statements. They’re unreadable. So, just shut up and write the check.
Electricity is a classic copper-to-coffee commodity. It need not be priced by a Gordian knot of rules, unless your rulers are auditioning for the role of commissar. For example, my utility in northwest Montana charges a flat $30 monthly fee and 8.26₵ per kWh. What does that mean? It means, first, that I can calculate my bill by looking at my meter. Secondly, with air conditioning running full blast in the summer, I received a bill for $125 as opposed to $450 in California (as of 2015).
Okay, some Golden State residents might say, “That’s not my bill.” You are fooling yourself. It may not be your bill; but if it isn’t your bill, it certainly is a classic example of the beggar-thy-neighbor approach to life. You benefit because somebody else is forced to pay what you don’t. And if they don’t pay, the utilities turn to beggar-thy-neighbor in having maintenance be the beggar. Thus, Paradise, Ca., burns down.
An aerial view of destruction from the Camp fire in Paradise, Calif., off Clark Road in November 2018. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
Democrat executives seem beset by all manner of catastrophes. Garcetti can’t keep the lights on and Newsom can’t either, plus keep the state from going up in flames. Blame-shifting is the usual response. The culprit is frequently some abstruse threat, a kind of politically useful bogeyman. Newsom’s favorite is “climate change”. He declared, “This [the fires] is a climate damn emergency.” To him, there’s nothing to debate, and he’ll brook no debate, dismissing those who disagree as “deniers”. It’s the typical attempt at public-shaming of people who won’t kowtow to the Party line.
There’s good reason not to bend a knee at the altar of the Sierra Club. Forest debris and dead trees have been piling up in the state’s forest for decades, as per the grand poohbahs of the greenie movement. If fires occur according to environmentalism’s vanguard elite, let ‘em burn because it is Gaia’s will. For those in the fire’s way, it’s their fault for being there. These powerful zealots are as calloused as the Bolshevik Grigori Zinoviev when he wrote in 1918 during the Red Terror:
“To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.”
“In the basements of the Cheka” by Ivan Vladimirov (1919)
Newsom would probably prefer (I hope) that opponents not be lined up against the wall, just muzzled till they die out. Soon, the alternative voices will be replaced by the indoctrinated young when they reach the age of consent. Thus, the imperative to politicize the k-through-college curriculum, exactly like Soviet schools.
Then it’ll be a clear path to … more fires, third world power reliability, and an existence typified in The Book of Eli. The mounting difficulties will lead to more controls, not less. The powers-that-be will need more regulators and Party discipline to address the errors from the previous batch of edicts. 100 million dead trees exploding into massive conflagrations will mean a de-kulakization of the foothills and mountains (reminiscent of Stalin’s 1930’s war on the peasant) by herding the outlying residents into the tight urban cores (the state’s current and future war on the ‘burbs and “exurbia”).
A panorama of dead trees in the Sierra-Nevada.A fire as blow torch: The Big Creek fire consumes a home as it blows through the Sierra-Nevada and 1,000 acres in 30 seconds in CNN photo from Sept. 10, 2020.
The power disruptions won’t be addressed by greater investment in delivery and production. Instead, small-is-beautiful will be the mantra: smaller homes; fewer and smaller appliances; the reduction of personal conveyance to glorified golf carts and graffitied and filthy public transport; and an end to air conditioning. See, the environmentalist’s future is a self-anointed elites’ playground for directing everyone’s lifestyle, mind, and behavior. Their current penchant for semi-totalitarianism will blossom into the full-throated variety.
Will any of this address the alleged malefactor, climate change? It might, but only if we and California are impoverished. Then again, the warming might persist unabated. Our GDP is to be lowered, but the Sierra Club can’t control China’s CCP or India. It only seems to control California. Other countries are beginning to experience the joys of air conditioning and they won’t have any qualms about coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear power plants. Other states similarly won’t view the disaster that is California as being a wholesome path to follow. The end result is a mutilated California and a climate change that continues its inexorable march.
Coal-fired power generation in China.
Is the goal a diminishment of climate change – which won’t be – or just a naked power grab to control all behavior and minds? Bet on the latter. Budding totalitarians can’t help themselves because they are, in their heart of hearts, little busybodies. As incessant buttinskies, mostly upset that the world didn’t conform to them, they seek power to make it so. Call it a form of therapy, one that comes at the expense of everybody else. And the rich go along because they can appear high-minded and, by the way, have the wealth to shield themselves from the many ill-consequences. It’s an alliance of the logically incontinent and the self-loathing/self-serving. As with the Russian peasants of the 1930’s, though, there will be no place to run for the average Joe and Josephina.
An Academic Control Freak
The surrender to this class of power-seeking busybodies began when late 19th-century academicians peddled the “expert” as the proper repository for governmental power. It’s progressivism’s greatest “contribution” to civilization. The accolade of “expert” was reserved for people like them, folks with degrees. A degree wrongly became a synonym for wisdom.
Our modern campuses of insulated little social cocoons are now a hotbed where certain whims are nurtured and fortified in ideologized academic departments and staffs. The graduates with those unexamined assumptions trickle out into the institutional centers of power and influence. The ridiculousness becomes the incontrovertible “truth” in the uncultivated mind of the rioters, BLM, Antifa, opening ceremonies of NFL and NBA games, corporate HR departments, and Democratic Party slogans. Within a fortnight, the miscreants who recently chanted “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” were turned into beacons of light.
Ibram X. Kendi
One of the academic abettors of this philosophical tyranny is Boston University’s Ibram X. Kendi, the occupant of the prestigious Andrew W. Mellon Professorship of the Humanities. The previous possessor of the title was philosopher and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. So, the position went from Wiesel’s classical liberalism to the racism of classical liberalism. It’s the crux of Kendi’s infantile explanation for all of human experience.
He wallows in the impatience of Marx, but replaced the proletariat with race, particularly blacks. Marx rejected previous norms and institutions – everything from family to constitutions, much of the corpus of classical liberalism and a good portion of western civilization to boot – because they inexorably exploited the masses of “wage slaves”, the working class. He was consumed with results, not the results of minor adjustments but with the apocalypse of existential revolution to overturn all of society. Take Marx’s general outline, replace a few nouns, recognize that both are obsessed with imposing fantastical complete equality in all its manifestations, and you have Kendi’s hectoring invective, How To Be An Antiracist.
This polemical diatribe is taken as the stuff of real scholarship. Au contraire, it’s a 284-page op-ed, a set of opinions wrapped up in biased verbiage. The quality of Kendi’s thinking can be seen in his clownish attempt to define the thing that he claims is the omni-explanation for nearly all of reality, racism. He writes, “Racism is a marriage of racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.” In case you missed it, he sounds like an eighth-grader in repeating a form of the word and its surrogates in his definition of the word. The circular thinking resides alongside his opinions, which are one kind of conclusion, being used to reach other conclusions. There’s much in this polemic that is sand in the gears of logic.
He’s proof that ethnic studies departments do not broaden the mind but generate the next generation of radicalized activists. And they are pouring into the streets of Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, New York City, Rochester, Kenosha, almost anywhere sympathizers hold the reins of power.
A riot against racial inequality and police violence in Portland, Oregon, August 2, 2020. (Caitlin Ochs/Reuters)
None of Kendi’s end-state of absolute equality can be achieved without the power to impose it. Inequality rears its head no matter what. Past attempts at equality-mongering (Remember the Iron and Bamboo Curtains?) only led to an aristocracy of overseers – people like Kendi – to patrol the jurisdictions of the equality-of-all-things. If the commissariat didn’t exist, life would revert back to its prior condition of an overclass of the powerful, talented, or most fortuitist. Unknowingly or knowingly, if Kendi and his followers get their bite at the golden apple of power, it’ll just be the powerful of the few with the guns.
The walls of absolute equality will have to be forever manned with incessant forays into people’s lives to enforce the multitude of decrees, sub-decrees, sub-sub-decrees, ad infinitum. Kendi and his initiates in the streets are actually control freaks par excellence.
Kendi is only one of the latest inductees into the rogue’s gallery. He’ll have to maneuver for floor space with the likes of Xi Jinping and Stalin. Much of the Democratic Party leadership is waiting in the wings to join him and them. As for the rest of us, we’ll have nowhere to run. The United States as the traditional haven from tyranny will have been eclipsed. Sad, really sad.
Protesters gather around after setting fire to the entrance of a police station as demonstrations continue after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minn., May 28, 2020. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)
It’s everywhere. The story of America is reduced to “systemic racism” to such an extent that the chants of Black Lives Matter are made mainstream. Logging onto my Facebook page confronted me with “Act Against Racial Injustice: We stand with the Black community and against racism. Together we can support causes working towards racial justice and equality.” Going to the Bing search engine brought out the announcement, “We stand in solidarity with the Black community and all those working toward racial equality. A message from our CEO.” At least the techies are all in for a campaign against the alleged pervasiveness of racism.
The headliner for an email from CEO Satya Nadella to Microsoft employees.Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
And then we have the New York Times weighing in with “The 1619 Project”. It’s an unadulterated attempt to boil the story of America down to racism. The tale is directed at the kiddies in K-12 curricula from the screed’s website. So, the kids get a bald-faced version ladled on top of what they receive daily from intellectually corrupted teachers, textbooks, and supplemental materials. The story is the same: Racism persists everywhere in an overt/covert and individual/institutional manner. To keep the story rolling, it’s better for the cause that the supposed threat be imprecise, vague, hidden, and forever true no matter what.
Sen. Tom Cotton penned an op-ed to the New York Times on the entirely reasonable option to use federal troops to quell our current wave of riots. The Constitution, The Insurrection Act, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Little Rock during Eisenhower’s White House residency are testament to its feasibility and legality. It’s an entirely different question to ask whether this is the time for it. In my view, we are getting there. Still, the reaction in the Times’s newsroom was open rebellion. The woke crowd in their work stalls had their sensitivities enflamed and threatened mass resignation.
But is the story of endemic racism true? Color me skeptical. Maybe you too.
Andrew C. McCarthy’s article in National Review Online, “The ‘Institutional Racism’ Canard”, puts lie to the charge. His case is strong. Quoting Heather McDonald, “a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.”
Andrew C. McCarthy
There’s more. A quarter of unarmed suspects killed by police are black, even though blacks make up 13% of the population. An argument for the Left? No. The lawlessness of many of our urban neighborhoods is illustrative of the fact that blacks compose 53% of murders and 60% of robberies. They have many more run-ins with the cops and a much higher potential to fall into the killed-by-police category. And the victims are overwhelmingly black and so are the ones reporting the crimes. It’s amazing that the number is “only” – but still sad – 9 unarmed blacks killed in contrast to 19 whites in 2019. The whole story that the marchers and rioters are bull-horning is manufactured.
Why does the story have resonance? In military parlance, the ground has been prepared. Decades of K-18 victimhood is extracting a price in combustible cities and hijacked minds. The matriculants filter into Fortune 500 boardrooms, cultural institutions, journalism, the arts, and everywhere people occupy positions of influence.
Undeniably, most impactful factor is the philosophical bias in the schools.
One person (David Bahnsen) even speculated on the role of colleges and universities in making California left wing from top to bottom and in and out. The more pervasive the campuses, the more pervasive the ideology. This circumstance might partially explain the uncompromising leftward tilt of the state.
Other blue states may periodically vote a split ballot: an occasional Republican for governor or mayor and Dems down-ballot (Mass., N.Y., N.J., Maryland for instance). Colleges are present in these states but not so wall-to-wall as in the Golden State. 115 community colleges exist in the state with 1 out of 4 community college pupils in the U.S. attending one in California. 119 4-year colleges and universities of a variety of shapes and sizes exist in the state, including the massive 33 public ones of over 670,000 full-time enrollees. No state has the capacity to disseminate leftist thinking as does California. There’s no corner of the state to escape the culture-smog. It penetrates everywhere and a super-majority of the electorate.
Students of UC Berkeley.
All kinds of nonsense and maliciousness sprouts in the pervasive academically-influenced soil of California. New and novel ways to repeal the Second Amendment in the state; outlawing separate boy/girl toy isles in a store; attempts to ban any alternative to the government schools; ham-handed efforts to force abortion and the LGBTQ agenda onto religious organizations and their social mission; environmental central planning; declaring war on preexisting and longstanding industries in favor of a destructive utopia; the nullification of federal immigration law; and the scare story of racism, racism everywhere, are taken seriously in this peculiar hothouse.
Do we need any more proof of the damage caused by the deformation of learning in our schools? Build more colleges in your state in this day and age and watch your politics go to hell. Real reform that moves us away from the precipice of perpetual victimhood, riots, falsehoods, and malignant crusades begins with the real reform of our schools. An unchallenged and malicious ideology shouldn’t be allowed to take root and then undermine the state and nation. This is no demand for the rule of another monolithic ideology, but rather a call for balance. Now that’s real reform.
The cry of “throw the bums out” begins with a focus on those in critical public agencies in education and the teacher-training colleges. Stop the madness by going to the source.
I wish that we could delist California Conservative from the list of endangered species but their numbers keep falling. While listening to National Review’s Radio Free California podcast with Will Swaim, (President of California Policy Center, a center/right think tank and legal organization in Tustin, Ca.) and John Eastman (former Dean of Chapman University School of Law and Founding Director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence in Ca.), I learned that Eastman flew the Southern California coop for Santa Fe, New Mexico. Furthermore, in a prior podcast, in a quick off-handed remark between Swaim and co-host David Bahnsen (Managing Director of the Bahnsen Group), both admitted to the fact that they didn’t know of anyone who didn’t have a plan to leave the state.
Speaking of caravans, Eastman has apparently joined the 4-decade-long crowd of middle-class refugees who have fled to points beyond the reach of Sacramento.
It’s more than a footnote in the sorry tale of the decline of the once-Golden State. The state increasingly resembles a feudal rat’s nest of masses of the poor and the super-rich protected behind the walls of their gated enclaves, as all of it sits atop a decaying infrastructure.
For many decades now, the majority of the people of the state have politically chosen rot … and the creation of millions wishing to escape. Sounds like Venezuela.
A LAUSD bus driver joins school workers at SEIU Local 99, which represents about 30,000 support workers, as they march at Marlton School in February 2018. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
40 years as a one-party state has made California very vulnerable to bear markets, like the one that we’re experiencing right now. Sometimes black swan events can come in the form of a virus and the effects move down the money digestive tract to the California taxpayer. Watch out taxpayers, pensioners, younger government employees and the whole gamut of local governments.
There are two bears stalking the state. One is the huge bond and pension indebtedness and the other is the public employee unions. The second one gave birth to the first one.
A local newspaper headline announces bankruptcy in Stockton, California June 27, 2012. (REUTERS/Kevin Bartram)
Here’s the scenario. Unsustainable defined-benefit public employee pensions – the most expensive to maintain, as opposed to the defined-contribution kind – requires a high rate of return to successfully service the payouts to retirees like my wife and I. The coronavirus bear market has shattered the 7 percent rate of return to adequately fund CalPers, CalSTRS, and any others out there. The pension bear was beget by the public employee union bear, the most powerful lobby in Sacramento. Who’ll make up the loss? If you said the taxpayer and lower-rung government employees, move to the front of the class.
The pension fund managers will go to the one-party state, which is housed in the state capital, to make ends meet. These clowns will then try to bilk more out of the “rich”. Already the top 1% of the state’s income earners account for 50% of the state income tax, which contributes 60-70% of the dough to the state’s coffers. What’ll happen? You guessed it: capital – meaning the “rich” – have already begun to flee to places like Incline Village just across the border in Nevada. Others seek refuge further points east. For a state that prides itself in its open heart for refugees, why is it so intense about making them?
Watch for how totalitarian taxation leads to totalitarianism. The State Franchise Tax Board is already manning up to scowl the nation for what it considers its truant millionaires and billionaires. We’ll see what the Supreme Court has to say about California’s attempt to fleece the new-found residents of other states. Does a state have the power to enter another state – literally or digitally – and force that state’s residents to prove that they didn’t spend 6 months in the People’s Republic?
The next in line to the guillotine will be local governments. To meet their pension obligations, they’ll have to layoff workers. It’s highly unlikely that the state with one of the highest combined rates of taxation in the nation can squeeze any more out of local residents. To pay the bill, they’ll have to raise the contributions from a shrunken workforce.
And what’ll happen to current retirees (like myself) whose retirement decisions were based on contractual obligations over a 30-year career? I’m nervous for the bear in the woods. Little did we know that Reagan’s 1984 commercial would have relevance beyond the Soviet threat. Watch the 1984 ad below to get my point.
The situation is clearly laid bare in a podcast interview of state Senator John Moorlach (R., Costa Mesa) by Will Swaim of the California Policy Center. You can listen to the discussion by clicking on Moorlach’s picture.
SACRAMENTO, CA – JULY 29: Secretary of State Alex Padilla is photographed in his office on Monday, July 29, 2019, in Sacramento, Calif. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
I’ll be a “census enumerator” for a couple of months to do my very small bit to prevent declining blue states – like California – from poaching a representative or two from the others. Actually, the motive is more than altruism. They’re paying me $17/hr plus mileage. But the probable antics of the deteriorating coastal-corridor states to pilfer what rightly belongs to others got me off my duff to join the fray.
California is pouring $187 million – compared to $10 million in 2010 – to find and/or invent humans so as to inflate its count. They’re even implementing a phone survey, not knowing who’s really on the other end and possibly doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the count from the other end of the line. Homelessness is rampant so tallying those folks – when they may not be around next week, next month, next year, or even in the land of the living – will make for abundant opportunities for hanky-panky. For the chief statewide Democrat ward healer, Sec. of State Alex Padilla, keeping the state’s congressional count at 53 is a matter of life and death.
The most commonly cited number for the flight of native Californians from the state over the past decade is about 400,000, nearly equal to the loss of one House seat. Meanwhile, other and more deserving states (mostly red) have blossomed. With foreign immigration declining (legal and illegal), the state can’t count on that source to makeup for the losses to red states like Texas and Florida.
Make no mistake about it, this is about the maintenance of raw, partisan political power. Padilla put it quite succinctly: “If people [bodies – real or imaginary – in California] don’t participate in the census, Trump wins. If we are successful in counting every Californian, Trump loses.” Translation: Screw the Republicans!
You can read more about the hustle in an August 15, 2019, interview with Padilla in the San Jose Mercury News here.
On Super Tuesday (yesterday), the Democratic Party may have stepped from the brink of a full-throated endorsement of truth-in-labeling. Appearances matter a lot, and most Dem voters seemed appalled at appearing to fondle a cranky septuagenarian holdover from the days of Tom Hayden and the SDS. They seem to want their socialism in an accumulation of smaller doses and without the “socialism” title. Comrade Sanders scraped a few wins in hard-left bastions (read California) and lost in many other locales that turned out to be more hospitable to another doddering septuagenarian of the plodding socialism-lite wing. A Super Tuesday vote for slow motion socialism?
When that great uncle, fresh from the dementia unit in a chronic care facility, becomes a party’s alternative to the ranting great uncle at Thanksgiving dinner, you know that the Dem bench is nearly empty. They both are nuts: one literally so, and the other a lifetime believer in falsehoods.
One wants to replicate the carnage of a long-dead Swedish socialism, thinking that the adjective “democratic” makes it all better, while extolling the virtues of totalitarian health care and literacy campaigns for the purpose of mind control. After all, Castro, Maduro, and Lenin can’t be all that bad … he says.
The other wants to dial back from “11” – to, let’s say, “9” – every one of the half-baked ideas to ooze out of the minds of the Squad and that good ol’ SDS crank. Instead of a real Green New Deal, the other wants a lime-green one. Instead of a full-on Medicare for All, he proposes a more haphazard government takeover but will, over time, eventually transform all health care workers into government employees. As for any damaging fallout, well, another group of government employees will be hired to clean up the mess, ad infinitum. Take each childish blathering of AOC and he will adopt it … but add a little water.
So, Dems, you have a choice between honest and damaging socialism and honest and damaging socialism-lite. And while you’re at it, vote to make pre- and post-natal abortion, along with gun confiscation, a commonplace. Both the honest fool and the demented one insist on it. They only differ in the amount of lead on their throttle-pressing foot.
Bernie Sanders, Oct. 30, 2018. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)
In our times, 5 decades is too long. Our historical memory seems to not last beyond one decade. What have our families, institutions, and schools done to us? One possible cause for the memory loss is a kind of imperialism of the present: an unexamined assumption that the past is a lesser, corrupted life and the present is all that counts. The lack of memory exaggerates the present and puts us in a position to repeat past mistakes, not realizing them as mistakes. Thus, to no surprise, we are seeing a rekindling of socialism and the rise of Bernie Sanders – a Super Tuesday and general election away from the White House.
The fabled 60’s counterculture gave birth to a willful forgetfulness of the past. The tenor of the times was captured in one of my favorite songs, “Let’s Live for Today” by the Grassroots. Great song, horrible philosophy. Here’s a good rendition:
The song came to mind as I was reading about Reagan’s strangulation of the USSR that would lead to its ultimate demise. He instituted steps to shrink hard currency (the stable currencies like the pound sterling and US dollar) to the monstrous behemoth. He lifted the price controls on our own crude oil production (imposed by Carter). The price controls led to a shuttering, for instance, of the oil fields around Bakersfield, where I lived, and across the country. Bernie promises to relive the disaster that was the malaise of the 70’s.
Man begging in Moscow in the 1980’s. Looks like a homeless encampment in one of our Democrat-run metropolises.
The price controls destroyed our own production, increased our dependency on foreign sources, and created shortages and inflated prices at the pump. Bernie wants to leap beyond Carter and reregulate the economy while imposing huge tax hikes on it, as well as bring Soviet central planning in the form of The Green New Deal to America. What Carter did to the US oil industry and the Soviet Union did to its people, Bernie wants to do to us.
Now, the Dems in Sacramento want to accelerate Bernie’s version of eco-terrorism – The Green New Deal – by “managing the decline of the oil industry” in the state. This isn’t about “price controls”. It’s about economic euthanasia. Wow be to those in the oil-producing regions of the state. No amount of utopian retraining will replace the loss.
Kern River oilfield outside Bakersfield, Ca.
I put the blame for the rise of Sanders and the crazy left in Sacramento squarely at the feet of pop culture’s corruption of our schools, families, and institutions — a present from the Summer of Love. It’s a form of engineered social amnesia. Are we about to institutionalize calamity because we have the memory of a hormone-addled teenager?
Drug-infused ecstasy during the Haight-Ashbury Summer of Love, 1967.
In this Nov. 10, 2018, file photo, the Camp Fire burns along a ridge top near Big Bend, Calif. (Photo: Noah Berger / Associated Press)
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C.S. Lewis and Progressivism
C.S. Lewis
Progressivism was succinctly defined by C.S.Lewis as “state-love”. One of Lewis’s novels, That Hideous Strength, strives to plumb the depths of progressivism, its nature and likely ramifications. The story centers on the attempt to takeover Great Britain by the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (NICE). It’s an organization dedicated to science and scientific management, but the science has more devious inclinations than the acronym implies. From the novel, Lewis encapsulates the character of progressivism in the form of NICE: “The NICE was the first-fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world.”
The cause of science-based control has a darker underbelly in the form of a security force that is headed by a Miss Hardcastle.
One of the chief protagonists, Mark, has a conversation with Hardcastle on the willingness of different groups to accept NICE propaganda. Mark expresses faith in the educated classes to be resistant. Hardcastle counters,
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
The novel and the dialogue in it foreshadow a warning about the real consequences of progressivism. A cadre of college-trained “experts” will fill the ranks of government service to more and more manage the affairs of the people. Accountability to those same citizens will be diluted because one scientific view among many will be imposed without reference to the wishes of the citizens. Their decisions have the force of law and the general public is increasingly subservient to them. Therefore, a dual threat exists in the form of a loss of sovereignty and an expansion of the state’s police powers, ergo That Hideous Strength.
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California and the Feds, Simpatico Bros
I was thinking of Lewis’s novel while reading about last year’s spate of wildfires in California. California is the epicenter of modern progressivism, a NICE writ large. Sacramento has a compulsion for all things state-love. The state’s ruling party has found few things that couldn’t be, in their estimation, improved by state intervention, especially if it is a holy war against purported oppression of fashionable victims’ groups, suppression of groups not in fashion, and the administrative deification of the environment as Gaia. One of the consequences could be an entire state literally going up in flames, among other calamitous maladies.
Gaia as depicted by Anselm Feuerbach, 1875.
Our political leaders try to avoid responsibility for the disasters by directing blame elsewhere. Both of California’s recent Sierra Club governors – Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom – lay the blame at the foot of “climate change”, recently rebranded from “global warming”. From the angle of their opponents, Trump wields his rhetorical machete at California’s governing classes for their blind subservience to environmental extremism. Trump’s jab unsurprisingly comes in the form of a tweet storm:
” The Governor of California, @GavinNewsom, has done a terrible job of forest management. I told him from the first day we met that he must “clean” his forest floors regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists, DEMAND of him. Must also do burns and cut fire stoppers…..” (Nov. 3, 2010)
In the end, Trump’s right … partially. The lefty gang in Sacramento is enthralled to an ideal of maximal environmental preservation as defined by the state’s entrenched swarm of well-heeled eco-activists. Many of the state’s public policies appear to channel the Environmental Defense Fund to such an extent that the colorful banter among the powerful in Sacramento and Coastal soirees must center on the History Channel’s “Life after People”.
Life After People, the History Channel (2008-2010). It’s a strange history: a “history” without anybody around to record it, and for whom?
The state’s ruling class is fully on-board with the Stalinist Green New Deal. Shortly after the giddy 30-year-old freshman congresswoman from New York’s 14th Congressional District (Ocasio-Cortez), flush with microphones and celebrity, announced the monstrosity, state party chieftains and power brokers like Kevin de Leon proudly gushed that the state was pro-Green New Deal before the Green New Deal, with its own eco-Gosplan, to be 100% “carbon neutral” on date certain. For an eco-extremist, extreme eco-ideas appear pale, and so they do for de Leon: “It’s not radical. By no stretch of imagination.”
But, then again, 57% of California’s designated forest lands are federally controlled, leading to Newsom’s subsequent tweet stab of hanging the wildfires around Trump’s neck in his response. Truly, almost three-fifths of the state’s forests are controlled out of DC … kinda. Yet, federal policies don’t always occur in the insular DC bubble. Some states have front row seats in the construction of federal land use policies, going back to 1970, in the form of review and comment procedures.
A little history lesson is in order. The Gordian Knot of federal environmental regulation got bigger with the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA). The mammoth law requires a period of comment for affected parties, including states, as part of the Environmental Impact Statement process. Before the US Forest Service implements land management policies, the states and everybody else in the eco-hive have to have their say. If the agency decides contra to their wishes, it’s off to the courts.
President Nixon signs the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on January 1, 1970.
Ditto for the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) and the National Forest Management Act (NFMA). Both require inclusion of state and local perspectives in federal decision-making.
Granted, the amiability between DC and a state matures into a tag team when both are riding the same Green Peace bullet train to ecotopia. Problems arise when a state wants to get off the train because it sees the conveyance careening to disaster. That’s no problem for California. It’s got an annual pass, shares bunking privileges, and enjoys the ride to ….
What I mean is that California tacks hard left on environmental policy, like much of the federal bureaucracy since the founding of the EPA. Regarding that bureaucracy, if the 2016 election is any indication, and the Clinton-Trump race is emblematic of the divide about eco government-worship (an admittedly debatable correlation), 95% of federal employee campaign contributions went to Clinton, which comports with California’s landslide vote for Clinton (by 4.2 million votes). If anything, it’s highly probable that the ideological inclinations of the federal environmental bureaucracy coincide with the state’s ruling political machine.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks during a rally in San Jose, California on May 26, 2016. (Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP)
So, Gavin Newsom’s reply to Trump relies on a completely unsupportable contention that the state’s one-party governing class is at ideological odds with the inclinations of the federal bureaucracy, particularly that part of it enchanted with the left’s ecotopia. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has the inside track to the governor’s mansion, state legislature, the state’s Democratic convention, and the state’s public workforce, as they do for a good chunk of the federal civil service. Complaints from the state’s mandarins about the emergence of matchstick federally-managed wildlands ring hollow since they did nothing – and were prone to be in agreement – as the fuel load mounted on those vast stretches of the BLM and USFS estates over the preceding decades. It’s a federal/state alliance for sins of omission and commission.
As all this was gestating, to be clear, Trump was nowhere to be found. He, among other things, was in and out of bankruptcy court, immersed in his tv show, and finagling real estate deals when the feds and California went eco-crazy.
Sorry, Gavin, you and your ideological fellow-travelers are complicit in the don’t-touch-nature movement, and the subsequent explosion of wildfires in the state. For Trump, he can’t even get many of his federal appointments approved, let alone leave an imprint on management practices on federal lands to counter the recklessness. Heck, that same bureaucracy is intent on trying to hang him à la impeachment.
It’s amazing when ideological biases infect the self-styled “experts” in the administrative state. Well maybe not amazing. Human beings are naturally prone to the favoritism of their biases regardless of place of employment and level of education.
What About That Sinister Culprit, Climate Change?
Have human beings inadvertently engineered a warmer climate? Could be – after all, 2.8 billion people in China and India are discovering the joys of air conditioning and the comforts and independence of the automobile. No more the dirt floors, rickshaws, and intestinal parasites for them.
Nantong Power Station, a coal-fired power station in Nantong, China.
Traffic jam on a Delhi, India, freeway.
The amount of greenhouse gasses from the energy necessary to power the two behemoth nations out of endemic poverty has grown dramatically. No need to belabor the point.
Has it contributed to a slight and general warming of the atmosphere? Probably. Is it catastrophic? Now that’s another matter.
Back to California, though. Regardless of the dust-up over “climate change”, the state has been dealt a difficult drought hand by mother nature, aka Gaia to the well-fed middle class twenty-somethings manning the ranks of Earth First. It is already prone to extensive dry spells due to its Mediterranean weather regime: dry summers and a short rainy season. It’s the very thing that attracted the aerospace industry, motion pictures, the trendy rich and powerful, and millions escaping the wintertime tundras everywhere else in post-WWII America. And it’s the very thing that caused the population to flood into the chronically dry biomes of the coast and foothills.
The low water level reveals two chairs at the Almaden Reservoir in San Jose, Calif., on Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2014. (Photo: Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group)
Such a climate is easy to tip over into drought. If the state doesn’t get its necessary allotment of precipitation in its 3-5 month wet season, it won’t get it at all. In fact, a study of tree ring data and other natural evidence bears the habit of significant dry spells, really big dry spells – all before Michael Mann became an ideological huckster with his “hockey stick”.
“Megadroughts” have afflicted the state over the last 1,000 years. One drought lasted 50 years starting in 850 AD. After that, another one stretched 150 years. Others extended over 10 to 20 year spans. They illustrate the fact that most of the state occupies a zone on the west coast with a sensitivity to drought.
You’d think that the state’s ruling class would realize that the same thing drawing them to the Golden State was the same thing to make it difficult to keep their swimming pools filled … and cause their chaparral vistas to explode in flames. And hopefully, one would think, lead them to ameliorate the worst of the threat. Instead, they dance to the tune of an aging water delivery system, energy policies that strip the electricity grid of the resources to protect it, and allow the fuel load to pile up on the chaparral and forest floors.
California chaparral biome.
It ain’t “climate change” as the numero uno suspect for what ails the state. The offender is the same climate in existence since before the internal combustion engine, combined with the eco-foolishness that is the stock-and-trade of the state’s ruling classes. These folks are literally playing with fire.
The Tinderbox
Progressives are fond of “experts” as if the label is some kind of magical incantation. The word normally connotes a person with technical proficiency and depth of knowledge in a particular subject matter. Yet, our modern liberals can’t come to grips with the fact that these “experts” bring more than technical competence to the table. They often possess the same prejudices and biases that afflict the rest of us. If they are gung-ho for the eco-craziness of the Green New Deal and spout the same ideologically-laden tropes of much of our schools’ tendentious curriculum, they’re just as capable of bringing forth a fiasco as anyone left to flying by the seat of their pants. The designers of California’s highly combustible wildlands policies have many “experts” among their number.
And the results are disturbing. Broad expanses of dead trees have become a common fixture in the forests of the state.
Dead trees in the area of Kings Canyon National Park, Ca.
A US Forest Service aerial survey in 2018 of California’s forests on state, federal, and private land discovered an additional 18 million dead trees to bring the total number to 147 million. How does it compare with previous years? A USFS official puts the normal number of additional deceased trees per year at 1 million. Drought appears to be the main driver, but drought is a chronic condition in a Mediterranean climate. Plus, why are 147 million dead trees still standing? Dead trees in a drought-sensitive climate should come as no surprise to anyone, especially to those living there. But 147 million!
Watch the progression of slides showing the increased intensity of dead trees in the Sierra-Nevada from 2014 to 2018.
Source: US Forest Service
Reality takes a back seat to ideological jihads. Tree harvesting has been on the decline since endangered species became watchwords for ending the timber industry. In the 1990’s the debilitating reproductive habits of the spotted owl were discovered, with natural predators also reducing the species’ life spans, and an entire industry found itself locked out of many of the state’s forests. This and other campaigns have suppressed harvesting on federal lands alone to one-tenth of what it was in 1988 when Reagan was president. As a result, new tree growth outstrips harvesting. In a seven-year drought, that means lots and lots of dead trees waiting for an arsonist, a lightning storm, or a decaying electricity grid.
Here’s the kicker: the subsequent fires from neutered management practices are a greater emitter of CO2 than forests thinned of the dead stuff and therefore healthier and more capable of absorbing CO2. As one CalFire official put it, “Current flux [of CO2] may not be sustainable without forest management!”
For all the protestations for a carbon-neutral future, the state’s governing class can’t get their story straight. What do they want? Do they fancy an end to anthropogenic CO2 or more wild fires and CO2 from drought-stricken and incendiary forests and scrub land? The two go hand-in-hand in the fanciful passions of the state’s powerful eco-mandarins. Eco-passions keep getting in the way of eco-passions.
“Sustainability” and Fire
Low and behold, many of the most destructive fires originated with the policies and practices of two largest of the state-chartered energy monopolists: PG&E and Southern California Edison. There isn’t much that they do without looking over their shoulder at the frenzied eco-fancies of the ruling party in Sacramento. The state’s NICE-equivalent government, as all big governments inevitably are, has a nasty habit of leaving behind a long slime-trail of unintended consequences. One is a disintegrating infrastructure as the operators seek to patronize the lunatics running the asylum of this state’s government, the same ones who have instigated an energy-delivery infrastructure that can function as a stimulant of conflagrations.
Indeed, one could be forgiven for entertaining the thought that PG&E and Southern California Edison are less about the provision of energy and more about pyromania. 6 of the 10 most damaging wild fires in the state were ignited by electrical equipment. CNBC intoned, “PG&E’s equipment has sparked 19 major fires in 2017 and 2018.”
Vehicles and homes burn as the Camp fire tears through Paradise, Calif., on Nov. 8, 2018. (photo: Josh Edelson/AFP)
But how did the state’s energy giants get there – “there” being their grid as a fuse and lighted match? Many seeking to blame capitalism focus on the “investor-owned” aspect of the companies. For them, it’s simply a matter of corporate greed, notwithstanding the fact that the companies are just as much “state-controlled” as they are “investor-owned”. Anyone with the least knowledge of the state’s Public Utility Commission knows that “investor-owned” doesn’t in the slightest mean “investor-controlled”. If an eco-craze becomes the latest and greatest thing to sweep the commanding heights of academia and government, you can bet the utilities, already cognizant of the need to ingratiate their powerful regulatory benefactors, will hop to the tune. If “sustainability” – meaning wind and solar – is all the rage, they’ll happily dance to the music.
However, the song is a hot mess … as it applies to keeping the servers running and the lights running 24/7. When you trade something of high value for something of low value, it will be known as an economic exercise in degringolade (a sudden decline). It’s unavoidable. In energy parlance, the “high” valued energy is reliable and stable, such as a 24/ power generating facility like a dam or fossil fuel plant. The “low” valued kind is the energy from the intermittent-producing wind or solar farm. They’re not dependable since the wind isn’t so obliging at all times and solar rays aren’t so cooperative through cloud cover and low sun angles . So, the lunacy of greenie energy policy lies in the tenacious push for the undependable to replace the dependable.
The priesthood of the “sustainables” – and it more resembles a clergy of a new mystical faith than “science” – will rely on their incessant calls for more truckloads of cash to be poured into greenie energy research. Aha! Batteries, they preach, are the answer, but they aren’t now, but they proclaim that they will be the answer if only we pile more of the public purse into feverish attempts to make them so. I suppose that they’d be proven right if only we allow them to bankrupt the country in the endeavor.
Absolutely, an unlimited budget can work wonders if we forget the reality of economic tradeoffs. As you lavish money on one thing , you soon realize that it’s not available for something else. More money into “sustainables” may result in a Pentagon barely able to defend us from an invasion of the Federated States of Micronesia; or a Social Security system barely able to keep the needy elderly from freezing to death in winter; or we become accustomed to a hyperinflation that would make Wiemar Germany’s seem like a paragon of monetary probity … if we try to have it all.
The Arrogant and Dopey Politician
Assemblymember Rob Bonta announces the California Green New Deal Act alongside other lawmakers near the East steps of the Capitol in downtown Sacramento, Monday, January 6, 2019.
The fact that the vast majority of politicians are at best novices in scientific matters is a fair conclusion, since huge numbers of them spirited off to law school and not to the research labs of Dow Chemical or MIT after getting their BA’s. They have all the gullibility of the ill-informed.
After activist politician meets activist scientist, your congressional representative can become quite a zealot . Indeed, there is such a person as an activist scientist. Does Michael Mann remind you of the type? For me, he does. Like him, many are infected with the same ideological biases that circulate among our self-styled cultural betters, of which they might consider themselves a charter member.
Buttressed in their “truth”, having the support of compatriot ideological zealots in lab coats, the people with the power to make law and impose it on us can be quite conceited in their convictions. How many times have we been exposed to this or that firebrand officeholder resorting to the tendentious pronouncements of this or that supposedly disinterested agglomeration of scientific experts?
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, right, announcing the resolution on Feb. 7, 2019. (photo: Pete Marovich for The New York Times)
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a classic example of the type. The politicos mouthing the pieties of the ideological-driven group of “experts” are completely ignorant of the pitfalls, cognitive holes, foolish assumptions, loose inferences, and faulty modeling that were garnered from the routine experience of previous failed scientific explorations. The experience makes a real scientist much more humble, not so the militant politician.
Instead, we get the demand to sit down and shut up or face the state attorney general.
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey speaks at a news conference with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and other US State Attorney’s General to announce a state-based effort to combat climate change in the Manhattan borough of New York City, March 29, 2016 [File:Mike Segar/Reuters]So we leap from the most extreme assertions of “climate change” to political actions without a second thought. Logic takes a backseat. A host of second thoughts would be elicited after consideration of something called the “capacity factors” of the various sources of energy production. Capacity factor? It’s the percentage of time that a given source of energy is actually producing electricity. It’s 85-90% for coal, natural gas, and nuclear. What about the much-vaunted wind and solar? For wind it is 40% or less, and solar hovers around 30% or less.
And things get worse for wind and solar. Once the prime sites have been taken, our potentates will have to command the move into less productive locations to increase generation. As energy productivity declines from more and more solar panels and windmills in non-accommodating areas, what’s the effect on the broader society? It won’t be benign as higher costs, poorer service, interruptions, dilapidated facilities and equipment, and a widening income gap filter through the population. Skyrocketing utility bills have that effect.
And, don’t forget, the eruption of more wildfires.
Those Pesky Marginal Sites
The sun rises behind windmills at a wind farm in Palm Springs, California, February 9, 2011. ( photo: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson)
Just imagine those high voltage transmission lines stretching over long distances of chaparral scrubland from the few places places with acceptable amounts of sun and wind to cities and towns further away. The highly-prized locations aren’t likely to be near those high-rises and exurban subdivisions with their curvilinear streets and swimming pools. If the lines are poorly maintained and subject to extreme weather, expect the hills to burn bright at night.
Mojave desert solar facility in California.
To bring the generation closer to the end-users means probable placement in less productive spots, because if prime locations were near the cities , the facilities would already be there. It begs the question. Greenie energy isn’t as location-friendly as a fossil fuel plant. Conversely, you could build a coal/gas-fired plant just about anywhere, if you can get past the nimbies [not in my back yard] and celebrity sit-ins at the construction site.
The expansion of wind and solar into marginal locations exacerbates the cost problem with these sources. They are already behind the economics eight ball before you move a spade of dirt. Once we include the costs of backup plants (peaker plants to keep the power flowing when the wind and sun doesn’t cooperate), longer transmission lines, subsidies, and immense dislocations due to guaranteed market shares, wind comes in at twice as expensive as conventional sources; solar power is three times as expensive.
Back to the problem of guaranteed market shares, promising anyone a customer base – or “market share” – ensures increases in costs by stripping the efficiencies of competition and volitional refusal out of the economic equation. The wind and solar producers get a first call on the taxpayer’s and ratepayer’s dollar.
Is that any way to run a grid? It is if you want your energy industry to look like something in the third world.
Housing in Freetown, Sierra Leone. (photo by Ira Peppercorn)
I wonder about the depressing effects of escalating energy costs on the overall economy and the economy’s ability to generate the funds for maintenance. Something has to give. People and businesses leave and/or reduce their economic activity which translates into disasters-in-waiting from a dilapidated grid, like the hillsides going up in flames.
Central Planners at Heart
Nobody in their right mind would knowingly wish for such a future. The emphasis is on the word “knowingly”. Point of fact, most of the public doesn’t know and their freely-chosen representatives are equally ignorant, but that won’t stop them from foisting the hot mess on their constituents.
Imposition is absolutely essential because the discomforting consequences would become so readily apparent to those with eyes to see. Thus, people must not be allowed to freely choose or not choose the nonsense. Their self-anointed “betters” have already decided the proper course for them. Whether with the velvet glove of subsidies – aka bribes – or the stick of punishing rates, people must be made to fall in line. In the end, greenie energy leads to one place: central planning.
So California, and her like-minded sister states, gets to relive the economic performance of the Soviet Union. The only problem is the unintended consequence of shortages and blackouts … and a grid that reflects the broader economic slide. It’s Gosplan with a fiery end.
The California Public Utilities Commission headquarters in San Francisco.
The building of the old Soviet State Planning Commission in Moscow.
The two photos above signify the same thing: two powerful central planning agencies, one in Sacramento and the other in Moscow. In the former, towns burn down.
The Camp fire rages through the town of Paradise, Calif., in Butte County on November 8, 2018. (photo: Neal Waters/Zuma Press/TNS)
In the latter, people queue up.
Queuing up at the state retail outlet in 1970’s Moscow.
Lewis’s NICE would be mightily impressed, and at the same time care less.
Adam Levine performs with Maroon 5 during the halftime show at Super Bowl LIII at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta on Feb. 3, 2019. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Lady Gaga in Super Bowl halftime show, 2017. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ANTHONY BEHAR / SIPA USA VIA AP IMAGES)
Is it just me or have you noticed that the Super Bowl has become more than a championship game and has evolved into an over-hyped vulgarity having more in common with a bacchanalia like the reality of today’s Mardi Gras? In addition, one of this year’s entrants is the team from San Francisco, a place poisoned by its embrace of a counter-culture – one that is also the dominant mental software of the commanding heights of our national culture (Hollywood, academia, cosmopolitan America, etc.). So, we’ll have brought together in Hard Rock Stadium the orgy and the team representative of the city who embodies the fiercest assault on our traditions.
I’ve given this much thought: How could I allow my social views to influence my sports loyalties? I was a 49er fan since the onset of my memory. Slowly, in my later years, I began to notice the disconnect between my team loyalties and the city that has come to represent much that is seriously wrong in our society. Say “San Francisco” and you’ll bring to mind social and moral dysfunction, more so than any other place. I can’t get past this realization.
Homeless encampment, San Francisco, Ca.
Vagina costumes in the Bay to Breakers road race, 2015.
It’s about the city that the team represents; it’s not about the team’s accomplishments or its players and organization. In my view, given the season’s worth of work, they should be the odds-on favorite. Congratulations to them for a job well done. Still, the city has become such an affront to decency that it is impossible to carry on as a fan.
