Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe testifies before a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in Washington, U.S., June 7, 2017. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)
If what your enemies say about you can amount to a claim of credibility, then Andrew C. McCarthy passes the test. He’s been lambasted by the Dem-Left as a hack and Trumpkins as a partisan of the “deep state”. They are both wrong. As a seasoned US attorney, he tries to objectively see the subject from many angles. When looking at the McCabe case, his analysis may not be dispositive but it lacks the hyperbole often found on MSNBC and the Trump-o-philes on Fox News. In McCarthys’ rendering, as I discern it, the McCabe case stinks of DC.
Andrew C. McCarthy
The DOJ’s decision not to pursue prosecution of McCabe has 3 factors swirling about. First, it’s hard to convict when star witnesses for the prosecution (like Lisa Page) are twisting testimony to the advantage of the defense.
Second, Trump smears the criminal justice process with his Tweet-rants. It’s hard to convict when all involved are continually exposed to announcements from the White House that the defendant is a “liar”, etc. The president as the ultimate chief prosecutor is mucking up the constitutional right to a fair trial. He has a “right” to free speech, as Hannity is wont of saying, but his “right” clashes with the “rights” of others. If Trump was a prosecutor – which he is as chief executive – he’d be sanctioned by the court. And he does this in DC, a place already with a deep and popular disdain for him and Republicans in general.
That leads me, finally, to the messy matter of a forever-tainted jury pool in DC. Overwhelmingly anti-Republican and anti-Trump sentiment are so deeply embedded in the DC population that Democrats are more-likely-than-not to skate. The story of the jury forewoman in the Roger Stone trial is a good case in point. For prosecutors of any Obama associate, they’d have to get beyond jury selection from a broad Resistance demography. It’d be like getting a conviction in a lynching case in the Deep South after Reconstruction. Currently in DC, a prominent Republican in the dock would get a hang ’em jury and a Democrat would have the advantage of jury nullification (a blanket refusal to convict). In DC, just remove the blindfold from the statue of the lady of justice.
All the more reason to strip DC of many of its administrative functions. Ship them out to environs less congenial. Pick a Midwestern state. Otherwise, we’ll be saddled with an unhinged and Democrat-dominated federal government for as far as the eye can see. Elections, all of a sudden, become less important. Were they ever, at least since FDR?
Much has been made of the urban/rural divide in America. It’s real and shows in many ways. The reactions in the Michael Vick dogfighting case are emblematic of the split. Federal prosecutors, the press (mostly urban), and urbanites emitted a profound revulsion. Most of Vick’s neighbors may have disapproved – or not – but didn’t see it as the equivalent of serial capital rape.
The local DA decided not to charge, reflecting in a sense the values of his hometown. The principle of subsidiarity (overwhelmingly most government should be local) is an unstated truth in our governmental system, and active here.
The immense publicity and concomitant mostly urban outrage stepped up the case to a more distant level: the feds. For city slickers (of which I’d have to include myself), anything is justified to get the abuser of the counterpart of the beloved family pet. The prosecutors, appropriately pedigreed in universities and suburban upbringings, turned the immense powers of the federal government on Vick. He went from shame and no charges to two years in a federal lockup. His life’s preparation and career were emasculated.
Michael Vick leaves federal prison in 2009 to serve the last few months of his sentence in home confinement.
Cock and dogfighting, and animal abuse in general, should be criminalized. No doubt. But this is a case of proportionality. For suburbanites, their personal exposure to animals is limited to Fido. For many childless adults – of which there are increasing numbers in our cities – Fido is a surrogate son or daughter to shower all their love and wealth. They’d sooner see Vick drawn and quartered. For Vick’s neighbors, it’s yawner.
The drawing and quartering of François Ravaillac, the assassin of Henry IV of France, 1610.
For me, a conviction, fine, probation, and all the bad publicity and shame that he heaped upon himself would be sufficient. For sheltered suburbanites, who would consider a lesson on Lewis and Clark’s eating of their dogs and horses to survive the Rockies to be akin to the distribution of child pornography, nothing short of waterboarding and a decade in Supermax would do.
Michael Vick recounts his journey to a restored faith to students at Liberty University on Jan. 29, 2018.
See the 2-part program. You can get it on ESPN’s “On Demand”.
William Barr at a press conference on Feb.11 announcing court filings against California, King County, Wa., and New Jersey.
“All the indications are that this treasonable inflammation – ‘secessionitis’ – keeps on making steady progress week-by-week. If disunion becomes an established fact, we have one consolation. The self-amputated members were diseased beyond immediate cure and their virus will infect our system no longer.” — George Templeton Strong in his diary as Southern states voted to leave the union in 1861.
George Templeton Strong
Once again, we are replaying the scene in the immediate aftermath of the presidential election of 1860. Local and state entities, under the spell of radical multiculturalism, have decided shortly after the election of Donald Trump to effectively negate federal immigration law in their jurisdictions. “Sanctuary” cities and states have taken the place of South Carolina and the ten other Southern states of 1860-1. This time, the sanctuaries’ target is immigration law and not the tariff or the spread of slavery. Attorney General William Barr, like Lincoln before him, has decided to reign in the “diseased members”, in Strong’s words, by announcing federal court action against California, King County, Wa., and New Jersey for inhibiting federal enforcement of immigration law. Barr’s press conference was the equivalent of Lincoln’s call for volunteers after the firing on Ft. Sumter.
Hurray, it’s finally on!
The sham logic of the seceding jurisdictions goes something like this: we need to maintain the cooperation of immigrant neighborhoods by not assisting federal immigration authorities as we enforce our laws, so we will ignore Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1996. Section 287(g) empowers state and local authorities to assist in the transfer of illegal immigrants with federal criminal violations. One of the sheriff’s elected in 2018 with the support of $175,000 from the ACLU was Gary McFadden in Mecklenburg County, NC. He crowed on election night, “287(g) is going to be history!”
McFadden runs for Mecklenburg County sheriff with the support of Maxine Waters (D, Ca.)
Leftists like McFadden use rationales that are invented to hide a real purpose, which in this case is the goal of advancing the idea of a nation of disjointed tribes (radical multiculturalism). Immigration law stands in the way of bringing about this utopia – or dystopia in reality.
If you think about it, the rationale succeeds at reaching new heights of silliness. Why single out immigration law for this exclusive treatment? The same logic could apply to federal larceny, counterfeiting, contraband, and kidnapping suspects who were taken into custody by local authorities on state charges. Illegal immigrants are by definition lawbreakers and are preternaturally nervous whenever ICE officers appear anywhere for anything. Whether it’s the receipt of stolen identities, drug dealing, the kidnapping of an adolescent girl across state lines, or nothing, by an “undocumented” neighbor, the rest of the “undocumented” will concentrate on remaining under the fed’s radar. The “woke” localists’ reasoning is actually a call for an abandonment of all federal law anywhere a large concentration of illegal immigrants exists. And we have massive concentrations of millions of the “undocumented” (10-22 million, anyone’s guess) since the spigot of immigration – legal and illegal – was first thrown wide open in 1965.
Migrants who crossed the US-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. (photo: Photo: AP / US Customs and Border Protection)
The secessionists hang their hat on their interpretation of 287(g) as “voluntary”. Voluntary or no, a state or local government can’t inhibit the federal government from carrying out its constitutional powers. Court rulings have protected state and local governments from being forced to financially support a federal responsibility. But when does “voluntary” and “not being forced” stray into interference? Do these jurisdictions generally withhold cooperation with other local jurisdictions, other than the federal government on immigration law? Are the costs for holding a local suspect for violations of federal law so burdensome? In a federated republic, like ours, the police powers are shared; therefore, law enforcement in a governmental arrangement of overlapping layers ipso facto mandates the incurring of costs of cooperation since criminal activity strays across the nation and levels of government. Call it the costs of doing business in a federated republic.
In the end, we are left with radical left-wing localities and states who have in effect nullified federal immigration law as if they have the power to pick and choose the federal government’s constitutional powers that they will recognize. They refuse to share information and release suspects before the feds can get their hands on them. The behavior goes beyond the exercise of state and local sovereignty and into blocking the enforcement of federal law.
Segregationists of the old South would be proud. No state or local government has the power to act as if the 14th Amendment or federal immigration law has been repealed. The costs of intergovernmental cooperation aren’t burdensome when they are limited to briefly holding suspects or sharing information. It’s nonsense to conclude that any cost is the equivalent of the forceful conscription of local government for the benefit of the feds. Otherwise, we are the United Nations General Assembly and not the United States of America.
Bernie Sanders strides to the podium to announce his victory in the New Hampshire Democrat primary, 2/11/2020. (photo: Jessica Rinaldi/Boston Globe)
The red/blue assignment on our election maps is wrong. The Democrats should be red, like the Labor Party in Britain. Now, anywhere from 25% to 35% of Democrat voters favor an avowed socialist. With Sanders’s narrow plurality in New Hampshire, to go along with his plurality in Iowa, he is in the hunt to win the nomination if not earn the moniker of “front runner”. In the past, the Dems got away with it through advocacy of slow-motion socialism – espousing socialism with plausible deniability.
Plausible deniability was accomplished by flippant self-identification as a “capitalist” – Warren’s trick. Capitalist or no, the Dems have pressed closer and closer to more and more government control of the economy and much of everything else. Socialism should be defined as “control” of the economy and not limited to “ownership”. Control is achieved with or without ownership.
Elizabeth on the campaign trail, 2019. (photo: Ethan Miller)
Sorry, Elizabeth Warren, you ought not get way with denying your true self. Sanders is more honest than you are.
Last night’s results removed the mask. To be a Democrat, you have just painted yourself one of the many shades of red … along with the espousal of taxpayer-funded abortion from conception to the drive home from the hospital – another kind of red.
John Lennon and George Harrison in the heady days of the Beatles.
While listening to Pandora during my exercise routine, I was reacquainted with a much-loved tune by George Harrison, “All Those Years Ago”. It is a tribute to John Lennon. My mind turned to the symbiotic relationship between words and music. A lovely tune can make words have a strong pull on our sentiments and carry with them the ring of truth. Words standing alone can be easily rejected, but wrap them up in music and they can seem like the siren call of the angels. Yet, are they? I think not.
George Harrison and John Lennon of The Beatles talking to the press and media at Bangor following the news of the death of their manager Brian Epstein, 27th August 1967. (Photo by Stephen Shakeshaft/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)
With deep sincerity, Harrison turns Lennon into something of a wise prophet when he refers to two of Lennon’s songs: “Imagine” and “All You Need Is Love”. Harrison recalls that others saw his friend as “so weird”. Yes, Lennon was caricatured as “weird”, and in a sense he was. I don’t mean in the literal meaning of the word. Lennon absorbed an emerging ethos of the 60’s that the world’s problems could be cured with “love”. Now that’s weird, and categorically wrong. Separating “love” from God and espousing a sterile and secularized form of it, as Lennon does in “Imagine”, leaves us with a longing for a vacuous impossibility: the universal embrace of a love-without-God. It’s self-defeating and ignores the reality of ourselves and our experience.
From the June 25, 1967 One World broadcast of “All You Need is Love.”
I fully empathize with Harrison’s purpose in his striving to fondly remember his dear friend, but his dear friend came to symbolize in the public imagination much that was wrong with the counter-culture and peace movement. We are still living with the consequences in our drug epidemics, a promiscuity that has emasculated the family, and a self-centeredness that has brought many to ruin.
Opioid addict. “Getting high” became therapeutic in the 1960’s. The falsehood entered the social mainstream in a big way after the 1960’s.
Oh well, enjoy the tune. Ironically, I find it to be one of Harrison’s best.
Here are the lyrics, if you’re interested:
I’m shouting all about love
While they treated you like a dog
When you were the one who had made it so clear
All those years ago
I’m talking all about how to give
They don’t act with much honesty
But you point the way to the truth when you say
“All you need is love”
Living with good and bad
I always looked up to you
Now we’re left cold and sad
By someone, the devil’s best friend
Someone who offended all
We’re living in a bad dream
They’ve forgotten all about mankind
And you were the one they backed up to the wall
All those years ago
You were the one who imagined it all
All those years ago.
Deep in the darkest night
I send out a prayer to you
Now in the world of light
Where the spirit free of lies
And all else that we despised
They’ve forgotten all about God
He’s the only reason we exist
Yet you were the one that they said was so weird
All those years ago
You said it all though not many had ears
All those years ago
You had control of our smiles and our tears
All those years ago.
All those years ago …
All those years ago …
All those years ago …
The metaphor is apt when applied to recent pronouncements and actions of Democrat partisans. The campaign against the winner of the 2016 presidential election most recently descended into foolish impeachment, and may have insinuated promiscuous impeachment into our national political life. Previously, calls to shake up our constitutional order were fixated on the dismantlement of the Electoral College, all this to guarantee more Democrats win the presidency. It’s shameful and grossly irresponsible, like children lighting matches to ignite a cherry bomb.
Are they cognizant of the dangers that they are foisting on us? Trent England, vice president of the Oklahoma Public Affairs Council, lays out the jeopardy to all of us in his piece, “The Dangers of the Attacks on the Electoral College” in Hillsdale College’s Imprimis (June 2019). It’s a must-read.
The effects of foolishness seldom are limited to the offender when it is performed on a political stage, and on a national one at that. Many foolhardy ideas have their origin in ignorance of the past, or a terrible misreading of it. Not well-understood is the fact that the Founders rejected a national plebiscite for choosing the president because they were fearful of domination by areas with high concentrations of population and regions with a unity of purpose. It was a check on narrow interests seizing control of the executive machinery of government.
It worked as a restraint on one of our worst tendencies: to mistakenly see the world through the lens of our immediate neighborhood and the confines of our acquaintances as the ultimate arbiter of “truth”, as in the Jim Crow South or today’s ultra-left California. Indeed, there is a historical symmetry between the Jim Crow South of yesteryear and today’s populous and heavily urbanized states like California, Illinois, and New York. The post-Civil War South accounted for an average of 10.6 % of the vote and the California of 2016 was 10.4% of it.
In the elections of 1876, 1880, and 1888, the old South – the old South of real black voter suppression, not the phony kind falsely attributed to voter ID – was prevented from imposing their partisan choices on the rest of the country. After all, this was the South of region-wide block voting for the Democratic Party, no matter what. This is a region of “yellow dog Democrats” stretching from North Carolina to Texas who “would sooner vote for a Democrat yellow dog than a Republican”. Sounds like a typical faculty lounge, big city, or Manhattan/Hollywood soiree of today.
Four of the five ladies of The View are noticeably chagrined and incredulous at having to hear the occasional disagreements of Megan McCain. The four reflect the bubble of the new “yellow dog Democrat”.
Donald Trump, Jr., in the hot seat on The View.
To deal with their frustration, our deeply blue, and occasionally purple, states have contrived a scheme to repeal the Electoral College without an amendment. It’s called the National Popular Vote (NPV) initiative. The thing would try to impose a presidential popular vote by getting enough states to pass statewide measures to require the nationwide vote total to determine their state’s electors. The scammers’ goal is to win over enough states to equal a majority of the Electoral College total, 270. Thereby, the old fuddy-duddy Electoral College will be practically repealed without having to do it the right way: by amendment. The schemers are currently ready to surpass 200.
Robert Burns’ “best laid plans of mice and men [go wrong]” is about to be confirmed again. The ploy is anti-constitutional as well as unconstitutional. First, the gimmick violates the original intent of the Founders, but, then again, when did progressives/socialists ever concern themselves with original intent. The Founders stipulated that a state’s electors were chosen by the states, not a national statistic like the national vote total. The easy-out for progressives is for all troublesome law to be interpreted out of existence. That’s anti-constitutional.
Secondly, the subterfuge violates Article 1, Section 10 of the Constitution. This troubling passage to progressives requires all interstate compacts to be approved by Congress, and this most assuredly is an interstate compact, whether they want to call it that or not. They’ll try to hide under the Constitutional power of each state to determine their method of choosing electors. But, as in all things, a limiting principle applies: a state can, if they don’t violate the Constitution in the process.
Like this latest round of impeachment, the gambit is a sham. Who in their right mind would want to live under the dictates of the lunatic cultural left? Remember, these states have some of the loosest election laws since troglodytes had to choose a tribal chief. They’ll run up the score with their usual shenanigans and the rest of us will be saddled with the result. Is this any way to run a republic?
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.
Elizabeth Warren is trying to right her sinking ship of a presidential campaign by appealing to the crazy left base of the Democratic Party with more and more outrageous utterances. Last Thursday (Jan. 30), she submitted a question in the impeachment trial by attacking the character of the Chief Justice, the presiding officer in the Senate trial. She basically accused him of being a shill for the president and Republicans. Watch the Chief Justice in a multi-second stare at the senator.
This not the way to “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (Dale Carnegie, 1936) . She would do well to get the book and read it. Under “Fundamental Techniques in Handling People”: #1, “Don’t criticize, condemn, or complain.”
Previously, she belittled the office of Secretary of Education by notifying the world that a “trans” child would make the choice if she wins the presidency. What?! Is she showing how far she will go to shamelessly humiliate herself at the altar of woke patronization. At what point is the word “despicable” appropriate in describing a politician?
