* Kabuki Theater: euphemism meaning posturing and diplomatic ritual to excess. Posturing can include effecting a stance in support of your party’s radicalism. Excessive diplomatic ritual can include today’s virtue signaling.
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Why must science be littered with non-science and public discussions revel in incoherent banalities? Even in seemingly sensible write-ups that rely on scientific expertise, we’ll run into the occasional assertion that jumps the evidence and logic. Furthermore, public figures babble in a string of emotive, highly charged phrases without much support or reasoning that advance understanding. The drivel rears most prominently when talk strays to climate change and guns.
Science is inductive, the scientific method, evidence, empiricism, falsifiability. That isn’t true when it comes to climate change, formerly known by a host of other monikers. In an otherwise sane piece by Richard Luthy, Stanford prof of civil and environmental engineering, on how California could harness the recent storm runoff to address water needs, he polluted his sensible suggestion about using aquifers as cisterns to store the runoff with the hackneyed contention that man has made a shambles of the climate. It certainly gets the ruling donkey party off the hook for running the state into the ground . . . instead of the storm water.
Like its poorly maintained forests that erupt into historic conflagrations, rickety electricity grid, and an aging water system built for 10 million fewer people, the state’s dangerous water shortage is a consequence of a ruling ideological orthodoxy translated into policy that has run roughshod over the state for decades.
It’s not that California voters didn’t punch the ticket for billions for water projects. Prop 1 in 2014 set aside $7.1 billion, and Props 68 and 3 in 2018 added almost $13 billion. Out of the $20 billion, about a third went to “Habitat Restoration”, play money for the eco-zealots. “Water Infrastructure” and “Reservoir Storage” account for only 43% of the total.
Californians thought that they were getting more water, but obviously aren’t. Where’s the new reservoirs, aqueducts, and recharge basins? It’s been eight years. I suspect that water projects face the same fate of any big construction in the state. They get strangled in the crib by California red tape and the delaying tactics of eco-activists (lawsuits, political skullduggery, etc.). Compounding the morass is the ideological affinity between the state’s bureaucratic minions and the zealots. So, in the end, you get the eco stuff, which is unchallenged, and not an ounce of additional water for you.
Don’t lay the problem at the feet of fossil fuels. Dry years should be expected in dry-summer climates. The Mediterranean climate that hovers over most of the state, with its dry-summer regime, only produces an annual precipitation average of 6-25 inches. The drier the climate, the more erratic is the precipitation. California has experienced 11 periods of drought since 1841, some lasting as long as seven years. At the time of the Middle Ages in Europe, California was mired in two long droughts, one lasted 220 years and the other 140. Dry-summer means a short window to get moisture, and if you don’t get it in those few months, you go without. Drought is a feature, not a stranger to the area, and not an effect of our love affair with the automobile, suburbia, and indoor lighting. The phenomena happened when only hunter-gatherers were around.
An engineer and scientist like Luthy should know better. The mention, as he does, of dry periods since 2000 is scant reason to let the Sacramento clown car off the hook. It’s even more of a scandal to science to use the incidents since 2000 as proof of climate change being the root of our evils. It’s hooey. The simple fact of the matter is that two-thirds of the water falls over the sparsely populated one-third of the state, in a region prone to drought since the end of the last ice age. Someone should take notice rather than foolishly run interference for the dolts in Sacramento and the state’s electorate.
The national electorate fairs no better sometimes. We’ve got a guy in the oval office who would be better off in a retirement home under close medical supervision. It must be admitted that Biden has an excuse – he’s old – but the under-50’s in the party sound no more intelligible. Mention “guns” and the limbic part of their brain takes over. Images of tv/movie shootouts immediately overwhelm what little they know on the subject. For Biden, as ossified in the brain as he is, he trots out one banality after another leaving the public in a state of bewilderment.
Charles C. W. Cooke writes of Biden’s use of trite rhetorical phrases when he talks about firearms. Biden trundles them out like Bill Clinton’s stock of pickup lines for seducing the hired help. Some of Biden’s juicy ones include “You can’t buy a cannon”, “Deer don’t wear Kevlar”, and my personal favorite, “If you want to take on the federal government, you need some F-15s, not an AR-15.” When in the history of our citizen republic is it proper for government to tell you what you need? Any government that can tell you what you need is one that treats its public as a collection of wooden puppets. Government as puppet master turns the popular sovereignty thing upside down.
The late George Orwell had some interesting things to say, per Cooke, about your alleged need for “some F-15s” to take on the federal government. For Orwell, government’s possession of sophisticated weaponry in relation to the citizen was a prerequisite for despotism: “Ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance.” Rifles and grenades are inherently democratic, and F-15s, aircraft carriers, and hypersonics are not. Biden’s formulation reduces the citizen to prostrate serfs, only getting the weapons that meet the approval of Biden’s commissars.
He completely misses the point of the Second Amendment. Cooke reminds us that the Constitution was made by a bunch of “insurrectionists” – people who birthed a country in armed revolt against a tyrannical government. The act of taking up arms against their government was memorialized in the Declaration of Independence: “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it . . . .” Thankfully, we aren’t there yet.
But lately, there’s been some extended eyebrow raising. Your government school indoctrinates your kids in neo-Marxist revolutionary dogmas; the attempt to establish censorship boards under the guise of “misinformation”; the attacks on the faithful for their refusal to violate their creeds when they refuse to kowtow to the government-approved zeitgeist; the loose talk among some of the powerful calling for gun confiscation; the refusal to enforce laws to protect people, property, and businesses; threats of taking away our gas stoves and cars and fuel under color of “saving the planet”; our children are prevented from receiving awards of excellence, such as National Merit Scholarships, because of government’s slavish devotion to neo-Marxist “equity”; our immigration laws are not enforced which tosses down the border exposing us to intensified villainy; our girls aren’t safe in their locker rooms, bathrooms, and in competitions; infanticide under the rhetorical rubric of “abortion”; child genital mutilation under “gender-affirming care” without parental knowledge and consent; and government turning a conspicuous blind eye as investment houses play revolutionary footsie (ESG) with my retirement. Did I miss anything?
Now Biden wants to tell me how many cartridges I can have in my gun. He forgets that the citizen’s right to firearms stems from a tradition that goes back to before the English Bill of Rights (1689). Those “Protestants” in the English Bill of Rights wanted their weapons to protect themselves from more than a burglar. Speaking of the limbic system of government apparatchiks, buried deep within it is the knowledge that the country’s citizens are armed thanks to the Second Amendment. American citizens aren’t prostrate serfs.
One of the key purposes of the Second Amendment is the right of the people to protect themselves not from government but the people in the government, the kind of people who would force citizens into acts that violate their faith, censor their speech, and make their life a living hell. Much of that government knavery is sanctioned carte blanche by climate change delirium. Combine the revolutionary dictums with Biden’s butchery of the country’s founding and we end up impoverished and manacled before our rulers.
It’s an insidious Kabuki Theater.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Rain finally came to California. We blew our chance to use it”, Richard G. Luthy, San Francisco Chronicle, 1/17/23, at https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Rain-came-to-California-we-blew-chance-to-use-it-17723529.php#:~:text=Rain%20finally%20came%20to%20California.%20We%20blew%20our,received.%20Patrick%20Tehan%20%2F%20Special%20to%20the%20Chronicle
* “How Much California Water Bond Money Is For Storage?”, Edward Ring, 8/9/2018, California Policy Center, at https://californiapolicycenter.org/how-much-california-water-bond-money-is-for-storage/
* “California drought: Past dry periods have lasted more than 200 years, scientists say”, The Mercury News, at https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/01/25/california-drought-past-dry-periods-have-lasted-more-than-200-years-scientists-say/
* “Severe Ancient Droughts: A Warning to California”, New York Times, 7/19/1994, at https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/19/science/severe-ancient-droughts-a-warning-to-california.html
* “Tree-Ring Study Reveals Historical Drought Record in Southern California”, 3/12/2018, California Dept. of Water Resources, at https://water.ca.gov/News/News-Releases/2018/March-18/Tree-Ring-Study-Reveals-Historical-Drought-Record-in-Southern-California
* “Biden’s Most Grotesque Gun-Control Argument”, Charles C.W. Cooke, National Review Online, 1/17/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/bidens-most-grotesque-gun-control-argument/