I’ll just place this here without any personal commentary, specifically for @wade2big…
“The Biden administration, with assent from California politicos, bureaucrats, Indian tribes, and green activists, is partnering with the state to destroy four major dams on Northern California’s Klamath River. Their ostensible idea is to facilitate better salmon runs, in part due to concessions to Native American lobbyists.
The government brags that the dismantling will mark the greatest destruction of dams in history—as if 1984-like regress is progress. Note: this will likely start a trend. So expect to see more dam busting in our future, especially in the Pacific Northwest where dams, hydroelectric power, flood control, and irrigation created the region’s 20th-century prosperity.
Such radical environmentalism might make sense if California was underpopulated, enjoying a budget surplus, blessed with excess water capacity, exporting electricity, and not subject to wild cycles of drought and flooding.
But the reality is that blowing up dams is about the worst policy the state could adopt given present realities of a water-short, 41-million-person state that each night imports huge amounts of electricity, suffers from alternating droughts and floods, and enjoys beautiful man-made recreation lakes for millions of middle and lower-middle class residents in its northern and eastern mountain ranges.
The state downplays these concerns, claiming the dams are of little value for flood control or for ensuring water supplies, and provide a mere 70-80,000 homes electricity, etc. etc., while the region’s surrounding population seems clearly opposed to the destructions.
So the Klamath nihilist project is a sort of mammoth California Water Project in reverse. It will jump-start a larger process of undoing the century of dam, reservoir, and aqueduct building that made viable the California anomaly of two-thirds of the population living where one-third of the precipitation falls.
In another Orwellian twist, over half of the money needed to blow up the dams will come from a California water bond once passed by voters on the misinformation and disinformation that it would likely go to building more dams for water storage. Or as NPR gleefully put it, the cost is covered, “with another $250 million from a California voter-approved water bond.”In California, a water bond translates into destroying water projects.
Dam busting is but a tiny part of a larger decivilization project wrought by elites who experiment on the middle class as if they were white rats in a university lab, with the proviso that the architects of chaos never assume they will never experience the blowback themselves.
Have you noticed who suffered from the lockdowns? Amazon, or mom-and-pop stores? Did Dr. Fauci worry about the millions who lost two years of their schooling and have never caught up? Did the criminologist at Harvard or Stanford who dreamed up critical legal theory or emasculating the police ever live in the inner city?
So what do defunding the police, outlawing clean-burning natural gas heaters and cooktops, allowing the homeless to take over the streets of major American cities, where storm drains send untreated feces and urine out to the nearby bay, destroying the southern border, and ceding on Saturday night entire swaths of the inner American city to Wild West shootouts, in which both the shooter and shot are never prosecuted, have in common?
Nihilism.
Ask yourself: who is more likely to be prosecuted: a criminal in nocturnal Chicago on a Saturday night who murders a bystander or a bystander who marched peacefully on January 6 and never entered the Capitol?
What drives this decivilizational impulse?
The age-old banes of Western civilization: affluence and leisure that convince postmodern societies that all the hard work of earlier civilization—ensuring fertility, security, plentiful food, clean water for urban use and irrigation for food production, public health that requires clean and safe streets—function as if on automatic pilot. The 1950s gave us safe water treatment plants, the 2020s gave us the new green idea of hosing feces-strewn runoff from the sidewalks to the storm drains to the oceans.
Our best and brightest must assume that our ancestors were never starving, facing constant epidemics, short of clean water, or without security at night, and so sacrificed to build and invest and ensure that their progenies might have what they did not.
The architects of decivilization are the supposed elites who come out of our purported top schools, with allegedly impressive alphabetic degrees after their names. A Pete Buttigieg is a good example of their pomposity and incompetence, as he lectures us about racist freeway clover-leaf ramps, but cannot deal with an imploding air travel industry, near-miss jet collisions, precivilizational violence on subways, blocked ports, and cargo ships stacked out to the horizon.
In other words, they are the academic“scientists” and “experts” who craft our homeless policies, defund our police, decriminalize shoplifting and carjacking, ban natural gas, and dream up mass lockdowns and quarantines (“follow the science”).
But they themselves prove quite unimpressive characters—with little or no common sense, questionable aptitude, but plenty of hubris.
In other words, our experts are those who subsidized gain-of-function viral research in Wuhan under the auspices of the People’s Liberation Army, insisted that herd immunity is of negligible value in battling COVID, planned the skedaddle from Afghanistan, bragged about their California high-speed-rail future, gave us modern monetary theory that pooh-poohed $31 trillion in aggregate debt, and laughed at broken-windows theories as they turned the subways and rails of a once safe New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles into something out of the era of the 1870s train robberies.
A final note to this epidemic of decivilization.
Have you noticed that our elites never apologize, never concede, never express remorse? A John Kerry wants to take away gas hot water heaters, but not Gulfstreams. Gavin Newsom would put you in jail for “not following the science” if you did not wear a mask in a park but had no problem dining while maskless with lobbyist contributors at the tony French Laundry.
If Bay Area scientists don’t believe in dams, then why do they not cut off the vast water transfers via the California aqueduct and the Hetch Hetchy lines into the San Francisco-San Jose 8-million-person corridor?
Jack Smith may well put military veteran and Trump-aid Walt Nauta in prison for claiming “I don’t know” when asked about the movement of presidential papers at Mar-a-Lago, but he would never indict an admitted liar like former CIA Director Brennan or former interim FBI Director McCabe.
So decivilization is also a synonym for a bankrupt elite who believes the floodwaters they unleash will never drown themselves.”
“The Biden administration, with assent from California politicos, bureaucrats, Indian tribes, and green activists, is partnering with the state to destroy four major dams on Northern California’s Klamath River. Their ostensible idea is to facilitate better salmon runs, in part due to concessions to Native American lobbyists.
The government brags that the dismantling will mark the greatest destruction of dams in history—as if 1984-like regress is progress. Note: this will likely start a trend. So expect to see more dam busting in our future, especially in the Pacific Northwest where dams, hydroelectric power, flood control, and irrigation created the region’s 20th-century prosperity.
Such radical environmentalism might make sense if California was underpopulated, enjoying a budget surplus, blessed with excess water capacity, exporting electricity, and not subject to wild cycles of drought and flooding.
But the reality is that blowing up dams is about the worst policy the state could adopt given present realities of a water-short, 41-million-person state that each night imports huge amounts of electricity, suffers from alternating droughts and floods, and enjoys beautiful man-made recreation lakes for millions of middle and lower-middle class residents in its northern and eastern mountain ranges.
The state downplays these concerns, claiming the dams are of little value for flood control or for ensuring water supplies, and provide a mere 70-80,000 homes electricity, etc. etc., while the region’s surrounding population seems clearly opposed to the destructions.
So the Klamath nihilist project is a sort of mammoth California Water Project in reverse. It will jump-start a larger process of undoing the century of dam, reservoir, and aqueduct building that made viable the California anomaly of two-thirds of the population living where one-third of the precipitation falls.
In another Orwellian twist, over half of the money needed to blow up the dams will come from a California water bond once passed by voters on the misinformation and disinformation that it would likely go to building more dams for water storage. Or as NPR gleefully put it, the cost is covered, “with another $250 million from a California voter-approved water bond.”In California, a water bond translates into destroying water projects.
Dam busting is but a tiny part of a larger decivilization project wrought by elites who experiment on the middle class as if they were white rats in a university lab, with the proviso that the architects of chaos never assume they will never experience the blowback themselves.
Have you noticed who suffered from the lockdowns? Amazon, or mom-and-pop stores? Did Dr. Fauci worry about the millions who lost two years of their schooling and have never caught up? Did the criminologist at Harvard or Stanford who dreamed up critical legal theory or emasculating the police ever live in the inner city?
So what do defunding the police, outlawing clean-burning natural gas heaters and cooktops, allowing the homeless to take over the streets of major American cities, where storm drains send untreated feces and urine out to the nearby bay, destroying the southern border, and ceding on Saturday night entire swaths of the inner American city to Wild West shootouts, in which both the shooter and shot are never prosecuted, have in common?
Nihilism.
Ask yourself: who is more likely to be prosecuted: a criminal in nocturnal Chicago on a Saturday night who murders a bystander or a bystander who marched peacefully on January 6 and never entered the Capitol?
What drives this decivilizational impulse?
The age-old banes of Western civilization: affluence and leisure that convince postmodern societies that all the hard work of earlier civilization—ensuring fertility, security, plentiful food, clean water for urban use and irrigation for food production, public health that requires clean and safe streets—function as if on automatic pilot. The 1950s gave us safe water treatment plants, the 2020s gave us the new green idea of hosing feces-strewn runoff from the sidewalks to the storm drains to the oceans.
Our best and brightest must assume that our ancestors were never starving, facing constant epidemics, short of clean water, or without security at night, and so sacrificed to build and invest and ensure that their progenies might have what they did not.
The architects of decivilization are the supposed elites who come out of our purported top schools, with allegedly impressive alphabetic degrees after their names. A Pete Buttigieg is a good example of their pomposity and incompetence, as he lectures us about racist freeway clover-leaf ramps, but cannot deal with an imploding air travel industry, near-miss jet collisions, precivilizational violence on subways, blocked ports, and cargo ships stacked out to the horizon.
In other words, they are the academic“scientists” and “experts” who craft our homeless policies, defund our police, decriminalize shoplifting and carjacking, ban natural gas, and dream up mass lockdowns and quarantines (“follow the science”).
But they themselves prove quite unimpressive characters—with little or no common sense, questionable aptitude, but plenty of hubris.
In other words, our experts are those who subsidized gain-of-function viral research in Wuhan under the auspices of the People’s Liberation Army, insisted that herd immunity is of negligible value in battling COVID, planned the skedaddle from Afghanistan, bragged about their California high-speed-rail future, gave us modern monetary theory that pooh-poohed $31 trillion in aggregate debt, and laughed at broken-windows theories as they turned the subways and rails of a once safe New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles into something out of the era of the 1870s train robberies.
A final note to this epidemic of decivilization.
Have you noticed that our elites never apologize, never concede, never express remorse? A John Kerry wants to take away gas hot water heaters, but not Gulfstreams. Gavin Newsom would put you in jail for “not following the science” if you did not wear a mask in a park but had no problem dining while maskless with lobbyist contributors at the tony French Laundry.
If Bay Area scientists don’t believe in dams, then why do they not cut off the vast water transfers via the California aqueduct and the Hetch Hetchy lines into the San Francisco-San Jose 8-million-person corridor?
Jack Smith may well put military veteran and Trump-aid Walt Nauta in prison for claiming “I don’t know” when asked about the movement of presidential papers at Mar-a-Lago, but he would never indict an admitted liar like former CIA Director Brennan or former interim FBI Director McCabe.
So decivilization is also a synonym for a bankrupt elite who believes the floodwaters they unleash will never drown themselves.”
By: Victor Davis Hanson
