Posts tagged progressive

In Crazifornia, I make the point that the state is no longer a democracy, having been converted – without the people’s consent – into a technocracy.  Here’s a bit of that from the manuscript:

Perhaps most to blame for the demise of California is the legislature’s determination to dodge accountability for its Progressive actions.  To do this, it has turned California into a technocracy, transferring the real power from the people and the electeds to technical experts – well, supposedly expert – in the state’s many large and powerful regulatory agencies, commissions and boards. 

It is these technocrats who go about imposing the will of the Legislature through obtrusive and costly regulations and fines that were never approved by any elected body.  It is they who have the power and authority to force California to meet the lofty, idealistic goals of AB 32, the state’s quixotic cure-all for global warming.  Not wanting to be blamed for all the dirty work that necessarily would follow passage of such an unrealistic and idealist bill, the legislature simply followed tradition and assigned the task to unelected technocrats further down the state government hierarchy, resulting in, among other things, California’s recent imposition of the nation’s first state-run carbon cap and trade system, without so much as a motion and second out of the legislature. 

Of course, technocrats live pretty much unaccountable lives, so they’re free to choose whatever “techno” suits their fancy. And in California, that means we’re run by technicians in global warming orthodoxy, radical environmentalism and engineered social change.  If facts get in the way, they can censor them – as they do with anything that runs counter to the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming and all the AB 32 protocols that it spawns.

Case in point:  SLR.  No, silly, not a single-lens reflex camera – it’s sea level rise.  If the sea isn’t rising, then the planet isn’t warming, so of course the sea level has to be rising.  So state agencies endlessly document sea level rise and project it to go up and up and up – which means they can exert more and more control over the coast.  (By “coast,” we really mean “California,” because that’s where you’ll find most of the state’s people, power and money.)

Here’s an example, courtesy of the California Ocean Protection Council (which is lambasted in Crazifornia) purportedly showing what sea level rise will be in Crescent City:

As you can see, the Ocean Protection Council wants you to believe the sea level on California’s north coast is surging up, and will be as much as two feet higher by the end of the century.  The trouble is, it won’t be.  It will be lower.

It’s got nothing to do with global warming and everything to do with plate techtonics.  The plate Crescent City sits on is rising, so effective sea level is dropping.  This is no secret, as the feds let us know in this counterpoint provided by the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration:

Yup.  Sea level is definitely dropping in Crescent City.  But that doesn’t follow the AB 32 dogma and undercuts the technocrats’ grip on power, so in Crazifornia, Crescent City isn’t rising, the ocean is, and the facts are censored so the people can remain blissfully ignorant as the technocrats seize more power and authority.

It’s all just more Progressivism because, you know, the elite technocrats are so much smarter than us and so much better qualified to run our lives, and our government, than we are.  Welcome to Crazifornia.

A tip of the Crazifornia hat to Neil Jordan, who provided the charts.