Posted on 04/20/2015 9:00:59 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
California’s drought and how it’s handled show just what kind of place the Golden State is becoming: feudal, super-affluent and with an impoverished interior. California has met the future, and it really doesn’t work. As the mounting panic surrounding the drought suggests, the Golden State, once renowned for meeting human and geographic challenges, is losing its ability to cope with crises. As a result, the great American land of opportunity is devolving into something that resembles feudalism, a society dominated by rich and poor, with little opportunity for upward mobility for the state’s middle- and working classes.
The water situation reflects this breakdown in the starkest way. Everyone who follows California knew it was inevitable we would suffer a long-term drought. Most of the state—including the Bay Area as well as greater Los Angeles—is semi-arid, and could barely support more than a tiny fraction of its current population. California’s response to aridity has always been primarily an engineering one that followed the old Roman model of siphoning water from the high country to service cities and farms.
But since the 1970s, California’s water system has become the prisoner of politics and posturing. The great aqueducts connecting the population centers with the great Sierra snowpack are all products of an earlier era—the Los Angeles aqueduct (1913), Hetch-Hetchy (1923), the Central Valley Project (1937), and the California Aqueduct (1974). The primary opposition to expansion has been the green left, which rejects water storage projects as irrelevant.
Yet at the same time greens and their allies in academia and the mainstream press are those most likely to see the current drought as part of a climate change-induced reduction in snowpack. That many scientists disagree with this assessment is almost beside the point.
(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...
And the supreme irony is that CA is blessed with so many natural resources including both oil and water. Imagine the potential the state could have it were allowed to access its resources.
Hunger Games
Eighty years ago, the idea of clearing land for homes, farms and roads was a no-brainer. The idea of building dams for power generation and the regulation of rivers so we wouldn’t have floods alternating with droughts was so obvious that only a crazy person would argue against it.
Now we have regulations on people so bugs and fishes can have comfortable lives.
The crazy people have taken over, and the sane people have to ask permission to be excused for living.
Ayn Rand called them looters.
Ayn Rand called them looters.
Happy Hunger Games and may the odds be ever in your favor.
Soylent Green.
“When those who produce must seek permission from those who produce nothing, your society is finished.’’.- Ayn Rand.
I hated to leave California, but I could see what it was becoming. There is just no opportunity there and if you didn’t inherit property, you can only buy it if you are willing and able to carry monstrous debt to the grave. The big cities are soon to be nothing but welfare pens surrounded by desert wasteland. The high hillsides reserved as gated enclaves for the super rich. It will be a lot like Rio de Janeiro.
And our train has arrived at that station.
The motor of the world is grinding to a halt.
Politically, it’s an opening for a Republican to step in and challenge the Democrats...in chaos there is profit. As long as it’s not a loser like the “terminator.”
Dead on. The People’s Democratic Republic of Kalifornia is circling the drain.
Kalifornia is a one party state. There will never be another Republican Governor.
Ah. That’s the way the Hollywood crowd would like it.
We also have billion dollar high speed rail projects that go to the middle of nowhere.
Yup. Each night before I go to bed I say, ‘’Lord, you can take me now, I’m ready’’. I don’t want to be here when America collapses. In a way I’m glad I never had children of my own. It would kill me to see the world their going to inherit. It do have a step-son and his children, my grandsons, are oblivious to what the future is. My daughter-in-law is from Canada. She warned us about socialized medicine. She loves it here and although she doesn’t like to discuss politics I think she’s beginning to realize and see the signs around her that a collapse is coming and it worries her.
I understand your feelings. But I’m not ready to go. In some ways I feel like being older gives me an advantage in that should the SHTF I have fewer years of life to lose. Perhaps it will give me the freedom to take some of the “looters” with me if necessary.
My daughter is a survivor. She has lived and traveled outside the US extensively. On the cheap.
Her attitude is that if it gets ugly enough here, she’s leaving. She fell in love with Uruguay, she said had she not had a good job here, she might have stayed and had us bring her dogs to her.
If I was younger, had decent hearing and the ability to learn another language, I would give some consideration to that notion myself.
The only good thing Brown ever did was Linda rondstat.
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