Opinion
An expert, it is said, is someone who knows more and more about less and less, until finally they know everything about nothing. We’re constantly lectured to “listen to the experts”: the problem is, though, that the experts have spent the last five years especially proving to everyone who’s paying attention just how little they really seem to know about anything.
Professor Neil Ferguson, for instance, is the expert on disease outbreaks. The only thing is that he has been consistently, dreadfully, wrong about every disease outbreak in the last few decades. “Siouxsie” Wiles is an “expert”, too; so is Shaun Hendy. Both of them gave ol Fergie a good run for his money in the “whoopsie, wrong again!” stakes.
Tim Flannery is another expert, on, well, pretty much everything, if his endless pontifications are to be taken seriously. Especially climate change. Except that, yet again, he’s been consistently hilariously wrong about climate change. He’s particularly given us an endless motherlode of comedy gold with his portentous predictions that Australia would never have flooding rain again, nor would our dams ever fill again. One can’t help but wonder if he thought back on those words as the floods crept, yet again, toward his luxurious riverside abode.
Not to be outdone, “experts” in the Golden State also predicted endless, withering drought.
SoCal’s weather is cyclical. A few wet years, a few dry years. It’s always been that way. But then “climate experts” began exploiting the dry years to sow panic that rain was never coming back. After two record dry years in 2014 and 2015, during which the “experts” decreed that rain was over, done, forever, we had a record wet season 2016–2017. At the time, February 2017, I wrote about how, because of the “experts,” California had stopped building reservoirs, because why build reservoirs if rain’s gone for good?
And now, after the record-breaking wet season of 2023 and what’s shaping up to be an even wetter one in 2024, even Gavin Newsom—arguably the most ideologically rigid governor in the state’s history—is finally admitting that the “experts” were wrong and we do need new reservoirs to hold the rain from the wet years so we can use them during the dry ones.
If you think California’s bureaucrats have come to what little senses they might have, think again.
Newsom’s fast-tracked a new reservoir. Standing in his way? The climate “experts” who refuse to admit they were wrong about reservoirs, and the drunken Injuns they’re using as proxies. Under California law, a public works project can be halted if “indigenous natives” claim it harms their culture, and a group of liquored-up ugh-amugh-ughs are trying to hold up the new reservoir by declaring that the dam harms their (and this is a direct quote) “spiritually important fish.”
This is almost as ridiculous as a West Australian farmer facing jail for “angering the Rainbow Serpent”, or a bridge in South Australia being held up for years because of the “ancient Aboriginal Secret Women’s Business” that the lagoon it would span supposedly looked like a giant vajayjay when seen from the air (what Aborigines were doing flying, pre-1788, is anyone’s guess).
But there’s nothing so ludicrous that an expert won’t believe it. Especially if they can dress it up in a bit of oogabooga. The same people who sneer at simple Mexican peasants praying to a piss-stain on a wall that looks a bit like the Virgin Mary, fall to their knees when some witch doctor in feathers and paint tells them a tall story about magic space vaginas.
If only these idiots didn’t have real-world clout.
Here’s the funny (or unfunny, depending on your perspective) part: As Newsom is lobbying for a new reservoir, the “experts” and Injuns are dismantling the ones we have. While Newsom—this very month—fast-tracked the Sites Reservoir project in Northern Cal, the state—this very month—is dismantling four reservoirs in Northern Cal. Yes, at the same time that Gavin conceded, “We need more reservoirs,” the state is building one and destroying four. The dismantling of the four Klamath dams/reservoirs—which supply water and power to much of the state—is described by the AP as “the largest dam removal project in United States history” and by PBS/OPB as “the world’s largest dam removal.”
And why’s it being done? To “free from dams” (again, in the words of the AP) “fish that are culturally and spiritually important to several Native American tribes in the area.”
If this seems retarded to you—ordering the construction of one new NorCal reservoir to manage water while spending $500 million (which is just the projected cost—expect the final bill to be around $2 billion) to dismantle four because Injuns think guppies are gods, you’re correct; it’s heap big retarded.
Even more deadly to the cult of “expertise” is that these two warring cults of “experts” are blatantly contradicting each other. The very people who tell us to bow down before THE SCIENCE can’t even agree among themselves on what THE SCIENCE is. Is it free the magic fish or storing water for the dry times?
There are government-sanctioned “experts” on both sides […] how can one group of California “experts” be saying “build more reservoirs” while another is saying “destroy all reservoirs”? If there is a “thee science,” why aren’t the water management “experts” concerned that there’s a split in which some experts take one position while others take a wholly contradictory one?
Well, it’s because government-anointed “experts” only like to debunk the bunk from lowlife commoners. Joe Rogan, Alex Jones, etc. And yes, their bunk is indeed bunk. But when one government-approved expert disagrees with another government-approved expert, each can totally live with the contradiction, because a public fight might expose the fact that “thee scientists” can’t agree on “thee science.” Publicizing this inconvenient truth might empower commoner scum to embrace the bunk that isn’t government-sanctioned.
It’s not just incredibly useful dams that are being laid waste in these wars of the “experts”. Even the humble fountain in your local park is a battleground.
In the late 1990s up to around 2012, it was a crusade on the part of “climate change” cultists to remove water features from parks […] “green experts” like Amy Vickers, in-house water-management commissar at USA Today, New York Times, Boston Globe, Atlanta Journal & Constitution, CNN, and NPR (and policy consultant for New York and Boston city government), lobbied for all outdoor water features to be “banned.” Ditto “experts” in Oregon (where it never rains!), who demanded that “waterfalls, ponds, and fountains” be “drained.” Nevada also banned all new water features. Even Florida (pre-DeSantis) restricted water features.
So, once pleasant little ponds and man-made streams and waterfalls were turned into weed-and-rubbish-strewn ditches. They had to destroy the park to save it from climate change!
Except…
Turns out the “experts” were wrong. In a shift in “thee science” that went totally unnoticed by everyone, “climate change” kingpins have now realized that water features don’t contribute to “global warming,” but fight it.
Takimag
Suddenly, everyone from the (Vatic)UN to the Institute of Physics (now, you don’t get more THE SCIENCE-y than that) agree that fountains and water features have a cooling effect. In the words of the WEF, “water features make cities more climate-change resilient”.
At least, until some obese, pasty drunk in some ocher and a possum-skin cloak suddenly remembers that water features make the jinga-jinga spirits plenty big angry.