RICHARD FERNANDEZ: How the World to the Dark Tower Came.

Knowledge inequality makes “magical” solutions inevitable because an ever smaller fraction of the public know how things work or are paid for.  Healthcare woes?  Medicare for all. Housing crisis?  Make affordable housing a “right”.  Students choking under loans?  Write it off.  Graduates without literacy or numeracy?  Teach Woke Math.

Fix the wildfires by tightly regulating development sounds like a solution.  Following Arthur C. Clarke’s famous adage that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” many things are now solved by linguistic legerdemain.  Ever since Apollo politicians have been invoking associative magic as political spells:

“Nothing is impossible in this age of miracles. If we can put a man on the Moon, we surely are capable of seeing that our temporary surplus agricultural products are placed in many hungry stomachs of the world.” …

Nixon’s Democratic opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, used the phrase in his standard stump speech: “If we can put a man on the Moon, certainly we can afford to put man on his feet on Earth.”

Sending a spacecraft to the lunar surface and solving homelessness might be different problems but with a few similes and metaphors they can be ‘magically’ connected and thus solved.

Read the whole thing.