"You can’t rebuild the same. We have to rebuild with science. We have to build with climate reality in mind," California Gov. Gavin Newsom told CNN last week in an interview about rebuilding the burned-out Pacific Palisades. "We have to look at infrastructure or redundancy systems. Ingress, egress, as it relates to emergency management and planning materials."
The interview seems to have flown under the radar, but when I caught it this morning, a bit belatedly, my alarm bells went off left and right.
Well, to be honest, they were all on the left.
Whatever happened to Newsom's promise that he'd eliminate red tape and accelerate the rebuilding of one of L.A.'s nicest and most historic neighborhoods? The former homeowners of Pacific Palisades who were hoping to quickly rebuild from the ashes now understand to their very cores what Otter told Flounder in "Animal House": "You f***ed up, you trusted us."
Anyone dumb enough to believe Newsom's promise to get people rebuilding within six or nine months... well, they probably voted for him. Gooder and harder, California.
What Newsom says needs to be done before lots can be cleared and construction begins looks to me like a huge, centralized process involving an awful lot of well-connected and high-priced "experts" empaneled to redesign Pacific Palisades according to "scientific" principles involving all the techno-babble Newsom went on about in that CNN sit-down. Instead of, you know, letting people build the homes they want in the kind of city they like.
If the temporary council to name the permanent council has completed its initial studies on who should conduct the actual studies that will someday mandate a Scientifically Perfect Palisades in terms of those "infrastructure or redundancy systems, ingress, egress, as it relates to emergency management and planning materials" has finished finding a list of acceptable names in six months, I'd be shocked.
If you think it's expensive and time-consuming just to get permission to add a small deck on the back of a Pacific Palisades home (which it is), just wait until a panel of experts gets together to redesign the entire neighborhood from the ashes up.
None of this boondogglery (hey, I made up another new word!) comes as a surprise to Longtime Sharp VodkaPundit Readers™. It wasn't even two weeks ago that I covered Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass's plan to rebuild the Palisades in her own image (shudder), led by philanthropist, "chief recovery officer," and former LAPD commissioner Steve Soboroff. They'll hire "an outside consultant to handle a significant rebuilding contract for areas devastated by this month’s Palisades fire," as the Los Angeles Times put it, and Soboroff promised that "they’re going to represent you and make sure that everybody does exactly what they say they’re going to do."
It was revealed last week that the "philanthropist" would be paid $500,000 for overseeing all that official graft and corruption, but Soboroff quickly backed down and said he'd do it for free. Don't worry, everybody — Soboroff included — will get their beaks plenty wet.
But it's the SCIENCE! part that gets me, the hubristic notion that a certain credentialed class of people have all the correct answers and that everyone else must be made to conform to their vision. "Follow the science" is the dumbed-down-for-television version of Marx and Engel's "scientific socialism" that masked their totalitarian nightmare behind a dreamy gauze of "scientific" logic.
We have more than a century of empirical evidence from testing scientific socialism in the real world and, as Sarah Palin might ask, "How's that sciency stuff workin' out for ya?"
Newsom and Bass might design the Scientifically Perfect Palisades of their dreams, but who will live in it?
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