Pasadena Sub Rosa

SHOULD PASADENA QUIT MWD? CHIEF HAHAMONGA HAS LAST LAUGH

by Wayne Lusvardi, Pasadena Imagine your city is located next door to a valley water district with enough surplus water to meet your needs but instead your city imports about two-thirds of its water hundreds of miles from the Colorado River and the Sacramento Delta, and pays a premium price for it, resulting in environmental degradation in the process.  Do you think this is wise policy for water rate payers in a city that praises itself for its Green City Action Plan? Moreover, as your city conserves more water due to a purported drought, municipal water rates go up because of a decline in water sold, and the underground water basin in your city becomes depleted.  Again, I ask you, is this rational water planning in a city which is continually advertising that it is preserving its natural watersheds? The City of Pasadena is such a city. Pasadena's largest park, Hahamonga Park located in its famed watershed the Arroyo Seco, ironically means "land of flowing waters."  But pregnant within the Indian word Hahamonga is the idiom "ha-ha," perhaps implying that flowing water in Pasadena is a joke. A street definition of Hahamonga may be "laughing waters" with Chief Hahamonga as a green version of The Joker. The City of Pasadena is presently holding a series of workshops to gain political support for a continuation of the water status quo - de facto planned obsolescence of the Raymond Basin and greater reliance on costly imported water supplies -- all paradoxically justified in the name of environmental "sustainability."  If Pasadena, and its water special interests, were serious about sustainability it should at least consider another option -- opting out of the regional Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and instead buying surplus water from the nearby San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District, as well as recharging the Raymond Basin. Pasadena has historically been at the forefront of water planning, having been the progenitor of The Metropolitan Water District at historic meetings held at the Green Hotel about 100 years ago. The City of Pasadena and MWD are so intertwined that just the thought of bolting from MWD membership is no doubt unthinkable. But Pasadena's current dire water situation perhaps is reason to think outside the box. Pasadena's and California's water systems are broken, perhaps beyond repair. Pasadena has recently mandated a once a week outdoor watering limit in response to a drought that is normal by historical measures. The longstanding water war between northern and southern California has resulted in nothing but a political logjam with no real solution in sight. And in Imperial County a Superior Court case has just begun challenging Southern California's allocation of Colorado River water. Due to all of the above, Pasadena is nearly back to where it started about 100 years ago with its water situation.  Pasadena might as well consider starting all over again, at least as an exercise in worst-case contingency planning. Additionally, the CEQA environmental clearance process is self-defeating as to the development of any new sources of water. CEQA makes it nearly prohibitive to consider building any new reservoir in a watershed that would add to our water supply. Only pure storage reservoirs in non-watersheds are able to vet through the tortuous environmental gauntlet. But even if we could build a new reservoir in a watershed where would we get an equal amount of water for environmental mitigation?  Counting on new large water infrastructure projects such as the Peripheral Canal or the proposed "Sites" Reservoir may thus be a zero sum game that ends up as a cruel joke.    The policy question water planners and elite policy makers should be asking is not trendy environmental or partisan political questions but what is best for the long-term interests of Pasadena's water ratepayers and the natural environment which Pasadenans are passionate about. That would mean putting on the planning table the possibility of eventually quitting the MWD and working out a deal to buy imported water from the nearby San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District which reportedly will have a potential surplus of water to sell in the near future.  As SGVMWD cleans up its huge underground reservoir of water from pollution it is expected to have a surplus it could sell to others. Pasadena should be poised to consider such an arrangement, especially before others beat them to it. Of course, this would mean that Pasadena would have to at least symbolically give up its historical role as a leader of water policy. It would mean abandoning the child it created, the MWD. It would mean having to give up some political power and stature on the larger stage of California's water politics.  It would mean having to partially abandon the water conservation policies and politics it has embraced as nothing but a "dry hole." It would possibly mean having to sever its strong ties to the Sierra Club with its dead end conservation policies. It would mean giving up all the power and privileges it gets from being a member agency of MWD.  It would mean giving up having its MWD Board Member as the present Chairman of the Board of MWD. The entrapments of power are the major impediment to any consideration of quitting MWD. The technocrats in the water industry will likely laugh at any such notion of quitting MWD with replies that it just can't be done. The MWD Board would likely ask for a stranded asset termination fee for reducing its rate base (but also reducing its water demand burden). MWD's Board would demand a "wheeling fee" to use its pipelines to ship water from SGVMWD to PWP.  But all these technical and legal details could be worked out if there was political will to do so.    MWD has reached an historical juncture and is a shell of its former self. It has a history of losing nearly every large court case and political battle (Arizona vs. California case, Peripheral Canal vote, etc.). Five years ago MWD got two-thirds of its water from the Colorado River and one-third from the Sacramento Delta. Now those percentages are reversed. MWD has evolved into nothing but another state agency subject to California's dysfunctional politics. It has been unable to develop new affordable water sources. MWD is moribund and Pasadena should reconsider its long-term relationship.  On the power side of the water and power equation, Pasadena is considering opting out of its long-term arrangement with the Intermountain coal-fired power plant in Utah. It should consider something similar only with its wholesale water supplier as part of its Integrated Water Plan. Pasadena doesn't need an "Integrated Water Resources Plan" as much as it may need a water "disintegration" plan or "reintegration" plan. Pasadena may continue with the water status quo which will include drought, geyser-like water rates, once a week watering, de facto depletion of the Raymond Basin, and gradual degradation of its natural resources. In which case the last laugh ("ha-ha") will be on us or among us (Hahamonga).   

ANTI-JEWISH, NOT ANTI-ISLAMIC, HATE CRIMES ON RISE

Source: IBD Editorials

ASTROTURFING CITY WATER PLAN WORKSHOPS

This blog received the following anonymous email regarding the City of Pasadena's Water Plan Workshop

http://ww2.cityofpasadena.net/waterandpower/waterplan/

held this past week:

I'll bet the "community input" at this workshop consisted of people like David Czamanske (Sierra Club) et al and Michael Hurley (water agency technocrat) and e.g. this "Green real estate agent," Meredith McKenzie, and not one "regular" rate paying citizen in sight.

Wikipedia.com has a good definition of what is called "astroturfing" that seems to apply here:

Astroturfing is an English-language euphemism referring to political, advertising, or public relations campaigns that are formally planned by an organization, but designed to mask its origins to create the impression of being spontaneous, popular "grassroots" behavior. The term refers to AstroTurf, a brand of synthetic carpeting designed to look like natural grass.

A basic explanation is: if a grassroots movement grows upward from collective efforts, on a local level, of dedicated people donating their time and efforts to further a political or social cause they deem to be good for the many, then Astroturfing (Astroturf being an artificial grass) is an artificial grassroots movement, one that is made to appear as though it is a real grassroots movement, but it is usually done to advance a cause for the benefit of specific individuals or group(s), and most often not at a local level.

The goal of such a campaign is to disguise the efforts of a political or commercial entity as an independent public reaction to some political entity—a politician, political group, product, service or event. Astroturfers attempt to orchestrate the actions of apparently diverse and geographically distributed individuals, by both overt ("outreach", "awareness", etc.) and covert (disinformation) means. Astroturfing may be undertaken by an individual pushing a personal agenda or highly organized professional groups with financial backing from large corporations, unions, non-profits, or activist organizations. Very often the efforts are conducted by political consultants who also specialize in opposition research.

FIXING HEALTH CARE LIKE SQUEEZING A BALLOON

Maine Finds Health Care Fix Elusive

New York Times
Maine is the Charlie Brown of health care. The state’s legislators have tried for decades to fix its system, but their efforts have always fallen short: health insurance premiums are still among the least affordable in the nation, health care spending per person is among the highest and hospital emergency rooms are among the most crowded. Indeed, many overhauls to the system have done little more than squeeze a balloon — solving one problem while worsening another. More here

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/health/policy/11maine.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

DEFORESTATION OVERESTIMATED BY 100%

Preface: A new study based on measurements, not computer models, indicates that the percentage of airborne carbon dioxide has stayed the same since 1850.   The trend in airborne concentration of carbon dioxide is effectively zero (0%) over the last 150 years. It is interesting what science finds when using measurements rather than highly manipulatable computer models. 

Another finding was that deforestation has been overestimated from 18% to 75%.  That is such a remarkably wide range of error it might as well be 0% to 100%. Read below:

Controversial New Climate Change Results
from PhysOrg.com

New data show that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of carbon dioxide having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now.

This suggests that terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans have a much greater capacity to absorb CO₂ than had been previously expected.

The results run contrary to a significant body of recent research which expects that the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans to absorb CO₂ should start to diminish as CO₂ emissions increase, letting greenhouse gas levels skyrocket. Dr Wolfgang Knorr at the University of Bristol found that in fact the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has only been 0.7 ± 1.4% per decade, which is essentially zero.

The strength of the new study, published online in Geophysical Research Letters, is that it rests solely on measurements and statistical data, including historical records extracted from Antarctic ice, and does not rely on computations with complex climate models.

This work is extremely important for climate change policy, because emission targets to be negotiated at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen early next month have been based on projections that have a carbon free sink of already factored in. Some researchers have cautioned against this approach, pointing at evidence that suggests the sink has already started to decrease.

So is this good news for climate negotiations in Copenhagen? “Not necessarily”, says Knorr. “Like all studies of this kind, there are uncertainties in the data, so rather than relying on Nature to provide a free service, soaking up our waste carbon, we need to ascertain why the proportion being absorbed has not changed”.

Another result of the study is that emissions from deforestation might have been overestimated by between 18 and 75 per cent. This would agree with results published last week in Nature Geoscience by a team led by Guido van der Werf from VU University Amsterdam. They re-visited deforestation data and concluded that emissions have been overestimated by at least a factor of two.

http://www.physorg.com/news177059550.html

PRE-EMPTIVE HEADLINE: GREEDY REPUBLICAN FUND MANAGERS ACQUITTED

We can anticipate the Rebecca Kimitch headline in the PSN already - "Greedy Republican Fund Managers Acquitted."  So we might as well pre-empt the headline about how two fund managers at the Republican Bear Stearns investment firm were acquitted of fraud and other criminal charges today.  Gosh, no scapegoats. What to do, what to do, what to do? What to write, what to write, what to write? Read 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125788421912541971.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTWhatsNews

Oh yah, below is a report of how investor John Paulson (not related to former Goldman Sachs CEO and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson) reaped windfall profits in the billions for himself due to the financial meltdown. Apparently, all of Paulson's trades were lawful.  And before PSN reporter Rebecca Kimitch reads this and thinks "greeeeeed" - please understand that credit default swaps had little to do with government policies contributing to the mortgage meltdown. Read below excerpted from Paul Kedrosky blog:

Lots of chatter about Greg Zuckerman’s new book about John Paulson’s subprime trade. Titled The Greatest Trade Ever, the book chronicles how Paulson’s risky trade came together and how it paid out, controversies, warts, timing and all. I have a copy on the way and am looking forward to reading it, but here is an opening excerpt:

The tip was intriguing. It was the fall of 2007, financial markets were collapsing, and Wall Street firms were losing massive amounts of money, as if they trying to give back a decade’s worth of profits in a few brutal months. But as I aid at my desk at The Wall Street Journal, tallying the pain, a top hedge-fund manager called to rave about an investor named John Paulson who somehow was scoring huge profits. My contact, speaking with equal parts envy and respect, grabbed me with this: “Paulson’s not even a housing or mortgage guy … And until this trade, he was run-of-the-mill, nothing special.”

… Paulson’s winning were so enormous they seemed unreal, even cartoonish. His firm, Paulson & Co., made $12 billion in 2007, a figure that topped the gross domestic products of Bolivia, Honduras, and Paraguay, South American nations nations with more than twelve million residents. Paulson’s personal cut was nearly $4 billion, or more than than $10 million a day. That was more than the earnings of J.K. Rowling, Oprah Winfrey and Tiger Woods put together. At one point in late 2007, a broker called to remind Paulson of an account worth $5 million, an account now so insignificant that it had slipped his mind. Just as impressive, Paulson managed to transform his trade in 2008 and early 2009 in dramatic form, scoring $5 billion more for his firm and clients, as well as $2 billion for himself. the moves put Paulson and his remarkable trade alongside Warren Buffet, George Soros, Bernard Baruch, and Jesse Livermore in Wall Street’s pantheon of traders. They also made him one of the richest people in world, wealthier than Steven Spielberg, March Zuckerberg, and David Rockefeller Sr.

 

 

WHAT PROPOSED WATER BILL SBX7-7 LOOKS LIKE QUICKLY, VISUALLY, AND OFFICIALLY

WHAT PROPOSED WATER BILL SBX7-7 LOOKS LIKE QUICKLY, VISUALLY, AND OFFICIALLY

THE QUICK VERSION: Check out this summary from the Fresno Bee.

THE VISUAL VERSION: Check out this Google map of bond expenditures from KQED’s Climate Watch blog.

THE OFFICIAL VERSION: 9-page pdf from the Department of Water Resources

THERE IS NO NORMAL ANYMORE - "V" TV SERIES

Former U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once coined the phrase "defining deviancy down."  Now "there is no normal" anymore to define it down to.  See website for the TV series "V" - here
http://www.visitorsite.net/

  

PASADENA TO PLANT "NATIVE" TREES ON FREEWAY OVERPASS?

Above: concrete tree

Pray tell, what kind of trees are "native" to a concrete freeway overpass?
 

Excerpted from Pasadena Political Underbelly:

"NATIVE TREE GRANT: Tree wacko Laurie Paul says they need to talk more before they do this. .. Bogus Bill says it's just an application and there is no program at this point. McAustin wants trees near public transportation like on Lake Avenue over the freeway.  Really, trees on the overpass! Great idiot idea. Tornek asks about suspicions people keep bringing up and wants to make sure info gets out there." 

http://underpasadena.blogspot.com/2009/11/council-blow-by-blow-for-11-2-09.html

Note: Suspicions: There is a rumor floating around town that street trees are being removed for roof-top solar panel installations.  I wonder when the lawsuit will appear suing the city for its street trees interfering with access to sunlight for solar power.  

"THE PASADENA WAY" - ANTONOMASIA

David Solway - Canadian poet
Excerpt from Pajamas Media

Lecturing in a poetry class a few years back, I had occasion to mention the rhetorical device called antonomasia. I was astonished afterward to learn that one of my students had assumed I was referring to a royal personage executed by the Bolsheviks. Now Anastasia is a charming name with loads of popular appeal but its proper sphere of application is chronicle or romance. I patiently explained that, despite the reminiscent ring, antonomasia is not the name of a Romanov princess or, for that matter, of a famous international dating service, specializing in mail-order brides (“the fastest way to reach thousands of Russian ladies”). It is a persuasive rhetorical trope which can be manipulated in a number of different ways, most pertinently as the use of a personal name to indicate a common noun or express a general idea. Typical examples are “Solon” for “wise legislator” (or “wisdom”) and “Hitler” for “evil despot” (or “pure evil” itself).

A little attention should reveal that when it comes to the discussion of current political issues, there is a kind of robotic reaction at work among many intelligent and well-meaning people, as if it were based in the autonomic nervous system or the solar plexus and not in the centers of thought. It hinges not on reasoning but on desire. To take a resonant example, the name “Bush” was (and is) met by a chain of verbal and emotional equivalents: “liar,” “moron,” “oil baron,” “imperialist,” swathed in a penumbra of knowing contempt. Each term of abuse triggered by the name is then made to stand for the United States itself.

The reverse operation is equally effective. Utter the name “Obama” and a host of surrogate terms leap to mind — “savior,” “new man,” “peacemaker,” “The One,” or, in the words of Newsweek editor Evan Thomas, no less than a “sort of god” — which are immediately reified as undoubted facts. Despite Obama’s recent, self-inflicted troubles and the crisis of confidence in which he is increasingly embroiled, he is still regarded by the MSM, the liberal-left, the Oslo peaceniks, and approximately half the American electorate as sacrosanct, as “good,” “honest,” “reliable,” “noble.” Like spellbound children following the Pied Piper, the epithets cling to the name. They are then associated in swift antonomastic transfer with a newborn, a “different,” America.

There is no awareness among the true believers — and especially among the myrmidons of the left — that they have been deluded by nomenclature, by the semiotic condensation of amorphous ideas and obscure but powerful feelings. As in the first case where a process of reevaluation is all but proscribed, so in the second skepticism is ruled out of court by all but the unconverted. In the current jargon, one could say that antonomasia, whether deployed negatively or positively, runs the signifier into the signified, rendering them indistinguishable from one another. Alternatively, the appellative word and the denominated thing have merged in a passion of similitudes.

As a result, disinterested analysis and the free exchange of ideas are no longer even remotely conceivable in an intellectual forum governed by antonomastic rigidities, which is only a kind of psychic concupiscence, a pressing need to satisfy the lust for instant correlations and spare us the burden of thinking. So to have said one is voting for “Bush” or approved of the pre-disengagement policies of “Sharon” inevitably exposed one to either incredulity or derision for neglecting self-evident “truths.” Similarly, to critique Obama or his policies leads to one being dismissed as a clown, a madman, a racist, a purveyor of smears, along with a batch of similar expletives, for, as we have seen, positive antonomasia has identified the current president as an exalted figure who can do no wrong.

It is high time, as Robert Conquest argues in The Dragons of Expectation, taking his cue from George Orwell, that we begin “harpooning some word-whales” and proceed to “demystify key words used in political speech.” But the attempt at demystification runs up against the formidable sticking-power of antonomastic discourse which substitutes a name for a concept, obscuring the fissure between the two and thus allowing the concept to escape scrutiny. Used as such, antonomasia re-valences the particular, then swaps the particular for the general, and in the process turns off the brain. The reactions it elicits are almost glandular in their immediacy, provoking a sort of lexical prurience that is difficult to resist.

Put to political purpose, antonomasia works. It is the easy, mechanical way to consolidate a set of reciprocal designations, demonizing the innocent and angelizing the culpable. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of infatuation. Said differently, antonomasia is the semantic variant of the mail-order bride, ready for service. And it is the fastest way to reach millions.