Weather or Not

Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Norman “Stormwater” Utility: An Unpublished Letter

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BACKGROUND

A Norman Transcript article appeared early this summer, ostensibly as news, but in reality thinly disguised advocacy for a utility for “stormwater” (should be two words: storm water, hyphenated when used as a modifier). This came on the heels of two wise and proper election defeats of the idea in the past decade, as I wrote a letter to the editor.

My letter qualified for publication on every stated check box. It was cleanly and creatively composed, free of grammar, punctuation, spelling, and usage errors, contained no personal attacks, and tallied a volume well under the word-count limit. Despite that, the editor of the Transcript ignored the letter, yet published several others favoring water-rate increases of other types not directly tied to storm water.

Clearly my offering struck a nerve. Choosing not to publish well-written dissent places the paper in firm editorial-control grip of those who favor more bureaucracy, higher taxes, and anti-rural agendas.

Fortunately, we live in an age when we need not depend on mass media to get word out, and anyone can publish online as he or she sees fit, with equal access worldwide as a corporate newspaper gets. In that spirit, here was the verbatim text of my letter to the editor:

———————–
LETTER to the EDITOR

Regardless of any oversimplified portrayals one hears, the storm-water utility’s electoral failures here largely have revolved around two issues:

1. Inequity and misleading nature of the tax proposed to finance it. It’s called a “fee” for the sake of utility bills, but that’s playing a semantics game that voters here see right through. It is a de facto tax. Residents of rural wards comprised a major part of rejection in these votes. This is because the proposed tax was applied identically to rural as well as urban parts of Norman, even though storm-water hydrology in each is far from identical. The tax was thoughtlessly based on the absolute amount (rather than percentage) of impermeable cover on a lot. Hence the rural inequity: adjacent acreage and uncovered land are much larger for the same raw amount of rural impermeable cover, and rural houses and driveways will drain into dirt or ponds more than will urban apartments, businesses and houses.

2. Making it a separate utility (bureaucracy) from the water department. Although it’s “done elsewhere,” that’s a follow-the-lemmings rationale, not a reasoned one. It makes no sense because this is a water problem. Keep it in a slightly expanded yet streamlined water department with one set of overlords and staff instead of two, one computer system instead of two, one itemized bill, etc., not a separate utility, and it would stand a better chance of being approved.

Normanites mostly aren’t opposed to storm-water remediation. Want a path to passing? It needs to be done in a manner consistent with urban/rural equitability (most of Norman’s drained land area is rural!) and streamlined, efficient governance.

The Fallacy of “Compromise” with Gaslighting Forces of Tyranny

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Compromise is great for business deals, arbitration, professional workplace disagreements, property-line disputes, and the like. At lawmaking governance levels, it’s often needed to get something done (say, to get enough legislators of the opposition party aboard to pass a budget).

However, compromise is, like most concepts involving social interaction, prone to abuse.

Stay alert to ways you can be compromised adversely, manipulated and taken advantage of, and resist those — whether at personal levels by abusive “friends” and “lovers”, or on larger scales, by government and media. Yes, you can be on the hurt side of an abusive relationship with a governing authority. History is chock full of examples.

A large-scale, abusive use of the concept of compromise is when high authorities wish to restrict the liberty of the people. That’s called tyranny. Genocides under Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot are famous large-scale examples just in the last 100 years. Without quite as much overt killing (yet still a lot, per the Uighurs), is the ongoing, worsening, Orwellian techno-control dictatorship in mainland China.

Less extreme, but just as insidious, are slow-drip, incremental tactics here and anywhere else in the so-called Free World, acclimatizing people to each seemingly minuscule sacrifice of freedom, until one day, you are in a de facto prison. How does that occur? Convince you to give up your own liberty, and it’s rather easy.

Gaslighting occurs not just in personal relationships, but by Big Bureaucracy. Situational types:
“Confused? We’re the experts at telling you what’s real, all else is disinformation.”
“Here, this pain I’m doling out is for your own good.”

We’re conditioned early to these vulnerabilities by having to accept needed pain as kids, at the behest of parents — such as by enduring awful-tasting medicines, painful shots, or stinging antiseptics applied to scrapes, that truly were for our own good. This conditioning renders us vulnerable to systemic, governance-level gaslighting as adults, via the same persuasive tactics. Furthermore, the process can be sudden, or creep along in tiny steps spanning years, or even generations. Generations!

Don’t we owe it to our children, and theirs, to ensure their liberties are greater than ours, not less?

At societal scales, freedom almost never returns after being sacrificed for what command-and-control figures plea is the “common good”. Who are they to define it? Who are they to make my decisions for me regarding anything I do that doesn’t directly and provably (in a legal, beyond-reasonable doubt sense) harm another individual?

Better it is to leave “common good” decisions to local scales, where groups of neighbors can better contextualize solutions to local needs. Neighborhoods and towns, perhaps even cities if not too large and diverse, work best. Above that, the bigger the scale of government, the greater the fallacy of “common good” when it comes to anything affecting freedom. Why? Simple: one size doesn’t fit all. In a physically and culturally vast nation like ours, the people and their situations are too diverse (by the true meaning of diversity) for that.

To wit, water restrictions in Las Vegas are rather inappropriate for Upper Michigan, on whose shores wash the three biggest Great Lakes. Fuel taxes hurt the Kansas wheat farmer or the poverty-level working single mom in Bakersfield more than the Boston loft dweller with no car. The same federal and state red tape involving business books and taxes burdens the margin-straddling machine shop in Minnetonka proportionately harder than the Minnesota Vikings, whose owner hires legions of accountants at the snap of a finger. Even within one city, zoning must vary, because development, drainage and land-use needs are nonuniform. More examples abound, by the millions, in countless situations.

Big bureaucracy commonly imposes, after gaslighting us into accepting they’re for our own benefit, or the benefit of others, one-size “solutions” justified off “the common good”. Again one size does not fit all.

Beware simple tactics of propaganda, such as the use of the words “compassion” or “empathy” in the political context; those are quite often little tools of psychological manipulation to soften resistance against top-down theft of freedoms. Bureaucracy cannot have “compassion” nor “empathy”. Only individuals and God can.

Freedom is God-given, per the concept of free will. As the Founders rightly recognized and wrote, our rights come not from the government, but are bestowed by the Creator on the governed. Liberty is a divinely inspired ideal! We should treat it as no less important than that.

Give the agents of tyranny an inch, and they’ll take a mile. Therefore, those who value life and liberty should not yield even an inch to those who wish to take it. “Compromise” with tyranny only incrementalizes its takeover.

The Importance of Openness and Transparency in Science and Government

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A nonpartisan (lower-case libertarian) statement on openness and full disclosure, with illustration:

For decades, I’ve been an unrelenting advocate of extreme openness and transparency in government at all levels, for accountability’s sake. [Core principle: It’s your and my tax dollars spent, therefore we are entitled to know.]

Freedom of Information Act is a great concept, but 1) is woefully incomplete, inadequately absolute and full of loopholes, and 2) should be needed far less than it is invoked in 2022. The latter is because the overwhelming majority of documents susceptible to FOIA (and much, much more) already should be digitized and freely available at will, online, unencumbered by hassles and waits of the request process. Don’t make the media and taxpayers request stuff; put it out there proactively, immediately!

When governments (including governmental arms such as science labs, law enforcement and school districts) refuse to disclose non-personal (non-PII) info, or stonewall and foot-drag FOIA requests, that naturally and understandably engenders suspicion and conspiracy theories about cover-ups. Do you want to greatly reduce conspiracy theories about governmental activity? Great, so do I! Here’s the solution: be fully open and transparent about it.

In science, openness is absolutely crucial. It’s a fundamental scientific principle. The core ethics of reproducibility and falsifiability demand it. This also has been a consistent position of mine this entire century, and motivated a team of similarly minded scientists and I to found the first fully open-access, no-cost to readers, open-review meteorology journal in the United States (EJSSM), still going after over 15 years.

Scientific results should be openly available for all to read and learn, immediately upon publication, across all sciences, all the time. Science-journal paywalls, even if temporary, are unscientific — a grotesque violation of the full-openness principle, and should be eliminated today. Do you want to greatly reduce conspiracy theories about scientific activity? Great, so do I! Here’s the solution: be fully open and transparent about it.

These principles, therefore, doubly apply to government-supported or -conducted science. Do you want to greatly reduce conspiracy theories about governmental scientific activity? Great, so do I! Here’s the solution: be fully open and transparent about it.

The same also applies to pretty much any other publicly funded activity at any level, local to state to national, including school curricula, minutes of policy meetings, budgetary deliberations, committees and subcommittees, “white papers” and other reports, and basically every document produced that doesn’t contain personally identifiable information (PII) or legitimately classified national-security sensitivities. Even in the latter cases, simply claiming that should be insufficient for denying access. The agency should bear the burden of proving that claim before an independent watchdog, judge or arbiter.