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He’s Coming for the Churches

California Governor-elect, Gavin Newsom, 2018.

“‘Religious Freedom’ which has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with a license to hate/discriminate”, Gavin Newsom, Twitter, July 2016.

Parse the tweet.  His Honor Gavin Newsom, and the constellation of lefty groups in the Democratic Party’s gravity field, believes that “Religious Freedom” must be defined by sexual activists of the cultural Left.  Make no mistake about it, the Bible in their excitable imaginations must be compelled to bow before their fashionable ideas on matters of sex.

You should not be allowed to take its sexual injunctions seriously, and so says California voters.  They, in their hip “wisdom”, have overwhelmingly entrusted the matter to the donkey party and its zealots in near super-majority numbers in the legislature – 29/11 Senate, 60/20 Assembly.

Here are the California Democrats at their state convention in May of 2017 announcing their dislike for President Trump, John Burton at the podium.  It’s a message that could equally apply to his evangelical supporters.

Soon, anti-Bible laws will take the pace of anti-sodomy laws. Oh, they say you’ll be okay if you keep the faith in the sanctuary.  Don’t dare, though, operate an orphanage, school, hospital, or charity.  Birth control, sexual reassignment surgery, abortion, nonchalant bathroom rules, curricular pandering, carte blanche in couplings in adoptions, and censorship in any pastoral message to drunk and drug-addled street people are just over the horizon.

What about the sanctuary?  Is it really sacrosanct?  If you naively presume it to be, I bring you “Houston, we have a problem”, the 2014 edition.  Houston Mayor Annise Parker and her cabal on the city council passed one of those all-inclusive anti-discrimination laws that ropes in “sexual orientation” and “gender identity”.  Innocent enough, right?  No, it’s the camel’s nose under the tent.

Mayor Parker announces the the withdrawal of the subpoena, October 2014.

Pastors in the city were worried about the ordinance’s reach into their long-held faith and practice.  They helped organize petitions to repeal the edict.  In a subsequent lawsuit, the city subpoenaed any sermons and related documents reflecting on Her Honor, the edict, and her fellow power brokers.

These grand ukases on sex in the guise of anti-discrimination laws cater to the barkers of the new sexology.  Yet, they won’t be satisfied with a legal abstraction.  They want it materialized in the here and now.  So their sexual license in policy inevitably will rub up against the First Amendment.

To clarify for the confused, tax-exempt status doesn’t repeal the First Amendment, if that rambled into your head.  Restrictions apply to candidate-advocacy, not issue-advocacy.  When fashionable policy trends stray into longstanding faith and practice, quite rightly these battles erupt.

Well, surprise to the disconnected and unaware.  The Bible is the centerpiece of Christian faith and practice.  Of great importance is its definition of the Godly life, and that includes injunctions on the subject of sex.  For many, you can’t take the book seriously and embrace gender fluidity and sodomy without twisting yourself in knots.

And you can’t do to the Bible what the lefties have done to the Constitution.  That is, interpreted it out of existence.

California is positioning itself as the first state to bring back the concept of the “state church”.  The only approved form of Christianity (and any other religion for that matter) will be the kind bleached of any advice on sex.  Like textbooks, the Bible will have the uncomfortable passages excised.

Newsom and the gang is coming for any denomination outside the officially sanctioned doctrines.  You’ll have no place in the Golden State if you don’t conform.  Time to load up the U-haul.

RogerG

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Techie Lefties

California’s hard left lurch is a matter of much discussion.  As a side-bar but related matter, there exists tech’s similarly hard left climate of opinion, much of it originated and housed in the state.  Tech’s leftist orientation was made glaringly obvious in a Stanford Graduate Business School study of December 2017.*  Next question: Does tech’s hard left lurch correspond to California’s transformation into a hard left bastion?

I’ll start off by saying, I don’t know. Correlation ain’t causation.
There’s no doubt, though, that tech is an overbearing piece of California’s fiscal and economic puzzle.  Has its prevailing ideological bearings bled into the state’s political bloodstream?  A connection can only be intimated, not necessarily proven.

The Stanford study makes clear that an incoherent blend of self-interest and lefty tropes blanket Silicon Valley and its offshoots like a thick layer of smog.  Techies overwhelmingly, almost militantly, stand four-square with the cultural left in the culture war. LGBTQ everything, multiculturalism, racial/ethnic/gender victimology, environmentalism, gun control, unrestrained abortion, a rejection of traditional institutions, open borders – the usual stuff of the left-wing orthodoxy – feature prominently.

All the while, techies don’t like anybody telling them what to do, especially the government.  Yet, government isn’t treated like Christianity, something for the unenlightened and hide-bound rubes.  While they don’t like regulation, they seem to be fully on-board with government-directed redistribution.  Is the inconsistency an attempt to paper over their guilt about their riches?  Could be.

Somehow their brains allow them to harbor “no government” alongside “lots of government”.  All the isms and assaults on traditional institutions, and the Robin Hood regime, mandates a whole lotta government.  I suppose that they want government to make everybody else live and believe like them.  At heart, then, this is Stalinism.

Some have attributed this motley collection of beliefs to the hippies of yore as there appears to be a line of mental and lifestyle, if not genealogical, descent.  The hippies were a mess, though.  Their hedonism and gross naivete about human nature gave us STD’s, a drug epidemic, and a new generation of Democratic Party activists.  Have the techies taken over where the hippies left off? Quite possibly.

The hippies of yore (1960’s).

Now we have the techie industry taking root throughout the country, and with it, implanting its mental smog and lifestyle.  In that sense, California is the future – a dystopian one.

RogerG

* The sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/technology/silicon-valley-politics.html?fbclid=IwAR1kVh0oXukXJxvSR8XO88SJAqIHZRmZj8OzRrb5-ERZQrU-q6qvUnjn630

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/political-behavior-wealthy-americans-evidence-technology?fbclid=IwAR0n0px25Vc_mdi-m5CueF8EchRsFmS7jA6ZoNs3xh72LkKZStRHjJIC5eU

 

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A Mao Approach to Energy

California has taken a page from Mao’s book of rule, wittingly or unwittingly.   On top of all the crony gimmies to solar, the state has ordered all new homes to have solar panels from 2020 on.

The brainchild of California’s eco-rulers.

Mao in his fevered imagination thought that he could order a massive increase in iron production by turning peasants into iron workers with their own “backyard smelters”.  In like manner, California’s “Great Helmsmen” have similarly declared every homeowner to be a rooftop electricity producer.  It all makes so much sense to the mandarins of the Party, Communist (China) or Democratic (Ca.).  Details be damned.

Mao’s brainchild of backyard smelters.

Such a detail as economies of scale hasn’t really graced their mind.  Instead, visions of millions backyard smelters, or rooftop solar panels, churning out iron, or electricity, excites their fancy.

California’s Great Leap Forward may end up like the last one: a disaster.  China’s iron production went up for a brief moment but many other things went down.  Ditto for California, just replace solar for iron. One of the things to go down will be home ownership.  In a state already suffering from over-inflated home prices, they will be jacked up by a further $8,400 on average.  That equates with pricing 444,385 families out of the market.

One of Mao’s consequences: famine.
One of the consequences of California’s eco-rulers: a rise in the homelessness and the under-housed.
This Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016 file photo shows tents from a homeless encampment line a street in downtown Los Angeles.

Whether the number of the negatively impacted is accurate or not, it is an effort to quantify another economic fact of life: the margin.  The margin is the place of action in an economy.  It defines prosperity and depression by referring to people who are sensitive to price changes.  A rise in prices results in a slice of the buying public being cut out.

Want a home to raise your kids? Move to Texas.

It has always mesmerized me how a few hundred thousand rooftop solar panels are supposed to reverse the impact of China’s and India’s many huge dirty-coal plants.  Only in the eco-dreamland can solar’s capacity factor of 18% correct for the nearly 60% of coal-fired plants.  How’s that to happen?

Chinese workers commute as steam billows from a coal fired power plant in Shanxi, China. (Bloomberg)

Do we need any more proof that the term “well-managed” doesn’t apply to one-party states?

Please read the following sources:
https://thehill.com/…/387270-the-problem-with-california-go…
https://www.latimes.com/…/la-fi-solar-mandate-20181214-stor…
https://openei.org/wiki/Definition:Capacity_factor

RogerG

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California as the Black Knight

Please watch the youtube video of Monty Python’s black knight at the bridge.

The black knight’s condition reminds me of California’s business sector.  A report by business relocation expert Joe Vranich says that 1,800 businesses have pulled up stakes and moved to other states, many to the Southwest, Northwest, and, of course, Texas.  There’s no reason not to expect the trend to continue.  What appears to be keeping the state afloat is LA digital media, Silicon Valley, and mostly foreign money.  Two of the three are linked and rise and fall together.  All are sensitive to the next downturn; and since the state’s economy is atrophying outside these economic islands, good luck. Good luck to all those people dependent on the state’s tax haul.

The state is downright hostile to business in all the well-known ways.  And if that ain’t bad enough, it relishes in creating catch-22’s for nearly anyone who has a payroll to meet.  The latest culprit is the recently passed California Immigrant Worker Protection Act.  This piece of identity pandering makes it illegal for a businessman to cooperate with ICE.  Of course, it’s a federal crime to not cooperate.  Vranich’s advice: Get Out!

Here’s the article: https://www.investors.com/…/california-companies-leave-tax…/ .

Venezuela was the first black knight at the bridge.  California has jumped in to take his place.  Go figure.

RogerG

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The Camp Fire and Its Lessons

PARADISE, CA – NOVEMBER 09: Sacramento Metropolitan firefighters battle the Camp Fire in Magalia, Calif., Friday, November 9, 2018. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
A business that was destroyed by the Camp Fire continues to smolder on November 9, 2018 in Paradise, California.

If you’ve got time (about an hour and 20 minutes), please listen to this conversation between 2 radio hosts and Prof. Peter Kolb of the U. of Montana’s Dept. of Forest Management about the recent and deadly fires in California (below at the bottom).  Prof. Kolb was a native Californian with family still living in the state.  The “burning” question for most everyone concerns the extent California state policies have contributed to the danger of destructive wildland fires in the state.  The quick and short answer shouldn’t be a quick and short answer.  Yet, the prevailing climate of governing opinion in the state can’t be ignored, a view that leans in the direction of environmental preservation at nearly all costs.  It is a factor bunched together with California’s unique conditions.

Here are some often-mentioned points to ponder:

(1) Climate change: Yes, we’re in a warming trend, but long term climate changes can’t be adjusted like your wall thermostat.  Besides, unless you’re able to convince 2 billion Chinese and Indians to stop they’re economic growth, global mitigations are highly unlikely.  Greenie energy like wind and solar aren’t a substitute for fossil fuels in propelling a poor country into prosperity.  Period.

Indian coal-fired power plant. (Image by Smeet Chowdhury)

(2) Drought: It’s a fact of life regardless of warming trends, and it’s only exacerbated by the state’s hot dry-summer climate.  This raises the concerns about the state’s measures, if any, to alleviate the annually recurring dry spells.  Do they intensify or lessen the fire danger?  There’s reason to doubt the efficacy of many of the policies that might exist.

(3) Foliage: California has biomes uniquely suited to its annual and extensive dry periods such as chaparral on the coasts and foothills .  These are plants that can survive the dry periods alongside the dry grasses and dead forest litter.  If the under-story of “fine fuels” ignites, a fire will race through with mounting intensity.

California chaparral biome.
California chaparral biome.

(4) El Diablo, the Santa Anas: These eastern hot and dry winds are a natural feature of California’s climate.  They exist regardless of climate change. Since they are as persistent as the coastal surf, what has the state done to deal with their inevitable consequences?  My guess: nothing much.

The Santa Ana winds as seen from space.

(5) Development practices in WUI (Wild-Urban-Interface): This refers to the aesthetic preference of many residents in the state for trees and brush against building walls in that uneven zone between wildlands and structures.  It’s a disaster-in-waiting in times of hot, dry, and windy conditions in California’s dry-summer biomes.

Residence in Paradise, Ca. Pay close to the landscaping with its foliage adjacent to the structure.
Another example in Paradise, Ca.

(6) California’s policies: It’s a state in the grip of environmentalism.  The “ism” is a single-minded preference for a form of nature preservation without humans.  Wildland management policies reflect this bias.  Fuel builds up in the hinterlands due to restrictions on measures to reduce the fuel load.  Such as, the state requires a “forest management plan” to remove dead trees and brush on a person’s property.  Of course, the rule and regulations about it are enforced by an elaborate bureaucracy.  Be prepared to spend $5,000-$10,000.

Tree mortality at Bass Lake, Sierra National Forest.
Dead trees in Sierra National Forest.

(7) California’s decaying infrastructure: The state’s water storage and delivery systems are now approaching 5 decades or older and were built for a population half the size.  In like manner, decades of greenie mandates and regulations are corrupting the state’s grid.  Rising electricity demands on an aging grid can contribute to mishaps like the one just outside of Paradise, Ca.  California’s answer is to raise taxes on an already over-taxed population, all the while undermining the physical grid by forcing the utilities to subsidize greenie visions of utopia at the expense of maintenance.  And of course, the governing classes will answer with a call to raise rates.

Power lines and electrical equipment are a leading cause of California wildfires. Increased loads on the lines cause them to sag. (photo:Los Angeles Times)
Solar and wind farm, Palm Springs, Ca. With so much emphasis on “sustainable” sources, the traditional grid has the potential to suffer from reduced upkeep.
(Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

In the end, California has the worst roads, a dilapidated water system, an energy grid that is environmentally snazzy but aging into incontinence, and the all-too-familiar recurrence of fires capable of reproducing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Just saying.

Please watch the video (see below).

RogerG

The video link:

https://www.facebook.com/newstalkkgvo/videos/369303803803244/?t=2

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Viva la Gilets Jaunes!

Californians in November meekly went to the polls to shoot down an attempt to lower their gas taxes.  Over the recent number of days, rural and blue-collar French hit the streets of Paris to riot against a 5% increase in taxes on gasoline prices already exceeding $6/gal.  The contrast is striking (no pun intended).

Why the outburst in Paris?  The citizens in the countryside and the blue-collar middle class are tired of shouldering the burden of the climate-change fixations of their urban and wealthier “betters”.  “Climate change” is more than a scientific matter.  It’s code for the fixers in the nomenklatura/academy alliance, buttressed by the upscale elect and their fashionable beliefs, to manipulate the lives of those not so privileged.

So, we get with the French a replay of 1789; while in California, docility.  Interesting.  Will the meek inherit the earth, or will it be adult firmness?  My bet is on “meekness” till it becomes unbearable.

Viva la gilets jaunes (yellow vests)! But put a hold on the violence.

RogerG

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What Its Like to be a Real Man

Watch Vice President Mike Pence’s eulogy for President George H.W. Bush.  He says it far better than I could write it.

Compare the senior Bush with those presidents that came after him.  Bill Clinton was, and ultimately remained, a frat boy with a lefty tinge at Bush’s age but George was flying an Avenger torpedo bomber and being shot at by the Japanese (downed twice).

A young George Bush, center, with Joe Reichert, left, and Leo Nadeau during World War II. (Robert B. Stinnett/National Archives)
George HW Bush is rescued by USS Finback, Sept. 2, 1944. (Credit: PHOTOSHOT)

His son, George W., went into the Air National Guard.  Then we have Barack Obama who at the same age went to Occidental and later Columbia to major in poli sci, smoke some pot, and dabble in socialist glamfests (for instance, the Socialist Scholars Conference), all in preparation for a life as a lefty agitator.  Finally, we have our current and petulant twitter-in-chief, Donald Trump.  He inherited daddy’s wealth and spent the rest of his life as a celebrity developer at the same time as many of his peers were risking their lives in jungles across the Pacific, as the elder Bush did in WWII.

Barack Obama in college. Occidental or Columbia? (Getty images)

Some have placed the moniker of “wimp” on the elder Bush.  Such labeling is evidence of how present clichés insult the past.  George H.W. Bush came from a time when a calming tone of voice and a code of decency were signs of good upbringing.  How could he be a “wimp” when he was the youngest Navy aviator, survivor of two splashdowns, and still persisted in being launched from a carrier till the war ended (50+ launches)?  We are so shallow today that voice and propriety can be used against you.

We could have done so much worse as we did with 3 of the 4 (maybe 4 of 4 depending on your rankings) that came after him.  I salute you, President George H.W. Bush.

RogerG

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Another Puff Piece Within the Society of Progressive Mutual Admirers

The “Society” in the title refers to a loose body of people and organizations who have similar backgrounds and enough of a common orthodoxy to distinguish as an identifiable social element, like, for instance, Protestants. In this case, it’s the background identifiers of degreed/middle-to-upper-class/urban/seemingly-professional and progressive/left in their philosophical orthodoxy. The “Puff Piece” in the title is the all-too-familiar journalistic softball interview with overtones of saccharine flattery that’s reserved for prominent people in the news who confirm the Society’s biases.

Case in point: “Seeking a Safe, Green Colombia” in National Geographic Magazine of January 2018 about Colombia’s ex-president, Juan Manuel Santos. He gets the treatment because he’s said to be about “peace” and he chants the clerisy’s doctrines on “climate change”. He knows the lingo and says all the right things. Thus, he’s beatified. Look at the magazine’s saintly photo from the article.

Saint Juan Santos

The “peace” part of his beatification has to do with his cramming down the throats of Colombians a detested agreement with FARC, the narco-terrorist organization. When put on the ballot, Colombians rejected it despite the weight of the world coming down on them to approve it. So, Santos got around those pesky voters with a jam-down in the legislature.

And what of the agreement? First off, Colombians hate FARC. Next, the settlement gave amnesty to murderers, bribed the killers to stop the killing and mayhem, and rewarded them with seats in parliament. For millions of FARC’s victims, what’s not to like?

Victims of FARC protest in Colombia during the peace talks with FARC.

And for that, the guy wins the Nobel Peace Prize. But what really earns his elevation to sainthood is his expressed worship of the clerisy’s iconography of “climate change” with statements like “… we are destroying Mother Earth”. For the Society’s parishioners, that’ll do it.

No such treatment was accorded the previous president, Alvaro Uribe, the winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. But he doesn’t sing the Society’s doctrines and he opposed the terrorist cave-in. What a flawed world we live in.

Ex-Colombian President Alvaro Uribe receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Pres. George W. Bush in 2009.

RogerG

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Millennials With Another Black Eye?

I know, I know, it’s faulty thinking to draw grand conclusions about an entire generation on a sample of one or a few individuals. For millennials, they’ve been given a bad rap for a host of alleged sins. Yet, a certain type is beginning to recur among them in my explorations of news and information: the ill-informed college-educated in positions of societal influence. A classic example of the phenomena appeared yesterday in an interview of Luke Zaleski by Hugh Hewitt.

Luke Zaleski with son.
Hugh Hewitt in his broadcast studio.

Zaleski seems to be in his mid-to-late 30s, a U. of Delaware graduate in Philosophy, and is currently Legal Affairs Editor for Condé Nast publications. He exhibits much of the hyper-progressivism of the deeply-entrenched left in today’s media, replete with a dislike for Trump and Republicans, an embrace of identity politics, and rampant victimology. And its all wrapped in a thin verneer of knowledge and understanding.

For example, here’s Zaleski on Hewitt’s lack of “diversity” in the previous day’s guests – Mike Lupica (sports writer), Sen. Tom Cotton (R, Arkansas), and Sen. John Cornyn (R, Texas):
“I feel like the sports world … would benefit from having more people of color and women … prominent in the conversations.” The diversity schtick on parade, eh? As for Cotton and Cornyn, he says, “… these guys are kind of the enemies of progress”.

Zelaski on his level of understanding of history as it relates to today’s issues and climate of opinion:
Hewitt asked him, “…was Alger Hiss a communist spy?” Zaleski dodged the question by mentioning Wikipedia and “I’m not a historian. I’m not an expert. I’m not interested in conspiracy theories. I’m not interested in debating Alger Hiss”. Mmmmm.

Another example of more recent history, Hewitt asked him, “Have you read The Looming Tower?” The quick and short of it, No! Since he didn’t mention any other book on the rise of international terrorism, I can assume he doesn’t read in depth, particularly on that topic.

Zaleski’s unfamiliarity with the principal characters involved in Iran’s export of its brand of Islamic extremism was evident when Hewitt asked him, “What is your opinion of Qasem Soleimani?” Zaleski’s answer: “I’m not familiar with that person.”

Remember that this guy, Zaleski, is an editor in a major media organization (look up Condé Nast).

Zaleski showed profound ignorance of nuclear weapons. Hewitt asked him, “So which part of the nuclear triad needs fixing the most?” Zaleski jumped to an unresponsive generality, “I’d like to see global denuclearization.” Related questions about our weapons systems were similarly met with befuddlement.

As a “Legal Affairs Editor”, one would think Zaleski has some legal training or even a law degree. Well, no. His background is as a “fact checker” for 20 years. Since “legal” is his beat, you’d think that he would be aware of the Supreme Court’s recent 8-0 smackdown of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for its abuse of the Endangered Species Act. But no.

I could present more on the interview but I think that you get the idea. A modern college education does not, ipso facto, dispel ignorance, let alone promote wisdom.

RogerG

Here’s the link to the transcripts of the interview:   http://www.hughhewitt.com/luke-zaleski-legal-affairs-editor-at-conde-nash-former-director-of-research-at-gq/?fbclid=IwAR3Scthy-2tCxV5gKtPCKq5A79eMp-FkG7mK5R0n7UrtrbZSDqtqBEhiq3A