A blog in defense of western civilization by Roger Graf
Author: RogerG
I am a retired teacher and coach, Social Science Department chairman, community college instructor in Physical and Human Geography. I have attended 4 colleges with relevant degrees and certificates in History, Religious Studies/Philosophy, Education, and Planning and Community Development. I am also a 3rd generation native Californian, now refugee living in northwest Montana.
I’ve noticed it during my college years and into my 30-year stint in teaching. Noticed what? It is the values and outlook of people divorced from many of the very real cruelties of life. These people live in an insulated social womb, free to think of the wilderness, for instance, as a park. Quiet, leafy suburbs and districts of swank penthouses, and jetting from suburban high school or elite prep school to higher ed to white-collar status, allows flights of fancy and grand ideas similarly divorced from the real world. The pampered lifestyle breeds pampered politics and pampered voting patterns.
It reminds me of my last visit to Disneyland in Anaheim, Ca., and the view of the park from the fifth floor of the park’s hotel. Anaheim by the first decade of the 21st century had become a grimy and seedy place. Inside the park’s fences, it was an oasis surrounded by an increasingly man-made dystopia.
Sadly, the cosseted life produces the stilted politics that abets the breakdown of civil order and broad prosperity. The love affair with “sustainability” and “equity”, for example, is an attack on upward mobility for anyone but themselves. It’s how just yesterday’s savagery becomes today’s victims in the minds of many on our college campuses. It’s how the gradual warming of the climate after the Little Ice Age can be turned into a full-frontal assault on your car and home appliances, and the pursuit of single-family residential for me, but not for thee. It’s how workers, shoppers, residents, and businesses must flee the gauntlet of the drug-addled, mentally troubled, and troops of barbarous urban youth that are allowed to congregate under the banner of “compassion” and “tolerance” and “social justice”. It’s how the call of “rights” now includes teenage genital mutilation. It’s come full circle: the eradication of the dangers of the real world incubated new dangers of the real world.
I’ve referred to this naïve and blinkered social set as the “REI crowd”. Recreational Equipment, Inc., (REI) epitomizes a business model for these babes in the woods. They don’t sell guns. They sell the great brands that keep you comfy as you walk through and sleep in nature, not a thing that’ll stop an apex predator that resides in that nature. Forget about bear spray. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it . . . . Well, let’s just say that at that moment nothing really matters, except a helicopter ride to a trauma center if you’re lucky.
E.g., REI recently tried to equate nature-love with “gender equity”, a trendy cause for those who devote much of their disposable income on trendy hiking paraphernalia. Watch it below. Then, on the accompanying post, look at nature’s reality. The experience must be similar to the hellscape that they’ve created for themselves inside their bubble.
The esteemed economist Thomas Sowell quipped, “Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero.” California is sadly learning this hard lesson as we speak.
Many California workers went from “Hurray!” to pink slips after California voters sent zealots into seats of power across the state to enact zany laws, like AB 1228. Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill last year that raised the minimum wage to $20 per hour for fast-food workers (with an exception for a donor), his legislative super-majorities guaranteeing the outcome. The lid was off for minimum wage hikes in the state’s other industries and in the many specific locales in the state enthralled by collectivist dreams. Now, the reality: everyone didn’t get the leap in pay. Many of those so-called “oppressed” found their hours cut or sent home without any hours, having lost their jobs.
All of this is a reminder of another Sowell witticism: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” You can only get things after giving up other things. The politicos issued the decree, “Thou shalt pay no one less than $20 per hour”, that led to those still facing a bottom line to cope by reducing the payroll. So, the numbskulls in power unwittingly created a “nominal” minimum wage, and a “real” one: nominal = $20; real = $0!
Lee E. Ohanian with the Independent Institute chronicles the number of workers who were zeroed out in the ungolden state (see #1 below). 9,500 lost employment in the state’s fast-food industry from fall to January of this year. Pizza Hut and Roundtable said goodbye to 1,300 delivery personnel. El Pollo Loco and Jack in the Box are shifting to robots. Thus, total employment in the state’s private sector during the same interval dropped .2%. Is this “Bidenomics”, or maybe “Newsomnomics”?
Prices are jumping with the minimum wage boost: Wendy’s 8%, Chipotle 7.5%, Starbucks 7%, and others like McDonalds will be announcing hikes soon. Fast food is a good with high elasticity (clientele is sensitive to price changes). So, they can only raise prices to the point when the loss of business begins to eat into the business model. Scott Roderick, a McDonald’s franchisee, said, “I can’t charge $20 for Happy Meals.” If he doesn’t, and economically can’t, he may have to close shop. How many then will join the ranks of the “real” minimum wage?
An economist at the Employment Policies Institute, Rebekah Paxton, lays out more carnage as the fever for $20 spreads to the other surviving remnants of the state’s shrinking private sector (see #2 below). The neo-Marxist SEIU is chomping at the bit to ruin other businesses in the state. West Hollywood is a microcosm of the elected lunacy gripping the state. Making their SEIU donors happy, the city proclaimed a $17.64 minimum wage for hotel workers. The union used this leverage to make it apply everywhere in the city. Currently, the “nominal” minimum wage stands at $19.08.
Predictably, many formerly joyous workers in the city are discovering that their services are no longer needed. Staff cuts of 30-40% are routine. 85 businesses in the city were shuttered last year. The 30-40% are back to $0.
Since Biden and the poohbahs of the donkey party are keen to hitch the nation to the California train, expect more of us across the nation to suffer, even those of us who fled the People’s Republic. Nationalizing lunacy is their chief aim. When will they learn that you can’t suspend the laws of nature, and the laws of economics that rise from them?
RogerG
Sources:
1. “California Loses Nearly 10,000 Fast-Food Jobs After $20 Minimum Wage Signed Last Fall”, Lee E. Ohanian, The Independent Institute, 4/26/2024, at https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14919&utm_source=FFF+Daily&utm_campaign=252dd0222c-FFF+Daily+2024-05-04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1139d80dff-252dd0222c-318121705
2. “California’s Predictably Disastrous Minimum-Wage Hikes”, Rebekah Paxton, National Review, 5/7/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/californias-predictably-disastrous-minimum-wage-hikes/
NYPD officers patrol as pro-Palestine protestors demonstrate outside of Columbia University’s campus in New York City on Thursday, April 18, 2024. Multiple students were arrested as officers cleared an encampment on the campus’ lawn. (Peter Gerber for Fox News Digital)
In many cases, if not most, the students (and non-students) occupying buildings, entire swaths of many campuses, supporting the barbarism of Hamas and expressing Jew-hatred, were radicalized before they arrived in higher ed. They didn’t suddenly discover their inner Marx in their college Sociology class. Predating the college acceptance letter, they were long marinated in the revolutionary dialectic, probably without even knowing it.
Parents, dropping your kids off at school for six hours and off you go on your merry way meant relegating their minds to God knows what. Well, we’re getting a glimpse of the consequence at places like Columbia, et al.
Robert P. George, professor and scholar at Princeton and other schools, acknowledges as much. See at https://www.foxnews.com/video/6352285225112.
Charles Malik (l) and today’s “student” protesters
Who was Charles Malik (1906-1987)? A devout Christian, he’s a man of public service with a distinguished academic pedigree at a time when the academy wasn’t so overwhelmingly sullied in doctrinaire neo-Marxism. Of Lebanese nationality, an escapee from Nazi Germany and move to the US to complete his PhD in Philosophy at Harvard, he taught at the school and other American universities. He returned to his native Lebanon to serve as the country’s ambassador to the US after WWII and helped author the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And he proved to be a prophet of things to come at our colleges.
In 1980, he delivered an address at Wheaton College warning of the moral chaos of the current reign of philosophical materialism and nihilism (rejection of objective standards, the basic guideposts for human flourishing) that he saw conquering the campuses 40 years ago (see #1 and #2 below). He put part of the blame at the feet of intellectual Christians, and Christian leaders in general, who abandoned the academy to the philosophical barbarians. Much of evangelical Christianity embraced political activism – the Moral Majority, et al – but at the same time scurried off into their own social silos, leaving the intellectual training grounds for future generations to be swamped by militant secular collectivists of all stripes. As he put it, “The enormity of what is happening is beyond words.”
The Humanities (literature, philosophy, languages, theology, art, etc.) were mangled beyond recognition. While declining in funding and enrollment, even in their tortured form, they still proved to be influential in shaping the minds of the next couple of generations down to the present day. There is no alternative to the rule of materialism’s atheism from K to grad school. It’s what happens when you abandon the field.
In response, a kind of anti-intellectualism took root in many Christian circles. Honestly, who can blame them after what they’re seeing in posts and broadcasts today from campuses around the country? Charles Malik warned us, though. It’s a consequence of a sin of omission of the Christian community: a surrender of the field to the brutes.
By the faithful’s flight from the campuses, we allowed a takeover that would breed future generations of pillagers of our civilization. It isn’t pretty as the next crop of young people will be robbed of the benefit of a more robust learning experience that more fully enriches our sense of ourselves. Instead, we have encampments that extoll savagery.
Indeed, “The enormity of what is happening is beyond words.”
RogerG
Sources:
1. “The Two Tasks”, an address delivered by Dr. Charles Malik at Wheaton College, 1980, The Charles Malik Institute, at https://charlesmalikinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/The-Two-Tasks-green.pdf
2. Thanks to Joseph Loconte, scholar in residence at New College of Florida, for bringing the subject to my attention in “A Christian Prophet’s Unheeded Warning to the Academy”, National Review, 5/4/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/a-christian-prophets-unheeded-warning-to-the-academy/
A man in a Hamas terrorist costume this week at Stanford University (photo from Daniel Gordis’s post)
Irving Kristol once wrote, “[A neoconservative is] a liberal who has been mugged by reality. A neoliberal is a liberal who got mugged by reality but has not pressed charges.”
Below (Sources #1) is a link to a liberal Israeli PhD student at Stanford who was “mugged by reality”. His account is enlightening because it comes from the ground at one of America’s “elite” universities (the word “elite” is in quotes because they are tarnishing the title).
A key takeaway from his piece is his sudden realization of the popularity of Donald Trump, from a person who would never vote for him if he could.
“This year I finally got it [Trump’s popularity in America]. No, if I were an American I still wouldn’t vote for Trump. But I now understand those who vote for him. Donald Trump is some Americans’ answer to the madness on the other side, a madness I didn’t notice until it turned its face in my direction. A madness no less terrible than Trumps’s madness. No, if I had the right to vote, I would not vote for Donald Trump. But America deserves him.”
The madness isn’t only epidemic on college campuses. High schoolers are seeking to join the madness (see #2 below). Chicago area high schools are a hotbed of pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas activism, many of them “elite” prep schools. Add Seattle schools to the educational sink hole. How did we get to a place where 16 and 17-year-olds rush to join the madness in higher ed? The answer lies in the curricular rot from teacher training and their undergrad coursework to the textbooks. When you drop your kid off at school or the bus stop, your kid is getting a steady diet of the oppressor/oppressed Marxist schtick.
And you thought your kid was learning the three R’s. Let me clue you, they’re getting much more than Algebra.
It’s everywhere. It’s on YouTube. For example, recently I watched a Gen X or Millennial academic who was commenting on something as innocuous as British castles and couldn’t resist continual references to the oppression of the lower classes. It’s a highly distorted portrayal of a period that lasted half a millennium or more. No concession was made to the possible benefits of socio-political hierarchy, let alone a moral hierarchy (some things are objectively good or bad). It was a simple message repeated ad nauseum: the rich and powerful bad, poor folk good. 16-year-old kiddies sitting in their desks, imbibing this blinkered view of the world, have their minds prepped for tramping on over to DePaul or University of Chicago in the “Chicago Youth For Justice” to link arms with an “abolitionist, anti-imperialist network of students”. You know the banter.
This Israeli PHD student noticed the mental rot right away. Most fundamentally, these firebrands are attacking more than Israel but lurking underneath is an assault on logic and reason itself. For these young people, everything is subjective, there being no objective truth, no facts, only feelings. Quoting him:
“I’m not referring here to those who express the opinion that it is difficult to get to the truth, or who think that the courts do not always succeed in finding out what the facts are, or who hold that different ideas are perceived differently through different eyes. I’m speaking about those who say unequivocally that there is no such thing as truth. They are not interested in presenting facts to support their arguments because they do not believe there is such a thing as facts, and they say so explicitly. They think that it is forbidden to use the term “jihadist” in front of jihadists, or to call supporters of terrorism by their names, because feelings are more important than facts (although, of course, first and foremost their feelings).”
Parents, sit down with your kids and query them about whether they believe in objective truth. You might be surprised at the answer.
There’s nothing like being mugged by reality to focus the mind. The sad reality is that this foreign student was mugged by American college students who, in turn, were mugged by their schooling in the good ol’ USA.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “I saw the American progressive movement … as an ally. That was a mistake.”, by Yotam Berger, in Daniel Gordis’s Israel from the Inside, at https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/i-saw-the-american-progressive-movement
2. “Pro-Hamas Craze Starts in K–12”, Haley Strack, National Review Online, 5/2/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pro-hamas-craze-starts-in-k-12/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
Students spray paint pro-Palestinian messages at a protest encampment at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., April 28, 2024. (David Ryder/Reuters)
Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings in a song admonished mothers to not “… let your babies grow up to be cowboys”. As the saying goes, that was then, this is now. It’s not cowboys that we ought to be worried about. It’s college students. College is in the process of demolishing itself. Look no further than the Ivy League. From there, a degradation has taken root that has spread like a cerebral small pox epidemic, infecting the vast majority of campuses. They’re proving themselves to be embarrassments. The rot extends right through the administrations to the faculty and passes into the students. Beware, parents, your kids may leave the house leaning right but may return with a criminal record for defacing veterans’ cemeteries.
To be fair, not all of higher ed is an intellectual cesspool, but the problem is so pervasive that it has begun to besmirch nearly anyone with a degree on their resumé. Add Sociology or Humanities or English Lit or any of the “soft sciences” and their paper bio could be well on its way to the circular file.
The recent antisemitic pro-Palestinian encampments and protests are telling us the time of day. The fixation with the “marginalized” now includes a sanction for the genocidal butchery of 10/7. So warped is the thinking that the charge of “genocidal butchery” has become monopolized by those who committed actual “genocidal butchery” – the kind that you saw with your own eyes on 10/7 – and daily perform war crimes using civilian human shields, not shirking from hiding their military caches and facilities in and under schools, hospitals, orphanages, and housing complexes. Thus, savagery is excused. The natural apprehension about civilian casualties is distorted to pardon unspeakable barbarism in practice. What a warped universe.
sraeli soldiers carry the body of a victim of an attack at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, in southern Israel, on October 10. (Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters)Hamas body cam photo of terrorist shooting indiscriminately into a house in Israeli kibbutz near Gaza border. (Israel Defense Forces via AP)
Don’t expect many of today’s college students to get it, having been raised on a steady diet of the oppressor/oppressed falderol throughout K-grad school, from public and elite prep schools all the way to the identity-mongering college curriculums. The curriculum of entire college academic departments, many of them mandatory for graduation, are based on this narrow little looking glass. The kids’ minds are forced shut, unable to exercise any kind of self-examination.
Anti-Israel tent encampment at Columbia UniversityPro-Palestinian student protesters continue demonstrations on the eighth day of the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ at Columbia University in New York on April 24. (Fatih Aktas/Anadolu/Getty Images)
For instance, a radicalized Columbia faculty senate in a 62-14 vote on Friday (4/26/24) approved a resolution to investigate the administration of an already weak and vacillating college president for finally taking action against an illegal campus encampment and student-led pogrom targeting Jewish students. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn wrote of a strikingly similar situation in his three-volume The Red Wheel, a novelized account of the socio-political setting leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution. He’s got the same mix of characters of academic adults and youths who’ve been radicalized. There’s something about the violent potential in socialism.
Not that all socialists are militant fanatics, mind you. It’s just that socialism is a systematic critique of a society, and there’s few things more thrilling for those immersed in a bubble divorced from realities, for four years or in a life of tenure, than the exciting prospect of overthrowing everything. Bulls in china shops are electrifying things to be for such young and stilted minds. The narrow-minded don’t know that they’re blinkered because they don’t know or understand or appreciate any alternatives. These are the reincarnated “comrade children” of the Khmer Rouge, alongside their adult abettors. Welcome to Columbia’s faculty senate and a chunk of the student body. The best and brightest or the worst and barbaric?
Not surprisingly, the faculty is as extreme as the youths given the fact that they curated this mess. It doesn’t take much to uncover the concomitant antisemitic student rage. Take, for instance, Khymani James, leader of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) cell who announced (see #1 below), “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” Such bombast would be treated as isolated anecdote until one notices that the school’s Jewish students were advised to stay home due to rampant Jew-hatred on campus (see #2 below).
Khymani James, shown in this photo from 2021
Ya think? This neo-Marxist antisemitism is in the academic ether, and in more than faculty offices and campus greens. George Washington University exploded and since the Jacobins also control the Washington, D.C., city government, the city won’t help the school enforce its rules. It declined the school’s request for police assistance. In the worst governed cities, we find the worst behavior. Get out of DC if you can and move the college to more civilized environs. The nation’s capital is a hot mess, and has been for quite some time.
As usual, Texas is showing how to handle the miscreants. The Austin chapter of the Palestine Solidarity Committee called for another one of these campus intifadas and were promptly arrested and carted off. UT’s Office of the Dean of Students declared to the group, “The University of Texas at Austin will not allow this campus to be ‘taken’ and protesters to derail our mission in ways that groups affiliated with your national organization have accomplished elsewhere.” Enough said. Call momma for the bail money.
Pro-Palestinian protesters on the campus of UT, Austin
Yale and Princeton followed suit in showing more backbone than Columbia. As soon as the tents went up on Princeton, the school authorities ordered them down “now”. Down they went and the waifs then resorted to their usual standby, a sit-in. Yale’s campus police did the work of clearing the foolishness by arresting around 45 (see #4 below). Mom, expect a call.
Los Angeles’s USC constructed a pickle for itself. It’s got the usual intifada circus on campus but it is happening at graduation time. They really stepped into it when they chose a self-styled pro-Palestinian activist to be the valedictorian, Asna Tabassum. This one is a real winner. Her Instagram profile links to a pro-Palestinian website that proclaims,
“Zionism is a racist settler-colonialist ideology. One Palestinian state would mean Palestinian liberation and the complete abolishment of the state of Israel.”
USC student Asna Tabassum speaks to ABC News, April 16, 2024 (Video screenshot)
The choice of speaker amid the broader call for intifada ignited a real hornet’s nest. The school canceled the school-wide graduation (see #4 below).
How did this person get into a position to be valedictorian? Good grades, high GPA? Well, today, given rampant grade hyper-inflation, they have as much value as the Turkish lira (54.8% inflation). Watch her tying herself in knots in an attempt to avoid the charge of Jew-hatred. Like many of her fellow protesters, she is a contortionist in concocting a hypothetical distinction between venom for Zionism and antisemitism. It’s a difference without a difference.
An overly inflated GPA must be the culprit since one need not be a genius to see that a one-state “river to the sea”, with the obvious right of return, would lead to another wholesale slaughter of the Jews. Just take today’s Iran and graft it onto the narrow trip between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Combine the Sharia viciousness of Hamas and gross misgovernance of the PLO and see what you get. Get the idea?
Living cheek by jowl with people who’ve been raised on a steady diet of characterizations of you as evil incarnate isn’t a recipe for kumbaya (see #5 below). Sorry, Miss Tabassum. Ditto for the munchkins in our classrooms. Parents, another four years in a neo-Marxist bubble isn’t necessarily a pathway to betterment for your offspring. As the song goes, mommas don’t let your babies grow up to be . . . college students. Beware, oh, beware.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “‘Zionists Don’t Deserve To Live’: Meet The Leader Of Columbia University’s Anti-Israel Encampment”, Kassy Akiva, The Daily Wire, 4/25/24, at https://www.dailywire.com/news/zionists-dont-deserve-to-live-meet-the-leader-of-columbia-universitys-anti-israel-encampment
2. “Columbia rabbi warns Jewish students to go home, don’t come back to campus because of ‘extreme antisemitism’”, Doree Lewak and Isabel Keane, New York Post, 4/21/24, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/columbia-rabbi-warns-jewish-students-to-go-home-don-t-come-back-to-campus-because-of-extreme-antisemitism/ar-AA1nouyc
3. “George Washington University Suspends Students for Organizing Anti-Israel Encampment”, James Lynch, National Review Online, 4/27/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/george-washington-university-suspends-students-for-organizing-anti-israel-encampment/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second
4. “USC Cancels Graduation Ceremony over Anti-Israel Protests”, Brittany Bernstein, National Review Online, 4/25/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/usc-cancels-graduation-ceremony-over-anti-israel-protests/
5. An accurate window into what Israel is facing can be found at the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) at https://www.memri.org/
The Senior Women for Climate Protection (KlimaSeniorinnen)
Here’s a story that caught my eye a while back. In March, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) declared that the Swiss government is a human rights abuser on a par with Iran, North Korea, the CCP, et al. How did the ECHR get to this judgment? Do the Swiss possess a pervasive secret police that piles people into dark, dank prisons never to be heard from again, like the CCP does to the Uyghurs? No. Switzerland became a target of opportunity for the usual assemblage of lefties that crops up from time to time to shout and litigate their way to imposing their views on everybody else.
This one, the Senior Women for Climate Protection (KlimaSeniorinnen), made up of lefty oldsters, brought suit against the Swiss government for not capping greenhouse gas emissions. In a story in the NYT (see below) on the Court ruling, it read in part,
“By not acting ‘in good time and in an appropriate and consistent manner,’ the ruling said, the Swiss government had failed to protect its citizens’ rights”.
The Court became a legislature. A legislature is the legitimate place where partisan contests are settled, among the people’s elected representatives, not a court. The “climate change” brouhaha is, most emphatically, a battle of competing viewpoints. There’s much to debate about the issue; there’s much unsettled about the issue. If the people want caps on such emissions, their reps can pass a law. If they want to remove the caps, they can do that also. The Court, instead, took the partisan opinion of a partisan group of lefty old folks and made their opinion a matter of law where there is no law.
The European Court of Human Rights
Remember that’s the complaint of the lefty grandmas. They want a law even though their elected reps have chosen not to make one. Rather, they have taken their little opinion and wrapped it into a lawsuit that asked the Court to act as if there was one. The tortilla for this partisan burrito was “human rights”. According to the ECHR, the opinion of a narrow group of lefties is to be shoved down the throats of the entire population of Switzerland, just under the guise of “human rights”. Now, it’s a “human right” to handcuff, and impoverish, a people against their will.
Without doubt, the so-called “caps” that have been morphed into a “human right” would turn the people’s lives upside down. Getting real, the “caps”, and its cousin “decarbonization”, would mean more intense electrification – i.e., reliance on a grid made more unstable by greenie generation (wind, solar, tides, you name it). The costs of the “transition” are mammoth. As a result, a lot of somebodies are going to be “ground down by the wheel of history” (a little Bolshevik lingo).
Farmers gather with their vehicles next to a Germany/Netherlands border sign during a protest on the A1 highway, near Rijssen, on June 29, 2022, against the Dutch Government’s nitrogen plans. (Photo by Vincent Jannink / ANP / AFP)
If the “caps” are a “human right”, is avoidance of the costs of the caps also a human right? Increasing the financial stress on a beleaguered population must be a threat to human rights. Ipso facto, the Senior Women for Climate Protection are human rights abusers. Should they be incarcerated to join the Uyghurs to protect our right not be subjected to their nonsense? The logic is inescapable.
Lefty grandmas are no different from lefty youngsters shutting down the colleges in an exercise of Hamas-love.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “In Landmark Climate Ruling, European Court Faults Switzerland”, Isabel Kwai and Emma Bubola, New York Times, 4/9/2024, at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/09/world/europe/climate-human-rights.html?auth=login-google1tap&login=google1tap
Emergency personnel work at the site where an apartment block was heavily damaged by a Russian missile strike in Dnipro, Ukraine on January 15, 2023. (REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne)
What makes no sense? The denial of aid to Ukraine, of course. Recently I listened to an interview of Ryan Zinke (R, Montana) regarding the four bills that were introduced by Speaker Mike Johnson to provide aid to Israel, Taiwan, Ukraine, and our defense industrial base. Zinke’s skepticism about supporting Ukraine is, to put it mildly, incoherent. Why single out Ukraine? It’s bonkers.
Ryan Zinke (R, Montana)
A person can be forgiven for concluding that a good chunk of the Republican caucus is scared, maybe petrified, of the screeching minority in the part of the party most infected with Trump Personality Disorder (TPD), people like Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Georgia) and Thomas Massie (R, Kentucky). They threaten to oust Johnson for simply putting Ukraine aid on the floor for a debate and a vote. Shrill, fire-breathing fanatics have outsized influence in a paper-thin Republican majority in the House, ironically a consequence of Trump’s ludicrous 2022 endorsements (he would like to shift blame to abortion).
What is TPD? These are people who, like Trump, confuse theatrics for common sense. It’s a form of political personality that treats stridency, bluntness, and coarseness as the virtues of a statesman.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R, Kentucky) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Georgia)
But why the hostility to Ukraine? Zinke provided the usual humdrum about needing to secure our borders, our depleted munition stockpiles, and Ukraine corruption. Yet, the first two excuses are ridiculous. Money and supplies going to Israel and Taiwan, which he supports, also steer resources away from our border and weapons inventories. As for corruption, is Ukraine any more corrupt than, say, Chicago, our teacher unions, any of our unions, defense contractors, our litany of eco-industries with both hands in the public purse, et al?
The corruption angle is a ruse to hide an affection for Putin by loud-mouthed zealots who’d never win the spelling bee. It’s all tied up in the Russia hoax melodrama of 2015 to 2019. The left scapegoated Hillary’s 2016 loss on Russia, so the dimwitted Trump enthusiasts quickly discovered their inner Putin. “They’re against him, so we must be for him” is the dictum. The door was thus opened to a love for authoritarian public cleanliness, physicality in political persona, Potemkin visits by Tucker Carlson, and the balderdash of Candace Owens’s rantings — and a willingness to leave Ukraine dangling.
A Ukraine flag on a Trumpkin’s house became as incongruous as the tortoise besting Usain Bolt in the 100 meters.
Ditto for the thought process in the donkey party’s embrace of Ukraine-love. Their own “for ‘em/against ‘em” dialectic led them to replace their LGBTQ+ rainbow flag with Ukraine’s. Russia gave us Trump, in their disturbed thinking, so let’s inflict Ukraine on the Russians. That’ll teach ‘em. It’s, frankly, astounding to watch them after they spent the later years of the Cold War siding with the Russians.
Where’s all that stuff about partisanship ending at the water’s edge in foreign affairs? Hogwash.
Is the MTG caucus aware of the new Axis? It’s not hyperbole to notice the similarities between Germany/Italy/Japan circa 1939 and Russia/Iran/China circa 2024. There are more 1939 similarities in this new triumvirate of evil than during the Cold War (the bipolar U.S. v. Soviet Russia), including a rehash of “American First” isolationism – another Trump legacy. They might concede Iran to a lesser extent, but their cyclopic monovision really only sees China. Thus, as in der Fuhrer gobbling up the Rhineland, then Austria, then Czechoslovakia, they are willing to return Europe to a battlefield, just eighty years later. Their myopia, alongside the rank pusillanimity in other parts of the Republican caucus, is a cloning of a combination of Britian’s Neville Chamberlain and U.S.’s own Charles Lindbergh throughout the party. Is anyone noticing that we’ve been down this road before?
German soldiers marching into the Czech “Sudetenland” in 1938
Pass the Ukraine bill, and damn The Squad, the TPD Republicans, and the cowardly in GOP ranks.
H.L. Mencken in his usual blunt way in 1926 put it succinctly about democracy: “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” “Individual ignorance” runs up and down the social pyramid. Frequently, clichés, banalities, pandering, sloganeering, and no real debate dominate much of the public discourse. Mencken’s right. For proof, look no further than our 2024 choices for president.
H.L. Mencken
The tendency is no truer than in the discussion about “climate change”. The fad-thought making the rounds is that the “debate is settled”; there’s no need to have one because “97% of scientists agree”. But that’s not the debate. You might get 97% agreement on a paper-thin subset of the “climate change” issue such as the belief that man’s production of greenhouse gases has warmed our atmosphere. But that’s not what we’re debating. No bill or policy is just about that.
Let’s be clear. We’re debating whether to turn our lives inside out and upside down. Fundamental technologies and entire ways of life that took decades, over a century to develop are being scheduled for the ash heap in less than 30 years. Their efficiencies and cost-effectiveness are to be discarded in a frenzied dash to . . . nothing, or the incoherent, incongruent, or the menacingly weaker. That’s what we’re debating, whether we should even go down this path.
If you go beyond the “97%” banality, you’ll run into questions like, “Is it really catastrophic?” Or, “Is it really out of alignment with other periods in the earth’s geologic history?” Or, “Would it be better to adapt rather than force mitigation in gargantuan measures that’ll ruin the lives of millions if not billions of people?” Or, “Ought we to really ‘decarbonize’?” Or, “Is that the only choice?” Or, “Is it even feasible?” I could go on.
Just looking at the economic aspects of the faddish treatment of the issue, trouble slaps you in the face. To my friends who see economics as mere rank materialism, think again. Poverty is an economic condition, and one to be avoided, if rotting teeth, malnutrition, disease abatement, clean water, widespread emphysema from the burning of candles and animal dung at the family hearth, etc., matters. Bad economics lead to bad conditions for our fellow human beings.
Let’s face it, eco-obsessions are a luxury for the well-off. And these people show just as much ignorance as the poor mother unknowingly drawing polluted water from the same infected well in East Africa. They might care about her plight, while they throw up roadblocks to her people developing beyond the charity of those denizens of the Google campus in California, or the half-wits occupying beachfront estates in Malibu and Martha’s Vineyard.
Buttressing the roadblocks are inane arguments about the economic costs of global warning. But everything has a cost. Think about this: What are the costs of averting the costs? One facile model sets a decline of 2% in GDP from global warming. Well, what are costs to GDP of the mitigations to “decarbonize”? If it’s in the 5-7% range as one study put it, we avoid 2% by paying 5-7%. Mmmmm, interesting.
If you want a real debate, have one. Access views beyond the ignorant thought police. They exist. Here’s one from the Hoover Institution. You might find it enlightening. Check it out below.
Whew, California has a $20 minimum wage. Think of it, wages determined by politicians. Command a “living wage” by proclamation and all good things will happen. Right? No. Watch for a cascade of unintended consequences. The cartoonist Michael Ramirez, as usual, captures the moment.
Prepare for a new wave of U-Haul rentals out of the state.
