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.
Here’s a disturbing tidbit: tweens (8-12 years old) are on their cell phones for an average of five and a half hours per day; teens (13-18 years old) average eight and a half hours (The Common Sense Census, see below). In addition, as of 2019, half of adolescents and tweens owned a cell phone, and 84% of teens owned one. I suspect that it’s only gotten worse. Why “disturbed” and “worse”? Think of the behavioral and mental contagions unleashed by these “pocket computers”.
The mania can be measured in “eyeball minutes” by Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. For them, they are the equivalent of the oilwell gushers of old. Much that they do is geared to maximizing the fixation of the eyes, particularly of the young.
Now, we have a new meaning for “viral”. What used to be applied to contagious diseases has greater relevance for today’s addiction for that eyeball-and-thumb rummaging through websites and pictures. It’s easy to alter mental states as never before. The emotional enslavement to the device was properly characterized by Bill Maher when he said on 60 Minutes,
“The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd-gods building a better world, and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in t-shirts selling an addictive product to children.”
Think of the emotional conditions that are sparked by the incessant activity on the thing. Anorexia nervosa, gender dysphoria, experiments in alternate sexual orientations, teen jealousies, distorted expectations, new and toxic behavioral norms, flash mobs, are just some examples of mental and behavioral contagions that a tween or teen can potentially experience through their incessant connectivity.
No wonder that a good chunk of today’s under-30’s are moonbat crazy.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Bill Maher quote at “Tech Insiders Call Out Facebook for Literally Manipulating Your Brain”, Jon Brooks, KQED, May 25, 2017, at https://www.kqed.org/futureofyou/379828/tech-insiders-call-out-facebook-for-literally-manipulating-your-brain#:~:text=%27The%20tycoons%20of%20social%20media%20have%20to%20stop,to%20children.%27%20Bill%20Maher%2C%20on%20his%20HBO%20show
* “The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teen (2021)”, Common Sense Media, at https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/8-18-census-integrated-report-final-web_0.pdf
* Much thanks to “I Was One of the Last Kids in America to Grow Up before the Smartphone”, Alexandra DeSanctis, National Review Online, Dec. 17, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/12/i-was-one-of-the-last-kids-in-america-to-grow-up-before-the-smartphone/
Okay, I’ll come out and say it: The young are moonbat crazy. Not all, but stunningly large numbers are. “Moonbat”, what’s that? Crazy is the easy part. The word “moonbat” in this context has been attributed to conservative commentator Howie Carr in referring to California governor Jerry Brown, Jr., who was caricatured in an online poster, “Before Moonbats, there was Jerry ‘Moonbeam’ Brown”.
It appears to be getting worse – the moonbat craziness, that is.
I know about youthful kookiness because “Been there, done that”, as any child of the 60’s should know. “Drugs, sex, and rock ‘n roll” isn’t exactly a clarion call for mature judgment. The nutty stuff is rooted in the young’s unappreciation for the arduous path that was trod by others to get to the present. It stems from the young’s newness to the world. All they really know is what’s around them.
They can be taught history, but they have no experience with prior struggles, and telling and showing them won’t be enough, even if someone lectured them. My WWII-generation parents experienced life before air conditioning, and when capable of acquiring it, they did in a heartbeat. Today, large percentages of the young, pampered by modern conveniences, prefer to end a/c in a holy war to defeat climate change. Yet, they wouldn’t last long without it, along with their trendy ev’s and obsession with connectivity. There’s only so much room on the coastal plain to accommodate the added millions fleeing the oppressive heat everywhere else. And the attendant blackouts and spiking utility bills won’t be good for streaming and the apps on their cellphones that direct them to the nearest Starbucks and car charger that won’t charge, the cell towers and relay centers absent the juice to run.
The moonbat in our young came out in all its glory in the last few elections. No, this conclusion isn’t ageist prejudice. Once again, “Been there, done that.” Epidemics of STD’s and drug abuse, riots, and mass displays of self-righteous posturing were as characteristic of my youth as flower power. The peace movement’s catastrophic demand to withdraw from South Vietnam led to the fall of Southeast Asia and millions exterminated and millions more shoved into tortuous reeducation camps. Not quite a Dark Age – for us, that is, a Dark Age for SE Asia – but certainly the quality-of-life lights were dimmed.
Well, the young are at it again. Kristen Soltis Anderson, pollster and partner of Echelon Insights, unknowingly lays out the evidence for moonbat craziness in the under-40’s. Large portions of youthful voters are committed to social and economic suicide. On the social side, they aren’t marrying and having kids at levels of previous generations, support sexual unions that can’t produce them, and want to treat pregnancy as a disease. I guess to make it all go down easier, they favor legal and social approval of THC intoxication in today’s highly potent, selectively cultivated pot (5 to 6 times more lusty than the kind passed around in the smoking circles of my youth).
The economic side of the self-abasement is a toxic embrace of socialism and eco-madness. Unknowingly for them, the socialist paradise of North Korea didn’t invent the microchip. No socialist Shangri-la had a hand in that. It’s a product of free-enterprise entrepreneurialism, capitalism. You know, private property and profits, all that “evil” stuff. Socialism is an assault on private property, profits, and the rich who got rich because they brought all that stuff to the Antifa zealots so they could virally coordinate to close down Portland.
The eco-madness is their poorly thought out but loudly espoused mitigations of “climate change”. Well, prove it. Prove that “climate change” is a man-caused apocalypse. Prove that your chic measures – ev’s, a grid reliant on windmills and solar panels, and chicken-coop housing in today’s urban hellscapes – will make more than a dimple of improvement on the hypothetical crisis. Convince me that it won’t lead to central planning, the ideological cousin of totalitarianism. Convince me that it won’t lead to the iron fist of totalitarianism to socially engineer the Sierra Club’s ideal person. History shows a link between moonbat utopianism in power and thuggery. What makes the young so confident in thinking that the historically evident travel from an imposed fantasy to full-throated coercion can be successfully suspended? History isn’t encouraging.
Here’s Soltis’s scoop on the political status of the young: they are strong Democrats, stronger than earlier renditions of youthfulness. The upper end of millennials has reached 40 and they punched the Democrat ticket by nine points in 2022. The bulk of them, though, are in their 30’s, and combined with the twenty-somethings, they favored the Democrats by 28 points! The Republicans are in a world of hurt with them. It’s been particularly true in the last three election cycles.
Long lines of students waiting to vote at a Michigan college.
What animates these young folks to ignore the urban filth and crime, inflation, a looming recession, the wildlands as open-air combustion chambers, the blackouts, the crippling national debt, the invasion of boys into girls’ sports and bathrooms, and schools that function more as lefty finishing schools than places of learning? The affection for the donkey party can’t solely be laid at the feet of Trump. The young obviously care more about other things. Among those under 30, 53% want abortion to be legal “under any circumstance”. That could unthinkingly include late term/partial birth abortions, ending the life of babies who survive the procedure, sex-selection abortions, and excusing those mothers who see a baby as an obstacle in the climb up the greasy corporate pole.
“Under any circumstance” is an awfully grizzly affair. Many of the young seem to be fully onboard with the “right” to abortion translating into the “right” of the mother and doctor to be executioners. Or do they? “Under any circumstance” precludes any consideration of viability. Pardon me, but I can’t accept the claim that 53% of the young are so inhuman. For many in the polling, I speculate, the response was a visceral reaction to Dobbs, which was caricatured by a similarly ill-informed press as a ban on abortion. But explaining the decision as a return to federalism would require an understanding of federalism. The trillions of dollars spent on the schools has yet to succeed at reading, writing, and math (NAEP scores). What makes you think that they will be any better at conveying the meaning of federalism?
Trillions more and dismal results (NAEP scores). Dismal results and political illiteracy. Political illiteracy and hitching a ride on the Democrats’ train of affection for government as super daddy.
Economic illiteracy too. Young people support labor unions because they supposedly have a “positive impact on the country”, more so than the church and the military. As long as we keep the discussion out of reality, America’s adversarial unions are seen in poorly developed young minds as fighting the battle against the exploitation of innocent workers by robber barons. But it isn’t that simple. A strong historical case can be made that industrial labor unions killed Detroit and sent American steel into a tailspin. Unionization was contorted into corporate and job euthanasia. Their extravagant demands, wrapped in a promiscuous right to strike and lavish collective bargaining agreements, paved the way for the rise of Toyota and the other Asian and European automakers. The industrial heartland became deindustrialized to a great extent by their workers.
Abandoned office/industrial building in Detroit.
The Rust Belt became as rusty as its unions. Who wants to invest in a dive into the jaws of our labor unions, so long as we still have the freedom to decide where to put our money? Better to avoid the Upper Midwest Rust Belt and go to friendlier places, like the American South, who are without laws that grant power to unions to force everyone into their clutches. “Right to work” laws in the South weren’t a ban on labor unions, but merely made them voluntary. Such nuances aren’t the stuff of K-to-grad school curriculums. We’ve trained a generation in AFL-CIO urban myths.
It doesn’t end there. More immediately, our young folks seem to be okay with not getting the latest edition of the I-phone, or even underwear. Those container ships anchored over the horizon at San Pedro were a gift of the Pacific Maritime Association (an affiliate of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union) representing dock workers. As of October 2022, 77 ships remain anchored outside the port. Our supply chain is dependent on the featherbedding of $171,000/year dock workers (2019 numbers). Monopolies of labor have the funny tendency of behaving like any other monopoly.
Even “the most pro-union president” (Biden) is feeling the heat of another possible disruption from a rail strike. Once the containers get off the ship, the most congested docks face the most congested railyard in the country. Its expansion faces the usual suspects: organized eco-zealots and California’s exhaustive eco-regulations. The state’s EIR’s (environmental impact reports), to go along with the fed’s EIS’s (environmental impact statements), to go along with multiple layers of bureaucratic meddling, prompted endless delays and lawsuits. We may get the expansion, but not without a taxpayer breaking and company busting and bloated price tag, not an unusual experience in the Democrats’ Mecca and Medina of California. Remember the state’s high-speed rail monolith to nowhere?
Unfinished California high-speed elevated rail line outside Fresno, Ca.
Such episodes don’t register with the young. I think that too many of the young are into the excitement and drama normally found in their personal diversions and aren’t attracted to the boring and tedious work of reading and contemplation. They won’t read a magazine of substance but will glance at Twitter burps and anything on their Instagram feed.
Why bother to vote If that is the case? Has anyone ever pondered the possibility that voting could be an immoral act? Think about it. An uninformed vote is the equal of an informed one, a frivolous one equal to a serious one. As in a fraudulent vote, one cancels the other. If you don’t know, don’t care, and won’t inform yourself, don’t you have a moral responsibility to stay away from the ballot . . . and power tools? Such an ethic of responsibility cannot be encapsulated in a law, but it should be implanted in our minds – to go along with honesty, charity, and love – from a young age. Before you do something, do it responsibly.
Today’s young are less inclined to be responsible because some parents and most of our schools have failed to prepare them to face the issues of their time. Take marriage as an example, same-zex marriage in particular. The young favor it by upwards to three-quarters in recent polling.
But is same-sex marriage an oxymoron? Has the thought ever graced their mind? Same-sex marriage might be sensible if marriage is construed as nothing but assuaging the interests of adults. In history, however, marriage has always been tied to civilization’s stake in procreation. For that to happen, heterosexual behavior is required. Not every married couple of a heterosexual complexion can or chooses to have children. That’s not the point. The long nurturing process of our young requires the tight bond of the people who brought them into being. The state and its disconnected operatives are no stand-in.
That tight bond is marriage, and it should be reserved for heterosexual pairings. Whether they have children or not is a personal matter. Other conceptions (civil unions, etc.) with many of the privileges and protections of marriage can be made available for same-sex couples. But heterosexuality is a privileged coupling because without it, there is no next generation. A society of the incontinent and gray-haired, because we have elevated everything else but childbearing and childrearing, doesn’t bode well for survival. Heterosexuality must be privileged. Marriage is the way, born of necessity, to do it.
The reservation of marriage for complimentary sexual pairings isn’t a prudish ban on “loving who you want”. That’s pure sophistry. Marriage is society’s minimal requirement for there to be a next generation.
Has this argument ever been presented to the three-quarters who think that same-sex marriage is a great idea? The overwhelming numbers in support of something is not proof of the thing’s validity. More accurately, it’s evidence of a lack of exposure to the history of our institutions, and to a real debate. Like much else involving the young, they don’t know any better and nobody told them.
It comes back to maturity. One element of maturity is tied up in the economic concept of tradeoffs: you can’t have it all. No one can. We give up one thing to obtain another. So, for our fulminating statue-topplers and Antifa zealots, and our twenty-somethings whose education didn’t educate, you can’t simultaneously have your socialism and 5G and the next generation of connectivity. That stuff is born of freedom, the freedom to live a life, to think anew, to acquire, without undermining the prerequisites for their being generations to come. It’s not the freedom of bureaucrats to meddle.
The young are just moonbat crazy. Is this what degringolade (downfall) looks like?
RogerG
Read here for more:
* “Republicans’ Lost Youth”, Kristen Soltis Anderson, National Review, Dec. 1, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/12/19/republicans-lost-youth/
* “NAEP national test scores fall to lowest levels in decades!”, Anthony Picciano of CUNY, Sept, 2, 2022, at https://apicciano.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2022/09/02/naep-national-test-scores-fall-to-lowest-levels-in-decades/#:~:text=Driving%20the%20news%3A%20The%20results%20on%20the%20NAEP%2C,in%20learning%20outcomes%20were%20starkest%20among%20lower-performing%20students.
* “77 box vessels waiting outside San Pedro Bay ports”, World Cargo News, Oct. 25, 2022, at https://www.worldcargonews.com/news/news/77-box-vessels-waiting-outside-san-pedro-bay-ports-67501#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Marine%20Exchange%20of%20Southern%20California%2C,Los%20Angeles%20are%20due%20to%20arrive%20at%20anchor.
Senator Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) gestures during an election night party after a projected win in the midterm runoff election in Atlanta, Ga., December 6, 2022. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)
The dust is beginning to settle, or so I thought. The Trump-endorsed Herschel Walker lost in the Georgia runoff to the sharp-tongued leftist masquerading as a man of the cloth, Raphael Warnock. Georgia has a rabble-rousing socialist to represent it in the U.S. Senate, to go along with the state’s other non-card-carrying member of the Socialist International, Jon Osoff. But the state’s leadership went red. Go figure. And just as things were settling down, Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema dropped the Democrat label yesterday morning and officially became an independent, and we are back to choking on dust again. What does all this mean? Who knows, but I suspect there’s much to clean up on isle . . . for both parties.
The Georgia situation is perplexing. The results of the 2022 elections left the state in a condition of political dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder). Think about it: the radical left in the US Senate for the state and solid conservatives from the governor’s mansion to majorities in the state houses. How? What?
Republicans have some “cleanup on isle . . . ”. The mess comes in the form of the person of Donald Trump. The guy is simply not the winner of his boasts. He’s a big turn-off. He appeals to a narrow slice of the electorate, but he’s toxic in suburbia. One step forward, three steps back. Walker carried the Trump label, a liability too strong to overcome in a rough-cut newcomer.
Some reports indicate that Trump convinced Walker to run, and thus exposed himself to the Democrats’ usual rectal examination. He came up short after the smears, but everywhere else on the ballot, Republicans did very well. Jim Geraghty of National Review Online lays out the results. He reports that Republicans in all the statewide races broke the 50% threshold in the general election and thus avoided runoffs, with the lone exception of Walker. And roughly 200,000 fewer Georgians voted for Walker in the runoff than the general. I won’t speculate on the meaning of that, but it’s clear that Walker is less appealing than the rest of the Republican slate. He’s got personal baggage, and additionally he’s got Trump to live down.
Walker joins a broad cast of characters who, instead of the union label, had the Trump label and lost. It was particularly true in battleground states, the states that Republicans have to win to become a majority. Pennsylvanians preferred a stroke victim to Oz. In the governor’s contest, Arizonians favored a millennial uptalking airhead who wouldn’t debate, and couldn’t win one, and avoided public appearances over the quick-witted, fast-talking, Trump-endorsed telecaster, Keri Lake. Like her inspiration, she’s suing and caterwauling over the election results. The Senate race wasn’t even close with Trump’s novice, Blake Masters, falling way short. To no surprise, In the deeper blue bastions of Lefty lunacy, Trump’s imprimatur didn’t prevent a shellacking.
It seems that Trump threw around his endorsements like a drunk trust-fund brat tossing chips in a Las Vegas casino. He appeared to be so flippant, focusing on the oddball, the ill-prepared, the inexperienced, anyone who could parade around under the clichéd banner “outsider”. Sometimes, there are very good reasons for some people to be “outsiders”. Trump has proven to be not very adept at distinguishing them.
Part of the Republican cleanup should include a better ground game. The Democrats adjusted the election system for theirs, which is chock full of the ill-informed, easily distracted, and unmotivated. First, they eliminated the concepts of election day and the secret ballot. The party of government used government to deform elections to their liking: depreciating personal responsibility in voting (like registering, staying informed, getting off the couch to vote in-person), and having a month to do it. Then, all they have left to do is to mine the rich veins of the politically illiterate in their base. That means a data base to identify them and the paid minions to harvest the ballots.
Certainly, it’s an insult to one man, one conscience, one vote. The loss of the “conscience” part is critical since mailing the things in the millions will land multiples of them on a kitchen table, or lie around the floor of the communal mailboxes, waiting for . . . whoever . . . to mark them. It’s a scam-made-legal. Republicans need to play the game by the Democrats’ rules.
If the Republicans succeed in shedding the Trump stigma, the Democrats’ own “cleanup on isle . . .” will be more glaring. The Democrats have to live down The Squad, “birthing people”, a reverse Jim Crow (CRT, “systemic racism”, punishing racial preferences, racial reparations, etc.), their disdain for holding hoodlums accountable for harming the innocent, the filth and degradation in places under their chronic suzerainty, and their destruction of prosperity in a wave of radical eco-mongering and spending. They will persevere in spite of their craziness if the Republicans continue to make Trump the face of the party.
Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) at a Sept. 13 gala wearing a gifted “Tax the Rich” gown, for which she is being investigated for House ethics violations.
Is there a broad and popular appetite for this stuff? The Republicans offer a cult of chaotic personality. The Democrats peddle lunacy. If there ever was a good reason for complacency, this is it. I’m pinning my hopes on the Republicans’ cleanup brigade because their task is easier. All they have to do is send Trump packing. The radical chic ethos runs too deep in the Democrats.
Protest in Minneapolis against the appearance of Pres. Trump in Oct. 2019. Prominent state Democrats energized the protest crowd with their appearance and chants, including the radical Democrat State Representative Aisha Gomez (DFL-Minneapolis).
Roger
Source:
* Jim Geraghty’s take on the Georgia election scene: “Are We Ready to Learn Our Lessons Now, Republicans?”, National Review Online, Dec. 7, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/are-we-ready-to-learn-our-lessons-now-republicans/
The backstory on Dylan’s “My Back Pages” is a teaching moment for the censorious zealots who happen to dominate the commanding heights of our culture and many of our political institutions. So are the lyrics, if rightly understood.
Here’s what I’ve been able to glean in my research into the song. In the mid-60’s, Dylan was given the Tom Paine Award for social activism by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. Before this, he was getting irritated at being pigeonholed as a radical activist. He got drunk, made a speech at the award ceremony, and much of that speech made its way into the lyrics. As one source put it regarding the song, “. . . Dylan intensely criticizes his younger self for his moral arrogance and intellectual naivety. More than anything, he’s mocking his own hypocrisy. His outlook on these subjects, on himself and on the progressive movement he lambasted from the awards ceremony pulpit . . . .” Further, according to this source, “The way Dylan saw it, he was becoming the authoritarian by continuing on his old path.” Sound familiar?
The song’s chorus, “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”, was a personal admonition for turning into a vain know-it-all. In the following lines, he upbraids himself for his hypocrisy in becoming as narrow-minded and pushy as the other side:
“In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach”
Equality at all costs was every bit the holy grail among the radical Left in Dylan’s time as it is today among the so-called social justice warriors spitting and fulminating in lecture halls against anyone who disagrees. Dylan saw it in the mid-60’s and portrayed it in the following lines:
“A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty is just equality in school
‘Equality,’ I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow”
What we are experiencing today is a rehash of an earlier time; only some people saw their descent into inhumanity and corrected. Others didn’t and won’t. The full lyrics are below.
***********
Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rolling high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
“We’ll meet on edges soon,” said I
Proud ‘neath heated brow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
“Rip down all hate,” I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull, I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
Girl’s faces formed the forward path
From phony jealousy
To memorizing politics of ancient history
Flung down by corpse evangelists
Unthought of, though, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty is just equality in school
“Equality,” I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My existence led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
***********
Enjoy the all-star version at Dylan’s honorary concert from the 1990’s with Neil Young, Tom Petty, Roger McGuinn, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, and of course Bob Dylan (below).
RogerG
Source:
* Backstory of “My Back Pages” at https://www.songfacts.com/facts/bob-dylan/my-back-pages#:~:text=Those%20lines%20clearly%20mirror%20the%20chorus%20for%20%22My,More%20than%20anything%2C%20he%27s%20mocking%20his%20own%20hypocrisy.
On the masthead of The Washington Post is this aphorism, “Democracy dies in darkness.” The country may not be in complete darkness, but the lights are fading, and the people at the dimmer switch are the same people who have loudly proclaimed “We need to save our democracy”. Yes, they are trying to save it by destroying it.
Democracy and its prerequisites are disfigured to mean their opposites by this delirious clique. The franchise is reshaped to mean almost anyone with a pulse: the uncaring, ignorant, the young to age 16 if Boston and others get their way, possibly those in comas, noncitizens (that means the citizens of other nations), and maybe even some without a heartbeat or brain waves. So, even a pulse is unnecessary. The freedoms of conscience and speech are constrained by the nebulous and capricious concept of “hate”, to be managed by a class of entitled and biased monitors and fact checkers. Equal opportunity is turned into a bean-counting exercise to the benefit of the fashionably “oppressed” and harm to the unfashionably “privileged”. The terms are flexible to fit the occasion. And a massive campaign of indoctrination is turned loose on everyone to buttress the whole sorry edifice. Did I miss anything?
Is this democracy in any meaningful sense? How could it be, with thoughts and speech monitored, the enforcement of a new Jim Crow, just pointing in a different direction, voting without any expectation of responsibility or qualifications, and a propaganda offensive to rival anything that came out of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth? This is a “democracy” to produce the desired outcomes of a pampered and revolutionary few, of the kind that delivers 99% of the votes for Stalin as General Secretary. As for the other 1%, like those of today who run afoul of the chic views of the powerful and influential, they are disappeared.
Elon Musk’s dump of Twitter’s earlier internal communications exposed a rats’ nest of mini control freaks. Speaking of the beaming of light into dark places, the rats are now attacking the guy with the flashlight.
I am no Fox News groupie, but you don’t have to be to find this swarming behavior deplorable. Notice the playing of footsie with words? Old fashioned censorship is renamed as the fight against “misinformation”. “Safety” and “hate” became the excuse to ban contrarian ideas and people. Of course, the cult was encouraged to inflict punishments by influential others (politicized “experts”) who offer up more justifications. This supportive cast superficially qualified their charges with “seemed” and “has all the hallmarks” of Russian disinformation. Think of the Hunter Biden laptop story in the New York Post. The qualifiers sound like plausible deniability to avoid civil liability. Hunter Biden was a booster of the concept as his favorite escape hatch from accountability, as is it is for this manipulative web of political insiders. It’s the language of skullduggery.
Silicon Valley Democratic Party Club
California, as the Mecca and Medina of wokeness, went national. Rudi Dutschke, the German radical Left activist of the 1960’s, spoke of the “march through the institutions”. The Long March began in Berkeley, spread to any place with a Sociology Department, gained a stranglehold in Sacramento, and then the nonsense was marketed far and wide into all of civil and public society.
These dogmas became holy writ, and, if threatened, the hive swarms. Too many parents protesting the indoctrination of their children into Antifa and transgenderism? If you’re the National School Boards Association, contact your political compatriots in the DOJ and watch parent protests acquire the patina of terrorism, or organized crime, to federal agents with guns – a service which AG Garland dutifully initiated on Oct. 4, 2021 (memo below). Parents were marked with an FBI “threat tag” despite Garland’s denial of doing what he was exactly doing. Protecting the Lefty edifice through legal jargon is a gambit of those other “people’s democracies” in Cuba, North Korea, and that huge one based in Beijing.
And what about that incestuous relationship between the Twitter gang and the Democratic Party? If censorship is your game, turn to your fellow travelers running the show at the social media giants to quash your opponents. No need to exclusively rely on the feds with their badges and guns. People were disappeared by Twitter’s “safety teams”. In October 2020, Biden’s campaign emailed Twitter to remove 5 tweets. What is even more startling is how quickly the Twitter people complied: “handled these”.
“Handled these” was the outcome if the Party objected to comments by celebrities such as Stephen Liuhuan and James Woods. Woods was banned, I kid you not, for parodying a meme about Democrats wanting men to step aside in favor of a women’s takeover of our society (see below).
Twitter banned The Babylon Bee for a joke about Rachel Levine, a transgender member of Biden’s cabinet. Yoel Roth, ex-Head of Site Integrity at Twitter, said in an interview (see below), “. . . the targeting and victimization of the trans community is very real, very life threatening, extraordinarily serious . . . .” So, transgenderism is above debate because to question it through humor is, by itself, the equivalent of a violent assault. If so, every member of the Communist Party USA should be guilty of murder 110 million times over. Assaults are committed by sociopaths, for instance, not ideologies. Physical attacks aren’t intrinsic to people who find ridiculous the idea of biological sex being reduced to a state of mind. Twitter can’t grasp the idea that the refusal of a person to participate in another’s discordant mental state isn’t an assault.
I could go on and on about the bizarre idea of applying “gender” – a word taken from the masculine, neutral, and feminine appellations in some languages – to chromosome pairings. For the folks running the show at Twitter, we must play-act as if biology can be suspended by personal fiat, and to think otherwise is yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater. Treating some people’s oversensitive triggers as “Fire!” dilutes the seriousness of real fires.
Throughout Trump’s term, Trump was caricatured as Putin’s lapdog. Could “lapdog” be an apt description of Twitter’s consensual relationship with the Democratic Party?
No more egregious example of lapdog behavior can be found than Twitter’s aforementioned deep-sixing of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story. Even one of Twitter’s social justice warriors in the c-suite, Yoel Roth, admitted it was a mistake to strike it from Twitter (see below): “It didn’t get there [banning it] for me.” The NY Post story should never have gotten anywhere near the death penalty because Twitter’s policy requires a law enforcement action to instigate a ban. The reporters at the New York Post were engaging in journalism, not running a crime syndicate or extortion ring. It was a real story that the American people deserved to see, but weren’t.
An unrepresentative political cult dominates our culture and institutions. Who believes this stuff? Who believes that “woman” can be divorced from chromosomes, and “mother” should be replaced by “birthing person”? Who believes that the lack of racism by individuals is somehow proof of “systemic racism”? In other words, the unprovable “systemic” variety is used to justify a jihad against what cannot be proven to exist in the first place. Who believes that our language should be debased by euphemisms – “hate”, “threats to safety”, “systemic . . .”, the multitudinous pronouns, “racist”, the plethora of thought phobias, “misinformation”, etc. – in order to pursue a revolutionary agenda? Who believes this stuff? Answer: no one, but that narrow class of ideologically infected hysterics coming out of our defiled colleges and universities.
One more example before I drop this rant: John Gibson, ex-CEO, co-founder, and largest shareholder of Tripwire Interactive, was mobbed out of his position by the cult (see below). Why? He tweeted the following: “Proud of #USSupremeCourt affirming the Texas law banning abortion for babies with a heartbeat. As an entertainer I don’t get political often. Yet with so many vocal peers on the other side of this issue, I felt it was important to go on the record as a pro-life game developer.” Yep, he’s pro-life and that made him a threat to “women’s health”. Just think, for the cult’s initiates, pregnancy is no longer a blessing; it’s a hazard, like COVID-19. The cult is a social suicide machine. And for his belief that a baby resides in the womb, he was subjected to social terrorism (to borrow his words).
It’s mindboggling.
Yes, I agree that our democracy is imperiled. The threat comes from a half-mad political cult that has ascended to great heights of political and cultural power. After their “saving” of our democracy, we will wake up to find that we don’t have one, with a shriveled next generation to boot.
RogerG
Read more and watch here:
* AG Garland’s memo to initiate an investigation of parental protests at school board meetings: https://www.justice.gov/media/1170056/dl?inline=
* Musk transferred the Twitter communications to Matt Taibbi: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394
* James was banned by Twitter for the following tweet at https://twitter.com/Millerita/status/1043179275812306944?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1043179275812306944%7Ctwgr%5E0bb2d3095508bffe9983e152690085794a51dbb0%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.westernjournal.com%2Ftwitter-legend-james-woods-hit-sjws-hard-twitter-blocked-platform%2F
* Yoel Roth interview after leaving Twitter explains the banning of The Babylon Bee for its parody of Rachel Levine at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFxjUF0uq6o
* Yoel Roth in the same interview exhibited the same ritualized use of euphemisms to hide his predilection for censorship of The Babylon Bee at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFxjUF0uq6o
* Tucker Carlson conducted an in-depth interview of John Gibson at https://www.foxnews.com/media/former-tripwire-ceo-looks-back-canceled-forced-step-down-from-company-over-pro-life-tweet
* Letter from 50 intelligence experts critical of story about the emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop at https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000175-4393-d7aa-af77-579f9b330000
The other night I watched the director’s cut of Ridley Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven”, all 3-plus hours’ worth. Since I’m retired, I have more time to devote to culture, or anti-culture depending on your point of view. The whole thing struck me as a polished, elaborate reflection of Howard Zinn’s indictment of western civilization. I can’t think of a more biased portrayal of the Crusades and Crusaders.
I know that I’m not unique in this portrayal of the movie, absent the connection to Howard Zinn. It was observed when it first premiered in 2005.
Who is Howard Zinn? Some of you may know of him. He is no minor figure in our current edition of the Democratic Party. When you think of our current “woke moment” – sometimes referred to as the “Great Awokening” – think of Howard Zinn. Remember 2020 and its wave of memorial defacements (statue-toppling, etc.) and Antifa and BLM riots? Howard Zinn’s characterization of our country and civilization animated the hyper-activity of the radicalized perpetrators. The Fortune 500 c-suite’s campaign against Georgia’s 2021 voting law, and their current threats against Elon Musk’s Twitter, were based on at least an intuitive acceptance of Howard Zinn’s opinion of American history. When I’ve said that a good chunk of the “beautiful people” have turned left, I meant that they have Howard Zinn’s definition of America roiling between their ears.
Howard Zinn
So, what is Howard Zinn’s grand thesis about America and western civilization? To put it bluntly, he believes that ours is a history of hate, racism, sexism, and general hostility to any of the “other” or so-called “out” groups in the world. In other words, overt and systemic oppression explains it all. Zinn is the historian’s version of Marcuse.
Of course, the Church (the latinate or Roman Catholic) comes in for particular abuse in the script. Priests, bishops, archbishops, the hierarchy are portrayed almost universally as venal, vicious, self-serving, and hypocrites. From the very beginning to the last scenes, Church figures are yuck!
The actual history of the Church’s involvement in the Crusades is more complicated, which is likely to be true regarding almost any accurate portrayal of many large-scale human endeavors in history. The Middle East of the Middle Ages was a diverse religious and cultural tapestry, much more so than it is today. The Crusades were triggered by Muslim depredations of Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. The cruelty was evident in an age of cruelty, when war and crime was conducted at the length of a man’s arm, up close and personal. Believe me, there was enough inhumanity to go around from all sides. This movie’s rendition of the siege of Jerusalem simplistically kept the focus for evil on the Christian side.
Another interesting aspect of the film’s story is the movie’s admiration for religious skepticism, bordering on secularism and atheism, in some of the characters. The film’s good guys fit that mold. But how true is that in actual history? The bloodiest century in history, the 20th, was made a bloodbath by atheists (110 million killings by Marxists) or people who rejected Christianity as a “slave” religion with a “slave” morality (the National Socialists, drawn from Nietzsche).
Murderous secularists have far bloodier hands than any of the laity and clergy of the Church. In fact, Christianity and its “slave” morality has generally been a moderating influence on human conduct. And further, the reality is that war and battlefield miseries does not generally turn people away from faith but will probably intensify those yearnings for the deeper and more profound meaning of life that is found in faith. The movie’s depiction of the wise and grizzled veterans as skeptics is a self-serving lefty trope.
If you’re wondering why surveys have registered a decline in the numbers who identify Christian (see below), part of the reason may lie in the fact that we are more of a visual people. The audio-visual arts surround and consume us. Howard Zinn’s ideology dominates Hollywood, so the story gets out and is repeated ad infinitum. Almost uniformly, Hollywood is an America self-hate enterprise.
Think of it, Disney, the company of Mickey Mouse, Cinderella, and Bambi, can’t bring itself to defend children from sexual mutilation. A company devoted to making children’s movies is so under the sway of Zinn’s dogmas that it kowtows to Zinn-influenced employees in opposing a Florida law to protect children from this grotesquery. Thank you, Howard Zinn and Hollywood.
Please, watch the movie . . . particularly if you’re a Howard Zinn groupie.
Marjorie Taylor Greene at press conference announcing a privileged resolution to audit aid to Ukraine, Nov. 17, 2022.
For Immanuel Kant, the “crooked timber of humanity” is a universal. He wrote, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
Yes, we do have a flawed nature and philosophies and ideologies can’t cleanse us of it. We aren’t saved by diversity trainings or renewing our commitment to Trump’s “stop the steal” crusade. “Gender therapy” – medical interventions such as synthetic hormones and surgeries – to straighten us out is an invitation to disaster. Simpletons, kooks, and charlatans are legion throughout the political spectrum and even the professions, and though they might agree with us on many matters, that doesn’t turn them into founts of wisdom. A prime example on the right can be found in the person of Marjorie Taylor Greene. At times, she dispenses sheer nuttery. She isn’t the only one.
Occasionally, the nuttery awakens as a consequence of a certain issue. The Ukraine War comes to mind. For anyone in their right mind (as in sober seriousness), befuddlement is the proper response to calls for appeasement in the face of thuggery and butchery. What else would you call it but appeasement? Marjorie Taylor Greene is consumed with it.
There’s an element on the Right intent on reviving the America First Committee of 1940. Aid to Britain was in the crosshairs at that time. The Third Reich’s Foreign Ministry was as overjoyed as Putin’s Foreign Ministry kleptocrats must be at this latest edition. Marjorie Taylor Greene, with all the confidence of a half-witted zealot, and with her coterie of the like-minded in tow, announced a “privileged resolution” to place aid to Ukraine under a cloud of suspicion. This thing isn’t about a prudent audit of a government spending program. Who opposes that, along with one for all the other federal spending monstrosities that are bankrupting our children’s future? But this one targets the Ukraine.
I smell a rat. The biblical injunction, “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:16 KJV), applies. These people have a track record of their illicit intentions. It goes far beyond prudence. She shares Trump’s weakness for Twitter bombast when she texted in March 2022, “We should not spend billions of American’s hard earned tax dollars on lethal aid to be given to possible Nazi militias that are torturing innocent people, especially children and women.” Additionally, “The US must demand Zelensky stop his military from torturing his own people.” Notice Putin’s “Nazi militias” propaganda line? This could have easily (and did) come out of his press spokesman. This gang isn’t a collection of original thinkers.
Matt Gaetz (R, Fla.), that other blowhard, has been pounding the drum for not doing anything on the international stage till we solve all our problems, or so it seems. In February 2022 at CPAC, Gaetz thundered, “Why should Americans have to pay the costs for freedom elsewhere when our own leaders won’t stand up for our freedom here?” Gaetz is correct to lambast Biden and his administration for their derelictions and disastrous policies but to say that our country’s foreign policy is tied to getting everything right here at home before we can do anything abroad is utter folly.
Our nation’s vital interests and security are of greater importance than Gaetz’s or Greene’s policy peccadillos. Yet, here they are advancing the ludicrous. They have a train of telegenic fellow travelers in the Right’s media. Candice Owens is similarly loose in her logic, tongue, and keypad when she tweeted, “President Zelensky is a very bad character who is working with globalists against the interests of his own people. I will not move one inch away from that assessment—ever—no matter how flowery the media depictions of him are.” In the wake of Putin’s claim that Russia created Ukraine, Owens in a fit of balderdash proclaimed, “Ukraine wasn’t a thing until 1989. Ukraine was created by the Russians…They speak Russian.” Whew, what do with that logic-chopping? Many people in the U.S. speak Spanish, but does that mean that Spain created the United States?
Candice Owens on her podcast show
As for the assertion that Russia created the Ukraine, it ignores one salient fact: Russia is an empire, a polyglot. Meaning, it’s a collection of separate peoples that have one thing in common: these regions came under Russian imperial rule over the course of centuries. So separate is Ukraine’s identity that Stalin tried to wipe it out in the 1930’s, going so far as to try to starve it to death in the Holodomor. Russian was imposed over the native Ukrainian language. Yes, Candice, the languages are different with divergent alphabets, “vocabulary, pronunciation of words, and so on [see below].” Language is a marker for so many other distinctions.
Candice, reliance on Putin as a scholarly source for an opinion is a junior-high level term paper mistake.
And, by the way, this discussion by us is superfluous since the Russians know it. Once given the chance, this polyglot empire flew apart with the collapse of the iron fist of the Soviet CCP. The Ukraine gained its independence along with Kazakhstan, etc. The Ukraine was so distinct that General Secretary Khrushchev drew its boundaries decades before. Agreed, he outbounded them a bit, but he obviously knew the Ukrainians to be a distinct enough people to recognize the fact with borders. Besides, the Politburo and the Soviet CCP agreed to the lines. It’s disingenuous for them to “speak with forked tongue” later and use a spurious argument to first lop off parts of the country and then invade and try to extinguish it. Poland was similarly imperiled in September 1939. Let’s face it, it’s a rhetorical gambit for empire-building thugs.
With every disclosure of Russian brutalities (see below), this troupe on the Right seems intent on shoving their foot further down their throats. It’s a cast of clowns. Is this element on the Right the appeasement caucus? Are they in the grip of fear of Russian nuclear weapons? If so, I can’t think of a stronger endorsement for every tyrant to get some for themselves. Where’s their argument to defend the rest of Asia from a nuclear Red China or the oil-rich Middle East from a jihadi-riddled and nuclear Iran? The fear of an aggressor hurting us is a poor basis for conducting foreign policy.
erhii Lahovskyi, 26, mourns over the body of his friend Ihor Lytvynenko, in Bucha, Ukraine, April 5, 2022. (Zohra Bensemra / Reuters)
Today’s America First dimwits have much in common with the 1980’s nuclear freeze movement. Back then, the anti-war movement of the abandonment of South Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia found another cause near and dear to their hearts in stopping Reagan’s effort to balance the Soviet Union’s intermediate missile threat to our western European allies. The placement of American intermediate missiles to counter the unopposed Soviet threat was declared by peaceniks to be provocative. Sound familiar? Greene earlier this year blamed our efforts to assist Ukraine for “Poking the bear”. You see, if only we hadn’t expanded NATO and recognized the alliance with military facilities amongst out allies, everything would have been hunky-dory with Putin. If only we had granted Putin a veto for NATO expansion, all would be goodness and light. It’s a version of the old blame-America-first tactic of the 60’s New Left. It took awhile but the brain-dead Left managed to find common ground with the brain-dead Right. Like seeks the company of like, brain-dead that is.
With cranks like these on the Right, we on the Right don’t need any enemies. The Left has The Squad to live down, and the Right has Marjorie Taylor Greene/Matt Gaetz and company. Don’t expect the public to trust the Republicans with power with dunderheads like these becoming the face of the GOP. They just end up running interference for the socialistic Democrats.
* “Difference Between Russian and Ukrainian”, Ask Any Difference, at https://askanydifference.com/difference-between-russian-and-ukrainian/#:~:text=The%20main%20difference%20between%20Russian%20and%20Ukrainian%20is,their%20vocabulary%2C%20pronunciation%20of%20words%2C%20and%20so%20on.
Screenshot from CNN report: ‘It’s like living in an igloo.’ People are turning off their heat as prices surge.
Referring to her home, “It’s like living in an igloo”; so says Charmaine Johnson of Philadelphia this weekend (Nov. 19-20, 2022) who works as an operator at a non-profit call center assisting low-income people heating their homes, and also personally experiencing the awful tradeoff of eat or freeze.
Here we go again. We have another government-sponsored trainwreck to add to history’s ever-lengthening ribbon list of failure. Yes, today, many people have a choice between eating or hypothermia. We never seem to learn that meddlesome ideologues with power screw things up. It makes no different if they’re commissars of the Soviet central planning agency, Gosplan, or Biden’s climate-change zealots. The consequences were famine in the Donbas, or massive shortages and waste and mismanagement in Soviet factories, or today’s sky-high heating bills dropped in American mailboxes. The misery has the same source: government with too much power.
The French word for the culprit is dirigisme, or an economic doctrine in which the state exercises a strong directive over a capitalist market economy.
Charmaine recently spent $1,000 to fill her fuel oil tank. Tim Wisely of Philadelphia, completely reliant on his Social Security benefits, will pay $1,500 to fill his. Wiseley said that he won’t raise the thermostat till his “teeth chatter”. He says, “It’s 50 or 55 degrees in here. To me that’s not unbearable yet.” He adds, “You can’t go food shopping and get oil. It’s one or the other.”
Tim Wisley’s thermostat settingScreenshot from CNN report: “It’s like living in an igloo.”
Nationwide, the cost of heating your home jumped 17% last year with another 18% for this year. The numbers are statistical abstractions until you run into people like Charmaine and Tim.
What’s amazing is that the source of the story, CNN’s Gabe Cohen, can’t bring himself to mention that the looney policies of Biden and his people are a principal cause of the misery. Anything but government is the go-to in our lefty newsrooms. Citing another government agency, the Energy Information Agency (EIA), Cohen repeats the agency’s desultory list of suspects which includes the Ukraine War (of course), OPEC+, increase energy exports, reduced energy inventories, and a higher demand for natural gas for electricity generation. Wait a minute, take a breath, isn’t this the all-too-common evidentiary slime trail of government-empowered zealots run amok?
It’s hard to blame Putin and the Ukraine War since heating bills began to spike in 2021 (17%), long before the thrust to Kiev in February 2022. A stronger correlation aligns with January 20, 2021 (Biden’s inauguration). The best that can be said to hide the donkey party’s full culpability is that Putin made worse what Biden triggered.
Suspect #2, the decision of OPEC+ to cut production, like Putin’s Ukraine adventure, is another after-the-fact that magnifies the fallout of Biden’s well-established ambition to lower the sea levels around Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard estate. Biden and his people accuse OPEC+ of doing what he intended to do: lower production — to assist a “transition” to a California-style Shangri-la. Everything from denying permits on federal lands, increasing the regulatory hoops to explore and produce, starving producers access to capital with new and demonizing SEC regulations, and vetoing pipelines works in the same manner as OPEC’s announcement of a 2,000-bpd cut. Do you believe for a moment that in this atmosphere anyone with capital to spare would spend it on a new refinery? I’m sure that the Sierra Club’s c-suite is dancing a jig over $7-pg diesel.
Los Angeles in a blackout?
Higher demand for natural gas? This is winter. Has anyone checked with Buffalo? Do ya think that Exxon isn’t aware of the seasons? This excuse makes farce look like a compliment.
Then there’s the “increase in energy exports”. What “energy exports”? It’s natural gas, liquified natural gas to Europe, the thing that Biden is trying to transition us from. You see, Biden is attempting to copy Europe in “net-zero” buffoonery. Germany did it . . . and became dependent on Putin. Hitching your wagon to Putin’s ambitions is a scarry energy strategy. But they did it, along with all the vast landscapes devoted to windmills and solar panels. The erratic production must be supplemented by something, and a hugely expensive infrastructure to make the erratic more stable. All for what? A hypothetical 1.5-degree Celsius increase in a century? We’ve had warming periods in the past. Heck, Britain once had vineyards. And cooling periods aren’t great for the food supply and public health (the Black Death). Europe and Biden adopted a “transition” to anguish.
The 2022 midterms were a referendum on . . .? I can’t believe it was a preference for this. Surely, people don’t desire vulnerability. Besides the retort “Don’t call me Shirley”, people must realize that they are exposed to bankruptcy and increased threats to their health. Biden’s “transition” is only a nice sounding word for vulnerability to misery. In the annals of state-sponsored misery, Biden’s greenie die-hards join the ranks of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, Lenin’s politburo, Soviet Gosplan, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, and the North Korean Kim dynasty’s “Juche”, the dirigisme of “self-sufficiency” and “self-isolation”.
Biden has ample company, and now, we get to experience the same results as the rest of the world’s hoi polloi. I can’t help but be reminded of the definition of insanity. You know, doing the same thing but . . . .
RogerG
Read more here:
* “‘It’s like living in an igloo.’ People are turning off their heat as prices surge”, Gabe Cohen, CNN, Nov. 20, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/success/home-heating-prices
* “OPEC announces the biggest cut to oil production since the start of the pandemic”, Hanna Ziady, CNN, Oct. 5, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/05/energy/opec-production-cuts/index.html
* “Heating costs forecast to soar this winter”, Chris Isidore, CNN, Oct. 12, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/12/energy/heating-costs/index.html
* “Biden Has Bungled Fossil-Fuel Policy”, Casey B. Mulligan, National Review Online, Nov. 2, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/biden-has-bungled-fossil-fuel-policy/
Biden’s a liar, but the Republicans have to contend with Trump. What a pickle for the American people. Trump makes it possible for Biden to rule and make a hash of our lives. It’s hard for Republicans to make the case when they’re constantly trying to live down one of the most repugnant characters on the political scene campaigning under their banner.
There is a chunk of the GOP base that remains enthralled by Trump. They are stuck in 2016. Back then, Trump was the fresh face with an outsized personality and no political track record to excoriate. He won and we quickly learned that it wasn’t an act. He gave us four years of repellant behavior and hasn’t stopped. Like it or not, he became the easily caricatured face of the party, and the necessary distraction for the Democratic Party to avoid accountability for their descent of the country into “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Thomas Hobbes, 17th century). The embrace of Trump has allowed the Democrats to get away with it.
Smath-and-grab in a high-end store in Los Angeles, November 2021
Trump is a big turn-off, and he’s turning off more. The act is getting old. He has a vendetta against people who have no vendetta against him, but against whom he might play second fiddle. Governor Ron DeSantis was insulted with “DeSanctimonious”. Governor Youngkin was pasted with an anti-Asian slur on Truth Social: “Young Kin (now that’s an interesting take. Sounds Chinese, doesn’t it?) in Virginia couldn’t have won without me.” What a narcissist. Because National Review isn’t sufficiently worshipful, he blasts them “as being led by lightweights that couldn’t shine the shoes of Bill Buckley.” Speaking of Buckley, he laid out the common-sense approach to choosing a candidate by advising conservatives to vote for the most conservative ELECTABLE contender. After three losing election cycles – 2018, 2020, and 2022 – Trumpkins are showing themselves to be a kamikaze brigade, and willing to take down the party with them. He isn’t the most conservative and he’s far from the most electable. Need more proof?
Republicans need to excise Trump’s influence from the party before we can hold Biden and the Democrats accountable for their engineered misery. No mistake about it, Biden gave us a 360-degree world of hurt. Energy is at the root of all that we do, especially economically. It’s hard to imagine prosperity with a Biden-imposed recession in the energy industry. Biden chose to take the advice of the teenage Greta Thunberg and lead us into a greenie fantasyland. And he’s lying about it.
Biden trotted out Energy Secretary Granholm in June 2022 to perpetuate the don’t-blame-me and the gaslight-the-public PR strategies. Granholm: “We are now at close to record levels of [domestic] oil production here in the U.S. . . . .” Lie. See chart below. Biden in October 2022: “Today, the most common price of gas in America is $3.39 – down from over $5 when I took office.” Lie. What other word qualifies when it’s as demonstrable as my current runny nose?
Energy Sec. Granholm at a press conference
There’s more where those came from. It’s as if Orwell’s Ministry of Truth leapt off the pages of “1984” and landed in D.C. Economist Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago puts it plainly when he wrote in October of 2022, “. . . we are well short of the production levels and trends that were occurring just three to four years ago.” The pandemic crushed everything, and we haven’t bounced back. Keep in mind that fracking made us into the Saudi Arabia of the western hemisphere. We have the abundant capacity so why haven’t we upped our game? Why hasn’t the supply side of the market responded as it always had before to price increases? The answer is found in the fact that the Thunberg-influenced Biden is signing executive orders to turn America’s grid into California’s. No big pipelines for you, America. Oh, let’s tax and EPA-regulate production on federal lands and offshore into near oblivion. Of course, let’s lie about it. While we’re at it, let’s herd the population into ev’s so we all can experience “range anxiety” together. If that isn’t enough, let’s strangle producers’ access to capital with new lefty ESG regulations from the SEC.
A capped oil well in the US.
Former Fed chairman Greenspan spoke of “animal spirits” in the market. Fear is an animal spirit. So is hostility. You’d have to be in a cryogenic state not to get the clues that the federal Leviathan hates you if you’re a supplier of the stuff that keeps people from freezing in the winter. Better to play along with algae, corn, tides, or anything that pops into the heads of the yoga-room minions on the Meta campus. Forget about more refineries and more exploration. Pardon an oil company CEO for not seeing the guillotine as the Welcome Wagon.
The concept of supply elasticity clearly stretches the mental capacity of the eco-fantasists around Biden. The responsiveness of supply to price changes has inexplicably taken a hiatus under Biden. Take my memory of the Kern River oilfields outside Bakersfield, Ca. Price goes up, wells are uncapped and the secondary-recovery generators turned on. Price goes down, there’s no justification for the expenses. It’s topsy-turvy if you’re Jimmy Carter of the 1970’s and put your foot on the neck of producers with a cap on domestic crude oil prices. Biden of 2021 put his foot back on the neck of producers to the point that the law of supply elasticity disappeared. Then he lambasts them for responding to his hostility by restraining their capital investments. It’s a replay of Stalin’s hunt for “wreckers” or “kulaks” after the blunders of his Five Year Plans in the 1930’s.
Lesson: Don’t expect the equivalent of the DMV to beneficially determine what to produce, how much of it to produce, and who’s to get it for everyone, everywhere, always. It’s a cluster*#&@. Welcome to Biden world.
Biden’s escape from the real world can be seen in his October price boast. Gas wasn’t $5 per gallon when he took office. It was $2.39. Is this old age infirmity at work or prevarication? Remember, this guy has a long history of wild exaggerations and untruths. Going back to his college days, blatant plagiarism and embellishment of his record were standard for him. Today, I’m not certain if it’s pure senility or the serial untruths of his youth ossifying into imaginary truths in a decaying brain. Is this a difference without a difference? Can’t say.
Fuel prices in Los Angeles, March 2022
Fuel prices normally gyrate through the year. It’s not month-to-month changes that are most relevant. It’s year-to-year, or June 2022 compared to June 2021. Biden is responsible for the elevated gyration plateau of 2021/2022 when compared to the gyration valley of 2019/2020 or 2020/2021 and before. For me, Biden’s falsehoods are true to form with a kicker of infirmity.
The lie reduced to one line has more appeal in this age of the internet attention span of a five-year-old than a reasoned analysis in a three-thousand-word essay. People can’t sit still long enough when Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and YouTube are beckoning. Biden ritually does it. Trump too, but he’s brazenly repugnant as he does it. Republicans would do the country a great service by putting Trump out to pasture. With him out of the way, the country might be in a mood to open up space in the same field for Biden and his lefty coterie. Something to ponder.
Then-VP Joe Biden finds two quarters on the sidewalk in Burlington, Vt., 2016. “I found two quarters.”Biden’s inauguration
RogerG
Read more here:
* The administration lying to the press at a June 2022 press briefing: “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm”, The White House, June 22, 2022, at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2022/06/22/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-karine-jean-pierre-and-secretary-of-energy-jennifer-granholm/
* Biden’s false claim of cheaper gas prices: “Fact check: Biden falsely claims the most common gas price was over $5 when he took office”, CNN, Oct. 28, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/28/politics/fact-check-biden-gas-prices/index.html
* Casey Mulligan’s piece: “Biden Has Bungled Fossil-Fuel Policy”, National Review Online, Nov. 2, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/biden-has-bungled-fossil-fuel-policy/
The Democrats know how to play political hardball. After all, they are the party of government. They want it, worship it, and are highly motivated to take it over. They need it because they have so much to accomplish, like make all of us into them. Not surprisingly, they’re socialists, the American edition of Europe’s many Social Democratic Parties. No name-calling here. They just are, despite their face-saving protestations to the contrary. The 2022 midterm was their template for dominating the government. It illustrated how to make people ignore their lyin’ eyes.
The fly in the ointment is that this socialism doesn’t work, never will. Government’s control of the means of production, using a little Marxist lingo, is simply turning over nearly all the important stuff to an entity that operates like the DMV. Government is a sloth and can never be a cheetah no matter the volume of synthetic hormones or gender reassignment surgeries. The Squad and the self-deluded Bernie Sanders keep harkening to a Scandinavia that no longer exists, the region having long since eschewed the poison. Yet, the dream never died, notwithstanding its long record of failure. To avoid a shellacking, the Democrats discovered the recipe to electorally prosper despite their socialism’s inherent fiascos.
The Michigander and auto critic Henry Payne recently performed an interesting autopsy on Michigan’s election. Whitmer and the rest of the authoritarian gang overwhelmed the party of government restraint (GOP). Amazingly, the donkey party found a campaign strategy to make it possible for people to prefer the sewer that the Democrats made of their lives.
First, the party of government used their control of Michigan state government to choose their opponents. This sounds like Xi Jinping at work – by the way, another socialist. Credible opposition was ordered off the Michigan ballot, much like Xi commanding the removal of ex-CCP president Hu Jintao from the recent Party Congress. The Michigan Board of State Canvassers was convened under the overseership of the Soros-backed Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and on a pure party line vote of 2-2 disqualified the Republican front-runner James Craig, the former Detroit police chief with a huge following, and four other Republicans allegedly for fraudulent signatures on their petitions. The tie means that they’re gone. No Democrats were ever affected, just Republicans. It’s fishy as you get into the weeds of the case. In the end, the Republican primary ballot was amputated to include only the weak with Tudor Dixon winning the primary.
Michigan Board of State Canvassers earlier in 2022
That’s not all by a long shot. The party knows how to exploit and champion the cultural barbarity that is now resplendent in certain demographics: the young, single women, mostly professional, and the quasi-educated with degrees. Of course, I’m speaking of some groups’ love affair with terminating pregnancies. Abortion has moved from trauma to a personal state of ecstasy in the psyche of some. We shouldn’t be surprised since the sex act has lost its procreational purpose and has become purely recreational in the minds of some. Humans being human, we get lazy and sloppy and babies unintentionally result. We can disagree on the starting line for human life, and compromise is possible between a complete ban and carte blanche to the moment of exit from the birth canal. All that is lost in the hubbub once the fear of losing power is on the table. Dobbs was mangled by the donkey party to fit the purpose of stampeding the base to quickly mark their mailed ballot.
Speaking of those mailed ballots, previously (2018), Michigan voters exhibited the now common and strange attraction for Rube Goldberg changes to their government through ballot initiatives. It’s an interstate phenomenon. For instance, the superficial glow of term limits in deeply blue California merely ended up replacing seasoned leftists with immature ones. The state’s adoption of the jungle primary means the routine choice between leftists in the general. Alaskans chose to mutilate their elections with ranked voting. For Michiganders, they chose in 2018 to grease the skids for the donkey party’s base, heavily populated as it is with low-information and low-motivated voters. Adult expectations of reasonable civic effort and responsibility has been reduced to nil with election-day registration and voting thereby complicating the tasks of verification for a government that can barely count them. Additionally, the no-fault absentee ballot – a device that makes mockery of the secret ballot – means that a person can remain in their pajamas and pause their Xbox hand controller for a short interval to vote their state into California-style chaos.
Shredded boxes and packages are seen at a section of the Union Pacific train tracks in downtown Los Angeles Friday, Jan. 14, 2022. Thieves have been raiding cargo containers aboard trains nearing downtown Los Angeles for months. (AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu)
With the election system duly lubricated, the ginned-up hysteria about Dobbs can be exploited by another contraption in the form of a state proposition: Proposition 3 to place in the Michigan state constitution alongside the usual Bill of Rights the “reproductive freedom” to end the existence of a fully formed baby in utero. The “protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant individual” language is pure jargon for infanticide. Notice that they can’t say “woman”; it’s “individual”. This whole thing is a monstrous theater of the absurd.
But it does work to get the sex-as-recreation crowd to vote early and often. Remember, this is a demographic at the start not too keen on the Dobbs’s federalism rationale. For them, federalism, what’s federalism? Anyway, the polyamorous are energized to show up and vote the state into oblivion.
Like chain immigration, chain-propositions bring in tow the scandalously authoritarian politicos. It’s a strange authoritarianism though. Freedom is the mantra, but freedom isn’t the result. There’s no freedom for in utero babies. What about the “freedom froms”? There’s certainly no freedom from car thieves, smash-and-grabs, killers, burglaries, muggings, drive-bys, and the mentally unstable and addicts turning our sidewalks and parks into open sewers. Watch where you step.
The use of hysteria-propositions to elect and reelect people who ignore what they should be doing in order to pursue what they ought not to do is folly on stilts. Whitmer garroted life in Michigan from closing the schools to pronouncing an end to gardening and boating without a scintilla of “science”. And election 2022 showed how you can get away with it. Gauging by the returns, terminating pregnancies mattered more than the kids’ lost education and the decline into barbarity. The kids experienced a double whammy in the election. Was this the most anti-child electorate ever from womb to classroom? One has to wonder.
I will not try to absolve the electorate’s responsibility for this descent into dégringolade (rapid decline or deterioration). Don’t pretend that democracy always translates into wisdom. A majority vote is not proof of righteousness. It is only evidence that certain campaign tactics work: construct a well-funded political machine; rearrange the election system to enhance the operation of the political machine; incite the base with fabrications; and with initiatives, distract the people from the politicos’ manifest failures.
It worked. Expect to see more of it. As in the fable of Nero, election 2022 showed how to pass out fiddles to the electorate as Rome (Michigan) burned.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “The Lessons for Republicans from Michigan’s Midterm Disaster”, Henry Payne, National Review, November 17, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/the-lessons-for-republicans-from-michigans-midterm-disaster/
* “Five Michigan GOP gubernatorial candidates booted from primary ballot”, Washington Examiner, May 26, 2022, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/five-michigan-gop-gubernatorial-candidates-booted-from-primary-ballot
* “Gretchen Whitmer Can’t Hide Her Track Record Of Shutting Michigan Children Out Of School”, Shawn Fleetwood, The Federalist, Nov. 1, 2022, at https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/01/gretchen-whitmer-cant-hide-her-track-record-of-shutting-michigan-children-out-of-school/
* An analysis of how strategically timed ballot initiatives can enhance a campaign’s electoral chances: “How ballot initiatives will impact voter turnout in the 2018 midterms”, John Hudack, Brookings, Oct. 22, 2018, at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2018/10/22/how-ballot-initiatives-will-impact-voter-turnout-in-the-2018-midterms/
