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.
“Freedom is not simply the right of intellectuals to circulate their merchandise. It is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their ‘betters’.” Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell
Sowell’s truism about freedom came to mind as more gibberish spewed from the mind of the self-styled Wise Latina on the Supreme Court, justice Sonia Sotomayor. In oral arguments in the Biden vaccine mandate case, she hysterically proclaimed, “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.” First thing, it’s not true! 4 Pinocchios! Next, public imminences can’t be trusted any longer. And, really, should they ever have been?
Justice Sonia Sotomayor
The latest plague apocalypse to go viral is Omicron. It’s certainly launching into our society. It may have launched into me. I can’t tell – wasn’t tested – but it turned out to be a 4-day flu. Tested or not, it was the flu whether as the ominous Omicron or not – a virus by any other name. Earlier in 2020, I had a brief bout with first-wave COVID and it was 2 days one-and-done. Both were characterized by a low-grade fever and fatigue and that’s it. The death cart making its regular rounds didn’t come knocking and I quickly resumed my domestic role as regular irritant to my wife.
According to the over-billed “experts”, I’ve got 2 strikes against me: I’m 69 and voted for Trump. Yet, no comorbidities, not obese, regular exercise, daily vitamin and mineral supplements, and no vices (other than popcorn and “The Lord of the Rings”) may have worked to counteract the age factor. As for the vote, sorry Rachel Maddow, I won’t do anything about it since I can’t endorse a doddering puppet of left-wing lunatics. That “comorbidity” stays.
Our time is not a period of calm reason. Wannabe totalitarians are out to make everyone, literally everyone, conform to their vision of vaccinations, endless boosters, Zoom school for the kids, and masks. These blinkered despots can’t bring themselves to even mention natural immunity and treatments. I’m up-armored by nature against the COVIDs going back to MERS and SARS. Vaccines are obviously part of the public health arsenal, not the entirety of it. Not a peep, though, from Walensky and company and The Big Wheels about natural immunity, monoclonal antibodies, and antivirals. When asked, they act like the kid in the cafeteria buffet line who can’t bring himself to request the broccoli in spite of mom’s insistence before leaving for school.
Instead, we’ve got a truncated public interplay between Vaccine/Vaccine/Vaccine/… on one side and on the other Vaccine/Microchip/One World Order by the people who gave us Q Anon and Death Rays from Space during fire season. Why can’t vaccines be an important element in a strategy without it being the focus of all our efforts? The nutter right, you can drop the resurgent John Bircherism anytime.
Remember the scandal of the East German doping (male hormones) of their female swimmers that ran from the 1970’s into the 1980’s and included the 1976 Montreal Olympics (read about it here)? Our girls (XX chromosomes) had to unknowingly compete against masculinized girls (still XX chromosomes) and few knew it, not even some of the East German girls. Later, these same German girls would suffer mental and physical damage, and later to give birth to babies with serious defects.
As for the Americans, some in the press at the time referred to them as “Ugly Americans” for their justifiable complaints. American Shirley Babashoff, slated to be the next Mark Spitz, wound up with one gold and a bunch of second place finishes in the ’76 Games. She refused to remain silent and sounded the alarm but was dismissed as “Surly Shirley”. She was right, she had courage, she was vilified, and it took 31 years (2007) for the scandal’s cover to be blown for all to see.
Shirley Babashoff (r) and a portion of the 1976 US Olympic women’s swim team.
Check out these understandable reactions by other members of the ’76 team:
“To be frank, I don’t think we should look like men.”
“I wouldn’t want to walk around the neighborhood looking like a guy.”
“That’s not the way God created us to be like that (looking like DDR Swimmers).”
That was then; this is now. Circa 2022 we have gone full circle, and then some. Today, those East Germans would be heralded as trans pioneers. We have men wanting to women and women wanting to be men, jumbled with the many whose psyche match their chromosomes, competing in women’s sports . . . with the full connivance of the so-called adults in the room. Chic ideologies have redefined scandal as liberation, and created a massive class of new victims whose sole characteristic is their satisfaction with God’s endowment. What chaos, what a mess.
Transgender Lia Thomas (MTF) recently hit the airwaves and pool at the U. of Penn. as a sensation setting pool, program, and meet records 38 seconds ahead of a real deal teammate. Then in a Saturday meet, lo and behold, Lia ran into transgender Iszac Henig (FTM) – who underwent a double mastectomy – who bested Lia twice. There you have it: female sports are to be dominated by people disenchanted with mother nature. It’s a competition among the disgruntled, leaving behind the long hours of training and coaching for the well-adjusted and contented girl (XX chromosome), the kind of girl that you as a boy (XY chromosome) wouldn’t mind taking home to mother (also XX chromosome). The other two would be difficult to explain.
Lia Thomas, centerIszac Henig
The “adults” who sanctioned this biological miasma are – you may have guessed it – the NCAA. In a policy that might have been written by a paid lobbyist or Ivy League lawyer, trans female athletes mustn’t compete on the women’s team until after one year of “testosterone suppression treatment”. Not a word about bone density, muscle mass, or anything else is mentioned. Much of the rest of their physical accoutrement in the men’s league follows them into the women’s pool.
Here’s the kicker. The policy is justified by the quality of reasoning that you’d expect from a brainwashed sophomore Anthropology major writing on systemic phobias of western civilization. Here it goes, brace yourself:
“. . . many people may have a stereotype that all transgender women are unusually tall and have large bones and muscles. But that is not true. . . . The assumption that all male-bodied people are taller, stronger, and more highly skilled in a sport than all female-bodied people is not accurate.”
Has anyone informed the geniuses at NCAA headquarters that the subject in question is not whether tall women or small men exist. That’s wholly irrelevant. At the level of elite competition in the vast majority of sports, men are taller, bulkier, faster, and stronger than women. The statement has no credible place in any policy defense, let alone one that seeks to condone the competition of taller, bulkier, faster, and stronger women-with-a-Y-chromosome with women limited to the fetal arrangement. It’s one of the goofiest things ever put to paper.
Girls – Iszac HenigBoys – Lia Thomas
How can women’s sports survive this mounting chaos over who’s a woman? Don’t look to bureaucrats of the NCAA for enlightenment. They spread the chaos by transmitting the confusion. The answer lies with us, the fans of girls’ sports. We must demand an end to the nonsense. Chromosomes are the ultimate determinant, not surgeries, injections, or counseling. Our pools, meets, and locker rooms must be made as safe for our girls and women (XX chromosome) as anywhere else.
Memory lane is a fertile source of human folly. John Meacham, normally accorded the title of historian but actually more of a journalist, explained his endorsement of Joe Biden on MSNBC in August 2020 (see below). The segment is short (5 minutes) and therefore not one for making a detailed case. What he levels against Trump in essence are a series of grotesquely inflated and abreviated charges.
In his mind, the choice in the election is between good (Biden) and evil (Trump). Bear in mind, by August of 2020 when Meacham went before MSNBC’s cameras, the people of this country saw, at ground level, evil as it marched across their tv screens and on their way to work. The public were inundated with media-supercharged police/suspect confrontations, cities wrecked by gross lawlessness, and residents forced to confront feces, syringes, and massive homeless encampments on their way to school and work. And all of this as an epidemic rages and their kids were unlearning under ZOOM. So, where’s the “evil”? Is it really Trump, or is this thing that Meacham calls evil something he is aiding and abetting? The thought hit me one year into “good” winning.
I was immediately struck by his vague illusion to “white racism” in America. Yet, none of the cop incidents of 2020 can be traced to racist cops. So, when you can’t pinpoint personal racism, invent an impersonal one and call it “systemic”. Meacham purports to be a scholar, but he would sound more like he stepped back into the world of medieval alchemy if he bent a knee to this new wizardry.
No person schooled in rational thought can excusably accept a proposition (systemic racism, white supremacy, et al) that tramples over Karl Popper’s first rule scientific reasoning: falsifiability. It must be testable. Nothing in this blob of political sloganeering is even remotely survivable under the simplest cross-examination. Since Marx, lefties have tried to make their ideologies scientific and this latest generation is no different. They try to do it with “statistical disparities”. The words sound imposing but they’re as simple as aggregating people into racial groups and different stats pop out. They immediately jump to their favorite bogeyman – racism – for the differences without any sound basis. It’s the modern alchemy. Apparently, the revolution is more important than truth.
We are told that we must use racism to combat racism, a militant affirmative action. Sounds like, we must have sin to combat sin. Combat the murder of nuns with the murder of priests. The formulations are endless. In the end, we have dangerous streets, decaying schools, the treachery of Afghanistan, a war on our gas tanks, shortages and inflation, a filthy public square, and a life under powerful potentates. Meacham’s “good” didn’t turned out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Meacham peddled on us a doddering and compliant agent of far more evils to replace a braggart who got some things right.
I wonder how Meacham views his performance on August 20, 2020. I hope that he cleaned his foot before insertion.
The cartoon below captures the delirium of our times. It’s safetyism run amok. The obsessive/compulsive nature of safety-at-all-costs is destroying us.
It took a virus to expose this latest contagion (pun intended) of the mind. We’ve lost all sense of balance. Safety-alone in all instances is as silly as having to wear a seat belt after a bad sunburn in a mad rush to the hospital for my wife to deliver our baby. No weighing of cost and benefit, comfort and discomfort, likes and dislikes, and personal assessment of risk. Somebody else – the government or the population of ninnies – claims the power to force us into their phobias.
If you really want to know the reason for the broad loss of credibility on the part of government-deputized “experts”, just look at their abundantly displayed lack of recognition of any other consideration other than the factoids of their narrow specialty. Fauci and Walensky wail about infections in a carpet-bombing of all the other things that make us human. Close the schools or open them with the kids isolated in pods, masks, plexiglass, and jabs; the germophobes screaming at other airline passengers for their refusal to continue suffocating behind a mask while eating; politicians ordering universal vaccination when the vaccine neither prevents additional infection nor its transmission; make it as difficult as possible for anyone to earn a living; prevent us as from seeking fellowship in worship; and effectually banish two thousand years of Christmas. Shocking and amazing.
The vaccines armor the many from hospitalization, but they can only do so much. They are not the “philosopher’s stone” of immunology. In fact, the unvaccinated 18 to 29 cohort run about the same risk as the vaccinated 50 to 64 according to OSHA’s own assessment (see https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/scotus-should-nix-bidens-vaccine-mandates/).
All the advice for sensible policy making isn’t limited to the kind coming out of a room full of lab coats. Their contributions are necessary but not sufficient. Necessary/sufficient isn’t a cliché. It’s a fact! I only wish politicians weren’t so eager to use the factoids of science as arrows in their political quiver. They end up besmirching themselves and science.
Kabul airport in August 2021 during the American evacuation.
Thank you, John Ondrasik for “Blood on My Hands” (see video below). Some things should not be easily forgotten. I suspect that the ongoing humiliation of Afghanistan will be fully felt on the beaches of Taiwan and on the eastern frontier of Ukraine before long. Worst of all is the treachery of turning our backs on those we had promised to protect. It’s shameful beyond belief.
Now, the man who promised to heal the country’s divisions has instead poured salt into the open wounds. He has inflicted inflation and a new racism on the nation. He and his allies are attempting to codify a neo-Marxist revolution in totalitarian environmentalism, the corruption of the election process to keep them in power for generations, and the spending of the country into debt oblivion through a huge expansion of the entitlement state. If successful, this will not be anybody’s America. It’ll just be another failed state in the western hemisphere.
On top of that will be the self-defilement that the president and his people have imposed on us. Let’s not turn a page. This one is too momentous to be forgotten with a flick of the wrist.
USC safeties coach Craig Naivar, center, runs players through drills during spring 2020 practice at USC. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)
Like a homeowner noticing termite shavings on the floor at the bottom of a wall, the urban folk of the metropolitan west coast might be awakening to the manufactured decay that is beginning to overtake them. The rot is “manufactured” (man-created) because of the bewildering decisions by public officials of their own choosing. Schools aren’t preparing the young for adulthood but are fermenting as radical indoctrination centers. The urban public square is littered with the homeless, the psychotic, needles and feces, roving gangs of thieves and extremist goons, boarded up store fronts, and no one in office seems to care, at least care enough to do anything about it, other than make it worse.
Homeless encampment in Portland in 2016.
The dégringolade (decline) ranges up and down the coastal plain. Nearly 60% of United Van Lines’s California hauls in 2021 were outbound, and it’s a poor metric due to its high cost. The more affordable U-Haul has become less affordable – 4 times the price for inboud – when trying to load up and skedaddle the Bear Flag Republic. Portlanders have acquired an affection for Boise, Idaho, according to UVL and Business Insider. The situation is summed up quite nicely by Greg Goodman, the co-president of the Portland Downtown Development Group: “If you know a retail or office broker, give them a call and ask them how many clients they have are trying to leave.” The exodus is palpable wherever progressivism reigns.
The east coast fares even worse by United’s numbers. New Jersey (69.5%) and New York (67%) rank #1 and #2 for the Great Migration out.
Is the decline and flight observable in organized athletic prowess? Is this trait a new canary in the coal mine alongside UVL and U-Haul numbers? As of now, in 2021/22, the PAC-12 is winless in bowl games for the second straight year. The last best hope for the conference, Utah, went down to Ohio State in the Rose Bowl on a last second field goal. Even the fact that Utah came close could be an additional sign of the new dynamism of people fleeing the coastal blight. The PAC-12 might have to switch its status ranking with the Mid-Atlantic Conference. It’s the “Conference of Champions” for volleyball or softball, but apparently not for anything exuding testosterone, which ironically is then forced to subsidize the former two.
UCLA lost its chance to break the losing streak by cancelling its appearance in the Sun Bowl after an outbreak of COVID on the team. COVID still raked the team after some of the most heavy-handed, authoritarian edicts by California’s recall-surviving governor and some of the most fear-paralyzed school administrations in the country. Remember “bend the curve” and “stop the spread”? The only thing “bent” or “stopped” was the hopes and dreams of the young men in shoulder pads. Try that as a recruitment angle.
Last year’s performance, the notorious year of COVID, was explained away, like the election laws, as a byproduct of the pandemic. Once again, nothing the prelates of the conference did changed a thing in regards to the rampage of the disease. It mutated and the crisis-too-good-to-waste registered as a wild-eyed panic to end athletic futures. Such overwrought reactions have a home in the same places that sanction violence and filth.
Another little-noticed and unremarked factoid is the appearance of four-star recruits from California showing up on the team rosters in the real power conferences. I tuned into the Georgia/Michigan game in time to watch Georgia’s tight end, Bowers, from northern California, receive a touchdown pass. Bryce Young, Alabama’s QB, and alumni of Mater Dei in Los Angeles, earned a 106 quarterback rating against Cincinnati. Ohio State/Utah was a battle between two California quarterbacks: Stroud and Rising. Are these mere anecdotes or a trend that has many similarities to prior demographic shifts in the country’s history?
Alabama’s Bryce Young (Photo by Ron Jenkins/Getty Images)Utah’s Cameron RisingOhio State’s C.J. StroudGeorgia’s Brock Bowers
California’s loss of one congressional seat after the last census understates the seriousness of its self-immolation. The state made strenuous efforts to hide the flight of its middle class and businesses with campaigns to count every soul, living and non-living and legal and illegal. But everyone knows what is happening, and it’s now appearing on the playing fields.
The “woke” on an American college campus.Chinese students inspired by Mao for a Cultural Revolution.
Mao Zedong wrote the playbook that he cast as a Cultural Revolution: animate the young, unleash them on the seasoned and fortunate, and coopt many institutions to make the offensive appear as an irresistible force. Then watch the carnage, but refashion it as the necessary cleansing of the corruptions from the social body.
Sound familiar? If not, it should. Quiet and not so quiet censorship abounds in today’s USA in the imposition of neo-Marxist critical theory on the young in their schools, cancellation of talks and lectures under threat of youthful mobs and their adult abettors, acts of public shaming and ritual self-abasement of the recalcitrant, and media channels populated with the mob’s zealots enforcing their own bans on thought. Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind in 1987 warned of higher ed’s ubiquitous indoctrination that is the enemy of free inquiry. It has only gotten worse since his time. Alas, it has come to pass on our streets, campuses, in school curricula, and in the corporate boardroom and lunchroom.
Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago, etc.
We let it happen through a blind deference to the gatekeepers of degrees and our broad acceptance, in essence, of the schools as glorified babysitters. We thought that all would be well if we turned over our kids to the clutches of indoctrinated and self-interested public employees, and our young reached early adulthood with a BA, any BA. Well, no, all is not well. The paper certificates didn’t produce an informed and wise citizenry and many of our private and public institutions have become the vanguard, the enforcers, of this revolution of the closed-minded.
Examples abound. Google banned money-making on its YouTube platform if it isn’t in accord with the “scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change”. That’s right, you can only enrich your bank account if you peddle the “consensus”, no matter its dubiousness. The “consensus” is a euphemism for a departure from the scientific method and into a coerced orthodoxy. It’s an announcement from on high that such and such is proper thought, something familiar to anyone brought before Stalin’s show trials, employed in Orwell’s Ministries of Truth and Love, or the papal Inquisition of the Renaissance. Amazing, progressives – by definition a group who loudly proclaims the past is dead – look to the past for their inspiration.
Who can forget AG Garland’s new role as thought policeman extraordinaire? A political constituency – namely, the insular and comfy special interests who’ve long dominated your child’s school – feels imperiled and our AG rides to the rescue by promising to chill the rancor and speech at school board meetings with FBI investigations. No one need be arrested to send angry parents home to anxiously await the dreaded late-night knock at the door. Censorship achieved by a threat, Fidel style.
Then there’s this little tidbit. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH, or more accurately “warpath”) protested Abigail Shrier’s interview of a clinical psychologist and vaginoplasty surgeon who question the use of puberty blockers in children in Common Sense with Bari Weiss. Such discussions according to “warpath” should be closeted in unread journals and not be exposed to a broader audience, lest we be made aware that there are many debatable contentions in transgenderism. The New York Times chimes in with its own silencing by not publishing these types of op-eds because they are “outside our coverage priorities right now”. This is how a “consensus” is built, in the dark of night.
Modern academia is a rich source of “consensus” building through censorship and thought control. Dorian Abbot of the University of Chicago, eminent professor of geophysical sciences, was invited to speak at MIT, then disinvited after protests by the Red Guards of critical theory because he criticized the new racialism and favored “Merit, Fairness, and Equality”. Unsurprisingly, the school relented to the mob. Professor Robert P. George of Princeton got wind of the fracas at MIT and extended an invitation to Abbot. The talk was held at Princeton on the same day. Thank God that the spirit of inquiry and debate still flickers in some little precincts of the lands of ivy-covered halls.
More from the college funhouse. Bright Shen of the University of Michigan, a man who lived through Mao’s original Cultural Revolution, faced our own Red Guards of denunciation when he showed Shakespeare’s Othello, Laurence Olivier starring in blackface. The hyper-politicized sensitivities of the childish goons shrieked, Shen experienced the ritual self-abasement, and he no longer teaches his music course turning Othello into an opera.
This kind of thing can only survive in the darkness of obscurity. Sunshine, after all, is a disinfectant.
Mao, sadly, is an inspiration for far too many of the young. It’s more proof that we’ve failed to transmit our civilization’s legacy to our children. We have willingly, or unwillingly, mostly by ignorance, let the minds of our children get away from us. We are reaping the consequences of the many little Maos in our midst.
EV: noun; abr.; electric vehicle.
Frivolity: noun; acting in a way that is silly or wasteful.
Fiat: noun; an arbitrary order. (arbitrary: based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system)
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Put the three words together: Turning all American car owners into EV proprietors in the span of 5-10 years by government fiat is an exercise in frivolity, and ruinous in the end.
Indeed, the whole campaign is arbitrary (fiat), totally lacking in sound reasoning. The end state of having all Americans junk their fully functional family sedans, minivans, and SUVs would turn upside down wholesale patterns of living just to satisfy a splinter group’s fantasy.
What prompted this observation? AAA’s “Via” magazine and its feature article, “Going the Distance: Tips and tricks from electric vehicle owners” (Nov./Dec. 2021). The splinter group in question is abundantly replicated in the article. The three profiled EV owners are full California urbanistas from the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California (Santa Rosa, Santa Clara, Irvine area). All are degreed in environmental studies, the Humanities, or digital tech. All are cloistered urbanites who visit rental properties, coastal B-and-B’s, the arts-and-crafts circuit, and venture into the forests for the snap visit to mother nature. Trip distances are short or limited in routes.
In other words, they represent the left coast fringe – socially, economically, and politically. These are the type of people who reflect the lives and norms of those who pursue an existence in rather exclusive suburban ranch houses, gentrified flats, landscaped yards, and aren’t likely to get their hands dirty working wrenches and equipment. The supporting cast of workers for this insular urban lifestyle has a separate life that is a world apart. Yet, the white collars want to force their preferences on everyone, no matter our circumstances.
Young people walking on top of canal boat
As such, one of the things that Biden brought to the White House was California, meaning its progressive personnel and monoculture. And that means the state’s eco-looniness. The EV-love in the administration’s ukases, like much that gurgles out of the left coast’s sunshine state, lacks any sound rationale, either environmental or economic.
The environmental justification is the easiest to dispense with. The ol’ bugaboo of climate change – as bellowed by that great thinker of our times, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg – is infected with leaps of faith and logic. The reality is that the atmosphere is too voluminous, its content too varied, and influences too multitudinous to justify Greta’s tantrum (Sept. 2021), “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood!” That should give you a flavor of the hysteria to force you out of your fully functional and efficient Chevy Suburban.
Greta Thunberg during her Zoomed UN speech on September 23, 2019.
What good is accomplished, though, by banishing the $40,000 investment in fuel, oil, metal, plastic, chips, and rubber in your garage, the euthanization of 2 million jobs in the fuel industry, and scotching the great advances in emissions and fuel efficiency down to the present? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Surely, Greta and her handlers in Big Environmentalism must realize that they have no street cred in Beijing and New Delhi – nearly 3 billion people combined and no desire to return to living in the dirt. Stack up their car fleets with ours. You would be replacing the cleaner things in our country with dirty cars, dirty power plants, and dirty air among these teeming hordes outside the developed world. Sorry, Greta, you’re nuts.
In the end, the amount of energy-trapping gases would scarcely budge, if not increase as capital seeking its highest rate of return rushes away from us to refuges of greater opportunity in places hungry to enjoy air conditioning. Dirty expands, clean shrinks. Punishing the clean is not a winning strategy.
So, why the headlong rush to the EV? Climate change doesn’t work for this lifestyle coup. Fact is, the campaign is a jumble of fantasies, fantasies about windmills, solar panels, and EVs. Greta’s fantasy sounds so simple. . . to the simple-minded.
The simple fact is that the EV is no practical substitute for the internal combustion engine. The infrastructure – repairmen, convenient and numerous charging stations, affordable parts and abundant retail outlets – will take multiple decades to arise. But the zealots are impatient: remember, 5-10 years to bankrupt you and the millions employed in keeping the existing fleet on the road. It’s reminiscent of the Stalin’s dekulakization campaign of the 1930’s. Eager to create forthwith Marx’s vision of the communal ideal, Stalin ordered (by fiat) the huge number of peasants in the Russian population – 82% of the total population – to give up their property and many of their belongings and herd them onto huge collective farms. The subsequent upheaval led to massive starvation and a huge expansion of concentration camps. An epidemic of death was inflicted on the bread basket of Russia. Similarly, lifestyle choices outsourced to the federal apparatchiks of Build Back Better will fare no better than Stalin’s Five-Year Plans.
Scenes from the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of 1932-3.
Why should the infantile ramblings of Greta and The Squad have greater weight than my own? Their dream has incompatible elements. Hitched to universal EV ownership is windmills, solar panels, and any energy scheme conjured in a gentrified Brooklyn flat. Sadly, the lab rats who are Californians show us the results. Blackouts and the high cost of energy are the outcomes. So, just as we are bribed and whipped into EV’s, they are making the grid more expensive and unstable. Picture this: you rush out to get to work and find your Nissan Leaf with too little juice to make it to the office or get the kids to school. Blackouts just blacked out your car.
Okay, you and your kids can always Zoom . . . if the lights come back on. The pandemic lockdowns showed how that worked. More than the grid was destabilized.
As for that holiday visit to grandma’s house of 300 miles one way? Think about it, 250 miles is the likely limit before your wheels come to a dead stop. Of course, you know that ahead of time. If the grid hasn’t gone dark and you have the 6-8 hours to charge the thing before departure, you still have to restrict your route to the availability of chargers. Let’s just hope that you chose right and the plug-ins are operational. If not, expect a motel expense and an overnight layover.
If something mechanically should go awry, well, you’re stuck. The ubiquitous shade tree mechanic or guy who built a top fuel dragster won’t be of any help. The ready availability of parts and community knowledge is decades into the future. Hope that the diesel bus or train stops at the nearby hamlet.
Tesla Model S battery pack
If, by chance, you get the thing to the dealership, they might discover that the huge lithium battery pack is plated over and in need of replacement, a $20,000 part. The battery’s life was apparently cut short by all the 30-minute fast charging, a necessary activity due to much long-distance commuting or forgetting to plug the thing for the safer 6-8 hours of overnight charging. The 10-year lifespan was turned into 6. Normally, you’ll notice the deterioration in shorter operational distances as you begin to panic in the desperate search for a charge in the many and expanding derelict urban districts along the way. Maybe the thought of being held up at gunpoint disabuses you of that short excursion to Walmart.
Chances are, if you’re so into EV’s, you’re also apoplectic about open pit mines and polluted air and water, just the type of thing that inhabits third world kleptocracies, Putin’s Russia, and Xi’s China. That’s where we find the rare earth minerals for the batteries of your feel-good EV; however, rest assured that your EV won’t be responsible for inundating the Obama estate on Martha’s Vineyard. Everyone else in the mass of humanity will, thanks to your insatiable appetite for lithium batteries.
The utopian rush to the EV has consequences, many of them not pleasant. It’s what happens when adults turn over governance to childish and monomaniacal fanatics. Their tunnel vision becomes our tunnel vision, their leaps of logic become our leaps of logic. It’s a lesson that the editors of AAA’s “Via” magazine – Whitney Phaneuf, Katie Henry, Mandy Ferreira, and Rebecca Smith Hurd – should take to heart before they fob off on us their niche proclivities.
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Watch a Norwegian Tesla owner destroy his Model S because of the prohibitive $22,000 cost to replace the car’s battery pack.
Mail-in ballots that may be compromised. (photo; Getty)
Have you noticed the intense hectoring to vote with no mention of the responsibility of the citizen to take the time and effort to be informed before they vote? If not, you should. It happens every election season. Make no mistake about it, this advertising campaign is not a benign and politically neutral activity, and doesn’t stop with media ad buys to “Rock the Vote”. It has infected how we vote and who’s counting the votes. The push is one that Tammany Hall would recognize in a heartbeat. The 2020 election became the playground for this new Tammany Hall. Beware Republicans, the wave election of your dreams in 2022 may not come to pass.
Tammany Hall is the model for the new corruption. Tammany Hall was the New York Democratic Party organization that controlled New York City and the state of New York for much of the second half of the 19th century. They used the immense human resource of millions of immigrants, many of them Irish, to build a vast voter base for electoral control. Ever wonder how the cliché of the Irish cop or fireman developed? The Hall provided “services” – jobs, housing, marriage for a daughter – in return for political loyalty, i.e., votes.
The Tammany Hall board game is designed to capture political control.Thomas Nast cartoon of Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall.
It was in the memorable words of George Washington Plunkett, one of its inestimable leaders, “honest graft”. They did some good to assist the needy and push public projects (honest), and they also got rich in the meantime (graft). Sounds like Maxine Waters? Though, it must be admitted, the motives and intentions of today’s modern incarnation of Tammany Hall are a bit different from Plunkett’s quaint formulation (Waters excluded). The old version lined the pockets of the organization’s operatives. The new edition hides an ideological partisanship behind philanthropy. Call it “honest rigging” for a revolution.
See, the Tammany Hall of old faced the same problem, in the same party, as our updated version. It’s called voter turnout. Both relied on demographic constituencies – the poor, minorities, immigrants, young, the loosely defined “oppressed” – that have a greater propensity to not vote. The Hall of the 1850’s addressed the problem by exploiting a loose election system that had no secret ballot. People voted with colored slips for the contending parties, so the Hall’s poll watchers knew who voted and how and could punish or award gratuities accordingly. Today’s revolutionary, techie copy employs vote-by-mail and big-moneyed philanthropy to grease the skids.
Like Plunkitt’s henchman, today’s manipulators abhor the secret ballot. The secret ballot, after checking identity, requires that people vote in a booth on a nondescript ballot which is deposited with no one knowing the contents. But such privacy is the enemy of maximizing turnout. The effort it takes to get registered, be prepared, and travel to a polling station is an obstacle to the lightly motivated, uninterested, easily inconvenienced, uninformed, and those of more frivolous priorities. Thus, the drive to replace the secret ballot with a mail-in one. The more carefree the process, the easier to overcome the massive reluctance that lies at the heart of their base.
The assassination of the secret ballot in 2020 began with the “philanthropy” of Zuckerbucks. Zuckerbucks were the $400 million from Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla, hosed mostly to “underserved” districts, which are synonymous with Democratic Party bastions, to inflate turnout in those locales. The money was filtered through a hive of Democratic Party front groups to infiltrate the public election system, alter it to suit Democrat needs, and assist the counting and collection of the ballots. It’s not so much stealing an election as it is rigging one. They worked to make previously prohibited practices legal and operational. Call it an “honest steal”.
Mark Zuckerberg and wife, Priscilla Chan
In many jurisdictions in 2020, ballots were shot-gunned to mail boxes and collected by third parties. New and suspicious euphemisms entered the lexicon like ballot “curing” and “harvesting”. Curing refers to the correction of errors on submitted mail-in ballots. Harvesting sanctions independent organizations to collect the mailed ballots. Instead of ward healers watching people drop colored slips of paper in the box, Zuckerbuck-funded activists lent their political acumen to the service of public election agencies. Activists were everywhere in the battleground states in “curing”, “harvesting”, in the administrative machinery of counting, and in Democrat-heavy neighborhoods. How else could a man who ran a presidential campaign from his basement still win? The fix was in.
The 2020 rogue’s gallery of Zuckerbuck-funded radical progressive electioneering groups was impressive. It began with 350 million Zuckerbucks to the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), founded by lefty activists from the “Democratic Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry”, the New Organizing Institute. How’s that for networking? The CTCL then doled out the money to a wide array of political affiliates, mostly in battleground states. How’s that for networking?
Georgia was beset by the locusts of the progressive Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) to inflate the numbers out of urbanized Fulton, Gwinnet, Cobb, and DeKalb counties.
Wisconsin presented a special case. Partisan money and talent descended from many quarters. Power the Polls, the Mikva Challenge, the Brennan Center, the Center for Civic Design, the Democracy Fund, The Elections Group, the ironically named Center for Secure and Modern Elections, and the National Vote at Home Institute, amply manned with donkey party activists, consulted and in some cases took over the administration of the elections in highly urbanized parts of the state, all Democrat fiefdoms.
Trump is technically wrong to say that the election was stolen. Instead, many practices, previously prohibited, like massive mail-in voting and harvesting and curing, were legalized. In addition, no one had experienced such an infusion of partisan “philanthropy” into the machinery of the election process and were quite unprepared for it. The activist groups filled the gaps in the law in ways that were shady but not illegal. It was an “honest steal”, but still a completely corrupting one.
Trump’s strong post-election reaction may be more due to the embarrassment of being caught with his pants down. While his zealous supporters after the event engaged in a futile crusade to uncover enough fraud to overturn the election, few paid much attention to the systematic pre-election groundwork that was established to outsource the machinery of elections to shadowy partisans, and scarcely a squeak at the time from Trump and his people.
In essence, the Democratic Party reverted back to type. They have a proven track record of refusal to put any responsibility on the voter – whether it be the work to inform oneself or simply get out of the lounge chair – as well as hostility to the secret ballot.
Is a modern election merely a race to put the fate of the country in the hands of the uncaring, ill-informed, and uninterested? It seems so, but it’s more than that. It took some time for a group of grifters to form the original Tammany Hall and profit from the tradition of loosey-goosey elections. Similarly, a new Tammany Hall will evolve with its own boast of graft and fraud, this time in mammoth mail-in voting, no authentic voter ID, and an army of activists collecting, curing, and counting the votes, and on a national scale.
In that case, for the average bloke, why vote? We’ll probably wake up one morning – and many mornings after that – to discover that a widespread disgust with the course of public affairs did not translate into commensurate election results. In that sense, how would we be any different from Putin’s Russia?
Is this our future, only with mail-in voting, harvesting, curing, and philanthropic money to increase Democratic Party turnout?
RogerG
*Thanks to John Lott and Mollie Hemingway for their work on this subject.
Parents protest at Loudon County school board meeting, June 2021
Most people are unaware of what’s happening in the deep and dark recesses of their most significant public institutions. If they’re informed, a good portion would hit the barricades, and for good reason. Well, here’s a couple of stories on the role of sunlight (public exposure) in the disinfectant process for public policy.
A scheme to strangle the civilian firearms industry of capital was forged in 2018 by – who else? – Cal STRS’s Christopher J. Ailman, chief investment officer, with collaboration from a few other public and private investment officers (a full list below). Basically, in typically obtuse and vague language, the declaration is an attempt to abridge a legal and Constitutionally protected activity because it affronts the sensibilities of California’s coastal elites who then try to foist their sentiments on the rest of the country.
Christopher J. Ailman of CalSTRS
Read the thing (here). Most of it was written by someone completely unfamiliar with the process of purchasing a firearm in America. Anyone buying a gun in a store goes through a federal background check. The unregulated transfers and sales – gifts, inheritances, underground sales – will always exist, with or without our many laws, in the same manner as the regulated drug market will always face a shadowy illicit version. Pass a law and an underground clone will pop up.
Further, the statement is littered with “best practices”, the “best practices” of Nancy Pelosi’s home district. It’s as scam to work-around the agencies of popular sovereignty, a people’s elected representatives, by organizing the socially and culturally insular crowd in gated and walled estates to do what an elected government refuses to do, because they were never elected to do it.
Light was beamed onto the scheme first by National Review (“Woke Capitalism: A History”, KDW, July 1, 2021) and then to the NRA (“Florida’s Pension Fund Joined a Gun-Control Compact, Until…”, LW, America’s 1st Freedom, Sept., 21, 2021). The NRA noticed the name of Michael McCauley, Senior Officer at the Florida State Board of Administration, as a signatory to the screed. Remember, Florida doesn’t suffer from the ritual identity-mongering and victimhood of the power brokers in the not-so-Golden State. Jimmy Patronis, Chief Financial Officer for the state, was informed by the NRA and Florida quickly withdrew its name from the extortion racket. Florida is growing precisely because it is not California, and now McCauley knows it too.
Jimmy Patronis, Florida Chief Financial Officer
Parents have joined the fray in shedding light on another radical ploy of longstanding. All the pandemic Zooming may have exposed the people who run your child’s classroom to be on a par with the ethos in Nancy Pelosi’s home district. I should know of what I write as a 30-year veteran of a public high school classroom. A while back, I retorted to our superintendent that we are nothing but a finishing school for “good little Democrats”. It’s only gotten worse since my retirement in 2015. What began with the multiculturalist nonsense of “diversity is our strength” quickly metastasized into the rancid racism-to-fight-racism.
Whatever you want to call it – critical theory, critical race theory, deconstructionism, anti-racism, white privilege, systemic racism, etc. – it’s still nothing but Marxism for a new revolution to overthrow our Constitutional order and civilization. The ideological seed germinated in teacher training (going back to my 1970’s), in all textbooks that I’ve used, and reviewed as a department chair, for the past three decades, in supplemental materials, as the orthodoxy in the colleges and universities, and as the pervasive and presumptive outlook in faculty lounges. It is so in the ether that one should not be surprised that we have undergrads in spittle-laced tirades at deans who’ve called for a little tolerance.
Watch this report on student treatment of Matt Walsh.
Not too many parents want their kids to join the statue-toppling brigades. And parents are beginning to show up at school board meetings. Good for them. Keep it up. And, by the way, a great deal of “throw the bums out” is more than deserved. Start local, then continue on up through the bureaucracies and the federal ladder. Clean house. Extremist partisans fiddling with our pensions funds and children should feel the heat. It begins with the white hot rays of the sun.
RogerG
* “The Principles for a Responsible Civilian Firearms Industry” authors: Christopher J. Ailman, Chief Investment Officer CalSTRS; Christianna Wood, Fellow at Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative; Michael McCauley, Senior Officer at the Florida State Board of Administration; Peter Reali, Senior Director at Nuveen; John O’Hara, Managing Director and Senior Advisor at Rockefeller Asset Management; and Rakhi Kumar, Senior Managing Director, Head of ESG Investments and Asset Stewardship at State Street Global Advisors.
