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.
Rep. Justin Amash (nominally an “R”) has jumped on board the Dems’ impeachment train. It shouldn’t surprise anyone. The guy is eccentric. He’s an example of the occasional wild consciences that populate the Republican caucus. Herding felines comes to mind when discussing the task of party leaders. It probably had a role in driving Ryan into retirement. They are in striking contrast to the Bolshevik-style discipline of the Dems. They are the party of government and government power. They come together with iron discipline when power is at stake. Not so with the wild hares in the Republican Party.
Amash’s flaming libertarianism, approaching neo-anarchism, has led him to scorch law enforcement and national security. He’s with the Dems on emasculating ICE. The guy had run-ins with his fellow Republicans over trade, national defense, immigration, entitlements, the budget, etc. The guy is really a party of one. (see here)
Here’s what he said about Speaker Paul Ryan: “Right now, in terms of process, we have the worst House speaker in the history of Congress”. No, this wasn’t Nancy Pelosi at a press conference.
Then-Speaker Paul Ryan.
He’s symptomatic of an all-too-common political phenomena: the politico with a combination of inflated ego, the corrupting influence of power, and heightened irascibility. He’s hard to get along with. He’s the loud, opinionated uncle at Thanksgiving dinner who can’t find anyone to sit next to him. But don’t expect him to get the message.
Trump speaks at his Sept. 2018 West Virginia rally.
Trump may be a great real estate developer but his understanding of trade stops at the water’s edge. It’s almost childlike, as it probably is for most people.
In recent rallies, Trump talks like a Democrat in his boasts of the prospect of $100 billion for the US treasury from his tariffs. The Dems do the same when trying to jack you with tax increases. It’s advertised as more money for “investment” – i.e., government spending out the wazoo.
The reality is different. If you want less of something, tax it. So, the Dems get less money to transform America into the image of their frenzied imaginations as people scurry about to escape Bernie-bro policies. Trump gets less money from his tariffs as they drive up prices which leads to less imports, fewer sales, and less dough for Uncle Sam. It’s elementary.
Of course, Trump might be guilty of good ol’ hucksterism. He’s been known to do that. Remember his crowing about his inaugural crowds.
He routinely bellows about the “trade deficit” sucking out the life blood of the nation. Each quarterly $124-billion hole is treated by him as a debt. It ain’t that simple.
In fact, it’s not the whole trade enchilada. The thing hawked by Trump is one third of the “balance of payments” super stat. Add the capital and financial accounts to the mix. Jury-rig one of the trio and you unexpectedly alter the other two. Anyway, ignoring the other two makes them as optional as sight for a driver’s license test. There’s a good chance in both instances that you’ll end up in a bad place.
The trade hole isn’t even a good barometer of the health of the economy. It’s ups and downs appear to be mostly irrelevant. Of the 120 months of the 1930’s and the Great Depression, 102 were trade surpluses. Being in the black in trade didn’t make a dent in industrial collapse and 25% unemployment. (See here)
Good times and trade surpluses don’t necessarily correlate. Policies intended to create trade surpluses can backfire. No best-laid-plans are immune. A blowback can erupt with nearly all policies, including globalization.
Globalization isn’t a golden brick road either. Nothing is. Costs and benefits aren’t evenly distributed in whatever economic tack is taken. The rich do get richer despite the Lenin-style attacks of Bernie and the congresswoman from the Bronx. There’s just a greater likelihood that enough of the blessings spillover to everyone else.
Socialism isn’t a prettier alternative. It lodges benefits in the growing numbers of meddlesome government workers while the costs show up as everybody else descending into a worsening mediocrity.
Take your pick: richer government workers and malaise for the masses, or the filthy rich getting filthier and the masses living marginally better. My money is on the latter.
With socialism, either of the national or international variety, a nation’s vitality is smothered. With globalization, the financial centers of megalopolis USA ride a wave as flyover country sinks into depopulation and a meth epidemic. Bernie bros bewail an inequality of wealth in the vertical dimension. They’re blind to an inequality of the geographical, horizontal dimension. It’s real and troublesome. It’s the only justification for Trump’s trade demagoguery.
This goes to show that cocooned knowledge in real estate doth not translate into hyper-wisdom on everything any more than an inside-the-beltway existence ensures good sense. The crooked timber of humanity is evident everywhere from the administrative state to party hacks to zealots of the left, right, and center.
A classical understanding of economics would help. Is anyone delivering it? Kudos to the few who are trying.
U.S. workers are seen next to heavy machinery while working on a new bollard wall in El Paso, Texas, as seen from the Mexican side of the border in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico September 26, 2018. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez.
Too much heat can destroy things. The same is true of political heat. It wreaks havoc on the language. For instance, take the word “old”, like walls being “old technology”.
I was thinking this morning of the amazing things that we are doing with technology. I bluetoothed my phone with my bedroom radio/receiver for the umpteenth time to listen to Pandora. It’s wonderful to know that we have crammed so much capability in a cellphone smaller than a chest-pocket notepad. In the end, though, the cellphone functions as a radio of days of yore. All the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities are just radio signals. It’s “old” in today’s corrupted parlance.
Radio and its signals weren’t understood until a nerdy and inventive kid, Edwin Howard Armstrong, figured out how it worked and came up with the components in the 1910’s-1930’s to make AM and FM radio, and television for that matter, possible. Apple and Android are riding on his back.
Armstrong explaining the superregenerative circuit, New York, 1922.
The cellphone has a lot more of “old” in it. Thanks to the gang at Bell Labs and Robert Noyce and his band of lusty fellows at Fairchild Semiconductor of the 1950’s and 1960’s we have the semiconductor and planar process. Without these things, no cellphone … and our kids would be normal.
“Old” is all around us. It seems foolish to call them “old” because they are as fundamental as gravity. It sounds jarring to speak of gravity as “old”. Newton and Einstein didn’t invent gravity. They attempted to understand it. Armstrong didn’t invent the EM spectrum. He just found a way to use it. Bell Labs and Robert Noyce didn’t invent silicon or electricity. They just found ways to use it for sending electrical signals (the integrated circuit).
Noyce and Gordon Moore in front of the Intel SC1 building in Santa Clara in 1970.
“Old” is everywhere. If it wasn’t for another “old” process, we wouldn’t be here … if we escaped the clutches of Planned Parenthood and our parents ignored the loony congresswoman from the Bronx (AOC).
“Old” is one of those words facing disfigurement by our partisan hotheads. Trump wants a wall; the Dems want power. Power to do what? Power to remake America. “Old” is attached to “walls” to frustrate efforts to limit and manage the human tide crashing our borders. Walls do work; ask any celebrity seeking privacy. The Dems, in their heart of hearts, don’t want anything that really works. That’s because they are predisposed to be more comfortable with open borders than they are with controlled borders.
Of course, the Dems need an alternative or surrender the field. Their favorite rejoinder is to attach “more” and “new” to “technology” and “more” to “personnel”. Sounds great, and is. The only problem is that the other side has long wanted this stuff … and walls.
The gambit of only “new technology” and “more personnel”, though, serves the Dems’ interests in two ways. First, the tech stuff can be easily turned off and the personnel moved away from the border if the political winds should blow their way. Secondly, it’s a hot opportunity to funnel some taxpayer cash to their rich donors in Silicon Valley. Construction companies and their workers building a wall aren’t likely to be a rich source of support anyway.
Sometimes such words are combined with others to produce nonsense, as in “diversity” combined with “is our strength”. What football team achieved BCS ranking by allowing the offensive line to be “diverse” in their blocking? It’s balderdash.
Bastardize is defined as “change (something) in such a way as to lower its quality or value, typically by adding new elements”. “Old” and “diversity” have been bastardized beyond recognition. Simply by affixing “old” to anything has convinced the Dems that they have won the argument. No, they’re just playing fast and loose with the language. Now there’s a scandal, a linguistic one with disastrous consequences.
Substitute Gavin Newsom for Brown. Gavin’s got more hair, and its gelled, but the straitjacket fits just as snugly.
I’ve previously posted about the new federal tax law’s possible effects on California and the rest of the deep blue states. Ditto about California’s astronomical gas prices. More has come to light, so the need for “Part II”.
I. California and Blue State Taxes.
April 15 has come and gone. Many Californios – of which I used to be one, like millions of others scattered throughout the country – and others in deep blue states are cutting checks to the IRS instead of receiving refunds. Curtailing SALT (the federal tax subsidy to high-tax states, the Hillary electorate) and the home mortgage interest deduction (HMID), and a few other tax changes, have wreaked havoc with their expectations. Now, they really know what it means to live in a high-tax state.
Michael Ramirez / Weekly Standard
First, lower refunds across the country are expected since withholding was reduced in each one of your paychecks. Paychecks were bigger as the feds took less. We could go back to the old system of the feds lopping off more from each one of your paychecks and giving a pittance back at the end of the tax year. Let’s face it; withholding is a scam.
Second, the caterwauling from California about getting less from the feds than they send to DC has reached a fever pitch. The only problem: it probably isn’t true. George Skelton in the LA Times raised serious doubts, as does Ann Hollingshead with the Legislative Analyst’s Office and the Tax Foundation (see here).
The old wives’ tale was born of a flawed study with gimmicky assumptions. Among other things, not properly accounted was California’s peculiar demography. The state’s age pyramid is distorted with a mass of the young and proportionally fewer elderly. I suspect that’s probably due to massive foreign immigration over the past 5 decades and the hemorrhaging of retirees to other environs. As a result, the accounting contains less federal Social Security and Medicare payments. How much of this is due to the policies championed by the state’s ruling party? Hmmmm, I wonder.
Also, the military draw down since the end of the Cold War didn’t help. Still, in the end, the accounting gimmicks in the earlier study exaggerated the monies going to DC and undervalued the monies to the state. It’s just more proof of Disraeli’s old line: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
As for the clamps on the HMID, any adverse effects can be traced to California foot-shooting. Real estate is very pricey in the state, and getting pricier. It’s a good bet that much of the state’s middle class have mortgages that greatly exceed the limits in the tax law. Why is that? You need look no further than the Leviathan of taxes and regulations smothering housing in the state. Eco-craziness and taxaholism leaves a hangover. It comes in the form of homeless encampments – the usefulness of human poop maps (SF, but applicable elsewhere) as a result – skyrocketing rents, and a strangulation of supply.
Aiming a cocked-and-loaded gun at your foot is an appropriate metaphor.
II. California’s Gas Prices.
Self-serve gasoline prices at Chevron in Malibu exceed $4 a gallon mark on April 15. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
Once again, foot-shooting reigns supreme regarding the state’s astronomically high gas prices. But the mandarins of the ruling party are looking for scapegoats. A Berkeley prof of Business Administration, Severin Borenstein, gave the goons ammunition by apparently identifying a 24-cent “surcharge”, an amount that he couldn’t account for. The near-socialist ruling party didn’t need much of an excuse to go on a jihad against capitalism. Borenstein gave them one.
Prof. Severin Borenstein, UC Berkeley
Well, Severin, here’s one factor that you didn’t think of: the state has so mangled the market for fuel that supply and demand have nowhere to reach but up. Sorry, Newsom and the other chiefs of the ruling party, you can’t suspend the laws of supply of demand like you tried with immigration law. There’s no such thing as a sanctuary from supply and demand. The Soviets took that route to prosperity, and discovered poverty and social collapse.
The peculiar CARBOB blend, cap-and-trade, greenie taxes, and the constant finagling of CARB (Ca. Air Resources Board) have given the state the least consumer-friendly fuel market in the country. Such markets still have supply and demand. It’s just that they intersect at a place above almost any red state. Call it the lefty “surcharge”.
A beleaguered California resident?
This postscript to previous posts only makes the plight of blue states bleaker. The fact that this is democratically-chosen bleakness doesn’t alter the reality. If you want the clowns, accept what happens when you’re ruled by clowns.
And that includes sending more money to the state, any metroplex in the state, and DC. And add to it the high prices for almost anything, including gas. I guess that you get what you vote for.
James Comey, the fired FBI director, has for the past 2 years since his firing been making the rounds as a sage while hawking his book, “A Higher Loyalty”. Should he be accorded unquestioned esteem? Rod Rosenstein thinks otherwise. Take a look.
Rosenstein has been muzzled by his official and professional responsibilities as Deputy Attorney General while Comey makes the rubber chicken circuit. A few days ago in a CNN townhall, the dispatched FBI Director, wrapping himself in a messianic aura, smeared the retired Deputy AG as a person lacking in “strong character”. Well, Rosenstein is no longer manacled by his job and can fight back. The self-anointed prophet of God, Comey, may turn out to be a three-card-monte scammer.
Rosenstein presents a Comey who got out in front of his skis, probably due to Comey’s inflated self-regard. With Comey, investigators are prosecutors. He did this twice in the heat of the 2016 presidential election when he announced the non-prosecution of Hillary and then publicly resuscitated the investigation of her. The word “Investigation” after “Federal”, “Bureau”, and “of” will have to be replaced by “Prosecution”. But admittedly FBP doesn’t have the same ring as FBI.
A higher loyalty? Comey’s higher loyalty may not ascend much above the person looking back at him in the mirror. Somehow the ancient Greek story of Narcissus keeps coming to mind.
The Democrats in charge of the House side of Congress, and their long media retinue, are in high dudgeon over the Mueller Report and the whole Russia mirage. Their epileptic seizures could be calmed by the application of a little history.
A huge part of the problem is their hatred of Trump which has deluded them into going whole hog on the Trump Manchurian candidate story. It was always an illusion, but illusions must be kept alive in the quest for power. Remember John C. Calhoun’s twisted logic in defense of slavery to keep the slavocracy in power in the South?
Remember the 1934 persecution-by-prosecution of William Insull – the man, more than any other, responsible for the creation of the nation’s electrical grid in the 1920’s – by FDR’s Justice Department as the scapegoat for the Depression and to further FDR’s grand scheme to place the economy, and much of life, under bureaucratic control? If you’re interested, after a 7-week trial, it took a jury only 2 hours to acquit Insull and his 16 co-defendants of all charges.
Examples abound.
Insidious illusions will be always, like the poor, with us, especially if power is at stake. For the Resistance true believers, Trump has to be guilty for him to be dethroned. Belief cometh before proof. So, Nadler and company are issuing subpoenas and contempt charges like a mad counterfeiter, as the media ballyhoo the latest round as Fort Sumter.
But what of Eric Holder?
AG Eric Holder held in contempt of Congress, June 2012.
Obama’s AG refused almost any information and documentation on the DOJ’s still-murky 2010 Fast and Furious operation. 17-21 Democrats in 2012 joined Republicans in approving civil and criminal contempt charges against Holder. The story barely lasted one news cycle in the mainstream media. That’s because contempt of Congress claims are essentially censure votes. These aren’t “contempt of court”. If anything, the targets are holding in contempt the excitable and riled partisan majority in the House.
And there are differences in the Barr and Holder cases. Barr released the whole report with the exception of parts falling under long-established rules and laws, like Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure (FRCP) 6(e) regarding the secrecy of grand jury proceedings. The law’s secrecy mandates were recently confirmed by the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (McKeever v. Barr).
The Dems are trying to hang their hat on the exceptions to non-disclosure, but that would stretch “intelligence” and “counter-intelligence” officials to include power-hungry politicos and their staffs as they distort jury deliberations for political ends. How long would it take for the pipeline to the WaPo and NYT to be turned on and the mud to flow?
By the way, the full unredacted Mueller Report is available to selected House members at the DOJ’s skiff, if they want. But they don’t want. They want power and that means Trump’s scalp. This isn’t about the truth. It’s about naked, raw power.
In contrast, Holder ignored and dissed Issa’s House Oversight Committed request for information. Barr gave to Congress and the public almost the whole thing. Holder is free to go on the lecture circuit and bash anyone with a “R” after their name. Barr is daily pilloried on CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of the brooding media big sisters. Go figure.
In some cases, we may have to wait for the afterlife to get justice. Humanity’s “crooked timber” holds sway in this life. In the meantime, a little bit of history may help us get beyond the worst that lies within.
Tucker Carlson on Fox News lately gave his audience another dose of his skepticism of American military “adventurism” – bashing our ventures in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and future ones in places like Venezuela – and couldn’t resist another wack at his favorite whipping boy, “neocons”. But what are “neocons”? His definition appears to be a cartoon.
First, his variant of “neocons” has more to do with his need for a label to affix to advocates of something loosely called “nation-building”. “Neocon” is readily available as it had most recently become the buzzword bogeyman for peacenik groups of the early 2000’s like Code Pink. To understand Code’s orientation, they couldn’t have chosen a better word than “pink”.
Oh, Tucker’s no pinko. He’s just got an antifa rendering of “neocon” implanted in his head, or Mick Jagger’s “My Sweet Neocon” on an endless loop.
That’s the cartoon translation of the term. The reality is quite different. To be blunt, neocons were liberal idealists of the 60’s who were mugged by the realities of the 70’s. I’m old enough to remember it.
Many were part of JFK’s “best and brightest”, rolling up their sleeves to conquer society’s worst social problems. Along came LBJ’s Great Society and within a decade things unraveled. Crime, family breakdown, out-of-wedlock births, a drug epidemic, lifestyle diseases (AIDS, Hep C, Syphilis, Herpes), etc., hit the roof.
In the international arena, the hopes of “peaceful coexistence” with the Soviets, welfare for the Third World (foreign aid and the Peace Corps), bountiful negotiations, and UN-love were dashed by a Soviet arms buildup, Soviet/Cuban adventurism, the UN General Assembly’s descent into demagoguery, the fall of Saigon, and the frantic attempt by populations to escape the ravages of communism’s advance. Remember the Boat People and the Killing Fields?
A Cambodian man walks past one of the many killing fields sites.A group of boat people escaping Vietnam aboard their sea vessel, 1978 or 1979.
On the intellectual side, a grand rethink began. Charles Murray’s “Losing Ground”, James Q. Wilson’s “Broken Windows”, George Gilder’s “Wealth and Poverty”, Charles Krauthammer’s writings, and publications like Commentary Magazine laid out the devastation and what to do about it. In a nutshell, they advocated a return to older values and institutions. Sounds like the “con” part of “neocons”.
Internationally, these ex-liberals realized that John Lennon’s “All You Need Is Love” wasn’t a mature foreign policy. They pressed for a military build up and a stance against the communists and other anti-American actors who would turn the world into their personal playground. No more American self-doubt. Sounds like Reaganism … and it is.
Ronald Reagan delivers his historic speech at the Berlin Wall on June 12, 1987.
There’s something to be learned from all of this. Don’t let cable news personalities be your sole window to the world. Sometimes they get it horribly wrong.
Alex Cora speaks to the press about the boycott before Monday’s game in Baltimore.
I just learned in “Axios AM” of the Red Sox partial boycott of the traditional White House visit to celebrate their World Series championship. Let’s be clear: I have my concerns about Trump, but admittedly even more so with the radical lefty lurch of the Democratic Party. Let’s be clear: I have my concerns about organized partisan political acts by athletes. Alex Cora, the manager, and some of the players say that they won’t attend. Well, now I have another team who has muddied itself with partisan politics to avoid. When will this stop?
Of course, Axios couldn’t help but portray the spat in skin color terms … and so do the boycotting players. The poison of reducing moral claims to melanin counts, cultural identities, and ritual assertions of victimhood has penetrated the locker room. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.
It’s disgusting. I’m reminded of an audience’s shout to singer James Taylor when he got political: “Shut up and sing!” A parallel?
Mark Zuckerberg in April of 2018 was quoted as saying before Congress that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place”. I would take it further. Any of the deep blue dots on the election map are, by definition, “extremely left-leaning place[s]”.
Today, almost any large institution or organization in our densely-packed urban nodes is likely to be an “extremely left-leaning place”. An example would be our tech giants like Google (or Alphabet, Inc). Daily, we are exposed to the socio-political biases of these “extremely left-leaning place[s]”. The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation (RMEF) in Montana was recently confronted with it. (see here)
Google employees at the Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.
The RMEF had been running ads on Google for years. In April, they were email notified by a Google employee that it would be no more. It seems that Google has a policy against hunting. Somebody apparently did a Google search on the RMEF. The RMEF quickly appealed to the Montana congressional delegation and the rejection was reversed.
Whether Google has a policy in opposition to hunting isn’t the pertinent question. Our gaze should be directed at the Google workroom. What’s happening in there? I suspect, with good reason, that they have an “extremely left-leaning” population at work. To them, nature is a Disney cartoon; hunting is cruelty; and we should all be vegan anyway. Hippie food stores and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation don’t go together.
Just another reminder that urbanity-as-in-citified is synonymous with eco-zealotry, gender fluidity, and Bernie bros/gals.
This has happened more than a few times in my 30-year teaching career. As part of a broader discussion, a kid will define a “conservative” as one who opposes change. That’s not the end of it. What follows is a train wreck of logic. Diving deeper, we find that the kid is hung up on the root “conserve”, which to the student means to stand athwart “change”. And “change” is synonymous with “reform”. And “reform” is “good”. That’s etymology, or a loose rendering of it. When did etymology become a substitute for philosophical reasoning? Somehow it has for the masses of the young passing through our schools into adulthood.
To set the record straight, “conservative” is one of many philosophies – in common usage, call them ideologies – that have bounced around our world for the past few centuries. Other modern examples would be “liberal”, “progressive”, and “Salafist Islam”. A philosophy/ideology is a simple set of judgments on how the world works.
The terms are also labels. What fits under the label can change over time. A “conservative” of 16th century England would support the aristocracy and a Catholic-style Church of England (High Churchmen in the parlance of the day). However, by the 19th into the 20th centuries, “conservative” came to be defined by the liberty agenda of Locke, Burke, Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, the now-defunct British Whig Party, and our founding fathers. Amazing as to what a few centuries can do.
If “conservative” can be defined by a liberty agenda, what of “liberal” and “progressive”? It’s easy to knock these two things out since they have morphed into the same thing. A “progressive” (or modern liberal) begins with an unexamined, unacknowledged, and unstated assumption about history. For them, the past is deficient, the present is an improvement, and the future is an advance on an inferior present. An appropriate progressive metaphor for the human experience would be a chairlift up a ski slope. It’s the unstated view of History curriculums in our schools, and part and parcel of the Obama rhetoric of being “on the right side of history”.
Some serious implications soon follow. For instance, who is the most capable of ferreting out the trajectory? Academics, of course. They, the knowledgeable, have the wherewithal to peer into the past and present and guide us onto the true path of human betterment. It’s the dawn of the administrative state and diminishment of the rough-and-tumble politics of popular sovereignty. Now, the way is laid open for an academically-trained civil service to guide and direct us. Say goodbye to the citizen republic, guns, and the spontaneous order of free markets. Life is reduced to the prescriptions of empowered social technicians.
The administrative state.
The Soviets tried to do the same thing on meth. It was called central planning.
“Science” is the buzzword. Science is, indeed, a great thing … but not when a little bit of it is extrapolated into airy historical predictions and social abstractions. Take for instance Marx’s “scientific socialism” and “dialectical materialism”. Take for instance the Green New Deal. At this point, “science” is no different from religious mysticism. The conclusions are no longer tethered to Earth’s gravity but have zoomed past the asteroid belt.
So, what do we have? We have one line of thought rooted in a firm grasp of human nature with all its flaws. Does the Old Testament sound familiar? Out of the idea comes the rule of law and constitutional republics as checks on the evil men and women can do. By contrast, the other reasoning means reform, reform, and more reform. Everything is turned topsy-turvy forever, and all under the direction of a set of planners with the latest zeitgeisty truths-of-the-moment. Be prepared to constantly queue up for shortages will be the afterbirth.
The Soviet Union in its latter days suffered from a birth dearth (and still does) and plague of alcoholism. I don’t think that the rule of dogmatic, degreed social managers comports well with our nature. The planners, as it turns out, have the same flaws as the rest of us. A social miasma will descend on life.
