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Democracy, Schmuckocracy

(Schmuck: a foolish or contemptable person; origin in the Yiddish schmok, i.e. penis)

Is it time to ditch 'NIMBYism'? - Phillips Group
NIMBYs, schmucks

The chant “Save our democracy”, it’s flung like so many shotgun pellets at anyone viewed as an opponent.  What about the people, the people doing the flinging?  The reality is that we have more “democracy” than ever before, and the dissatisfaction with our plight has never been greater.  How does that compute: more democracy equals more discontent?  Can the collective, also known as “the people”, act in the manner of schmucks, harming themselves?  Democracy, schmuckocracy?

The level of discontent is palpable in polls.  Here’s one: Gallup’s recent survey of public confidence in major institutions ranging from the governmental to the social and economic, public and private (see #1 and #2 below).  11 of the 16 measured entities experienced declines; not one turned in a sterling performance.  Much of the public’s lackluster assessment of our institutions can be attributed to their current conduct.  Biden’s infirmity, an engineered chaos at the border, the embarrassing bugout from Kabul, the highly destructive endeavor to shut down nearly all human activity during a viral episode, inflation, the unaffordability of shelter, the unaffordability of energy, crime, nothing seems to work, boys in girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms, etc., goes a long way to heaping scorn on government, on “our democracy”, on any of our institutions that had a hand in the degeneracy.

Military Clears Crew of Plane That Took Flight as Afghans Fell to Their Deaths - The New York Times
eople running alongside a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane as it moved down a runway of the international airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, in August, in 2021. (photo: Associated Press)
Olympics 2024: Boxer Angela Carini quits after 46 seconds against Imane Khelif amid eligibility row
An alleged transgender boxer consoles Italian boxer who quit after 46 seconds in Olympic female boxing match.

It doesn’t end there.  Many private ones – “big business”, big tech, the media – get slammed, and maybe deservedly so.

The Supreme Court takes a hit as well.  That might be due to another feature of a democracy: the people’s tendency to be acclimated to bunk.  Since 1973 when the Court imperiously invented a provision in the Constitution that established a national right to take unborn life, “the people” grew accustomed to it.  A 51-year odyssey ensued to do it.  So, by today, people crave their newly minted national license to end the life of people who haven’t exited the womb.  The Court’s Dobbs decision just struck the word “national” from the license, not the license itself.  But don’t expect “the people” to understand such subtlety.

Combine this with the habit of the public to be persuaded by jargon, such as “assault rifle”, and therefore unwittingly consign the Second Amendment to the mercy of demagogues, and we have another journey down Alice’s rabbit hole.  The Constitution stands in the way of the passion of the moment so “the people” turn on it and the Court in demanding a shortcut around the cumbersome task of properly amending it.  Understanding isn’t a feature of the mob, which sadly is another trait of democracy.

We’ve injected so much unrestrained democracy into our system that our founders’ original design seems strange to anyone born after the Great Depression.  Reading the Constitution must seem like a bizarre experience for a population raised on a steady diet of democracy this and democracy that.  An example would be the abuse heaped on the Electoral College.  Once a powerful faction loses the presidency by it, but wins the popular vote, they agitate to dismantle it and make the head of the executive branch conform to the wishes of the crowds on the two coasts and every urban center with a college campus.  It’s not enough that a form of direct democracy is the operative principle of the lower house of Congress in the Constitution.  The will of the mob must be made to dominate throughout.

Lest we forget, checking democracy and its mobs was an important goal of the founders.  Here’s a sampling of their views:

“Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.” – James Madison

“It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government.  Experience has proved that no position is more false than this.  The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government.  Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.” – Alexander Hamilton

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.  There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” – John Adams

“It is one of the evils of democratical governments, that the people, not always seeing and frequently misled, must often feel before they can act.” – George Washington

There was never a more searing indictment of democracy than that of Ambrose Bierce when he wrote toward the end of the 19th century, “Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.”

“The people” aren’t cognizant of our already mammoth strides away from the founders’ restraints on the lustful will of “the people”.  Even for the House of Representatives, that bastion of the popular will in the original framing, a state’s representation became determined by single-district direct elections and not by the state legislatures by the late 19th to early 20th centuries.  That was only the beginning of the state legislatures’ attempt to neuter themselves in a mad dash away the founders’ wisdom.

The state legislatures were further taken out of the picture with the 17th Amendment: the direct election of senators.  They would no longer have any say in the selection of the state’s two senators.  Then came the initiative, referendum, and recall – “the people” make law, reject law, and reverse elections.  These ideas were championed by 19th century progressives who were more intent on removing the obstacles to their rise to power.  Smoke-filled back rooms were replaced by the big-government, neo-Marxist lunatics of the faculty lounge, the so-called “experts”, the constituency of our modern progressive gang, the people mostly responsible for our discontents when you think about it.

In the irony of all ironies, like the state legislatures, “the people” chose people who then took strides to remove “the people” from self-government, and thus enunciated the rise of the massive and unaccountable administrative state.  This new Leviathan can make law (regulations), execute their law, and adjudicate on their law without much input of an electorate.  Where’s the democracy?  It’s here: “the people” elect progressives, and continue to elect progressives particularly in the populous blue jurisdictions, who then heap more layers on the mountainous administrative state like the many bands piling upward in a mature stratovolcano.

No wonder we’re in a hell of a mess.  Pressure will build, and it’ll blow like a proverbial Vesuvius, but make sure that you’re not in the path of the political pyroclastic flow that follows.  In 2020, a cop-beating video clip went viral and progressives seized the opportunity to dismantle law enforcement, elect DAs who won’t prosecute, decriminalize criminality, riots erupted, people and property were torched, and many cities descend into the dysfunction and lawlessness where they lie today.  The only real export of LA and New York City are people as they flee the pyroclastic flow.

Seattle police at scene of riots in 2020 (photo: KOMO News, Seattle)
Antifa and anarchists co-opted an otherwise peaceful Justice for George Floyd demonstration in Seattle on Saturday, turning it into a riot. The next day, scores of employees and volunteers came together to help clean up the mess Antifa and the anarchists made. (Photo: Jason Rantz)
Seattle the day after the occupation by so-called anarchists and Antifa, 2020 (photo: KTTH 770, Seattle)

One word describes the hidden potential of the “our democracy” chant: California.  The taxes, the crime, the sordidness, the inner-city dysfunction, and the pervading sense of overall decay envelop the state and its “democracy”.  “The people” in the state chose it, and continue to choose it.  California’s “our democracy” is a Democratic one-party state.

Unfortunately, the state’s Democratic Party dominates the national Democratic Party.  The socialism of the state’s ruling Dems is the guiding philosophy of the national Dems.  The state’s Dems wreck the state’s economy and the national Dems work to imitate the wreckage everywhere else.  Quite a tag-team duo.

The state’s Dems lay waste to social life in making a mockery of nature’s male and female.  Boys rhetorically become girls and the next thing we see is that they’re in the girls’ locker rooms, bathrooms, and on their swim, track, volleyball teams, etc.  The state’s public schools are required to disseminate the gender confusion in the curriculum.  Taking his cues from California, Biden announces changes to Title IX of the Civil Rights Act to include the transgendered as a protected class thereby codifying rhetorical girls and boys into everywhere (see #3 below).

The not-so-golden state’s administrative state is imperial thanks to the ruling party’s zeal for upending an entire way of life in a senseless and manic effort to modulate the earth’s atmosphere.  That’s right, one state of 39 million people (and declining) is gung-ho about sacrificing its people’s standard of living on the altar of climate-change ideology, acting like they hold the thermostat to the global atmosphere.  They’d like to take the suicide attempt national, and Biden is accommodating.  In May of this year, the EPA issued new power plant regulations that’ll function as a death warrant to reliable, affordable electricity by mandating expensive efforts (carbon capture, etc.) to reduce emissions in fossil fuel plants (see #4-6 below).  It’s death by regulation, parroting California’s lunacy, and Europe’s.  However, Europe backed away, not so for the zealots in California and D.C.

The blackout was underway Friday as most of the state was issued Stage 3 emergency

Do “the people’s” government in America care?  Do “the people” even have enough of a pulse to care?  As for the first question, no, they don’t care a lick about your plight.  As for the second, no sé.  These activists in power are true-believers, with all the heart of a Bergen-Belsen commandant.  They are coming to get more than your sedan.  They sneer at your air conditioner, which is a lifesaver for anyone not living in Malibu (see #7 below).  This is totalitarianism pure and simple.  Like a rabid Marxist, their ultimate goal is to reengineer humanity, making the new man, woman, whatever.  You’ll be forced to live in the world that they have created for you.  And, like previous crusades for heaven on earth, it’ll be the opposite.

Watch as we relive the travel from hubris to nemesis in Greek tragedy.  The hubris hides ignorance and arrogance which leads to the disaster of nemesis.  Welcome to the base of the Democratic Party and the EPA.

We are living the nemesis that arose out of the hubristic arrogance and ignorance of a clan of firebrands, firebrands that we elected.  Don’t like Trump, voted for Biden, maybe vote for Harris in 2024?  Reality sets in: you avoid the ogre but get the greenie neo-Marxists and ruination.

Both sides decry the escalating cost of housing, the loss of the “American dream”.  The problem can’t be laid at the feet of high interest rates or inflation since it predated Biden’s spiking of the money supply in trillions of new spending.  No, speaking of supply, it’s a supply problem.  It’s been building for decades.  Look around you and you’ll hear hostility to housing construction: “The new people crowd my streets and schools”; “I’ve lost my small town”; “The new developments spoiled the scenery; they’re ugly”; “It’s destroying my property values”; “My property taxes have jumped to pay for their infrastructure and public services.”  Who’s there to speak for the young’s access to the “American dream”?  Nobody.  The only ones filling the hearing rooms and filing the lawsuits are NIMBYs galore and eco-revolutionaries.

This Northern California county tops national list for unaffordable housing

This method of governance was pioneered by California.  Growth control incubated in northern California (Petaluma, 1961).  In that instance, “the people” elected county and city officials to freeze in amber the “character” of the place.  What do you think happened to the housing supply?  Regulations and delays only added to the cost of whatever survives the local gauntlet.

In fact, the brutal gauntlet was extended.  “The people” of California gave to the world the California Coastal Commission (CCC) in approving Prop 20 in 1972, providing more avenues to block, impede, and knock out new housing, or make it so expensive that nobody in their right mind would want to pour a foundation in the “coastal zone”,  which is another one of those politically fungible concepts that prove useful to all eco-utopians and would-be social engineers statewide.

The CCC is one of many regulatory behemoths that “the people” of the state have created with their own hand in propositions or through their elected representatives to make it difficult to get the nod to nail two studs together.  Eco-obsessions reign supreme.  The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is the mother of all hoops to jump.  It empowers the California Department of Fish and Game, the various Air Quality Management Districts, anything conservation oriented, anything eco-utopian, who can only be pacified by project defeat, endless delays, and burdensome costs.  It’s a veritable goat rope.

In a microcosm of the state’s protracted assault on housing, a small 4-lot housing development in Los Osos, San Louis Obispo County, was approved as per the state and the CCC-ratified Local Coastal Program (LCP) of the county.  Later, the CCC discovered a sand dune on the property, declared it to be in an Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area (ESHA), and repealed the permits (see #8 below).  The developers are fighting back in the California Supreme Court.  I’m pessimistic because the state’s courts reflect the longstanding and overweening one-party state.

Gauntlets bedevil the entire state.  It’s so prevalent, according to the California Association of Realtor’s (C.A.R.) Housing Affordability Index, only one in five home buyers can afford a median-priced house in the state (see #9 below).  According to Zillow, of those prospective home buyers, 70% are married and 44% have children (see #10 below).  Where do the underhoused with kids go instead of just another rental in a cramped apartment complex?  Good question.  Possibly, a U-Haul barreling east on Interstate 10 might be their best option.

But do the powerful really care?  Do they understand supply and demand or possess even a rudimentary grasp of trade-offs?  Eco-purity is expensive, very expensive.  So-called saving the coastal zone or preserving the habitat of the blunt-nosed leopard lizard, the gnat catcher, kangaroo rat, mountain lion, or whatever happens to dance across the screen of the hawkers of biodiversity, comes at the price of more than a house or rent.  The price tag shows as lost opportunities for the young and generations to come.  Their “American dream” will be stillborn.  But who shows up at the hearings or has an army of “public interest” law firms ready to file suit in court?  It’s the current homeowner who already has their slice of the dream and the eco-zealot who doesn’t care about the dream and would be quite happy with a repeal of the Industrial Revolution and upward mobility.  They’d be overjoyed with the return of the Middle Ages.

All of this can be traced back to “the people”, to “our democracy”, to the four wolves deciding the fate of the lamb.  The people chose societal collapse.  It didn’t magically appear out of the ether.  And it shows in the names on the ballot.  The parties gave them to us, or, more accurately, the party bases.  The political parties are more democratic than ever before, and their choices are miserable for anyone outside the “bases”.  For that is what democracy led to: the rise of the “base”.  Think of the “base” as a mob, an assemblage animated by jive.  For the Democrats, they’re enraptured by Marx and his ideological cousins in the Frankfurt School and faculty lounges everywhere.  All of this is unstated, mostly unknown to them since their beliefs never came with source footnotes.  They deny it while implementing it.  Anybody reaching the top of their slimy pole must sacrifice their good sense at the altar of the base’s groupthink.

portrait of critical theorists frankfurt school
Prominent Marxists – “critical theorists” (CRT, being woke) – of the Frankfurt School, who would be influential in the West. From top-left; Oskar Negt, Jurgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Claus Offe

The Republicans have discovered their own inner mob, or “base”.  It’s a cult around Donald J. Trump.  People were right to admire his policy successes but they were a product of Reaganism and not anything that might be construed as Trumpism.  Social conservatives and free marketeers populated his administration giving the country border control, tax cuts, deterrence, a burgeoning economy, and a Supreme Court that acts like a court and not a legislature – the very essence of Reaganism.

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The socialist Bernie Sanders in 2020
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AOC and powerful Dems announcing their Green New Deal
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MAGA from 2023 (?)

What would a second Trump term bring?  I suspect that it’ll be more like Trump and less like Reagan.  In economic policy, he’ll pursue his own form of central planning which is called industrial policy with a flurry of tariffs and taxpayer-funded benefits to his own favorites.  Right-to-work – freedom from coerced unionization – may take a back seat in a bid for the union vote.  Trade protectionism will be combined with a new isolationism, which is nothing more than America alone.  We might even see an abandonment of Ukraine.  Would any of this be popular among the general public?  It’s hard to say, but it sells with the “base”.

How did we get saddled with an inevitable neo-Marxist and Donald Trump when both are detested?  Trump in a good week never rises above the upper 40’s in his favorability.  The popularity of the Dems’ neo-Marxism is hard to gauge since it’s never exposed as such.  People probably wouldn’t embrace the public pronouncements of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party platform if saw the line-by-line plagiarism from the writings of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School or the eugenics of Margaret Sanger.

As of today (8/3/2024), Trump’s favorability stands at 43.3% and is viewed unfavorably by a whopping 51.7% (according to FiveThirtyEight, see #10 below).  He’s a consistent stinker.  In the same poll aggregation, Kamala Harris’s standing isn’t much better with 42.4 favorable and 49.1% unfavorable.  She’s about the same in the pungency factor, even with a honeymoon of media praise, near worship, after her rise to donkey-party heir apparent.

The Dems’ neo-Marxism and its espousal by its candidates is joined by the GOP’s transformation into a personality cult.  For both parties, it’s the culmination of a century and a half of the democratization of their operations, and like the injection of direct democracy into more of our politics, dissatisfaction increases with the results.

Political extremists love the democracy rhetoric, aiming to recreate the Paris mob of the French Revolution.  Late 19th century progressives – many of whom were socialists (ex.: John Dewey) – pushed for the direct primary to replace party caucuses.  Primaries to choose delegates became routine starting in the 1970s for the Democrats and 1980s for the GOP.  It resulted in mass fealty to a person or to a groupthink among the base, thus the rise of the Dems’ Bernie Bros and the woke and the Republicans’ MAGA (see #11 below), with a corresponding rise in public disillusionment.

Democratization means rule by the base, not by the franchise.  Interparty rivalries get stamped out by a normally radical groupthink that captures the imagination of the party’s activist base.  For Dems, the groupthink is an enthusiasm for a campaign to ferret out white/heteronormative/male privilege, to expand the unacknowledged footprint of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School’s principal creed.  They’ll hide it because they have to.  The stench of the “socialist” label still pervades.

It’s so widespread that party big wheels – long-in-the-tooth politicos and big donors – had to step into the breech in 2020 to sidestep the frenzy for the Bernie Bros by resurrecting the doddering Biden, and later to swap the infirmed Biden for the younger-but-babbling Kamala Harris.  At least the Democrats have some adult guardrails which is a backhanded admission that too much democracy can get you into trouble.

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Guardrails don’t seem evident in the GOP.  Trump romped from primary to primary despite the fact that he’s the weakest candidate in a general election matchup.  Trump is popular with the base, unpopular to the those outside of it.  An infirm Biden managed to keep it close with Trump, and now the dullard Kamala Harris has drawn even with the man from Mar-a-Lago.  Ironically, with Trump in the picture, execrable socialism is still in play, thanks to mob rule in both parties and a broad apathy compounded by ignorance.

It must be hard to admit that schmucks exist in more places than among elites.  Look around you, maybe take a long hard look in the mirror.  Me too!  More direct democracy exposed the likelihood that schmucks have a broader presence than we’ve been willing to admit.  Party bases can be full of them.  The general public too.  “The people” can desire things that they ought not get.  The demands of half-witted utopians and adults who’ve already got theirs trample the prospects of the young and those yet to be born.  The adults of today confiscate the opportunities of those too young to vote and future generations.

It’s disgusting, and brought to you by . . . democracy.  Democracy, schmuckocracy.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “Historically Low Faith in U.S. Institutions Continues”, Lydia Saad, Gallup, 7/6/2024, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/508169/historically-low-faith-institutions-continues.aspx
2. “Confidence in U.S. Institutions Down; Average at New Low”, Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup, 7/5/2024, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-institutions-down-average-new-low.aspx
3. “Biden Administration: Title IX Protections Extend to Transgender Students”, Lauren Camera, US News and World Report, 6/16/2021, at https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-06-16/biden-administration-title-ix-protections-extend-to-transgender-students
4. “Greenhouse Gas Standards and Guidelines for Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants”, EPA, at https://www.epa.gov/stationary-sources-air-pollution/greenhouse-gas-standards-and-guidelines-fossil-fuel-fired-power
5. “4 Things to Know About US EPA’s New Power Plant Rules”, Dan Lashof, Lori Bird, and Jennifer Rennicks, World Resources Institute, 5/3/2024, at https://www.wri.org/insights/epa-power-plant-rules-explained
6. Much thanks to Gordon Hughes of the National Center for Energy Analytics in “The EPA’s Proposals for Power Plants Satisfy the Definition of Insanity”, National Review, 5/13/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/the-epas-proposals-for-power-plants-satisfy-the-definition-of-insanity/
7. “It’s time to rethink air conditioning”, Rebecca Leber, Vox, 8/26/2021, at https://www.vox.com/22638093/air-conditioning-worsens-climate-change-ac
8. “California Coastal Commission unlawfully blocks home construction”, Pacific Legal Foundation, describing their lawsuit against the CCC in Shear Development Co., LLC v. California Coastal Commission, at https://pacificlegal.org/case/shear-california-coastal-commission/
9. “2nd Quarter California housing affordability”, California Association of Realtors, 8/11/2023, at https://www.car.org/en/aboutus/mediacenter/newsreleases/2023-News-Releases/2qtr2023hai#:~:text=Fewer%20than%20one%20in%20five%20%2816%20percent%29%20home,according%20to%20C.A.R.%E2%80%99s%20Traditional%20Housing%20Affordability%20Index%20%28HAI%29.
10. FiveThirtyEight’s Aug. 3, 2024 poll aggregation at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/
11. “10.1 History of American Political Parties”, Open Library, at https://open.lib.umn.edu/americangovernment/chapter/10-1-history-of-american-political-parties/

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“2,000 Mules”, 2,000 (or More) Chumps

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I am a man of faith.  There is a God.  But is faith an appropriate basis for judgment in, let’s say, a court of law or a lab?  Don’t facts or evidence count?  Two instances bring to light the muddled thinking – the weird confusion of using the thought processes of the pew in a trial or medical experiment – in Trump’s surreal conviction of God-knows-what and Salem Media’s now-discredited “2,000 Mules”.  The misapplication of faith abounds in both, and both are disgraceful.

Now, with Biden out of the picture, the Dems are pivoting to the tag line “Harris prosecutor and Trump convicted felon”.  It’ll work among people who have a deep faith in the Democrats’ neo-Marxist vision, who are already disposed to believe anything that dribbles out of PBS, MSNBC, or The View.  However, of what was Trump convicted in a Manhattan court, before a Manhattan jury, by a Manhattan DA who would make a Stalin prosecutor proud?  The indictment’s 34 felony counts were actually one count just multiplied every time it appeared in the paperwork.  The felonies were invented by injecting an ethereal and fuzzy federal election fraud charge into accusations that can’t survive the statute of limitations.  All of it was hocus pocus for people who are inclined to believe in the unbelievable.

Well, the belief in the unbelievable is evident in people who regard Trump to be God’s vicar on earth, in the same fashion as that Manhattan jury’s belief in socialist prosperity, an oxymoron if there ever was one.  So, if Trump castigates his 2020 election loss as fraud so will the massive supportive political complex behind him.  Facts, evidence aren’t allowed to stand in the way.  Salem Media’s “2,000 Mules” is a classic in the annals of political fiction.

In case you haven’t heard, Salem Media dropped Dinesh D’Souza’s “2,000 Mules” from its media platforms and issued an apology to Mark Andrews, one of the so-called “mules” (see #1 and #2 below).  As it turned out, Andrews was placing in the Atlanta drop box ballots for himself, his wife, and three adult children.  This is one “mule” that couldn’t be made to fit the invented profile.  The narrator’s “What you are seeing is a crime” was pure poppycock.  What of the other 1,999 “mules”?  We get a clue when Salem Media dropped all mention of D’Souza’s monstrosity.  Even diehards shrink from the prospect of having to shell out millions of dollars in compensatory awards.

Might there have been vote fraud in 2020?  Possibly.  Might there have been more fraud than normal?  Possibly.  But “possibly” shouldn’t be good enough for an electorate with their heads screwed on straight.  Good sense demands a large dose of skepticism of an allegation of a secret conspiracy of 2,000 anybodies.  A man with much good sense, Benjamin Franklin, once wrote, “Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.”  Actually, conspiracy is the last refuge of the scoundrel, not patriotism, in today’s toxic political playground.

Why is it so toxic?  It’s the junction of two factors.  On the one hand, in true Marxist fashion, the Democrats have firmly adopted the maxim, the ends justify the means.  Anything is considered proper so long as it accomplishes the desired end.  On the other hand, the Democrats’ institutional heft behind the neo-Marxist revolution is confronted by their opponents’ cult of the middle finger in the person of Donald Trump.  As a result, our politics are grotesque and filled with fantasies.

Welcome to a public that has been made into chumps.

December 2020:

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “Publisher of ‘2000 Mules’ Apologizes to Georgia Man Falsely Accused of Ballot Fraud in the Film”, US News and World Report from AP, 5/31/2024, at https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/georgia/articles/2024-05-31/publisher-of-2000-mules-apologizes-to-georgia-man-falsely-accused-of-ballot-fraud-in-the-film

2. “A Belated Apology for ‘2000 Mules’”, Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal, 6/5/2024, at https://www.wsj.com/articles/2000-mules-salem-media-lawsuit-mark-andrews-dinesh-dsouza-2020-election-true-the-vote-1565ace0

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Republican Party Is Now the Trump Party: Change the Name and Be Done with It

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* For my dear family and friends who are Trump supporters, I wish not to be provocative and strive only to be honest in my assessment of Donald Trump.  Donald Trump is not the personification of “conservative”.  If you read further, you’ll see why.  Please keep in mind that hagiography (worshipfulness) is not an endearing quality.  I won’t engage in it.  That kind of adulation should be reserved for Him who raises up and brings down nations (see 2 Samuel 22:48), and belongs not to the hot political personage of the moment.

The choice of J.D. Vance is more proof that the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan has been laid to rest . . . for the time being.  Like a vampire rising from his crypt, though, the GOP corpse is resurrecting as the Trump Party, while standing for nothing more than Trump’s brusque utterings on all matters foreign and domestic.  Replace the “R” with a “T” after the name of the party’s officeholders.

What does the “T” actually represent?  A strong hint can be found in the party’s platform.  Warning, don’t be so dismissive of the party’s platform as an empty gesture and meaningless after the convention.  Platforms are aspirational, reflective of the collective heart and mind of a party and provide the direction for where its representatives would like to nudge the country once in office.

Where does Trump want to lead the party and country in his platform?  He no doubt wants to sidestep the prickly issue of abortion.  The party’s longstanding and firm stance in support of unborn life has been replaced by a “Vote of the People” (see #1 below).  A “Vote of the People” sanctifies the taking of unborn life according to the Trump Party.  The only abortion act to be condemned is “Late Term Abortion”, the poll-tested safe position.  The Trump Party’s positions are as poll-tested as the verbiage to tar opponents coming out of the Democrat political complex.

By its nature, the issue of the taking of unborn life can’t be reduced to states’ rights.  A “Vote of the People” can’t sanctify a practice that is unsanctifiable.  Instead, to advance Trump’s political interests, the 2020 commitment – “. . . we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed” – must be expunged and replaced by the 2024 “Vote of the People” and a curt seven lines.

The Trump Party has adopted the 1854 rationale of Sen. Stephen Douglas (D, Ill.) in his Kansas-Nebraska Act regarding slavery in the territories, just adapted for abortion.  Douglas called it “popular sovereignty”, like Trump’s “Vote of the People”: let the people in the territories choose to enslave others, or, in our moment, take the life of children who haven’t exited the womb.  That makes it alright, eh?

Stephen Douglas Speech in the Lincoln-Douglas Debate
Sen. Stephen Douglas (D, Ill.), author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854

Trump has a history of being a bit dodgy on abortion.  He was for it before he was against it, following in the illustrious rhetorical tradition of John Kerry.  Now he’s shuffled slightly in reverse to “Vote of the People”.  Anything that’ll get him back in the White House, even if it is over the bodies of the unborn.

There’s much in the platform to be lauded: rebuilding our military and its domestic industrial base, immigration controls, the defense of common sense in the culture wars, preserving the 2018 tax cuts, choice in education, ending the eco-madness, etc.  These fall in the Venn diagram overlap between the old Republican Party and the new Trump Party.  It’s in the expanding outstretched areas beyond the common zone that the Republican Party turns into the Trump Party, so much so that the word “Republican” is unrecognizable in the party name and as the descriptor of its members’ affiliation.  “Republican” needs to be trash-canned for Trumpican.  Those who gathered in Milwaukee are Trumpicans, not Republicans.  All Trump Party officeholders, formerly Republican, should be designated like Sen. J.D. Vance – T, Ohio.  Ditch the “R”.

No better example of the metamorphosis can be found than in the Trump Party’s newfound pledge to commit fiscal lechery (see #4 below), and this from a man who has filed six Chapter 11 bankruptcies starting in the early 1990s.  It’s no secret that the dole, the welfare state, entitlements are driving us to the status of 1980s Argentina with an inflation rate of 3,000% (see #3 below), or Weimar Germany between 1922 and 1923 when inflation made one US dollar worth 4,210,500,000,000 marks.  The three elephants in the federal budget of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid currently account for almost half of all federal spending (see #5 below), and are on a glide path to eat up more.  Then, you must pile the mounting and mandatory debt interest payments onto that fiscal Mt. Everest.  Interest payments don’t add one new frigate to the navy or new bridge to the interstate highway system.

What’s the Trump Party’s answer?  Mimicking Trump before his adoring crowds, the platform reads, “President Trump has made absolutely clear that he will not cut one penny from Medicare or Social Security.”  The bombast is followed by a promise of more benefits and a pie-in-the-sky hope that we can grow ourselves out of the incontinence (see #4 below).

Be honest, speak to the young and future generations about the huge burden that they will be expected to carry.  Currently, we’re creating $1 trillion of new debt every 100 days (see #5 below).  To say that the three elephants aren’t a big part of that picture is to play the part of the flim-flam artist in the old shell game.  When we try to fund anything else, like defense, it only increases the pressure on the total federal budget, regardless of the gimmicky mirage of FICA taxes going in and bennies going out. Demography can’t sustain it.  The Trump Party promises to stop the alleged raiding of the account, but ironically they need to raid it in order to shower rewards on favored industries, fund additional benefits, and resuscitate a languishing military after years of neglect.

One shouldn’t expect fiscal probity from a man who’s played fast and loose with the bankruptcy laws.  Trump will be freed from the normal debt worries that are faced by normal people since he’ll have the federal power to issue new debt and gin up the printing presses.  Debt is something for somebody else to worry about.  Right?  By that time, Trump and his aged cohort will have passed to their reward.  Not so for your kids.  We ought to be ashamed.

On the domestic front, the Trump Party promises tariffs and all manner of trade tomfoolery including the showering of largesse on favored companies and penalties for consumers (tariff-induced price increases), people who might be reluctant to subsidize the featherbedding of our labor unions, the same gang who ran Detroit and its automakers into the ground.  Read Chapters three and five of the platform to know what the Trumpicans have in store (see #6 below).  The effect of treating natural allies as trade enemies at a time of a resurgent Red China is anybody’s guess.  It probably won’t end well.

But forward thinking hasn’t been the hallmark of Trumpicans, including Trump’s anointed 39-year-old #2, J.D. Vance. Look at the Trump Party’s definition of “National Interest” (see #7 below):

“Republicans will promote a Foreign Policy centered on the most essential American Interests, starting with protecting the American Homeland, our People, our Borders, our Great American Flag, and our Rights under God.”

Sounds great, right?  This isn’t a product of independent deep thinkers coming together.  It’s a cut-and-paste job from Trump’s stump speeches.  The threat of Red China, the interests of our friends in the Indo-Pacific and Israel are mentioned, but Ukraine and the threat of Putin’s Russia didn’t survive the Trump censors.

Trump’s outlook presents a bugaboo that is compounded in Vance.  It is a lack of appreciation for the international liberal political order after World War II.  Don’t fly off the handle about the word “liberal”.  The liberal order means the classically liberal cooperative arrangement of rule-of-law democracies, alliances, also called collective defense, and free trade.  The “America First” jargon of the Trump clan often means America alone.  The attacks on free trade translates into a love affair with tariffs, which is not a lubricant for international collaboration.  Are the criticisms of NATO limited to making member nations increase their contributions or do they represent a pivot away from the alliance, another manifestation of America alone?

We’ll learn the hard way by putting him and his people in the White House for a second term.  His people in a second term may not be the Reaganite types that populated the first.  This second edition may be populated with protectionists and isolationists/noninterventionists, appointees falling under the dubious conjury of “national conservative”.

Listening to Vance, one worries about a whole lot of things.  The former Never Trumper of 2016 has shape-shifted into a Trump firebrand with the same propensity for bombast before an open mic or on X as his Trump “shifu” (Chinese martial arts master).  In 2019, Vance made clear the battle lines in the party between Reagan Republicanism and Trumpism. Speaking of Trump and the party split, he said,

“Even though he [Trump] was the president of the United States, there were already people who were aggressively pushing back against his influence, who were already planning a return to basically reimplementing the Wall Street Journal editorial page’s preferred positions in 2019.  I think that’s over now.  And the fact that it’s over is a huge, huge win for you guys [i.e. national conservatives], but mostly, it’s a huge, huge win for the American people.” (see #8 below)

By 2024, the Reaganite Republican Party of 2019, which Vance characterizes as the “Wall Street Journal editorial page’s preferred positions” – the free trade/small government/robust-military-and-diplomatic-engagement stance of Reagan – is eclipsed by people vaguely referred to as “populists”.  The word demands parsing.

The “populism” for Vance is a cry for big government which is evident in his hostility to changes in Social Security and Medicare and in his support for trade protectionism.  In 2020, running for the Senate, Vance said, “I don’t support cuts to Social Security or Medicare and think privatizing Social Security is a bad idea.”  “Privatizing” is political code for opposition to the reforms that make them sustainable.  It’s one of Chuck Schumer’s favorite rhetorical contraptions.

And in many ways, Vance is right there with Schumer and the rest of the collectivist establishment in the donkey party.  They don’t like free enterprise, because it might be too free of their control, and apparently neither does Vance.  He adores Lina Khan, Biden’s radical chairwoman of Federal Trade Commission (FTC).  He gushingly approves of her when he said, “I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job.”

F.T.C. Chair Lina Khan Upends Antitrust Standards by Suing Meta - The New York Times
Lina Khan

If you’re a socialist of the kind commonly found in today’s Democrat Party, then the FTC is the place to be to assault your arch enemy, the free enterprise system.  Khan traffics in the “Bigness is Badness” jargon of the Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party rather than the more practical and sensible “consumer welfare” principle of anti-trust law and regulation.  The former is indefinable and leaves much running room for anti-business skullduggery, perfect for the budding socialists manning the parapets of today’s Democratic Party.  Vance is anxious to join her there, while she has driven the two remaining Republicans out of the commission (see #11 below). Does Vance match Lenin’s definition of the “useful idiot”?

Vance’s “national conservative” compadres yearn for the 1950s, a time when our trade competitors were digging out from under the rubble of World War II.  Then came the 1970s oil shocks, new regulations and new muscular federal regulatory agencies, and the revival of our trade rivals.  Much American industry couldn’t survive their unions that were made powerful during the lax times of the 1950s and 60s.  Much traditional American manufacturing fled the Rust Belt for the right-to-work Sun Belt and the South Belt. Michigan’s loss was Tennessee’s and South Carolina’s gain.

Foreign manufacturers jumped into the American right-to-work free trade zone of states making the words “foreign made” irrelevant.  The car list is quite impressive.  Much of Toyota’s entire lineup, Honda, Nissan, Hyundai, Kia, Volkswagen, Mercedes, and BMW have made their way into states not blue, not controlled by the AFL-CIO, where freer labor meets freer trade, and that means a smaller government.  That’s the prescription for economic growth, not Vance’s big government manipulation of economic actors, whether they be consumers or producers, with bombast like, “We won’t sacrifice our supply chains to unlimited global trade, we’ll stamp every product made in the U.S.A.”

Josh Hawley’s Common-Good Conservatism Isn’t Just Right, It Can Win | The Daily Caller
Sen. Josh Hawley (T, Missouri)

Do you actually think these protectionists will stop with “supply chains”?  Another Vance-style “populist”, Sen. Josh Hawley (T, Missouri), now favors private sector labor cartels, commonly called “unions”, and opposes right-to-work laws.  What is right-to-work?  Right-to-work is the counter to the longstanding practice of using state powers to goad workers into labor unions under the legal colloquialism “collective bargaining”.  The “collective” part of the phrase is the greasing of the skids, through force of law, to direct workers into the arms of union bosses, people who today have a propensity to be more socialist than a socialist.  Yes, right into the arms of people like Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO.

We should examine Liz Shuler, the kind of person who Vance and Hawley would like to link arms (see Wikipedia for her brief bio).  She is an example of the new, postmodern kind of boss, unlike the fabled bosses of decades past who toiled in blue collar jobs.  Not her.  Active in Oregon’s Democratic Party, and after her degree in journalism, and after union organizing activism in Oregon and California, she does what aspiring union bosses of today do: fight worker freedom in the workplace.  She led the AFL-CIO effort to defeat Proposition 226 in California.  It would have restricted the unions’ habit of easy access to a worker’s paycheck under state law to garner dues payments, and additionally it would have required a worker’s permission before his or her dues moneys can be used for political purposes.  These are the type of people who Vance and Hawley want to join in political comradery.

Oregon labor leader Liz Shuler elected as first woman to head AFL-CIO - oregonlive.com
Liz Shuler, AFL-CIO president

In so many ways, the Trump/Vance/Hawley “populism” is a white flag to the Left.  They pander by surrendering to the militant unionism that made a hash of industries who fell under its powerful political sway.  Is it just pure greed for a company to escape to a right-to-work state or overseas to avoid future bankruptcy?  A survival instinct most emphatically exists in the economic realm, as it does among unionists whose very existence is dependent on government-granted privileges, without which, they’d shrink to voluntary associations.  Trump/Vance/Hawley are okay with government-sponsored union power over the lives of workers and their employers.

For the Trump/Vance/Hawley gang, it’s a cold and hard calculation for the union vote while laying waste to American competitiveness.  Union-love hasn’t worked going back to the 1930s.  Consumers behave like business.  They both thrive under conditions of free choice.  Businesses discovered the welcome mat in southern states and European and Asian competitors recovered from the rubble of WWII, and buyers prospered with more options than those offered by the protectionists and hardcore unionists.  Workers might need to relearn the lesson that without buyers for their production, their jobs evaporate.  That’s why Trump/Vance/Hawley want to goad consumers, like they do workers, into buying what they wouldn’t in a level playing field.  But now with the rise of the Trumpican Party, all of us will be forced to live our lives under a flimsy “industrial policy” of tariffs, subsidies, and coerced unionization.  It’s an invitation to go back to the 1970s.

The bait for the unionized worker is a combination of tariffs and the bennies of the dole.  The dole is bribing people with other people’s money, ditto with tariffs.  Trump/Vance/Hawley is incomprehensible on tariffs.  American consumers pay the tariff like any other business tax.  Prices jump either directly from the tariff or from an oligopoly of “Made in America” favorites.  Ironically, Trump is skeptical of EV mandates – as am I – but he wants to empower unions with a powerful government, the same government that imposed the EV mandate to begin with.  Since they’re too busy sending Reagan to the ash heap of history, don’t expect the Trumpicans to recognize this 1986 Reagan masterpiece: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

This Trumpican Party is busy sending up the white flag on the welfare state, but they won’t stop there.  It’s quadrafecta of white flags that includes Ukraine, coerced unionization, and free trade.  Would Reagan be a member of this party, a party of bankrupting welfare programs, America alone, neo-socialist assaults on free enterprise, labor monopolies, and a deaf ear to the cries of aborted babies?  I kinda doubt it.  After all, as he said of his departure from the Democratic Party in the 1960s, “I didn’t leave my party [the Democratic Party]; my party left me.”  Well, has my party left me?

May be an illustration of text

RogerG

Sources:

1. The GOP 2024 party platform can be read at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-party-platform. For abortion, turn to Chapter 9, section 4 of the 2024 platform.
2. Compare the brevity of the 2024 abortion plank with 2020 which can be found in “Republican Party Platform: ‘The Unborn Child Has a Fundamental Right to Life’” at https://www.lifenews.com/2020/09/03/republican-party-platform-the-unborn-child-has-a-fundamental-right-to-life/
3. “Inflation rates in Argentina”, WorldData.info, at https://www.worlddata.info/america/argentina/inflation-rates.php#:~:text=The%20hyperinflation%20of%20the%201980s%20peaked%20in%201989,economic%20turbulence%20began%20again%20in%20the%20new%20millennium.
4. Read the Social Security/Medicare planks in the 2024 GOP platform in Section 6, “Protect Seniors” at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-party-platform.
5. “U.S. National Debt Soars Adding a Staggering $1 Trillion Every 100 Days” at https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/us-national-debt-soars-adding-a-staggering-1-trillion-every-100-days/ss-BB1pOq5u#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20National%20Debt%20is%20skyrocketing%2C%20ballooning%20from,track%20to%20increase%20by%20%242.8%20trillion%20this%20year.
6. Chapters three and five of the GOP platform at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-party-platform.
7. Chapter 10 of the GOP platform at https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-party-platform
8. Thanks to Philip Klein for his research into J.D. Vance in “J. D. Vance Pick Represents Another Nail in Coffin of Reagan Republicanism”, National Review, 7/15/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/07/j-d-vance-pick-represents-another-nail-in-coffin-of-reagan-republicanism/
9. “J.D. Vance Ditches Past Support For Social Security Cuts”, Travis Waldron, HuffPost, 7/13/2022, at https://www.yahoo.com/news/j-d-vance-ditches-past-161011851.html?guccounter=1
10. “Why the rise of JD Vance in Trump World divides US business”, Lauren Fedor, Financial Times, 7/12/2024, at https://www.ft.com/content/ff258541-dfe3-4dd9-99bf-2a1d26b6a21c
11. “Lina Khan’s Stalled Revolution”, Dominic Pino, National Review, 3/20/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/04/17/lina-khans-stalled-revolution/
12. “The Grand Strategy Behind J.D. Vance’s Latest Push To Kill Ukraine Aid”, Ian Ward, Politico, 4/18/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/18/jd-vance-ukraine-aid-00153201#:~:text=In%20place%20of%20the%20rules-based%20international%20order%2C%20Vance,more%20insulated%20from%20global%20economic%20and%20military%20entanglements.

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The Attempted Assassination of Trump and the Left’s Legacy of Political Violence

May be an image of 2 people

This piece has little to say about the Trump shooter, simply because we know so little.  It’s about the common threads of political violence and murder in the history of the last century and a half.

Violence as a means of political expression has come and gone only to return.  The mobs of ancient Athens and other Greek poli were legendary.  The 11th century’s Islamic Order of Assassins is renowned.

Starting in the late 19th century, political murder, assassinations, the targeting of prominent leaders, appeared with greater frequency.  By the first few decades of the of the 20th, the collective action of gangs and mobs reemerged alongside the more targeted approach to killing.  Something entered our political bloodstream to make political discourse incendiary from the late 19th century on.  The attempted assassination of Donald Trump could be another episode in this sorry state of affairs.

The chronicle of political murder beginning in the late 19th century is startling.  The incidences increased with the rise of revolutionary reformist movements of the anarcho-socialist-communist bent. Russian Czar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 by killers of the Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), a collection of revolutionary socialists.  Then, entering the 20th came a string of killings.  The Russia of this period was a breeding ground for them.  Aleksandr Ulyanov, the brother of Lenin (real name: Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov), was executed in 1887 for his involvement in a plot to kill Czar Alexander III.  In 1911, the reformist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin was murdered by another of those revolutionary socialists of the time.

Unrest, plots, and assassinations continued apace till the stresses of World War I provided opportunities for the most radical and violent of the revolutionary socialists, the Bolsheviks, to seize power in Petrograd in 1917 and eventually exterminated Czar Nicholas and his entire immediate family, including retainers, in July 1918: Nicholas, wife Alexandra, their 4 daughters of Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and the young heir Alexei.  Others of the extended family soon followed.  Under the rule of a string of communist general secretaries, the now USSR was plagued with purges, a gulag archipelago, mass executions, and thousands of the singular quiet variety in the basement of secret police headquarters in the Lubyanka, Moscow.  It’s state-sponsored political violence on a mass scale.

The king of Greece, George I, was murdered in the streets of Thessaloniki in 1913.  13 years before, the king of Italy Umberto I was assassinated by an anarcho-socialist in Monza, Italy.  One year after the king of Greece succumbed, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and wife Sophie were murdered in Sarajevo by a greater-Serbia nationalist.  All suffered at the hands of fanatics of some abstract reformist better world, most frequently of one brand of revolutionary socialism or another.

Presidents Garfield (1882) and McKinley (1901) experienced a similar fate at the instigation of a similar cast of characters.  From the 1880s on, anarcho-socialists targeted business leaders and successfully bombed Wall Street in 1920 killing 40 and injuring 143.  Reaching down to the middle of the 20th century, JFK was killed by a loner of the same psychological profile as Gavrilo Princip (killer of the archduke and wife) or Leon Czolgosz (the McKinley assassin).  The disenchanted, alienated, radicalized, and unbalanced went after Reagan and Gerald Ford.  In the 21st, a Bernie Sanders supporter attempted the extermination of the Republican House leadership in 2017.

January 6, 2021 accorded some Trump rally attendees the opportunity to flex their collective riot muscles.  This pales when compared to the 2020 summer of riots, killings, lootings, and arson, all excused as a reaction to some indefinable, mysterious, hidden racism – the same so-called structural oppression that can be traced back to the doctrines of Narodnaya Volya and the assassination of Czar Alexander II.

Most political murders of the past century and a half coincided with a fervor for reformist schemes of a revolutionary socialist cast.  Progressivism simultaneously arose from an associated reformist zeal: the passion to construct the “progressive” state under a class of appointed “experts” to rationalize society.  For both progressives and revolutionary socialists, possession of the power of the state is the sine qua non (essential condition) for building the better world.  There’s so much at stake that, for some, murder might appear excusable.  Political violence is frequently the underbelly of reformist zeal.

Their zeal to seize the commanding heights, as Lenin put it, has led to an equally zealous attempt to stop them.  Donald Trump isn’t an idea politician.  He’s the middle finger to the establishment of those pushing the aggrandizement of state power.  Trump is a gesture politician who draws strong gestures from the opposition, who happen to be the same people already in possession of excessive reformist passion.

Up to now, the hair trigger hasn’t come from MAGA.  A century and a half of political violence shows that revolutionary socialism with its reformist zeal provides a much more consistent impetus for political killings and wide-ranging violence.  Hitler and Mussolini were as ruthless insofar as they had their own programs of upheaval to impose on their people.  Race socialism shares the same ideological DNA as the socialists’ systemic extermination of a spectral bourgeoisie, the nebulous “enemies of the working class”.  They both trade in the common currency of radical social engineering and don’t shy from radical means to achieve radical ends.

Skepticism about ending political violence is warranted so long as extremist reform movements, mostly of the anarcho-socialist persuasion (think Antifa, BLM and offshoots, CRT, etc.), occupy pride of place in one of our two major political parties.  For them, a state of expansive powers is essential to remake the world.  This extremism seldom applies the breaks to extremist actions.

May be pop art of text

RogerG

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The Attempted Assassination of Trump and the Left’s Legacy of Political Violence

May be an image of 2 people

This piece has little to say about the Trump shooter, simply because we know so little.  It’s about the common threads of political violence and murder in the history of the last century and a half.

Violence as a means of political expression has come and gone only to return.  The mobs of ancient Athens and other Greek poli were legendary.  The 11th century’s Islamic Order of Assassins is renowned.

Starting in the late 19th century, political murder, assassinations, the targeting of prominent leaders, appeared with greater frequency.  By the first few decades of the of the 20th, the collective action of gangs and mobs reemerged alongside the more targeted approach to killing.  Something entered our political bloodstream to make political discourse incendiary from the late 19th century on.  The attempted assassination of Donald Trump could be another episode in this sorry state of affairs.

The chronicle of political murder beginning in the late 19th century is startling.  The incidences increased with the rise of revolutionary reformist movements of the anarcho-socialist-communist bent.  Russian Czar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 by killers of the Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”), a collection of revolutionary socialists.  Then, entering the 20th came a string of killings.  The Russia of this period was a breeding ground for them.  Aleksandr Ulyanov, the brother of Lenin (real name: Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov), was executed in 1887 for his involvement in a plot to kill Czar Alexander III.  In 1911, the reformist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin was murdered by another of those revolutionary socialists of the time.

Unrest, plots, and assassinations continued apace till the stresses of World War I provided opportunities for the most radical and violent of the revolutionary socialists, the Bolsheviks, to seize power in Petrograd in 1917 and eventually exterminated Czar Nicholas and his entire immediate family, including retainers, in July 1918: Nicholas, wife Alexandra, their 4 daughters of Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and the young heir Alexei.  Others of the extended family soon followed.  Under the rule of a string of communist general secretaries, the now USSR was plagued with purges, a gulag archipelago, mass executions, and thousands of the singular quiet variety in the basement of secret police headquarters in the Lubyanka, Moscow.  It’s state-sponsored political violence on a mass scale.

The king of Greece, George I, was murdered in the streets of Thessaloniki in 1913.  13 years before, the king of Italy Umberto I was assassinated by an anarcho-socialist in Monza, Italy.  One year after the king of Greece succumbed, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and wife Sophie were murdered in Sarajevo by a greater-Serbia nationalist.  All suffered at the hands of fanatics of some abstract reformist better world, most frequently of one brand of revolutionary socialism or another.

Presidents Garfield (1882) and McKinley (1901) experienced a similar fate at the instigation of a similar cast of characters.  From the 1880s on, anarcho-socialists targeted business leaders and successfully bombed Wall Street in 1920 killing 40 and injuring 143. Reaching down to the middle of the 20th century, JFK was killed by a loner of the same psychological profile as Gavrilo Princip (killer of the archduke and wife) or Leon Czolgosz (the McKinley assassin).  The disenchanted, alienated, radicalized, and unbalanced went after Reagan and Gerald Ford.  In the 21st, a Bernie Sanders supporter attempted the extermination of the Republican House leadership in 2017.

January 6, 2021 accorded some Trump rally attendees the opportunity to flex their collective riot muscles.  This pales when compared to the 2020 summer of riots, killings, lootings, and arson, all excused as a reaction to some indefinable, mysterious, hidden racism – the same so-called structural oppression that can be traced back to the doctrines of Narodnaya Volya and the assassination of Czar Alexander II.

Most political murders of the past century and a half coincided with a fervor for reformist schemes of a revolutionary socialist cast.  Progressivism simultaneously arose from an associated reformist zeal: the passion to construct the “progressive” state under a class of appointed “experts” to rationalize society.  For both progressives and revolutionary socialists, possession of the power of the state is the sine qua non (essential condition) for building the better world.  There’s so much at stake that, for some, murder might appear excusable.  Political violence is frequently the underbelly of reformist zeal.

Their zeal to seize the commanding heights, as Lenin put it, has led to an equally zealous attempt to stop them.  Donald Trump isn’t an idea politician.  He’s the middle finger to the establishment of those pushing the aggrandizement of state power.  Trump is a gesture politician who draws strong gestures from the opposition, who happen to be the same people already in possession of excessive reformist passion.

Up to now, the hair trigger hasn’t come from MAGA.  A century and a half of political violence shows that revolutionary socialism with its reformist zeal provides a much more consistent impetus for political killings and wide-ranging violence.  Hitler and Mussolini were as ruthless insofar as they had their own programs of upheaval to impose on their people.  Race socialism shares the same ideological DNA as the socialists’ systemic extermination of a spectral bourgeoisie, the nebulous “enemies of the working class”.  They both trade in the common currency of radical social engineering and don’t shy from radical means to achieve radical ends.

Skepticism about ending political violence is warranted so long as extremist reform movements, mostly of the anarcho-socialist persuasion (think Antifa, BLM and offshoots, CRT, etc.), occupy pride of place in one of our two major political parties.  For them, a state of expansive powers is essential to remake the world.  This extremism seldom applies the breaks to extremist actions.

May be pop art of text

RogerG

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Biden’s Decline Is Part of a Bigger Story

No photo description available.
Illustration from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes”

Biden’s decline is part of a massive swindle, at once intentional and in other ways stupefyingly unintentional, and involves much more than a single person’s descent into senility.  We are constantly confronted with demands to believe in the unbelievable.  Many of us do.  It’s as if we want to be swindled.  It’s become routine, and we are shocked when the list of unbelievabilities turns out to be, just that, falsehoods and fiascos.

Of course, the story begins with the revelation of the not-so-revelatory story of Biden’s mental deterioration.  It should have been clear to anyone observing Biden’s 2020 “basement” campaign.  It succeeded.  We elected a basement president.  In that protracted war room of the left, which is composed of the natural alliance of the legacy media and the Democratic Party, all of a sudden it’s now safe to say that the president is a cognitive mess.

May be an image of 1 person and the Oval Office
President Biden from the 6/27 debate
May be an image of 1 person, the Oval Office and text
More of our president

They even admit that they buried the story and knew for quite some time.  The leader of Biden’s praetorian guard, Ron Klain, only feeds the news in the President’s Daily Briefing that won’t trigger explosions of anger in the president.  According to Politico, dealing with Biden is like coping with an unstable mental patient (see #1 and #2 below):

“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official.  “It’s a Rorschach test, not a briefing.  Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed.  It’s very difficult, and people are scared s***less of him.”

The dean of the left’s war room, the Washington Post’s Carl Bernstein, spilled the beans.  On CNN he divulged (see #3 below),

“[Thursday’s debate] is not a one off, that there have been 15, 20 occasions in the last year and a half when the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed [the debate].”

Those around Biden knew and the media’s co-conspirators knew.  They gaslighted us, till 50 million people tuned in last Thursday night (6/27) and saw the glaring reality.  Shame on them, and shame on many of us for our willingness to keep Biden in the game.  Actually, get real, they’re torturing the poor guy.

It doesn’t end there.  There’s a popular belief in the government’s ability to rescue us from all of life’s travails.  Speaking of the belief in the unbelievable.  Why is it that no one will mention the looming catastrophes of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid?  Not Trump, not anybody.  If you do, the left’s war room will descend on you like a flock of buzzards.  The programs were built with a design flaw: demographics.  Increasing numbers of old folks will clash with proportionally fewer working young folks.  Taxes going in don’t cover benefits going out, and the national debt continues to balloon.  This won’t end well.  It never does.  The root of it is our preference for the unbelievable.

Let’s move on to the pandemic and our misplaced faith in government employees in the administrative state.  Doctors all, and, as it turned out, not to be trusted.

Look at what they gave us.  You’ll still see people masking themselves in public when before the triumvirate of Fauci/Collins/Birx rose to prominence, they wouldn’t dream of it.  The new paralyzing fear of the simplest public engagement is combined with children still trying to cognitively and developmentally recover from the isolation of Zoomed screens and closed playgrounds.  The rush to forcibly vaccinate all of humanity came with a suffocation of the production of therapeutics even as the virus mutated and continued to spread.  They even tried to blot out the ingrained human tendency to produce for oneself and family.  It was an assault on our very nature.  The waterboarding of society lasted longer in blue states, those places with a particularly gripping faith in government “experts”.  We’re still living with the consequences in endemic inflation and a stubbornly low labor participation rate.

Who would have thought that they could destroy what makes us human?  They tried really hard.

Our stunted nature is evident in a whole line of other unbelievabilities.  How did we ever get to the point of assassinating our standard of living in the eco-fantasies of “sustainability” in the span of a decade?  Somehow, energy density no longer mattered.  Physics no longer matters.  Extensive forests of windmills and floodplains of solar panels wrecking the landscape are billed as the salvation from the left’s wet dream of an apocalypse.  Suddenly, our finely honed sedan is to be junked in favor of an obese array of batteries, or something else that doesn’t even exist.  The already strained grid is to be burdened further.  All the while, we’re chained to a chronological escalator to a new world order that resembles something conjured from the imagination of Salvador Dali or Hieronymus Bosch.

XY-people get to pretend that they are XX-people, and vice versa, and the rest of us are ordered to play along.  The insecurities of tween and teen girls and boys are used as proof to herd them into the same pretend world.

It’s astounding, our willingness to believe in the unbelievable. Hans Christian Andersen meant more than he intended in his story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (see #4 below).  In the tale, two shyster weavers convince the emperor that they will produce raiment that only a fool cannot see.  Fearful of being thought stupid, the emperor and his ministers see nothing but go along and pays them for their services.  Then, with his new “clothes”, the emperor parades out in public to greet his subjects.  No one in the crowd wants to be thought a fool till a child blurts out the obvious.  See the parallel?

Fear of being thought a fool makes dunces of us all.  People of the left believed in Biden’s sharpness so as not to be called MAGA.  A challenge to Fauci/Collins/Birx was said to be proof of the existence of neanderthals among us.  Ibram X. Kendi and the rest of the CRT cabal were made into geniuses to avoid the epithet of being called a closet racist.  Fear of being labeled an implicit bigot in the c-suite has led to a rush call for the “marginalized” and quasi-obese in advertising campaigns.  Anything less is a demand for more shaming sessions in the corporate world.  Having an EV in the garage is proof that you’re not a denier, that you’re “smart”, despite the fact that you are afraid to venture 40 miles from your home charger.  You’ll have to hide the essential internal combustion engine vehicle parked next to your four-wheeled symbol of virtue.  We’re made to pretend that we’re not fools, as we prove that we are.

From Biden to California’s eco-nuttery, we are encouraged to pretend that we’re not making fools of ourselves.  Ironically, our enemies are the child in the crowd who isn’t afraid to laugh.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. Thanks to Jim Geraghty of National Review for the analysis and sources in “So Now It’s Okay to Talk about Biden’s ‘Cognitive Decline’”, 7/2/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/so-now-its-okay-to-talk-about-bidens-cognitive-decline/
2. “‘We’ve all enabled the situation’: Dems turn on Biden’s inner sanctum post debate”, Eli Stokols, et al, Politico, 7/2/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/02/biden-campaign-debate-inner-circle-00166160
3. “‘Not a one-off’: Bernstein’s sources say concerns about Biden have been growing for a year”, Anderson Cooper interview of Carl Bernstein, CNN, video on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhFmaAMC1_Q
4. “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, complete story by Hans Christian Andersen, at https://americanliterature.com/author/hans-christian-andersen/short-story/the-emperors-new-clothes/

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Blowhard-fest I Postmortem

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The Biden-Trump rematch is in the books.  Who won and who lost?  Nobody won, and Biden lost.  Will they move on to a second match?  Hardly.

In a nutshell, by the end of the talkathon, my fears about Biden’s infirmity were confirmed, but my concerns about Trump were elevated.  Biden came off as a doddering old Marxist head honcho like one of those Eastern European party strongmen in the waning days of the Iron Curtain, or the party elders standing next to Brezhnev overlooking the May Day grand parade in Moscow in the 1970s.  Yes, Biden is infirm but what came out of his mouth in his infirmity was the socialism that is firmly established Democratic Party doctrine.  If the party movers and shakers succeeded in pushing him aside, his replacement won’t be an improvement, just more presentable.

The left-wing party establishment got what it wanted under Biden (and Obama), and the country is a wreck for it.  Biden resorted to the party’s doctrinal tics throughout the debate: tax the “rich” to save Social Security (it won’t), all the “pay their fair share” talk, the greenie nonsense, the “glories” of ending unborn life as if it was God’s eleventh commandment, and more bribery of friendly political constituencies with other people’s money.  It’s disgusting, and ruinous.

For his part, Trump was . . . Trump.  He brought his “A” game, as in donkey.  He donned his adolescent schoolyard bully uniform for all to see.  Vague generalities, superlatives in regard to himself, avoidance of questions in favor of rudimentary insults, and the repetitive use of a monotonous standard line were the essence of his performance.

Trump boasts were routine.  For instance, “I’ll end the Ukraine War before inauguration day.”  How’s he going to do that?  He has no practical leverage on Putin.  He’ll hang Zelensky out to dry and give Putin a third of the country, that’s how.  All will be done in an isolated meeting after which there will be a smiling Trump photo op.  Zelensky won’t be smiling, Ukraine will be in tears, and naked aggression will have been rewarded.  Speculation?  It’s more realistic than any of Trump’s self-assessments.

Trump made the correct observation that other world leaders see Biden as an embarrassment.  After last night’s performance, they see our country as crazy.  Are these two people the best that we can come up with?

Now more than ever, we need a real leader to prosecute the case against the creeping socialism that is smothering us, and for the unborn.  We don’t have one, certainly not in Trump.  Trump has always been merely a walking gesture, the middle finger to our decrepit politico-cultural elites.  He’s incapable of presenting an argument, a line of reasoning.  It shows every time that he steps onto a stage.  In the meantime, the country is careening to insolvency.  At this juncture, neither party will even recognize the tidal wave of debt that threatens to swamp us and our ability to defend ourselves.  Eco-central planning is no more coherent than the kind in the old Soviet Union.  Who do we have to make the case?  Who has the wherewithal to convince the American people to turn away from their belief in the impossible, from decadence?

Don’t look for it in Trump.  Don’t look for it in either political party.  We need leadership, not a middle finger.

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RogerG

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We’re Being Fooled, Or Are We Fooling Ourselves?

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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., joined from left by Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., and Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., speaks to reporters before a vote on legislation to protect same-sex and interracial marriages, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2022. (AP Photo: J. Scott Applewhite)

How can a deep red state continue to send a progressive to represent it in the US Senate?  How can a state’s electorate continue to elect people who do things that they don’t like?  The key word is “continue”.  Yet, simultaneously, people consistently register dissatisfaction with the direction of the country in polls.  Wrong-track numbers persistently hover in the 60s.  We need to explore the possibility that we are being fooled, or, more accurately, allowing ourselves to be fooled.  The foolishness is a partnership between political jesters and an impressionable electorate prone to folly.  People don’t like the results but go to the polls and contribute to them.  Does this make any sense?

Two anecdotes point to the nature of the problem.  One is Democrat John Tester’s popularity in red-state Montana.  The other is the decimation of California under a raft of policies that originate in a popularly elected super-majority of Democrats ruling the roost on the state’s populous coastal plain and thus in the state capitol.  If migration patterns within and out of the state are any indication of the level of dissatisfaction, the state is in a world of hurt that ironically is popularly chosen.

Tester’s prominence in my adopted home state of Montana is particularly vexing.  One possible contributing factor is money, the mother’s milk of politics (see #1-#5 below).  Tester is a creation of out-of-state money, and a whole lot of it. He’s a boxer with a potent left-right combination.  He jabs with his left in the form of money flowing into his personal campaign to project his oneness with tradition, the rural lifestyle, domesticity, veterans, the outdoors, guns, and Montana’s working man.  He elicits an image of rubbing elbows with Republicans and Trump, who’s popular in the state.

Tester Ad Features Missing Fingers, Shows How Red-State Dems Still In The Fight - TPM – Talking ...
John Tester in campaign ad

Anyone with half a brain would recognize this to be baloney.  As he washes grease and dirt from his hands in a tv ad, the reality is that he’ll go back to Washington to reelect Chuck Schumer of New York for leader of the Senate.  This is the same Chuck Schumer who’d pack the Supreme Court with lefties, who’d eliminate the filibuster to make it easier for his congressional allies to mangle voting throughout America by removing the few remaining barriers against fraud such as voter ID, who’d ad DC and Puerto Rico as states to create a lock of four more Democrat senators to guarantee such absurdities into the foreseeable future, turning the whole country into New York and California.  Tester is a vote for continued bi-coastal control of the federal Leviathan, with all of their baleful influences.

Tester has the bank for his left jab to burnish his outdoors cred while he has a devastating right in Chuck Schumer’s Last Best Place PAC (LBP) to appeal to the darker angels of a public’s nature.  This is a massive negative campaign to paint his opponent, Tim Sheehy, as an out-of-stater bent on raping Montana.  Get this?  A real out-of-stater from the power elite of New York is smashing Sheehy for allegedly being like him.

Putting aside the fact that Sheehy has beliefs and sentiments more in line with the popular Trump, we need to pull the covers away from Last Best Place PAC (LBP) to expose its rank duplicity.  What we see is the darker underbelly of politics.  The pro-Tester (no pun intended) group leaves a paper and money trail from DNC-patronized banks right to Schumer’s Senate office and right to the anti-Sheehy ad buys flooding Montana’s airwaves – over $5.6 million worth, and counting, as of June 12 of this year according to Open Secrets (see #4 below).

Impact investing tackles dark money in politics

Here’s how the flim-flam works.  Money is laundered from Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC, into Majority Forward PAC – a 501(c)(4) group that doesn’t have to disclose its contributors – and from there into LBP. These expenditures go through Dem-linked banks and consultancies in DC and Alexandria, Va.  Throughout, Tester has plausible deniability.  He can walk the high road of remaining positive about himself while the dirty work of maligning his opponent is performed by mysterious dark forces (see #5 below).  It’s morally scandalous, but it works, as it did in the 2022 midterms.

It only works if the residents of Montana allow it.  The story of this sleight-of-hand has been out for quite some time, since at least mid-2023.  As before a judge, ignorance of it is no excuse.  If you don’t know, you should have.

Its success is dependent on inventing fear, fear of something that doesn’t exist: stoking fear of Sheehy to assist the Democrats in continuing to move the country down the “wrong track”, and in the case of California, dread of an ecological disaster.  The stage is set for a headlong rush to the emasculation of California’s entire way of life, the most striking “wrong track” that one can imagine.

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Chevron gas station in Encinitas, Calif., October 23, 2023 (photo: Mike Blake/Reuters)

The state’s entire governmental apparatus is geared to overturning the simple bases of life through a full-on assault on energy.  Why?  Climate-change hysteria.  The fear factor gets people elected to enact edicts that disrupt how its residents pursue life in the most basic ways, and for the worst.

First, the hysteria.  California’s popular ruling clique is terrorized, and is terrorizing, by a global average increase of 1.34 degree Celsius since 1880, well within the fluctuations in geologic time.  And, besides, warming temps are a much healthier experience for growing food and increasing plant life, and better than the opposite with its plagues and famines and deadly freezes (see #6-7 below).  If CO2 is the culprit, plants love it; and that’s the main reason for questioning it as a pollutant, that and our emission of CO2 every time we exhale.  Are normal body functions now to be the target of regulatory extinction alongside the internal combustion engine?

The fabricated fright is even more outlandish when they try to strike a chord with the economy-minded by magically spawning imaginary threats to our standard of living.  The chutzpah.  At worst, according to Steven Koonin, Obama’s undersecretary for science in the Department of Energy, the warming will have a modest impact.  He decries the hysteria as “shock-journalistic pseudoscience” (see #6 below).  Given all the benefits of warming temps, the recent elevated levels of CO2 may be a net plus.  The only real threat emanates from California’s ruling claque.

If the fanciful prospect of frying us in the skillet of a 1.34 degrees Celsius increase in 144 years won’t do the trick, maybe the story of twisters and hurricanes run amok will.  In today’s politicized jargon, it’s called “extreme weather”.  It may work if the fabulists pursue the Big Lie route.  The fact is, just looking at hurricanes, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study concludes that there appear to be no “… compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in … [catastrophic] hurricane[s] ….” (see #8 below)

The Big Lie, A Cartoon by Award-Winning Bill Day | Smart City Memphis

Fires might manufacture the necessary panic if hurricanes won’t.  But, here again, the world’s total fire-ravaged area hit a new low (see #6 below).  Could California’s recent spate of firestorms be a consequence of its uniquely screwball wildlands management policies and its forcible diversion of utility funds away from grid maintenance to “sustainable” pipe dreams?  California’s governing choices are proving to be the match in the powder magazine.

What about droughts?  Where’s the proof that SUVs and Exxon are triggering droughts?  Others report that CO2 reduces drought – warm air carries more moisture (look at the tropics) – and increases food production (see #6 below).  Anyway, droughts aren’t an unusual circumstance in a Mediterranean climate.  Dry-summer could easily flip into dry-all-year if the normal annual pattern of offshore ocean temps flip, which they normally do in roughly 10-year oscillations.  The window is awfully narrow – 5-6 months – for the state to get its annual allotment of precipitation.  If it falls short at any time during that brief period, it’s in drought for the rest of the year.

But such attempts at realism are a yawner for the power-hungry utopians who are elected to run the state.  Not possessing a shortage of other rhetorical arrows in their quiver, though, they’ll bark out the dubious crisis of rising sea levels.  From 1880 to 2023, annual sea elevations have variously increased by an averaged .08 to .14 inches per year, with .06 being the number for 133 of those years (see #6 below).  At that rate, it’ll be a couple of geological eras before the state’s foothills become beachfront property. Continental drift is faster.

No wonder California is the epitome of “wrong track”.  The climate caterwauling has led to the election of people who pass laws and enforce them to further nudge the state’s residents down the path to dystopia, and it’s about to get worse for the remaining residents of the state.  The state with one of the highest fuel prices in the nation (second only to Hawaii) is dead set on ballooning them to the thermopause (top of the atmosphere).  No remorse, the state’s governing super-majority is cheerleading the pain by using it to make you conform to their chosen lifestyle for you.  By hook or by crook, for instance, they want to make you trade reliability for range anxiety.

Don’t forget, nothing that they’re doing to their own residents will make a difference for the climate.  California’s 38 million (and falling) are pale when compared to China and India’s 2-3 billion.  Newsom and company will do more in reducing emissions if they convince Xi and Modi to stop their nations’ march to prosperity.  In other words, persuade them to do to their countries what the California Dems are busy doing to the golden state.  Good luck, Gavin.

The state’s popularly elected super-majority in Sacramento have created a legal glide path to terminal decline.  What’s bad is about to get worse.  The California Air Resources Board (CARB), one of the state’s principal eco-commissariats, is using the Low Carbon Fuel Standards (LCFS) and cap-and-trade laws to hijack the state’s residents out of their fuel-efficient sedans and big rigs and into dangerously frivolous electric vehicles.

One leg of the double-whammy uses fuel taxes under LCFS.  Diesel taxes provide a glimpse into the fate for regular gas, and all fossil fuels.  CARB’s timetable for ruination ratchets diesel taxes upwards from 59 cents (2025) to 66 (2026) to $2.41 (2041) (see #9 below).  By that time (2041), your perfectly good family sedan and those diesel semi’s trucking down the road will be littering junk yards.  I cringe at the thought of chronically empty store shelves and Amazon warehouses in the state and price hikes on everything.

The other leg utilizes the state’s cap-and-trade folderol.  CARB has scheduled a lowering of the emissions cap each year (see #9 below).  Above that, companies are taxed.  It’s all geared to get you as a person or company to trade the reliable (fossil fuels) for the intermittent and unreliable (the “sustainable” stuff).  If you think that you’ll do just fine in this brave new world, you’re in need of a drug test.  Your prospects only improve if the ruling donkey progressives are stopped electorally.  I’m pessimistic on that score.

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Expect “wrong track” to be only thing that rises – that and prices.  Did “they” do this to us, or did we choose it?  I’m inclined to believe, based on all the evidence, that foolishness is popular.  We don’t like the results but still go ahead and choose the cause of our discontents.  Montanans might very well choose Chuck Schumer (through Tester) and Californians may prefer degradation for their kids and generations to come.  We get the government that we deserve.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “Non-profit files FEC complaint against Super PAC’s spending on anti-Sheehy ads”, Nicole Girten, Daily Montanan, 2/24/2024, at https://dailymontanan.com/2024/02/14/non-profit-files-fec-complaint-against-super-pacs-spending-on-anti-sheehy-ads/
2. “Nine months before the Montana GOP primary, a mysterious super PAC is on the airwaves attacking Tim Sheehy”, Ally Mutnick, Politico, 9/12/2023, at https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2023/09/12/congress/montana-senate-sheehy-pac-ads-00115276
3. “Chuck Schumer Is Behind This Mysterious PAC Meddling in Montana’s GOP Primary”, Joseph Simonson, Washington Free Beacon, 1/26/2024, at https://freebeacon.com/democrats/chuck-schumer-is-behind-this-mysterious-pac-meddling-in-montanas-gop-primary/
4. “Last Best Place PAC Outside Spending”, Open Secrets, according to data reported on 6/12/2024, https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/detail?cmte=C00849729&cycle=2024
5. “Schumer-tied dark money group wires $6 million to GOP primary meddler as Democrats slam anonymous cash”, Gabe Kaminsky, Washington Examiner, 4/24/2024, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/senate/2975704/schumer-dark-money-gop-primary-meddler/
6. “The Green Left Lies Used to Justify Authoritarian Climate Regulation”, John Fund and David Simon, National Reivew, 6/9/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/the-green-left-lies-used-to-justify-authoritarian-climate-regulation/
7. Thanks to Fund and Simon for the following link: “Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study”, 5/20/2015, at https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)62114-0/fulltext
8. Thanks to Fund and Simon for the following link: “Global Warming and Hurricanes”, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), 4/17/2024, at https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/
9. “California Gas Prices to Go from Bad to Worse as Dems Move to Tighten Environmental Regulations”, David Zimmerman, National Reivew, 6/12/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/california-gas-prices-to-go-from-bad-to-worse-as-dems-move-to-tighten-environmental-regulations/

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The U.S., A Third-Rate Country? Part II of the Trump Verdict

Trump guilty verdict: What happened in court as judge read decision
Alvin Bragg, Manhattan DA
Who Is Justice Juan Merchan?
Judge Merchan in the so-called Trump hush-money trail

In the old parlance of the Cold War, the world was divided between a First World (the wealthy nations mostly aligned with the West), a Second World (the communist bloc), and a Third World (everyone else, mostly the poor, corrupt, and so-called nonaligned).  The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR blotted out most of the Second, leaving the First and an amorphous blob of everyone else.  As the widely recognized head of the First, the U.S. of today has willfully, not inevitably, decided to make its way down into the blob.  No better sign of the descent into the corruption thicket can be found than the recent Trump verdict.

It’s more than the political prosecution of an obscure local politician that occurs from time to time.  It’s the chutzpah to target one of highest profile figures in this important decision-making year, the chief opponent of the reigning president, and to do so on alarmingly spurious charges.  One is left to only admire the ingeniousness in crafting a malign charade out of a patchwork of legal mumbo-jumbo.  In the America of today, there’s no need for a seizure of the presidential compound and barbarous firing squads.  Just use our mountainous legal code to accomplish the same end.  The gambit is all Third World.

Let’s take a look at the travesty. It begins with a jumbled understanding of a “conspiracy” (see #1 below). In the law, a criminal conspiracy is one or more people coordinating the means to achieve an illegal objective, a crime.  Absent a criminal end, there is no conspiracy.  Think it through.  For a bank robbery, you might have three people: one to buy the masks and gun, one to drive the getaway car, and one to rush into the bank to take the money.  There are two crimes: the robbery which makes for the second crime, the conspiracy to do it.  Without the criminal objective, the disguises were for a masked ball, the driver is a chauffeur, and the third person is making a savings account withdrawal.

In the Trump saga, where’s the crime?  Non-disclosure agreements (NDA) aren’t illegal.  The bookkeeping entries for payments in the NDAs may or may not be infractions (misdemeanors), but that’s irrelevant since the 2-year statute of limitations had long since expired.  When your paramount goal is not to lose power, just use obscure laws in convoluted ways in an intensely partisan jurisdiction before an intensely partisan judge and jury to hang your opponent; and you too can have your country join the ranks of Burundi-style electioneering (in Africa, the Fund for Peace’s most unstable country).

Rest assured; they won’t let a little thing like a statute of limitations stand in the way any more than a generalissimo would.  Just magically turn the misdemeanors into felonies and therefore leap over the time limit.  The cabal needs a second crime though.  How to manufacture one?  Establish a conspiracy using the highly dubious Article 17-152 of New York’s election law which oddly defines conspiracy as the use of unlawful means to “to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office” (see #1 below).  Let that sink in.  Normally, the means become unlawful because the objective is a crime, but promoting or negatively campaigning against a person for office is not a crime.  It can’t be.  It’s the stuff of campaigns.  Bragg did not even prove an “unlawful means” for the second crime that translates the misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records into felonies.

Instead, Bragg and the judge gave the jury a choice of three unindicted possibilities (whew, think that one through): a Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) violation, hypothetical bookkeeping infractions other than the original 34, or some other tax illegality.  The whole thing is rubbish.  Bragg and a Manhattan court aren’t empowered to enforce FECA, a federal law forbidding Bragg’s, Judge Merchan’s, and a dimwitted jury’s meddling.  Regarding the other two, while keeping them silent in the indictment, Bragg and the trial court stampeded over Trump’s Sixth Amendment right to know the charges.

And then for the legal morass to work, proof of intent is still required – evidence of Trump’s state of mind to commit fraud – which Bragg never established for charges that he never indicted.  The trial and the verdict are an absolute disgrace.

Not surprisingly, Biden’s number three at DOJ, Matthew Colangelo, left in December 2022 to join Bragg’s team.  Coincidence? Call me . . . skeptical.  Who leaves a high-status DC post to be an underling to a local DA unless something else is afoot?  This stinks to high heaven.

It’s an embarrassment to the U.S. and us, its citizens.  Bragg, Merchan, and the numbskull jury made us a laughingstock to the world.  What makes our “justice” any different from the CCP’s “People’s Tribunals” to imprison or execute “enemies of the people”?  Some say democracy is messy.  No, that’s too nice.  This makes us third-rate, all of us.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. Andrew C. McCarthy’s work on the trial is invaluable in his “The ‘Other Crime’ in the Trump Trial: Conflating Ends and Means”, National Review, 6/3/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/the-other-crime-in-the-trump-trial-conflating-ends-and-means/

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A Green Totalitarianism Is Descending Upon Us

Online surveillance bill opens door for Big Brother | CBC News

They are coming for more than your family sedan.  They are going to upend, disrupt the entire system that brings everything to your home, grocery store, et al.  You’re going to be hit big time in your pocketbook and in every facet of your life.  Get prepared for it is coming, if not stopped.

Is Biden determined to turn me into a Trump voter?  Trump, no doubt, is the ugly face of my party, but Biden and his donkey party are trying to construct a totalitarian state on a preposterous green agenda.  Animating the whole venture, as is true with all totalitarian crusades, is a belief system on how best to organize and control people.  To gain popular traction, it’s best for all such crusades to contain a strong apocalyptic element, one powerful enough to justify stampeding the people into acceptance of its dictates and regimentation.  It’s happening before our eyes, right now!  Say goodbye to the republic and hello to the Soviet.

The EPA is the chief engine of the transformation from citizen republic to rule by all-powerful commissars.  Under the guise of “climate change”, we are being ordered to scrap our already immense sunk costs in affordable and reliable transportation for the mirage of something that doesn’t exist, and if it does, it’s a catastrophe as a replacement.  Prepare for a calamity, one that’ll conspicuously fall more seriously upon our children and generations to come.  Your kids will be the real victims.

March is turning into a deadly month for the health of our constitutional republic.  The EPA earlier in the month announced its intention to follow the template of California, one of a few states famous for turning many of its residents into refugees.  Like the authoritarian clown car in Sacramento, tighter emissions for “light duty” vehicles (cars, trucks, many SUV’s) will be imposed from 2027 through 2032, eventually sealing the death warrant for the production of nearly anything with an internal combustion engine (see #1 below).  Say goodbye to more than the citizen republic.  Say goodbye to that thing in your garage that allows you to get the kids to school, or you to work, or pay a visit to grandma for Thanksgiving, for its life will be wrung out of it by regulating and taxing it to death in escalating licensing fees and costs for upkeep, parts, and fuel.  Manufacturers will be forced to eliminate their production.  The comrades in power plan to leave you with no way out but into their approved and glorified golf cart.  This is nothing but totalitarianism “for your own good”.  And, of course, they know better about what’s good for you.  Right?

EPA Says More Diverse Advisory Committees Will Mean More Equitable Decisions - Union of ...

On the heels of that monstrosity, the commissars proclaimed a similar rule for the fleet of big vehicles that bring everything from produce to your grocery store to all things from an Amazon distribution center, everything that fills a shelf (see #3 below).  It’ll be much worse for those people who choose to live outside the controllable and tight confines of an urban area.  Think about it, all that stuff that was affordably made available at your fingertips will be crammed onto battery-powered big rigs (fuel cells create their own immense problems, see #2 below) of limited capacity, range, and tremendous recharging difficulties.

The mammoth costs of so-called “innovating” our way out of these imposed problems will only short-circuit the necessary wealth to satisfy other necessities of life.  These blinkered potentates have no understanding of the gargantuan trade-offs that they are inflicting on us.  Either that or they don’t care.

My bet is that they don’t care.  Why?  They possess a religious fervor for an ideology that justifies, in their mind, taking over more and more of your life.  For them, they are busy saving the planet, even if it means destroying your standard of living.  You see, their religio-ideology is founded upon a robust, promethean definition of “social cost” and “externalities”.  Like a canon law in the church, their “church”, the two doctrines give overriding weight to real or imagined costs for all of society for everything that you do.  Where’s the limits? Practically, there aren’t any.  Thus, the creeds become the supreme, open-ended excuses for the EPA, or any commissariat for that matter, to do anything that they want.

In the past, it was national socialist race justice to prevent defilement of the “race”, or the dictatorship of the proletariat to cram equality of condition on all of humanity to prevent exploitation.  Today, it’s saving the climate, leaving aside the lack of any credible, peer reviewed evidence that anything that they’re doing will positively affect a global atmosphere under which billions of people are acting independently and beyond the reach of the EPA.  Pardon me for concluding that this is nothing but pure stupidity.

In the end, the Biden claque and his Democratic Party are seemingly intent on destroying our way of life and replacing our citizen republic with rule by totalitarian zealots.  It’s Petrograd 1917, Berlin 1933, or Beijing 1949.  Keeping this crowd in power would have us see the end of much that we cherish.  So, if the choice is between the abominable Trump or this gang of totalitarian fanatics, one can be forgiven for preferring boorishness to Big Brother.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. In Orwellian language, the EPA announcement: “Biden-Harris Administration finalizes strongest-ever pollution standards for cars that position U.S. companies and workers to lead the clean vehicle future, protect public health, address the climate crisis, save drivers money”, March 20, 2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-pollution-standards-cars-position
2. A survey of the literature on the shortcomings of fuel cells:
* “Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Vehicles: Everything You Need to Know”, Car and Driver, 9/26/2022, at https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a41103863/hydrogen-cars-fcev/
* “A review of PEM hydrogen fuel cell contamination: Impacts, mechanisms, and mitigation”, ScienceDirect, 3/20/2007, at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378775306025304
* “Fuel Cells”, University of Illinois, at https://publish.illinois.edu/fuel-cells/benefits-and-disadvantages/
* “How Fuel Cells Work”, How Stuff Works, at https://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/alternative-fuels/fuel-cell.htm

3. The same Orwellian language for heavy-duty vehicles: “Biden-Harris Administration Finalizes Strongest Ever Greenhouse Gas Standards for Heavy-Duty Vehicles to Protect Public Health and Address the Climate Crisis While Keeping the American Economy Moving”, EPA, 3/29/2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-greenhouse-gas-standards-heavy

4. National Review articles that provide excellent overviews of the issues:
* “Biden’s Vehicle-Emissions Gaslighting”, Luther Ray Abel, 3/20/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bidens-vehicle-emissions-gaslighting/
* “Electric Vehicles: The EPA’s Fast Track to Fiasco”, Andrew Stuttaford, 3/25/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/electric-vehicles-the-epas-fast-track-to-fiasco/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=second
* “Biden Admin Imposes Strict Pollution Standards for Buses and Heavy-Duty Vehicles”, Caroline Downey, 3/29/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-admin-imposes-strict-pollution-standards-for-buses-and-heavy-duty-vehicles/