California – Page 6 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

September 16, 2022September 16, 2022

Modern Mass Psychosis in Climate Change, Systemic Racism, and COVID

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Here’s a story for you. University of South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley refuses to admit that she was mistaken in recently cancelling her team’s basketball games with BYU. In a statement to a reporter, she said, “I continue to stand by my position.”

Why cancel games with BYU? Staley was reacting to a charge by a Duke University volleyball player, Rachel Richardson, who claimed some BYU fans heckled her with racial slurs. An exhaustive review by BYU of all available video and audio recordings and interviews with over 50 nearby spectators uncovered no evidence of the insults. Still, Staley refuses to back down. Why cling to an unfounded decision in spite of the evidence? She isn’t the only one. Lately, over at least a decade, and more incidents recently, we’ve gone through mass derangements over climate change, systemic racism, and COVID. Facts don’t matter. Despite, or maybe because of, trillions spent on education and the most intense networks of information ever devised, we seem not to be particularly inoculated from mass psychosis.

Investors should be aware of this thing called mass psychosis, typically referred to as mass formation psychosis. It happens in markets and occurs anywhere a large group of interconnected people exists. One source defined it in the following way:

“Psychosis is when people lose some contact with reality. Mass formation psychosis is when a large part of a society focuses its attention to a leader(s) or a series of events and their attention focuses on one small point or issue. Followers can be hypnotized and be led anywhere, regardless of data proving otherwise. A key aspect of the phenomena is that the people they identify as the leaders – the one’s that can solve the problem or issue alone – they will follow that leader(s) regardless of any new information or data. Furthermore, anybody who questions the leader’s narrative are attacked and disregarded.” (Source: see below)

Evidence, proof, and real scientific inquiry are abandoned. Take the long-running issue of climate change with the adjective “apocalyptic” added for good measure. Beyond the reasonable assertion on the contribution of CO2 and fossil fuels, much else strays into the realm of speculation or mysticism. So many other questions on the subject – other contributing factors, their interplay, and impacts – cannot be answered with reasonable certainty, unless pure ideological bias qualifies for seasoned judgment. How’s that any different from the Heaven’s Gate cult? Besides, flagellating the most fuel efficient and clean society on the planet – ours – is pointless as over 2.8 billion people in China and India discover the joys of rising incomes, air conditioning, and affordable transportation. All made possible from the majesty of fossil fuels.

John Kerry is paid by us to jet around the world to cajole foreign rulers whose interests do not align with his fellow comfortable elites in their super-zip estates. He must be seen by them as a clown to be tolerated, maybe indulged a bit for photo-ops, but otherwise ignored.

John Kerry’s model is California. The cliché has it that California leads the way to the future. Maybe so, if that future is characterized by a mass psychosis in the mysticism of climate change. The rest of the country gets a bird’s-eye view of that fate. The state’s grid has been turned into a health hazard as the landscape dries out from the dry-summer climate’s periodic droughts. The state has made it difficult for anyone to clean out the surface debris in its wildlands, and 100 million dead trees await a spark. And eventually one will be provided by nature or from one of the state’s many urchins from its urban chaos.

The same psychosis that has turned the state into a fire trap is utterly destroying any concept of reliable, affordable energy. The altar of wind and solar isn’t a sensible means to appease Gaia. They are intermittent by nature, which strains the grid. Power lines are made for steady streams of electricity, not the boom and bust that is endemic in sunlight and bursts of air movement. Any grid under this steady strain breaks down if not assiduously maintained, which it isn’t. It just so happens, though, that California experiences an annual 5-month dry spell, alongside its endemic droughts, for the ruptures to send thousands fleeing the attendant flames hoping that they have enough charge in their EV to escape death-by-firestorm.

But don’t let the facts get in the way.

California is a self-made disaster. Their infatuation with air movement and sunlight energy has unknowingly made them dependent on steady-stream sources – fossil fuel, co-gen, hydro, nuclear – to buck up the losses from the night and calm days. But the state is busy torpedoing most of this backbone. Co-gen is mostly irrelevant. For the state’s ruling class, natural gas and coal are the devil’s brew. Hydro is undermined by eco-mandates for steady stream flows that has helped to turn the state’s reservoirs into puddles. Don’t only blame the drought. Every year is not a drought year, and no effort is made to store during the wetter times. Riparian habitats and dreams of the return of ancient salmon runs checkmate any other use.

The state’s dams have become the equivalent of Egypt’s pyramids. They are monumental but, as opposed to the pyramids, aren’t likely to attract many visitors three-quarters empty. The same fate has befallen the state’s two nuclear power plants: San Onofre and Diablo Canyon. Delayed maintenance while the state bullied the utilities into greenie fantasies put the kibosh to San Onofre, which cost the state 2.2 gigawatts of power. Diablo Canyon was scheduled for death in 2025. Blackouts have forced the state’s ruling party to back down on that one. How long? Well, it’ll probably remain open until the next spate of wet years gin up hydro for awhile, waiting for the next dry spell to once again reasserts itself to overtax the seas of solar panels and vast windmill forests that mar a once beautiful state. It’s a cycle of futility buttressed by a mass psychosis: a mystical belief in horrors that fact, reason, and science cannot dispel.

None of this matters one twit to the zealots who run the state. Evidence be damned. Electoral majorities in the state are in the grip of a mass mania that jettisons all reason and fact. All that remains is blackouts, skyrocketing electricity rates, hillsides aflame, and no effect on climate change.

Would it be better to simply enjoy the extended growing season and build more nuclear and low-emission power plants to enjoy the glories of air conditioning? Regardless, India and China will see to it that CO2 emissions continue to glut the atmosphere with or without the ministrations of John Kerry or the ladies on The View.

Climate change isn’t the only opportunity to go crazy. We have another one in “systemic racism”. What is systemic racism? Does it exist? Hard to say since “systemic” means that it is hidden and therefore not directly observable. Thus, we have to rely on others to simply announce its existence as they make an affluent living on their soothsaying.

The racism “experts” are actually grifters. Racial disparities occur in all sorts of areas such as incarceration rates, educational outcomes, birth rates, marriage, incomes, and social status. Thus, they insist that racism persists, but not in the Jim Crow way: obvious, in-your-face, and therefore open to rational inquiry. It’s easier for them to proclaim that the disparities are the proof of racism, even though they haven’t proven it, because they can’t, because the imprecision of the thing makes it immune to empirical testing (falsifiability). The “ghost in the machine” kind of thing. Instead, they claim to possess the special gnosis to expose it and how to remediate it as they go to the bank with thousands, if not millions, in book sales, consultant fees, and speeches. A new industry of charlatans is born. It’s as if astrology and the four humors in medicine are making a comeback.

The parallels with medieval medicine are glaring. People in earlier times noticed that fevers were reduced by bleeding a patient. The ancient Greek philosopher Galen and his four-humors paradigm was proven correct, or so they thought. It was, however, the classic post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc fallacy at work: two events occur sequentially with the first one assumed to be the cause. For our current race hustlers – Kimberle Crenshaw, Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DeAngelo, et al – systemic racism is proven by unequal outcomes by race. Poor educational outcomes on assessment tests by race, for instance, must mean that the test and its providers are “systemically” racist. It’s tantamount to saying, “Fever fell after bleeding, and patient is cured.” It’s nonsense.

Still, two full seasons after the death of George Floyd, “End Racism” dons the helmets of some NFL players. Viewers and our kids are barraged by the effort to ferret out something mysteriously within them and lurking in everything that surrounds them. It’s tantamount to the 17th century Salem witch trials in the modern form of a bogeyman in a Klan outfit.

The whole campaign rides on the inequalities in academic measures by race. The cause is presumed – racism – but only because “family structure” is excluded. Kids swim around in social circumstances that have greater impact on academic performance than melanin count or more money in the bank accounts of the NEA membership. Commissioned by the US Office of Education in 1966, the Coleman Report levelled a blow at the ego of the education industry’s special interests when it concluded, “. . . the inequalities imposed on children by their home, neighborhood, and peer environment are carried along to become the inequalities with which they confront adult life at the end of school.” Yep, chaotic home life and slums have greater bearing on admission to MIT than school funding, teacher salaries, and the racism bogeyman. But you won’t find outcomes by family structure anywhere in the various measures. Strange. You’ll see math, reading, and science scores by race, gender, ethnicity, economic status, etc., but nary a word about the home.

The missing link between the social measures and their cause is never filled with anything resembling empirical proof. Unequal stats by race are said to automatically point to racism. That’s it, and we’re off to the races to follow the “experts” in the secret gnosis. COVID gave to us another example of the same phenomena: trust the “experts” to fill the gap between a development and its treatment.

Filling the shoes of Kimberle Crenshaw, one of the overpaid founders of CRT, is Dr. Fauci and his peers in government, the NGO’s, many in BIG Pharma, Democratic Party potentates, et al. The lockdowns, school closures, mandatory masking, social distancing, the vaccine decrees, the overall suffocation of a society, were persistently avowed without a real scientific basis. Other approaches to maintain the functioning of civilization and protect the vulnerable were treated to covert and tacit censorship. Therapeutics, targeting safeguards on those with certain health conditions, natural immunity, the costs to children, the canceled or forgone medical appointments, the strain on a population quarantined in the four walls of their home (many more walls if you live in the super-zips), and the huge economic losses from the waterboarding of work and production were shunted aside in a mad rush to stamp out the virus, the very opposite of “follow the science”.

Once the “experts” had their foot on the pedal, they never let up, in spite of the growing evidence that they were prescribing a suicide pill. By summer 2020, it was widely established that the young ran little risk. So, forcing kids into filthy masks and into isolation behind plexiglass in schools that opened their doors was more than pointless. It was harmful. The schools most beholden to the blinkered “experts” were in Democrat strongholds, the inner cities, and they closed the longest. The academic performance gap morphed into a Grand Canyon. To no great surprise, the principal victims of this enthusiastic pursuit of school lockdowns and other tortures were minorities, putting a lie to “black lives matter”, especially for young ones.

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Data began to stumble out that the states who were the most religious in following Fauci and CDC mysticism fared no better than those who were more agnostic about what Florida’s Gov. DeSantis called “Fauciism” (see below). Claims were made by our health elites in power that the lockdowns, masking, social distancing, school closures, mandatory vaccines, et al, would “stop the spread” or “bend the curve” when one of the tiniest things in biology and profusely evolving – a virus – will in all likelihood evade the best laid plans of mice and men. Their interventions were heralded as the holy grail and natural immunity was ridiculed. Two years after the pandemic’s onset, we’re still grappling with a shape-shifting virus and infections persist.

Who’s to blame for this disorder by mass psychosis? Certainly, trillions spent annually on schools from K to grad school have monumentally failed at truly and broadly educating the population. Education is enlightenment. Are we enlightened? Evidence to date says “no”. Conversely, it may be the source of much of this mass psychosis.

What then is the value of our enormous communication network on the net and through satellites, cables, Wi-Fi, cell towers, and the infinite variety of radio signals? What are they communicating? Much that is spewed spikes mass psychosis. We seem to be great at inventing things but no so good at using them.

All our inventions haven’t altered the crooked timber of humanity. They have only magnified its prese nce. Immanuel Kant’s famous line from the 18th century remains true: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Credentials are certainly no guarantor. Civilizations over millennia have created civil society to grapple with our fundamental pretzel character. You know, faith, family, morals, and neighborly affiliations in local self-help organizations came into being. People like Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Robert Nisbet wrote of the virtues of these “little platoons”. Well, the centralized welfare state carpet-bombed their importance.

We just created more bullhorns for mass psychosis.

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RogerG

Sources:

* “What is Mass Formation Psychosis?”, SWFI, 1/2/22, at https://www.swfinstitute.org/news/90470/what-is-mass-formation-psychosis

* Ivan Rowe at the American Enterprise Institute wrote of the missing ingredient of family structure in most reports of our social condition. One column on this subject can be read at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/08/29/students-family-background-matters/.

* Skepticism is always warranted when people go beyond what the science gives. Climate change ideology is a classic example of the phenomena. Those in the field of science who have managed to keep their wits exist. Princeton’s Freeman Dyson outlined his critique in the NYT Magazine at https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?sq=Freeman. Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg is another. Kevin Shapiro’s review of his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, can be found in Commentary Magazine at https://www.commentary.org/articles/kevin-shapiro-2/the-skeptical-environmentalist-by-bjorn-lomborg/. Japanese scientist Kiminori Itoh argues for more complexity in the dynamics of the atmosphere than John Kerry would admit. An account of his views can be found in the Orange County Register at https://www.ocregister.com/2008/06/18/japanese-ipcc-scientists-says-global-warming-worst-scientific-scandal/. The Norwegian physicist Ivar Giaever, and Nobel Prize winner, equates the climate change crusade with a religion. A talk by him on the subject is available through Foreign Policy Journal at https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2016/01/01/nobel-laureate-ivar-giaever-on-climate-change/. There are many others out there.

* The Federal Bureau of Economic Research in spring 2022 issued a report on how states fared in their response to COVID-19. Biases marred the analysis of the report. Some with blue-state leanings say that the BER paper proved the wisdom of aggressive COVID measures, while others of a red-state tint say the opposite. Blue-state biases downplayed or ignored the secondary damages of children’s developmental and education losses, the harms from delayed or absent medical treatment, the increase in suicides and depression, the massive disruption to the economic life of the country, etc. One analysis from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity appears more accurate than most. It can be read at https://committeetounleashprosperity.com/final-report-card-on-state-responses-to-covid-19/.

* A report on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on student achievement was made by the Brookings Institute in March 2022 and can be read at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2022/03/03/the-pandemic-has-had-devastating-impacts-on-learning-what-will-it-take-to-help-students-catch-up/.

September 9, 2022September 10, 2022

The Bear Flag Republic Doubles Down on Stupid

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You should know that I was a second-generation California native of 62 years who no longer lives in the state as of 2015. I am retired but had been disgruntled with the state for the previous couple of decades. The state is worn down, falling apart, and progressive utopias were, and still are, pursued at every turn. At least I got out before the blackouts.

Already, at the time, $400-$500 monthly electricity bills in the summertime heat of Bakersfield were financially strapping us. The high rates are a form of extortion to compel a resident into poorly-thought-out wind and solar schemes at a time when the powerful were beginning to kill off nuclear, natural gas, and other streams of reliable electricity. I fled a state with a current average of 25 cents per KWh to a place with 8 cents (national average: 15 cents). The state’s population is being fleeced for a blackout-riddled energy product, with rates running so high that depopulation of the Central Valley and desert regions is the unmentioned but logical consequence. What good is accomplished when you must swelter in the darkness?

Average electricity rates in 9/3/22. (Source: energysage.com)

The con is hidden behind the threat of “climate change”, which became the rhetorical substitute for the old “global warming”. CO2 is the go-to scapegoat, and it probably has a role. How much? Hard to say. Water vapor does to, but the sound of crickets resonates in media gabfests. People who claim to know don’t, and lack realistic scientific humility. They fail to admit that there remain huge gaps in our understanding of the dynamics of the atmosphere.

We do know that we live at a time when a plethora of global sensors – terrestrial, atmospheric, in space – produce a flood of data as never before. The problem isn’t the paucity of data. Gosh, we can see every weather system around the world. The problem lies in the processing of the visuals and numbers. What do they mean? Nearly everywhere across the airwaves and the net, ideology goes where scientific theory dare not tread. When they don’t know, they rely on their biases to hide the fact. Mediagenic mouthpieces declare that it must be man-caused, which leads the unthinking right into the wheelhouse of the progressive utopians: redesign the human being to fit into the utopians’ preferred lifestyle. We have left real scientific inquiry long ago. The results are played out in California with the mauling of the state in massive wildfires that are ignited by ideologically driven forestry practices and ideologically driven state agencies mandating and pressuring public utilities away from simple things like grid maintenance. And now, the regular blackouts.

Have you heard about PG&E’s guilty plea in causing the deaths of 84 people in the 2018 Camp Fire? Poorly maintained power lines touched off the firestorm. But why so poorly maintained? PG&E may be guilty at some level, but so are the eco-driven mandarins in Sacramento and their henchmen in state agencies such as the PUC, one of the state’s utility regulatory agencies. The political inmates running the asylum in Sacramento in their infinite wisdom foisted on the utilities the “Renewables Portfolio Standard” in 2002, 13 years before my flight from the state. The state has been in a pell-mell rush to shoehorn its grid into “renewables”, essentially wind and solar, 60% of all sources by 2030, in a mere 8 years! More money spent on the utopia is less money to prevent sparks from igniting the poorly maintained hillsides. PG&E was in the dock, but where were the activists, agency heads, and politicians? They deserve a perp-walk too.

It’s amazing that this is done as mandates for roof-top solar has reduced incoming company revenue. The utilities are hit by the double whammy of less coming in and more going out. It’s surprising that more of the state hasn’t been charred, and much more CO2 convulsed into the atmosphere than from the state’s 800,000 internal combustion engines in the residents’ possession.

And to think that now they want everyone out of their dependable car and into a $60,000-$70,000 electric vehicle. Nothing like doubling down on stupid.

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RogerG

Sources:

* “Cost of electricity in California”, updated 9/3/22, at https://www.energysage.com/local-data/electricity-cost/ca/
* “Wind Energy in California”, California Energy Commission, at https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/california-power-generation-and-power-sources/wind-energy-california#:~:text=Wind%20energy%2C%20an%20integral%20part%20of%20California%27s%20electricity,the%20south%20to%20Shasta%20County%20in%20the%20north.
* “RPS [Renewables Portfolio Standard] Program Overview”, Public Utilities Commission, at https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/RPS_Overview/#:~:text=California%27s%20Renewables%20Portfolio%20Standard%20%28RPS%29%20is%20one%20of,portfolio%20from%20eligible%20renewable%20energy%20resources%20by%202030
* “PG&E pleads guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter in devastating Camp Fire”, NBC News, June 16, 2022, at https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pg-e-pleads-guilty-84-counts-manslaughter-devastating-camp-fire-n1231256

September 7, 2022September 8, 2022

California Is Dangerous to Your Child’s Health. Exhibit #1: S.B. 107

An example of the crazies in California: boosters of transgender ideology pressure a charter school board in Rocklin, Ca., in 2017 to prevent parents from opting out of lessons on transgenderism.

The old warning on a pack of cigarettes went like this: “SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, and May Complicate Pregnancy”. With some simplification, a warning label could be pasted on all maps: “Parents, California is dangerous to your child’s health.” How? Its eco-fanaticism will deprive them of a future, surely, if extended nationally, but California S.B. 107 promises to put the entire weight of California government in opposition to your natural right to raise your children. It’s on Governor Newsom’s desk waiting for his signature.

Go read the bill. It’s below. Under the title “Gender-affirming care”, the bill expressly prohibits medical and insurance providers in the state from releasing the identity of any child from anywhere seeking gender transition treatments even if the child’s state or local jurisdiction has laws that restricts such practices. You’ll never know as a Florida parent that your 14-year-old, in a phase of gender confusion, is taking puberty blockers, opposite-sex hormones, and sex-change surgeries in California. That’s not all. All relevant California authorities are forbidden from interceding on your behalf and retuning your child to your custody. Read it. It’s astounding.

Just think, unknown to you, your 14-year-old child may spend too much time on social media and gets caught up in a social contagion of gender confusion. Those same social media platforms will also spread information on the medical interventions, all forever life-altering, and how to get to California to satisfy the urge. Then, after filing a missing person report to your local sheriff, you get a text from your daughter of her double mastectomy and her metoidioplasty (create an artificial penis) in a California hospital. Your daughter, without your knowledge and approval, has turned herself into your pseudo-son. All thanks to the elected lunatics running California.

If any state action screams “unconstitutional”, this is it. Ever since 1824 and Gibbons v. Ogden, the Constitution gives to Congress the sole power to regulate interstate commerce. Furthermore, the contracts clause in the Constitution impairs a state’s ability to nullify agreements made in another state. n A state cannot undermine one state’s power to regulate matters within its borders simply because the resident stepped foot in another state. Kidnapping is still kidnapping if the victim is transported to a different state. Any differences between the states’ kidnapping laws are irrelevant.

Come to think of it, assisting a child in travel against the wishes of the parent could be construed as kidnapping. Gavin Newsom and Scott Wiener (D, State Senator, San Mateo) could be eligible for indictment. Remember, Panama’s dictator Manuel Noriega was indicted by a federal grand jury in Miami and arrested by US Navy SEALs under orders of President Bush 41. If it could happen to a foreign despot, why not to a sitting state governor and head honcho in the state legislature? Newsom, I’d think twice before signing this monstrosity.

The absurdity of this action by California zealots is easily understood if roles were reversed. Lets’ say, Florida passes a law to make it a felony for any person wherever they reside to knowingly authorize and protect individuals who engage in medical practices on the state’s resident minors without parental knowledge and consent. If California can expressly shield violators of another state’s laws, why can’t the offended state seek redress by taking into custody these offenders, whether they be medical practitioners or state officials, when they come into contact with lawful authorities of the offended state? Interstate interference is interstate interference. If one is sanctioned, so is the other. Goose and gander equality anyone?

It’s a useful thought experiment, and a sign of how harmful California has become to the rest of the nation. Let’s get on with it. Put the warning label on our maps.

RogerG

Sources:

* The full text of California SB 107 can be read at https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220SB107
* For more on the story, read the column by Sharon Supp, a senior research analyst for the Alliance Defending Freedom at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/09/california-declares-war-on-parents-in-all-50-states-with-gender-transition-sanctuary-state-law/

August 28, 2022August 28, 2022

Californios, Get Out While You Still Can

May be an image of 1 person — Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks to Matt Gutman of ABC News about the August 2022 vote by the California Air Resources Board to ban gas powered cars in the state of California by 2035. (ABC News)

The people running the state of California have issued a ban on the sale of new gas-powered cars, minivans, SUV’s, and pickups by 2035. A centrally planned edict, with little sound reasoning, will descend upon everyone in the state. Of course, the commissars’ dream is to force the lunacy on the entire country. The irony is that California is losing population at a rapid pace – over a quarter million from 2020 to 2021 alone – but the kulturkampf crackpots ruling the state fantasize that the state’s weight of population will force upon the whole country the lifestyle preferences of the California coastal plain. I hope not. In the meantime, Californios, get out while you still can.

If you’re the owner of a business or a person planning to make a huge investment in a home, a car, retiring, or settling your kids into one of the many schools in the state, you might be making one of the biggest mistakes in your life. California is no place to make life-shaping commitments. Millions already got a whiff and fled over the past number of decades. A decline in the rate of increase in previous decades has been replaced by an absolute reduction. 39.5 million became 39.2 million from July 2020 to June 2021. The same people that think they can dictate their lifestyle preferences to the nation are the same ones who can’t keep their people.

Their justification for imposing their choices gets weaker with each passing year. California must be stopped from dictating to the rest of the nation. They get away with this by throwing their demographic weight around which intimidates the Fortune 500. A ban on the sale of conventional cars in cuckoo land, it is hoped, will soon have Topeka and Wichita dealerships flooding Kansas with ev’s against the wishes of the sunflower state’s consumers. That’s the hope of Sacramento’s potentates. But watch the dream get dashed by a lack of appreciation for unintended consequences, which is a persistent blind spot for this breed of power-hungry zealot.

That’s right, they pretend that the unintended consequences are fabrications of “deniers” at the same time that the “fabrications” come crashing into the quality of life. Unintended consequences are either a product of child-like naivete or the belief that the economic law of tradeoffs can be dismissed with a wave of the hand. The central planners’ assault on living standards will happen nonetheless. There is no future in boarded up gas stations and skyrocketing fuel and utility rates. An already decrepit grid teetering into chronic blackouts will be expected to power the state’s new fleet of personal transportation by fiat. Get real. No smothering of the state in a widening blanket of windmills and solar panels can turn intermittent into non-intermittent. Money subtracted from grid maintenance shows up in the massive expansion of “renewables” (tradeoffs), turning the dilapidating grid into a gargantuan arsonist of cataclysmic wildfires. The fires aren’t due to climate change but are the unintended consequence of people obsessed with climate change.

Aerial detection survey photo of dead and dying trees on the Sequoia and Sierra National forests, August 2016. (USFS photo)

Thomas Fire 2 — Firefighters attack the Thomas Fire’s north flank with backfires as they continue to fight a massive wildfire north of Los Angeles, near Ojai, California, Dec. 9, 2017. (photo: Reuters)

There’s more. Going back to those abandoned gas stations, the price of fuel will rise as it becomes harder to get because the market is forcibly shrunk by government dictat. For the diesel heavy vehicles and equipment, their fueling costs will skyrocket since the fuel market dwindled to cover only them. Truck stops are rarer.

The immense total societal investment of over a century in personal conveyances will have been wiped out virtually overnight. In its place will come disposable cars, thrown away because the heart of them, the batteries, is no longer composed of moving parts. The great and proven reservoir of human capital (experience, skills, and knowledge) in mechanics will no longer have a place in this new way of life, having been made useless not by the voluntary choices of people in a free market but by edicts of an activist nomenklatura.

Scrap yards, fields, or overgrown back lots will fill up with the things, scavenged for the few things sellable. If the track record of recycling is any clue, subsidies for the recycling of the batteries will be required. All government subsidies are a replay of the student loan forgiveness scam. One group gets a benefit at the expense of another. I don’t care how it’s configured. If a benefit flowed to one group (recyclers) by government command, it must be shaken from the consumer or taxpayer at the end of the day. Any burden on the manufacturer is a pass-through down to the buyer.

The huge battery packs for the bliss of all-electric will come from the ChiComs, unstable and unfriendly Third World kleptocracies, or domestic oligarchs like US RareEarth. I have yet to see an eco-activist with a love of mining, especially of the open pit variety. Where will the rare earths (lithium, gallium, hafnium, zirconium) and magnets come from? The enthusiasts don’t have a clue. They just have faith in a “market” that they detest. The grand viziers dictate and people must bow to suit. The only innovations are those contrived to fit the commands. They aren’t a product of liberty, for they are a product of kowtowing to the state. Few in their right mind would stake a trip to the emergency room on a vehicle that doesn’t perform well in a blackout. The contraption works best if you don’t live far from the emergency room, and, better yet, if you’re a block away and can quickly push the wheelchair that far.

Pray to God that the ambulances aren’t electric. If they are, you’re screwed in a blackout, and doubly so if they’ve had a number of runs that night. The station house might have a generator but it relies on the same fossil fuel from the same rapidly disappearing fuel supply. All in all, you’re still screwed.

An all-electric future is no nirvana. Even so, they tell us, we’ll benefit from saving the planet. Will we? How are 39.2 million souls, and falling, going to counteract the voracious energy appetite of 2.82 billion? India and Red China have no qualms about burning coal, even our coal. They love jobs and air conditioning too. Get this straight: we are expected to believe that 1.4% of the population of India and Red China will save the planet. Uh?

My greatest sympathy goes to the rest of the state east of the Coast Range. Crossing the Coast Range west to east is departing one cultural entity and entering another. California is two states: the nearly 27 million west along the coastal plain has Sandinista sympathies and the 12 million remainder to the east would hang Sandinistas. It’s a schizophrenic state with the largest portion of the state’s brain psychotic. The diseased two-thirds overwhelms the sensible third. If the analogy was perfect, the healthy cells would seek an escape to a healthier body, which many are doing at a fast clip. They can jettison the state since we have a US Constitution which makes us citizens of the USA and merely residents of a state. We have the right to travel.

So, travel. Get out while you still can.

May be an image of road and text that says 'LEAVING California 'hol Photo illlustration'

RogerG

Sources:
* “California to ban sale of all new gasoline-powered cars starting in 2035, a “historic turning point”, The Mercury News, August 27, 2022, at https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/08/24/california-to-ban-sale-of-all-new-gasoline-powered-cars-starting-in-2035-a-historic-turning-point/?utm_email=7532E23EB4C725A2B431242632&g2i_eui=4hjus%2bKiCR9WZhjuKq1urjE8uS5QtgSd&g2i_source=newsletter&lctg=7532E23EB4C725A2B431242632&active=no&utm_source=listrak&utm_medium=email&utm_term=https%3a%2f%2fwww.mercurynews.com%2f2022%2f08%2f24%2fcalifornia-to-ban-sale-of-all-new-gasoline-powered-cars-starting-in-2035-a-historic-turning-point%2f&utm_campaign=bang-mult-nl-weekend-morning-report-nl&utm_content=manual
* “Editorial: Yes! California just banned the sale of new gas cars. This is a big deal”, LA Times, August 26, 2022, at https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-08-26/california-gas-car-ban-zero-emission
* “A New Demographic Surprise for California: Population Loss”, NY Times, May, 7, 2021, at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/us/california-population-loss.html
* “These 10 maps explain California’s changing population: The state lost more than a quarter-million residents during the first year of the pandemic, but some counties grew and shrank for different reasons”, The Mercury News, April 4, 2022, at https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/04/04/these-10-maps-explain-californias-changing-population/
* “US Needs 10X More Rare Earth Metals To Hit Biden’s Electric Vehicle Goals”, Forbes, Sept. 29, 2021, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/09/29/us-needs-10x-more-rare-earth-metals-to-hit-bidens-electric-vehicle-goals/?sh=70e13a093e41
* The east/west breakdown of California’s population in “Economics and Demographics”, NOAA, Office for Coastal Management, at https://coast.noaa.gov/states/fast-facts/economics-and-demographics.html#:~:text=California%20tops%20the%20coastal%20populations%20chart%20with%2026.7,6.8%20million.%205%20461%20People%20per%20Square%20Mile

July 26, 2022

California, A Sanctuary for Modern Gender Lysenkoism

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What is Lysenkoism and what does it have to do with California? Lysenkoism was a Soviet theory of biology that illustrates the corrupting influences of ideology on science. In addition to the bloodthirsty nature of communism, it would prove to be a force multiplier for famine in the 1930’s in the Soviet Union. In like manner, today, transgenderism is just the latest edition of the attempt to have ideology guide science, and still call it “science”. It too will have dire consequences particularly for the young who will be swept into it. California is trying to establish itself as the mecca for this latest thought experiment with our children as guinea pigs.

While pursuing this transgenderism delusion, California has a hard time keeping its people and businesses. For the second straight year, the state has registered an absolute reduction in its population, down some 117,552 in 2021 alone. From 2000 to 2020, the state shed a net of 2.6 million people. Similarly, increasingly, businesses in the state are decamping for parts beyond the reach of California’s legislators, tax collectors, and regulators. The consulting firm Spectrum Solutions counts a total of 265 relocations of California-headquartered enterprises from 2018 to June 2021. It’s undoubtedly an undercount since many fly under the radar – like the number for “apprehensions at the border”.

The published 2021 list of business out-migrations is quite impressive and includes Apple and Oracle (now Austin, Tx.) and Nestle USA (now Arlington, Va.). If the state won’t be hospitable to the spirit of enterprise, the state seems to be salivating at the prospect of becoming a kind of Vatican for the grisly arts: snuffing out unborn life and mutilating the bodies of confused tweens. Abortion from conception to birth (and maybe beyond) is lauded and subsidized, going so far as to advertise for out-of-state “customers”. The “gender affirming care” (euphemisms abound in the grisly arts) of double mastectomies, hormonal injections, castrations, genital reconstruction operations, and psychological indoctrination is favored in ways the real economy is not. Fascinating.

This medical assault on the bodies of the young is justified under “transgenderism”, today’s ideological clone of Lysenkoism. Lysenkoism is an artifact of the Marxist belief system dictating the architecture of science. The inherent qualities in basic biology are rejected – nothing is inherent in Marxism but all is said to be a product of socio-economic power structures. Sound familiar to the rantings of the race hustlers of critical race theory? Trofim Lysenko, Soviet biologist who was heralded in Soviet propaganda as a genius, rejected genetics and based his agriculture advice on discredited 18th century notions of inheritance (Lamarckism). The whole idea easily conformed to the pretensions of Marxism-Leninism. The result was the catastrophic crop failures leading to the Holodomor, the famine in the Ukraine and Donbas, the vast breadbasket of Russia and Europe.

May be a black-and-white image of 1 person — Trofim Lysenko in 1938

Thus, what happens when ideology guides science? You have massive calamities. Like the Soviet-inspired famines, we will have cohorts of impressionable adolescents equally damaged, growing up psychologically scarred and physically mutilated, and it will all be chalked up as “gender affirming”. For many, they’ll end up like the 60-year-old regretting the body-covering tattoos, now fading and wrinkled, of their twenties. Only worse.

Inspired by the conceit of transgenderism, California State Senator Scott Weiner has introduced a bill that would create an interstate underground railroad for sex-change operations, in effect, neutering the laws of the other states, according to Jeremy Redfern, press secretary of the Florida Department of Health. Children from Florida, or wherever, could be placed in California foster care, with or without parental notice and consent, and in essence Mengele-like experiments would be conducted on their bodies (Josef Mengele was the sinister Auschwitz doctor). The bill promises to prohibit the enforcement of another state’s arrest warrant if the warrant is related to that state’s restrictions on sex-change treatments.

Mengele was galvanized by a faith in another popular pseudoscience of the early 20th century: eugenics, or the idea that we should breed a “better” human being like we could a horse. Many academic, medical, and public health organizations of the day jumped onboard the eugenics train. Transgenderism has the same groupie effect, and sadly it’s frequently reported by the same people who have next to no understanding of science. What’s more astonishing is the ideological capture of people who should know better. The gambit was blown wide open when the American Academy of Pediatricians guidelines on transgenderism were shown to be written by a trans activist with a degree not in science but “women’s, gender and sexuality studies”. All-too-often, such organizational policy stands are written by a narrow claque of activists. It is neither reflective of the science or the membership.

In contrast, the euphoric and headlong rush into transgenderism is taking a pause in Europe and many states, except for the half-witted firebrands running the state of California, ironically as they run people and businesses out of the state. Dutch gender-dysphoria researchers call for “more research” before more definitive actions are taken. One Dutch gender-dysphoria specialist warned of the dangers in using sex-change chemical treatments by saying that “little research has been done so far on treatment with puberty blockers and hormones in young people.” Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare (NBHW) warned that “the risks [of sex-change treatments] outweigh the benefits at present.” They cited the “uncertain science” about the most popular sex-change prognoses. Thus, to put it succinctly, “gender affirming” is a nice way of saying “dangerous”. But still, California wants to go there.

It took 8-10 million dead in the USSR in the 1930’s and chronic crop failures to have Lysenkoism quietly go down the memory hole. What will it take for California to halt its breakneck slide into an “uncertain science”? How many kids will have to be disfigured and emotionally scarred before saner heads take over?

And to think that Governor Gavin Newsom is feted as a presidential contender for 2024. Given all that we know, who’d wish that on any nation, let alone our own?

RogerG

Sources:

*California’s population decline: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/04/us/california-population-decline.html
*Businesses flee California: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adammillsap/2021/08/27/businesses-are-fleeing-california-along-with-its-residents-and-president-biden-should-pay-attention/?sh=6fae8b722327
* Moms for Liberty Locked Out of Twitter after Criticizing California Gender-Transition Bill, National Review Online, Caroline Downey, July 25, 2022, https://www.nationalreview.com/news/moms-for-liberty-locked-out-of-twitter-after-criticizing-california-gender-transition-bill/
* Florida Is Following Europe’s Lead on Gender-Dysphoria Guidelines, National Review Online, Madeleine Kearns, April 27, 2022, https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/florida-is-following-europes-lead-on-gender-dysphoria-guidelines/

July 23, 2022July 23, 2022

Making Energy Sense, Not a Biden Skill

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President Biden is noticing the inverse relationship between gas prices and a politician’s approval rating: one goes up, the other goes down. So, what does he do? Sacrificing intelligibility, ignoring human nature in the laws of supply and demand, and contradicting the crux of his green-energy agenda, he spirited off letters to energy company CEO’s on June 15 haranguing them for taking his war on fossil fuels seriously. He attempted to strongarm them into dropping prices at the pump by threatening,

“. . . at a time of war, refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable. . . . I request that you provide the Secretary with an explanation of any reduction in your refining capacity since 2020, and any ideas that would address the immediate inventory, price, and refining capacity issues in the coming months — including transportation measures to get refined product to market.”

For decades now, our cultural hegemons have inundated the whole of humanity with climate-change doom. The drumbeat is everywhere; can’t miss it. Now, we have a government of doomsayers, who have put combative policy teeth to the apocalypse story. The hostility to the CEO’s principal product – fossil fuels – is impossible to avoid, even for the pressed suits in the c-suites. They’ve adjusted to the cultural lynch mob by running ads touting their greenie bona fides and a redirection of investments to match. They see what’s in the wind. They see a government on an eco-jihad. Cancellation of pipelines, ending new leases on federal lands, greenie Bolsheviks in charge at the EPA, greenie Bolsheviks running the show at Transportation and Energy – indeed, throughout the Article II branch – and the regulatory and permitting process under the zealous gaze of a greenie Cheka (the forerunner to the KGB), isn’t exactly a green light to increase production, “to get refined product to market”. What Lord Biden taketh away, he expects them to give.

May be an image of outdoors and text that says 'Snack Shop Regular 579% 589 599% Plus V-Power Gasoline' — Gas prices in Los Angeles in May of 2022.

Just think like a CEO of a multi-billion-dollar energy behemoth. He or she would be crazy to commit years and $5-15 billion into building a new refinery or maintaining an existing one, which mostly explains why we haven’t added a new one since 1976 and some are closing. Additionally, why commit millions – without commitment to an asylum – to exploring and extracting the stuff that is constantly portrayed to be the environmental equivalent of monkeypox?

Why do that when Biden’s commissariat, and the sub-commissariats in the blue states, have adopted the Stalinesque “Energy Portfolio Standards” (EPS)? EPS’s are Five Year Plans to shoehorn the entire population into the greenie utopia of blackouts, cramped and overpriced housing, expensive ev’s, and filthy, crime-ridden, and time-guzzling public transit, specifically subjecting it on the most hesitant in the aspiring middle class and proletariat (regular or lumpen). Imagine your standard of living being forcibly molded to fit the conscience of the Sierra Cub executive board, or the lunchroom at Google.

Don’t be a bit surprised that your life takes on the appearance of the beneficiaries – err, victims – of the New Deal-inspired urban renewal extravaganzas of the last half of the 20th century. Is Chicago’s Cabrini Green our future writ large?

May be an image of train, railroad and text that says 'not onter ΔE enter tracks' — A key goal of the Green New Deal is to herd the population into mass transit like this in NYC.

May be an image of sky and skyscraper — Another key goal of environmentalists is dense housing, much of it public, like this one in Chicago. It became a hive of crime and drugs and was demolished in 2011.

May be an image of 4 people and people standing — A policewoman searches the jacket of a teenage boy for drugs and weapons in the graffiti-covered Cabrini Green Housing Project.

So, we are set to replace $2-per-gallon gas and air conditioning for the “intermittency problem” of windmills and solar panels, which means regular episodes of things going dark and summer sweltering. The polar vortexes present particularly vexing problems for a grid with an irregular heartbeat. Be prepared for forests of windmills and seas of solar panels to mar the views during the family drive in the expensive ev, which could be a dangerous activity if no one thought to plug it in the night before.

And where will the electricity come from to charge the thing? Not much chance of charging the ev if the town went dark. I always thought that a continuous flow of electricity, one that can be ramped up as needed, was preferable to one interrupted by clouds, the rotation of the earth, or the lack of air movement. If we are so paralyzed by the thought of burning coal that we are willing to rush into the arms of “intermittency”, natural gas and nuclear could offer a way forward without upending the entire system from the generating plant to coffee maker. Building new gas and nuclear plants to power the grid makes more sense than trying to repeal the laws of physics regarding intermittency, energy density (remember the vast panoramic expanses of windmills and solar panels – the very opposite of density), and the dumping of trillions into R and D to make something work that by nature is inclined not to.

May be an image of cloud and twilight — Intermittency in action: Rolling blackouts in Southern California, 2021

May be an image of standing, nature and text — A picture of intermittency: Mojave Desert windmills, California.

May be an image of outdoors — Another picture of intermittency: Solar farm in California’s Mojave Desert

We know much more about natural gas and nuclear generation and the necessary tweaks to make them safer and more efficient. Instead, we are offered the huge opportunity costs of the Green New Deal. Money sunk into this basket of extravagances is money not available for the obvious and accessible. In fact, the obvious and accessible is sacrificed on the altar of will-o’-the-wisp “renewables” as gas-powered turbines are shut down and nuclear power plants closed. Oddly, the most emissions-friendly one, nuclear, has been especially targeted. Globally, nuclear power accounted for 17% of total energy production in 1996. Today, it’s 10%. The picture in the U.S. isn’t any better. Nuclear’s contribution to our energy total is scheduled to fall to 11% by 2050 from the 20% of today. The scare stories of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and the damage to Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plants in 2011 are dredged to make the inefficient – the aforementioned “renewables” – seem plausible.

May be an image of coast and nature — Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, California, scheduled for decommissioning in 2025.

It will turn into the classic example of government-engineered socio-economic devolution. Where will this lead? Think of the Middle Ages, the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Venezuela, North Korea, anywhere coercive utopians seized absolute control of the government to compel others to build their dreamland.

Meanwhile, two words – “carbon” and “capture” – go down the memory hole. A fraction of the money going into R and D for overturning a civilization’s entire way of life could be devoted to “carbon” and “capture” with a much more salutary effect. The remainder of the GND price tag could remain in the pockets of the people. But all that makes too much sense.

And making sense is not the forte of eco-zealots drunk with power in the age of Biden.

May be an image of text

RogerG

Sources:

* Biden’s Full Letter to Oil Companies Demanding Help on Gas Prices, https://www.mediaite.com/news/read-bidens-full-letter-to-oil-companies-demanding-help-on-gas-prices-historically-high-profit-margins-are-unacceptable/
* The Global Nuclear Power Comeback, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-global-nuclear-comeback-green-energy-fossil-fuels-supply-climate-mandates-power-generation-11658170860
* The Blue-State War on Nuclear Power, by Nate Hochman, https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/the-blue-state-war-on-nuclear-power/

July 5, 2022July 5, 2022

Running Out of Puff

May be an image of 1 person, outdoors and text that says 'MAR NIWING 35 VEHIGLE WEMISSION GNP POLICE CE POLICE FXI8 FXI8EEN EEN' — UK police EV

Yes, that’s right. The UK’s Daily Telegraph reported on July 5 “Electric police cars ‘running out of puff’ on way to emergencies”. It’s the kind of thing that Democrat politicos wish for America. Just think, as an angry neighbor is about to go postal and you call 911, the 5-to-6-minute response time turns into . . . never. The cops’ EV ran out of juice on the way. It’s time to call the coroner.

It seems that all the EV’s accessories such as a/c, heater, radio, computers, lights, and siren run off the same battery as the one powering the wheels. The existential crisis of climate change turned into the existential crisis of a dead family member.

Following Biden’s lead, who is following the lead of California, who is following the lead of the UK – a pied piper of delusionals – the “best and brightest” have either outlawed the production of diesel and gas vehicles by date certain (2030 in the UK) or a target date of 2030 or 2035 is set for achieving 100% EV fleets. Utopians are habitual central planners and love numbered targets to force other people into meeting, no matter the disruption or loss of life.

Officers responding to emergencies in EV’s report the well-founded worry of not getting to the crisis. Batteries drain, charging stations haven’t kept up with the government mandates for EV’s, god-awful charging times (45 minutes to 8 hours), and the grid providing the power is being made more precarious at the same time by the same clowns.

It’s a cascade of absurdities. Going all-electric is quickly turning into all-farce, and a deadly one at that.

RogerG

June 29, 2022

The Times They Are A-Changin’

See the source image

That’s right, for the times they are a-changin’. We are in a moment similar to the era of Bob Dylan’s youth. Back then, the target of his ire was the hideous Jim Crow. The same lyrics could equally apply to the reign of the radical left from the halls of power in Washington, DC, to big metropolitan areas and deep blue states. Signs are everywhere that “the times they are a-changin’”.

The lyrics of Bob Dylan’s first stanza are poignant:

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

San Fransisco voted world's filthiest slum — San Francisco homeless encampment in 2018

Watch as the smash and grab phenomena sweeps the country in 2021-2022:

I’ll give you three indications that the ruling radical left of the donkey party might “sink like a stone”: (1) 1.7 million voters changed their registration from Democrat to Republican, a net gain of a 1 million to the R’s, from 2021 to 2022; (2) Arizona’s Gov. Doug Ducey signed a bill that allows the state’s students to take $6,400-per-pupil to a school of their parents’ choice; and (3) a San Diego school district dumped their identity-mongering, DEI-loving Superintendent. Let’s take a closer look at each one of these horsemen of the apocalypse.

The Democrats have a problem: they have a “smell of death” around them (to borrow from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “That Smell”), thanks to “defund the police”, their destruction of livelihoods and standards of living in greenie radicalism, constant campaigns of race and gender warfare, homoerotic curriculums to 7-year-olds, willful refusal to enforce laws, the erasure of the borders of the United States, a concerted effort to suspend the laws of economics in order to bribe and coerce the people into the preferred lifestyle of a fashionable clique, and . . . you get the picture.

The pungent odor that proceeds them has caused 1.7 million voters to flee the smell of the Democrat ship and crawl on board the USS Republican Party. Some 600,000 went the other way for a plus-1-million gain for the GOP, something not seen since the Elder Days (Lord of the Rings lingo). According to the AP, who broke the story, the biggest change occurred in the suburbs, by people who previously found Trump repulsive. Well, Trump’s no longer at the head of the parade. It’s Biden and his cohorts of lefties and greenie utopians at the tiller of state. It’s not a good look for moms and dads who have to regularly fill up the family sedan and balance the checkbook. And what awaits them as they go for a walk? Try ducking stray bullets, avoiding the long strings of homeless encampments, the random assaults by the criminally insane, staying clear of the parks for the drugs and filth and crime, the incessant car and home break-ins, and the schools that aren’t any better, if they’re allowed to be open. It’s heathier to hunker down with Netflix, popcorn, and a 45. As Lynyrd Skynyrd put it, “Ooh-ooh that smell”.

And, boy, did parents get a whiff of what’s happening in their child’s classroom. The lockdowns not only forced parents to sacrifice making ends meet but the end to in-person instruction also showed to many that they could live without the offerings of the teacher unions and the captured education Borg. “School choice” became more popular, and Gov. Ducey of Arizona and legislative Republicans responded with an expansion of the state’s voucher-like Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA’s). If an off-the-charts lefty San Francisco school board majority could be sent packing in, of all places, San Francisco, what do you think can be done in saner locales?

Arizona Governor Doug Ducey in Pheonix on June 17, 2022

It’s amazing to know that the unions’ agitation for school closures also exposed their shenanigans. It took away the barrier of gates and walls that protected them from any scrutiny. Parents are awake everywhere from Loudon County to San Francisco. Arizona has reacted, with other states soon to follow.

Simply put, all that Arizona did was to empower parents with the ability to walk away. Lets’ see how the Borg survives without the gravy train.

All of the ideological bile that runs the schools came to a head in another place, Sand Diego. The San Dieguito Union High School District Superintendent let the cat out of the bag, the feline of identity-mongering that is. The mental straitjacket of diversity-equity-inclusion (DEI) that runs the district came out on YouTube. Take a peek below.

In a training session last week, Superintendent Cheryl James-Ward reduced the kids to a collection of groups. And as groups, the children’s individuality was smothered under generalizations and racial, socioeconomic stereotypes. Like a true Marxist, the main target was the successful, the successful who happen to be labeled Asians. Asians are the Kulaks of Stalin’s fevered imagination in the fevered imagination of James-Ward. Not enough D’s and F’s for Asians and too many for the oppressed, a problem to be corrected by bureaucratic intervention. There you have it: the script for bringing one group down and artificially elevating other groups, all done to make the charts look good. James-Ward would make for an excellent colleague of Orwell’s Winston Smith in the Ministry of Truth of “1984”. The world of Oceania, though, is not to the liking of most people, Asian or otherwise.

San Dieguito UHSD Superintendent Cheryl James-Ward in a local tv interview on April 23. 2022.

She’s gone, fired by the school board, and so are 1.7 million from the Democrat voter registration rolls, and many Arizona parents who now have the financial heft to escape the Borg’s monopoly. To borrow again from Lynyrd Skynyrd:

Oo-oo that smell
Can’t you smell that smell?
Oo-oo that smell
The smell of death’s around you

Bob Dylan got a whiff of the same smell and it drew him to the conclusion that the “The Times They Are A-Changin’”.

Lynyrd Skynyrd performing That Smell:

RogerG

Bibliography:

*AP story on the Democrat’s loss of 1.7 million voter registrations in the past year: https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-biden-covid-health-presidential-e50db07385831e67f866ec45402be8b9

*The story of Sand Diequito School District’s firing of Supt. Cheryl James-Ward: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/california-school-district-fires-superintendent-for-divisive-comments-about-asian-students/

*The story of Arizona’s expanded school choice plan: https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/arizona-passes-universal-school-choice-for-1-1-million-students/

June 27, 2022

A Mass Exodus from the Democrats’ America, Part II

May be an image of 2 people, car and road

Anecdote is proof of nothing but anecdote. So goes logic, but some anecdotes are more notable than others. I was informed by a friend of mine in California that their neighbor moved to a state in the South, a red state of course. I don’t know the reason but it does seem that more and more neighbors have fled the not-so-Golden State over the past few decades. A Washington Examiner editorial sheds more light on the glaringly obvious trend in states run by Democrats. Indeed, “A mass exodus from the Democrats’ America”.

I’ve previously written that California would have lost two to three congressmen after the 2020 census, instead of just the one, if the 2021 population numbers were included. There’s more. 15 of the 15 fastest-growing cities and towns are in states under Republican rule: Arizona, Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and Idaho. 14 of the 15 fastest-declining are in Democrat states. If we combine the 2020-2021 losses for San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, we’d have the population of Miami.

It really doesn’t matter if an individual jurisdiction has more of a Republican lean if it still resides in a state run by Democrats. You can’t avoid the political suffocation coming out of the state capital.

Draconian COVID restrictions of Democrat governors certainly acted as an accelerant for the flight. COVID brought out the inner totalitarian in the governing class of lefty progressives. We should have known the inner totalitarian would be unmasked since wokeness and progressivism are functionally synonymous, and the thuggishness has been on display for quite some time in the “cancellations” on campuses and everywhere else its acolytes hold sway. Giving these people power is an invitation to “cancellation” of basic liberty, and more refugees. Who wants to live and raise kids under that, the governing equivalent of North Korea?

Further, two Democrat states – Colorado and Washington State – fell off the growth list after COVID. Apparently, Democrat governance is toxic to growth. I guess that making your state repellant to its residents is one sure way to achieve the lefty dream of zero population growth.

Chris Stokes, left, and Angel Zickefoose ... — Two Colorado residents openly smoke marijuana during the 4/20 event (day to celebrate pot) at Civic Center Park on April 20, 2017 in Denver. In Colorado, marijuana was legalized for almost any use in 2012.

The California boom of the 1950’s and 60’s is over and is going in the opposite direction. Other states who followed California’s lead into radical lefty rule saw their booms of the 80’s/90’s/early 2000’s evaporate as well. The key to personal, family, and state well-being is NOT to be like California . . . and New York, Washington State, Colorado, Illinois, etc., etc. Biden, are you paying attention? Are the rest of you paying attention?

RogerG

June 19, 2022June 25, 2022

Why I am Opposed to Red Flag Laws

No, it’s not due to a view of the Second Amendment that claims the right of every American to own rapid-fire artillery. My opposition to red flag laws stems from government’s inbred incompetence. The more responsibilities are piled onto government, the more the ineptitude overwhelms. It’s the perfect storm for exploitation by sinister political actors. In the confusion, due process and equal application of the laws gets buried under prejudices and arbitrary and capricious actions. Oh, then add civil service protections and unionization for the hirelings in the people’s government and the people’s government quickly becomes a worker soviet. Get the picture?

As proof, and previously mentioned, Democrats demand expanded background checks for gun purchases when recent violations of the existing background checks seldom go to investigation, let alone charges. Also, state gun-enhancements in the commission of crimes get tossed out the window by progressive – read “soft on crime” – DA’s enthralled with “equity”, meaning racial proportionality, meaning the race-norming of the numbers on the docket so they don’t exceed the race’s 13% of the population. More succinctly, a form of criminal justice affirmative action is implemented to give “protected classes” a head start by discarding the weapons charges entirely. Either way, more embellished background checks, expanded rules and bans on difficult-to-define guns and their appurtenances, and new layers of regulations in red flag laws will not translate into safer communities. An already difficult task was made gargantuan for an already difficult-to-manage government workforce.

Stenographers and typists taking a civil service exam on July 9, 1936.

Don’t think for a moment that hiring more government workers will do the trick. More government workers won’t necessarily mean more work gets done. It’ll just create a larger worker soviet, as California has proven with the CSEA and CTA. It’s a state government of the public employee unions, by the public employee unions, and for the public employee unions. The word “capture” keeps coming to mind. There’s a reason for the California DMV, or CalTrans (the state transportation agency) for that matter, being a nationwide insult to efficiency.

Speaking of California, look at what they’ve done to their election laws. It’s more proof that more laws and an explosion in their attendant regulations means more . . . of a mess. While guns and voting are different arenas, if you fumble one, don’t expect a person in their right mind to give you unfettered access to the other. Chaotic elections give to us a clue about the fate of the Second Amendment.

Led by the mantra to “count every vote” and the rhetoric to fight “voter suppression” by the poohbahs of the one-party state, laws were passed that can only make your eyes roll. An election system is efficient if results are produced in a timely manner and come with the reasonable expectation that vote totals actually reflect legal, honest-to-God votes. Today, nothing can be further from the truth. In an earlier time, election results were frequently known hours after the polls closed. Only three-quarters of the votes were counted in LA’s June mayoral contest after 5 days.

Many things are awry in California’s election zoo. It’s a criminal act in the state for a poll worker to ask a person for ID. Yes, a criminal act! They’ve done this as they’ve made it exceedingly difficult to identify ballot misbehavior. To boot, ballots are shotgunned through the mail, a method famous for election shenanigans. My son, a recent California refugee, got two ballots for this June’s primary election: one from Sanders County, Mt., where he now lives, and one from California. The state mailed the absentee ballot to him at his Montana residence (?). He has a Montana driver’s license to prove it. You’d think that someone in the California county clerk’s office would notice. So much for that thought.

A worker bends over to move ballots from a drop box into gray bags as another worker loads bags into the back of a van — Workers from the Los Angeles County registrar’s office collect ballots from a drop box in Norwalk on Nov. 4. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

He has no inclination for vote fraud, but can we be certain about others, especially if the system is constructed to make it difficult to detect the chicanery? Remember, this is the party of bail funds for rioters, inciters of public incivility against their opponents, mobs to intimidate the administration of justice, and plotters with friends in the administrative state to hound a duly elected president from pre-election to the four years of post-election. Is this a party that would shrink from pushing the envelope on voting if they have a reasonable expectation of never being caught? If you’re naïve enough to think so, I have some Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment to sell you.

I can’t prove fraud, few can, because the system is designed to hide it. Ballots, after being scattered through the mail, are picked up by who-knows-who, taken behind closed doors to be marked by God-knows-who, and then collected in bulk by who-knows-who. California in 2016 made it a matter of law to sanction the “harvesting” of the vote. Uhhhh, what can go wrong?

In a brief moment of sanity, in a holiday from its usual display of Trump derangement syndrome, the LA Times in 2018 condemned the “overly-permissive ballot collection law”. The Times said the law opens “the door to coercion and fraud and should be fixed or repealed.” Precisely!

Voter registration with verified identity, eligibility, and address is made into a Keystone Cops’ comedy skit. Moter-voter – automatic voter registration at the DMV (driver’s license, vehicle registration) – makes a conduit for prohibited persons such as felons, the underaged, non-residents, and illegal immigrants (the “undocumented”). Unknowingly, or knowingly, they can get swept onto the voter rolls. Remember, the whole system is manned (or womanned, or whatever) by proud SEIU-protected state workers.

Federal law requires a regular clean-up of the rolls (removal of the ineligible, dead, inactive, or moved), something that California is notoriously delinquent. California hasn’t been removing “inactive” voters from the lists for 20 years, in spite of a Supreme Court reaffirmation of the requirement in 2019 (Husted v. Randolph Institute). The problem aggravated to such an extent that Judicial Watch forced a consent decree onto the state to fulfill federal law. It is being done in fits and starts or not at all.

Then, compound the problem: the provisional ballot morass allows a person to vote anywhere in the state, away from the precinct registration rolls, which puts more pressure on an election workforce not prone to efficiency to begin with. Don’t expect SEIU-protected underlings to be aficionados of signature analysis in obscure comparisons. When you add to the muddle the ballots allowed to arrive days after the election, it is no wonder election day in California turns into election month(s). And the results . . . ?

Can anyone have faith in California elections? Would you entrust the “the right to bear arms” to the California mentality of government, amply displayed in their crazy-quilt elections laws and regulations? If you are, I suppose that there is a larger clientele for Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment than I thought.

May be a cartoon

RogerG

Bibliography:

*Read John Fund’s piece on California’s election system here: https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/californias-crazy-vote-count-is-a-warning-to-other-states/

*The LA Times editorial against ballot harvesting can be found here: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-mail-ballots-harvesting-20171115-story.html

*For a full accounting of the public employee unions representing California state government workers, refer to here: https://lao.ca.gov/StateWorkforce/BargainingUnits