Pro-life demonstrators celebrate outside the United States Supreme Court as the court rules in the Dobbs v. Women’s Health Organization abortion case overturning Roe v. Wade in Washington, D.C., June 24, 2022. (Photo: Michael Mccoy/Reuters)
Journalism is a disgrace. Their job is to inform. They don’t. They have become a platform for their collective biases and prejudices, which are about as well-informed as the general public that they serve. Thus, when opinion polls are conducted on the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe, glaring contradictions stand out in public perceptions of Roe, Dobbs, and abortion. We may as well disregard the polls except as proof of the press’s dereliction of duty.
Take the recent Harvard-Harris poll after the announcement of the Dobbs decision. We certainly can hold two ideas in our heads at the same time, but what if they are contradictions? In the Harvard-Harris poll, 55% opposed the overturning of Roe, yet 72% would limit abortion to 15 weeks. So, they want abortion possibly up to birth which is the essence of Roe and the later Casey decision, but then say that they don’t. Go ahead, try to square that circle.
Let’s further pick apart Roe and Casey and Dobbs and the poll. Roe has a “health of the mother” standard wrapped into a trimester scheme. Casey replaced that concoction with an admonition against placing an “undue burden” on a woman’s choice. Either way, there’s enough room to authorize abortion at birth. That’s Roe/Casey, and where 55% are. . . until they aren’t.
Then we have Dobbs. It affirmed the constitutionality of the Mississippi law that allowed abortion up to 15 weeks, where 72% of the public stands. 55% or 72%, which is it?
The American press, what a mess, what an embarrassment.
RogerG
*The Harvard-Harris poll here: https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/HHP_June2022_KeyResults.pdf
*More on the poll in Charles Cooke’s column here: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/harvard-harris-americans-dont-know-what-roe-did/
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.
July 4th fireworks over the Jefferson Memorial in DC
The United States is a credal nation, a creed that we haven’t always lived up to, but what nation ever has? The creed of liberty is a high bar, a perfection that blemished human beings may never fully achieve. But it’s the striving that counts.
Liberty is not the sole possession of any one race, ethnicity, or gender. It’s a universal moral aspiration as shown by the waves of humanity risking life and limb to get here. The fact that our nation more than any other has a decent sense of liberty as its North Star welcomes all who wish to follow our laws in getting here. We are not a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of liberty-loving human beings.
We must remind ourselves that liberty is not license. Liberty without morals is like faith without works. It’s dead! Today, we run the risk of liberty becoming license, and the securing of the blessings of liberty is under assault by a noxious ideology that pits one group of Americans against another. We must resist this infection from the 19th and 20th centuries that undermines the blessings that have attracted millions. Americans beware of false mental idols that incite incessant group warfare. Every generation has its challenge. That’s today’s challenge.
God bless America.
I couldn’t settle on one rendition of Irving Berlin’s classic, originally composed in 1918. Here’s Kate Smith with a stirring performance from World War II.
To all, the video of Cheryl James-Ward exhibiting her woke approach in managing the district has been removed by the uploader according to YouTube. Sad. I once thought that transparency, the necessary quality of democratic-republics for the public to know what their paid public servants are up to, was still held to be a good thing. Not any longer. We’re back to the veil of secrecy.
Here’s a local tv station’s report on the controversy which includes the redacted video. Parents attended a school board meeting to call for the firing of Supt. Cheryl James-Ward. There’s more than one way to get around the censors.
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 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/
Pro-life demonstrators at the Supreme Court in Washington, June 15, 2022. (CNS photo/Tyler Orsburn)
Well, the Supreme Court finally reversed the silly, convoluted jurisprudence of Roe/Bolton/Casey. The claptrap joined the ash heap of history with the Dred Scott decision, fascism, the USSR, and disco fashions. Or has it, and they? These things are the closest to vampires that reality has produced. They never really die.
And corporate America is in a fever over Dobbs. Many have instantly proclaimed their Planned Parenthood bona fides. Tucker Carlson of the Fox News commentariat puts the blame on corporate greed: corporations hate families because they get in the way of the wage slaves’ total commitment to the firm. Besides sounding like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and The Squad, he is as wrong as they are. The c-suite may be ambivalent about marriage and kids, but their wokeness has been evident for years. Remember their real and metaphorical kneeling after George Floyd, their donations to BLM Inc., their growing tendency to funnel streams of cash to the Democratic Party, Zuckerbucks, their support for woke indoctrination, and their campaigns against election integrity laws? It could be the equivalent of political ransom money pioneered by the Mob and Jesse Jackson, but I doubt it. There appears to be not a scintilla of worry over a backlash from at least half the country. Where’s the greed interest in that, unless the corporate mavens are completely unaware?
uckerbucks: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, an organization led by Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla, gave more than $400 million to nonprofit groups involved in “securing” the 2020 election. Most of the money went to left wing groups.
These latest unvarnished declarations on the Dobbs decision are rooted in something else. The explanation can be found in the fact the c-suite has more in common with the college faculty lounge than the lives of everyone underneath their self-declared status level. Indeed, they aren’t likely to be aware of a different and prevalent perspective because they never see anyone with one. Charles Murray has written extensively on the “super zips” and their increasing self-isolation from the rest of the country. For the denizens of the super zips (as in super-wealthy zip codes), mostly metropolitan, the ladies of The View reflect a national consensus. To put it bluntly, the c-suite is as cocooned as the Duchess of Sussex (Meghan Markle).
How else can one explain the lurch of Disney to protest laws that protect 7-year-olds from sexualized instruction in the rudiments of gay sex? The Mouse and sodomy? It’s jaw-dropping . . . unless one’s social universe is limited to conversations populated with progressive clichés.
How else to explain Delta and American Airlines, Coca-Cola, MLB, and a raft of others opposing wildly popular laws that do nothing but protect elections from fraud? What’s wrong with measures that ensure a vote of the people is actually a vote of the people? In the cloistered world of high-end gated communities, elite prep schools, the Ivy League, and business-class air travel, the air is thick in unchallenged lefty banalities.
So, Dobbs is seen in the silk-stocking enclaves as just another revolt of the rubes, people whose crudity in the eyes of their “betters” discounts their opinions. These aristocratic prejudices emanate from stupidity immersed in ignorance. Their social isolation leads the c-suite into minefields.
Thus, following the mental script of their isolated social world, ending a pregnancy isn’t much different from removing a hang nail. If their employees want to end the life of the baby within, Disney pledges to foot the employee’s bill for abortion shopping around the country.
Speaking of shopping, depending on the consumer’s choice, never before has the purchase of goods and services been so closely tied to something two-thirds of the American public finds abhorrent. A trip to Disney World now constitutes an unwitting consumer subsidy of abortion. How could a good Catholic ever again by a ticket to the Magic Kingdom for their kids? The parishioner would be compromised in taking communion.
The progressive activism doesn’t end with Disney. Paramount, Meta, Warner Bros., and Netflix announced their abortion subsidy. Uber, Lyft, and Apple are likely to follow suit.
Dick’s Sporting Goods earlier joined the “assault weapon” crusade. Now, they expressed their financial fealty to employee abortions. Think about that when shopping for Little League equipment. If they get their way, future Little Leagues would be a lot smaller. One would think that a different tack would do better to fatten the bottom line.
Amazon is fully onboard to the tune of $4,000 in travel expenses for an employee to find an abortionist or mutilate their bodies in sex-change therapies and surgeries. The progressive-industrial-complex is brought to you by the costumers of Amazon, Citibank, Uber, and the complex’s abettors in the related entertainment-industrial-complex. All of them managed by mentalities from out-of-touch secular monasteries.
Dobbs vs. corporate America is essentially flyover country vs. corporate America.
A rioter clad in the black of Antifa raises his fist during the August 2020 riots in Portland. (photo: Nathan Howard, Getty Images)
“God made the angels to show Him splendor, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind.” – Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons”.
Paul Scofield as Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons”
Sir Thomas More in the movie was correct. The witty tangle in our heads exists, but the congeries of thoughts, memories, emotions, and facts can generate ideas that can redound to mankind’s credit or condemnation.
Gosh, our present age is amply illustrative of the tangle gone wildly astray. Ideas, oh, those ideas, of the destruction of moral standards that led an 18-year-old to storm into a classroom to kill 19 10-year-olds and 2 teachers. Personal grievance cancels human life. A community’s historical memory is erased by mobs who are angered by the fact that the past doesn’t match the climate of opinion in a college ASB. Defacement of cherished memorials ensued. Waves of crime, violence, riots, and general disorder have turned many urban areas into wastelands that would stretch the imagination of sci-fi writers. The facts of biology are said to play second fiddle to the fancies in our mind. Chromosomes are made irrelevant by chemical and surgical interventions. Thus, a mockery is made of girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports. Blatant, revolutionary indoctrination is openly disseminated to the very young in their classrooms and is heartily embraced in corporate boardrooms. The laws of economics take a back seat to highly contestable utopian visions as expressed in climate-change ideology and coerced group equality. Fuel costs skyrocket; broad inflation is unleashed; supply chains break; shortages appear; livelihoods are threatened; the work ethic is weakened; and depopulation continues apace as fertility rates plummet and pews become vacant. Get the picture?
World fertility rate
Something is at work. It’s ideas that emanate from the tangle in one person’s mind and enters the tangle of another. Frequently, if history is any guide, the results aren’t pretty.
These thoughts came to me from a reading of “Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography” by Julian Young (2010 ed.) and a subsequent viewing of Stanley Kramer’s “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961).
The one is an account of high-minded philosophy and the other is about the vile ends that philosophical ideas can be put. Nothing like the Holocaust, the underlying subject of “Judgment at Nuremberg”, was the intention of Nietzsche in his late 19th century writings. Nonetheless, the Holocaust happened, and Nazi belief was scented with Nietzsche’s ideas: the will to power, the Supermen, his aristocratic radicalism, the need to be hard, the grotesque eugenics, the rejection of Christianity’s “slave” morality, a monolithic ideology supposedly promoting “community health”, and the condemnation of democracy and pluralistic societies, referring to them as “motley cows”. It’s all there in Nietzsche’s published musings.
Elizabeth Froster-Nietzsche, sister of Friedrich Nietzsche, who preserved his legacy as her life’s mission, joyfully receiving Adolf Hitler who honored Nietzsche for his contributions to Nazi belief.
The lesson: a person can control what they write; they can’t control how others use what they wrote.
The whole of the twentieth century into this new one is a museum of the evil that men and women can do . . . from the tangle of their minds. The demeaning of standards and the institutions that buttress them is the primary culprit. Revolutionary dogmas – communism, fascism, CRT, transgenderism – were, and are, the excuse to replace the old social fabric with these new (relatively speaking) shiny objects of the mind.
“A Judgment at Nuremberg” put on display only one consequence – Nazism and its Holocaust – while ignoring its competitor, communism. It was easy to do. Invading armies into Germany produced ample eye witnesses as they came upon the scenes when the ovens were still warm and the gas chambers had yet to be demolished, something not true for the victims of Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union – and to think that they were our allies (!?). We only had the writings of Solzhenitsyn and a few others to chronicle the horrors of Marxism: Katyn, Kurapaty Forest, 30,000 gulags, the unrestrained secret police, show trials, mass executions, state-manufactured famines. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then experiencing it with your own eyes, nose, ears, and hands is worth a thousand pictures.
Soviet NKVD officer executing a Polish soldier and prisoner
Don’t think for a moment that the horrors arising from the tangle of our minds are only matters for the history books. The dialectics of Nazism and Marxism are present in our time’s woke brigades. Yes, dialectics: the alleged truth that everything boils down to open and hidden coercion – the “system” so to speak – of people into the categories of the oppressed and oppressors. Merit and free will have no role. Group guilt dominates all. It’s the pith and marrow of critical legal theory in law and critical race theory for everything else in public policy. It shows in your child’s school in the forms of teacher training, curriculum, textbooks, and school management. It shows in banal euphemisms such as “equity” which then bleeds into nearly everything that government does.
Much of our lives are to be turned upside down to fit someone’s incoherent abstraction. In the end, we are guided down the well-traveled road to societal decay, to places occupied by the likes of the USSR, North Korea, the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia, Xi’s surveillance-and-gulag state, Castro’s Cuba, and Maduro’s Venezuela.
It’s great for the high priesthood of the woke for they’ll get rich as they feed on the rotting social corpse.
Ibram X. Kendi, high priest of CRT
For the rest of us, welcome to the Middle Ages. See, the tangle of the mind can be made to pay, even as it destroys.
RogerG
*Also in my Substack feed, “The Golden Mean”, at rogerlgraf.substack.com/.
Recalled San Francisco DA Chesa BoudinSan Francisco poop map
Early morning Wednesday (6/8/22), a California man was arrested with weaponry and break-in tools to assault Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his home. Surprised?
Tuesday (6/7/22), San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin was recalled (i.e., removed from office) by a vote of the people in the city. Much of the city’s disorder, filth, and crime wave was attributed to him and his platform of “restorative justice” and “ending the carceral state”, which meant that he claimed the power to pick the laws that he was going to enforce and not enforce, and how.
What do these two incidents have in common? Both of them are indications of the lawlessness of the Left and its institutional avatar, the Democratic Party.
Lawlessness doesn’t stop at Boudin or a failed assassin. We’ve known for quite some time that public tirades by public figures purposefully instigate the unhinged. They’re invitations to lawlessness. Maxine Waters, Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, and others of the donkey party’s hierarchy have incited campaigns of intimidation of those who disagree with them. No wonder that in 2017 a Bernie Sanders supporter, James T. Hodgkinson, marched onto an Alexandria, Va., baseball field and shot five Republican congressmen. No wonder that Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mitch McConnell, and Ted Cruz couldn’t enjoy a family meal at a DC area restaurant without facing a mob’s verbal fulminations. No wonder that 2020 would be known as The Year of Living Dangerously when America’s urban centers were turned into stage sets for Escape from New York or Escape from Los Angeles (to continue the movie metaphor). And Brett Kavanaugh was targeted by an assassin for daring to think that abortion is a matter for the states and not DC potentates.
Nicholas John Roske (l) arrested for preparing to assault Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his home.
Ironically, and quite a hoot as well, it’s the Democrats who are blindly wedded to the idea of law as cure-all. Think about it: have poverty, pass a law to spend money. Have school problems, pass a law to spray more money their way. Have “gun violence”, pass a law. And problem solved, or so they think. Though, it must be admitted, they’re great about spending money but not so great about enforcement. So, we end up with inflation, bloated budgets, and a breakdown of civilization.
Take their response to the Uvalde shooting. They trot out their prepackaged, 30-year-old talking points. It’s chock full of the same gun bans, regulations, and onslaughts on business. For them, it’s a simple matter of passing a law and then meeting after work for libations. Their great for “universal background checks”, for instance, but violations of the existing checks are rarely prosecuted. I suspect that it’s because either prosecutions would create more serious injustices – which says a lot about the inherent wisdom of the law – or a good chunk of the perps don’t fit the preferred profile: too many “people of color”, too few people without color.
A 2017 GAO report on the status of the federal government’s background check system found massive non-enforcement. Of the 112,000 documented cases of prohibited buyers stopped by the system, only 12,700 were even investigated, and of that number, 12 were prosecuted. Pass a law, spend money to set up the system, hire the personnel, and then don’t bring the miscreants to court. Surely, there must be more than 12 of the 112,000 deserving of a date before a judge.
Law without enforcement is no law at all. There exists a law that bans intimidation in the administration of justice, like what is happening on the sidewalks and streets outside the homes of six Supreme Court justices. The use of anything but the law in the provision of justice is expressly banned in 18 U.S. Code, Section 1507. Unlike most of the 1,000-plus-page gibberish that frequently emanates out of the Democratic caucus, this law is unmistakably clear:
“Whoever, with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty, pickets or parades in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer, or with such intent uses any sound-truck or similar device or resorts to any other demonstration in or near any such building or residence, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”
For the constitutionally dense, 1507 is the statutory means to implement the Constitution’s equal protection and due process clauses. Look them up. Nowhere do public demonstrations have a role in their application.
Why does AG Garland refuse to enforce 1507? Simple, it’s politics. The Dems demand a particular result in an abortion case before the Court and are willing to turn a blind eye to the law. In effect, 18 U.S. Code, Section 1507 just disappeared from the federal code. It’s been relegated to the same purgatory where you’ll find many federal, state, and local provisions on rioting, public indecency, theft, burglary, assault and battery, sentencing guidelines and laws, etc., etc. Garland and local DA’s like George Gascon and Chesa Boudin see themselves as mini-legislatures to make and unmake statute as they please. It’s grotesque, and so are our streets and public spaces.
Lawlessness appears to be a key Democratic Party doctrine.
RogerG
*Read Kevin D. Williamson’s excellent piece on the federal background check system.
A prayer circle at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Tx., on the day of the shooting.
The Uvalde elementary school shooting has sparked another public discussion riddled with confusion, hyperbole, and banal talking points. Frothing out of talk shows, the mouths of publicity hounds, and the speeches on the floors of Congress come the same stale rhetoric and empty gestures that will do absolutely nothing to stop sociopaths from shooting into crowds of adults or kids. The problem is what it has always been: unhinged people looking for soft targets.
First, the confusing rhetoric. A favorite among demagogues seeking to exploit horrible incidences for partisan advantage is “weapons of war”. They go right from the analogy of machine guns, real weapons of war, to the semi-auto rifles available for sale in a civilian gun store. The guns in the store look like the kind used on the battlefield of Iraq and Afghanistan but aren’t. They are as semi-auto, and not full auto, as my scoped semi-auto Remington 742 rifle. The 742 looks like deer rifle in one’s imagination.
Remington 742 Woodsmaster, semi-autoThe so-called “weapon of war”: AR-15 in a gun store, semi-auto.
They both operate the same and the bullet exits the barrel at the same frequency. So, the argument pivots on cosmetics. That’s right, ban a gun for its appearance but watch the same gun appear later absent the looks (pistol grip, banana clip, and with a different stock). It’s ridiculous. This is what happens when public policy is left to the firearm illiterate.
Next, the idea of red flag or stop orders that is being tossed around. These orders allow DA’s and judges to confiscate guns for cause. The problem with the idea is the great variability in implementation and enforcement. A Texas DA is likely to be a far cry in implementation from Joe Biden’s Justice Department, San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin, or LA’s George Gascon. In the former, a measured enforcement; in the other, the enticing opportunity to eradicate the Second Amendment. We’ve all seen what the latter has done to the enforcement of immigration law and a host of crimes below rape and murder. They execute the law as they wish.
A sensible middle ground might be an enhanced insta-check system, with updated, improved, and expanded criteria for denials. But, as above, it is only as good as the people administering it.
The “weapons of war” nonsense does nothing to enhance understanding. Red flag systems are ripe for abuse by the soapbox orator in the DA’s office. Even the middle ground only applies to new gun purchases. That leaves a big, huge gaping hole in the security of our kids: many of our schools are glaring soft targets, which means non-existent or too few good people with guns on the school grounds to stop bad people with guns. If you want to protect the kids, immediately harden your soft targets with many good people with guns. It’s the one thing that’ll make a difference.
No more soft targets, and leave the rest of the gun debate for another day.
In a previous post, I complained of the embarrassingly poor quality of our current elites, calling them dunces. The latest gathering at the World Economic Forum in Davos is proving the point. Their prattle was full of advocacy for a distasteful future. Snooping from outside and within our bodies, lifestyle controls in minute detail, living on less, and an overall abysmal existence, while calling it progress, were an important part of the gaseous blather. Of course, don’t expect these people to relinquish their private jets, mansions, and second-home paradises.
La Rochefoucauld once said that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. I rework the aphorism for the present moment: hypocrisy’s tribute is actually the price the rest of us must pay for living their conscience.
Absurdities rolled off their tongues in an endless parade at Davos. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, in glorious rapture, spoke of swallowing pills with chips to alert God-knows-who about what passes through our digestive tract. The complete lack of self-awareness was astounding.
Indeed, an absence of self-awareness is at epidemic levels among these plutocrats. China’s multinational Alibaba Group president J. Michael Evans talked of an “individual carbon footprint tracker” to monitor everything from our kitchen cupboards to our travels to the multiplex. Stalin would be proud. Xi is beaming.
That grand eminence, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, was gushing in his praise of artificial intelligence as a “co-pilot of every cognitive task”. Is he so certain that it will make us better or just more controllable? The possibilities are endless in the campaign to eradicate the next class of kulaks, or the Joes and Jennies who love RV’s.
The luminaries at Davos preened each other with prognostications of growing veganism and the eradication of borders. The sanctification of German industrialist Klaus Schwab as the patron saint of the Great Reset – which is a Soviet Gosplan for our future – proceeded apace. Make no mistake about it, this is a totalitarianism of smiley faces in expensive suits.
They are billing themselves as Plato’s philosopher kings, but are proving to be the latest gaggle of fat cats with an unbounded yearning to be taken seriously on matters beyond their ken. Every time that they gather and open their mouths, they are proving that they don’t deserve it. Please, go back to your c-suites and do what you do best: make oodles of cash for spreading prosperity. Prosperity isn’t a dirty word. Drop the hectoring nanny routine.
