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Just Saw it, Just Blew It

The Nike ad.

I just saw the full Nike ad on Thursday Night Football. It was repeated in college football broadcasts Saturday. It was a seemingly innocuous message mostly in homage to the “marginalized”, replete with a girl boxer wearing the mandatory hijab — I don’t know how that squares with the early feminist sacramental act of bra-burning. The whole kaleidoscope was emceed by a resurrected Kaepernick, the guy who soiled himself by soiling the flag. The message was never to be dissuaded from your “dreams”, an adolescent primal scream without an inkling of mature judgment if there ever was one.

Honor goes to Michael Ramirez for his capture of the ludicrous spectacle in a single image. Here it is:

RogerG

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Just Do It, Even if “It” Means Desecration of Our Country

 

Once again, many American citizens can’t avert being affronted doing something as simple as going to the store to buy a pair of running shoes. Nike has given a paycheck to a person whose claim to fame is using the national anthem as the opportunity to express his radical social views. A NFL fan had to put up with it during the 2017 season and now Nike, with Kaepernick unemployed, has hired him to peddle their wares. Nike has the freedom to hire him; Kaepernick has the freedom to push his babble; and I have the freedom not to subsidize his extremist views. I’ll refuse to participate by steering clear of the “swoosh”.

Oh how muddled is the thinking of some. George Takei of Star Trek fame tweeted the rubbish, “Protest is patriotic”, during Kaepernick’s 2017 kneeling crusade – a takeoff of the old mental kabuki, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism”. The saying has no provable author, but the left from Howard Zinn to the 60’s neo-socialist SDS have tried to attribute it to Jefferson – wrongly – or exploit it to justify spitting on returning Vietnam vets.

If Nike thinks nobility lies in hawking Kaepernick, they are mistaken. No, dissent isn’t the highest form of patriotism. Follow the logic. If dissent is patriotic, treason is the highest form of dissent, and, therefore, treason must be the highest form of patriotism (Thanks Jonah Goldberg for the witticism). George, it’s called a syllogism. Now we’re in the land of Timothy Leary and psychedelics.

Soiling the flag and anthem while forcing others to bear the spectacle is an unhealthy way to run a league or shoe company. Nike can burnish indecency as decency and Americans can avoid the corruption by staying away. Shame on you, Nike.

RogerG

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Trade War: Trump Gets It and Doesn’t Get It

I’ve been watching the trade war talk heat up as our president pursues something mystically called “fair” trade. I’m all in favor of free and fair trade. Furthermore, I agree with the president that trade deals should be “reciprocal”. But, in a sense, on trade, Trump gets it and doesn’t get it.

Certainly, the broad general benefits of our free trade agreements are real. Yet, those very real gains aren’t evenly distributed. The negative repercussions seem to be concentrated in the industrial middle part of the country. Even though, to be honest, the problem had been building long before NAFTA and WTO. It’s the coastal urban financial centers, though, who have garnered most of the dough. That’s the “gets it” part, if we can construe his comments to be some roundabout recognition of free trade’s spotty effects.

FILE – In this Dec. 11, 2008 file photo, pedestrians walk by the abandoned Packard plant in Detroit. Dominic Cristini, who claims ownership of the Packard plant through Bioresource Inc., is awaiting demolition permits. He says he wants to start demolition within a month. He estimates it will cost $6 million to raze the plant. The plant closed in the mid 1950s. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File)

As for the “doesn’t get it” part, he talks about $500 billion trade deficits as if the money is lost from our country. Really? No, it isn’t lost. For instance, China gets dollars for its exports to us. What are they going to do with the dollars? They can’t use them as currency in China or any other foreign country for that matter. They have to either spend them in the US or park the dollars in US financial assets. I suppose that they could hunt around on the international money markets to unload them but that just shifts the problem to somebody else. No, Mr. President, the money isn’t lost from us. Really, the things never left.

Now, here’s where it gets tricky. Most of the dollars end up in our financial centers. Read: mostly our coastal urban cores and Chicago. This does much to explain the bull market in California coastal real estate despite its Venezuela-type government. Trendy blue dots, with their lefty culture in tow, prosper.

Trendy Laguna Beach, Ca.

Ironically, as recent events will attest, free international markets end up feeding the places that are busy destroying them. The dem-socialist darling of the Dem Party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, could only get elected in one of those pampered locales.

She’s proof that an economics degree did her no more good than Trump’s self-taught trade “wisdom” did for him. It’s the age of gibberish.

RogerG

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2016 Hayseed Racists? NO!

I’ve been reading Salena Zito and Brad Todd’s The Great Revolt, an exegesis of the 2016 election. Villification of one’s opponents after the shocking loss has reached new heights, enough to obscure the reality. Tune into the halfwit but snarky late-night comedians and you’ll get a flavor of it.

The authors Brad Todd (c) and Salena Zito (r) on C-SPAN Book TV.

No, the voters opposing Hillary cannot be reduced to rural bigots left behind by “progress”. Many other things were at root to explain Trump’s winning coalition: condescension, social and political bias, and too many deaf ears in too many places of cultural authority. Those places correspond to urban and academic dots, socio-political monasteries walled off into insular echo chambers. The roiling in the backcountry therefore came as a shock to those comfortably nestled behind the walls – which means most everybody in the dots, or mentally influenced by the dots.

The book dispels these real urban myths with a grand survey of Trump voters and a series of vignettes in locales that flipped 15-30 points from solidly Democrat to Trump in the rust belt. In a nutshell, they were so fed up with the long-running disparagement that not even Trump’s boorishness would slacken their momentum to the polls.

Main Street, USA, the epicenter of the Great Revolt.

Main Street rebelled against the Acela corridor, the left coast, intense urban clusters, and the disconnected college campus. Zito and Todd make abundantly clear it was a revolt and not a Klan march. Many Obama voters became Trump voters and the rest is history.

RogerG

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A Chance Meeting and Not Connecting the Dots, 5/26/2018

An accidental meeting on a forest road with a semi-Californian/Montanan – he spends his winters in California (understandable) – showcases much that has gone astray in the America of today. Our biggest threat doesn’t arise from material circumstances but from what rolls around in our heads. Occupying the synapses are an excess of unexamined assumptions and the crazes that they feed.

Let me explain. While riding our ATV’s through the forests near our property, my wife and I came upon a man on a motor-bike. Pleasantries and friendly conversation arose. It turns out that the man haled from Redding, Ca. He had few nice things to say about the winters and complained of the shrinking longevity of restaurants in the area. I mentioned that we had lost our appetite for our native state after one of many recent visits. Prohibitions, high prices, and petty annoyances – the plastic bag carousels are empty at the stores for instance – have soured us.

He complained about the plastic litter in a feeble defense of the ban. I don’t think that he, and many others, connected the dots between the propensity for prohibition and the new feudalism that is taking shape in the so-called golden state. Many off-the-cuff reactions to a hypothetical evil produce unexpected effects. Too much plastic bag litter? Ban them. Too many poor people? Tax the rich. Don’t like carbon? Command people to put solar panels on their roofs or punish them with high utility bills – or both. Don’t like suburbia? Strangle it in a maze of land-use controls. The only problem is: growth suffocates; the middle-class flees; and the cost of living inflates. The result is a new feudalism of the hyper-rich in their manorial enclaves surrounded by a growing low-wage servant class.

As for the limited restaurants in our area, our friend showed no acknowledgement of rudimentary cause-and-effect. Enterprise has been suffering in industrial and rural America for quite some time. Take away the primary industries – mining and lumbering in our case – in those places dependent on them and poverty, meth use, and social chaos erupts. Tourism is a very poor substitute.

Many of these ruminations were kept to myself. He did say that he didn’t like mining for its scarring of the land. I responded with the obvious: without it, he and I wouldn’t be on our vehicles. He dismissed the claim with a cursory, “I’ll buy it from China”.

There you have it. Don’t think of employing our own people; export our wish-fulfillment to foreign lands; and don’t give a second thought about the repercussions. As long as the consequences are invisible to us, and we remain ensconced in our comfortable illusions, all is right with the world. Right?

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” Luke 23:34

RogerG

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The Free State of … San Bernadino

US President Donald Trump makes remarks at a roundtable meeting on sanctuary cities May 16, 2018, in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington, DC. Orange County Supervisor Michelle Steel is 3rd from left.(Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)

From 1864 to 1865, Jones County, Mississippi, and its immediate environs were in open revolt against the Confederate state of Mississippi and its governor, Charles Clark – a Democrat by the way. The so-called “Free State of Jones”. Numerous state officials were assaulted and harassed, some probably killed. Clearly, this was a pro-union constituency. Project forward to May 16, 2018 and a meeting of disgruntled California local leaders with President Trump. A parallel anyone?

Some firebrands of the left – who rule the roost in California – are as incensed about federal immigration law as the South was about abolitionism and tariffs. They have made cooperation with ICE the equivalent of assisting child porn traffickers. What’s next, an act of secession?

Well, some in the state are having none of it. They have approached the president, as surely as some in 1864 Jones County would relish a confab with Lincoln.

History seldom repeats, but it does rhyme. (Reputedly stated by Mark Twain)

RogerG

* See “Orange County, Inland Empire leaders talk immigration with Trump in White House”, Roxana Kopetman, Orange County Register, 5/17/2018, https://www.pe.com/2018/05/16/trump-meeting-today-with-leaders-from-orange-county-inland-empire/

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Happy Mother’s Day, 2018

If we can’t celebrate our moms on a special day for her, how can we, in good conscience, show deep and personal gratitude to anyone? A she – with the momentary assistance of a he – brought us into the world. In an age when women are pressured to stretch themselves thin by being a master of the universe, motherhood still makes all those other competing roles fade to insignificance. Literally, my very existence came from her. I thank God every day for having had my mom.

It’s time to resurrect motherhood in this era of declining birth rates and turmoil over marriage and genders. Mom, dad, and home need some burnishing, now more than ever. We can start by resurrecting the writings of Phyllis McGinley.

“Women are the fulfilled sex. Through our children we are able to produce our own immortality, so we lack that divine restlessness which sends men charging off in pursuit of fortune or fame or an imagined Utopia . . . the wholesome oyster wears no pearl, the healthy whale no ambergris, and as long as we can keep on adding to the race, we harbor a sort of health within ourselves.”

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms.

RogerG

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#REDFORED = #RESIST

Teachers rally outside the state Capitol for the second day of a teacher walkout to demand higher pay and more funding for education in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, April 3, 2018. Reuters

The recent teacher strikes – mostly in “red” (i.e., Conservative) states – are intriguing. What started out as a cause to boost the pay of truly underpaid teachers in West Virginia has metastasized into Occupy Wall Street, something under the rubric #redfored. In truth, I think that the lefty hive is being ginned up as the Supreme Court deliberates its decision in Janus vs. AFSCME. If Janus wins, the cushy power relationships of public employee unions will be deflated. But here’s the big scoop from the ruckus: government unions are lefty enterprises.

PHOENIX, AZ – APRIL 26: Arizona teachers chant in support of the #REDforED movement as they walk through downtown Phoenix on their way to the State Capitol on April 26, 2018 in Phoenix, Arizona.  (Photo by Ralph Freso/Getty Images)

It’s a familiar script. Trump gets elected and hyperventilation replaces deliberation – mostly on the left but also in some extreme precincts on the right. The swarming extends everywhere the left has a stranglehold. The only surprise to me is the length of time it took for the education blob to catch on.

What has the adoption of California-style taxes to do with teacher pocketbook issues? Clearly, for the firebrands, simply raising pay is too vanilla. The slogan is bloated to include lefty planks like the adoption of the progressive tax nightmare and dolloping layers of bureaucracy on the schools. Poor pay was simply the vehicle to swarm the hive and cloak the wolf in a pleasant disguise.

Well, it took some time but the genus Ovis aries (sheep) costume was outed. Now the “#redfored” is no different from “#resist”, “Bernie Sanders for president”, or Occupy … [fill in the blank].

RogerG

* Check out “Teacher strikes morph from pocketbook clash to partisan street theater”, Frederick M. Hess, Education Next, AEI, 5/8/2018,  http://www.aei.org/publication/teacher-strikes-morph-from-pocketbook-clash-to-partisan-street-theater/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT0RjM1pERXhabUZsWVRBNSIsInQiOiJzeFpQdkVWblBGaExlMGhtQnFwTFB4dEd4VmlDbFBxYWdZSVF5QXJoQVVzNDdYK3J3bDNEb0xycDBHT2dJOWUzVGI5Rjh1QTdIOU9mMWhDYllmWWFodVpneWxPNXhWSUo5T0VtWGZsK3BGSGtIV2ordDBHM0ZqcVhiVUxvSnhyYiJ9

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Equality Run Amok

International Women’s Day protest march in Sydney, March 2017.

I can’t help noticing it. One of the crazes of our times is the attempt to force equality in almost all its guises, a hell-bent exercise in the ludicrous and insane. While flitting about online this morning, even as I was booting up, the Windows 10 startup pic was graffitied with reminders of female underrepresentation in technology and inventions. And, of course, they announce what Microsoft is doing to even the score … as if “underrepresentation” was enough to embark on a major campaign to redirect the company’s resources. The tendentiousness of it is astounding.

And this coming on the heels of reading Heather McDonald’s speech at Hillsdale College in “Imprimis”.* Her thesis is the danger of “#MeToo” morphing into a jihad (my words). She recounts the orchestrated shaming that would make the Khmer Rouge proud. In America’s boardrooms, professional associations, and cultural centers, the suits are running to the hills with proclamations of their own efforts to even the score.

Heather McDonald of the Manhattan Institute.

Click on the link on the wallpaper and you’re sent to Microsoft’s “#MakeWhatsNext Patent Program” site. Hiding beneath the surface of these “programs” is a false premise: We are all the same and chromosomes are completely irrelevant. For these commissars, chromosomes should be put on a par with melanin. They assert that what is true for skin tone must be true for chromosomal development from blastocyte on. Really!

And to think that none of this matters to those caught up in the craze. Put your mind to imagining the consequences when a country tries to live a lie. No good will come of it.

Stress, anxiety, and chronic dissatisfaction may await as some women torture themselves to live a lie.

RogerG

* Please read “The Negative Impact of the #MeToo Movement”, Heather McDonald, Imprimis, April 2018, https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/the-negative-impact-of-the-metoo-movement/?appeal_code=MK418EM15&utm_campaign=imprimis&utm_source=housefile&utm_medium=email&utm_content=april_2018_metoo&_hsenc=p2ANqtz–nx1IRYEsOfVpXhXSv_00N_BJDcN0RdDFM962GZJdXztH6TfJuTDMLRifXm7zued-LhNvNqUTlHHNRgIb5FxjnDohB4Q&_hsmi=62504373

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Our Failing Schools and the Second Amendment

The wake of the Parkland school shooting brought to mind a little-known incident from my teaching days (retired in 2015). As the Social Science Department chair in my high school, and with the responsibility for making requests for new and updated textbooks, I noticed a subtle change in one commonly available supplemental and historical document: the English Bill of Rights. An older version of the piece included the following clause: “That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence [sic] suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law”. The newer form of the document had it removed. Why? I was suspicious then and still am.

The English Bill of Rights of 1689.

I have always understood the opposition to the Second Amendment to be part ideological and part cultural – maybe mostly cultural. I suspected that a bias due to the ascendancy of the values and beliefs of a narrow subset of our population was at work, for the most part.

An eatery in NYC’s Greenwich Village neighborhood.

Putting the best face on the item’s exclusion, the abridging of the document caused the publishers (Holt McDougal) to weed out those things considered less important. Still, though, that’s just a roundabout way to knowingly or unknowingly display the same prejudice.

Children will go through life not understanding the full connection of the English experience and our Constitutional legacy, particularly the parts that are embarrassing to our self-anointed cultural potentates. The result is profound ignorance about our most cherished natural rights, and the susceptibility to end up like David Hogg (made famous by the Parkland shooting) and other young and eager enthusiasts for gun control.

David Hogg at the March for Our Lives this past March 2018.

Let’s set the record the straight: (1) the “militia” was all able-bodied men with the expectation that they be privately armed, and correspondingly not an organ of the government but part of civil society; (2) the English Civil War was as much a religious as political affair; (3) Charles I, in an attempt to squash religious and political dissent, called out the militia with their best private weapons and then quickly disarmed them; (4) privately-owned weapons were long held to be an inherent right of Englishmen for defense from threats to personal safety and tyranny; and (5) a great majority of the people who originally settled here carried this legacy with them to the new world. The right to bear arms is clearly an individual right – indeed, a “natural right” – as based on the words’ clear meaning to the amendment’s authors and the history leading up to its inclusion in our Constitution.

Modern reenactor of a 17th century English militiaman.
Pre-revolution Virginian militiaman.

It’s a lesson increasingly lost on successive generations brought up on the progressives’ love-state fetish. The deficiency is built into the curriculum and nearly everything the teachers were taught. Ignorance begets ignorance … and poorly informed 17-year-old agitators.

RogerG

** Thanks to The Avalon Project of Yale Law School for preserving our cultural inheritance: “English Bill of Rights 1689”,
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/england.asp .