They are coming for more than your family sedan. They are going to upend, disrupt the entire system that brings everything to your home, grocery store, et al. You’re going to be hit big time in your pocketbook and in every facet of your life. Get prepared for it is coming, if not stopped.
Is Biden determined to turn me into a Trump voter? Trump, no doubt, is the ugly face of my party, but Biden and his donkey party are trying to construct a totalitarian state on a preposterous green agenda. Animating the whole venture, as is true with all totalitarian crusades, is a belief system on how best to organize and control people. To gain popular traction, it’s best for all such crusades to contain a strong apocalyptic element, one powerful enough to justify stampeding the people into acceptance of its dictates and regimentation. It’s happening before our eyes, right now! Say goodbye to the republic and hello to the Soviet.
The EPA is the chief engine of the transformation from citizen republic to rule by all-powerful commissars. Under the guise of “climate change”, we are being ordered to scrap our already immense sunk costs in affordable and reliable transportation for the mirage of something that doesn’t exist, and if it does, it’s a catastrophe as a replacement. Prepare for a calamity, one that’ll conspicuously fall more seriously upon our children and generations to come. Your kids will be the real victims.
March is turning into a deadly month for the health of our constitutional republic. The EPA earlier in the month announced its intention to follow the template of California, one of a few states famous for turning many of its residents into refugees. Like the authoritarian clown car in Sacramento, tighter emissions for “light duty” vehicles (cars, trucks, many SUV’s) will be imposed from 2027 through 2032, eventually sealing the death warrant for the production of nearly anything with an internal combustion engine (see #1 below). Say goodbye to more than the citizen republic. Say goodbye to that thing in your garage that allows you to get the kids to school, or you to work, or pay a visit to grandma for Thanksgiving, for its life will be wrung out of it by regulating and taxing it to death in escalating licensing fees and costs for upkeep, parts, and fuel. Manufacturers will be forced to eliminate their production. The comrades in power plan to leave you with no way out but into their approved and glorified golf cart. This is nothing but totalitarianism “for your own good”. And, of course, they know better about what’s good for you. Right?
On the heels of that monstrosity, the commissars proclaimed a similar rule for the fleet of big vehicles that bring everything from produce to your grocery store to all things from an Amazon distribution center, everything that fills a shelf (see #3 below). It’ll be much worse for those people who choose to live outside the controllable and tight confines of an urban area. Think about it, all that stuff that was affordably made available at your fingertips will be crammed onto battery-powered big rigs (fuel cells create their own immense problems, see #2 below) of limited capacity, range, and tremendous recharging difficulties.
The mammoth costs of so-called “innovating” our way out of these imposed problems will only short-circuit the necessary wealth to satisfy other necessities of life. These blinkered potentates have no understanding of the gargantuan trade-offs that they are inflicting on us. Either that or they don’t care.
My bet is that they don’t care. Why? They possess a religious fervor for an ideology that justifies, in their mind, taking over more and more of your life. For them, they are busy saving the planet, even if it means destroying your standard of living. You see, their religio-ideology is founded upon a robust, promethean definition of “social cost” and “externalities”. Like a canon law in the church, their “church”, the two doctrines give overriding weight to real or imagined costs for all of society for everything that you do. Where’s the limits? Practically, there aren’t any. Thus, the creeds become the supreme, open-ended excuses for the EPA, or any commissariat for that matter, to do anything that they want.
In the past, it was national socialist race justice to prevent defilement of the “race”, or the dictatorship of the proletariat to cram equality of condition on all of humanity to prevent exploitation. Today, it’s saving the climate, leaving aside the lack of any credible, peer reviewed evidence that anything that they’re doing will positively affect a global atmosphere under which billions of people are acting independently and beyond the reach of the EPA. Pardon me for concluding that this is nothing but pure stupidity.
In the end, the Biden claque and his Democratic Party are seemingly intent on destroying our way of life and replacing our citizen republic with rule by totalitarian zealots. It’s Petrograd 1917, Berlin 1933, or Beijing 1949. Keeping this crowd in power would have us see the end of much that we cherish. So, if the choice is between the abominable Trump or this gang of totalitarian fanatics, one can be forgiven for preferring boorishness to Big Brother.
RogerG
Sources:
1. In Orwellian language, the EPA announcement: “Biden-Harris Administration finalizes strongest-ever pollution standards for cars that position U.S. companies and workers to lead the clean vehicle future, protect public health, address the climate crisis, save drivers money”, March 20, 2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-pollution-standards-cars-position
2. A survey of the literature on the shortcomings of fuel cells:
* “Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Vehicles: Everything You Need to Know”, Car and Driver, 9/26/2022, at https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a41103863/hydrogen-cars-fcev/
* “A review of PEM hydrogen fuel cell contamination: Impacts, mechanisms, and mitigation”, ScienceDirect, 3/20/2007, at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378775306025304
* “Fuel Cells”, University of Illinois, at https://publish.illinois.edu/fuel-cells/benefits-and-disadvantages/
* “How Fuel Cells Work”, How Stuff Works, at https://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/alternative-fuels/fuel-cell.htm
3. The same Orwellian language for heavy-duty vehicles: “Biden-Harris Administration Finalizes Strongest Ever Greenhouse Gas Standards for Heavy-Duty Vehicles to Protect Public Health and Address the Climate Crisis While Keeping the American Economy Moving”, EPA, 3/29/2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-greenhouse-gas-standards-heavy
4. National Review articles that provide excellent overviews of the issues:
* “Biden’s Vehicle-Emissions Gaslighting”, Luther Ray Abel, 3/20/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bidens-vehicle-emissions-gaslighting/
* “Electric Vehicles: The EPA’s Fast Track to Fiasco”, Andrew Stuttaford, 3/25/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/electric-vehicles-the-epas-fast-track-to-fiasco/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=second
* “Biden Admin Imposes Strict Pollution Standards for Buses and Heavy-Duty Vehicles”, Caroline Downey, 3/29/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-admin-imposes-strict-pollution-standards-for-buses-and-heavy-duty-vehicles/
Demonstrators march down Pennsylvania Avenue during a protest against police brutality and racism on June 6, 2020 in Washington, DC. This one end of the voter spectrum. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)Trump supporters, the other end of the voter spectrum
Debt. Debt. Debt. Government at all levels is awash in it. Mountains of bonds and treasuries, unfunded mandates, and government spending galore is bankrupting the country. The numbers are in the trillions for Washington, D.C., and beyond millions and into the billions in some state and local hives. California stands out, and is leading the way to massive, harebrained fiscal imbecility, and a dismal future for anyone too young or unborn to vote.
And to think that nobody really cares. The public doesn’t, just try and do something about it. What animates the Trump crowd is rhetorical red meat, sticking it to the libs, and other acts of political theater. No talk of debt, addressing it, or facing the runaway train of our entitlements.
Donald Trump waves to the crowd at one of his rallies in Florida, 2024.
Nothing in Trump’s past or in his recent four years at the Resolute desk is promising. The guy is a real estate magnate who fumbled around in debt and bankruptcy most of his adult life. As president, he just wanted to spend and spend and spend, even chastising Senate Republicans for balking at another spewing of checks across the fruited plain to grease his reelection campaign. The only problem with his personality kink is the absence of the discipline of a bottom line in a federal government that can issue more debt and dollars at will. No state has a Federal Reserve Board. Trump is a child in a candy store, and so are his followers. Enough of this inane talk of having a businessman in the White House, especially this businessman.
The other choice on the political landscape is a band of neo-Marxist central planners who never met a tax, new bottomless social engineering gambit, and outright giveaway that they didn’t like. The central planning is bad enough, but the vacuuming of more taxpayer dollars from potentially productive endeavors in the private sector into the hands of politicians and their special pleading lackeys is a recipe to repeat 1920s Weimar Germany, or maybe 1920 Bolshevik Russia.
President Biden delivers remarks regarding student loan debt forgiveness in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in 2022. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images / Getty Images)
Where are the adults? Do we really want adults in decision-making posts? Apparently not. Adults aren’t popular. Never have we been more in need of someone who will speak truth to power, and that power means the American public who keep electing these clowns. We, the American voter, are the real “establishment”. As before, watch demagoguery short-circuit any come-to-Jesus talk.
The numbers are staggering. The national debt of $34.5 trillion is not far from the country’s total productive output, increasing $1 trillion every 100 days (see #1 and #3 below). Meaning, we are close to the land of no return. Compound the nightmare with rising interest rates adding fatter interest payments to the astronomical total and the magnitude of our fiscal immaturity resembles the black hole at the center of the galaxy. Democrats and Trump only know how to spend, with the Democrats performing a lethal injection of tax hikes into our bloodstream as we drown in the sea of debt.
If there’s one thing both sides agree on, besides the profligate spending, it is, “Don’t touch Social Security and Medicare!” As entitlements, both are on spending autopilot. The spending flies on, but the funding source is deteriorating; the revenue fuel tank of the contraption is shrinking in real time. The program is set up as pay-as-you-go, so the elderly need to stop saying that they are only getting their contributions back. Balderdash. Current retirees are receiving the contributions of current workers. That’s the truth behind the lies. When the amount of inflow stagnates or declines due to demography or deteriorating prospects for the young contributors, and the outflow prances forever upward, the fiscal tipsiness is guaranteed to add more huge infusions of red ink.
How much of an infusion? Don’t let the banality of these colossal numbers (trillions) habituate you into accepting them as tolerable. They aren’t. Euphemistically referred to as “unfunded obligations” among official bean counters, Social Security is scheduled to pour $19.8 trillion into the master “unfunded obligation” of the national debt through 2095. Medicare promises another $68.1 trillion. If we take the trend line into the great beyond, in perpetuity, as far as it can be calculated, Social Security raises the ignominy to $59.8 trillion and Medicare $163.2 trillion (see #2 below). If this was a drunk, the victim would have long ago expired from alcohol poisoning.
California is paving the way to this sordid future, but in their muddled thinking, in their clichéd mind, it’s a compliment – all the talk about “California is the future”. Well, they got this one right. California is likely to be the country’s future. They went right from a state that could conceive and build the California Water Project to inmates running the asylum. It’s a playground of the insane. There’s your future.
California governor Gavin Newsom speaks at a press conference in Beijing, China, October 25, 2023. (Tingshu Wang/Reuters)
The state’s popularly elected governor and legislature discovered, like kids coming downstairs to the Christmas tree, an eye-popping $100 billion pot of gold, or “surplus”, in the summer of 2022. Chief inmate, Governor Gavin Newsom, gushed, “No other state in American history has ever experienced a surplus as large as this.” And then he and his fellow adolescents went around showering the largesse in a splurge of incontinence. 23 million of its residents received checks worth as much as $1,050 at a price tag of $9.5 billion. It then would seem only natural for a self-proclaimed sanctuary state for immigration law violators to bankroll $5 billion for the health care of the same immigration law violators (see #4 below). Foreign nationals in our country in violation of our laws now get bennies. Got that?
In their unthinking habit of seeing bigger budgets as success in any social venture – not kids reading better or the number of homeless declining – the Sacramento clown car shoveled $20 billion into the pockets of the professionalized homeless “advocates” in their opulent NGOs, with no positive impact on public defecation, open-air drug dealing and use, crime, or the number of filthy encampments littering city streets. The state’s potentates could go a long way in curing the problem just by being a little more energetic, as they demonstrated recently in sprucing up grimy San Fransisco for the ruling thug of Red China, Xi. Instead, you’re likely to see an increase in real estate investments by those professionals in their NGOs. They don’t have an interest in curing the problem for that would only make them get a real job (see #4 below).
The state’s deficit stands at $78 billion, and rising. Add the state’s massive overspending to local wantonness and the total debt picture throughout the state approaches $1.6 trillion (see #4 below). I’m not sure if a cliff or wall is the most appropriate metaphor, but the car is more than driven by the mandarins in city hall or Sacramento. These nincompoops are popularly elected. The people of the state have their foot on the pedal. The people want fiscal insanity.
So, let’s stop blaming some abstract others for this dire situation. The people voted for it, and continue to do so. I’m reminded of Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror”.
As one stanza puts it:
“I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could’ve been any clearer
If they wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change”
Leave it to the King of Pop to issue a come-to-Jesus moment. It’s astounding to think that a deeply flawed man, who died of a deadly cocktail of drugs, made more sense than the people do in their elections. Stew on that for a while.
RogerG
Sources:
1. US Debt Clock at https://www.usdebtclock.org/. You can watch it climb in real time.
2. “The Real Federal Deficit: Social Security And Medicare”, John C. Goodman, Forbes, 2/25/2024, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/johngoodman/2023/02/25/the-real-federal-deficit-social-security-and-medicare/?sh=25189f695679
3. “The U.S. national debt is rising by $1 trillion about every 100 days”, Michelle Fox, CNBC, 3/1/2024, at https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/01/the-us-national-debt-is-rising-by-1-trillion-about-every-100-days.html
4. “California’s Deficit: Bring Your Alibis”, Will Swaim, National Review, 3/18/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/californias-deficit-bring-your-alibis/
The Feudal Future Podcast, two Chapman University professors warning of California’s slide into feudalism, or, more accurately, manorialism.
Most historians of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West would admit of centuries of misrule and foreign pressures leading to its disappearance. The Fall was incremental with most people adjusting to the slowly deteriorating conditions. Then, on the heels of persistent and growing disorder, the Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD. The evidence of decline was visible on the ground in the depopulation of many urban centers – Rome’s population in the 5th century had fallen to 50,000 – and in overgrown and decaying infrastructure. A healthy middle class faded with the weakening of commerce and the spreading lawlessness, and people began to cluster around powerful land barons. Western Europe became feudal. And so is California.
Feudal California has been a consistent theme of mine for a number of years. I’m not alone in this assessment. Two Chapman University professors (Orange, Ca.), Marshall Toplansky and Joel Kotkin, have been sounding the alarm in their “The Feudal Future” podcast at https://www.feudalfuturepodcast.com/home51396438. Check it out.
Professor Marshall Toplansky recently sat down for an interview with Siyamak Khorrami (see below) to explain what is happening to the socio-economic profile of California as it is sliding into feudalism. In sum, California is losing its middle class. A thriving middle class is a product of a vibrant commerce. Commerce is fading in the state’s broad system collapse. Sound familiar? As the middle class flees for opportunity elsewhere, the leftover population begins to take on the character of the wealthy in their walled manors and a growing mass of the poor to service their needs. How long will it be before we start calling California’s poor “peasants” or “serfs” and the state’s hyper-rich “Lord”?
This state of affairs wasn’t an accident. It is a willful consequence of elected choices. Decline and decay are popularly elected. It’s a one-party state with policy excesses never held to account. A chief target of the excess is commerce – or more simply, the economy. Doing business in California is like descending into Dante’s Inferno. A reputation for hostility is cemented; businesses leave for more welcoming states; air quality improves because the economy is systematically depressed; and the young in their peak family-formation and income years take flight. “Going green” (ev’s, solar panels, windmills, recycling galore, a war on fossil fuels, etc.) is going-going-gone for the middle class.
Please take time to watch the Toplansky interview. It should be enlightening for anyone in California or seeking to avoid its fate.
Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis speaks at a press conference next to prosecutor Nathan Wade after a Grand Jury brought back indictments against former president Donald Trump in Atlanta, Ga., August 14, 2023. (photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Reuters)
* Populism, a common definition: a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.
***********
Other definitions exist, the term being so fuzzy and susceptible to gross generalization. Today, it’s all the talk among devotees of Donald Trump. Realistically, though, it also can be applied to deep blue jurisdictions who would like nothing better than to hang the aforementioned Donald Trump. In Georgia, and pertaining to Atlanta, DA’s and judges are elected, not appointed. Fani Willis and the judge ruling on a defense motion for her to be removed from the case must face an electorate in a far-left fever swamp. You can’t get any more populist than that, can you? Fever swamps and populism go together.
And we’ve got a circus going on. It’s what happens when popularly-elected demagoguery is confused with justice. Willis, and her love interest, Nathan Wade, her chosen special prosecutor targeting Donald Trump, may have committed perjury regarding their ongoing tryst. The judge, facing the same electorate, ruled on a defense disqualification motion to keep Willis but send Wade packing. As a layman who didn’t sleep at a Holiday Inn, the ruling seems puzzling. They both stink of graft. But, then again, that’s populism. Not much is bound to make sense.
Atlanta Judge McAfee
Trump’s populism is his particular form of political theater that appeals to a certain crowd. Fani Willis and the judge have to face voters – the ones that can be cajoled to the polls, that is – who prefer legal buffoonery and corruption to good governance. Both Trump and Atlanta’s crowd favorites in power have their “populisms”.
All the talk of RINO, establishment, elites from Trump fellow-travelers is their lingua franca for anyone who opposes their demigod, Trump. Atlanta’s carnival barkers in power know how to gin up their base in monotonous cries of “white racism” or “white privilege”, etc. Go for the rich white guy and you’re well on your way to a lucrative book deal, fame and fortune, elevation up the political greasy pole, maybe becoming the next Stacey Abrams and unlimited appearances on MSNBC. It’s all populism.
Let’s plow through the muck of Willis’s case against Trump – populism meets the legal system. Well, let’s not scour too deeply that septic tank. See #1 below if you have the sensory fortitude. Suffice it to say that a broad, ill-defined RICO case without an alleged major crime is reminiscent of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, or Beria’s fawning retort to Stalin, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Atlanta’s brand of populism is showing the way to banana republic, just add a jury that is drawn from the city’s mob to a DA and judge appealing and having to face the same mob.
Trump and Willis, with the judge playing along, deserve each other. Populism is a political rats’ nest. The less we see of it, the better off we’ll be.
RogerG
Sources:
1. Thanks to Andrew C. McCarthy for his stellar work on Fani Willis’s case against Donald Trump. His columns on the subject can be found at:
* https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-and-georgia-defendants-be-careful-what-you-wish-for/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=hero&utm_content=related&utm_term=first
* https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/09/11/the-trump-indictment-of-democrats-dreams/
* https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/08/why-the-fani-willis-case-is-ill-conceived/
* https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/08/fani-williss-flawed-rico-charge-against-trump/
* https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/09/fani-williss-monstrous-trump-case/
Cillian Murphy wins the Oscar for Best Actor for Oppenheimer at the 96th Academy Awards in Hollywood, Calif., March 10, 2024. (photo: Mike Blake/Reuters)
Not the history of Hollywood, but Hollywood’s version of history, a type of history which is staggeringly distilled from the lefty leanings of pop culture. Well, to no surprise, “Oppenheimer” won the Oscar for best picture. Good movie, bad history, especially if you want your history without the hackneyed left-wing bromides. It’s a history for today’s credentialed, degreed, but functional illiterates. It’s proof that today’s education is not educating, and thus Hollywood can get away with distorting history to an ill-informed public.
The film is filled with the now familiar leftist clichés. Cliché #1: Oppenheimer was persecuted. The pertinent question is, however, was he a significant security risk? A “security risk” does not require him to be a communist. As for the “risk” at America’s most top-secret war project, and one for which he is running, a simple examination of Oppenheimer’s background, activities, and associations should raise eye brows above the hair line. Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” obviously raises the subject – for it cannot be ignored, and is central to his plot – but paints the picture in gauzy hues of sympathy for him.
Oppenheimer can legitimately be an object of sympathy, like many people, but sympathy and ascertaining the danger to the country for having him at that post are different subjects. The latter is clearly more significant for us than the former. In this respect, context provides an important back story for events that would involve Robert Oppenheimer, and should have been part of Nolan’s story but are conspicuously absent.
At the time that the Manhattan Project was being organized, the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service at its operations center outside Washington, D.C., Arlington Hall, was ordered to begin collecting coded messages between Soviet operatives to their colleagues in the U.S. and superiors in Moscow. Stalin was an ally but many in our government were prudently dubious about his motives, intentions, and actions. Would he abandon us and/or undermine our efforts? After all, his connivance with Hitler in 1939 – the Nazi-Soviet Pact – helped trigger World War II. The activities of the Soviet Comintern (Communist Internationale) destabilized many countries in Europe throughout the 1920s and 30s. The Soviet takeover of the so-called Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, in tandem with Fascist support for Franco’s Nationalists, helped turn Spain into a bloodbath.
U.S. Army Signals Intelligence codebreakers, Arlington Hall, VA, 1943.
Simultaneously, the collection of the messages necessitated an intense effort to break the code which did not bear fruit till the end of the war and into the 1950s due to the complexity of the Soviet code. The program to collect and break the Soviet code was given the cover name, Venona.
Furthermore, step back to the 1930s and the preeminent trends of thought in college faculty lounges. If there was an observable sympathy in the U.S. during the 1930s, it was the warmth of our intellectual chattering classes for collectivism ranging from milder socialisms to communism, which is just an impatient socialism. For a good portion of the professoriate, the Great Depression condemned capitalism. The Soviet Union benefitted from much of that warmth and it showed in intellectual discussion groups, social affiliations and activities, which extended beyond the classrooms and laboratories. It’s into this milieu that people like Oppenheimer swam.
Many were attracted to FDR and the New Deal as only the beginning of the crusade to make the world right. Many would eventually fill FDR’s agencies and programs and brought their ideological affections with them. The extent of some of this cognitive kinship was uncovered in decrypted Soviet messages from 1946 on. The affection sometimes translated into espionage.
The effort gained new urgency in 1949 when the USSR successfully tested their first atomic bomb many years earlier than expected, which, as it turned out, was a carbon copy of our very first plutonium bomb, the one of the famous Trinity test at Los Alamos. What’s up? How’d they get it? Venona uncovered two moles at Los Alamos (Manhattan Project): nuclear physicist Klaus Fuchs and mathematician Ted Hall. Confirmation was additionally provided from Soviet archives that were thrown open in 1991. From the evidence gleaned, others at the time would be suspected, including Oppenheimer.
Clockwise from top left: Los Alamos spies Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, Oscar Seborer, and David Greenglass. In 2019, Seborer’s story was unearthed by Harvey Klehr, a retired professor from Emory University, and John Earl Haynes, former historian for the Library of Congress.
As it turned out, the espionage reached deep into FDR’s administration. Adviser Laughlin Currie, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, the State Department’s Alger Hiss, and a host of Justice Department and other personnel were fingered in Venona.
Around Oppenheimer personally, his wife, brother, and mistress were known to be communists. Moving about educated and influential circles at the time could have, understandably, oriented a person to the lefty side of the spectrum, leaving aside the natural social self-selection process that normally occurs. All of these factors and facts were not part of Nolan’s script, and should have been if he was truly interested in a faithful rendition of the times and the man. Instead, we got historical schlock that distorted and hid much under the rug, and an Oscar-winning movie.
Once a subject enters movie mode, it falls into the drama of protagonist/antagonist, good/bad. There’s the incessant movieland trope of creating villains who in real life may not have been. Always lurking in the background is Hollywood’s deeply embedded anti-anti-communism. The aura of McCarthy and McCarthyism overshadows their modern brain. So, they invent McCarthy-like characters.
One such maligned person was Gordon Gray, portrayed in the movie as a conniving lawyer of sinister motives. He actually was a distinguished graduate of Yale University, award-winning newspaper publisher, president of the University of North Carolina, and widely respected at the time as secretary of the army and presidential national security adviser. He headed the panel reviewing Oppenheimer’s security clearance that voted two to one to revoke it. Now, Gray will be forever reverse black-listed by Hollywood.
Gordon Gray
The rescinding of it was actually a “dah” moment. There was enough on Oppenheimer to determine that he was too great a risk to our national security, given all that we know from Venona and subsequent FBI investigations. It’s fair to conclude that the FBI’s investigation of Oppenheimer was inconclusive, but being inconclusive could be enough to keep him away from critical research, the risk being too great. He will take a downstream hit to his employability prospects but those are pale when compared to the danger to everyone else’s safety and security.
The movie doesn’t stop there in maligning people. Another object of concocted derision in the movie was Lewis Straus, but he was hardly Robert Downey Jr.’s dark and malevolent denizen of DC. An esteemed Jewish American and president of New York’s Emanu-El congregation, he rose from the bottom to the rank of Rear Admiral, headed Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, and was Eisenhower’s chief of staff and secretary of state. All this was washed away by Nolan to make Straus a demon to Oppenheimer’s saint. Let’s call it what it is: the Hollywood treatment for anybody of prominence on the right.
President Eisenhower receives a report from Lewis L. Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, on the hydrogen bomb tests (Operation Castle) in the Pacific, March 30, 1954.
Hollywood history becomes real history to people who don’t know history. There’s enough out there to know better. You just have to go from the theater to the library, or wherever honest, in-depth sources are available. They’re out there. But, best of all, be abundantly skeptical of what Hollywood is stylishly placing on the big screen. It’s nearly as much fantasy as Disney’s “Snow White”.
RogerG
Sources:
1. An excellent backgrounder on the times is Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, available on Amazon
2. Another excellent backgrounder is Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government by M. Stanton Evans, available on Amazon
3. Thanks to Neal Freeman’s piece in National Review, “Oppenheimer Provides Great Entertainment, Disfigured History”, 7/30/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/oppenheimer-provides-great-entertainment-disfigured-history/
4. Thanks to Armond White’s review of “Oppenheimer” at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/oppenheimer-the-first-nihilist-oscar-winner/
The House GOP clown car: Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene
It seems that treating the American people like adults is not in vogue, on the right or left. The Right is quickly shedding its classical liberal credentials, the ideas that animated our founding fathers, Coolidge and Reagan, and are embedded in our founding documents. The Left is on a march to establish government as the Promethean social engineer par excellence. Either outlook has us mired in a hell of a mess.
Take this interview with Kari Lake, Arizona Republican Senate candidate, as she panders to the mental adolescents in the Republican primary. Two issues stand out in this foreplay of mental immaturity: Ukraine and the debt/deficit.
Kari Lake at Turning Point Conference, July 24, 2021
The debt/deficit is something that, when prompted, people express deep concern, but to be honest, nobody seems willing to do anything about it. Republicans, led by Trump and others like Lake, are frightened away from doing anything to reform the biggest component of the federal budget, Social Security and Medicare, which by all measures is pushing the federal budget over the fiscal cliff. Surely, Democrats salivate at the prospect of demagoguing the issue. A reporter recently asked whether Lake agreed with Trump in opposing changes to the monster entitlements (see #1 below). Lake answered, “I do not think we should touch them.” Then, she goes on a hackneyed recitation of why we ought not do anything. The “Thema and Louise” scene of the two women driving their car off the cliff keeps coming to mind.
Thelma and Louise drive off the cliff
She proposes thinking “creative” (?) and meanders on over to onshoring manufacturing jobs in the U.S. without showing much cognizance of the reasons for the flight of businesses in the first place. Manufacturers, or anybody with a payroll for that matter, face the maw of our unions’ and politicians’ class war machine. They’ll encounter crushing taxation, with the promise of more to come (“wealth taxes”), regulations and mandates galore, and a greenie pummeling. What’s there not to like, eh?
We’re left mystified by the connection between a careening debt and this pandering to the AFL-CIO. Similar befuddlement will arise when she, like much of the Trump right, dumps Ukraine into the mixing bowl with the border crisis. What are we left to conclude? Let Putin have Ukraine as we grapple, or fail to grapple, with our southern border? Apparently, the world’s premiere superpower can’t simultaneously walk and chew gum, or rebuild our defense industrial base, while supporting a small country under a Putin invasion.
Okay, here’s a question for Kari Lake and her ilk: what are the consequences of a Putin conquest of Ukraine? Wargame it, think about it beyond the half-witted musings of Candace Owens. Don’t complain about Biden’s Kabul catastrophe when the Right is prepared to imitate him on the continent of Europe. The previous four-century history of European autocrats, dictators, and totalitarians rampaging across the continent is not encouraging. Of course, we could revert back to the 18th century and let the world go to hell in a handbasket, us locked away behind our oceans, and watch a chunk of our prosperity and security go down the drain as we do it. The logic is stuck in the age of sailing ships and far removed from this era of hypersonics.
This is an age of demagogues and panderers for we are treated as children. It is assumed that we can’t handle hard truths. One of the most fundamental and irritating truths is, as the philosopher Richard Weaver put it, “ideas have consequences”. He wrote an entire philosophical work on it (see #2 below). The upshot is that we are limited by realities; there can be no “year zero”, and remake ourselves into whatever we want to be. Misery is the result. Adults must know this to be true, or they’re not adults, despite the age on their driver’s license.
We actually believe that we can afford something we can’t (Social Security and Medicare as currently constructed for instance). Much of the nonsense frequently begins in the bubble of academia, or the broader chattering classes, and infects the downstream culture. A rationale is concocted that works to keep us in our childlike status.
Right now, a move is afoot to treat pregnancy as a disease (see #3 below) so young people can remain enslaved to their youthful desires with no consequences. Aldous Huxley wrote about it decades ago in Brave New World. No need for responsibilities or meeting social expectations in this agenda. The authors of a piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics lay out the suicidal logic:
“We can compare pregnancy with measles. Measles is uncontroversially regarded as a disease and treated as such by public health authorities and health professionals. Measles is harmful to nearly all of those who catch it. However, most patients will survive. Very few will die, and only a small proportion will go on to experience longer term impacts on their health. [Like pregnancy.]”
Does she have a disease?
Pregnancy – or ironically how the authors and everybody else got here to bag on it – is a parallel experience to measles, and should be treated like it. How does that work, unless you’re a complete nincompoop? All of us were a product of the “disease”. Nothing about the biological cycle of life to see here. It’s lunacy on stilts.
Personally, I think that the writers are retroactively justifying our current efforts to birth-control ourselves to death. No doubt about it, marriage and fertility rates are cratering (see #5 below). Fewer people are filling the pews at the same time as fewer are heading to the altar to take their vows. Religious observance appears to have a direct relationship with marriage and childbearing. They follow each other in tandem.
That’s no problem to a population reared on the doctrines of the Malthusian death cult (as in Thomas Malthus, the foolish late 19th century cleric and amateur futurist). It’s the chant of too many people, too many people, . . .. It only makes sense at an adolescent level. The great innovative productivity of our farms, factories, investments, and our dynamic brains, is beyond most people’s stunted comprehension, let alone a kid’s. We are what we’ve been told over and over again, the spiel of the Malthusian death cult. Underneath it all, though, is the blandishment to believe that marriage and children impinge on our desire to have more fun and stuff.
It’s no surprise that marriage is on the rocks; we’ve bastardized it so. Marriage has been turned into something as binding as a handshake, or the Boy Scout oath. What was once, by definition, a special institution for heterosexual couplings, the only kind capable of procreation, was elasticized to encompass pairings that can never, by definition, accomplish that feat. This is different from heterosexual infertility. Sorry, sodomy and oral sex can’t produce a child. Do we really need to be told that?
Instead, we shift from merely the impossible to the grotesque, and H.G. Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau. People with medical degrees can inject us with chemicals and mutilate our sexual organs in order to contradict the chromosomes throughout our body. Think about it: an ex-man – actually a man due to chromosomes – with an artificial womb. I’m back to Weaver’s thesis. Are there any limiting principles to our desires? Can reality be endlessly and radically bent with no adverse consequences?
Transgender girl allows cameras to document her/his sex reassignment surgery
What of the kids? What kids? Marriage is certainly no longer about the kids. It’s about the adults. Marriage of the kind that procreates is no longer a preferred component in life’s journey. It’s an option like color in an Amazon order. Those kids that managed to survive the gauntlet of the abortionist’s suction tube and made it to adulthood won the lottery of unending teenage wish fulfillment. They don’t have kids either.
It shows in the numbers. The current U.S. fertility rate hovers between 1.6 to 1.7, below the estimated 2.1 replacement rate. The birth rate measured per thousand collapsed from 51.8 in 2007 to 37.8 last year (see #5 below). All such numbers point in the same direction – down. It’s a calamity in waiting. Who’s going to be around to be taxed to bankroll the safety net? Who’s going to be around to change the bed pans and feeding tubes? Don’t expect the global poor to be your nursery. Importing them imports other problems. Chief among them, the taxation of the low wages of the imported global poor is a net negative when compared to the forgone potential of higher incomes of the homegrown, leaving aside the rising costs of subsidizing the imported poor. You just piled a fiscal problem onto a demographic one.
Reversing the trend is like stopping a descending 100-railcar freight train. It can be done but it’s going to take a long while. Government interventions in the realm of demography are not encouraging. Centrally planned demography doesn’t work any better than centrally planned economics. China’s CCP commanded a one-child policy in the late 1970s and 80s and set in motion the unintended: a lopsided population pyramid of males. Now, as China demands to be recognized among the ranks of the international big boys, it has fewer girls to be the mothers of the next generation. They’re in a demographic death spiral. It’s baked into the population cake unless they jump into the oven to rejigger the batter. Good luck with that, as they try to do it.
The CCP’s answer is more centrally-planned demography to replace the now failing centrally-planned demography. They’ve cashiered the population commissariat and abortion goon squads in every village and city and are wildly bribing the remaining female population into fertility. In the meantime, they’re stuck with a declining population, fewer workers, and too few mothers. How long will it be before China reverts back to its status of a failed state?
Europe is experiencing a similar demographic death spiral. Government policies in the form of goodies and subsidies (bribes) produce lackluster results at best. France for decades has tried through policies to reverse its death spiral (see #6 below). Still, its birthrates hover below replacement at between 1.7 to 1.9. The country’s fertility is better than most of Europe but they have yet to break the 2.1 threshold. Hungary has taken the same approach and only arrested its fall.
This is not a problem conducive to remediation by government ministries. Once attitudes and lifestyles become entrenched, the problem lies in the culture and is amazingly resistant to more spending in a few budgetary line items. Adults have to become adults, and come to find fulfillment in a marital union of sexual compatibility (heterosexual) and family. Today, it’s “he who dies with the most stuff wins”.
Of all people, Elon Musk may have set the record straight. At a Wall Street Journal event he said (see #8 below), “There are not enough people. I can’t emphasize this enough, there are not enough people.” He further added, “If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble. Mark my words.”
Elon Musk with one of his children
Could a broad immaturity, now culturally rooted, be at the core of much of what ails us? Turning around the situation begins with the realization that there is no “something for nothing”, and that there are limits and consequences to our actions. At one time, we were helped along the way by the traditional institutions of church, family and marriage, and free markets. Until they are returned to their time-honored place, we are doomed to an endless cycle of failure and mediocrity, and Musk’s warning.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Kari Lake Talks ‘Difficult’ Deficit Math”, Audrey Fahlberg, National Review, 3/7/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/kari-lake-talks-difficult-deficit-math/
2. Ideas Have Consequences, Richard M. Weaver, 1948 edition, Expanded edition, Kindle edition, can be acquired on Amazon, et al.
3. “Is pregnancy a disease? A normative approach”, Anna Smajdor and Joona Rasanen, Journal of Medical Ethics, at https://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2024/01/28/jme-2023-109651
4. Thanks to Wesley J. Smith for bringing the issue of pregnancy as a disease to my attention: “Bioethics Journal Article: Pregnancy Equivalent to Catching the Measles”, National Review, 2/3/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bioethics-journal-article-pregnancy-equivalent-to-catching-the-measles/
5. “Natalism Is Not Enough”, Partick T. Brown, Ethics and Public Policy Center, in National Review Magazine, 1/25/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/03/natalism-is-not-enough/
6. “Fertility and Family Policies in France”, Marie-Thérèse Letablier, Journal of Population and Social Security (Population), Supplement to Volume 1, at https://www.ipss.go.jp/webj-ad/WebJournal.files/population/2003_6/9.Letablier.pdf
7. “Number of children born per woman in France from 2005 to 2020”, statista, at https://www.statista.com/statistics/746549/fertility-rate-france/#:~:text=The%20fertility%20rate%20is%20the%20average%20number%20of,children.%20This%20value%20was%20the%20lowest%20since%202005.
8. “Elon Musk says ‘civilization is going to crumble’ if people don’t have more children”, Sam Shead, CNBC, 12/7/2021, at https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/07/elon-musk-civilization-will-crumble-if-we-dont-have-more-children.html
We’re living in a nutty time. Alongside the Loch Ness monster, the second gunman on the grassy knoll, free healthcare, Elvis in the land of the living, people believe in the darndest things. Modern iterations of the same phenomena include a “two-state solution” in Palestine, a wildly popular Trump, “undocumented” immigrants, a successful Marxism, etc. How can this be? Do adults actually believe in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus?
In an aside, attaching “undocumented” to immigrant hides the reality. This person – “undocumented” – is a citizen of another nation who trespassed our border and our laws to plant themselves in our country. This person is illegally present in the country, period. “Undocumented” is synonymous with “illegal”. “Illegal immigrant” clears the air. The people who patronize us with “undocumented” are deceptive or they actually believe the unbelievable.
One guy, Robert Malone, MD, on Joe Rogan’s podcast, deposited his pet theory of “mass formation psychosis” (mfp) as an explanation for a broad belief in the unbelievable (see #1 below). I don’t know whether I accept the idea, but it certainly is intriguing. Malone used it to explain much of the mania during the pandemic. It could convincingly be applied beyond Covid and right into 2024 and our roiling election-year controversies.
So, what is it? Mfp is a psychotic condition on a mass scale in a time of deep divisions when events seem monumental yet poorly understood. Someone or some explanation arises, goes viral, and the impressionable group runs the danger of being detached from reality. The resulting behavior is often delusional to the point of derangement, or a state of mass hypnosis. As Malone says to Rogan,
“When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it, and then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point just like hypnosis, they literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere.” (see #1 below)
Welcome to 2024. Are Republican primary voters in the grip of mfp? How else to explain the popularity of Donald Trump in the party, in spite of the clear evidence of his toxicity? He romped to a 20-point win in South Carolina after his other big wins in Iowa and New Hampshire. Nothing holds promise of derailing his rush to the nomination. It’s odd given the fact that, post-2016, Republicans appear lining up for a four-peat of the miserable performances in 2018, 2020, and 2022. A very powerful constant in the previous three election cycles is Donald Trump as the face of the party. No one scares suburban voters and women more than the prospect of Trump in the White House. Yet here we go again.
How did the party get to this juncture? Nothing provides more proof of the presence of mass psychosis formation in Republican ranks than an enduring faith in Trump’s electability. The previous losses didn’t penetrate the rational faculties of their brains, or the fact that a semi-functional nursing home patient is competitive with Trump. Clinging to the unreal, South Carolina GOP voters in exit polls believe Trump is more electable than Nikki Haley (87% to 57%), in spite of national polling showing Haley slaughtering Biden by double digits (see #2 below). Trump’s advantage over the senescent Biden is within the margin of error.
Trump needs but frightens suburban women
A record of repeated failures won’t shock these people into reality, and neither will foul behavior diminish their fervor, even among people who profess the need for moral rectitude. Trump recently went before religious broadcasters (Christian), laced his talk with the promiscuous use of “hell” before many pastors, and was met with laughs and cheers (see #4 below). No admonitions, not a lick.
His responses to rivals are not arguments but insults. We were reminded of his chronic incivility when he referred to Nikki Haley as “birdbrain” and tried to be derisive by ridiculing her ethnic name. This is par for the course for Trump.
At a rally in South Carolina, Trump mocked Haley’s husband for not being around to support his wife. He scoffed, “What happened to her husband? Where is he?”, and added, “He’s gone.” In fact, he’s deployed in service to his country. This isn’t the only time that he’s reached for the use of invective in an effort to be humorous, with the target being people in uniform, and a loved one of his opponent.
There’s more. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief staff, confirmed earlier reports of Trump bad-mouthing those who suffered in war defending our country (see #5 below). In the inner sanctum of the oval office according to Kelly, Trump referred to John McCain and H.W. Bush as “losers”. John Kelly again: “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’” More incidents will remain on the cutting room floor for lack of confirmation.
Before you dismiss Kelly, remember that he was a widely respected commander prior to his association with Trump. Suddenly, he’s on the outs with Trump and the object of abuse by Trumpkins, who just yesterday held their hats at their hearts when a soldier was laid to rest. Trumpkins are required to sacrifice their personal integrity in an allegiance to a lout. It’s another example of believing in the unbelievable, in the righteousness of a man who exploited five deferments to avoid military service in time of war.
The coarse disrespect from his mouth is a green light to churlishness in his supporters. It’s a pattern now common in all his campaigns from the beginning in 2016. For instance, during a 2016 New Hampshire rally, he was lambasting Ted Cruz, a rival for the nomination, when a woman in the audience yelled, “He’s [Cruz] a pussy”. Trump feigned a criticism and then happily repeated it to laughter and applause. This is unthinkingly dismissed as “Trump being Trump”, and the behavior rubs off on his followers.
Achieving laughter through invective is a recurring Trumpism of those seeking the brass ring in his wake, like Kerry Lake who has the ambition to be one of Arizona’s senators. Trump bashes McCain – “[McCain is] not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured” – so Lake piles on with, “Boy, Arizona has delivered some losers [McCain], haven’t they?” She prefaced that doozy with, “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we?” She answered, “Well, get the hell out!” Out Trumping Trump is considered an asset in this twisted little eco-system. (see #6 below)
Believing that it is endearing and won’t cost you elections, by someone who’s already lost one, is an amazing feat of delusion. She’s the reason for an uptalking lefty occupying the governor’s mansion – in a state where the previous Republican governor won reelection by double digits – along with the Trump fealty claque in the party primary who put her on the general election ballot in the first place.
No wonder the party is plagued with over-the-top Trump worshippers in office in the likes of Lauren Boebert, Majorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, J.D. Vance, and others. They embrace flamboyance as a substitute for civility, good judgment, and seriousness. Clowns now rule the roost in the party.
The previous losses don’t seem to penetrate the fogged-up part of the logical brain. Cults of personality don’t have coattails; it’s in their nature. The down-ballot for Trump has been a disaster. He may win in a squeaker in November but expect a Democrat Congress to quickly impeach him. I don’t relish the sight of the bloody aftermath of that imbroglio. And to think that it is all due to people believing in that which ought not to be believed. The Democrats believe in a successful Marxism. Republicans believe in a popular Trumpism.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “What Is Mass Formation Psychosis? Robert Malone Makes Unfounded Covid-19 Vaccine Claims On Joe Rogan Show”, Bruce Y. Lee, Forbes, 1/2/2022, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2022/01/02/what-is-mass-formation-psychosis-robert-malone-makes-covid-19-vaccine-claims-on-joe-rogan-show/?sh=4077085d1d4c
2. “Exit Polls: Exit Poll Results for 2024 Presidential Primaries and Caucuses”, CNN, at https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/primaries-and-caucuses/exit-polls/south-carolina/republican-primary/0
3. Thanks to Philip Klein for his analysis regarding the electability question in “South Carolina Results Show Why It’s Hard to Run on Electability”, National Review, 2/24/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/south-carolina-results-show-why-its-hard-to-run-on-electability/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth
4. Trump’s speech at the convention of the National Religious Broadcasters can be viewed at https://youtu.be/x1xKn6LR5gY?si=8bAv8muBXKRwXpjI
5. “Exclusive: John Kelly goes on the record to confirm several disturbing stories about Trump”, Jake Tapper, CNN, 10/3/2023, at https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/02/politics/john-kelly-donald-trump-us-service-members-veterans/index.html4
6. “‘No Peace, B****,’ Meghan McCain Tells Kari Lake”, Haley Stack, National Review, 2/21/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-peace-b-meghan-mccain-tells-kari-lake/
Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda at news conference after their infamous visit to North Vietnam in 1972Jane Fonda in the seat of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, the ones that were killing American pilots.Tucker Carlson recently in Moscow to perform the same service for Putin
Tom Hayden, premiere anti-Vietnam War activist, who declared “We refuse to be anti-Communist”, made multiple trips to North Vietnam from 1965 to 1974, including a 1972 one with his future wife, Jane Fonda, whitewashing the communist Hanoi regime. Who elected him to conduct our country’s foreign relations? The nerve of the guy. The American people already elected other people to do it. He’s of the Left, and today on the Right we have Tucker Carlson. In the Hayden tradition of pasting happy face on brutal and totalitarian thuggeries, Carlson goes to Russia and Vladimir Putin to normalize his tyranny, whether intended or not.
Watch below Tucker’s piece about his tour of the Kiyevskaya metro station in Moscow, Russia. Watch him gush about its orderliness and cleanliness. In case you may have missed it, spotless public spaces are a common feature of totalitarianism from Der Fuhrer to the communist Kim dynasty of North Korea. Tucker, it’s hardly a selling point, unless you’re quick to sacrifice liberty for sanitized public spaces.
Throughout his interview with Putin, the despot betrayed his basic Marxist outlook, a product of indoctrination in the USSR from child to career KGB officer. The Soviet Union hasn’t gone away; it’s only gone through a name change. And you can see the shadow of the sinister past in the station.
The Kiyevskaya metro station is named after Kiyev, or the anglicized “Kiev”. Yes, that Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. As this station went up in the 1930s, Stalin was murdering and starving 10 million people or so, mostly in the Ukraine, in something called the Holodomor. The murals festooning the station’s wall are propaganda images of happy peasants at work on their government-imposed communes, or collective farms (kolkhozes). The reality was anything but joyous.
Stalin ordered industrialization, even the industrialization of agriculture, for the country. Of course, the farmers liked their land, farms, animals, and equipment, and resistance fomented as their property was seized and they were herded onto collective farms or work camps (gulags), losing everything. Even the seed for next year’s crop which, like all the grain, was sold to purchase factory equipment. No more crop next year. The communes were as great a disaster as the factories. Famine spread and was exploited by the big man and his politburo to suppress Ukrainian nationalism. The gulags proliferated and became an archipelago of gulags in Solzhenitsyn’s famous words. The murals in the metro were designed to hide the horrors. They were totalitarianism in art.
Spotlessness in public appearances, absolute hygienic orderliness, could be a similar sign of complete tyranny. To keep the spaces clear of rubbish and ugliness, the Putin claque utilizes an import from the CCP: AI facial recognition tech tied to thousands of cameras. But that’s not the only purpose of it. Putin’s henchmen use it to pick up dissenters, dissidents, and political opponents. Many a free thinker has been spirited away into Putin’s archipelago, many never to be heard from again.
Friday, another one of the greats of Russian free thought, Alexei Navalny, died in custody. He joins many others in the grave. Life imitates art, Orwell’s Big Brother. Yep, Tucker, the last vestiges of freedom are thrown into the trash bin along with the other refuse. But Russia has clean subways.
And cheaper food prices, cheaper for a fat and sassy westerner like Tucker as he was guided into a Moscow grocery store (see #4 below). Everything is cheaper in the country, including the labor, which explains the lower prices. Lower incomes depress prices. In 1930s America, during The Great Depression, the time was a buyer’s paradise . . . if you had a steady job. The average monthly income in Russia is $787, as opposed to the U.S. monthly median of $4,568 (see #2 and #3 below). That says volumes.
That’s not all. 60% of Russians spend half their income on just food. 22% of Russian households don’t have indoor plumbing, compared to the American .3% (see #3 below). With a consumer base like that, Tucker could buy out the store with just pocket change, if he could slip it by customs at JFK airport.
North Korea is similarly spotless. Over the years, we’ve seen many pictures of the pristine, purified places in Pyongyang, and thin, even emaciated people standing around. Compare Tucker’s Moscow metro station with this video of Pyongyang street scenes in the next post. Tucker, could we also learn a few things from the Kim dynasty?
I nominate Tucker Carlson for the 2024 Tom Hayden Memorial Emissary Award for his attempt at dignifying the indecent.
Please watch the Carlson tour below.
RogerG
Sources:
1. The full Tucker Carlson interview with Putin can be viewed at https://youtu.be/hYfByTcY49k?si=kxFsUvWJsbtKDUzl
2. “How Average Salary in Russia Compares to US”, Tom Norton, Newsweek, 2/16/24, at https://www.newsweek.com/how-average-salary-russia-compares-us-1870740#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20latest%20figures,was%20about%20%24787%20in%20November.
3. Thanks to Jim Geraghty of National Review for his comparison of Russia and the U.S. in “No, America Is Not ‘Ugly and Decayed’”, 2/19/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/no-america-is-not-ugly-and-decayed/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=second
4. Tucker’s grocery store tour can be viewed at https://twitter.com/TPostMillennial/status/1758158808835125642
5. “We Need to Talk about Tucker”, Jeffrey Blehar, National Review, 2/20/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/we-need-to-talk-about-tucker/
6. “Tucker Carlson Claims Groceries Are Cheaper in Russia Despite a Russian Food Inflation Crisis”, Troy Matthews, MTN, 2/16/24, at https://www.meidastouch.com/news/tucker-carlson-claims-groceries-are-cheaper-in-russia-despite-a-russian-food-inflation-crisis#:~:text=In%20a%20survey%20of%205%2C000,more%20than%2020%25%20on%20food.
School children with masks and behind Plexi-glass in a San Diego school during the COVID-19 pandemicDestroyed, burned, and abandoned cars at music festival, Israel, October 7. Some UN aid workers were implicated in the massacre.
If the quality of our civilization can be gauged by the quality of our institutions, then we’re in serious trouble.
Domestically, our schools, FBI, CIA, a good portion of big business, the entertainment industry, federal bureaucracies, many state bureaucracies and local governments, many of them urban, much of the judiciary (federal to local, judges to juries), and the health bureaucracies (federal to local) have soiled themselves in neo-Marxist claptrap, authoritarian impulses, or rank donkey party partisanship. The rule of law is actually the rule of deeply compromised men and women. And it gets worse when we saunter on down to Turtle Bay in New York City, the United Nations.
We get daily reminders of the civilizational decay. Now, it’s another UN flight into gross immorality. The affiliated International Court of Justice (ICJ) trampled on any remaining moral authority that it may have possessed by bizarrely indicting Israel on charges of genocide. The absurdity of the pronouncement is obvious if you just think it through: the victim of genocide is guilty of responding to it. Then, the UN’s human rights conglomerate reserved for Iran the “Chair for the Human Rights Council’s one-day ‘Social Forum’” (see #1 below). Adding moral injury to moral injury, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East had people who were involved in the massacre of 1,200 mostly civilian Jews in Israel on October 7 (see #4 below). Can the “international community” get any more putrid?
The ICJ, specifically ordered Israel to stop “genocide-attacks” on Palestinian civilians in Gaza after, of course, finding evidence of “Israeli genocide” (see #3 below). Let me get this straight: the organization that runs Gaza stormed into southern Israel and slaughtered 1,200 Jews, took over 200 hostages, is not the party guilty of genocide; it’s the country who responded to the genocide. How does that compute?
Let’s rattle this around in the head a bit more. The nation that defends itself against a genocide is guilty of genocide as the original perps of the primary genocide commit another war crime by using the Gaza population as a writ-large human shield (see #2 below). Does this make any sense? Completely absent from the black robes’ decision is Hamas’s fundamental war crime – Gaza civilians as human shields – which immensely complicates the Israeli defensive response without running afoul of “genocide”. The elaborate and massive tunnel network under and into hospitals, schools, homes, large apartment buildings, orphanages, wherever civilians congregate in large numbers, the kind of civilians that are easily exploited for propaganda purposes, didn’t grace the Court’s printout. Since civilian casualties are inevitable when the human shields are used in crowd number, the Court’s opinion is tantamount to a blessing for the practice of large-scale human shields.
Maj. (res.) ‘Mem,’ a combat engineering officer, shows a tunnel that troops found inside a home in northern Gaza. The entrance was hidden underneath a bed in a children’s bedroom, November 7, 2023. (photo: Emanuel Fabian/Times of Israel)
If that isn’t crazy enough, we get to experience mullah-ruling Iran as a guardian of human rights. Isn’t that like the Grand Dragon of the Klan heading the Office of Civil Rights? Gracing the mullahs with the Chair of the UN Human Rights Council’s one-day “Social Forum” at the end of last year was too much even for the Iran-appeasing Biden administration. Biden’s Human Rights Council Ambassador Michele Taylor wrote (see #1 below), “It is unacceptable that any body associated with the promotion and protection of human rights be chaired by a representative from a nation implicated in such persistent and flagrant human rights abuses as Iran.” Exactly.
Yet, here we are, but there’s more. Speaking of the 1,200-person atrocity by Hamas on October 7, UN Works and Relief Agency workers were implicated in the barbarousness. Several had to be fired. Where’s the prosecutions (at the ICJ)? And related is the Hamas hijacking of that much-vaunted AOC-demanded “humanitarian aid” to Gazans (see #4 below). According to one source, “Hamas has their hands on UNRWA administration workers, and it manages UNRWA. . . . From the day they [Hamas] rose to power they took control of everything.” Much of the aid is dispensed by USAID. The federal organization’s Office of Inspector General (USAID OIG) “…has identified deliberate interference and efforts to divert humanitarian assistance in regions where FTO [foreign terrorist organizations, Hamas] activity is prevalent … [t]his includes systemic coercion of aid workers by FTOs…”, as reported by Jim Geraghty of National Review (see #4 below). Things at UN headquarters and in the field resemble the anti-Semitic chaos on our college campuses.
It’s getting so bad that almost anything with thousands of employees, funded by taxpayers, distant from them like D.C., the Hague and UN, and big-international in scope is a civilizational embarrassment. The little taxpaying guy and gal in the U.S., and the nation of Israel, get hosed. In this sense, bigness has become badness. I’m skeptical that anything can be done about the situation short of tearing the whole edifice down and starting over.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Outrage as Iran regime chairs United Nations Human Rights Council body despite ‘alarming’ abuses”, Peter Aitken, Fox News, November 2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/outrage-as-iran-regime-chairs-united-nations-human-rights-council-body-despite-alarming-abuses/ar-AA1jhvrT
2. “Human Shields in International Humanitarian Law: A Guide to the Legal Framework”, Beth Van Schaack, Just Security, 12/7/2016, at https://www.justsecurity.org/35263/human-shields-ihl-legal-framework/#:~:text=Making%20the%20civilian%20population%20or%20individual%20civilians%20the,and%20Article%208%20%28e%29%20%28i%29%20%28applying%20to%20NIACs%29.
3. “ICJ ruling: Key takeaways from the court decision in Israel genocide case”, Reuters, 1/26/24, at https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/key-takeaways-world-court-decision-israei-genocide-case-2024-01-26/
4. “What about the UNRWA Humanitarian-Aid Trucks?”, Haley Stack, National Review, 1/26/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-about-the-unrwa-humanitarian-aid-trucks/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth
Solar panels and windmills in India. The scene is familiar in the USA, especially California.Utility bill shock thanks to “sustainable” energy
King Claudius: “O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven. It hath the primal eldest curse upon it. A brother’s murder.” — Hamlet, William Shakespeare
King Claudius in Zeffirelli’s “Hamlet” from 1990
Claudius’s lament was over the festering memory of his murder of his brother to gain the throne. Today, similarly, we have much to lament. People who should know better, but don’t, are our bane. It’s unsettling as we watch the barbarous takeover occurring before our eyes. The religio-ideology of environmentalism and genderism is poisoning us as Claudius did his brother King Hamlet.
The offenses to good order are mounting daily. In some west coast states (Washington, California for example), mental health professionals are forbidden by law to use any other approach to gender dysphoria than acceptance of a teen’s declaration of their new sexual identity. For the parents, they are straitjacketed into only assent to juvenile whims. Any other response is treated as criminal child abuse. It’s a command for fully irreversible teenage mental and genital mutilation. In some states, even famously conservative ones, voters have approved in clever wording an open license to expunge the next generation. People are tramping to the polls to give individuals the power to end human life from conception to the moment of exit from the birth canal, and maybe after as well. Don’t be fooled with the feigned “health of the mother” check since it’s been interpreted out of existence. On the eco front, climate-change is the cudgel to brow-beat people into a depreciation of their own and their children’s prosperity. Disfigured children, abortion mills, and a completely fabricated and permanent mass decline in the standard of living could be our lot if we continue down this path.
Sex change operation. Massachusetts mandates insurers cover sex-change treatments.
A mass propaganda push ensues to manufacture broad compliance with this dystopia. Search engines are in the vanguard. Try a Google or Bing search for “states who ban alternatives to gender affirming care”. You’ll get the opposite: states who ban gender affirming care, not those who banned alternatives. It’s the wrong end of the telescope. You have to come up with the partisan jargon employed by the revolutionaries against their opponents to get an inkling, albeit a distorted one, of the proper state of play. For instance, the rhetorical contrivance “conversion therapy” must be employed, which in actuality is talking therapies to help a person come to grips with their birth gender, but is now freighted with sinister connotations throughout most of the search offerings.
Likewise, the campaigns of illogic and ideological activism litter the search results on climate change. “Criticisms of climate change ideology” in Bing actually listed criticisms of the critics of climate change ideology. In third place, right behind the left-wing Guardian’s “’Word salad of nonsense’: scientists denounce Jordan Peterson’s comments on climate models” and ExxonMobil’s PR-kowtowing to the hysteria, was David Vetter’s piece in Forbes, “5 Big Lies About Climate Change [from critics], And How Researchers Trained A Machine To Spot Them” (see below). I’m amply familiar with the arguments having taught college-level Physical Geography for years.
David Vetter is an architype of the activist journalist with some exposure to science, actually an ideologically-laden version of science, not “science” as such. His LinkedIn page tells the tale. He matriculated through Cardiff University to a masters in International Journalism, and then he’s off to Oxford for a masters in Science – not anything approaching Physics, mind you, but the science of “Sustainability, Enterprise, & Environment”. It’s a little bit of science, only enough to buttress the activism, and a whole lot of ideology.
David Vetter (Forbes profile pic)
His article immediately produced the poker tell of non-science masquerading as science. In the very first sentence he gave away the store: “the science is settled”. What? The science of something as complex as our climate is “settled”, settled in the sense that we can move immediately to hammering in the coffin nails to our personal prosperity, justifying an end to cheap, reliable energy? Understanding the relationships between the many elements of our atmosphere and the natural and human injections into it is a perpetual scientific enterprise. “The science is settled” doesn’t cut it. It’s the pitch of the activist, not the scientist who wants to be respected as a scientist.
The sleight-of-hand of “the science is settled” leads to attempts to make the chicanery seem unassailable. One way is to construct a black box which will conjure condemnations of their critics. Vetter in his piece uncritically describes exactly that. Politicized scientists devised software to tar opinions that they don’t like. They’ve come up with a way to artificially make their opinions superior to those of their critics without having to scientifically prove it. It’s more sleight-of-hand to hide the initial sleight-of-hand. Garbage in, garbage out.
Target #1 for the hysterics like Vetter is the grid. Prepare yourself for vast stretches of the landscape and seascape consumed under huge blankets of solar panels and forests of mammoth windmills stretching over the horizon, and intermittency, brownouts, blackouts, and bankrupting energy bills. Target #2 is your car.
Your car must fit into this central planner’s dream. That’s no easy task. Today’s common vehicle with its internal combustion engine (ICE) was the result of decades, a century and a half, of trial-and-error and interplay of many generations of tinkerers, producers and consumers. Now, the economics of organic development are to be suddenly replaced by the central commands of politicians and their government bureaus. Out of politics – for government is politics and politics is government – come the central planners’ edicts in the form of numerical quotas on date certain. Collectivists of all stripes love blunt commands to bring everyone into line. It’s the mental fingerprint of totalitarians. Stalin loved his Five-Year Plans. The CCP loved their one-child policy and forced abortions on a grand scale. From today (2023) to 2050, the plan is for all of us to be shoehorned into their choice for us.
Extolling the virtues of central planning in the Soviet Union
Would you fly on a plane designed in a confab between technocrats of the Department of Commerce and the staff of Bernie Sanders? Count me out. The electric vehicle isn’t that much different. Oh, the cabal won’t engineer the thing from the ground up. They don’t have to. Stalin’s potentates in Gosplan (Soviet central planning agency) and the politburo didn’t. They just ordered the heavy-manufactured thing into existence like God in Genesis, but left the dirty details to less-than-benighted underlings. In America, failure is rewarded in unionization and civil service protections, something called tenure. For Stalin and the gang, failure in living up to the fancies of the junta means show trials for “wreckers”, zek-status in the Gulag Archipelago, or a mass grave in Kurapaty Forest.
Our ruling over-caffeinated simpletons are following a movie script, “Field of Dreams”. The farmer Ray in the movie hears a voice telling him, “If you build it, he will come”. It’s the activists’ voice in the heads of Gov. Gavin Newsom, his super majority of totalitarian utopians in the state legislature, everywhere the donkey party is in power, and the entire Democratic Party ensconced in DC. Translation: “Build the EV, and we’ll force the others to buy it.” But the thing ordered into mass production, and the forced scuttling of the second largest family investment, is a mass incoherency.
As a golf cart in a Florida planned-unit-development, it’s a great concept. Try selling the thing to anyone travelling a couple of hours to do their once-a-month Costco shopping, visit grandma, or road-tripping to Yellowstone. Try selling the idea to anyone responsible for distributing the tonnage from port to Amazon warehouse to your suburban doorstep waiting for thieves to take it. Not everyone lives in the tightly packed confines of our urban hellscapes. Not everyone lives within reach of California’s coastal Highway 1. The EV is designed for pampered urbanites living in mild climates, and close to the frequently vandalized charging stations – much like everything else vandalized in our cities – which are tied to a grid made unreliable by the same geniuses forcing you into the EV. Does any of this compute?
The ridiculousness of it all is intensified by the flight of the middle class from our decaying cities. It seems that people with kids don’t appreciate over-taxation, skyrocketing housing costs, a cost of living made unsustainable by those things labeled “sustainable”, the crime and broad urban dysfunction, the Soviet-style schools, and the horrible thought that once your kid is infected with the social contagion of gender confusion, they’ll fall into the clutches of those who are striving to permanently scar their minds and bodies, and you won’t be able to do anything about it. Imagine it: H.G. Wells’s “Island of Dr. Moreau” made real.
Of course, the advocates of dystopia will face declining congressional representation each new census. But, wait, the activists in and out of government have an answer for this new unintended consequence of coercing others to live the activists’ dreams. They’ll just open the immigration floodgates to the global poor. Then, these teeming hordes will be shuttled in sufficient volume to fill the vacuum left by the skedaddling middle class in time for the next census.
Still, more of the taxpaying middle class will be scattered over flyover country, in places unsuitable for the bi-coastal, urban zeitgeist of EV-love. The weather doesn’t cooperate, and the long distances can quickly turn the EV into a death trap. Oh, well, they’ll vote Republican; so, who cares? Right?
Stuck in an EV in winter waiting for a charge
The whole incongruency – in exchanging what works for what doesn’t – glares at you in the face. When it comes time to get rid of the EV, there isn’t much of a resale market for it (see below). Once used, who wants it, because who knows how those delicate batteries were treated? Not staying within the optimal charging window of 20%-80% and frequent fast-charges permanently sap it. Has anyone religiously followed the strictures in charging their cellphone, or anything for that matter run on a rechargeable battery? What makes you think that it’ll be any different with the Biden-car? You can’t order an end to quick-charging if you want to sell the thing to anyone with a life, nor will mandatory gizmos to prevent over-charging be any more effective. You’ll have to perform the mental trick of 80% becoming 100%. 300 miles of range is actually 240; but long before that, systems start shutting down to preserve power to the wheels. Playing it safe by over-charging is the norm. And do you think that people in the resale market don’t know this? If they don’t, they’ll soon discover it.
Our future?
Let’s put numbers to the absurdity. The numbskulls in central planning realize that everyone, including the unwashed masses trying to get to work and the kids to school and soccer practice, must be in an EV to create the illusion of mass acceptance of the contraption. The rich can afford anything, including Elon Musk’s latest offering, with or without a government bribe, er, subsidy, er, rebate, er, fully refundable tax credit. So, the bribes ($7,500) are concocted with income ceilings: $300,000 for married couples filing jointly, $150,000 for individuals (see below). And you won’t have to wait to file your taxes to get it.
To keep leasing within the totalitarian fold, it’s even easier to garner the bribe since the dealer and you don’t have to worry much about the red tape of the domestic content and manufacture folderol of an outright purchase.
The problem is, with leasing and rentals, they’re swelling the used-EV supply. But dealers and rental companies can’t get rid of them. They’re stuck with something quickly losing its value. EVs are the worst segment in the used car market, their value collapsing nearly 50% in five years after purchase. Rental companies are limiting their purchases and some such as Sixt SE won’t buy any more Teslas. And to think that the zealots in power want you to buy the thing where it’ll occupy half the floor space in your garage next to the thing that works, the thing for which you are holding onto in a death grip – your good ‘ol fossil-fueled sedan. Indeed, the central planners’ dream stinks to high heaven, while collecting dust among all the other junk in your garage.
To hide the disruption and devastation in the automobile industry, the euphemism “transition” will be applied and a host of subsidies, kickbacks, tax largesse, and domestic-content favoritism will be showered on Detroit. Meanwhile, as lunch-pail Joe shows solidarity with UAW strikers, his administration is bribing and coercing their employer into reducing the payroll. The planners’ forecast of growing employment in the EV’s “battery belt” to replace losses elsewhere should ring hollow to UAW members since America’s “belt” is mostly in the non-union South. Still, net jobs in the industry could very well be negative. Hints abound of things to come. Stellantis, parent of Chrysler, announced in December 2023 that they plan to cut 3,600 jobs in the unionized Midwest due to California’s increasingly draconian fuel-efficiency standards. Mandatory EV sales targets as a percentage of all sales and these blunt mpg targets encourage compliance by not necessarily increasing production of EVs, or expanding total production, but lowering production across the board. It’s a side effect of California zealotry, and, after all, Biden’s and Schumer’s DC is California, Jr.
Where California goes, the donkey party’s national potentates follow. It’s said of California that lately the only thing that it produces in abundance is refugees in an imitation of Marxism-Leninism behind the Iron Curtain. Wrong. It’s bad ideas. CARB (California Air Resources Board) has ordered into existence something that doesn’t exist: “zero-emission” locomotives (see below). First, the CARB authoritarians have ordered the train companies to squirrel away money in preparation for their 2035 deadline when all new locomotives will be, magically, “zero emission”.
Of course, if you throw enough money at any Salvador Dali-like adventure into surrealism, reality can be forcibly contorted to fit the vision, but who wants to live in the result? Who can live in the result? The things carrying the freight will likely be battery-powered with less toque and horsepower, less range, less hauling capacity. It’s the same approach in the state’s edicts for tractor/trailers, the trucking industry. The consequence is batteries, batteries everywhere, and diminishment of your well-being. Shortages, jumps in distribution costs, and mounting difficulties in getting anything for producers and consumers will translate into you living poorer. The average person will get smacked, and royally.
The reality of California’s battery-powered locomotive?
But your well-being is beside the point for utopians drunk with power. Without a doubt, this is state tyranny as obvious as slavery in the ante-bellum South. A state in the grip of lunacy shouldn’t be allowed to drag everyone else into its self-imposed quicksand, which is the current state of affairs. Clearly, ports, trucking, and trains are the stuff of interstate commerce, and the feds in the Constitution govern it (Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl. 3). Also, clearly, California is interfering with it, obstructing it. Any state action so egregiously injurious to interstate commerce should be brought to heel. Existing Supreme Court case law affirms the Constitution’s plain language in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), Wickard v. Filburn (1942), Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (1964), Katzenbach v. McClung (1964), et al.
So, the power is there; why isn’t it exercised? Our federal government is crippled by two evenly matched and irreconcilable sides. One is in the grip of neo-Marxism and the other, the antidote, is consumed in a repulsive cult of personality. Much of the blame for this sorry deadlock lies with the electorate, for they are equally befuddled by two unpalatable options, or they’re boosters of the nonsense. They won’t, and maybe can’t, give the antidote the requisite overwhelming majorities in Congress and the executive branch to right the ship. We end up muddling through with California idiocy pulling the rest of the country into a morass.
It’s all so worrisome as we inch closer to a government-engineered suppression of our personal prospects.
More could be said of California’s inspiration in the federal government’s latest assault on the ubiquitous electric motors used in all American manufacturing. It’s more of the same ilk. They want to onshore manufacturing while they pummel manufacturers with an additional cost of $20,000 per employee in new regulations. It’s like the EV and batteries, batteries everywhere. Something stinks to high heaven; or, more accurately, it’s as toxic as phosgene or chlorine gas wafting over WWI battlefields. King Claudius has nothing on these dunces.
RogerG
Sources:
* “5 Big Lies About Climate Change, And How Researchers Trained A Machine To Spot Them”, David Vetter, Forbes, 11/19/21, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2021/11/19/5-big-lies-about-climate-change-and-why-researchers-trained-a-machine-to-spot-them/?sh=9d2a24349f47
* “2023 Study Shows Electric Vehicles Are Worst for Resale Value”, Marc Wiley, MotorBiscuit, 11/14/23, at https://www.motorbiscuit.com/studies-show-electric-vehicles-worst-resale-value/
* “Top 25 Cars That Hold Their Value the Best – and the 25 Worst: Electric vehicles are the worst at holding their value, while hybrids, sports cars and trucks depreciate the least”, ISeeCars, 11/6/23, at https://www.iseecars.com/cars-that-hold-their-value-study#v=2023
* “The $7,500 tax credit for electric cars will see big changes in 2024. What to know”, Camila Domonoske, NPR, 12/28/23, at https://www.npr.org/2023/12/28/1219158071/ev-electric-vehicles-tax-credit-car-shopping-tesla-ford-vw-gm
* For a horror story with a rental EV: “Car-Rental Companies Are Ruining EVs: Good luck charging your surprise electric rental car.”, Saahil Desai, The Atlantic, 6/16/2023, at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/06/electric-vehicle-rental-cars-hertz-chargers/674429/
* “No one wants to buy used EVs and they’re piling up in weed-infested graveyards”, Monica Raymunt and Bloomberg, Fortune, 12/22/23, at https://fortune.com/2023/12/22/no-one-wants-to-buy-used-ev-piling-weed-infested-graveyards-tesla-bmw-vw/amp/
* “California Kills Auto Jobs in Toledo: Stellantis warns of layoffs in the Midwest owing to the Golden State’s electric-vehicle mandate.”, The Editorial Board, The Wall Street Journal, 12/11/23, at https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-kills-auto-jobs-in-toledo-electric-vehicle-mandate-15c44a5c?mod=hp_opin_pos_1
* “California Mandates Green Trains That Don’t Exist”, Dominic Pino, National Review, 12/28/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/california-mandates-green-trains-that-dont-exist/
