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A Green Totalitarianism Is Descending Upon Us

Online surveillance bill opens door for Big Brother | CBC News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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May be an image of car and text that says 'ELECTRICY wm HaynE LANL "Plug in to nearby taxpayer's wallet and she's ready to go!"'

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RogerG

Sources:

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

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

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

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What Does a Lack of Interest in Government Debt Say About Us? Nothing Good.

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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)
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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”.

Michael Jackson Man In The Mirror Wallpapers - Wallpaper Cave

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.

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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/

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They’re Still Leaving as of Friday, 12/29/23

Local Moving Labor | U-Haul

In “Poltergeist II”, the little girl stares into the snow of the TV screen and announces, “They’re baaaaack!”.  Who’s back?  The ghosts, of course.  For those chronicling the decline of California, the iconic declaration must be reworked.  A person staring at their daily news feed comes away with stories of people leaving the state saying, “They’re leeeeeeeeeeaving!”  This time, it’s Time magazine in “Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time” (see below).

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The little girl from “Poltergeist II”

And I quote from the story: “Los Angeles was not at the top of the list [of places to move to], instead becoming the area residents were most likely to move away from.”  According to a Redfin report, “That marks the first time on record [LA] has been the number one place homebuyers are leaving, and the first time in over two years the Bay Area has dropped out of the number one spot.”

A dubious distinction for the not-so-Golden State.  LA occupies the top spot, but the rest of the list is a who’s who of American urban dystopia, all of them Democratic Party satraps. San Francisco, New York City, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit and Denver are kryptonite to businesses and the middle class.  People are voting with their feet as they have for millennia.  Hell on earth is not a magnet.

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A common strip of homelessness in Los Angeles
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Litter from the chronic mobs of thieves along rail lines in Los Angeles

Welcome to urban America, and for the globe-trotting foreign traveler, reconsider that visit to the City by the Bay or Disneyland. Unless you’re a member of a major bowl game broadcast crew like the ESPN team reporting from the floor of the Rose Bowl, who’ll speed from the airport to hotel to the Rose Bowl in a limousine, you’ll risk face-to-face encounters with urban dysfunction.

For Californians, get out. For visitors, stay away.

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RogerG

Source:
* “Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time”, Suzanne Blake, Time, 12/29/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/americans-are-fleeing-los-angeles-more-than-anywhere-else-for-first-time/ar-AA1md8sC?ocid=msedgntp&pc=LCTS&cvid=483db5997a504d34a10fb00840ed94db&ei=52

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It’s Basic Economics. The EV Is Junk.

Watch This Severe Electric Car Fire And Explosion At A Charging Station
May 8, 2020, at a charging station in Dongguan, China, where an electric car caught fire when being plugged into a charger.

While perusing my news feed, I found a recent Fortune magazine article on the problems that electric vehicle owners are having with their cars, 80% more difficulties on average than conventional combustion vehicles (see below).  The writer tried to deflect the problems into the category of “growing pains” for the new industry.

Yes, I agree with him, but he seems unaware of the much more fundamental issue.  Problems or no, the EV is a politically driven product and, like any such good or service, has politically driven trade-offs.  Growing pains?  Growing pains or no, the whole EV industry probably would be immensely smaller but for politics.  Politicians constructing their road to utopia understand that people must be bribed, and coerced, to mass adopt something that makes their lives worse off.  The things still don’t make much economic sense compared to those efficient muscle engines.

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Gasoline direct injection engine.
Electric-car battery costs: Tesla $190 per kwh for pack, GM $145 for cells
An EV battery pack weighs on average 1,000 pounds. Your typical combustion engine and its transmission can vary from 300 (4-cylinder) to 1,000 pounds (V-8 powerhouse).

Lest we forget, politicians are camp followers, always with their fingers in the wind discerning the next fashionable thought or issue.  Those leaning to the Left already have a laundry list of ready-made issues, just add water – i.e., donors’ money.

But there’s one huge complication: Politics is a poor driver of an economy. Utility (use and practicality) occupies first place in a normally functioning economy.  Sellers invent and continue to produce the stuff that buyers find useful and enhances their lives.  If it’s not as good as the alternatives, it’s essentially junk.  It’s the economic definition of junk.  When politics enters the fray, utility disappears from the equation.  Practicality and usefulness take a back seat to powerful groups’ ideological demands.  When the movement rises in prominence due to their momentary occupation of the commanding heights of the culture, they quickly gain the reins of political power to impose their preferences, and the artificially driven esteem for junk rises.

Trade-offs and opportunity costs are tossed to the wind.  If pressed, the true believer can always interject their own wholly invented, unprovable costs into the equation.  Prominent among the hypothetical eco-costs is the existential end of the planet.  That’s always the gambit for the zealot: scare people into adopting the zealot’s choices.  The Left’s ownership of the cultural commanding heights has made it easy for already Left-leaning politicos to engage in the hyperbole.  Consequently, political power is married to an ideology’s agenda.  In the end, your family sedan is forced into oblivion.

So, as politically inspired junk is imposed on the population, what is lost, or the opportunity cost?  On the EV front, the auto producers’ resources are plowed into the less-useful and away from the more-useful.  That’s a trade-off, and it’s unavoidable.  The loss of the opportunity for producing the more useful things (opportunity costs) increases, and that’s equally unavoidable.

What to do if your electric car runs out of charge | Toyota of Orlando
An EV depleted of charge
Vandals cut cables at EV charging station on Vancouver Island - Drive Tesla
Vandals cut and removed charging handles from this charging station on Vancouver Island, B.C.

What does all this mean for you?  Your life changes, and for the worse.  It always pencils-out that way when you are forced to choose the worst alternative. How bad is that alternative?  The whole eco-agenda cascades onto you with its abundant unintended consequences.  It goes beyond the problems with charging and the batteries (some of them catch fire) in the article.  The additional resources to make the thing work as the numerous glitches of the impractical (“growing pains”) raise the costs of producing the impractical which will always translate into an increase in the cost of living.  Higher standards of living do not ride the back of higher costs of production and living.  The more that you try and do that, the worse it gets.

Save the planet by being worse off?  But you aren’t saving the planet. Do you think for a moment that India and China and the rest of Donald Trump’s “shitholes” are going to give up cheap energy?  Come on, get a grip.  China is building new coal-fired plants at the same clip as they are warships.  India, soon to be the planet’s most populous country, wants relief from the oppressive heat.  Sorry, solar panels and windmills won’t cut it.  Economies of scale in energy production, meaning a grid and power plants, is the only thing that’ll elevate people out of the sweat and filth.  Everyone, if they were honest, knows it, except AOC, John Kerry, and our culture’s eco-barkers.

Wait a minute.  That’s quite a crowd who’ve bought into the nonsense.  And nonsense it is.  The leap of faith from a period of warming temperatures to the apocalypse more resembles a religious doctrine than science.  “Follow the science” is no such thing.  It’s follow the eco-Pope.

That Genius of Lansing, Mi., Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, has decided to go California and follow the eco-Pope.  She’s hellbent on bringing blackouts and skyrocketing utility bills to the wolverine state.  She signed two bills establishing energy central planning (see below).  The state must be 100% “clean energy” by 2040, 60% by 2035.  That means a massive increase in solar and wind, 1.5 million acres more (Mackinac Center report, see below).  The costs will be humungous, and it will be taken out of the hide of Michiganders.  And out of the sovereign powers of localities.  Their power to regulate these gargantuan scars on the land in their neighborhood will be proscribed.  Expect each family in the state to shell out an additional $2,746 per year for energy (Mackinac Center report).

Declaring war on gas and petroleum and monopolizing all energy needs onto an electrical grid suffering from “intermittency” (solar and wind) is absolute folly.  Do you want to live worse off? Do you want your children to be worse off?  Don’t think for a moment that at least you’ve saved the planet, as they’ve made most people’s lives more challenging.  By the way, it won’t be true for Jeff Bezos, nor Mark Zuckerberg, nor John Kerry, who married into the Heinz fortune.

Al Gore Celebrates Earth Day By Buying Another 12,000 Square Foot Mansion | The End Times ...
Albert Gore and his mansions

The planet will be the same as before, and you’ll be less well off.  All this brought to you by people who don’t know what they’re doing.

On second thought, they do.  And it’s hooey.

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RogerG

Read more here:

* “Electric vehicle owners report 80% more problems than with conventional cars and trucks amid ‘growing pains’ for the industry, Consumer Reports says”, Tom Krisher of the AP, Fortune, 11/23/23, at https://fortune.com/2023/11/29/electric-vehicle-reliability-more-problems-gas-powered/

* “Michigan Gov Whitmer signs sweeping green energy bill forcing transition from fossil fuels”, Thomas Catenacci, Fox News, 11/30/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/michigan-gov-whitmer-signs-sweeping-green-energy-bill-forcing-transition-from-fossil-fuels/ar-AA1kJF4I

* “New Energy Bills Would Increase Costs and Blackouts”, Holly Wetzel, Mackinac Center, 10/27/2023, at https://www.mackinac.org/pressroom/2023/new-energy-bills-would-increase-costs-and-blackouts

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Our Revolting Politics Is Making a Lot of Things Revolting

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38-year-old Vivek Ramaswamy running for the Republican presidential nomination
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Inside Pride Month 2023 at Target
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Dylan Mulvaney and Bud Light

Two things are on today’s docket: Vivek Ramaswamy’s star is rising and Bud Light and Target are still crashing.  Regarding the former, Ramaswamy is pandering to the Trumpkins in the GOP.  He’s trying to be a 38-year-old Trump but without the ugliness.  He’s risen to second place in some state polls.  Astonishingly, Bud Light and Target have jumped onto the gender-confusion/teenage-genital-mutilation bandwagon, as if their customers want to hear from them on the culture war.  In both cases, what foolishness.  Who in their right mind would think that any of this would pass the smell test?

Trump’s powerful presence in the GOP is making the party a reflection of his unlikeable persona for a functioning majority of the national electorate.  By that, I mean disliked by those not siloed behind the increasingly constricted walls of MAGA world.  As many Trumpers cling ever so tightly to him with each indictment, other and far more numerous GOP-leaning demographics fly the coop, no matter the imbecilities of the Biden clan on the other side of the political ledger.  Democrats win by making the other guy more detested than them.

Vivek wants the nomination and will say anything to get it.  For him, as an investment guru, everything, including politics, is transactional – i.e., you get something (the nomination) by paying something (pandering to the Trump crowd).  What comes out is pure, unadulterated poppycock.

Have you heard Hugh Hewitt’s interview of Vivek from August 14, 2023 (transcript and audio below)?  Vivek announced to the world a green light for Red Cina to invade Taiwan after 2028.  You heard me right. Imitating his mentor (DJT) in the use of blunt and stark terms, no matter how asinine, he declared,

“I’m being very clear: Xi Jinping should not mess with Taiwan until we have achieved semiconductor independence, until the end of my first term when I will lead us there. And after that, our commitments to Taiwan, our commitments to be willing to go to military conflict, will change after that, because that’s rationally in our self-interest.”

Vivek Ramaswamy talk's Hugh about his new book "Capitalist Punishment." - The Hugh Hewitt Show

There you have it in Ramaswamy’s words: Don’t mess with us until after my term ends and we have transplanted Taiwan Semiconductor and/or a good portion of the world’s semiconductor industry to our shores within reach of our IRS, EPA, and our ascendant neo-Marxists.  After that, Taiwan, my friend, you’re on your own.  Done.

MAGA is thrilled because no more “forever wars”.  A President Ramaswamy looks tough in announcing a four-year delayed abandonment in “Trumpian” words.  Well, for Taiwan, starting in 2029, enjoy the Taipei May Day parades of the People’s Liberation Army.

When pressed by Hewitt about the astounding repercussions, Vivek began repeated non-clarifications with “Let me make myself perfectly clear.”  Making oneself “perfectly clear” is a poker-tell that you’re not going to be clear.  He continued to insist on sending a huge naval force to the area but backed away from the will to use it.  What’s the point?  Thugs need to face real threats, not an armada that would blithely move out of the way for the PLA’s amphibious and aerial assault.  The will to use it must be conveyed along with the deployment of the Pacific Fleet.  Without the will, it’s an empty bluff.

Vivek, try to be something more than talking like Trump while acting like Jimmy Carter, Obama, or Joe Biden.  It isn’t a good look for you, nor is it good for the country.

I would say, “Thank God, this guy isn’t president”, but then I have to glance over at the current occupant.  Whew, what a mess, what a choice.  Sadly, for this investment exec, transactional thinking doesn’t necessarily incorporate strategic calculus, such as the loss of Taiwan producing a gaping hole in the first island chain for the burgeoning PLA Navy to flood the Pacific.  Vivek will do nothing but reinforce among our allies our habit of abandonment when things get messy.  Remember Vietnam, Bill Clinton’s 1990s dithering with Al-Qaeda, Obama’s Iraq pullout and red line in Syria, and Biden’s Afghanistan bugout?  And now Taiwan?

Naval news and analysis: China caught between a green and a blue water navy

Our potential and current friends and allies will certainly remember.  A lack of steadfastness and reliability won’t bode well for alliance-making.  Who’d want to be our friend?

At that point, it will be America alone as the export part of our economy dries up in the face of a cordon of CCP satraps.  If you think that Biden and company is making a hash of our way of life, wait for a President Ramaswamy and his 20-30% hit (value of our exports) to US GDP after his forced retreat to fortress America.  We would be in Great Depression territory.  Speaking of transactional thinking, Vivek’s pandering to the no-more-forever-wars constituency will have real world costs.  We’ll quickly learn the value of alliances as we get crushed under a depression-ignited, debt-fueled, and bulging safety net.

Vivek’s foolishness can be chalked up to youthful rashness.  What’s the excuse for the seasoned big wheels at Anheuser-Busch and Target?  Or, are they “seasoned”, by whom, where?  Who thought that a man (Dylan Mulvaney) trying to compete and look like a bulk of their customers’ wives and girlfriends would be a nice way to expand the Bud Light brand?  Who thought that the family-friendly Target, with many a mother with children in tow, would be an excellent venue to advocate gender confusion and same-sex amory?  It’s unfathomable.

At this time, Bud Light’s sales continue to plummet.  They can’t give away the stuff.  Whereas, at the beginning of the year, it ranked #1.

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Alissa Heinerscheid, the Bud Light advertising exec behind the Dylan Mulvaney endorsement

The person most responsible for the debacle was Bug Light’s 39-year-old advertising exec Alissa Heinerscheid.  Her classroom pedigree is impressive: Groton, Harvard, Wharton.  But is such a distinguished pedigree a marker for success for the company and its products?  We’re at a stage in our history when people need to question the idea that business acumen is a product of overhyped degrees from institutions who have been diminishing in excellence for years.

It probably never occurred to Alissa that expanding the brand in one direction could lead to lead to a dramatic contraction in another.  This is a person who was marinated in a cocoon far removed from the lives of the people who buy the goods.  She may know of the average Americans’ way of life, but it’s a kind of knowing absent the intimacy of actually having lived it.  For her, “beer” meant European or craft.  In her rarified social atmosphere, sex rebels are a cute social appurtenance; they’re kind of cool.

However, for the bulk of Bug Light’s consumers, it’s a movement to revolutionize their lives and expose their kids to emotional harm in their crucial developmental years.  They want a beer to drink at the bar-be-cue not one that is curated to advance a disturbing cause.  Who would have thought that in a week someone like Heinerscheid could turn a popular product into an icon of a left-wing cultural revolution?  Bud Light’s sales have dropped for 17 straight weeks.  “Expanding the brand” turned into subtracting the core, and out goes Alissa, and down goes Bud Light.

Target Stock Down After 1 Million Promise to Boycott - Family Policy Alliance

It’s a similar pattern with Target.  Pride Month 2023 in June heralded a drop in sales which continues into the third quarter after the geniuses in the c-suite thought that it was a good idea to plaster the kids’ department in pride flags, introduce a line of “tuck friendly” girls’ swimsuits, and carry children’s products from Abprallen, famous for their Satanist line.  What accounts for what can only be described as bizarre decisions?  Like Bud Light and its determination to link with a TikTok “influencer” for transgenderism, these decisions arise out of people who were acculturated in a peculiar environment at odds to the life lived by most people who’ll never experience the Groton-to-Wharton social pipeline.  The c-suite is simply out of touch, and grossly so.  It’s as if they came from a different planet, and don’t realize it.

LGBTQ activists call for new strategies to promote equality after Target backlash
A Pride Month display at a Target store in Dickson City, Pa. (photo: Ted Shaffrey/AP)
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Idealized Target board meeting from its website. They’ve certainly got the look of the ignorant and naive.

Both cases are abject lessons in how to clog the bankruptcy courts by making yourself detested.  The quality and affordability of the good or service is made irrelevant.  Simply seen walking from the parking lot into the store, or being seen with the blue can in your fridge, now could brand you as an endorser of extremist causes.

It’s more complicated than “go woke, go broke”.  The turn-off won’t come from the Groton-to-Wharton crowd.  Anyway, their Maserati won’t be seen in the parking lot or with a 12-pack in the passenger seat.  More accurately, it’s “go woke and half the country will be suspicious of what you’re selling”.

Meanwhile, from the right comes the youngish business savant, anxious to be president, who is completely out of his league regarding foreign relations and national security, adding greater urgency to the possible uses of the phrase “idiot savant”.  Along with much of the c-suite, their self-confidence is so grand that they will court disaster for all of us.

May be a doodle of text that says 'RANIPS Forget Cancel Culture, I think it' a sham I do not like it, Uncle Sam-I-am. Ignoring achievements in the name of the Woke, and cause more division with the fires they stoke. Take history out of context is now the new game. Not looking for justice, just someone to blame. Today, it's a book, so watch what you do. One day in the future, they may cancel you. @Ramireztoons michaelpramirez.com'
Michael Ramirez is great for a comical portrayal of our current condition. Could fear of being “cancelled” drive the corporate brain trust to endorse left-wing cultural causes?

RogerG

Read more here:

* Transcript and audio of High Hewitt’s complete 8/14/23 interview of Vivek Ramaswamy: “Vivek Ramaswamy On All Things National Security” at https://hughhewitt.com/vivek-ramaswamy-on-all-things-national-security?highlight=vivek%20ramaswamy

* “Who Will Heed the Lessons of Target and Bud Light?”, Jim Geraghty, National Review Online, 8/17/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/who-will-heed-the-lessons-of-target-and-bud-light/

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Making the New Soviet Man, Western Style

50 Jahre nach dem Attentat: "Dutschke hatte ein Stück Gehirn verloren" - n-tv.de
Rudi Dutschke

Creating the New Soviet Man (and woman, and whatever) necessitates control of the social mechanisms that transmit culture.  The German leftist of the 1960’s, Rudi Dutschke, coined the slogan “der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen” – the long march through the institutions – and thus compacted the strategy to a neat little quip.

Let’s face it, a radical leftist is a Marxist who has adopted the rhetorical flair of a claque of history’s Marxists – Antonio Gramsci, The Frankfurt School (Institute for Social Research and Herbert Marcuse, et al) – in expanding the list of the oppressed to include the “nots”: not white; not white and male; not white, male, hetero – you get the picture.  The doctrine then begins to overwhelm the culture once the revolutionaries shed their shaggy hair, jeans, and sandals and don tweed, professorial beards, pant suits, and gain tenure.  After that, their nonsensical ideological peccadillos permeate everything from Supreme Court opinions to PBS’s “American Experience” films.

The Frankfurt School and Ideology - YouTube

The crux of the strategy involves conjuring a statistical disparity between a hypothetical gender/race overclass and the radicals’ favored “minorities” – aka the “oppressed” – and then a jump to one of the many “isms” and “phobias” (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia) as the cause.  The numbers are connected to a preconceived cause – a predetermined ism/phobia – by only tenuous threads of logic and fact, at best.  Once you hear or read the shambolic reasoning, if you haven’t been previously indoctrinated and still retain your wits, you will be left scratching your head at the flight of fancy’s chutzpah.

That titan of pure reason, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who refused to define woman in her confirmation hearing, injected an extension of the tactic (statistical disparity and leap to predetermined cause) in her dissenting opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC.  According to her, without the racial favoritism of “diversity” gamesmanship in college admissions, black babies will die.  Citing a study in one of those prestigious but newly radicalized science journals in the “long march through the institutions” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), she expounded with all the confidence of an excessively opinionated sophomore, “. . . for high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.”  So, in her ill-reasoned reasoning, a B-average student from a poorly performing school should have precedence over a straight-A one who faced a more demanding curriculum, with race being the deciding factor.  Got that?  We’re back to racism.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson Declines To Define 'Woman' Because She's 'Not A Biologist,' Sparking ...

The problem: Jackson’s study is bogus.  Even the study cites a miniscule five one-hundredths of a percent (99.96% v. 99.91%) difference in the survival rate of black newborns between black and white doctors.  Diving into the flotsam of this shipwreck, the number of infants is too small to support such a tiny difference and the study’s conclusions.  The study’s methodology screams “high margin of error”.

Not only that, it relied on generalized Census data which meant that in many cases the race of the attending physician couldn’t be determined, or whether the treatment was from a nurse, physician’s assistant, midwife, or a doctor.  Other relevant factors were left on the cutting room floor, such as the plethora of social factors that aren’t evenly distributed through the population under any circumstances.  To conclude that these social disparities are further proof of systemic racism merely nestles one more logic-leap into the general logic-leap.  Welcome to the mental miasma of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Our intertwined schools and media prepare the ground for this buffoonery.  Many teachers incorporate PBS documentaries into their curriculum (I did).  Today’s “American Experience” (AE), though, isn’t the AE of a decade ago.  It’s gone woke.  Two episodes – “American Oz” and “Flood in the Desert” – illustrate the corruption.  Many of the contributing “experts” clearly worship at the altar of the groupthink. If you wanted to learn a little about L. Frank Baum and his Oz creations, you would, along with a heavy dose of racism, sexism, and genocide against “indigenous peoples”, adding at least another 30 minutes to the program.  The collapse of St. Francis Dam north of Los Angeles in the 1920’s can’t proceed without cis-gender white male racism, sexism, and the overall patriarchal contemptuousness for Gaia.

American Experience: American Oz [New DVD] 841887045384 | eBay

The St. Francis Dam Disaster | Flood in the Desert | American Experience | PBS - YouTube

The productions are littered with interesting facts . . . and a heavy dose of generational sneering.  It’s as if the production staff see themselves as a class of pure, enlightened deities passing judgment on those in the past who didn’t have the opportunity to be civilized at the feet of the great master, Marcuse.

The films are dripping with hubris, but what have these Marcuse acolytes wrought?  Inspired by the same mindset – maybe without the Molotov cocktails, riots, killings, and arson of their Antifa military wing – many of our cities, at the mercy of this governing philosophy, are in a doom-loop.  Go ahead, spend time travelling the surface streets of the doom-loop corridor from Seattle to San Diego, or Chicago (hire a protective private army), or the Bos-Wash corridor on the east coast.  If you avoid hepatitis or HIV, or cholera, from the litter of hypodermic needles and the open-air poop on the sidewalks, you may not survive the mugging.  The only thing in abundance, besides the filth, is the desire of residents to flee.  Marcuse-thought is a boon to U-Haul.

Who should be sneering, today’s half-witted who think themselves Olympian in their wisdom, or our ancestors?  Let Mark Twain cut to the quick:

“What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”

And our modern nincompoops know a whole lot that “ain’t so”. . . to our peril.

The New Man (or woman, or whatever) is a new man, woman, or whatever, mired in a hellscape.  San Francisco is the canary in the coal mine.  The bird is passed out on the floor of the cage.  Go ahead, YouTube search “San Francisco doom loop”.  Watch the video clip below, and this is what our post-modernist, neo-Marxist big wheels are proud of?  It’s shameful, absolutely shameful.

Here’s another one from a slightly different angle with the same conclusions:

RogerG

Read more here:

* “Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Dissent Repeats Debunked Claim About Black Doctors”, Sarah Weaver, The Daily Caller, July 2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/justice-ketanji-brown-jacksons-dissent-repeats-debunked-claim-about-black-doctors/ar-AA1dgRln

* The study that Jackson cites: “Physician–patient racial concordance and disparities in birthing mortality for newborns”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 17, 2020, at https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1913405117

* Both “American Oz” and “Flood in the Desert” can be view on YouTube.

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EV Nuttery and the Vanguard of the Revolution

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Audi’s Hildegard Wortmann, Audi’s head of sales and marketing

Electric vehicles are still nuts, and still useful to make revolution pay.  Some titans of industry will smatter themselves with ill-repute to make a buck from current revolutionary fad-thoughts.  For instance, the junk-thought associated with the religio-ideological cult of climate change.  For instance, the corporate heavies angling for advantage at Audi and most of the rest of the auto industry.

Revolutionaries don’t care one twit about the bigwigs except as useful idiots.  How useful?  Lenin put it quite succinctly: “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”  Right now, the fire breathing zealots of the cult are oblivious of your needs to get to work or have a little vacation happiness to make life a bit more pleasant.  They want to shackle you to the ev whether it works for you or not.  And there is no shortage of corporate honchos who, like vultures, would like to ride the wave for fun and profit.  Some may actually believe the jargon.

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'got rope? "The Copitolists will sell US the rope with which we will hang them." -V.I. Lenin'

Case in point: Ms. Hildegard Wortman, Audi’s head of sales and marketing, who said,

“. . . why we are doing this.  Not to sell another technology; we are doing this to decarbonize, and we need to come to an end with fossil fuels.”

I’m skeptical.  The cult dominates the state and then uses the state to make the people conform.  For Wortman and Audi, why not hitch a ride on the crusade, because the commissars are going to force the folks into buying them anyway.  Push the propaganda for it will contribute to the bottom line.  Heck, it’s been done before.  It’s the tried-and-true practice of crony corporatism to ally with the ruling zealots with the guns.

If you are going to cater to the revolution for fun and profit, may as well go all the way.  May as well patronize the whole program, including the Frankfurt School/Marcuse/Gramsci neo-Marxism that is reflected in the wokedom of “critical (race, legal, gender) theory”.  Go to the Audi website and you’ll find:

“The colonial mythology of technology that saw us as superior to nature and shepherded only the Eurocentric technologies through to the present was wrong.  Rather than continuing a narrow view of technology informed by our distance from nature, we must acknowledge that the Enlightenment mythology of technology was just one way and not the only way for humankind to progress.”

Is this from Audi, or the Princeton’s ASB?

An electric vehicle with its humungous batteries will span our “distance from nature”?  Take a look at the pictures below. Is this uniting us with nature or gouging into it?

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This and the two following images: Lithium mines for those ev batteries

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Two of 40,000 children working in lithium mines in the Congo.

Pardon my cynicism but what happens after they’ve forced us into filthy, foul-smelling mass transit, sitting beside injecting drug addicts and the psychotic, and into an ev, and then pull the rug out from under us with blackouts and mandatory closures of the mines producing the battery materials?  The same people who want you in the ev also don’t like cars, electric or fossil fuel, period.  Their crocodile tears come to mind in regard to your predicament.

Indeed, rope selling for Audi and a descent into the 19th century for the rest of us.

RogerG

Read more here:

* Audi’s Hildegard Wortmann interview at “Audi’s Hildegard Wortmann: ‘Edutainment’ needed to boost consumers’ confidence in EVs”, Larry P. Vellequette, Automotive News, 7/30/23, at https://www.autonews.com/executives/audi-sales-marketing-exec-says-ev-marketing-must-change

* The Audi statement of wokedom: “Five theses on progress”, in interview with New York-based Julia Watson, at https://www.progress.audi/progress/en/julia-watson-describes-her-stance-using-five-theses-on-progress.html#:~:text=The%20colonial%20mythology,humankind%20to%20progress.

* A general overview of Audi and the ev craze: “EVs Aren’t Undercooked, You’re Just Stupid”, Luther Ray Abel, National Review Online, 7/31/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/evs-arent-undercooked-youre-just-stupid/

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A “Very Expensive Exercise in Futility”, Morris Chang, CEO of TSMC

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Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company founder Morris Chang (Sam Yeh/Getty Images)

Mr. Chang’s comment in the title came a mere matter of months after a much-ballyhooed opening of a new Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC) facility in Phoenix, Arizona, a heavily subsidized joint effort with the state of Arizona and the federal government’s CHIPS Act.  President Biden gushed during the opening ceremonies that manufacturing in the U.S. “is back, folks.”  However, Mr. Chang had a hard look at the financials and concluded that the Arizona plant was a loser and the CHIPS Act ($52 billion in chip subsidies) was a “very expensive exercise in futility.”  TSMC is scaling back operations at the new plant.

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Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is building its first fabrication plant in North Phoenix. (TSMC)

Why the harsh assessment? The “folks” at TSMC came to realize that business activity in America is a much more expensive proposition than they had earlier contemplated.  We are simply uncompetitive and the freebies – free infrastructure, other giveaways, tax goodies, etc. – can’t make up for the cultural, social, political, and economic deficits.  The Rust Belt, California’s economic decrepitude, and the other blue states’ dismal economic futures are not magical, accidental happenstances.  They are a byproduct of America’s current – and past – infatuation with government intervention for an ever-expanding list of excuses.

The Democratic Party is the institutional gatekeeper of this our bumbling central planning, with some Republicans tagging along in the hope of sharing in the reflected glory of a big and splashy event.  But for the donkey party, they see themselves as the keeper of the lodestar – a sort of Ark of the Covenant – of their vision, and it is none other than the New Deal.  It’s a forever template to be repeated endlessly.  Of course, one must ignore the fact that it was a disaster.  The depression became a Great Depression which persisted for a decade, was interrupted by the emergency of World War II, and was set to resume if subsequent Republican Congresses in the late 1940’s hadn’t interceded to quash much of the madness

CWA workers
Men pushing wheel barrows in Civil Works Administration project in the 1930’s.
The Great Depression Facts: Double Dip Economic Slump :: The Market Oracle
In spite of the tremendous federal government interventions, unemployment remained high throughout the 1930’s. One can conclude that FDR’s New Deal was a massive failure, hugely ineffectual, or helped to prolong the Depression. Whichever, it was a disaster.

Whenever the donkey party ascends the grimy pole of power, their favorite ploy is to imitate FDR.  So, concerns of declining domestic manufacturing – which, if true, was a result of government interventions – is to be addressed by . . . more government intervention.  Thus, the CHIPS Act is just another exercise in flooding the zone with taxpayer moneys like in the heady days of FDR’s meddling.

True, today, Trump and his cadre of “populist” Republicans also love the idea of slathering gobs of the public treasury on favorite obsessions such as manufacturing and employing the stick of government intervention in tariffs to protect their golden boy.  They don’t have the smarts to understand that it’s central planning by another name.  Call it “industrial policy”.  It’s a rebranded New Deal for a new era of demagogues and nitwits.

Why did this latest effort at what doesn’t work fail?  Mr. Chang belatedly noticed that he entered the snake pit that is America.  The Rust Belt of the Upper Midwest became a rusty belt of abandoned factories, expanding slums, chronic unemployment, and a declining tax base because of the unrestrained greed of government-empowered labor unions, onerous taxation, and the country’s ascent to the zenith of reregulating its economy.  Much of what made the Rust Belt rusty remains, and gets a boost whenever the donkey party is granted the keys to the kingdom.

Think about all the ways that America is an economic snake pit.  Ever since FDR’s New Deal lavishly spent and bullied farmers, workers, and entrepreneurs for a decade, Democrats have assiduously worked to revive the monster.  The 1970’s rise of environmentalism replaced the 1930’s corporatism and socialism as the go-to excuse to bring back the Leviathan.  Out came the well-intentioned Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and their subsequent amendments, and herd of agencies and regulations.

California has a housing crisis for the same reason that Mr. Chang has a gloomy attitude about chip manufacturing in Arizona, or any other place in America.  Permitting and the host of other approvals easily doubles the cost of plant construction as compared to Taiwan.  Additionally, labor costs are through the roof: triple, maybe four times the cost of Taiwanese workers when you factor in all the mandated benefits alongside the higher wages and salaries.  Don’t expect these numbers to remain the same for long if local lefties discover America’s proven appetite for hiking the minimum wage.  The jump in wages for fast food workers ripples through the economy all the way to the plant floor.

The quality of what economists call human capital is another troubling factor.  Chief among the attributes of human capital is a robust work ethic, which includes timely, quick responses to problems at work.  Shang-yi Chiang, TSMC’s head of research and development, was quoted as saying, “people worked so much harder in Taiwan.”  He cites the example of an equipment failure at 1 a.m. being immediately repaired by 2 a.m. in Taiwan.  In America, the plant has to wait till 10 a.m. He concludes about the island’s workforce, “They [workers] do not complain, and their spouse does not complain either.”

county union (SEIU 1021) workers strike
SEIU picketers chant while sitting and marching during the county union workers (SEIU 1021) strike held at the Solano County Governement Center plaza, Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2015, in Fairfield. (Steve Reczkowski/Daliy Republic)

Of course, panderers at Fox News or MSNBC, and “populists” everywhere, would counter with something about Americans not being wage slaves, or similar rhetoric.  But they ignore the time when Taiwan’s Horatio Algierses were actually Americans of the 19th century.  A cursory biographical reading of the lives of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Ford, etc., reads like Chaing’s depiction of the average Taiwanese employee.  Did we lose our va-va-voom in an avalanche of modern self-satisfaction, self-esteem, and victimhood indoctrination?

Indeed, indoctrination is the watchword in describing much of American public education today.  As for teaching math, science, reading, history, literature, and civics, the academic core, NAEP scores have stagnated at embarrassing levels if not fallen.  Proficiency in U.S. History and Civics by eighth-graders currently hovers around 14% and 22% respectively.  The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) shows a significant step down from Taiwan to the U.S. in academic performance in math and science.

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The differential would probably be much worse if the U.S. hadn’t experienced a large influx of Asians over the past few decades who are still somewhat immune from our pop-cultural depredations.  They dominate enrollments in elite high schools and college programs in math and science to such an extent that Big Academia practices covert reverse discrimination against them, treating them as “white” in this new era of blatant DEI racial favoritism.

Yes, friendly foreign investors face a snake pit of an ill-prepared labor pool, one with a declining appreciation for hard work, and an economic environment plagued by a host of collectivist busy bodies who are heavily bankrolled by the hyper-wealthy possessing the means to insulate themselves from the insipid consequences of their lofty ideals.  Analogies work best in describing this state of affairs.  A snake pit is an accurate depiction of the economic ecosystem but flies-to-cow-paddies or maybe piranhas-in-a-feeding-frenzy is a much better fit for our government interventions of regulation and subsidies.  American government brings to the table its retinue of rent seekers and socialistic/neo-Marxist partisans to muck up the works.  Throw out the money and regulatory power and like flies or piranha this brood shows up to feed on the carcass.  Apparently, TSMC doesn’t relish being viewed as cold meat on the side of the road.

Welcoming TSMC with the CHIPS Act, our government hid the regulatory “guardrails” (Biden’s word) that turned the well-intentioned into a feeding frenzy.  The law to replant chip manufacturing in the U.S. was saddled with mandates for favored demographics, our adversarial labor unions, greenie canards, and DEI and ESG and all the other acronyms of the hard left’s political project.  As in “Arbeit Macht Frei” over the gates of Auschwitz, the “CHIPS Act Notice of Funding Opportunity” welcomes recipients of this government largesse.  This gamut of insidiousness in the “Notice” was the translation of the Act’s language by the Department of Commerce and the National Institute of Standards and Technology into an expensive regulatory morass.

Since analogies work best, quicksand is more accurate than “revitalization”. “Revitalization” means to make healthy again, but health isn’t the actual goal.  The CHIPS Act was just another vehicle to advance a political and cultural revolution.  And these revolutions are expensive, and two centuries of experience shows them to be descents into a life of, in Thomas Hobbes’s words, the “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.

Beware of our government’s handouts.  Our dole didn’t benefit the poor – if their neighborhoods are any indication – and they won’t benefit anyone operating with a bottom line.

POLITICO MAFIOSO: Cartoon of the Day:What Solyndra Scandal?

RogerG

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* For a account of the New Deal, go to the following: The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, Amity Shlaes, Harper, 2008. The “forgotten man” in the title is a reference to the average worker, taxpayer, and businessman, not to the Left’s litany of the “oppressed”.

* The situation involving TSMC’s Arizona chips plant is appraised in “Why the CHIPS Act Will Fail”, Jordan McGillis (Manhattan Institute) and Clay Robinson (Arizona State graduate student), National Review, 5/11/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/05/29/why-the-chips-act-will-fail/

* For American student academic performance turn to “US eighth-grade history, civics scores fall to 1990s levels”, NewsNation, 5/3/2023; “Reading and mathematics scores decline during COVID-19 pandemic”, NAEP, National Center for Education Statistics, 2022, at https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2022/

* “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology”, Chris Miller, Scribner, 2022.

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Papering Over Insanity: The Green Energy Charade, Cap-and-Trade, and the Assault on Trucking

esla unveils its new electric semi truck at a presentation in Hawthorne, Calif., in 2017. (Alexandria Sage/Reuters)

I begin with a tripartite revolution, of which the charade is a manifestation.

The sudden onset of a cultural and political revolution is bedeviling us.  It’s a three-legged revolution.  One leg is the “woke” revolution with its reverse pogrom against the vast majority of the population and the entire civilization itself.  Think of it as the reverse of the sanctioned riots – pogroms – against Jews, a small minority in imperial Russia.  Currently, a resurrected cadre of Red Guards (of Maoist infamy), defames, and defaces our cherished institutions, beliefs, customs, and commemorations, and are on the hunt to eradicate a mystical and vague “privilege” of “whiteness” or the “rich” or whoever they wish to pillory as their enemy.  The parallel with Mao’s carnage is stunning.

That’s not all.  With the assault of the “woke” comes the second leg: an intensified zealotry for the battle against “climate change” and a newfound veneration of the pagan goddess Gaia.  A suddenly intense and fanatical war on man-made carbon is the tip of the spear of the revolution.  States like California are leading the way into what will probably result in a decline much like the descent into Medieval times.  One of the chief vehicles to undermine our quality of life is the loosely-defined “green energy”, and that means a love affair with “renewables” and electric everything.  In the end, it can only produce a broad, sustained misery.

The third leg is the erection of a monster state to make it happen, for without it, the dreams of utopia will not be realized.  This turns the struggle into a war against human nature, the existence of which they have brushed aside in congeries of rhetoric in order to reimagine people as fully malleable to their designs.  It’s a calamity at the end of the day.  Think of it as a full-court, state-sponsored destruction of prosperity.

The vocabulary of “sustainable” or “renewable” is a chimera and an evisceration of our quality of life.  Solar, wind, geothermal, and small hydro is the mantra but their enfeebled productivity is the reality.  Lenin’s Bolsheviks toyed with the elimination of a financial system (money, banking, etc.), discovered that it only produced chaos, and settled on state-ownership of the economy.  In the end, that system collapsed under the weight of its own internal contradictions.  The same fate awaits this latest copy of dreams supplanting reality.

In Bolshevik Russia, a vast array of commissariats was found to be necessary to oversee the state-manipulation of ordinary life.  Human beings don’t naturally behave in ways complimentary to the official utopian template.  In California and other greenie states, and now the Biden federal government, similar government impositions are required to turn inherently deficient “renewables” into the energy backbone of a state and nation.  A flim-flam is necessary to hide the truth, much like the paper-shuffling in the Soviet Gosplan (state economic planning agency).  California has AB32 – the official, legally mandated set of commandments for greenie energy – CARB and an assisting regulatory labyrinth of support agencies.  Biden has his EPA and the entire federal Leviathan to make the incoherent appear coherent.

Open letter of apology from UCSF Professor John Balmes, MD, to the Bayview Hunters Point ...

Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Soviet politburo under Gorbachev

How incoherent is the whole scheme in California?  One need look no further than the spinoffs and unintended consequences of the greenie energy campaign.  To paper over the scant production and the fact that “sustainables” can’t meet energy needs, certificates – Renewable Energy Certificates (REC’s) and Environmental Attributes – are issued to solar, wind, and hydro producers in an elaborate carbon-credit scam who then peddle them, independent of their source, to purchase “dirty” power to make up for the abundant shortfalls.  “Dirty” instantly becomes “green” with an REC or Energy Attribute pasted over it.

The energy deficits are real because renewables are chronically untimely and deficient in their production – solar spikes at around 3-4 pm and rapidly declines after, which doesn’t coincide with actual usage; wind only contributes when there’s wind; and hydro adds only when there’s sufficient stream flow.  This certificated wallpaper is peddled by Investor Owner Utilities (IUO’s) – PG&E, Southern California Edison, etc. – and a new organizational Frankenstein called Community Choice Aggregators who are smaller energy collectives mostly composed of counties who virtue-signal their commitment to 100% pure renewables (Community Choice Energy), which isn’t, to their chagrin.  In the end, after all the gamesmanship, just as much carbon is released into the air as before, just with more bureaucracy, middle men, and paperwork to turn the simple provision of energy into a more expensive shell game.

Got it?  If not, you are not alone.  Just remember one thing: all of us would benefit from the acknowledgment of a simple facet of the real world – trade-offs.  More resources in time, resources, and capital spent on one thing means that they are not available for other things.  Greenie energy is more costly in so many ways.  How much have we unwittingly given up in new medical cures, inventions to make life easier and more productive, and greater prosperity as we spin our wheels in pursuit of a costly mirage?  This is what declining civilizations do.

Royalty Free Woman Looking At A Maze Pictures, Images and Stock Photos - iStock

So, the effort to make crippled electricity everything gave us the PR stunt of Biden tooling around in a parking lot in an electric F150 and extolling its alleged virtues.  It absolutely makes no sense.  Without the internal combustion engine, the categories of utility vehicles and freight haulers (18-wheelers) would never have come into existence in the first place.  Commerce and ranch work would revert back to the Middle Ages without it.  Imagine the food supply more dependent on local production and the return of local famines as natural disasters periodically lay waste to the nearby food supply.  The supermarket is inconceivable without the internal combustion engine.

The electric vehicle is a tony appurtenance for people who plan a life in a pampered urban cage, a life lacking in self-reliance and reveling in hedonistic indulgence.  It’s a tailor-made booster of totalitarianism, whether of the soft or hard variety, since a cooped-up population is easier to control.  It’s easier to make people greenie-compatible and keep them that way.  Say goodbye to a real functioning citizen republic.

California, of course, is leading the way to this bleak future.  The advances in fossil fuels and power efficiencies from better lubricants, tighter manufacturing tolerances, improved materials, fuel injection, solid-state ignition, and emission controls are now to be junked in an overnight leap into lithium batteries.  It’s a disaster-in-waiting.

Think about all the “don’ts” you’ll have to anticipate.  Don’t charge the ev overnight.  It degrades the battery, without which, junk the $60,000 thing in a few years.  Don’t buy one if you live in the routine path of hurricanes.  Those batteries ignite if submerged in water.  Don’t throw luggage into the trunk at the start of that long-anticipated road trip to Yellowstone.  You might have to spend the night in the car waiting to be rescued – charging stations being quite sparse outside your urban cocoon.  Don’t mindlessly grab that charging wand at some defaced public charging station.  Think of the kilovolts passing through the wires just millimeters from your fingers.  Insulation breaks down, especially when exposed to weather, vagrants, thousands of careless users jamming the things into their charging ports, and roving bands of teenage delinquents.  The utility companies constantly warn us not to touch or go near downed power lines.  What’s the difference?  At least with gasoline, you’re safe so long as you don’t play with fire while filling up.

And then there’s the weight of the thing – the battery, that is.  Weight matters a lot when getting from point A to point B, and when hauling anyone or anything.  The family sedan has a thousand-pound one; the Ford F150, 1,500 pounds; the Hummer, 5,000, the weight of a light tank.  The more weight, the less you can haul and the less distance you can haul it, making the trip through flyover country an anxiety-plagued, white-knuckled adventure as we are swallowed up in a geographical vacuum of charging stations.

14.5Kwh High Energy Electric Vehicle Battery Packs For Pick Up Truck
Batteries for an electric pickup

The asylum-by-the-coast called California is showing the world additional ways to muck things up.  Along with shoe-horning soccer moms into ev’s, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the state’s preeminent greenie commissariat, is doing the same thing to truckers.  It has declared that all new drayage trucks (the ones used around ports) are to be emission-free by 2026. By 2035, all trucks must be. So, getting freight from ship to warehouse could turn into a real comedy skit.  No practical alternative to diesel exists to do it.

Better yet, avoid California ports entirely – and while you’re at it, the entire west coast. Gulf Coast governors are waiting to welcome you in open arms. Trucking companies might very well be joining the middle class in fleeing California.

Have you seen the battery-powered 18-wheeler?  Tesla has a prototype – MAN, Scalia, Triton, Freightliner, and Volvo too. But what are we giving up as we bow to the climate-change Inquisition?  Answer: money (lots of it), reduced hauling capacity, the need for more trucks to make up for the smaller hauls, a vast increase in hauling time, the added expense of a specialized fleet of trucks impractical for anything but specialized use (drayage).

You’ll experience sticker shock at the price of that electric 18-wheeler. Try doubling the price of a new diesel one (around $185,000).  A price jump of that nature will limit the number of companies financially capable of competing in a freight hauling market now artificially skewed to the big, big capitalized boys. An already distorted market will be further mangled beyond recognition.

Guess what?  That battery powering the contraption makes an ev hauler about 5,400 lbs. heavier than the diesel version.  Given the fact that the legal total weight of truck and freight can’t be over 80,000 lbs. without crumbling the roads and bridges, the load in the trailer must be smaller.  More hauls, more trucks to do it, and jacked up prices for everything delivered by Amazon and to every brick-and-mortar store.  Expect sparser offerings on the shelves and inflation at the register.  Out the window goes Amazon Prime’s 3-day shipping and its current price tag.

Trucker collapses historic bridge, causing up to $1M damage - Bring Me The News

The whole concept of refueling takes on a new meaning.  A diesel truck takes about 15 minutes; the battery-powered behemoth takes hours.  The very people driving their trendy Nissan Leaf to Whole Foods will notice the attendant price increases and shortages.  Given their pattern of partisan proclivities, the residents have voted to turn their world upside down.  Last I checked, Manhattan, or inner-city anywhere, wasn’t famous as a verdant agricultural region or node of food packing and processing.  Everything must be trucked into the hipster lair.  I wonder how carefree is their lifestyle when scarcity turns from being more than theoretical background noise to real deprivation.  Rents may become cheaper since people no longer want to live there, and all of it as a byproduct of hours-long refueling and trucks crippled in their carrying capacity.

Photo: Empty produce shelves at Whole Foods Market, Longmont, CO, March 13, 2020; Compass Natural
Empty produce shelves at Whole Foods Market, Longmont, CO, March 13, 2020

People adjust, and in ways not foreseen by CARB central planners.  Their greenie ukases will push the population into crippled transportation and onto a crippled grid.  California will have to generate 11.5 gigawatts of more electricity from sources that are already strained to the breaking point to meet the 2026 deadlines.  Where’s that coming from?  Not from inside the state.  More limited and spasmodic energy from wind and solar won’t cut it.  I suspect more of the paper flim-flam to disguise the reliance on “dirty” sources.  It’s the truth that can’t admitted in polite company.

The state is already experiencing blackouts.  Watch produce and other perishables rot as the state scrambles to reenergize the lines.  That won’t be the end of it.  The ultimate result is a descent by baby steps into a way of life that doesn’t work as well as our grandparents’.  The green movement is a social suicide pact.

And to think that I haven’t even mentioned the monumental task of disposing of the batteries, spent solar panels (a lifespan of 10-15 years), and wind mills and their parts.  Recycling only eats up more of the grid and consumes other scarce resources.  All the toxic materials run the risk of seeping into our ground water.  Think of it: we are making such humungous efforts to move our pollution from the air and into the ground, and our way of life will get hammered as never before.  Our water supply might end up like the Salton Sea (Remember the MTBE scare? Look it up.).  Whew, what a mess.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832): “Oh what a tangled web we weave when at first we start to deceive.”

May be a graphic of text that says '219 CALIFORNIA i COMMITTEC RENEWABLE ENERG IT'S WHY WE HAVE the HIGHEST ELECTRICITY RATES CONTIGUOUS UNITED STATES. RATHER than SECURING POWER LINES, WE HAVE BLACKOUTS,L LIKE THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES. OCAC WE COMMITTING YOUR MONEY to TRANSITIONto 100% RENEWABLE ENERGY INSTEAD. OAr በርላር SOIFA WILDFIRE BREAKS OUT YOUR AREA, LEASE EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY. UNLESS YOU'RE M A BLACKOUT AREA and YOU HAVE an ELECTRIC CAR. ncAc @Ramireztoons DCAC DAC michaelpramirez.com'

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RogerG

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* For an account of California’s drayage truck mandates: “California’s latest environmental regulation may have unintended consequences for truckers”, Rachel Premack, FREIGHTWAVES, 5/25/2023, at https://www.freightwaves.com/news/californias-latest-trucking-emissions-regulation-may-have-unintended-consequences

* Thanks to Dominic Pino for his piece of 5/25/2023 in National Review Online, “Electric Trucks Are Worse than Diesel Trucks”, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/electric-trucks-are-worse-than-diesel-trucks/

* For an account of the new electric big rigs: “Semi-truck maker Freightliner has a test fleet of 40 rigs, with availability in 2022”, Mark Vaughn, Autoweek, 5/21/2021, at https://www.autoweek.com/news/green-cars/a36506185/electric-big-rig-semi-trucks/

* More on the reduced hauling capacity of electric 18-wheelers: “Electrifying trucking will mean sacrificing critical weight for heavy batteries, eating into already-slim margins”, Bianca Giacobone, Business Insider, 2/2/2023, at https://www.businessinsider.com/electric-trucks-longhaul-batteries-tesla-heavy-cargo-weight-problem-2023-2

* Here’s a little synopsis of the MTBE scare: “MTBE controversy”, Wikipedia, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTBE_controversy

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Our National Decomposition Continues Apace

Union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
Teacher union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
Supreme Court candidate Janet Protasiewicz reacts while speaking at her election night watch party in Milwaukee, Wis., on Tuesday, April 4, 2023. Protasiewicz, 60, defeated former Justice Dan Kelly, who previously worked for Republicans and had support from the state's leading anti-abortion groups. (Mike De Sisti /Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel via AP)
Janet Protasiewicz speaks at her election night party in Milwaukee after she defeated former Justice Dan Kelly for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. (Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)

 

Our national decomposition shows little sign of abating.  Elections in Wisconsin and Chicago indicate that there remains an appetite for decay.

Another word for decline or decomposition of a culture, civilization, or nation is degringolade.  Whichever word is used, however, we are experiencing it.  Nature isn’t doing it to us.  We are doing it to ourselves.  The precipitating factor is what is bouncing between our ears.  A sizeable chunk of the electorate, without even knowing it in many cases, is sold on toxic neo-Marxism in the guise of modern progressivism.  Today, progressivism and this updated Marxism are synonymous.  I’m beginning to sound like a broken record since I’ve certainly mentioned it often enough but can’t get away from it.  It’s constantly resurfacing in many places around the country.

This isn’t the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson.  As a refresher, this current edition is a relatively modern refashioning of Karl Marx’s paradigm: the systemic oppression of the oppressed who are defined by an ever-fungible list of outgroups covering everything from XY girls to the poor to anyone with high melanin counts.  To the rescue in this blinkered ideological schematic is a complete, top to bottom, inside and out, overhaul of all societal arrangements from the family to property, a thoroughgoing Marxist revolution.  Sound familiar?  Read BLM’s mission statement before it was scrubbed clean of too much revelatory information (see below).  We’ve proven to be quite creative in defining the “oppressed”, or victim groups.  For greenies, you might add the mother goddess Gaia (earth) to the list.  Anyway, this latest edition fairs no better than the kind that lurked behind the Iron Curtain or Mao’s China or is lurking in North Korea and Cuba.  It is a sacking of our heritage and thrusting the country into despair.

The canary passing out in the coal mine in this moment of our evisceration is urban America.  Our cities are crumbling, and so are the states dominated by them. The story has been acted out before.  We are historically rhyming with 4th and 5th-century AD Rome.  The Roman Empire didn’t go out in a boom but a whimper.  The cities became unlivable, mired in high taxes, crumbling infrastructure, a deterioration of services, lack of security, and overburdening controls.  Who’d want to live there?  Apparently, many didn’t by the 5th century.  The population of the city nearly emptied from over a million in the 1st century AD to 30,000 by the 5th.  Other similarly weakened urban places suffered.  People flocked to fortified estates, monasteries, and towns with natural defenses.  It’s the beginning of feudalism.

visigoths+%281%29.jpg 1,405×1,005 pixels | Vikings | Pinterest | Roman empire and Roman legion

Feudalism is returning.  Today, in the good ‘ol USA, people are rushing to states and places where 3-strikes laws mean something, where taxes and bureaucracies aren’t bleeding producers white, where parking your car on the street in front of your house isn’t an invitation to vandalism.  In other words, where neo-Marxism/progressivism is held in disrepute.

Where boys’ and girls’ bathrooms are separated by a wall.  Where nature’s chromosomal distinction hasn’t been buried by the linguistic manipulations of pronouns and “birthing person” for “woman”.  It’s just the opposite in our urban neo-Marxist silos.  Entirely mired in the mindset, many of our cities and urbanized states are busy advancing the revolution by eliminating other distinctions such as the one between criminal and law-abiding.  Judges and local potentates treat criminals as victims and their real victims as . . . well . . . .

As if we need any more evidence, Whole Foods announced yesterday (4/10/2023) that it was “temporarily closing” its 65,000 square foot San Francisco outlet at Eighth and Market, the Trinity section, that it just opened last year.  According to a company spokesman, “If we feel we can ensure the safety of our team members in the store, we will evaluate a reopening of our Trinity location.”  The area has been plagued by brutal beatings, stabbings, killings, and accidents in recent weeks.  Too few cops and law-unenforcement is making San Francisco look like 5th-century Rome (see below).

These arbiters of revolutionary justice in places like San Francisco have their own vocabulary to push this cultural revolution. “Decarceration” is the go-to for releasing offenders to reoffend, just call it “low-level crime”, which is another word for “inconsequential” to Soros-backed DA’s – inconsequential to everyone but the person left battered, bruised, and bleeding in the subway.  Barbarian invasions aren’t doing it to us, unless barbarian refers to the urban powerful who have drunk the neo-Marxist Kool-Aid. Your progressive DA, judges, city council, mayor, governor, and state legislature are performing the role of the Visigoths and their King Alaric in laying waste to Rome in 410 AD.

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Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD.
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Minneapolis in the 2020 summer of riots.

The only recourse for those not too fond of the mayhem is to vote with their feet.  Get out!  But these are democracies – surprise!  The corruption is democratic.  People are voting for mayhem. How’s that possible?  It might have something to do with a little cost/benefit analysis on the run: the rewards of group largesse from the public treasury are greater than the costs of possibly losing your little girl in a drive-by.  I know, it’s hard to believe.  But, on the other hand, it could just be stupid people being stupid, something not unheard of in the annals of democracy.

Or it could be due to the overall social decomposition extending to our schools.  People aren’t taught any better; they don’t know any better; and are easily led into believing nonsense.  Yet, policy-nonsense still behaves, as it always has, whether popularly chosen or not, like a drunk behind the wheel.  It’s a disaster careening down our thoroughfares.  And like most drunks, all-too-often they don’t get sober till they hit bottom.  Apparently, our urban electorates haven’t hit bottom.  Or it could be that the voter pool has been reduced to the drunks, the sober having fled to safer climes (red states).

A sizeable majority – by ten points – of Wisconsin voters recently failed the field sobriety test but still grabbed the car keys.  Some attribute the recent election of the Visigothic Janet Protasiewicz to the State Supreme Court to the abortion issue.  Probably true, but Wisconsinites have now let the Visigoths through the gates with a new Visigothic majority on the Court and, as a result, will get much more than carte blanche abortion.  Protasiewicz promised during the campaign to rewrite the state’s redistricting maps to the advantage of the neo-Marxists who promise more sacking into the foreseeable future.  In addition, expect more teacher-union power to dictate your child’s education, backdoor racism in diversity-equity-inclusion, and higher taxes to finance the revolution.  The whole litany of policies to promote the revolution against hypothetical systemic “oppressors” are about to be unleashed.  And so will a run on exiting U-Hauls, proving once again that the only thing efficiently produced by Marxism is refugees.

Money is the mother’s milk of politics . . . and revolution.  The donkey party neo-Marxists, in spite of their dismal record, are well-funded from a network of similarly intoxicated donors.  The precedent was established by Lenin in 1917.  The Bolsheviks were bankrolled by Imperial Germany. A revolution rides on more than fulminations.

Money and an election system reshaped to the advantage of their base put Protasiewicz in office, and gave Chicago another Alaric-style mayor, Brandon Johnson, to replace the Visigothic Lori Lightfoot.  The guy is marinated in neo-Marxism, like his predecessor.  San Francisco, Wisconsin, and Chicago are pointing the way to the future, the same future viewed by 5th-century Romans and early 20th-century Petrograd residents.

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If not arrested, our condition will continue to deteriorate . . . until riveting calamities shock us back to our senses.  Hopefully, by then, it won’t be too late.  Hopefully, we won’t wake up to news of two aircraft carriers sunk in the western Pacific, and our response is crippled by an economy unable to meet the demands of the moment, or a population unwilling to fight after years of anti-western indoctrination in our media and schools.  A pool of recruits rattled by gender dysphoria and accusations of white privilege can’t instill much confidence.

The signs of decay aren’t limited to the popularity of chic neo-Marxism among urban sophisticates.  Another passed-out canary is plummeting birth rates and closing maternity wards.  It’s hard to have a robust generational talent pool to face the threat with a population befuddled by pronouns and fungible sex-identity, all as the population shrinks.  We’ve got a lot to worry about.  And all the while, neo-Marxism, acting like the Visigoths, is busy hollowing out the nation and its civilization.  At this late hour, the odor of national decomposition is beginning to overwhelm the olfactory glands.

No photo description available.

RogerG

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* BLM’s mission statement included the following:
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.” It’s straight out of the writings of Karl Marx, nothing unusual for the self-professed Marxism of BLM’s founders of Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi.

From the Wayback Machine Archive, Black Lives Matter: “What We Believe”, at https://web.archive.org/web/20200408020723/https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/

* “Whole Foods closes San Francisco flagship store after one year, citing crime”, Jordan Valinsky, CNN, 4/11/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/whole-foods-closes-san-francisco-flagship-store-after-one-year-citing-crime/ar-AA19IDPH

* If you’re interested, here’s a local San Francisco newscast about people getting out during the Covid shutdown: “On The Move: San Francisco residents on the move during the COVID-19 economic downturn” at