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Making a Mess of the Grid

A sign calling for utility company PG&E to turn the power back on is seen on the side of the road during a statewide blackout in Calistoga, Ca., Oct. 10, 2019. (Photo by John Edelson/AFP)

In my mid-twenties, I was trying to find a way to turn my History/Religious Studies degree into meaningful employment to support what was to be a burgeoning family.  While in grad school, and taking a cue from a friend, I explored two avenues of study for employment: urban planning and teaching.  I ended up in teaching.  It slowly began to dawn on me, though, that the education and training in these fields was a grand muddle.  Delving into urban planning wasn’t really scholarship but indoctrination into an ideology.  Teacher training courses were frequently excursions into Summer-of-Love hippiedom and John Dewey’s socialism – a socialism applied to the classroom.

Inside the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in its earliest days. The clinic opened on June 7, 1967.  Many of these people would go into the college schools of education, the teachers of teachers.

Parents, beware, your schools are hip deep in the junk to an even greater extent today.  The balderdash remains and accounts to some extent for our population of college snowflakes.

Muddling (i.e., the action or process of bringing something into a disordered or confusing state), in fact, is what we do.  Take for instance the ideology/science muddle. It’s the essence of environmentalism, or the effort to stitch together science factoids in support of a political scheme – i.e., socialism.  What happens in real life when a muddle is at the root of public policy?  A mess!

No better example can be found than in the latest craze to sweep the hominid world: greenie (“sustainable”, “renewable”, etc.) energy.  Toward that end, we have the crazy-quilt of “net metering”.  What’s that?  It’s a ploy to bilk one energy consumer to benefit another.  How?  Stay tuned.

I was reading about it this morning.  40 states plus DC have elaborate schemes to force utility companies to buy the extra and unreliable electricity from mostly rooftop solar panels of homeowners – net-metering.  Sounds like a great gig for the soccer mom/dads of suburbia.  Right?  No, it falls into the too-good-to-be-true category.

The burlesque of net-metering.

The problem lies in the “unreliable” part of the ruse.  No one wants to buy a good or service if it cannot be expected to be there when needed.  It’s every bit as true when contracting for lawn-mowing service as it is for PG&E or, up here, Northern Lights.  The sun doesn’t align itself to the wishes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC).  The utility must revamp it’s grid for the on-again/off-again nature of rooftop solar.  The utility’s legal mandate to provide reliable 24/7 energy must be made to mesh with the unpredictable production of soccer mom/dad’s pigeon-shading solar panels.  That’s expensive for the utility company to make work and maintain.  It’ll show up in your bill, or in utility bankruptcy, or, also as in California, poorly maintained power poles going up in flames.  The consequences of the muddling of “unreliable” with “reliable” will appear in many ways, many of them not good.

The alternative is simple.  If you want the things, you pay and take full responsibility for them.  Sounds like something that my dad told me when I was a teenager.  Don’t try and get somebody else – the utility or the consumer who prizes simple reliability – to pay for your actions.  But the allure of the seemingly something-for-nothing – either through tax rebates, subsidies, utility mandates, or all of the above – allows soccer mom/dad to delude themselves.  The scheme is more productive of delusions than reliable energy.

For those attuned to the scam, the scheme is sold as a sacrifice for the good of the planet.  Remember though, “sacrifice” is the very essence of utopia-mongering.  You know, the ends-justify-means stuff. Or, as Nikolai Yezhov, head of Stain’s NKVD (Bolshevik secret police) would put it, “When you chop wood, chips fly.”  AOC has interesting company.

Nikolai Yezhov, far right, next to Stalin.

Don’t buy into the racket.  Furthering our descent into third-world status won’t alter India’s and China’s belching of CO2.  The planet won’t be saved, our grid will resemble Venezuela’s, and we will have proven that a “smart” grid is essentially a “dumb” one.  What does that say about us?

RogerG

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Not Making Sense

The Getty Fire burns near the Getty Center along the 405 freeway north of Los Angeles, California, U.S. October 28, 2019. (REUTERS/ Gene Blevins)

We aren’t well-served by the mass of our journalists or schools.  Frequently as a simple reader or teacher I’ve come away from an article or textbook treatment of a topic with a lingering sense of bafflement.  The stories don’t make much sense.

As a History teacher, for example, the common treatment of the Great Depression is awash in incoherence.  Blame is placed on greed and “over-production”.  What?!  “Over-production” is everywhere present in an economy and is corrected by sell-offs with no hint of a depression, let alone a “great” one.  As for “greed”, it’s been with us since Eve met the serpent, maybe before.  It wasn’t invented by the 1920’s.

The New Deal’s answer for “overproduction” and the decline in agricultural prices.

Plus, the authors don’t attempt to explain why the thing lasted so long.  The greed and over-production mantras are presented as a set-up for a love affair with FDR and all things New Deal. Interestingly the horror persisted and even worsened in ’36-’37.  Textbooks and teacher training are composed of the long march of banalities, and we’re spreading the bunk to the youngins.

Ditto for news stories.  Descriptions of today’s happenings are often muddled.  Take for instance The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey in her piece, “California Is Becoming Unlivable”.  The “unlivable” part of California is ascribed to the underlying factors of climate change and high housing costs.  Both, according to Lowrey, led to California’s fires.  The high cost of housing forced development into the wildland urban interface (WUI). Her answer is the totalitarian urge to herd people into apartment complexes, something the commissars in Sacramento have been trying to accomplish for at least a couple of decades.  Could this have something to do with the high cost of housing?  Something about the dementia of “doing the same thing and expecting a different result” comes to mind.

Could this be their vision for the future of California housing?

Mulberry Street, NYC, circa 1900.

Of course they won’t leave the topic without throwing the fire epidemic into the climate change vortex.  But the climate change god doesn’t just pick on California.  It’s a global phenomenon.  What has turned California into matchsticks is a combination of its dry-summer climate, with its El Diablo winds, and the clowns in Sacramento.  Wildland fire suppression tactics are so passé among the ruling class of lefties in Sacramento.  Though, in the dry-summer chaparral biomes, it’s like playing with firecrackers in a refinery.

The clowns try to hide their incompetence behind a barrage of charges against the utility companies.  They can only get away with it under conditions of collective amnesia.  PG&E and the rest of the gang are under the PUC’s thumb and its lefty hobby horses.  Hardening the grid in a dry-summer climate takes second fiddle to dreams of a greenie energy utopia.  After piling up the firewood under the weakly-maintained power lines, the goofs are shocked that physics takes over.  Astounding!

A power line goes up in flames along a hillside as the Cocos Fire continues to burn in San Marcos, California May 15, 2014. (REUTERS/Mike Blake)

Parents beware of the indoctrination of your kids.  Additionally, you have to be leery of the network news and print and digital publications.  I’m beginning to wonder about the benefits of ignorance when compared to propaganda.  Mmmm, something to think about?

RogerG

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Settling Controversy By Diktat

Below is a video from Mearns Academy, in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, which went viral in June of 2019, of a teacher who removed a student for stating that there are only two genders.

In my mind, the remarkable thing about the incident was the teacher’s frequent reference to “policy”, as in the school’s and government’s policy of recognizing more than two genders settles the issue enough to squash dissent.  It’s an approach that seems to be seeping into most areas of public life.  In other words, be silent if you disagree with the powers-that-be on an issue that is inherently open to dispute.

Yes, open to dispute.  Elementary logic makes it easy to challenge this most modern of contentions.  Yet, the enthusiasts for 40 or so genders try to swamp opposing voices with, in essence, a politicized résumé.  The tactic is to prepare a list of gullible Ph.D.’s – ones with prejudicial sympathies for the claims – make sure that they occupy powerful positions in the relevant professional associations who have an instinct for political adventurism, and have a fervent activist base – size doesn’t matter, approximation to political power does.  In that way, logic and facts get overwhelmed by the loud volume of an intense few.  Education is bedeviled by the technique, as I can attest from personal experience.

For an alternative view of transgenderism, go here.

What it comes down to is a person’s self-assertion that he or she (or whatever) is the opposite of his or her (or whatever) chromosomes.  Rhetoric, verbal distinctions, and analytical procedures to identify “legitimate” claims are invented to bolster the new “science”.  If the purpose of the process is to winnow out the dubious from the genuine, the filter has holes the size of railroad tunnels.  If this is science, it is of the sham variety.

We’ve been down this road before with eugenics and racial purity.  And we might have to add overwrought “climate change” to the list.  So-called “science” is just as vulnerable to fanciful popular trends as hemlines and music.

At the end of the day, what have we done?  As is usual in these kinds of things, it’s the young who pay the price for our impulsiveness.  They are injected with pharmaceuticals at a young age in preparation for surgery later.  The drugs will stunt their development and the surgery is irreversible.  But by then, it’s too late.  A change of heart just became meaningless.  With transgenderism, you might as well repeal the Hippocratic oath.

The problems don’t stop there.  Girls’ track, swimming, soccer, etc., or girl’s anything, will have been made nonsensical.  The inherent advantage of the transgendered girl over those whose mental state aligns with their chromosomes means that past-boys will dominate present-girls.  I wonder about the survival of the longstanding feminist push for sports equity when the boys-now-girls are harvesting the majority of girls’ sports scholarships and dominating the record books.  We don’t have to much worry about the process working the other way.

This is what happens when government wades into a controversy in favor of the side obviously lacking in merit but nonetheless having proximity to power.  Government diktat overwhelms debate and discourse, and helps to produce viral videos of public employees shaming dissenters even though the dissenters have the stronger case.  Is this any way to run a citizen republic?

RogerG

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Add Degree Inflation to the Other Forms of Malignant Inflation

Sproul Plaza, UC Berkeley, June 2019.

One evening I received a call from one of my students in my community college Physical Geography class.  He was disappointed in his grade and begged for a higher one.  This was his second time around but couldn’t show much improvement.  I told him that I couldn’t in good conscience raise his grade as it would be unfair to the other students.  He pleaded, “If I don’t get a higher grade, I won’t graduate and I won’t rise to anything in my life.”  My heart sank after hearing this.  I proceeded to dispel him of the crazy notion.  It may be crazy but it is instilled in the young from pre-school on.  How did we get to this place?

Somehow, going to college has become our society’s default path to personal advancement.  Call it degree inflation.  The relentless drumbeat of “college, college, college” has warped public policy with its plethora of taxpayer subsidized financial aid, degraded entry and instructional standards, and produced new “soft science” degree fields that have little bearing on real learning and improved abilities and does much to produce alienated and disgruntled students with a bent for political activism.

Oberlin College students protest a bakery for alleged racism. Later, the college incurred a $44 million judgment for defaming the owners and an employee.

And it fabricates a raft of “disparate impacts”, that old bugbear of civil rights warriors since the 1960’s.  College degrees aren’t distributed evenly among social groups, and some groups have protected status in law and court decisions (the Civil Rights Acts and the Griggs decision).  As the college degree becomes a de facto test for employment, the brunt will fall disproportionately upon these groups.  A new college-industrial complex has taken shape to provide new barriers to job entry and advancement, whose relevance to work performance is more hypothetical than real.  The case is laid out beautifully by Frederick M. Hess and J. Grant Addison in National Affairs, “Busting the College-Industrial Complex” (see here).

I suspect that a social bias is at work in this call of “college for all”.  Most people making the push come from social strata who predominate in college admissions.  It’s how they did it; it’s how their parents did it; it’s how everyone in their well-to-do neighborhood does it.  When they get into positions of influence, it’s their preferred prescription for everyone to reach elevated levels of esteem.  For them, anything else is for the hoi polloi.

Pres. Obama with daughter Malia, who attends Harvard, and Pres. and Mrs. Clinton with Chelsea who attended Stanford.

Illogic abounds in the process.  On the one hand, they complain about the escalating cost of college; on the other, they push as many people as possible into it.  It’s as if college advocates want to suspend the relationship between demand and price.  You can’t, and when you try, the disjunction will show in other damaging ways.

To put it bluntly, college isn’t for everybody.  Nor should it be.  Anyway, the heralded thing is debased beyond recognition.  Many of our young would be better served if they looked elsewhere for personal growth.

RogerG

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A Pet Peeve

College student doesn’t recognize Ronald Reagan.

This has happened more than a few times in my 30-year teaching career.  As part of a broader discussion, a kid will define a “conservative” as one who opposes change.  That’s not the end of it.  What follows is a train wreck of logic.  Diving deeper, we find that the kid is hung up on the root “conserve”, which to the student means to stand athwart “change”.  And “change” is synonymous with “reform”.  And “reform” is “good”.  That’s etymology, or a loose rendering of it.  When did etymology become a substitute for philosophical reasoning?  Somehow it has for the masses of the young passing through our schools into adulthood.

To set the record straight, “conservative” is one of many philosophies – in common usage, call them ideologies – that have bounced around our world for the past few centuries.  Other modern examples would be “liberal”, “progressive”, and “Salafist Islam”.  A philosophy/ideology is a simple set of judgments on how the world works.

The terms are also labels.  What fits under the label can change over time.  A “conservative” of 16th century England would support the aristocracy and a Catholic-style Church of England (High Churchmen in the parlance of the day).  However, by the 19th into the 20th centuries, “conservative” came to be defined by the liberty agenda of Locke, Burke, Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, the now-defunct British Whig Party, and our founding fathers.  Amazing as to what a few centuries can do.

If “conservative” can be defined by a liberty agenda, what of “liberal” and “progressive”?  It’s easy to knock these two things out since they have morphed into the same thing.  A “progressive” (or modern liberal) begins with an unexamined, unacknowledged, and unstated assumption about history.  For them, the past is deficient, the present is an improvement, and the future is an advance on an inferior present.  An appropriate progressive metaphor for the human experience would be a chairlift up a ski slope.  It’s the unstated view of History curriculums in our schools, and part and parcel of the Obama rhetoric of being “on the right side of history”.

Some serious implications soon follow.  For instance, who is the most capable of ferreting out the trajectory?  Academics, of course.  They, the knowledgeable, have the wherewithal to peer into the past and present and guide us onto the true path of human betterment.  It’s the dawn of the administrative state and diminishment of the rough-and-tumble politics of popular sovereignty.  Now, the way is laid open for an academically-trained civil service to guide and direct us.  Say goodbye to the citizen republic, guns, and the spontaneous order of free markets.  Life is reduced to the prescriptions of empowered social technicians.

The administrative state.

The Soviets tried to do the same thing on meth.  It was called central planning.

“Science” is the buzzword. Science is, indeed, a great thing … but not when a little bit of it is extrapolated into airy historical predictions and social abstractions.  Take for instance Marx’s “scientific socialism” and “dialectical materialism”.  Take for instance the Green New Deal. At this point, “science” is no different from religious mysticism.  The conclusions are no longer tethered to Earth’s gravity but have zoomed past the asteroid belt.

So, what do we have?  We have one line of thought rooted in a firm grasp of human nature with all its flaws.  Does the Old Testament sound familiar?  Out of the idea comes the rule of law and constitutional republics as checks on the evil men and women can do.  By contrast, the other reasoning means reform, reform, and more reform.  Everything is turned topsy-turvy forever, and all under the direction of a set of planners with the latest zeitgeisty truths-of-the-moment.  Be prepared to constantly queue up for shortages will be the afterbirth.

The Soviet Union in its latter days suffered from a birth dearth (and still does) and plague of alcoholism.  I don’t think that the rule of dogmatic, degreed social managers comports well with our nature.  The planners, as it turns out, have the same flaws as the rest of us.  A social miasma will descend on life.

Please, take me somewhere else.

RogerG

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Harming Our Kids

Steve Forbes in “Forbes” (April 30, 2019) reviewed Rich Karlgaard’s book, “Late Bloomers”.  In the book, Karlgaard makes the point that there is no hard timetable for human flourishing.  When we act as if there is one, we disfigure our kids and their future.  We go further in creating a cult of youth and shuffling the old out to pasture.  In the end, I can’t help but think that we are fashioning our young into future clients of the therapy and counseling industry, and increasingly dragging in the government as financier.  Taxpayers, watch out, for the taxman cometh.

Evidence of the mauling is all around. Parents will stretch themselves into bankruptcy court to move into a “nicer” neighborhood for the so-called “good” schools.  The schools aren’t better; the student body is just better dressed with better cars in the parking lot.

And the kids are more likely to do the homework.  But what’s in the homework?  It’s the same deficient curriculum for the most part.

Guess what?  This is all about cosmetic resume-building.  Make sure to get the AP on your high school transcripts; go to the right summer camp; crowd your kid into as many organized sports as possible; do a charity for the way it’ll look to the college admissions officer.  When does the kid have the breathing space to simply be a kid?

The college entrance cheating scandals are a sign of the trend.  Do all of the above, and if that doesn’t work, or if the kid hasn’t done it, cheat.  We’re creating a world of facile and sterile expectations.

But where does wisdom fit into the grand plan?  It doesn’t.  In a world of only looking good, wisdom has no place.  Wisdom doesn’t arise from a mad race to fill a resume.  Life, family, and faith have a much greater bearing on personal resilience and true happiness.  And for some, maybe most, that takes awhile.

A Stanford prof is quoted as saying that the incoming freshman are increasingly “brittle”.  Indeed.

Students in Los Angeles protest the November 2016 election result.

RogerG

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A Tale of Two Articles

Lesson: Fashionable ideas frequently fall into the category of “too good to be true”.

Compare Amy Harder’s Axios piece from yesterday, “The key to unlocking wind and solar: Making it last”, and Michael Shellenberger’s Forbes article from 2018, “We Don’t Need Solar And Wind To Save The Climate — And It’s A Good Thing, Too”.  The former is a puff piece about another alleged “breakthrough” for solar and wind energy.  The latter is a healthy splash of cold water on the whole ploy.  In today’s media, almost anything chic among the beautiful people, popular with the rulers in deep blue states, championed in thousands of public service ads, and exalted in high school science fairs, should be taken with a ton of salt.

Here’s a few takeaways from the analysis:

* Solar and wind, especially solar, have always been on the cusp of the next will-o’-the-wisp big breakthrough since the 19th century.  Shellenberger recounts the history; Harder unwittingly provides another example.

* Solar and wind are expensive.  They sound like a great idea since the sun shines and the wind blows without our help.  Check out the electricity rates of countries who have bought into solar and wind.

* The environmental damage of wind and solar is immense.  They use up and mar vast tracts of the landscape, disrupt and threaten the natural flora and fauna, and the production of their devices begets toxic wastes and land scarring.

* Nuclear is an obvious alternative but gets no mention in the rush to the solar-and-wind utopia. It’s better, more efficient, more cost effective, produces no CO2, and recycles much of its waste.  What’s there not to like … if we can look away from the scowls of the beautiful people?

The China Syndrome (1979), directed by James Bridges. Shown from left: James Hampton, Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas.

The real world can’t be boiled down to Sierra Club talking points.  I wish that our media would stop repeating them and our kids weren’t taught the baloney.

RogerG

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A 16-Year-Old Vote?

Here’s a thought, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (waitress/batender/sophmore class president) makes it easy to imagine: AOC is proof of the mistake of extending the vote to 16-year-olds.  With the exception of age, what’s the difference between her and Molly Ringwald’s character in “Sixteen Candles”?  Answer: not much.

RogerG

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Government as Parent

Case in point: Parenting Montana.

I begin with “crowding out”.  Crowding out occurs when so much money flows to one thing that other things die on the vine.  It happens in venues other than those based on mammon.  Big, really big question: Has the state become so huge that it’s sucking the blood out of civil society?  A vampire could work as a metaphor.

Nosferatu is phlebotomizing civil society.  What is the victim, civil society?  Our definitions are muddled.  The UN’s World Health Organization tries to pigeonhole civil society away from business and government.  To them, civil society is “collective action around shared interests, purposes and values”, and the third rail of life.  Sorry, that’s way too cute.  Sounds too much like something out of a snooze-inducing textbook.  Actually, much business is born of the interactions of those “shared interests, purposes and values”.  The same could be said of government, but civil society – and business, at least pre-Sanders – is voluntary.  Government isn’t about voluntary.  People in power have a quiver full of carrots and sticks to make you do something they want, and behind every carrot is a big fat hand holding that big fat stick.  Isolate government to itself while civil society since business share too much DNA.  Thus, in actuality, 2 rails exist.

Of side note, Ocasio-Cortez and her minions would like to gene-splice business and government together.  That’s the socialist thing at work.  They want 2 rails with this new hybrid Leviathan attacking the neck of a remaining and wilting civil society (in keeping with same metaphor).

This came to mind while streaming Pandora.  An ad for “Parenting Montana” appeared between the music, another one of those dot-org’s.  What the heck is that?  Smelling a rat, yep, it’s government. Go to the website and you’ll find in the fine print a scat trail to a federal block grant program to the State of Montana, CFDA 93.959.  Mind you, I find not much wrong with government helping to address the deeply troubled in our neighborhoods.  The fly in the ointment is that it is today’s government doing it.

Our present government isn’t a better one than great grandpa’s; it’s just bigger, way bigger, and beset by the ACLU, dominated by a narrow demographic, and addicted to fashionable causes.  The result is a mess.

I’m not sure what John Dewey and the rest of the Progressive leading lights of a century back, as pushers of big government, would think of today’s Leviathan.  They envisioned a government of technocratic know-it-alls guiding us to the promised land.  He probably couldn’t grasp the fact that the techs could lack wisdom and are infected with their own prejudices.  What they, the Prog’s,  produced is a government shaped around their experience of 16-plus years sitting in a classroom receiving curriculum.  Yes, curriculum.  For them, curriculum is the answer.  There’s nothing that couldn’t be cured by more curriculum.

Follow the steps, procedures, and factoids and you’re supposed to be a better person.  It is the chosen path for the representatives who made the law and the people who passed the civil service exam to get the thing up and running.  Do you get the picture?  The whole outlook is based on form (curriculum), not the substance (what’s in the curriculum).

Decamp to the website, ParentingMontana.org, and you’ll find curriculum and some referrals to nonprofits in government’s gravitational pull.  Watch videos, read the how-to links, and pay a visit to a counselor steeped in the curriculum – more people with degrees and certificates as Dewey preached.

Issues develop not with curriculum per se.  Curriculum is only a guide for what and how to teach.  The person doing the teaching most assuredly is important, but even more important is the “what”, what are they teaching?  The substance mentioned before.  Sadly, the spiritual is absent from the syllabus.  No room here for the faith.  A Bible study is replaced by your state-sponsored counseling group led by your state-approved counselor.  A referral to a church would be met by the hounds of the ACLU and years in court.  The experience produces a vanilla curriculum without God.

It competes with the kind offered by your priest or pastor, but with a distinct advantage.  Milton Friedman had it right when he said, “Nothing is more permanent than a temporary government program”.  Government draws strength from its access to everybody’s paycheck (the taxing power) and the Bureau of the Mint.  And politics is the measure of success, not bottom-line metrics, so a program has life long after it became rancid (ag subsidies anyone?).  Not exactly a level playing field here.

And government programs can be hip.  Your local priest or pastor, in contrast, will be bound to God’s word, the Bible.  Government is bound by politics, and politics is bound by money under the spell of any tight organization of commonly-oriented loud mouths.  If something gets popular traction, you bet that the authorities-that-be will take it in.  Consider gay marriage and transgender rights.  Look at the pot craze sweeping red and blue states alike (see Forbes).  The fashion-of-the-moment will find a place in government decrees on everything imaginable, including its “wisdom” on being a good mommy.

I saw the phenomena at work in a California high school.  California being so chic in thought and feeling, and personally as a teacher and department chair (Social Studies), the staff and I were frequently told of a new mandate from the state to honor one of the many “marginalized” in our lessons.  So, we went from unions to blacks to women to multiple ethnics to LGBTQ in its many variations, and back again.  Remember, the more time devoted to balkanized America, the less time for the Constitution, the Civil War, Supply/Demand, the Great Depression, etc.  “Crowding out” at work before your munchkins.  Welcome to politics flummoxing your kid’s school.

It’s no less true for “Parenting Montana”.  Scroll through the links.  Since many problems in the home can be traced to the desire for a high, a good part of the guidance will be consumed with booze and drug abuse.  Going to the links, I couldn’t find any mention of marijuana.  I found heroin, meth, alcohol, but no “mary jane”.  The words “abuse” and “reefer”, and its many equivalents, weren’t connected.  Could it be that marijuana has a constituency?  It’s fashionable whereas shooting up in a public bathroom isn’t.

But think about it: today’s THC-rich cannabis isn’t the stuff wafting through a 60’s Grateful Dead concert.  It’s jam-packed with maybe 3x’s more (though potheads hotly dispute the figure).  Hey, more bang for the buck, and with the “bang” comes all kinds of things attaching to your lungs as if you were lighting up a Marlborough (according to the American Lung Association).  Even more disturbing are the neurological and cognitive effects (see here).  It helps in germinating mental illness in the form of multiple psychoses like schizophrenia (see here).  The junk should not be given a free pass as “Parenting Montana” does.

But what are you going to do when getting high becomes “medical” … and fashionable?

I can only imagine the kinds of mischief that a hotbed of a lefty dreamscape like California can put the money to.  “Parenting” could be combined with “Heather Has Two Mommies” and how to teach your child to share a bathroom with someone of divergent genitalia.  The possibilities are endless.  If government is your mommy, you just found another way to inject politics into the family and the rest of civil society.  And then is civil society all that civil?  It certainly is more political.  Soon, we may be down to only one rail: government.  Sanders, AOC, and Marx would be smiling.

RogerG

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What’s Happening to Our News and Information?

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.  The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

Who said this? Bernie Sanders?  AOC in one of her Twitter fits?  Any of our “woke” college activists rampaging at a Charles Murray presentation?  Good guesses, but wrong.  The author is Karl Marx in his “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”.

In one sense, though, it sounds like the kind of thing they would say (maybe not AOC because that would ask too much of her facile understanding).  And it sounds like the kind of thing rattling the synapses of the vast majority of those manning our broadcast studios, newsrooms, and much of the publishing industry.  It’s a view of the world smothering the mental faculties of many in the chattering classes, whether chattering with the mouth or a word processor.

The notion has infected much of what we read, watch, and learn in our classrooms. It’s the idea that a hidden structure of oppression exists to ensnare us no matter what we do.  For Marx, the idea justified a complete revolution in the individual’s mind to the family to social relations to government.  Everything was to be managed, and that means big, really big government.  Sounds like the Green New Deal?

I’m reminded of Marx’s influence, now, almost every time I pick up my National Geographic Magazine (NGM).  The magazine reads like a series of op-eds in The Daily Worker.  A common tactic in its articles is to quote opinionated academics to buttress an opinion.  Add some stats and a few graphs, and, voilà, an opinion becomes “science”.  Marx also liked to say that his opinions were “science”.

Race is a field rich with possibilities for exploitation by those inclined to see the world as Marx did.  For instance, NGM’s April 2018 issue, “Black and White”, blathered about race as some “social construct” while veering off into Confederate statues and racial profiling.  The opinions of opinionated profs were replete in the issue’s articles.  The confusion of opinions with science has become a hallmark for the magazine, just like Marx.

Let’s examine the magazine’s treatment of racial profiling.  There’s more to the story than “racist” cops, but you wouldn’t know it from the piece.  Absent from the author’s angle on the issue is any recognition of something called “context” – context as in any other considerations.  What about the uneven distribution of chaos in the home, the uneven distribution of violent crime on the streets, the war on drugs, the debilitating effects of made-in-America welfare, other issues like the epidemic of illegal immigration to the tune of an accumulated 11 million to 21 million “undocumented” (Who knows?), and the attendant presence of the Sureños/Norteños/MS-13 and Crips/Bloods?  Circumstances exist beyond the hidden, unconscious prejudices of a police officer and the Man.

2 Sureños and 2 Norteños.

An interesting aside that’s never been adequately explained by the race hustlers: There was a time when NYC black cabbies would avoid fares from young black males. In advertising, it’s called branding.  Past experience can brand an entire demographic, even among black cabbies tired of being crime victims by the very same demographic.  I would think that something else is at work other than racism (hidden or otherwise) against blacks by black cab drivers.

Police are searching for answers after a Flash Cab driver was found shot to death inside his taxi in the Lincoln Square neighborhood. Feb. 23, 2016. (CBS Chicago)

Instead, NGM and its stable of writers traipse off into the fantasy of Marx’s world.  Evil has always resided in the souls of our species. Racism and general mayhem have always been there.  Marx’s non-stop revolution won’t change that fact.  An ever-bigger government to police human thought and conscience won’t either.  A healthy civil society – the very thing that the Left is systematically dismantling – with appropriate public sanctions is the answer.

Adopting Marx is a descent into the snake pit of totalitarian control.  Bad, very bad.

RogerG