Identity Politics – Page 7 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

August 7, 2022August 7, 2022

When Buffoonery Infects the Right

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Republicans are bedeviled by the spawn of Trump and Democrats are enthralled by neo-Marxism in their combination of rank socialism and malignant identity pandering. While Democrats engage in a headlong rush into college-campus extremism, many Republicans seem intent on adopting the philosophy of Smoot-Hawley, ignoring Adam Smith’s lessons on the inherent foolishness of politicians managing trade or the general economy, shunting Hayek’s knowledge problem to the corner, and an emulation of Soviet Gosplan (central planning) only with them in the catbird seat. As a Republican in the Buckley-Reagan tradition, it’s galling. Trump is responsible for unloading this hash of blustery claptrap on the sole remaining party that should know better.

The steamy love affair with government by some of today’s Republicans shouldn’t catch anyone by surprise. Every politician loves to bring home the bacon, so politics can make hypocrites of us all. Yet, this is different. An orthodoxy developed around Trump’s buffoonery. Suddenly, Republicans and others on the Right started walking around proclaiming the evils of the free market.

It’s not surprising that Trump should be their spiritual leader. Here’s a man who made fame and fortune in real estate, the economic sector most debased by politics and government at every level. Government can help you make millions, indeed billions. Government is a partner for a big developer who needs local potentates to eliminate competitors, get approvals, and steamroll recalcitrant homeowners. Trump happened to have a career in an industry that found government not necessarily an obstacle but just another factor of production. The transition from Big Government Developer to Big Government Republican is easy in that matrix. Add a little 60’s Queens street tuff to the public persona and you too can have people walk over broken glass to attend your rallies.

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The Republican slide into incoherence came to the fore at the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s American Economic Forum on July 29. Billed as the antidote to Davos’s left-leaning World Economic Forum, it interestingly emulated Davos. Both confabs provided ample grist for government control of the economy. The only difference is the targeted beneficiaries.

A defensible role for government as referee against brute force and monopoly in the market is one thing. It’s quite another to play Karl Marx in distorting economic activity to the advantage of one class. For Rick Santorum, it’s blue-collar workers – not much different from Marx’s Cinderella class of the proletariat. Subsidies, the tax code, and regulatory powers should be geared to cementing the working class to the GOP in Santorum’s grand design – admirable as a political goal, but lousy economic advice. Did it ever grace his mind that blue-collar workers need blue-collar industries? And blue-collar industries need investment, i.e., capital, i.e., Wall Street. The economy is a synergistic whole. The only answer from Santorum and company is to grease the skids for manufacturing, mindless of the effect on the rest of the economic web.

May be an image of 1 person and indoor — Rick Santorum

It doesn’t work. Thomas Sowell’s famous dictum cannot be repealed: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” The reality is that some manufacturers get favored treatment over others. Some get the resources that are sucked away from others.

And what of those labor unions who turned themselves into the false champions of those blue collars? Remember, the same unions that drove two of the big three automakers into the arms of a government bailout in 2008-9 are manifestations of the one currently aggravating the supply-chain crisis at west coast ports, the featherbedding International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union. Anchored cargo ships are visible over the horizon. A blue-collar organization meant to benefit blue-collars does so at the expense of every other facet of economic life, and other workers. Government has a congenital habit of only turning its gaze to the squeaky wheel and to heck with the other three. Try driving a car with three flat tires. Trade-offs anyone, aggravated by government winner-picking?

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How do tariffs fit into Santorum’s quest for the blue-collar vote? Good question, but another participant at the talkfest, Trump’s trade czar Robert Lighthizer, is a fanboy of them. He is a practitioner of economic snake oil, just like his patron, Donald J. Trump. With “balanced trade” as code for tariffs, he proclaimed that they wrought “astonishing results”. Really? I hear “post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy” (two events happening chronologically with the earliest one mistakenly assumed to be the cause) in the bombast. So many reforms were swirling around in 2017-2018, thanks to a Republican Congress, to overwhelm the impact of the tariff silliness.

May be an image of 1 person — Robert Lighthizer

Thus, attributing the so-called “Trump economy”, pre-COVID, to the orange man’s tariffs is demagogic self-puffery. Take the “Trump” tax cuts. They were really the Paul Ryan/Republican-caucus tax cuts, a distillation of ideas running around Republican policy circles since at least the 1990’s. Trump just happened to be in office to put his signature to something that was mostly the work of others. The business tax reductions were testosterone for economic muscle growth. And it showed according to AEI’s James Pethokoukis. Let’s just call the “Trump” tax cuts what they really were: the “Paul Ryan/Republican” tax cuts.

Oftentimes, cutting regulations can act like tax cuts. Remember the Congressional Review Act (CRA) of 1996? It codified a Congressional veto power over the administrative state’s rule-making juggernaut. Keep in mind that the Democrats love the administrative state going back to Woodrow Wilson so don’t expect them to exploit the power. Thus, Congress’s successful use of the CRA is dependent on the vagaries of presidential elections. A repeal requires a president’s signature like any bill. From 1996 to 2001, a repeal succeeded only once when a Republican, George W. Bush, was in the Oval Office. We’d have to wait another 16 years for a Republican-controlled Congress to remind itself of its power. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell in 2017 jumped at the chance and sent to Trump’s desk 14 veto resolutions bringing to heel the federal eco-agencies, FCC, Department of Labor, SEC, the Ed Department, etc., of our community-organizer-in-chief, Barack Obama. Trump simply put his signature to a political impetus that began elsewhere by other people.

For Lighthizer to bully his way to the podium at the American Economic Forum to take credit brings braggadocio to new heights, like his mentor, the prince of Mar-a-Lago.

The tax cuts, reining-in the pit bulls of the Left’s administrative state, and unleashing American energy production have long been Republican talking points and planks in the party platform, and not the lab creatures of Trump, Robert Lighthizer, or Peter Navarro (by the way, a former SoCal Dem no-growther). The GOP has long been a booster of opening up ANWAR, fracking, horizontal drilling, pipelines, refineries, offshore platforms, things that would incite conniptions in Silicon Valley lunchrooms. Trump just happened to be the sympathetic warm body to not stand in the way of affordable energy.

As for Trump’s beloved tariffs, they are sand tossed into the economy’s gears. They are a drag since tariffs are taxes. Surprise! Impose them and you just increased the burden on consumers and businesses. The Trump 25% tariff on imported steel slabs is a case in point. American steel producers remanufacture these slabs into sheet metal for fenders and appliance housings among other American-made desirables. Well, guess what? Since March 2020, the price of steel ballooned by 215%. While Biden’s eco-craziness and socialism has a role, Trump’s contribution to our current travails is his mindless worship at the altar of “balanced trade”, i.e., tariffs. If business tax cuts are testosterone, then tariffs are a flesh-eating virus. Give ‘em a little time before we end up in intensive care. The Republican Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 showed the way.

See the source image — Smoot-Hawley Tariff in the newspaper, June 17, 1930

Not only that, tariffs needlessly make enemies, especially at a time when you need allies, unless, of course, you want America First to be America Alone. Red China has discovered its inner hegemon. Many Pacific countries are fearful of entering the maw of the CCP and are turning to the US as the only counterforce. The relationship between trade ties and military ones is well known. Just as we were about to draw much of the Pacific rim into a closer cooperation with us, 2016, a presidential election year, came upon us. The Dems practiced their usual fealty to the AFL-CIO and Hillary trashed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), something negotiated across multiple administrations. Not to be outdone, Trump in his usual bombast blasted the deal as “a continuing rape of our country”.

Well, what is this “rape”? The pact would slash tariffs all around the Pacific rim from the US to Brunei to Chile. For an America First/Alone enthusiast like Trump, the TPP is the perfect whipping boy. He torpedoed the deal and then boasted about it, repeatedly. But he made it harder to begin a “pivot to Asia” by initiating a trade war with our natural allies. His economic advisors must have been aghast and suggested their own pivot from “rape” to “bilateral”. The rhetorical gimmick was to disparage the adjective “multilateral” (TPP) and substitute “bilateral” in agreements. So, Trump’s people scrambled around the region to cement a smorgasbord of individual pacts to substitute for the omnibus one, all to save face from admitting to the slander.

One way to prevent the much-hated “forever wars” and bankruptcy of the US treasury is to have many allies. Their contributions may be small but together think of them as forcing upon Red China a weakening by a thousand cuts. We provide the biggest military piece but it’s better than having to pay for the whole piece which would be the consequence of the America Aloners.

The Aloner evangelists such as Tucker Carlson or Tulsi Gabbard, or even the conservative Tom McClintock (R, Ca.), stray into the logical dead end of more-allies-means-more-wars. Actually, that is only one possibility, and the least likely one. More allies mean more deterrence. A worse buzzsaw cannot be imagined for Putin’s Russia and Xi’s CCP for them to venture into an attempted reconstitution of the USSR and a Red Chinese-led Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The addition of Sweden and Finland to NATO intensify deterrence on Russia and trade pacts with miliary cooperation in the Pacific rim makes Xi’s Middle Kingdom dream seem more like a nightmare.

Coups are frequently associated with costly adventurism by despots. Everyone does cost-benefit analysis, unless they’re crazy. Even then, deterrence raises the costs to prohibitive levels for any compadres-of-convenience in the regime to continue to follow the lunatics. Still, anyway, if the crazy should practice a Nigh of the Long Knives (Hitler’s 1934 elimination of his rivals), you’ll definitely need those allies more than ever.

Foreign relations and a nation’s economy are intricately connected. Our national prosperity cannot survive a world with the renminbi as the world’s reserve currency, the World Bank headquartered in Beijing, the world’s shipping lanes policed by the PLA Navy, a NATO decaying in its nearly vacant Brussels headquarters, and a new USSR bullying its way westward and southward. Then we will be really alone. And it begins when we start to mangle economics and our recent history to fit the ambitions of narcissists and the hucksters of economic nostrums. I am worried that we are seeing too many of both among the people who should know better.

Specifically, the golden years, pre-COVID, from 2017 to early 2020 should not be referred to as the Trump economy. It was the Republican economy, all of it emanating from the Republican “establishment”. Anyone but Tucker Carlson fanboys should realize it.

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RogerG

Sources:

*“Did the Trump Tax Cuts Work? The Answer May Not Be What You Think”, James Pethokoukis, American Enterprise Institute, at https://www.aei.org/economics/did-the-trump-tax-cuts-work-the-answer-may-not-be-what-you-think/
*” Trump’s Steel Tariffs Still Harming Producers and Consumers”, Bob Luddy, Brownstone Institute, at https://brownstone.org/articles/trumps-steel-tariffs-still-harming-producers-and-consumers/
*”Congressional Review Act”, Ballotpedia, at https://ballotpedia.org/Congressional_Review_Act
*”Where Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump stand on Obama’s legacy trade deal”, Business Insider, at https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-tpp-2016-9
*” Central Planning with Conservative Characteristics”, Dominic Pino, National Review Online, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/central-planning-with-conservative-characteristics/
*Tom McClintock’s vote against support for adding Finland and Sweden to NATO in “One California congressman voted against Finland and Sweden joining NATO. Here’s why”, in the Sacramento Bee, at https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article263626043.html

August 3, 2022

We Are Stuck with the Democracy that We Have. The Result of Kansas Amendment 2 is Proof.

I’m reminded of the truism in military strategy of knowing your enemy. In the arena of great policy debates, it takes the form of knowing and being able to summarize your opponent’s arguments. Don’t expect such awareness among the general public. They have neither the time nor inclination to do the homework. More commonly, they have vague analogies and precepts in their heads to help them make sense of the world. The origins of these ideas are unknown, just blindly accepted as fact, and for which they have adapted their lives around. Thus, not knowing that these fuzzy ideas have a birthdate, it’s very hard to get the electorate to reverse a notion maybe born in their childhood but one that they have grown accustomed to.

We are simply stuck with the democracy that we have.

Yesterday, Kansas voters soundly rejected Amendment 2, an attempt to remove an earlier exercise of raw judicial power when the state’s high court wrote into the Kansas constitution something that isn’t there, namely the right to abortion. “Raw judicial power”, yes!

That gets to the crux of the matter. The general public is mostly unaware that the Kansas high court was egregiously out of their lane, actually to the point of deserving impeachment and removal from office. They legislated from the bench, a habit taught to them by the Warren Court and its federal progeny.

Formerly, new rights, powers, and privileges were in the wheelhouse of our elected representatives, our legislators. If you can’t get an idea past our elected representatives, well, that’s called a democratic republic. Don’t run to black-robed jurists trained in the application of laws to make the laws for you on the fly. That’s called autocracy. Distinctions in the basic functions of government aren’t taught and, therefore, most people only have the experience of their limited experience to guide them. Our instructional and informational organs have fallen flat on their face.

As a result, relatively new ideas – new in the sense of a lifespan of only a generation or two – have an extended grip for an understandably oblivious public. They do their duty, go to the polls, and express a discomfort in reversing something whose origin and basis is mostly unknown to them.

No, don’t mistake this for popular “wisdom”. It’s always “wisdom” if your side wins. It’s “racism” or some other scapegoat if your side loses. Welcome to the airheads of The Squad and fans of Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Who is to blame? Not the general public, for how can we expect them to exhibit a mental acuity that large groups have never shown before? If you have a desire to point fingers, aim them in the direction of the media and schools, or maybe the proponents for not doing the necessary groundwork.

The media and schools have been particularly derelict. Don’t expect your teacher or mediagenic news personality to patiently explain “raw judicial power”. That would require knowing the existence of the first three articles of the US Constitution. They establish three branches with their own lanes of competence: to legislate, to carry out the law, and to apply the law. Today, the appliers now legislate, ergo “raw judicial power”. How? The propagandists of the imperial courts claim the law says something that it doesn’t. Well, it doesn’t say it in clear words, they say, but the words that do exist can be stretched to cover what it doesn’t say. Got it?

For those 17-year-olds taking US History, it’s called “The Living Constitution”, and in the high school where I did the bulk of my teaching, the textbook has an entire chapter devoted to it. The “grooming” starts early.

No wonder people get attached to The Living Constitution. Yet, opinion polls consistently show disapproval of its consequences. How else can one get to racism as anti-racism from equal protection in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments? How else can one get to defund the police, no-cash bail, non-prosecution of crimes, blanket early releases from prison, and filthy, homeless, dangerous, and drug-addled streets and parks? How else can one codify in court opinions the newly minted wall of separation between gender and chromosomes? And as a result, get masturbation, new ideas for playtime, and drag queens in elementary school and public libraries? How else can sports designed for one set of chromosomes be destroyed by the forced acceptance of those with a different set? How else can we get to Obama and Biden Justice Department letters threatening Title IX actions against schools who insist on keeping distinct bathrooms for each set of chromosomes? Want your ten-year-old daughter to share a bathroom with a twelve-year-old XY “girl”? The Living Constitution folks do. The malformation of the Constitution knows no bounds.

It doesn’t stop there. Try to announce the obvious and you’ll face condemnation, maybe prosecution, disciplinary action, termination of employment, ostracism, and a life under the chronic threat of Twitter-hell. There are dire consequences for speaking truth to . . . .

If we are ever to get back to law being law, and not just an utterance of the zeitgeist, people who are cognizant of the nonsense must stand up and work to correct the miseducation coming from our educrats and telegenic poseurs. Strap on your waiters for this is going to be a long hard slog.

RogerG

Source:

Kansas rejects Amendment 2, which would have eliminated a right to abortion from the state constitution (msn.com)

July 26, 2022

California, A Sanctuary for Modern Gender Lysenkoism

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What is Lysenkoism and what does it have to do with California? Lysenkoism was a Soviet theory of biology that illustrates the corrupting influences of ideology on science. In addition to the bloodthirsty nature of communism, it would prove to be a force multiplier for famine in the 1930’s in the Soviet Union. In like manner, today, transgenderism is just the latest edition of the attempt to have ideology guide science, and still call it “science”. It too will have dire consequences particularly for the young who will be swept into it. California is trying to establish itself as the mecca for this latest thought experiment with our children as guinea pigs.

While pursuing this transgenderism delusion, California has a hard time keeping its people and businesses. For the second straight year, the state has registered an absolute reduction in its population, down some 117,552 in 2021 alone. From 2000 to 2020, the state shed a net of 2.6 million people. Similarly, increasingly, businesses in the state are decamping for parts beyond the reach of California’s legislators, tax collectors, and regulators. The consulting firm Spectrum Solutions counts a total of 265 relocations of California-headquartered enterprises from 2018 to June 2021. It’s undoubtedly an undercount since many fly under the radar – like the number for “apprehensions at the border”.

The published 2021 list of business out-migrations is quite impressive and includes Apple and Oracle (now Austin, Tx.) and Nestle USA (now Arlington, Va.). If the state won’t be hospitable to the spirit of enterprise, the state seems to be salivating at the prospect of becoming a kind of Vatican for the grisly arts: snuffing out unborn life and mutilating the bodies of confused tweens. Abortion from conception to birth (and maybe beyond) is lauded and subsidized, going so far as to advertise for out-of-state “customers”. The “gender affirming care” (euphemisms abound in the grisly arts) of double mastectomies, hormonal injections, castrations, genital reconstruction operations, and psychological indoctrination is favored in ways the real economy is not. Fascinating.

This medical assault on the bodies of the young is justified under “transgenderism”, today’s ideological clone of Lysenkoism. Lysenkoism is an artifact of the Marxist belief system dictating the architecture of science. The inherent qualities in basic biology are rejected – nothing is inherent in Marxism but all is said to be a product of socio-economic power structures. Sound familiar to the rantings of the race hustlers of critical race theory? Trofim Lysenko, Soviet biologist who was heralded in Soviet propaganda as a genius, rejected genetics and based his agriculture advice on discredited 18th century notions of inheritance (Lamarckism). The whole idea easily conformed to the pretensions of Marxism-Leninism. The result was the catastrophic crop failures leading to the Holodomor, the famine in the Ukraine and Donbas, the vast breadbasket of Russia and Europe.

May be a black-and-white image of 1 person — Trofim Lysenko in 1938

Thus, what happens when ideology guides science? You have massive calamities. Like the Soviet-inspired famines, we will have cohorts of impressionable adolescents equally damaged, growing up psychologically scarred and physically mutilated, and it will all be chalked up as “gender affirming”. For many, they’ll end up like the 60-year-old regretting the body-covering tattoos, now fading and wrinkled, of their twenties. Only worse.

Inspired by the conceit of transgenderism, California State Senator Scott Weiner has introduced a bill that would create an interstate underground railroad for sex-change operations, in effect, neutering the laws of the other states, according to Jeremy Redfern, press secretary of the Florida Department of Health. Children from Florida, or wherever, could be placed in California foster care, with or without parental notice and consent, and in essence Mengele-like experiments would be conducted on their bodies (Josef Mengele was the sinister Auschwitz doctor). The bill promises to prohibit the enforcement of another state’s arrest warrant if the warrant is related to that state’s restrictions on sex-change treatments.

Mengele was galvanized by a faith in another popular pseudoscience of the early 20th century: eugenics, or the idea that we should breed a “better” human being like we could a horse. Many academic, medical, and public health organizations of the day jumped onboard the eugenics train. Transgenderism has the same groupie effect, and sadly it’s frequently reported by the same people who have next to no understanding of science. What’s more astonishing is the ideological capture of people who should know better. The gambit was blown wide open when the American Academy of Pediatricians guidelines on transgenderism were shown to be written by a trans activist with a degree not in science but “women’s, gender and sexuality studies”. All-too-often, such organizational policy stands are written by a narrow claque of activists. It is neither reflective of the science or the membership.

In contrast, the euphoric and headlong rush into transgenderism is taking a pause in Europe and many states, except for the half-witted firebrands running the state of California, ironically as they run people and businesses out of the state. Dutch gender-dysphoria researchers call for “more research” before more definitive actions are taken. One Dutch gender-dysphoria specialist warned of the dangers in using sex-change chemical treatments by saying that “little research has been done so far on treatment with puberty blockers and hormones in young people.” Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare (NBHW) warned that “the risks [of sex-change treatments] outweigh the benefits at present.” They cited the “uncertain science” about the most popular sex-change prognoses. Thus, to put it succinctly, “gender affirming” is a nice way of saying “dangerous”. But still, California wants to go there.

It took 8-10 million dead in the USSR in the 1930’s and chronic crop failures to have Lysenkoism quietly go down the memory hole. What will it take for California to halt its breakneck slide into an “uncertain science”? How many kids will have to be disfigured and emotionally scarred before saner heads take over?

And to think that Governor Gavin Newsom is feted as a presidential contender for 2024. Given all that we know, who’d wish that on any nation, let alone our own?

RogerG

Sources:

*California’s population decline: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/04/us/california-population-decline.html
*Businesses flee California: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adammillsap/2021/08/27/businesses-are-fleeing-california-along-with-its-residents-and-president-biden-should-pay-attention/?sh=6fae8b722327
* Moms for Liberty Locked Out of Twitter after Criticizing California Gender-Transition Bill, National Review Online, Caroline Downey, July 25, 2022, https://www.nationalreview.com/news/moms-for-liberty-locked-out-of-twitter-after-criticizing-california-gender-transition-bill/
* Florida Is Following Europe’s Lead on Gender-Dysphoria Guidelines, National Review Online, Madeleine Kearns, April 27, 2022, https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/florida-is-following-europes-lead-on-gender-dysphoria-guidelines/

July 26, 2022

The Yuck Factor in Modern Higher Education

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Ideology: noun; a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic, social, or political theory and policy.

Women’s studies, gender studies, and feminist anything are ideologies and not fields of learning, of scholarship. If they were the subject of real academic inquiry, their premises would be critically examined and not accepted as preordained truths. Dissemination of an ideology is propaganda and, if successful, indoctrination. Welcome to the modern university . . . and the yuck factor.

Years ago, the writer Robert Caro produced a multi-part book series on the life of the 36th president, Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ). I remember one literary critic after reviewing the book summing up the character of LBJ in one word, “Yuck!”

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This is my reaction to modern higher education as described in Princeton undergraduate Abigail Anthony’s account in National Review Online of the smothering prevalence of sexual ideologies on our college campuses, particularly the Ivy League. As a high school teacher and Social Science Department chair, counselors and staff were beaming with pride when one of our seniors was accepted to one of the Ivy League schools. After reading Anthony’s exposé, no one should be beaming. Not only is “yuck” an appropriate descriptor for some important parts of the campus curriculum and intellectual climate but the acceptance letter should come with a warning label, “Parents Beware!”

And don’t think for a moment that warning should be limited to the Ivy league. Notre Dame, the most famous Catholic college in America, has a Gender Studies Program to propagate the many ways to subvert Catholic doctrine. The creed of the program is summarized on the school’s website: “Integrating learning and research with social change, Gender Studies identifies, examines, and challenges injustice, while imagining and creating better futures that serve the common good.” See those words “social change” and “challenges injustice”? They’re code for political activism, which means that the program’s central purpose is to create political followers of a particular political ideology, one whose premises are unexamined and accepted as truth, much like a new religion expunging an old one. Go figure, an anti-Catholic Catholic University.

The Baptists have their own problem. Baylor University, the largest Baptist institution in the world, not surprisingly has a Women’s and Gender Studies Program (WGS). The camel’s nose of physical and self-professed identity being central to the search for truth and wisdom is clearly visible through the college’s tent flap. The usual rhetorical markers of the ideology are littered throughout the program’s web page. On the program’s “About Us” page is this juicy tidbit: “The WGS program emphasizes the intellectual, artistic, political, social, economic, and spiritual contributions of women, which traditional scholarship long overlooked or denigrated.” In addition, “WGS uses the lens of gender to extend this analysis to a broader range of issues, including the social and cultural meanings of masculinity, femininity, and identity construction.” “The difference between gender and sex” and “The social construction of gender” are representative samples of “What you will learn”. One prof is described as an expert in “feminist theology”. Another colleague is presented as an expert in “feminist philosophy”. Still another proudly proclaims her membership in Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE), a group with the Squad-simpatico mission statement that reads, “CBE’s mission is to eliminate the power imbalance between men and women resulting from theological patriarchy.” This is the old Marxist oppressed/oppressor schtick under the guise of a “Christian” resumé.

Dr. Lisa Shaver opens the program by introducing the audience to Baylor University’s new minor in Women’s and Gender Studies. (Photo: Baylee VerSteeg | Multimedia Journalist)

If it is possible in places thought to be resistant to the fad thought, sectarian schools, what do you think is happening at your run-of-the-mill State U? These college operatives don’t have to face the skeptical gazes of a hidebound board of regents, people who are more likely to believe that the Word of God is actually the Word of God. The people running the show at your public colleges and universities are usually of the sort fully marinated in the junk thought. Go to any public university website and look up “Women’s Studies” and “Gender Studies”. Google it. It’s more in your face and a cause célèbre (arousing widespread controversy, outside campaigning, and heated public debate).

At the Ivies, Anthony recounts the septic tank of the mind. In alphabetical order, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and Yale are littered with the usual litany of visiting lectures by drag queen (and Tufts University prof) LaWhore Vagistan; the ubiquitous Centers for Women and Gender “to engage the campus community through a feminist praxis of activism and academics”; a variety of pornography courses with the usual hands-on (pun intended) applications; some version of Columbia’s student-led BDSM group, Conversio Virium; courses like Cornell’s Nightlife to understand “queer communities of color” and “interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production”; and Dartmouth’s religion department sponsoring “Dragmouth”, a drag show. Get the picture?

Gay pride parade — University of Oregon students in Pride parade on campus, 2018.

Parents, do you understand what your daughters and sons are about to get into? A co-ed dorm filled with students immersed in pornography and BDSM? How about a catalogue of offerings that confuse ideological indoctrination for scholarship? They certainly will not be wiser after accruing $60,000 in student debt. It might be better for them to forego the superficial prestige of a degree, avoid the debt anchor, pick up practical skills in the real world, and maybe later attend a real college with a real classical curriculum. As one observer put it, Hillsdale can’t take everyone.

Young people, parents, steer clear of the yuck factor.

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RogerG

Sources:

*Abigail Anthony’s piece in National Review Online, https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/the-sexual-experiment-at-the-ivy-leagues/
*Notre Dame’s Gender Studies Program, https://genderstudies.nd.edu/
*Baylor University’s Women’s and Gender Studies Program, https://genderstudies.artsandsciences.baylor.edu/

July 10, 2022July 10, 2022

America’s Ya’nan Rectification Campaign

May be an image of 5 people and text that says 'CRITICAL RACE THEORY: Racism is "systemic" and present in every aspect of life. Your "identity" is function of your skin color. America's 19th century westward expansion was the shameful product of "Whiteness.' White people give blacks opportunities only when its in their own best interests. RACIST.'

1986 became the pivotal year when American universities began the process of turning American’s young people into illiterates of their own national and cultural inheritance. It was the year when political entrepreneurs like Jesse Jackson arrived on the Stanford University campus to chant “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go.” Their target was instruction in the western way of life, the cultural legacy of advanced science, personal liberty, intellectual enlightenment, Judeo-Christian spirituality, economic prosperity, and popular sovereignty. Jackson and his student audience demanded to chuck it all.

Jesse Jackson at Stanford University in 1986 joining in a protest against a western civilization curricular core at the school, famous for the chant, “Hey Hey, ho ho, western culture has to go”.

The 1980’s core requirement of a multi-quarter Western Culture curriculum for all students had replaced Western Civilization after the uproar against western civilization by 1960’s left radicals. Shortly after Jackson’s appearance on campus, anything exclusively western would be expunged as a universal core requirement. Eventually, the Stanford faculty senate replaced Western Culture with the nebulous Cultures, Ideas, and Values. The signal for the ostracization of western civilization has since permeated everywhere down to the instruction given to the kindergartners of today. Don’t dare place a mic before a college senior on spring break to describe the Constitution’s three branches of government. You’ll get jibberish.

And look at what replaced it, for something did. Nature hates a vacuum and so does the mind. In crept a neo-Marxist self-loathing. On the heels of the incessant assault on western culture and history came the full-throated “Rectification” program of the 2000’s that mirrors what Mao did in China, which started in Moa’s remote base of Ya’nan, Shaanxi province, in the 1940’s, and was called the Ya’ana Rectification Campaign. It was a ghastly campaign that slaughtered an estimated 10,000 people before Mao was done. It was Moa’s megalomania on parade. Of interest here isn’t the bloodthirsty escapades, even though that’s bad enough. It’s his methods of inculcating the incipient Marxist/Maoist mush.

May be a black-and-white image of 1 person, standing and outdoors — Mao in Ya’nan in 1939

The isolation of groups by identity, the “struggle sessions”, the bizarre confessions, the identification of abstract enemies, the pounding indoctrination, and the denunciations goes beyond thought control and right into emotion control. It’s sickening, and it’s replicated today. Mao’s target at the time was the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but for today’s revolutionaries, the entire society is the target. Don’t worry, Mao got there quick enough.

Under the labels of “CRT”, “Critical Theory”, “Anti-racism Training”, “Understanding White Privilege”, etc., our modern revolutionary theorists are treating the minds of Americans up and down the social pyramid from classrooms to corporate boardrooms as clay. Employees are subjected to Anti-racism training, essentially the works of revolutionary theorists such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin Deangelo. The kiddies in their classrooms go through lessons that heap shame on them for their “whiteness”, and doubly so if they happen to be male. The shaming of “heteronormativity” knows no bounds. The victimology is relentless. Watch as your kids know more about Belgian colonialism in the Congo than they do about the American founding or the Protestant Reformation. How can young minds withstand the withering assault?

I say that they don’t. They are befuddled as they are made ignorant of the West’s great gift of the probing mind that has ballooned the food supply, pulled millions out of living in the dirt, expanded the frontiers of medicine, pushed back disease, spread freedom of conscience, etc. Software engineers’ “rectified” minds are as toxic to that legacy as anything described in Orwell’s “1984” or Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon”.

They have succeeded in importing Mao into America. We are having our own Cultural Revolution and it will end in the same place: stunted minds and stunted lives.

Sources:
*The 1980’s abandonment of Western Civ at Stanford University: https://stanfordreview.org/the-case-for-a-western-civilization-requirement-at-stanford/
*The debate between Donald Kennedy, president of Stanford University, and William Bennett, Secretary of Education in 1988: https://archives.stanforddaily.com/1988/04/20?page=1

July 9, 2022July 10, 2022

The Un-Unhinged Left

I have this question. You can join a political movement, but how do you join a sex? The seasoned actor Alan Alda used to call himself a proud feminist, but would it be reasonable for him to announce that he is now a woman, if he was so inclined? The thought came to mind after reading about some celebrity leftists coming to the conclusion that the ultimate of identity politics, self-identity, has its limits. The prospect of former men, now declaring themselves to be women, shattering women’s NCAA and Olympic records and sidelining women who were born women may have revitalized the obvious truism that chromosomes matter in physical activities. At some point, politics must face reality.

J.K. Rowling was one of the first lefties to the realization of the reality. She noticed that trans-ideology was the invasion route of men into women’s athletics and the obliteration of the athletic prowess of “menstruators”. As such, she has come under withering fire from hyper-activist “trans”-women. Other brave female voices have joined her as they too confront “cancellation” from the usual sources. That’s why they are courageous.

May be an image of 2 people, people standing and text that says 'ERLIME' — Bette Midler and Macy Gray

Recently Bette Midler tweeted the following: “WOMEN OF THE WORLD! We are being stripped of our rights over our bodies, our lives and even of our name! They don’t call us ‘women’ anymore; they call us ‘birthing people’ or ‘menstruators’, and even ‘people with vaginas’! Don’t let them erase you! Every human on earth owes you!”

The singer Macy Gray was succinct when she stated in an interview, “I will say this and everyone’s gonna hate me, but as a woman, just because you go change your parts, doesn’t make you a woman, sorry.”

See below:

NY Times columnist Pamela Paul, no right-winger by any stretch, echoing Gray, said, “Even the word ‘women’ has become verboten.” And further, “In its place are unwieldy terms like ‘pregnant people,’ ‘menstruators’ and ‘bodies with vaginas . . . . [this is a] bitter way to mark the 50th anniversary of Title IX.”

The Left may be unhinged in many of their social, economic, and political views, but they aren’t so crazy as to accept the move to make women’s sports an offshoot of men’s sports. Call these brave voices the un-unhinged Left.

May be an illustration of indoor and text

RogerG

*Bette Midler’s tweet: https://twitter.com/BetteMidler/status/1543979948611981313?s=20&t=O37Tc0ny2mm7Zx2ooddPzg
*Macy Gray’s comment on Piers Morgan’s “Uncensored” show: https://youtu.be/K3eWYEaOqDk
*Paul’s statement: https://news.yahoo.com/pamela-paul-criticized-anti-trans-192133188.html
*Great piece by columnist Madelein Kearns on the subject: https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/trans-skepticism-goes-mainstream/

June 30, 2022June 30, 2022

Update: Video of Supt. Cheryl James-Ward Removed from YouTube (see previous post), But Here’s Another

To all, the video of Cheryl James-Ward exhibiting her woke approach in managing the district has been removed by the uploader according to YouTube. Sad. I once thought that transparency, the necessary quality of democratic-republics for the public to know what their paid public servants are up to, was still held to be a good thing. Not any longer. We’re back to the veil of secrecy.

Here’s a local tv station’s report on the controversy which includes the redacted video. Parents attended a school board meeting to call for the firing of Supt. Cheryl James-Ward. There’s more than one way to get around the censors.

RogerG

June 29, 2022

The Times They Are A-Changin’

See the source image

That’s right, for the times they are a-changin’. We are in a moment similar to the era of Bob Dylan’s youth. Back then, the target of his ire was the hideous Jim Crow. The same lyrics could equally apply to the reign of the radical left from the halls of power in Washington, DC, to big metropolitan areas and deep blue states. Signs are everywhere that “the times they are a-changin’”.

The lyrics of Bob Dylan’s first stanza are poignant:

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

San Fransisco voted world's filthiest slum — San Francisco homeless encampment in 2018

Watch as the smash and grab phenomena sweeps the country in 2021-2022:

I’ll give you three indications that the ruling radical left of the donkey party might “sink like a stone”: (1) 1.7 million voters changed their registration from Democrat to Republican, a net gain of a 1 million to the R’s, from 2021 to 2022; (2) Arizona’s Gov. Doug Ducey signed a bill that allows the state’s students to take $6,400-per-pupil to a school of their parents’ choice; and (3) a San Diego school district dumped their identity-mongering, DEI-loving Superintendent. Let’s take a closer look at each one of these horsemen of the apocalypse.

The Democrats have a problem: they have a “smell of death” around them (to borrow from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “That Smell”), thanks to “defund the police”, their destruction of livelihoods and standards of living in greenie radicalism, constant campaigns of race and gender warfare, homoerotic curriculums to 7-year-olds, willful refusal to enforce laws, the erasure of the borders of the United States, a concerted effort to suspend the laws of economics in order to bribe and coerce the people into the preferred lifestyle of a fashionable clique, and . . . you get the picture.

The pungent odor that proceeds them has caused 1.7 million voters to flee the smell of the Democrat ship and crawl on board the USS Republican Party. Some 600,000 went the other way for a plus-1-million gain for the GOP, something not seen since the Elder Days (Lord of the Rings lingo). According to the AP, who broke the story, the biggest change occurred in the suburbs, by people who previously found Trump repulsive. Well, Trump’s no longer at the head of the parade. It’s Biden and his cohorts of lefties and greenie utopians at the tiller of state. It’s not a good look for moms and dads who have to regularly fill up the family sedan and balance the checkbook. And what awaits them as they go for a walk? Try ducking stray bullets, avoiding the long strings of homeless encampments, the random assaults by the criminally insane, staying clear of the parks for the drugs and filth and crime, the incessant car and home break-ins, and the schools that aren’t any better, if they’re allowed to be open. It’s heathier to hunker down with Netflix, popcorn, and a 45. As Lynyrd Skynyrd put it, “Ooh-ooh that smell”.

And, boy, did parents get a whiff of what’s happening in their child’s classroom. The lockdowns not only forced parents to sacrifice making ends meet but the end to in-person instruction also showed to many that they could live without the offerings of the teacher unions and the captured education Borg. “School choice” became more popular, and Gov. Ducey of Arizona and legislative Republicans responded with an expansion of the state’s voucher-like Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA’s). If an off-the-charts lefty San Francisco school board majority could be sent packing in, of all places, San Francisco, what do you think can be done in saner locales?

Arizona Governor Doug Ducey in Pheonix on June 17, 2022

It’s amazing to know that the unions’ agitation for school closures also exposed their shenanigans. It took away the barrier of gates and walls that protected them from any scrutiny. Parents are awake everywhere from Loudon County to San Francisco. Arizona has reacted, with other states soon to follow.

Simply put, all that Arizona did was to empower parents with the ability to walk away. Lets’ see how the Borg survives without the gravy train.

All of the ideological bile that runs the schools came to a head in another place, Sand Diego. The San Dieguito Union High School District Superintendent let the cat out of the bag, the feline of identity-mongering that is. The mental straitjacket of diversity-equity-inclusion (DEI) that runs the district came out on YouTube. Take a peek below.

In a training session last week, Superintendent Cheryl James-Ward reduced the kids to a collection of groups. And as groups, the children’s individuality was smothered under generalizations and racial, socioeconomic stereotypes. Like a true Marxist, the main target was the successful, the successful who happen to be labeled Asians. Asians are the Kulaks of Stalin’s fevered imagination in the fevered imagination of James-Ward. Not enough D’s and F’s for Asians and too many for the oppressed, a problem to be corrected by bureaucratic intervention. There you have it: the script for bringing one group down and artificially elevating other groups, all done to make the charts look good. James-Ward would make for an excellent colleague of Orwell’s Winston Smith in the Ministry of Truth of “1984”. The world of Oceania, though, is not to the liking of most people, Asian or otherwise.

San Dieguito UHSD Superintendent Cheryl James-Ward in a local tv interview on April 23. 2022.

She’s gone, fired by the school board, and so are 1.7 million from the Democrat voter registration rolls, and many Arizona parents who now have the financial heft to escape the Borg’s monopoly. To borrow again from Lynyrd Skynyrd:

Oo-oo that smell
Can’t you smell that smell?
Oo-oo that smell
The smell of death’s around you

Bob Dylan got a whiff of the same smell and it drew him to the conclusion that the “The Times They Are A-Changin’”.

Lynyrd Skynyrd performing That Smell:

RogerG

Bibliography:

*AP story on the Democrat’s loss of 1.7 million voter registrations in the past year: https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-biden-covid-health-presidential-e50db07385831e67f866ec45402be8b9

*The story of Sand Diequito School District’s firing of Supt. Cheryl James-Ward: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/california-school-district-fires-superintendent-for-divisive-comments-about-asian-students/

*The story of Arizona’s expanded school choice plan: https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/arizona-passes-universal-school-choice-for-1-1-million-students/

June 27, 2022

A Mass Exodus from the Democrats’ America, Part II

May be an image of 2 people, car and road

Anecdote is proof of nothing but anecdote. So goes logic, but some anecdotes are more notable than others. I was informed by a friend of mine in California that their neighbor moved to a state in the South, a red state of course. I don’t know the reason but it does seem that more and more neighbors have fled the not-so-Golden State over the past few decades. A Washington Examiner editorial sheds more light on the glaringly obvious trend in states run by Democrats. Indeed, “A mass exodus from the Democrats’ America”.

I’ve previously written that California would have lost two to three congressmen after the 2020 census, instead of just the one, if the 2021 population numbers were included. There’s more. 15 of the 15 fastest-growing cities and towns are in states under Republican rule: Arizona, Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and Idaho. 14 of the 15 fastest-declining are in Democrat states. If we combine the 2020-2021 losses for San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, we’d have the population of Miami.

It really doesn’t matter if an individual jurisdiction has more of a Republican lean if it still resides in a state run by Democrats. You can’t avoid the political suffocation coming out of the state capital.

Draconian COVID restrictions of Democrat governors certainly acted as an accelerant for the flight. COVID brought out the inner totalitarian in the governing class of lefty progressives. We should have known the inner totalitarian would be unmasked since wokeness and progressivism are functionally synonymous, and the thuggishness has been on display for quite some time in the “cancellations” on campuses and everywhere else its acolytes hold sway. Giving these people power is an invitation to “cancellation” of basic liberty, and more refugees. Who wants to live and raise kids under that, the governing equivalent of North Korea?

Further, two Democrat states – Colorado and Washington State – fell off the growth list after COVID. Apparently, Democrat governance is toxic to growth. I guess that making your state repellant to its residents is one sure way to achieve the lefty dream of zero population growth.

Chris Stokes, left, and Angel Zickefoose ... — Two Colorado residents openly smoke marijuana during the 4/20 event (day to celebrate pot) at Civic Center Park on April 20, 2017 in Denver. In Colorado, marijuana was legalized for almost any use in 2012.

The California boom of the 1950’s and 60’s is over and is going in the opposite direction. Other states who followed California’s lead into radical lefty rule saw their booms of the 80’s/90’s/early 2000’s evaporate as well. The key to personal, family, and state well-being is NOT to be like California . . . and New York, Washington State, Colorado, Illinois, etc., etc. Biden, are you paying attention? Are the rest of you paying attention?

RogerG

June 15, 2022June 15, 2022

The Tangle of Our Mind

A protester holds his fist in the air during a protest against racial injustice and police brutality early in the morning on August 23, 2020 in Portland, Oregon. — A rioter clad in the black of Antifa raises his fist during the August 2020 riots in Portland. (photo: Nathan Howard, Getty Images)

“God made the angels to show Him splendor, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind.” – Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons”.

May be an image of 2 people and people standing — Paul Scofield as Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons”

Sir Thomas More in the movie was correct. The witty tangle in our heads exists, but the congeries of thoughts, memories, emotions, and facts can generate ideas that can redound to mankind’s credit or condemnation.

Gosh, our present age is amply illustrative of the tangle gone wildly astray. Ideas, oh, those ideas, of the destruction of moral standards that led an 18-year-old to storm into a classroom to kill 19 10-year-olds and 2 teachers. Personal grievance cancels human life. A community’s historical memory is erased by mobs who are angered by the fact that the past doesn’t match the climate of opinion in a college ASB. Defacement of cherished memorials ensued. Waves of crime, violence, riots, and general disorder have turned many urban areas into wastelands that would stretch the imagination of sci-fi writers. The facts of biology are said to play second fiddle to the fancies in our mind. Chromosomes are made irrelevant by chemical and surgical interventions. Thus, a mockery is made of girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports. Blatant, revolutionary indoctrination is openly disseminated to the very young in their classrooms and is heartily embraced in corporate boardrooms. The laws of economics take a back seat to highly contestable utopian visions as expressed in climate-change ideology and coerced group equality. Fuel costs skyrocket; broad inflation is unleashed; supply chains break; shortages appear; livelihoods are threatened; the work ethic is weakened; and depopulation continues apace as fertility rates plummet and pews become vacant. Get the picture?

May be an image of 1 person and text

Something is at work. It’s ideas that emanate from the tangle in one person’s mind and enters the tangle of another. Frequently, if history is any guide, the results aren’t pretty.

These thoughts came to me from a reading of “Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography” by Julian Young (2010 ed.) and a subsequent viewing of Stanley Kramer’s “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961).

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'A Philosophical Biography Friedrich Nietzsche Julian JYoung Young'

May be an image of 4 people and text that says 'አ JUDGMENTA MELHOR ATOR /ROTEIR INDICAÇOES NUREMBERG JULGAMENTO EM NUREMBERG VENCEDORES OVENCIDOS ÁUDIO PORTUGUES 5.1 INGLÊS 2.0 BURT LANCASTER MARLENE DIETRICH SPENCER TRACY "OSCAR" marca oistrada da Academia de Ciencias Hollywood Um filme de STANLEY KRAMER'

The one is an account of high-minded philosophy and the other is about the vile ends that philosophical ideas can be put. Nothing like the Holocaust, the underlying subject of “Judgment at Nuremberg”, was the intention of Nietzsche in his late 19th century writings. Nonetheless, the Holocaust happened, and Nazi belief was scented with Nietzsche’s ideas: the will to power, the Supermen, his aristocratic radicalism, the need to be hard, the grotesque eugenics, the rejection of Christianity’s “slave” morality, a monolithic ideology supposedly promoting “community health”, and the condemnation of democracy and pluralistic societies, referring to them as “motley cows”. It’s all there in Nietzsche’s published musings.

May be an image of 3 people and people standing — Elizabeth Froster-Nietzsche, sister of Friedrich Nietzsche, who preserved his legacy as her life’s mission, joyfully receiving Adolf Hitler who honored Nietzsche for his contributions to Nazi belief.

The lesson: a person can control what they write; they can’t control how others use what they wrote.

The whole of the twentieth century into this new one is a museum of the evil that men and women can do . . . from the tangle of their minds. The demeaning of standards and the institutions that buttress them is the primary culprit. Revolutionary dogmas – communism, fascism, CRT, transgenderism – were, and are, the excuse to replace the old social fabric with these new (relatively speaking) shiny objects of the mind.

“A Judgment at Nuremberg” put on display only one consequence – Nazism and its Holocaust – while ignoring its competitor, communism. It was easy to do. Invading armies into Germany produced ample eye witnesses as they came upon the scenes when the ovens were still warm and the gas chambers had yet to be demolished, something not true for the victims of Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union – and to think that they were our allies (!?). We only had the writings of Solzhenitsyn and a few others to chronicle the horrors of Marxism: Katyn, Kurapaty Forest, 30,000 gulags, the unrestrained secret police, show trials, mass executions, state-manufactured famines. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then experiencing it with your own eyes, nose, ears, and hands is worth a thousand pictures.

Don’t think for a moment that the horrors arising from the tangle of our minds are only matters for the history books. The dialectics of Nazism and Marxism are present in our time’s woke brigades. Yes, dialectics: the alleged truth that everything boils down to open and hidden coercion – the “system” so to speak – of people into the categories of the oppressed and oppressors. Merit and free will have no role. Group guilt dominates all. It’s the pith and marrow of critical legal theory in law and critical race theory for everything else in public policy. It shows in your child’s school in the forms of teacher training, curriculum, textbooks, and school management. It shows in banal euphemisms such as “equity” which then bleeds into nearly everything that government does.

Much of our lives are to be turned upside down to fit someone’s incoherent abstraction. In the end, we are guided down the well-traveled road to societal decay, to places occupied by the likes of the USSR, North Korea, the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia, Xi’s surveillance-and-gulag state, Castro’s Cuba, and Maduro’s Venezuela.

It’s great for the high priesthood of the woke for they’ll get rich as they feed on the rotting social corpse.

For the rest of us, welcome to the Middle Ages. See, the tangle of the mind can be made to pay, even as it destroys.

May be an image of 1 person and text

RogerG

*Also in my Substack feed, “The Golden Mean”, at rogerlgraf.substack.com/.

*Also in my Facebook page under Roger Graf.