A man in a Hamas terrorist costume this week at Stanford University (photo from Daniel Gordis’s post)
Irving Kristol once wrote, “[A neoconservative is] a liberal who has been mugged by reality. A neoliberal is a liberal who got mugged by reality but has not pressed charges.”
Below (Sources #1) is a link to a liberal Israeli PhD student at Stanford who was “mugged by reality”. His account is enlightening because it comes from the ground at one of America’s “elite” universities (the word “elite” is in quotes because they are tarnishing the title).
A key takeaway from his piece is his sudden realization of the popularity of Donald Trump, from a person who would never vote for him if he could.
“This year I finally got it [Trump’s popularity in America]. No, if I were an American I still wouldn’t vote for Trump. But I now understand those who vote for him. Donald Trump is some Americans’ answer to the madness on the other side, a madness I didn’t notice until it turned its face in my direction. A madness no less terrible than Trumps’s madness. No, if I had the right to vote, I would not vote for Donald Trump. But America deserves him.”
The madness isn’t only epidemic on college campuses. High schoolers are seeking to join the madness (see #2 below). Chicago area high schools are a hotbed of pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas activism, many of them “elite” prep schools. Add Seattle schools to the educational sink hole. How did we get to a place where 16 and 17-year-olds rush to join the madness in higher ed? The answer lies in the curricular rot from teacher training and their undergrad coursework to the textbooks. When you drop your kid off at school or the bus stop, your kid is getting a steady diet of the oppressor/oppressed Marxist schtick.
And you thought your kid was learning the three R’s. Let me clue you, they’re getting much more than Algebra.
It’s everywhere. It’s on YouTube. For example, recently I watched a Gen X or Millennial academic who was commenting on something as innocuous as British castles and couldn’t resist continual references to the oppression of the lower classes. It’s a highly distorted portrayal of a period that lasted half a millennium or more. No concession was made to the possible benefits of socio-political hierarchy, let alone a moral hierarchy (some things are objectively good or bad). It was a simple message repeated ad nauseum: the rich and powerful bad, poor folk good. 16-year-old kiddies sitting in their desks, imbibing this blinkered view of the world, have their minds prepped for tramping on over to DePaul or University of Chicago in the “Chicago Youth For Justice” to link arms with an “abolitionist, anti-imperialist network of students”. You know the banter.
This Israeli PHD student noticed the mental rot right away. Most fundamentally, these firebrands are attacking more than Israel but lurking underneath is an assault on logic and reason itself. For these young people, everything is subjective, there being no objective truth, no facts, only feelings. Quoting him:
“I’m not referring here to those who express the opinion that it is difficult to get to the truth, or who think that the courts do not always succeed in finding out what the facts are, or who hold that different ideas are perceived differently through different eyes. I’m speaking about those who say unequivocally that there is no such thing as truth. They are not interested in presenting facts to support their arguments because they do not believe there is such a thing as facts, and they say so explicitly. They think that it is forbidden to use the term “jihadist” in front of jihadists, or to call supporters of terrorism by their names, because feelings are more important than facts (although, of course, first and foremost their feelings).”
Parents, sit down with your kids and query them about whether they believe in objective truth. You might be surprised at the answer.
There’s nothing like being mugged by reality to focus the mind. The sad reality is that this foreign student was mugged by American college students who, in turn, were mugged by their schooling in the good ol’ USA.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “I saw the American progressive movement … as an ally. That was a mistake.”, by Yotam Berger, in Daniel Gordis’s Israel from the Inside, at https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/i-saw-the-american-progressive-movement
2. “Pro-Hamas Craze Starts in K–12”, Haley Strack, National Review Online, 5/2/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pro-hamas-craze-starts-in-k-12/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
“Democracy dies in darkness.” — From the masthead of The Washington Post.
President Joe Biden speaks about infrastructure spending, much of it greenie, at the La Crosse Municipal Transit Authority, Tuesday, June 29, 2021, in La Crosse, Wisconsin. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
Yes, democracy, and civilization also, dies in darkness – the “darkness” of ignorance and foolishness. Few things today are more foolish than the EV craze and the climate-change mania that undergirds it. Even more absurd is the renewed faith in central planning to ramrod the country into the foolishness. We are reliving the failed Bolshevik experiment.
What precipitated my reaction? I ran into a Yahoo! Finance article by Rick Newman, “Hold on tight to your gas-powered car” (see below). There’s much to recommend the piece, but much of it is still predicated on slipshod, ideologically laden “science”. The people who write about climate change and most everything related to it rely on arguments from authority. That’s the lazy man’s rationale for people who never developed an understanding of science and the scientific method. They’ve got the ideology down – man is an inveterate defiler of the environment – but depend on “experts” who are similarly corrupted by ideological biases to lend a large measure of confirmation bias to the scribbler’s contentions. It’s frilly political theater until it metastasizes into central planning – the Sovietization of life – and then becomes dangerous to the health of a civilization.
At the point of Sovietization, life will spiral downward. Remember the Soviet Union? Maybe not, for anyone who reached puberty after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Biden and his cohorts are busy resurrecting central planning on American soil. A newly announced policy issued from a DC commissariat, the EPA – much like the Bolshevik’s Gosplan (the USSR’s economic planning agency) and its Five-Year Plans – will punish owners and producers of internal combustion engines (ICE) with leaps in emissions’ standards to kill them off and herd the population into EV’s (see below). Classic central planning.
Long lines to buy shoes in 1970’s Soviet Union.Empty shelves in the government stores, 1970’s and 80’s.Waiting in line for clothes at a government clothing store.Long lines waiting to charge for electric vehicles at a California charging station, 2022.
Whether we’re talking about Stalin’s industrialization/dekulakization plans or Biden’s zero-emission schemes, they are reflections of one another and will suffocate prosperity. How? Why? Much of it has to do with Hayek’s knowledge problem: something as multitudinous and multifaceted as a society cannot be managed by a small group of centralized “experts” or “elites” (see below). No one knows and cannot know enough to do it, except God. Not surprisingly, a delusion of godliness is the companion of central planning.
When top/down controls are issued, expect the litany of unintended consequences. In prior efforts to dictate choices regarding fuel efficiency, cars became “light-weighted” and accident fatalities increased. And the gains in fuel efficiency unexpectedly led to more fuel consumption, not less – something heartily detested by the gang at the Sierra Club.
SNAFU, the refrain of WWII GI’s: situation normal all #&?%!@ up. And the prominence of snafu rises with the boldness of the plan, like forcing 330 million people in the span of a couple of decades to relinquish the second biggest investment in their adult lifetime and coerce them into an electrified and inconvenient alternative chosen by their commissars.
Biden’s EPA commissar, Michael Regan, announces new tailpipe emissions standards.
Of course, with this clique of dullards, the failures of central planning are to be met with . . . more central planning. They’ll never admit failure. Don’t underestimate the creativity of these powerful zealots to conjure more reasons to centrally plan, thus this latest round of EPA ukases. The climate-change gambit has been particularly expedient in expanding the Leviathan. A casualty of it all will be the existence of markets, if you discount the mangled kind that limply survives the administrative state’s waterboarding. Central planning and healthy markets are matter/antimatter to each other.
Markets are what happens when buyers and sellers spontaneously come together under conditions of freedom. They cannot exist without personal freedom. As with markets, freedom and central planning cannot coexist. A huge part of the sales job to accept the assault on freedom is to convince a governing chunk of the franchise that freedom is bad, even on the most mundane things. You are shamed for wanting a SUV with a v-8. You see, in repeated shouts of fevered gibberish, you’ll be browbeat into believing that buying that 5.7L Chevy Yukon will rain down on the planet extreme weather and California’s forever-drought. Hysteria works great to make people want to be controlled.
As if in a real-world experiment, watch the home base of the frenzy, California, descend into feudalism.
Biden is following California’s lead. And all for what? The political leverage afforded by politicized “science”? Physics is bastardized into the simplicity of Lego blocks or Lincoln Logs. Forget about the physics of quantum mechanics, the general theory, and energy pathways. The complex workings of nature are debauched by ignorant die-hards with a cause. In their playroom of the mind, the temperature of the multi-layered atmosphere of varying composition can be regulated like a finger pressing a touch screen on a wall thermostat. Need to lower global temperatures? Just command an x-amount reduction in fossil fuel usage for an x-amount temp decrease; it’s all so simple in the mind of a child. But both the prognosis and cure are what you’d expect from people more influenced by the unstable teenager Greta Thunberg than the lessons of real science.
The hysterical teenager Great Thunberg.
Combine the crusaders with scientists who have forsaken science for politics, and we have the makings of central planning. After all, what were the Bolsheviks, as harbingers of central planning? They were Marxists. Marxists are followers of Karl Marx as he tried to turn history into science, the “science” of his totalitarian revolution. Add a little Lenin with his “vanguard elite” to lead the revolution and direct the construction of the utopia and we’re back to central planning. And we get to relive the Soviet experience of an ossified economy of chronic food shortages and empty store shelves.
Karl Marx was right about one thing when he wrote that historical incidences occur “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. Welcome to another one of Biden’s farces, this time through his EPA commissariat.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Hold on tight to your gas-powered car”, Rick Newman, Yahoo! Finance, 4/12/2023, at https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hold-on-tight-to-your-gas-powered-car-193629839.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall
* “Biden administration proposes toughest auto emissions standards yet: The rules, which would dramatically reshape the auto industry, could cut as much as 10 billion tons of carbon emissions by 2050, the EPA projected”, Rose Horowitch, NBC News, 4/12/2023, at https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-administration-proposes-toughest-auto-emissions-standards-yet-rcna79304. —- It’s a press release that solely functions as a rah-rah statement for draconian cuts in vehicle emissions to herd the population into EV’s. You have to dig deeper to find the specific actions that drive the policy.
* “Biden-Harris Administration Proposes Strongest-Ever Pollution Standards for Cars and Trucks to Accelerate Transition to a Clean-Transportation Future”, EPA, 4/12/2023, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-proposes-strongest-ever-pollution-standards-cars-and
* For Hayek’s knowledge problem thesis: “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, F. A. Hayek, at https://fee.org/articles/the-use-of-knowledge-in-society
What was Anheuser-Busch, Inc., thinking? For that matter, what was Disney, Inc., thinking? Dylan Mulvaney as the face of Bud Light? Add the bigs at MLB, the NFL, NBA, and NHL to the socially detached. The list of corporate heavies insulting their customer bases is quite long. They aren’t even aware that they have positioned themselves at the edge of a culture war. A beer brand strongly identified with the lunch-pail crowd decides to make a boy-turned-girl the face of its product. Did it occur to anyone in the c-suite that this could be a problem? I guess not. Why? The mediocrities at the helm of our big corporations are people completely out to lunch, out of touch, or what have you.
I suspect the disconnect has much to do with something identified by Charles Murray in his book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010”. An intensifying social nepotism among people of increasingly uniform background has created an insular managerial class ignorant of the world beyond their bubble, much like the nobility at Versailles. Thus, they are caught flat-footed when an advertising strategy that is broached at a wine soiree goes awry. It only sounds compelling to those similarly closeted. Outside, for the rest of us, it’s absolute looney tunes.
This is a girl, Alissa Heinerscheid, the vice president of marketing for Anheuser-Busch, with the monotonous social resumé of her class: the same elite schooling and social entanglements and experiences. They don’t drink the stuff but are identical to the other inhabitants of corporate headquarters. They have the sensibilities of the Harvard life but lack an acquaintance with regular life. I suspect that the same happenstance applies to every institution under the management of the socially privileged and cocooned.
Alissa Heinerscheid, Anheuser-Busch ad exec.Alissa Heinerscheid as a Harvard undergrad at one of her Isis Club’s bashes.
Credentials are no protection from the bumbling mediocrities who have such great power over livelihoods. We are living through a time when “elite” and “expert” makes one cringe, like watching the face of transgenderism become the face of Bud Light.
Be my guest and watch the Sky News report on the story.
Nashville killer in hallway of Covenant School as she hunts for more victims (from school surveillance camera).People pray during a community vigil for the victims of the Nashville Covenant School shooting spree in nearby Mount Juliet, Tenn., on March 28, 2023. (photo: Andrew Nelles, AP)
This past Monday a young woman, age 28, walked into an elementary school in Nashville and murdered three children and three adults. I was nearly brought to tears watching the police body cam footage that shows courageous police officers in a frantic rush through the rooms and finally ending the madness by killing the shooter. The tears were for the shock and horror of children having to face another murderous miscreant. Quite frankly, it was hard to watch. Prayers go out to all the families who now have a huge hole in their hearts to bear, and to the parents of the killer who now must continue their lives knowing that their child is a mass murderer. Thinking about it, the sadness must be almost unendurable.
After these events, and even more horrifying, we’ve seen people too regularly jump to their agenda in grotesque exploitation. The president, Monday, went before the press to comment on the event and opened with a standup comedy routine and then shifted to his favorite hobby horse of gun control (see below). The bodies are still at the coroner, loved ones are devastated and groping for ways to cope, and a president shames himself before cameras and microphones. The White House scene was obscene.
We don’t know much at this stage about the shooter and her motive. It’s far too easy for us to join the crowd and connect the tragedy to our personal social and political hobby horses. I will try to refrain from doing that. Yet, there are certain aspects about the shooter to come to light that may or may not be relevant. Absent evidence, though, keep in mind that the known facts of her trans-identity as a man and the killing spree should be treated as unrelated at this moment.
But it doesn’t mean that killings by a trans person suddenly prevents us from continuing our public discussion on transgenderism and the strong possibility of a social contagion. Regardless of the outcome of this investigation, this debate must proceed for the stakes are too great for our children.
The argument against a trans social contagion relies on a suspension of common sense. Peer pressure and social media contagions apply everywhere else but magically they are blocked from operating on this topic. The entire advertising industry and cancel culture rely on the triggering aspect of peer pressure. People buy Coke over Pepsi (and vice versa) and censorship on campus is justified by alleged “hurts” that transmit through the social ether of the student body. Sorry, the argument lacks merit.
And other facts clearly point to a social contagion. Where is trans-identity most prevalent? It isn’t evenly distributed. Madeleine Kearns (see below) has followed the subject for quite some time. She noticed that California has young people identifying “as trans at a nearly 38 percent higher rate than the national average”. In the very progressive California city of Davis, according to numbers provided by the Davis Unified School District, the rate is three times that of California. What is there in the California social eco-system that is causing a teen rush to transgenderism? The scale of the increase suggests something more than children are now free to expose their inner trans self.
Trans-identity certainly happens everywhere but concentrations strongly imply a contagion is at work. A bump in the numbers not only occurs by geographical location but also by sex. Just a short time ago, it was boys who mostly suffered from gender-dysphoria. Now, it’s girls by two to one. What happened? Social media happened as other influences were locked down during the pandemic. Kids were isolated in long stretches with their cellphones. The isolation and the well-known sensitivity of teenage girls about their bodies brews a perfect storm.
Consider this: any husband will rue the day he ever suggested to his wife that she is getting a bit plump.
My position on the social contagion aspect of transgenderism is unrelated to the Nashville event. Her trans-identity didn’t pull the trigger. Until proven otherwise, trans people aren’t prone to murder any more than anyone else. The willingness to take life stems from something much deeper in the cranial recesses than gender dysphoria, genitalia, or chromosomes.
That said, we need to take seriously the fact that young people are intensely more impressionable than some gratuitously let on. Drag queen story hours, anal and oral sex picture books for adolescents, the instant networking of tweens/teens on their cellphones, the pervasive online content, and parental detachment from the lives of their children make for a toxic brew. Are we weaponizing normal tween/teen insecurities into rampant dissatisfaction with their bodies? Yes, we appear to be. Its modern manifestation is transgenderism.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Biden makes ice cream joke in first statement since Nashville shooting”, Stephen Nelson, The NY Post, 3/27/2023, at https://nypost.com/2023/03/27/bidens-bizarre-ice-cream-joke-in-nashville-shooting-remarks/
* “Trans and Teens: The Social-Contagion Factor Is Real”, Madeleine Kearns, National Review, 2/20/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/02/20/trans-and-teens-the-social-contagion-factor/
A mural by street artist PBOY depicting yellow vest protesters inspired by Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People. (photo: Philippe Lopez/AFP)
“The green dreams of urbanites spark outrage in rural areas.” – Joel Klotkin, executive director of the Urban Reform Institute, and respectively Presidential and Washington Fellow at Chapman and Claremont Universities
Joel Klotkin’s newest piece on the urban/rural divide would be a revelation for those comfortable in their biases and lifestyle in their insulated, well-to-do urban enclaves (see below).
Joel Klotkin
They control urban-dominated states like California and are conducting a Sherman-esque scorched-earth march through the hinterlands to make them “howl” in forced conformity to a dubious enviro ideology. Their William Tecumseh Sherman flanking strategy involves the annihilation of vast stretches of flyover country in windmill forests and blankets of solar panels in conjunction with attacks on the farmers’ products and production inputs. Make no mistake about it, it’s at least a cold war, and occasionally a hot one, on those who feed the world’s hungry and provide the material backbone for the cultural commissariat’s own luxurious lifestyle.
Ironically, it’s an attack on themselves if they only thought deeper than a star-struck Davos groupie totally consumed in enviro agitprop. Anyway, they’re relaxed because it’ll bankrupt others further down the wealth pyramid first. They’re like Rome’s patricians laughing at Nero fiddling as the flames slowly approach their villas.
It’s an ideological crusade centering on climate change and should not be mistaken for real science. Leaps of faith are required to overcome huge holes in logic and fact. Here’s some “What’s” to ponder. What’s the degree of human impact on climate to ascertain urgency? What’s the level of positive effect on climate from a sudden shackling of the U.S. population to unreliable and expensive energy? What’s the influence on other countries, or will it be ignored? No amount of computer modeling can overcome these holes in the train of logic since software has always been susceptible to GIGO – garbage in, garbage out. The model is only as good as its designer. Artificial intelligence isn’t immune. On this topic, ideology trumps scientific objectivity all too often.
One fact constantly escapes the synapses of this secular faith’s upscale adherents: energy density. No amount of “we’ll innovate our way through the problem” can mask this ugly reality. Their favorite sources for energy “sustainability” are the feebly dense wind and solar – they need an awful lot of space to be practical. These contraptions require vast state-sized stretches of landscape on the order of magnitude of Tennessee to Texas, depending on how close you want to get to “net zero” in carbon emissions. What does that mean? It means the consumption of huge swaths of open space, wilderness, and land devoted to food and fiber. A dystopian future awaits in the nerve-rending and constant hum of wind turbines and a consigning of small town and rural residents to a hellish view of much of their surroundings under expansive pavements of solar panels or intimidating chorus lines of giant towers extending over the horizon. Watch real estate values and quality of life plummet for rural, small town, exurban residents.
A wind project in Michigan farm area in 2013.A sea of solar panels in Portugal.
And guess what? You still need fossil fuel backup which adds to the cost misery of the whole scheme. If batteries are to be your lifeline around the problem of blackouts and having to fire up backup gas-powered steam turbines, remember, the law of tradeoffs isn’t suspended. More resources pumped into this black hole translates into lost investment in medicine, manufacturing technology, food production and distribution, water, etc. The alternatives sacrificed are too numerous to mention.
That’s the glory of free markets, though; the voluntary choices of thousands, if not millions, sort this out. The rule of bureaucrats and pandering demagogues in elective office, when given billions and trillions of dollars to play with, are more famous for boondoggles. Remember Solyndra or California’s train to nowhere, parts languishing and graffitied like a LA Stonehenge in the Central Valley? I don’t expect Millennials, Gen Z’ers, and those following to have an inkling of life in the old USSR under a vast bureaucracy’s central planning, given the sorry state of our schools. California is chugging full speed into this fog of ignorance.
California’s upper crust may be the most visibly intoxicated by the eco-jihad but the mania is evident worldwide. Farmers and rural and small-town residents around the world are about to be engulfed in a plundering of their spaces by the half-witted infatuations of zealots with money and influence. But a counterrevolution is kicking in. In Europe, French truckdrivers and farmers rose up in the “gilets jaunes” (yellow vests) protests in November 2018 against the new greenie fuel taxes. Dutch farmers were brimming with hostility over crippling emissions and fertilizer regulations just last year. So devastating are the potential impacts of the new rules that a projected 3,000 Dutch farms may be lost in the next few decades.
Europe isn’t alone. African countries like Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa have registered similar protests to Davos flights of fancy. The path to the ecotopia is lined with appropriated farmland, farmers, and everyone else who provide the hands, backs, and brains for the jet set to live in luxurious isolation.
Yep, ecomania among the insular well-to-do is poison to blue collars and everyone outside a country’s super zips. Joel Klotkin is right to use the world “colonize” in describing the imperial designs of cultural power brokers for the areas of the country who don’t vote and live like them. Occasionally, colonists rise up. Does Lexington and Concord remind you of anything?
The yellow vest protests in Paris, November 2018.Farmers gather with their vehicles next to a Germany/Netherlands border sign during a protest on the A1 highway near Rijssen, Netherlands, June 29. They are protesting the Dutch Government’s nitrogen plans, which would eliminate a sizable number of farms. (photo: Vincent Jannink / AFP via Getty Images)
Please read Joel Klotkin’s piece below.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Much thanks to Joel Klotkin for his research in “Energy Colonialism Will Worsen the Urban-Rural Divide”, Joel Klotkin, National Review Online, 3/3/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/03/energy-colonialism-will-worsen-the-urban-rural-divide/
* “’Yellow Vests’: The elites talk about the end of the world, when we talk about the end of the month”, Le Monde, 11/24/2018, at https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2018/11/24/gilets-jaunes-les-elites-parlent-de-fin-du-monde-quand-nous-on-parle-de-fin-du-mois_5387968_823448.html
* “Farmers’ Protest in Netherlands Reflects Rise of Popular Revolts in Europe”, National Catholic Register, 7/29/2022, at https://www.ncregister.com/news/farmers-protest-in-netherlands-reflects-rise-of-popular-revolts-in-europe
Chelsea Handler came to mind, curiously, as I viewed Sheila E’s “The Glamorous Life” (1984) music video (below). Handler patronized herself in a recent Twitter video, “Day in the Life of a Childless Woman” (below). At least she knows herself to be a woman, something Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Jackson couldn’t – or wouldn’t – define. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R, Tenn.) asked Jackson at her confirmation hearing, “Can you provide a definition for the word woman?” Jackson replied, “Can I provide a definition? No. I can’t.” Then added, “Not in this context, I’m not a biologist [see below].” Apparently, it’s not enough for Jackson to check herself while bathing. She needs somebody with a certificate to tell her. Bizarre.
Chelsea Handler’s “Day in the Life of a Childless Woman”:
Childlessness is not inherently either a virtue or failing. For some, it’s a matter of physical impairment or emotional comportment. For most, today, it’s a choice. Yet, simple common sense would demand the overriding importance of having another generation. The legacy of a civilization dies without youngins. Somebody must be having babies or else we’re stuck with collapsing entitlements and the soaring needs of the mounting aged as they descend into senility. Thank God somebody has made the sacrifice to provide the people who’ll change the bedpans for the doddering Chelsea Handler, childless, wrinkled, and alone.
Handler’s little clip includes the freedom to text a “hot guy” from some online dating app, “Wanna f%#*?” She’s free, but is she happy? Isn’t this behavior a bit dangerous? I’m reminded of the 1977 film, “Looking for Mr. Goodbar”, of a young woman who descends into the bar, casual hookup, and drug scene of the late 1970’s. It doesn’t end well for her: she’s murdered in her last hookup. The movie isn’t for the faint of heart.
And neither is Handler’s libertine jeremiad on Twitter. The thing that’s missing from her Twitter romp is love – not the platonic or sexual gratification kind, but the deeper intimacy that frequently leads to marriage and children. Prince, who composed “The Glamorous Life”, a man known for his own licentiousness, nonetheless contains the chorus:
“She wants to lead the glamorous life
But without love, it ain’t much”
If you understand the lyrics, the Chelsea lifestyle is “without love, [but] it ain’t much”. Love requires commitment, and no better commitment than marriage and the raising of children. On that score, Prince is right: without love, it ain’t much.
Check out the Handler Twitter clip, research “Looking for Mr. Goodbar”, and watch Sheila E’s “The Glamorous Life” music video and reference the lyrics as you do. How’s that for some cultural homework?
Here’s the full lyrics to “The Glamorous Life”:
She wears a long fur coat of mink
Even in the summer time
Everybody knows from the coy little wink
The girl’s got a lot on her mind
She’s got big thoughts, big dreams
And a big brown Mercedes sedan
What I think this girl
She really wants is to be in love with a man
She wants to lead the glamorous life
She don’t need a man’s touch
She wants to lead the glamorous life
But without love, it ain’t much
She saw him standing in the section marked
If you have to ask you can’t afford it lingerie
She threw him bread and said make me scream
In the dark what could he say
Boys with small talk and small minds
Really don’t impress me in bed
She said I need a man’s man baby
Diamonds and furs
Love would only conquer my head
She wants to lead the glamorous life
She don’t need a man’s touch
She wants to lead the glamorous life
Without love, it ain’t much
They made haste in the brown sedan
They drove to 55 Secret street
They made love by the seventh wave
She knew she had a problem
She thought real love is real scary
Money only pays the rent
Love is forever that’s all your life
Love is heaven sent, it’s glamorous
Lead the glamorous life
She don’t need a man’s touch
She wants to lead the glamorous life
Without love it ain’t much
She wants to lead the glamorous life
She don’t need a man’s touch
She wants to lead the glamorous life
Without love it ain’t much, it ain’t much
Lead the glamorous life
She don’t need a man’s touch
She wants to lead the glamorous life
Without love it ain’t much, it ain’t much
She wants to lead the glamorous life
She don’t need a man’s touch
She wants to lead the glamorous life
Without love it ain’t much, it ain’t much
Lead the glamorous life
She don’t need a man’s touch
She wants to lead the glamorous life
Without love it ain’t much, it ain’t much
Woo-ooh oo-ooh
She wants to lead the glamorous life
She don’t need a man’s touch
She wants to lead the glamorous life
Without love it ain’t much, it ain’t much
Oooh oo-ooh ohhh
(Songwriter: Prince Rogers Nelson)
(From: Musixmatch)
RogerG
Read more here:
* Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Jackson’s strange inability, or unwillingness, to define a woman can be found here: “Biden Supreme Court pick says she can’t define what a ‘woman’ is when asked at confirmation hearings”, 3/23/2022, at https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/i-cant-define-what-a-woman-is-supreme-court-nominee-says/
Okay, I’ll come out and say it: The young are moonbat crazy. Not all, but stunningly large numbers are. “Moonbat”, what’s that? Crazy is the easy part. The word “moonbat” in this context has been attributed to conservative commentator Howie Carr in referring to California governor Jerry Brown, Jr., who was caricatured in an online poster, “Before Moonbats, there was Jerry ‘Moonbeam’ Brown”.
It appears to be getting worse – the moonbat craziness, that is.
I know about youthful kookiness because “Been there, done that”, as any child of the 60’s should know. “Drugs, sex, and rock ‘n roll” isn’t exactly a clarion call for mature judgment. The nutty stuff is rooted in the young’s unappreciation for the arduous path that was trod by others to get to the present. It stems from the young’s newness to the world. All they really know is what’s around them.
They can be taught history, but they have no experience with prior struggles, and telling and showing them won’t be enough, even if someone lectured them. My WWII-generation parents experienced life before air conditioning, and when capable of acquiring it, they did in a heartbeat. Today, large percentages of the young, pampered by modern conveniences, prefer to end a/c in a holy war to defeat climate change. Yet, they wouldn’t last long without it, along with their trendy ev’s and obsession with connectivity. There’s only so much room on the coastal plain to accommodate the added millions fleeing the oppressive heat everywhere else. And the attendant blackouts and spiking utility bills won’t be good for streaming and the apps on their cellphones that direct them to the nearest Starbucks and car charger that won’t charge, the cell towers and relay centers absent the juice to run.
The moonbat in our young came out in all its glory in the last few elections. No, this conclusion isn’t ageist prejudice. Once again, “Been there, done that.” Epidemics of STD’s and drug abuse, riots, and mass displays of self-righteous posturing were as characteristic of my youth as flower power. The peace movement’s catastrophic demand to withdraw from South Vietnam led to the fall of Southeast Asia and millions exterminated and millions more shoved into tortuous reeducation camps. Not quite a Dark Age – for us, that is, a Dark Age for SE Asia – but certainly the quality-of-life lights were dimmed.
Well, the young are at it again. Kristen Soltis Anderson, pollster and partner of Echelon Insights, unknowingly lays out the evidence for moonbat craziness in the under-40’s. Large portions of youthful voters are committed to social and economic suicide. On the social side, they aren’t marrying and having kids at levels of previous generations, support sexual unions that can’t produce them, and want to treat pregnancy as a disease. I guess to make it all go down easier, they favor legal and social approval of THC intoxication in today’s highly potent, selectively cultivated pot (5 to 6 times more lusty than the kind passed around in the smoking circles of my youth).
The economic side of the self-abasement is a toxic embrace of socialism and eco-madness. Unknowingly for them, the socialist paradise of North Korea didn’t invent the microchip. No socialist Shangri-la had a hand in that. It’s a product of free-enterprise entrepreneurialism, capitalism. You know, private property and profits, all that “evil” stuff. Socialism is an assault on private property, profits, and the rich who got rich because they brought all that stuff to the Antifa zealots so they could virally coordinate to close down Portland.
The eco-madness is their poorly thought out but loudly espoused mitigations of “climate change”. Well, prove it. Prove that “climate change” is a man-caused apocalypse. Prove that your chic measures – ev’s, a grid reliant on windmills and solar panels, and chicken-coop housing in today’s urban hellscapes – will make more than a dimple of improvement on the hypothetical crisis. Convince me that it won’t lead to central planning, the ideological cousin of totalitarianism. Convince me that it won’t lead to the iron fist of totalitarianism to socially engineer the Sierra Club’s ideal person. History shows a link between moonbat utopianism in power and thuggery. What makes the young so confident in thinking that the historically evident travel from an imposed fantasy to full-throated coercion can be successfully suspended? History isn’t encouraging.
Here’s Soltis’s scoop on the political status of the young: they are strong Democrats, stronger than earlier renditions of youthfulness. The upper end of millennials has reached 40 and they punched the Democrat ticket by nine points in 2022. The bulk of them, though, are in their 30’s, and combined with the twenty-somethings, they favored the Democrats by 28 points! The Republicans are in a world of hurt with them. It’s been particularly true in the last three election cycles.
Long lines of students waiting to vote at a Michigan college.
What animates these young folks to ignore the urban filth and crime, inflation, a looming recession, the wildlands as open-air combustion chambers, the blackouts, the crippling national debt, the invasion of boys into girls’ sports and bathrooms, and schools that function more as lefty finishing schools than places of learning? The affection for the donkey party can’t solely be laid at the feet of Trump. The young obviously care more about other things. Among those under 30, 53% want abortion to be legal “under any circumstance”. That could unthinkingly include late term/partial birth abortions, ending the life of babies who survive the procedure, sex-selection abortions, and excusing those mothers who see a baby as an obstacle in the climb up the greasy corporate pole.
“Under any circumstance” is an awfully grizzly affair. Many of the young seem to be fully onboard with the “right” to abortion translating into the “right” of the mother and doctor to be executioners. Or do they? “Under any circumstance” precludes any consideration of viability. Pardon me, but I can’t accept the claim that 53% of the young are so inhuman. For many in the polling, I speculate, the response was a visceral reaction to Dobbs, which was caricatured by a similarly ill-informed press as a ban on abortion. But explaining the decision as a return to federalism would require an understanding of federalism. The trillions of dollars spent on the schools has yet to succeed at reading, writing, and math (NAEP scores). What makes you think that they will be any better at conveying the meaning of federalism?
Trillions more and dismal results (NAEP scores). Dismal results and political illiteracy. Political illiteracy and hitching a ride on the Democrats’ train of affection for government as super daddy.
Economic illiteracy too. Young people support labor unions because they supposedly have a “positive impact on the country”, more so than the church and the military. As long as we keep the discussion out of reality, America’s adversarial unions are seen in poorly developed young minds as fighting the battle against the exploitation of innocent workers by robber barons. But it isn’t that simple. A strong historical case can be made that industrial labor unions killed Detroit and sent American steel into a tailspin. Unionization was contorted into corporate and job euthanasia. Their extravagant demands, wrapped in a promiscuous right to strike and lavish collective bargaining agreements, paved the way for the rise of Toyota and the other Asian and European automakers. The industrial heartland became deindustrialized to a great extent by their workers.
Abandoned office/industrial building in Detroit.
The Rust Belt became as rusty as its unions. Who wants to invest in a dive into the jaws of our labor unions, so long as we still have the freedom to decide where to put our money? Better to avoid the Upper Midwest Rust Belt and go to friendlier places, like the American South, who are without laws that grant power to unions to force everyone into their clutches. “Right to work” laws in the South weren’t a ban on labor unions, but merely made them voluntary. Such nuances aren’t the stuff of K-to-grad school curriculums. We’ve trained a generation in AFL-CIO urban myths.
It doesn’t end there. More immediately, our young folks seem to be okay with not getting the latest edition of the I-phone, or even underwear. Those container ships anchored over the horizon at San Pedro were a gift of the Pacific Maritime Association (an affiliate of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union) representing dock workers. As of October 2022, 77 ships remain anchored outside the port. Our supply chain is dependent on the featherbedding of $171,000/year dock workers (2019 numbers). Monopolies of labor have the funny tendency of behaving like any other monopoly.
Even “the most pro-union president” (Biden) is feeling the heat of another possible disruption from a rail strike. Once the containers get off the ship, the most congested docks face the most congested railyard in the country. Its expansion faces the usual suspects: organized eco-zealots and California’s exhaustive eco-regulations. The state’s EIR’s (environmental impact reports), to go along with the fed’s EIS’s (environmental impact statements), to go along with multiple layers of bureaucratic meddling, prompted endless delays and lawsuits. We may get the expansion, but not without a taxpayer breaking and company busting and bloated price tag, not an unusual experience in the Democrats’ Mecca and Medina of California. Remember the state’s high-speed rail monolith to nowhere?
Unfinished California high-speed elevated rail line outside Fresno, Ca.
Such episodes don’t register with the young. I think that too many of the young are into the excitement and drama normally found in their personal diversions and aren’t attracted to the boring and tedious work of reading and contemplation. They won’t read a magazine of substance but will glance at Twitter burps and anything on their Instagram feed.
Why bother to vote If that is the case? Has anyone ever pondered the possibility that voting could be an immoral act? Think about it. An uninformed vote is the equal of an informed one, a frivolous one equal to a serious one. As in a fraudulent vote, one cancels the other. If you don’t know, don’t care, and won’t inform yourself, don’t you have a moral responsibility to stay away from the ballot . . . and power tools? Such an ethic of responsibility cannot be encapsulated in a law, but it should be implanted in our minds – to go along with honesty, charity, and love – from a young age. Before you do something, do it responsibly.
Today’s young are less inclined to be responsible because some parents and most of our schools have failed to prepare them to face the issues of their time. Take marriage as an example, same-zex marriage in particular. The young favor it by upwards to three-quarters in recent polling.
But is same-sex marriage an oxymoron? Has the thought ever graced their mind? Same-sex marriage might be sensible if marriage is construed as nothing but assuaging the interests of adults. In history, however, marriage has always been tied to civilization’s stake in procreation. For that to happen, heterosexual behavior is required. Not every married couple of a heterosexual complexion can or chooses to have children. That’s not the point. The long nurturing process of our young requires the tight bond of the people who brought them into being. The state and its disconnected operatives are no stand-in.
That tight bond is marriage, and it should be reserved for heterosexual pairings. Whether they have children or not is a personal matter. Other conceptions (civil unions, etc.) with many of the privileges and protections of marriage can be made available for same-sex couples. But heterosexuality is a privileged coupling because without it, there is no next generation. A society of the incontinent and gray-haired, because we have elevated everything else but childbearing and childrearing, doesn’t bode well for survival. Heterosexuality must be privileged. Marriage is the way, born of necessity, to do it.
The reservation of marriage for complimentary sexual pairings isn’t a prudish ban on “loving who you want”. That’s pure sophistry. Marriage is society’s minimal requirement for there to be a next generation.
Has this argument ever been presented to the three-quarters who think that same-sex marriage is a great idea? The overwhelming numbers in support of something is not proof of the thing’s validity. More accurately, it’s evidence of a lack of exposure to the history of our institutions, and to a real debate. Like much else involving the young, they don’t know any better and nobody told them.
It comes back to maturity. One element of maturity is tied up in the economic concept of tradeoffs: you can’t have it all. No one can. We give up one thing to obtain another. So, for our fulminating statue-topplers and Antifa zealots, and our twenty-somethings whose education didn’t educate, you can’t simultaneously have your socialism and 5G and the next generation of connectivity. That stuff is born of freedom, the freedom to live a life, to think anew, to acquire, without undermining the prerequisites for their being generations to come. It’s not the freedom of bureaucrats to meddle.
The young are just moonbat crazy. Is this what degringolade (downfall) looks like?
RogerG
Read here for more:
* “Republicans’ Lost Youth”, Kristen Soltis Anderson, National Review, Dec. 1, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/12/19/republicans-lost-youth/
* “NAEP national test scores fall to lowest levels in decades!”, Anthony Picciano of CUNY, Sept, 2, 2022, at https://apicciano.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2022/09/02/naep-national-test-scores-fall-to-lowest-levels-in-decades/#:~:text=Driving%20the%20news%3A%20The%20results%20on%20the%20NAEP%2C,in%20learning%20outcomes%20were%20starkest%20among%20lower-performing%20students.
* “77 box vessels waiting outside San Pedro Bay ports”, World Cargo News, Oct. 25, 2022, at https://www.worldcargonews.com/news/news/77-box-vessels-waiting-outside-san-pedro-bay-ports-67501#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Marine%20Exchange%20of%20Southern%20California%2C,Los%20Angeles%20are%20due%20to%20arrive%20at%20anchor.
The backstory on Dylan’s “My Back Pages” is a teaching moment for the censorious zealots who happen to dominate the commanding heights of our culture and many of our political institutions. So are the lyrics, if rightly understood.
Here’s what I’ve been able to glean in my research into the song. In the mid-60’s, Dylan was given the Tom Paine Award for social activism by the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. Before this, he was getting irritated at being pigeonholed as a radical activist. He got drunk, made a speech at the award ceremony, and much of that speech made its way into the lyrics. As one source put it regarding the song, “. . . Dylan intensely criticizes his younger self for his moral arrogance and intellectual naivety. More than anything, he’s mocking his own hypocrisy. His outlook on these subjects, on himself and on the progressive movement he lambasted from the awards ceremony pulpit . . . .” Further, according to this source, “The way Dylan saw it, he was becoming the authoritarian by continuing on his old path.” Sound familiar?
The song’s chorus, “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”, was a personal admonition for turning into a vain know-it-all. In the following lines, he upbraids himself for his hypocrisy in becoming as narrow-minded and pushy as the other side:
“In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach”
Equality at all costs was every bit the holy grail among the radical Left in Dylan’s time as it is today among the so-called social justice warriors spitting and fulminating in lecture halls against anyone who disagrees. Dylan saw it in the mid-60’s and portrayed it in the following lines:
“A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty is just equality in school
‘Equality,’ I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow”
What we are experiencing today is a rehash of an earlier time; only some people saw their descent into inhumanity and corrected. Others didn’t and won’t. The full lyrics are below.
***********
Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rolling high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
“We’ll meet on edges soon,” said I
Proud ‘neath heated brow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
“Rip down all hate,” I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull, I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
Girl’s faces formed the forward path
From phony jealousy
To memorizing politics of ancient history
Flung down by corpse evangelists
Unthought of, though, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty is just equality in school
“Equality,” I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My existence led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
***********
Enjoy the all-star version at Dylan’s honorary concert from the 1990’s with Neil Young, Tom Petty, Roger McGuinn, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, and of course Bob Dylan (below).
RogerG
Source:
* Backstory of “My Back Pages” at https://www.songfacts.com/facts/bob-dylan/my-back-pages#:~:text=Those%20lines%20clearly%20mirror%20the%20chorus%20for%20%22My,More%20than%20anything%2C%20he%27s%20mocking%20his%20own%20hypocrisy.
Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez at the gala for The Rings of Power
In Tom Wolfe’s novel, “A Man in Full”, the main protagonist is the successful Atlanta entrepreneur Charlie Croker who seems to have everything but tranquility and satisfaction. His corporation is mired in crushing debt but he has all the trappings of material success, and a new, younger trophy wife. He divorced his first wife, Martha, after decades of marriage. She begins to resume her life without him by getting back in shape. She joins a gym and quickly realizes that women have changed, particularly in body type. Gone is the hour-glass figure and everywhere she notices the absence of hips among the female fitness fanatics. A female ideal has changed. She dubs these women “boys with breasts”.
Harvey C. Mansfield, Harvard professor of political philosophy, wrote the book “Manliness” in 2006. In it, he distinguished between masculinity and manliness. Masculinity can, but not always, stray into beastly behavior (“toxic masculinity”). By contrast, manliness in the ancient Greek is synonymous with “courage” and therefore tied to virtue. A manly person – for women can also exhibit manliness – would protect the weak. Bluster, bullying, and abuse is not the stuff of manliness.
Harvey C. Mansfield
Manliness must be differentiated from the modern slang of “BDE”, or “big d*** energy”. At a recent campaign rally, Keri Lake (Arizona gubernatorial candidate) introduced Ron DeSantis using the earthy initials. People enamored of Trump use it. Manliness should not be confused with brutish bellicosity.
Why mention “boys with breasts” and manliness in connection with Amazon’s Rings of Power? Simple, if the masterminds of the series, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, wanted to create a Middle-earth matriarchy, they could find no better device than to turn Galadriel into an Aragorn with breasts and refocus Tolkien’s tale on one of the three queens of Númenor, a total of three among the twenty-five rulers of the land in the legendarium. The women’s characters were crafted to portray Mansfield’s manliness but lack the charisma to inspire a drug addict into an opium den. And why the decision to exercise the creative arts to distort Tolkien’s story in this manner? I suspect that something more fundamental is afoot, like the politico-cultural prejudices of a narrow social claque that gave us Jane’s Revenge (pro-abortion terrorism) and cancel culture. They are the same crowd that ate up as gospel the wild smears against Brett Kavanaugh. The bias is everywhere in our institutions and now unsurprisingly could be corrupting this rendition of Tolkien’s Middle-earth in the second age.
J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay
Or, conversely, it could be just a terrible misreading of the public’s desires from the top of the cultural pyramid above the clouds. McKay and Payne may be doing it without awareness, mistakenly thinking that’s what the public wants.
Either way, we got an incoherent mess in this the first season. The creation of Mordor was so off-the-wall that it could have been the product of an all-night LSD-laced bull session. Tolkien’s Mordor was created by the evil super-spirit Melkor to be a land of volcanic activity. Payne/McKay make it a product of the mechanical operation of turning a sword hilt like a key and voilà we have volcanic eruptions, bursting aquifers, and pyroclastic flows. By the way, this pyroclastic flow doesn’t behave like a real pyroclastic flow. Amazingly, magically, the hurricane of super-heated deadly gasses and fine ash doesn’t kill everyone in its path. Galadriel, the queen of Numenor, and many others walk away as if they were only plastered with the dust from a shaken vacuum cleaner filter. A pyroclastic flow buried Pompeii in AD 70. Talk to anyone who fled the 1980 Mt. St. Helens eruption. Fantasy is riveting if it has some relationship to the real. This falls into the category of laughingstock.
The speeches of the matriarchy are not, shall we say, awe-inspiring. It’s not because they were made by women. They are just simply stale. Compare any of them to Margaret Thatcher’s refusal to bow to the pressure to compromise at the October 1980 conference of the British Conservative Party: “The Lady’s not for turning” (see below). Or, closer to home, Peter Jackson/Fran Walsh managed the stirring words for Aragorn at the Black Gate of Mordor in “The Return of the King” (see below), or Theoden’s rallying cry before the Rohirrim’s charge into the orc ranks in the Battle of Pelennor Fields (see below). They would steel the spine of anyone facing long odds. In comparison, the words of the Payne/McKay matriarchy are an insipid string of gibberish.
Then we have the disjunction of physical prowess and the natural female musculature and skeletal fragility of, say, the Aragorn with breasts, Galadriel. There’s a reason why actors as diverse as Christian Bale to Chris Pratt to Michael B. Jordan bulk up. It’s intuitive to match in some sense the physical action of a role with the appropriate appearance. While it’s a stretch at times, it’s an easier visual sell. But take Morfydd Clark’s Galadriel and her domineering physical antics alongside her frail muscle mass. These are muscles that would have difficulty crushing a grape, let alone wielding a heavy sword to take down the mighty men of Numenor. They’d be better casting a female MMA fighter for the role. At least the gap between the action and her appearance would be lessened. But better yet, reshape Galadriel’s character to fit Tolkien’s strengths for her.
Morfydd Clark as Galadriel in The Rings of Power
Ludicrously beefing up the female roles was evident throughout, to the point of relegating the men to subsidiary positions in the story. The Payne/McKay men are weak, petulant, or stubbornly wrongheaded. All of a sudden, Tolkien’s mighty men of Numenor become . . . ? ? ? . . . . One is left to wonder how they became so pivotal and deserving of great respect in the later trilogy. Now, in the hands of Payne/McKay, the two sagas don’t relate in a basic sense. What we have with the Rings of Power is something that appears to be an artifact of the present moment of millennials who were raised on identity politics and cultural reparations, warping everything to fit the manias of the present. Some would say that this is a “woke” LOR and in many ways they would be right.
Even for the Harfoots (proto hobbits), while they have a male leader, it’s two teenage girls in the tribe who carry the action and wisdom of the group. They dictate the clan’s thread in the story. The males are limited to being sperm donors, objects of pity, and comic relief.
Women, women, girls, girls everywhere may be alright in another context, but it isn’t Tolkien. Galadriel was strong in character, and according to Tolkien sparred with the boys, and had special gifts. She is deserving of a prominent role in any production under the byline of Tolkien. But Aragorn, or even Legolas, she is not. Tolkien’s conception for her would parallel the English history of powerful monarchs like Elizabeth I. Elizabeth was wily and shrewd, but not known for her swordplay with the Earl of Essex. An adult Galadriel would use her feminine guile, wisdom, and special powers of foresight to command a situation. Watching this production left me with the idea that this is Tolkien as the women of The View would have him.
We are not viewing Tolkien’s legendarium. In the hands of Payne/McKay, it became another exercise in the modern fixation to turn women into boys with breasts. No wonder transgenderism has gone viral and men seem to be settling into the role that Hollywood has assigned for them – as they are seemingly dropping out of the workforce, marriage, and college in substantial numbers. Will I be watching any more of it? Maybe. I’d be interested in seeing how much further this thing descends into our modern cultural rabbit hole.
Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks to Matt Gutman of ABC News about the August 2022 vote by the California Air Resources Board to ban gas powered cars in the state of California by 2035. (ABC News)
The people running the state of California have issued a ban on the sale of new gas-powered cars, minivans, SUV’s, and pickups by 2035. A centrally planned edict, with little sound reasoning, will descend upon everyone in the state. Of course, the commissars’ dream is to force the lunacy on the entire country. The irony is that California is losing population at a rapid pace – over a quarter million from 2020 to 2021 alone – but the kulturkampf crackpots ruling the state fantasize that the state’s weight of population will force upon the whole country the lifestyle preferences of the California coastal plain. I hope not. In the meantime, Californios, get out while you still can.
If you’re the owner of a business or a person planning to make a huge investment in a home, a car, retiring, or settling your kids into one of the many schools in the state, you might be making one of the biggest mistakes in your life. California is no place to make life-shaping commitments. Millions already got a whiff and fled over the past number of decades. A decline in the rate of increase in previous decades has been replaced by an absolute reduction. 39.5 million became 39.2 million from July 2020 to June 2021. The same people that think they can dictate their lifestyle preferences to the nation are the same ones who can’t keep their people.
Their justification for imposing their choices gets weaker with each passing year. California must be stopped from dictating to the rest of the nation. They get away with this by throwing their demographic weight around which intimidates the Fortune 500. A ban on the sale of conventional cars in cuckoo land, it is hoped, will soon have Topeka and Wichita dealerships flooding Kansas with ev’s against the wishes of the sunflower state’s consumers. That’s the hope of Sacramento’s potentates. But watch the dream get dashed by a lack of appreciation for unintended consequences, which is a persistent blind spot for this breed of power-hungry zealot.
That’s right, they pretend that the unintended consequences are fabrications of “deniers” at the same time that the “fabrications” come crashing into the quality of life. Unintended consequences are either a product of child-like naivete or the belief that the economic law of tradeoffs can be dismissed with a wave of the hand. The central planners’ assault on living standards will happen nonetheless. There is no future in boarded up gas stations and skyrocketing fuel and utility rates. An already decrepit grid teetering into chronic blackouts will be expected to power the state’s new fleet of personal transportation by fiat. Get real. No smothering of the state in a widening blanket of windmills and solar panels can turn intermittent into non-intermittent. Money subtracted from grid maintenance shows up in the massive expansion of “renewables” (tradeoffs), turning the dilapidating grid into a gargantuan arsonist of cataclysmic wildfires. The fires aren’t due to climate change but are the unintended consequence of people obsessed with climate change.
Aerial detection survey photo of dead and dying trees on the Sequoia and Sierra National forests, August 2016. (USFS photo)Firefighters attack the Thomas Fire’s north flank with backfires as they continue to fight a massive wildfire north of Los Angeles, near Ojai, California, Dec. 9, 2017. (photo: Reuters)
There’s more. Going back to those abandoned gas stations, the price of fuel will rise as it becomes harder to get because the market is forcibly shrunk by government dictat. For the diesel heavy vehicles and equipment, their fueling costs will skyrocket since the fuel market dwindled to cover only them. Truck stops are rarer.
The immense total societal investment of over a century in personal conveyances will have been wiped out virtually overnight. In its place will come disposable cars, thrown away because the heart of them, the batteries, is no longer composed of moving parts. The great and proven reservoir of human capital (experience, skills, and knowledge) in mechanics will no longer have a place in this new way of life, having been made useless not by the voluntary choices of people in a free market but by edicts of an activist nomenklatura.
Scrap yards, fields, or overgrown back lots will fill up with the things, scavenged for the few things sellable. If the track record of recycling is any clue, subsidies for the recycling of the batteries will be required. All government subsidies are a replay of the student loan forgiveness scam. One group gets a benefit at the expense of another. I don’t care how it’s configured. If a benefit flowed to one group (recyclers) by government command, it must be shaken from the consumer or taxpayer at the end of the day. Any burden on the manufacturer is a pass-through down to the buyer.
The huge battery packs for the bliss of all-electric will come from the ChiComs, unstable and unfriendly Third World kleptocracies, or domestic oligarchs like US RareEarth. I have yet to see an eco-activist with a love of mining, especially of the open pit variety. Where will the rare earths (lithium, gallium, hafnium, zirconium) and magnets come from? The enthusiasts don’t have a clue. They just have faith in a “market” that they detest. The grand viziers dictate and people must bow to suit. The only innovations are those contrived to fit the commands. They aren’t a product of liberty, for they are a product of kowtowing to the state. Few in their right mind would stake a trip to the emergency room on a vehicle that doesn’t perform well in a blackout. The contraption works best if you don’t live far from the emergency room, and, better yet, if you’re a block away and can quickly push the wheelchair that far.
Pray to God that the ambulances aren’t electric. If they are, you’re screwed in a blackout, and doubly so if they’ve had a number of runs that night. The station house might have a generator but it relies on the same fossil fuel from the same rapidly disappearing fuel supply. All in all, you’re still screwed.
An all-electric future is no nirvana. Even so, they tell us, we’ll benefit from saving the planet. Will we? How are 39.2 million souls, and falling, going to counteract the voracious energy appetite of 2.82 billion? India and Red China have no qualms about burning coal, even our coal. They love jobs and air conditioning too. Get this straight: we are expected to believe that 1.4% of the population of India and Red China will save the planet. Uh?
My greatest sympathy goes to the rest of the state east of the Coast Range. Crossing the Coast Range west to east is departing one cultural entity and entering another. California is two states: the nearly 27 million west along the coastal plain has Sandinista sympathies and the 12 million remainder to the east would hang Sandinistas. It’s a schizophrenic state with the largest portion of the state’s brain psychotic. The diseased two-thirds overwhelms the sensible third. If the analogy was perfect, the healthy cells would seek an escape to a healthier body, which many are doing at a fast clip. They can jettison the state since we have a US Constitution which makes us citizens of the USA and merely residents of a state. We have the right to travel.
So, travel. Get out while you still can.
RogerG
Sources:
* “California to ban sale of all new gasoline-powered cars starting in 2035, a “historic turning point”, The Mercury News, August 27, 2022, at https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/08/24/california-to-ban-sale-of-all-new-gasoline-powered-cars-starting-in-2035-a-historic-turning-point/?utm_email=7532E23EB4C725A2B431242632&g2i_eui=4hjus%2bKiCR9WZhjuKq1urjE8uS5QtgSd&g2i_source=newsletter&lctg=7532E23EB4C725A2B431242632&active=no&utm_source=listrak&utm_medium=email&utm_term=https%3a%2f%2fwww.mercurynews.com%2f2022%2f08%2f24%2fcalifornia-to-ban-sale-of-all-new-gasoline-powered-cars-starting-in-2035-a-historic-turning-point%2f&utm_campaign=bang-mult-nl-weekend-morning-report-nl&utm_content=manual
* “Editorial: Yes! California just banned the sale of new gas cars. This is a big deal”, LA Times, August 26, 2022, at https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-08-26/california-gas-car-ban-zero-emission
* “A New Demographic Surprise for California: Population Loss”, NY Times, May, 7, 2021, at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/us/california-population-loss.html
* “These 10 maps explain California’s changing population: The state lost more than a quarter-million residents during the first year of the pandemic, but some counties grew and shrank for different reasons”, The Mercury News, April 4, 2022, at https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/04/04/these-10-maps-explain-californias-changing-population/
* “US Needs 10X More Rare Earth Metals To Hit Biden’s Electric Vehicle Goals”, Forbes, Sept. 29, 2021, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/09/29/us-needs-10x-more-rare-earth-metals-to-hit-bidens-electric-vehicle-goals/?sh=70e13a093e41
* The east/west breakdown of California’s population in “Economics and Demographics”, NOAA, Office for Coastal Management, at https://coast.noaa.gov/states/fast-facts/economics-and-demographics.html#:~:text=California%20tops%20the%20coastal%20populations%20chart%20with%2026.7,6.8%20million.%205%20461%20People%20per%20Square%20Mile
