Modern Marxism – Page 7 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

January 20, 2023January 21, 2023

The 21st Century’s Kabuki Theater

May be an image of 5 people, people standing and text that says 'SAFER AMERICA WILKES-BARRE,PA' — President Joe Biden delivers remarks on gun crime and his “Safer America Plan” during an event in Wilkes Barre, Pa., August 30, 2022. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

* Kabuki Theater: euphemism meaning posturing and diplomatic ritual to excess. Posturing can include effecting a stance in support of your party’s radicalism. Excessive diplomatic ritual can include today’s virtue signaling.

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Why must science be littered with non-science and public discussions revel in incoherent banalities? Even in seemingly sensible write-ups that rely on scientific expertise, we’ll run into the occasional assertion that jumps the evidence and logic. Furthermore, public figures babble in a string of emotive, highly charged phrases without much support or reasoning that advance understanding. The drivel rears most prominently when talk strays to climate change and guns.

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'BASEMENT KABUKI THEATER'

Science is inductive, the scientific method, evidence, empiricism, falsifiability. That isn’t true when it comes to climate change, formerly known by a host of other monikers. In an otherwise sane piece by Richard Luthy, Stanford prof of civil and environmental engineering, on how California could harness the recent storm runoff to address water needs, he polluted his sensible suggestion about using aquifers as cisterns to store the runoff with the hackneyed contention that man has made a shambles of the climate. It certainly gets the ruling donkey party off the hook for running the state into the ground . . . instead of the storm water.

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Like its poorly maintained forests that erupt into historic conflagrations, rickety electricity grid, and an aging water system built for 10 million fewer people, the state’s dangerous water shortage is a consequence of a ruling ideological orthodoxy translated into policy that has run roughshod over the state for decades.

It’s not that California voters didn’t punch the ticket for billions for water projects. Prop 1 in 2014 set aside $7.1 billion, and Props 68 and 3 in 2018 added almost $13 billion. Out of the $20 billion, about a third went to “Habitat Restoration”, play money for the eco-zealots. “Water Infrastructure” and “Reservoir Storage” account for only 43% of the total.

Officials inspect Oroville Dam's crippled spillway Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2017, in Oroville, Calif ... — Officials inspect Oroville Dam’s crippled spillway Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2017, in Oroville, Calif. California water authorities stopped the flow of water down the spillway, Monday, allowing workers to begin clearing out massive debris that’s blocking a hydroelectric plant from operating. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Californians thought that they were getting more water, but obviously aren’t. Where’s the new reservoirs, aqueducts, and recharge basins? It’s been eight years. I suspect that water projects face the same fate of any big construction in the state. They get strangled in the crib by California red tape and the delaying tactics of eco-activists (lawsuits, political skullduggery, etc.). Compounding the morass is the ideological affinity between the state’s bureaucratic minions and the zealots. So, in the end, you get the eco stuff, which is unchallenged, and not an ounce of additional water for you.

Don’t lay the problem at the feet of fossil fuels. Dry years should be expected in dry-summer climates. The Mediterranean climate that hovers over most of the state, with its dry-summer regime, only produces an annual precipitation average of 6-25 inches. The drier the climate, the more erratic is the precipitation. California has experienced 11 periods of drought since 1841, some lasting as long as seven years. At the time of the Middle Ages in Europe, California was mired in two long droughts, one lasted 220 years and the other 140. Dry-summer means a short window to get moisture, and if you don’t get it in those few months, you go without. Drought is a feature, not a stranger to the area, and not an effect of our love affair with the automobile, suburbia, and indoor lighting. The phenomena happened when only hunter-gatherers were around.

California drought is the most severe in at least 1,200 years — Tree rings show megadrought 1,200 years ago in California.

An engineer and scientist like Luthy should know better. The mention, as he does, of dry periods since 2000 is scant reason to let the Sacramento clown car off the hook. It’s even more of a scandal to science to use the incidents since 2000 as proof of climate change being the root of our evils. It’s hooey. The simple fact of the matter is that two-thirds of the water falls over the sparsely populated one-third of the state, in a region prone to drought since the end of the last ice age. Someone should take notice rather than foolishly run interference for the dolts in Sacramento and the state’s electorate.

The national electorate fairs no better sometimes. We’ve got a guy in the oval office who would be better off in a retirement home under close medical supervision. It must be admitted that Biden has an excuse – he’s old – but the under-50’s in the party sound no more intelligible. Mention “guns” and the limbic part of their brain takes over. Images of tv/movie shootouts immediately overwhelm what little they know on the subject. For Biden, as ossified in the brain as he is, he trots out one banality after another leaving the public in a state of bewilderment.

Charles C. W. Cooke writes of Biden’s use of trite rhetorical phrases when he talks about firearms. Biden trundles them out like Bill Clinton’s stock of pickup lines for seducing the hired help. Some of Biden’s juicy ones include “You can’t buy a cannon”, “Deer don’t wear Kevlar”, and my personal favorite, “If you want to take on the federal government, you need some F-15s, not an AR-15.” When in the history of our citizen republic is it proper for government to tell you what you need? Any government that can tell you what you need is one that treats its public as a collection of wooden puppets. Government as puppet master turns the popular sovereignty thing upside down.

Cartoon of the Day: The Political Puppet Master - Essex Watch

The late George Orwell had some interesting things to say, per Cooke, about your alleged need for “some F-15s” to take on the federal government. For Orwell, government’s possession of sophisticated weaponry in relation to the citizen was a prerequisite for despotism: “Ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance.” Rifles and grenades are inherently democratic, and F-15s, aircraft carriers, and hypersonics are not. Biden’s formulation reduces the citizen to prostrate serfs, only getting the weapons that meet the approval of Biden’s commissars.

He completely misses the point of the Second Amendment. Cooke reminds us that the Constitution was made by a bunch of “insurrectionists” – people who birthed a country in armed revolt against a tyrannical government. The act of taking up arms against their government was memorialized in the Declaration of Independence: “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it . . . .” Thankfully, we aren’t there yet.

But lately, there’s been some extended eyebrow raising. Your government school indoctrinates your kids in neo-Marxist revolutionary dogmas; the attempt to establish censorship boards under the guise of “misinformation”; the attacks on the faithful for their refusal to violate their creeds when they refuse to kowtow to the government-approved zeitgeist; the loose talk among some of the powerful calling for gun confiscation; the refusal to enforce laws to protect people, property, and businesses; threats of taking away our gas stoves and cars and fuel under color of “saving the planet”; our children are prevented from receiving awards of excellence, such as National Merit Scholarships, because of government’s slavish devotion to neo-Marxist “equity”; our immigration laws are not enforced which tosses down the border exposing us to intensified villainy; our girls aren’t safe in their locker rooms, bathrooms, and in competitions; infanticide under the rhetorical rubric of “abortion”; child genital mutilation under “gender-affirming care” without parental knowledge and consent; and government turning a conspicuous blind eye as investment houses play revolutionary footsie (ESG) with my retirement. Did I miss anything?

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Now Biden wants to tell me how many cartridges I can have in my gun. He forgets that the citizen’s right to firearms stems from a tradition that goes back to before the English Bill of Rights (1689). Those “Protestants” in the English Bill of Rights wanted their weapons to protect themselves from more than a burglar. Speaking of the limbic system of government apparatchiks, buried deep within it is the knowledge that the country’s citizens are armed thanks to the Second Amendment. American citizens aren’t prostrate serfs.

One of the key purposes of the Second Amendment is the right of the people to protect themselves not from government but the people in the government, the kind of people who would force citizens into acts that violate their faith, censor their speech, and make their life a living hell. Much of that government knavery is sanctioned carte blanche by climate change delirium. Combine the revolutionary dictums with Biden’s butchery of the country’s founding and we end up impoverished and manacled before our rulers.

It’s an insidious Kabuki Theater.

May be a cartoon of text that says '7DEAD, 25 WOUNDED M TEXÁS. WE NEED STRICT GUN CONTROL to PREVENT these MASS KILLINGS... utch LIKE the STRICT GUN CONTROL LAWS HERE in CHICAGO? CHICAGOLAB SHOOTINGS 7DEAD @Ramireztoons michaelpramirez.com'

RogerG

Read more here:

* “Rain finally came to California. We blew our chance to use it”, Richard G. Luthy, San Francisco Chronicle, 1/17/23, at https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Rain-came-to-California-we-blew-chance-to-use-it-17723529.php#:~:text=Rain%20finally%20came%20to%20California.%20We%20blew%20our,received.%20Patrick%20Tehan%20%2F%20Special%20to%20the%20Chronicle
* “How Much California Water Bond Money Is For Storage?”, Edward Ring, 8/9/2018, California Policy Center, at https://californiapolicycenter.org/how-much-california-water-bond-money-is-for-storage/
* “California drought: Past dry periods have lasted more than 200 years, scientists say”, The Mercury News, at https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/01/25/california-drought-past-dry-periods-have-lasted-more-than-200-years-scientists-say/
* “Severe Ancient Droughts: A Warning to California”, New York Times, 7/19/1994, at https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/19/science/severe-ancient-droughts-a-warning-to-california.html
* “Tree-Ring Study Reveals Historical Drought Record in Southern California”, 3/12/2018, California Dept. of Water Resources, at https://water.ca.gov/News/News-Releases/2018/March-18/Tree-Ring-Study-Reveals-Historical-Drought-Record-in-Southern-California
* “Biden’s Most Grotesque Gun-Control Argument”, Charles C.W. Cooke, National Review Online, 1/17/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/bidens-most-grotesque-gun-control-argument/

November 20, 2022November 23, 2022

Biden, the Prevaricator-In-Chief; Trump, the Obstacle; and an Eviscerated Energy Industry

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Biden’s a liar, but the Republicans have to contend with Trump. What a pickle for the American people. Trump makes it possible for Biden to rule and make a hash of our lives. It’s hard for Republicans to make the case when they’re constantly trying to live down one of the most repugnant characters on the political scene campaigning under their banner.

There is a chunk of the GOP base that remains enthralled by Trump. They are stuck in 2016. Back then, Trump was the fresh face with an outsized personality and no political track record to excoriate. He won and we quickly learned that it wasn’t an act. He gave us four years of repellant behavior and hasn’t stopped. Like it or not, he became the easily caricatured face of the party, and the necessary distraction for the Democratic Party to avoid accountability for their descent of the country into “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Thomas Hobbes, 17th century). The embrace of Trump has allowed the Democrats to get away with it.

Trump is a big turn-off, and he’s turning off more. The act is getting old. He has a vendetta against people who have no vendetta against him, but against whom he might play second fiddle. Governor Ron DeSantis was insulted with “DeSanctimonious”. Governor Youngkin was pasted with an anti-Asian slur on Truth Social: “Young Kin (now that’s an interesting take. Sounds Chinese, doesn’t it?) in Virginia couldn’t have won without me.” What a narcissist. Because National Review isn’t sufficiently worshipful, he blasts them “as being led by lightweights that couldn’t shine the shoes of Bill Buckley.” Speaking of Buckley, he laid out the common-sense approach to choosing a candidate by advising conservatives to vote for the most conservative ELECTABLE contender. After three losing election cycles – 2018, 2020, and 2022 – Trumpkins are showing themselves to be a kamikaze brigade, and willing to take down the party with them. He isn’t the most conservative and he’s far from the most electable. Need more proof?

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Republicans need to excise Trump’s influence from the party before we can hold Biden and the Democrats accountable for their engineered misery. No mistake about it, Biden gave us a 360-degree world of hurt. Energy is at the root of all that we do, especially economically. It’s hard to imagine prosperity with a Biden-imposed recession in the energy industry. Biden chose to take the advice of the teenage Greta Thunberg and lead us into a greenie fantasyland. And he’s lying about it.

Biden trotted out Energy Secretary Granholm in June 2022 to perpetuate the don’t-blame-me and the gaslight-the-public PR strategies. Granholm: “We are now at close to record levels of [domestic] oil production here in the U.S. . . . .” Lie. See chart below. Biden in October 2022: “Today, the most common price of gas in America is $3.39 – down from over $5 when I took office.” Lie. What other word qualifies when it’s as demonstrable as my current runny nose?

There’s more where those came from. It’s as if Orwell’s Ministry of Truth leapt off the pages of “1984” and landed in D.C. Economist Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago puts it plainly when he wrote in October of 2022, “. . . we are well short of the production levels and trends that were occurring just three to four years ago.” The pandemic crushed everything, and we haven’t bounced back. Keep in mind that fracking made us into the Saudi Arabia of the western hemisphere. We have the abundant capacity so why haven’t we upped our game? Why hasn’t the supply side of the market responded as it always had before to price increases? The answer is found in the fact that the Thunberg-influenced Biden is signing executive orders to turn America’s grid into California’s. No big pipelines for you, America. Oh, let’s tax and EPA-regulate production on federal lands and offshore into near oblivion. Of course, let’s lie about it. While we’re at it, let’s herd the population into ev’s so we all can experience “range anxiety” together. If that isn’t enough, let’s strangle producers’ access to capital with new lefty ESG regulations from the SEC.

A natural gas wellhead. — A capped oil well in the US.

Former Fed chairman Greenspan spoke of “animal spirits” in the market. Fear is an animal spirit. So is hostility. You’d have to be in a cryogenic state not to get the clues that the federal Leviathan hates you if you’re a supplier of the stuff that keeps people from freezing in the winter. Better to play along with algae, corn, tides, or anything that pops into the heads of the yoga-room minions on the Meta campus. Forget about more refineries and more exploration. Pardon an oil company CEO for not seeing the guillotine as the Welcome Wagon.

The concept of supply elasticity clearly stretches the mental capacity of the eco-fantasists around Biden. The responsiveness of supply to price changes has inexplicably taken a hiatus under Biden. Take my memory of the Kern River oilfields outside Bakersfield, Ca. Price goes up, wells are uncapped and the secondary-recovery generators turned on. Price goes down, there’s no justification for the expenses. It’s topsy-turvy if you’re Jimmy Carter of the 1970’s and put your foot on the neck of producers with a cap on domestic crude oil prices. Biden of 2021 put his foot back on the neck of producers to the point that the law of supply elasticity disappeared. Then he lambasts them for responding to his hostility by restraining their capital investments. It’s a replay of Stalin’s hunt for “wreckers” or “kulaks” after the blunders of his Five Year Plans in the 1930’s.

Lesson: Don’t expect the equivalent of the DMV to beneficially determine what to produce, how much of it to produce, and who’s to get it for everyone, everywhere, always. It’s a cluster*#&@. Welcome to Biden world.

Biden’s escape from the real world can be seen in his October price boast. Gas wasn’t $5 per gallon when he took office. It was $2.39. Is this old age infirmity at work or prevarication? Remember, this guy has a long history of wild exaggerations and untruths. Going back to his college days, blatant plagiarism and embellishment of his record were standard for him. Today, I’m not certain if it’s pure senility or the serial untruths of his youth ossifying into imaginary truths in a decaying brain. Is this a difference without a difference? Can’t say.

Fuel prices normally gyrate through the year. It’s not month-to-month changes that are most relevant. It’s year-to-year, or June 2022 compared to June 2021. Biden is responsible for the elevated gyration plateau of 2021/2022 when compared to the gyration valley of 2019/2020 or 2020/2021 and before. For me, Biden’s falsehoods are true to form with a kicker of infirmity.

The lie reduced to one line has more appeal in this age of the internet attention span of a five-year-old than a reasoned analysis in a three-thousand-word essay. People can’t sit still long enough when Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and YouTube are beckoning. Biden ritually does it. Trump too, but he’s brazenly repugnant as he does it. Republicans would do the country a great service by putting Trump out to pasture. With him out of the way, the country might be in a mood to open up space in the same field for Biden and his lefty coterie. Something to ponder.

Glenn Russell/The Burlington Free Press via AP — Then-VP Joe Biden finds two quarters on the sidewalk in Burlington, Vt., 2016. “I found two quarters.”

RogerG

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* The administration lying to the press at a June 2022 press briefing: “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm”, The White House, June 22, 2022, at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2022/06/22/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-karine-jean-pierre-and-secretary-of-energy-jennifer-granholm/

* Biden’s false claim of cheaper gas prices: “Fact check: Biden falsely claims the most common gas price was over $5 when he took office”, CNN, Oct. 28, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/28/politics/fact-check-biden-gas-prices/index.html

* Casey Mulligan’s piece: “Biden Has Bungled Fossil-Fuel Policy”, National Review Online, Nov. 2, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/biden-has-bungled-fossil-fuel-policy/

November 19, 2022

The Michigan Election and How to Get People to Ignore Their Lyin’ Eyes

The Democrats know how to play political hardball. After all, they are the party of government. They want it, worship it, and are highly motivated to take it over. They need it because they have so much to accomplish, like make all of us into them. Not surprisingly, they’re socialists, the American edition of Europe’s many Social Democratic Parties. No name-calling here. They just are, despite their face-saving protestations to the contrary. The 2022 midterm was their template for dominating the government. It illustrated how to make people ignore their lyin’ eyes.

The fly in the ointment is that this socialism doesn’t work, never will. Government’s control of the means of production, using a little Marxist lingo, is simply turning over nearly all the important stuff to an entity that operates like the DMV. Government is a sloth and can never be a cheetah no matter the volume of synthetic hormones or gender reassignment surgeries. The Squad and the self-deluded Bernie Sanders keep harkening to a Scandinavia that no longer exists, the region having long since eschewed the poison. Yet, the dream never died, notwithstanding its long record of failure. To avoid a shellacking, the Democrats discovered the recipe to electorally prosper despite their socialism’s inherent fiascos.

The Michigander and auto critic Henry Payne recently performed an interesting autopsy on Michigan’s election. Whitmer and the rest of the authoritarian gang overwhelmed the party of government restraint (GOP). Amazingly, the donkey party found a campaign strategy to make it possible for people to prefer the sewer that the Democrats made of their lives.

First, the party of government used their control of Michigan state government to choose their opponents. This sounds like Xi Jinping at work – by the way, another socialist. Credible opposition was ordered off the Michigan ballot, much like Xi commanding the removal of ex-CCP president Hu Jintao from the recent Party Congress. The Michigan Board of State Canvassers was convened under the overseership of the Soros-backed Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and on a pure party line vote of 2-2 disqualified the Republican front-runner James Craig, the former Detroit police chief with a huge following, and four other Republicans allegedly for fraudulent signatures on their petitions. The tie means that they’re gone. No Democrats were ever affected, just Republicans. It’s fishy as you get into the weeds of the case. In the end, the Republican primary ballot was amputated to include only the weak with Tudor Dixon winning the primary.

That’s not all by a long shot. The party knows how to exploit and champion the cultural barbarity that is now resplendent in certain demographics: the young, single women, mostly professional, and the quasi-educated with degrees. Of course, I’m speaking of some groups’ love affair with terminating pregnancies. Abortion has moved from trauma to a personal state of ecstasy in the psyche of some. We shouldn’t be surprised since the sex act has lost its procreational purpose and has become purely recreational in the minds of some. Humans being human, we get lazy and sloppy and babies unintentionally result. We can disagree on the starting line for human life, and compromise is possible between a complete ban and carte blanche to the moment of exit from the birth canal. All that is lost in the hubbub once the fear of losing power is on the table. Dobbs was mangled by the donkey party to fit the purpose of stampeding the base to quickly mark their mailed ballot.

Speaking of those mailed ballots, previously (2018), Michigan voters exhibited the now common and strange attraction for Rube Goldberg changes to their government through ballot initiatives. It’s an interstate phenomenon. For instance, the superficial glow of term limits in deeply blue California merely ended up replacing seasoned leftists with immature ones. The state’s adoption of the jungle primary means the routine choice between leftists in the general. Alaskans chose to mutilate their elections with ranked voting. For Michiganders, they chose in 2018 to grease the skids for the donkey party’s base, heavily populated as it is with low-information and low-motivated voters. Adult expectations of reasonable civic effort and responsibility has been reduced to nil with election-day registration and voting thereby complicating the tasks of verification for a government that can barely count them. Additionally, the no-fault absentee ballot – a device that makes mockery of the secret ballot – means that a person can remain in their pajamas and pause their Xbox hand controller for a short interval to vote their state into California-style chaos.

Shredded boxes and packages are seen at a section of the Union Pacific train tracks in downtown Los Angeles Friday, Jan. 14, 2022. Thieves have been raiding cargo containers aboard trains nearing downtown Los Angeles for months. (AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu)

With the election system duly lubricated, the ginned-up hysteria about Dobbs can be exploited by another contraption in the form of a state proposition: Proposition 3 to place in the Michigan state constitution alongside the usual Bill of Rights the “reproductive freedom” to end the existence of a fully formed baby in utero. The “protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant individual” language is pure jargon for infanticide. Notice that they can’t say “woman”; it’s “individual”. This whole thing is a monstrous theater of the absurd.

But it does work to get the sex-as-recreation crowd to vote early and often. Remember, this is a demographic at the start not too keen on the Dobbs’s federalism rationale. For them, federalism, what’s federalism? Anyway, the polyamorous are energized to show up and vote the state into oblivion.

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Like chain immigration, chain-propositions bring in tow the scandalously authoritarian politicos. It’s a strange authoritarianism though. Freedom is the mantra, but freedom isn’t the result. There’s no freedom for in utero babies. What about the “freedom froms”? There’s certainly no freedom from car thieves, smash-and-grabs, killers, burglaries, muggings, drive-bys, and the mentally unstable and addicts turning our sidewalks and parks into open sewers. Watch where you step.

The use of hysteria-propositions to elect and reelect people who ignore what they should be doing in order to pursue what they ought not to do is folly on stilts. Whitmer garroted life in Michigan from closing the schools to pronouncing an end to gardening and boating without a scintilla of “science”. And election 2022 showed how you can get away with it. Gauging by the returns, terminating pregnancies mattered more than the kids’ lost education and the decline into barbarity. The kids experienced a double whammy in the election. Was this the most anti-child electorate ever from womb to classroom? One has to wonder.

I will not try to absolve the electorate’s responsibility for this descent into dégringolade (rapid decline or deterioration). Don’t pretend that democracy always translates into wisdom. A majority vote is not proof of righteousness. It is only evidence that certain campaign tactics work: construct a well-funded political machine; rearrange the election system to enhance the operation of the political machine; incite the base with fabrications; and with initiatives, distract the people from the politicos’ manifest failures.

It worked. Expect to see more of it. As in the fable of Nero, election 2022 showed how to pass out fiddles to the electorate as Rome (Michigan) burned.

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RogerG

Read more here:

* “The Lessons for Republicans from Michigan’s Midterm Disaster”, Henry Payne, National Review, November 17, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/the-lessons-for-republicans-from-michigans-midterm-disaster/

* “Five Michigan GOP gubernatorial candidates booted from primary ballot”, Washington Examiner, May 26, 2022, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/five-michigan-gop-gubernatorial-candidates-booted-from-primary-ballot

* “Gretchen Whitmer Can’t Hide Her Track Record Of Shutting Michigan Children Out Of School”, Shawn Fleetwood, The Federalist, Nov. 1, 2022, at https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/01/gretchen-whitmer-cant-hide-her-track-record-of-shutting-michigan-children-out-of-school/

* An analysis of how strategically timed ballot initiatives can enhance a campaign’s electoral chances: “How ballot initiatives will impact voter turnout in the 2018 midterms”, John Hudack, Brookings, Oct. 22, 2018, at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2018/10/22/how-ballot-initiatives-will-impact-voter-turnout-in-the-2018-midterms/

November 8, 2022November 8, 2022

A Picture Says a Thousand Words

The Great Awokening in the wake of George Floyd, and spurred on by Obama’s decade-long sermonizing, was actually The Great Disconnect for the Democratic Party. The Party is simply out of touch. No better example can be found of the Party’s separation from most people’s lives than the picture of a hard-working and dirty coal miner attending a University of Kentucky basketball game with his son (see below). This coal miner is as far removed from the funhouse/playhouse campus of Twitter as one can imagine – in ways more than geography. The picture captures the Democrats’ predicament.

The Democratic Party traded blue-collars for the pampered denizens of faculty lounges and white-collars sheltered in air-conditioned offices and free to be enraptured without consequences by gauzy ideologies. The hunt to combat climate change, an undefinable racism, and transphobia jumped to the front and center and over the concerns of people facing worsening family budgets, schools, and safety.

What do the Democrats have to offer? Nothing but misery. They’re after that guy’s job. Biden goes out on the stump and proclaims an end to drilling and the use of coal. The Party is all agog in fantasies of forests of windmills and vast expanses of solar panels replacing nuclear, coal, and natural gas. And why are they so enthusiastic about taking away that man’s livelihood? Answer: a climate-change hysteria that is as unscientific as it is illogical. It’s more religious than anything. It can only be entertained in the isolated and pleasant indoor climates made possible by the toil and sweat of people like that dirty miner in the stands with his son. The Party has become an institutional affront to most of working America.

Do you think that only he knows the dirty secret of the Party turning its back on him? To borrow from Biden, come on, man. Working America encompasses both sexes and all races and ethnicities. Work is color and gender blind. So, regardless of melanin count and genitalia, many are walking away from a party much more identified with techie billionaires, Antifa, and Sierra Club conferees. Thus, a rising GOP black and Latino vote.

For a Democrat, the picture below should hit you in the gut. What are you doing to that man and his son?

Michael McGuire covered in soot after a shift in the mines. He rushed to be with his son, Easton, for the first live basketball game together at the University of Kentucky. (photo: WKYT)

RogerG

November 7, 2022November 7, 2022

Our Politics Are a Mess. Shame on the Culprits.

President Joe Biden delivers remarks on prescription drug costs, Social Security and Medicare, during a campaign event, in Joliet, Ill., November 5, 2022. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Election Day is nigh, and our politics are a mess. Shame on the Culprits.

Biden goes on a rant about the “idiots” who actually take the Democrats for their word: the Democrats are “socialists” if not in self-acclamation, then in deeds. But you are an “idiot” for noticing. Trump fulminates in his usual adolescent way by insulting a potential rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis, as “DeSanctimonious”. When will that 20% of the GOP electorate actually grow up? Our 2024 choices at this juncture could be between the revolutionaries’ old fart (Biden) or an old-but-narcissistic browbeater (Trump). It’s a real binary because only one of the two could be inflicted on us after 2024.

Former President Donald Trump speaks during a pre-election rally to support Republican candidates in Latrobe, Pa., November 5, 2022. (Mike Segar/Reuters)

How did we end up with two septuagenarian-to-octogenarian figures to represent our political divide? One is clearly senile and the other is an embarrassing oaf who hasn’t outgrown schoolyard bullying because it sells in our hyperactive digital age. While the two mouthpieces have an equal measure of their own version of decrepitude, the two parties are not as equivalent in their rot. The Democratic Party went off their rocker into full-blown ultra-Left fanaticism. The Republican Party is the one left to buttress the nation against the lunacy, being now the only adult left in the room, but, sadly, they are anchored down by the telegenic buffoon. He just might get a second shot at it in 2024.

The GOP’s barker, Trump, had his 4-year turn with the brass ring but ran into a buzzsaw of Left/bureaucratic hostility that dominates our increasingly putrefying culture and administrative state. The thing that attracts clicks and cameras – a dramatic persona, or BDE (look it up) in the words of Trumpkins – also stirred the entrenched Left to attempt to shred our Constitutional order, which they tried to do in short order after they were returned to power under the senescent Biden in January 2021 in calls for court packing, elimination of the Electoral College, engineering four new Senate seats for themselves, calling for an elimination of any voice for the minority in the Senate (it is said that the filibuster is a “relic” of Jim Crow), pushing a federal takeover of elections to legalize election fraud to expand their voter base and ensure dominance over the horizon, etc.

And then the wheels came off the nation under their refashioned version of Il Duce’s old slogan of “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” No energy for you if it didn’t come from a windmill or solar panel. No car for you if it doesn’t take 2 hours to 2 days to charge, and won’t burst into flames after being inundated in a storm surge. The Green New Deal central planners are going to hogtie you into their utopian rabbit hole with or without your consent.

As for your sidewalks and parks, be careful because addiction on the streets and in the green spaces is “decriminalized”. Plus, you get the opportunity to see nihilism in practice with the rampant smash-and-grab mobs, property crime, and raging assaults – Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange” brought to life. Heck, just keep your mayhem under $950, and even if you don’t, no-cash-bail and non-prosecution ensures that the miscreants will never get a chance to look from the wrong side of bars. It’s a huge subsidy for Hobbes’s old prediction of the “war of all against all”.

Our girls’ locker rooms have been invaded by XY “girls”. Our daughters aren’t safe, and their lifetime efforts and achievements cut short by XY “women” athletes. All of this brought to you by a party that wants to make all things a matter of human will. No obvious boys and girls, and all is subject to choice and human interventions. High school dances are now a real adventure for all concerned.

The so-called kitchen table isn’t exempt because you are increasingly unable to afford much to put on it. Your nest egg (401k, pension) has tanked. Shortages are disguised in euphemisms like “supply chain crisis”. It’s always a crisis with these central-planning folks. Central planning has its shortcomings. And, if you had a job, the highways just became useless since you can’t afford the juice to turn the wheels of your car, or the home charger was made inert by a blackout. “Sustainable” also has its shortcomings.

The ultimate in central planning – the pandemic lockdowns, closures of businesses, schools, and civil life, and the mandates, and the incessant tinkering with essential and nonessential – has contributed to much of the disruption of ordinary life that we experience today, setting back our kids for a year or two. COVID central planning is like Soviet central planning or the kind run out of Pyongyang: shortages and a stunted existence.

But what’s there to complain about? Much, oh so very much. The blathering blowhard of the GOP won’t be on the ballot till 2024, but Biden’s “idiots” – the average person that makes the country click by living and working – face an existential threat: Biden and his big-government party. Vote like your life depended on it, because it actually does.

You’re the Lifeguard?

Terrifier

RogerG

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* “Biden calls anti-socialism protesters ‘idiots’ in Illinois stump speech attacking GOP”, Washington Times, Nov. 5, 2022, at https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/nov/5/biden-calls-anti-socialism-protesters-idiots-illin/ .

* “Trump hits DeSantis as ‘Ron DeSanctimonious’ at rally amid 2024 announcement rumors”, Washington Times, Nov. 5, 2022, at https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/nov/5/trump-hits-ron-desantis-ron-desanctimonious-rally-/ .

November 7, 2022November 7, 2022

Can I Sue?

Really, can I sue California’s STRS, the state’s teacher pension system? I would think that I have standing. After all, I am receiving a CalSTRS pension. Why would I sue? They are imperiling my pension. Simple.

How are they harming the integrity of my pension? It comes in three letters – ESG – and, to no great surprise, California is all into it. The initials stand for “environment, social, governance” and the plan is to impose these political abstractions on the entire business sector including finance, which also includes pension investing. In practical terms, ESG means the grab bag of leftwing causes from transgender ideology to the crusade against “systemic racism” to climate-change apocalyptics. The purpose is to strongarm businesses into leftwing causes with the use of the mother’s milk of business – capital – capital even from pension members.

The State of Utah is suing – that is, suing Standard and Poor’s (S&P) for assessing the state’s financial stability and credit worthiness according to leftwing metrics (ESG), or how diligent the state is in furthering leftwing causes such as hostility to the firearms industry and energy companies. Since the electorate of Utah doesn’t have the political sensibilities of gun controllers, BLM, the progressive ladies of The View, or the Sierra Club, the state’s financial status and bonds get downgraded by S&P acting in the role of the Left’s hatchet man. If the state’s electorate doesn’t pay heed to the fascinations of a college Sociology faculty, their bonds get branded “B” (junk). The purpose is to jeopardize the state’s financial health if they don’t come to heel.

Public-employee pension funds are particularly prone to the sway of the zealots, especially CalPers and CalSTRS in California, already under the direct thumb of an off-the-charts progressive one-party state. Out goes the standard fiduciary rule of working in the best interests of the client, in comes a redefinition of “best interests” to involve the political inclinations of those like Gavin Newsom wanting to risk the pensioners’ contributions and ultimate payout on Solyndra-type ventures and away from investments that until yesterday were pro forma.

In the case of a public-employee pension system, “best interest” can’t be limited to managers taking dictates from powerful and ideologically pretentious politicos. Contributions come from everyone from Marxists to NRA members in general funds like CalSTRS. The only real requirement is to be a teacher of the requisite number of years. The one thing that they all have in common is being retired and spoiling their grandkids. If any of them want to fund the antics of The Squad, they can do it from their pre- or post-retirement income, not beforehand after a deterioration of potential payouts to every beneficiary by Gavin Newsom’s preferences.

Kentucky’s AG, Daniel Cameron, senses the chicanery as well. He hit the mark with a letter to the state’s pension fund managers when he warned them about ESG investing because it would “violate statutory and contractual fiduciary duties.” He continued, “There is an increasing trend among some investment management firms to use money in public and state employee pension plans — that is, other people’s money — to push their own political agendas and force social change.” Those fiduciary duties might apply to California as well.

A favorite tactic to make ESG seem legitimate is to label the opinions of the Left a matter of “science” and a product of a “consensus”, therefore irrefutable, therefore “misinformation” if challenged, therefore above and beyond the standard rules of fiduciary responsibility. This new “science” – the scientific truth (?) of Leftist opinion – is actually a “science” without the scientific method. Think about it: What scientist comes from an experimental test of his/her hypothesis with the observation that the results are wrong because they violate a “consensus”? The whole exercise is as nonsensical as handing over my pension’s investment portfolio to the screeching ministrations of Greta Thunberg or Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

But here we are at a place where we can’t challenge the destruction of a pension because anyone who disagrees is censored as a “denier”. So, the Left gets carte blanche with the money for my old age. I don’t think so. Send lawyers, guns, and money. Oh, drop the “guns” part and let’s sue.

I identify with Warren Zevon’s predicament in his song “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”. The lyics:

“I went home with the waitress, the way I always do
How was I to know, she was with the Russians, too?

I was gambling in Havana, I took a little risk
Send lawyers, guns and money, dad, get me out of this, ha

I’m the innocent bystander
Somehow I got stuck between the rock and a hard place
And I’m down on my luck, yes I’m down on my luck
Well, I’m down on my luck

And I’m hiding in Honduras
I’m a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns, and money
The shit has hit the fan

Alright, send lawyers, guns, and money
Huh, yeah
Send lawyers, guns, and money
Uh
Send lawyers, guns, and money
Hey
Send lawyers, guns, and money
Oo, yeah
Yeah
Yeah”

Zevon’s performance of “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”:

RogerG

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* “Follow Daniel Cameron’s lead, purge every hint of ESG from your state’s finances”, Washington Examiner, Nov. 4, 2022, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/faith-freedom-self-reliance/follow-daniel-camerons-lead-purge-every-hint-of-esg-from-your-states-finances .

* “Utah pushes back against pro-Putin ESG financial analysis”, Washington Examiner, May 2, 2022, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/utah-pushes-back-against-pro-putin-esg-financial-analysis .

November 4, 2022

Today’s Opportunities for a Columnist with Flair, Heather Wilhelm

charging-station-california — Electric cars sit charging in a parking garage at the University of California, Irvine, in Irvine, Calif., 2015. (photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

I get a kick out of Heather Wilhelm’s columns. She writes for The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, National Review, etc., and calls Austin, Tx., home. She has a flair, as in a recent piece “Running on Fumes”. The topic is California’s fetish for electric cars. As I’ve written many times, it’s a looney idea. Wilhelm agrees . . . with flair.

Here’s some juicy tidbits from the column, with a few quips of my own:

* “. . . America’s favorite loopy wine-swilling communist aunt who dabbles in astrology and mushrooms — I’m speaking, of course, of the government of California . . . .” — What a great distillation of Sacramento.

* “What could go wrong?” [A reference to California’s brain fart to end gas-powered cars by 2035 coupled with the state’s grid operator recently requesting a stop to EV charging from 4 pm to 9 pm.] Putting it in more laymen terms in a fictional expansion of the announcement, she wrote, “ . . . freeze, just like a statue, between the hours of 4 p.m. and 9 p.m., avoiding movement that could cause an injury, lest you have to walk 16 miles to the ER with a broken scapula. Please also refrain from having any personal emergencies that might require a car during this specific time window. And for heaven’s sake, do not — please do not — go into labor between the hours of 4 p.m. and 9 p.m.”

* Then she quotes a Newsom spokesperson: “We’re not saying don’t charge them. We’re just saying don’t charge them between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m.” — You can’t make this stuff up. California is an SNL skit in real time.

* “Ah. Remember: If you’re going to get appendicitis, don’t.” — Need I say more?

* “California is a gorgeous state filled with natural wonders and wonderful people, but pretty soon the only way to get out of the place might involve the few remaining clusters of beleaguered residents’ begging Ron DeSantis to fly them to Martha’s Vineyard.” — Nicely put.

* On EV road trips: “Electric cars are great, unless you actually want to go somewhere that’s, you know, far.” Further, “. . . if you want to take a road trip with a car that plugs in, in a vast, sprawling country with multiple wilderness areas that will likely never have an abundance of places to plug it in . . . well, you might want to give the whole idea a second thought.” — You say?

* Or this line about her: “I believe in self-sufficiency, am a bit of a prepper, and always keep my gas tank at half full or higher in case the apocalypse breaks out or Beto O’Rourke somehow gets elected to some form of public office.” – The latter hypothetical would be proof that the electorate went mad. Again, hope that DeSantis will fly you to Martha’s Vineyard.

* Lastly, this jab at the airheaded central planners like Newsom and his coterie of sadomasochistic Green New Dealers: “I’d bet on the free market to do a better job than a guy like Gavin Newsom.” Precisely, let people decide – it’s called a free market – and not some shortsighted drunk-on-power goofs with an adolescent vision.

Radical visionaries seldom trouble themselves with consequences. With the “sustainable” grid chronically down, a heat wave means that you’ll . . . sweat, hopefully not into stroke. No electricity, no air conditioning. After controlling your usage with “smart” thermostats – beware of Alexa – the same geniuses might mandate the return to the Victorian 13-foot ceiling and ban air conditioning to go along with your gas-powered car. In one fell swoop, the state’s housing stock of 8-foot ceilings will be made obsolete. Our airheads follow in the footsteps of the many totalitarians who have gone before. They will make you into their better person even if it’ll ruin you.

Heather Wihelm’s full article is at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/10/17/running-on-fumes/.

RogerG

November 4, 2022November 4, 2022

Real Institutional Racism in the Boardroom

The admissions building at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A trial widely perceived to be a referendum on affirmative action is scheduled to begin Monday. (HADLEY GREEN / The New York Times, file) — The admissions building at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (HADLEY GREEN / The New York Times, file)

Benjamin Disraeli (19th century British politician, Prime Minister, and writer/philosopher) in his book “Sybil, Or the Two Nations” wrote of the deep split of a people into two camps, almost nations, each completely estranged from the other:

“Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws . . . . THE RICH AND THE POOR.”

For him, the divide was between the rich and the poor, an artifact of a time of much greater hardship. For us, it is between the blue silos of a radical Left cultural ethos and the red hinterlands of the traditions of standards, faith, the rule of law, equality before the law, and popular sovereignty under constitutional checks. The former wishes to overthrow the latter.

In these isolated little blue enclaves, overwhelmingly inner cities and college campuses, the hyper-wealthy and academics can entertain ideological fancies far afield from the lives of the vast majority of people living outside, people who are actually struggling with the daily realities of living and not secure from them by walls, money, and tenured academic freedom.

How could the corporate boardroom – in the past immune – become so enthralled by this revolutionary ethos? The answer lies in the social realities of living in a narrowly confined space of limited interactions. A homogeneous mind incubates in a scene of intermarriage, secluded social engagements in a protective cocoon, and an upbringing that transmits the same campus cultural revolution in these secluded social petri dishes.

los angeles estate — Security gate at a Beverly Hills estate

Adapting Mao’s Long March mythology, Rudy Dutschke, a leader of the German radical Left of the 1960s, advocated a long march through institutions in that 1967 time of troubles of strikes, riots, and massive protests in the West. Rather than tear the institution down, take them over, he said. Well, it happened. Yesteryear’s student radical is today’s tenured college faculty with matriculated mental offspring littered throughout the Fortune 500.

What brings this to mind? Eighty-two American companies expressed their official support for race-based college admissions, loosely referred to as affirmative action, in two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court involving the University of North Carolina and Harvard (see their briefs below). Big corporate players such as Google, Apple, JetBlue, and General Electric produced briefs utilizing the same old neo-Marxist rhetoric of group-conscious oppression. Rhetorically, the table is set for the talisman of “diversity”. Merit is redefined as being a member of the proper race or possessing the proper genitalia and calling it “diversity”. No, this isn’t diversity of opinion. It’s the diversity of immutable characteristics. Competence and a special gnosis, it is assumed, emanates from melanin count and genitalia, not from observable qualifications. It’s preposterous.

The pretzel logic required to make this scheme marketable boggles the mind. In Monday’s hearing before the Supreme Court, defense counsel emphasized the gambit of race as one among many factors but couldn’t escape withering cross examination from Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito and Barrett. The inescapable fact is that at least some admissions will be based on race, and thusly a violation of statute and the Constitutional guarantees of equal protection. Trying to hide race among the weeds doesn’t eliminate the fact that race will be determinative to award advantages to some to the detriment of others not so privileged with the right skin color and genital comportment.

How could they get away with this after a Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment, Brown v. Board of Education, and the various Civil Rights Acts in the long campaign to end the award of benefits and/or disabilities based on race or other immutable factors? The whole enterprise relies on rhetorical legerdemain and a mountain of verbiage in bastardized “studies” to the point that “studies have shown” has gained the reputation as a tipoff for ideological skullduggery. It’s a new Jim Crow favoring the radical Left’s “oppressed”.

And an afront to most people’s practical sense of fairness. There’s a reason why lady justice wears a blindfold.

Not surprisingly given their backgrounds, corporate titans have bought into it. Read the briefs and you’ll find the ritual abuse of “diversity” and “qualified”, as in “Classroom diversity is crucial to producing employable, productive, value-adding citizens in business.” Or, how about the claim that the favoritism produces “a pipeline of highly qualified future workers and business leaders”? “Highly qualified” just became an oxymoron. “Qualification” now means the right melanin count and genitalia.

The whole thing is a legal, moral, and rational trainwreck. To borrow a movie line, “Yes, Virginia, there is institutional racism”, but it’s coming from the folks who brought you The 1619 Project, CRT, the 2020 summer of BLM riots, home appliances, and annual college admission letters. Amazing, the campaign against institution racism was always about furthering institutional racism.

May be a cartoon of text

RogerG

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* The corporate briefs in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, and Harvard, can be found at https://www.naacpldf.org/wp-content/uploads/Brief-for-Major-American-Business-Enterprises-Supporting-Respondents-FINAL.pdf .

* An excellent synopsis of the case by Brittany Bernstein can be found at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/dozens-of-major-u-s-companies-urge-supreme-court-to-uphold-race-based-college-admissions/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=next-article&utm_term=first

October 23, 2022October 23, 2022

We Did It to Ourselves

In Rob Reiner’s “This Is Spinal Tap”, the boys in the band are asked about the unexpected deaths of some of their drummers, including one who mysteriously erupted in spontaneous combustion.

It’s hilarious, but not so funny for Florida electric vehicle (EV) owners in the wake of Hurricane Ian. We now know that water and EV batteries don’t mix. The things don’t need a spark. After the deluge and submersion in flood waters, they’ll just quietly simmer in a super-hot chemical reaction, smoke a little, and then erupt. Watch the Good Morning in America (GMA) report below.

The EV is the darling of our eco-central planners and the eco-acolytes who sit atop many of our institutions. For the elected ones, they didn’t gain their seats of power and influence by accident. We chose them. Through the franchise and Electoral College, we made the choice to give power to those who would force us out of our deep family investments in clean and fuel-efficient sedans, mini-vans, and SUV’s and into the thing that could set a packed parking lot and neighborhood ablaze. Add to that the range anxiety from inoperable, scarce, and inconvenient charging stations; dishonestly advertised operational distances if one takes into account running life-support and other systems like air conditioning and the heater; and the threat of hypothermia as we wait the hour or two for enough juice to get the thing up and running in a Michigan winter.

Wait, there’s more. The same folks who are foisting the EV on us are creating the most unstable grid distributing the most expensive electricity. An ever-growing expanse of giant windmill forests and broadening seas of solar panels marring ever greater portions of the earth’s surface will be our future if they have their way. And if that isn’t enough, much of that grid is exposed to the annual seven-month firestorm season from eco-crazed forestry practices that annually belches millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air, like the 130 million tons from last year’s conflagrations in California – the equivalent CO2 of 25 million regular autos. So, they shove everyone into EV’s to allegedly save the planet as they encourage the buildup of debris to burn it up. Go figure.

Incidentally, try to find a place to charge up the thing if you happen to be in the path of the flames, the lines are down, and the cell towers are incinerated. It’s a perpetual motion machine of eco-nuttery. Lesson: Don’t sell that old Camry with the regular unleaded in the gas tank.

Who’s at fault? We are. We elected the clowns who thought that showering the country in paper money was economically righteous and think that eco-central planning is somehow different from the Soviet variety.

It’s not that the donkey party hid it from us. Nancy Pelosi and The Squad have been busy concocting the Green New Deal since Pelosi took the gavel (2019) and Biden the oath of office (2021). Anyone above the sentience level of a worm should have known. Biden repeatedly bellowed their intent when he, for instance, looked into the eyes of a teenage girl (a real XX-chromosome one) in 2019 and said,

“I want you to look at my eyes. I guarantee you. I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.”

Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden pumps his fist as he speaks during a campaign stop, Friday, Sept. 6, 2019, in Laconia, N.H. (AP Photo/Mary Schwalm)

True to his word, he’s trying to euthanize the entire industry: practically ending oil development on federal lands and offshore, axing pipelines, lavish spending on loopy “sustainables”, and a quiet strangulation of the energy companies by frightening financial capital away from them. For this gang, real, affordable energy is a dragon to be slain.

The choice of candidates in the 2020 presidential race was between the uncouth with the right policies (for the most part) and a revolutionary ethos of class warfare, neo-Marxist race-baiting, transgenderism, open borders, law unenforcement, and greenie fanaticism. As it turned out, a majority preferred the revolution. Look no further than the mirror for the cause of our troubles if you thought that the uncouth drove you into the arms of the revolutionary. A candidate is much more than the fact that he’s not the other guy.

See the source image

RogerG

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* “Red Tape Is Making Wildfires Worse”, Shawn Regan and Tate Watkins, National Review Online, Oct. 4, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/red-tape-is-making-wildfires-worse/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=third

* “About Those Green Jobs . . . They Keep Vanishing”, Andrew Follett, National Review Online, Oct. 15, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/about-those-green-jobs-they-keep-vanishing/

* “Climate Policy Should Pay More Attention to Climate Economics”, John H. Cochrane, National Review Online, Sept, 3, 2021, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/climate-policy-should-pay-more-attention-to-climate-economics/

* “In intimate moment, Biden vows to ‘end fossil fuel'”, Steve Peoples, ABC News, Sept, 6, 2019, at https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/intimate-moment-biden-vows-end-fossil-fuel-65442382

October 14, 2022

Are We Getting Stupider?

Could be, I don’t know. We fellow Boomers weren’t so smart. We rebelled against self-restraint and got a world without self-restraint. Now, a pleasant afternoon stroll in Denver or New York City will be through a smokey haze of people lighting up blunts amid the staccato bursts of drive-bys.

You can’t say that the times are the best for kids. If we aren’t pummeling their future prospects with eco-nuttery and $31 trillion of debt, we are destroying their mental capacities under a barrage of toxic neo-Marxism and a campaign to turn teenage emotional instability into gender dysphoric mutilations. Not only that, with all the cultural poison at their I-phone fingertips, we suffocate their leaning behind masks, plexiglass, social distancing and an end to in-person instruction under the threat of teacher union die-hards. The results? This is the most anti-child era in living memory, if not all time, and I haven’t got to the zealous push to abort them from conception to just before the slap on the back side after exiting the birth canal. Maybe after that too. A few data points are illustrative.

Item #1: ACT Scores dropped to their lowest level in 30 years. The ACT is a snapshot of the mental astuteness of this year’s incoming college freshman class. The shamings, lockdowns, school closures, and kids living their lives in the glow of flat video screens have produced one of the most ill-prepared incoming classes of matriculants. We did it to them under the pseudo-claims of “follow the science” and “experts”. Progressivism’s blind faith in a professional-but-politicized class of bureaucrats led us straight into a dark hole, and an even darker and deeper one for our kids.

And once they get to the ivy-covered walls of state U, more stupidity awaits them. Look at what our isolated hyper-wealthy in the isolation of their hyper-wealthy foundations consider “genius”, a “genius” that will flush through the lecture halls. Item #2: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation released this year’s 25 winners of their no-strings-attached “genius” cash awards ($800,000). They’re left-wing activists. They’re “geniuses” because of it. Really. I don’t know of any veterans of the Young Americans for Freedom or Federalist Society getting the phone call.

The winners check all the preferred boxes of today’s race/gender neurotics. Two-thirds are women and 19 of the 25 were recruited from the so-called “marginalized”, all of the approved biases. No Candice Owens or Winsome Sears (Virginia lt. gov.) types were obviously considered. Somewhere, among the sanctified, you might find someone of the wrong genitalia and melanin count but still certainly, along with the rest, of the right ideological orientation.

Patronizing mediocre artists (Amanda Williams) and a chattering class of whiners (Kiese Laymon, etc.) with the title of “genius” will degrade it like “real estate agent” after the collapse and serial fraud in the Florida Land boom in 1926. “Genius” was applied to Reuben Jonathan Miller, U. of Chicago prof and peddler of the “mass incarceration” nonsense. The crusade against “mass incarceration” means “mass decarceration” and is turning many of our neighborhoods into war zones. Thanks “genius”. How many more vapid treatments of anything “indigenous” do we need? Robin Kimmerer serves up another one in “Braiding Sweetgrass”. The more-in-tune-with-nature schtick is an attack on air conditioning, the family mini-van, and the single-family home. This stuff is as old as the hippie commune and is as equally bankrupt. And this makes her a “genius”? The WaPo reporter tried to buck up Kimmerer’s status by writing that her book “has gone from surprise hit to juggernaut bestseller”. No, only if “juggernaut” is 4,474 in Amazon’s rankings (paperback, 1,504 in Kindle, 3,313 in hardcover).

See the source image

Are these our educational influencers? These are only geniuses among people who are gullible enough to believe it. As a teacher of 30 years and annually exposed to the blatherings of credentialed activists telling us how to teach, I’ve watched them wilt under even mild cross examination. The phrase “empty suit” was tailored for this type. Yes, they’re empty suits but now they’re also rich “geniuses”. As for the kids, they’re languishing.

Watch Kmele Foster’s excellent observations on the decline in ACT scores, but don’t expect an $800,000 “genius” award for him coming from the MacArthurs. Use the link below.

https://www.foxnews.com/video/6313699523112

RogerG

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* “ACT Test Scores Drop to Lowest in 30 Years Following School Closures”, Cheyanne Mumphrey, RealClear Politics, 10/13/2022, at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/10/13/act_test_scores_drop_to_lowest_in_30_years_following_school_closures_148318.html .

* “Meet the new MacArthur ‘genius grant’ winners”, Karen Heller, Washington Post, 10/12/2022, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/12/macarthur-genius-grant-fellows/ .

RogerG

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* “Meet the new MacArthur ‘genius grant’ winners”, Karen Heller, Washington Post, 10/12/2022, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/12/macarthur-genius-grant-fellows/ .