Matt Gaetz (r, Fla.) and Lauren Boebert (R, Co.), two of the twenty Republicans opposing McCarthy as Speaker
Still no Speaker for the new Republican-majority Congress.
What happens when you cross a lunkhead with P.T. Barnum? The blending of DNA gives you the Republican rump opposing Kevin McCarthy as Speaker and Republican efforts to put the brakes on the Democrats’ scheme to gut America. Some of the gaggle take after the lunkhead side of the gene pool, others the carnival barker. For others exhibiting the wild gene in the family tree, nothing but the perfect will do. The result is a “fecal” (rhymes with chit) show.
If you were looking forward to Republican governance in the House, well, expect to be aghast. If you weren’t, sit back and watch the drama-queen cast of the Keystone Cops at work. It should be a great show. 20 Republicans are making a laughingstock of the other 202. If the rump gets a scalp, such as McCarthy’s, expect scalp-taking to be routine. Meaning, who’d want the leadership job among this cast of narcissistic dolts?
Donald Trump provided the modern template for the drama queen that lies at the heart of many a politician’s soul, but even he finds Gaetz’s stunt “Sad!” What’s more striking is that many of these deadenders don’t really mind if the Democrats regain the Speaker’s gavel. Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News reports that Gaetz, Boebert (R, Co.), and Perry (R, Pa.) told McCarthy in a private meeting that “they don’t mind if the speaker vote goes to plurality and [Dem leader] Hakeem Jeffries is elected [because] they’ll fight him.” If true, it speaks volumes for the mindset of these clowns. They want to fight and not govern. They’re into political theater and not responsible decision-making.
No wonder the Republicans are losing the ‘burbs and the degreed middle class. The Republicans are presenting a choice between the sweaty histrionics of Republican William Jennings Bryans and the socialist glibness of California Bay Area Democrats. Many mortgage payers might prefer the glibness to the blustery pandemonium.
To hell with ‘em. Don’t give them a scalp. If anything, hand them theirs. The only choice is McCarthy, period. A disorganized House is clearly their fault. They will be guilty of any return of the crippling Democrats to the seats of power and control of the House’s agenda and committees. Primary them! If they can’t cooperate with fellow Republicans, they can’t cooperate with anybody. Start planning the campaigns now: money, campaign staffs, and candidates.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Jake Sherman’s scoop of the private meeting with McCarthy at https://twitter.com/JakeSherman/status/1610275667756679169
Climate activists, and so-called “stakeholders”, 2019
Stakeholder: noun; a person with an interest or concern in something, especially a business. (Google)
***********
Cut to the chase, a “stakeholder” is someone with no direct invested risk (land, labor, capital) in an enterprise who wants the power to impose their political opinions on those that do. Stakeholder is a euphemism for those who want to screw up your investment for their benefit, however defined. “Stakeholder” is a buzzword, for instance, that strives to create the stampede to end the internal combustion engine (ICE) and push everyone into electric vehicles (ev’s).
I can’t, and we oughtn’t, leave this phenomenon of the ev alone.
As a 30-year veteran of the public schools, I’m well aware of “stakeholders”. Instead of the simple equation of producers (teachers, principals) and consumers (students, parents), we’ve got “stakeholders” to give us diversity/equity/inclusion (DEI), the principal tenets of critical race theory (CRT), “restorative justice” for classroom disruptors, gender-identity grooming, and the rest of the neo-socialistic chaos of the modern classroom. Student performance in the academic core craters but all of that is brushed aside by the education industry’s “stakeholders”. And you and your kids are the guinea pigs, not the principal “stakeholders” of the whole enterprise. For most of the “stakeholders” and their kids, elite prep schools await.
Now the jive is overtaking the relationship between car buyer and car producer. It works like this: create a mania (the role of “stakeholders”), politicize the mania (the role of “stakeholders”), the subsequent politicization transmutes into government mandates (jobs for “stakeholders”), and the rest of us get to live a life imposed by those far removed by from our needs and wants. This isn’t a free economy at work; it’s politics. “Stakeholders” are political activists!
And as is true with all ideological ninnies who want power to tell us how to live, we end up grappling with their crackpot choices. Classic example: the ev. And you know what? A “silent majority” in the auto industry c-suite in their quieter moments recognize the shambolic nature of the scam. Others in the know are beginning to write about it. The Wall Street Journal and National Review’s Andrew Stuttaford, among others, are part of a growing chorus writing about this shortsighted stampede to the ev.
Take the recent comments by the CEOs of Suzuki (Maruti Suzuki India, Ltd), Toyota, Nissan, and Stellantis (Fiat Chrysler/Peugeot) who have expressed misgivings. In the drumbeat of NFL game ads and the enthusiasm blanketing the whole gamut of media, you’d never know of their anxiety. Producers can’t completely ignore the manufactured mania, but amidst the monotonous din some drum up the courage to say the obvious: the “stakeholders” are looney.
It’s like the manufacturers being caught on an open mic. President Akio Toyoda of Toyota Motor Corp. was reported in The Wall Street Journal as being “among the auto industry’s silent majority in questioning whether electric vehicles should be pursued exclusively, comments that reflect a growing uneasiness about how quickly car companies can transition.” Oh, they can abruptly transition, but how much carnage would follow in its wake? Interesting question.
Akio Toyoda, CEO of Toyota Motor Corp.
In January 2022, the CEO of Stellantis was quoted as saying, “What is clear is that electrification [of cars] is a technology chosen by politicians [and their stakeholders], not by industry . . .” Further, according to him, it takes about 44,000 miles to begin to experience the carbon benefit of an ev over your ICE. By that time, your ev is half worn out. Then, what do you do with the toxic thing with its toxic batteries? Recycle? Hogwash. You can’t cost-effectively refurbish the things in the quantities that they will have to be produced. And you thought that your fossil-fuel contraption was an eco-disaster.
Carlos Tavares, CEO of Stellantis
Chairman R.C. Bhargava of Maruti Suzuki India Lt. was encapsulated in a Bloomberg report, “. . . the automaker that sells every other car on the nation’s roads [India], believes electric vehicles aren’t the answer to reducing carbon emissions in the world’s third-biggest releaser of greenhouse gases — at least not in the immediate future.” Yep, because millions of Indians in ev’s requires a steady flood of electricity from – you guessed it – coal and natural gas. See, the stakeholders’ central planners are all about the glitz in the flashy tv ads, like the stakeholders themselves, and are not into the grimy details. Don’t expect practical advice from political activists posing as “stakeholders”. They’ll get you into trouble.
Chairman R.C. Bhargava of Maruti Suzuki India Lt.
Nissan Chief Executive Uchida Makoto predicates more ev production on government help in the form of regulations to herd consumers into his products and cash payouts from taxpayers to his company’s pocket to make the things. It’s the same attitude that turned Detroit’s Big Three into basket cases in the 1970’s and required TARP in 2008. After WWII, Europe and Japan were wrecked and Detroit was riding high. Then, our competitors’ stone age ended in the 1960s and 70s and Detroit and its featherbedding unions turned to Uncle Sam for protection. Ironically, another European import, the Fascists’ idea of corporatism (the tripartite alliance of big corporations, big government, and big labor), entered the go-to manual for American policy makers and their “stakeholders”. It was already resplendent in FDR’s New Deal as a policy maker’s template.
Uchida Makoto, CEO of Nissan Motor Co.
American automakers are well-versed in taking hat in hand to Washington, D.C. Uchida likes the idea, and so does GM. GM pledges to go all electric by 2035. Of course, when things get sticky, they’ll expect Uncle Sam to continue to manufacture the market for them. In the throes of eco-stakeholders, DC will comply. In other words, we’re back to where we were with TARP . . . and a bunch of impractical four-wheelers crowding our driveways
We’ll then experience déjà vu for that fuel-injected ICE under a dusty cover in the garage. Remember the time when a fill-up took a couple of minutes, and the a/c didn’t cause a frantic search for an open charger in the 110-degree Texas/Mojave heat?
Mountain View, Ca., Teslas waiting in line for a charge.
You see, the electric vehicle has nothing to do with the creative freedom of entrepreneurs and voluntary interaction of free consumers and producers, the stuff of an economy in a free society. It’s a central planner’s dream. A central planner is a government employee. “Stakeholders” use political clout to make government empower central planners to make you live according to their lights. Out of the mire comes the ev and your struggles to get the kids to school, show up on time at work, and visit grandma for Thanksgiving. Of course, the “stakeholder” says that you don’t have to do any of that. The whole crusade is soft totalitarianism, soft because of the absence of a massive extra-legal secret police, but then again there’s the unceasing state indoctrination in teacher training and control of the curriculum in nearly every classroom K to grad school. It sounds to me like a totalitarian perpetual motion machine self-generating the support for power to the state’s “stakeholders”.
Interestingly, the problem is not with the electric vehicle itself. It’s the forcing of the things on the entire public. A golf cart made to look like your car is your future, whether you like it or not. The concerns of the auto industry’s execs stem from the exclusive focus on the ev. Hybrids, alternative fuels (biomass, compressed hydrogen, etc.), our trusty reduced-emissions ICE, and many others should also be part of the mix in a truly free society, one without the so-called “stakeholders” running the show. Yeah, it used to be called a free market.
The “stakeholders” aren’t into freedom, or a market with “free” – the autonomous soul – in front of it. They’re into making you think like them. Your life is to be rigged by them to be loyal clients of big-corp whose production decisions have been constricted by big-government under the influence of big-activists, aka “stakeholders”. Once government has a “stake” in electric vehicles, it’s going to make you buy them. Count on your state to resemble the hellscape of California.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Toyota Chief Says ‘Silent Majority’ Has Doubts About Pursuing Only EVs”, River Davis and Sean McLain, The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 18, 2022, at https://www.wsj.com/articles/toyota-president-says-silent-majority-has-doubts-about-pursuing-only-evs-11671372223
* “Electric Vehicles: Mr. Toyoda is Worried”, Andrew Stuttaford, National Review Online, Jan. 1, 2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/electric-vehicles-mr-toyoda-is-worried/
* “India’s Top Carmaker Bets on Hybrids Over EVs in Clean Shift”, Ragini Saxena, Bloomberg, Jan. 26, 2022, at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-26/india-s-top-carmaker-bets-on-hybrids-over-evs-in-clean-shift?cmpid=BBD062722_GREENDAILY&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=220627&utm_campaign=greendaily&sref=KgEBWdKh&leadSource=uverify%20wall
Matt Gaetz (R, Fla.), “Chairman” of the Imbecile Caucus
The GOP has its Freedom and Mainstreet Caucuses in Congress, among others. Now, we must add the Imbecile Caucus to the list of GOP factions. The charter members are Matt Gaetz, Ralph Norman, Andy Biggs, Bob Good, and Matt Rosendale, with room for the meanderings of Lauren Boebert. For some reason, they don’t like Kevin McCarthy as Speaker and are holding up the Republican majority from organizing the House. One of the Democrats’ greatest allies is this confab of the witless in Republican ranks. Thank them for the subsequent misrule and return of the neo-socialists to power in a couple of years.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell must be in a state of amazement when he glances over to the other wing of the Capitol Building. Maybe that’s the reason for the Republican support in the Senate for a big-spending omnibus bill instead of something smaller and of shorter duration. Any budget bill awaits the House chaos and the maw of the Imbecile Caucus after January 3. Better get something through before Republicans get blamed for another government shutdown.
Like McConnell, I shake my head in befuddlement. In a twist on an old banality, these knives couldn’t cut butter. What is this claque up to? What do they want? Right off the bat, let’s recognize that the only demographic group that they represent is the constituents of the kamikaze brigades. They represent no one but people who get giddy about flying planes into ships or rushing headlong through interlocking fields of machine gun fire.
They don’t seem to want anything but ways to systematize pandemonium. No Speaker for them who could discipline the wackos and present calm, mature leadership. Here’s their camera-hogging guru, Matt Gaetz: “House Republicans need a leader with credibility across every spectrum of the GOP conference in order to be a capable fighting force for the American people.” He adds, “That person is not Kevin McCarthy.” Who’s this clown to say that McCarthy doesn’t represent “every spectrum of the GOP conference”? First, no one can represent “every spectrum” because inevitably within that crowd of 222 there are a few cranks and fetishists – like the Imbecile Caucus. The best that can be hoped for is a realization that the outliers understand themselves to be outliers and agree to suppress their nuttery.
Well, I’m not holding my breath. Even the additional congressman granted my home state of Montana was apparently wasted on Matt Rosendale. He has signed onto the Imbecile Caucus manifesto. He said, “Each member of Congress has earned and deserves equal participation in the legislative process.” Sure they do, but that shouldn’t be an invitation to replicate the worst of the anarchic Italian electoral system. He and the rest of the Imbecile Caucus shouldn’t be allowed to subject the Speaker to the whims and piques of a constantly disgruntled five, which is what they want.
At root, the problem for McCarthy is rooted in math. Five dimwits run the show in a Republican House. It wasn’t true for the Democrats. Pelosi managed to govern with 222 seats in spite of the four Squad kooks. Republicans are different. They are the party of principle, the principle of being shoved around by a few headstrong dullards.
RogerG
Read more here:
“5 Republicans publicly oppose McCarthy’s speakership bid, putting ascension to leadership role in jeopardy”, Haris Alic, Fox News, Nov. 28, 2022, at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/republicans-publicly-oppose-mccarthys-speakership-bid-putting-ascension-leadership-role-jeopardy
“McCarthy offers key compromise in exchange for support on House speaker bid: Report”, Cami Mondeaux, Washington Examiner, Dec. 30, 2022, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/mccarthy-offers-compromise-in-exchange-for-house-speaker
* The History Channel’s “The Cars That Built the World” prompted the following reaction.
History shows that we go through periods of frenzy. Nearly everything gets sucked into a time’s all-encompassing and obsessive manias. We’re in one of those crazy times. You can’t escape the time’s convictions. The idea(s) permeates every nook and cranny of modern culture. There can be more than one overriding and widespread infatuation, but “climate change” seems to rise heads and shoulders above most others. It’s an ideology and is only science insofar as science can be recruited to lend it some credence and therefore an aura of irrefutability. Thus, a seemingly objective excuse is presented for intolerance of countervailing views and force-feeding the people into the narrow confines of its beliefs.
It’s an ideological enterprise with overtones of authoritarianism, even straying into totalitarianism. The difference between the two is summarized by the fact that authoritarians don’t really care how you think and live so long as you don’t threaten their power. Totalitarians seek to control everything about you. The “total” thing enshrines a surveillance state to manage your life in the most intimate details.
Can democracies be totalitarian? Impossible, you say? We are in the midst of an experiment to prove them compatible. Totalitarianism enters through the door of the mass acceptance of an ideology that has many of the characteristics of a religion – with or without God of course. Most often, if God is mentioned as part of the equation, He is the caboose trailing the train of thought. As a quasi-faith, environmentalism has its dogmas, such as “climate change” and an assortment of sacraments like “net zero” in carbon. One manifestation of “net zero” is the full-frontal assault on the internal combustion engine and the drive to get everyone into electric vehicles (ev’s).
The infatuation with the ev is a product of our time’s Secular Great Awakening: the vast upsurge in ethusiasm for Environmentalism. Environmentalism entails a severe preservationism that implants a loathing to alter the natural world for man’s benefit. It’s a prejudice against convenience for humankind. The ev is one allowance approved by the faith’s ecclesiastical leadership because it is said to address the cardinal sin of climate change, similar to the purchase of an indulgence.
Au contraire to The History Channel, the electrical vehicle has a distinct developmental history as compared to the rise of the SUV. The modern all-electric auto is not the outcome of the earlier scattered, hit-and-miss process of freedom-loving actors that led to the conventional automobile. The ev was essentially commanded into existence by the faith’s politically powerful adherents. In that sense, the ev mandates have much more in common with Stalin’s Five-Year Plans rather than anything recognizable in Adam Smith’s free market.
The track record of command-economy technologies isn’t impressive. Mao thought that he could jump-start Chinese industrialization (The Great Leap Forward) by turning the country’s peasants into steel producers with smelters in village backyards. It all was a bunch of hooey and culminated in the worst famine in history.
Chinese people working in a commune during the Great Leap Forward
Then along came the Soviet MIG-25 “Foxbat” fighter. A Soviet pilot defected one to an American airbase in Japan in 1976, and, low and behold, its materials and avionics were outdated. Like most everything coming out of the Soviet Union’s command economy, it was as flawed as the fake tractor that first rolled out of one of Stalin’s first new tractor factories in the 1930’s. Politicians, ignorant of production processes and engineering, are agog over flashy, showy things. The impracticality of their hairbrained ideas is unknown to them, and irrelevant to them anyway. In today’s political eco-system, environmentalism’s dogmas are assumed to be true and therefore windmills, solar panels, and ev’s are commanded to be the only true path to the Promised Land.
Soviet MIG-25 fighter that was flown by Soviet pilot Victor Belenko to Japan on Sept. 6, 1976
These thoughts were lurking in the background as I watched the four episodes of The History Channel’s “The Cars That Built the World”. I kept expecting the ubiquitous reference to the threat of man-caused apocalyptic climate change to rear its ugly head in the program’s rendition from the development of the internal combustion engine to Toyota, like so much of today’s litany of programming. It’s usually lurking in there somewhere. It finally did at the end of the last installment by associating the development of the electric vehicle to the creative energies of the bygone era.
The parallel is misleading to say the least. The ev is the dream product of today’s ideologically driven central planners. The thing’s glaring deficiencies are overlooked in the headlong rush to get people into them. True, advances in the ev have been made but not enough to overcome its inherent shortcomings and justify a junking of nation’s entire car fleet in a few decades. This can only happen when powerful political actors stray outside their limited lane of competence to force us into their preferred choice.
By contrast, no one was forced out of their horse-and-buggy at the dawn of the twentieth century in order to go further, faster, more cheaply and reliably than ever before. But our choice today isn’t between facing the back end of a horse and Henry Ford’s Model T. It’s a choice between a cleaner and fuel-efficient multi-cylinder and something that can’t be charged quickly, drains quickly the moment you turn on life support (heating, a/c), and is tied to a grid that ev-enthusiasts have made astonishingly unreliable. The trajectory of the internal combustion engine is toward lower emissions and greater fuel-efficiency. Ev’s have an improvement ascent as well, but where’s the cost-benefit for the centrally planned disruption that will inevitably ensue?
Answer: There isn’t one. Cost/benefit commonly stems from a calculation of the opportunity costs and tradeoffs of competing options. What opportunity costs and tradeoffs are entailed in the massive shift to ev’s by government command? What are we giving up by doing so? Therein lies the limiting principle for these politically driven economic schemes. It’s not that the product doesn’t look and sound great – you know, the all-agog reaction of our elected nincompoops. It’s what we are forgoing as we turn a good portion of our lives upside down. The amount that we spend or give up on this choice isn’t available for other things.
The result isn’t a seamless transition but a chaotic, disruptive mess. It won’t be anything like the shift from analog to digital recordings (cd’s, etc.). Digital’s advantages were immediately apparent. Leaving aside its recording superiority, its portability and ease of transition across multiple platforms using its storage advantages, flash drives, WIFI, streaming, cellphones, and assorted peripherals, it turned music into an easy-to-access commodity. Music was democratized every bit as much as personal transportation was by Henry Ford’s Model-T. Can we expect the same glorious outcome when we are forced to scrap our $30,000 sedan in exchange for a thing that will introduce us to serious “range anxiety”. It’s a step down, but for what?
We will be expected to accept the devolution because of the faith’s catechism in the original sin of climate change. So, we must forego something that has only gotten cleaner and more efficient in return for something with inherent difficulties in recharging, long recharge times (1 hour to 2 days) producing long wait times, a range dependent on ambient temperatures and use of basic accessories (such as a/c), and a dependence on a fitful grid.
To iron out the some of the most glaring deficiencies, batteries, batteries everywhere will be necessary for the zillions of ev’s and to level out electricity generation from an uncooperative nature with her flippant spasms of wind and her half-day time off when the sun is on the other side of the planet. More open-pit mining and disposal facilities for all those environmentally unfriendly batteries will be imperative. And, by all means, if you happen to live in a flood-prone area, park your drenched ev blocks away from anything of value. They spontaneously combust like Spinal Tap’s drummers.
Luxury electric vehicles bursting into flames after being damaged by floodwaters and car batteries catching on fire have prompted a new warning from the state after Hurricane Ian. (ABC News)
The electric vehicle – like the secular catechism’s other components such as wind, solar, locking up the forests, and the assault on suburbia – is a product of an ideology that functions as quasi-religion. Though, an ideology is different from a religion. While exhibiting many of the characteristics of one, ideology possesses one fundamental difference: a religion doesn’t generally concern itself with your choice of car, but an ideology can. A religion is primarily limited to the condition of your soul. An ideology can march you off to the death pits or simply shame you into fealty to the ordained lifestyle. Puritanism never really faded. Our modern version just stripped away the God-garb and donned the raiment of the prig. Only this time, the self-righteous are commissars.
Progressives pride themselves in being in the vanguard of history’s arc of betterment, thus Obama’s “wrong side of history” claptrap. But history has no arc. While one technological advance can lead to others, amidst the science and gadgets, we are the same hoard of clashing ambitions, prejudices, and interests. We can still spend ourselves into oblivion and turn the knowledge to malevolence such as robust ways to kill babies, surveille the population, force everyone into lockdowns, and believe in the unbelievable. So, history isn’t an ascending glide path but the teeth of a saw blade. The quality of life bounces up and down. It can register a descent if the balance of nonsense overwhelms the sense.
The electric vehicle as a substitute for your regular family sedan makes no sense. One sure way to institute a new dark age is to force people into making their lives more difficult. The ev aligns more appropriately with the rule of Xi Jinping. Welcome to the reign of today’s eco-Puritanism.
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.
Senator Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.) gestures during an election night party after a projected win in the midterm runoff election in Atlanta, Ga., December 6, 2022. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)
The dust is beginning to settle, or so I thought. The Trump-endorsed Herschel Walker lost in the Georgia runoff to the sharp-tongued leftist masquerading as a man of the cloth, Raphael Warnock. Georgia has a rabble-rousing socialist to represent it in the U.S. Senate, to go along with the state’s other non-card-carrying member of the Socialist International, Jon Osoff. But the state’s leadership went red. Go figure. And just as things were settling down, Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema dropped the Democrat label yesterday morning and officially became an independent, and we are back to choking on dust again. What does all this mean? Who knows, but I suspect there’s much to clean up on isle . . . for both parties.
The Georgia situation is perplexing. The results of the 2022 elections left the state in a condition of political dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder). Think about it: the radical left in the US Senate for the state and solid conservatives from the governor’s mansion to majorities in the state houses. How? What?
Republicans have some “cleanup on isle . . . ”. The mess comes in the form of the person of Donald Trump. The guy is simply not the winner of his boasts. He’s a big turn-off. He appeals to a narrow slice of the electorate, but he’s toxic in suburbia. One step forward, three steps back. Walker carried the Trump label, a liability too strong to overcome in a rough-cut newcomer.
Some reports indicate that Trump convinced Walker to run, and thus exposed himself to the Democrats’ usual rectal examination. He came up short after the smears, but everywhere else on the ballot, Republicans did very well. Jim Geraghty of National Review Online lays out the results. He reports that Republicans in all the statewide races broke the 50% threshold in the general election and thus avoided runoffs, with the lone exception of Walker. And roughly 200,000 fewer Georgians voted for Walker in the runoff than the general. I won’t speculate on the meaning of that, but it’s clear that Walker is less appealing than the rest of the Republican slate. He’s got personal baggage, and additionally he’s got Trump to live down.
Walker joins a broad cast of characters who, instead of the union label, had the Trump label and lost. It was particularly true in battleground states, the states that Republicans have to win to become a majority. Pennsylvanians preferred a stroke victim to Oz. In the governor’s contest, Arizonians favored a millennial uptalking airhead who wouldn’t debate, and couldn’t win one, and avoided public appearances over the quick-witted, fast-talking, Trump-endorsed telecaster, Keri Lake. Like her inspiration, she’s suing and caterwauling over the election results. The Senate race wasn’t even close with Trump’s novice, Blake Masters, falling way short. To no surprise, In the deeper blue bastions of Lefty lunacy, Trump’s imprimatur didn’t prevent a shellacking.
It seems that Trump threw around his endorsements like a drunk trust-fund brat tossing chips in a Las Vegas casino. He appeared to be so flippant, focusing on the oddball, the ill-prepared, the inexperienced, anyone who could parade around under the clichéd banner “outsider”. Sometimes, there are very good reasons for some people to be “outsiders”. Trump has proven to be not very adept at distinguishing them.
Part of the Republican cleanup should include a better ground game. The Democrats adjusted the election system for theirs, which is chock full of the ill-informed, easily distracted, and unmotivated. First, they eliminated the concepts of election day and the secret ballot. The party of government used government to deform elections to their liking: depreciating personal responsibility in voting (like registering, staying informed, getting off the couch to vote in-person), and having a month to do it. Then, all they have left to do is to mine the rich veins of the politically illiterate in their base. That means a data base to identify them and the paid minions to harvest the ballots.
Certainly, it’s an insult to one man, one conscience, one vote. The loss of the “conscience” part is critical since mailing the things in the millions will land multiples of them on a kitchen table, or lie around the floor of the communal mailboxes, waiting for . . . whoever . . . to mark them. It’s a scam-made-legal. Republicans need to play the game by the Democrats’ rules.
If the Republicans succeed in shedding the Trump stigma, the Democrats’ own “cleanup on isle . . .” will be more glaring. The Democrats have to live down The Squad, “birthing people”, a reverse Jim Crow (CRT, “systemic racism”, punishing racial preferences, racial reparations, etc.), their disdain for holding hoodlums accountable for harming the innocent, the filth and degradation in places under their chronic suzerainty, and their destruction of prosperity in a wave of radical eco-mongering and spending. They will persevere in spite of their craziness if the Republicans continue to make Trump the face of the party.
Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) at a Sept. 13 gala wearing a gifted “Tax the Rich” gown, for which she is being investigated for House ethics violations.
Is there a broad and popular appetite for this stuff? The Republicans offer a cult of chaotic personality. The Democrats peddle lunacy. If there ever was a good reason for complacency, this is it. I’m pinning my hopes on the Republicans’ cleanup brigade because their task is easier. All they have to do is send Trump packing. The radical chic ethos runs too deep in the Democrats.
Protest in Minneapolis against the appearance of Pres. Trump in Oct. 2019. Prominent state Democrats energized the protest crowd with their appearance and chants, including the radical Democrat State Representative Aisha Gomez (DFL-Minneapolis).
Roger
Source:
* Jim Geraghty’s take on the Georgia election scene: “Are We Ready to Learn Our Lessons Now, Republicans?”, National Review Online, Dec. 7, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/are-we-ready-to-learn-our-lessons-now-republicans/
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.
Marjorie Taylor Greene at press conference announcing a privileged resolution to audit aid to Ukraine, Nov. 17, 2022.
For Immanuel Kant, the “crooked timber of humanity” is a universal. He wrote, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
Yes, we do have a flawed nature and philosophies and ideologies can’t cleanse us of it. We aren’t saved by diversity trainings or renewing our commitment to Trump’s “stop the steal” crusade. “Gender therapy” – medical interventions such as synthetic hormones and surgeries – to straighten us out is an invitation to disaster. Simpletons, kooks, and charlatans are legion throughout the political spectrum and even the professions, and though they might agree with us on many matters, that doesn’t turn them into founts of wisdom. A prime example on the right can be found in the person of Marjorie Taylor Greene. At times, she dispenses sheer nuttery. She isn’t the only one.
Occasionally, the nuttery awakens as a consequence of a certain issue. The Ukraine War comes to mind. For anyone in their right mind (as in sober seriousness), befuddlement is the proper response to calls for appeasement in the face of thuggery and butchery. What else would you call it but appeasement? Marjorie Taylor Greene is consumed with it.
There’s an element on the Right intent on reviving the America First Committee of 1940. Aid to Britain was in the crosshairs at that time. The Third Reich’s Foreign Ministry was as overjoyed as Putin’s Foreign Ministry kleptocrats must be at this latest edition. Marjorie Taylor Greene, with all the confidence of a half-witted zealot, and with her coterie of the like-minded in tow, announced a “privileged resolution” to place aid to Ukraine under a cloud of suspicion. This thing isn’t about a prudent audit of a government spending program. Who opposes that, along with one for all the other federal spending monstrosities that are bankrupting our children’s future? But this one targets the Ukraine.
I smell a rat. The biblical injunction, “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:16 KJV), applies. These people have a track record of their illicit intentions. It goes far beyond prudence. She shares Trump’s weakness for Twitter bombast when she texted in March 2022, “We should not spend billions of American’s hard earned tax dollars on lethal aid to be given to possible Nazi militias that are torturing innocent people, especially children and women.” Additionally, “The US must demand Zelensky stop his military from torturing his own people.” Notice Putin’s “Nazi militias” propaganda line? This could have easily (and did) come out of his press spokesman. This gang isn’t a collection of original thinkers.
Matt Gaetz (R, Fla.), that other blowhard, has been pounding the drum for not doing anything on the international stage till we solve all our problems, or so it seems. In February 2022 at CPAC, Gaetz thundered, “Why should Americans have to pay the costs for freedom elsewhere when our own leaders won’t stand up for our freedom here?” Gaetz is correct to lambast Biden and his administration for their derelictions and disastrous policies but to say that our country’s foreign policy is tied to getting everything right here at home before we can do anything abroad is utter folly.
Our nation’s vital interests and security are of greater importance than Gaetz’s or Greene’s policy peccadillos. Yet, here they are advancing the ludicrous. They have a train of telegenic fellow travelers in the Right’s media. Candice Owens is similarly loose in her logic, tongue, and keypad when she tweeted, “President Zelensky is a very bad character who is working with globalists against the interests of his own people. I will not move one inch away from that assessment—ever—no matter how flowery the media depictions of him are.” In the wake of Putin’s claim that Russia created Ukraine, Owens in a fit of balderdash proclaimed, “Ukraine wasn’t a thing until 1989. Ukraine was created by the Russians…They speak Russian.” Whew, what do with that logic-chopping? Many people in the U.S. speak Spanish, but does that mean that Spain created the United States?
Candice Owens on her podcast show
As for the assertion that Russia created the Ukraine, it ignores one salient fact: Russia is an empire, a polyglot. Meaning, it’s a collection of separate peoples that have one thing in common: these regions came under Russian imperial rule over the course of centuries. So separate is Ukraine’s identity that Stalin tried to wipe it out in the 1930’s, going so far as to try to starve it to death in the Holodomor. Russian was imposed over the native Ukrainian language. Yes, Candice, the languages are different with divergent alphabets, “vocabulary, pronunciation of words, and so on [see below].” Language is a marker for so many other distinctions.
Candice, reliance on Putin as a scholarly source for an opinion is a junior-high level term paper mistake.
And, by the way, this discussion by us is superfluous since the Russians know it. Once given the chance, this polyglot empire flew apart with the collapse of the iron fist of the Soviet CCP. The Ukraine gained its independence along with Kazakhstan, etc. The Ukraine was so distinct that General Secretary Khrushchev drew its boundaries decades before. Agreed, he outbounded them a bit, but he obviously knew the Ukrainians to be a distinct enough people to recognize the fact with borders. Besides, the Politburo and the Soviet CCP agreed to the lines. It’s disingenuous for them to “speak with forked tongue” later and use a spurious argument to first lop off parts of the country and then invade and try to extinguish it. Poland was similarly imperiled in September 1939. Let’s face it, it’s a rhetorical gambit for empire-building thugs.
With every disclosure of Russian brutalities (see below), this troupe on the Right seems intent on shoving their foot further down their throats. It’s a cast of clowns. Is this element on the Right the appeasement caucus? Are they in the grip of fear of Russian nuclear weapons? If so, I can’t think of a stronger endorsement for every tyrant to get some for themselves. Where’s their argument to defend the rest of Asia from a nuclear Red China or the oil-rich Middle East from a jihadi-riddled and nuclear Iran? The fear of an aggressor hurting us is a poor basis for conducting foreign policy.
erhii Lahovskyi, 26, mourns over the body of his friend Ihor Lytvynenko, in Bucha, Ukraine, April 5, 2022. (Zohra Bensemra / Reuters)
Today’s America First dimwits have much in common with the 1980’s nuclear freeze movement. Back then, the anti-war movement of the abandonment of South Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia found another cause near and dear to their hearts in stopping Reagan’s effort to balance the Soviet Union’s intermediate missile threat to our western European allies. The placement of American intermediate missiles to counter the unopposed Soviet threat was declared by peaceniks to be provocative. Sound familiar? Greene earlier this year blamed our efforts to assist Ukraine for “Poking the bear”. You see, if only we hadn’t expanded NATO and recognized the alliance with military facilities amongst out allies, everything would have been hunky-dory with Putin. If only we had granted Putin a veto for NATO expansion, all would be goodness and light. It’s a version of the old blame-America-first tactic of the 60’s New Left. It took awhile but the brain-dead Left managed to find common ground with the brain-dead Right. Like seeks the company of like, brain-dead that is.
With cranks like these on the Right, we on the Right don’t need any enemies. The Left has The Squad to live down, and the Right has Marjorie Taylor Greene/Matt Gaetz and company. Don’t expect the public to trust the Republicans with power with dunderheads like these becoming the face of the GOP. They just end up running interference for the socialistic Democrats.
* “Difference Between Russian and Ukrainian”, Ask Any Difference, at https://askanydifference.com/difference-between-russian-and-ukrainian/#:~:text=The%20main%20difference%20between%20Russian%20and%20Ukrainian%20is,their%20vocabulary%2C%20pronunciation%20of%20words%2C%20and%20so%20on.
Screenshot from CNN report: ‘It’s like living in an igloo.’ People are turning off their heat as prices surge.
Referring to her home, “It’s like living in an igloo”; so says Charmaine Johnson of Philadelphia this weekend (Nov. 19-20, 2022) who works as an operator at a non-profit call center assisting low-income people heating their homes, and also personally experiencing the awful tradeoff of eat or freeze.
Here we go again. We have another government-sponsored trainwreck to add to history’s ever-lengthening ribbon list of failure. Yes, today, many people have a choice between eating or hypothermia. We never seem to learn that meddlesome ideologues with power screw things up. It makes no different if they’re commissars of the Soviet central planning agency, Gosplan, or Biden’s climate-change zealots. The consequences were famine in the Donbas, or massive shortages and waste and mismanagement in Soviet factories, or today’s sky-high heating bills dropped in American mailboxes. The misery has the same source: government with too much power.
The French word for the culprit is dirigisme, or an economic doctrine in which the state exercises a strong directive over a capitalist market economy.
Charmaine recently spent $1,000 to fill her fuel oil tank. Tim Wisely of Philadelphia, completely reliant on his Social Security benefits, will pay $1,500 to fill his. Wiseley said that he won’t raise the thermostat till his “teeth chatter”. He says, “It’s 50 or 55 degrees in here. To me that’s not unbearable yet.” He adds, “You can’t go food shopping and get oil. It’s one or the other.”
Tim Wisley’s thermostat settingScreenshot from CNN report: “It’s like living in an igloo.”
Nationwide, the cost of heating your home jumped 17% last year with another 18% for this year. The numbers are statistical abstractions until you run into people like Charmaine and Tim.
What’s amazing is that the source of the story, CNN’s Gabe Cohen, can’t bring himself to mention that the looney policies of Biden and his people are a principal cause of the misery. Anything but government is the go-to in our lefty newsrooms. Citing another government agency, the Energy Information Agency (EIA), Cohen repeats the agency’s desultory list of suspects which includes the Ukraine War (of course), OPEC+, increase energy exports, reduced energy inventories, and a higher demand for natural gas for electricity generation. Wait a minute, take a breath, isn’t this the all-too-common evidentiary slime trail of government-empowered zealots run amok?
It’s hard to blame Putin and the Ukraine War since heating bills began to spike in 2021 (17%), long before the thrust to Kiev in February 2022. A stronger correlation aligns with January 20, 2021 (Biden’s inauguration). The best that can be said to hide the donkey party’s full culpability is that Putin made worse what Biden triggered.
Suspect #2, the decision of OPEC+ to cut production, like Putin’s Ukraine adventure, is another after-the-fact that magnifies the fallout of Biden’s well-established ambition to lower the sea levels around Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard estate. Biden and his people accuse OPEC+ of doing what he intended to do: lower production — to assist a “transition” to a California-style Shangri-la. Everything from denying permits on federal lands, increasing the regulatory hoops to explore and produce, starving producers access to capital with new and demonizing SEC regulations, and vetoing pipelines works in the same manner as OPEC’s announcement of a 2,000-bpd cut. Do you believe for a moment that in this atmosphere anyone with capital to spare would spend it on a new refinery? I’m sure that the Sierra Club’s c-suite is dancing a jig over $7-pg diesel.
Los Angeles in a blackout?
Higher demand for natural gas? This is winter. Has anyone checked with Buffalo? Do ya think that Exxon isn’t aware of the seasons? This excuse makes farce look like a compliment.
Then there’s the “increase in energy exports”. What “energy exports”? It’s natural gas, liquified natural gas to Europe, the thing that Biden is trying to transition us from. You see, Biden is attempting to copy Europe in “net-zero” buffoonery. Germany did it . . . and became dependent on Putin. Hitching your wagon to Putin’s ambitions is a scarry energy strategy. But they did it, along with all the vast landscapes devoted to windmills and solar panels. The erratic production must be supplemented by something, and a hugely expensive infrastructure to make the erratic more stable. All for what? A hypothetical 1.5-degree Celsius increase in a century? We’ve had warming periods in the past. Heck, Britain once had vineyards. And cooling periods aren’t great for the food supply and public health (the Black Death). Europe and Biden adopted a “transition” to anguish.
The 2022 midterms were a referendum on . . .? I can’t believe it was a preference for this. Surely, people don’t desire vulnerability. Besides the retort “Don’t call me Shirley”, people must realize that they are exposed to bankruptcy and increased threats to their health. Biden’s “transition” is only a nice sounding word for vulnerability to misery. In the annals of state-sponsored misery, Biden’s greenie die-hards join the ranks of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, Lenin’s politburo, Soviet Gosplan, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, and the North Korean Kim dynasty’s “Juche”, the dirigisme of “self-sufficiency” and “self-isolation”.
Biden has ample company, and now, we get to experience the same results as the rest of the world’s hoi polloi. I can’t help but be reminded of the definition of insanity. You know, doing the same thing but . . . .
RogerG
Read more here:
* “‘It’s like living in an igloo.’ People are turning off their heat as prices surge”, Gabe Cohen, CNN, Nov. 20, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/success/home-heating-prices
* “OPEC announces the biggest cut to oil production since the start of the pandemic”, Hanna Ziady, CNN, Oct. 5, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/05/energy/opec-production-cuts/index.html
* “Heating costs forecast to soar this winter”, Chris Isidore, CNN, Oct. 12, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/12/energy/heating-costs/index.html
* “Biden Has Bungled Fossil-Fuel Policy”, Casey B. Mulligan, National Review Online, Nov. 2, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/biden-has-bungled-fossil-fuel-policy/
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.
Smath-and-grab in a high-end store in Los Angeles, November 2021
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?
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?
Energy Sec. Granholm at a press conference
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 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 in Los Angeles, March 2022
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.
Then-VP Joe Biden finds two quarters on the sidewalk in Burlington, Vt., 2016. “I found two quarters.”Biden’s inauguration
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/
