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The U.S., A Third-Rate Country? Part II of the Trump Verdict

Trump guilty verdict: What happened in court as judge read decision
Alvin Bragg, Manhattan DA
Who Is Justice Juan Merchan?
Judge Merchan in the so-called Trump hush-money trail

In the old parlance of the Cold War, the world was divided between a First World (the wealthy nations mostly aligned with the West), a Second World (the communist bloc), and a Third World (everyone else, mostly the poor, corrupt, and so-called nonaligned).  The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR blotted out most of the Second, leaving the First and an amorphous blob of everyone else.  As the widely recognized head of the First, the U.S. of today has willfully, not inevitably, decided to make its way down into the blob.  No better sign of the descent into the corruption thicket can be found than the recent Trump verdict.

It’s more than the political prosecution of an obscure local politician that occurs from time to time.  It’s the chutzpah to target one of highest profile figures in this important decision-making year, the chief opponent of the reigning president, and to do so on alarmingly spurious charges.  One is left to only admire the ingeniousness in crafting a malign charade out of a patchwork of legal mumbo-jumbo.  In the America of today, there’s no need for a seizure of the presidential compound and barbarous firing squads.  Just use our mountainous legal code to accomplish the same end.  The gambit is all Third World.

Let’s take a look at the travesty. It begins with a jumbled understanding of a “conspiracy” (see #1 below). In the law, a criminal conspiracy is one or more people coordinating the means to achieve an illegal objective, a crime.  Absent a criminal end, there is no conspiracy.  Think it through.  For a bank robbery, you might have three people: one to buy the masks and gun, one to drive the getaway car, and one to rush into the bank to take the money.  There are two crimes: the robbery which makes for the second crime, the conspiracy to do it.  Without the criminal objective, the disguises were for a masked ball, the driver is a chauffeur, and the third person is making a savings account withdrawal.

In the Trump saga, where’s the crime?  Non-disclosure agreements (NDA) aren’t illegal.  The bookkeeping entries for payments in the NDAs may or may not be infractions (misdemeanors), but that’s irrelevant since the 2-year statute of limitations had long since expired.  When your paramount goal is not to lose power, just use obscure laws in convoluted ways in an intensely partisan jurisdiction before an intensely partisan judge and jury to hang your opponent; and you too can have your country join the ranks of Burundi-style electioneering (in Africa, the Fund for Peace’s most unstable country).

Rest assured; they won’t let a little thing like a statute of limitations stand in the way any more than a generalissimo would.  Just magically turn the misdemeanors into felonies and therefore leap over the time limit.  The cabal needs a second crime though.  How to manufacture one?  Establish a conspiracy using the highly dubious Article 17-152 of New York’s election law which oddly defines conspiracy as the use of unlawful means to “to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office” (see #1 below).  Let that sink in.  Normally, the means become unlawful because the objective is a crime, but promoting or negatively campaigning against a person for office is not a crime.  It can’t be.  It’s the stuff of campaigns.  Bragg did not even prove an “unlawful means” for the second crime that translates the misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records into felonies.

Instead, Bragg and the judge gave the jury a choice of three unindicted possibilities (whew, think that one through): a Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) violation, hypothetical bookkeeping infractions other than the original 34, or some other tax illegality.  The whole thing is rubbish.  Bragg and a Manhattan court aren’t empowered to enforce FECA, a federal law forbidding Bragg’s, Judge Merchan’s, and a dimwitted jury’s meddling.  Regarding the other two, while keeping them silent in the indictment, Bragg and the trial court stampeded over Trump’s Sixth Amendment right to know the charges.

And then for the legal morass to work, proof of intent is still required – evidence of Trump’s state of mind to commit fraud – which Bragg never established for charges that he never indicted.  The trial and the verdict are an absolute disgrace.

Not surprisingly, Biden’s number three at DOJ, Matthew Colangelo, left in December 2022 to join Bragg’s team.  Coincidence? Call me . . . skeptical.  Who leaves a high-status DC post to be an underling to a local DA unless something else is afoot?  This stinks to high heaven.

It’s an embarrassment to the U.S. and us, its citizens.  Bragg, Merchan, and the numbskull jury made us a laughingstock to the world.  What makes our “justice” any different from the CCP’s “People’s Tribunals” to imprison or execute “enemies of the people”?  Some say democracy is messy.  No, that’s too nice.  This makes us third-rate, all of us.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. Andrew C. McCarthy’s work on the trial is invaluable in his “The ‘Other Crime’ in the Trump Trial: Conflating Ends and Means”, National Review, 6/3/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/the-other-crime-in-the-trump-trial-conflating-ends-and-means/

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Progressivism’s Totalitarian Streak Exposed: The Trump Verdict

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Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg (l)

What is totalitarianism?  Some described it this way: authoritarianism wants obedience; totalitarianism wants belief.  An authoritarian controls what you do; a totalitarian controls that and what you think, what’s in your head and heart.  Today’s progressivism is developing before our eyes the authoritarian means to pursue totalitarian ends.  The Trump verdict is the latest piece in this sordid puzzle.

The case is absurd.  The highly debatable misdemeanor bookkeeping violations in New York law were legally dead having gone beyond New York’s statute of limitations.  The “fraud” was Trump doing what Bill Clinton did: allegedly attempting to hide adultery.  The shame of adultery is not a crime.  Perjury is; nondisclosure agreements are not.  According to Andrew C. McCarthy on the principal Bragg allegation of fraud in the bookkeeping to hide a campaign expense, “… [a campaign] expense has to be an obligation that relates directly to the campaign and would not exist absent the campaign” (see #1 below).  This clearly wasn’t, which explains why the feds didn’t pursue it.  The 34 charges were one charge cloned 34 times to embellish this Bragg quackery.  The resuscitation of the defunct minor allegations, and the elevation of the flummery to felonies, was conjured by connecting these to a mysterious fraud in hypothetical and uncharged federal campaign finance violations or some other unknown and unproven derelictions, a clear and unmistakable violation of the Sixth Amendment’s right of a defendant to know the charges, even the hidden one used to leap over the statute of limitations and into a felony.  The judge’s behavior was egregiously partisan.  This trial and verdict have “reversible error” (overturned on appeal) written all over them.

But the dam of restraint on political prosecutions has been breached.  A hideous precedent is set.  Blue-state and blue-precinct soviets are quickly becoming the ruling norm in pockets around the country.  The template to be the target of this Beria brand of persecution (Stalin’s NKVD head: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”) is now established: be conservative, occupy a position of influence, be outspoken, and be a political threat to the reigning soviet, and “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” comes into play.

Lavrenti Beria – Soviet politician - Russian Personalities
Lavrenti Beria (l) and Stalin, 1930s or 40s

Stalin only carried the title of General Secretary of the Communist Party throughout his entire tenure at the head of the country.  So, a powerful party is essential to spearhead the complete revolution in thought and action.  We have one in the Democratic Party as the ideological home for this revolution.  And now they do not shrink from Beria-like actions, rule of law be damned.

The Party is not alone in the endeavor.  Their sympathizers dominate in newsrooms, academia, much of the c-suite, the media, and entertainment, almost complete domination of the cultural commanding heights, to assist the Party in building their new order.  They’re free to sexualize your kids into transgenderism, indoctrinate them in the neo-Marxism of oppressor/oppressed, shoehorn every facet of your existence into their eco-vision, and reserve the power to force not only compliance but also love for their revolution.  And this isn’t totalitarianism in practice?

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China’s CCP only replicates what Bragg achieved before a Manhattan judge and jury in the CCP’s recent arrest and persecution of dissidents in Hong Kong.  It’d be rank hypocrisy for anyone in the donkey party to complain.  The jargon of “hatred” and “incite netizens [sic] to organize or participate in illegal activities” could have easily come out of Bragg’s or Jack Smith’s offices (see #2 below).  Our soviets in New York and Washington, D.C., have no grounds to condemn Red China’s CCP after imitating them in a Manhattan courtroom.  Beijing has “courtrooms” too.

None are safe from the drumbeat.  The conservative, original-intent majority on the Supreme Court is particularly in the Party’s crosshairs.  After decades of dominating the Court, they now want to pillory the new majority that might contest the Constitutional worthiness of the Party’s designs.  From attacks on flags to accusations of “extreme closeness to his wife” (see #3 below), the Party’s minions shower invective to silence opposing voices.  In Congress, they strive to pack the Court with fellow travelers, impeach and recuse dissenters, and extend an unconstitutional executive and legislative branch jurisdiction over the Court, anything to force the Court into conformity, like everyone else.

It’s enough to turn a Trump skeptic into a Trump supporter, if for no other reason than to stop this totalitarian trainwreck.  John Yoo of UC Berkeley’s school of law put it succinctly (see #4 below): “To limit and undo that damage and restore the rule of law, Republicans may have no choice but to respond in kind.”  In order to reestablish deterrence against this kind of behavior, the revolution’s partisans must experience the sting of a political prosecution that they enunciated.  Think of it as engendering a new respect for mutual assured destruction.  Watch out Barack Obama, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, et al, as one red state AG or DA after another hauls you before a local grand jury and into a local criminal court before a local judge.  I can envisage criminal charges stemming from the assassination of an American citizen overseas, criminal misuse of sensitive government communications (emails), influence peddling as Vice President or acting as an unregistered foreign agent, being a middle man funneling bribes to the “big man”, inflicting harm on border communities due to willful dereliction of legally mandated responsibilities, etc.

Additionally, Republican officeholders, don’t step foot into DC, New York City, Chicago, California, any city dominated by a college campus, or any other blue bastion.  Go further.  Move all federal offices outside the reach of the Alvin Braggs and Fani Willises of the world.  If need be, Zoom it.

In the meantime, prepare for a hurricane.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “Bragg Falsifies Business-Records Charges against Trump”, Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 3/23/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/bragg-falsifies-business-records-charges-against-trump/
2. “Hong Kong police arrest 6 people accused of violating the city’s new national security law”, Kanis Leung, AP, 5/28/2024, at https://www.abc27.com/international/ap-hong-kong-police-arrest-6-people-accused-of-violating-the-citys-new-national-security-law/
3. “New York Times Op-Ed: Does Clarence Thomas Love His Wife Too Much?”, Noah Rothman, National Review, 5/21/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-york-times-op-ed-does-clarence-thomas-love-his-wife-too-much/
4. “Trump’s Trial Has Already Damaged the Office of the Presidency”, John Yoo, National Review, 5/29/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/trumps-trial-has-already-damaged-the-office-of-the-presidency/

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Next Stop for Carnage: UCLA’s Medical School

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The state’s elite medical schools, such as UCLA’s Geffen School of Medicine, aren’t immune from the broad carnage that has swept K-12 in California.  Let’s start off, though, with the lower grades, then move to the current ravaging of UCLA’s med school.

Overall primary and secondary education in California is miserable.  In no educational measure is the state an exemplar.  From Wallet Hub to the Nation’s Report Card, it’s a trail of tears for the state’s K-12 schools (see #1 below). Quoting one source (see #2 below):

“A new study by Wallet Hub [2015], a financial advice company, puts California schools at the bottom of the pack.  California school systems are the ninth worse in the nation.”

The above report was from 9 years ago, and it hasn’t gotten any better; though, teacher salaries have, with a top-ranked annual average of over $95,000 (see #3 below).  But that is eaten up by the humungous cost of living (see #4 below).  It’s big money when compared to other states, but that number relegates a California teacher in their prime to tenement life in LA or the Bay Area.  Forget about a coastal bungalow.

So, why the stratospheric cost of living?  It’s more than the attraction of the climate driving up demand, if that’s what you’re thinking.  The state is all into central planning, copying Lenin’s economic playbook – the state dominating the “commanding heights” kind of thing.  “Transitioning the economy” is central planning.  DEI is central planning.  Official sanctification and propagation of transgenderism is central planning.  What isn’t central planning on the progressive’s wish list?

And central planning is expensive, always has been, in more ways than one.  It’s expensive because it’ll come out of your hide in more than prices, like shortages, blackouts, and declining opportunities.  It’s a replay of the Soviet Union.

California is centrally planned into a housing crisis.  Look at your centrally planned utility bills. The high cost of fuel extends beyond the pump and into sticker prices on everything on store shelves.  The centrally planned jump in the state’s minimum wage is driving up fast food prices and driving out jobs.  Wait for the centrally planned EV mandates to slap you in the face.  Try to build anything in the state as you face the daunting gauntlet of layers of litigation and fees and approvals and disapprovals, and the state’s burgeoning activist groups.  They’ve even managed to centrally plan homelessness into a catastrophe.  The crime problem is centrally planned with “restorative justice” and “equity”.  Filth and crime join unaffordability in the state’s reputation.  For a teacher, $95,000 is as meaningful as 95,000 Weimar Reichsmarks in 1922 (50,000 marks for a pound of potatoes).

Now, what the state’s central planners have done to the cost of living and K-12, they’re excited to bring to the med schools.  UCLA is the epicenter of more than antisemitic encampments and mobs.  The med school’s newly minted admissions approach magically turned the unqualified into qualified by reliance on melanin count, genitalia, home language, and other such markers of medical excellence, sarcastically speaking (see #5 below).  No GPA in the hard sciences or MCAT for these DEI grand viziers.  But it’s one thing to have the unqualified in sociology, quite another to have one in the operating room.  Do you think I’m kidding?

Some federal judges are refusing to offer clerkships to Ivy League law students, the law being replaced by revolutionary doctrines in these law schools.  The same reaction might soon be true of hospitals and patients for graduates of the UCLA Medical School.  A big framed UCLA diploma on the wall behind the newly licensed doctor might be your cue to bolt for the door. The alarm is sounding.  The Washington Free Beacon is working the story, as are many other outlets (see #5 and #6 below).

They are finding sources in the med school willing to speak up.  The Free Beacon writes,

“In interviews with the Free Beacon and complaints to UCLA officials, including investigators in the university’s Discrimination Prevention Office, faculty members with firsthand knowledge of the admissions process say it has prioritized diversity over merit, resulting in progressively less qualified classes that are now struggling to succeed.”

At the tip of the spear in debasing medical education at UCLA is Jennifer Lucero, Associate Dean for Admissions at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine (DGSOM), and the Vice Chair for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) for the Department of Anesthesiology.

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She has openly berated med school admissions committee members for raising questions about the poor qualifications of some matriculants if they happen to fall into one of her “protected” identities, this after she has stacked the committee with fellow believers.  From The Free Beacon: “Speaking on the condition of anonymity, six people who’ve worked with her described a pattern of racially charged incidents that has dispirited officials and pushed some of them to resign from the committee.”

She’s a mess creating a mess.  Staff and faculty complaints about her have been lodged with the school’s Discrimination Prevention Office.  They have much to complain about, and it goes beyond personal treatment.  Each year since her elevation to power, the danger increases that the unqualified and unmerited will slip through the school and into medical practice to the detriment of patients and the school’s reputation.  One admissions committee member recounted,

“I have students on their rotation who don’t know anything.  People get in and they struggle.”

One student assisting in an operation couldn’t identify the major artery when asked.  She then verbally attacked her professor for putting her on the spot.  One professor confessed, “Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students.”

Anecdotes abound.  And it shows in shelf tests, the examinations administered at the end of each clinical rotation.  The failure rate increased ten-fold under her stewardship.  Almost a quarter of the school’s students in the class of 2025 have failed 3 or 4 such tests.  Another professor admitted, “… a third to a half of the medical school is incredibly unqualified.”  If one of these practitioners should be supervising your medical treatment after a car accident, when you come to, demand to see their resume’ and look for an escape.

Major airlines promise to adopt the same approach for pilots.  I may not fly again.  Merit has a place, and it really has a place for 150 passengers at 30,000 feet.

The problems with California run deeper than its so-called ruling elites.  It’s more than governors, legislators, mayors, or even college deans.  All of them, directly or indirectly, owe their positions to popular choices in elections.   People vote for this stuff by electing the people who bring this stuff.  A dean of admissions couldn’t declare war on merit if she wasn’t protected by the nest of an agreed-upon agenda that can be traced back to the elected.  The war on merit is a popular choice, whether understood by the electorate or not.

I refer to H.L. Mencken once again,

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.  No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

Yes, the great masses of the plain people of California.

It’s the difference between government and regime.  Think of “government” as the outward signs of rule: offices, constitutions, its structure and institutions. In contrast, “regime” runs much deeper.  Often used to identify authoritarian systems, it nonetheless has application to democracies.  A particular approach to governance becomes a pattern – red and blue states for instance – due to pervasive and endemic cultural and social norms.  Elections occur within this social matrix, and the “regime” rears its head.

You can’t have an official nod to teenage genital mutilation without at least a vaguely popular toleration of the ideology of transgenderism.  You can’t have a broad war on merit without at least a vaguely popular toleration of the assault.  What else accounts for the ritual pattern of choosing people who bring these policies?  California’s regime, which originates with the state’s people and their tendencies, is responsible.  If anyone is to blame, blame the people of the state.

Those people are a huge part of a socio-political eco-system favoring the advancement of the unqualified.  But who has the time and resources to investigate their doctor to uncover whether they emanated out of this cauldron?  California schools are proving that they don’t come with the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.  We are left with a rule of thumb.  If your doctor came out of California, and especially its med schools, play it safe by shopping around. You’ve got at least 30 or more states to choose from.  A state’s reputation now matters, and matters a lot.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. The Nation’s Report Card at https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=NP&chort=1&sub=MAT&sj=&st=MN&year=2022R3
2. “How Do California Schools Rank Compare to the Rest of the Nation?”, Patch, 8/1/2015, ahttps://patch.com/california/santamonica/how-do-california-schools-rank-compare-rest-nationt
3. “California teachers struggle despite having the highest salaries in the nation”, Malekka Seshardi, EdSource, 5/13/2024, at https://edsource.org/updates/california-teachers-struggle-despite-having-the-highest-salaries-in-the-nation
4. “California ranks last in opportunity due to cost living: U.S. News”, Kenneth Schrupp, The Central Square: California, 5/16/2024, at https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/article_f06f4eec-13c9-11ef-a68c-6f1b9d775308.html
5. “’ A Failed Medical School’: How Racial Preferences, Supposedly Outlawed in California, Have Persisted at UCLA”, Aaron Sibarium, Washington Free Beacon, 5/23/2024, at https://freebeacon.com/campus/a-failed-medical-school-how-racial-preferences-supposedly-outlawed-in-california-have-persisted-at-ucla/
6. “‘Shocking decline’: UCLA med school prioritized racial diversity, leading to decline, report says”, The College Fix, staff, 5/23/2024, at https://www.thecollegefix.com/shocking-decline-ucla-med-school-prioritized-racial-diversity-leading-to-decline-report-says/
7. Special thanks to Jeffrey Blehar in “DEI Will Destroy Our Trust in Doctors”, National Review, 5/23/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dei-will-destroy-our-trust-in-doctors/

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This Is What College Kids in America Support

3 minutes of horror – Chilling footage from kidnapping of IDF female troops aired
Screenshot of female IDF soldiers taken captive by Hamas on 10/7

Below is raw Hamas footage of the taking of female IDF soldiers at a base near the Gaza/Israel border on 10/7.  How many of them were raped?  How many of them will survive?  It’s hard to say.

But we don’t need to see American politicians and a bunch of college kids preaching to us about “genocide” and a “ceasefire”.  The only genocide occurred on 10/7 and a ceasefire is a Hamas rescue mission.

Let’s not forget that these savages took them back into Gaza for more torture amid the cheers of Gazan spectators along the way.  The savages then hunkered down among the mostly cheerleading civilians, using the population of Gaza as one big human shield, waiting for our decrepit youth and politicians to come to the rescue.

Many of our college kids are proving themselves to be underserving of the largesse showered upon them.  They are proving that much of college is toxic.

Please watch the video.  Double click or got to youtu.be/PZRlrWHHRoU?si=bsJDjkcgHOumb3mw to see the video.

RogerG

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California’s Threat to Nevada and the Constitution’s Commerce Clause

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Gov. Joe Lombardo, Nevada

The federal government is supreme in regulating interstate commerce (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3).  Fact, end of story!

But California is a law unto itself, free to screw up states that have the unhappy circumstance of sharing a border with it.  In a letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday 5/14, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo stated the obvious: California policies are jacking up fuel prices for Nevadans as well as Californios (see #1 below).  You see, much of Nevada’s western fuel market is fed by refineries and pipelines from California, businesses under the thumb of that state’s multifarious politburos.

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Gov. Gavin Newsom, Ca., responds to letter from Gov. Lombardo

Newsom responded to Lombardo in the lingua franca of today’s hard-left Democratic Party by saying that Lombardo is a lackey of “Big Oil”.  As if parroting the editor of the Daily Worker (1924-1941, official newspaper of the Communist Party USA), Newsom said, “. . . [Lombardo] knows full well that oil refiners are driving up gas prices and making massive profits . . ..”  There’s not much room for the CPUSA in our national political corral since that space is increasingly monopolized by the DNC, especially their California affiliate.

Apparently, according to Newsom, refiners are only greedy bloodsuckers in California, and in a few other states acting as cheap knockoffs of the not-so-golden state.  The highest retail gas prices by state are all Democrat fiefdoms.  The prices (as of 5/16/2024) range from California’s average of $5.24/gal. to Mississippi’s $3.06.  No red state rises above Idaho’s $3.83 (see #2 below).  My Montana comes in at $3.48.

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Gas prices at Fairfax Ave. and Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, 5/17/2024

Following the Marxist template, as usual, is the Democrat supermajority in the state legislature as exemplified in the Newsom-signed state Senate Bill X1-2.  The decree would establish a new commissariat to oversee these latest “malefactors of wealth” with power to investigate and recommend penalties to the state’s uber-commissariat, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).

That’ll do the trick.  Just persecute by prosecution the people with whom you rely for your fuel.  This won’t work, unless you believe in the efficacy and efficiency of a slave economy.  Whips and chains and overseers aren’t the best way to get the most out of people.  Unlike the mid-19th century’s era of chattel slavery in the old South, no Fugitive Salve Act exists to compel a people’s acceptance of involuntary servitude to Newsom and company.  Flight is always an option, as it has been for the past few decades for the state’s middle class, families, and many businesses.  What a time to be in the moving business, one of the few growth industries left in the state.

Never do these people look in the mirror.  The state gets sanction from the federal government to exceed the Clean Air Act.  More federalism?  Not! California gets to throw around its market weight in the form of mammoth regulations, mandates, and taxes on refiners that clearly disrupts the interstate commerce in fuel.  Just think, its EV mandate alone by 2035 will force the shipment of fuel onto electric big rigs – or electric trains that don’t exist – further ballooning costs and worsening efficiencies in an already California-tortured industry.

The fuel that flows down its pipelines doesn’t fare any better.  It does so under the lash of the state’s immense panoply of eco-commissariats.  For Nevadans, what comes out the other end is bloated in cost.  Just drive on Interstate 15 up and away from California and you’ll see prices drop the more California recedes in the rear-view mirror.  Test it out for yourself.

It would be a dereliction of duty on the part of Nevada’s governor to not look out for the interests of his state.  Nevada, like all states, has a keen interest in reviving Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce, and end the unwitting delegation of that power to fanatics in Sacramento, if for no other reason than the need to avoid the collateral damage from California’s suicide attempt.

Go get ‘em Gov. Lombardo.  And Congress, dump California’s exemption.  If necessary, federal marshals should seize control of all the state’s ports and repeal the state’s interference in interstate commerce by truck, railroad, plane, ship, and pipeline.  Keep California’s malign effects limited as much as possible to its residents, who regularly vote for the mess.  No state should be forced to live under the political toxicity of another.

Remember, the U.S. Constitution guarantees to each state a republican form of government, not a California government – Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution.

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RogerG

Sources:
1. “Lombardo to Newsom: Act now before gas prices get even higher”, KTNV staff (Las Vegas, Nv.), 5/14/2024, at https://www.ktnv.com/news/lombardo-to-newsom-act-now-before-gas-prices-get-even-higher
2. “Today’s Gas Prices By State”, Kelly Anne Smith and Korrena Bailie, Forbes, 5/16/2024, at https://www.forbes.com/advisor/personal-finance/gas-prices-by-state/#:~:text=California%20has%20the%20highest%20price%20of%20gas%2C%20with,average%20of%20%243.09%20per%20gallon%20of%20regular%20gas.

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From Eco-Consciousness to Eco-Totalitarianism

Family Farms Continue to Power U.S. Agriculture | USDA
Georgia small farm

Please watch the 20-minute video of the current predicament of small agricultural producers in Oregon.  You’ll see how green ideology leads to totalitarianism, or complete micromanagement of a people.  It’s a lesson in how the tapestry of individual liberty is crushed under mass controls.  It’s happening across the country.  And you wonder why Trump remains popular in many quarters.

Trump is the middle finger to this ideologically driven straitjacket.  Trumpism, loosely referred to as “populism”, isn’t a refined set of beliefs so much as it is a temperament, an attitude, a posture toward the smothering of personal, mundane choices.

It’s a consequence of the ruling eco-left’s attempt to herd people into an officially preferred lifestyle, one that is easily concentrated and thus managed in urban locations.  The war on the internal combustion engine, and on fossil fuels, is one means to that end. It’s a war on personal mobility.  If you can’t make the EV work for you or your family, or afford it, lying below the surface, unstated, remains their ultimate selection for you: unaccommodating, grimy, and unsafe government mass transit.

The 19th-century Bronx

The impracticality of electric vehicles – their only choice left for you – will force you back into the equivalent of tenements anyway, exactly where the charging infrastructure is most efficiently provided.  The concomitant range anxiety will do much to keep you condensed into apartment life for the rest of your family’s existence.  No swing set or doll house for your daughter, the government’s park in all its seedy glory being the only remaining option for her.  That, or the streets.

Tenement Housing: 10+ Photos Show the Tragic Lives of New York City’s Immigrants in the 1800s ...
Tenement, New York City, undated

The desire for control doesn’t stop there.  The increasing grip on urban folk is extended to those who are scattered in places where the grip of the central planners is more tenuous, in the outback.  Small agriculture is targeted like the individual family in their individual car in their individual bungalow.  Climate-change hysteria is the ramrod for empowering the state.  Other hypothetical eco-disasters – groundwater use and pollution for instance – are similarly used to police the guy or gal with a few sheep, horses, cattle, chickens, or surplus vegetables.  The way is left open for greater concentration for the already highly concentrated operators, those big enough to stand toe-to-toe with big government.

USA_AG_BEEF_15_xs.jpg | Peter Menzel
Harris Ranch, Ca., feedlot for 100,000 head of cattle

Anyway, it’s an easy sell to ideologically domesticated urbanites once they accept the premise that cattle flatulence is a mortal threat to Gaia, or the choices of those rural “deplorables” must be made to fit the mold of their urban cousins.  Urbanites outvote the “deplorables”, so it is a popularly elected totalitarianism.  Somehow, the chant of “save our democracy” rings rather hollow.

Again, please watch the video of eco-consciousness turning into eco-totalitarianism.

RogerG

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Antisemitism Is in the Money

Soros ATM

The song – “We’re in the Money” – immediately came to mind after learning of the money trail for the misnamed Jewish Voices for Peace.  They’ve been active with anti-Israel malcontents since the October 7 massacre.  Radicalism on the Left is an ecumenical ideology not restricted to the fashionable identities.  Your physical characteristics, background, and choice of bed partner says little about what is rolling around in your head.  There are Jews who are all into self-negation as there are in any group in or out of the “protected classes”.  And a Daddy War Bucks can always be found to fund your efforts at self-negation.

Take the aforementioned Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP).  Here’s a list of the fat cats who dug deep to bankroll the extremist group (and the fellow-travelling IfNotNow) from 2019 to 2021 (see Sources below).  The Daddies War Bucks include the $650,000 from Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Kaphan Foundation’s $441,510, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s $340,000, the Schwab Charitable Fund’s $654,233, the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund’s $260,705, $175,600 from Morgan Stanley Global Impact, the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program’s $98,650, and the Tides Foundation’s $75,000.  No mere chump change, lefty revolution is expensive.

No wonder the encampments seemed so well provisioned and coached.  It’s because they could sing along, “We’re in the money, we’re in the money . . . “.  Enjoy the rendition in the clip below as you view the campus chaos.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “George Soros Funds Groups Behind DNC Riot Where Protesters Assaulted Cops”, Chuck Ross, The Washington Free Beacon, 11/16/23, at https://freebeacon.com/democrats/george-soros-funds-groups-behind-dnc-riot-where-protesters-assaulted-cops/
2. “Jewish Voice for Peace’s Funding Network”, NGO Monitor, 11/13/23, at https://www.ngo-monitor.org/reports/jewish-voice-for-peaces-funding-network/
3. A special thanks to Brittany Bernstein in “Activist Groups behind Violent DNC Protest Have Long History of Defending Terrorism, Receive Funding from Major Corporations”, National Review, 11/17/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/activist-groups-behind-violent-dnc-protest-have-long-history-of-defending-terrorism-receive-funding-from-major-corporations/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=more-in-tag&utm_term=second

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The Real Minimum Wage Is Zero

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Thomas Sowell

The esteemed economist Thomas Sowell quipped, “Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero.”  California is sadly learning this hard lesson as we speak.

Many California workers went from “Hurray!” to pink slips after California voters sent zealots into seats of power across the state to enact zany laws, like AB 1228.  Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill last year that raised the minimum wage to $20 per hour for fast-food workers (with an exception for a donor), his legislative super-majorities guaranteeing the outcome.  The lid was off for minimum wage hikes in the state’s other industries and in the many specific locales in the state enthralled by collectivist dreams.  Now, the reality: everyone didn’t get the leap in pay.  Many of those so-called “oppressed” found their hours cut or sent home without any hours, having lost their jobs.

All of this is a reminder of another Sowell witticism: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”  You can only get things after giving up other things. The politicos issued the decree, “Thou shalt pay no one less than $20 per hour”, that led to those still facing a bottom line to cope by reducing the payroll.  So, the numbskulls in power unwittingly created a “nominal” minimum wage, and a “real” one: nominal = $20; real = $0!

Lee E. Ohanian with the Independent Institute chronicles the number of workers who were zeroed out in the ungolden state (see #1 below).  9,500 lost employment in the state’s fast-food industry from fall to January of this year.  Pizza Hut and Roundtable said goodbye to 1,300 delivery personnel.  El Pollo Loco and Jack in the Box are shifting to robots.  Thus, total employment in the state’s private sector during the same interval dropped .2%.  Is this “Bidenomics”, or maybe “Newsomnomics”?

Prices are jumping with the minimum wage boost: Wendy’s 8%, Chipotle 7.5%, Starbucks 7%, and others like McDonalds will be announcing hikes soon.  Fast food is a good with high elasticity (clientele is sensitive to price changes).  So, they can only raise prices to the point when the loss of business begins to eat into the business model.  Scott Roderick, a McDonald’s franchisee, said, “I can’t charge $20 for Happy Meals.”  If he doesn’t, and economically can’t, he may have to close shop.  How many then will join the ranks of the “real” minimum wage?

An economist at the Employment Policies Institute, Rebekah Paxton, lays out more carnage as the fever for $20 spreads to the other surviving remnants of the state’s shrinking private sector (see #2 below).  The neo-Marxist SEIU is chomping at the bit to ruin other businesses in the state.  West Hollywood is a microcosm of the elected lunacy gripping the state.  Making their SEIU donors happy, the city proclaimed a $17.64 minimum wage for hotel workers.  The union used this leverage to make it apply everywhere in the city.  Currently, the “nominal” minimum wage stands at $19.08.

Predictably, many formerly joyous workers in the city are discovering that their services are no longer needed.  Staff cuts of 30-40% are routine. 85 businesses in the city were shuttered last year.  The 30-40% are back to $0.

Since Biden and the poohbahs of the donkey party are keen to hitch the nation to the California train, expect more of us across the nation to suffer, even those of us who fled the People’s Republic.  Nationalizing lunacy is their chief aim.  When will they learn that you can’t suspend the laws of nature, and the laws of economics that rise from them?

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “California Loses Nearly 10,000 Fast-Food Jobs After $20 Minimum Wage Signed Last Fall”, Lee E. Ohanian, The Independent Institute, 4/26/2024, at https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14919&utm_source=FFF+Daily&utm_campaign=252dd0222c-FFF+Daily+2024-05-04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1139d80dff-252dd0222c-318121705
2. “California’s Predictably Disastrous Minimum-Wage Hikes”, Rebekah Paxton, National Review, 5/7/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/californias-predictably-disastrous-minimum-wage-hikes/

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The Radicalization Began Much Earlier

NYPD officers patrol as pro-Palestine protestors demonstrate outside of Columbia University’s campus
NYPD officers patrol as pro-Palestine protestors demonstrate outside of Columbia University’s campus in New York City on Thursday, April 18, 2024. Multiple students were arrested as officers cleared an encampment on the campus’ lawn. (Peter Gerber for Fox News Digital)

In many cases, if not most, the students (and non-students) occupying buildings, entire swaths of many campuses, supporting the barbarism of Hamas and expressing Jew-hatred, were radicalized before they arrived in higher ed.  They didn’t suddenly discover their inner Marx in their college Sociology class.  Predating the college acceptance letter, they were long marinated in the revolutionary dialectic, probably without even knowing it.

Parents, dropping your kids off at school for six hours and off you go on your merry way meant relegating their minds to God knows what.  Well, we’re getting a glimpse of the consequence at places like Columbia, et al.

Robert P. George, professor and scholar at Princeton and other schools, acknowledges as much. See at https://www.foxnews.com/video/6352285225112.

Red Mass speaker Robert P. George announced - Today's Catholic
Prof. Robert P. George, Princeton University

RogerG

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An Israeli PhD Student at Stanford Mugged by Reality

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A man in a Hamas terrorist costume this week at Stanford University (photo from Daniel Gordis’s post)

Irving Kristol once wrote, “[A neoconservative is] a liberal who has been mugged by reality.  A neoliberal is a liberal who got mugged by reality but has not pressed charges.”

Below (Sources #1) is a link to a liberal Israeli PhD student at Stanford who was “mugged by reality”.  His account is enlightening because it comes from the ground at one of America’s “elite” universities (the word “elite” is in quotes because they are tarnishing the title).

A key takeaway from his piece is his sudden realization of the popularity of Donald Trump, from a person who would never vote for him if he could.

“This year I finally got it [Trump’s popularity in America].  No, if I were an American I still wouldn’t vote for Trump.  But I now understand those who vote for him. Donald Trump is some Americans’ answer to the madness on the other side, a madness I didn’t notice until it turned its face in my direction.  A madness no less terrible than Trumps’s madness.  No, if I had the right to vote, I would not vote for Donald Trump. But America deserves him.”

The madness isn’t only epidemic on college campuses.  High schoolers are seeking to join the madness (see #2 below).  Chicago area high schools are a hotbed of pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas activism, many of them “elite” prep schools.  Add Seattle schools to the educational sink hole.  How did we get to a place where 16 and 17-year-olds rush to join the madness in higher ed?  The answer lies in the curricular rot from teacher training and their undergrad coursework to the textbooks.  When you drop your kid off at school or the bus stop, your kid is getting a steady diet of the oppressor/oppressed Marxist schtick.

And you thought your kid was learning the three R’s.  Let me clue you, they’re getting much more than Algebra.

It’s everywhere.  It’s on YouTube.  For example, recently I watched a Gen X or Millennial academic who was commenting on something as innocuous as British castles and couldn’t resist continual references to the oppression of the lower classes.  It’s a highly distorted portrayal of a period that lasted half a millennium or more.  No concession was made to the possible benefits of socio-political hierarchy, let alone a moral hierarchy (some things are objectively good or bad).  It was a simple message repeated ad nauseum: the rich and powerful bad, poor folk good.  16-year-old kiddies sitting in their desks, imbibing this blinkered view of the world, have their minds prepped for tramping on over to DePaul or University of Chicago in the “Chicago Youth For Justice” to link arms with an “abolitionist, anti-imperialist network of students”.  You know the banter.

This Israeli PHD student noticed the mental rot right away.  Most fundamentally, these firebrands are attacking more than Israel but lurking underneath is an assault on logic and reason itself.  For these young people, everything is subjective, there being no objective truth, no facts, only feelings.  Quoting him:

“I’m not referring here to those who express the opinion that it is difficult to get to the truth, or who think that the courts do not always succeed in finding out what the facts are, or who hold that different ideas are perceived differently through different eyes.  I’m speaking about those who say unequivocally that there is no such thing as truth.  They are not interested in presenting facts to support their arguments because they do not believe there is such a thing as facts, and they say so explicitly.  They think that it is forbidden to use the term “jihadist” in front of jihadists, or to call supporters of terrorism by their names, because feelings are more important than facts (although, of course, first and foremost their feelings).”

Parents, sit down with your kids and query them about whether they believe in objective truth.  You might be surprised at the answer.

There’s nothing like being mugged by reality to focus the mind.  The sad reality is that this foreign student was mugged by American college students who, in turn, were mugged by their schooling in the good ol’ USA.

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RogerG

Sources:
1. “I saw the American progressive movement … as an ally. That was a mistake.”, by Yotam Berger, in Daniel Gordis’s Israel from the Inside, at https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/i-saw-the-american-progressive-movement
2. “Pro-Hamas Craze Starts in K–12”, Haley Strack, National Review Online, 5/2/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pro-hamas-craze-starts-in-k-12/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first