Porgressivism – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

May 3, 2024

An Israeli PhD Student at Stanford Mugged by Reality

May be an image of 10 people and phone — 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

April 28, 2024April 29, 2024

Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be . . . College Students

Students spray paint pro-Palestinian messages at a protest encampment at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., April 28, 2024. (David Ryder/Reuters)

Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings in a song admonished mothers to not “… let your babies grow up to be cowboys”. As the saying goes, that was then, this is now. It’s not cowboys that we ought to be worried about. It’s college students. College is in the process of demolishing itself. Look no further than the Ivy League. From there, a degradation has taken root that has spread like a cerebral small pox epidemic, infecting the vast majority of campuses. They’re proving themselves to be embarrassments. The rot extends right through the administrations to the faculty and passes into the students. Beware, parents, your kids may leave the house leaning right but may return with a criminal record for defacing veterans’ cemeteries.

To be fair, not all of higher ed is an intellectual cesspool, but the problem is so pervasive that it has begun to besmirch nearly anyone with a degree on their resumé. Add Sociology or Humanities or English Lit or any of the “soft sciences” and their paper bio could be well on its way to the circular file.

The recent antisemitic pro-Palestinian encampments and protests are telling us the time of day. The fixation with the “marginalized” now includes a sanction for the genocidal butchery of 10/7. So warped is the thinking that the charge of “genocidal butchery” has become monopolized by those who committed actual “genocidal butchery” – the kind that you saw with your own eyes on 10/7 – and daily perform war crimes using civilian human shields, not shirking from hiding their military caches and facilities in and under schools, hospitals, orphanages, and housing complexes. Thus, savagery is excused. The natural apprehension about civilian casualties is distorted to pardon unspeakable barbarism in practice. What a warped universe.

Israeli soldiers carry the body of a victim of an attack at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, in southern Israel, on October 10. — sraeli soldiers carry the body of a victim of an attack at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, in southern Israel, on October 10. (Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters)

Hamas terror attacks — Hamas body cam photo of terrorist shooting indiscriminately into a house in Israeli kibbutz near Gaza border. (Israel Defense Forces via AP)

Don’t expect many of today’s college students to get it, having been raised on a steady diet of the oppressor/oppressed falderol throughout K-grad school, from public and elite prep schools all the way to the identity-mongering college curriculums. The curriculum of entire college academic departments, many of them mandatory for graduation, are based on this narrow little looking glass. The kids’ minds are forced shut, unable to exercise any kind of self-examination.

Student demonstrators occupy the pro-Palestinian "Gaza Solidarity Encampment" on the West Lawn of Columbia University on April 24, in New York City. — Anti-Israel tent encampment at Columbia University

Pro-Palestinian student protesters continue demonstrations on the eighth day of the 'Gaza Solidarity Encampment' at Columbia University in New York on April 24. — Pro-Palestinian student protesters continue demonstrations on the eighth day of the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ at Columbia University in New York on April 24. (Fatih Aktas/Anadolu/Getty Images)

For instance, a radicalized Columbia faculty senate in a 62-14 vote on Friday (4/26/24) approved a resolution to investigate the administration of an already weak and vacillating college president for finally taking action against an illegal campus encampment and student-led pogrom targeting Jewish students. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn wrote of a strikingly similar situation in his three-volume The Red Wheel, a novelized account of the socio-political setting leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution. He’s got the same mix of characters of academic adults and youths who’ve been radicalized. There’s something about the violent potential in socialism.

Not that all socialists are militant fanatics, mind you. It’s just that socialism is a systematic critique of a society, and there’s few things more thrilling for those immersed in a bubble divorced from realities, for four years or in a life of tenure, than the exciting prospect of overthrowing everything. Bulls in china shops are electrifying things to be for such young and stilted minds. The narrow-minded don’t know that they’re blinkered because they don’t know or understand or appreciate any alternatives. These are the reincarnated “comrade children” of the Khmer Rouge, alongside their adult abettors. Welcome to Columbia’s faculty senate and a chunk of the student body. The best and brightest or the worst and barbaric?

Not surprisingly, the faculty is as extreme as the youths given the fact that they curated this mess. It doesn’t take much to uncover the concomitant antisemitic student rage. Take, for instance, Khymani James, leader of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) cell who announced (see #1 below), “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” Such bombast would be treated as isolated anecdote until one notices that the school’s Jewish students were advised to stay home due to rampant Jew-hatred on campus (see #2 below).

Khymani James, shown in this photo from 2021

Ya think? This neo-Marxist antisemitism is in the academic ether, and in more than faculty offices and campus greens. George Washington University exploded and since the Jacobins also control the Washington, D.C., city government, the city won’t help the school enforce its rules. It declined the school’s request for police assistance. In the worst governed cities, we find the worst behavior. Get out of DC if you can and move the college to more civilized environs. The nation’s capital is a hot mess, and has been for quite some time.

As usual, Texas is showing how to handle the miscreants. The Austin chapter of the Palestine Solidarity Committee called for another one of these campus intifadas and were promptly arrested and carted off. UT’s Office of the Dean of Students declared to the group, “The University of Texas at Austin will not allow this campus to be ‘taken’ and protesters to derail our mission in ways that groups affiliated with your national organization have accomplished elsewhere.” Enough said. Call momma for the bail money.

Pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrate at the University of Texas on April 24, in Austin, Texas. — Pro-Palestinian protesters on the campus of UT, Austin

Yale and Princeton followed suit in showing more backbone than Columbia. As soon as the tents went up on Princeton, the school authorities ordered them down “now”. Down they went and the waifs then resorted to their usual standby, a sit-in. Yale’s campus police did the work of clearing the foolishness by arresting around 45 (see #4 below). Mom, expect a call.

Los Angeles’s USC constructed a pickle for itself. It’s got the usual intifada circus on campus but it is happening at graduation time. They really stepped into it when they chose a self-styled pro-Palestinian activist to be the valedictorian, Asna Tabassum. This one is a real winner. Her Instagram profile links to a pro-Palestinian website that proclaims,

“Zionism is a racist settler-colonialist ideology. One Palestinian state would mean Palestinian liberation and the complete abolishment of the state of Israel.”

USC student Asna Tabassum speaks to ABC News, April 16, 2024 (Video screenshot)

The choice of speaker amid the broader call for intifada ignited a real hornet’s nest. The school canceled the school-wide graduation (see #4 below).

How did this person get into a position to be valedictorian? Good grades, high GPA? Well, today, given rampant grade hyper-inflation, they have as much value as the Turkish lira (54.8% inflation). Watch her tying herself in knots in an attempt to avoid the charge of Jew-hatred. Like many of her fellow protesters, she is a contortionist in concocting a hypothetical distinction between venom for Zionism and antisemitism. It’s a difference without a difference.

An overly inflated GPA must be the culprit since one need not be a genius to see that a one-state “river to the sea”, with the obvious right of return, would lead to another wholesale slaughter of the Jews. Just take today’s Iran and graft it onto the narrow trip between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Combine the Sharia viciousness of Hamas and gross misgovernance of the PLO and see what you get. Get the idea?

Living cheek by jowl with people who’ve been raised on a steady diet of characterizations of you as evil incarnate isn’t a recipe for kumbaya (see #5 below). Sorry, Miss Tabassum. Ditto for the munchkins in our classrooms. Parents, another four years in a neo-Marxist bubble isn’t necessarily a pathway to betterment for your offspring. As the song goes, mommas don’t let your babies grow up to be . . . college students. Beware, oh, beware.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “‘Zionists Don’t Deserve To Live’: Meet The Leader Of Columbia University’s Anti-Israel Encampment”, Kassy Akiva, The Daily Wire, 4/25/24, at https://www.dailywire.com/news/zionists-dont-deserve-to-live-meet-the-leader-of-columbia-universitys-anti-israel-encampment
2. “Columbia rabbi warns Jewish students to go home, don’t come back to campus because of ‘extreme antisemitism’”, Doree Lewak and Isabel Keane, New York Post, 4/21/24, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/columbia-rabbi-warns-jewish-students-to-go-home-don-t-come-back-to-campus-because-of-extreme-antisemitism/ar-AA1nouyc
3. “George Washington University Suspends Students for Organizing Anti-Israel Encampment”, James Lynch, National Review Online, 4/27/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/george-washington-university-suspends-students-for-organizing-anti-israel-encampment/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second
4. “USC Cancels Graduation Ceremony over Anti-Israel Protests”, Brittany Bernstein, National Review Online, 4/25/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/usc-cancels-graduation-ceremony-over-anti-israel-protests/
5. An accurate window into what Israel is facing can be found at the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) at https://www.memri.org/

April 26, 2024April 29, 2024

Grandma Is a Lefty

These four climate cases are changing how we can tackle climate change - Greenpeace International — The Senior Women for Climate Protection (KlimaSeniorinnen)

Here’s a story that caught my eye a while back. In March, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) declared that the Swiss government is a human rights abuser on a par with Iran, North Korea, the CCP, et al. How did the ECHR get to this judgment? Do the Swiss possess a pervasive secret police that piles people into dark, dank prisons never to be heard from again, like the CCP does to the Uyghurs? No. Switzerland became a target of opportunity for the usual assemblage of lefties that crops up from time to time to shout and litigate their way to imposing their views on everybody else.

This one, the Senior Women for Climate Protection (KlimaSeniorinnen), made up of lefty oldsters, brought suit against the Swiss government for not capping greenhouse gas emissions. In a story in the NYT (see below) on the Court ruling, it read in part,

“By not acting ‘in good time and in an appropriate and consistent manner,’ the ruling said, the Swiss government had failed to protect its citizens’ rights”.

The Court became a legislature. A legislature is the legitimate place where partisan contests are settled, among the people’s elected representatives, not a court. The “climate change” brouhaha is, most emphatically, a battle of competing viewpoints. There’s much to debate about the issue; there’s much unsettled about the issue. If the people want caps on such emissions, their reps can pass a law. If they want to remove the caps, they can do that also. The Court, instead, took the partisan opinion of a partisan group of lefty old folks and made their opinion a matter of law where there is no law.

May be an image of 4 people — The European Court of Human Rights

Remember that’s the complaint of the lefty grandmas. They want a law even though their elected reps have chosen not to make one. Rather, they have taken their little opinion and wrapped it into a lawsuit that asked the Court to act as if there was one. The tortilla for this partisan burrito was “human rights”. According to the ECHR, the opinion of a narrow group of lefties is to be shoved down the throats of the entire population of Switzerland, just under the guise of “human rights”. Now, it’s a “human right” to handcuff, and impoverish, a people against their will.

Without doubt, the so-called “caps” that have been morphed into a “human right” would turn the people’s lives upside down. Getting real, the “caps”, and its cousin “decarbonization”, would mean more intense electrification – i.e., reliance on a grid made more unstable by greenie generation (wind, solar, tides, you name it). The costs of the “transition” are mammoth. As a result, a lot of somebodies are going to be “ground down by the wheel of history” (a little Bolshevik lingo).

Tractors stop traffic in the Netherlands in protest of enviro rules — Farmers gather with their vehicles next to a Germany/Netherlands border sign during a protest on the A1 highway, near Rijssen, on June 29, 2022, against the Dutch Government’s nitrogen plans. (Photo by Vincent Jannink / ANP / AFP)

If the “caps” are a “human right”, is avoidance of the costs of the caps also a human right? Increasing the financial stress on a beleaguered population must be a threat to human rights. Ipso facto, the Senior Women for Climate Protection are human rights abusers. Should they be incarcerated to join the Uyghurs to protect our right not be subjected to their nonsense? The logic is inescapable.

Lefty grandmas are no different from lefty youngsters shutting down the colleges in an exercise of Hamas-love.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “In Landmark Climate Ruling, European Court Faults Switzerland”, Isabel Kwai and Emma Bubola, New York Times, 4/9/2024, at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/09/world/europe/climate-human-rights.html?auth=login-google1tap&login=google1tap

April 4, 2024April 5, 2024

The Insanity of Our Moment

Lack of action on climate change has sparked protests (Photo: Getty) — Climate extinction?

Obviously, Facebook, and probably much of the techie universe for that matter, is enthralled by hair-on-fire climate alarmism. So much so that they put a “context warning” on a cartoon that was attached to one of my recent posts about the EV craziness sweeping the halls of power, a politicized professoriate, their young charges mobbing the public square, and the beautiful people in the culture. It’s crazy, just think about it. I’ll explain.

Some people are braving the hostility of today’s unofficial (and official) Inquisition who, like Galileo, just stepped forward to say, “Wait a minute!” There are voices out there other than the lefty Union of Concerned Scientists. One such voice is the Cornwall Alliance (https://cornwallalliance.org); there are others. They raise some glaring questions that few if any denizens in big media newsrooms would know enough to ask.

Right off the bat, Cornwall and most others don’t deny the existence of man-caused (anthropogenic) climate change – i.e., global warming. They assert, however, that the doom-mongering is not science. One should never say “the science says”. “Science” has no vocal cords. It’s a method that comes close to “trust but verify”, or “where’s the beef”, or simply “prove it”. Waiting for “science” to say something treats the whole endeavor as if it were a homogenized mass of one mind. May as well put up a huge picture of Mao to represent all of China, er “science”, in one fell swoop. People that wallow in “the science says” aren’t scientists and wouldn’t know which end of the telescope to use, or explain a hypothesis, or how to conduct a fitting test for one, the essence of science. Thus, it’s easy for the scientifically illiterate to jump to doom.

Such stunted science-minds would never consider, or ask, the following:

* What is the nature of the warming? Much of the available evidence indicates that the warming is concentrated in the upper latitudes and affects average daily low temperatures (mostly at night) and not the highs.

* What are the actual effects of the warming? Are they all bad? No, and on balance, they are likely to be positive. Warmer global temps in the upper latitudes extends the growing season and expands the amount of the earth’s surface for agriculture. The growing season starts earlier and ends later. Plants love CO2. Conversely, history shows that bad things happen with cooling (the Black Death, famine, for instance).

* What about droughts? They come and go, and are sensitive to localized conditions, like cold/warm water currents. El Nino is a result of warm ocean water; La Nina is born of cold. Warm water warms the air above it and warmer air has more room for more water vapor for more rain. The jet stream accommodates and sends it to one area and away from another. One place is in drought, and another can’t handle the deluge. The cycles are called “decadel” because they come and go every 7-12 years on average. Welcome to nature, and not a soccer mom’s preference for an SUV.

* Are the scare stories of an avalanche of “extreme weather” accurate? No, the evidence suggests that our current weather patterns haven’t varied from the historical record going back in time using tree rings and core samples. If anything, they prove that climate, and its short-term equivalent, weather, varies around a mean, sometimes quite dramatically, and also that climate (long term weather patterns of at least 30 years) has never been steady-state. The earth wobbles on its axis; the orbit slightly shifts; and solar radiation jumps up and down. And we have always put in and taken out stuff since we ventured out of the cave. Variation, like all of nature, is the chief characteristic of our weather and climate.

* Is the nation of Micronesia, or the Obama estate on Martha’s Vineyard, about to disappear in rising sea levels? No, because we are talking about inches in the single digits covering centuries if not thousands of centuries. It’s manageable. Talk to the Dutch who’ve been dealing with holding back the North Sea for at least a half of a millennium or more.

So, why are our science semi-literates in power so gung-ho to ruin our lives? Simple, for them, Chicken Little is a divine oracle. The apocalypse is nigh. For them, we can’t adapt our way out of the doom. For them, we must mitigate, and that means turning our lives upside down, declaring war on fossil fuels, and erecting the Soviet to oversee our wants and desires.

Actually, we can adapt, not mitigate, because their Chicken Little is essentially a witch doctor. A sea wall can handle a few inches of rise in coastal waters protecting Obama’s mansion investment on Martha’s Vineyard and Oprah’s luxurious enclaves in Montecito (Santa Barbara) and Maui. Receding ice sheets in the polar regions is more than compensated by more land open for farming and a longer growing season. Feeding more people sounds good to me. More greenery from more CO2 has a tremendous upside.

This war on fossil fuels throws common sense out the window. What do we gain (benefits) by handcuffing millions and billions of people to a crippled grid and treating the possession of an SUV as a war crime? What are the costs? The forced exchange of what works for what doesn’t will mean that more people will enter the ranks of the poor. Pencil it out. We’ll have less CO2 in the air and more filth and poverty on the ground. It’s insane.

Yep, this is our moment of insanity.

RogerG

Sources:

* Additional YouTube presentations on green matters, the other side to the debate:

1. Michael Shellenberger, “Why renewables can’t save the planet”, at https://youtu.be/N-yALPEpV4w?si=-frZCso5LEaCVNIj
2. “’What Percent Of Our Atmosphere Is CO2?’: Doug LaMalfa Stumps Entire Panel With Climate Questions”, Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Ca.), 2023, at https://youtu.be/bJfrKNR3K2k?si=9Cn0wiMwaqa8DQfe
3. Stephen Hayward, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Global Warming”, 2014, at https://youtu.be/RZlICdawHRA?si=WiZZs82W58z6D0ns
4. A balanced assessment of EV’s: The Car Guys, “THE BIG EV LIE. Why They Won’t Save the Planet & All About Dirty Electricity”, 2021, at https://youtu.be/sytWLB4-W-M?si=34ck2aFrRkRiql9n
5. Pete Buttigieg’s slick glibness. Watch him skate around the immense problems associated with an EV life. One key problem is generating the electricity to make it all work. He talks about the grid but not about the sources for an immense expansion of the necessary generation of the electricity. “’Which Uses More Electricity…A Refrigerator When It’s Running Or Electric Car When It’s Charging?’”, in questioning of Buttigieg by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky), 2023, at https://youtu.be/avi9iBC8opU?si=LoSEVadXpLZK09J1

* This is not a comprehensive list but is a sample of a robust debate that exists outside attempts in the media to quash it. Real science cannot be suppressed.

March 31, 2024April 5, 2024

A Green Totalitarianism Is Descending Upon Us

Online surveillance bill opens door for Big Brother | CBC News

They are coming for more than your family sedan. They are going to upend, disrupt the entire system that brings everything to your home, grocery store, et al. You’re going to be hit big time in your pocketbook and in every facet of your life. Get prepared for it is coming, if not stopped.

Is Biden determined to turn me into a Trump voter? Trump, no doubt, is the ugly face of my party, but Biden and his donkey party are trying to construct a totalitarian state on a preposterous green agenda. Animating the whole venture, as is true with all totalitarian crusades, is a belief system on how best to organize and control people. To gain popular traction, it’s best for all such crusades to contain a strong apocalyptic element, one powerful enough to justify stampeding the people into acceptance of its dictates and regimentation. It’s happening before our eyes, right now! Say goodbye to the republic and hello to the Soviet.

The EPA is the chief engine of the transformation from citizen republic to rule by all-powerful commissars. Under the guise of “climate change”, we are being ordered to scrap our already immense sunk costs in affordable and reliable transportation for the mirage of something that doesn’t exist, and if it does, it’s a catastrophe as a replacement. Prepare for a calamity, one that’ll conspicuously fall more seriously upon our children and generations to come. Your kids will be the real victims.

March is turning into a deadly month for the health of our constitutional republic. The EPA earlier in the month announced its intention to follow the template of California, one of a few states famous for turning many of its residents into refugees. Like the authoritarian clown car in Sacramento, tighter emissions for “light duty” vehicles (cars, trucks, many SUV’s) will be imposed from 2027 through 2032, eventually sealing the death warrant for the production of nearly anything with an internal combustion engine (see #1 below). Say goodbye to more than the citizen republic. Say goodbye to that thing in your garage that allows you to get the kids to school, or you to work, or pay a visit to grandma for Thanksgiving, for its life will be wrung out of it by regulating and taxing it to death in escalating licensing fees and costs for upkeep, parts, and fuel. Manufacturers will be forced to eliminate their production. The comrades in power plan to leave you with no way out but into their approved and glorified golf cart. This is nothing but totalitarianism “for your own good”. And, of course, they know better about what’s good for you. Right?

EPA Says More Diverse Advisory Committees Will Mean More Equitable Decisions - Union of ...

On the heels of that monstrosity, the commissars proclaimed a similar rule for the fleet of big vehicles that bring everything from produce to your grocery store to all things from an Amazon distribution center, everything that fills a shelf (see #3 below). It’ll be much worse for those people who choose to live outside the controllable and tight confines of an urban area. Think about it, all that stuff that was affordably made available at your fingertips will be crammed onto battery-powered big rigs (fuel cells create their own immense problems, see #2 below) of limited capacity, range, and tremendous recharging difficulties.

The mammoth costs of so-called “innovating” our way out of these imposed problems will only short-circuit the necessary wealth to satisfy other necessities of life. These blinkered potentates have no understanding of the gargantuan trade-offs that they are inflicting on us. Either that or they don’t care.

My bet is that they don’t care. Why? They possess a religious fervor for an ideology that justifies, in their mind, taking over more and more of your life. For them, they are busy saving the planet, even if it means destroying your standard of living. You see, their religio-ideology is founded upon a robust, promethean definition of “social cost” and “externalities”. Like a canon law in the church, their “church”, the two doctrines give overriding weight to real or imagined costs for all of society for everything that you do. Where’s the limits? Practically, there aren’t any. Thus, the creeds become the supreme, open-ended excuses for the EPA, or any commissariat for that matter, to do anything that they want.

In the past, it was national socialist race justice to prevent defilement of the “race”, or the dictatorship of the proletariat to cram equality of condition on all of humanity to prevent exploitation. Today, it’s saving the climate, leaving aside the lack of any credible, peer reviewed evidence that anything that they’re doing will positively affect a global atmosphere under which billions of people are acting independently and beyond the reach of the EPA. Pardon me for concluding that this is nothing but pure stupidity.

In the end, the Biden claque and his Democratic Party are seemingly intent on destroying our way of life and replacing our citizen republic with rule by totalitarian zealots. It’s Petrograd 1917, Berlin 1933, or Beijing 1949. Keeping this crowd in power would have us see the end of much that we cherish. So, if the choice is between the abominable Trump or this gang of totalitarian fanatics, one can be forgiven for preferring boorishness to Big Brother.

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May be an image of car and text that says 'ELECTRICY wm HaynE LANL "Plug in to nearby taxpayer's wallet and she's ready to go!"'

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RogerG

Sources:

1. In Orwellian language, the EPA announcement: “Biden-Harris Administration finalizes strongest-ever pollution standards for cars that position U.S. companies and workers to lead the clean vehicle future, protect public health, address the climate crisis, save drivers money”, March 20, 2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-pollution-standards-cars-position
2. A survey of the literature on the shortcomings of fuel cells:
* “Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Vehicles: Everything You Need to Know”, Car and Driver, 9/26/2022, at https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a41103863/hydrogen-cars-fcev/
* “A review of PEM hydrogen fuel cell contamination: Impacts, mechanisms, and mitigation”, ScienceDirect, 3/20/2007, at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378775306025304
* “Fuel Cells”, University of Illinois, at https://publish.illinois.edu/fuel-cells/benefits-and-disadvantages/
* “How Fuel Cells Work”, How Stuff Works, at https://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/alternative-fuels/fuel-cell.htm

3. The same Orwellian language for heavy-duty vehicles: “Biden-Harris Administration Finalizes Strongest Ever Greenhouse Gas Standards for Heavy-Duty Vehicles to Protect Public Health and Address the Climate Crisis While Keeping the American Economy Moving”, EPA, 3/29/2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-greenhouse-gas-standards-heavy

4. National Review articles that provide excellent overviews of the issues:
* “Biden’s Vehicle-Emissions Gaslighting”, Luther Ray Abel, 3/20/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bidens-vehicle-emissions-gaslighting/
* “Electric Vehicles: The EPA’s Fast Track to Fiasco”, Andrew Stuttaford, 3/25/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/electric-vehicles-the-epas-fast-track-to-fiasco/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=second
* “Biden Admin Imposes Strict Pollution Standards for Buses and Heavy-Duty Vehicles”, Caroline Downey, 3/29/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-admin-imposes-strict-pollution-standards-for-buses-and-heavy-duty-vehicles/

March 23, 2024March 25, 2024

What Does a Lack of Interest in Government Debt Say About Us? Nothing Good.

May be an image of crowd and text — Demonstrators march down Pennsylvania Avenue during a protest against police brutality and racism on June 6, 2020 in Washington, DC. This one end of the voter spectrum. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

May be an image of 8 people, crowd and text that says 'WARD TRUMP SUPPORT PRESIDENT TRUMP PORT DENT' — Trump supporters, the other end of the voter spectrum

Debt. Debt. Debt. Government at all levels is awash in it. Mountains of bonds and treasuries, unfunded mandates, and government spending galore is bankrupting the country. The numbers are in the trillions for Washington, D.C., and beyond millions and into the billions in some state and local hives. California stands out, and is leading the way to massive, harebrained fiscal imbecility, and a dismal future for anyone too young or unborn to vote.

And to think that nobody really cares. The public doesn’t, just try and do something about it. What animates the Trump crowd is rhetorical red meat, sticking it to the libs, and other acts of political theater. No talk of debt, addressing it, or facing the runaway train of our entitlements.

May be an image of 5 people, crowd and text — Donald Trump waves to the crowd at one of his rallies in Florida, 2024.

Nothing in Trump’s past or in his recent four years at the Resolute desk is promising. The guy is a real estate magnate who fumbled around in debt and bankruptcy most of his adult life. As president, he just wanted to spend and spend and spend, even chastising Senate Republicans for balking at another spewing of checks across the fruited plain to grease his reelection campaign. The only problem with his personality kink is the absence of the discipline of a bottom line in a federal government that can issue more debt and dollars at will. No state has a Federal Reserve Board. Trump is a child in a candy store, and so are his followers. Enough of this inane talk of having a businessman in the White House, especially this businessman.

The other choice on the political landscape is a band of neo-Marxist central planners who never met a tax, new bottomless social engineering gambit, and outright giveaway that they didn’t like. The central planning is bad enough, but the vacuuming of more taxpayer dollars from potentially productive endeavors in the private sector into the hands of politicians and their special pleading lackeys is a recipe to repeat 1920s Weimar Germany, or maybe 1920 Bolshevik Russia.

May be an image of 3 people, the Oval Office and text — President Biden delivers remarks regarding student loan debt forgiveness in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in 2022. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images / Getty Images)

Where are the adults? Do we really want adults in decision-making posts? Apparently not. Adults aren’t popular. Never have we been more in need of someone who will speak truth to power, and that power means the American public who keep electing these clowns. We, the American voter, are the real “establishment”. As before, watch demagoguery short-circuit any come-to-Jesus talk.

The numbers are staggering. The national debt of $34.5 trillion is not far from the country’s total productive output, increasing $1 trillion every 100 days (see #1 and #3 below). Meaning, we are close to the land of no return. Compound the nightmare with rising interest rates adding fatter interest payments to the astronomical total and the magnitude of our fiscal immaturity resembles the black hole at the center of the galaxy. Democrats and Trump only know how to spend, with the Democrats performing a lethal injection of tax hikes into our bloodstream as we drown in the sea of debt.

May be an image of text that says 'CREATORG. CEM 2016© MY GOODNESS, THEY'RE I.O.U.S NATIONAL DEBT @Ramireztoons michaelpramirez.com'

If there’s one thing both sides agree on, besides the profligate spending, it is, “Don’t touch Social Security and Medicare!” As entitlements, both are on spending autopilot. The spending flies on, but the funding source is deteriorating; the revenue fuel tank of the contraption is shrinking in real time. The program is set up as pay-as-you-go, so the elderly need to stop saying that they are only getting their contributions back. Balderdash. Current retirees are receiving the contributions of current workers. That’s the truth behind the lies. When the amount of inflow stagnates or declines due to demography or deteriorating prospects for the young contributors, and the outflow prances forever upward, the fiscal tipsiness is guaranteed to add more huge infusions of red ink.

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How much of an infusion? Don’t let the banality of these colossal numbers (trillions) habituate you into accepting them as tolerable. They aren’t. Euphemistically referred to as “unfunded obligations” among official bean counters, Social Security is scheduled to pour $19.8 trillion into the master “unfunded obligation” of the national debt through 2095. Medicare promises another $68.1 trillion. If we take the trend line into the great beyond, in perpetuity, as far as it can be calculated, Social Security raises the ignominy to $59.8 trillion and Medicare $163.2 trillion (see #2 below). If this was a drunk, the victim would have long ago expired from alcohol poisoning.

California is paving the way to this sordid future, but in their muddled thinking, in their clichéd mind, it’s a compliment – all the talk about “California is the future”. Well, they got this one right. California is likely to be the country’s future. They went right from a state that could conceive and build the California Water Project to inmates running the asylum. It’s a playground of the insane. There’s your future.

May be an image of 1 person, the Oval Office and text — California governor Gavin Newsom speaks at a press conference in Beijing, China, October 25, 2023. (Tingshu Wang/Reuters)

The state’s popularly elected governor and legislature discovered, like kids coming downstairs to the Christmas tree, an eye-popping $100 billion pot of gold, or “surplus”, in the summer of 2022. Chief inmate, Governor Gavin Newsom, gushed, “No other state in American history has ever experienced a surplus as large as this.” And then he and his fellow adolescents went around showering the largesse in a splurge of incontinence. 23 million of its residents received checks worth as much as $1,050 at a price tag of $9.5 billion. It then would seem only natural for a self-proclaimed sanctuary state for immigration law violators to bankroll $5 billion for the health care of the same immigration law violators (see #4 below). Foreign nationals in our country in violation of our laws now get bennies. Got that?

In their unthinking habit of seeing bigger budgets as success in any social venture – not kids reading better or the number of homeless declining – the Sacramento clown car shoveled $20 billion into the pockets of the professionalized homeless “advocates” in their opulent NGOs, with no positive impact on public defecation, open-air drug dealing and use, crime, or the number of filthy encampments littering city streets. The state’s potentates could go a long way in curing the problem just by being a little more energetic, as they demonstrated recently in sprucing up grimy San Fransisco for the ruling thug of Red China, Xi. Instead, you’re likely to see an increase in real estate investments by those professionals in their NGOs. They don’t have an interest in curing the problem for that would only make them get a real job (see #4 below).

The state’s deficit stands at $78 billion, and rising. Add the state’s massive overspending to local wantonness and the total debt picture throughout the state approaches $1.6 trillion (see #4 below). I’m not sure if a cliff or wall is the most appropriate metaphor, but the car is more than driven by the mandarins in city hall or Sacramento. These nincompoops are popularly elected. The people of the state have their foot on the pedal. The people want fiscal insanity.

So, let’s stop blaming some abstract others for this dire situation. The people voted for it, and continue to do so. I’m reminded of Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror”.

Michael Jackson Man In The Mirror Wallpapers - Wallpaper Cave

As one stanza puts it:

“I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could’ve been any clearer
If they wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change”

Leave it to the King of Pop to issue a come-to-Jesus moment. It’s astounding to think that a deeply flawed man, who died of a deadly cocktail of drugs, made more sense than the people do in their elections. Stew on that for a while.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. US Debt Clock at https://www.usdebtclock.org/. You can watch it climb in real time.
2. “The Real Federal Deficit: Social Security And Medicare”, John C. Goodman, Forbes, 2/25/2024, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/johngoodman/2023/02/25/the-real-federal-deficit-social-security-and-medicare/?sh=25189f695679
3. “The U.S. national debt is rising by $1 trillion about every 100 days”, Michelle Fox, CNBC, 3/1/2024, at https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/01/the-us-national-debt-is-rising-by-1-trillion-about-every-100-days.html
4. “California’s Deficit: Bring Your Alibis”, Will Swaim, National Review, 3/18/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/californias-deficit-bring-your-alibis/

March 20, 2024March 25, 2024

A Freely Elected Feudalism

Feudal Future Podcast – Restoring the California Dream - Joel Kotkin — The Feudal Future Podcast, two Chapman University professors warning of California’s slide into feudalism, or, more accurately, manorialism.

Most historians of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West would admit of centuries of misrule and foreign pressures leading to its disappearance. The Fall was incremental with most people adjusting to the slowly deteriorating conditions. Then, on the heels of persistent and growing disorder, the Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD. The evidence of decline was visible on the ground in the depopulation of many urban centers – Rome’s population in the 5th century had fallen to 50,000 – and in overgrown and decaying infrastructure. A healthy middle class faded with the weakening of commerce and the spreading lawlessness, and people began to cluster around powerful land barons. Western Europe became feudal. And so is California.

Feudal California has been a consistent theme of mine for a number of years. I’m not alone in this assessment. Two Chapman University professors (Orange, Ca.), Marshall Toplansky and Joel Kotkin, have been sounding the alarm in their “The Feudal Future” podcast at https://www.feudalfuturepodcast.com/home51396438. Check it out.

Professor Marshall Toplansky recently sat down for an interview with Siyamak Khorrami (see below) to explain what is happening to the socio-economic profile of California as it is sliding into feudalism. In sum, California is losing its middle class. A thriving middle class is a product of a vibrant commerce. Commerce is fading in the state’s broad system collapse. Sound familiar? As the middle class flees for opportunity elsewhere, the leftover population begins to take on the character of the wealthy in their walled manors and a growing mass of the poor to service their needs. How long will it be before we start calling California’s poor “peasants” or “serfs” and the state’s hyper-rich “Lord”?

This state of affairs wasn’t an accident. It is a willful consequence of elected choices. Decline and decay are popularly elected. It’s a one-party state with policy excesses never held to account. A chief target of the excess is commerce – or more simply, the economy. Doing business in California is like descending into Dante’s Inferno. A reputation for hostility is cemented; businesses leave for more welcoming states; air quality improves because the economy is systematically depressed; and the young in their peak family-formation and income years take flight. “Going green” (ev’s, solar panels, windmills, recycling galore, a war on fossil fuels, etc.) is going-going-gone for the middle class.

Please take time to watch the Toplansky interview. It should be enlightening for anyone in California or seeking to avoid its fate.

RogerG

March 15, 2024March 18, 2024

Oppenheimer, Hollywood History

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Not the history of Hollywood, but Hollywood’s version of history, a type of history which is staggeringly distilled from the lefty leanings of pop culture. Well, to no surprise, “Oppenheimer” won the Oscar for best picture. Good movie, bad history, especially if you want your history without the hackneyed left-wing bromides. It’s a history for today’s credentialed, degreed, but functional illiterates. It’s proof that today’s education is not educating, and thus Hollywood can get away with distorting history to an ill-informed public.

The film is filled with the now familiar leftist clichés. Cliché #1: Oppenheimer was persecuted. The pertinent question is, however, was he a significant security risk? A “security risk” does not require him to be a communist. As for the “risk” at America’s most top-secret war project, and one for which he is running, a simple examination of Oppenheimer’s background, activities, and associations should raise eye brows above the hair line. Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” obviously raises the subject – for it cannot be ignored, and is central to his plot – but paints the picture in gauzy hues of sympathy for him.

Oppenheimer can legitimately be an object of sympathy, like many people, but sympathy and ascertaining the danger to the country for having him at that post are different subjects. The latter is clearly more significant for us than the former. In this respect, context provides an important back story for events that would involve Robert Oppenheimer, and should have been part of Nolan’s story but are conspicuously absent.

At the time that the Manhattan Project was being organized, the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service at its operations center outside Washington, D.C., Arlington Hall, was ordered to begin collecting coded messages between Soviet operatives to their colleagues in the U.S. and superiors in Moscow. Stalin was an ally but many in our government were prudently dubious about his motives, intentions, and actions. Would he abandon us and/or undermine our efforts? After all, his connivance with Hitler in 1939 – the Nazi-Soviet Pact – helped trigger World War II. The activities of the Soviet Comintern (Communist Internationale) destabilized many countries in Europe throughout the 1920s and 30s. The Soviet takeover of the so-called Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, in tandem with Fascist support for Franco’s Nationalists, helped turn Spain into a bloodbath.

Cracking the Code: The Venona Project — U.S. Army Signals Intelligence codebreakers, Arlington Hall, VA, 1943.

Simultaneously, the collection of the messages necessitated an intense effort to break the code which did not bear fruit till the end of the war and into the 1950s due to the complexity of the Soviet code. The program to collect and break the Soviet code was given the cover name, Venona.

Furthermore, step back to the 1930s and the preeminent trends of thought in college faculty lounges. If there was an observable sympathy in the U.S. during the 1930s, it was the warmth of our intellectual chattering classes for collectivism ranging from milder socialisms to communism, which is just an impatient socialism. For a good portion of the professoriate, the Great Depression condemned capitalism. The Soviet Union benefitted from much of that warmth and it showed in intellectual discussion groups, social affiliations and activities, which extended beyond the classrooms and laboratories. It’s into this milieu that people like Oppenheimer swam.

Many were attracted to FDR and the New Deal as only the beginning of the crusade to make the world right. Many would eventually fill FDR’s agencies and programs and brought their ideological affections with them. The extent of some of this cognitive kinship was uncovered in decrypted Soviet messages from 1946 on. The affection sometimes translated into espionage.

The effort gained new urgency in 1949 when the USSR successfully tested their first atomic bomb many years earlier than expected, which, as it turned out, was a carbon copy of our very first plutonium bomb, the one of the famous Trinity test at Los Alamos. What’s up? How’d they get it? Venona uncovered two moles at Los Alamos (Manhattan Project): nuclear physicist Klaus Fuchs and mathematician Ted Hall. Confirmation was additionally provided from Soviet archives that were thrown open in 1991. From the evidence gleaned, others at the time would be suspected, including Oppenheimer.

Four Spies — Clockwise from top left: Los Alamos spies Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, Oscar Seborer, and David Greenglass. In 2019, Seborer’s story was unearthed by Harvey Klehr, a retired professor from Emory University, and John Earl Haynes, former historian for the Library of Congress.

As it turned out, the espionage reached deep into FDR’s administration. Adviser Laughlin Currie, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, the State Department’s Alger Hiss, and a host of Justice Department and other personnel were fingered in Venona.

Around Oppenheimer personally, his wife, brother, and mistress were known to be communists. Moving about educated and influential circles at the time could have, understandably, oriented a person to the lefty side of the spectrum, leaving aside the natural social self-selection process that normally occurs. All of these factors and facts were not part of Nolan’s script, and should have been if he was truly interested in a faithful rendition of the times and the man. Instead, we got historical schlock that distorted and hid much under the rug, and an Oscar-winning movie.

Once a subject enters movie mode, it falls into the drama of protagonist/antagonist, good/bad. There’s the incessant movieland trope of creating villains who in real life may not have been. Always lurking in the background is Hollywood’s deeply embedded anti-anti-communism. The aura of McCarthy and McCarthyism overshadows their modern brain. So, they invent McCarthy-like characters.

One such maligned person was Gordon Gray, portrayed in the movie as a conniving lawyer of sinister motives. He actually was a distinguished graduate of Yale University, award-winning newspaper publisher, president of the University of North Carolina, and widely respected at the time as secretary of the army and presidential national security adviser. He headed the panel reviewing Oppenheimer’s security clearance that voted two to one to revoke it. Now, Gray will be forever reverse black-listed by Hollywood.

The rescinding of it was actually a “dah” moment. There was enough on Oppenheimer to determine that he was too great a risk to our national security, given all that we know from Venona and subsequent FBI investigations. It’s fair to conclude that the FBI’s investigation of Oppenheimer was inconclusive, but being inconclusive could be enough to keep him away from critical research, the risk being too great. He will take a downstream hit to his employability prospects but those are pale when compared to the danger to everyone else’s safety and security.

The movie doesn’t stop there in maligning people. Another object of concocted derision in the movie was Lewis Straus, but he was hardly Robert Downey Jr.’s dark and malevolent denizen of DC. An esteemed Jewish American and president of New York’s Emanu-El congregation, he rose from the bottom to the rank of Rear Admiral, headed Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, and was Eisenhower’s chief of staff and secretary of state. All this was washed away by Nolan to make Straus a demon to Oppenheimer’s saint. Let’s call it what it is: the Hollywood treatment for anybody of prominence on the right.

President Eisenhower receives a report from Lewis L. Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, on the hydrogen bomb tests (Operation Castle) in the Pacific, March 30, 1954.

Hollywood history becomes real history to people who don’t know history. There’s enough out there to know better. You just have to go from the theater to the library, or wherever honest, in-depth sources are available. They’re out there. But, best of all, be abundantly skeptical of what Hollywood is stylishly placing on the big screen. It’s nearly as much fantasy as Disney’s “Snow White”.

RogerG

Sources:

1. An excellent backgrounder on the times is Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, available on Amazon
2. Another excellent backgrounder is Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government by M. Stanton Evans, available on Amazon
3. Thanks to Neal Freeman’s piece in National Review, “Oppenheimer Provides Great Entertainment, Disfigured History”, 7/30/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/oppenheimer-provides-great-entertainment-disfigured-history/
4. Thanks to Armond White’s review of “Oppenheimer” at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/oppenheimer-the-first-nihilist-oscar-winner/

February 15, 2024March 17, 2024

Off Our Rocker

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Are we off our rocker? Republicans sound like the 60s New Left and Democrats come across as Ronald Reagan (regarding Ukraine). Both Democrats and Republicans go off the cliff respectively into a crazy neo-Marxism and blind fealty in a cult of personality. I give you a few examples.

Right off the bat, Sen. J.D. Vance (R, Ohio) is clearly off his rocker. He took to the conservative American Spectator to burnish proof of his bonkers state of mind (see #1 below). In his mind, nearly everything goes down a conspiracy rat hole, particularly aid to Ukraine. The fact that the funding goes into next year is, in the twists and turns of his brain, proof of a Democrat plot to trap Donald Trump in impeachment if he should be elected this year. Here’s a shocker: it’s normal for funding to go beyond the fiscal year since it takes time to pass through the intestines of the federal Leviathan and make the stuff – in this case, munitions. It’s true for the aid to Israel in the bill which Vance incongruously, without a hint of embarrassing hypocrisy, supports (as do I).

The alleged trap assumes Trump will be elected and while in office turn the screws on Ukraine and by acts of omission assist Putin’s conquest of Russia’s “near abroad” – which, by the way, is strangely reminiscent of Lebensraum from another quarter of eight decades passed. Furthermore, it unwittingly presumes that Democrats will control the House and Senate to give us another impeachment parade, which might happen if Republicans continue to serve up candidate looniness and stage ugliness (Trump being Trump). For a good portion of the American public, who would want to check the Democrats’ neo-Marxism with the bestial and batty? Vance, without thinking and saying it, assumes that voters will prefer the neo-Marxists and thus they’ll be in position to oust Trump. Vance’s reasoning inadvertently slaps himself as he attempts to slap Ukraine.

What a strange way to quietly show affection for Putin and isolationism, albeit of the incoherent variety. What a strange way to make yourself unelectable as a party.

And in the Republican stable, more craziness awaits. Rep. Matt Rosendale (R, Montana), a stalwart of the House Republican suicide attempt in the toppling of Kevin McCarthy (R, Ca.) from the speakership, that didn’t make a lick of sense, announced that he’d like to bring the same looniness to the Senate chamber (see #3 below). Brandishing all the Trumpy jargon of the “establishment” drivel, he’s challenging Republican Tim Sheehy, who’s been running since summer last. So, the state Republican Party will be asked to place on the November ballot a man who lost to Montana Democrat Sen. John Tester in 2018 in a state Trump carried by 16 points in 2020. We’ll see if the state’s Republican voters are hungry to replicate 2022 when getable seats were lost by choosing the bestial and batty to carry the party flag. A sizeable chunk of Republican voters has proven to be the Democrats’ best allies.

Potentially Illegal Mailer Sent To Montana Voters Causes Upheaval In Senate Election | The Daily ... — Rep. Matt Rosendale (R, Montana)

In the end, ironically, after election 2024 passes from the scene, the Democrats might still be in a position to ruin the country, or make it look like the hellscapes of California and New York. Businesses and people are fleeing these bastions of insanity. When will we ever learn that lefty policy is a ticket to societal carnage? These states are governed by people who hate the Second Amendment and economic activity that isn’t directed by them. Lawbreaking, adolescent genital mutilation (“gender-affirming care” in the jargon of our time), eco-central planning, our schools as Marxist preparatory academies, the filth and crime, and the secessionist flouting of federal immigration law emanate from these metropolitan and bi-coastal enclaves. These places are a mess.

Their favorite whipping boys are people who bring us our energy and those who produce the means for us to protect ourselves from the miscreants coddled by them. Defund the police? The targets, especially the arms industry, are escaping a bevy of regulations, punishing taxation, and massive state-law sponsored lawsuits. Smith and Wesson fled Massachusetts for Tennessee. Now, Remington is abandoning New York for Georgia (see #4 below). Ilion, upstate NY, will shrink further.

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Our newfound passion to make everyone whole (in legal eagle lingo) in the extreme is driving whole industries into bankruptcy, literally. The fact that a wacko used a Bushmaster to kill 20 kids and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School is the excuse to squeeze $73 million from Remington and, by extension, its employees. What of the car manufacturer of the vehicle that the killer drove? What of the gas station that the killer accessed to get him to the school? What of the fuel manufacturer? What of the maker of the shoes, clothes, and food that kept him alive and well to perform the heinous deed? What of all the hammers and steak knives that have been utilized to commit mayhem throughout history? In states like New York, we have a web of law and a jury pool, indeed a population, curated on hostility to certain industries. Remington became the target, less so the killer. Well, they are getting out. Masochism shouldn’t be expected to be a requirement for economic activity.

From the article:

“My mom worked there [Remington, Ilion]. My dad worked there. My wife works there with me now. My daughter works there with me now. My second daughter works there with me now. And my son-in-law works there,” said Brown, president of the United Mine Workers of America Local 717. “So it’s a double-hit for me and my wife: two of us out of a job.”

Do ya think?!

In statements to the press and employees, Remington cited New York’s threatening “legislative environment” and the fact that Georgia “supports and welcomes the firearms industry” (see #4 below). As a result, the State of New York is giving its residents much more than they ask for.

It’s much more than a shrinking tax base. It’s a clear field of play for criminals after non-prosecution, hostility to self-protection, and suppressed bail requirements under the puffery of “equity”. Where’s the “equity”? Right now, some people have greater rights to steal and destroy your property than you do in desiring to keep it. If the numbers don’t break down “equitably” by race, then hell is turned loose on the law-abiding, and good number of those are in so-called “protected classes” supposedly in need of “equity”. It’s laughable, if it wasn’t also so tragic.

There you have it. Current events are a chronicling of absolute lunacy. Are we off our rocker?

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “The Republican Plot Against Donald Trump”, Sen. J.D. Vance, The American Spectator, 2/12/24, at https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-congress-is-pursuing-endless-war-in-ukraine-and-trying-to-stop-a-trump-election/
2. Thanks to Noah Rothman for the reportage and commentary on Vance’s claim in “J. D. Vance Thinks You’ll Believe Anything”, 2/12/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/02/j-d-vance-thinks-youll-believe-anything/
3. “Rosendale’s entry into Montana Senate primary sparks GOP furor”, Julia Mueller, The Hill, 2/11/24, at https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4459261-matt-rosendales-montana-senate-primary-donald-trump-tim-sheehy/
4. “Remington leaves the upstate New York village where it made guns for 200 years after a PE takeover and 2 bankruptcies”, Michael Hill and AP, Fortune, 2/11/24, at https://fortune.com/2024/02/11/is-remington-in-business-who-owns-leaving-new-york/

January 30, 2024

Respected Institutions Are No Longer Respectable

School children with masks and behind Plexi-glass in a San Diego school during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abandoned and torched vehicles shown near the Supernova desert music festival in the wake of Hamas' October 7 attack — Destroyed, burned, and abandoned cars at music festival, Israel, October 7. Some UN aid workers were implicated in the massacre.

If the quality of our civilization can be gauged by the quality of our institutions, then we’re in serious trouble.

Domestically, our schools, FBI, CIA, a good portion of big business, the entertainment industry, federal bureaucracies, many state bureaucracies and local governments, many of them urban, much of the judiciary (federal to local, judges to juries), and the health bureaucracies (federal to local) have soiled themselves in neo-Marxist claptrap, authoritarian impulses, or rank donkey party partisanship. The rule of law is actually the rule of deeply compromised men and women. And it gets worse when we saunter on down to Turtle Bay in New York City, the United Nations.

We get daily reminders of the civilizational decay. Now, it’s another UN flight into gross immorality. The affiliated International Court of Justice (ICJ) trampled on any remaining moral authority that it may have possessed by bizarrely indicting Israel on charges of genocide. The absurdity of the pronouncement is obvious if you just think it through: the victim of genocide is guilty of responding to it. Then, the UN’s human rights conglomerate reserved for Iran the “Chair for the Human Rights Council’s one-day ‘Social Forum’” (see #1 below). Adding moral injury to moral injury, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East had people who were involved in the massacre of 1,200 mostly civilian Jews in Israel on October 7 (see #4 below). Can the “international community” get any more putrid?

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The ICJ, specifically ordered Israel to stop “genocide-attacks” on Palestinian civilians in Gaza after, of course, finding evidence of “Israeli genocide” (see #3 below). Let me get this straight: the organization that runs Gaza stormed into southern Israel and slaughtered 1,200 Jews, took over 200 hostages, is not the party guilty of genocide; it’s the country who responded to the genocide. How does that compute?

Let’s rattle this around in the head a bit more. The nation that defends itself against a genocide is guilty of genocide as the original perps of the primary genocide commit another war crime by using the Gaza population as a writ-large human shield (see #2 below). Does this make any sense? Completely absent from the black robes’ decision is Hamas’s fundamental war crime – Gaza civilians as human shields – which immensely complicates the Israeli defensive response without running afoul of “genocide”. The elaborate and massive tunnel network under and into hospitals, schools, homes, large apartment buildings, orphanages, wherever civilians congregate in large numbers, the kind of civilians that are easily exploited for propaganda purposes, didn’t grace the Court’s printout. Since civilian casualties are inevitable when the human shields are used in crowd number, the Court’s opinion is tantamount to a blessing for the practice of large-scale human shields.

Maj. (res.) ‘Mem,’ a combat engineering officer, shows a tunnel that troops found inside a home in northern Gaza. The entrance was hidden underneath a bed in a children’s bedroom, November 7, 2023. (photo: Emanuel Fabian/Times of Israel)

If that isn’t crazy enough, we get to experience mullah-ruling Iran as a guardian of human rights. Isn’t that like the Grand Dragon of the Klan heading the Office of Civil Rights? Gracing the mullahs with the Chair of the UN Human Rights Council’s one-day “Social Forum” at the end of last year was too much even for the Iran-appeasing Biden administration. Biden’s Human Rights Council Ambassador Michele Taylor wrote (see #1 below), “It is unacceptable that any body associated with the promotion and protection of human rights be chaired by a representative from a nation implicated in such persistent and flagrant human rights abuses as Iran.” Exactly.

Yet, here we are, but there’s more. Speaking of the 1,200-person atrocity by Hamas on October 7, UN Works and Relief Agency workers were implicated in the barbarousness. Several had to be fired. Where’s the prosecutions (at the ICJ)? And related is the Hamas hijacking of that much-vaunted AOC-demanded “humanitarian aid” to Gazans (see #4 below). According to one source, “Hamas has their hands on UNRWA administration workers, and it manages UNRWA. . . . From the day they [Hamas] rose to power they took control of everything.” Much of the aid is dispensed by USAID. The federal organization’s Office of Inspector General (USAID OIG) “…has identified deliberate interference and efforts to divert humanitarian assistance in regions where FTO [foreign terrorist organizations, Hamas] activity is prevalent … [t]his includes systemic coercion of aid workers by FTOs…”, as reported by Jim Geraghty of National Review (see #4 below). Things at UN headquarters and in the field resemble the anti-Semitic chaos on our college campuses.

It’s getting so bad that almost anything with thousands of employees, funded by taxpayers, distant from them like D.C., the Hague and UN, and big-international in scope is a civilizational embarrassment. The little taxpaying guy and gal in the U.S., and the nation of Israel, get hosed. In this sense, bigness has become badness. I’m skeptical that anything can be done about the situation short of tearing the whole edifice down and starting over.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “Outrage as Iran regime chairs United Nations Human Rights Council body despite ‘alarming’ abuses”, Peter Aitken, Fox News, November 2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/outrage-as-iran-regime-chairs-united-nations-human-rights-council-body-despite-alarming-abuses/ar-AA1jhvrT

2. “Human Shields in International Humanitarian Law: A Guide to the Legal Framework”, Beth Van Schaack, Just Security, 12/7/2016, at https://www.justsecurity.org/35263/human-shields-ihl-legal-framework/#:~:text=Making%20the%20civilian%20population%20or%20individual%20civilians%20the,and%20Article%208%20%28e%29%20%28i%29%20%28applying%20to%20NIACs%29.

3. “ICJ ruling: Key takeaways from the court decision in Israel genocide case”, Reuters, 1/26/24, at https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/key-takeaways-world-court-decision-israei-genocide-case-2024-01-26/

4. “What about the UNRWA Humanitarian-Aid Trucks?”, Haley Stack, National Review, 1/26/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-about-the-unrwa-humanitarian-aid-trucks/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth