Golden State Warriors guard Steph Curry, in an April 21, 2022, game in Denver, has voiced his opposition to townhomes near his San Francisco Bay Area mansion. (David Zalubowski / Associated Press)
Have you heard this? Steph Curry of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors doesn’t want a 1.5 acre, 16-unit “affordable” townhouse development near his $30 million mansion in the exclusive Bay Area community of Atherton (see below). It’s too easy to expose the obvious hypocrisy given the guy’s outspoken progressive views. Rich people of lefty inclinations seem to run away from their lefty beliefs as soon as the consequences get too close. But Curry has legitimate concerns of safety and privacy for a celebrity like himself and his family. The bigger issue, though, isn’t affordable housing in a state woefully deficient of it. It’s the central planning that inherently comes with lefty/progressive thinking of the type running the show in California.
It’s borrowed from Stalin, a fellow lefty. He abandoned his orthodox seminary as a young man and radicalized himself into an atheist revolutionary. Off went the priestly frock and traditional beliefs and on came the drive to build the utopia on totalitarianism in league with a clique of fellow bomb throwers and statue topplers. Sound familiar? Portland? Almost any urban complex or campus in the so-called golden state? Central planning is one of the quintessential expressions of totalitarianism.
Soviet poster proclaiming the Five-Year Plan of industrialization.
Now in control, to Stalin, the utopia means industrialization at breakneck speed no matter the cost and turmoil to people’s lives. Sound similar to “zero carbon”, the Green New Deal, Biden announcing the end of fossil fuels, Newson and his one-party state destroying energy production and herding the entire population of the state into ev’s? As for Stalin, he ordered more steel from his politburo to Gosplan (state economic planning agency) who then gets the furnaces billowing at full blast to produce more of something that few can and want to use. It piles in heaps outside the foundries.
Ditto for Governor Newsom and housing. Not enough affordable housing? He ordered the regional governments in the state (like SoCal Area Governments – SCAG – for instance) to create precise plans for more “affordable housing”. Atherton, within ABAG (Assoc. of Bay Area Governments), did its part with 348 new housing units – 16 of which are to be plunked down next to the Curry estate.
Aerial view of Atherton, Ca.New home development in Atherton with bungalows starting from between a stripped-down $620,000 to three-quarters of a million.The $3.2 million mansion sold by Steph Curry and wife.Rear view of Curry’s new $31 million mansion in Atherton, Ca
That’s how central planning works. Need something like cheaper housing? Well, just order it as Stalin did steel, while ignoring the Russian realities of the absence of a trained workforce, the infrastructure for a supply chain, whether the stuff is any good, the absence of contingent enterprises that could use it. Equally oblivious as Newsom is, the land in question in Atherton probably goes for $8 million per acre. Do the math: $12 million for the land and sixteen “affordable” units at $250,000 each will bring in . . . wait for it . . . $4 million. Oops, it doesn’t add up.
Watch “affordable housing” turn into “unaffordable housing”. To cover just land costs, each unit will have to go for $750,000. Add other incidentals like labor, engineering, materials, energy (fuel, electricity, etc.), the inevitable California delays, fees, taxes, and approvals, and you’re back to California’s housing crisis. Stalin ended up with the world’s largest steel ingot and crappy tractors. Newsom commands cheaper housing and ends up with fewer units and a huge subsidy bill to fund from the depleted state, county, and municipal treasuries and the state’s beleaguered taxpayers. My bet: the units don’t get built.
Don’t worry, Steph. The state’s buffoonish central planning and incompetence will protect you.
The housing situation won’t improve because the political eco-system for development in the state hasn’t changed. It’s the same one that caused the problem. Layer upon layer of bureaucracy smothers the housing industry. Powerful interest groups perch like vultures waiting to pounce. EIR’s and EIS’s and related “public” hearings filled with NIMBY’s and the state’s militant eco-utopians make a mockery of the process. CEQA, the Coastal Commission, the planning agencies in every jurisdiction in the state, the overlay of air quality management districts throughout the state, Cal. Fish and Game, USFWS, and their endangered species lists are poised to tear their claws into the project.
The endangered Lord Howe Island stick insect (female). Photo Courtesy San Diego Zoo.
To tell the truth, the state has a housing crisis because it wants one. They must want it, or they’re insane. Anyone with an ounce of common sense must know that punishing a behavior, like building more housing, will mean less of the behavior. It’s been the reality since the eco-industrial complex discovered the Delta Smelt, the Tipton Kangaroo Rat, and the evil of humans attempting to live better.
It gets worse. Newsom’s affordable housing imperial decree is ready to clash with a recent California court’s decree extending California Endangered Species Act protections to invertebrates – i.e., insects (see below). Californios will quickly learn that bumble bees count more than anything affordable in the state. Karl Marx was wrong about much, but he got one thing right: “. . . history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
Stalin’s central planning created the Holodomor and dekulakization which devastated the Ukraine, the Donbas, the Russian peasantry and agriculture, and created the stirrings of the bloody purges in the hunt for “wreckers”. Newsom thinks that he can wave the magic wand of an imperial decree and, voilà, “affordable housing” appears. Just announce it and it will be so. Forget about Marx’s tragedy stage; the state quickly jumped to farce.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “NBA’s Steph Curry joins neighbors in opposing affordable-housing plan for ritzy Atherton”, Howard Blume, LA Times, 2/3/23, at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-02-03/nba-star-steph-curry-fights-affordable-housing-atherton
* “California court ruling opens door for protection of insects as endangered species”, Liz Kimbrough, Mongabay, 6/2/22, at https://news.mongabay.com/2022/06/california-court-ruling-opens-door-for-protection-of-insects-as-endangered-species/
* The following is my reaction to “Laurel Canyon” and “Helter Skelter” now showing on Amazon Prime. I recommend them but not in ways intended by the creators.
Upon preparing our transition to Montana, some very dear Montana friends advised us to replace our California vehicle plates asap. We did. It was probably the same guidance offered to any Golden State resident making a move to Oregon, Washington, Texas, Colorado, or practically anywhere. Why is the word “California” so disconcerting to our fellow Americans beyond the Sierras? No doubt, the state has a bad reputation. To be blunt, it got it after the Sixties settled in, stayed, and took over the state. Other people see the results, want no part of it, and wish to quarantine the virus.
The Sixties was a utopian cultural revolution with strong political implications that cast a dark shadow expanding up and down the coast and entrenching itself in metropolitan and academic nodes nationwide. What came to be called “the Sixties” set in motion a full-scale assault on traditions and institutions while advancing license with a heavy expansion of state interventions, taxes, and regulations to clean up the concomitant mess and make society conform to a now-discredited utopian vision. The government is by nature ill-equipped to be the cleanup brigade and only compounds the problems. California is thought by many across the nation to be the birthing center of the horror. Daily, the impression is confirmed.
A scene from one of the many residences of rock performers that came to congregate in Laurel Canyon.LA. It looks like Stephen Still (l) of the Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young sitting atop a car with what looks like Peter Tork of Monkees fame.
The march of the Sixties went from San Francisco, Berkeley, Haight-Asbury, LA, Topanga Canyon, Laurel Canyon, Sunset Blvd., through the coastal plain, up and down Highway 1, to the halls of power in Sacramento; all resplendently displayed in “Laurel Canyon” and “Helter Skelter”. Later, bare feet and Levi’s gave way to the tweed of tenured faculty positions and the current legislative supermajorities and a lock on the governor’s mansion and every other statewide elective office in California.
Haight-Ashbury during the so-called Summer of Love.
Surprisingly, I came away from viewing the two episodes of “Laurel Canyon” and the six of “Helter Skelter” on Amazon Prime with these thoughts in mind. They were a reminder of the times but not necessarily a discovery. I’m a Boomer, having entered junior high in 1964. I’m aware. The films illustrate that the Sixties cultural influence lurks in the background of the great folk-rock of the Laurel Canyon scene of the Sixties and the Manson murders.
Though, don’t be fooled. The Sixties didn’t cause the Manson murders. Manson and his troupe of sycophants are responsible. Yet, the Sixties set the stage for what happened and for what California became.
Charles Manson in one of many photos taken during his 1970 trial.Some of Manson’s “family” on the Spahn Ranch property, 1969.The bodies of Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring, two of the five victims at the Polanski/Tate residence.
The Sixties (actually from 1965 to the early Seventies), the word, came to refer to a wholesale rejection of convention. Restraint is gone, anything goes, and moral anarchy reigns. The earlier insidiousness of drug use – euphorics, psychedelics – was supplanted by a view of them as a shortcut to genius and God. Psychologist Timothy Leary at a 1966 Golden Gate Park “Human Be-In” set the tone with “Turn on, tune in, drop out”. People caught up in the whirlwind found themselves beset by addictions, sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and the underbelly of the drug culture. Today, the phenomena have spread far beyond the confines of Haight-Ashbury.
California pot farm
The anti-convention of the Sixties ultimately became the convention of today. It’s everywhere but most intense in California, its epicenter. Just take a stroll through a Denver park to smell the spread of the zeitgeist, or travel the epicenter to experience a LA homeless encampment, the filth of the downtowns, the homelessness parked and tented along Highway 1, the growing pot dispensaries dotting the landscape, the legal and illegal pot plantations that make a hike in the California woods dangerous, and sex as recreation with an allied abortion industry to dispose of the consequences.
Belief in traditional Christianity and church attendance is taking a hit and a buttress of civility is crumbling (nationwide numbers below).
Narcissism and a short-term time horizon were other byproducts. Take away something higher and that leaves the self and an obsession with the present. The future, a fruitful legacy, and personal responsibility be damned. The Sixties-inspired absolute rule of the self overpowers everything to the point that even biological restraints are subjected to the will with enough chemicals and surgeries. Fabricated girls – formerly boys – are free to invade female spaces. The dating scene, already fraught with many uncertainties, will have a few more to contend with.
Socialism is a nice fit for the ongoing fight against convention. It, by definition, is an invasion into the conventionally protected private sphere: private property, home, family, faith, your kids’ schooling, personal economic initiative, and a person’s accumulated earnings. Free love became free-a-lot covering a gamut from healthcare, abortions, racial reparations, an expanding list of other monetary giveaways, and all of it bankrolled by one of the most onerous taxation regimes this side of North Korea. California wants to approximate a hippie commune as close as is humanly possible . . . by dictat.
Environmentalism is the state’s unofficial religion and it’s a two-fer: it’s a cover for more socialism and assists in dismantling the old conventions, their institutions and standards. Eco-fanaticism dictates your choice of car, constructs an unreliable and costly grid that sets the hillsides aflame, inflates energy prices to astronomical levels, stands by as the state’s infrastructure crumbles, and all of it managed by a state government that can’t even manage its lavish unemployment benefits (much of it illegally landed in the hands of the miscreants in the state’s prisons, see below).
And you wonder why a California license plate on a car in a Missoula WinCo parking lot is viewed with a slight undercurrent of contempt by locals? People beyond the Sierras get a daily media dose of the California malignancy. They know. Many areas of the country are only getting redder as a result. The Democratic Party is seen by many people as being under the hypnotic spell of what California has become, so much so that the House Democrat delegation almost split evenly on a resolution on Thursday (2/2/23) to condemn socialism (109 for, 100 against/present, see below). The opponents have their reasons, but they exhibit obfuscation or ignorance of socialism.
The resolution reads in part, “. . . socialist ideology necessitates a concentration of power that has time and time again collapsed into Communist regimes, totalitarian rule, and brutal dictatorships.” Some of the foes trotted out their old stand-by claim that an attack on socialism is a not-so-subtle design to eliminate Social Security and Medicare. However, all serious reforms call for a transition to a more sustainable program, one in line with our time-honored values of personal responsibility, private property, and greater returns. Demagoguing the issue hides an affection for top-down government control and the entrapment of the population into the status of serfs to the state, hallmarks of socialism.
The Squad in Congress, American marchers for socialism, and the socialist dictator Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela.
Many voting no/present disfigured the meaning of socialism in order to cover an affection for it. Clouding their judgment is a version of socialism coming out of the Sixties love-ins in California. For them, it is a cutesy sharing of everything, whether it be belongings or bed partners. Manson demanded the surrender of all of a person’s possessions, including clothes, before acceptance into the clan. It’s a sentiment familiar to the crowd before Timothy Leary in the Human Be-In of 1966, and morphed into the Democratic Party platform of today.
The red states’ desire to contain the virus may gain strength with more refugees . . . but only to a point. Up to now, the vast majority of California refugees are the low-hanging fruit of people equally disgusted by the turn of events in their home state. They add to the red tendencies of their adopted states. Yet, when others of progressive orientations discover to their joy the availability of progressive culture in burgeoning urban settings like Nashville or Austin, without the onerous taxes, some of these red states might shift to more of a purple hue. Watch out for Colorado-ization.
And so it goes. California wasn’t confined. It took over the culture, one of our two political parties, and is shedding population like my dogs do fur. Why are they fleeing? You know, most have come to dislike California for the same reasons as you might.
More importantly, California is the sheep’s clothing covering the Sixties wolf. The Sixties was a disaster. To say otherwise is smearing lipstick on a pig, er wolf. Watch “Laurel Canyon” and “Helter Skelter” on Amazon Prime and don’t be fooled by the lipstick. If viewed with a jaundiced eye, the films show much more than what their creators intended.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “California sent coronavirus relief money to inmates living in multiple states”, Bethany Blankley, The Center Square, 1/7/2021, at https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/california-sent-coronavirus-relief-money-to-inmates-living-in-multiple-states/article_dfb87e08-5080-11eb-8fd2-5f361329774e.html#:~:text=%28The%20Center%20Square%29%20%E2%80%93%20More%20than%20%2442%20million,prison%20and%20jail%20inmates%2C%20a%20recent%20report%20found.
* More on California’s unemployment insurance scandal: “California’s Unemployment Insurance System in Crisis, Needs a Fix.”, Orange County Register, 1/18/2023, at https://www.ocregister.com/2023/01/18/unemployment-insurance-in-crisis-needs-a-fix/
* “House passes resolution denouncing socialism, vote splits Democrats”, Michael Schnell, The Hill, 2/2/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/house-passes-resolution-denouncing-socialism-vote-splits-democrats/ar-AA172Gvv
* “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace”, Pew Research Center, 10/17/2019, at https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/
Gov. Newsom of California makes claim that Texans pay more in taxes in recent news conference.
Mehmet Murat ildan, Turkish writer and economist, once quipped for good reason, “One of the greatest responsibilities for the people of our time is to accept everything that he hears in the pro-government media as a lie and to investigate the truth from independent sources personally!” Good advice in this age of serial falsehoods from our self-anointed “betters”.
Mehmet’s point is to keep one’s wits about them. For instance, ask a few questions. Like, what is “government” in “pro-government media”? Former representative and Democratic Party poohbah Barney Frank tried to put an anodyne spin on the term: “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”
Is it really? Mehmet might beg to differ. Today, our western media, the other part of the Mehmet’s phrase, are more than organs of communication. They are part of an incestuous nexus of the college faculty lounge, corporate boardroom, legacy media, Hollywood, government down into its bowels, and a smattering of non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) – a class of people peering from the top of the social pyramid and overwhelmingly leaning left. Indeed, be leery enough to personally “investigate the truth from independent sources”.
In today’s news roundup are two items that touches upon our “betters” malign influence: Gavin Newsom on taxes and the chicanery of Hamilton 68. Both stories are indicative of our modern culture of lying.
In the first one, the serial prevaricator Gov. Gavin Newsom of California mangles the truth about Texas taxes. He has to do it because he’s the used car salesman trying to unload a clunker on a weary costumer, the jalopy being the state of California. Thus, he blurted out this whopper: “95% of Texans pay higher taxes than Californians.” What? Texas has no state income tax and California has the highest one in the nation and taxes everything under the sun (and within Hubbel’s expanding universe, Hubble’s Law: v = H*r). The poor folks of California are pummeled with them.
It bodes well for DeMeco Ryans, 49er defensive coordinator, who looks like he’ll take the head coaching gig with the Houston Texans. He’ll get a leap in his salary and be allowed to keep more of it by simply making the move.
What is the basis for Newsom’s attempt at making the implausible plausible? Surely, there must be some grounding for the shocking claim. Well, the guy’s staff rooted through the publications of the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in the not-so-illustrious state. They cited a 2018 study from the group that doesn’t support the bombast. Even more embarrassing, a spokesperson for the group refuted Newsom by saying, “We do not compute a specific percentage of Californians who pay less/more tax than Texans.” Instead, the focus of the Institute’s study was to illustrate California’s “fairer” tax system, not that it was cheaper. Newsom: liar, liar, pants on fire!
To clear the air, the more reasonable Tax Foundation went through the numbers comparing Texas and California, just looking at income, property, and sales taxes, and avoiding California’s morass of regulatory and business taxes. Here’s the results using a $100,000 income in both states: the person in Texas pays $6,335 and the poor Californio’s burden almost doubled to $11,946. The biggest reason for the gap is that Texans pay $0 in state income taxes because Texas doesn’t have one. Add a lighter tax burden to the cheaper cost of living and a sensible person can understand the attraction of Texas to a California middle-class family of four or Elon Musk.
Plus, one doesn’t have to put up with the eco-nuttery, crazed and infanticidal abortion, being locked into abysmal public schools, the widespread urban decay, and their daughters having to share with boys the girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and running and swimming lanes. There’s a lot to be said for loading up a U-Haul.
Newsom has to gaslight us to cover up his mounting mess. Hamilton 68 lies to maintain its death grip on power. What is it? It’s another one of those transnational groupies of the well-heeled and people accustomed to power and influence. It’s a Who’s Who of powerful insiders. It was birthed by an entity called the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) which in turn was created by the German Marshall Fund, which is bankrolled by European and the US governments. Got that? It sounds like an old fashioned, meandering money laundering scheme, like much of today’s politics when the powerful want to hide their machinations.
Former FBI counterintelligence agent and “disinformation” expert Clint Watts, the spokesman for Hamilton
Their key obsession is “misinformation”. So, they fight so-called “misinformation” with “disinformation”. It was all uncovered by Elon Musk’s clean-up crew at Twitter. Hamilton 68 was part of the cabal to tar the 2016 election as a product of a Russian skullduggery. They stuck around to be the source for the wild claims of Russia collusion for MSNBC, legacy media, and the disreputable fact-checking operations of Snopes and Politifact.
Hamilton purported to find hundreds (644) of Russian bots actively at work since 2015-16. In reality, according to Twitter execs at the time in their Musk-released emails, the Hamilton’s hundreds shrunk to the reality of 34, most of them related to RT (Russia Times). Swept up in the tarring were conservatives such as Michael Horowitz, and others with much fewer Twitter followers, for merely expressing a point of view contrary to the center-left’s transnational zeitgeist.
Apparently, they’ve been snooping Twitter accounts, not unusual since they are joined at the hip with the “intel community” and Silicon Valley muckety-mucks. Many of Hamilton’s members are well-connected to the amorphous glob. And just think, US taxpayers are forced to bankroll an operation (the German Marshall Fund) targeting themselves. Hamilton 68 is a huge con job that besmirched the 2016 election with lies and was bent on libeling anyone aligned with the result. It’s outrageous.
With Hamilton 68 and Newsom’s falsehoods, one has to wonder about the legitimacy of those preening and peering from the top of the social pyramid. Their culture of lies is smothering us.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Mehmet Murat ildan’s quote from Goodreads, “Lies Politics Quotes” at https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/lies-politics , and more on Mehmet at https://mehmetmuratildanresmiwebsitesi.wordpress.com/
* Barney Frank quote from “The Intolerant State”, Matt Welch, Reason Magazine, Dec. 2013, at https://reason.com/2013/11/11/the-intolerant-state/#:~:text=%22Government%20is%20simply%20the%20name%20we%20give%20to,to%20opposite%20sides%20of%20America%27s%20bitter%20ideological%20divide.
* “Newsom says 95% of Texans pay more than Californians in taxes. But is he correct?”, David Lightman, The Sacramento Bee, 1/18/23, at https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article271288017.html#storylink=cpy
* “Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud”, Matt Taibbi, Racket, 1/27/23, at https://www.racket.news/p/move-over-jayson-blair-meet-hamilton
* More on Hamilton 68 at “The Right Underreacts”, Michael Brandon Dougherty, National Review Online, 1/31/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-right-underreacts/
* Also on my website at libertatevirtute.com
* Also in my Substack feed, The Golden Mean, at https://rogerlgraf.substack.com/
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R, Fla.) and Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene (R, Ga.)Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) and Pres. Joe Biden at the microphone
When does just being wrong cross over into insanity? Einstein had an answer during his debate with the proponents of quantum theory (mechanics) in the 1920’s. The quantum theory presented the possibility of unpredictability in the atomic and subatomic world: identical circumstances can produce different results. Flippantly, Einstein threw off the one-line response, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Thus, according to Einstein, quantum theory proponents such as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were engaging in folly.
Niels Bohr (left) with Albert Einstein in the late 1920s, when quantum mechanics was in its infancy. (Photo credit: Emilio Segre Visual Archives/AIP/SPL)
Today, we have good reason to know better. Micro reality behaves differently than macro. Einstein’s explanation of the cosmos (macro) can’t account for activity in the atomic and subatomic realm (micro).
However, applying Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to human affairs would be an invitation to chaos. Out the window would go any universal principles like deductive/inductive reasoning, equal protection of the laws, rules of due process, standards of decency, human rights, anything regarding the proper regulation of human conduct in a society, the scientific method itself if taken to an extreme. Yet, that is where we are going. We are heading back into places that were known to be thickets of danger and malevolence.
Passion and bias overwhelm good sense. Indeed, that happenstance may be the only true constant in human conduct through the ages, down to the present, and into the future.
We pride ourselves in being better than our ancestors, progressives being the most hubristic. Their entire belief system is based on it. Yet, an earlier incarnation of today’s progressives produced improvements in how a democracy registers the will of the people, advances that modern progressives are busy dismantling. Is this “progress” or a return to an atavistic past, one that their ideological ancestors were trying to escape?
Thomas Nast cartoon of Boss Tweed of the Tammany Hall Democrat political machine of NYC.
Einstein’s insanity definition is fully operational when it comes to the Democratic Party’s efforts to shred the accomplishments of 19th century progressives. Back then, progressives were aghast at the corruption of a powerful few in smoke-filled backrooms. Their efforts at broad political, economic, and social reform were thwarted by a clique with the power to manipulate elections. Before they could accomplish anything, elections must be cleaned up. The process must be professionalized with nonpartisan administration of elections, clean voter rolls, the secret ballot, and diligent prosecution of fraud. Only then, they believed, could they circumvent the self-serving few stuffing the ballot boxes.
Professor Richard T. Ely of Johns Hopkins U. and the U. of Wisconsin, influenced Woodrow Wilson, Rober La Follette, Theodore Roosevelt, etc. (photo: public domain/via Wikimedia)
After, other election reforms would kick in: the popular election of Senators, popular vote primaries, the referendum, initiative, and recall. More democratization, but first in clean elections, was thought to be the cure. Now, it’s back to stuffing the ballot box. Democrats resist efforts to make voter rolls match the actual eligible warm bodies in a precinct, like removal of the dead and noncitizens or those who moved. They thwart voter ID initiatives, whose purpose is to ensure that the person showing up to vote is actually the person on the list. And they are enthusiastic proponents of mail-in balloting, unmonitored drop boxes, the third party harvesting of ballots, same-day registration, voting beyond election day, the kinds of proposals that place a huge question mark over election integrity. What could go wrong? Is it completely unreasonable to find these ideas at least troubling?
Not for Democrats. They don’t have misgivings, blinded as they are by the rhetorical device of “disenfranchisement”, the bogeyman of systemic racism, a zeal to win elections at all costs, and making it so easy to vote that the insentient, uninterested, and those desiring to vote and vote often have an open field. Public faith in the result is sacrificed in the fury of everyone, dead or alive, having a ballot(s) in their hand. My sons still receive California absentee ballots years after ID and registration in Montana.
The New York Times in a brief moment of sanity declared, “Voting by mail is now common enough and problematic enough that election experts say there have been multiple elections in which no one can say with confidence which candidate was the deserved winner” (see below). My faith in elections has taken a hit since easy-to-voting/easy-to-cheat has become the official doctrine of the Party and in jurisdictions under its control.
Their whole scheme was encapsulated in the Democrats’ Senate Bill 1 of 2021, the horribly misnamed “For the People Act”. All of the above would be imposed on the entire country if a couple of Democrat Senators had decided to follow the rest of the lemmings over the cliff.
Far from leaving the Democrats’ Tammany Hall past in the dust, they are now embracing it. The single biggest threat to election integrity is the mail-in ballot. Think about it: instead of a ballot given to a confirmed eligible voter in front of many witnesses, and the person is observed going to a booth to secretly mark it, and it is dropped into the box under the eye of a nonpartisan official, the Democrats want to shotgun ballots in the mail. Yes, participation will increase . . . but by whom?
Absentee ballots below the mailboxes at a Paterson, NJ, apartment complex, May 2020.
The ballots lie on the floor in piles in apartment mailrooms. Multiple ballots are delivered to a single residence and what happens to them once taken inside is anyone’s guess. The sole bow to authentication is a Boy-Scout-oath signature on a perjury line. So much for the single ballot reflecting the conscience of a single person. It doesn’t take the imagination of Lewis Carroll to picture what might be happening beyond the domicile’s door. Add the likelihood of a partisan activist delivering and collecting the things (ballot harvesting) – and who knows what else they’re doing – and no wonder I’m ready to throw up my hands and be done with voting.
The Democrats forestall any steps to allay concerns. They glibly point to the rarity of voter fraud prosecutions. Get real, they’ve created a system that makes it hard to identify fraud. The signature on a mail-in ballot is no guarantee of authenticity because it was produced in the same manner as the marked ballot – behind a closed door. Once the things are collected and delivered, they are shorn of their envelopes and placed in piles. Authentication is gone, gone forever.
How can fraud be uncovered at this point? People have to be extremely stupid to be caught. Prosecutions are a measure of stupidity and not election integrity. The secret ballot is dead, dead!
Slipshod voting is as bad as slipshod policing. In the latter, you may get killed, pistol-whipped, or face wrongful prosecution. With the former, you will be ruined by political hucksters. Come to think about it, what’s the difference?
Under the skin of today’s Democratic Party progressives is an old-fashioned and venal Tammany Hall ward heeler. They are back to a deeply rooted behavior that progressives of an earlier incarnation would find abhorrent and a bit insane.
The other party, the current Republican Party, hews even more closely to Einstein’s definition. A significant block of the Party can’t shake its fetish for Donald Trump no matter how many times he embarrasses the Party and its electoral chances. This influential chunk of the Party’s base would rather die on the hill of confrontation than make room for the part of the electorate who are 70% with them but can’t take the juvenile boorishness. This blinkered part of the party can’t get their heads around the fact that politics is about addition and not subtraction. Reliance on the cult-of-personality cohort in the party’s base to choose nominees will only guarantee more Democrat inaugurals.
Mehmet Oz concedes to John Fetterman, Nov. 9, 2022.
You’d think that the November 2022 midterms would wake them up. No such luck. Back then, in many key primary races when a more experienced and more popular candidate in relation to the Democrat frontrunner squared off against a Trump-endorsed one for statewide offices (Senator for example), the Trumpist won and then proceeded to lose the general. The current Democrat majority in the Senate owes much to Trump’s endorsement of untested and “anti-establishment” candidates.
Einstein’s insanity still afflicts a majority of the party’s base. They are proving it weekly. A spate of polls in January 2023 exhibits the same tendency. Emerson, Morning Consult, and Harvard Harris show Trump besting DeSantis by 26, 19, and 20 points respectively for the nomination. Public opinion is fluid with polls providing only a snapshot, albeit a fuzzy one. Still, Republicans show that they can’t seem to kick their Trump fix.
Trump’s stature with the general electorate is more troubling. A deep dive into the Harris poll shows him besting Biden by 5 points. DeSantis does so by 3. Good news for Trump? Not so fast. Biden is standing atop a wrecked economy, border, culture, schools, and public safety – underwater by 14 in his favorables. Yet, Trump only looks marginally better than a wholly discredited Biden. Among possible Republican challengers, Trump shares negative likeability numbers (-3) with Ted Cruz (-2) and Mike Pompeo (-4). DeSantis beams brightly, up by 13 in the sunny uplands of likeability. Amazingly, Republicans in the poll still favored the one with the higher negatives, and therefore with weaker prospects. At this juncture, they are poised to do to America what Arizona and Pennsylvania Republicans did to their states. Knowingly choosing weakness might be an additional definition of insanity.
It won’t require much donor cash from the Democrats’ cadre of billionaire smear merchants to remind people of Trump’s vulgarity. The guy daily confirms the worst about him: occasionally cavorting with the lunatic fringe and incessant recourse to worn out narcissisms.
He opens his mouth and middle-class suburbanites cringe. The schtick leaves only the diehards who revel in politics as performance art – “owning the libs”, “Trump being Trump”. Thus, the Trump following is starting to resemble Grateful Dead groupies: bellicose, aging, and regularly depleted by admissions to nursing homes and funeral parlors. Don’t look here for a winning coalition.
With Democrats professing affection for Marxist folly (in CRT, systemic oppression, the too-numerous …phobias, eat the rich), and resorting to Tammany Hall electoral tactics, one has to wonder about their grip on sanity, or honesty, or at least good sense.
Republicans are proving themselves to be no better. Shockingly, many, maybe a majority, have come to fondle crassness and crudity as some kind of winner. Combine those bestialities with inexperience and naivete in candidate choice and we end up with Democrats getting a Mulligan (second chance) to make more hash of our lives. Republicans don’t have a grip on the first rule of politics: first, you’ve got to win elections. Republicans hitching their wagon to Trump, and candidates like him, will only guarantee another wild ride over the cliff.
We can’t even discuss these matters sanely, intelligently. Our vocabulary is riddled with empty generalities. Mostly they are straw-man figures of hate. A good portion of the chattering classes on the right lambast the “establishment” and “RHINOS” without much definition beyond somebody who might have governing experienced and lacks a hair-trigger Defcon 3 personality. Democrats are straitjacketed by a paranoia about a fascist under every rug, “systemic” racism when you can’t find real racism, Gaia-worship in climate-change mania, and an ever-expanding list of “protective classes” in need of their paternalistic care . . . at our expense. Listening to Tucker Carlson or Matt Gaetz on the right is as shrill to the ears as Biden, MSNBC, or AOC on the left. If they aren’t insane, why do they talk like it?
Whew, woe be to the American republic at this degenerate phase in its life cycle. We appear to be so insane.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Trio of polls show Trump clawing back momentum from DeSantis”, Zachary Basu, Axios, 1/24/23, at https://www.axios.com/2023/01/24/trump-desantis-polls-2024-presidential-election
* Harvard-Harris Poll, January 18-19, 2024, at https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/HHP_Jan2023_KeyResults.pdf
* NYT skepticism of mail-in voting can be found in “It Takes a Superspreader to Know a Superspreader: Whether Sturgis, BLM, or voting by mail, the media chooses narrative over facts every time.”, Gerald Baker, Wall Street Journal, 9/14/2020, at https://www.wsj.com/articles/it-takes-a-superspreader-to-know-a-superspreader-11600097758
* Additionally, NYT’s skepticism can be found here: “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises” at https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-by-mail-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html
* The differences between modern progressives and their 19th century cousins can be found here: “Modern Vs. 19th-Century Progressives”, Jason Merchey, 11/22/2017, at https://valuesofthewise.com/modern-vs-19th-century-progressives/
President Joe Biden delivers remarks on gun crime and his “Safer America Plan” during an event in Wilkes Barre, Pa., August 30, 2022. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
* Kabuki Theater: euphemism meaning posturing and diplomatic ritual to excess. Posturing can include effecting a stance in support of your party’s radicalism. Excessive diplomatic ritual can include today’s virtue signaling.
************
Why must science be littered with non-science and public discussions revel in incoherent banalities? Even in seemingly sensible write-ups that rely on scientific expertise, we’ll run into the occasional assertion that jumps the evidence and logic. Furthermore, public figures babble in a string of emotive, highly charged phrases without much support or reasoning that advance understanding. The drivel rears most prominently when talk strays to climate change and guns.
Science is inductive, the scientific method, evidence, empiricism, falsifiability. That isn’t true when it comes to climate change, formerly known by a host of other monikers. In an otherwise sane piece by Richard Luthy, Stanford prof of civil and environmental engineering, on how California could harness the recent storm runoff to address water needs, he polluted his sensible suggestion about using aquifers as cisterns to store the runoff with the hackneyed contention that man has made a shambles of the climate. It certainly gets the ruling donkey party off the hook for running the state into the ground . . . instead of the storm water.
Like its poorly maintained forests that erupt into historic conflagrations, rickety electricity grid, and an aging water system built for 10 million fewer people, the state’s dangerous water shortage is a consequence of a ruling ideological orthodoxy translated into policy that has run roughshod over the state for decades.
It’s not that California voters didn’t punch the ticket for billions for water projects. Prop 1 in 2014 set aside $7.1 billion, and Props 68 and 3 in 2018 added almost $13 billion. Out of the $20 billion, about a third went to “Habitat Restoration”, play money for the eco-zealots. “Water Infrastructure” and “Reservoir Storage” account for only 43% of the total.
Officials inspect Oroville Dam’s crippled spillway Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2017, in Oroville, Calif. California water authorities stopped the flow of water down the spillway, Monday, allowing workers to begin clearing out massive debris that’s blocking a hydroelectric plant from operating. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)
Californians thought that they were getting more water, but obviously aren’t. Where’s the new reservoirs, aqueducts, and recharge basins? It’s been eight years. I suspect that water projects face the same fate of any big construction in the state. They get strangled in the crib by California red tape and the delaying tactics of eco-activists (lawsuits, political skullduggery, etc.). Compounding the morass is the ideological affinity between the state’s bureaucratic minions and the zealots. So, in the end, you get the eco stuff, which is unchallenged, and not an ounce of additional water for you.
Don’t lay the problem at the feet of fossil fuels. Dry years should be expected in dry-summer climates. The Mediterranean climate that hovers over most of the state, with its dry-summer regime, only produces an annual precipitation average of 6-25 inches. The drier the climate, the more erratic is the precipitation. California has experienced 11 periods of drought since 1841, some lasting as long as seven years. At the time of the Middle Ages in Europe, California was mired in two long droughts, one lasted 220 years and the other 140. Dry-summer means a short window to get moisture, and if you don’t get it in those few months, you go without. Drought is a feature, not a stranger to the area, and not an effect of our love affair with the automobile, suburbia, and indoor lighting. The phenomena happened when only hunter-gatherers were around.
Tree rings show megadrought 1,200 years ago in California.
An engineer and scientist like Luthy should know better. The mention, as he does, of dry periods since 2000 is scant reason to let the Sacramento clown car off the hook. It’s even more of a scandal to science to use the incidents since 2000 as proof of climate change being the root of our evils. It’s hooey. The simple fact of the matter is that two-thirds of the water falls over the sparsely populated one-third of the state, in a region prone to drought since the end of the last ice age. Someone should take notice rather than foolishly run interference for the dolts in Sacramento and the state’s electorate.
The national electorate fairs no better sometimes. We’ve got a guy in the oval office who would be better off in a retirement home under close medical supervision. It must be admitted that Biden has an excuse – he’s old – but the under-50’s in the party sound no more intelligible. Mention “guns” and the limbic part of their brain takes over. Images of tv/movie shootouts immediately overwhelm what little they know on the subject. For Biden, as ossified in the brain as he is, he trots out one banality after another leaving the public in a state of bewilderment.
Charles C. W. Cooke writes of Biden’s use of trite rhetorical phrases when he talks about firearms. Biden trundles them out like Bill Clinton’s stock of pickup lines for seducing the hired help. Some of Biden’s juicy ones include “You can’t buy a cannon”, “Deer don’t wear Kevlar”, and my personal favorite, “If you want to take on the federal government, you need some F-15s, not an AR-15.” When in the history of our citizen republic is it proper for government to tell you what you need? Any government that can tell you what you need is one that treats its public as a collection of wooden puppets. Government as puppet master turns the popular sovereignty thing upside down.
The late George Orwell had some interesting things to say, per Cooke, about your alleged need for “some F-15s” to take on the federal government. For Orwell, government’s possession of sophisticated weaponry in relation to the citizen was a prerequisite for despotism: “Ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance.” Rifles and grenades are inherently democratic, and F-15s, aircraft carriers, and hypersonics are not. Biden’s formulation reduces the citizen to prostrate serfs, only getting the weapons that meet the approval of Biden’s commissars.
He completely misses the point of the Second Amendment. Cooke reminds us that the Constitution was made by a bunch of “insurrectionists” – people who birthed a country in armed revolt against a tyrannical government. The act of taking up arms against their government was memorialized in the Declaration of Independence: “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it . . . .” Thankfully, we aren’t there yet.
But lately, there’s been some extended eyebrow raising. Your government school indoctrinates your kids in neo-Marxist revolutionary dogmas; the attempt to establish censorship boards under the guise of “misinformation”; the attacks on the faithful for their refusal to violate their creeds when they refuse to kowtow to the government-approved zeitgeist; the loose talk among some of the powerful calling for gun confiscation; the refusal to enforce laws to protect people, property, and businesses; threats of taking away our gas stoves and cars and fuel under color of “saving the planet”; our children are prevented from receiving awards of excellence, such as National Merit Scholarships, because of government’s slavish devotion to neo-Marxist “equity”; our immigration laws are not enforced which tosses down the border exposing us to intensified villainy; our girls aren’t safe in their locker rooms, bathrooms, and in competitions; infanticide under the rhetorical rubric of “abortion”; child genital mutilation under “gender-affirming care” without parental knowledge and consent; and government turning a conspicuous blind eye as investment houses play revolutionary footsie (ESG) with my retirement. Did I miss anything?
Now Biden wants to tell me how many cartridges I can have in my gun. He forgets that the citizen’s right to firearms stems from a tradition that goes back to before the English Bill of Rights (1689). Those “Protestants” in the English Bill of Rights wanted their weapons to protect themselves from more than a burglar. Speaking of the limbic system of government apparatchiks, buried deep within it is the knowledge that the country’s citizens are armed thanks to the Second Amendment. American citizens aren’t prostrate serfs.
One of the key purposes of the Second Amendment is the right of the people to protect themselves not from government but the people in the government, the kind of people who would force citizens into acts that violate their faith, censor their speech, and make their life a living hell. Much of that government knavery is sanctioned carte blanche by climate change delirium. Combine the revolutionary dictums with Biden’s butchery of the country’s founding and we end up impoverished and manacled before our rulers.
It’s an insidious Kabuki Theater.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Rain finally came to California. We blew our chance to use it”, Richard G. Luthy, San Francisco Chronicle, 1/17/23, at https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Rain-came-to-California-we-blew-chance-to-use-it-17723529.php#:~:text=Rain%20finally%20came%20to%20California.%20We%20blew%20our,received.%20Patrick%20Tehan%20%2F%20Special%20to%20the%20Chronicle
* “How Much California Water Bond Money Is For Storage?”, Edward Ring, 8/9/2018, California Policy Center, at https://californiapolicycenter.org/how-much-california-water-bond-money-is-for-storage/
* “California drought: Past dry periods have lasted more than 200 years, scientists say”, The Mercury News, at https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/01/25/california-drought-past-dry-periods-have-lasted-more-than-200-years-scientists-say/
* “Severe Ancient Droughts: A Warning to California”, New York Times, 7/19/1994, at https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/19/science/severe-ancient-droughts-a-warning-to-california.html
* “Tree-Ring Study Reveals Historical Drought Record in Southern California”, 3/12/2018, California Dept. of Water Resources, at https://water.ca.gov/News/News-Releases/2018/March-18/Tree-Ring-Study-Reveals-Historical-Drought-Record-in-Southern-California
* “Biden’s Most Grotesque Gun-Control Argument”, Charles C.W. Cooke, National Review Online, 1/17/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/bidens-most-grotesque-gun-control-argument/
Governor Gavin Newsom gives the inaugural address after taking the oath of office at his inauguration ceremony at the Capitol Mall in Sacramento, Calif., January 6, 2023. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Gavin Newsom regaled a state capitol audience with an attempt to apply makeup to a hog in his January 6 inaugural address. The “lipstick on a pig” is more than a cliché. How best to describe a surreal bid to portray a long-running fiasco as a “personal embrace of freedom”? Will Swaim of the California Policy Center in his morning’s piece (1/15/23, see below) makes clear the state’s predicament to anyone with eyes to see. California is a mess, big time!
Heck, California lost a congressman and has lost population for the third year in a row, not just a decline in the rate of growth when compare to other states, but actually went negative. The state is shrinking. It’s been building for decades only to accelerate in numbers that resemble the crowds stampeding the southern border. Instead of heading north, they’re rushing east. Apparently, many of the state’s existing and former residents don’t like the smell of Newsom’s “personal embrace of freedom”. And the clowns that dominate the state government keep making the smell ever more pungent.
Swaim chronicles a growing list of recent executive and legislative perniciousness that is driving people pell-mell out the state, something Newsom blithely pretends isn’t happening. The compendium of noxiousness knows no bounds. Newsom berates “Red state politicians” (read DeSantis and Abbot) in his speech as possessing “authoritarian impulses” while he retains emergency powers, the go-to for history’s real Fascists. Hitler didn’t replace the Weimar Constitution but ruled throughout under its Article 48 emergency powers up to his last days in the bunker. Likewise, Newsom locked down the state and shuttered the schools longer than anywhere else, proving that when you scratch a progressive, a dogmatic authoritarian is exposed.
If you happen to be a doctor in the state, you might face prosecution under Newsom’s “misinformation” law since it is illegal to register qualms about the state’s medical proclamations because they are deified as the “contemporary scientific consensus”. Patriotism isn’t the last refuge of the scoundrel. “Contemporary scientific consensus” is! Past contemporary scientific consensuses included the luminiferous ether (space isn’t a vacuum), the heavenly vault (Copernicus’s ceiling beyond the solar system), Lamarckism (animal behavior determines mutations, not genetic diversity), etc. The concept of “scientific consensus” as determinant of truth is ludicrous, but the state’s doctors will have to acquiesce in silence to avoid Galileo’s fate before the Inquisition. Careerwise, it’s healthier to jump the Sierras seeking a post in a Boise hospital. This is California “freedom”? This is California’s new “liberty”?
For Copernicus, the solar system was the universe with the stars comprising a heavenly vault.
The state’s finances are drowning in unfunded mandates. Rather than address this beast, Newsom and his goofs in Sacramento have proposed to ladle a reparations payment of $223,000 for each member of a supportive voting block: descendants of African slaves. How do you determine the award winners? I’m sure that they’ll come up with some cockamamie formula – they’ll have to – but watch the prospect of six-figure money attract Caucasians, Asians, Hispanics, transplanted Jamaicans, anyone who’ll claim mysterious ancestors who suffered under Simon Legree’s lash, much like Elizabeth Warren seeking Native American affirmative action points or others probing a cut of the casino profits.
For the Sacramento clown car and its voter base, running the oppression lottery ranks higher than the provision of . . . water, without which we’d die after 3 days. No new damns, reservoirs, or aqueducts have been added since the state’s population was 23 million in 1980. It’s 39 million today (and shrinking). And that 100- to 40-year-old infrastructure wears out. No alternative sources such as desalinization are on the horizon. Last year, California’s bureaucratic behemoth, the Coastal Commission, rejected a proposed plant near Costa Mesa. No additional water for you, California. You have nothing to look forward to but draconian state rationing and brown lawns, withering crops, and 30-second showers every other day by state edict. Don’t expect the recent downpours to rescue you. The water is flushing out to the sea and not to your shower head.
Lake Oroville, the head of the State Water Project, in 2022 after years of drought.
The people of California asked for this. Somehow, the seed of Lefty aesthetics was planted deep under the popular cranium as far back as 1972 when Pop 20 was popularly approved to create the California Coastal Commission. The original purpose was to protect the coast from overdevelopment. It did, and is now busy dehydrating the 14 million people on the coastal plain. Obviously, it’s a blueprint for the rest of the state: blame some bogeyman – climate change – as Newsom did in his screed, and don’t do anything but rail against the people and shove them into electric cars hooked up to a grid that they are making unstable. Go figure.
In a certain sense, Californians, you are doing it to yourself. Lunacy is popular in the state.
If you’re a fast-food worker and think that hiking the minimum wage to $15.50/hour is such a great idea, think again. If you still have a job – a big “if” – you’ll notice fewer colleagues and more machines surrounding you. The order to boost the minimum wage is in reality the depress-labor-participation-and-increase-automation act since fewer people can be afforded and machines pay dividends far into the future when compared to the alternative — you!
An automated McDonalds in California
Owners of the outlets don’t fair any better. The governor, super-majorities of both legislative houses, and the state’s gargantuan bureaucracies want to impose unionization on you. Like doctors, get out! Help Boise grow.
Hey, truckers and owners of trucking firms, the guy and his minions are after you. Closed union shops will befall you the longer you stay. Great weather can’t compensate for decreasing competitiveness.
The state desires not to be a haven for jobs and business. Instead, it heartily seeks the moniker of sanctuary for abortionists and sexual mutilators of children. So radical are they about abortion that escaping the womb while still breathing won’t save the baby. The state considers the baby not be human, rather to be treated like the mother’s infected tonsils. Unlike the mother’s tonsils, however, the baby has its own DNA profile independent of the mother. It is not an organ of the mother, which is the first indication that the unborn young are to be treated differently than a hang nail. Such is the Clockwork Orange nature of the state (read A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess).
An ultrasound of a baby who survived an abortion pill.
The grotesqueries don’t end there. A child’s sexual organs are to be treated like pregnancy: an inconvenience to be surgically or pharmaceutically manipulated. If your kid happens to find their way to transgenderism’s underground railroad to California without your knowledge, the State of California protects the mutilator and the child’s wishes to be mutilated unbeknownst to you. It’s truly appalling what the state has become. It’s more than A Clockwork Orange. It’s the Island of Doctor Moreau (H.G. Wells author).
A scene from A Clockwork Orange, the movie.Scene from The Island of Doctor Moreau, the movie.
These are just some of the “successes” mentioned by the state’s gubernatorial Dr. Moreau. The assault on business continues unabated. The state’s malformations only get grander. To remain, at this point, comes close to quiet acquiescence.
I’m reminded of the silent German citizens who resided next to Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, or Buchenwald. Said nothing, did nothing, until Patton arrived at Buchenwald in March of 1945. Sickened and horrified, he ordered the surrounding residents out of their homes to view the horrors that were conducted in their name. Californians, look around you at the actions that are being taken in your name. Infanticidal abortion and child sexual mutilation are no small things.
German civilians parading past piles of the dead at Buchenwald in April 1945. Notice the woman shielding her eyes.
Many Californians regularly vote against this kind of thing. They are to be applauded, but they need more people like them at a time when many of the people who do have fled. That means a change of heart among a good portion of the Lefty voter base. And that is going to be hard, oh so very hard. Meanwhile, the state potentates will be applying lipstick on a pig. Nay, lipstick on a wild boar.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Newsom’s Hollow Ring of Freedom”, Will Swaim, National Review Online, 1/15/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/newsoms-hollow-ring-of-freedom/
* “California regulator rejects desalination plant despite historic drought”, Daniel Trotta, Reuters, 5/13/22, at https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-regulator-rejects-plan-desalination-plant-2022-05-13/
* “California’s Tyrannical Covid ‘Misinformation’ Law”, Pradheep J. Shanker, National Review Online, 10/6/22, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/californias-tyrannical-covid-misinformation-law/
* “Liberals Finally Admit That California Is Shrinking but Still Don’t Accept Blame”, Will Swaim, Nationa,l Review Online, 5/15/22, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/liberals-finally-admit-that-california-is-shrinking-but-still-dont-accept-blame/
* “The Buchenwald Concentration Camp: Patton’s Bastardly Discovery”, Flint Whitlock, Warfare History Network, Summer 2019, at https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/buchenwald-concentration-camp-general-pattons-bastardly-discovery/
Venkman (l) and Stantz after they were ejected from the university in “Ghostbusters”.
We should put a brake on our headlong rush to inflate our government. Imagine, we have a sizeable chunk of our electorate who actually believe that government can, and ought to, achieve equality of result in all aspects of life. California, have you looked at your roads, schools, crime-ridden communities, rampant vagrancy, and firestorms in your forests?
Just one look at our Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, should dispel any illusion of something called “government efficiency”. If there ever was an oxymoron, this is it. Look at the months it took for the city-owned Port of Los Angeles to whittle down the 100-ship backlog anchored over the horizon? Buttigieg passes the responsibility to the Labor Secretary to avert a rail strike stoppage to add to the misery at the ports. Then, along comes a winter storm and my grandson, like thousands of others across the country, faced massive cancellations, and stranded a thousand miles from home. Can this guy think out of the box, or is he simply a blockhead, one with pedigreed credentials?
Could Buttigieg survive in the real private sector? Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) faces the fear of having to earn of living outside the protective academic cocoon, and this after the three paranormal “scientists” were thrown out on their ear by the university administration. Stantz to Venkman: “You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.” Maybe our Secretary’s vision would be broadened by a job repairing train tracks once the rest of us are relieved of him.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg
Really, what did you expect? Mayor Pete’s overwhelming life experience was at a desk. From a bluestocking extended stay at elite schools to McKinsey to small-city mayor to ensign in the Navy to politics, the guy was far removed from the practical day-to-day consequences of his work. I can picture him in the emotional state of Dr. Stantz in 2024. Take a look.
(L to R) Main characters Stantz, Venkman, and Zeddemore in “Ghostbusters”.
Of course, I’m thinking of “Ghostbusters”, the movie. The story follows a group of academics in a semi-academic field – the paranormal – who don’t, and won’t, conform to the demands of the campus powers-that-be. They bust out on their own, form a business, and run into the widening tentacles of the eco-regulators in the person of Walter Peck, inspector of the EPA, third district of New York City. Please watch below.
Making the tale more relevant, Biden’s EPA is a clone of California and New York’s entangling web of eco-regulators. So filled with arrogance and hubris, they are busy jettisoning their middle class and a good portion of their economies to other states, just like Peter Venkman and company fled the campus and opened shop in the commercial district of 1980’s NYC. The script’s parallels with our times are nothing short of fascinating.
Back to the real, Mark Wahlberg has put his Los Angeles 12-bedroom, 20-bath mansion on the market and is decamping for Nevada. The reason is the same as the one for 300,000 other people who have bolted the state over the past couple of years. He’s an entrepreneur and family man and finds Nevada a better place for his economic health as Ghostbusters’ Venkman, Stantz, and Spengler would discover in fleeing the college.
Mark Wahlberg in April 2022
About the only occupational category whose growth prospects look sunny in California, for instance, is government regulator/inspector. The equation is simple: more laws, more regulations, more state government employees. Each year, the buffoons in the asylum formerly known as the state legislature add to the number of Pecks. One law taking affect this year would require more inspectors of private insurance to enforce a ban on co-pays for abortions. The state’s minimum wage is on legal auto-pilot and is scheduled to jump to $15.50/hour which means more investigators. A new law, effective Jan. 1, 2023, would add to the government workforce to compel compliance with the state’s newfound role of sanctuary for the mutilators of children in transgender medical procedures. New state land use laws will layer more complexity, and regulators, on an already suffocating building industry. In total, Newsom signed 997 new laws, most to take effect on Jan. 1 of this year.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom displays a state bill signed by him shielding abortion providers and volunteers, June 24, 2022.
Thus, California has turned itself into a sanctuary for immigration lawbreakers, child sexual mutilators, and the country’s budding Walter Pecks.
Kathy Hochul’s State of New York is California, Jr. How appropriate that the setting for “Ghostbusters” is New York City. It may as well be Los Angeles or the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area. These blue havens are awash in Peck-like busybodies. No wonder Texas and Florida added congressmen and the Bear Flag Republic and the Empire State lost some. Expect it to continue.
Walter Peck, the EPA guy, in “Ghostbusters”
RogerG
Read more here:
* Mark Wahlberg’s departure from California to Nevada: “Mark Wahlberg left California for Nevada to give his kids ‘a better life’”, Marianne Garvey, CNN, 10/13/22, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/entertainment/mark-wahlberg-california-nevada-move/index.html
* “New California Laws on Abortion, Jaywalking, Rap Lyrics”, AP, USN&WP, 12/30/22, at https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/california/articles/2022-12-30/new-california-laws-on-abortion-jaywalking-rap-lyrics
The late great Michael Crichton placed Jurassic Park on a tropical island, but CBS programming execs showed signs that they seized the thing and replanted it in 60 Minutes. As proof, the show welcomed the new year with the fossil discovery of . . . Paul Ehrlich. Yep, the Stanford prof and dinosaur is still alive and vigorous at age 90, alive enough to push his signature doomsaying, and 60 Minutes obliged by trotting him out (see below).
What’s with Stanford University? They seem to be a hotbed for the kind of kooks who are frocked in PhD’s and flock to the limelight like a moth to a porch light. It’s a tradition at Stanford. Remember William Shockley, the engineer and Nobel Prize-winning co-inventor of the transistor and inveterate purveyor of racialist mumbo jumbo? Well, move over Shockley to make room for Ehrlich and colleagues like Tony Barnosky. Science is their vocation and doom is their game. Chicken Little has nothing on these folks.
But they’re scientists, right? They ought to know, right? Yes, they ought to, but don’t. They represent a peculiar species of scientist who pushes science beyond its capacities and right into divination. They take a slice of present data, conjure a trend, and then laser-like project it into the future. No understanding of history; no understanding of mitigating circumstances. Based on the results, their soothsaying is no more accurate, maybe less so, than bibliomancy – the practice of closing one’s eyes, randomly opening a book to a page, and pointing the index finger to a line of verse to extract the future.
In the past, Ehrlich predicted an earth suffocating under the weight of 4 billion souls (earth’s population in the 1960’s), mass starvation, resource exhaustion, and ecological collapse. Now, the siren song is mass species extinction under 8 billion souls. His misses are many and include the famous 1980 lost bet with U. of Maryland economist Julian Simon. Ehrlich chose five industrial metals and bet that their price would be higher in ten years, expecting the subsequent shortages would lead to price increases. He lost. You see, Ehrlich probably wouldn’t make for a good economist. Ehrlich is blind to financier Henry Clews’s insight in 1918 when Clews wrote “the best cure for high prices is high prices”: prices go up, efficiencies increase, new sources discovered, and prices drop. For Ehrlich, mitigations be damned, adjustments be damned, and full speed to the apocalypse.
Economist Julian Simon
Human capital doesn’t exist in Ehrlich’s mind. We’re only animals eating up everything that we can get our hands on. Yet, human beings change their circumstances with innovations. As a consequence, more food is produced with greater efficiency, wealth increases, fertility declines, urbanization intensifies, and pressure on the wildlands decreases. So much for the alleged cataclysm of mass extinction. People like Ehrlich are chronically wrong.
Interestingly, the same 60 Minutes chart of past mass extinctions also shows a recovery afterwards. And the recovery was hundreds of thousands of years before Lenin’s invention of central planning. No need for technocrats like Ehrlich and Barnosky to herd the masses back into the Middle Ages to avoid these shamans’ predictions of doom.
Ehrlich and his sidekick Barnosky are programmed to fail in their prognostications. The problem is entrenched is their reliance on a loose extrapolation from a large area to a smaller one (see below). The data can also be fraught with hypotheticals in interpretation. Out of the conjury comes hair-on-fire Armageddons that turn out to be wrong. We are constantly afflicted with it in everything from plastics to the end of the world in climate change. We are kept on the edge of our seats in a pass-the-baton series of dooms.
60 Minutes’s resurrection of the fossil Ehrlich proves that hysteria is a natural feature of the human condition, and the barkers will always have a place at the table. Ironically, progressives pride themselves in their alleged immunity to it and see themselves at war with it, while they are preoccupied with it. They are the chief purveyors. Self-delusion has no bounds.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “60 Minutes Promotes Paul Ehrlich’s Failed Doomsaying One More Time”, Ronald Bailey, Reason, 1/3/23, at https://reason.com/2023/01/03/60-minutes-promotes-paul-ehrlichs-failed-doomsaying-one-more-time/
* “Paul Ehrlich: Wrong on 60 Minutes and for Almost 60 Years”, Peter Jacobsen, Foundation for Economic Education, 1/4/23, at https://fee.org/articles/paul-ehrlich-wrong-on-60-minutes-and-for-almost-60-years/
* The reason for the error in Ehrlich and Barnosky’s predictions can be understood by reading “Species–area relationships always overestimate extinction rates from habitat loss”, Fangliang He and Stephen P. Hubbell, Nature, 5/18/2011, at https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09985
Climate activists, and so-called “stakeholders”, 2019
Stakeholder: noun; a person with an interest or concern in something, especially a business. (Google)
***********
Cut to the chase, a “stakeholder” is someone with no direct invested risk (land, labor, capital) in an enterprise who wants the power to impose their political opinions on those that do. Stakeholder is a euphemism for those who want to screw up your investment for their benefit, however defined. “Stakeholder” is a buzzword, for instance, that strives to create the stampede to end the internal combustion engine (ICE) and push everyone into electric vehicles (ev’s).
I can’t, and we oughtn’t, leave this phenomenon of the ev alone.
As a 30-year veteran of the public schools, I’m well aware of “stakeholders”. Instead of the simple equation of producers (teachers, principals) and consumers (students, parents), we’ve got “stakeholders” to give us diversity/equity/inclusion (DEI), the principal tenets of critical race theory (CRT), “restorative justice” for classroom disruptors, gender-identity grooming, and the rest of the neo-socialistic chaos of the modern classroom. Student performance in the academic core craters but all of that is brushed aside by the education industry’s “stakeholders”. And you and your kids are the guinea pigs, not the principal “stakeholders” of the whole enterprise. For most of the “stakeholders” and their kids, elite prep schools await.
Now the jive is overtaking the relationship between car buyer and car producer. It works like this: create a mania (the role of “stakeholders”), politicize the mania (the role of “stakeholders”), the subsequent politicization transmutes into government mandates (jobs for “stakeholders”), and the rest of us get to live a life imposed by those far removed by from our needs and wants. This isn’t a free economy at work; it’s politics. “Stakeholders” are political activists!
And as is true with all ideological ninnies who want power to tell us how to live, we end up grappling with their crackpot choices. Classic example: the ev. And you know what? A “silent majority” in the auto industry c-suite in their quieter moments recognize the shambolic nature of the scam. Others in the know are beginning to write about it. The Wall Street Journal and National Review’s Andrew Stuttaford, among others, are part of a growing chorus writing about this shortsighted stampede to the ev.
Take the recent comments by the CEOs of Suzuki (Maruti Suzuki India, Ltd), Toyota, Nissan, and Stellantis (Fiat Chrysler/Peugeot) who have expressed misgivings. In the drumbeat of NFL game ads and the enthusiasm blanketing the whole gamut of media, you’d never know of their anxiety. Producers can’t completely ignore the manufactured mania, but amidst the monotonous din some drum up the courage to say the obvious: the “stakeholders” are looney.
It’s like the manufacturers being caught on an open mic. President Akio Toyoda of Toyota Motor Corp. was reported in The Wall Street Journal as being “among the auto industry’s silent majority in questioning whether electric vehicles should be pursued exclusively, comments that reflect a growing uneasiness about how quickly car companies can transition.” Oh, they can abruptly transition, but how much carnage would follow in its wake? Interesting question.
Akio Toyoda, CEO of Toyota Motor Corp.
In January 2022, the CEO of Stellantis was quoted as saying, “What is clear is that electrification [of cars] is a technology chosen by politicians [and their stakeholders], not by industry . . .” Further, according to him, it takes about 44,000 miles to begin to experience the carbon benefit of an ev over your ICE. By that time, your ev is half worn out. Then, what do you do with the toxic thing with its toxic batteries? Recycle? Hogwash. You can’t cost-effectively refurbish the things in the quantities that they will have to be produced. And you thought that your fossil-fuel contraption was an eco-disaster.
Carlos Tavares, CEO of Stellantis
Chairman R.C. Bhargava of Maruti Suzuki India Lt. was encapsulated in a Bloomberg report, “. . . the automaker that sells every other car on the nation’s roads [India], believes electric vehicles aren’t the answer to reducing carbon emissions in the world’s third-biggest releaser of greenhouse gases — at least not in the immediate future.” Yep, because millions of Indians in ev’s requires a steady flood of electricity from – you guessed it – coal and natural gas. See, the stakeholders’ central planners are all about the glitz in the flashy tv ads, like the stakeholders themselves, and are not into the grimy details. Don’t expect practical advice from political activists posing as “stakeholders”. They’ll get you into trouble.
Chairman R.C. Bhargava of Maruti Suzuki India Lt.
Nissan Chief Executive Uchida Makoto predicates more ev production on government help in the form of regulations to herd consumers into his products and cash payouts from taxpayers to his company’s pocket to make the things. It’s the same attitude that turned Detroit’s Big Three into basket cases in the 1970’s and required TARP in 2008. After WWII, Europe and Japan were wrecked and Detroit was riding high. Then, our competitors’ stone age ended in the 1960s and 70s and Detroit and its featherbedding unions turned to Uncle Sam for protection. Ironically, another European import, the Fascists’ idea of corporatism (the tripartite alliance of big corporations, big government, and big labor), entered the go-to manual for American policy makers and their “stakeholders”. It was already resplendent in FDR’s New Deal as a policy maker’s template.
Uchida Makoto, CEO of Nissan Motor Co.
American automakers are well-versed in taking hat in hand to Washington, D.C. Uchida likes the idea, and so does GM. GM pledges to go all electric by 2035. Of course, when things get sticky, they’ll expect Uncle Sam to continue to manufacture the market for them. In the throes of eco-stakeholders, DC will comply. In other words, we’re back to where we were with TARP . . . and a bunch of impractical four-wheelers crowding our driveways
We’ll then experience déjà vu for that fuel-injected ICE under a dusty cover in the garage. Remember the time when a fill-up took a couple of minutes, and the a/c didn’t cause a frantic search for an open charger in the 110-degree Texas/Mojave heat?
Mountain View, Ca., Teslas waiting in line for a charge.
You see, the electric vehicle has nothing to do with the creative freedom of entrepreneurs and voluntary interaction of free consumers and producers, the stuff of an economy in a free society. It’s a central planner’s dream. A central planner is a government employee. “Stakeholders” use political clout to make government empower central planners to make you live according to their lights. Out of the mire comes the ev and your struggles to get the kids to school, show up on time at work, and visit grandma for Thanksgiving. Of course, the “stakeholder” says that you don’t have to do any of that. The whole crusade is soft totalitarianism, soft because of the absence of a massive extra-legal secret police, but then again there’s the unceasing state indoctrination in teacher training and control of the curriculum in nearly every classroom K to grad school. It sounds to me like a totalitarian perpetual motion machine self-generating the support for power to the state’s “stakeholders”.
Interestingly, the problem is not with the electric vehicle itself. It’s the forcing of the things on the entire public. A golf cart made to look like your car is your future, whether you like it or not. The concerns of the auto industry’s execs stem from the exclusive focus on the ev. Hybrids, alternative fuels (biomass, compressed hydrogen, etc.), our trusty reduced-emissions ICE, and many others should also be part of the mix in a truly free society, one without the so-called “stakeholders” running the show. Yeah, it used to be called a free market.
The “stakeholders” aren’t into freedom, or a market with “free” – the autonomous soul – in front of it. They’re into making you think like them. Your life is to be rigged by them to be loyal clients of big-corp whose production decisions have been constricted by big-government under the influence of big-activists, aka “stakeholders”. Once government has a “stake” in electric vehicles, it’s going to make you buy them. Count on your state to resemble the hellscape of California.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Toyota Chief Says ‘Silent Majority’ Has Doubts About Pursuing Only EVs”, River Davis and Sean McLain, The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 18, 2022, at https://www.wsj.com/articles/toyota-president-says-silent-majority-has-doubts-about-pursuing-only-evs-11671372223
* “Electric Vehicles: Mr. Toyoda is Worried”, Andrew Stuttaford, National Review Online, Jan. 1, 2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/electric-vehicles-mr-toyoda-is-worried/
* “India’s Top Carmaker Bets on Hybrids Over EVs in Clean Shift”, Ragini Saxena, Bloomberg, Jan. 26, 2022, at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-26/india-s-top-carmaker-bets-on-hybrids-over-evs-in-clean-shift?cmpid=BBD062722_GREENDAILY&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=220627&utm_campaign=greendaily&sref=KgEBWdKh&leadSource=uverify%20wall
