It looks like two-thirds of the key elements for a woke Super Bowl are lined up: a woke team and a woke location (plus the racial anthem and BLM sloganeering on team attire). The NFC championship game will be represented by two urban dystopias in a dystopian state – San Francisco and Los Angeles in California. One woke city or another from a woke state will land in Inglewood, an enclave in one of the worst governed metropolitan areas in the worst governed state. Either the Bengals, Chiefs, or the Bills of the AFC will have to play in wokedom (Bills and Chiefs are tied as of this writing).
49ers celebrate after the winning field goal against the Packers, 1/22/22.Rams players celebrate after defeating the Buccaneers, 1/23/22.
That’s not the end of it. The geographic center of wokedom, the state of California, will get its grubby hands on a good chunk of the players’ earnings. Over half will be taken in income taxes once the tax-thirsty Sacramento goons with their highest state income tax in the nation thrust their mitts into each player’s till. It’d be better if the game was played in Texas or Florida. They don’t have a state income tax.
If you’re wondering how the scam works, California fine-tuned in 1991 the gambit of any professional athlete performing in the state to be subject to the state’s highest in the nation income tax. The state dubs the teams’ visits “duty days” which includes all days for the visit. The players for the Rams, 49ers, and Chargers really get whacked for at least 6 home games. All other teams face the ordeal at most only two times, absent any playoff games in the tax hellhole. The Woke Bowl in Inglewood may not be as joyous of an event if the players’ tax accountants run the numbers and get word to their clients.
As for me, the game is “Meh”. The Woke Bowl has little appeal. I’m not sure if I’ll watch it. It depends on what’s showing at the theater.
On the same link you’ll find this gem of a headline: “Christian plumber under fire for refusing same-sex fittings.” Parody is an excellent vehicle to unmask the ditzy pretensions of the Left. The whole belief system is a slipshod amalgam of demonstrably proven silliness.
Long live satire, an admirable tradition going back to Aristophanes of the 5th century BC. I just hope that the lefty die-hards who permeate our cultural commanding heights can take it as well as conservatives in the past century and a half.
At the top of our society is a Brahmin caste of an elect in possession of prestigious degrees. Their high status is drawn from their educations, but the claim can only have legitimacy if their many years of formal instruction truly enlightened. The evidence for that is weakening by the day. Instead, these paragons were marinated in a hot house of radical ideology. It was political activism masquerading as scholarship. Still, off they go to fill positions of power and influence in our culture. They’re everywhere.
Prime example: professional sports, or Big Sports, Inc. An aristocracy of athletic talent earning six figures, sometimes seven, eight, or nine, is managed by a metropolitan administrative apparatus of people marked by paper credentials. It’s an insular social caste far removed from the fan base that is not so well-endowed with these modern markers of prestige. The interests, tastes, social norms, and biases of this caste in the clouds escapes serious cross-examination due to uniform social reinforcement. Nearly everybody around them thinks the same way. It’s the dumb lacking any self-awareness of their dumbness.
How else can the sloganeering of campus neo-Marxists seep onto the helmets of athletes with astronomical salaries, the normal expression of patriotic unity in opening ceremonies be debased by overt racial anthems, and the change of venue of a long-scheduled all-star game after the wailing of small-minded activists be realized? Radicalism becomes fashionable when there’s no competing voices.
Nothing escapes infection including the on-field attire. The NFL has an approved list of slogans for their helmets that includes “Stop Hate”, “End Racism”, and “Black Lives Matter”, all of them taken from people who previously chanted “pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon”. We know from where the adoption of extremist slogans come. It comes from people whose agenda exceeds the simple and generic meaning of the words. “Stop Hate”? What hate? Do they mean the garden variety of hate exhibited in domestic abuse, or the kind shown by a thief pistol-whipping a store clerk for resisting, or a jihadist taking synagogue worshippers hostage? I think not. The whole “Stop Hate” gambit became a cause because a viral video of an abusive cop was exploited as evidence of a systemic racial hatred. In point of fact, it was a singular incident of a bad cop, not proof of the KKK in blue.
It says more about our time’s hyper-communicability of bad behavior to every corner of the planet, whereas before it would be put in the context of a local incident to be handled locally.
“End Racism”? What racism? Widespread racial animus shows up in no respectable poll. In fact, whatever it is, it’s declining and widely condemned as shameful. So, where’s the “racism” that needs to be “ended”? Instead, a revolutionary agenda is at work. Cutting to the quick, our new fashionable revolutionary cadre want to end “acting white”, the Enlightenment, rationality, math, the scientific method, the constitutional order, anything that they assert stands in the way perfect categorical equality. This is the “racism” that they’re trying to “end”. Of course, none of this is achievable without a totalitarian state. That’s how you really kill the Enlightenment. Mao or Che would be proud.
As for “Black Lives Matter”, it came into vogue as if people needed to be reminded of the obvious: black lives do matter. Though, try saying “All lives matter”, the essence of the Gospels, and see how quickly the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion Department and Twitter mob pounce. All lives don’t matter to the chic radicals because they are consumed by the oppressor/oppressed shtick of Karl Marx and his later kindred spirits, of which there are many in the country’s thousands of faculty lounges. Things don’t turn out equal in racial enumerations, so the egregious non sequitur “use racism to combat racism” – in the immortal words of the high priest of Anti-Racism, Ibram X. Kendi (Ibram Henry Rogers) – becomes the latest slogan to be turned into policy preference. Until the numbers come out equal, ALL lives don’t matter in this sewer of the mind.
Look to the knit caps worn by people on the sidelines. Prominently stitched is the word “Equity”. Just yesterday, “equity” was consonant with justice. Today, it’s consonant with racial vengeance. It’s back to Kendi’s bunk of “use racism to end racism”. That’s right, enact cash payouts for being black (reparations). Hiring, promotions, and admissions should place race as the topmost criteria. If one race shows up too prominently in the crime stats, redefine crime, end bail, and avoid prosecutions. If you haven’t enough miscreants of other racial categories in the prosecutor’s hopper, invent them in campaigns to ferret out “white supremacy” as the new “domestic terrorism”, but define it broadly so you can bag your political opponents.
Why is it that “equity” crusades all too often stray into the ugliest despotism?
We can’t even watch a football game without getting a steady diet of the politicized word salad. I can’t think of my San Francisco 49ers without Colin Kaepernick and the kneeling craze crossing my mind. Ditto for the San Francisco Giants. Taking it further, San Francisco is more aptly “San Fransicko” (Michael Schellenberger’s book of the same title). The city’s muddied reputation proceeds all. Ditto for California.
Most members of the San Francisco Giants kneel during a moment of silence prior to an opening day baseball game against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Thursday, July 23, 2020, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)Hunter Pence #8 of the San Francisco Giants looks on during batting practice before the game against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Dodger Stadium on July 23, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)
And corporate-boardroom NFL parades across our TV screens BLM/Antifa slogans. It’s just one big “Meh”. No enthusiasm and don’t care. I tried to watch 49ers/Cowboys and Rams/Cardinals but, once again, “Meh”. Time to switch to Netflix.
P.S.: The politicization of professional associations is next.
A U-Haul truck and other vehicles travel along Interstate 10 as wind turbines generate electricity at the San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm near Palm Springs, Calif., February 27, 2019. (photo: Robert Alexander)
As if any more needs to be said: U-Haul ran out of rental moving trucks in California in 2021. In its annual report the company stated, “. . . U-Haul simply ran out of inventory to meet customer demand for outbound equipment.” That’s report-speak for, “We couldn’t keep up with the demand to get out.” (Read the report here)
“To help meet the demand of millions of people desperately trying to escape the dark, ravaged wasteland of California, U-Haul is introducing a new product in its moving van line-up: the War Rig. These weaponized, armored moving vehicles will ensure you and your belongings stay safe during the long and perilous journey out of the state.” (Source: Babylon Bee)
Where could the refugees be headed? Top of the list is Texas, followed by Florida, then by Tennessee, and then South Carolina and Arizona. Not a blue state in the bunch. The U-Hauls seem to be following Elon Musk and Zuckerberg’s Meta (parent company of Facebook, et al), who is filling a new office tower in downtown Austin.
I guess it’s true. Make life miserable for people and they leave. Throughout history, it’s the same story. A third of Cuba lives in south Florida. Some people are drawn to leave their homeland for a fatter paycheck; others are forced to flee. In the case of California, the migrants must feel compelled to jump ship. Wonderful weather and natural beauty are no compensation for filth, crime, unaffordable housing, blackouts, schools as Maoist indoctrination centers, and regulations, diktats, and taxes up the gazoo.
Check out this latest California outrage: a sea of trash from the looting of trains as they pass through Los Angeles.
And now the poor souls can’t lay their hands on a rental truck. That doesn’t mean that people won’t still flee. We might be viewing an updated version of the 1930’s Okie migration in reverse: eastbound roads and interstates clogged with Priuses with mattresses on top. What’s next, labor camps in U-Haul’s top 5 destinations?
“Freedom is not simply the right of intellectuals to circulate their merchandise. It is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their ‘betters’.” Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell
Sowell’s truism about freedom came to mind as more gibberish spewed from the mind of the self-styled Wise Latina on the Supreme Court, justice Sonia Sotomayor. In oral arguments in the Biden vaccine mandate case, she hysterically proclaimed, “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.” First thing, it’s not true! 4 Pinocchios! Next, public imminences can’t be trusted any longer. And, really, should they ever have been?
Justice Sonia Sotomayor
The latest plague apocalypse to go viral is Omicron. It’s certainly launching into our society. It may have launched into me. I can’t tell – wasn’t tested – but it turned out to be a 4-day flu. Tested or not, it was the flu whether as the ominous Omicron or not – a virus by any other name. Earlier in 2020, I had a brief bout with first-wave COVID and it was 2 days one-and-done. Both were characterized by a low-grade fever and fatigue and that’s it. The death cart making its regular rounds didn’t come knocking and I quickly resumed my domestic role as regular irritant to my wife.
According to the over-billed “experts”, I’ve got 2 strikes against me: I’m 69 and voted for Trump. Yet, no comorbidities, not obese, regular exercise, daily vitamin and mineral supplements, and no vices (other than popcorn and “The Lord of the Rings”) may have worked to counteract the age factor. As for the vote, sorry Rachel Maddow, I won’t do anything about it since I can’t endorse a doddering puppet of left-wing lunatics. That “comorbidity” stays.
Our time is not a period of calm reason. Wannabe totalitarians are out to make everyone, literally everyone, conform to their vision of vaccinations, endless boosters, Zoom school for the kids, and masks. These blinkered despots can’t bring themselves to even mention natural immunity and treatments. I’m up-armored by nature against the COVIDs going back to MERS and SARS. Vaccines are obviously part of the public health arsenal, not the entirety of it. Not a peep, though, from Walensky and company and The Big Wheels about natural immunity, monoclonal antibodies, and antivirals. When asked, they act like the kid in the cafeteria buffet line who can’t bring himself to request the broccoli in spite of mom’s insistence before leaving for school.
Instead, we’ve got a truncated public interplay between Vaccine/Vaccine/Vaccine/… on one side and on the other Vaccine/Microchip/One World Order by the people who gave us Q Anon and Death Rays from Space during fire season. Why can’t vaccines be an important element in a strategy without it being the focus of all our efforts? The nutter right, you can drop the resurgent John Bircherism anytime.
Remember the scandal of the East German doping (male hormones) of their female swimmers that ran from the 1970’s into the 1980’s and included the 1976 Montreal Olympics (read about it here)? Our girls (XX chromosomes) had to unknowingly compete against masculinized girls (still XX chromosomes) and few knew it, not even some of the East German girls. Later, these same German girls would suffer mental and physical damage, and later to give birth to babies with serious defects.
As for the Americans, some in the press at the time referred to them as “Ugly Americans” for their justifiable complaints. American Shirley Babashoff, slated to be the next Mark Spitz, wound up with one gold and a bunch of second place finishes in the ’76 Games. She refused to remain silent and sounded the alarm but was dismissed as “Surly Shirley”. She was right, she had courage, she was vilified, and it took 31 years (2007) for the scandal’s cover to be blown for all to see.
Shirley Babashoff (r) and a portion of the 1976 US Olympic women’s swim team.
Check out these understandable reactions by other members of the ’76 team:
“To be frank, I don’t think we should look like men.”
“I wouldn’t want to walk around the neighborhood looking like a guy.”
“That’s not the way God created us to be like that (looking like DDR Swimmers).”
That was then; this is now. Circa 2022 we have gone full circle, and then some. Today, those East Germans would be heralded as trans pioneers. We have men wanting to women and women wanting to be men, jumbled with the many whose psyche match their chromosomes, competing in women’s sports . . . with the full connivance of the so-called adults in the room. Chic ideologies have redefined scandal as liberation, and created a massive class of new victims whose sole characteristic is their satisfaction with God’s endowment. What chaos, what a mess.
Transgender Lia Thomas (MTF) recently hit the airwaves and pool at the U. of Penn. as a sensation setting pool, program, and meet records 38 seconds ahead of a real deal teammate. Then in a Saturday meet, lo and behold, Lia ran into transgender Iszac Henig (FTM) – who underwent a double mastectomy – who bested Lia twice. There you have it: female sports are to be dominated by people disenchanted with mother nature. It’s a competition among the disgruntled, leaving behind the long hours of training and coaching for the well-adjusted and contented girl (XX chromosome), the kind of girl that you as a boy (XY chromosome) wouldn’t mind taking home to mother (also XX chromosome). The other two would be difficult to explain.
Lia Thomas, centerIszac Henig
The “adults” who sanctioned this biological miasma are – you may have guessed it – the NCAA. In a policy that might have been written by a paid lobbyist or Ivy League lawyer, trans female athletes mustn’t compete on the women’s team until after one year of “testosterone suppression treatment”. Not a word about bone density, muscle mass, or anything else is mentioned. Much of the rest of their physical accoutrement in the men’s league follows them into the women’s pool.
Here’s the kicker. The policy is justified by the quality of reasoning that you’d expect from a brainwashed sophomore Anthropology major writing on systemic phobias of western civilization. Here it goes, brace yourself:
“. . . many people may have a stereotype that all transgender women are unusually tall and have large bones and muscles. But that is not true. . . . The assumption that all male-bodied people are taller, stronger, and more highly skilled in a sport than all female-bodied people is not accurate.”
Has anyone informed the geniuses at NCAA headquarters that the subject in question is not whether tall women or small men exist. That’s wholly irrelevant. At the level of elite competition in the vast majority of sports, men are taller, bulkier, faster, and stronger than women. The statement has no credible place in any policy defense, let alone one that seeks to condone the competition of taller, bulkier, faster, and stronger women-with-a-Y-chromosome with women limited to the fetal arrangement. It’s one of the goofiest things ever put to paper.
Girls – Iszac HenigBoys – Lia Thomas
How can women’s sports survive this mounting chaos over who’s a woman? Don’t look to bureaucrats of the NCAA for enlightenment. They spread the chaos by transmitting the confusion. The answer lies with us, the fans of girls’ sports. We must demand an end to the nonsense. Chromosomes are the ultimate determinant, not surgeries, injections, or counseling. Our pools, meets, and locker rooms must be made as safe for our girls and women (XX chromosome) as anywhere else.
The cartoon below captures the delirium of our times. It’s safetyism run amok. The obsessive/compulsive nature of safety-at-all-costs is destroying us.
It took a virus to expose this latest contagion (pun intended) of the mind. We’ve lost all sense of balance. Safety-alone in all instances is as silly as having to wear a seat belt after a bad sunburn in a mad rush to the hospital for my wife to deliver our baby. No weighing of cost and benefit, comfort and discomfort, likes and dislikes, and personal assessment of risk. Somebody else – the government or the population of ninnies – claims the power to force us into their phobias.
If you really want to know the reason for the broad loss of credibility on the part of government-deputized “experts”, just look at their abundantly displayed lack of recognition of any other consideration other than the factoids of their narrow specialty. Fauci and Walensky wail about infections in a carpet-bombing of all the other things that make us human. Close the schools or open them with the kids isolated in pods, masks, plexiglass, and jabs; the germophobes screaming at other airline passengers for their refusal to continue suffocating behind a mask while eating; politicians ordering universal vaccination when the vaccine neither prevents additional infection nor its transmission; make it as difficult as possible for anyone to earn a living; prevent us as from seeking fellowship in worship; and effectually banish two thousand years of Christmas. Shocking and amazing.
The vaccines armor the many from hospitalization, but they can only do so much. They are not the “philosopher’s stone” of immunology. In fact, the unvaccinated 18 to 29 cohort run about the same risk as the vaccinated 50 to 64 according to OSHA’s own assessment (see https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/scotus-should-nix-bidens-vaccine-mandates/).
All the advice for sensible policy making isn’t limited to the kind coming out of a room full of lab coats. Their contributions are necessary but not sufficient. Necessary/sufficient isn’t a cliché. It’s a fact! I only wish politicians weren’t so eager to use the factoids of science as arrows in their political quiver. They end up besmirching themselves and science.
USC safeties coach Craig Naivar, center, runs players through drills during spring 2020 practice at USC. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)
Like a homeowner noticing termite shavings on the floor at the bottom of a wall, the urban folk of the metropolitan west coast might be awakening to the manufactured decay that is beginning to overtake them. The rot is “manufactured” (man-created) because of the bewildering decisions by public officials of their own choosing. Schools aren’t preparing the young for adulthood but are fermenting as radical indoctrination centers. The urban public square is littered with the homeless, the psychotic, needles and feces, roving gangs of thieves and extremist goons, boarded up store fronts, and no one in office seems to care, at least care enough to do anything about it, other than make it worse.
Homeless encampment in Portland in 2016.
The dégringolade (decline) ranges up and down the coastal plain. Nearly 60% of United Van Lines’s California hauls in 2021 were outbound, and it’s a poor metric due to its high cost. The more affordable U-Haul has become less affordable – 4 times the price for inboud – when trying to load up and skedaddle the Bear Flag Republic. Portlanders have acquired an affection for Boise, Idaho, according to UVL and Business Insider. The situation is summed up quite nicely by Greg Goodman, the co-president of the Portland Downtown Development Group: “If you know a retail or office broker, give them a call and ask them how many clients they have are trying to leave.” The exodus is palpable wherever progressivism reigns.
The east coast fares even worse by United’s numbers. New Jersey (69.5%) and New York (67%) rank #1 and #2 for the Great Migration out.
Is the decline and flight observable in organized athletic prowess? Is this trait a new canary in the coal mine alongside UVL and U-Haul numbers? As of now, in 2021/22, the PAC-12 is winless in bowl games for the second straight year. The last best hope for the conference, Utah, went down to Ohio State in the Rose Bowl on a last second field goal. Even the fact that Utah came close could be an additional sign of the new dynamism of people fleeing the coastal blight. The PAC-12 might have to switch its status ranking with the Mid-Atlantic Conference. It’s the “Conference of Champions” for volleyball or softball, but apparently not for anything exuding testosterone, which ironically is then forced to subsidize the former two.
UCLA lost its chance to break the losing streak by cancelling its appearance in the Sun Bowl after an outbreak of COVID on the team. COVID still raked the team after some of the most heavy-handed, authoritarian edicts by California’s recall-surviving governor and some of the most fear-paralyzed school administrations in the country. Remember “bend the curve” and “stop the spread”? The only thing “bent” or “stopped” was the hopes and dreams of the young men in shoulder pads. Try that as a recruitment angle.
Last year’s performance, the notorious year of COVID, was explained away, like the election laws, as a byproduct of the pandemic. Once again, nothing the prelates of the conference did changed a thing in regards to the rampage of the disease. It mutated and the crisis-too-good-to-waste registered as a wild-eyed panic to end athletic futures. Such overwrought reactions have a home in the same places that sanction violence and filth.
Another little-noticed and unremarked factoid is the appearance of four-star recruits from California showing up on the team rosters in the real power conferences. I tuned into the Georgia/Michigan game in time to watch Georgia’s tight end, Bowers, from northern California, receive a touchdown pass. Bryce Young, Alabama’s QB, and alumni of Mater Dei in Los Angeles, earned a 106 quarterback rating against Cincinnati. Ohio State/Utah was a battle between two California quarterbacks: Stroud and Rising. Are these mere anecdotes or a trend that has many similarities to prior demographic shifts in the country’s history?
Alabama’s Bryce Young (Photo by Ron Jenkins/Getty Images)Utah’s Cameron RisingOhio State’s C.J. StroudGeorgia’s Brock Bowers
California’s loss of one congressional seat after the last census understates the seriousness of its self-immolation. The state made strenuous efforts to hide the flight of its middle class and businesses with campaigns to count every soul, living and non-living and legal and illegal. But everyone knows what is happening, and it’s now appearing on the playing fields.
The “woke” on an American college campus.Chinese students inspired by Mao for a Cultural Revolution.
Mao Zedong wrote the playbook that he cast as a Cultural Revolution: animate the young, unleash them on the seasoned and fortunate, and coopt many institutions to make the offensive appear as an irresistible force. Then watch the carnage, but refashion it as the necessary cleansing of the corruptions from the social body.
Sound familiar? If not, it should. Quiet and not so quiet censorship abounds in today’s USA in the imposition of neo-Marxist critical theory on the young in their schools, cancellation of talks and lectures under threat of youthful mobs and their adult abettors, acts of public shaming and ritual self-abasement of the recalcitrant, and media channels populated with the mob’s zealots enforcing their own bans on thought. Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind in 1987 warned of higher ed’s ubiquitous indoctrination that is the enemy of free inquiry. It has only gotten worse since his time. Alas, it has come to pass on our streets, campuses, in school curricula, and in the corporate boardroom and lunchroom.
Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago, etc.
We let it happen through a blind deference to the gatekeepers of degrees and our broad acceptance, in essence, of the schools as glorified babysitters. We thought that all would be well if we turned over our kids to the clutches of indoctrinated and self-interested public employees, and our young reached early adulthood with a BA, any BA. Well, no, all is not well. The paper certificates didn’t produce an informed and wise citizenry and many of our private and public institutions have become the vanguard, the enforcers, of this revolution of the closed-minded.
Examples abound. Google banned money-making on its YouTube platform if it isn’t in accord with the “scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change”. That’s right, you can only enrich your bank account if you peddle the “consensus”, no matter its dubiousness. The “consensus” is a euphemism for a departure from the scientific method and into a coerced orthodoxy. It’s an announcement from on high that such and such is proper thought, something familiar to anyone brought before Stalin’s show trials, employed in Orwell’s Ministries of Truth and Love, or the papal Inquisition of the Renaissance. Amazing, progressives – by definition a group who loudly proclaims the past is dead – look to the past for their inspiration.
Who can forget AG Garland’s new role as thought policeman extraordinaire? A political constituency – namely, the insular and comfy special interests who’ve long dominated your child’s school – feels imperiled and our AG rides to the rescue by promising to chill the rancor and speech at school board meetings with FBI investigations. No one need be arrested to send angry parents home to anxiously await the dreaded late-night knock at the door. Censorship achieved by a threat, Fidel style.
Then there’s this little tidbit. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH, or more accurately “warpath”) protested Abigail Shrier’s interview of a clinical psychologist and vaginoplasty surgeon who question the use of puberty blockers in children in Common Sense with Bari Weiss. Such discussions according to “warpath” should be closeted in unread journals and not be exposed to a broader audience, lest we be made aware that there are many debatable contentions in transgenderism. The New York Times chimes in with its own silencing by not publishing these types of op-eds because they are “outside our coverage priorities right now”. This is how a “consensus” is built, in the dark of night.
Modern academia is a rich source of “consensus” building through censorship and thought control. Dorian Abbot of the University of Chicago, eminent professor of geophysical sciences, was invited to speak at MIT, then disinvited after protests by the Red Guards of critical theory because he criticized the new racialism and favored “Merit, Fairness, and Equality”. Unsurprisingly, the school relented to the mob. Professor Robert P. George of Princeton got wind of the fracas at MIT and extended an invitation to Abbot. The talk was held at Princeton on the same day. Thank God that the spirit of inquiry and debate still flickers in some little precincts of the lands of ivy-covered halls.
More from the college funhouse. Bright Shen of the University of Michigan, a man who lived through Mao’s original Cultural Revolution, faced our own Red Guards of denunciation when he showed Shakespeare’s Othello, Laurence Olivier starring in blackface. The hyper-politicized sensitivities of the childish goons shrieked, Shen experienced the ritual self-abasement, and he no longer teaches his music course turning Othello into an opera.
This kind of thing can only survive in the darkness of obscurity. Sunshine, after all, is a disinfectant.
Mao, sadly, is an inspiration for far too many of the young. It’s more proof that we’ve failed to transmit our civilization’s legacy to our children. We have willingly, or unwillingly, mostly by ignorance, let the minds of our children get away from us. We are reaping the consequences of the many little Maos in our midst.
EV: noun; abr.; electric vehicle.
Frivolity: noun; acting in a way that is silly or wasteful.
Fiat: noun; an arbitrary order. (arbitrary: based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system)
****************
Put the three words together: Turning all American car owners into EV proprietors in the span of 5-10 years by government fiat is an exercise in frivolity, and ruinous in the end.
Indeed, the whole campaign is arbitrary (fiat), totally lacking in sound reasoning. The end state of having all Americans junk their fully functional family sedans, minivans, and SUVs would turn upside down wholesale patterns of living just to satisfy a splinter group’s fantasy.
What prompted this observation? AAA’s “Via” magazine and its feature article, “Going the Distance: Tips and tricks from electric vehicle owners” (Nov./Dec. 2021). The splinter group in question is abundantly replicated in the article. The three profiled EV owners are full California urbanistas from the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California (Santa Rosa, Santa Clara, Irvine area). All are degreed in environmental studies, the Humanities, or digital tech. All are cloistered urbanites who visit rental properties, coastal B-and-B’s, the arts-and-crafts circuit, and venture into the forests for the snap visit to mother nature. Trip distances are short or limited in routes.
In other words, they represent the left coast fringe – socially, economically, and politically. These are the type of people who reflect the lives and norms of those who pursue an existence in rather exclusive suburban ranch houses, gentrified flats, landscaped yards, and aren’t likely to get their hands dirty working wrenches and equipment. The supporting cast of workers for this insular urban lifestyle has a separate life that is a world apart. Yet, the white collars want to force their preferences on everyone, no matter our circumstances.
Young people walking on top of canal boat
As such, one of the things that Biden brought to the White House was California, meaning its progressive personnel and monoculture. And that means the state’s eco-looniness. The EV-love in the administration’s ukases, like much that gurgles out of the left coast’s sunshine state, lacks any sound rationale, either environmental or economic.
The environmental justification is the easiest to dispense with. The ol’ bugaboo of climate change – as bellowed by that great thinker of our times, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg – is infected with leaps of faith and logic. The reality is that the atmosphere is too voluminous, its content too varied, and influences too multitudinous to justify Greta’s tantrum (Sept. 2021), “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood!” That should give you a flavor of the hysteria to force you out of your fully functional and efficient Chevy Suburban.
Greta Thunberg during her Zoomed UN speech on September 23, 2019.
What good is accomplished, though, by banishing the $40,000 investment in fuel, oil, metal, plastic, chips, and rubber in your garage, the euthanization of 2 million jobs in the fuel industry, and scotching the great advances in emissions and fuel efficiency down to the present? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Surely, Greta and her handlers in Big Environmentalism must realize that they have no street cred in Beijing and New Delhi – nearly 3 billion people combined and no desire to return to living in the dirt. Stack up their car fleets with ours. You would be replacing the cleaner things in our country with dirty cars, dirty power plants, and dirty air among these teeming hordes outside the developed world. Sorry, Greta, you’re nuts.
In the end, the amount of energy-trapping gases would scarcely budge, if not increase as capital seeking its highest rate of return rushes away from us to refuges of greater opportunity in places hungry to enjoy air conditioning. Dirty expands, clean shrinks. Punishing the clean is not a winning strategy.
So, why the headlong rush to the EV? Climate change doesn’t work for this lifestyle coup. Fact is, the campaign is a jumble of fantasies, fantasies about windmills, solar panels, and EVs. Greta’s fantasy sounds so simple. . . to the simple-minded.
The simple fact is that the EV is no practical substitute for the internal combustion engine. The infrastructure – repairmen, convenient and numerous charging stations, affordable parts and abundant retail outlets – will take multiple decades to arise. But the zealots are impatient: remember, 5-10 years to bankrupt you and the millions employed in keeping the existing fleet on the road. It’s reminiscent of the Stalin’s dekulakization campaign of the 1930’s. Eager to create forthwith Marx’s vision of the communal ideal, Stalin ordered (by fiat) the huge number of peasants in the Russian population – 82% of the total population – to give up their property and many of their belongings and herd them onto huge collective farms. The subsequent upheaval led to massive starvation and a huge expansion of concentration camps. An epidemic of death was inflicted on the bread basket of Russia. Similarly, lifestyle choices outsourced to the federal apparatchiks of Build Back Better will fare no better than Stalin’s Five-Year Plans.
Scenes from the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of 1932-3.
Why should the infantile ramblings of Greta and The Squad have greater weight than my own? Their dream has incompatible elements. Hitched to universal EV ownership is windmills, solar panels, and any energy scheme conjured in a gentrified Brooklyn flat. Sadly, the lab rats who are Californians show us the results. Blackouts and the high cost of energy are the outcomes. So, just as we are bribed and whipped into EV’s, they are making the grid more expensive and unstable. Picture this: you rush out to get to work and find your Nissan Leaf with too little juice to make it to the office or get the kids to school. Blackouts just blacked out your car.
Okay, you and your kids can always Zoom . . . if the lights come back on. The pandemic lockdowns showed how that worked. More than the grid was destabilized.
As for that holiday visit to grandma’s house of 300 miles one way? Think about it, 250 miles is the likely limit before your wheels come to a dead stop. Of course, you know that ahead of time. If the grid hasn’t gone dark and you have the 6-8 hours to charge the thing before departure, you still have to restrict your route to the availability of chargers. Let’s just hope that you chose right and the plug-ins are operational. If not, expect a motel expense and an overnight layover.
If something mechanically should go awry, well, you’re stuck. The ubiquitous shade tree mechanic or guy who built a top fuel dragster won’t be of any help. The ready availability of parts and community knowledge is decades into the future. Hope that the diesel bus or train stops at the nearby hamlet.
Tesla Model S battery pack
If, by chance, you get the thing to the dealership, they might discover that the huge lithium battery pack is plated over and in need of replacement, a $20,000 part. The battery’s life was apparently cut short by all the 30-minute fast charging, a necessary activity due to much long-distance commuting or forgetting to plug the thing for the safer 6-8 hours of overnight charging. The 10-year lifespan was turned into 6. Normally, you’ll notice the deterioration in shorter operational distances as you begin to panic in the desperate search for a charge in the many and expanding derelict urban districts along the way. Maybe the thought of being held up at gunpoint disabuses you of that short excursion to Walmart.
Chances are, if you’re so into EV’s, you’re also apoplectic about open pit mines and polluted air and water, just the type of thing that inhabits third world kleptocracies, Putin’s Russia, and Xi’s China. That’s where we find the rare earth minerals for the batteries of your feel-good EV; however, rest assured that your EV won’t be responsible for inundating the Obama estate on Martha’s Vineyard. Everyone else in the mass of humanity will, thanks to your insatiable appetite for lithium batteries.
The utopian rush to the EV has consequences, many of them not pleasant. It’s what happens when adults turn over governance to childish and monomaniacal fanatics. Their tunnel vision becomes our tunnel vision, their leaps of logic become our leaps of logic. It’s a lesson that the editors of AAA’s “Via” magazine – Whitney Phaneuf, Katie Henry, Mandy Ferreira, and Rebecca Smith Hurd – should take to heart before they fob off on us their niche proclivities.
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Watch a Norwegian Tesla owner destroy his Model S because of the prohibitive $22,000 cost to replace the car’s battery pack.
