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The Insanity of Our Moment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yep, this is our moment of insanity.

RogerG

Sources:

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

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

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

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Tucker Carlson, My Tom Hayden Memorial Emissary Award Winner

 

Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda at news conference after their infamous visit to North Vietnam in 1972
Vintage Photographs of Jane Fonda's Trip to North Vietnam in 1972, Which Earned Her the Nickname ...
Jane Fonda in the seat of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, the ones that were killing American pilots.
Tucker Carlson confirms he's interviewing Putin in Moscow
Tucker Carlson recently in Moscow to perform the same service for Putin

Tom Hayden, premiere anti-Vietnam War activist, who declared “We refuse to be anti-Communist”, made multiple trips to North Vietnam from 1965 to 1974, including a 1972 one with his future wife, Jane Fonda, whitewashing the communist Hanoi regime.  Who elected him to conduct our country’s foreign relations?  The nerve of the guy.  The American people already elected other people to do it.  He’s of the Left, and today on the Right we have Tucker Carlson.  In the Hayden tradition of pasting happy face on brutal and totalitarian thuggeries, Carlson goes to Russia and Vladimir Putin to normalize his tyranny, whether intended or not.

Watch below Tucker’s piece about his tour of the Kiyevskaya metro station in Moscow, Russia.  Watch him gush about its orderliness and cleanliness.  In case you may have missed it, spotless public spaces are a common feature of totalitarianism from Der Fuhrer to the communist Kim dynasty of North Korea.  Tucker, it’s hardly a selling point, unless you’re quick to sacrifice liberty for sanitized public spaces.

Throughout his interview with Putin, the despot betrayed his basic Marxist outlook, a product of indoctrination in the USSR from child to career KGB officer.  The Soviet Union hasn’t gone away; it’s only gone through a name change.  And you can see the shadow of the sinister past in the station.

The Kiyevskaya metro station is named after Kiyev, or the anglicized “Kiev”.  Yes, that Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.  As this station went up in the 1930s, Stalin was murdering and starving 10 million people or so, mostly in the Ukraine, in something called the Holodomor.  The murals festooning the station’s wall are propaganda images of happy peasants at work on their government-imposed communes, or collective farms (kolkhozes).  The reality was anything but joyous.

Stalin ordered industrialization, even the industrialization of agriculture, for the country.  Of course, the farmers liked their land, farms, animals, and equipment, and resistance fomented as their property was seized and they were herded onto collective farms or work camps (gulags), losing everything. Even the seed for next year’s crop which, like all the grain, was sold to purchase factory equipment. No more crop next year.  The communes were as great a disaster as the factories.  Famine spread and was exploited by the big man and his politburo to suppress Ukrainian nationalism.  The gulags proliferated and became an archipelago of gulags in Solzhenitsyn’s famous words.  The murals in the metro were designed to hide the horrors.  They were totalitarianism in art.

Spotlessness in public appearances, absolute hygienic orderliness, could be a similar sign of complete tyranny.  To keep the spaces clear of rubbish and ugliness, the Putin claque utilizes an import from the CCP: AI facial recognition tech tied to thousands of cameras.  But that’s not the only purpose of it.  Putin’s henchmen use it to pick up dissenters, dissidents, and political opponents.  Many a free thinker has been spirited away into Putin’s archipelago, many never to be heard from again.

Friday, another one of the greats of Russian free thought, Alexei Navalny, died in custody.  He joins many others in the grave.  Life imitates art, Orwell’s Big Brother.  Yep, Tucker, the last vestiges of freedom are thrown into the trash bin along with the other refuse.  But Russia has clean subways.

And cheaper food prices, cheaper for a fat and sassy westerner like Tucker as he was guided into a Moscow grocery store (see #4 below).  Everything is cheaper in the country, including the labor, which explains the lower prices. Lower incomes depress prices.  In 1930s America, during The Great Depression, the time was a buyer’s paradise . . . if you had a steady job.  The average monthly income in Russia is $787, as opposed to the U.S. monthly median of $4,568 (see #2 and #3 below).  That says volumes.

That’s not all. 60% of Russians spend half their income on just food.  22% of Russian households don’t have indoor plumbing, compared to the American .3% (see #3 below).  With a consumer base like that, Tucker could buy out the store with just pocket change, if he could slip it by customs at JFK airport.

North Korea is similarly spotless.  Over the years, we’ve seen many pictures of the pristine, purified places in Pyongyang, and thin, even emaciated people standing around.  Compare Tucker’s Moscow metro station with this video of Pyongyang street scenes in the next post.  Tucker, could we also learn a few things from the Kim dynasty?

I nominate Tucker Carlson for the 2024 Tom Hayden Memorial Emissary Award for his attempt at dignifying the indecent.

Please watch the Carlson tour below.

RogerG

Sources:
1. The full Tucker Carlson interview with Putin can be viewed at https://youtu.be/hYfByTcY49k?si=kxFsUvWJsbtKDUzl
2. “How Average Salary in Russia Compares to US”, Tom Norton, Newsweek, 2/16/24, at https://www.newsweek.com/how-average-salary-russia-compares-us-1870740#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20latest%20figures,was%20about%20%24787%20in%20November.
3. Thanks to Jim Geraghty of National Review for his comparison of Russia and the U.S. in “No, America Is Not ‘Ugly and Decayed’”, 2/19/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/no-america-is-not-ugly-and-decayed/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=second
4. Tucker’s grocery store tour can be viewed at https://twitter.com/TPostMillennial/status/1758158808835125642
5. “We Need to Talk about Tucker”, Jeffrey Blehar, National Review, 2/20/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/we-need-to-talk-about-tucker/
6. “Tucker Carlson Claims Groceries Are Cheaper in Russia Despite a Russian Food Inflation Crisis”, Troy Matthews, MTN, 2/16/24, at https://www.meidastouch.com/news/tucker-carlson-claims-groceries-are-cheaper-in-russia-despite-a-russian-food-inflation-crisis#:~:text=In%20a%20survey%20of%205%2C000,more%20than%2020%25%20on%20food.

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Peaceniks on the Right

May be an image of 3 people and text that says 'FOX NEWS SHOULD WE SPEND TAXPAYER DOLLARS ARMING UKRAINE? VE TUCKER CARLSON tonight- @TuckerCarlson DENAED PRESIDENT TRUMP' S PERSONAL ATTORNEY RUDY GIULIANI TO PRODUCE DOCUMENTS RELATED TO'

May be an image of 1 person, the Oval Office and text

May be a black-and-white image of 9 people and text that says 'END THE WAR NOW! BRING THE TROOPS HOME STOP Bring THE WAR OUR BOYS HOME ALIVE! 限'
ntiwar March outside Crisler Arena on the University of Michigan Campus, September 20, 1969. Courtesy of The Detroit News Collection, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.

Stalwarts of America First (SAF) approved the following manifesto on July 24, 2022: “[SAF] advocates that the U.S. get out of [Ukraine] for the following reasons: (a) the war hurts the [Ukrainian] people; (b) the war hurts the American people; (c) [SAF] is concerned about the [Ukrainian] and American people.”

The above is a bit of fiction.  Most of the manifesto wording, with the substitution of “SAF” and “Ukrainian” for “SDS” and “Vietnamese”, was originally the official demand of the overt socialist Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) for an immediate U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam that was approved prior to their notorious March on Washington, April 17, 1965.  Give it a few years and their wish would be fulfilled, and the demons turned loose.  All of Indochina fell in reeducation camps, gulags, executions, a genocide of the Laotian Hmong people, the Khmer Rouge bloodlust in Cambodia, a quarter million boat people, the hammer-and-sickle red flag flying over all of Indochina.

This time, it’s Ukraine on the chopping block, and the appeasement is coming from the right in a fit of real pretzel logic.  Could it be “He must be for it; therefore, I must be against it” at work?  People who placed Black Lives Matter yard signs out front in 2020 are flying the flag of Ukraine in 2022. Democrats and Biden cheer Zelensky; therefore, Zelensky and Ukraine are suspect.  Is it that infantile?  Don’t underestimate the slipshod reasoning of our so-called “thought leaders”, whether of the left or right.

Yep, peaceniks on the right.  Who would have thunk it?  It’s pretty bad when a person must turn to the always-wrong left for at least a glimmer of sense.  Tucker Carlson, now banished to the hinterlands of podcast world, displayed a dose of the Left’s unhinged quality on the eve of the Soviet, er, Russian, invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.  In language reminiscent of the 1960’s New Left, Carlson accused Ukraine of being “a pure client state of the United States State Department”.  After the invasion, he kept it up, throwing mud on Zelensky.  He accused Zelensky of being a dictator, a demagogue.  He, Zelensky, is charged by Carlson of taking “the opportunity to turn Ukraine into effectively a one-party state, which it now is.”  He’s oblivious to the attempted obliteration of Zelensky’s country, or the fact that the martial law measures were passed by the Ukrainian parliament, a parliament that was really elected.

I wonder how long would it be before Carlson starts calling for the shuttering of the New York Times after the Peoples Liberation Army comes pouring over the Sierra Nevada.  George Washington marched at the head of a militia force in 1794 to put down resistance to a tax.  Carlson: “Der Fuehrer Washington”?  I shutter to think about Carlson’s contempt for Lincon’s suspension of habeas corpus when Lincoln was confronted with the dissolution of the Union.  Overwhelming threats to national survival make opposition to national existence under the guise of freedom a dangerous luxury.  You may not agree but at least it’s understandable.

Tucker’s bloviating has earned him the respect of the Putin regime, the same junta that murders opposition at home and abroad, even before Putin’s tanks embarked on their misbegotten invasion in February 2022.  He’s the go-to for Putin propaganda to buoy Russian spirits in the midst of the catastrophic losses.  One headline in official state media, Russia Today, says it all: “Tucker Carlson wonders why U.S. elites hate Putin.  Biden will pay for ‘defending freedom’ of Ukraine out of your pocket, controversial Fox host warns Americans.”

His compatriot at Fox News, Laura Ingraham, has similar sycophantic tendencies.  Zelensky’s admonition to Putin to not attack his country was turned into “a pathetic plea” by Ingraham.  She characterized the bid for conquest as just a “border dispute”.  According to her, we are conditioned to “hate Putin” by the Dems, our media, the “establishment”, or something.  There’s nothing to worry about from dear old Vlad.  Whenever aid to Ukraine comes up, you can expect an insult directed at Zelensky or Ukraine from her.  She did it again last night (12/15/2022).

Not everyone at Fox News agrees.  Brian Kilmeade wouldn’t let Senator J.D. Vance (R-Oh.), a favorite of the Carlson/Ingraham crowd, get away with it.  Vance on more aid to Ukraine: “It feels sometimes to me like we’re just shoveling money over there without any clear plan for what it’s meant to accomplish.”  The no-plan, no-objective canard didn’t sell for Kilmeade: “Think down the line, though.  You let Russia take 20% of a country, what about the next country?  Give them another 20?…  You gotta play this out.  What don’t you understand about that?” Precisely.

JD Vance, Brian Kilmeade spar over US sending tanks to Ukraine: 'What is our ultimate objective ...
rian Kilmeade on the couch to the right on Fox and Friends; Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Oh.) to the left.

Other voices from the newly emerging isolationist right have jumped onto the pro-Putin bandwagon with gusto.  Candace Owens is foremost, after she removes her foot from her mouth.  In a full-throated endorsement of Putin propaganda, she refuted Ukraine’s right to exist.  She said, “Obviously Ukraine wasn’t a thing until 1989.  Further, “Ukraine was created by the Russians. They speak Russian.”  Actually, according to their latest census before the invasion, 29% of Ukrainians speak Russian as their first language.

Candace Owens Uses Ukraine Invasion To Take Jabs At ‘Black Lives Matter’
Candace Owens

She went further.  The Left has claimed for years that the U.S. is at fault for provoking our international conflicts.  From the right comes Candace Owens to blame America first.  She tweeted, “As I’ve said for [a] month— NATO (under direction from the United States) is violating previous agreements and expanding eastward. WE are at fault.”  In her fevered imagination, we upset Vlad and we ought not tinker with the delicate sensibilities of a despot.  This is akin to the hazy “systemic racism”.  Think of systemic America’s fault, equally as vague as the chants of Antifa.

The retort to Owens came from an imminent historian of Soviet atrocities (the gulags, the Holodomor), Anne Applebaum.  She succinctly tweeted in reference to Owens, “Behold the face of pure ignorance.”  Quite right.

O brilhante ‘A Fome Vermelha’ revê genocídio premeditado por Stalin | VEJA
Anne Applebaum

The symmetry of the peacenik left and peacenik right is evident in recent remarks by that aging paragon of the 60s New Left, Noam Chomsky. He praises Trump for opposing aid to Ukraine.  His compatriots at left-wing publications such as “Jacobin”, “New Left Review”, and “Democracy Now!” blame, like Owens, the U.S. and NATO for Putin’s brutal invasion.  Is the horseshoe theory of politics – when the political extremes come to take common positions – validated in our time?  Mmmmm, something to think about.

May be a graphic of text that says 'centre left right far left far right'

Appeasement doesn’t normally go well, especially on the continent of Europe.  1939-40 brought us the America First movement, and Hitler’s and Japan’s rampages over Europe and Asia.  The 1960s brought us the New Left’s Anti-War Movement, and the bloodbath in Indochina.  The Age of Trump has horseshoed us back to the old isolationism, this time under MAGA.  What is in store for us under this New Right?

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RogerG

Sources:

* “On the eve of war, Tucker Carlson defended Putin. Now he’s backpedaling”, Lorraine Ali, LA Times, 2/24/22, at https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2022-02-24/ukraine-russia-vladimir-putin-tucker-carlson-laura-ingraham-fox-news

* “Why America’s Far Right and Far Left Have Aligned Against Helping Ukraine”, Jan Dutkiewicz and Dominik Stecuła, Foreign Policy, 7/4/22, at https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/07/04/us-politics-ukraine-russia-far-right-left-progressive-horseshoe-theory/

* “Fox News Host Confronts GOP Senator J.D. Vance on Opposition to Ukraine Aid”, Fatma Khaled, Newsweek, 1/27/23, at https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-host-confronts-gop-senator-jd-vance-opposition-ukraine-aid-1777122

* “Resistance and Revolution: The Anti-Vietnam War Movement at the University of Michigan, 1965-1972”, “The March on Washington”, at https://michiganintheworld.history.lsa.umich.edu/antivietnamwar/exhibits/show/exhibit/the_teach_ins/national_teach_in_1965#:~:text=The%20SDS%20March%20on%20Washington%20to%20End%20the,college%20students%20and%20others%20to%20the%20nation%E2%80%99s%20capital.

* “Tucker Carlson wonders why US elites hate Putin”, Russia Today (RT), 2/23/22, at https://www.rt.com/russia/550320-tucker-carlson-putin-hate/

* “Candace Owens Blames America For Russian Invasion of Ukraine: ‘WE Are at Fault’”, Caleb Howe, Mediaite, 2/22/22, at https://www.mediaite.com/politics/candace-owens-blames-america-for-russian-invasion-of-ukraine-we-are-at-fault/

* “‘Behold the face of pure ignorance’: Candace Owens mocked by Pulitzer-winning historian for Ukraine comment”, Gino Spocchia, The Independent, 3/19/22, at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/candace-owens-ukraine-anne-applebaum-b2039581.html

* “Is Ukraine a Democracy? Separating Fact From Fiction”, Darragh Roche, Newsweek, 3/22/22, at https://www.newsweek.com/ukraine-democracy-separating-fact-fiction-russia-1690505

* “Tucker Carlson, downplaying Russia-Ukraine conflict, urges Americans to ask, ‘Why do I hate Putin?’”, Timothy Bella, Washington Post, 2/23/22, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/02/23/tucker-carlson-putin-russia-ukraine/

* “Tucker Carlson Challenges Zelensky to Prove Ukraine Is a Democracy”, Aleks Phillips, Newsweek, 1/23/23, at https://www.newsweek.com/tucker-carlson-volodymyr-zelensky-ukraine-democracy-1809590

* “Candace Owens Says U.S., NATO to Blame for Russia’s Ukraine Invasion”, Patricia McKnight, Newsweek, 2/22/22, at https://www.newsweek.com/candace-owens-says-us-nato-blame-russias-ukraine-invasion-1681589

* “Candace Owens Backs Putin’s Claim Russia Created Ukraine”, Katherine Fung, Newsweek, 3/16/22, at https://www.newsweek.com/candace-owens-backs-putins-claim-russia-created-ukraine-1688700

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Making the New Soviet Man, Western Style

50 Jahre nach dem Attentat: "Dutschke hatte ein Stück Gehirn verloren" - n-tv.de
Rudi Dutschke

Creating the New Soviet Man (and woman, and whatever) necessitates control of the social mechanisms that transmit culture.  The German leftist of the 1960’s, Rudi Dutschke, coined the slogan “der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen” – the long march through the institutions – and thus compacted the strategy to a neat little quip.

Let’s face it, a radical leftist is a Marxist who has adopted the rhetorical flair of a claque of history’s Marxists – Antonio Gramsci, The Frankfurt School (Institute for Social Research and Herbert Marcuse, et al) – in expanding the list of the oppressed to include the “nots”: not white; not white and male; not white, male, hetero – you get the picture.  The doctrine then begins to overwhelm the culture once the revolutionaries shed their shaggy hair, jeans, and sandals and don tweed, professorial beards, pant suits, and gain tenure.  After that, their nonsensical ideological peccadillos permeate everything from Supreme Court opinions to PBS’s “American Experience” films.

The Frankfurt School and Ideology - YouTube

The crux of the strategy involves conjuring a statistical disparity between a hypothetical gender/race overclass and the radicals’ favored “minorities” – aka the “oppressed” – and then a jump to one of the many “isms” and “phobias” (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia) as the cause.  The numbers are connected to a preconceived cause – a predetermined ism/phobia – by only tenuous threads of logic and fact, at best.  Once you hear or read the shambolic reasoning, if you haven’t been previously indoctrinated and still retain your wits, you will be left scratching your head at the flight of fancy’s chutzpah.

That titan of pure reason, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who refused to define woman in her confirmation hearing, injected an extension of the tactic (statistical disparity and leap to predetermined cause) in her dissenting opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC.  According to her, without the racial favoritism of “diversity” gamesmanship in college admissions, black babies will die.  Citing a study in one of those prestigious but newly radicalized science journals in the “long march through the institutions” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), she expounded with all the confidence of an excessively opinionated sophomore, “. . . for high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.”  So, in her ill-reasoned reasoning, a B-average student from a poorly performing school should have precedence over a straight-A one who faced a more demanding curriculum, with race being the deciding factor.  Got that?  We’re back to racism.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson Declines To Define 'Woman' Because She's 'Not A Biologist,' Sparking ...

The problem: Jackson’s study is bogus.  Even the study cites a miniscule five one-hundredths of a percent (99.96% v. 99.91%) difference in the survival rate of black newborns between black and white doctors.  Diving into the flotsam of this shipwreck, the number of infants is too small to support such a tiny difference and the study’s conclusions.  The study’s methodology screams “high margin of error”.

Not only that, it relied on generalized Census data which meant that in many cases the race of the attending physician couldn’t be determined, or whether the treatment was from a nurse, physician’s assistant, midwife, or a doctor.  Other relevant factors were left on the cutting room floor, such as the plethora of social factors that aren’t evenly distributed through the population under any circumstances.  To conclude that these social disparities are further proof of systemic racism merely nestles one more logic-leap into the general logic-leap.  Welcome to the mental miasma of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Our intertwined schools and media prepare the ground for this buffoonery.  Many teachers incorporate PBS documentaries into their curriculum (I did).  Today’s “American Experience” (AE), though, isn’t the AE of a decade ago.  It’s gone woke.  Two episodes – “American Oz” and “Flood in the Desert” – illustrate the corruption.  Many of the contributing “experts” clearly worship at the altar of the groupthink. If you wanted to learn a little about L. Frank Baum and his Oz creations, you would, along with a heavy dose of racism, sexism, and genocide against “indigenous peoples”, adding at least another 30 minutes to the program.  The collapse of St. Francis Dam north of Los Angeles in the 1920’s can’t proceed without cis-gender white male racism, sexism, and the overall patriarchal contemptuousness for Gaia.

American Experience: American Oz [New DVD] 841887045384 | eBay

The St. Francis Dam Disaster | Flood in the Desert | American Experience | PBS - YouTube

The productions are littered with interesting facts . . . and a heavy dose of generational sneering.  It’s as if the production staff see themselves as a class of pure, enlightened deities passing judgment on those in the past who didn’t have the opportunity to be civilized at the feet of the great master, Marcuse.

The films are dripping with hubris, but what have these Marcuse acolytes wrought?  Inspired by the same mindset – maybe without the Molotov cocktails, riots, killings, and arson of their Antifa military wing – many of our cities, at the mercy of this governing philosophy, are in a doom-loop.  Go ahead, spend time travelling the surface streets of the doom-loop corridor from Seattle to San Diego, or Chicago (hire a protective private army), or the Bos-Wash corridor on the east coast.  If you avoid hepatitis or HIV, or cholera, from the litter of hypodermic needles and the open-air poop on the sidewalks, you may not survive the mugging.  The only thing in abundance, besides the filth, is the desire of residents to flee.  Marcuse-thought is a boon to U-Haul.

Who should be sneering, today’s half-witted who think themselves Olympian in their wisdom, or our ancestors?  Let Mark Twain cut to the quick:

“What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”

And our modern nincompoops know a whole lot that “ain’t so”. . . to our peril.

The New Man (or woman, or whatever) is a new man, woman, or whatever, mired in a hellscape.  San Francisco is the canary in the coal mine.  The bird is passed out on the floor of the cage.  Go ahead, YouTube search “San Francisco doom loop”.  Watch the video clip below, and this is what our post-modernist, neo-Marxist big wheels are proud of?  It’s shameful, absolutely shameful.

Here’s another one from a slightly different angle with the same conclusions:

RogerG

Read more here:

* “Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Dissent Repeats Debunked Claim About Black Doctors”, Sarah Weaver, The Daily Caller, July 2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/justice-ketanji-brown-jacksons-dissent-repeats-debunked-claim-about-black-doctors/ar-AA1dgRln

* The study that Jackson cites: “Physician–patient racial concordance and disparities in birthing mortality for newborns”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 17, 2020, at https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1913405117

* Both “American Oz” and “Flood in the Desert” can be view on YouTube.

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The Modern Octopus: The Anti-Trump Jihad and Watergate

May be an image of text
. Frederick Keller’s “The Curse of California”, which appeared in The Wasp on August 19, 1882, is the likely origin of the depiction of the Southern Pacific Railroad monopoly as an octopus.
Flashback to F.B.I. Chief’s ’93 Firing, and to Saturday Night Massacre - The New York Times
Archibald Cox, first Watergate Special Prosecutor
Durham Report proves COLLUSION between FBI and Hillary Clinton over ...
ames Comey, FBI Director, and Hillary Clinton. Her campaign originated the Trump-Russia Collusion hoax.
John Durham investigation largely focused on FBI: report
John Durham, special counsel into the Trump/Russia charade

*Grab a cup of coffee, sit awhile for I have much to get off my chest.  My readings during my recent 10-day eastern Mediterranean cruise have given me much to ponder.

***************

Frank Norris in 1901 had his “The Octopus: A Story of California” published, a novel of crafty control of state government by a railroad monopoly.  Today, a different octopus has a grip on the federal government in Washington DC and the blue states.  This one has personality traits that are a mixture of the ideology of progressivism with its obsession for perpetually fungible oppressed classes (neo-Marxism) and an overweening administrative state, mindless immersion in the FDR and Kennedy auras, deeply entrenched, and a proven capacity to drain the vitality of a once-great civilization.  Ours!

One can get a whiff of the putrefaction (decay) just having to go through TSA/customs at San Francisco airport (SFO), without having to actually step out onto the filthy, crime-plagued streets of the city-by-the-Bay.  The labyrinth is mind-boggling, and in stark contrast to the relative ease in old world airports in cities such as Frankfurt, Munich, and Athens.  I kept thinking to myself as we were navigating the SFO maze, “This is what civilizational decline looks like”: the meaningless scurrying through an array of channels and corridors, checks and rechecks, picking up luggage and hauling them to additional check-ins, and the near strip-search to add to the one already performed by the German federal police in Munich. And this is for people who never left the confines of airport security walls from Munich to the gulag-type walls of SFO – not much opportunity to acquire a cache of weapons and bombs to further the jihad.  It’s reminiscent of the late-stage Ottoman sultanate, and look at what happened to them in 1919.  It disappeared, and so is the population of San Francisco and California.

The nation is quickly resembling the condition of California: a society living off the fumes of the past.  Its essential infrastructure is crumbling as the state, and now the country, pursues the suicide pact of substituting high-density energy (fossil fuels, nuclear) with low (solar, wind).  There’s plenty of money for subsidized abortions up to infanticide, transgender mutilations of tweens absent parental cognizance, the effective repeal of the nation’s immigration laws leading to immense social costs, and million-dollar payments to descendants of ancient relatives of a distant history’s wrongs, but nary a cent to expand water deliveries or clean up the streets of the crime and the mental- and drug-addled.  Prices go sky high, nothing seems to work, and that scent of social decay overhangs nearly everything like a suffocating blanket of smog.  Welcome to our modern, putrefied sultanate.

The reason why nothing seems to work is that we are governed, essentially managed, by a class apart: the minions of the administrative state and assorted interconnected functionaries in allied institutions – a socially incestuous tribe of Ivy League graduates and academics, the media, and a cadre of self-appointed arbiters of culture.  They operate like a hive but resemble an octopus like the railroad monopoly in Frank Norris’s “The Octopus”.  It’s an octopus of and for the octopus.  Benefitting society’s citizens runs second to power, protections, and rewards for it.  They do well, we don’t.

It is vengeful when challenged.  We see how it operates by examining the Trump saga and, going back further, to Watergate of the 1970’s.  The recently released Durham report draws back the curtain on partisan chicanery targeting Trump by the FBI and Obama holdovers in the Justice Department and lesser minions in the national security agencies.  Nearly an entire presidential term was handcuffed in meaningless impeachments and massive investigations.  No evidentiary predicate existed to support them.  They were efforts of the octopus to remove an interloper – really, the American people through their electoral choices.

It’s the same template used against Nixon. Geoff Shepard in his book, “The Real Watergate Scandal”, from 2015 performed the role of John Durham in exposing this older skullduggery from the early 1970’s.  What has come to light since those heady days is a tale of judicial and prosecutorial collusion, serious beaches of due process, and the octopus of mostly networked Democrat operatives from Ivy League campuses filling power positions in DC.  They’re amazing in their nearly homogeneous partisan makeup, with only a sprinkling of publicity-hound Republicans joining the phalanx.  They form a Praetorium Guard protecting the interests of the Democratic Party and its ruling progressive orthodoxy in the upper reaches of power that is DC.

The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, And The Plot That Brought Nixon Down | Geoff ...

On Shepard, he was a second-tier assistant to the president, not in any way connected to what came to be called Watergate.  He’s got two letters from Watergate prosecutors clearing him of any involvement.  As a member of the administration, he knew many of the principal players in the story and oversaw efforts to comply with court orders on such matters as the famous White House audio tapes.  On what later came to be popularly referred to as the break-in and cover-up, he had intimate knowledge of the indicted and the so-called evidence.  The popular story didn’t compute to him back then and has only been drawn into more question as more information has since come to light.

Foremost, the octopus – or hive if you will – that swarmed Nixon and his people.  A cursory examination of the key players in what can only be described as an anti-Nixon jihad would illustrate the workings of octopus.  The principal presiding judge, the publicity hound John Sirica, a nominal Republican, barely passed the bar exam.  He floundered as a U.S. attorney, went into private practice and faced an even more dismal experience (his “starving time” in his own words) before he was rescued by the eminent Democrat lawyer, fixer, and influencer Edward Bennett Williams.  Riding in the wake Williams’s prestige, Sirica got himself appointed to the DC District Court by Eisenhower.  The Williams connection and friendship would benefit him for the rest of his life.  The DC social Borg at work.

What of the first Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox?  Here’s a who’s who from the Ivy League/Kennedy nexus.  From Harvard College to Harvard Law to the law school faculty, a lifelong Democrat and Kennedy clan confidant, he advised JFK and wrote many of his speeches in the 1960 campaign.  He filled the slot of chief federal litigator as Solicitor General under Attorney General Robert Kennedy, JFK’s brother.

If Cox’s prosecutorial team – often called Cox’s army – faced the inevitable appeals from Sirica’s gung-ho, get-Nixon style, waiting in the wings to handle the appeals was the chief judge of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, David Bazelon with a judicial majority on the Circuit to back him up.  A veteran of the Truman administration as assistant attorney general, he was known to harbor a dislike of Nixon since Nixon’s days on the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigating Alger Hiss, another Democrat/FDR protégé but since proven to be a Soviet spy.  Compounding the octopus’s Nixon antipathy is Nixon’s 1950 elevation to the Senate through his upset win over the much-loved, former star of stage and screen, firebrand progressive, and favorite, Helen Gahagan Douglas.  Nixon was the bête noire of the Democrat DC octopus in an obvious Democrat town.

1 David bazelon Stock Videos, Editorial Videos and Stock Footage | Shutterstock

That’s just a sampling. There’s more, much more.  The lineup of hired guns in the Special Prosecutor’s office under Cox and Jaworski exhibited the same partisan and social affinities.

The city’s demographic profile displayed, and continues to display, the same hard-edged partisanship.  For instance, the city’s overwhelming electoral base for the Democratic Party is a prosecutorial force multiplier for any judicial proceedings with Republicans in the dock. DC is a Democrat city run by and for Democrats.  The city’s growth owes much to FDR’s centralization of power, the patron saint for all subsequent Democrat administrations.  Back in the 1970’s, grand and trial juries were drawn from the city’s three-quarters Democrat voter base.  Today, it’s worse; 90% is more like it.

The galling Nixon 49-state sweep in 1972 didn’t faze the 78% DC election count for the humiliated Democrat candidate George McGovern.  This presents a tricky problem for Republicans elected from the hinterlands and who now must reside in a sea of hostility.  Partisan crusades – think Sen. Ted Stevens, Russia collusion, civil proceedings against Trump, anything drummed up against Republicans – will have a good shot at convictions and seeing Republicans in pin stripes.  The maw of DC awaited Nixon and still lies in wait for any Republican officeholder today.

The Constitutional protections for a fair trial, fair jury, fair, balanced and conscientious prosecutors, and due process are trampled under foot in this one-party city.  If you think that legal mechanisms such as preemptory challenges to remove biased prospective jurors are adequate protection, think again.  There aren’t enough challenges to compensate for a 78%-90%+ Democrat jury pool in an atmosphere ginned up by a longstanding local Democrat-friendly media.

A change of venue to a more balanced jurisdiction is laughable when the DC appellate and trial courts collude with prosecutors to ensure prosecution-friendly presiding judges and appellate judges who are noted for their progressive proclivities.  Appeals are stymied and so is due process.  Once in a DC court, you’re never going to be allowed any other place.  Republicans beware if you find yourself before a DC jury.

Biased Jury Cartoons and Comics - funny pictures from CartoonStock

Washington DC is an obese city gorging itself on the extracted wealth from the provinces – er, states, as in fourth-century Rome.  Its output is government, and more government, and has no relation to the generation of goods and services that compose real economic life for the nation’s citizens.  It grew and benefitted from the party of government, the party’s progressivism, the party of the administrative state, the Democratic Party.  The city’s denizens vote as if they know their benefactors.  From this lair, the octopus extends its tentacles to encompass nearly all facets of national life.

The situation has deteriorated to the point that for the nation to thrive, Washington DC must not.  The chances of national prosperity improve if DC fell into a deep commercial and residential real estate depression.  We have too much government rooted in abstract, ideological crusades, and possessing too much power to interfere in daily life.  Shrink the government and acquaint some of the federal workforce to the pink slip.  Strip the city of all operatives except for the minimum necessary for physical proximity to the heads of the three branches of government.  The functioning headquarters of the Department of Agriculture in Wichita, the base of the FBI and Justice Department in Columbus, Missouri, the operational centers for the four military service branches scattered from Mobile, Alabama, to Minot, South Dakota, might be just a thought, but certainly an appealing one.  Oh, how about the headquarters of the EPA ensconced somewhere in Ohio or West Virginia, surrounded by the victims of its regulatory excess?

Strangle the octopus and reinstitute popular sovereignty.  The type of people of Archibald Cox’s background have too much sway, and have only proven to possess the capacity to muck things up.  How’s that for a path to “make America great again”?

May be pop art of lighter, candy and text

RogerG

Read more here:

* Of all the books that I have read on Watergate, this is the one that resonates: “The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down”, Geoff Shepard, 2015. By now, in light of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, the tale ought to sound like a familiar one. Of particular note, refer to pages 184-5, “The D.C. Jury Pool”, to understand the ingrained partisan prejudice against Republicans in D.C. Please go to “The False Heroes of Watergate”, page 12-17, for a deep dive into the backgrounds of people pursuing Nixon and his people.

* Geoff Shepard’s Watergate account reads like John Durham’s 316-page report of May 12, 2023: “Report on Matters Relating to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns”, John Durham, at https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Durham-Report.pdf

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The Sovietization of Science in America

October 2020 - Scientific American
October 2020 – Scientific American
Nature - 15 October 2020 » PDF Digital Magazines
Nature – 15 October 2020

The communist rulers in the old Soviet Union gradually came to believe that opposition to them was more than a different point of view but symptomatic of mental illness.  Dissent from Karl Marx’s mental prism was tantamount to being emotionally disturbed.  They developed a form of pseudo-scientific psychiatry to suppress disagreement, and the same thing is germinating in the United States: the distortion of science to pursue political ends.

In the USSR of the 1960’s-80’s, a pseudo-scientific jargon was invented to give The Science the sound of legitimacy.  An entire fake science was cobbled together by a professor of Soviet psychiatry, Andrei Snezhnevsky of the impressive sounding USSR Academy of Medical Sciences.  His diagnosis of “sluggish schizophrenia” and “delusion of reformism” was applied to anyone whose beliefs led them to renounce their atheism, attempt to immigrate, engage in protests, or practice a faith.  If you think that it’s not happening here, think again.

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Andrei Snezhnevsky of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences
Leonid Plyushch in 1976, after his release from a mental asylum where he was held for years by the Kremlin.
Leonid Plyushch in 1976, after his release from a mental asylum where he was held for years by the Kremlin. (photo: Agence France-Presse)

Let’s be clear, “The Science” must not be confused with science.  It’s an institutionalized variant of science that carries with it all the norms of organizational man/woman/whatever.  People in organizations don’t behave like man/woman/whatever in their natural and private settings.  A group personality coalesces around shared expectations and norms and frequently morphs into shared opinions.  Once a shared attachment to collectivism takes root, for instance, the organizational politicization of science will soon follow.  It’s happened, and is happening.

Our science is increasingly politicized to promote highly contentious opinions.  Disagreement is persecuted as ignorance and bigotry, and maybe even attributed to a disturbed emotional comportment.  Ideologically partisan journalists such as Chris Mooney in his books “The Republican War on Science” (2005) and the follow-up “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science — and Reality” come close to imitating Andrei Snezhnevsky when they hide their glaring political opinions under the cloak of “The Science”.

VIDEO: Chris Mooney: The Republican War on Science - UCTV - University of California Television
Chris Mooney

The tactic of branding your political opponents with dementia isn’t limited to Mooney.  Express some skepticism about the extravagant and ideologically tinged claims on highly debatable issues from climate change to transgenderism to systemic racism and you’ll face a fusillade of abuse and threats to your livelihood, and maybe jail time if they can get away with it.  Having these forbidden thoughts isn’t a career enhancer. You’ll be erased off the ledger of respectable humanity. The word “denier” serves the same purpose as “sluggish schizophrenia”.

Zeks (gulag prisoners) in Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” often referred to “beyond the wire” (or something like it) for the world outside the camp.  In today’s politics masquerading as science, the equivalent of zeks, or “deniers”, are accused of straying “beyond the wire” of the approved mental prison – synonymous with “scientific consensus”.  Straying beyond the wire is the excuse for the gatekeepers – er, mental prison guards – to put The Science at the service of a particular political party, the Democratic Party, who helps keep the fence electrified, and at the disservice of the other who questions the very existence of the camp in the first place.  Political endorsements by science figureheads, organizations, and their publications have followed, and to the detriment of their reputations as they come to be viewed as just another collection of political hacks.

Politicized Science - YouTube

It hasn’t occurred to the guards that naturally non-political organizations and their participants – think professional sports: NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, etc. – alienate half, maybe more, of their clientele when they identify with one side in the country’s political divide.  It’s a no-brainer: endorse Democrats, anger Republicans.  At least half the public, maybe more, begins to see them as little different from a super-PAC.  Buying a ticket or product of the compromised enterprise is perceived as the equivalent of a political donation.  The same political self-labeling occurs when scientists step into partisan battles and the culture war.

Phil Jackson, the famous coach of the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers, doesn’t watch the NBA because it’s too political (see below).  When players were allowed to festoon their jerseys with political slogans and obscuring their names, his grandkids recounted a particular play with “Justice went to the basket and Equal Opportunity knocked him down.”  It’s funny if it wasn’t so tragic to the sport.  And now The Science is turning off people in like manner.

NBA, gli slogan più scelti dai giocatori sulle proprie maglie: domina 'Equality' | Sky Sport

What NBA Players can do to support BLM instead of boycotting the playoffs | by Jessica Lim ...

The culture war, or revolution, has a clear partisan flavor to it.  The high-stakes contest is one of revolution and counterrevolution with the D’s in the vanguard of the revolution and R’s trying to put the brakes on it.  The journal “Nature” in 2020 jumped with both feet into the cultural and partisan war in a ringing endorsement of Joe Biden.  In an editorial that could have come from Biden’s campaign staff – or Stalin’s chief prosecutor in the show trials, Andrei Vyshinsky – they branded the R’s candidate as “accelerating climate change, razing wilderness, fouling air and killing more wildlife — as well as people.”  Trump may be a lot of things, but singlehandedly obliterating the planet is a bit of a stretch.  This is the language of the zealot, not a lab scientist grappling with a hypothesis.

Not to be outdone, as if on cue, “Scientific American”, the sister magazine to “Nature” (same publisher, Springer Nature), issued a partisan clarion call in an October 2020 editorial titled “Scientific American Endorses Joe Biden” (see below).  Their hyperbole descends into the same political septic tank: “The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science.”  The hubris is astounding.  They claim to own The Science and the zeks must be kept from straying “beyond the wire”.

U.S. Rep. Rush Holt criticizes federal approach to airline security, full-body scanners - nj.com
Eight term Democrat representative Rush Holt, Jr., was chosen to lead the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the publisher of “Science” and other prominent journals. A partisan bias in The Science?

But they don’t own the science; they own a collection of political opinions.  At the root of these opinions is an affection for collectivism.  It’s the one thing that unites the denizens of The Science.  Somehow, in their mind, collectivism became the thinking man’s (or woman’s/whatever) ideology. They were perhaps blinkered by an academic marination in it without knowing it.  It was embedded in their insular classroom instruction as undergrads.  Hayek’s freedom-based spontaneous order, or anything like it, was never allowed to grace their intellects.

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'Spontaneous Order is system which has developed not through the central direction or patronage of one or few individuals but through the unintended consequences of the decisions of myriad individuals each pursuing their own interests through voluntary exchange, cooperation, and trial and error F.A. Hayek b4 Spontaneors Order'

A constrained education is woven with an endemic apocalypse-mongering which turns all issues into calls for collectivist action: it’s existential and therefore we can’t afford free markets, freedom of conscience, capitalism, or anyone practicing real science which is based on a healthy skepticism of extravagant claims.  A healthy scientific intellect would raise eyebrows at hysterical calls to eliminate an entire car fleet and transportation system in the span of twenty years.  A healthy scientific intellect would raise eyebrows at burdening an already overstretched grid with electric-everything and radically shifting it to low-density energy after banning high-density.  This isn’t science.  It’s ideology on the march.

Not unlike The Science in the Soviet Union.  The gambit is the same: make the science an adjunct of the politics and then weaponize it against your political opponents.  It’s a very dangerous thing to do for a country in an increasingly perilous time.  It’ll ruin us.  Khruschev did say, after all, “We’ll bury you.”  Well, we’ll bury ourselves.

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RogerG

Read here for more:

* Much thanks to the work of Christine Rosen of the American Enterprise Institute in “The Folly of Nature’s Biden Endorsement”, 3/30/2023, National Review Online, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/04/17/the-folly-of-natures-biden-endorsement/

* “NBA champion coach Phil Jackson says he doesn’t watch basketball anymore because it got too political”, Lauren Sforza, The Hill, 4/23/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/other/nba-champion-coach-phil-jackson-says-he-doesn-t-watch-basketball-anymore-because-it-got-too-political/ar-AA1aeBfW

* “Scientific American Endorses Joe Biden”, Editors, The Scientific American, 10/1/2020, at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientific-american-endorses-joe-biden1/

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Our National Decomposition Continues Apace

Union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
Teacher union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
Supreme Court candidate Janet Protasiewicz reacts while speaking at her election night watch party in Milwaukee, Wis., on Tuesday, April 4, 2023. Protasiewicz, 60, defeated former Justice Dan Kelly, who previously worked for Republicans and had support from the state's leading anti-abortion groups. (Mike De Sisti /Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel via AP)
Janet Protasiewicz speaks at her election night party in Milwaukee after she defeated former Justice Dan Kelly for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. (Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)

 

Our national decomposition shows little sign of abating.  Elections in Wisconsin and Chicago indicate that there remains an appetite for decay.

Another word for decline or decomposition of a culture, civilization, or nation is degringolade.  Whichever word is used, however, we are experiencing it.  Nature isn’t doing it to us.  We are doing it to ourselves.  The precipitating factor is what is bouncing between our ears.  A sizeable chunk of the electorate, without even knowing it in many cases, is sold on toxic neo-Marxism in the guise of modern progressivism.  Today, progressivism and this updated Marxism are synonymous.  I’m beginning to sound like a broken record since I’ve certainly mentioned it often enough but can’t get away from it.  It’s constantly resurfacing in many places around the country.

This isn’t the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson.  As a refresher, this current edition is a relatively modern refashioning of Karl Marx’s paradigm: the systemic oppression of the oppressed who are defined by an ever-fungible list of outgroups covering everything from XY girls to the poor to anyone with high melanin counts.  To the rescue in this blinkered ideological schematic is a complete, top to bottom, inside and out, overhaul of all societal arrangements from the family to property, a thoroughgoing Marxist revolution.  Sound familiar?  Read BLM’s mission statement before it was scrubbed clean of too much revelatory information (see below).  We’ve proven to be quite creative in defining the “oppressed”, or victim groups.  For greenies, you might add the mother goddess Gaia (earth) to the list.  Anyway, this latest edition fairs no better than the kind that lurked behind the Iron Curtain or Mao’s China or is lurking in North Korea and Cuba.  It is a sacking of our heritage and thrusting the country into despair.

The canary passing out in the coal mine in this moment of our evisceration is urban America.  Our cities are crumbling, and so are the states dominated by them. The story has been acted out before.  We are historically rhyming with 4th and 5th-century AD Rome.  The Roman Empire didn’t go out in a boom but a whimper.  The cities became unlivable, mired in high taxes, crumbling infrastructure, a deterioration of services, lack of security, and overburdening controls.  Who’d want to live there?  Apparently, many didn’t by the 5th century.  The population of the city nearly emptied from over a million in the 1st century AD to 30,000 by the 5th.  Other similarly weakened urban places suffered.  People flocked to fortified estates, monasteries, and towns with natural defenses.  It’s the beginning of feudalism.

visigoths+%281%29.jpg 1,405×1,005 pixels | Vikings | Pinterest | Roman empire and Roman legion

Feudalism is returning.  Today, in the good ‘ol USA, people are rushing to states and places where 3-strikes laws mean something, where taxes and bureaucracies aren’t bleeding producers white, where parking your car on the street in front of your house isn’t an invitation to vandalism.  In other words, where neo-Marxism/progressivism is held in disrepute.

Where boys’ and girls’ bathrooms are separated by a wall.  Where nature’s chromosomal distinction hasn’t been buried by the linguistic manipulations of pronouns and “birthing person” for “woman”.  It’s just the opposite in our urban neo-Marxist silos.  Entirely mired in the mindset, many of our cities and urbanized states are busy advancing the revolution by eliminating other distinctions such as the one between criminal and law-abiding.  Judges and local potentates treat criminals as victims and their real victims as . . . well . . . .

As if we need any more evidence, Whole Foods announced yesterday (4/10/2023) that it was “temporarily closing” its 65,000 square foot San Francisco outlet at Eighth and Market, the Trinity section, that it just opened last year.  According to a company spokesman, “If we feel we can ensure the safety of our team members in the store, we will evaluate a reopening of our Trinity location.”  The area has been plagued by brutal beatings, stabbings, killings, and accidents in recent weeks.  Too few cops and law-unenforcement is making San Francisco look like 5th-century Rome (see below).

These arbiters of revolutionary justice in places like San Francisco have their own vocabulary to push this cultural revolution. “Decarceration” is the go-to for releasing offenders to reoffend, just call it “low-level crime”, which is another word for “inconsequential” to Soros-backed DA’s – inconsequential to everyone but the person left battered, bruised, and bleeding in the subway.  Barbarian invasions aren’t doing it to us, unless barbarian refers to the urban powerful who have drunk the neo-Marxist Kool-Aid. Your progressive DA, judges, city council, mayor, governor, and state legislature are performing the role of the Visigoths and their King Alaric in laying waste to Rome in 410 AD.

No photo description available.
Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD.
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Minneapolis in the 2020 summer of riots.

The only recourse for those not too fond of the mayhem is to vote with their feet.  Get out!  But these are democracies – surprise!  The corruption is democratic.  People are voting for mayhem. How’s that possible?  It might have something to do with a little cost/benefit analysis on the run: the rewards of group largesse from the public treasury are greater than the costs of possibly losing your little girl in a drive-by.  I know, it’s hard to believe.  But, on the other hand, it could just be stupid people being stupid, something not unheard of in the annals of democracy.

Or it could be due to the overall social decomposition extending to our schools.  People aren’t taught any better; they don’t know any better; and are easily led into believing nonsense.  Yet, policy-nonsense still behaves, as it always has, whether popularly chosen or not, like a drunk behind the wheel.  It’s a disaster careening down our thoroughfares.  And like most drunks, all-too-often they don’t get sober till they hit bottom.  Apparently, our urban electorates haven’t hit bottom.  Or it could be that the voter pool has been reduced to the drunks, the sober having fled to safer climes (red states).

A sizeable majority – by ten points – of Wisconsin voters recently failed the field sobriety test but still grabbed the car keys.  Some attribute the recent election of the Visigothic Janet Protasiewicz to the State Supreme Court to the abortion issue.  Probably true, but Wisconsinites have now let the Visigoths through the gates with a new Visigothic majority on the Court and, as a result, will get much more than carte blanche abortion.  Protasiewicz promised during the campaign to rewrite the state’s redistricting maps to the advantage of the neo-Marxists who promise more sacking into the foreseeable future.  In addition, expect more teacher-union power to dictate your child’s education, backdoor racism in diversity-equity-inclusion, and higher taxes to finance the revolution.  The whole litany of policies to promote the revolution against hypothetical systemic “oppressors” are about to be unleashed.  And so will a run on exiting U-Hauls, proving once again that the only thing efficiently produced by Marxism is refugees.

Money is the mother’s milk of politics . . . and revolution.  The donkey party neo-Marxists, in spite of their dismal record, are well-funded from a network of similarly intoxicated donors.  The precedent was established by Lenin in 1917.  The Bolsheviks were bankrolled by Imperial Germany. A revolution rides on more than fulminations.

Money and an election system reshaped to the advantage of their base put Protasiewicz in office, and gave Chicago another Alaric-style mayor, Brandon Johnson, to replace the Visigothic Lori Lightfoot.  The guy is marinated in neo-Marxism, like his predecessor.  San Francisco, Wisconsin, and Chicago are pointing the way to the future, the same future viewed by 5th-century Romans and early 20th-century Petrograd residents.

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If not arrested, our condition will continue to deteriorate . . . until riveting calamities shock us back to our senses.  Hopefully, by then, it won’t be too late.  Hopefully, we won’t wake up to news of two aircraft carriers sunk in the western Pacific, and our response is crippled by an economy unable to meet the demands of the moment, or a population unwilling to fight after years of anti-western indoctrination in our media and schools.  A pool of recruits rattled by gender dysphoria and accusations of white privilege can’t instill much confidence.

The signs of decay aren’t limited to the popularity of chic neo-Marxism among urban sophisticates.  Another passed-out canary is plummeting birth rates and closing maternity wards.  It’s hard to have a robust generational talent pool to face the threat with a population befuddled by pronouns and fungible sex-identity, all as the population shrinks.  We’ve got a lot to worry about.  And all the while, neo-Marxism, acting like the Visigoths, is busy hollowing out the nation and its civilization.  At this late hour, the odor of national decomposition is beginning to overwhelm the olfactory glands.

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RogerG

Read more here:

* BLM’s mission statement included the following:
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.” It’s straight out of the writings of Karl Marx, nothing unusual for the self-professed Marxism of BLM’s founders of Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi.

From the Wayback Machine Archive, Black Lives Matter: “What We Believe”, at https://web.archive.org/web/20200408020723/https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/

* “Whole Foods closes San Francisco flagship store after one year, citing crime”, Jordan Valinsky, CNN, 4/11/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/whole-foods-closes-san-francisco-flagship-store-after-one-year-citing-crime/ar-AA19IDPH

* If you’re interested, here’s a local San Francisco newscast about people getting out during the Covid shutdown: “On The Move: San Francisco residents on the move during the COVID-19 economic downturn” at

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The Cause of Our Discontents

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Trump supporter and Antifa member confront each other, 2017.

“We are divorced, North from South, because we have hated each other so.” — Mary Boykin Chestnut from her diary at the onset of the American Civil War.

Today, one could substitute “urban from rural” for “North from South”.  Please be cautioned, though, that some blowhards will manage to warp the nature of the divide.  Marjorie Taylor Greene, that grand dame of unhinged hyperbole on the right, recently tweeted and repeated on Sean Hannity, “We need a national divorce.”  She added, “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.”  Her national divorce is incomprehensible since her blue/red dividing lines don’t neatly conform to state boundaries.  It is more intrastate than anything, between a plethora of blue freckles against a sea of red across the entire national domain.  That reality captures the essence of the current impasse.  The root of our disjunction is cultural.  A fundamental difference of ethos separates the blue dots from the red swaths.

The split consists of mutually incompatible mindsets with one being revolutionary and the other defensive of America’s founding.  Both sides didn’t mutually move way from each other.  One leaped from the other as if it had the plague.  The key precipitating factor is the adoption of a radical cultural revolution by social, commercial and political elites in concentrated urban and academic nodes.  Ronald Reagan once said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.”  Well, America didn’t leave rural areas, but it certainly was kicked out of these nodes of concentrated power and influence.  The separation is the logical outgrowth of the radicalization of our cultural elites.

The radicalization of the blue dots – what today makes them blue (actually red in its historical meaning) – consists in the adoption of a particular Marxist’s ideas on how to advance the revolution in spite of popular resistance to it.  Antonio Gramsci in the 1930’s penciled out his grand strategy to advance the worldwide revolution.  Karl Marx’s original idea was the organic development of a worker class consciousness which would culminate in the seizure of the means of production and set the world on the path to utopia.  Others, including Lenin and Gramsci, noticed that it wasn’t happening as predicted.  Lenin’s solution was a vanguard elite to precipitate the overthrow of the existing order.  For his part, Gramsci advocated a “long march” through cultural institutions and civil society, the social elements that lie mostly between the people and government (civil society: churches, charities, social organizations, schools, businesses).

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Antonio Gramsci

Lenin’s coup d’état expired with the implosion of the USSR in 1991 – speaking of internal contradictions that culminate in revolution (typical Marxist rhetoric).  Gramsci, who died before he was set to be released from Mussolini’s jail in 1937, would posthumously succeed beyond his wildest dreams.  He became the darling of the 1960’s New Left that would quickly morph into today’s progressivism.  A hive of intertwined Gramsci acolytes dominates many of our important institutions such as the schools, the Fortune 500 c-suite, media, entertainment, foundations, charities, mainline churches, the administrative state, the Democratic Party, and of course higher ed.

The danger of this new Gramscian upper class to the rest of the country, so isolated as they are, was best expressed by Charles Murray in his book, Coming Apart:

“Many of the members of the new upper class are balkanized. Furthermore, their ignorance about other Americans is more problematic than the ignorance of other Americans about them.  It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors.  It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisers cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers.  It is inevitable that people have large areas of ignorance about how others live, but that makes it all the more important that the members of the new upper class be aware of the breadth and depth of their ignorance.”

Truckers Shutting Down DC To Protest The Federal Government And Its "Bulls**t"
Truckers descend on DC in 2022.

So ubiquitous are Gramsci’s ideas that you at least know them intuitively.  They are everywhere. The notorious CRT is just the application of Gramsci’s Critical Theory to racial matters.  It’s the same formula when considering gender, ethnicity, or mixtures of the host of identities (intersectionality) encompassed within the “other”, the so-called oppressed.  Favoritism and oppression in the Gramscian hivemind are embedded in the culture, even if it has been superficially expunged from government.  It’s systemic in the culture, they say.  Real revolution won’t happen if the broader culture isn’t enlisted in the effort.  Today, they succeeded for the most part.

The influence of the hivemind may be what John O’Sullivan had in mind in his law of organizational behavior: all organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.  The prevalent hivemind is too powerful to ignore.  The evidence is all around.  TV commercials are replete with representations of the “other” far beyond any reasonable relationship to their portion of the population.  Those same ads are boosters for the ideology’s favorite products such as ev’s, as well as campaigns against the hated plastics and fossil fuels, alongside a push for the stakeholder corporate-management nonsense that threatens the health of my pension.  MLB moved the Allstar Game; the NFL diluted the national anthem with the addition of an identity anthem; the kneelings; the black power fist thrusts.  Popular entertainment and their awards extravaganzas are not without their ritual display of the putative threat of systemic racism and illusory attacks on the “other”.  DEI and CRT are everywhere in curriculums, hiring, and admissions, with a baleful effect on standards and morale.

An entire industry has appeared overnight to cater and push the agenda on adults and their children.  All of it is meant to bend the mind to accept the advantaging of one group at the expense of another, all of it based on race, gender, and ethnicity identity.  We’re back to a new Jim Crow.

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The assault on the minds of children is the most outrageous.  Outright pornography is introduced to adolescents under the guise of furthering tolerance for the sexual “other” (transgendered, etc.).  The distinction between mere tolerance and ideological recruitment won’t be fully appreciated on the part of the teacher-as-propagandist or obviously an impressionable high school sophomore, thereby artificially swelling the ranks of this new “other” in a social contagion.  Behavior and language – if presented on radio or television, they would be eligible for a fine or loss of license – is now part of school and training curriculums, and the inventories of school libraries, for 8-year-olds in some places.  Child abuse laws in states like California have been warped to shield children from parental interference in a minor’s choice to engage in essentially experimental sex-change interventions.

California has gone so far as declared itself to be the newest kind of sanctuary: a haven for a minor’s decision to break free of their parents’ influence, from any place, state, or country of origin.  An underground railroad to the golden state for legally protected child sexual mutilation will soon follow.

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A child’s newfound identity as a gender “other” will be reinforced by an absence of countervailing views, opposing opinions having been quashed by entrenched activists dominating society’s institutions.  The struggle in the newsroom at the NY Times is instructive.  Prior to 2021, the paper treated the issue of trans ideology as if there was only one side, the trans activists’ side.  You know, it’s the same one given to your kids in their school: sex isn’t binary; denial of gender identity is bigotry; refusals to affirm a child’s self-diagnosis are akin to murder by suicide; a medical consensus exists in support of all things trans; the recent increase in teen trans self-identity isn’t evidence of a social contagion.  Truth be told, a defensible counterpoint can be made to each one of these contentions, but it didn’t appear on the pages of the Times.  Then, dissenters found other outlets like Bari Weiss’s Substack page.

After activists in the newsroom got opinion editor James Bennet to resign for approving a Tom Cotton op-ed, his replacements began to show some spine in not kowtowing to the radicals in their midst.  Some opinion pieces questioning the newsroom orthodoxy began to appear.  The hive was riled about having to face an opposing point of view.  LGBTQ+ activist groups penned a letter to the paper condemning the openness.  A group of contributors sent one railing against the simple recognition of another side in the debate.  For them, there is no debate.

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Their mind is closed and want to see everyone’s mind similarly clamped shut.  In one of the letters, they declared, “. . . stop questioning science that is SETTLED.”  Where have we heard that before?  End a debate by simply issuing the fatwah of “SETTLED” without stooping so low as to prove their position.

The censorship makes the unproven and untrue seem plausible.  At this point, the Gramscian “long march” sheds its cloak of tolerance to expose its true totalitarian nature.  The philosopher Robert P. George has an eloquent description of the difference between an authoritarian and totalitarian:

“Ordinary authoritarians are content to forbid people from speaking truths.  Totalitarians insist on forcing people to speak untruths.”

Cancel culture is forcing the gullible to speak untruths.  We are running the danger of an entire generation being coaxed into believing contestable ideas are uncontestable.  That’s dangerous.  It’s one sure way for humaneness to disappear from humanity.  People are frog-marched out of their jobs and free speech and conscience are suppressed.  Public intellectuals, academics, and people of professional accomplishment who disagree are dismissed as “deniers”, “. . . phobics”, haters, and blocked from outlets.

The reigning neo-Marxists have, maybe forever, mutilated the meaning of words such as “consensus”.  Their “consensus” – “the science is SETTLED” – is the wedge that is driving rural from urban.  The blue nodes are the nexus of this Gramscian cultural revolution.  Pardon people in the countryside for noticing this lurch into insanity.  A good portion of the country doesn’t want to go where DEI consultants want to lead it.

Previously travelled routes to the socialist hyper-state have only led to misery.  Now, will I be “cancelled” for saying it?

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RogerG

Read more here:

* Charles Murray’s book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010” is an excellent place to start research into our current predicament.

* “Biography of Antonio Gramsci”, Nicki Lia Cole, PHD, ThoughtCo.com, 8/14/2019, at https://www.thoughtco.com/antonio-gramsci-3026471

* An additional concise survey of the life and influence of Antonio Gramsci can be found here: “The Long March Back”, Nate Hochman, National Review Online, 2/16/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-long-march-back/

* A brief account of the philosophy of Princeton’s Robert P. George can be found here: “The Georgian Way”, Andrew T. Walker, fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, National Review Magazine, 3/6/2023

* The struggle in the NY Times newsroom is captured here: “All the News That’s Fit to Debate”, Madeine Kearns, National Review Magazine, 3/20/2023

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The Sudden Crusade Against Disinformation; Drought; and the Inner Totalitarian

Lake Mead near the Hoover dam, seen from the Arizona side of the dam near Boulder City, Nev., July 19, 2022. (photo: David Becker/Reuters)
David Mikkelson, founder of Snopes, the site that tracks fakery on the web. He’s in his home office in a nearly 100-year old home in Tacoma. (Greg Gilbert / The Seattle Times, 2018)
David Mikkelson, founder of Snopes, the site that tracks fakery on the web. He’s in his home office in a nearly 100-year old home in Tacoma, Wa. (photo: Greg Gilbert / The Seattle Times, 2018)

Why the sudden crusade against “disinformation”?  Is our time plagued by a singular onrush of lying and deceit?  Really?  According to today’s referees of language – who themselves could be mired in modern cultural/political manias – disinformation is “false information that is spread deliberately and often covertly to influence public opinion or obscure the truth” (Merriam-Webster).  Slanting the truth or even outright falsehoods has been the stuff of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (a little Dale Carnegie lingo) since people discovered other people.  Moses’s biblical admonition against “bearing false witness” covers the topic quite nicely.

For years, some people insisted that taxing the rich at towering rates leads to more revenue, as if people blindly and willingly, like lemmings, lay themselves prostrate before the IRS.  Does the British “brain drain” from high-tax Britain to elsewhere in the Anglosphere of the 1950’s to 1970’s remind you of anything?  Tax havens in the Bahamas?  For years, even today, some continue to persist in the belief that socialism leads to prosperity despite its long record of failure.  Eugenics, at one time, was all the craze even as it treated people as if they were draft animals.  I could go on.  So, where’s the sudden crisis in bad information?  Dis- and its cousin misinformation have been around as long as humans had the capacity for speech.  Now the Southwest is in the midst of a harrowing drought.  Watch the “disinformation” smears muddy the waters in how to deal with it.

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Honestly, cut to the chase, this jihad against “disinformation” is actually a massive censorship campaign.  By what standard are the Cassandras of disinformation labeling some opinions or factual claims fraudulent?  As it turns out, these arbiters of truth are partisans who rely on partisans.  It’s mental gunk relying on mental gunk to produce more mental gunk in order to control what people say.  GIGO – garbage in, garbage out.

GIGO case in point: Valerie Wirtschafter of Brookings and her piece, “Audible reckoning: How top political podcasters spread unsubstantiated and false claims” (see below), where she proclaims that the podcast world is too free, with much too much “disinformation”.  Where’s she been?  The advertising industry would never have been around to launch so many successful Madison Avenue careers without exaggerations and falsehoods.  Coke and Pepsi lambasted each other for years with disinformation.  Watch any Superbowl’s commercial breaks for your daily diet of disinformation.  Joe McCarthy (Sen, Wisc., 1950’s) and the Socialist International would be minor footnotes in history without mis- and disinformation.  It’s been the motivation for wars and invasions and the rhetorical bedrock for politicians in their climb up the greasy pole . . . forever.  And, all of a sudden, “Dr.” Wirtschafter discovered it’s a problem.

Summer Institute in Computational Social Science
Valerie Wirtschafter

Come on, these are biased people who don’t like what other people have to say.  People like Wirtschafter hide behind the aura of other people’s credentials, their government positions, or undeserved media respectability to engineer a “study” to silence still others.  To her, the government is always right, and so are the scribblers and mouths that populate the Big Media newsrooms, anyone mentally messaged in endless lecture halls like hers all the way to her “PhD”, and the millennials and Gen-Z’ers filling the cubicles of Snopes and PolitiFact.

Snopes and PolitiFact have been scandalous in their interventions in our political brawls.  If it was up to them, we’d never know that there is a strong possibility that COVID-19 came out of a Communist Chinese lab.  We’d continue to shutter the schools not knowing that children face a near non-existent threat while ignoring the long-term damage to their emotional and mental development.  We’d still be suffocating behind masks, not knowing that masking has little effect in stopping the spread of a respiratory virus.  We’d never know that the vaccines don’t stop the spread of the bug or that natural immunity is just as good (see below).  Much that we now know to be true about the pandemic would have been strangled in the crib.

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Thanks to the people whom Wirtschafter trusts, businesses would still be closed and a couple of adult generations would continue to be nurtured on the idea that they shouldn’t have to go to work.  Snopes and PolitiFact would paste as “true” any mention of the low unemployment rate, leaving a below-average labor participation rate lying on the cutting room floor.  The low unemployment rate talk is empty absent any discussion of the emaciated labor pool from which the number is calculated.  The high portion of employed (and conversely the low number unemployed, hence the low unemployment rate) is drawn from a worker pool that shrunk after the federal government started bribing a good portion of current and potential worker force out of the labor pool with extended pandemic benefits.  The money spigot wasn’t shut off till the damage was done.  Often referred to as the Great Resignation, quiet quitting, and I Quit Movement, Gen-Z’ers and others have discovered that living in Dad’s basement and receiving a government check (er, debit card) ain’t so bad (see below).  Bringing it up might incur the wrath of the self-deputized disinformation bounty hunters.

Should we pay for pajama boy’s college?

Partisan-laced industries abound in this age of institutionalized political correctness.  Stifling voices is the name of the game in the anti-disinformation industry.  Though, how can we see our way clearly on existential threats such as the drought in the Southwest when discussion is monitored by the disinformation police?  Having long experience with the lefty tendencies of the classroom and faculty lounge, the kinds of people admired by Wirtschafter, there exists among this group a psychomotor tick for totalitarian lifestyle control.  That’s the reason for the affection for the buzzword “conservation” and the knee-jerk suspicion about individual freedom.  Any talk of increasing the general water supply so people can be free in their daily lives will be met with a smirk.

Let me send Wirtschafter, Snopes and PolitiFact into a tizzy by mentioning a piece by Ed Ring of the California Policy Center, “How California Can Solve the Colorado Water Deficit” (see below).  He lays out the practical possibility that more than conservation is necessary to stave off disaster for states like California: the supply of water has to be increased.  But don’t bring that up at the next Sierra Club confab or among the chattering classes attending a Wirtschafter soiree.

Ring points out a number of options to increase supply, even while taking into account the climate-change bugaboo.  Climate change doesn’t mean that California will be the newest Sahara Desert in a century.  Precipitation will still fluctuate in a wet season and over time and present opportunities to expand supply.  One is the installation of French drains underneath the subsurface gravel beds of the San Joaquin/Sacramento Delta’s natural channels.  It would capture a portion of the excess flows (flood waters) that flush into SF Bay.  The water could then be stored in off-stream reservoirs and delivered to users and/or utilized to recharge the depleted aquifers of California’s Great Central Valley.  French drains, think about it.

Expanding and upgrading wastewater reclamation could be an additional route to take.  Even if only for non-potable uses such as landscaping or ag irrigation, it would free large quantities of potable sources for human consumption.  Of course, that would require budgetary restraint in not wasting money on zany efforts to kill off the next generation in unbridled and subsidized abortions, or turn the state into a parent-free sanctuary for teen sexual mutilation (transgenderism), or find new ways to ladle cash to new and old “oppressed” classes, or drive businesses out of the state in hyper-regulation and -taxation, or sink more public and private money into the thankless task of making unsustainable “sustainable” energy “sustainable”.  Keep it simple: just try to maintain water pressure at the faucet.

Desalination is another option if the state can keep its militant eco-utopians and NIMBY’s at bay.  It’s expensive, like any of the other options, but, honestly, can you think of a wiser use of taxpayer moneys than the provision of something so important that three days without it brings death?  However, I suspect that the inner totalitarian of the conservation-only legion has too great a grip on the minds in Sacramento.  These busybodies are just too obsessed with telling other people how to live, and conservation fits the bill.  Yep, the inner totalitarian has a grip on power in the state.

Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant protests organized by Abalone Alliance Demonstrators blockade and police arrest at the front gate Photos dated 9/-/1981
1981 Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant protests in California organized by Abalone Alliance Demonstrators blockade and police arrest at the front gate. (Photo: Steve Ringman/The Chronicle)

California has an aged 20-million-person water delivery system in a 39-million-person state.  Granted, people are leaving so, who knows, maybe its population will eventually come to match its outdated supply.  Still, if opportunities aren’t grasped, it’ll be a bumpy ride of brown lawns, metered restrictions and fines, and more of the Great Central Valley resembling the Sudan.  Droughts should be anticipated in dry-summer climates but California would rather play the role of woke crusader.  With the disinformation inquisition in full swing, you’ll never know that the anguish could have been avoided.

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RogerG

Read more here:

* “Audible reckoning: How top political podcasters spread unsubstantiated and false claims”, Dr. Valerie Wirtschafter, Brookings Institute, 2/2023, at https://www.brookings.edu/essay/audible-reckoning-how-top-political-podcasters-spread-unsubstantiated-and-false-claims/

* A critique of the Wirtschafter study can be found here: “The ‘Disinformation Industry’ Is Only One Part of a Larger Scandal”, Jeffrey Blehar, National Review Online, 2/23/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-disinformation-industry-is-only-one-part-of-a-far-larger-media-scandal/

* Dr. Fauci admits to limited effectiveness of the vaccine in stopping the spread of respiratory viruses: “Fauci Changes His Public Tune on Covid Vaccines”, Joel Zinberg, director of Paragon Health Institute’s Public Health and American Well-being Initiative, National Review Online, 2/16/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/fauci-changes-his-public-tune-on-covid-vaccines/

* Excellent piece on unemployment and the labor participation rate: “Unemployment Is Low, But So Is The Labor Force Participation Rate — What’s Going On In The U.S. Labor Market?”, Q.ai, Forbes, 1/23/23, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2023/01/25/unemployment-is-low-but-so-is-the-labor-force-participation-rate—whats-going-on-in-the-us-labor-market/?sh=5ad8aff1244e

* “Inside the rise of ‘antiwork,’ a worker’s strike that wants to turn the labor shortage into a new American Dream”, Juliana Kaplan and Andy Kiersz, Insider, 11/25/21, at https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-antiwork-workers-quit-dont-work-strike-better-conditions-2021-11#:~:text=1%20The%20%22antiwork%22%20movement%20is%20rapidly%20growing%2C%20as,and%20what%20it%20means%20about%20the%20American%20Dream.

* “How California Can Solve the Colorado Water Deficit”, Ed Ring, California Policy Center, in National Review Online, 2/13/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/how-california-can-solve-the-colorado-water-deficit/

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Victor Davis Hanson, What Happened to You?

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I was an avid follower of Victor Davis Hanson’s podcast.  I appreciated his astute observations on the state of play in the country.  But lately, I’ve discerned derangement when it comes to Ukraine.  It’s the same mania that has a grip on the loonier fringes of the right.  Why did some Republican congresspeople stand in still defiance of Zelensky in his December 2022 speech to Congress?  Why do some mouthpieces of the right’s chattering classes (Tucker Carlson for instance) never miss an opportunity to smear Zelensky and Ukraine?  It’s so very odd given the fact that the talk emanating from this faction is chock full of complaints about Ukraine but is glaringly empty of any suggestions as to what we should do in response to one nation attempting a blatant conquest of another on a continent historically beset with near-apocalyptic conflagrations.  It’s a bitch session without any practical suggestions.

Video shows Marjorie Taylor Greene 'didn't applaud' Zelensky's speech to Congress | indy100
Marjorie Taylor Greene stands motionless as others clap during Zelensky speech to Congress in December 2022.

The behavior boggles the mind.  Not since Saddam Hussein barged into Kuwait, or the Wehrmacht’s 1930’s plunge into Czechoslovakia and Poland, has the world experienced such naked aggression as this.  Gauging by the reaction of neighbors and some adamantly neutral nations – Sweden and Finland – something very big had happened when Putin unleashed his military forces on Kyiv.  Sweden, a country that during the Cold War had its fighter jets on the tarmac simultaneously facing east and west, is rushing to the arms of NATO.  Finland, since Stalin’s time a strictly nonpartisan pacifist nation, has declared its intention to join the alliance as well.  The already skittish Baltics are in a panic, and rightly so.  Yet, for people like Tucker and Marjorie Taylor Greene, it’s the Alfred E. Neuman line of Mad Magazine fame, “What- Me Worry?”  More than that, they seem to have stocked up on a supply of broad coarse brushes and buckets of tar to lather on Zelensky and Ukraine.

I got a full dose of VDH’s mental state in regard to Ukraine in his February 9 podcast (see below).  It was full of vitriol about Ukraine and Zelensky but nary a word about what he would propose to counter a brazen act of conquest on a continent already the scene of the world’s two greatest bloodbaths that were ignited by nearly identical aggressions – Belgium/France 1914, 1930’s Austria/Czechoslovakia/Poland.  The lambast included a characterization of Zelensky as an ingrate, but by a standard that would make Churchill one.  Hanson’s depiction of the comparative weights (population, economy, nuclear weapons, etc.) of the two sides, while superficially correct, isn’t dispositive of the end result if history is any guide.  From the battlefields of Plataea, Marathon, and Salamis of ancient Greece to the jungles of Vietnam and the mountainous uplands of Afghanistan, small forces with esprit de corps and allies can defeat a much bigger one.  Hanson clearly knows this, so why does he suggest that the Ukrainian defeat is inevitable?  Once again, it boggles the mind.

Ancient Greece timeline | Timetoast timelines
Greeks defeat the Persians at Marathon in 490 BC.
Mujahideen Waiting for Soviet Army | Afghan-Soviet war 1979-… | Flickr
Mujahideen fighters in position against the Soviet army in Afghanistan in the 1980’s.

Far from it, Ukraine could gain the upper hand in this thing.  The question then will be: who got worn down?  One French estimate puts Putin’s losses at around 250,000 since he started the invasion (see below), not to mention the hundreds of thousands of fighting-age men who have fled.

Hanson’s trump card, though, is the Russian possession of nuclear weapons.  That somehow makes Putin unbeatable, which does more to explain why the Kim family of North Korea and the mullahs of Iran want them.  But the problem with a nuclear arsenal was the same one during the Cold War: use them and you’re done.  Mutually assured destruction either though a nuclear response, prolonged siege of sanctions and isolation, a forever red-dot bullseye on Putin’s forehead, or a Milosevich-type prosecution at the Hague awaits the Kremlin.  Remember, victims and survivors of holocausts are unrelenting in their pursuit of the perps.  Two names illustrate the point: Simon Wiesenthal and his pursuit of Nazis and Israel’s capture of Adolf Eichmann (and many others) in 1960.  Use a nuke, tactical or otherwise, and Putin will have a life of sleepless nights.  Don’t you think that he knows this?  Who wants to share space in history books with Heinrich Himmler?

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But here’s the rub with Hanson’s rant: none of his points about Ukraine make much sense outside a reference to American domestic politics.  A faction of the right judges almost every issue in light of its relation to Trump.  A Ukrainian energy company hired Hunter.  Trump’s “perfect” phone call – which honestly wasn’t perfect, nor illegal, nor impeachable – was with Zelensky.  Some Ukrainian policymakers favored Hillary, which isn’t unusual since all nations with a gun to their head – like Ukraine – nuzzle up to the likely winner of the leadership post of the big dog that can save them.  Heck, everyone including Trump thought he was going to lose in 2016.

Ironically, we also play the election-interference game in places like Israel, post-Soviet Russia, and elsewhere.  It’s therefore hardly surprising, even if illegal, for foreigners to interfere in our domestic politics.

Then there’s the notorious ex-Ukrainian US Colonel Vidman whose testimony at Trump’s impeachment hearing helped lead to the spurious abuse-of-power charge.  See, you paint enough anti-Trump stuff on Ukraine and Trump sycophants begin to view Ukrainians as outside their tribe.  Sure, it’s sophomoric, “the politics of the junior-high lunchroom” (see below), but it works as an important signifier for those who have difficulty constructing a coherent thought on their own.

Impeachment witness Alexander Vindman says in op-ed 'doing what's right matters'
Colonel Vidman in testimony in impeachment hearing of Pres. Trump in 2020.

So, we are experiencing the sophomoric thinking that goes along with the sophomoric behavior of the Trump influence on our current political scene.  VDH dips his toe into this pond scum.

VDH, I’ve got your complaints.  Now, what do we do?  If all is so bad about Ukraine, what do you propose that we do about bald-faced, naked aggression on the continent of Europe?  Are America’s other problems truly a justification for standing idly by?  Do we restrain ourselves till we have solved our border problems, opened up ANWR, created more entitlements, corrected our birth dearth and declining labor participation rate, etc.?  It seems strange to hold foreign policy hostage to success at solving every other internal problem.  It’s essentially an argument for not having a foreign policy.

It still comes down to one question: what do we do?  Do nothing?  If we choose to take that route, prepare for conquest in the world’s other tinderboxes.  I wonder how that will sit with Xi as he makes his preparations for swallowing Taiwan.  Don’t ever bring up Biden’s Afghanistan debacle if you’re willing to create a Ukraine one.

Negotiations could end this imbroglio, but it can’t be under a prostrate Ukraine for that will only sanction subjugation with words.  If the goal is to deter this kind of behavior, Putin’s forces must suffer on the battlefield.  Ukrainians are proving quite adept at providing that.  Keep them in the fight and give them the wherewithal in the form of tanks, fighter aircraft, Patriot batteries, whatever, to make Putin see the negotiating table as his only practical way out.  Make Ukraine a too hard of a nut to crack for him.

Ukraine destroy Russian tank with drone in 'extraordinary' footage | World | News | Express.co.uk
Ukrainian soldier launches drone to destroy a Russian tank (r).

Additionally, talks at the stage of a near Ukrainian defeat after we starved them of supplies will be an inspiration for Xi.  The CCP armed forces invade and take Taiwan, then negotiate a new Hong Kong style status for the island to seem moderate, which in due course will morph into full incorporation into the regime.  Bye, bye Taiwan, to go along with the addition of the new Russian province of Ukraine.  It’s Churchill’s world crisis of 1939 all over again.

My bet is that we’ll get every bit of that international horror after this unhinged talk runs its course, and our domestic situation will still be a mess.  Reversing our decrepit culture and corrupting entitlements is a much more monumental task than shipping Abrams tanks to Ukraine.  Think about it, VDH: an unsafe and wracked USA compounded by an unsafe and wracked world.  That is the ultimate conclusion that we’re left drawing from your harangue on Ukraine.

May be a cartoon of text

RogerG

See and read more here:

* Feb. 9 VDH podcast “Our Broken Kaleidoscope” on Spotify at https://open.spotify.com/show/5pmfHJqJDIRkbZuRqZyRIE

* “EU estimates Russian casualties in Ukraine at 250,000 killed and wounded”, Yahoo News, Jan. 4, 2023, at https://news.yahoo.com/eu-estimates-russian-casualties-ukraine-183600085.html

* “Why Progressives Can’t Quit Their Masks”, Kevin D. Williamson, Nation Review Online, Feb. 13, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/why-progressives-cant-quit-their-masks/