Anecdote is proof of nothing but anecdote. So goes logic, but some anecdotes are more notable than others. I was informed by a friend of mine in California that their neighbor moved to a state in the South, a red state of course. I don’t know the reason but it does seem that more and more neighbors have fled the not-so-Golden State over the past few decades. A Washington Examiner editorial sheds more light on the glaringly obvious trend in states run by Democrats. Indeed, “A mass exodus from the Democrats’ America”.
I’ve previously written that California would have lost two to three congressmen after the 2020 census, instead of just the one, if the 2021 population numbers were included. There’s more. 15 of the 15 fastest-growing cities and towns are in states under Republican rule: Arizona, Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and Idaho. 14 of the 15 fastest-declining are in Democrat states. If we combine the 2020-2021 losses for San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, we’d have the population of Miami.
It really doesn’t matter if an individual jurisdiction has more of a Republican lean if it still resides in a state run by Democrats. You can’t avoid the political suffocation coming out of the state capital.
California 2012 Presidential election results by county. Notice the red counties are overwhelmed by the population concentrations on the coast. San Diego-to-San Francisco controls Sacramento.
Draconian COVID restrictions of Democrat governors certainly acted as an accelerant for the flight. COVID brought out the inner totalitarian in the governing class of lefty progressives. We should have known the inner totalitarian would be unmasked since wokeness and progressivism are functionally synonymous, and the thuggishness has been on display for quite some time in the “cancellations” on campuses and everywhere else its acolytes hold sway. Giving these people power is an invitation to “cancellation” of basic liberty, and more refugees. Who wants to live and raise kids under that, the governing equivalent of North Korea?
Further, two Democrat states – Colorado and Washington State – fell off the growth list after COVID. Apparently, Democrat governance is toxic to growth. I guess that making your state repellant to its residents is one sure way to achieve the lefty dream of zero population growth.
Two Colorado residents openly smoke marijuana during the 4/20 event (day to celebrate pot) at Civic Center Park on April 20, 2017 in Denver. In Colorado, marijuana was legalized for almost any use in 2012.
The California boom of the 1950’s and 60’s is over and is going in the opposite direction. Other states who followed California’s lead into radical lefty rule saw their booms of the 80’s/90’s/early 2000’s evaporate as well. The key to personal, family, and state well-being is NOT to be like California . . . and New York, Washington State, Colorado, Illinois, etc., etc. Biden, are you paying attention? Are the rest of you paying attention?
Pro-life demonstrators at the Supreme Court in Washington, June 15, 2022. (CNS photo/Tyler Orsburn)
Well, the Supreme Court finally reversed the silly, convoluted jurisprudence of Roe/Bolton/Casey. The claptrap joined the ash heap of history with the Dred Scott decision, fascism, the USSR, and disco fashions. Or has it, and they? These things are the closest to vampires that reality has produced. They never really die.
And corporate America is in a fever over Dobbs. Many have instantly proclaimed their Planned Parenthood bona fides. Tucker Carlson of the Fox News commentariat puts the blame on corporate greed: corporations hate families because they get in the way of the wage slaves’ total commitment to the firm. Besides sounding like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and The Squad, he is as wrong as they are. The c-suite may be ambivalent about marriage and kids, but their wokeness has been evident for years. Remember their real and metaphorical kneeling after George Floyd, their donations to BLM Inc., their growing tendency to funnel streams of cash to the Democratic Party, Zuckerbucks, their support for woke indoctrination, and their campaigns against election integrity laws? It could be the equivalent of political ransom money pioneered by the Mob and Jesse Jackson, but I doubt it. There appears to be not a scintilla of worry over a backlash from at least half the country. Where’s the greed interest in that, unless the corporate mavens are completely unaware?
uckerbucks: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, an organization led by Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla, gave more than $400 million to nonprofit groups involved in “securing” the 2020 election. Most of the money went to left wing groups.
These latest unvarnished declarations on the Dobbs decision are rooted in something else. The explanation can be found in the fact the c-suite has more in common with the college faculty lounge than the lives of everyone underneath their self-declared status level. Indeed, they aren’t likely to be aware of a different and prevalent perspective because they never see anyone with one. Charles Murray has written extensively on the “super zips” and their increasing self-isolation from the rest of the country. For the denizens of the super zips (as in super-wealthy zip codes), mostly metropolitan, the ladies of The View reflect a national consensus. To put it bluntly, the c-suite is as cocooned as the Duchess of Sussex (Meghan Markle).
How else can one explain the lurch of Disney to protest laws that protect 7-year-olds from sexualized instruction in the rudiments of gay sex? The Mouse and sodomy? It’s jaw-dropping . . . unless one’s social universe is limited to conversations populated with progressive clichés.
How else to explain Delta and American Airlines, Coca-Cola, MLB, and a raft of others opposing wildly popular laws that do nothing but protect elections from fraud? What’s wrong with measures that ensure a vote of the people is actually a vote of the people? In the cloistered world of high-end gated communities, elite prep schools, the Ivy League, and business-class air travel, the air is thick in unchallenged lefty banalities.
So, Dobbs is seen in the silk-stocking enclaves as just another revolt of the rubes, people whose crudity in the eyes of their “betters” discounts their opinions. These aristocratic prejudices emanate from stupidity immersed in ignorance. Their social isolation leads the c-suite into minefields.
Thus, following the mental script of their isolated social world, ending a pregnancy isn’t much different from removing a hang nail. If their employees want to end the life of the baby within, Disney pledges to foot the employee’s bill for abortion shopping around the country.
Speaking of shopping, depending on the consumer’s choice, never before has the purchase of goods and services been so closely tied to something two-thirds of the American public finds abhorrent. A trip to Disney World now constitutes an unwitting consumer subsidy of abortion. How could a good Catholic ever again by a ticket to the Magic Kingdom for their kids? The parishioner would be compromised in taking communion.
The progressive activism doesn’t end with Disney. Paramount, Meta, Warner Bros., and Netflix announced their abortion subsidy. Uber, Lyft, and Apple are likely to follow suit.
Dick’s Sporting Goods earlier joined the “assault weapon” crusade. Now, they expressed their financial fealty to employee abortions. Think about that when shopping for Little League equipment. If they get their way, future Little Leagues would be a lot smaller. One would think that a different tack would do better to fatten the bottom line.
Amazon is fully onboard to the tune of $4,000 in travel expenses for an employee to find an abortionist or mutilate their bodies in sex-change therapies and surgeries. The progressive-industrial-complex is brought to you by the costumers of Amazon, Citibank, Uber, and the complex’s abettors in the related entertainment-industrial-complex. All of them managed by mentalities from out-of-touch secular monasteries.
Dobbs vs. corporate America is essentially flyover country vs. corporate America.
National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), the cornerstone of so-called red flag laws.
No, it’s not due to a view of the Second Amendment that claims the right of every American to own rapid-fire artillery. My opposition to red flag laws stems from government’s inbred incompetence. The more responsibilities are piled onto government, the more the ineptitude overwhelms. It’s the perfect storm for exploitation by sinister political actors. In the confusion, due process and equal application of the laws gets buried under prejudices and arbitrary and capricious actions. Oh, then add civil service protections and unionization for the hirelings in the people’s government and the people’s government quickly becomes a worker soviet. Get the picture?
As proof, and previously mentioned, Democrats demand expanded background checks for gun purchases when recent violations of the existing background checks seldom go to investigation, let alone charges. Also, state gun-enhancements in the commission of crimes get tossed out the window by progressive – read “soft on crime” – DA’s enthralled with “equity”, meaning racial proportionality, meaning the race-norming of the numbers on the docket so they don’t exceed the race’s 13% of the population. More succinctly, a form of criminal justice affirmative action is implemented to give “protected classes” a head start by discarding the weapons charges entirely. Either way, more embellished background checks, expanded rules and bans on difficult-to-define guns and their appurtenances, and new layers of regulations in red flag laws will not translate into safer communities. An already difficult task was made gargantuan for an already difficult-to-manage government workforce.
Stenographers and typists taking a civil service exam on July 9, 1936.
Don’t think for a moment that hiring more government workers will do the trick. More government workers won’t necessarily mean more work gets done. It’ll just create a larger worker soviet, as California has proven with the CSEA and CTA. It’s a state government of the public employee unions, by the public employee unions, and for the public employee unions. The word “capture” keeps coming to mind. There’s a reason for the California DMV, or CalTrans (the state transportation agency) for that matter, being a nationwide insult to efficiency.
Speaking of California, look at what they’ve done to their election laws. It’s more proof that more laws and an explosion in their attendant regulations means more . . . of a mess. While guns and voting are different arenas, if you fumble one, don’t expect a person in their right mind to give you unfettered access to the other. Chaotic elections give to us a clue about the fate of the Second Amendment.
Led by the mantra to “count every vote” and the rhetoric to fight “voter suppression” by the poohbahs of the one-party state, laws were passed that can only make your eyes roll. An election system is efficient if results are produced in a timely manner and come with the reasonable expectation that vote totals actually reflect legal, honest-to-God votes. Today, nothing can be further from the truth. In an earlier time, election results were frequently known hours after the polls closed. Only three-quarters of the votes were counted in LA’s June mayoral contest after 5 days.
Many things are awry in California’s election zoo. It’s a criminal act in the state for a poll worker to ask a person for ID. Yes, a criminal act! They’ve done this as they’ve made it exceedingly difficult to identify ballot misbehavior. To boot, ballots are shotgunned through the mail, a method famous for election shenanigans. My son, a recent California refugee, got two ballots for this June’s primary election: one from Sanders County, Mt., where he now lives, and one from California. The state mailed the absentee ballot to him at his Montana residence (?). He has a Montana driver’s license to prove it. You’d think that someone in the California county clerk’s office would notice. So much for that thought.
Workers from the Los Angeles County registrar’s office collect ballots from a drop box in Norwalk on Nov. 4. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)
He has no inclination for vote fraud, but can we be certain about others, especially if the system is constructed to make it difficult to detect the chicanery? Remember, this is the party of bail funds for rioters, inciters of public incivility against their opponents, mobs to intimidate the administration of justice, and plotters with friends in the administrative state to hound a duly elected president from pre-election to the four years of post-election. Is this a party that would shrink from pushing the envelope on voting if they have a reasonable expectation of never being caught? If you’re naïve enough to think so, I have some Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment to sell you.
I can’t prove fraud, few can, because the system is designed to hide it. Ballots, after being scattered through the mail, are picked up by who-knows-who, taken behind closed doors to be marked by God-knows-who, and then collected in bulk by who-knows-who. California in 2016 made it a matter of law to sanction the “harvesting” of the vote. Uhhhh, what can go wrong?
In a brief moment of sanity, in a holiday from its usual display of Trump derangement syndrome, the LA Times in 2018 condemned the “overly-permissive ballot collection law”. The Times said the law opens “the door to coercion and fraud and should be fixed or repealed.” Precisely!
Voter registration with verified identity, eligibility, and address is made into a Keystone Cops’ comedy skit. Moter-voter – automatic voter registration at the DMV (driver’s license, vehicle registration) – makes a conduit for prohibited persons such as felons, the underaged, non-residents, and illegal immigrants (the “undocumented”). Unknowingly, or knowingly, they can get swept onto the voter rolls. Remember, the whole system is manned (or womanned, or whatever) by proud SEIU-protected state workers.
SEIU Local 1000 workers from the DMV marching in celebration of Cesar Chavez.
Federal law requires a regular clean-up of the rolls (removal of the ineligible, dead, inactive, or moved), something that California is notoriously delinquent. California hasn’t been removing “inactive” voters from the lists for 20 years, in spite of a Supreme Court reaffirmation of the requirement in 2019 (Husted v. Randolph Institute). The problem aggravated to such an extent that Judicial Watch forced a consent decree onto the state to fulfill federal law. It is being done in fits and starts or not at all.
Then, compound the problem: the provisional ballot morass allows a person to vote anywhere in the state, away from the precinct registration rolls, which puts more pressure on an election workforce not prone to efficiency to begin with. Don’t expect SEIU-protected underlings to be aficionados of signature analysis in obscure comparisons. When you add to the muddle the ballots allowed to arrive days after the election, it is no wonder election day in California turns into election month(s). And the results . . . ?
Can anyone have faith in California elections? Would you entrust the “the right to bear arms” to the California mentality of government, amply displayed in their crazy-quilt elections laws and regulations? If you are, I suppose that there is a larger clientele for Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment than I thought.
RogerG
Bibliography:
*Read John Fund’s piece on California’s election system here: https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/californias-crazy-vote-count-is-a-warning-to-other-states/
*The LA Times editorial against ballot harvesting can be found here: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-mail-ballots-harvesting-20171115-story.html
*For a full accounting of the public employee unions representing California state government workers, refer to here: https://lao.ca.gov/StateWorkforce/BargainingUnits
From the January 2021 Georgia special election, clockwise from upper left: Jon Ossof (D), Davis Perdue (R), Raphael Warnock (D), Kelly Loeffler (R)
Of late, two things are proving to be true: the January 6 Committee is a farce and Donald Trump is a scoundrel.
Pelosi scandalized her own creation – the Committee – when she packed it with hanging judges, with two of the most egregious carefully selected from the other side of the aisle. As for Trump, his warped character wasn’t necessarily exposed by anything uncovered by the January 6 rump. We’ve known since 2015 that the guy is prone to excitable outbursts, almost all self-serving. One series of outbursts, though, and their immediate aftermath, plague us to this day: his caterwauling about being cheated in November 2020 with disastrous results for the country. He depressed the Georgia conservative vote in the January 2021 special election which then gave us two hard left Georgia senators and a hard left Senate for the country.
Nancy Pelosi’s handpicked committee to hang Trump and Republicans.Pres. Trump at Georgia rally in support of Perdue and Loeffler,12/5/20.
Where’s the proof that he made it easy for Stacy Abrams and neo-socialists Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossof in that January Georgia faceoff? Atlanta’s David Burrell, CEO of Wick, a well-respected producer of opinion surveys, cited their poll of conservative voters who voted in November 2020 but stayed home in January 2021, the date of the Senate special election. The results showed “lack of confidence in the 2020 election outcome” by respondents. The “lack of confidence” didn’t materialize out of thin air. Trump gave ample reason for Georgia conservatives to not waste their time going to the polls in January 2021. He lambasted the November vote as corrupt, and still does today. A hard left Senate thanks to Donald Trump.
Thank goodness, Republican Kelly Loeffler, a victim of Trump’s bombast in that special election in January 2021, wasn’t so dispirited to exile herself from Georgia politics. She rolled up her sleeves and founded Greater Georgia to reenergize Georgia conservatives and go toe-to-toe with the demagogic Stacy Abrams. Loeffler succeeded wonderfully. This May’s Georgia primary had 1.2 million votes in Republican contests while the Stacy Abrams crowd only generated 724,244 for the Democrats.
Kelly Loeffler at the launch of Greater Georgia.
In addition, Governor Brian Kemp (R), a special target of Trump vitriol, showed he was adept at recognizing the need for and appeal of election reform. It was a Republican two-fer: conservatives came out in droves and Biden’s “Jim Crow 2.0” demagoguery only splashed more mud on the senescent occupant of the White House and his donkey party.
It proves that Republicans can overcome the plague of Trump’s self-dealing. It begins with the recognition by Republicans that Trump is the Democrats’ long hoped-for gift that keeps on giving. Well, at least in Georgia, 2022 was the year that conservatives with help from Loeffler could get out from the Trump shadow.
In an interesting aside, Trump’s shadow isn’t as large as some of the pundits in the Fox News primetime lineup would have you believe. In spite of Biden’s wrecking of American life, his approvals dipping into the 30’s, an Emerson College survey showed Trump besting Biden by only 2 points, 44-42. A Harvard/Harris poll put the margin at 45-42 Trump. Let’s be clear, Trump is no Reagan of 1984 when the Gipper swept 49 pf 50 states. Trump has an enthusiastic following, but he can only produce cliff hangers in which he wins the Electoral College and loses the popular vote (2016) or draws more people to his camp but energizes the opposition even more to lose in another squeaker (2020).
I don’t know about you but I’m ready for a landslide, a complete thrashing of the donkey party. However, don’t expect to win the Kentucky Derby riding a bucking bronc.
RogerG
Bibliography:
*Read Jack Fowler’s piece on the 2022 Georgia primary here: https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/sweet-georgia-red/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=third
A rioter clad in the black of Antifa raises his fist during the August 2020 riots in Portland. (photo: Nathan Howard, Getty Images)
“God made the angels to show Him splendor, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind.” – Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons”.
Paul Scofield as Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons”
Sir Thomas More in the movie was correct. The witty tangle in our heads exists, but the congeries of thoughts, memories, emotions, and facts can generate ideas that can redound to mankind’s credit or condemnation.
Gosh, our present age is amply illustrative of the tangle gone wildly astray. Ideas, oh, those ideas, of the destruction of moral standards that led an 18-year-old to storm into a classroom to kill 19 10-year-olds and 2 teachers. Personal grievance cancels human life. A community’s historical memory is erased by mobs who are angered by the fact that the past doesn’t match the climate of opinion in a college ASB. Defacement of cherished memorials ensued. Waves of crime, violence, riots, and general disorder have turned many urban areas into wastelands that would stretch the imagination of sci-fi writers. The facts of biology are said to play second fiddle to the fancies in our mind. Chromosomes are made irrelevant by chemical and surgical interventions. Thus, a mockery is made of girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports. Blatant, revolutionary indoctrination is openly disseminated to the very young in their classrooms and is heartily embraced in corporate boardrooms. The laws of economics take a back seat to highly contestable utopian visions as expressed in climate-change ideology and coerced group equality. Fuel costs skyrocket; broad inflation is unleashed; supply chains break; shortages appear; livelihoods are threatened; the work ethic is weakened; and depopulation continues apace as fertility rates plummet and pews become vacant. Get the picture?
World fertility rate
Something is at work. It’s ideas that emanate from the tangle in one person’s mind and enters the tangle of another. Frequently, if history is any guide, the results aren’t pretty.
These thoughts came to me from a reading of “Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography” by Julian Young (2010 ed.) and a subsequent viewing of Stanley Kramer’s “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961).
The one is an account of high-minded philosophy and the other is about the vile ends that philosophical ideas can be put. Nothing like the Holocaust, the underlying subject of “Judgment at Nuremberg”, was the intention of Nietzsche in his late 19th century writings. Nonetheless, the Holocaust happened, and Nazi belief was scented with Nietzsche’s ideas: the will to power, the Supermen, his aristocratic radicalism, the need to be hard, the grotesque eugenics, the rejection of Christianity’s “slave” morality, a monolithic ideology supposedly promoting “community health”, and the condemnation of democracy and pluralistic societies, referring to them as “motley cows”. It’s all there in Nietzsche’s published musings.
Elizabeth Froster-Nietzsche, sister of Friedrich Nietzsche, who preserved his legacy as her life’s mission, joyfully receiving Adolf Hitler who honored Nietzsche for his contributions to Nazi belief.
The lesson: a person can control what they write; they can’t control how others use what they wrote.
The whole of the twentieth century into this new one is a museum of the evil that men and women can do . . . from the tangle of their minds. The demeaning of standards and the institutions that buttress them is the primary culprit. Revolutionary dogmas – communism, fascism, CRT, transgenderism – were, and are, the excuse to replace the old social fabric with these new (relatively speaking) shiny objects of the mind.
“A Judgment at Nuremberg” put on display only one consequence – Nazism and its Holocaust – while ignoring its competitor, communism. It was easy to do. Invading armies into Germany produced ample eye witnesses as they came upon the scenes when the ovens were still warm and the gas chambers had yet to be demolished, something not true for the victims of Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union – and to think that they were our allies (!?). We only had the writings of Solzhenitsyn and a few others to chronicle the horrors of Marxism: Katyn, Kurapaty Forest, 30,000 gulags, the unrestrained secret police, show trials, mass executions, state-manufactured famines. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then experiencing it with your own eyes, nose, ears, and hands is worth a thousand pictures.
Soviet NKVD officer executing a Polish soldier and prisoner
Don’t think for a moment that the horrors arising from the tangle of our minds are only matters for the history books. The dialectics of Nazism and Marxism are present in our time’s woke brigades. Yes, dialectics: the alleged truth that everything boils down to open and hidden coercion – the “system” so to speak – of people into the categories of the oppressed and oppressors. Merit and free will have no role. Group guilt dominates all. It’s the pith and marrow of critical legal theory in law and critical race theory for everything else in public policy. It shows in your child’s school in the forms of teacher training, curriculum, textbooks, and school management. It shows in banal euphemisms such as “equity” which then bleeds into nearly everything that government does.
Much of our lives are to be turned upside down to fit someone’s incoherent abstraction. In the end, we are guided down the well-traveled road to societal decay, to places occupied by the likes of the USSR, North Korea, the Khmer Rouge’s Cambodia, Xi’s surveillance-and-gulag state, Castro’s Cuba, and Maduro’s Venezuela.
It’s great for the high priesthood of the woke for they’ll get rich as they feed on the rotting social corpse.
Ibram X. Kendi, high priest of CRT
For the rest of us, welcome to the Middle Ages. See, the tangle of the mind can be made to pay, even as it destroys.
RogerG
*Also in my Substack feed, “The Golden Mean”, at rogerlgraf.substack.com/.
Recalled San Francisco DA Chesa BoudinSan Francisco poop map
Early morning Wednesday (6/8/22), a California man was arrested with weaponry and break-in tools to assault Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his home. Surprised?
Tuesday (6/7/22), San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin was recalled (i.e., removed from office) by a vote of the people in the city. Much of the city’s disorder, filth, and crime wave was attributed to him and his platform of “restorative justice” and “ending the carceral state”, which meant that he claimed the power to pick the laws that he was going to enforce and not enforce, and how.
What do these two incidents have in common? Both of them are indications of the lawlessness of the Left and its institutional avatar, the Democratic Party.
Lawlessness doesn’t stop at Boudin or a failed assassin. We’ve known for quite some time that public tirades by public figures purposefully instigate the unhinged. They’re invitations to lawlessness. Maxine Waters, Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, and others of the donkey party’s hierarchy have incited campaigns of intimidation of those who disagree with them. No wonder that in 2017 a Bernie Sanders supporter, James T. Hodgkinson, marched onto an Alexandria, Va., baseball field and shot five Republican congressmen. No wonder that Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mitch McConnell, and Ted Cruz couldn’t enjoy a family meal at a DC area restaurant without facing a mob’s verbal fulminations. No wonder that 2020 would be known as The Year of Living Dangerously when America’s urban centers were turned into stage sets for Escape from New York or Escape from Los Angeles (to continue the movie metaphor). And Brett Kavanaugh was targeted by an assassin for daring to think that abortion is a matter for the states and not DC potentates.
Nicholas John Roske (l) arrested for preparing to assault Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his home.
Ironically, and quite a hoot as well, it’s the Democrats who are blindly wedded to the idea of law as cure-all. Think about it: have poverty, pass a law to spend money. Have school problems, pass a law to spray more money their way. Have “gun violence”, pass a law. And problem solved, or so they think. Though, it must be admitted, they’re great about spending money but not so great about enforcement. So, we end up with inflation, bloated budgets, and a breakdown of civilization.
Take their response to the Uvalde shooting. They trot out their prepackaged, 30-year-old talking points. It’s chock full of the same gun bans, regulations, and onslaughts on business. For them, it’s a simple matter of passing a law and then meeting after work for libations. Their great for “universal background checks”, for instance, but violations of the existing checks are rarely prosecuted. I suspect that it’s because either prosecutions would create more serious injustices – which says a lot about the inherent wisdom of the law – or a good chunk of the perps don’t fit the preferred profile: too many “people of color”, too few people without color.
A 2017 GAO report on the status of the federal government’s background check system found massive non-enforcement. Of the 112,000 documented cases of prohibited buyers stopped by the system, only 12,700 were even investigated, and of that number, 12 were prosecuted. Pass a law, spend money to set up the system, hire the personnel, and then don’t bring the miscreants to court. Surely, there must be more than 12 of the 112,000 deserving of a date before a judge.
Law without enforcement is no law at all. There exists a law that bans intimidation in the administration of justice, like what is happening on the sidewalks and streets outside the homes of six Supreme Court justices. The use of anything but the law in the provision of justice is expressly banned in 18 U.S. Code, Section 1507. Unlike most of the 1,000-plus-page gibberish that frequently emanates out of the Democratic caucus, this law is unmistakably clear:
“Whoever, with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty, pickets or parades in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer, or with such intent uses any sound-truck or similar device or resorts to any other demonstration in or near any such building or residence, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”
For the constitutionally dense, 1507 is the statutory means to implement the Constitution’s equal protection and due process clauses. Look them up. Nowhere do public demonstrations have a role in their application.
Why does AG Garland refuse to enforce 1507? Simple, it’s politics. The Dems demand a particular result in an abortion case before the Court and are willing to turn a blind eye to the law. In effect, 18 U.S. Code, Section 1507 just disappeared from the federal code. It’s been relegated to the same purgatory where you’ll find many federal, state, and local provisions on rioting, public indecency, theft, burglary, assault and battery, sentencing guidelines and laws, etc., etc. Garland and local DA’s like George Gascon and Chesa Boudin see themselves as mini-legislatures to make and unmake statute as they please. It’s grotesque, and so are our streets and public spaces.
Lawlessness appears to be a key Democratic Party doctrine.
RogerG
*Read Kevin D. Williamson’s excellent piece on the federal background check system.
A prayer circle at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Tx., on the day of the shooting.
The Uvalde elementary school shooting has sparked another public discussion riddled with confusion, hyperbole, and banal talking points. Frothing out of talk shows, the mouths of publicity hounds, and the speeches on the floors of Congress come the same stale rhetoric and empty gestures that will do absolutely nothing to stop sociopaths from shooting into crowds of adults or kids. The problem is what it has always been: unhinged people looking for soft targets.
First, the confusing rhetoric. A favorite among demagogues seeking to exploit horrible incidences for partisan advantage is “weapons of war”. They go right from the analogy of machine guns, real weapons of war, to the semi-auto rifles available for sale in a civilian gun store. The guns in the store look like the kind used on the battlefield of Iraq and Afghanistan but aren’t. They are as semi-auto, and not full auto, as my scoped semi-auto Remington 742 rifle. The 742 looks like deer rifle in one’s imagination.
Remington 742 Woodsmaster, semi-autoThe so-called “weapon of war”: AR-15 in a gun store, semi-auto.
They both operate the same and the bullet exits the barrel at the same frequency. So, the argument pivots on cosmetics. That’s right, ban a gun for its appearance but watch the same gun appear later absent the looks (pistol grip, banana clip, and with a different stock). It’s ridiculous. This is what happens when public policy is left to the firearm illiterate.
Next, the idea of red flag or stop orders that is being tossed around. These orders allow DA’s and judges to confiscate guns for cause. The problem with the idea is the great variability in implementation and enforcement. A Texas DA is likely to be a far cry in implementation from Joe Biden’s Justice Department, San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin, or LA’s George Gascon. In the former, a measured enforcement; in the other, the enticing opportunity to eradicate the Second Amendment. We’ve all seen what the latter has done to the enforcement of immigration law and a host of crimes below rape and murder. They execute the law as they wish.
A sensible middle ground might be an enhanced insta-check system, with updated, improved, and expanded criteria for denials. But, as above, it is only as good as the people administering it.
The “weapons of war” nonsense does nothing to enhance understanding. Red flag systems are ripe for abuse by the soapbox orator in the DA’s office. Even the middle ground only applies to new gun purchases. That leaves a big, huge gaping hole in the security of our kids: many of our schools are glaring soft targets, which means non-existent or too few good people with guns on the school grounds to stop bad people with guns. If you want to protect the kids, immediately harden your soft targets with many good people with guns. It’s the one thing that’ll make a difference.
No more soft targets, and leave the rest of the gun debate for another day.
In a previous post, I complained of the embarrassingly poor quality of our current elites, calling them dunces. The latest gathering at the World Economic Forum in Davos is proving the point. Their prattle was full of advocacy for a distasteful future. Snooping from outside and within our bodies, lifestyle controls in minute detail, living on less, and an overall abysmal existence, while calling it progress, were an important part of the gaseous blather. Of course, don’t expect these people to relinquish their private jets, mansions, and second-home paradises.
La Rochefoucauld once said that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. I rework the aphorism for the present moment: hypocrisy’s tribute is actually the price the rest of us must pay for living their conscience.
Absurdities rolled off their tongues in an endless parade at Davos. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, in glorious rapture, spoke of swallowing pills with chips to alert God-knows-who about what passes through our digestive tract. The complete lack of self-awareness was astounding.
Indeed, an absence of self-awareness is at epidemic levels among these plutocrats. China’s multinational Alibaba Group president J. Michael Evans talked of an “individual carbon footprint tracker” to monitor everything from our kitchen cupboards to our travels to the multiplex. Stalin would be proud. Xi is beaming.
That grand eminence, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, was gushing in his praise of artificial intelligence as a “co-pilot of every cognitive task”. Is he so certain that it will make us better or just more controllable? The possibilities are endless in the campaign to eradicate the next class of kulaks, or the Joes and Jennies who love RV’s.
The luminaries at Davos preened each other with prognostications of growing veganism and the eradication of borders. The sanctification of German industrialist Klaus Schwab as the patron saint of the Great Reset – which is a Soviet Gosplan for our future – proceeded apace. Make no mistake about it, this is a totalitarianism of smiley faces in expensive suits.
They are billing themselves as Plato’s philosopher kings, but are proving to be the latest gaggle of fat cats with an unbounded yearning to be taken seriously on matters beyond their ken. Every time that they gather and open their mouths, they are proving that they don’t deserve it. Please, go back to your c-suites and do what you do best: make oodles of cash for spreading prosperity. Prosperity isn’t a dirty word. Drop the hectoring nanny routine.
A Tesla Model S electric car at a dealership in Seoul, South Korea, July 6, 2017. (Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters)
I’ve written on this topic before, the subject of EV’s, and so has the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and US New and World Report (USNWP). Today, electric vehicles and the central planning of the Green New Deal are tied at the hip in the policy debate. You can’t have one without the other.
But the error that is central planning will remain with us, not washed clean by the save-the-planet hot air. The recurring problem with central planning – i.e., government running the economic show – lies in Hayek’s knowledge problem: humans are flawed and a small group of them can’t possess the requisite knowledge to make the zillions of decisions in an everyday economy. But the situation gets worse when we realize that we aren’t producing the “best and brightest” to occupy the commanding heights of public service and culture. Veritable dunces dominate both the policy and discussion.
I suspect that most of the blame for this sad state of affairs must be placed on our schools, with much of it belonging to our colleges. Logic is thrown out the window. Highly contentious propositions are taught as maxims, or ultimate truths, so much so that any possible debate in the classroom is cut off at the knees. “Systemic” racism, the absolute determinism of self-proclaimed identity, all-pervasive group oppression, and the reduction of meteorology and climate science to ideological slogans are rampantly presented as truisms. No wonder, upon graduation, these minions couldn’t argue their way out of paper cuffs.
If, heaven forbid, they should ever have to appear before a microphone, they are reduced to mumbling incoherencies. As such, beware of politicians who preface their remarks with “all experts agree”. Chances are, it isn’t true. But it’s an easy rhetorical handle to push something that they don’t really understand. It’s a favorite when they have to talk about economics, “climate change”, or Covid restrictions.
The push for electric vehicles is another one of those fad-thoughts that can’t withstand cross-examination. Just think, your recent model Toyota Corolla in your garage – the one that is nearly paid off and gets 40 mpg – must be ushered to the junk pile for – what? – a cramped four-wheeled runabout of limited range or a near mortgage-priced Tesla – all of which will irreparably alter what it means to drive to grandma’s house for Thanksgiving.
Soviet-style apparatchiks – increasingly common in Democrat administrations – are famous for five-year plans. Biden announced an eight-year one: half of all vehicles sold in the US will be “zero emissions” by 2030. It’s easy to announce, and a horror if implemented.
How so? For one, we’ll become dependent on the ChiComs for either those “righteous” batteries or their manufacturing materials like nickel and lithium. Mining the stuff in America is a difficult proposition since the same enviros who extol the virtues of zero emissions also hate mining. We have restricted ourselves to one mine each for nickel and lithium (Silver Peak Mine, Nv.). The internal contradiction of Biden’s proclamation alongside zealous nature-preservation translates into an unintelligible policy goulash.
Compound the above with the monumental difficulties in keeping the thing charged. Where to charge? At home and/or on the road? If at home, it’ll take from 45 minutes for an 80% charge (fast charge) to 3-4 days (level 1 charge), depending on whether or not you want to do the equivalent of a home remodel to install the essential circuitry.
Charging is further impacted by how hot or cold the ambient temperature and the things are. Colder takes longer.
If on the road, who knows what you’ll face. One recent survey showed that 25% of the current charging stations were inoperable. And be prepared, if you find a functioning one, for a 45-minute wait (fast charge) or an overnight stay (10 hours) if sufficient terminals are available at a level 2 facility, which most are. And bear in mind, California and a host of blue states are busy deconstructing their grids. Unstable grids mean unstable charging, possibly ending up empty on the side of the road, and hopefully not in the dead of winter in a raging polar vortex.
Hypothermia from a dead battery is not as farfetched as you think. Apparently, a byproduct of “sustainable” electricity grids is blackouts. Someone could make quite a name for themselves by correlating an increased reliance on “renewables” and an uptick in blackouts. Some numbers are trickling in to bolster the relationship. In one study, outages went from 24 in 2000 to 180 in 2020.
Blackouts are one outcome in a system that is by nature erratic, as wind and solar are. So, realistically, production can meet 100% of demand in one brief moment to chronically falling below it to everything going dark. Once we begin to notice that the only lights are coming from vehicles, and the surrounding area is as dark as northern Chile’s remote Atacama Desert, it’s panic time in our Nissan Leaf on “empty”.
A recent power outage in LA.The Atacama Desert at night.
Let’s face it, the contraption can only appeal to those who plan to never leave the metropolis. It’s an artifact of cities, like the Acela train or subways. It’s easy to envision if your commute is ten miles or a few miles down the road to the soccer fields . . . except when you come back to reality trying to plan for the holidays or a family vacation to a national park.
And, so, we are expected to take the plunge for what, the delusion that American commuters are the principal cause of warming temperatures and not the rest of the world’s discovery of a life above grinding poverty and dirt floors? Air conditioning, after all, is a godsend to the Third World and they want more of it.
Pardon me, broad electrification of transportation is lunacy. Like most unhinged manias, it’ll have to be imposed or we’ll have to be bribed into the things with other people’s money. Fact is, it won’t be other people’s money but magically pulled out of the ether, which means inflation, the hidden tax, and an erosion of personal wealth. In the end, we’ll just be poorer and face enormously disrupted lives . . . for no good reason.
Welcome to the Biden edition of central planning’s nightmare.
RogerG
*Thanks to Andrew Stuttaford for important insights.
Gas prices in Jersey City, N.J., March 9, 2022. (Mike Segar/Reuters)
Central planning: A method of economic regulation in which investment, production, and resource allocation are coordinated according to a comprehensive national governmental plan. (lexico.com)
Democrats love the idea of central planning, not that they always and fully practice it. When given the opportunity, any opportunity, they become giddy at the prospect of meddling in the most intimate economic decisions. The Green New Deal is a classic in this control-freak genre of economics. It’s understandable. After all, let’s not forget that they are the defacto socialist party in America.
However, I must admit that the Trump-populist subspecies of Republican are intoxicated by it in their newfound affection for centrally planned tariffs in an attempt to resuscitate a 1950’s mythical ideal.
Still, the Democrats have essentially cornered the market in zeal for grand government plans to engineer a world that better suits their prejudices. And like the now-deceased Soviet Union, they’ll fail as the unintended and disastrous consequences pile up. We’ll live the disaster. Regardless, Biden and fellow Democrat big cheeses are blissfully strolling down the path blazed by the USSR.
Indeed, the examples are piling up. To address high gas prices, Biden and his people conjured the idea of increasing the supply by allowing more ethanol in the blend. Watch for shortages and price jumps in corn meal, anything made with corn, its processed derivatives (sweeteners, etc.), all complimentary goods (meats, baking goods, machinery, ingredients, seeds, fertilizers, etc.), and substitutes (other grains such as wheat, rice, oats, soy beans, etc.). And to think that the $6/gal. fuel was itself a result of Biden’s day-one executive orders to attack anything that would make more crude oil available in demanded volumes (XL pipeline, bans on federal leases, tax threats, an EPA run amok, etc.). It’s a politically-engineered theater of the absurd.
And here’s another kicker: our refining capacity hasn’t changed much since 1977, the year of the construction of the last major refinery. NIMBY’s, byzantine environmental reviews, and orchestrated hostility to fossil fuels has throttled the ability to turn the crude into affordable road trips and brimming supermarket shelves. Instead, we get sermons to go electrical in a glorified golf cart or $60,000 Tesla. Mind you, nothing is physically wrong with the conventional family sedan – it being made more fuel efficient and less polluting over the years – it’s just that these wunderkinds have a visceral hate for the lifestyles of soccer moms, the ‘burbs, and RV-vacations. Under Biden, the bigotry gets a chance to be translated into policy.
Right now, the public’s focus is on shortages of everything from gasoline to baby formula, all of it trucked. Think of the container ships piling up outside San Pedro, but don’t forget that the price of diesel is running a $1 more per-gallon than gasoline on an already inflated price base. Today, it takes $700-$800 to fill up the required 150-gallon tanks on the big rig. Some loads aren’t cost-effective and can’t be made outside bankruptcy proceedings. Shortages!
So, Biden catered to eco-fantasies of his base and threw everyone else wild curve balls. One of those batters in the box receiving the wild pitch is the oil industry. The oil companies, like everyone else, have a survival instinct. They have sensed over the recent years an infantile dislike for them among half-witted cultural elites. As a result, they have increasingly tried to get on the “sustainable” bandwagon: biofuels like algae, etc. You’ve seen the ads. So, scarce refining capacity is devoted to them. A Shell refinery (La.), a Tesoro refinery (Ca.), the HollyFrontier refinery (Wyo.), the Western Refining refinery (N.M.), and the Dakota Prairie refinery (N.D.) have responded to the political heat by restricting crude oil processing and a shift to the greenie will-o’-the-wisp.
Sending less gasoline from the refinery to the pumps is just one aspect of the problem. Some refineries have simply called it quits. The Philadelphia Energy Solutions, the largest refinery on the East Coast at 335,000 barrels per day, is slated to fall under the wrecking ball soon. Lyondel Bassell’s refinery in Houston (263,000 barrels processed per day) is scheduled to close its gates by December 2023.
Some are being strangled in the crib. The largest and newest proposed refinery, Hyperion Energy’s facility in South Dakota, is drowning in bureaucratic delays and an environmentalist insurgency. Economic late-term abortions in the energy sector are becoming commonplace.
Tack on federal and state taxes – a dollar per gallon in California alone – and we have a pile-on for pump sticker shock and Walmarts with empty store shelves. If you’re a climate-change hysteric, you must love misery. Biden is proving that environmentalism is a sadistic religion.
