It looks like two-thirds of the key elements for a woke Super Bowl are lined up: a woke team and a woke location (plus the racial anthem and BLM sloganeering on team attire). The NFC championship game will be represented by two urban dystopias in a dystopian state – San Francisco and Los Angeles in California. One woke city or another from a woke state will land in Inglewood, an enclave in one of the worst governed metropolitan areas in the worst governed state. Either the Bengals, Chiefs, or the Bills of the AFC will have to play in wokedom (Bills and Chiefs are tied as of this writing).
49ers celebrate after the winning field goal against the Packers, 1/22/22.Rams players celebrate after defeating the Buccaneers, 1/23/22.
That’s not the end of it. The geographic center of wokedom, the state of California, will get its grubby hands on a good chunk of the players’ earnings. Over half will be taken in income taxes once the tax-thirsty Sacramento goons with their highest state income tax in the nation thrust their mitts into each player’s till. It’d be better if the game was played in Texas or Florida. They don’t have a state income tax.
If you’re wondering how the scam works, California fine-tuned in 1991 the gambit of any professional athlete performing in the state to be subject to the state’s highest in the nation income tax. The state dubs the teams’ visits “duty days” which includes all days for the visit. The players for the Rams, 49ers, and Chargers really get whacked for at least 6 home games. All other teams face the ordeal at most only two times, absent any playoff games in the tax hellhole. The Woke Bowl in Inglewood may not be as joyous of an event if the players’ tax accountants run the numbers and get word to their clients.
As for me, the game is “Meh”. The Woke Bowl has little appeal. I’m not sure if I’ll watch it. It depends on what’s showing at the theater.
Ticker Carlson in early December when he raised the possibility of supporting Russia in its threats against the Ukraine.
Last night (1/20/22), I exploded – not literally, but emotionally. Tucker Carlson performed his now-familiar jeremiad against US overseas intervention. This time, it’s about US support for Ukraine. This guy appears to be so scarred by our recent “forever wars” that he can’t bring himself to ardently oppose naked aggression of the kind that has been abundantly on display throughout history with all their horrifying consequences. Carlson reminds me of Édouard Daladier of France and Neville Chamberlain of the United Kingdom, eager to avoid the bloodbath of World War I, hopping planes to Munich to sell out Czechoslovakia in 1938. Just replace Ukraine for Czechoslovakia.
British statesman and prime minister Neville Chamberlain (1869 – 1940) at Heston Airport on his return from Munich after meeting with Hitler, making his ‘peace in our time’ address. (photo: Central Press)
An accurate film about this disgraceful page in history appeared in 1988, “Munich: A Peace of Paper”. If you watch carefully, the parallels with events on Ukraine’s border are eye-opening. Please watch it if you have an hour to spare. It’s well worth it.
In the lead up to the invasion, Hitler infiltrated the German-speaking Czech population with his sponsorship of the Sudeten German Party (Sudetendeutsche Partei, SdP) and subsidized paramilitary and militia groups in the country. Hitler massed troops and conducted military exercises to raise tensions to incite an excuse to invade. Sound familiar, familiar to Putin’s activities along Russia’s border with Ukraine?
Daladier and Chamberlain traveled in a panic to Munich to cut a deal to desperately avoid war. They delayed war by sacrificing Czech territory to Germany, the part of Czechoslovakia with the best natural defenses against a German invasion, the so-called Sudetenland. Within seven months, Hitler took the rest of the country. Disgraceful.
From left to right: Neville Chamberlain, Daladier, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Galeazzo Ciano before signing the Munich Agreement. (Wikimedia Commons)
All of it was a prelude to the Nazi-Soviet pact and the invasion of Poland and the onset of WWII with its 60-85 million dead. Of course, our predecessors could have continued to evade war by following the Tucker Doctrine of “Why should Americans shed their blood for a group of German-speaking Czechs?” The US did and stayed on the sidelines till a much larger sacrifice was required.
The fact is, no one is calling for the introduction of the 101st Airborne into the Ukraine. Carlson’s predicate of Americans dying for the Ukraine is a straw man. The airlift of military supplies to the Ukraine doesn’t mean the US is at war with Russia. It means that we are doing what Putin and the CCP do regularly: support their foreign allies. We would be simply empowering Ukrainians to make Russians die for their country, all without US troops.
Hitler made a career of portraying Germany as a victim of Versailles and was surrounded by the “predatory” Allies. Carlson parrots Putin’s identical complaints about NATO. The Allies came together before the World Wars for the same reason that Poland, the Baltic States, and Ukraine are seeking the protective umbrella of NATO. For the former, it was fear of an aggressive and expansionistic Germany. For the latter, they have an understandable fear of the Kremlin seeking to reassemble the Soviet Empire. Their history is littered with Russian invasions, conquests, and depredations.
Russian tanks, artillery, armoured vehicles and trucks situated on the border with Ukraine at Valuyki, Belgorod Oblast. (Pictures: Google Earth)Russian tanks massed on the border with Ukraine in March 2020.The Russian paramilitary group known as the Wolves’ Hundred – “the little green men” – with their commander Evgeny Ponomaryov in the foreground, block the road near the checkpoint not far from Slavyansk, in eastern Ukraine, April 20, 2014 (photo: Maxim Dondyuk)
How calloused and duplicitous can a person be to exclaim, as Carlson did in an earlier broadcast, “Why don’t we take Russia’s side?” Indeed, why didn’t we take the Axis side? Either a moral obtuseness or outright ignorance is at work in the minds of some of our celebrities in front of a camera.
In 2021, Carlson was gung-ho about getting out of Afghanistan. We did and gave up a strategic outpost on the flank of our chief adversary, the CCP. Now, we’re worried about Red Chinese nuclear-tipped hyper-sonics and East Asia as a CCP empire. In 2019, Carlson favored a double-crossing of our Kurdish allies to the Turks who are equally enthralled by a return to Ottoman greatness. There doesn’t appear to be a US intervention that he won’t oppose. The parallels with history are too obvious to ignore.
Yet, he does. Wait for it: you’ll hear talk-radio callers parrot the line almost word-for-word. A significant segment of the right will fall for the nonsense. If Carlson has his way, Reagan’s famous dictum, “Trust but verify”, will be shoved to the side for “Get out and stay out”. This won’t end well.
On the same link you’ll find this gem of a headline: “Christian plumber under fire for refusing same-sex fittings.” Parody is an excellent vehicle to unmask the ditzy pretensions of the Left. The whole belief system is a slipshod amalgam of demonstrably proven silliness.
Long live satire, an admirable tradition going back to Aristophanes of the 5th century BC. I just hope that the lefty die-hards who permeate our cultural commanding heights can take it as well as conservatives in the past century and a half.
At the top of our society is a Brahmin caste of an elect in possession of prestigious degrees. Their high status is drawn from their educations, but the claim can only have legitimacy if their many years of formal instruction truly enlightened. The evidence for that is weakening by the day. Instead, these paragons were marinated in a hot house of radical ideology. It was political activism masquerading as scholarship. Still, off they go to fill positions of power and influence in our culture. They’re everywhere.
Prime example: professional sports, or Big Sports, Inc. An aristocracy of athletic talent earning six figures, sometimes seven, eight, or nine, is managed by a metropolitan administrative apparatus of people marked by paper credentials. It’s an insular social caste far removed from the fan base that is not so well-endowed with these modern markers of prestige. The interests, tastes, social norms, and biases of this caste in the clouds escapes serious cross-examination due to uniform social reinforcement. Nearly everybody around them thinks the same way. It’s the dumb lacking any self-awareness of their dumbness.
How else can the sloganeering of campus neo-Marxists seep onto the helmets of athletes with astronomical salaries, the normal expression of patriotic unity in opening ceremonies be debased by overt racial anthems, and the change of venue of a long-scheduled all-star game after the wailing of small-minded activists be realized? Radicalism becomes fashionable when there’s no competing voices.
Nothing escapes infection including the on-field attire. The NFL has an approved list of slogans for their helmets that includes “Stop Hate”, “End Racism”, and “Black Lives Matter”, all of them taken from people who previously chanted “pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon”. We know from where the adoption of extremist slogans come. It comes from people whose agenda exceeds the simple and generic meaning of the words. “Stop Hate”? What hate? Do they mean the garden variety of hate exhibited in domestic abuse, or the kind shown by a thief pistol-whipping a store clerk for resisting, or a jihadist taking synagogue worshippers hostage? I think not. The whole “Stop Hate” gambit became a cause because a viral video of an abusive cop was exploited as evidence of a systemic racial hatred. In point of fact, it was a singular incident of a bad cop, not proof of the KKK in blue.
It says more about our time’s hyper-communicability of bad behavior to every corner of the planet, whereas before it would be put in the context of a local incident to be handled locally.
“End Racism”? What racism? Widespread racial animus shows up in no respectable poll. In fact, whatever it is, it’s declining and widely condemned as shameful. So, where’s the “racism” that needs to be “ended”? Instead, a revolutionary agenda is at work. Cutting to the quick, our new fashionable revolutionary cadre want to end “acting white”, the Enlightenment, rationality, math, the scientific method, the constitutional order, anything that they assert stands in the way perfect categorical equality. This is the “racism” that they’re trying to “end”. Of course, none of this is achievable without a totalitarian state. That’s how you really kill the Enlightenment. Mao or Che would be proud.
As for “Black Lives Matter”, it came into vogue as if people needed to be reminded of the obvious: black lives do matter. Though, try saying “All lives matter”, the essence of the Gospels, and see how quickly the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion Department and Twitter mob pounce. All lives don’t matter to the chic radicals because they are consumed by the oppressor/oppressed shtick of Karl Marx and his later kindred spirits, of which there are many in the country’s thousands of faculty lounges. Things don’t turn out equal in racial enumerations, so the egregious non sequitur “use racism to combat racism” – in the immortal words of the high priest of Anti-Racism, Ibram X. Kendi (Ibram Henry Rogers) – becomes the latest slogan to be turned into policy preference. Until the numbers come out equal, ALL lives don’t matter in this sewer of the mind.
Look to the knit caps worn by people on the sidelines. Prominently stitched is the word “Equity”. Just yesterday, “equity” was consonant with justice. Today, it’s consonant with racial vengeance. It’s back to Kendi’s bunk of “use racism to end racism”. That’s right, enact cash payouts for being black (reparations). Hiring, promotions, and admissions should place race as the topmost criteria. If one race shows up too prominently in the crime stats, redefine crime, end bail, and avoid prosecutions. If you haven’t enough miscreants of other racial categories in the prosecutor’s hopper, invent them in campaigns to ferret out “white supremacy” as the new “domestic terrorism”, but define it broadly so you can bag your political opponents.
Why is it that “equity” crusades all too often stray into the ugliest despotism?
We can’t even watch a football game without getting a steady diet of the politicized word salad. I can’t think of my San Francisco 49ers without Colin Kaepernick and the kneeling craze crossing my mind. Ditto for the San Francisco Giants. Taking it further, San Francisco is more aptly “San Fransicko” (Michael Schellenberger’s book of the same title). The city’s muddied reputation proceeds all. Ditto for California.
Most members of the San Francisco Giants kneel during a moment of silence prior to an opening day baseball game against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Thursday, July 23, 2020, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)Hunter Pence #8 of the San Francisco Giants looks on during batting practice before the game against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Dodger Stadium on July 23, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)
And corporate-boardroom NFL parades across our TV screens BLM/Antifa slogans. It’s just one big “Meh”. No enthusiasm and don’t care. I tried to watch 49ers/Cowboys and Rams/Cardinals but, once again, “Meh”. Time to switch to Netflix.
P.S.: The politicization of professional associations is next.
A U-Haul truck and other vehicles travel along Interstate 10 as wind turbines generate electricity at the San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm near Palm Springs, Calif., February 27, 2019. (photo: Robert Alexander)
As if any more needs to be said: U-Haul ran out of rental moving trucks in California in 2021. In its annual report the company stated, “. . . U-Haul simply ran out of inventory to meet customer demand for outbound equipment.” That’s report-speak for, “We couldn’t keep up with the demand to get out.” (Read the report here)
“To help meet the demand of millions of people desperately trying to escape the dark, ravaged wasteland of California, U-Haul is introducing a new product in its moving van line-up: the War Rig. These weaponized, armored moving vehicles will ensure you and your belongings stay safe during the long and perilous journey out of the state.” (Source: Babylon Bee)
Where could the refugees be headed? Top of the list is Texas, followed by Florida, then by Tennessee, and then South Carolina and Arizona. Not a blue state in the bunch. The U-Hauls seem to be following Elon Musk and Zuckerberg’s Meta (parent company of Facebook, et al), who is filling a new office tower in downtown Austin.
I guess it’s true. Make life miserable for people and they leave. Throughout history, it’s the same story. A third of Cuba lives in south Florida. Some people are drawn to leave their homeland for a fatter paycheck; others are forced to flee. In the case of California, the migrants must feel compelled to jump ship. Wonderful weather and natural beauty are no compensation for filth, crime, unaffordable housing, blackouts, schools as Maoist indoctrination centers, and regulations, diktats, and taxes up the gazoo.
Check out this latest California outrage: a sea of trash from the looting of trains as they pass through Los Angeles.
And now the poor souls can’t lay their hands on a rental truck. That doesn’t mean that people won’t still flee. We might be viewing an updated version of the 1930’s Okie migration in reverse: eastbound roads and interstates clogged with Priuses with mattresses on top. What’s next, labor camps in U-Haul’s top 5 destinations?
California Governor Gavin Newsom makes an appearance after the polls close on the recall election at the California Democratic Party headquarters in Sacramento, Calif., September 14, 2021. (Fred Greaves/Reuters)
“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”, what a hot mess. Extending it, what happens in California stays in California. Few things falser can be imagined. What happens in and for California invades the whole country without anyone’s consent. California’s manias have become our manias. It’s time to treat California as the pariah state that it is. Pariahs are isolated to quarantine their deadly influence.
Will Swaim of the California Policy Center provides sound reason to place California on the same list with North Korea (read about it here).
The Rocky Mountain states get to inhale the consequences of California’s desire to maintain combustible forests. Why? The state’s periodic droughts, normal in Mediterranean climates, blanket the golden state in a thick layer of matchsticks if not cleared. Guess what? The state’s wildlands aren’t cleared due to a glowing hatred of logging and prescribed burns. In addition, the spark, literally the spark, frequently comes from the state’s aging and neglected grid because of the state’s Public Utilities Commission fixation on the greenie fantasies of wind and solar. Anyone can see the results from their car window as they flee the flames: the ubiquitous forests of humongous windmills scarring the landscape, extensive seas of solar panels, and the costliest electricity rates with the greatest unreliability. The state’s folly now becomes our filthy air.
California wildfire smoke wafting over the skies in the Northwest and southern Canada.
What about the epidemic of “out of stock” online and off? A huge link in the supply chain lies parked off the Southern California coast. Controlling the docks in the most incompetent way possible is the ILWU, the longshoreman’s union, which fully exploits the generous powers granted to it by the state’s maniacally pro-Big Labor laws. If those containers finally get off the ship, there are few trucks to pick them up because of the state’s uniquely intense jihad against fossil fuels, half the available trucking fleet having been made illegal by state diktats. The state’s pathological obsessive/compulsiveness in regards to emissions is now a gross obstacle to interstate commerce. It’s unsettling to discover that Billings supermarkets are so heavily impacted by lunatics in Sacramento.
Container ships and oil tankers waiting in the ocean outside the Port of Long Beach in California in April 2021. (photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)
The price of meat is rising. Well, expect it to go higher for the whole country as producers scramble to meet the commands of California’s Prop 12, the Farm Animal Confinement Initiative. The state has ordered all producers from Fresno to Iowa to Canberra (Au.), wherever, to meet its demands if they want to peddle their goods in this asylum with an elected government. So, their meat products will be more expensive everywhere as producers scramble to cater to the state’s ninnies. Nobody voted for this outside this looney bin’s precincts.
The same tactic is at work in forcing the state’s climate change feverishness on all of us. First in the crosshairs are the carbon consuming and emitting conveyances in your garage, no matter the state. For years, California’s fastidious phobias on emissions shows up on all vehicles whether sold in Los Angeles or Lubbock. The Zanyland’s mammoth market share and the dictates of production efficiencies force all of us to share in the dementia. Call it the California premium that everyone has to pay. This is the second instance of California getting to set its psychotic agenda on all states with corporate America as a co-conspirator. More about this later.
A ubiquitous California smog test
Interstate commerce isn’t managed out of Congress according to the Constitution’s Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3, but effectively out of Sacramento. And, as it turns out, neither is immigration (Clause 4). The state’s official immigration policy – it’s been a sanctuary state since 2017 – routinely ignores federal law and its enforcement personnel, going so far as to make it a crime ($10,000 fine) for businesses in the state to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. Further, the state subsidizes nonprofits assisting in the law-breaking while at the same time lavishing entitlements on the law-breakers. Clearly, the state is at war with the Constitution (Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl. 4)
Pro-illegal immigration protest, California 2019.
The state is one huge affront to the rule of law: the US Constitution. The use of the state’s police powers to block interstate and international commerce should be no more tolerated than its zany regulations be allowed to affect consumers who had no voice in their creation. The state must be brought to heel. The situation has aggravated beyond a mere irritant. It’s getting close to being an existential threat to the nation.
A corrective begins with the recognition of the state as a pariah, one that habitually operates outside the bounds of our Constitution. Quarantine the madness to make certain that Californios bear the full freight of their lunacy. Take the management of their ports away from them. Institute forest management practices by sidelining the state’s powerful eco-crazed lobbies. State interference in the enforcement of federal immigration law should be treated as acts of secession. Federal legislation should prevent interstate producers from imposing costs of meeting California’s frenzies on the entire national market. What happens in California should be made to stay in California.
Over time, the need for explicit action may wane as people continue to do what they have been doing: flee the asylum run by the inmates. The state’s overbearing market share is fading as the number of outbounded moving trucks continues to mount. The problem is taking care of itself, but a little legal protection for the rest of the nation is needed along the way.
“Freedom is not simply the right of intellectuals to circulate their merchandise. It is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their ‘betters’.” Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell
Sowell’s truism about freedom came to mind as more gibberish spewed from the mind of the self-styled Wise Latina on the Supreme Court, justice Sonia Sotomayor. In oral arguments in the Biden vaccine mandate case, she hysterically proclaimed, “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.” First thing, it’s not true! 4 Pinocchios! Next, public imminences can’t be trusted any longer. And, really, should they ever have been?
Justice Sonia Sotomayor
The latest plague apocalypse to go viral is Omicron. It’s certainly launching into our society. It may have launched into me. I can’t tell – wasn’t tested – but it turned out to be a 4-day flu. Tested or not, it was the flu whether as the ominous Omicron or not – a virus by any other name. Earlier in 2020, I had a brief bout with first-wave COVID and it was 2 days one-and-done. Both were characterized by a low-grade fever and fatigue and that’s it. The death cart making its regular rounds didn’t come knocking and I quickly resumed my domestic role as regular irritant to my wife.
According to the over-billed “experts”, I’ve got 2 strikes against me: I’m 69 and voted for Trump. Yet, no comorbidities, not obese, regular exercise, daily vitamin and mineral supplements, and no vices (other than popcorn and “The Lord of the Rings”) may have worked to counteract the age factor. As for the vote, sorry Rachel Maddow, I won’t do anything about it since I can’t endorse a doddering puppet of left-wing lunatics. That “comorbidity” stays.
Our time is not a period of calm reason. Wannabe totalitarians are out to make everyone, literally everyone, conform to their vision of vaccinations, endless boosters, Zoom school for the kids, and masks. These blinkered despots can’t bring themselves to even mention natural immunity and treatments. I’m up-armored by nature against the COVIDs going back to MERS and SARS. Vaccines are obviously part of the public health arsenal, not the entirety of it. Not a peep, though, from Walensky and company and The Big Wheels about natural immunity, monoclonal antibodies, and antivirals. When asked, they act like the kid in the cafeteria buffet line who can’t bring himself to request the broccoli in spite of mom’s insistence before leaving for school.
Instead, we’ve got a truncated public interplay between Vaccine/Vaccine/Vaccine/… on one side and on the other Vaccine/Microchip/One World Order by the people who gave us Q Anon and Death Rays from Space during fire season. Why can’t vaccines be an important element in a strategy without it being the focus of all our efforts? The nutter right, you can drop the resurgent John Bircherism anytime.
Remember the scandal of the East German doping (male hormones) of their female swimmers that ran from the 1970’s into the 1980’s and included the 1976 Montreal Olympics (read about it here)? Our girls (XX chromosomes) had to unknowingly compete against masculinized girls (still XX chromosomes) and few knew it, not even some of the East German girls. Later, these same German girls would suffer mental and physical damage, and later to give birth to babies with serious defects.
As for the Americans, some in the press at the time referred to them as “Ugly Americans” for their justifiable complaints. American Shirley Babashoff, slated to be the next Mark Spitz, wound up with one gold and a bunch of second place finishes in the ’76 Games. She refused to remain silent and sounded the alarm but was dismissed as “Surly Shirley”. She was right, she had courage, she was vilified, and it took 31 years (2007) for the scandal’s cover to be blown for all to see.
Shirley Babashoff (r) and a portion of the 1976 US Olympic women’s swim team.
Check out these understandable reactions by other members of the ’76 team:
“To be frank, I don’t think we should look like men.”
“I wouldn’t want to walk around the neighborhood looking like a guy.”
“That’s not the way God created us to be like that (looking like DDR Swimmers).”
That was then; this is now. Circa 2022 we have gone full circle, and then some. Today, those East Germans would be heralded as trans pioneers. We have men wanting to women and women wanting to be men, jumbled with the many whose psyche match their chromosomes, competing in women’s sports . . . with the full connivance of the so-called adults in the room. Chic ideologies have redefined scandal as liberation, and created a massive class of new victims whose sole characteristic is their satisfaction with God’s endowment. What chaos, what a mess.
Transgender Lia Thomas (MTF) recently hit the airwaves and pool at the U. of Penn. as a sensation setting pool, program, and meet records 38 seconds ahead of a real deal teammate. Then in a Saturday meet, lo and behold, Lia ran into transgender Iszac Henig (FTM) – who underwent a double mastectomy – who bested Lia twice. There you have it: female sports are to be dominated by people disenchanted with mother nature. It’s a competition among the disgruntled, leaving behind the long hours of training and coaching for the well-adjusted and contented girl (XX chromosome), the kind of girl that you as a boy (XY chromosome) wouldn’t mind taking home to mother (also XX chromosome). The other two would be difficult to explain.
Lia Thomas, centerIszac Henig
The “adults” who sanctioned this biological miasma are – you may have guessed it – the NCAA. In a policy that might have been written by a paid lobbyist or Ivy League lawyer, trans female athletes mustn’t compete on the women’s team until after one year of “testosterone suppression treatment”. Not a word about bone density, muscle mass, or anything else is mentioned. Much of the rest of their physical accoutrement in the men’s league follows them into the women’s pool.
Here’s the kicker. The policy is justified by the quality of reasoning that you’d expect from a brainwashed sophomore Anthropology major writing on systemic phobias of western civilization. Here it goes, brace yourself:
“. . . many people may have a stereotype that all transgender women are unusually tall and have large bones and muscles. But that is not true. . . . The assumption that all male-bodied people are taller, stronger, and more highly skilled in a sport than all female-bodied people is not accurate.”
Has anyone informed the geniuses at NCAA headquarters that the subject in question is not whether tall women or small men exist. That’s wholly irrelevant. At the level of elite competition in the vast majority of sports, men are taller, bulkier, faster, and stronger than women. The statement has no credible place in any policy defense, let alone one that seeks to condone the competition of taller, bulkier, faster, and stronger women-with-a-Y-chromosome with women limited to the fetal arrangement. It’s one of the goofiest things ever put to paper.
Girls – Iszac HenigBoys – Lia Thomas
How can women’s sports survive this mounting chaos over who’s a woman? Don’t look to bureaucrats of the NCAA for enlightenment. They spread the chaos by transmitting the confusion. The answer lies with us, the fans of girls’ sports. We must demand an end to the nonsense. Chromosomes are the ultimate determinant, not surgeries, injections, or counseling. Our pools, meets, and locker rooms must be made as safe for our girls and women (XX chromosome) as anywhere else.
Memory lane is a fertile source of human folly. John Meacham, normally accorded the title of historian but actually more of a journalist, explained his endorsement of Joe Biden on MSNBC in August 2020 (see below). The segment is short (5 minutes) and therefore not one for making a detailed case. What he levels against Trump in essence are a series of grotesquely inflated and abreviated charges.
In his mind, the choice in the election is between good (Biden) and evil (Trump). Bear in mind, by August of 2020 when Meacham went before MSNBC’s cameras, the people of this country saw, at ground level, evil as it marched across their tv screens and on their way to work. The public were inundated with media-supercharged police/suspect confrontations, cities wrecked by gross lawlessness, and residents forced to confront feces, syringes, and massive homeless encampments on their way to school and work. And all of this as an epidemic rages and their kids were unlearning under ZOOM. So, where’s the “evil”? Is it really Trump, or is this thing that Meacham calls evil something he is aiding and abetting? The thought hit me one year into “good” winning.
I was immediately struck by his vague illusion to “white racism” in America. Yet, none of the cop incidents of 2020 can be traced to racist cops. So, when you can’t pinpoint personal racism, invent an impersonal one and call it “systemic”. Meacham purports to be a scholar, but he would sound more like he stepped back into the world of medieval alchemy if he bent a knee to this new wizardry.
No person schooled in rational thought can excusably accept a proposition (systemic racism, white supremacy, et al) that tramples over Karl Popper’s first rule scientific reasoning: falsifiability. It must be testable. Nothing in this blob of political sloganeering is even remotely survivable under the simplest cross-examination. Since Marx, lefties have tried to make their ideologies scientific and this latest generation is no different. They try to do it with “statistical disparities”. The words sound imposing but they’re as simple as aggregating people into racial groups and different stats pop out. They immediately jump to their favorite bogeyman – racism – for the differences without any sound basis. It’s the modern alchemy. Apparently, the revolution is more important than truth.
We are told that we must use racism to combat racism, a militant affirmative action. Sounds like, we must have sin to combat sin. Combat the murder of nuns with the murder of priests. The formulations are endless. In the end, we have dangerous streets, decaying schools, the treachery of Afghanistan, a war on our gas tanks, shortages and inflation, a filthy public square, and a life under powerful potentates. Meacham’s “good” didn’t turned out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Meacham peddled on us a doddering and compliant agent of far more evils to replace a braggart who got some things right.
I wonder how Meacham views his performance on August 20, 2020. I hope that he cleaned his foot before insertion.
The cartoon below captures the delirium of our times. It’s safetyism run amok. The obsessive/compulsive nature of safety-at-all-costs is destroying us.
It took a virus to expose this latest contagion (pun intended) of the mind. We’ve lost all sense of balance. Safety-alone in all instances is as silly as having to wear a seat belt after a bad sunburn in a mad rush to the hospital for my wife to deliver our baby. No weighing of cost and benefit, comfort and discomfort, likes and dislikes, and personal assessment of risk. Somebody else – the government or the population of ninnies – claims the power to force us into their phobias.
If you really want to know the reason for the broad loss of credibility on the part of government-deputized “experts”, just look at their abundantly displayed lack of recognition of any other consideration other than the factoids of their narrow specialty. Fauci and Walensky wail about infections in a carpet-bombing of all the other things that make us human. Close the schools or open them with the kids isolated in pods, masks, plexiglass, and jabs; the germophobes screaming at other airline passengers for their refusal to continue suffocating behind a mask while eating; politicians ordering universal vaccination when the vaccine neither prevents additional infection nor its transmission; make it as difficult as possible for anyone to earn a living; prevent us as from seeking fellowship in worship; and effectually banish two thousand years of Christmas. Shocking and amazing.
The vaccines armor the many from hospitalization, but they can only do so much. They are not the “philosopher’s stone” of immunology. In fact, the unvaccinated 18 to 29 cohort run about the same risk as the vaccinated 50 to 64 according to OSHA’s own assessment (see https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/scotus-should-nix-bidens-vaccine-mandates/).
All the advice for sensible policy making isn’t limited to the kind coming out of a room full of lab coats. Their contributions are necessary but not sufficient. Necessary/sufficient isn’t a cliché. It’s a fact! I only wish politicians weren’t so eager to use the factoids of science as arrows in their political quiver. They end up besmirching themselves and science.
