A blog in defense of western civilization by Roger Graf
Here’s the relevant scene from “A Man For All Seasons” mentioned in my previous post. Substitute young Roper for the cancel-culture mobs patrolling our campuses, infecting our children’s curriculums, manning the halls of power, and swarming the newsrooms. Mob rule has the upper hand over the rule of law and decency. These, indeed, are tumultuous times. We must keep our heads on straight in this period of malevolent madness.
RogerG
The movie, “A Man For All Seasons”, has a pertinent exchange between Sir Thomas More and his daughter’s fiancée, William Roper. Roper proclaims his desire to steamroll any law to suppress an evil. More counters with this: “And when the last law was down – and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?” As the kids in the backseat would say, “Are we there yet?” Are our laws, like the Bill of Rights, made flat?
I don’t know, but we seem to be close. The Biden posse is coming after guns, embarking on a crusade against its political foes under the banner of the fight against the illusory “White Supremacy”, and rigging the federal election system to sustain its grip on power by making it easier to vote and easier to cheat. We are quickly becoming a banana republic with Stalinistic overtones.
“A Man For All Seasons” is worth a look. It isn’t the cup if tea for those raised on films with thin dialogue and abundant eye candy, but it more than makes up for it in gripping moral lessons.
RogerG
I’ve known for some time that the state’s power class has wanted to do it – i.e., tax its refugees. People are fleeing the state for its institutional cancel culture, crumbling quality of life, taxes, and regulations but Sacramento’s tenured political grifters are still trying to keep their hands in the pockets of even the escapees.
AB 2088 is the latest attempt at cross-border taxation. It would create a wealth tax that could be assessed for 10 years after a person has left the state. It rides on the back of AB 1253 which established the job-crushing wealth tax. Residents punished with the highest taxes in the nation will continue to be flogged after they flee if the influential have their way.
Read about the bill here.
The state’s Commissariat of Revenue – Franchise Tax Board – reserves to itself the omnipotent power to define a resident without any deference or recognition of any other state’s laws. To boil the issue down to simple terms, another state’s residents get the privilege of paying California taxes. That’s right, if a person meets the residency requirements of their new state, California can override that state’s laws, impose its byzantine formula for California residency, and still hold them financially hostage.
Somehow, the Constitutional provisions over interstate commerce and the right travel would seem to have some relevance here. They do! The gambit is blatantly unconstitutional.
California, you need to be reminded that you are only one state in fifty. A person can only be a “resident” of a state, but he or she is a “citizen” of the United States. My US citizenship trumps your ham-handed attempt to avoid the consequences of transforming your state into a decaying one-party nightmare.
Watch that space. I certainly will since I am one of those refugees.
RogerG
Dan Crenshaw (R, Tx., below) has a website for those in the military to report instances of woke politicization of the ranks. Anonymity is guaranteed. The web page for the whistleblower form can be found here.
The services aren’t so insulated from the rest of us that crass left-wing indoctrination should be able to avoid an exposure to sunlight. We ought to know what the woke careerists in the Pentagon are doing to our husbands and wives, sons and daughters, and moms and dads in uniform.
To our people in uniform, think of it as your oath to a higher authority. Rudolph Eichmann and Pol Pot faced a higher justice, and the excuse that I was “following orders” afforded no respite from accountability. This extremist brainwashing is a dagger at the heart of the nation. Crenshaw, a combat veteran who wears the scars of battle, and federal law protects you as you do your duty.
Turn in the malefactors.
RogerG
Our military isn’t to be political. Our Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, is making it so. One could be excused for concluding that the Squad is running the Defense Department as it does the Democratic Party.
In a CNN interview, Austin tried to rebut claims that the military is “soft” because of its embrace of wokeness. No, he’s dangerously wrong. Secretary Austin is undermining the most important asset of a fighting unit: the willingness of its members to sacrifice for each other. Tell me how cramming down the throats of our fighting men and women racist and identity-mongering screeds will lead to combat effectiveness.
(Read about the interview here.)
Treason is defined as making war on the United States. This isn’t treason, but it has the effect of treason. It destroys the ability of the country to defend itself by dividing the troops into squabbling camps of identity groups.
The Navy came out with a reading list for the “growth and development” of sailors that included Ibram X. Kendi’s extremist tirade, “How to Be an Antiracist”. The Navy’s Second Fleet created a book club for discussing and reading Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility”. Vice admiral Andrew L. Lewis, you should be ashamed of yourself. These are extremist left-wing spiels that are being normalized in the ranks.
Austin uses the left-wing jargon of “look like America” which in reality will compete with competence. Do you want an engineer “to look like America” or do you want a bridge that won’t collapse under your car? This is not only nonsense; it’s dangerous nonsense when it’s given a stamp of approval from the top.
The Army is running ads about “Heather has Two Mommies” in the ranks. What effect does all this identity obsessiveness have on morale? It produces nothing good. A constant refrain that encourages prickliness is a threat to the nation, and is not just another policy choice. For this reason alone, Austin is deserving of censure.
He may want a military that “looks like America”, but it won’t look, or act, like an effective fighting force. See, Lloyd, looks can be deceiving.
RogerG
Memorial Day is a time to remember that we are mostly a decent people. No measure of decency can compete with this divine insight from the Gospel of John: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” We have patriot graves all over the world that are testament to the greatest love. Their headstones are a rebuke to today’s insidious malcontents who seem to have a grip on the cultural gateways of today. As they besmirch the nation and anybody older than them, these graves are the ultimate censure. They died so others might live, live in Lincoln’s “last best hope of earth”.
We should not forget that ours is a good nation, not a perfect one. Nothing touched by the hand and mind of man is without fault, including, and most poignantly, the fevered beliefs of those who would tear it all down in their profound ignorance. There are too many in graveyards scattered around the country and world who practiced that greater love. Today, we honor them and condemn the misguided who belittle them and the nation for which they died.
“The Mansions of the Lord” seems most appropriate in this troubled time.
Here are the lyrics:
To fallen soldiers let us sing
Where no rockets fly nor bullets wing
Our broken brothers let us bring
To the Mansions of the Lord
No more bleeding, no more fight
No prayers pleading through the night
Just divine embrace, eternal light
To the Mansions of the Lord.
Where no mothers cry and no children weep
We will stand and guard though the angels sleep
Through the ages safely keep
The Mansions of the Lord.
(Words by Randall Wallace and music by Nick Glennie-Smith)
RogerG
Good question. David Chipman, Biden’s nominee to run the ATF, couldn’t come up with a definition but he wants to ban them anyway. Sen. Kennedy of Louisiana pressed him for a definition. Chipman said, “There’s no way I could define an assault weapon.” Senator Cotton of Arkansas did as well. Chipman tried to redirect the question to Congress and dredged up an old memo on suspect weapons crossing the southern border. He described the memo defining an assault rifle as semi-automatic, detachable magazine, in caliber 22 on up. He just made illegal most of the rifles and pistols in the possession of good American citizens.
That’s the problem with the mythical gun: it can’t be defined in any sensible way. It’s a rhetorical mirage. Take a look at the rifles below. Which one is an “assault rifle”? Is it “A” or “B”?
A:
B:
You say “B”. Why not “A”? “B” looks military – it’s the notorious AR-15 – and “A” is for hunting Bambi, you might say. So it must be about the looks of “B”, right?
Looks is the only difference because both are semi-automatic, besides the fact that the hunter uses the more powerful 30-06 round as opposed to the smaller 5.56 in the other.
Will “B” assault you more effectively than “A”? If so, how so? Will the bullet out of the barrel of “B” assault you more effectively than the projectile leaving the barrel of “A”? Let me help you. The answer is “no”. Both will tear into anything that happens to be in the way. Thus, all guns with a bullet exiting the barrel “assault” whatever is in their path.
Of course, the thing just sits there as an inert piece of metal, wood, and plastic, till a human mind behind a human finger at its trigger turns it into a projectile-ejecting tool. No human, no assault. Simple.
Is the semi-automatic feature scary to you? You see “automatic” in semi-automatic. They aren’t the same. For all intents and purposes, full auto weapons aren’t available to you and I. The only thing that we can get is a gun that will fire only one round with each pull of the trigger. “A” does it just as well as “B”.
Chipman enters Alice’s Wonderland when he said that the AR-15 was issued to him as a federal agent and called it a “particularly lethal weapon”. Particularly lethal? How? All guns are lethal if you happen to be in the flight path of the bullet. Just point ’em in a dangerous direction. And another round will issue out of the hunter as quickly as the AR.
The “assault rifles” discussion is demented. If you can play word games with a legal and widely available gun in order to ban it, then any gun can be banned if you can find the right word chemistry to use against it. And there goes the 2nd Amendment.
RogerG
*Also on my Facebook page.
So, there’s a bit of the spit-in-your-eye gumption left in the Golden State. The “Battle of Tinhorn Flats” was inaugurated by the son of the owner while his dad was overseas on business, with full approval of dad. While it didn’t end well – the eatery still fell under the iron boot of Newsom’s Council of Commissars like all the others – the episode showed that the spirit 1776 has a pulse in the People’s Republic. I’m inspired.
Check out this exchange between father and son at the onset of the imbroglio:
Son, Baret Lepejian, expresses the desire to reopen in spite of Newsom’s edicts and his father says that there are 30,000 closed restaurants in LA.
The younger Lepejian recalled: “100 percent fully aware, and I said there’s going to be 29,999, and there’s going to be one motherf***er that’s going to be open, and that’s going to be us.”
It’s reminiscent of Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe’s response to a German demand for the surrender of American forces in besieged Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, December 1944. He replied, “Nuts!” He was right in the end, and rescued by Patton, and the Germans lost. Which side do you think Newsom mirrors?
The Leperjians fought Newsom’s Stalinesque requisition squads down to Baret’s stays in goal and $50,000 in fines. When a judge orders the cut-off of power, employees brought in generators. When doors were chained and locked, employees used saws. When agents installed a chain-link barrier around the building, they set up a food truck and grill serving “non-comply tacos” and “freedom burgers”.
It turns out that gumption is more scientific than the self-important decrees of the state’s Ministry of Truth. The pandemic still raged in spite of all the lockdowns. Blanketing everyone’s face behind a secular burka didn’t stem the tide. School closures treated the young-ins the same as nursing home residents in complete disregard of the science (As for the teachers, they are essential workers like doctors, nurses, and truckers). The public square was awash in hypocrisies. I could go on, and none of it worked.
Newsom is only opening up to save his own political bacon, and before the rest of the state packs up and leaves.
“Remember Tinhorn Flats” will join “Remember the Alamo” in the annals of rallying cries for freedom. Please read the article about it.
RogerG
Remember the Supreme Court’s decision in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo in November of last year. It slapped down Cuomo’s near lockdown of church in his state. The Court ruled that he couldn’t have more severe restrictions on places of worship than for other organizations. Soon after, Harvest Rock Church and Ministry in California filed suit to challenge Newsom’s assault on faith. Their case reached the Court and it referred the matter back to the 9th Circuit with the stipulation to follow the decision in Brooklyn. Meaning, California was slapped down again.
But wait, there’s more. The governor will be forced to pay the $1.35 million legal tab in a settlement on file with the 9th Circuit. But wait, there’s more. Newsom will be the first governor in history to be under a federal injunction to protect houses of worship. According to one source, “the state of California is now under a permanent injunction from imposing restrictions on churches and houses of worship that are not equally applied to other critical infrastructure or essential services.”
Read about the case here.
The Court has had enough of California’s extremist state government. But what of the state’s electorate who keeps sending these Maduro-loving clowns to Sacramento in super majorities? Recent opinion polls indicate that Newsom is set to survive the recall. Maybe it’s not surprising. The guy is buying votes by flooding the state with millions of checks. Apparently, that’s all it takes to keep the state in its current morass of blackouts, punishing taxes, rampaging wildfires, bad roads, cities that look like homeless Woodstocks, water shortages, empty prisons/rising crime, and a permanent condition of lockdown.
California voters, after all, it was always up to you.
RogerG
Robert Manfred, MLB Commissioner, in April announced the relocation of the Allstar Game out of Atlanta. The reason? In his own words: “Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box.”
Of course, he was lambasting Georgia’s new election law which was meant to correct some of the impromptu and ill-conceived, panic-inspired changes to voting last year. The law included the hated but popular – hated by radical activists – “voter id” for all voting, absentee and in-person. What led Manfred to hitch MLB’s wagon to the horse of radical politics? It was more than talks with radicalized groups associated with Al Sharpton, Stacey Abrams, and Big Sports’ mega-millionaires like Lebron James (worth $500 million+). The sport is bureaucratized and, as such, is as isolated as LeBron James in his sprawling estate in Akron or his $20.5 million mansion in Brentwood. When you’ve become separated from the fan base, it’s easy to mistake the barking of a few well-situated extremists for a popular groundswell.
Just last October, at the World Series trophy ceremony in Los Angeles, Manfred was stunned after being heartily booed by the remaining fans in the stadium. Earlier, he had truncated the season to 60 games in a COVID-panic. From his lawyer’s mind, he tried to upend a century of baseball tradition with “pace-of-play” rules. Honestly, some of the rules might be justified, but lawyers are famous for producing a host of unintended ill-consequences. And, quite frankly, the whole scene is another one of those big-moneyed Harvard lawyers in a pin-striped suit telling main street America what’s best for them.
Yes, Manfred was a labor lawyer for Morgan, Lewis, and Bockius, LLP, when he came to the attention of the MLB big wheels in New York City, home of MLB, Inc. The guy is only familiar with the corporate suite and has less familiarity with the locker room than the queen of England. She has more exposure to reality since her love of horses and horse racing regularly took her into the stables.
The detachment leads to dealings only with groups, groups that aren’t representative of the people buying the tickets, gear, or putting their eyes and ears to the broadcasts. Manfred is an organizational man, far removed from the lives of ordinary wage-earners.
Organizational men and women are, by definition, bureaucrats, functionaries in an administrative state. We can see this unique social eco-system gestating in MLB in the 1970’s. It was abundantly on display in the short history of the Portland Mavericks as portrayed in “The Battered Bastards of Baseball”, currently showing on Netflix.
MLB is sport as entertainment, as is true of all professional sports. The fan goes to the park to root for the team in a drama whose uncertain outcome has to be played out on the field. Bing Russell, the founder of the Mavericks, understood better than the corporate heads what drives fans, all fans. He gave them people to root for, care for, and have an emotional investment in. He didn’t see his single-A franchise as another cog in the wheel of the corporate machine. He loved being around the players and fans. To people like Manfred, it’s the opposite: the hoi polloi are statistical abstractions that are buried in the corporate balance sheet.
Bing reminded me of the early swashbucklers of Silicon Valley, or the Howard Hugheses in the young years of aviation: take chances and fly by the seat of your pants. That world is alien to a person whose chief qualification arose in matriculation from Cornell to Harvard Law to a federal clerkship to a law partnership to legal retainerships with the corporate suits.
In the end, we get a homogenized product without any of the grit of the qualities that make for personal attachment. We also get the blunders of an insulated nomenklatura. And all of us should know what happened to the Soviet Union by 1991.
See “The Battered Bastards of Baseball” on Netflix. You’ll enjoy it, and get a glimpse into MLB’s current condition. Oh, by the way, Bing’s son is Kurt Russell, the actor, who obviously has important memories to contribute to the story.
RogerG
*Also on my Facebook page.