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Sally Yates, join your mentor in happy retirement.

The Constitution deposits all “executive” authority in the president – not “legislative”, nor “judicial”, just “executive”. Sally, “execute” means to carry out and enforce the law. You, as an appointee, are an agent of the president. Your job is to assist the president, not be the president.

The man that put you in your position is no longer president. He’s a private citizen with a golf bag. Join him on the links.

Sally, your “conscience” is really a bunch of opinions. The guy with your opinions isn’t around. Another guy with different opinions was elected. For peace of mind, please, go join the howler monkeys in the lefty firmament. You’ll be happier … and so will the rest of us.

RogerG

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Progressive Enclaves at War with the Rest of America

While reading the December 20, 2016 issue of Forbes, I ran into an article, “The Just 100: America’s Best Corporate Citizens”.  It extolled certain companies in a variety of industries for their humane and environmentalist policies.

Further into the issue was a small piece titled, “Giving Big to Change the World”.  It identified 10 large donations that go big to “Change the World”.  Michael Bloomberg’s $30 million grant to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, the Donald Graham and William and Karen Ackman’s $50 million contribution to TheDream.US for scholarships to the undocumented, and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation’s handout to The ClimateWorks Foundation to mold a “low-carbon society” are but a few examples.

Both pieces shared space with an article on Silicon Valley’s tech dynamo NIVIDIA and one of its founders, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.  Not uncommon for the Valley’s success stories, the author, Aaron Tilley, celebrated the lavish employee perks and environmentalism that permeates the corporate culture.

((Huang and NIVIDIA)

What’s the point?  Colossal corporate America, big philanthropy, and Silicon Valley inhabit “blue” America.  By “blue”, I mean bastions of progressivism, modern liberalism, and the Left.  The terms are practically synonymous.  And “blue” America is toxic to the rest of the country, called “red” America.

Today’s progressivism encompasses a fixation on sexual/melanin-count/ethnic diversity and solipsism (the relativistic libertine individual as the center of all things).  It also incorporates environmentalism.  Environmentalism isn’t science.  It’s ideology.  It is a cluster of beliefs at home with progressivism.

People sometimes confuse environmentalism with science, and try to bleach environmentalism of its “ism”.  The two are distinct things.  Science can depict the heat-trapping properties of CO2.  It can’t predetermine policy choices requiring more than “heat-trapping” as a consideration.  Filling the gap from fact to decision is environmentalism’s ideological bias to socially engineer a particular definition of the better person and society.  The alleged betterment aligns with the prejudices of “blue” America to the detriment of “red” America.

The consequences are a purging of progressives in “red” America as “blue” America’s policy preferences threaten to destroy the livelihoods of  many in “red” America.  The 2016 election was a clash of the two Americas.

A group of coal miners wave signs for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as they wait for a rally in Charleston, W.Va., Thursday, May 5, 2016. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

In Salena Zito’s piece in the Washington Examiner (1/29/17),  “The Democrats’ diversity challenge”, the Democrats are facing near extinction in “red” America.  As Kevin, a longtime Johnstown, Pa., Democrat and Hillary voter, said,

“There is no one who looks like me in the party anymore.  Every single thing that is part of my weekly routine is constantly under attack by my own party. I am a gun owner, I am pro-life and I work in the energy sector. That pretty much makes me an enemy of my own party.”

The party is in the process of cannibalizing the more moderate Blue Dogs in its caucus.  The faction has shrunk from 44 in 2006 to the 17 of today.   The handwriting for the Dogs appeared on the wall in 2006.  Joe Lieberman (D) of Connecticut, a classic Blue Dog, lost the party primary to the leftist Ned Lamont.  Lieberman won the general running as an independent.  Today, the party is the result of the cross-breeding of the Sierra Club, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.  There’s no room for the pro-lifer … or the coal miner.

The party is reflexively Left and increasingly relegated to urban islands, college towns, and the coasts.  The collapse of the party in the vast region between the West’s Coast and Cascade Ranges and the western edges of Atlantic coastal plain is recounted in the loss of statehouses, governorships, and federal officeholders in this vast area not normally seen as haunts for the beautiful and trendy people.

The denizens of “blue” America are surprised that a West Virginia coal miner might find the infatuation with low carbon as a threat to the family income.  Amazingly, the very thing that the trendy lefties are trying to destroy, coal, along with thousands of livelihoods, may end up rescuing states like California from the self-inflicted blackouts that will strangle those Santa Clara server farms.

You see, that “low-carbon” future may mean a chaotic energy one.  “Sustainable” energy really means “variable” energy.  Solar and wind don’t track household use.  Solar peeks during the day while the ac continues whirring away at night.  And, of course, the wind is the wind.

Sorry, there’s no way to store any surplus generated during the day or when the wind is howling.  You use or lose it.

To keep energy flowing in the grid at all times during peaks and when lunar radiance has replaced solar, you need the backstop of nuclear, fossil fuels, hydro, and geothermal.  But the phobia of climate change, so much in vogue in the blue bubbles, has resulted in a breakdown of the backstop.  Blue states like California will feel the pinch.

Natural gas is the backstop.  It is preferable not only because it’s cheaper.  It’s because the alternatives have been executed (coal), fallen into obsolescence (nuclear), and nature doesn’t cooperate with droughts (hydro) and subsurface volcanism (geothermal).

For the lefty tekkies, coal is evil coal.  A coal company exec will be a lonely person  in the Santa Clara social circuit.  Those coal-fired plants in the blue fiefdoms have long since gone the way of the dodo bird.  Obama’s people were trying to exterminate the things nationwide before the Trump train disrupted the endeavor.

That leaves natural gas.  Fracking – another thing despised by the activists – has made it cheap, for now.  Prices are expected to rise this year.  It is transported by pipeline, another thing on the activist hit list.

Storage is limited  in a few central locations.  If anything should happen to those places, especially in states handcuffed to windmills and solar panels, well, buy a generator, get a gun for protection (do this at least 2 weeks before things go dark), and barricade yourself in your home.

California was warned by FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) of blackouts last year.  In 2005, LA’s Aliso Canyon gas storage facility was closed due to a leak.  It has only partially reopened.  The nearby La Paloma plant will close soon as the direct fallout of the state’s climate change policies.  The backstop in Southern California is beginning to be dismantled.

SoCalGas Aliso Canyon 3

New York, and much of the northeast, has similarly tacked left.  Tony Clark, ex-FERC commissioner, said, “The Northeastern states are notorious for policies that de-industrialize their economies. They are nothing if not consistent.”  If you lack a graduate degree in computer science, a resume’ chock-a-block full of tekkie employment, and sufficient personal wealth to rise above the over-inflated market,  make a mad dash away from the coasts.  Rescue yourself from “blue” lunacies.

When the lights start going out, will that sober up Angelinos and those in Manhattan penthouses to a greater appreciation of coal?

“Red” America understands that “blue” America is trying to impose a fantasy.  If “blue” America is granted the power to do it, “red” America loses its livelihoods and “blue” America gets to experience “Escape from New York”.  Lose, lose.  Eh?

2016 was the year red said “no” to blue.

RogerG

Sources:

Forbes, 12/20/16

“The Democrats’ diversity challenge”, Salena Zito, Washington Examiner, 1/29/17, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/the-democrats-diversity-challenge/article/2613114

“Coal to the rescue”, John Siciliano, Washington Examiner, 1/30/17, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/coal-to-the-rescue/article/2613181

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Playing Gotcha While Ignoring the Integrity of the Vote

What conceivable reason could a person give for opposing a requirement for a valid ID before voting?  Could it be that ID’s “suppress” and “disenfranchise” voters?  Surely, some people have good reason for not having a valid ID at the time of voting.  Can the circumstance be handled without obstructing ID laws?  Certainly.  Provisional ballots can be issued till identification is verified.  It’s already being done.

Is getting an ID so onerous that it places an undue burden on the disadvantaged?  Well, if it is, banks and stores are imposing a “disparate impact” on the needy.   Where was Obama’s DOJ in enforcing “equal access” to check-cashing and retail services?

Obama’s DOJ is nowhere to be seen around check-cashing counters and cash registers.  Getting an ID is easy.  It takes some time and a little effort.  Instead, the Obama’s DOJ warriors targeted efforts at purging voter rolls of invalid registrants, while denying access to the fed’s database.  They didn’t hesitate hauling state officials before the federal bar for having the same condition to vote as for boarding a plane, entering a federal courthouse, and to buy booze.

Much of the media is complicit in the charade.  Instead of a balanced treatment of the issue, we get a drawn out game of gotcha.  Trump tweets something and many in the media rush to the “fact-checking” websites to contradict him.

They get hung up on the factoid.  Proving Trump wrong is more important than the core issue.  The real issue isn’t the accurate number of illegal votes, whether its 3 million, 5 million, or 346.  The real contest is between maximizing voter turnout at all costs and ensuring the integrity of the vote.  The two positions are at odds.

The zeal to contradict Trump is an adjunct of the zeal to show vote fraud is rare.  Since it is said to be rare, measures meant to prevent it are assumed to be grounded in racial animus, xenophobia, white privilege, and the rest of the “Occupy” check list.  Thus, full speed ahead to making it easier to vote than to buy toilet paper.

Did it ever occur to anyone that the alleged rarity of a crime is, quite frankly, irrelevant to the need to prevent it?  For example, take murder.  Murder is certainly rare in comparison to all crimes.  It’s statistically infinitesimal.  Following the logic of the no-ID crowd, efforts to define the act and to forestall its occurrence must be a waste of time.

Is it a wild analogy?  Think again.  Infinitesimal percentages are concocted by comparing a small number of occurrences with a much larger pool of instances.  Applying the math to the case of voter fraud, the number of discovered occurrences is infinitesimal to the large pool of 125 million votes.

The reasoning for laws about voter fraud is the same as for laws about murder.  The laws aren’t dependent on the frequency of their occurrence.  The laws exist because the acts occur, unless the no-ID claque is asserting vote fraud is at absolute “0” (absolute zero is 0 Kelvin or -459F).  Now that’s absolutism … and silly.

It’s safe to say that vote fraud is significantly above absolute “0”.  The need to buttress the already shaky proposition of the no-vote-fraud/no-ID-laws clamor leads to the flailing about for other sources of support.  Mentioning Colin Powell or court decisions is a common and worn out tactic.  Neither one has much validity.

Both are examples of the fallacious exercise of argumentum ad verecundiam (argument from authority).  People throw out names or opinions as if these are dispositive.  They aren’t.  Without more substance, their use will fill up space in a column but add nothing to the argument.

The practice of citing court opinions is particularly weak.  Court opinions on issues like voter ID laws range all over the issue landscape.  One reason for the variance is the tactic of court-shopping by activists.  People seek judges and courts with a history of a particular bias.  Yep, bias exists in the judiciary.  Just because a judge has spoken, don’t assume God has.  Search long enough and you’ll find another jurist to contradict somebody.

Facetious arguments such as these only cloud an already hazy situation.  The multiplicity of geographical actors in the  system is astounding.  Voting occurs in millions of homes through mail-in ballots, in over 110,000 polling places (a guesstimate) across the country, all managed by the 50 separate states.  The interactions of this crazy quilt would overwhelm the skills of the X-Men.  It’s a fertile environment for gaffes, waste, and abuse.

Some coordination among some of the states to help clean up their voter lists has occurred with the Electronic Registration Information Center of 21 states and the 30 states belonging to the Interstate Crosscheck Program sponsored by the Kansas Secretary of State.  The country’s most populous state, California, doesn’t appear to belong to either club.

In the headlong rush to rock the vote, California has left a few zombies on the voter rolls.  Dead people vote.  One reporter for the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles found 265 dead voters, with 215 in LA County alone.  146 were Democrats.  On person who went cold in 2003 nonetheless voted in ’04, ’05, ’06, ’08, and ’10.  Another commuter from the grave entered it in 2004 but later roamed out to vote in ’08, ’10, ’12, ’14.  32 of the walking dead voted in 8 elections apiece.

In fact, California was the last state to come into compliance with the Help America Vote Act of 2002.  It took 14 years and the final weeks before the 2016 general election for the state to make itself legal, after it rushed into online registration up to 15 days before the election, and the wave of 600,000 new registrants in the weeks before the June primary.

They don’t even record IP addresses so one enterprising soul with a laptop hanging out at Disneyland’s Star Tour could register the crowd in the waiting line.  Pardon me but I’m skeptical about something called “verification”.

Compounding the difficulties is the campaign to expand the electorate into the margins of the politically casual and ignorant.

It means making voting as easy as turning on the tv set.  It means voting at home and by mail.  Of course, the mail-in vote puts the kibosh to the secret ballot.  Plural ballots sent to the same address presents the delightful opportunity of one person filling out everyone’s ballot.  Who knows what takes place at the kitchen table.

For some states like California, going to the DMV to register your car, or obtain or renew a driver’s license, will nearly lock you into the voter list.  If a person misses the citizen/non-citizen section on the form, the state will seek you out for an answer.  If you refuse one, they’ll register you anyway.

If you explicitly checked “no”, the state will hunt you down with a letter to verify the “no” answer.  Apparently, what part of “no” don’t they understand?

What about that driver’s license, the ticket to all things requiring ID, as in registering to vote?  States like California issue them to illegal non-citizens.  Illegals get one nearly indistinguishable from a 4th generation native.

Except for a notation in the upper right hand corner and on the back, the thing is exactly like my sons.  How this avoids a violation of the Real ID Act, Title II, Section 202 – “uses a unique design or color indicator to alert Federal agency and other law enforcement personnel ” – is beyond my understanding.  I can only hope the small print catches the attention of the eagle eyes of the counter clerk.  Good luck.

But then again, you don’t need it to vote in a state life California.  In that zoo, it’s illegal to even ask for the thing at the polling place.  No better word describes elections in many places in America than “slipshod”.  How did it get this bad?

Well, if your goal is to maximize turnout, you cut corners on vote integrity.  You’re willing to accept some cancellation of legal votes by illegal ones in the rush to get a ballot into everyone’s hands.  Disparagement of the desire to protect legal ones from cancellation is part of the propaganda onslaught that we’re experiencing today.

The absurdity of criminalizing a request for an ID, obstructing access to federal lists that might expose illegals on the voter rolls, pushing for avenues of voting that make a hash out of the secret ballot, and the embrace of the fetish of corralling the inattentive and  uninterested into the electorate makes a mockery of our republic.

It raises an interesting question: Why vote?  Devoting the time and effort to keep up on things will prove to be no asset once your ballot joins those others.

RogerG

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Healthcare Myth-making: Scandinavian Medicine and The Shell Game

It’s amazing.  Did you know that there are adults who actually believe in the prosperity-generating potential of the robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul principle of governance?  It’s like the “shell game”.  If the peanut under the shell represents wealth, then shuffling it about through taxing schemes will magically produce more peanuts.  Right?

Wrong, if one stays clear of the hallucinogenics and other intoxicants, and has the mental maturity beyond a preteen.  Clinging to the illusion isn’t much different than insisting on the corporeal existence of Santa Claus.

The shyster logic isn’t understood to be shyster logic among those “feeling the Bern” and within the Democratic Party hive.  It’s holy scripture.  Santa Claus is real to them.  Translation: Socialism is great!  It’s no accident that the subjects in the 2 previous sentences begin with “S”.

No better example of the phenomena can be found than the unbridled faith in “socialized medicine”, Obamacare, “single payer”, the “public option”, and similar disfigurements of the language.

Of course, while appealing to the feeble-minded, the idea of a fat dude falling down a chimney delivering “free” goodies without any concept of cost may not be so convincing to the sober-minded.  So, the equivalent of the North Pole must be created.  For health care, and all things tax-and-spend, it’s Sweden or, more generally, Scandinavia … which also has the added advantage of being not too far from the North Pole.

But as in all dreams, one must awaken.  Bernie Sanders invoking Sweden/Scandinavia may be more Santa Claus than the reality of mom and dad running up the credit card debt for the goodies placed under the tree.  His image of Scandinavia is  sheer fantasy.

The case of Robert Nielsen in Denmark, above, is instructive.  He proudly boasts that he’s been on Danish welfare since 2001.  He owns his own co-op apartment and eschews work. (4)  This rise of dependency has shocked many Danes.  It’s a problem spanning many Scandinavian countries.

The “Carina” (a psuedonym) story also outraged many  Danes.  She, 36 and a single mother, has been on welfare since age 16, currently receiving $2,700 a month.  Many Danes are thinking the formerly unthinkable – welfare reform.

Karen Haekkerup, the minister of social affairs and integration, in 2013 exclaimed,

“In the past, people never asked for help unless they needed it.  My grandmother was offered a pension and she was offended. She did not need it.  But now people do not have that mentality. They think of these benefits as their rights. The rights have just expanded and expanded. And it has brought us a good quality of life. But now we need to go back to the rights and the duties. We all have to contribute.”(4)

There are more problems than the refusal to wean from the government teat.  Sweden is forced to grapple with difficulties associated with a bountiful healthcare teat.  One unavoidable problem arises from the necessity of implementing the “California DMV” model of provisioning government medical care.  You’ll be assigned a client ID number, a priority number, take a seat and … wait.  It’s how government naturally responds when confronted with millions of users for all things advertised as “free”.

(LA DMV office, 2014)

In Sweden, patients, like cattle,  are herded into monolithic facilities like the one below.  Everyone is assigned a district (landsting) and must utilize it’s hospital.  In many cases,  there ‘s only one per landsting.(1)

(Sodersjukhuset, Stockholm hospital, 2014, by Arild Vagen)

Since “free” outperforms price, public (government) eviscerates private care.  The remaining private medical operations are heavily regulated by the state.  They might as well be “public”. (1)

Another of the ways that the DMV-style of healthcare adapts to the crowd seeking “free” is the ranking of patients.  Government prioritizes according to “future taxpayer value” and similar numbers-driven analytics.  Woe be to you if you’re old and need a procedure normally assigned to the aged.(1)

Government behavior will produce a sinking sensation when one hears “wait times”.  Emergency room wait times are 5-7 hours during the 9-5 slot and only Monday through Friday.  Beware: Don’t get sick or injured after-hours and on weekends. Furthermore, sickness and injuries should be avoided during the public employee vacation season of June to August.(1)

“Wait times” for a general practitioner are typically a month.   It’s worse for specialists.  If your son is experiencing gender-identity difficulties, the surrender to surgery may have already occurred in the 18 months before seeing a child psychiatrist.(2)

Klaus Bernpainter, Swedish healthcare expert, captures the situation in an anecdote.

“When I moved to the U.S., our family health insurance took three months to kick in. One of my family members broke a leg in this period. We found a ‘five-minute clinic’ half an hour away, had the leg X-rayed, straightened and casted, with no waiting time — all for $200 cash. That kind of service is non-existent in Sweden.”(1)

Of course, the whole thing is executed by functionaries with the caring and affection of a protected, tenured DMV counter clerk.(1)

(Still from the 1962 film adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial.)

If you can’t apply the word “panacea” to Scandinavian healthcare, what about Scandinavian education?  Well, their education Borg could be confused with our own.  Sweden’s math and reading scores, according to OECD numbers, are more dismal than ours.  For all of Scandinavia, they’re treading water with us.(5)

Much of the freebie government stuff has become a problem for them, and many in the upper northern latitudes know it.  Yet, many Americans trek on up to places like Copenhagen  and Stockholm and return with sugar plums dancing in their heads.  Many natives have a different point of view.  They notice the decline, and the depressing realization that they’re living off the fumes of the past.

Freebie-Scandinavia didn’t always exist.   For example, Sweden was one of the poorest countries in Europe, hence all the 19th-century immigration to places like Minnesota and a football team named after them.  Starting in 1870, an economic renaissance began.  Free-market reforms on taxes, tariffs, and property rights produced a surge of prosperity.  Sweden experienced the highest GDP growth in the industrial world from 1870-1936.(3)

Then, something happened on the way to the future.  Forgetting the legacy in the late 60s and 70s, they embarked on an escalator of soaring taxes, spending, and welfare rolls, with the attendant rise in crime, drug addiction, welfare dependency, and red tape.  In 1976, Time Magazine summarized what many Norse were thinking, “Growing numbers are plagued by a persistent, gnawing question: Is their Utopia going sour?”(3)  Indeed.

And those “feeling the Bern” and the pandering, identity-politicians of the Democratic Party want us to jump on board the sour-utopia train.  Much of the Trumpophobia is rooted in the fantasy of Scandinaviophilia.

We’d be much better served by keeping in mind Friedman’s old maxim TINSTAAFL – There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.  The fact is, politicians can’t bring on the eschaton and its paradise.

RogerG

Sources:

(1) “The Truth About SwedenCare”, Klaus Bernpaintner, The Mises Institute, 7/10/2013, https://mises.org/library/truth-about-swedencare

(2) “Sweden’s healthcare is an embarrassment”, The Local, se, Johan Hjertqvist is President of Health Consumer Powerhouse, a Swedish-based organization which compares healthcare systems around the world (This is an abridged version of an article originally published in Swedish bySvenska Dagbladet.), http://www.thelocal.se/20150127/swedens-health-care-is-a-shame-to-the-country

(3) “No, Bernie Sanders, Scandinavia is not a socialist utopia”, Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, 10/15/2015,https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/10/15/bernie-sanders-scandinavia-not-socialist-utopia/lUk9N7dZotJRbvn8PosoIN/story.html

(4) “Danes Rethink a Welfare State Ample to a Fault”, Suzanne Daley, NYT, 4/20/13, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/world/europe/danes-rethink-a-welfare-state-ample-to-a-fault.html

(5) “Scandinavia Isn’t a Socialist Paradise: If you’re looking for a prosperous European country to emulate, don’t look to the high-tax social democracies of Scandinavia. Check out Switzerland, instead. ”, Kelly McDonald, The Federalist, 8/11/15, http://thefederalist.com/2015/08/11/scandinavia-isnt-a-socialist-paradise/

(6) “The strange death of social-democratic Sweden”, The Economist, 9/16/10, http://www.economist.com/node/17039151

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The Distressed Working Class and the 2016 Election

Understanding the 2016 election requires something more involved than a 140-character tweet or an abbreviated Facebook post.  Much has been written about the white working class in the lead up and aftermath to the Trump victory.  The video is an AEI panel discussion with J.D. Vance and Charles Murray on the topic from October of 2016.  First, watch the conversation and then read the essay below it.

Our politics seems increasingly disjointed as many see the electorate as disparate victims’ groups.  Some call it “identity politics”.  A semi-official status as “victim” normally follows an intense period of political activism.  The process was evident for unionized workers, all sorts of hyphenated Americans, and gays (now to be added to the “hyphenated” category).  Did the 2016 election cycle insert the “white working class” to the list?  Can it claim addition to the growing list of the “oppressed”?

Indeed, something significant has been happening to the white working class; something ignored by the culturally powerful.  It’s a story of the isolation and ignorance of the culturally influential from the everyday lives of average working Americans.  It’s a story of the negative impacts of an insular elite’s popular causes on people outside the elite redoubts, in a place I call “middle-America”.

Middle-America is an entity culturally, economically, and geographically defined.  Culturally, middle-Americans are least likely to experience haute couture and an Ivy League setting.  Dining preferences ranges from a good steakhouse to a bar/grill to fast-food.  Economically, they occupy the rungs hovering around the poverty line to blue collar, wage-earning incomes.  Geographically, they reside in areas conducive to their livelihoods.  They increasingly have been weeded out of the now expensive coastal enclaves and gentrified, trendy inner-city neighborhoods.  More and more they are identified with the vast stretch between the Appalachians and the West’s Coast and Cascade Ranges.

Middle America is a swath of the country in distress.  Socially, many middle-Americans are mirroring the experience of the African-American underclass.  Marriage rates are down; illegitimacy is up.  Church attendance is down; social pathologies like drug use and crime are up.  Unstable families more and more characterize life for many children.  Educational attainment is stunted.  Workforce participation by males is in decline.  The upshot is an evisceration of human capital that will be handed down to the next generation. (1) (2)

Factors like the decline of private-sector unions aren’t the cause as some claim.  The decay of these unions is a symptom, like all the rest, of a broader blue collar malaise.

These conditions are far removed from the cultural and economic elect.  They congregate in particular aesthetically pleasing nodes on the west coast and in places like Vail, Co.  They dominate financial and media centers and the surrounding neighborhoods, and college-centered communities.  Their children predominantly experience stable, intact families.  While church attendance is increasingly rare, values of hard work associated with formal education are stressed.  The backstop of strong families gives them a leg up in a world they’ll increasingly dominate.

Today, the two slices of America rarely intersect.  In the past, as recounted in the works of Charles Murray and Robert Putnam, they did.  It was common for the wealthy to rub elbows with workers and the poor.  Residential districts weren’t far apart and frequently shared the same schools, stores, and churches.

“Deindustrialization” has shattered this unity.  Some factories, the mainstay of some communities, have closed as economic weight gravitated to centers of financial services, technology, and higher education.  An outlook, distinct and secluded, has developed within each group. (2) (4)

Beliefs, as a consequence of isolation, begin to take hold among the two slices of the population.  Of particular note are the ideological obsessions and prejudices of the emerging upper class.  J.D. Vance makes reference to the slights of “hillbillies” and “rednecks” as acceptable language in conversation among so-called sophisticates.

Environmentalism has come to replace Christianity as a focus of near worship among cultural and upper class elites. (5)  It may be speculation but the attraction of the ideology probably has much to do with aesthetic cleanliness and neatness, just taking the form of environmental purity – thus the love affair with recycling, climate change, almost anything labeled “sustainable”, biodiversity, the preservation ethic for public lands, etc.

Furthermore, a formally educated elite has a predilection for the rule of “experts”, a foundational tenet of progressivism.  Environmentalism’s prescriptions lend themselves to the rule of “experts”.  Of course, the “experts” tend to be themselves.

The consequences of these views being translated into policy for those outside the elite enclaves is profound.  Yet, these effects aren’t maturely appreciated by this class of self-anointed “betters”.  For the elites, the forests are in essence parks that are to be treated as recreational preserves for the REI-crowd.  For a blue collar worker, the woods represent jobs and the stuff that fills a Home Depot.  Different perceptions, but it’s the REI-crowd who has magnified influence beyond their numbers.

The whole gamut of environmentalism’s causes has deleterious effects on working people and their communities.  Their safety-net is threatened as tax revenues decline.  Jobs disappear, only to be replaced by unemployment checks and part-time work.  Communities watch the housing stock deteriorate and store fronts board up.

Why?  One possible answer can be directed at the policy prescriptions whose origins lie in the perceptions of a particular, insular cultural elite.

The elite’s response to anyone harmed is a galling condescension and social engineering.  Opposition is ridiculed.  People experiencing the negative fallout will be directed into the “proper” behaviors and “proper” occupations.  Their children will be directed into the “proper” thoughts.   The near totalitarian dimensions of the outlook is obvious.

The political dimensions are equally obvious.  The blue along the coasts, and in the urban and college islands, corresponds with the cultural elite (map above).  The red is everyone else.  The Trump movement was a revolt, a revolt of middle-America against the condescension and effrontery of a cultural claque residing in “blue” America.

It will be interesting as the Democrats try to reshuffle their ideological deck to make it more appealing to blue collars.  I’m reminded, though, of the adage about lipstick on a pig.

RogerG

Sources:

(1) Losing Ground, Charles Murray

(2) Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, Charles Murray

(3) Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, J.D. Vance

(4) Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, Robert D. Putnam

(5) “Diversity in Environmental Organizations”, Sierra Club, 9/9/14, http://www.sierraclub.org/planet/2014/09/diversity-environmental-organizations

 

 

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Middle America’s Invasion: Donald Trump Becomes President Donald Trump

(Trump takes the oath, Jan. 20, 2017)

I support Trump with reservations. I opposed him in the primaries but voted for him, with reluctance, in the general. I retain my doubts. My observations aren’t those of a Trump zealot nor those of the rabid left. Clearly put, his election was a gathering of middle-America in opposition to the growing ascendancy of an insular, self-anointed elite.

By “middle-America”, I mean those people not graced with membership in one of the fashionable victims’ groups. It’s “middle” also geographically. As a glance at the election map indicates, Trump’s success was founded on a citizenry not privileged with residence on the trendy coasts, nor in a densely-packed urban agglomerate, nor a college cocoon.

If America is divided, the growing gulf lies between the insular places of swank values and their pet issues and the aspiring social middle scattered in “flyover country”.

Those outside the bubbles aren’t enamored by the chic but smothering outlook of the “beautiful people”.  Inside the bubbles, lefty progressivism is the catechism.  

The “Lefty” part of the reigning dogma in the blue archipelagos is a single-minded belief in the Marxist dictum of material conditions being all-determining in human relations.  Thus the lefty fixation on equalizing material conditions, and almost everything else. Surprise, that requires mammoth government.

The alliance of the left with government is a natural one.  The left needs power to transform people and society.  They need a cadre of enforcers and self-proclaimed “experts” to meddle into lives and shape a new society.  It’s what Obama and the Democrats tried to do while constrained by the limits of republican government.

Those of the left are totally oblivious of the Orwellian trap depicted in Animal Farm.  Painted on the side of the barn is the pigs’ new maxim, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”  In the Soviet Union it was called the “nomenklatura”.  In America, today, it’s called the administrative state.  It’s a metastasizing power base increasingly shielded from democratic accountability.

The “progressive” element is the conviction that  government is the most important agency for the achievement of a person’s highest potential.  For progressives, power is ensconced in a self-anointed class of elites – those so-called “experts”.  In reality, their grasp on wisdom is highly suspect.  Many are corrupted by progressive ideology and excessive self-confidence.   It’s the reason that “climate change” fits so neatly into their platform.

Furthermore, “potential” is left nebulous – tailor-made for the accretion of power into the state.  The state becomes isolated, unaccountable, and far removed from the vast middle of the country, where we find the sort of people who pay and receive little benefit.

Trump’s constituency is the real forgotten man and woman not so privileged by the adoring gaze of lefty progressives and their shock troops of “experts”.  The real forgotten American is only a target for social engineering.

Funny thing about this isolated elite: they don’t know themselves to be so parochial. They’re completely unaware. Self-reflection isn’t one of their strengths. They were blinkered by an ideology – leftist progressivism – that was ever-present in their environs, and few other places. In the end, they were blindsided by an election.

Interesting turn of events.

RogerG

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The Reaction to My “California Exodus” Cartoon

 The cartoon (above) from one of my Facebook posts seems to have elicited quite a spirited response from a couple of my friends. I respect their affection for California. As nearly a 3rd generation Californian, I can’t help but care about its prospects as well. And its prospects are troubling. I don’t relish saying this. The situation is widely documented. Here’s a brief synopsis from the National Center for Policy Analysis: http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=21859.
Also, below is a PBS “Intelligence Squared” debate on the topic. Take a seat, grab a cup of coffee, and view the debate. It’s fascinating.

RogerG

 

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A Recommendation: “The Witness”, a Documentary

Now playing on Netflix is “The Witness”. It’s a compelling account of a brother’s attempt to understand and explain his sister’s murder and its treatment by the media at the time and in the years since. The story is one of an assumption about the condition of our society being imposed on an actual event, with the attendant distortion and invention of facts. It becomes an urban myth, and doesn’t do justice for the victim, the victim’s family, and our society.

The 60s were rife with all manner of social critique. Leaving any judgment of the criticisms aside, sometimes incidents were shaped to fit these commentaries. Thus, events became fictionalized to some extent.

Having experienced the 60s up close and personal, a common complaint at the time, and articulated in a variety of ways, was the alleged dehumanization of our society. The story of the murder of a young woman was crafted to fit this premise. Actually, the real story is quite different.

Questions arise. If the real story diverges from the contrived version, are any pertinent lessons to be gleaned different from the ones assumed?  How often does this happen?  What does this situation say about the nature of our media? What does it say about the media’s herd instinct to naively follow the lead of a single media outlet, notably the NY Times?

Interesting questions. Watch the film.

RogerG

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Why is California the Bluest of Blue States? Part II

Part II: Blue Policies Make for Bluer States

(Sen. Kamala Harris and Rep. Mike Pompeo during Pompeo’s confirmation hearings, January 2016.)

It didn’t take long for California’s newly-minted Senator, Kamala Harris, to display the animating concerns of California’s insular governing class.  The confirmation hearings of Mike Pompeo for CIA Director gave us a perch to view the political island of California at work.  It quickly became apparent that all other matters pale in significance to sexual orientation and the Sierra Club’s environmentalist demands .

Without a whiff of humility or scientific caution, while being oblivious to the more relevant Age of Terror threats, she raised “climate change”.  She asked,

“CIA Director Brennan who spent a 25-year career at the CIA an analyst, a senior manager, a station chief in the field, has said that when CIA analysts look for deeper causes of rising instability in the world, one of the cause those CIA analysts see is the impact of climate change. Do you have any reason to doubt the assessment of these CIA analysts?”

She further burrowed in,

“In the past you have questioned the scientific consensus on climate change. Nevertheless, according to NASA, multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that 97% or more of actively published climate scientists agree that climate warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities. In addition most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position. Do you have any reason to doubt NASA’s findings?”

Doctrinaire positions on sexual orientation matched Harris’s passion for “climate change”.  Again, Pompeo had to sit through the following query,

“Your voting record and stated position on gay marriage and the importance of having a quote un quote traditional family structure for raising children is pretty clear. Um, I disagree with your position, but, of course, you are entitled to your opinion. Um, I don’t want to that, however, to impact your opinion on that matter—the recruitment or retention of patriotic LGBT women and men in the CIA, some of whom, of course, have taken great risks to their lives for our country. Can you commit to me that your personal views on this issue will remain your personal views and will not impact internal policies that you put in place at the CIA?”

Why the insistence on ramrodding anything LGBT and “climate change” into national security?  The awkwardness of the issues in a hearing on the CIA should be apparent to anyone not blinkered by partisanship.  But they are the common obsessions of the governing interests in California.  These interests became governing interests when once in power they drove out the base for opposing views and interests.  Their policies helped create the conditions for their dominance.  Blue begets blue.

The policies of the state’s governing class are actually a set of politicized aesthetics.  They are a collection of fashionable standards of thought and beauty of particular powerful factions in the state.  It’s a litmus test ranging from growth control, environmental purity, victimization, and stamping the Hollywood sitcom version of urban life on the whole state – and the nation if they get away with it.   Of course, all of it hinges on the mirage of the omnicompetent state.

Some of the factions merged as NIMBY/drawbridge suburbanites united with environmentalist partisans.  The alliance paved the way for growth control ordinances, CEQA, the California Coastal Commission, activist local planning boards, expanded powers for state and local agencies, and rising housing prices as if on a booster rocket.  The effect is great for people with already attained wealth and homes.  It’s not so great for those wanting to join them.

The rich are in a class of their own.  They can afford whatever the Frankenstein housing market presents.

Jacked-up prices on the coast push the housing market into the interior.  But people looking for cheaper housing will not escape the reach of the environmental lobby and its rich and powerful patrons.  They’ll face jacked-up utility bills due to the necessity of air conditioning.  On the map of electric rates below, the dark color follows the borders of the state.

The state’s energy markets are a state-run extortion racket forcing home buyers to pay $500/month or blanket their roof with solar panels.  The utility companies are at the mercy of the state’s environmentalist godfathers and forced to play along.  The state’s ratepayers and taxpayers are on the hook for all the subsidies.  It’s a massive robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul gambit in a game of musical chairs.  No wonder many have thrown up their hands, loaded up the U-Haul, and headed east.

Accepting longer commutes for cheaper housing may prove to be no bargain either.  The environmentalist reach will grab you at the pump.  The state has the highest fuel taxes in the nation.  Just crossing the state border saves you 25-38 cents per gallon.

Don’t think taxes are the end of it.  The boutique fuel markets within the state, with its state-mandated blends, distorts the markets and pushes up prices. (8) (9)  There’s no end to it.

If the car should ever wear out, which it will on the poorly maintained roads, replacing it will be costlier than most any other state.  California ranks as one of the worst to buy, operate, and maintain a car.   It is next to dead last according to the Huffington Post. (10)

One-time, state-imposed costs (fees and taxes) at the time of purchase are some of the highest in the nation. (12)

In no ranking is California among the cheapest for buying a car, or almost anything for that matter.

Need I say anything about taxes?  California has set herself up as one of the worst, to add to all the other “worsts”. (16)

It certainly isn’t a welcoming place to do business.  It’s not breaking news to find California dead last in surveys of the best and worst states for business.  One CEO was quoted as saying, “States like California just don’t get it.  At the rate they are going, who’s going to pay the bills with such an anti-business, leftist government and businesses leaving every month for Arizona and Washington state?”  Another exclaimed, “California has been running businesses out of the state for years, and, in fact, their policies are getting worse. Class-action lawsuits abound, and it’s a crazy environment for small business out there.”  Such comments are so common, and its been true for so long, a person can be excused for responding with “ho-hum”. (13)

But such nonchalance hides a deeper reality: nobody gets a real job off a poor person.  You need rich people and business people.  An economy is more than the entertainment and tourism industries and Silicon Valley.  Any economy so narrowly contrived will increasingly become feudal with the prosperous in their coastal castle-keeps in a sea of peasant poverty.

Once again, the eastward trek continues.  Left behind is the supportive base for the disease.

Woe be to you if you happen to live in California and take your Christianity seriously.  Woe be to you if you believe the Holy Scripture to be holy.  The LGBT lobby is on the prowl, with the state’s legislature and governor as sidekicks.

Prop 8 – the 2008 effort to define marriage as a traditional one – had the misfortune of appearing on the “California” ballot.  The state is a hornet’s nest of LGBT activism.  The abuse heaped upon Prop 8 supporters rivaled Kristallnacht.  More than individuals, entire and long-established Christian denominations were targeted as if they were synagogues in 1938 Germany.  (14)  Like German Jews of the 30’s, Christians might feel more comfortable elsewhere.  No doubt, Christians make up a large portion of the U-Haul clientele.

Leaving no stone unturned, the power of the state’s LGBT hive is now aimed at Christian colleges.  Already, youngsters in the public schools are required to be exposed to the hive’s agenda and sexual activity.  With SB 1146, faith-based colleges will face lawsuits and the withdrawal of financial aid for teaching and practicing their faith.  There used to be an exemption, which is not likely to last much longer. (15)

Everyone must bend a knee to the hive.  Religion, by definition, must have some relation to timeless truths.  There’s little room for a zeitgeist here.  The normalization of homosexual conduct demands the embrace of the LGBT zeitgeist by a Christianity going back to the cross and further to Genesis.  It all must give way to the zeitgeist.   Too much of the Bible is an embarrassment to the hive.  Accommodation to the hive’s agenda by Christianity essentially works out as a suicide pact.  For Christians who actually believe their Christianity, it may be healthier to leave the state.  Many have.

High taxes, abusive energy costs, hostility to business and Christianity lead to a combination of fear and loathing for the not-so-golden Golden State.  The welcome sign has been removed for the striving, enterprising, family-oriented, and Christian crowds.  Those left behind are increasingly more accepting of this hostile agenda.  The political playing field is steeply tilted blue.  The tilt is getting steeper by the day.

RogerG

Sources:

(1) http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/01/12/dem-senator-grills-pompeo-on-climate-change-in-confirmation-hearing/, “Dem Senator grills Pompeo on climate change in confirmation hearing”, The Blaze, 1/12/17

(2) “California Prepares to Throw Climate-Change Skeptics In Jail. Meanwhile, They Allow Violent Criminals To Go Free.”, Hank Berrien, The Daily Wire, 6/2/16, http://www.dailywire.com/news/6263/california-prepares-throw-climate-change-skeptics-hank-berrien

(3) “California Senate sidelines bill to prosecute climate change skeptics”, Wash Times, 6/2/16, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jun/2/calif-bill-prosecutes-climate-change-skeptics/

(4) “California to investigate whether Exxon Mobil lied about climate-change risks”, LA Times, Ivan Penn, 1/20/16, http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-exxon-global-warming-20160120-story.html

(5) “Virtues of journalism are at stake in project by Columbia’s Energy and Environment Reporting Fellowship”, Crain’s Cleveland Business, Richard Osborne (former reporter, editor, publisher, Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame 2007), 1/26/16, http://www.crainscleveland.com/article/20160126/BLOGS05/160129864/virtues-of-journalism-are-at-stake-in-project-by-columbias-energy

(6) “InsideClimate News: Journalism or Green PR?”, Jillian Kay Melchior, NRO, 12/22/15, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428878/environmentalism-advocacy-journalism-who

(7) “Kamala Harris Grills CIA Nominee Pompeo on Gay Rights and Climate Change”, Weekly Standard, 1/12/17, http://www.weeklystandard.com/kamala-harris-grills-cia-nominee-pompeo-on-gay-rights-and-climate-change/article/2006261

(8) “Why California gasoline is so expensive”, Dan McSwain, San Diego Union-Tribune, 2/3/16, http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/business/columnists/sdut-why-california-has-higher-gasoline-prices-2016feb03-story.html

(9) “Car Buyers Beware, Cheapest And Most Expensive States For Unexpected Fees”, Forbes, Jim Henry, 6/29/14, http://www.forbes.com/sites/jimhenry/2014/06/29/car-buyers-beware-cheapest-and-most-expensive-states-for-unexpected-fees/#f45371677f5e

(10) “Most (and Least) Expensive States to Own a Car”, Elyssa Kirkham, Huffington Post, 3/21/16, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gobankingrates/most-and-least-expensive_b_9516846.html

(11) “Tax-Friendly Places to Buy a Car”, Mark Solheim, Kiplinger, 4/7/06, http://www.kiplinger.com/article/cars/T009-C000-S001-tax-friendly-places-to-buy-a-car.html

(12) “Most (and Least) Expensive States to Own a Car”, GoBannkingRates, 3/21/16, https://www.gobankingrates.com/car-loans/most-least-expensive-states-own-car/

(13) “Survey: California still worst state for business”, Editors, OC Register, 5/23/16, http://www.ocregister.com/articles/california-716365-states-business.html

(14) “The Price of Prop 8”, Thomas M. Messner, Heritage Foundation, Backgrounder #2328 on Family and Marriage, 10/22/09, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2009/10/the-price-of-prop-8

(15) “Does This New Bill Threaten California Christian Colleges’ Religious Freedom?”, Thomas Berg, Christianity Today, 7/5/16, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/july-web-only/california-sb-1146-religious-freedom.html

(16) “Best and Worst States for Taxes 2016”, Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/pictures/emeg45ehhij/no-45-california/#391c3d67e3cd