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Our Times

Progressive/left protesters crowd and shout into Rep. Chris Stewart’s (R, Utah) townhall in Salt Lake City, March 31, 2017. George Frey/Getty Images

Our times seem to be especially fraught with some of the worst invective, character assassination, and outbursts of anger bordering on rage.  Disruptive chants and slogans have replaced reasoned discourse.  I’ve complained about this often.  Astonishingly, it has taken place at a time when we are spending trillions on education.  As it turns out, mass education hasn’t produced mass wisdom.  The situation raises serious questions about our educational system.  Are we educating citizens or producing close-minded activists?

Watch this episode of young climate-change activists making demands at a recent (August 22) DNC meeting in San Francisco.  The Sunrise Movement is most certainly the Sundown Movement, the sundown of reasoned discourse.

Very little intelligent dialogue takes place, nor is there any evidence of its presence in the short cognitive histories of these young people.  They jump from rash conclusion to street activism with nothing prior or between.

The same is true in much of our political landscape.  Brusque knee-jerk reactions take the place of thoughtful discussion and civil discourse.  I doubt if the groundwork in the form of sufficient knowledge has been made in order to make it possible.  So, it’s back to chants, slogans, disruptions, and hectoring.  I cringe just thinking about what will happen if Pres. Trump gets the chance to fill another Supreme Court vacancy.

In the case of the above video, the instigator is the previously-mentioned Sunrise Movement.  When I look into the faces of these young people, I slump into depression thinking of what our media and schools have done to their minds.  All is not lost though.  There are still a few golden and older voices in the wilderness, even if they’re no longer with us.  Two of those voices belong to the late Milton and Rose Friedman.  Their legacy continues in the Free to Choose Network.  Airing this month on Amazon Prime Video are “The Real Adam Smith: Ideas That Changed the World” and “Sweden: Lessons for America?”.  I viewed both recently.

    

The first should be a must-see for Pres. Trump and some of the hosts on Fox News.  Are you listening Tucker?  The second one should be required viewing for – wait, it’s a list –  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, her political soul mates, the activist base of the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders, much of the rest of Democratic Party’s wannabee presidents, and those protesters pushing their way into the DNC’s meeting in San Francisco.

Pres. Trump reacts to trade issues in the same way as a developer dealing with his project’s immediate circumstances and the relevant people before him.   Tariffs for him are like the rent charged in Trump Tower.  It adds to his bottom line.  The “trade deficit” is treated as a debt or loss in his books.  It isn’t quite that simple.  Tariffs are taxes paid by consumers in one way or another.  Call it a value-added tax on imports, and operates in like manner.  As for the “trade deficit”, it is just one component in the balance of payments.  A shortfall in it will lead to surpluses in the other two components: the financial and capital accounts.  The importer gets dollars and we get their goods.  The dollars end up in financial instruments (bonds, government debt for example) and foreign direct investment.

For Trump, the dollars flow in the pockets of foreign fat cats as they live in, get this, a non-dollar society.  How does that work?  It doesn’t.  The fat cat must translate his dollars into his country’s currency to buy that swank penthouse in Shanghai or keep the Benjamins to spend them on a Montecito mansion.  He’ll need renminbis in the PRC or hand over the dollars to the old-moneyed seller in posh Montecito.  Another option is parking the money in our government debt.  Whichever way, dollars eventually come back here.

Dollars or renminbi (yuan).

Could trade deficits have downsides?  Yes, they could.  Some regions could fall into depression as they lose out in the international competition.  The social effects of economic decline aren’t pretty.  Shuttered factories and businesses, distressed neighborhoods, family breakdown, substance abuse, people locked into a cycle of life with few prospects, and welfare dependency are symptoms of the malaise.

Abandoned and dilapidated factory complex in Detroit, Mi.
Injecting opioids.

This is one weak spot in the film.  Free trade has a ying and yang quality.  It works best among countries with free economies, more or less.  The role of similar social expectations and norms among nations can’t be counted out.  I suspect that the PRC sees trade as another weapon in the long twilight struggle for national and ideological dominance.  If their people get richer in the process, that’s icing on the cake.  The country is certainly one for us to be very leery.

Nonetheless, the first film – “The Real Adam Smith” – lays out a useful primer for the value of free trade, one that Trump and his courtiers should understand.  It might restrain them in their enthusiasm for punishing our literal and natural allies with tariffs.  But we can hold two ideas at the same time (per Hillary’s iteration, and true).  President-for-life Xi may be Trump’s friend, but he isn’t ours.

The second film – “Sweden: Lessons for America?” – is a necessary corrective to a popular urban myth for self-styled urban sophisticates.  They pride themselves in being smarter, more intelligent, and better informed than the rubes.  For them, the right side of the political spectrum is populated with Morlocks.

The Morlocks in the 1960 movie, “The Time Machine”.

The prejudice was on full display when Paul McCartney accepted the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2010 and bellowed this insult at ex-President George W. Bush while President Obama and wife were in attendance: “After the last eight years, it’s great to have a president who knows what a library is.”

McCartney and Pres. Obama at the award ceremony, June 2010.

Ironically, the rank condescension of an accomplished pop music star is rooted in a profound ignorance that is common in places like bein pensant circles in Georgetown.  For the beautiful people, all the smart people are on the left side of the spectrum.  In reality, they’ve adopted John C. Calhoun’s outlook, but the target isn’t African-Americans.  It’s anyone who might wear a tool belt, pay a mortgage, attend a Bible-believing church, and just might register Republican.  Johan Norberg, the documentary’s host, unwittingly presents proof of the presence in chic quarters of the “Ignorant” stamp on the forehead with a frequency equivalent to tattoos in the crowd of heavy metal concertgoers.  Norberg does it by shattering their fantasies about Swedish socialism.

Bernie Sanders has frequently tried to distinguish himself from the brutal socialism in the Soviet Union and Mao’s China.  He does it by attaching his socialist vision to Scandinavian “social democracy”, not Pol Pot.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , a younger Bernie Sanders with different genitalia, imitates him.  Both invoke the experience of “democratic socialism” in Scandinavia.

CNN quotes Bernie Sanders as follows: “I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway and learn what they have accomplished for their working people.”  The Danes recoil from the “socialist” label.  Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen responded in a speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, “I would like to make one thing clear.  Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, October 30, 2017.

Bernie and AOC continue to maintain that these countries are working examples of a successful socialism.  They try to do so, in spite of the Scandinavian leaders’ rejection of the “socialism” label, by emphasizing “democracy”.  It’s rhetorical sleight of hand.  The fact of the matter is that the scheme is all about government control.  It matters little if the control is exercised through a small claque of ideological oligarchs or a mob of 50% plus one.   Private property becomes meaningless if it is at the mercy of any assemblage of 50%-plus-one.  “Democracy” is the cover for all sorts of sins. 

To say it is “democratic”, also, doesn’t mean the administrative state goes away.  Rules to avoid chaos and give direction will have to be promulgated by a commissariat approaching the size of the Soviet Gosplan.  The likes of Bernie and AOC have all kinds of social and eco  “justice” to pursue.  AOC helped author one incoherent version of the Green New Deal and Bernie later came up with his own monstrosity.  Whichever of the two routes you take, you’ll end up in the same place: central planning!

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (right) speak during a press conference to announce Green New Deal legislation on Feb. 7. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Plus, the two carnival barkers act as if nothing has happened since the heyday of Scandinavian socialism in the 1970’s.  It’s here that the Swede, Johan Norberg, and “Sweden: Lessons for America?” clears away much of the verbal smog.  To make it simple for Bernie and Alexandria, Sweden had a free market economy, lost it, then gained it back.  How did they do it?  They reined in their “social democracy”.  Business taxes were lowered; pensions became contribution-based rather than benefit-based; universal school vouchers were implemented to the point of private high schools becoming half of all high schools; unions became cooperative rather than combative; the vaunted universal health care system is remarkably decentralized with vouchers and a growing number of private healthcare providers; and on and on and on.  In many ways they are freer than us.

Bernie wishes that we could be more like Sweden.  Oh really, Bernie?  I don’t think so.  There is one area that should especially draw the ire of Bernie and much of the Dem Party.  Sweden makes everyone pay taxes.  If you will receive government benefits, you will pay.  They don’t have a tax structure that attempts to shoulder the burden of government on the pocketbooks of the wealthy and the businesses who are the engine of jobs.  They tried that in the 1970’s and saw their economy slump and businesses flee.  Don’t doubt for a moment that Bernie and AOC won’t try to inflict the horrible history on us.

Really, the amazing part of the story is the abject ignorance of the story.  Bernie, AOC, and the like, stop history in the 1970’s.  Democratic socialism’s failures are deleted from the record so they can ignore Scandinavia’s movement toward free markets.  Our democratic socialist icons take the system of its heyday, pretend the failures and reforms didn’t happen, and attribute the successes of its reforms to the socialism of the earlier misbegotten period.  This is circularity with a huge bite out of its circumference.  It’s nonsense.

In Scandinavia, particularly Sweden, Adam Smith has made a comeback … out of necessity.  Socialism failed.  In America, especially among the Democratic Party base and millennials, Marx is making a comeback.  Go figure.  AOC tries to distance herself from Marx to be more politically palatable.  So does Bernie.  Yet, do they really understand Marx?  I kinda doubt it.  Marx is socialism with an eschatology.  Strip the violent eschatology and you still have socialism.  Our lefty politicos want socialism to be elected into power.  But does the means of implementation matter?  Socialism is socialism and it doesn’t work.  Isn’t the emphasis on 50%-plus-one just another attempt at putting lipstick on a pig?

A return to a sound understanding of human nature and the modes of social organization that are attuned to it would be huge step forward in removing needless chatter and destructive venting.  I doubt, though, that it will ever get a hearing in today’s toxic climate.  Too many people just don’t know a damn thing.  Many of them are on the left, but that won”t stop them from being oh so confident.  There is nothing more dangerous than an over-confident ignoramus.

Please see the films.

RogerG

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Bernie’s Intergenerational Suicide Pact

Today, Bernie Sanders unveiled his plan for the Green New Deal, a $16.3 trillion monster.  You can read about it here in the New York Times.  The number – 16.3 trillion – is so huge that we lose sight of its magnitude.  To break it down, if the dollars were miles, it would be a little less than three-quarters of the distance to Alpha Centauri, an entirely separate planetary system “far far away”.  The size of the number means that the bill can’t be paid by anyone.  The projected payback will extend beyond generations “far far away”.  It’s essentially an invitation to join the Stone Age for anyone and everyone in generations from now to those “far far away”.

That dingbat congresswoman from the Bronx would like to stampede us into the Stone Age with hysterical cries that we have only 10 years before the Götterdämmerung if we do nothing.  For her, better the Stone Age than extinction.  Apparently, Bernie also favors the choice of the Stone Age.  For me, the difference is marginal.  The Stone Age was best captured in Thomas Hobbes’s famous dictum: life is “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short”.

Making flints in the Stone Age.

But is the U.S. in the catbird seat to stave off disaster anyway?  Remember, our government’s decisions to economically harm us only harms … us!  China and the rest of the developing world have a keen interest in indoor plumbing and air conditioning.  They’ll burn down their jungles and the fossil fuels in a long list of Saudi Arabias to get out from living in the dirt.  So, unless Bernie appoints himself to be the Maoist General Secretary of the World and embarks on a Genghis Khan-style conquest of the planet to enforce the resultant poverty, he’ll just end up destroying us.  The rest of the world will continue to pollute, albeit at a faster clip.

BEIJING, CHINA – DECEMBER 20: Citizens walk in smog on December 20, 2016 in Jinan, Shandong Province of China. Air quality index (AQI) readings exceeded 400 and some schools have suspended classes in Jinan. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)
Burning coal in China to generate electricity.

A few numbers might help Bernie, his fellow ideological asylum inmates, and the Squad in understanding the extent of the craziness.  The U.S. is about a quarter of the world’s economy.  China comes in second at 15%.  The numbers are nearly reversed in global CO2 emissions: China at 30%, the U.S. at 15%.  So – I’ll go slow for the woke crowd – we produce 25% of the world’s product at only 15% of emissions, and China knocks out 15% of the world’s product at 30% of emissions.  What’s that mean?  I’ll go slow once again for all those with degrees but show no sign of better judgment: It means that China is dirtier, much dirtier at a rate twice ours.  The lesson, therefore, is to smash the cleaner nation’s economy only to clear the way for the dirty one.  Bernie must have skipped Math class in high school.

The hope is that China will be inspired by our example to voluntarily follow suit.  What example?  It’s the example of how to level a first world country into the third world.  I suspect that they’d like to avoid the experience as if it was a leper colony.

California prides itself in being a ground breaker.  They have adopted the greenie snake oil through a variety of measures over the past couple of decades.  As of 2017/18, though, the state accounts for only 1.1% of global CO2 discharges.  Even if they knock it down to zero – probably by running the rest of the economy out of the state – their slot will be more than replaced by India as it ramps up.

What’s the upshot of all the greenie caterwauling?  Say goodbye to the future for your kids, their kids, and their kids’ kids.  Maybe they might feel better if they know that they were making a sacrifice for the good of … no one.  Not!

RogerG

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There’s “Poop” In Them Thar Hills, San Francisco Hills That Is

George Francis “Gabby” Hayes (1885–1969)

In 1848, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill.  170 years tater, human waste is discovered on the streets and sidewalks of San Francisco.  And just think, you don’t have to pan for it.

How bad is the problem?  Poop maps have become indispensable for any tourist visiting Sodom-by-the-Sea.  Here’s an instructional pic along with some maps showing the intensity of its occurrence.

If you’re wondering, here’s how it’s done:

From the streets of San Francisco.

This poop map appeared in Forbes, 2019:

This map appeared on Thrillist and is from 2017.  If both maps are accurate, two years was enough time for public defecation to become the most popular San Francisco fad since bipedalism among humanoids.

Here, the dropping of one’s drawers in public can be seen as a miasmic cloud.

This map breaks down the number of incidences by district.  Warning, stay clear of Golden Gate Park.

Here’s what it means for a municipal sanitation worker:

The Golden Gate was a reference to the entrance into the Bay and San Francisco in particular.  The Brown Gate would be more accurate for today.

RogerG

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A Harbinger of Ill-Winds

John Burton, outgoing chair of the California Democratic Party, leads a “F*** Trump” chant at their 2017 convention.

Some have often stated to the point of cliché that California presages the social and political future.  The claim is abused but has some applicability to the benefit of opposing ends of the ideological spectrum.

In the 60’s to the 80’s it served the interests of conservatives.  Reagan was governor, then president, and California became a willing partner in the Sagebrush Rebellion’s challenge to the collectivists in the DC administrative state.  Prop 13 heralded a nationwide tax revolt.  Today, it’s the left who benefits from the state’s 36 million person heft.  They have a super-majority stranglehold on the state.

The place is a veritable political Disneyland for the furthest tip of the “progressive” left wing of the Democratic Party.  Among other things, it’s a state with it’s own immigration policy – i.e., open borders.  The Constitution be damned. Now with SB 1, California will declare that it’s the Obama presidency forever within the confines of the state’s borders.  The Electoral College be damned.

SB 1 cyrogenically freezes in place the regulations of Obama’s people as of January 19, 2017, the day before Trump took the oath.  The bill would in effect veto the Trump administration’s deregulation efforts on, and in, every inch of soil in the new PRC, the People’s Republic of California.  This sounds to me like secession … till the next election that they win.

The effect on property owners and farmers would make worse an already bad situation.  The bill specifically targets changes in endangered species regulation.  Protections for a non-native fish – get that, non-native – the Delta Smelt, in the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta, will continue to be draconically enforced to the detriment of west-side Central Valley agriculturalists.  The land out there is dry as a bone and fallow.  The towns are drying up as water spills out through the Golden Gate.  You can read about it here in an op-ed by John Harris, owner of Harris Ranch.

The Delta Smelt. (Illustration: Bob Bukin)

A puff piece from the sponsoring commissar can be found here.

Watch for other blue-dot havens to follow suit. Instead of a Sagebrush Rebellion, it’ll be secessionitis in the chic soirees of Brentwood/Malibu/Hollywood and Greenwich Viilage/Manhattan till a socialist or socialist-lite places his or her hand on the inaugural Bible and begins our slide into national incontinence. They won’t be happy till they get their chance to emasculate the country. And emasculate they will.

An el diablo is blowing out of Sacramento. The thing has long been associated with firestorms. To borrow with a twist the Las Vegas line, what happens in California rarely stays in California.

RogerG

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Bacchanalia as Icon

The Woodstock Music Festival, August 1969
Woodstock, the scene after it ended.

The golden anniversary (50 years) of Woodstock is winding down, and with it, hopefully, the end of the glamorization of the wild bacchanalia.  The thing has been raised to the status of near-religious icon.  I must admit that I’m in a mood for a little iconoclasm similar to Byzantine plebes and peasants smashing icons in the 8th century AD.  Woodstock doesn’t deserve anything “golden”.

Let me take that back. Some of the music was great.  But let’s be honest, Woodstock and its aftermath for a couple of decades was hedonism with a beat.  As it would turn out, the only ones to profit were the media moguls and the purveyors of Hep C treatments.

Hashish at Woodstock

For the rest of us, we got a poisoned culture.  We’re still trying to live down an epidemic of out-of-wedlock births, drugs as recreation, sex as recreation, a “me” culture, and a rash of self-centered materialists.  The cultural ooze swamped civil society with its families, churches, neighborhoods, and voluntary associations.  For many, they inhabit a culturally deracinated war zone.

The same rationale that stripped our culture of its moral moorings on Yasgur’s farm also is pushing for government as mommy and comforter-in-chief to pick up the pieces.  Besides detonating any concept of fiscal limits, the ultimate result is to freeze us in amber as perpetual adolescents.  I sense a return of aristocratic condescension and noblesse oblige without much of an independent middle class.  A resurgence of feudalism anyone?

Thanks Woodstock for the great music, but no thanks for the scorched earth culture.

Opioid users in Tennessee. Two of the three have been using since they were young teenagers. Photograph: Chris Arnade/The Guardian

RogerG

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Solutions Made for … Political Careers

U.S. Senator and Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris (D, Ca.) in a CNN Town Hall, April 22, 2019. She pledged that, if elected president, she would take executive action to enact sweeping gun control measures.

America is awash in solutions in search of a problem.  Climate change is happening to some extent.  But is the problem such an obvious cataclysm to justify sovietizing our entire economy and way of life in the Green New Deal?  Differences exist in aggregate, average wages between men and women.  So, is massive federal, state, and local intrusions into every business’s labor practices down to the minutest detail reasonable?  These examples highlight a light year’s worth of space between proposed solution and hypothetical problem, with emphasis on hypothetical.

Well, we’ve taken the nonsense to a whole new level in the recent barking over gun control.  Would any of the proposed “solutions” prevent the mass shootings, mass stabbings, and a career criminal and drug dealer placing cops in his crosshairs in north Philadelphia?  Solution and problem have gone beyond the distance to Alpha Centauri (4.37 light years).  The two are in separate and parallel universes.

Going back to Sandy Hook, the killer lived in a home with guns, shot his mother to death, and then took a ride past a closer but protected high school to an unarmed elementary school.  What background check, gun ban, magazine size limitation, or gun buy-back program would have stopped the guy?  What about the murderous loons in El Paso and Dayton?  Without a paper trail, there’s nothing to check.  Really, do you think any sort of gun ban would have stopped them from getting armed to shoot revelers and Walmart shoppers?  Ditto for the Las Vegas murderer.

In Orange County, the savage didn’t even need a gun. He was content with a knife.

The suspect in a stabbing and robbery spree in Garden Grove and Santa Ana, August 7, 2019.

And then we have the Philly shooter.  The miscreant had already run afoul of half of the gun laws on the books in the city and state, in addition to huge swaths of the rest of the penal code.  I suppose that a career of assaults, prison stays, and meth/crack/heroine dealings would have made him sensitive to a ban on a banana clip in his gun.  Nooot!!!  This is farce chasing buffoonery.

The surrender of the shooting suspect in north Philadelphia, August 14, 2019.

So they chant, “Ban assault weapons”.  What is an “assault weapon”?  Put that one into law.  Go ahead.  Ban “semi-automatic”.  In so doing, you just criminalized a good portion of the American public – many of the guns not handled by Sylvester Stalone in one of his flicks are semi-automatic.  Ban what the thing looks like, like make the pistol grip taboo.  Really?  Is that the best that you can do?  That fact is, a workable definition is as slippery as a frog lathered in Crisco.  What the Dems are really trying to do is ban anything that might look like something in a “John Wick” movie.

The whole herd in the Dem presidential field line up in support of the quackery.  Just today I heard an interview of one of the “moderates” in the stable, Seth Moulton (D, Mass.).  He tried to peddle his service in Afghanistan and Iraq to rationalize his efforts to steal my rights.  Seth, I salute your service but I’m not in a mood to surrender my rights to your conscience.  You give up your guns; leave mine alone.  They’re legal and I’m clean.

Today’s political circus mangles solutions and problems, and any relationship between the two.  It’s a burlesque show; it’s a mess.  It’s the political equivalent of speaking in tongues and snake handling.  The truth of the matter is that power-hungry politicos, already inclined to make us subservient to mommy and daddy government, want to build a political career on the corpse of our rights – legal, Constitutional, and natural.  It’s all about manufactured solutions at the service of political careers.  Now that’s the very definition of disgraceful.

RogerG

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Our Boiling Cities and Campuses

 

Antifa in a U.S. city.

Outbursts of murderous mayhem in addition to an undercurrent of political incivility – the exhibitionism of barbaric rudeness and physical assault – have become common and sometimes shrugged off as simply folks being a little too exuberant.  Much of it emanates from our cities and universities (the two are often synonymous).  It sounds like the seething cauldron of pre-revolutionary Russia as described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his novel “August 1914”.  We have a city and university problem like Russia of a century ago.

We have Antifa, the Resistance, and a Democratic Party in the grip of the worst bombast coming from the other two – frequently the three groups are synonymous.  Similarly, Russia had radical student activism in the cities and campuses.  Rudeness, outbursts of pandemonium, and violence were incessant.

Antifa in Portland, Or.

The tie that binds our and their activists through time and space is leftist ideology.  The leftist belief system has three basic planks: (1) the overthrow of tradition, (2) collectivism, and (3) an unquestioning faith in pure equality, equality in everything and in almost every way.  Our lefty activists have much in common with those running around in Russian towns, cities, and campuses of a century ago.

Take a look at collectivism, with socialism being the political expression of it.  Collectivism was popular among Russia’s young at the time as it is today among our young.  Look at socialism’s positives in our 18-26 age cohort.  Collectivism treats people as a generality.  To the collectivist, people are a group, not individuals.  To ensure the well-being of all, they say, everyone should control nearly everything.  “Everyone” means the state.  Personal possessions are at the behest of the group.

A mass meeting with a Bolshevik agitator in the Putilov Works in Petrograd in 1917.
A demonstration against the Provisional Government, in Petrograd in July, 1917.

Sound familiar?  Sounds like Barney Frank’s famous quote, “Government is simply a word for the things we decide to do together”?  Sounds like free [you name it], the schemes of confiscatory taxation, the Green New Deal’s massive overthrow of our constitutional order, and expansive government powers to advance the alleged interests of any fad-of-the-moment victims’ group, as expounded in the talking points of Democratic politicians?

It doesn’t stop there.  Tradition is the harbinger of all evil to the leftist.  Family, faith, and old principles of civil order are to be eliminated or refashioned to fit the vision.  The metric to govern the social engineering is “equality”, equality in nearly all things.  If disparities exist, it is assumed to be the result of a systemic or hidden [you name the evil].

Herein lies the totalitarian temptation.  Equality of outcome doesn’t come naturally.  People vary so much in so many different ways as to make its attainment impossible … if left alone.  For a leftist, you can’t leave it alone.  Equality will have to be forced.  Thus, the Leviathan must be huge and intrusive.

We seem to be repeating Russia’s path of the last couple of decades of the 19th century to the penultimate explosion of 1917.  The centers of upheaval in Russia were the towns, cities, and college campuses as they are today in our country.  And they were as horribly misguided and destructive as they will be in our own time if given the power.  I hope cooler heads prevail.

Famine victim at an Ukrainian orphanage, 1920’s.

I’m a fan of the aphorism frequently attributed to Mark Twain: “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes”.  So true.  So true.

RogerG

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Biased Assumptions

Why are we experiencing mass shootings and a spike in suicides, up 30% since 1999?  I can’t help but wonder that a deep dissatisfaction is running like an undertow in our times.  Are we quickly approaching a dystopia rather than a utopia?  If so, our modern life has undermined a key tenet of progressivism.  No longer can it be said that life is getting better, also known as “progress”.  In some ways, our times may be beginning to stink up the place.

Why the decline?  Well, something called solipsism has taken the place of knowledge of our past and a grounding in our civilization.  Solipsism is the philosophical core of radical individualism.  All reality is interpreted through the individual.  Subjectivism runs rampant, and any notion of moderation and objective standards takes a back seat.  We are encouraged to have no historical and social understanding and are free to create our own “truth”, not unusual among the fringe who are intertwined in cloistered social media hubs.  All-too-often, it is the alienated tutoring the alienated.

How did we get so atomized?  How did solipsism take root?  Part of the blame can be laid at the feet of our media and schools.  Both spread the secular gospel.  Radical individualism is hard to avoid in the movies and tv, but it’s reinforced by the schools.  C.S. Lewis saw it happening in British schools in the 1950’s.  He wrote about it in his book, The Abolition of Man.  In a chapter entitled “Men Without Chests”, he reviewed a British textbook teaching literary interpretation:

“I do not mean, of course, that he [the student] will make any conscious inference from what he reads to a general philosophical theory that all values are subjective and trivial.  The very power of Gaius and Titius [pseudonyms for the authors] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake.  It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.  The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him.”

The problem lies in the fact that the student will unknowingly possess assumptions that “will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.”

A continuous pounding of the bias will set the stage for a desperate loneliness as we become more unhinged from the roots of family, church, and our cultural inheritance.  The social setting is lost, and young people find themselves disconnected in a miasma of their thoughts.

And thus we have Al Qaeda, Nikolas Cruz, the El Paso and Dayton shooters. Are we sowing the seeds of our own destruction?

The El Paso shooter at the Walmart.
The Dayton shooter in a bar on the evening of the killings.

RogerG

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Killings and Diseased Discourse

“Beto” O’Rourke at the scene of the El Paso shooting.

The two murderous rampages over the weekend are more than evil deeds.  They have become, like most everything else, fuel to feed the unrelenting push to, in a modification of Eric Voegelin’s immortal phrase, immanentize progressivism’s eschaton – to bring to life the left’s dream of the better world.  It’s like all that happens in the world is forever on the event horizon, ready to fall into the left’s interstellar black hole.  Evil deeds can’t just exist to be fought against; they must be recruited for a partisan political agenda.  The events’ magnitude and sorrow, therefore, is cheapened by a horde of demagogues.

El Paso after the August 3 shooting.
Dayton after the August 4 shooting.

The airwaves are saturated with demagoguery.  Fingers are pointing at Trump for super-charged rhetoric.  Speaking of super-charged rhetoric, have you attended a Pelosi or Schumer presser, heard the bombast from AOC+3, seen “Beto” before a mike, or been verbally accosted by the rest of the herd running to seize the Democratic Party’s brass ring?  If Trump is to blame for El Paso, then Bernie is to blame for the 2017 shooting of Republican congressmen; or the Sierra Club and Paul Ehrlich are responsible for the Unibomber.  Anyone can play this game.  And it is a game: something far removed from mature thinking.

The Unibomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski, after his arrest, 1996.
The 2017 shooter, James T. Hodgkinson, a Bernie Sanders activist.

A favorite of the mob is, you guessed it, “gun control”.  Large numbers – 300 million guns in private ownership for instance – are contorted to serve the desired end, which is to make gun ownership as difficult as it is in Maduro’s Venezuela.  Their list of banalities includes “universal background checks”, bans on “military guns”, and various forms of gun confiscation.  What any of this has to do with straightening out the crooked timber of humanity escapes me.  What any of it has to do with addressing the causes of these incidents also escapes causal reasoning.  They do, however, serve a political end while advancing certain political careers.  In my book, it’s shameful.

The federal government’s powers could be expanded in the manner of Australia and New Zealand and initiate gun confiscation, but still completely miss the point.  And the point is the mental isolation of some of today’s young men, typically in the 20-25 age cohort.  Could our modern society be a breeding ground for alienated youth?  Parental absenteeism in the pursuit of careerism and material wants, or as a consequence of marital breakup and casual amours, have disturbing developmental effects on children.  In addition, the buffer of other civil institutions such as neighborhood associations and church aren’t what they used to be.  These factors are the ignored elephants in the room as the media chases the demagogues and their rantings.  The fact is, a very few of these young people – and some older adults – would be dangerous whether an AR-15, machete, or spoon is available.

Trump-hatred overwhelms all.  Could we just stop the hokum and take an adult look at how we are raising the next generation?  It could be that all we have to do is draw back the state in order to allow room for civil society to breathe.  Yes, and that’s no doubt a tall order in today’s atmosphere of smothering hyperbole.

RogerG

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Once Upon A Time … in DC

Mueller testifying before Congress, 7/24/2019.

Kyle Smith’s  review of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood  compared Tarantino’s film with Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America.  Tarantino adopted Leone’s technique of a singular story thread set in a panoramic and historical scene.  If some future filmmaker wanted to channel Watergate’s All the President’s Men and Leone, the current unraveling of the Russia-collusion-Mueller-Comey-et al saga would provide excellent grist for the mill.

The Setting

All the elements are present.  The grand backdrop is present-day DC with 364,000 federal government workers, many at the top of the federal pyramid scheming and plotting for partisan and personal advantage, and a mass of hanger-ons populating K Street and other nodes in the metropolitan area.  The administrator water cooler talk must be impregnated with the expectations born of a peculiar universe’s lifestyle and norms that are divorced from the real world’s preoccupation with producing the necessities and wants of life.  It’s a world unto its own, all put on steroids by the 44th president’s ideological penchant for big government as a cure-all.  It is great for those seeking highly remunerative and secure employment in a highly unproductive sector, coupled with fantastic opportunities for the city’s real estate agents.

Enter stage left, Donald Trump (protagonist or antagonist depending on one’s point of view): crass, boorish, sometimes vulgar, and a champion of the pitchfork brigade.  He wasn’t supposed to win.  And when he did, the curtain was thrown open as in the The Wizard of Oz.

Woodrow Wilson’s government of “experts” is exposed as a charade.  I can only speculate about the extent of the conniving, scheming, and plotting for personal and partisan advantage as a normal facet of life particularly in the administrative suites of the nation’s capital.  Regardless, the now-bogus collusion story ripped the smiley face off the Leviathan.

Act One: Pride Before the Fall

Like many scandals, this one has at least two acts or phases: the first one peddled by the left-oriented and self-styled cultural “betters” in the media, academia, and the Democratic Party in our cosmopolitan centers, and the later, more sinister one as the initial story began to unravel.

Phase one seemed implausible from the get-go for anyone with a scintilla of adult skepticism, but it was overwhelmed by volume, both in quantity and decibel levels in our left-dominated media channels.  That story is now familiar.  A litany of banalities consumed the airwaves: “Russia attacked our democracy”; “Trump is a Putin stooge”; “The Russians elected Trump”; “Trump conspired with the Russians”; etc., etc., etc.  You’ve heard the carnival barking.

ca. 1927 — W.C. Fields as a carnival sideshow announcer in a scene from the 1927 Paramount Pictures film, . — Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS

The party of more government and big government – the Democratic Party –  needs government power, and they failed to get it.  Their loss necessitates an explanation, and it can’t be that their vision of the better world isn’t popular enough.  The default excuse is malevolence by some unseen and nefarious forces attached to the winner.  It just so happens that an expedient was readily available from their own skulduggery in the 2016 campaign.   Democrat trolling for dirt – often called “oppo research” – led to the Hillary campaign > Fusion GPS > Christopher Steele > the Steele dossier > FBI/DNI/CIA spying on Trump > leaks to a salivating press.  The stage is set for its continuation after Trump’s shocking victory.

A common reaction after shock is rage.  Sure, Trump’s bombastic rhetoric acted as an accelerant, but that matters little.  George W bent over backwards in a contortionist’s pretzel to accommodate and still earned the rant, “Bush lied and people died”, alongside efforts at his impeachment.  Rage is a powerful motivator to do some really bad things, even using falsehoods to repeal an election.  Remember, power is far more important to a progressive than to those more conservative since it is needed to overwhelm parents’ concerns about such things as their little daughters sharing a bathroom with boys who believe – or simply make the claim – that they can think themselves into being girls.

 

The ploy required a predicate.  It was found in the jingle, “Russia attacked our democracy.”  We don’t have a democracy; we have a constitutional republic … but I digress.  How did Putin attack our so-called democracy and purportedly steal the election from her highness?  A few  trolling farms and $100,000 in Facebook ads, half of which were pro-Hillary and half were after the election?

In fact, the presiding judge in the trial of one of the defendants (Concord Management and Consulting LLC) indicted by Mueller chastised Jeannie Rhee, a former Obama Deputy Attorney General and part of Mueller’s team, and Mueller (and by extension Atty. Gen. Barr) for prejudicing a potential jury by reaching conclusions in the publicly released Mueller report not supported in the indictment, thereby raising doubts about the strength of the evidence linking the firm to the Russian government.  Could the mantra “Russia stole the election” be a bait-and-switch maneuver with the mantra being loudly proclaimed by a partisan mob in the media and Congress as the Mueller gang switches to the thin gruel of a far lesser claim in court?  Are we, the public, being scammed?

Jeannie Rhee, former Deputy Attorney General under Obama and Special Counsel prosecutor under Mueller.

How could 1/100th ($50,000) of a 30-second Super Bowl ad bend a 63 million-vote election spread over 274, 252 precincts and 113,754 polling paces?  Hillary alone was awash in $700 million.  Trump fell $300 million short.  The charge is preposterous given the minuscule effort, and ignores the history of this kind of thing.  Almost every Israeli election results in American campaign operatives tramping over to Tel Aviv to help Labor or Likud.  One of Obama’s chief campaign advisers, Jeremy Bird, showed up in the country in 2015 to try to defeat Benjamin Netanyahu.  We’ve left our fingerprints in other countries as well.  The PRC helped bankroll Bill Clinton’s reelection.  Soviet disinformation money seeded street protests in America and Europe throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, a godsend to Teddy Kennedy’s efforts to frustrate Reagan.  Soviet efforts didn’t stop there.  The Venona disclosures in 1995 and the brief opening of Soviet Communist Party archives in 1991 showed evidence of Soviet espionage and the presence of agents of influence occupying powerful positions under FDR and Truman.  And today’s Democrats and their fellow travelers are carping about a few bots and Facebook ads?

Venona Project. Meredith Gardner, at far left, working with cryptanalysts, mid-1940’s.

The predicate is a farce.  It’s in the DNA of international relations for nations to influence strategically important countries.  In another time it was called statecraft.  We would be well-served if we remembered the concept when observing the vicious mullahs in Tehran.

Oh, they squeal that the Russsians “hacked our democracy” when they were alleged to have purloined Hillary’s and the DNC’s emails and began to disseminate them through Wikileaks.  Wikileaks is most certainly a pipeline for Russian (and any other nation’s) chicanery.  After all, they came out of the same anti-western and anti-US breeding ground that gave us CISPES (advanced the interests of the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua), the nuclear freeze movement (supported by Soviet disinformation measures), Code Pink, today’s Antifa, and the perpetual peace-at-literally-any-price crowd.  The mission statement of being the guardians of government transparency is a facade for useful idiots.  They’ll take information from any source so long as it further their end, which is the embarrassment of only western governments.

What’s missing from the hacked-our-democracy charge is any semblance of context.  Of course, in our intensely techie world, cyber crime is as big a thing as mail fraud was in the days before Intel.  No doubt, the bumbling Hillary made it easy by concocting her own digital communication system in her basement, bathroom, closet, or what have you.  She would be an easy mark for any government with nearly unlimited resources (since all governments skim off as much as they want from their citizens’ private economic activity) to play this game.  The 2015 Chinese (PRC) hacking of the federal OPM data base, getting personal information on 20 million persons in the process, is illustrative.

Any system is vulnerable, including Hillary’s garage setup, the DNC, RNC, and anyone else thought to be important.  The Iranians remember Stuxnet in 2010, the joint US-Israeli worm to crash the regime’s nuclear program computers.  Whether through phishing or incredibly easy passwords in the case of the DNC, cyber warfare is part of statecraft.  Make the best safeguards as possible, but it will remain a staple of modern life.

Was it as vice-president Cheney called it, “an act of war”?  Hardly.  The behavior is so common that we would be in a constant state of war with almost any nation with access to a keyboard.   Cheney’s declaration is ludicrous.

But is it even relevant to Hillary’s 2016 loss?  Both candidates were held in low esteem going into the election.  Hillary’s negatives were 24 points higher than her positives and Trump’s were even worse (41 points).  It wasn’t hacked emails that dragged Hillary down.  Hillary has left a well-known slimy trail from Arkansas to DC.  She’s a known quantity, and it smells.  As for Trump, he was stinking up the works with his boorish rhetoric, past sexual escapades, and Access Hollywood.  Could it be that a easily dislikeable candidate, 8 years of Obama malaise, a horrible campaign strategy, poor campaign management, and Trump being a fresh face had more to do with the result than Wikileaks and $100,000 in Facebook ads?

However, giving the story heft was our FBI in DC, something euphemistically called the “intel community”, and who knows how many big cheeses in the Obama administration.  More than putting a thumb on the scale, they were sitting on it.

First, Comey’s gang “exonerated” Hillary after her clear violations of 18 U.S. Code § 798 et al.  Furthermore, and amazingly, Comey and his courtiers somehow reached the conclusion that  bleach-bitting her hard drives and servers and smashing devices to smithereens didn’t qualify as obstruction of justice.  And to think that Trump had to fight through hell for two and a half over the now-dubious charges of conspiring with Russia and interfering (obstruction) with Mueller’s inquisition into a non-crime.

Go figure.  Now that’s the stuff of movies.

As Comey was clearing Hillary, he was conducting a surveillance operation against the Trump campaign since at least summer 2016.  A piece of Democrat oppo research – the Steele Dossier – was funneled to the FBI, Obama’s Justice and State Departments, and Obama’s intel chiefs, Clapper and Brennan.  The Democrat oppo research was filled with vile falsehoods but was peddled to FISA courts to entrap people connected to Trump, no matter how loose their affiliation.  Ironically, the Dossier would turn out to be the only proven instance of collusion: the cooperative arrangement between the Russians, Steele, and the Hillary campaign/DNC.

With sycophants in the media, leaks would keep the pot boiling in an attempt to delegitimize Trump’s victory up to the point when drips and drabs of FBI/Obama mischievousness start to dribble into view, and the release of Mueller’s incoherent report in April of 2019 raised new concerns about the fable.

Anyway, the 2018 midterms gave the House to the Democrats and off into impeachment land we go.

By the time of the release of Mueller’s unintelligible tome, enough was known of the gross misbehavior of Obama’s people and his holdovers in the executive branch.  The rogues gallery includes Strok, Page, McCabe, Comey, the Ohrs, Clapper, Brennan, maybe Lynch, and anybody else in the Obama claque now looking to lawyer-up.  Include the minor interstellar bodies who are in the orbit of Obama’s intel glob like Halper and Misfud.  Also, friendly foreign intel services were more than happy to participate in the scam.

The plot thickens.  With one house of our bicameral legislature in hunger pangs for impeachment, getting Trump becomes more than partisan mudslinging.  It becomes institutional, partisan mudslinging on the federal dime.  Subpoenas fly and the Bolsheviks took over committee chairs.  Who’d have thunk it?

Jerry Nadler, chrmn. House Judiciary Comm., and Adam Schiff, chrmn. of the House Intelligence Comm.

Impeachment was juiced up.  The Democrats’ electoral success in 2018, though, could possibly end up breeding their own fall.  In Sophocles’s tragedy, Ajax, Ajax proudly asserts that he doesn’t need Zeus’s help.  Oedipus in Oedipus Rex boastfully claims the genius to solve a murder mystery.  It didn’t end well.  From the Book of Proverbs, 16:18: “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”  Warnings abounded, but the Dems insisted on pushing the issue.

The April release of the much-anticipated Mueller Report made matters murkier.  Trump collusion was put to bed but he was “not exonerated” (?) of obstruction, something Hilary did blatantly.  Now that’s an extremely odd concept in a prosecutor’s brief, “not exonerated”.  It’s such a loose concept that anybody not charged can be labeled “not exonerated”.  That’s not how our system works.  Innocence is presumed, not “not exonerated”.  Well, it’s enough of a kernel for Democrats blinded with rage for losing in 2016.

Then Mueller reluctantly testified after the Dems threatened him with subpoenas.  Mueller’s testimony proved to be the emperor with no clothes.  Bumbling, stumbling, incoherent, and ignorant of his own report made the show an embarrassment for both him and the Dems.

The spectacle raises questions about who was running the show in the Office of Special Counsel.  Was Mueller merely the man running interference for the likes of Andrew Weissman and Jeannie Rhee, both leftovers from Obama’s DOJ?

The Special Counsel and his team.

Mueller’s awkward performance and his lack of familiarity with the report that bears his name would seem to indicate that the partisan inmates were running the partisan asylum.  13 of the 17 prosecutors working under Mueller were registered Democrats – and prominent Democrat apparatchiks in DC – with the remaining four unknown or unaffiliated.

Mark July 24, 2019 on your calendar, the day of Mueller’s testimony.  It’s the day for all-things-Russia to exit stage left.  Another angle to the story, frothing beneath the surface, is about to spill over the top.

The curtain comes down on Act One.

Act Two: The Fall

The script for Act II has not been written.  Yet, key elements are present for a second generation Watergate.

The full story of the lefty nexus of the mainstream media, the Obama holdovers in the executive branch, and the Democratic Party has yet to be written.  This place has the potential for a real conspiracy.  Attorney General Barr, US Attorney Durham, US Attorney Huber, and IG Horowitz will have something to say in due course, though the general outlines are already present.  The investigation of the investigators has just begun, the start of Act Two.

Yes, the rogue’s gallery mentioned earlier should lawyer-up.  It’s a great time to be a criminal defense lawyer in DC.

Here’s a possible scenario.  The story begins with the effort to remove Trump from the political scene.  Comey’s in the middle of it.  Comey and his claque in the FBI were eager to use the fraudulent dossier to undermine the Trump campaign and presidency as early as summer 2016, after which they would end up with 4 FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign.  The applications for the warrants to begin the effort were deceptions to the FISA judges.  The operation (“Crossfire Hurricane”) continued well into 2017.

The media played along to perpetuate the story.   They acted like a megaphone for wild and lurid claims for gross partisan advantage.  It was a cooperative venture among a triad of actors: (1) big name/legacy media, (2) the DNC/Hillary campaign, and (3) an executive branch that acted like its namesake, a community organizer – which is nothing but a rabble-rousing community activist.

But surprise, surprise: Trump won.  And …..  Stay tuned for the rest of the story.

RogerG