February 2020 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

February 28, 2020

The Decline of Memory and Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders, Oct. 30, 2018. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

In our times, 5 decades is too long. Our historical memory seems to not last beyond one decade. What have our families, institutions, and schools done to us? One possible cause for the memory loss is a kind of imperialism of the present: an unexamined assumption that the past is a lesser, corrupted life and the present is all that counts. The lack of memory exaggerates the present and puts us in a position to repeat past mistakes, not realizing them as mistakes. Thus, to no surprise, we are seeing a rekindling of socialism and the rise of Bernie Sanders – a Super Tuesday and general election away from the White House.

The fabled 60’s counterculture gave birth to a willful forgetfulness of the past. The tenor of the times was captured in one of my favorite songs, “Let’s Live for Today” by the Grassroots. Great song, horrible philosophy. Here’s a good rendition:

The song came to mind as I was reading about Reagan’s strangulation of the USSR that would lead to its ultimate demise. He instituted steps to shrink hard currency (the stable currencies like the pound sterling and US dollar) to the monstrous behemoth. He lifted the price controls on our own crude oil production (imposed by Carter). The price controls led to a shuttering, for instance, of the oil fields around Bakersfield, where I lived, and across the country. Bernie promises to relive the disaster that was the malaise of the 70’s.

Man begging in Moscow in the 1980’s. Looks like a homeless encampment in one of our Democrat-run metropolises.

The price controls destroyed our own production, increased our dependency on foreign sources, and created shortages and inflated prices at the pump. Bernie wants to leap beyond Carter and reregulate the economy while imposing huge tax hikes on it, as well as bring Soviet central planning in the form of The Green New Deal to America. What Carter did to the US oil industry and the Soviet Union did to its people, Bernie wants to do to us.

Now, the Dems in Sacramento want to accelerate Bernie’s version of eco-terrorism – The Green New Deal – by “managing the decline of the oil industry” in the state. This isn’t about “price controls”. It’s about economic euthanasia. Wow be to those in the oil-producing regions of the state. No amount of utopian retraining will replace the loss.

Kern River oilfield outside Bakersfield, Ca.

I put the blame for the rise of Sanders and the crazy left in Sacramento squarely at the feet of pop culture’s corruption of our schools, families, and institutions — a present from the Summer of Love. It’s a form of engineered social amnesia. Are we about to institutionalize calamity because we have the memory of a hormone-addled teenager?

Drug-infused ecstasy during the Haight-Ashbury Summer of Love, 1967.

RogerG

February 26, 2020February 26, 2020

A Basket of Deplorables, the Democrats’ Version

The Democratic presidential hopefuls in debate in South Carolina, Feb. 25, 2020.

Hillary Clinton, September 9, 2016:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it.”

Hillary Clinton speaking at a fundraiser in New York City, Sept. 9, 2016, where she made the infamous “basket of deplorables” comment.

Clinton slimed an entire demographic for mere partisan political advantage. Well, I’d like to inform Ms. Clinton that “deplorables” exist in her own party. They were on display in South Carolina last night. It was an extremely ironic episode in shaming Bernie for his “socialism” while the other 6 advanced different degrees of it. Medicare For All, the Green New Deal, Free…, named and unnamed boosts in taxes, open borders, etc., are, in their own ways, heralding a socialist future.

To add to the irony, 2 billionaires were on the stage. How could big-moneyed men be so socialistic, whether under Steyer’s environmental radicalism or Bloomberg’s nanny statism/gun grabs/Green New Deal? They’re either grossly ignorant or simply pathetic.

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn in his The Red Wheel series on the Russian Revolution recounts a realistic conversation in 1916 between Lenin and Alexander Parvus, a long-time socialist (indeed, “democratic socialist” as they all called themselves, and was the title of Lenin’s publication, Social Democrat) and successful businessman. In Solzhenitsyn’s rendering, Parvus concocted the scheme of enlisting the financial help of Kaiser’s Germany to fund Lenin’s seizure of power in Russia. German money, indeed, kept the Bolsheviks afloat in Russia as a revolutionary enterprise in 1916 and 1917. Parvus was rich – like Bloomberg and Steyer – and was free with his money to advance the cause.

Lenin’s old trope about using the money from the rich to buy ropes to hang them would be quite appealing to Bernie bros. But why are Mike and Tom so eager to walk under the noose? The contradiction is so glaring that the only practical conclusion is that they are fools.

That’s another reason to keep the whole gang from ever getting close to the White House.

Watch the debate highlights below.

RogerG

February 25, 2020February 25, 2020

Bernie’s Screwed-up Head

Bernie Sanders appeared on “60 Minutes” last Sunday (below) to say a number of things including his tendency to make sure to praise the world’s most hideous regimes, like Castro’s.

Rather than dialing it back, he doubles-down on the “good” things about communist rule on the island. He mentioned Castro’s great strides in literacy. It would never cross his mind that communist literacy campaigns are another pillar in totalitarian control. See, if the communist state controls all avenues of information and media, being able to read becomes another means to control and shape the individual’s mind. Far from liberating the person, it locks him and her in a communist mental prison. Bernie is so decrepit in his thinking that he can’t bring himself to think that literacy can be put to evil purposes.

A teacher lectures on the history of the Communist Party of China at Red Flag Elementary School in Chongqing, June 28.

To him, as in a Marxist, government is geared to outcomes such as the equal distribution of wealth. That feat doesn’t come naturally so great government power is required to control all sources of wealth. In contrast to him, our founder’s sense of government was based on its alignment with and under “nature” and “Nature’s God”. To be in accord with God’s design, government is subservient to a higher law which includes the moral law, and integral to the moral law – or law of nature – are the natural rights of human beings. Bernie’s conception tramples all over those fundamental natural rights to get to his artificial equality. Bernie’s entire career is an affront to the founding.

Don’t expect him to know or care. He’s an old dog who hasn’t learned any new tricks. All he can do is yap class warfare and blather about any issue (climate change) that furthers a Castro-like control of all sources of wealth. Personally, I think he knows but has spent his whole life mentally corrupted by Marxist drivel on the evils of one person having more than another. Keep this guy away from sharp objects and the levers of power.

He’s a huckster for national ruin.

RogerG

February 25, 2020February 25, 2020

Full-On Red, Part II: A Grave Forewarning

In the previous post I wrote, “It [socialism] sells … to a small slice of our over-credentialed but grossly ill-educated population.” Could persistent ignorance in the face of trillions spent on education be a major factor for socialism’s appeal today? I don’t know, but socialism has risen from an underground of cranks to a near takeover of one of our major political parties. Bernie Sanders is about to achieve what Eugene Debs failed to do in the early 20th century: be a standard bearer of a major party.

Eugene Debs had to quit the Democratic Party to run five times for president as the candidate of the Socialist Party of America. Democrats wouldn’t have him. John Dewey, the guru of education from his lofty perch at Columbia University, said that he was a socialist but advocated not using the term because of its ill-favored reputation with the public.

Eugene Debs, the rail union president and ex-Democrat who ran five times as a Socialist for the U.S. presidency, campaigned with fiery speeches. (Chicago Tribune historical photo)

Socialism was associated with the worst sort of violence in the early years of the labor union movement. The Haymarket Square Riot (1886) and Homestead Strike (1892) still seared in the public’s mind.

Flyer printed at the office of the German-language and left-wing newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung, 1886. The call for participants to arm themselves is circled.

A near-contemporaneous rendering of the bomb explosion killing 7 police officers that set off the riot.

SALEM EVENING NEWS, Massachusetts, May 6, 1886.

Today, socialism is about to be served up as the other choice on the ballot, in spite of its perfect historical record of carnage. Legions of Bernie bros and glib half-wits in Congress are openly advocating the hot mess. Socialism may lose, but is its time coming? Are we, to alter a bit Moynihan’s famous quip, defining social, political, and economic deviancy down to the point of making the horrible acceptable?

This election may be a first. To borrow from Neil Armstrong on the moon, is this election a small step for socialist man and a giant leap for socialist mankind? Absent a resounding electoral slaughter, we may be in serious trouble from this election forward.

Warning!

RogerG

February 24, 2020

Full-On Red

Bernie Sanders raises as fist as he speaks at his caucus night rally Des Moines, Iowa February 1, 2016. (Rick Wilkin/Reuters)

The vast majority of votes are counted in Nevada (88%). Bernie Sanders in a 8-person race got almost 50% (47%). Yeah, it’s a small state but it adds to the big “mo” for Bernie and his bros as he heads into Super Tuesday and its treasure trove of delegates. If Bernie was placed on a color swatch in the Home Depot paint department, he would be full-on red with the others still huddling around the darker end of the slip of paper.

Now begins – if the Dem hierarchy succumbs to what appears to be inevitable – the effort to mainstream his socialism. Bernie, his bros, and the Squad try to emphasize the “democratic” in front of “socialism”. Poison, whether administered through so-called “democratic” or totalitarian means, is frankly irrelevant. It sells, though, to a small slice of our over-credentialed but grossly ill-educated population.

Socialism is toxic no matter its modifier. Government with its army of employees, lawyers, regulators, enforcers, laws, programs, and regulations will make the word “private” in front of “citizen” a dead letter. Government and its politics will overhang and penetrate nearly all aspects of life like a Beijing smog. Albania as the Socialist People’s Republic of Albania wasn’t a basket case because a dictator – Enver Hoxha – ruled over it. It was ruined by socialism.

Enver Hoxha as communist dictator of Albania.

Shkoder, Albania, 2017. The consequences of Hoxha’s socialism.

Now, Bernie, his bros, the Squad, and many in the activist base of today’s Dem Party want to recapitulate Albania right here in America. Of course, they try to dodge that reality by hiding behind the word “Scandinavian” like they do “democratic”. Scandinavia shed its 1960’s-70’s socialism by the 1990’s because it was making them into Albania. Rather than learn that lesson, Bernie and company want to relive the disaster.

The rest of this year’s Dem offerings are just slightly lighter shades of red on the swatch – still, though, on the darker end. They differ only in the size of the dose of poison.

RogerG

February 23, 2020February 23, 2020

The Bigotry of the Cosmopolitan

Democratic presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaks during his campaign launch of “Mike for Black America,” at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum, Thursday, Feb. 13, 2020, in Houston. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

As a community college student back in the day, my college’s football team (Bakersfield College) would host a team from the LA area. LA team supporters would chant “sooie” while amply spicing their outbursts with “redneck” and “hayseed” and cow bells. I didn’t think much of it because our team frequently sent them packing soundly defeated, but the incident came to mind as I listened to Michael Bloomberg’s denigration of farmers. Cosmopolitanism is classically meant to indicate a broad exposure leading to refinement. No more. It’s a synonym for narrow-mindedness. Bigotry can be found not only under Klan robes but also in faculty lounges, corporate boardrooms, and Manhattan penthouses.

Bloomberg has as much familiarity with agriculture as the Peter Sellers character, Chance, in the movie “Being There”, did with modernity. For Chance, spending his entire life in the mansion and educated by tv, he was mentally out of place with the outside world as Bloomberg is in flyover country or among anybody who makes a living with their hands.

Chance (Peter Sellers) as his benefactor lays dying.

Bloomberg was raised and continued to live in an urban cocoon. Born in a Boston neighborhood, raised in Medford, Mass., and afterward attended Johns Hopkins and Harvard, Bloomberg went into high finance at Salomon Bros. on Wall Street before he founded Bloomberg, Inc., in New York City. It’s safe to say that not much dirt ever got under his fingernails. Yet, he confidently pontificates on the alleged superiority of air-conditioned office occupants over the millions of hard workers in pickup trucks travelling the fields of the American heartland. Similarly, another Dem huckster, Joe Biden, with a wave of the hand, condemned the fossil fuel industry and totalitarianly announced that all its workers would be transformed into coders. Frankly, it’s nauseating.

Check out this interview with Victor Davis Hanson on this subject and others (click on the Hanson picture below). I don’t agree with Hanson on everything, but I think he hits the mark here.

RogerG

February 23, 2020February 23, 2020

Village Idiot Districts

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) on The View, Feb. 19, 2020.

The old term “yellow dog districts” needs an update. If you’ve forgotten, there really were districts in the Jim Crow South filled with white people who would sooner vote for a yellow dog than a Republican. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act began the process of sending them into extinction, and rightly so. Though, that hasn’t stopped the rise of village idiot districts. These are districts filled with people who would sooner vote for a village idiot than a Republican. In this case, it’s more than a caricature. They actually do vote them into office.

Granted, idiocy crosses the partisan divide; however, it’s a special kind of idiocy that runs deep in today’s Democratic Party. The lunacy stems from the mental maturity of a toddler and extends into a person’s 30’s, and maybe beyond. These are adults who espouse tooth-fairy economics for example. Watch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez provide proof of the existence of the “village idiot district”.

Many things stand out as I watch her performances. One thing is her glibness and confidence as she spouts nonsense. When pressed on how she’ll pay for her list of freebies, for instance, she mentions such things as a “transaction tax” on securities trades to pay for the scheme. She has no concept of the impact of her tax on behavior. Her notion of economics has much in common with a slave economy. Slave economics functions on the principle that you can whip and chain people with taxes and regulation and they will continue to perform as before. In other words, she is a college economics major without a high-schooler’s understanding of incentives and disincentives. You punish people in a free economy and they will seek to avoid the lash. Welcome, Alexandria, to Reality 101.

So, two things will happen under the tutelage of the Democrats’ dominatrix: (1) businesses find it harder to get capital, and therefore fewer businesses, usually startups – something not totally unwelcome to a socialist – and (2) she ends up with less dough for her cockamamie handouts. Welcome, Alexandria, to lecture #2 of Reality 101.

She reminds me of the high school sophomore who goes home after History class to tell dad of the Battle of Khe Sanh, of which he participated and said nothing. She looks and speaks with the self-assurance of an oracle while taxing the patience of dear old dad. The only problem on The View is that she is sitting with 3 other self-assured sophomores; McCain deserves to be excluded.

Kids say the darndest things, and so do some adults who think like kids.

RogerG

February 21, 2020February 23, 2020

Sadly, Remembering Parkland, 2/14/2018

People distant from an event have a tendency to nationalize it. The occurrence is shoe-horned into some broader issue, or, better yet for activists, a politically opportune crisis. The shooting at Marjorie Stoneman High School would descend into the gutter of national gun-control politics. The most impactful circumstances surrounding the shooter are glazed over in the pursuit of a hot-button issue. Useful lessons are avoided as the coffers fill with contributions from any number of frightened citizens and well-heeled political exploiters (Michael Bloomberg, et al).

The most relevant facts, though, are those that directly relate to the cultprit. Right there, we find a convoluted and perplexing school discipline policy – the Promise program – in the school district, all meant to dilute the reality of bad behavior in the classroom, no matter the violator’s background. The result is a discipline system that few can understand, including the miscreant. The old rule of investing applies: if you don’t understand it, don’t do it.

The second factor to come out of the horrid affair is the insipid reactions of our public employees up and down the federal system. Take district superintendent Runcie and his use of gross and misleading numbers to defend his discipline system that in reality can’t and won’t remove real threats. Disgusting. Or the behavior of local law enforcement to refuse to enter the building to stop the shooter. Or the school’s security personnel who saw the guy coming and did nothing to stop him. Appalling. Or the warnings coming from citizens over a number of years to authorities about the shooter’s disturbing behavior. Warnings were plenty, and unheeded.

This only proves that real public safety begins with personal responsibility of the individual citizen. That’s the reason for the Second Amendment. Gun-free zones are in practice safe zones for killers.

Crass language would refer to the Parkland incident as one huge government “cluster #$&?@”. Either way you cut it, it was an entirely avoidable disaster … if government worked as designed in its flow chart. Fact is, it seldom does.

Instead, we get the parade of demagogues who promise a more centralized and bureaucratized version of the same. A good place to find them was on the stage Feb. 19, 2020, in Las Vegas.

The lineup of demagogues in Las Vegas, Feb. 19, 2020.

Mike, Hello, Get Out of the Snake Pit.

Yes, Mike Bloomberg, the Democratically Party is a crazy-left snake pit. Many people commenting on last night’s Democratic debate dwelled on Warren’s takedown of Bloomberg and the knife fight between Klobuchar and Buttigieg. I saw it differently. It was a brawl over who is most crazy-left. Combine the back-and-forth with the looney-left audience and you have a debate in an antifa bubble. Mike, face it, you have no place in that cuckoo’s nest.

Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren at the Las Vegas debate.

Ironically and sporadically, the only one to approach sanity on the stage was Bloomberg. Yes, he’s crazy about goofy gun control, he’s a living insult to agriculture, and he’s got a Leninesque streak to control what’s on our kitchen tables. But on some matters – government-run health care, the absurdity of socialism, recognition of the basic responsibility for law enforcement – he was speaking truth to the power of the mob. On those occasions, he was the adult in the room.

Take Elizabeth’s Warren’s play to Bolshevik feminism at Bloomberg’s expense. True, Bloomberg may have been a pig in the workplace (NDA’s anyone?) but she plays up to it to support the aggrandizement of state power to manage more of the intimate details of our lives. I don’t know what’s worse: a male chauvinist or a hyper-left commissar of all interpersonal relations.

The Buttigieg/Klobuchar spat contained some real whoppers. For instance, Buttigieg assailed Klobuchar for voting to confirm Trump’s director of ICE. In that exchange, Buttigieg stepped all over his tongue in claiming that it was only Trump and this official who separated families. No, Pete, when illegal border-crossers with children were taken into custody, the children were separated – under Obama too. You can read about it here.

It became a burgeoning problem when Obama sent signals in thought and action, like DACA, that children can be a transit ticket into the US. Trump became saddled with a growing number of illegals who grabbed a kid, or parents who had one or more at hand, to illegally enter our country. Families became an increasing feature of illegal immigration at the start of the Trump presidency. But don’t interrupt Mayor Pete with facts as he jumps on the party’s train to no borders.

Mike, do you really belong in a party reeking with no-borders socialism and its inevitable cousin of central planning? I would think that last night’s snake pit would be enough for anyone to seek safer political environs. Sorry Mike, your indulgences in money to the party, gun grabs, and your conversion to climate change hysteria apparently aren’t enough to excuse the fact that you’re a rich white guy who can’t quite buy into the socialist fantasies. I don’t know where you belong, unless you’re a fetishistic masochist.

RogerG

February 20, 2020

Are We Irreconcilably Divided as a Nation?

Christopher Caldwell of the Claremont Institute says “yes”. In a presentation before an audience at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center, Caldwell lays out his diagnosis of our current rupture. It’s an argument worth serious consideration.

In a nutshell, Caldwell sees the country split into winners and losers, purported villains and heroes, and the much-abused oppressed and oppressor. I attribute it to Marxist theory seeping into the schools, media of almost any type, and the broader culture. Caldwell views it as a byproduct of the extension of our civil rights crusade beyond any prudent limit. He asserts that it created a second constitution – a subversion of the original one. The second and unratified constitution created law by bureaucratic and judicial decree, and began to short-circuit popular sovereignty. Then, all began to notice that they were, without approval, placed into the categories of winners and losers, villains and heroes, and the oppressed and oppressors.

For me, the Marxist paradigm entered the social bloodstream from the cultural commanding heights of our urban centers. It’s there that we find it lavishly evident in our faculty lounges, urban political machines, media headquarters, and even the corporate boardroom. Thus, the much talked-about blue/red divide.

Caldwell, though, has a point. He illustrates how a noble cause – civil rights, equal protection, etc. – can fall down the rabbit hole of malign governance. Please read the speech in the latest edition of Imprimis.

RogerG