January 2021 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

January 30, 2021January 31, 2021

The Puzzling 2020 Election

New York election workers coping with a deluge of absentee ballots, November 3, 2020.

No, I can’t leave the 2021 election alone, nor should anyone else. As of now, though, it is, as per Churchill’s quip about the Soviet Union, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. Analysis varies so much and is often infected with wishful thinking and partisan bias. Maybe it’s just that it’s too soon to tell. Maybe we’ll just have to wait for analytical competence. I don’t know.

Part of the problem lies in our affection for generalizations. Generalizations stray into oversimplifications. Many Republicans ask themselves the question, can we have Trump without Trump? Meaning, can we have Trump’s good parts and not his bad parts? The answer frequently swirls around stats that compare his numbers with R’s down ballot in an attempt to measure his toxicity. And that picture is murky. He did better in some places and worse in others. In the battleground ‘burbs, the scene is equally cloudy. The plain fact is that the numbers are all over the map making general conclusions difficult.

In addition, the raw vote totals for Trump don’t paint a clear picture. He added to his vote totals in some states, counties, and precincts, but in many of those places so do did Biden. In Texas for instance, Trump added 1.2 million more votes, but Biden added 1.3 million. In other locations, he didn’t. Thus, the percentage differential between him and Biden fluctuated wildly. Post-election boasts from either side is probably pablum.

Processing ballots in Michigan, November 3, 2020.

Two factors missing from the analysis are secularization and the weird election system that was concocted this time around. Secularization is a trend that predates Trump. Broadly speaking, it has been on the march long before Trump, even in places that have been Republican strongholds. How much has it weakened the strength of the elephant party? As of yet, I haven’t seen any numbers for this election. I suspect – and suspicion is all that I have at this point – that it has continued its onward march. Religiosity has been known to have a clear relationship to political affiliation and voting patterns. The trend has been going ill for Republicans.

And then there’s COVID. The virus was destructive, and so was our reaction to it. The economy, the schools, our social life was laid waste. Elections weren’t spared. Distance voting joined social distancing and distance learning and distance working in our lives, with equally deleterious effects. It was imposed by purely authoritarian means, and out the window went voter authentication at the point of voting, which was the precinct polling place in normal times. Not this time. The point of voting happened to be a home with any number of people to fill them out, cajole, harangue. The person alone with their conscience became a social affair.

Increasingly conducting an election by mail is fraught with serious credibility problems. In many states, the simple authenticating act of presenting an ID to a precinct worker in normal in-person suffrage was replaced by county registrar worker bees functioning as graphologists. I didn’t know that handwriting expertise could be so easily performed by temporary, underpaid, and overwhelmed election workers. Software can help, but I wonder about its efficacy. This and other mutilations of our vote system resulted in mail-in votes accounting for over 60% of the total cast. This election system was weird, very weird, making comparisons highly suspect.

What would never have been tolerated in prior elections was done with zeal in this one. In some states, ballots were shot-gunned through the mail from voter registration lists littered with inaccuracies. Absentee ballots laid in clumps beneath mail boxes in apartment complexes in some documented cases. Forget about voter verification; forget about knowing what happens behind a home’s four walls to the four ballots that arrived. Out the window went the secret ballot. The normal election system was completely upended in many states.

The process so skewed the vote numbers that this election stands as a one-of-a-kind phenomenon, hardly analogous to any other. The process dictated the outcome to a great degree. The Democrats have long maintained the advantage in the suspicious kind of voting that doesn’t require your presence. Combine this with their longstanding vetoes of voter authentication measures and efforts to clean up the voter lists and you have an election system that feeds into their wheelhouse. They now have a legalized means to round up the large cohorts of the uninterested and ill-informed in their potential fan base. Their numbers were inflated in ways that hopefully will be never replicated again. All numbers were artificially inflated, with COVID-panic as the underlying excuse. As a result, once again, any comparisons with earlier elections to draw out trends will be fraught with misperceptions.

Since vote-by-mail asks so little of the voter – after all, the ballot comes to them so they don’t even have to go get it – it places premium on the uncaring and moron voter. In normal times, they won’t get off their couch. I intuit – and intuition is all that many of us have at this time – that a large increase in the moron vote in this election had some effect. To whose benefit? Can’t say. I have my suspicions.

Then we have the person of Trump, a third underappreciated element in this campaign season. How did his outsized personality affect the results? The spectrum of reactions to him ranged from repulsed to merely tolerated to loved, with not much between the markers. The personality-driven election may have made it possible for Biden to run his “not Trump” campaign from his basement and thereby hide his mental incontinence by simply laying back to garner the repulsed, something easy to do with ballots scattered by mail and postage-free voting. Trump here, there, and everywhere may have altered the normal election landscape.

In so many ways, this was an election like no other. It stands alone, and may not be comparable at all. So, when I see talking heads make bold claims, I shake my head in wonder at the silliness. They take the black swan election of 2020 and place it in a line with previous ones. But that’s like bringing onto the stage the 7’2” Kareem Abdul Jabbar and then claiming that he’s proof that we’re getting taller.

To the editors of publications of the literary set: 2020 was a huge black swan event which mangled everything within its calendar. Please exercise caution before you spout.

RogerG

January 29, 2021January 29, 2021

Seabiscuit, The Salve of Our Times

*If you need something to steel your spine in the face of progressive authoritarianism, watch “Seabiscuit”.

Last night, as I routinely do, I watched the nightly news by flipping between CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. The first two infuriate me and the third revs up the infuriation about the other two. I normally break away from it by seeking something else as food for the soul. Lo and behold, from our downstairs rec room came the sounds of my wife and son watching “Seabiscuit”. I thought what a great idea since I haven’t seen it for a long time. So, I streamed the film from the beginning. It’s a great movie.

It is a perfect accompaniment for an escape from the discontents of our time, and a perfect lesson for us in our troubled times. The arc of the story has the additional advantage of being true . . . for the most part. The New Deal hero-worship by historian David McCullough’s voice-over was a bit much. The fact is, the New Deal made many people feel better as it kept them in misery. But the story, the story. The script artfully blended the lives of three broken people – Tom Smith, Charles Howard, and Red Pollard – brought together by a broken horse.

Seabiscuit wasn’t so much broken as rejected. He didn’t fit the expected profile for a racehorse – like many of us who don’t fit the expected mental profile of our rich, fashionable, insulated, and lacking in self-awareness “social betters” by rejecting their chic and foolish ideas. He lacked, as they say among horseracing connoisseurs, “conformation”. He didn’t look like a racehorse. He was short, had awkward legs with knobby knees, and was gimpy in his walk. To boot, he was lazy, temperamental, unpredictable in performance, and hated training.

And he became a hero to the “forgotten man” in a decade of troubled times. The “forgotten man” isn’t the one exploited by FDR in the 1936 campaign for political purposes: the man, in Roosevelt’s words, “at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” The real “forgotten man”, according to economist Amity Schlaes, was the working men and women who ended up paying for the largesse that was distributed to the constituents of FDR’s New Deal coalition, and beginning the political practice of using taxpayer money to build political power. Actually, both versions flocked to a horse who bucked the preferred look of the privileged class, as most of his fans did.

The horse’s fan base is more like today’s “smelly Walmart shoppers” than the student bodies and alumni of prestige colleges with their fat trust funds. Princess Diana was garishly and undeservedly given the moniker of the “people’s princess”. In contrast, the “people’s horse” was a title rightfully earned by Seabiscuit. His following grew so much that by the time of his five-year-old season in 1938 he drew enormous crowds. In the seven years after his retirement to his death, he had 50,000 visitors.

Seabiscuit fans who came out to see him race.

The thing about Seabiscuit is that he had “fight”. It’s a word in disrepute among today’s self-appointed gatekeepers of thought after its use by their bogeyman Trump on January 6. The word simply means the well-spring to rise to a challenge. Some people call it grit; others associate it with courage and determination. Whatever it was, he had it, and it was admirable and inspirational. It’s something we’ll need to resist the hegemony of our malignant and politically-connected cultural elites.

Seabiscuit crossing the finish line ahead of War Admiral in the 1938 match race.

Trump is a special taste for a special political and social pallet. His ability to inspire didn’t reach beyond his tranche of the electorate. “Inspiration” isn’t a word that I can easily associate with him. “Dogged” and “fight”, yes. Seabiscuit had all three.

See the movie, even if it might be for the third time. It’s the perfect salve for those anxious about the gauntlet that the cultural left from their exclusive estates and seats of power are setting before us. Seabiscuit’s “fight” is a lesson for us 70 years later.

RogerG

January 28, 2021January 28, 2021

The Principal Cause of Our Discontents

Pro-life Democrats are beyond “endangered” on that official list of fading species. They are “critically endangered”. Soon, you’ll only be able to see a stuffed one in a musty museum exhibit.

At the start of 2020, there were four in the House. Now, there is one: Henry Cuellar of Texas. Two were taken down by Republicans in the general, and one, Dan Lipinski of Illinois, was primaried earlier by another one of those signature social justice warriors in vogue in the Party. The downfall of Democrats who show even the slightest squeamishness about abortion is the harbinger of the Party’s leap to the far left, which is the principal cause of the chasm in our national politics and culture.

Our split cannot be charitably described as both sides simultaneously moving in opposite directions – or even a by-product of a particularly boorish Republican president – but is a result of a leftward momentum in the Democratic Party that began long before the orange man came down the escalator. The Party absorbed the 60’s radical left and thereafter continued its transformation into the organizational agent of muscular eco-utopianism and the erection of a central-planning police state.

It’s happening before our eyes. And the Party’s minions aren’t alone in their mission in “transforming” America. Censorship is about to enjoy the full force of the central government, but the greater reach to blanket all of America is made possible with the cooperation of well-moneyed elites who speak in the mono-voice of the cultural left. The tenets of cancel-culture are found everywhere from the corporate boardroom, faculty lounge, Big Tech oligarchs, the entire world of entertainment to its branch in Big Sports. Super Bowl LV will be replete with subtle and not-so-subtle messages about a racist America. Watch that space.

Buffalo Bills players kneeling during the national anthem.

Big Money is fully on board. This isn’t a revolution of pitchfork-wielding peasants. It’s being imposed from the top down. Following the money, as they say, will show that Biden’s basement campaign and Stacey Abram’s antics in Georgia were amply funded from the deep pockets of Big Money. The poor Republicans weren’t the party of the rich zip codes, by a factor of three or four.

Don’t believe me? Comb the campaign finance reports.

Big Money made it possible to engineer an election ripe for exploitation by funding the political pressure for immense mail-in voting, registration drives for the uninterested and ill-informed, the army to hector the uninterested and ill-informed and harvest the things. The pandemic was the excuse; but with the fear-mongering no longer sustainable, they are working to chisel the scandalous regime in granite for all time in Pelosi’s much-loved HR1. If she has her way, America’s elections will have all the credibility of those in Maduro’s Venezuela.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has claimed victory for ‘the revolution’ in a controversial election a day after ten were killed in a wave of protests, July 2017.

The half-witted, semi-literate elites, and their underlings, at the commanding heights of our culture gave us a left-wing government and are seeking to complete the cycle by dictating a left-wing culture as well. Amazingly, though, enough word gets out to animate a counter revolution. Hats off to the folks at Fox News, et al, and people like Mike Lindell for swimming against the currents at the oxygen-starved financial elevations of Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos.

It’s a troubling trend: achieve a 9-zero portfolio and your brains are drained. They’re good at the narrow specialty that earned the bank, but it doesn’t qualify them for the post of philosopher-in-chief. But that hasn’t stopped them from claiming the mantle.

This crowd with their money beyond count, allied to a radical left party that sings their cultural tune, has enforced a new kind of Jim Crow, an imposed feudalism. They, with their values and political views in tow, have divorced themselves from the hordes of paycheck and mortgage-paying Americans. If they can engineer an election system like they do cell phones, they will be able to make America unrecognizable to your grandparents.

Sen Charles Schumer’s famous quip after the November 2020 elections.

Herein lies the crux of our dilemma: our moneyed elites have shamefully abandoned America and its traditions, culture, and institutions. Personally, I think that it’s a consequence of years of K-through-grad school indoctrination in UN-love and global citizenship.

Their alliance with a radical left Democratic Party has pushed the Party and its co-conspirators away from the rest of us. They are the principal cause of our discontents. Until the Party opens its doors to ideological and cultural diversity, and or moneyed elites show more practical sense, America will remain in the throes of a cold civil, and maybe not-so-civil, war.

At least 3 officers were injured after being attacked at a Black Lives Matter protest in July 2020. (Source: Screenshots from Twitter)

Meanwhile, I’m not certain about watching Super Bowl LV. I don’t have a taste for political sermons emanating from a Manhattan-based league monolith and the mouths of its multi-millionaire players. If I’m to have leftism splattered into my life, I prefer that it come from the usual miscreants: California’s Democratic Party, the Antifa and BLM street thugs, our increasingly decrepit colleges, and the urban and coastal mandarins in lifetime sinecures.

Politics on the playing field is like spitting in church.

RogerG

January 24, 2021January 24, 2021

A Few Prudent Suggestions for Biden; Most Are Pernicious

Politico reached out to the punditry class for suggestions on how to unite the country (see here). First, let me say, “unity” can be a very dangerous word. Totalitarian rulers seek unity, albeit through a police state and elimination of opposition in the form of a well-armed cancel culture, the antithesis of real rule-of-law democracies.

Visage of Big Brother on the Ministry of Truth from Orwell’s “1984″.

The overwhelming majority of the pieces in Politico fall into this trap like “Root out extremism in the military ranks” (Beirich/Singh), “A White House task force on white supremacy” (Miller-Idris), “Punish politicians who lie” (Uscinski), “Update national standards for U.S. history” (Cooter), “Rebuild a shared reality” (Enders), “A new voting rights act” (Albright), “A truth and reconciliation commission” (Shim), “Increase access to affordable housing” (Sugrue), “Investigate Trump’s treatment of immigrants” (Garcia-Rios), “Reparations for Black Americans” (Galea), etc. These authors’ partisanship leaves no doubt.

This advice is proof that the Overton window (a group’s range of acceptable thought) of the Democratic Party has leaped to the extreme Left toward state-sponsored indoctrination, coercion, and federal Soviet-style central planning. It is the attempt to manufacture unity through the barrel of the state’s metaphorical gun. If followed, don’t expect unity but await irreconcilable and deepening division.

There were a few in the batch deserving of honorable mention: “Reaffirm the First Amendment” (Bauerlein), “Call out new threats to freedom in America” (Eberstadt), and “A nonpartisan, no-nonsense virus strategy” (James).

The actual cause of our division – beyond the fact that it’s natural in a democracy – is the false and malignant campus cancel culture that has entered the public square’s mainstream through one of our two institutional political parties, the Democratic Party. To paraphrase Reagan, we didn’t leave the Party; the Party left us. By left us, I mean that they went off the left-wing cliff.

If we really want to remove the road blocks to calm, reasoned deliberation, we must expunge the toxicity at the root of our inability to dialogue. Yes, noxiousness can be found on the right, but it’s a coopting of the Left’s identity-mongering. The left-wing variety has all of the backing of our cultural commanding heights. The Left has all the wind in their sails. Tune into Netflix, the networks (except Fox News), and social media with their decidedly left-wing workforces and you’ll get the monotone voice of a leftist monoculture.

Our rancor won’t disappear with a rearming of the federal government with crusades for racial reparations or an “Investigate Trump . . .”. The enmity will fade once the donkey party opens its ranks to pro-life Democrats and people who could carry the mantle of Truman, Scoop Jackson, and Hubert Humphrey. No need to worry about the crazies on the right. They’ve already been ostracized. The donkey party needs to look in the mirror and excise the radical left inquisition in control of it.

Half the country not only disagrees with them. They are justifiably afraid of them.

RogerG

January 24, 2021January 24, 2021

‘Tis the Season for Lunacy

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, was quoted recently as saying in a comparison of the skilled-labor pools in China and the U.S., “In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.” Other than the usual crony-capitalist plea for more H1B visas and cheap labor, what is he actually saying about our education system and the broader American culture? I construe nothing positive. We should sit up and take notice, though.

Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks during an Apple event on Monday, March 9, 2015, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)

Is he right? Is it fair to draw these implications? Mostly . . . yes and yes. For decades, from the commanding heights of our culture has come a corrupting message that has severely damaged our long-term prospects. We have incessantly advertised the idea that personal well-being is found in the possession of a piece of paper from an institution with a similarly questionable piece of accreditation paper, called a college. And this has simultaneously occurred as powerful political currents have demolished academic rigor and classroom decorum, and morphed our schools into indoctrination camps. The result is a growing class of opinionated dunces, a divorce from reality for many, and a country that has to import the brains that are capable of delivering the stuff on our Amazon wish lists.

The culture drives our problems, a culture from the individual to the family right up through the entire federal system. Human beings don’t just pop out of the ground as in Gimli’s joke about the birthing of dwarves in “The Lord of the Rings”. People are born and raised in a social setting, a setting of distracted or, at the other extreme, smothering parents who themselves were a product of the same social eco-system, as were their parents. It’s been around that long. The whole notion of practical realities is fading from the social memory. Nature abhors a vacuum and similarly our social and mental vacuum is being filled with drivel.

One of the worst ideas to come down the pike is the ethos of collectivism, or as Hillary was fond of saying: “the things we do together”. The personal accountability of the Genesis story, the prophets, and the Gospels is erased by an imperial group identity. Personal souls become group souls. Group guilt and rewards are the necessary by-product. Racial vengeance in the form of racial reparations and a check-the-box of “oppressed” identities for new hires and promotions are the expected norm. Social cohesion is the first casualty as some groups realize that they are screwed.

The past is contorted to fit the new reigning obsession, and when things go awry, as they inevitably will, more fallacies in thought and action will be implemented to cover the tracks. For instance, order in the classroom will come under attack as soon as it is discovered that suspensions by group don’t conform to neat proportionalities. The old justice for the individual turns into group justice – a noxious idea no matter where it has reared its ugly head in history, a history we are quickly forgetting. The classroom spirals downhill only to lead to more permissiveness, ad infinitum. The only operative principle to draw is never having to admit you’re wrong (from what movie?).

“Statistical disparity” enters the lexicon as the bogeyman to all things good and right. Now, we are no longer expected to look at the particular circumstances of each incident of mayhem. From the classroom to the street, some people who’ve shown the propensity to harm people and their things get essentially a free pass because any rightful application of justice trips the group’s proportionality.

Group oppression in the form of race and the ever-expanding number of phobias is the go-to explanation for the misalignment, the “statistical disparity”; thus, the rise of “systemic” racism, sexism, and the phobias to drive the left’s social engineering crusades. Using the airy adjective “systemic” makes it possible to say it without proving it. It’s impossible to prove an ill-defined abstraction. Just say it and that’s tantamount to proving it. Never entering the mind of these dunces is the possibility that social pathologies don’t conform to proportionality. But that’s roundly rejected as further proof of, you guessed it, “systemic” fill-in-the-blank. Is there something grossly absurd in this fever swamp of thinking?

Nonetheless, off we go to the land of fantasy where we find leprechauns and unicorns. And it shows in the people trashing Portland and manning (and womanning, or whatever) the Biden administration. Toppling the statues of people who established their right to believe in nonsense has been one of the miscreants’ highest priorities. Has the irony occurred to them?

Not stopping there, many coddle a fascination with socialism of almost every shade, from, once again, the people trashing Portland and manning (and womanning, or whatever) the Biden administration. Some deny it while still talking like it, like our new commander-in-chief. Has it occurred to these people that a society corseted by the overweening principle of government massively taking from one group to give to another is disruptive to national cohesion and prosperity? The coerced giver has little incentive to produce the means to give and the recipient of the largesse has little incentive to earn it. It doesn’t matter if you reclassify the waste as “investment”, a mere play on words. You’ll still end up with less of what you want – the stuff on our Amazon wish lists – and more of what you don’t – more people on the dole.

The self-styled progressives aren’t espousing Christian social teaching. Don’t fool yourself. This is social suicide. I don’t think that Thomas Aquinas had a suicide pact in mind.

What we are getting is less demanding of our people and more of a demanding people. The work ethic declines as we increasingly distance ourselves from the practical realities of life. An infatuation with leisure, individual license, a wallowing in falsehoods, and schools reflecting the morass is not likely to fill a stadium with mechanical engineers. China may not eat our lunch, but we are certainly making it possible for everybody else to do it.

Our only recourse to date would be to export the madness. Win by making others equally as corrupt. Beijing, how about taking in more of the faculty of our grad schools of education? Many of them are already with the Party program anyway.

RogerG

January 22, 2021January 22, 2021

The Lord of the Rings

Last night, I watched the first installment of The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring. It’s an entirely fitting thing to do given what has happened to us in the general election and what is about to happen to us thereafter, whether you voted for the guy or not. Joe Biden and his coterie have the ring of power.

The movie opens with Galadriel’s haunting premonition of evil tidings and a recitation of the past that led to this new and ominous dark time.

“The world has changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost. For none now live who remember it. It began with the forging of the great rings [to the rulers of the three races of Middle Earth].

But they were all of them deceived for another ring was made. In the land of Mordor, in the fires of Mount Doom, the dark Lord Sauron forged in secret a master ring, to control all others and into this ring, he poured his cruelty, his malice, and his will to dominate all life. One ring to rule them all.”

I can’t think of anything that better captures the awful sense of foreboding that dominates the mind of many Americans today. Nothing that Biden said in his speeches allayed those fears. He exacerbated them.

His inaugural speech was replete with calls for unity and an end to the “uncivil war”. Good, as far as it goes. But “a more perfect union” has a different ring coming out of the mouth of the leader of a party whose Overton window has lurched in the direction of Marx. “Racial justice” is tantamount to witch hunts against an ill-defined “white supremacy” which may mean a crusade against political opposition. “The cry of survival from the planet” is code for the enhanced central planning of the Green New Deal.

Back to “unity”. What kind of “unity” was it? “Unity” was the rhetorical device to express the portentous power of the ring. Biden used “unity” innumerable times to the point that it suffered from a Weimar level of value debasement. If anything, it was the “unity” of capitulation. “Shared values” meant their values.

Inauguration Day was more than the speech. Yesterday, something like the discovery of the ring of power was encapsulated in other parts of an otherwordly ceremony. Watching the COVID inaugural festivities was another one of those surreal experiences that goes right alongside the scenes from the COVID election, COVID anti-socialization in quarantined homes, the COVID anti-learning in COVID “distance learning”, the COVID shuttering of economic life, and COVID anti-romance for those seeking a mate – something hard to do with two-thirds of the face hiding behind a mask. COVID mangled life and now gave us an expensively-produced infomercial masquerading as an inaugural ceremony that could have come right out of the History Channel’s “Life After People”. There were few, very few hominids around, with the exception of the speech itself.

“Virtual reality” must be expanded to include “virtual inauguration”. Ceremonies and celebrations without people leave the impression that people aren’t necessary, and the first step toward inhumanity.

It was an inauguration signaling the rise of new power in the east. It had nothing to do with a transference of a ring of power since the losing party is less about power – therefore no need for the ring – than it is about the restraining and channeling of power to allow a free people to function freely. The winning party in its current manifestation is almost purely about power, the power to bring about an eschaton that is founded upon a set of fallacies. This end state has to be imposed by force since few in their right mind would freely accept it. It’s as if Sauron gained possession of the ring.

An inkling of where things are going is evident in Biden’s inaugural 17 executive orders. Globalism replaced nationalism as he will hogtie us back into the CCP-dominated World Health Organization and CCP-favored Paris Climate Accord. American health and economic policy will be laboring to breath under an UN and CCP wet blanket.

Uighur concentration camp in Xinjiang, Red China.

The chaos at the southern border is set to return. The first step in scotching the wall was made. Legislating from the Resolution desk was endorsed with a rechristening of DACA. It’s the very thing that helped sanction a new approach to gain illegal entry: grab a kid. The signal was sent that the possession of a kid necessitates favored treatment.

Making asylum really mean asylum and not just another means to make “poor” the unofficial-but-real criteria for access to the U.S. will be obliterated in present and future proclamations in Biden’s orders. Be prepared for the play-acting that countries who are known to germinate terrorists aren’t, and that vetting asylum-seekers from these places can actually occur. These countries don’t even have reliable birth certificates. How can anybody be traced from these places? I don’t think that Al Qaeda or ISIS operates on the principle of ID cards. Still, we’re going down this moral and rational dead-end.

Immigrants try to swarm the border wall near San Diego, April 2018.

Instead, we are going to be showered with announcements on the “real” threat of “domestic terrorism”. We will be told that the real danger does not lie with Islamic fanatics who would behead a teacher for showing Muhammed cartoons in a lesson on free speech, as what recently happened in France. No, Biden and company say that we’ve got to hunt down people who might have strong reservations about the donkey party’s socialist revolution. Will the rank and file of the FBI allow itself to be used as the Biden administration’s NKVD (Stalin’s secret police)? The worry is not out of the realm of possibility given the Comey/McCabe/Brennan/Clapper/Obama shenanigans of recent memory.

Biden ordered a return to the shackling of the US energy industry in a Don Quixote tilting at global greenhouse-gas windmills. No more Keystone/XL pipeline. Federal emissions standards will follow the lead of California’s eco-socialists. Federal taxpayer-owned lands and continental shelf will fall under the gaze of Biden’s own eco-socialist commissars. Thousands will be given their last paycheck and back to the union hall they will go seeking work from a vastly depleted list of opportunities.

Buttigieg’s comments on the repeal of the permits for the Keystone/XL pipeline at his Senate confirmation hearing had all the compassion of a NKVD requisition officer dispossessing a farmer and his family (“kulaks”) of their land, home, and last bit of food in the heady days of Stalin’s collectivization campaign. Chilling, absolutely chilling.

Buttigeig at his confirmation hearing for the post of Secretary of Transportation.

The expropriation of a Ukrainian Farmer’s land and home by a NKVD requisition squad in the 1930’s as part of Stalin’s collectivization campaign.

If that’s not enough, out goes Trump’s 1776 Commission and in comes the dangerous and facetious 1619 Project. The former would instill a sense of thankfulness for our country while the latter is meant to foment disgust. The latter is about to be force-fed to the kiddies on a grander scale now that the federal Leviathan is gearing up to cram it into the schools. Our schools may come to mirror Red China’s Uighur reeducation camps or Cuba’s schoolhouses.

The “be prepareds” are in order. Be prepared for a taxpayer-funded shaming campaign for owning a SUV. Be prepared for the whole graph of fuel-price gyrations to be shifted upward. Meaning, starting up the car might become a family budget-busting activity. Be prepared for an economy that’ll be expected to run on wind gusts and solar farms the size of a western state. Be prepared for the hosing of taxpayer dollars in the direction of any claque of eco rent-seekers with their snouts fully buried in the public trough. These people are bound and determined to make the impossible possible with your money.

More “be prepareds” are in order. Be prepared for the march of woke authoritarianism. Out goes the First Amendment amid the reclassification of unwelcome speech into hate speech. Racism will reappear as “equity”, “equity” being the official sanction of racial vengeance. The approved melanin count, genitalia, self-diagnosed gender, and any combination thereof will be the new privileged Boston Brahmins. The longstanding Boston Brahmins will continue their inside track to status and fame. The ones on the outs will be the children of Asians, blue collars and the working middle class of paler complexions.

Power is the necessary ingredient for this revolution. It must be forced. If Biden didn’t gain possession of the ring of power, he certainly is acting like it. The Lord of the Rings is the perfect accompaniment to his new revitalization of Mordor.

The totalitarian N.I.C.E. from CS Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.

Or maybe the more accurate parallel is the totalitarian N.I.C.E. in C.S. Lewis’s The Hideous Strength. It’s a tale of science without morality and in the service of totalitarian social engineering. Either way, “The Lord of the Rings” will do for now in getting you in the proper mood for what’s coming.

RogerG

January 19, 2021January 19, 2021

Playing with Words, Playing with Minds, Playing with Fire

Insurrection: noun; an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government. It is a violent revolt against an oppressive authority. Insurrection is different from riots and offenses connected with mob violence. (USLegal Dictionary at definitions.uslegal.com)

Miriam-Webster definition of “insurrection”: noun; an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government. Synonyms include rebellion, revolution, uprising, revolt, mutiny.

The word “insurrection” is crossing the lips and keyboards of more and more of the entrenched and telegenic punditry in the increasingly and ideologically monolithic chattering classes. Why? Why this particular word choice? One possible answer lies with the desire to expunge dissent without having to deal with the heretics to the emerging group mind. It’s happening as I write.

Add government power to monolithic control over expression and you come close to the adjective “Orwellian” (as in George Orwell, as in “1984”). Orwell’s dystopia could quickly become ours.

Speaking of “triggering”, the January 6 event is the trip wire for using “insurrection” in a form of word manipulation to enforce ideological conformity. A mob breaks into the capitol and suddenly it’s an attempted coup. A “mob” is instantly translated into “insurrectionists”; “riot” is consonant with “revolt”; and “mayhem” is converted into “treason” – and this after a summer of BLM and Antifa rioting in cities across America. None of the word pairings connote anything nice but they are useful if the goal is to advance a monopoly of power to ram an unpopular agenda down the throats of the American people.

If it was anything, the January 6 episode was a brawl and not an attempted overthrow of the U.S. government. The malefactors were not anything like the Bolsheviks planning their October 1917 coup in Petrograd’s Smolny Institute. There was little if any orchestration, even though a few were clearly bent on violence. There was more coordination among BLM and Antifa hoodlums in Seattle, Portland, Kenosha, Minneapolis, New York City, and LA than the followers of chief war paint (Jake Angeli) in his buffalo headdress milling around the Senate chambers. He’ll get the book thrown at him while BLM thugs get kneeling gestures, incoherent defenses, and donations to their defense funds. It’s preposterous.

Democrats, let’s drop the preening on a contrived moral high ground. The duplicity and hypocrisy among our so-called “social betters” are rancidly resplendent for all to see. Cutting to the quick, the guilty deserve a fair punishment . . . and leave the rest of us alone.

Something more insidious is afoot. The concentration of troops in the capitol resembles Gen. Schwarzkopf’s massing of forces for his famous “left hook” to decimate the Iraqi army in Kuwait in Gulf War I. Why the show of force for an inauguration? I suspect that it’s much more than protection. It’s a visible reminder in order to paint the millions of dissenting Americans as moral outlaws. Some of the troops showing up in DC were indoctrinated with fears of “white supremacists” in scenes reminiscent of the brainwashing given to Red Chinese troops before they stormed Tiananmen Square in 1989. Will the National Guardsmen be given live ammunition also? And all this after the ruling party issued broad stand-down orders this summer in many of our major cities so they could be left to burn. The duplicity and hypocrisy among our so-called “social betters” are rancidly resplendent for all to see.

Is this appropriate in a citizen republic?

If you’ll recall, Inauguration Day 2017 was treated remarkably different by our media oligarchs. Remember the Women’s March and the cries of “Me Too”, some speakers describing dreams of blowing up the White House? The next three years treated America to disclosures of a similarly aligned administrative state conniving to deprive a candidate of the office that he fairly won, and then embroil his presidency in stonewalling and impeachment. Some donkey party mouths, like Maxine Waters, called for public abuse and incivility for officeholders of the other party. Where was the outrage back then?

The Democrats of today’s social-revolutionary Democratic Party are sitting atop a pile of kerosene-soaked kindling. Their agenda is simply too repugnant to a huge block of the American public. The situation has gone beyond a mere difference of opinion. When one side sees the other side as a threat, all bets are off. The ruling party’s platform is so extreme that a softening of the edges will placate few. I’m very fearful that an already unhinged fringe will resort to more extreme forms of opposition as an answer to an extreme agenda.

So, playing with words is playing with minds, but it also is playing with fire. Please, Biden and company, don’t stoke it. Please, the unhinged among the dissenters, don’t head to the arsenals. Find other means to express your discord. For the rest of us in the opposition party, get organized to do to Schumer/Pelosi/Biden and company what they did to McConnel/Trump and company for all of Trump’s term. And by all means, exploit the scandalous mail-in voting system to the hilt.

Come to think of it, we’d all be better off if the social-revolutionary party scrapped the revolutionary laundry list and for cooler heads to prevail. Sounds good to me. Anyway, I wonder how many people actually voted for a socialist revolution? I suspect few, very few.

RogerG

January 12, 2021January 12, 2021

The Monoculture’s “Triumph of the Will”

Leni Riefenstahl at work in the filming of “Triumph of the Will”.

Apple commercial that appeared on Jan. 11, 2021 during the NCAA College Football championship telecast,

*monoculture: noun; in agriculture, monoculture is the practice where a single crop, livestock species, or plant of one species that are genetically uniform at a time.

The term “monoculture” need not be limited to agriculture. It accurately applies to us and our time. It also has regurgitated throughout history. 1935 was the year of release for Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”, a propaganda film commissioned by the Nazi Party about the 1934 Nuremburg rally (see it here with some commentary). Modern tyrannies seek to impose a uniform mind, a monoculture of thought if you will, and they have a plethora of media technologies to assist them like film and today’s Big Tech media tentacles. In 1935, the Party sought to implant the purity of the “kulture” of the German “volk”, and the Party and its Leader as the embodiment of it, as a pretext for mammoth social engineering that would lead, among other things, to the squashing of all dissent and eventually the Holocaust. Riefenstahl’s film was part of the program to further the goal of creating a Teutonic version of Rousseau’s General Will, a “will” that will not tolerate opposing views. It is happening to us, as I write, across a broad front of armies of sycophants under the command of powerful corporate boardrooms, ad agencies, Big Tech, Big Media, Big Entertainment, Big Sports (NCAA, NFL, NBA, MLB), etc.

We see the singular message everywhere from athletes’ helmets to streaming services, the networks, and commercials (like the one below). It’s a simple message: America is an oppressive society. It’s a very pernicious idea that has nothing behind it but rank repetition in our media-saturated world. The idea lies around like a loaded gun on a table in the memorable words of Justice Robert Jackson in his famous dissent in Korematsu, the 1944 Court decision that sanctioned the internment of Japanese-Americans during the WWII. He wrote that the Court in its majority opinion had “for all time…validated the principle of racial discrimination … The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” Today, the monoculture that dominates our cultural commanding heights is the “hand” ready to inflict on the country the loaded gun of a racial jihad and reverse Jim Crow.

Japanese-American internment camp, WWII.

Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, one of 3 dissenters in Korematsu v. United States, 1944.

The real targets of the monoculture’s purveyors are anyone who doesn’t accept the idea. Those enemies of the monoculture’s “will” were neatly summed up in Hillary Clinton’s words from 2016: “… you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it.” The tactic involves permanently branding your opponents through control of the media and endlessly repeating the slander. It’s happening right now.

It occurs when Big Tech “depltaforms” people and goes after Parler. Everyone else gets the message after a few scalps.

Look at the not-so-subtle messaging in the Apple commercial from last night’s college football telecast (see below). With a driving beat in the background, the voice-over childishly opines that “There’s a certain kind of person who won’t take no for an answer. They don’t walk in quietly. They parade in . . . status-quo breaking.” And what status quo are they breaking? Look to the placards on the wall or on a t-shirt. “Racism” and “Me Too” define that status quo: America, the racist and sexist pig. The whole ad was an incitement to bellow against “systemic” . . . anything, like the contrived-but-useful -isms or -phobias.

This is rank mental conditioning from a shallow crust at the top of our societal pyramid. The crust is not just socially shallow – a small percentage of the population living in exclusive isolation from the rest of us – but cognitively. All that they complain about are singular incidents that may or may not reflect an evil -ism, or is reliant on the numerical hocus-pocus of “statistical disparity”. The numbers may shed light on a problem, but they say next to nothing about causation. Why do African-Americans disproportionately show up in violent crime statistics? Is it because an entire system of police officers – black, white, Asian, Latino, men, women, et al – have it in for blacks? Or could it be the disproportionate presence of certain social conditions in our black communities that explain the disparity? Well, if your mental reflex is to hate America, then the “system” is your target of choice. Now, that’s a tall order – to tinker with an entire way of life – but it’s the one robust enough to justify great power for our power-seeking utopian busybodies.

Will half the country acquiesce to Big Brother’s message? Will they accept the grand social engineering crusade that will be in store for them? My guess is “No”. Deep cultural fissures already exist and the monoculture’s efforts to smash dissent will only exacerbate them. No amount of woke proselytizing by Big Tech and Big Media in their own versions of the “Triumph of the Will” will make dissenters conform.

Two brothers from Ohio at a 2018 Trump rally wearing t-shirts that said, “I’d Rather Be A Russian Than A Democrat.”

A cold civil war seems likely. I just hope and pray it won’t turn hot. It all depends on how provocative the cultural Left pushes their project of smothering those who demur. Beware Big Business, Big Tech, and Big Media, you may find yourself deplatformed by half the country.

RogerG

January 12, 2021January 12, 2021

Big China, Big Bust

Slum dwellings in one of China’s cities.

Is China about to overtake the U.S. as the world’s number one economy? Looking at the question closer, the answer is a resounding “No”. The problem for China is the same problem inherent in big government anywhere. If there is one thing glaringly true about China, it is still a communist country with government, government everywhere, overt and covert. The economic reality is that jumps in productivity produce the real growth, but government is about politics, not productivity. Examples abound. It’s a powerful lesson beyond the imagination of our ruling revolutionary-Left Democratic Party.

Our new viziers need a walk down memory lane. The various iterations of the 1930’s New Deal mucked with the economy to such an extent that the Depression lingered and lingered for a decade, and was ready to resume after the War. WWII was a recess that only replaced one kind of misery for another. Finally, a stake was pounded into the heart of some of the New Deal by the ’46 and ’48 Congresses and the 50’s boom resulted.

Remember the 60’s-and-beyond War on Poverty, Urban Renewal, and the Fed’s management of the money supply as it opened the money spigot to grease the skids for them and war? Many of you weren’t around in the 1970’s; I was. It was a disaster. Today, huge portions of our cities and hinterlands are ghastly places.
That’s not all. Look at government’s mucking around with the schools. Once again, I was there. They’re still screwing with them. “Reform” and bucks flow in and ignorance flows out. Now, we are likely to get more of the opinionated ignoramuses, the kind who torch our cities and mutilate free speech.

One of the biggest boondoggles of recent memory are the massive governmental crusades to deal with the hyped “climate change” (previously “global warming”). Does Solyndra remind you of anything? California – with the highest utility rates in the country and can only fill its energy needs with large infusions from other states – is scarred with vast tracts of windmills. Homeowners, schools, businesses are under the gun to strap solar panels to their roofs. If you don’t play along, you’ll be bankrupted. All this for essentially nothing.

I could go on, but why bore you.

Red China, like Red California, is a bust. The ChiComs spout big numbers for the opinionated ignoramuses in our media, but the truth lies somewhere else. In many ways, they follow Stalin’s gambit of spewing big numbers, real or imagined. Mostly imaginary. There’s quite a different reality behind that Potemkin Village. Watch the video below from the American Enterprise Institute. It tells the truth about China.
Sadly, in the global competition, wreckers are in charge on the U.S. side of the divide. Maybe I should hedge my bets.

RogerG

January 10, 2021January 11, 2021

“The Spirit of Resistance to Government”, Thomas Jefferson

If you of the revolutionary-Left persuasion are not too busy trashing Thomas Jefferson, or toppling his statue, you might take time to ponder his words. In the end, he’ll drive you crazy and into uncontrollable bouts of more rage. Check out these words.

In the wake of Shays’ Rebellion of 1786-7, Jefferson saw something benign in it. In a letter to Abigail Adams, later to James Madison, he wrote, “I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere”.

Armed farmers began appearing at courthouses shutting down proceedings to prevent foreclosures on their farms.

In a letter to John Adams’s son-in-law, “God forbid that we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion”. If the people remained quiet for too long, he claimed, “… it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty”. Jefferson wrote that if it should cost some lives it was still worth it: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure”.

Could these words be appropriated by Antifa or BLM? Well, they could if you possessed the mental sophistication of a child, which Antifa, BLM, race hustlers, and the barkers in the Democratic Party exhibit daily. Shays wasn’t fighting to create the collectivist tyranny of a Green New Deal, racial reparations, racial political exhibitionism, and a Constitutional order to keep themselves in power for a generation or more. He wanted relief from government.

There’s good reason, if you think about it, for the halfwits in The Squad, BLM, and Antifa to target Jefferson. He was a slaveholder, an identity that caused anguish for the rest of his life. He was also a proud exponent of liberty: the freedom of the individual to live a life of virtue and choose their own path of reward. The radical Left in whatever guise – socialism, communism, Antifa, BLM, the Democratic Party platform, etc. – is a movement to shackle one population through a powerful government of commissars to allegedly deliver benefits to another. The reality is a shackle for everybody. They’d be better off quoting Marx, not Jefferson.

UNSPECIFIED – CIRCA 1865: Karl Marx (1818-1883), philosopher and German politician. (Photo by Roger Viollet Collection/Getty Images)

I’m reminded of Jefferson’s words as I watched Wednesday’s mob storm the capitol. Honestly, I have as much trouble with his words pre-riot as I do post. But the event presents a clear warning for today’s power-hungry collectivists: the ghost of Daniel Shays is buried deep in the American psyche. Pushed too far, people will march on DC as they did on Springfield, Mass., in 1787.

Once again, I’m not advocating it. I’m predicting it. Pray to God that cooler heads prevail.

RogerG