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Mini-Maos

The “woke” on an American college campus.
Chinese students inspired by Mao for a Cultural Revolution.

Mao Zedong wrote the playbook that he cast as a Cultural Revolution: animate the young, unleash them on the seasoned and fortunate, and coopt many institutions to make the offensive appear as an irresistible force. Then watch the carnage, but refashion it as the necessary cleansing of the corruptions from the social body.

Sound familiar? If not, it should. Quiet and not so quiet censorship abounds in today’s USA in the imposition of neo-Marxist critical theory on the young in their schools, cancellation of talks and lectures under threat of youthful mobs and their adult abettors, acts of public shaming and ritual self-abasement of the recalcitrant, and media channels populated with the mob’s zealots enforcing their own bans on thought. Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind in 1987 warned of higher ed’s ubiquitous indoctrination that is the enemy of free inquiry. It has only gotten worse since his time. Alas, it has come to pass on our streets, campuses, in school curricula, and in the corporate boardroom and lunchroom.

Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago, etc.

We let it happen through a blind deference to the gatekeepers of degrees and our broad acceptance, in essence, of the schools as glorified babysitters. We thought that all would be well if we turned over our kids to the clutches of indoctrinated and self-interested public employees, and our young reached early adulthood with a BA, any BA. Well, no, all is not well. The paper certificates didn’t produce an informed and wise citizenry and many of our private and public institutions have become the vanguard, the enforcers, of this revolution of the closed-minded.

Examples abound. Google banned money-making on its YouTube platform if it isn’t in accord with the “scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change”. That’s right, you can only enrich your bank account if you peddle the “consensus”, no matter its dubiousness. The “consensus” is a euphemism for a departure from the scientific method and into a coerced orthodoxy. It’s an announcement from on high that such and such is proper thought, something familiar to anyone brought before Stalin’s show trials, employed in Orwell’s Ministries of Truth and Love, or the papal Inquisition of the Renaissance. Amazing, progressives – by definition a group who loudly proclaims the past is dead – look to the past for their inspiration.

Who can forget AG Garland’s new role as thought policeman extraordinaire? A political constituency – namely, the insular and comfy special interests who’ve long dominated your child’s school – feels imperiled and our AG rides to the rescue by promising to chill the rancor and speech at school board meetings with FBI investigations. No one need be arrested to send angry parents home to anxiously await the dreaded late-night knock at the door. Censorship achieved by a threat, Fidel style.

Then there’s this little tidbit. The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH, or more accurately “warpath”) protested Abigail Shrier’s interview of a clinical psychologist and vaginoplasty surgeon who question the use of puberty blockers in children in Common Sense with Bari Weiss. Such discussions according to “warpath” should be closeted in unread journals and not be exposed to a broader audience, lest we be made aware that there are many debatable contentions in transgenderism. The New York Times chimes in with its own silencing by not publishing these types of op-eds because they are “outside our coverage priorities right now”. This is how a “consensus” is built, in the dark of night.

Modern academia is a rich source of “consensus” building through censorship and thought control. Dorian Abbot of the University of Chicago, eminent professor of geophysical sciences, was invited to speak at MIT, then disinvited after protests by the Red Guards of critical theory because he criticized the new racialism and favored “Merit, Fairness, and Equality”. Unsurprisingly, the school relented to the mob. Professor Robert P. George of Princeton got wind of the fracas at MIT and extended an invitation to Abbot. The talk was held at Princeton on the same day. Thank God that the spirit of inquiry and debate still flickers in some little precincts of the lands of ivy-covered halls.

More from the college funhouse. Bright Shen of the University of Michigan, a man who lived through Mao’s original Cultural Revolution, faced our own Red Guards of denunciation when he showed Shakespeare’s Othello, Laurence Olivier starring in blackface. The hyper-politicized sensitivities of the childish goons shrieked, Shen experienced the ritual self-abasement, and he no longer teaches his music course turning Othello into an opera.

This kind of thing can only survive in the darkness of obscurity. Sunshine, after all, is a disinfectant.

Mao, sadly, is an inspiration for far too many of the young. It’s more proof that we’ve failed to transmit our civilization’s legacy to our children. We have willingly, or unwillingly, mostly by ignorance, let the minds of our children get away from us. We are reaping the consequences of the many little Maos in our midst.

RogerG

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EVs: The Frivolity of Transportation by Fiat

Electric vehicle of the early 20th century.

EV: noun; abr.; electric vehicle.
Frivolity: noun; acting in a way that is silly or wasteful.
Fiat: noun; an arbitrary order. (arbitrary: based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system)

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Put the three words together: Turning all American car owners into EV proprietors in the span of 5-10 years by government fiat is an exercise in frivolity, and ruinous in the end.

Indeed, the whole campaign is arbitrary (fiat), totally lacking in sound reasoning. The end state of having all Americans junk their fully functional family sedans, minivans, and SUVs would turn upside down wholesale patterns of living just to satisfy a splinter group’s fantasy.

What prompted this observation? AAA’s “Via” magazine and its feature article, “Going the Distance: Tips and tricks from electric vehicle owners” (Nov./Dec. 2021). The splinter group in question is abundantly replicated in the article. The three profiled EV owners are full California urbanistas from the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California (Santa Rosa, Santa Clara, Irvine area). All are degreed in environmental studies, the Humanities, or digital tech. All are cloistered urbanites who visit rental properties, coastal B-and-B’s, the arts-and-crafts circuit, and venture into the forests for the snap visit to mother nature. Trip distances are short or limited in routes.

In other words, they represent the left coast fringe – socially, economically, and politically. These are the type of people who reflect the lives and norms of those who pursue an existence in rather exclusive suburban ranch houses, gentrified flats, landscaped yards, and aren’t likely to get their hands dirty working wrenches and equipment. The supporting cast of workers for this insular urban lifestyle has a separate life that is a world apart. Yet, the white collars want to force their preferences on everyone, no matter our circumstances.

Young people walking on top of canal boat

As such, one of the things that Biden brought to the White House was California, meaning its progressive personnel and monoculture. And that means the state’s eco-looniness. The EV-love in the administration’s ukases, like much that gurgles out of the left coast’s sunshine state, lacks any sound rationale, either environmental or economic.

The environmental justification is the easiest to dispense with. The ol’ bugaboo of climate change – as bellowed by that great thinker of our times, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg – is infected with leaps of faith and logic. The reality is that the atmosphere is too voluminous, its content too varied, and influences too multitudinous to justify Greta’s tantrum (Sept. 2021), “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood!” That should give you a flavor of the hysteria to force you out of your fully functional and efficient Chevy Suburban.

Greta Thunberg during her Zoomed UN speech on September 23, 2019.

What good is accomplished, though, by banishing the $40,000 investment in fuel, oil, metal, plastic, chips, and rubber in your garage, the euthanization of 2 million jobs in the fuel industry, and scotching the great advances in emissions and fuel efficiency down to the present? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Surely, Greta and her handlers in Big Environmentalism must realize that they have no street cred in Beijing and New Delhi – nearly 3 billion people combined and no desire to return to living in the dirt. Stack up their car fleets with ours. You would be replacing the cleaner things in our country with dirty cars, dirty power plants, and dirty air among these teeming hordes outside the developed world. Sorry, Greta, you’re nuts.

In the end, the amount of energy-trapping gases would scarcely budge, if not increase as capital seeking its highest rate of return rushes away from us to refuges of greater opportunity in places hungry to enjoy air conditioning. Dirty expands, clean shrinks. Punishing the clean is not a winning strategy.

So, why the headlong rush to the EV? Climate change doesn’t work for this lifestyle coup. Fact is, the campaign is a jumble of fantasies, fantasies about windmills, solar panels, and EVs. Greta’s fantasy sounds so simple. . . to the simple-minded.

The simple fact is that the EV is no practical substitute for the internal combustion engine. The infrastructure – repairmen, convenient and numerous charging stations, affordable parts and abundant retail outlets – will take multiple decades to arise. But the zealots are impatient: remember, 5-10 years to bankrupt you and the millions employed in keeping the existing fleet on the road. It’s reminiscent of the Stalin’s dekulakization campaign of the 1930’s. Eager to create forthwith Marx’s vision of the communal ideal, Stalin ordered (by fiat) the huge number of peasants in the Russian population – 82% of the total population – to give up their property and many of their belongings and herd them onto huge collective farms. The subsequent upheaval led to massive starvation and a huge expansion of concentration camps. An epidemic of death was inflicted on the bread basket of Russia. Similarly, lifestyle choices outsourced to the federal apparatchiks of Build Back Better will fare no better than Stalin’s Five-Year Plans.

Scenes from the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of 1932-3.

Why should the infantile ramblings of Greta and The Squad have greater weight than my own? Their dream has incompatible elements. Hitched to universal EV ownership is windmills, solar panels, and any energy scheme conjured in a gentrified Brooklyn flat. Sadly, the lab rats who are Californians show us the results. Blackouts and the high cost of energy are the outcomes. So, just as we are bribed and whipped into EV’s, they are making the grid more expensive and unstable. Picture this: you rush out to get to work and find your Nissan Leaf with too little juice to make it to the office or get the kids to school. Blackouts just blacked out your car.

Okay, you and your kids can always Zoom . . . if the lights come back on. The pandemic lockdowns showed how that worked. More than the grid was destabilized.

As for that holiday visit to grandma’s house of 300 miles one way? Think about it, 250 miles is the likely limit before your wheels come to a dead stop. Of course, you know that ahead of time. If the grid hasn’t gone dark and you have the 6-8 hours to charge the thing before departure, you still have to restrict your route to the availability of chargers. Let’s just hope that you chose right and the plug-ins are operational. If not, expect a motel expense and an overnight layover.

If something mechanically should go awry, well, you’re stuck. The ubiquitous shade tree mechanic or guy who built a top fuel dragster won’t be of any help. The ready availability of parts and community knowledge is decades into the future. Hope that the diesel bus or train stops at the nearby hamlet.

Tesla Model S battery pack

If, by chance, you get the thing to the dealership, they might discover that the huge lithium battery pack is plated over and in need of replacement, a $20,000 part. The battery’s life was apparently cut short by all the 30-minute fast charging, a necessary activity due to much long-distance commuting or forgetting to plug the thing for the safer 6-8 hours of overnight charging. The 10-year lifespan was turned into 6. Normally, you’ll notice the deterioration in shorter operational distances as you begin to panic in the desperate search for a charge in the many and expanding derelict urban districts along the way. Maybe the thought of being held up at gunpoint disabuses you of that short excursion to Walmart.

Chances are, if you’re so into EV’s, you’re also apoplectic about open pit mines and polluted air and water, just the type of thing that inhabits third world kleptocracies, Putin’s Russia, and Xi’s China. That’s where we find the rare earth minerals for the batteries of your feel-good EV; however, rest assured that your EV won’t be responsible for inundating the Obama estate on Martha’s Vineyard. Everyone else in the mass of humanity will, thanks to your insatiable appetite for lithium batteries.

The utopian rush to the EV has consequences, many of them not pleasant. It’s what happens when adults turn over governance to childish and monomaniacal fanatics. Their tunnel vision becomes our tunnel vision, their leaps of logic become our leaps of logic. It’s a lesson that the editors of AAA’s “Via” magazine – Whitney Phaneuf, Katie Henry, Mandy Ferreira, and Rebecca Smith Hurd – should take to heart before they fob off on us their niche proclivities.

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Watch a Norwegian Tesla owner destroy his Model S because of the prohibitive $22,000 cost to replace the car’s battery pack.

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RogerG

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The Tammany Hall of the Modern Era

Mail-in ballots that may be compromised. (photo; Getty)

Have you noticed the intense hectoring to vote with no mention of the responsibility of the citizen to take the time and effort to be informed before they vote? If not, you should. It happens every election season. Make no mistake about it, this advertising campaign is not a benign and politically neutral activity, and doesn’t stop with media ad buys to “Rock the Vote”. It has infected how we vote and who’s counting the votes. The push is one that Tammany Hall would recognize in a heartbeat. The 2020 election became the playground for this new Tammany Hall. Beware Republicans, the wave election of your dreams in 2022 may not come to pass.

Tammany Hall is the model for the new corruption. Tammany Hall was the New York Democratic Party organization that controlled New York City and the state of New York for much of the second half of the 19th century. They used the immense human resource of millions of immigrants, many of them Irish, to build a vast voter base for electoral control. Ever wonder how the cliché of the Irish cop or fireman developed? The Hall provided “services” – jobs, housing, marriage for a daughter – in return for political loyalty, i.e., votes.

The Tammany Hall board game is designed to capture political control.
Thomas Nast cartoon of Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall.

It was in the memorable words of George Washington Plunkett, one of its inestimable leaders, “honest graft”. They did some good to assist the needy and push public projects (honest), and they also got rich in the meantime (graft). Sounds like Maxine Waters? Though, it must be admitted, the motives and intentions of today’s modern incarnation of Tammany Hall are a bit different from Plunkett’s quaint formulation (Waters excluded). The old version lined the pockets of the organization’s operatives. The new edition hides an ideological partisanship behind philanthropy. Call it “honest rigging” for a revolution.

See, the Tammany Hall of old faced the same problem, in the same party, as our updated version. It’s called voter turnout. Both relied on demographic constituencies – the poor, minorities, immigrants, young, the loosely defined “oppressed” – that have a greater propensity to not vote. The Hall of the 1850’s addressed the problem by exploiting a loose election system that had no secret ballot. People voted with colored slips for the contending parties, so the Hall’s poll watchers knew who voted and how and could punish or award gratuities accordingly. Today’s revolutionary, techie copy employs vote-by-mail and big-moneyed philanthropy to grease the skids.

Like Plunkitt’s henchman, today’s manipulators abhor the secret ballot. The secret ballot, after checking identity, requires that people vote in a booth on a nondescript ballot which is deposited with no one knowing the contents. But such privacy is the enemy of maximizing turnout. The effort it takes to get registered, be prepared, and travel to a polling station is an obstacle to the lightly motivated, uninterested, easily inconvenienced, uninformed, and those of more frivolous priorities. Thus, the drive to replace the secret ballot with a mail-in one. The more carefree the process, the easier to overcome the massive reluctance that lies at the heart of their base.

The assassination of the secret ballot in 2020 began with the “philanthropy” of Zuckerbucks. Zuckerbucks were the $400 million from Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla, hosed mostly to “underserved” districts, which are synonymous with Democratic Party bastions, to inflate turnout in those locales. The money was filtered through a hive of Democratic Party front groups to infiltrate the public election system, alter it to suit Democrat needs, and assist the counting and collection of the ballots. It’s not so much stealing an election as it is rigging one. They worked to make previously prohibited practices legal and operational. Call it an “honest steal”.

Mark Zuckerberg and wife, Priscilla Chan

In many jurisdictions in 2020, ballots were shot-gunned to mail boxes and collected by third parties. New and suspicious euphemisms entered the lexicon like ballot “curing” and “harvesting”. Curing refers to the correction of errors on submitted mail-in ballots. Harvesting sanctions independent organizations to collect the mailed ballots. Instead of ward healers watching people drop colored slips of paper in the box, Zuckerbuck-funded activists lent their political acumen to the service of public election agencies. Activists were everywhere in the battleground states in “curing”, “harvesting”, in the administrative machinery of counting, and in Democrat-heavy neighborhoods. How else could a man who ran a presidential campaign from his basement still win? The fix was in.

The 2020 rogue’s gallery of Zuckerbuck-funded radical progressive electioneering groups was impressive. It began with 350 million Zuckerbucks to the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), founded by lefty activists from the “Democratic Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry”, the New Organizing Institute. How’s that for networking? The CTCL then doled out the money to a wide array of political affiliates, mostly in battleground states. How’s that for networking?

Georgia was beset by the locusts of the progressive Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) to inflate the numbers out of urbanized Fulton, Gwinnet, Cobb, and DeKalb counties.

Wisconsin presented a special case. Partisan money and talent descended from many quarters. Power the Polls, the Mikva Challenge, the Brennan Center, the Center for Civic Design, the Democracy Fund, The Elections Group, the ironically named Center for Secure and Modern Elections, and the National Vote at Home Institute, amply manned with donkey party activists, consulted and in some cases took over the administration of the elections in highly urbanized parts of the state, all Democrat fiefdoms.

Trump is technically wrong to say that the election was stolen. Instead, many practices, previously prohibited, like massive mail-in voting and harvesting and curing, were legalized. In addition, no one had experienced such an infusion of partisan “philanthropy” into the machinery of the election process and were quite unprepared for it. The activist groups filled the gaps in the law in ways that were shady but not illegal. It was an “honest steal”, but still a completely corrupting one.

Trump’s strong post-election reaction may be more due to the embarrassment of being caught with his pants down. While his zealous supporters after the event engaged in a futile crusade to uncover enough fraud to overturn the election, few paid much attention to the systematic pre-election groundwork that was established to outsource the machinery of elections to shadowy partisans, and scarcely a squeak at the time from Trump and his people.

In essence, the Democratic Party reverted back to type. They have a proven track record of refusal to put any responsibility on the voter – whether it be the work to inform oneself or simply get out of the lounge chair – as well as hostility to the secret ballot.

Is a modern election merely a race to put the fate of the country in the hands of the uncaring, ill-informed, and uninterested? It seems so, but it’s more than that. It took some time for a group of grifters to form the original Tammany Hall and profit from the tradition of loosey-goosey elections. Similarly, a new Tammany Hall will evolve with its own boast of graft and fraud, this time in mammoth mail-in voting, no authentic voter ID, and an army of activists collecting, curing, and counting the votes, and on a national scale.

In that case, for the average bloke, why vote? We’ll probably wake up one morning – and many mornings after that – to discover that a widespread disgust with the course of public affairs did not translate into commensurate election results. In that sense, how would we be any different from Putin’s Russia?

Is this our future, only with mail-in voting, harvesting, curing, and philanthropic money to increase Democratic Party turnout?

RogerG

*Thanks to John Lott and Mollie Hemingway for their work on this subject.

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Sunlight Is a Disinfectant

Parents protest at Loudon County school board meeting, June 2021

Most people are unaware of what’s happening in the deep and dark recesses of their most significant public institutions. If they’re informed, a good portion would hit the barricades, and for good reason. Well, here’s a couple of stories on the role of sunlight (public exposure) in the disinfectant process for public policy.

A scheme to strangle the civilian firearms industry of capital was forged in 2018 by – who else? – Cal STRS’s Christopher J. Ailman, chief investment officer, with collaboration from a few other public and private investment officers (a full list below). Basically, in typically obtuse and vague language, the declaration is an attempt to abridge a legal and Constitutionally protected activity because it affronts the sensibilities of California’s coastal elites who then try to foist their sentiments on the rest of the country.

Christopher J. Ailman of CalSTRS

Read the thing (here). Most of it was written by someone completely unfamiliar with the process of purchasing a firearm in America. Anyone buying a gun in a store goes through a federal background check. The unregulated transfers and sales – gifts, inheritances, underground sales – will always exist, with or without our many laws, in the same manner as the regulated drug market will always face a shadowy illicit version. Pass a law and an underground clone will pop up.

Further, the statement is littered with “best practices”, the “best practices” of Nancy Pelosi’s home district. It’s as scam to work-around the agencies of popular sovereignty, a people’s elected representatives, by organizing the socially and culturally insular crowd in gated and walled estates to do what an elected government refuses to do, because they were never elected to do it.

Light was beamed onto the scheme first by National Review (“Woke Capitalism: A History”, KDW, July 1, 2021) and then to the NRA (“Florida’s Pension Fund Joined a Gun-Control Compact, Until…”, LW, America’s 1st Freedom, Sept., 21, 2021). The NRA noticed the name of Michael McCauley, Senior Officer at the Florida State Board of Administration, as a signatory to the screed. Remember, Florida doesn’t suffer from the ritual identity-mongering and victimhood of the power brokers in the not-so-Golden State. Jimmy Patronis, Chief Financial Officer for the state, was informed by the NRA and Florida quickly withdrew its name from the extortion racket. Florida is growing precisely because it is not California, and now McCauley knows it too.

Jimmy Patronis, Florida Chief Financial Officer

Parents have joined the fray in shedding light on another radical ploy of longstanding. All the pandemic Zooming may have exposed the people who run your child’s classroom to be on a par with the ethos in Nancy Pelosi’s home district. I should know of what I write as a 30-year veteran of a public high school classroom. A while back, I retorted to our superintendent that we are nothing but a finishing school for “good little Democrats”. It’s only gotten worse since my retirement in 2015. What began with the multiculturalist nonsense of “diversity is our strength” quickly metastasized into the rancid racism-to-fight-racism.

Whatever you want to call it – critical theory, critical race theory, deconstructionism, anti-racism, white privilege, systemic racism, etc. – it’s still nothing but Marxism for a new revolution to overthrow our Constitutional order and civilization. The ideological seed germinated in teacher training (going back to my 1970’s), in all textbooks that I’ve used, and reviewed as a department chair, for the past three decades, in supplemental materials, as the orthodoxy in the colleges and universities, and as the pervasive and presumptive outlook in faculty lounges. It is so in the ether that one should not be surprised that we have undergrads in spittle-laced tirades at deans who’ve called for a little tolerance.

Watch this report on student treatment of Matt Walsh.

Not too many parents want their kids to join the statue-toppling brigades. And parents are beginning to show up at school board meetings. Good for them. Keep it up. And, by the way, a great deal of “throw the bums out” is more than deserved. Start local, then continue on up through the bureaucracies and the federal ladder. Clean house. Extremist partisans fiddling with our pensions funds and children should feel the heat. It begins with the white hot rays of the sun.

RogerG

* “The Principles for a Responsible Civilian Firearms Industry” authors: Christopher J. Ailman, Chief Investment Officer CalSTRS; Christianna Wood, Fellow at Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative; Michael McCauley, Senior Officer at the Florida State Board of Administration; Peter Reali, Senior Director at Nuveen; John O’Hara, Managing Director and Senior Advisor at Rockefeller Asset Management; and Rakhi Kumar, Senior Managing Director, Head of ESG Investments and Asset Stewardship at State Street Global Advisors.

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Let’s Get On with Our Lives

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks during the daily briefing at the White House, Dec. 1, 2021, in Washington. (photo: Susan Walsh/AP)

Going back to March 2020, I lamented the lockdowns and all the other grotesque deformations of the past year or two, unleashing unbounded social, economic, and psychological harm just to show fealty to a new ideology, or theology, called safteyism. The work ethic was euthanized for many. Kids were allowed to cognitively, behaviorally, and emotionally atrophy. Labor and capital entered a forced coma; no wonder supply chains are frazzled and inflation is enflamed – it’s more than the Democrats’ and the fed’s overheated money machine. The same people who wrecked community life across the country also wrecked our public square. The streets were set afire in riots and raging crime, and littered with filthy tent encampments, needles, and feces. The year(s) of COVID were made into a dark age.

Assisting in the civilizational collapse, the Biden gang persists in a collective Retinitis Pigmentosa (tunnel vision). All they can see is vaccine, and force everyone, literally everyone, to get it. It’s coercive utopianism. They are fruitlessly forcing a naturally heterogenous population on medical practices into being an imaginary homogeneous one. In the end, 15-25% won’t get it, no matter what, but we’ll be forced to endure the threats, mandates, and the loss of many of the basic functions of life in pursuit of the unattainable. It’s foolish.

An obvious alternative exists. It’s the same one during any health scourge: get vaccinated if you choose, stay healthy, and if you catch the bug, rest at home, see a doctor, and seek many of the prescribed and over-the-counter treatments. Curling up with a couple of glasses of cognac probably wouldn’t hurt.

Thus, therapeutics are a big part of epidemiology if we can escape the mental prison of vaccine-only, and our big wheels jettison their commitment to sucking the air from therapeutics and toward their favorite pet of vaccine-only. Anti-malarial drugs such as Atovaquone show promise. Pfizer’s Paxlovid and Merck and Biotherapeutics’ Molnupiravir are medications that don’t require the intravenous apparatus of the monoclonal antibodies. But the FDA is dragging their feet in granting them the same emergency authorization that it did for the vaccines.

Resident of Battle Creek, Mi., recieves monoclonal antibody treatment outside a Detroit hospital, December 2021. (photo: Kimberly Mitchell, Detroit Free Press)

Really, let’s face it, the masking, social distancing, and avoidance of crowds should be limited to the vulnerable and frightened. Home delivery, curbside pickup, and Zoom are for them. For everyone else, go to work, got to school, shop, attend a game, see a movie, hit the gym, and pay a visit to grandma and grandpa. Stop forcing all of society to bend to the will of the small portion who can’t physically or emotionally handle it.

RogerG

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Systemic Falsehoods

Jessie Smollett (l) with Robin Roberts of ABC News on GMA in February of 2019.

After Jussie Smollett’s arrest and her on-air interview with him, Robin Roberts said, “It’s [his arest] a setback for race relations, homophobia, MAGA supporters – the fingers were pointed at them [MAGA supporters].”  She added, “I cannot think of another case where there’s this anger on so many sides, and you can understand why there would be.”

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Some like to say racism is systemic. Well, so can fallacies. In fact, today, systemic falsehoods are far more real and far more dangerous than any mythical resurgence of the Klan.

Three stories tell the tale of systemic falsehoods: two in America and one in Germany, all in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The first, chronologically, occurred in October 1938 after the Nazi government ordered its initial expulsion of German Jews. One of those was the Grynszpan family who had a son living in Paris with an uncle, 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan. A week later, Herschel walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot to death German diplomat Ernst vom Rath. After it, the virulent Jew-hatred of the Nazi Party would take to the streets throughout Germany in the organized assaults on Jews on 9-10 November called Kristallnacht, thus inaugurating the Holocaust. An excuse presented itself to implement a key part of the National Socialist revolutionary program and thought. Their revolutionary racism was solely based on a systemic falsehood, and millions would end up dead.

Henry Grynszpan (l) and Ernst vom Rath

The second happened in America in 1955. It was the lynching and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till by a white mob in Mississippi in August 1955. The scurrilous racism in the minds of some Southern whites of the tarring of all Blacks with a dollop of depravity is much more than a systemic racism. It’s a systemic falsehood.

Emmett Till

But a systemic racism in the Jim Crow South of 1955 would be matched later by a systemic falsehood for today’s revolutionaries in Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Inc., and the Democratic Party. Yes, they’re revolutionaries. For them, it’s forever Jim Crow in America, the better to overturn the “system” (revolution), not just reform it or even acknowledge the improvements. Germany’s National Socialists exploited one killing to carry out millions; today’s left-wing zealots do the same (with Michael Brown, George Floyd, whoever). Yet, facts on the ground don’t match their hype, but that won’t stop the torching of America’s cities nor the falsehood’s infiltration of the classroom, the donkey party, Congress, and the Biden administration.

The third incident is Jussie Smollett. He peddled the falsehood of an alleged assault by fictitious Maga supporters in 2018. A patently false story, now proven in court, would, in the ensuing years, help perpetuate the falsehood of ever-present systemic racism as if nothing has changed since 1955. For the disciples of this false catechism, our landscape was, is, and will be forever littered with Emmett Tills and Bull Connors. The fiction penetrated all channels of news and entertainment from the classroom to 30 Rock (NBC headquarters). Our cosseted cultural elites peddled the lie and “systemic racism” entered the lexicon as a fact, when it is no such thing – not any truer than the Big Lie was for the goons torching synagogues in 1938.

Jussie’s Smollett’s booking photograph after he turned himself into Chicago police on charges of filing a false police report.

Smollett got away with it for 3 years because our cultural avatars were predisposed to believe the lie due to the monotone influences in their cultural and educational bubbles. For a couple of years, they propagated Smollett’s lie until evidence of the hoax came to light and then they went silent. Smollett’s December 9 conviction on five counts of disorderly conduct for filing a false police report puts all those in the media who helped him peddle the lie in the dock alongside him. His desire to concoct the hoax and their desire to push it exposed a systemic gullibility stemming from a deeply embedded systemic falsehood: it’s forever Jim Crow in America. For this crowd, the nation is forever guilty.

Ideas have consequences, and so does this one. Crime is spiking all over America. Amazingly, some have contorted logic to blame the cops. In their muddled minds, police lack legitimacy in the eyes of the public and so crime is transformed into a form of protest. People perceive racist cops and feel justified in performing mayhem according to this flight of fancy.

It’s nonsense. Perception is key. Views about policing are too often guided by the media’s it-leads-if-it bleeds philosophy, only tailored to fit the popular systemic racism/racist cop scenario. No wonder Americans – left, right, and center – in various polls and studies (one by the Skeptic Research Center) have an exaggerated view of police shootings of unarmed black men, by a factor of 50.

What do you expect would happen after the public is fed a steady stream of the rare but viral videos of a shooting? Part of the blame lies with a media eager to validate their prejudices, and part is attributed to millions carrying in the palms of their hands a video camera. The public is armed with the things, social media spreads them at light speed, and media mavens cull them for the confirmation of their biases. Would we be a more balanced people without the things and the instantaneous social media hookups? Interesting question.

Smollett with the Obamas

All the while, branding cops as racist isn’t exactly a booster to recruitment and retention. Who wants to join a profession that might bankrupt you in lawsuits or land you in prison, and/or tar you as a uniformed mob looking for more Emmett Tills to kill? In a great skedaddle, cops are leaving and recruits are scant. There are fewer people to man the cruisers and telephones, walk the beat, and investigate crime. Nationwide, the Police Executive Research Forum in June reported midsized departments showing a 26% drop in hiring and large ones recording a 36% fall, some with a 50% drop in applicants. The total number of sworn officers dropped from 720,000 in 2013 to 690,000 in 2018, and the slide continues.

Retirements are up, way up. Deep blue bastions are particularly feeling the pinch. The Chicago force experienced a 30% retirement increase in 2020 (560) from the previous year. Portland, that lefty playground, saw 117 (and counting) officers leave since July of 2020. The men in NYC blue, under the radical Bill de Blasio, saw 2,600 officers vacate their positions. The story is the same across the country. Amputated budgets (“defund the police”) and a dispirited force don’t make for public safety.

A little-known truth: fewer cops mean more crime. There’s a stronger correlation between these two criteria than the more popular one in elite circles of the lack of respect for cops leading to an epidemic of murders, torchings, robberies, and beatings. Using 911 calls as the metric, studies show that high-profile police killings don’t affect the number of calls (studies by Harvard’s Michael Zoorob, Tanaya Devi, and Roland Fryer in 2020), the exact opposite of what you’d expect if there was a general disgust with cops. Not surprisingly, after all the budget cuts, lambastings by media hogs, force draw-downs and stand-downs, and a disheartened rank-and-file, mayhem has returned. Everyone not enthralled by stupidity has recognized since creation of the London police force in the 19th century that more cops mean safer streets.

So, we’ve come to this pass: Can we trust any longer an elite so enraptured to systemic falsehoods? In the end, we’ll have nowhere to turn. Remember, they’re the same people who want to take your guns. Now, they want to take your cops.

RogerG

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Ink on Paper

The lower house, the House of Representatives, of the Montana legislature in Helena in 2019.

A measure before the Montana legislature (LC 1551) would add Montana to the list of states calling for a Convention of the States to write and approve a Balanced Budget Amendment to the US Constitution. Once again, if the legislature approves the resolution, and two-thirds of the other states agree, we’ll put our faith in ink on paper to resolve our fiscal ills. If successful, watch the whole endeavor not change things a twit.

The principal problem with our federal government isn’t some structural defect in our Constitution. It’s the people that we elect. It would be true with or without the constitutional addition. Right now, littered throughout our federal behemoth are progressives who are dyed-in-the-wool evolutionists when it comes to words. Look at what they’ve done to the commerce clause and due process/equal protection provisions of the 14th Amendment. Limited and enumerated powers nearly became unlimited, with any enforceable restrictions hanging by the narrow thread of a black-robed jurist’s opinion. Ink on paper hasn’t stopped these people.

The fact of the matter is, if you want a better government, elect better people. Ink won’t correct for incompetent electoral choices.

Many jurisdictions have elected hordes of these linguistic gymnasts (progressives). When a convention is called, guess who’ll attend? It won’t be only people like you or me. Included will be people from AOC’s Twitter feed and all those from the many deep blue satraps. Any amendment will be massaged by this crowd’s fingers. Watch a balanced budget become a warrant to raise taxes. It’s the only reason that they’ll agree to the thing. Remember, a conservative’s goal is to restrain the federal government. Their ambition is to inflate it. The middle will be a license to increase taxes. In the end, we’ll be back to where we started. Depending on who is in power, we’ll still have either a bloated or restrained government. Nothing will have changed.

Structural gimmicks never work! California is a prime example. Reading parts of the California Constitution reads like a conservative’s dream. They’ve got a state balanced budget amendment, approved as Prop 58 in 2004 by a hefty 71% of the vote. It’s all just smoke and mirrors. Just reclassify legacy costs and debt out of the equation, along with a few other pricey tidbits, and a powerful progressive is home free. The highest taxed state became also the most fiscally incontinent.

They’ve got a “bi-partisan” redistricting commission that rubber stamps Democratic Party hegemony in the state for perpetuity. Prop 13 didn’t curtail the tax burden. They just inflated all the others. The state has terms limits written into their framework. It only replaced simple progressives with the zealous and foolish kind. Bad was made worse.

Conservatives won’t gain anything from adding more words to the Constitution. We’ll have wasted immense political capital on a wrong-headed endeavor, instead of increasing our presence in those blue enclaves to change their hue. Chasing mirages won’t change a thing. The facts on the ground remain the same. If you want a better government, elect better people.

RogerG

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MERS, SARS, COVID-19 and Natural Immunity

One question about our current epidemic: Does previous exposure to MERS (2003) and SARS (H1N1, 2009) improve a person’s immunological response to COVID-19? I’m an absolute layman on these types of issues and I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn. Personal experiences raise this query, however. Our brains don’t stop functioning if we don’t wear a lab coat.

I am and was a healthy and fit teacher during my 30-year career. During the time periods of the spread of MERS and SARS, I became so ill that I took 2-3 days of sick leave, something un-heard of in my long career. Later, after retirement, I came down with fatigue and a low-grade fever that lasted 2 days, actually overnight, in spring 2020. It came and went and life quickly returned to normal. Was it COVID-19? I can’t say, but I haven’t had a bout of illness since then in spite of frequent and broad exposure, no vaccine, and the fact that I’m in a vulnerable cohort (age 69) during this latest contagion.

The similarities of the three bugs are manifest (see below). All three are of the Coronaviridae family. They mostly show as respiratory illnesses. COVID-19 could be different in that it was a product of gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab. Thus, it had a far more serious pathological footprint. Still, could their biological likenesses arm a person’s immune system against all three?

No photo description available.
MERS virus
No photo description available.
SARS virus
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COVID-19

If so, the swath of the population with natural immunity is larger than previously thought. Again, if so, the politicization of the pandemic can be turned down a notch or two. Threats, mandates, and the one-trick-pony of vaccination-only can be laid to rest.

When science is drafted to a political cause, nasty things happen. Science is no longer “science” and politics becomes authoritarian (if not totalitarian). Marxism and its theoretical cousin, critical theory, are attempts to make a “science” of history and ideological sophistry. Its results are laid bare on our cities’ streets and in the radical left turn of the Democratic Party. This political scientization of our life is creating havoc with our civilization.

I’m sure that many people can shed more light on my question than I. I eagerly await enlightenment.

RogerG

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December 7, A Day in Infamy

Operation Z commenced without warning at 7:48 a.m., Sunday, December 7, 1941. After the last wave of Japanese aircraft left Pearl Harbor, 2,402 were killed and 1,178 wounded. On this day, every American should be reminded that it is one of the highest civic acts to visit the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor at least once in their life to pay their respects. I did in 2016.

The USS Arizona as a burning hulk, Dec. 7. 1,177 sailors and Marines were killed.

Certain days provide cringing lessons. We’ve had a few since that harrowing day. The heart-wrenching scenes of the evacuation of the US embassy in Saigon in 1975 would be one. Another would be 9/11. Now, Kabul airport in August of 2021 would qualify as still another. Two of these were at the hands of others while two were the culmination of our own actions. Two rallied the nation to confront the threats. Two were disgraceful and will result in calamitous decades to follow.

Honor the sacrifices, remember the dead, and learn the lessons of history . . . if history isn’t molested in the classroom by a fashionably extremist ideology so it can’t be remembered properly. Remember, but remember well.

The Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.

RogerG

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The Year’s Signal Event: Afghanistan. Lest We Forget.

Afghans at Kabul airport scrambling to get aboard a taxying US plane to escape the Taliban on August 16, 2021. 5 died in the attempt.

President Obama to prominent donors and Democratic Party operatives in 2020: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s [Biden] ability to f&#@ things up.”

Alas, Biden has, and what he left behind in the dust is the reputation of the USA and a green light to the world’s scoundrels. We’ll be feeling the foul repercussions for decades to come.

President Biden followed his repugnant decision to flee Afghanistan with a repugnant excuse. He dismissed complaints about his bugout with, “What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point, with al-Qaeda gone?” It’s a question, unspoken, that similarly roiled the brain of President Trump. Trump dubbed it an “endless war” (Biden liked “forever”) and scheduled his bugout in his infamous Doha Agreement that set the withdrawal for May 1, 2021. Would Trump have delayed the skedaddle? Hard to say; in fact, it’s impossible to say for sure. A tantalizing clue stems from the fact that Trump wanted out from the moment he rode down the escalator in 2015. Any contrary and hypothetical action is rank speculation. In the end, we had a succession of two presidents who could think of nothing else but getting out. One formalized the bugout in a signing ceremony in Doha; the other pushed it through, damn the torpedoes.

We forget at our peril that the US is no ordinary country. We provide the guardrails for a civilized order on a planet beset with innumerable and unpredictable villains. Our world isn’t a Sesame Street stage set. The UN can’t function as the guardians because it is a vacuous debating society populated with the same villains. That leaves the US as the hall monitor of last resort, like it or not. We’re not the “world’s policeman”; we’re the Don that the vulnerable turn to in extremis. If we abdicate the responsibility, we’ll pay a heavy price at home and abroad.

Indeed, the rush to hide behind two oceans, following the inclinations of Tucker Carlson, Trump, and the mentally corrupted Biden, would result in a US under constant siege. The only other parallel is Israel. It’s a country on a near perpetual war footing, whose existence is guaranteed by the shadow of America’s big stick. What happens when the big stick is kept behind our oceanic walls?

In turn, try to have a prosperous free economy when we must forever fortify and man the walls as the oceans and lands beyond are a playground for those who hate us. History shows that autarky (the drive for complete national self-sufficiency) is the dream of halfwits and murderous thugs, and a ticket to a medieval way of life. Adam Smith laid out the case quite clearly. Go ahead, sell it to a family of four struggling to make the mortgage, whose life was made harder because our so-called populists were popular and in office to mess up their lives.

A great deal of American engagement in the world is good for a decent everybody, and most of all, us. So, to escape a repetition of the mistake, what are the lessons of the self-inflicted catastrophe? First, unilateral withdrawals aren’t much different in their effects from humiliating surrenders. Nobody trusts you; you lose strategic positioning and intelligence-gathering benefits on the flanks of your enemies; and your real and potential allies avoid you like the plague. It’s a lose-lose in every direction.

Second, we need to clean house of our sclerotic foreign policy/defense leadership. We should start with Biden but he’s got a four-year term. If we can’t fire Biden – short of a declaration of incapacity and invocation of the 25th Amendment (not out of the realm of possibility but ultimately culminating in no improvement in fitness looking at the replacements) – we should sweep through the NSA, CIA, State and Defense Departments, anyone with fingerprints on the debacle. The Pentagon is especially a nest of gross incompetence. Austin, Milley, and some senior service commanders are ripe for the axe. Worst of all, they are responsible for the insidious imposition of the horrendous and dispiriting neo-Marxist ideology of diversity-inclusion-equity (DEI) which emasculates esprit de corps and shrivels retention and recruitment. Who wants to join an armed force run by the rants of campus snowflakes? Biden is commander-in-chief but he’s a bozo without well-balanced and strong-minded advisers. This crowd doesn’t cut the mustard.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin (L) and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley (R) testify during a hearing before the House Committee on Armed Services on June 23, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (photo; Alex Wong)

For someone like Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, an illustrious career would be forever soiled by his own behavior in the runup to the calamity. Sad, so very sad.

Thirdly, we’d be less vulnerable to the dimwits in the executive branch if Congress would step up to exercise their Constitutional oversight and legislative powers in the war-making arena. Simply put, they won’t act since they’ve surrendered so much to the executive branch.

A good portion of the blame lies in the makeup of one of the major political parties. How do you get the 535 politicians in the Capitol building to act in anything like a commanding voice when one side, the Democrats, is so enthralled to a radical, neo-Marxist mindset? Bridging the gulf would only produce a semi-neo-Marxist conclusion, something highly unpalatable. The radical stridency of one party nearly rules out a cooperative coalition of both parties to defend Congressional prerogatives. The parties have so little in common. Where are the Scoop Jacksons? So long as the Democratic Party remains a revolutionary party, Congress will remain a joke.

Senator Scoop Jackson (D, Wa.), now deceased.

The Republicans, on their part, should steer clear of the American Firsters that were resuscitated in the wake of the Trump ascendancy. Firebrands, cranks, and cooks are not steady hands at the tiller of state.

Since the Article I branch is a cantankerous mess, finally, Congress is not in a position to stop the administration from swinging a wrecking ball to our delicate diplomatic and defense arrangements around the world. As such, the horrific scenes that unfolded at Kabul airport were cringing to our present and possible allies as it incited dreams of new possibilities in our adversaries. Russia and the CCP’s China have every reason to follow their lusts. It could spell doom to the Ukraine and Taiwan. American perfidy just downgraded American deterrence. The Kremlin and Beijing are neither as militarily crippled nor lacking in determined leadership as they were in the 1990’s. The Afghan retreat is a replay of the police stand-down orders in Portland, Minneapolis, Kenosha, Baltimore, New York City, et al. When the cat is gone, the mice play.

Massive quantities of Russian supplies and equipment on Ukranian border in recent satellite photo.

Hitler parallels have become a rhetorical banality, but some are noteworthy because the similarities are so striking. Of particular relevance is the Munich Agreement of 1938. At the time, America had taken itself off the table – in a Tucker Carlson stance – as Germany shredded the Versailles Treaty and performed the March 1938 Anschluss (forced unification of Austria and prohibited by Versailles) with only a diplomatic protest in response. The League of Nations was a nonentity. The Axis allies of Italy and Japan were molesting North Africa and China respectively. A demoralized France and a Britain in the grip of appeasement were left to check Hitler’s ambitions in Eastern Europe, notably Czechoslovakia. They retreated from a defense of the small country and it was sacrificed in the subsequent Munich concord only to have much worse follow. An appeal to the hearts and minds of thugs is dangerous; after all, they’re thugs.

Afghanistan is our Munich. Should we say goodbye to the Ukraine and Taiwan as the West said arrivederci to the Sudetenland in 1938? And what of a nuke-obsessed Iran and its terror proxies surrounding Israel? Will the band of rogues be satisfied with the vast steppe west of the Urals, Formosa, and a smoldering Tel Aviv? I suspect not. They are probably just the hors d’oeuvres.

RogerG