January 2022 – Page 2 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

January 8, 2022January 15, 2022

A Retrospective Foot in Mouth

Memory lane is a fertile source of human folly. John Meacham, normally accorded the title of historian but actually more of a journalist, explained his endorsement of Joe Biden on MSNBC in August 2020 (see below). The segment is short (5 minutes) and therefore not one for making a detailed case. What he levels against Trump in essence are a series of grotesquely inflated and abreviated charges.

In his mind, the choice in the election is between good (Biden) and evil (Trump). Bear in mind, by August of 2020 when Meacham went before MSNBC’s cameras, the people of this country saw, at ground level, evil as it marched across their tv screens and on their way to work. The public were inundated with media-supercharged police/suspect confrontations, cities wrecked by gross lawlessness, and residents forced to confront feces, syringes, and massive homeless encampments on their way to school and work. And all of this as an epidemic rages and their kids were unlearning under ZOOM. So, where’s the “evil”? Is it really Trump, or is this thing that Meacham calls evil something he is aiding and abetting? The thought hit me one year into “good” winning.

I was immediately struck by his vague illusion to “white racism” in America. Yet, none of the cop incidents of 2020 can be traced to racist cops. So, when you can’t pinpoint personal racism, invent an impersonal one and call it “systemic”. Meacham purports to be a scholar, but he would sound more like he stepped back into the world of medieval alchemy if he bent a knee to this new wizardry.

No person schooled in rational thought can excusably accept a proposition (systemic racism, white supremacy, et al) that tramples over Karl Popper’s first rule scientific reasoning: falsifiability. It must be testable. Nothing in this blob of political sloganeering is even remotely survivable under the simplest cross-examination. Since Marx, lefties have tried to make their ideologies scientific and this latest generation is no different. They try to do it with “statistical disparities”. The words sound imposing but they’re as simple as aggregating people into racial groups and different stats pop out. They immediately jump to their favorite bogeyman – racism – for the differences without any sound basis. It’s the modern alchemy. Apparently, the revolution is more important than truth.

We are told that we must use racism to combat racism, a militant affirmative action. Sounds like, we must have sin to combat sin. Combat the murder of nuns with the murder of priests. The formulations are endless. In the end, we have dangerous streets, decaying schools, the treachery of Afghanistan, a war on our gas tanks, shortages and inflation, a filthy public square, and a life under powerful potentates. Meacham’s “good” didn’t turned out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Meacham peddled on us a doddering and compliant agent of far more evils to replace a braggart who got some things right.

I wonder how Meacham views his performance on August 20, 2020. I hope that he cleaned his foot before insertion.

RogerG

January 4, 2022January 15, 2022

Tyranny of Safetyism

The cartoon below captures the delirium of our times. It’s safetyism run amok. The obsessive/compulsive nature of safety-at-all-costs is destroying us.

May be an illustration of text

It took a virus to expose this latest contagion (pun intended) of the mind. We’ve lost all sense of balance. Safety-alone in all instances is as silly as having to wear a seat belt after a bad sunburn in a mad rush to the hospital for my wife to deliver our baby. No weighing of cost and benefit, comfort and discomfort, likes and dislikes, and personal assessment of risk. Somebody else – the government or the population of ninnies – claims the power to force us into their phobias.

If you really want to know the reason for the broad loss of credibility on the part of government-deputized “experts”, just look at their abundantly displayed lack of recognition of any other consideration other than the factoids of their narrow specialty. Fauci and Walensky wail about infections in a carpet-bombing of all the other things that make us human. Close the schools or open them with the kids isolated in pods, masks, plexiglass, and jabs; the germophobes screaming at other airline passengers for their refusal to continue suffocating behind a mask while eating; politicians ordering universal vaccination when the vaccine neither prevents additional infection nor its transmission; make it as difficult as possible for anyone to earn a living; prevent us as from seeking fellowship in worship; and effectually banish two thousand years of Christmas. Shocking and amazing.

The vaccines armor the many from hospitalization, but they can only do so much. They are not the “philosopher’s stone” of immunology. In fact, the unvaccinated 18 to 29 cohort run about the same risk as the vaccinated 50 to 64 according to OSHA’s own assessment (see https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/scotus-should-nix-bidens-vaccine-mandates/).

All the advice for sensible policy making isn’t limited to the kind coming out of a room full of lab coats. Their contributions are necessary but not sufficient. Necessary/sufficient isn’t a cliché. It’s a fact! I only wish politicians weren’t so eager to use the factoids of science as arrows in their political quiver. They end up besmirching themselves and science.

RogerG

January 3, 2022January 15, 2022

Let’s Not Forget

Thank you, John Ondrasik for “Blood on My Hands” (see video below). Some things should not be easily forgotten. I suspect that the ongoing humiliation of Afghanistan will be fully felt on the beaches of Taiwan and on the eastern frontier of Ukraine before long. Worst of all is the treachery of turning our backs on those we had promised to protect. It’s shameful beyond belief.

Now, the man who promised to heal the country’s divisions has instead poured salt into the open wounds. He has inflicted inflation and a new racism on the nation. He and his allies are attempting to codify a neo-Marxist revolution in totalitarian environmentalism, the corruption of the election process to keep them in power for generations, and the spending of the country into debt oblivion through a huge expansion of the entitlement state. If successful, this will not be anybody’s America. It’ll just be another failed state in the western hemisphere.

On top of that will be the self-defilement that the president and his people have imposed on us. Let’s not turn a page. This one is too momentous to be forgotten with a flick of the wrist.

Watch the video below.

RogerG

January 2, 2022January 2, 2022

Are Bowl Games Another Canary in the Coal Mine?

USC safeties coach Craig Naivar, center, runs players through drills during spring 2020 practice at USC. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)

Like a homeowner noticing termite shavings on the floor at the bottom of a wall, the urban folk of the metropolitan west coast might be awakening to the manufactured decay that is beginning to overtake them. The rot is “manufactured” (man-created) because of the bewildering decisions by public officials of their own choosing. Schools aren’t preparing the young for adulthood but are fermenting as radical indoctrination centers. The urban public square is littered with the homeless, the psychotic, needles and feces, roving gangs of thieves and extremist goons, boarded up store fronts, and no one in office seems to care, at least care enough to do anything about it, other than make it worse.

Homeless encampment in Portland in 2016.

The dégringolade (decline) ranges up and down the coastal plain. Nearly 60% of United Van Lines’s California hauls in 2021 were outbound, and it’s a poor metric due to its high cost. The more affordable U-Haul has become less affordable – 4 times the price for inboud – when trying to load up and skedaddle the Bear Flag Republic. Portlanders have acquired an affection for Boise, Idaho, according to UVL and Business Insider. The situation is summed up quite nicely by Greg Goodman, the co-president of the Portland Downtown Development Group: “If you know a retail or office broker, give them a call and ask them how many clients they have are trying to leave.” The exodus is palpable wherever progressivism reigns.

The east coast fares even worse by United’s numbers. New Jersey (69.5%) and New York (67%) rank #1 and #2 for the Great Migration out.

Is the decline and flight observable in organized athletic prowess? Is this trait a new canary in the coal mine alongside UVL and U-Haul numbers? As of now, in 2021/22, the PAC-12 is winless in bowl games for the second straight year. The last best hope for the conference, Utah, went down to Ohio State in the Rose Bowl on a last second field goal. Even the fact that Utah came close could be an additional sign of the new dynamism of people fleeing the coastal blight. The PAC-12 might have to switch its status ranking with the Mid-Atlantic Conference. It’s the “Conference of Champions” for volleyball or softball, but apparently not for anything exuding testosterone, which ironically is then forced to subsidize the former two.

UCLA lost its chance to break the losing streak by cancelling its appearance in the Sun Bowl after an outbreak of COVID on the team. COVID still raked the team after some of the most heavy-handed, authoritarian edicts by California’s recall-surviving governor and some of the most fear-paralyzed school administrations in the country. Remember “bend the curve” and “stop the spread”? The only thing “bent” or “stopped” was the hopes and dreams of the young men in shoulder pads. Try that as a recruitment angle.

Last year’s performance, the notorious year of COVID, was explained away, like the election laws, as a byproduct of the pandemic. Once again, nothing the prelates of the conference did changed a thing in regards to the rampage of the disease. It mutated and the crisis-too-good-to-waste registered as a wild-eyed panic to end athletic futures. Such overwrought reactions have a home in the same places that sanction violence and filth.

Another little-noticed and unremarked factoid is the appearance of four-star recruits from California showing up on the team rosters in the real power conferences. I tuned into the Georgia/Michigan game in time to watch Georgia’s tight end, Bowers, from northern California, receive a touchdown pass. Bryce Young, Alabama’s QB, and alumni of Mater Dei in Los Angeles, earned a 106 quarterback rating against Cincinnati. Ohio State/Utah was a battle between two California quarterbacks: Stroud and Rising. Are these mere anecdotes or a trend that has many similarities to prior demographic shifts in the country’s history?

Alabama’s Bryce Young (Photo by Ron Jenkins/Getty Images)

California’s loss of one congressional seat after the last census understates the seriousness of its self-immolation. The state made strenuous efforts to hide the flight of its middle class and businesses with campaigns to count every soul, living and non-living and legal and illegal. But everyone knows what is happening, and it’s now appearing on the playing fields.

Think about it.

RogerG