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A Time of Political Insanity

Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene won't commit to Capitol rally in support of Jan. 6 rioters ...
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R, Fla.) and Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene (R, Ga.)
Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) and Pres. Joe Biden at the microphone

When does just being wrong cross over into insanity?  Einstein had an answer during his debate with the proponents of quantum theory (mechanics) in the 1920’s.  The quantum theory presented the possibility of unpredictability in the atomic and subatomic world: identical circumstances can produce different results.  Flippantly, Einstein threw off the one-line response, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”  Thus, according to Einstein, quantum theory proponents such as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were engaging in folly.

Black and white photo showing Bohr and Einstein sitting side by side in conversation.
Niels Bohr (left) with Albert Einstein in the late 1920s, when quantum mechanics was in its infancy. (Photo credit: Emilio Segre Visual Archives/AIP/SPL)

Today, we have good reason to know better.  Micro reality behaves differently than macro.  Einstein’s explanation of the cosmos (macro) can’t account for activity in the atomic and subatomic realm (micro).

However, applying Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to human affairs would be an invitation to chaos.  Out the window would go any universal principles like deductive/inductive reasoning, equal protection of the laws, rules of due process, standards of decency, human rights, anything regarding the proper regulation of human conduct in a society, the scientific method itself if taken to an extreme.  Yet, that is where we are going.  We are heading back into places that were known to be thickets of danger and malevolence.

Passion and bias overwhelm good sense.  Indeed, that happenstance may be the only true constant in human conduct through the ages, down to the present, and into the future.

We pride ourselves in being better than our ancestors, progressives being the most hubristic.  Their entire belief system is based on it.  Yet, an earlier incarnation of today’s progressives produced improvements in how a democracy registers the will of the people, advances that modern progressives are busy dismantling.  Is this “progress” or a return to an atavistic past, one that their ideological ancestors were trying to escape?

Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall cartoon by Thomas Nast | American History | Pinterest | Tammany hall ...
Thomas Nast cartoon of Boss Tweed of the Tammany Hall Democrat political machine of NYC.

Einstein’s insanity definition is fully operational when it comes to the Democratic Party’s efforts to shred the accomplishments of 19th century progressives.  Back then, progressives were aghast at the corruption of a powerful few in smoke-filled backrooms.  Their efforts at broad political, economic, and social reform were thwarted by a clique with the power to manipulate elections.  Before they could accomplish anything, elections must be cleaned up.  The process must be professionalized with nonpartisan administration of elections, clean voter rolls, the secret ballot, and diligent prosecution of fraud.  Only then, they believed, could they circumvent the self-serving few stuffing the ballot boxes.

Professor Richard T. Ely of Johns Hopkins U. and the U. of Wisconsin, influenced Woodrow Wilson, Rober La Follette, Theodore Roosevelt, etc. (photo: public domain/via Wikimedia)

After, other election reforms would kick in: the popular election of Senators, popular vote primaries, the referendum, initiative, and recall.  More democratization, but first in clean elections, was thought to be the cure.  Now, it’s back to stuffing the ballot box.  Democrats resist efforts to make voter rolls match the actual eligible warm bodies in a precinct, like removal of the dead and noncitizens or those who moved.  They thwart voter ID initiatives, whose purpose is to ensure that the person showing up to vote is actually the person on the list.  And they are enthusiastic proponents of mail-in balloting, unmonitored drop boxes, the third party harvesting of ballots, same-day registration, voting beyond election day, the kinds of proposals that place a huge question mark over election integrity.  What could go wrong?  Is it completely unreasonable to find these ideas at least troubling?

Not for Democrats.  They don’t have misgivings, blinded as they are by the rhetorical device of “disenfranchisement”, the bogeyman of systemic racism, a zeal to win elections at all costs, and making it so easy to vote that the insentient, uninterested, and those desiring to vote and vote often have an open field.  Public faith in the result is sacrificed in the fury of everyone, dead or alive, having a ballot(s) in their hand.  My sons still receive California absentee ballots years after ID and registration in Montana.

The New York Times in a brief moment of sanity declared, “Voting by mail is now common enough and problematic enough that election experts say there have been multiple elections in which no one can say with confidence which candidate was the deserved winner” (see below).  My faith in elections has taken a hit since easy-to-voting/easy-to-cheat has become the official doctrine of the Party and in jurisdictions under its control.

Their whole scheme was encapsulated in the Democrats’ Senate Bill 1 of 2021, the horribly misnamed “For the People Act”.  All of the above would be imposed on the entire country if a couple of Democrat Senators had decided to follow the rest of the lemmings over the cliff.

Far from leaving the Democrats’ Tammany Hall past in the dust, they are now embracing it.  The single biggest threat to election integrity is the mail-in ballot.  Think about it: instead of a ballot given to a confirmed eligible voter in front of many witnesses, and the person is observed going to a booth to secretly mark it, and it is dropped into the box under the eye of a nonpartisan official, the Democrats want to shotgun ballots in the mail.  Yes, participation will increase . . . but by whom?

Mail-in ballots on the floor at the Park East Terrace Apartments.
Absentee ballots below the mailboxes at a Paterson, NJ, apartment complex, May 2020.

The ballots lie on the floor in piles in apartment mailrooms.  Multiple ballots are delivered to a single residence and what happens to them once taken inside is anyone’s guess.  The sole bow to authentication is a Boy-Scout-oath signature on a perjury line.  So much for the single ballot reflecting the conscience of a single person.  It doesn’t take the imagination of Lewis Carroll to picture what might be happening beyond the domicile’s door.  Add the likelihood of a partisan activist delivering and collecting the things (ballot harvesting) – and who knows what else they’re doing – and no wonder I’m ready to throw up my hands and be done with voting.

The Democrats forestall any steps to allay concerns.  They glibly point to the rarity of voter fraud prosecutions.  Get real, they’ve created a system that makes it hard to identify fraud.  The signature on a mail-in ballot is no guarantee of authenticity because it was produced in the same manner as the marked ballot – behind a closed door.  Once the things are collected and delivered, they are shorn of their envelopes and placed in piles.  Authentication is gone, gone forever.

How can fraud be uncovered at this point?  People have to be extremely stupid to be caught.  Prosecutions are a measure of stupidity and not election integrity.  The secret ballot is dead, dead!

Slipshod voting is as bad as slipshod policing. In the latter, you may get killed, pistol-whipped, or face wrongful prosecution. With the former, you will be ruined by political hucksters. Come to think about it, what’s the difference?

Under the skin of today’s Democratic Party progressives is an old-fashioned and venal Tammany Hall ward heeler.  They are back to a deeply rooted behavior that progressives of an earlier incarnation would find abhorrent and a bit insane.

The other party, the current Republican Party, hews even more closely to Einstein’s definition.  A significant block of the Party can’t shake its fetish for Donald Trump no matter how many times he embarrasses the Party and its electoral chances.  This influential chunk of the Party’s base would rather die on the hill of confrontation than make room for the part of the electorate who are 70% with them but can’t take the juvenile boorishness.  This blinkered part of the party can’t get their heads around the fact that politics is about addition and not subtraction.  Reliance on the cult-of-personality cohort in the party’s base to choose nominees will only guarantee more Democrat inaugurals.

2022 Midterms: Dr. Mehmet Oz calls John Fetterman to concede Pennsylvania's US Senate race
Mehmet Oz concedes to John Fetterman, Nov. 9, 2022.

You’d think that the November 2022 midterms would wake them up.  No such luck.  Back then, in many key primary races when a more experienced and more popular candidate in relation to the Democrat frontrunner squared off against a Trump-endorsed one for statewide offices (Senator for example), the Trumpist won and then proceeded to lose the general.  The current Democrat majority in the Senate owes much to Trump’s endorsement of untested and “anti-establishment” candidates.

Einstein’s insanity still afflicts a majority of the party’s base.  They are proving it weekly.  A spate of polls in January 2023 exhibits the same tendency. Emerson, Morning Consult, and Harvard Harris show Trump besting DeSantis by 26, 19, and 20 points respectively for the nomination.  Public opinion is fluid with polls providing only a snapshot, albeit a fuzzy one.  Still, Republicans show that they can’t seem to kick their Trump fix.

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Trump’s stature with the general electorate is more troubling.  A deep dive into the Harris poll shows him besting Biden by 5 points.  DeSantis does so by 3. Good news for Trump?  Not so fast.  Biden is standing atop a wrecked economy, border, culture, schools, and public safety – underwater by 14 in his favorables.  Yet, Trump only looks marginally better than a wholly discredited Biden.  Among possible Republican challengers, Trump shares negative likeability numbers (-3) with Ted Cruz (-2) and Mike Pompeo (-4).  DeSantis beams brightly, up by 13 in the sunny uplands of likeability.  Amazingly, Republicans in the poll still favored the one with the higher negatives, and therefore with weaker prospects.  At this juncture, they are poised to do to America what Arizona and Pennsylvania Republicans did to their states.  Knowingly choosing weakness might be an additional definition of insanity.

It won’t require much donor cash from the Democrats’ cadre of billionaire smear merchants to remind people of Trump’s vulgarity.  The guy daily confirms the worst about him: occasionally cavorting with the lunatic fringe and incessant recourse to worn out narcissisms.

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He opens his mouth and middle-class suburbanites cringe.  The schtick leaves only the diehards who revel in politics as performance art – “owning the libs”, “Trump being Trump”.  Thus, the Trump following is starting to resemble Grateful Dead groupies: bellicose, aging, and regularly depleted by admissions to nursing homes and funeral parlors.  Don’t look here for a winning coalition.

 

With Democrats professing affection for Marxist folly (in CRT, systemic oppression, the too-numerous …phobias, eat the rich), and resorting to Tammany Hall electoral tactics, one has to wonder about their grip on sanity, or honesty, or at least good sense.

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Republicans are proving themselves to be no better.  Shockingly, many, maybe a majority, have come to fondle crassness and crudity as some kind of winner.  Combine those bestialities with inexperience and naivete in candidate choice and we end up with Democrats getting a Mulligan (second chance) to make more hash of our lives.  Republicans don’t have a grip on the first rule of politics: first, you’ve got to win elections.  Republicans hitching their wagon to Trump, and candidates like him, will only guarantee another wild ride over the cliff.

We can’t even discuss these matters sanely, intelligently.  Our vocabulary is riddled with empty generalities.  Mostly they are straw-man figures of hate.  A good portion of the chattering classes on the right lambast the “establishment” and “RHINOS” without much definition beyond somebody who might have governing experienced and lacks a hair-trigger Defcon 3 personality.  Democrats are straitjacketed by a paranoia about a fascist under every rug, “systemic” racism when you can’t find real racism, Gaia-worship in climate-change mania, and an ever-expanding list of “protective classes” in need of their paternalistic care . . . at our expense.  Listening to Tucker Carlson or Matt Gaetz on the right is as shrill to the ears as Biden, MSNBC, or AOC on the left.  If they aren’t insane, why do they talk like it?

Whew, woe be to the American republic at this degenerate phase in its life cycle. We appear to be so insane.

RogerG

Read more here:
* “Trio of polls show Trump clawing back momentum from DeSantis”, Zachary Basu, Axios, 1/24/23, at https://www.axios.com/2023/01/24/trump-desantis-polls-2024-presidential-election
* Harvard-Harris Poll, January 18-19, 2024, at https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/HHP_Jan2023_KeyResults.pdf
* NYT skepticism of mail-in voting can be found in “It Takes a Superspreader to Know a Superspreader: Whether Sturgis, BLM, or voting by mail, the media chooses narrative over facts every time.”, Gerald Baker, Wall Street Journal, 9/14/2020, at https://www.wsj.com/articles/it-takes-a-superspreader-to-know-a-superspreader-11600097758
* Additionally, NYT’s skepticism can be found here: “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises” at https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-by-mail-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html
* The differences between modern progressives and their 19th century cousins can be found here: “Modern Vs. 19th-Century Progressives”, Jason Merchey, 11/22/2017, at https://valuesofthewise.com/modern-vs-19th-century-progressives/

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The 21st Century’s Kabuki Theater

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President Joe Biden delivers remarks on gun crime and his “Safer America Plan” during an event in Wilkes Barre, Pa., August 30, 2022. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

* Kabuki Theater: euphemism meaning posturing and diplomatic ritual to excess.  Posturing can include effecting a stance in support of your party’s radicalism.  Excessive diplomatic ritual can include today’s virtue signaling.

************

Why must science be littered with non-science and public discussions revel in incoherent banalities?  Even in seemingly sensible write-ups that rely on scientific expertise, we’ll run into the occasional assertion that jumps the evidence and logic.  Furthermore, public figures babble in a string of emotive, highly charged phrases without much support or reasoning that advance understanding.  The drivel rears most prominently when talk strays to climate change and guns.

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'BASEMENT KABUKI THEATER'

Science is inductive, the scientific method, evidence, empiricism, falsifiability.  That isn’t true when it comes to climate change, formerly known by a host of other monikers.  In an otherwise sane piece by Richard Luthy, Stanford prof of civil and environmental engineering, on how California could harness the recent storm runoff to address water needs, he polluted his sensible suggestion about using aquifers as cisterns to store the runoff with the hackneyed contention that man has made a shambles of the climate.  It certainly gets the ruling donkey party off the hook for running the state into the ground . . . instead of the storm water.

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Like its poorly maintained forests that erupt into historic conflagrations, rickety electricity grid, and an aging water system built for 10 million fewer people, the state’s dangerous water shortage is a consequence of a ruling ideological orthodoxy translated into policy that has run roughshod over the state for decades.

It’s not that California voters didn’t punch the ticket for billions for water projects.  Prop 1 in 2014 set aside $7.1 billion, and Props 68 and 3 in 2018 added almost $13 billion.  Out of the $20 billion, about a third went to “Habitat Restoration”, play money for the eco-zealots. “Water Infrastructure” and “Reservoir Storage” account for only 43% of the total.

Officials inspect Oroville Dam's crippled spillway Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2017, in Oroville, Calif ...
Officials inspect Oroville Dam’s crippled spillway Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2017, in Oroville, Calif. California water authorities stopped the flow of water down the spillway, Monday, allowing workers to begin clearing out massive debris that’s blocking a hydroelectric plant from operating. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Californians thought that they were getting more water, but obviously aren’t.  Where’s the new reservoirs, aqueducts, and recharge basins?  It’s been eight years.  I suspect that water projects face the same fate of any big construction in the state.  They get strangled in the crib by California red tape and the delaying tactics of eco-activists (lawsuits, political skullduggery, etc.).  Compounding the morass is the ideological affinity between the state’s bureaucratic minions and the zealots.  So, in the end, you get the eco stuff, which is unchallenged, and not an ounce of additional water for you.

Don’t lay the problem at the feet of fossil fuels.  Dry years should be expected in dry-summer climates.  The Mediterranean climate that hovers over most of the state, with its dry-summer regime, only produces an annual precipitation average of 6-25 inches.  The drier the climate, the more erratic is the precipitation.  California has experienced 11 periods of drought since 1841, some lasting as long as seven years.  At the time of the Middle Ages in Europe, California was mired in two long droughts, one lasted 220 years and the other 140.  Dry-summer means a short window to get moisture, and if you don’t get it in those few months, you go without.  Drought is a feature, not a stranger to the area, and not an effect of our love affair with the automobile, suburbia, and indoor lighting.  The phenomena happened when only hunter-gatherers were around.

California drought is the most severe in at least 1,200 years
Tree rings show megadrought 1,200 years ago in California.

An engineer and scientist like Luthy should know better.  The mention, as he does, of dry periods since 2000 is scant reason to let the Sacramento clown car off the hook.  It’s even more of a scandal to science to use the incidents since 2000 as proof of climate change being the root of our evils.  It’s hooey.  The simple fact of the matter is that two-thirds of the water falls over the sparsely populated one-third of the state, in a region prone to drought since the end of the last ice age.  Someone should take notice rather than foolishly run interference for the dolts in Sacramento and the state’s electorate.

The national electorate fairs no better sometimes.  We’ve got a guy in the oval office who would be better off in a retirement home under close medical supervision.  It must be admitted that Biden has an excuse – he’s old – but the under-50’s in the party sound no more intelligible.  Mention “guns” and the limbic part of their brain takes over.  Images of tv/movie shootouts immediately overwhelm what little they know on the subject.  For Biden, as ossified in the brain as he is, he trots out one banality after another leaving the public in a state of bewilderment.

Charles C. W. Cooke writes of Biden’s use of trite rhetorical phrases when he talks about firearms.  Biden trundles them out like Bill Clinton’s stock of pickup lines for seducing the hired help.  Some of Biden’s juicy ones include “You can’t buy a cannon”, “Deer don’t wear Kevlar”, and my personal favorite, “If you want to take on the federal government, you need some F-15s, not an AR-15.”  When in the history of our citizen republic is it proper for government to tell you what you need?  Any government that can tell you what you need is one that treats its public as a collection of wooden puppets.  Government as puppet master turns the popular sovereignty thing upside down.

Cartoon of the Day: The Political Puppet Master - Essex Watch

The late George Orwell had some interesting things to say, per Cooke, about your alleged need for “some F-15s” to take on the federal government.  For Orwell, government’s possession of sophisticated weaponry in relation to the citizen was a prerequisite for despotism: “Ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance.”  Rifles and grenades are inherently democratic, and F-15s, aircraft carriers, and hypersonics are not.  Biden’s formulation reduces the citizen to prostrate serfs, only getting the weapons that meet the approval of Biden’s commissars.

He completely misses the point of the Second Amendment.  Cooke reminds us that the Constitution was made by a bunch of “insurrectionists” – people who birthed a country in armed revolt against a tyrannical government.  The act of taking up arms against their government was memorialized in the Declaration of Independence: “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it . . . .”  Thankfully, we aren’t there yet.

But lately, there’s been some extended eyebrow raising.  Your government school indoctrinates your kids in neo-Marxist revolutionary dogmas; the attempt to establish censorship boards under the guise of “misinformation”; the attacks on the faithful for their refusal to violate their creeds when they refuse to kowtow to the government-approved zeitgeist; the loose talk among some of the powerful calling for gun confiscation; the refusal to enforce laws to protect people, property, and businesses; threats of taking away our gas stoves and cars and fuel under color of “saving the planet”; our children are prevented from receiving awards of excellence, such as National Merit Scholarships, because of government’s slavish devotion to neo-Marxist “equity”; our immigration laws are not enforced which tosses down the border exposing us to intensified villainy; our girls aren’t safe in their locker rooms, bathrooms, and in competitions; infanticide under the rhetorical rubric of “abortion”; child genital mutilation under “gender-affirming care” without parental knowledge and consent; and government turning a conspicuous blind eye as investment houses play revolutionary footsie (ESG) with my retirement.  Did I miss anything?

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Now Biden wants to tell me how many cartridges I can have in my gun.  He forgets that the citizen’s right to firearms stems from a tradition that goes back to before the English Bill of Rights (1689).  Those “Protestants” in the English Bill of Rights wanted their weapons to protect themselves from more than a burglar.  Speaking of the limbic system of government apparatchiks, buried deep within it is the knowledge that the country’s citizens are armed thanks to the Second Amendment.  American citizens aren’t prostrate serfs.

One of the key purposes of the Second Amendment is the right of the people to protect themselves not from government but the people in the government, the kind of people who would force citizens into acts that violate their faith, censor their speech, and make their life a living hell.  Much of that government knavery is sanctioned carte blanche by climate change delirium.  Combine the revolutionary dictums with Biden’s butchery of the country’s founding and we end up impoverished and manacled before our rulers.

It’s an insidious Kabuki Theater.

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RogerG

Read more here:

* “Rain finally came to California. We blew our chance to use it”, Richard G. Luthy, San Francisco Chronicle, 1/17/23, at https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Rain-came-to-California-we-blew-chance-to-use-it-17723529.php#:~:text=Rain%20finally%20came%20to%20California.%20We%20blew%20our,received.%20Patrick%20Tehan%20%2F%20Special%20to%20the%20Chronicle
* “How Much California Water Bond Money Is For Storage?”, Edward Ring, 8/9/2018, California Policy Center, at https://californiapolicycenter.org/how-much-california-water-bond-money-is-for-storage/
* “California drought: Past dry periods have lasted more than 200 years, scientists say”, The Mercury News, at https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/01/25/california-drought-past-dry-periods-have-lasted-more-than-200-years-scientists-say/
* “Severe Ancient Droughts: A Warning to California”, New York Times, 7/19/1994, at https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/19/science/severe-ancient-droughts-a-warning-to-california.html
* “Tree-Ring Study Reveals Historical Drought Record in Southern California”, 3/12/2018, California Dept. of Water Resources, at https://water.ca.gov/News/News-Releases/2018/March-18/Tree-Ring-Study-Reveals-Historical-Drought-Record-in-Southern-California
* “Biden’s Most Grotesque Gun-Control Argument”, Charles C.W. Cooke, National Review Online, 1/17/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/bidens-most-grotesque-gun-control-argument/

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Putting Lipstick on a Pig

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Governor Gavin Newsom gives the inaugural address after taking the oath of office at his inauguration ceremony at the Capitol Mall in Sacramento, Calif., January 6, 2023. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Gavin Newsom regaled a state capitol audience with an attempt to apply makeup to a hog in his January 6 inaugural address.  The “lipstick on a pig” is more than a cliché.  How best to describe a surreal bid to portray a long-running fiasco as a “personal embrace of freedom”?  Will Swaim of the California Policy Center in his morning’s piece (1/15/23, see below) makes clear the state’s predicament to anyone with eyes to see.  California is a mess, big time!

Lipstick On A Pig Can't Fix A Bad Offer | Barron Marketing

Heck, California lost a congressman and has lost population for the third year in a row, not just a decline in the rate of growth when compare to other states, but actually went negative.  The state is shrinking.  It’s been building for decades only to accelerate in numbers that resemble the crowds stampeding the southern border.  Instead of heading north, they’re rushing east.  Apparently, many of the state’s existing and former residents don’t like the smell of Newsom’s “personal embrace of freedom”.  And the clowns that dominate the state government keep making the smell ever more pungent.

Swaim chronicles a growing list of recent executive and legislative perniciousness that is driving people pell-mell out the state, something Newsom blithely pretends isn’t happening.  The compendium of noxiousness knows no bounds.  Newsom berates “Red state politicians” (read DeSantis and Abbot) in his speech as possessing “authoritarian impulses” while he retains emergency powers, the go-to for history’s real Fascists.  Hitler didn’t replace the Weimar Constitution but ruled throughout under its Article 48 emergency powers up to his last days in the bunker.  Likewise, Newsom locked down the state and shuttered the schools longer than anywhere else, proving that when you scratch a progressive, a dogmatic authoritarian is exposed.

If you happen to be a doctor in the state, you might face prosecution under Newsom’s “misinformation” law since it is illegal to register qualms about the state’s medical proclamations because they are deified as the “contemporary scientific consensus”.  Patriotism isn’t the last refuge of the scoundrel. “Contemporary scientific consensus” is!  Past contemporary scientific consensuses included the luminiferous ether (space isn’t a vacuum), the heavenly vault (Copernicus’s ceiling beyond the solar system), Lamarckism (animal behavior determines mutations, not genetic diversity), etc.  The concept of “scientific consensus” as determinant of truth is ludicrous, but the state’s doctors will have to acquiesce in silence to avoid Galileo’s fate before the Inquisition.  Careerwise, it’s healthier to jump the Sierras seeking a post in a Boise hospital.  This is California “freedom”?  This is California’s new “liberty”?

Diagram with which Copernicus changed for the conception of the cosmos
For Copernicus, the solar system was the universe with the stars comprising a heavenly vault.

The state’s finances are drowning in unfunded mandates.  Rather than address this beast, Newsom and his goofs in Sacramento have proposed to ladle a reparations payment of $223,000 for each member of a supportive voting block: descendants of African slaves.  How do you determine the award winners?  I’m sure that they’ll come up with some cockamamie formula – they’ll have to – but watch the prospect of six-figure money attract Caucasians, Asians, Hispanics, transplanted Jamaicans, anyone who’ll claim mysterious ancestors who suffered under Simon Legree’s lash, much like Elizabeth Warren seeking Native American affirmative action points or others probing a cut of the casino profits.

POCAHONTAS 2.0: Elizabeth Warren Apologises To Cherokee Nation For Mocking Their Culture By ...

For the Sacramento clown car and its voter base, running the oppression lottery ranks higher than the provision of . . . water, without which we’d die after 3 days.  No new damns, reservoirs, or aqueducts have been added since the state’s population was 23 million in 1980.  It’s 39 million today (and shrinking). And that 100- to 40-year-old infrastructure wears out. No alternative sources such as desalinization are on the horizon.  Last year, California’s bureaucratic behemoth, the Coastal Commission, rejected a proposed plant near Costa Mesa.  No additional water for you, California.  You have nothing to look forward to but draconian state rationing and brown lawns, withering crops, and 30-second showers every other day by state edict.  Don’t expect the recent downpours to rescue you.  The water is flushing out to the sea and not to your shower head.

Lake Oroville reaches all-time low level; hydroelectric plant shuts down for first time ever
Lake Oroville, the head of the State Water Project, in 2022 after years of drought.

The people of California asked for this.  Somehow, the seed of Lefty aesthetics was planted deep under the popular cranium as far back as 1972 when Pop 20 was popularly approved to create the California Coastal Commission.  The original purpose was to protect the coast from overdevelopment.  It did, and is now busy dehydrating the 14 million people on the coastal plain.  Obviously, it’s a blueprint for the rest of the state: blame some bogeyman – climate change – as Newsom did in his screed, and don’t do anything but rail against the people and shove them into electric cars hooked up to a grid that they are making unstable.  Go figure.

In a certain sense, Californians, you are doing it to yourself.  Lunacy is popular in the state.

If you’re a fast-food worker and think that hiking the minimum wage to $15.50/hour is such a great idea, think again.  If you still have a job – a big “if” – you’ll notice fewer colleagues and more machines surrounding you.  The order to boost the minimum wage is in reality the depress-labor-participation-and-increase-automation act since fewer people can be afforded and machines pay dividends far into the future when compared to the alternative — you!

Job Killer: McDonald's Adding Automated Order Machines to All Restaurants - YouTube
An automated McDonalds in California

Owners of the outlets don’t fair any better.  The governor, super-majorities of both legislative houses, and the state’s gargantuan bureaucracies want to impose unionization on you.  Like doctors, get out!  Help Boise grow.

Hey, truckers and owners of trucking firms, the guy and his minions are after you.  Closed union shops will befall you the longer you stay.  Great weather can’t compensate for decreasing competitiveness.

The state desires not to be a haven for jobs and business.  Instead, it heartily seeks the moniker of sanctuary for abortionists and sexual mutilators of children.  So radical are they about abortion that escaping the womb while still breathing won’t save the baby.  The state considers the baby not be human, rather to be treated like the mother’s infected tonsils.  Unlike the mother’s tonsils, however, the baby has its own DNA profile independent of the mother.  It is not an organ of the mother, which is the first indication that the unborn young are to be treated differently than a hang nail.  Such is the Clockwork Orange nature of the state (read A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess).

Unborn Baby Miraculously Survives Abortion Pill Taken By Mother - Opposing Views
An ultrasound of a baby who survived an abortion pill.

The grotesqueries don’t end there.  A child’s sexual organs are to be treated like pregnancy: an inconvenience to be surgically or pharmaceutically manipulated.  If your kid happens to find their way to transgenderism’s underground railroad to California without your knowledge, the State of California protects the mutilator and the child’s wishes to be mutilated unbeknownst to you. It’s truly appalling what the state has become.  It’s more than A Clockwork Orange.  It’s the Island of Doctor Moreau (H.G. Wells author).

A Clockwork Orange | Film Review | Slant Magazine
A scene from A Clockwork Orange, the movie.
The Island of Dr. Moreau: Evil in Adaptation #TBT
Scene from The Island of Doctor Moreau, the movie.

These are just some of the “successes” mentioned by the state’s gubernatorial Dr. Moreau.  The assault on business continues unabated.  The state’s malformations only get grander. To remain, at this point, comes close to quiet acquiescence.

I’m reminded of the silent German citizens who resided next to Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, or Buchenwald.  Said nothing, did nothing, until Patton arrived at Buchenwald in March of 1945.  Sickened and horrified, he ordered the surrounding residents out of their homes to view the horrors that were conducted in their name.  Californians, look around you at the actions that are being taken in your name.  Infanticidal abortion and child sexual mutilation are no small things.

German civilians parading past piles of the dead at Buchenwald in April 1945. Notice the woman shielding her eyes.

Many Californians regularly vote against this kind of thing.  They are to be applauded, but they need more people like them at a time when many of the people who do have fled. That means a change of heart among a good portion of the Lefty voter base.  And that is going to be hard, oh so very hard. Meanwhile, the state potentates will be applying lipstick on a pig.  Nay, lipstick on a wild boar.

May be an illustration of 1 person, standing and text that says '2 SVEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL CREATORS.COM CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR NEWSOM SIGNED A BILL to STUDY REPARATIONS for SLAVERY. BUT CALIFORNIA ENTERED the UNION AS "FREE STATE. WE NEED REPARATIONS for HAVING AN IMBECILE forA GOVERNOR @Ramireztoons michaelpramirez.com'

RogerG

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* “Newsom’s Hollow Ring of Freedom”, Will Swaim, National Review Online, 1/15/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/newsoms-hollow-ring-of-freedom/
* “California regulator rejects desalination plant despite historic drought”, Daniel Trotta, Reuters, 5/13/22, at https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-regulator-rejects-plan-desalination-plant-2022-05-13/
* “California’s Tyrannical Covid ‘Misinformation’ Law”, Pradheep J. Shanker, National Review Online, 10/6/22, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/californias-tyrannical-covid-misinformation-law/
* “Liberals Finally Admit That California Is Shrinking but Still Don’t Accept Blame”, Will Swaim, Nationa,l Review Online, 5/15/22, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/liberals-finally-admit-that-california-is-shrinking-but-still-dont-accept-blame/
* “The Buchenwald Concentration Camp: Patton’s Bastardly Discovery”, Flint Whitlock, Warfare History Network, Summer 2019, at https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/buchenwald-concentration-camp-general-pattons-bastardly-discovery/

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The Economic Philosophy of Ghostbusters: A Wakeup Call for Pete Buttigieg

Overthinking Ghostbusters: Shot by Shot
Venkman (l) and Stantz after they were ejected from the university in “Ghostbusters”.

We should put a brake on our headlong rush to inflate our government.  Imagine, we have a sizeable chunk of our electorate who actually believe that government can, and ought to, achieve equality of result in all aspects of life.  California, have you looked at your roads, schools, crime-ridden communities, rampant vagrancy, and firestorms in your forests?

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Just one look at our Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, should dispel any illusion of something called “government efficiency”.  If there ever was an oxymoron, this is it.  Look at the months it took for the city-owned Port of Los Angeles to whittle down the 100-ship backlog anchored over the horizon?  Buttigieg passes the responsibility to the Labor Secretary to avert a rail strike stoppage to add to the misery at the ports.  Then, along comes a winter storm and my grandson, like thousands of others across the country, faced massive cancellations, and stranded a thousand miles from home.  Can this guy think out of the box, or is he simply a blockhead, one with pedigreed credentials?

US airline services temporarily disrupted, several…

Could Buttigieg survive in the real private sector?  Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) faces the fear of having to earn of living outside the protective academic cocoon, and this after the three paranormal “scientists” were thrown out on their ear by the university administration.  Stantz to Venkman: “You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.”  Maybe our Secretary’s vision would be broadened by a job repairing train tracks once the rest of us are relieved of him.

Progressives Accuse Pete Buttigieg Of Racism For Using The Word 'Heartland' In A Tweet
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg

Really, what did you expect?  Mayor Pete’s overwhelming life experience was at a desk.  From a bluestocking extended stay at elite schools to McKinsey to small-city mayor to ensign in the Navy to politics, the guy was far removed from the practical day-to-day consequences of his work.  I can picture him in the emotional state of Dr. Stantz in 2024.  Take a look.

RogerG

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The Political Philosophy of Ghostbusters

Ghostbusters: Original Cast's Net Worth, Ranked | TheRichest
(L to R) Main characters Stantz, Venkman, and Zeddemore in “Ghostbusters”.

Of course, I’m thinking of “Ghostbusters”, the movie.  The story follows a group of academics in a semi-academic field – the paranormal – who don’t, and won’t, conform to the demands of the campus powers-that-be.  They bust out on their own, form a business, and run into the widening tentacles of the eco-regulators in the person of Walter Peck, inspector of the EPA, third district of New York City.  Please watch below.

Making the tale more relevant, Biden’s EPA is a clone of California and New York’s entangling web of eco-regulators.  So filled with arrogance and hubris, they are busy jettisoning their middle class and a good portion of their economies to other states, just like Peter Venkman and company fled the campus and opened shop in the commercial district of 1980’s NYC.  The script’s parallels with our times are nothing short of fascinating.

Back to the real, Mark Wahlberg has put his Los Angeles 12-bedroom, 20-bath mansion on the market and is decamping for Nevada.  The reason is the same as the one for 300,000 other people who have bolted the state over the past couple of years.  He’s an entrepreneur and family man and finds Nevada a better place for his economic health as Ghostbusters’ Venkman, Stantz, and Spengler would discover in fleeing the college.

Mark Wahlberg, here in April, opened up about a recent move he made with his family.
Mark Wahlberg in April 2022

About the only occupational category whose growth prospects look sunny in California, for instance, is government regulator/inspector.  The equation is simple: more laws, more regulations, more state government employees.  Each year, the buffoons in the asylum formerly known as the state legislature add to the number of Pecks.  One law taking affect this year would require more inspectors of private insurance to enforce a ban on co-pays for abortions.  The state’s minimum wage is on legal auto-pilot and is scheduled to jump to $15.50/hour which means more investigators.  A new law, effective Jan. 1, 2023, would add to the government workforce to compel compliance with the state’s newfound role of sanctuary for the mutilators of children in transgender medical procedures.  New state land use laws will layer more complexity, and regulators, on an already suffocating building industry.  In total, Newsom signed 997 new laws, most to take effect on Jan. 1 of this year.

California New Laws | State | wvgazettemail.com
California Gov. Gavin Newsom displays a state bill signed by him shielding abortion providers and volunteers, June 24, 2022.

Thus, California has turned itself into a sanctuary for immigration lawbreakers, child sexual mutilators, and the country’s budding Walter Pecks.

Kathy Hochul’s State of New York is California, Jr.  How appropriate that the setting for “Ghostbusters” is New York City.  It may as well be Los Angeles or the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area.  These blue havens are awash in Peck-like busybodies.  No wonder Texas and Florida added congressmen and the Bear Flag Republic and the Empire State lost some.  Expect it to continue.

The Movie Rewatch of Great Nostalgia: Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II | Tor.com
Walter Peck, the EPA guy, in “Ghostbusters”

RogerG

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* Mark Wahlberg’s departure from California to Nevada: “Mark Wahlberg left California for Nevada to give his kids ‘a better life’”, Marianne Garvey, CNN, 10/13/22, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/entertainment/mark-wahlberg-california-nevada-move/index.html
* “New California Laws on Abortion, Jaywalking, Rap Lyrics”, AP, USN&WP, 12/30/22, at https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/california/articles/2022-12-30/new-california-laws-on-abortion-jaywalking-rap-lyrics

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60 Minutes Is the Real Jurassic Park

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'60 Minutes' Exhumes Enviro Cult Leader for a New Round of ...
Paul Ehrlich on 60 Minutes

The late great Michael Crichton placed Jurassic Park on a tropical island, but CBS programming execs showed signs that they seized the thing and replanted it in 60 Minutes.  As proof, the show welcomed the new year with the fossil discovery of . . . Paul Ehrlich.  Yep, the Stanford prof and dinosaur is still alive and vigorous at age 90, alive enough to push his signature doomsaying, and 60 Minutes obliged by trotting him out (see below).

What’s with Stanford University?  They seem to be a hotbed for the kind of kooks who are frocked in PhD’s and flock to the limelight like a moth to a porch light.  It’s a tradition at Stanford.  Remember William Shockley, the engineer and Nobel Prize-winning co-inventor of the transistor and inveterate purveyor of racialist mumbo jumbo?  Well, move over Shockley to make room for Ehrlich and colleagues like Tony Barnosky.  Science is their vocation and doom is their game.  Chicken Little has nothing on these folks.

But they’re scientists, right?  They ought to know, right?  Yes, they ought to, but don’t.  They represent a peculiar species of scientist who pushes science beyond its capacities and right into divination.  They take a slice of present data, conjure a trend, and then laser-like project it into the future.  No understanding of history; no understanding of mitigating circumstances.  Based on the results, their soothsaying is no more accurate, maybe less so, than bibliomancy – the practice of closing one’s eyes, randomly opening a book to a page, and pointing the index finger to a line of verse to extract the future.

Bibliomancy has the Answer – Dayology.com

In the past, Ehrlich predicted an earth suffocating under the weight of 4 billion souls (earth’s population in the 1960’s), mass starvation, resource exhaustion, and ecological collapse.  Now, the siren song is mass species extinction under 8 billion souls.  His misses are many and include the famous 1980 lost bet with U. of Maryland economist Julian Simon.  Ehrlich chose five industrial metals and bet that their price would be higher in ten years, expecting the subsequent shortages would lead to price increases.  He lost.  You see, Ehrlich probably wouldn’t make for a good economist.  Ehrlich is blind to financier Henry Clews’s insight in 1918 when Clews wrote “the best cure for high prices is high prices”: prices go up, efficiencies increase, new sources discovered, and prices drop.  For Ehrlich, mitigations be damned, adjustments be damned, and full speed to the apocalypse.

Julian Simon on Optimism and Progress | National Review
Economist Julian Simon

Human capital doesn’t exist in Ehrlich’s mind.  We’re only animals eating up everything that we can get our hands on.  Yet, human beings change their circumstances with innovations.  As a consequence, more food is produced with greater efficiency, wealth increases, fertility declines, urbanization intensifies, and pressure on the wildlands decreases.  So much for the alleged cataclysm of mass extinction.  People like Ehrlich are chronically wrong.

Interestingly, the same 60 Minutes chart of past mass extinctions also shows a recovery afterwards. And the recovery was hundreds of thousands of years before Lenin’s invention of central planning.  No need for technocrats like Ehrlich and Barnosky to herd the masses back into the Middle Ages to avoid these shamans’ predictions of doom.

MY HAIR IS ON FIRE!! - YouTube

Ehrlich and his sidekick Barnosky are programmed to fail in their prognostications.  The problem is entrenched is their reliance on a loose extrapolation from a large area to a smaller one (see below).  The data can also be fraught with hypotheticals in interpretation.  Out of the conjury comes hair-on-fire Armageddons that turn out to be wrong.  We are constantly afflicted with it in everything from plastics to the end of the world in climate change.  We are kept on the edge of our seats in a pass-the-baton series of dooms.

60 Minutes’s resurrection of the fossil Ehrlich proves that hysteria is a natural feature of the human condition, and the barkers will always have a place at the table.  Ironically, progressives pride themselves in their alleged immunity to it and see themselves at war with it, while they are preoccupied with it.  They are the chief purveyors.  Self-delusion has no bounds.

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RogerG

Read more here:
* “60 Minutes Promotes Paul Ehrlich’s Failed Doomsaying One More Time”, Ronald Bailey, Reason, 1/3/23, at https://reason.com/2023/01/03/60-minutes-promotes-paul-ehrlichs-failed-doomsaying-one-more-time/
* “Paul Ehrlich: Wrong on 60 Minutes and for Almost 60 Years”, Peter Jacobsen, Foundation for Economic Education, 1/4/23, at https://fee.org/articles/paul-ehrlich-wrong-on-60-minutes-and-for-almost-60-years/
* The reason for the error in Ehrlich and Barnosky’s predictions can be understood by reading “Species–area relationships always overestimate extinction rates from habitat loss”, Fangliang He and Stephen P. Hubbell, Nature, 5/18/2011, at https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09985

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Whew, What a Blowout! Georgia 65 – TCU 7.

May be an image of 5 people and people standing

As of now, the South is the king of football, with competition from the upper Midwest.  It’s much more than the SEC.  It’s regional dominance.  There are places where physical, masculine virtues still prevail.  Football thrives in a culture that has a place for such attributes.

I invite others to do a detailed analysis of the region’s productivity of top-tier football talent throughout the NCAA top 20.  I’ll admit that it’s more than the South, though.  California still gives the country some of the most highly recruited players in the country: C.J. Stroud (The Ohio State), Bryce Young (Alabama), Brock Bowers (Georgia), to name a few.  Up and down the west coast, schools constantly dip into the state’s talent pool.  Where would Oregon be without California talent?

But the state is shedding population (114,000 last year and almost 118,000 for 2021) and its reigning culture isn’t conducive to the exaltation of virility.  The state is too busy becoming the Mecca of transgenderism, which says a lot about where that social eco-system is heading.  Persistent pockets of male virtue exist, but the trend is increasingly inhospitable.

Texas, like the rest of the South, produces much talent that is diluted among many schools in the region.  So does Florida.  The performance of those states’ schools says little because of the chronic raiding.

In addition, the powerhouse schools of the South have a tendency to dominate because they are assisted by coaches who have the magic elixir to draw in much of the region’s pool of talent: Dabo Sweeney (Clemson), Nick Saban (Alabama), Kirby Smart (Georgia) for instance.  There will always be exceptions, but they confirm what Cicero of ancient Rome said in Latin, exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis, which means the exception confirms the rule in cases not excepted.  In my mind, the generality of the South’s preeminence rings true.

As for the Midwest, they compete with the South.  The Ohio State, Michigan, and Penn State compete with the best of the South.  Based on what I saw in this year’s playoff games, the real national championship game was between The Ohio State and Georgia.  This region’s dominance, like the South, draws on the same residue of cultural male virtue.

This shift of football power may partially explain USC and UCLA’s move to the Big Ten in 2025.  Some say that it’s all about the money.  Yes, it is, and money follows success.  It’s striking to realize that these big schools have to turn to red America to maintain competitiveness.

Some of my dear friends and family in California may find this assessment jarring, but it’s my judgment of the state of play circa 2023.  I could be wrong, and the situation could change.  There’s nothing more permanent than flux in human affairs.

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RogerG

Read more here:

* On California’s precarious demographic situation:

“For Second Straight Year, California Sees a Population Decline”, Tim Arango, NY Times, May 4, 2022, at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/04/us/california-population-decline.html

“California’s shrinking population has big impacts”, Dan Walters, CalMatters, April 10, 2022, at https://calmatters.org/commentary/2022/04/california-population-decline/

“California’s population keeps shrinking”, Marc Sternfield, KTLA, Dec. 26, 2022, at https://ktla.com/news/california/californias-population-keeps-shrinking/

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One More Reason to Avoid Primetime FNC

Tucker Carlson Rips 'Snarling Face' Dan Crenshaw After Congressman ...

I pulled this Carlson rant from Mediate (below), an admittedly left-wing site. The website can be disreputable but here is Carlson in the all-too-familiar raiment of the contrarian. That’s it, he’s crafted this persona of being a contrarian, an inveterate opponent of whatever any large group wants – or as he oftentimes prattles, a foe of “lying, pomposity, smugness, and groupthink”. It’s a simple-minded reflex to defend the smaller number against the many, even if the “underdog” happens to be a Al Capone. It’s ludicrous.

* Watch here: https://www.mediaite.com/tv/tucker-carlson-blasts-fox-news-contributor-ben-domenech-as-a-moron-and-a-buffoon-for-his-speakership-take/

He sprays vituperation and smug giggles at both the condemnable and reasonable, apparently showing no sign of being able to distinguish between the risible MSNBC nutcases and the sensible others. The only discernable metric being the number: the smaller good, the larger bad. In regard to the Republican leadership fight, he’s a bigot against the 200 and patron saint of the 20. By that standard, if the guy was around Petrograd in 1917, he’d be giddy over the little cluster of Bolsheviks around Lenin. No serious analysis of the demands and antics of the 20 is presented. It’s rabbit-hole logic.

How Far Right Are The 20 Republicans Who Voted Against McCarthy - PHP ...
The 20 Republicans opposing McCarthy
Communist leader defends Bolsheviks from Putin’s treason charges — RT Russian politics
Bolshevik leadership: Lenin in middle row, second from right.

The contrarian schtick has its limitations. Tucker, try leveling your gaze at the 20 as you do the 200. Surely, there’s something more to the imbroglio than the size of the two sides. Hannity, to his credit, has exposed the 20’s most outspoken rabble rousers to some cross examination. After all the chest thumping, the clique demands attention, chaos, and power over the wishes of the other 200. Tucker didn’t portray them for what they are: a conspiratorial rump of the likes frequently seen in history from the Jacobins to the Khmer Rouge.

McCarthy finally won the Speakership on the 15th vote, and that with 216 votes, not the 218 that was repeated ad nauseum because of the kinks of plurality voting in House rules. 6 of the kamikazes still preferred going down in flames.

Kamikaze-in-flames-off-USS-yorktown - Plan A Academy

In the end, McCarthy is, as Phil Klein of National Review said in this morning’s piece, “Speaker in name only”. A weakened Speaker will grant free range for these deadenders to rampage across the Republican caucus all the way to a drubbing in 2024. According to the surrender agreement with the clique, McCarthy must face a vote to fire him whenever a single Republican gets his or her panties in a bunch. The Freedom Caucus and its rump has greater weight than any other group on the omnipotent Rules Committee.

The fact is, the rump can’t, as they say, “deliver results for the American people”. The boast exhibits no understanding of the Constitution, even a rudimentary awareness of separation of powers. The Dems control half of Article I (the Senate) and the Article II branch (executive). The rump’s sparsely supported designs face a deep-sixing in the Senate and Biden’s veto pen. Oversight investigations will ensue in the House, but that would occur without these embarrassing histrionics. Looking down the road, 20 halfwits could very well spell doom for the GOP and increase the likelihood of untrammeled Democrat neo-socialism after 2024.

Thank you, the carnival barkers of FNC, for making it easier for Democrats to ram through their plans to gut what used to be the United States of America. My only hope is that the bulk of the American people will see through the nonsense, in spite of the 20 clowns in the House Republican Conference under the protective aura of the FNC commentariat.

I’m hoping for 20 well-funded primary challenges in 2024. And that includes you, Matt Rosendale (R, Montana 2nd congressional district).

RogerG

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* “Kevin McCarthy Elected Speaker in Name Only”, Philip Klein, Narional Review Online, 1/7/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/kevin-mccarthy-elected-speaker-in-name-only/

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Why I Have Stopped Watching Fox News

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L to R: Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity

My viewing of the Fox News Channel (FNC) has cratered.  Why, if you’re even interested?  They seem to be speaking to an increasingly narrow fringe of the right.  A conservative cannot be limited to Trump-worship, neo-protectionism, neo-isolationism, and pandering to the unhinged on the far, far right.  Extolling those in Republicans ranks who mirror the antics of the Democrats’ “Squad” isn’t a winning formula for me.  It’s off-putting.

The news division is different from the commentariat side.  Those reporting the news at FNC do yeoman work in carrying stories that should be leads in our now fully woke legacy media, but aren’t.  However, the big money and attention in FNC goes to the primetime lineup of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham.  The school is still out on Greg Gutfeld and Jesse Watters.  Carlson is a repulsive booster of neo-isolationism, an odd critic of support for the victims of brutal aggression (Ukraine), a knee-jerk carper against the “big” in big business, and a half-witted reviler of free markets, among other things.  Hannity can’t seem to go beyond Trump-worship.  It’s disgusting.  Like Tucker, Laura rails against a nebulous “establishment” that eerily and rhetorically performs the same function as CRT’s hazy “white supremacy” and Marx’s “working class”.  She and Carlson conduct a regular tag-team hatchet job on Zelensky, and she follows Carlson into the swamp of isolationism.  I could go on but won’t bore you with an ever-lengthening laundry list.

I found myself yelling at the tv at age 70 as when I was 30 years younger screaming at Dan Rather.  I’d rather ingest my news through reading.  The Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Washington Examiner, Townhall.com, National Review, etc., staying away from the kookier sites, with supplements from some of the dinosaurs, are my current choices.  At least in that way, I can better filter out the balderdash, and keep my sanity.

ABC, CBS, and NBC nightly news covered climate for less than two hours in 2013

FNC was a necessary counterpoint to the monotonous leftism most everywhere else.  It’s too bad that they regularly soil themselves in the 6 to 9 pm (MST) time slot.  Au revoir Fox News Channel.

Access by Design

RogerG

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Primary Them!

Gaetz goes to bat for Boebert, talks treatment of conservative women during interview - World Posts
Matt Gaetz (r, Fla.) and Lauren Boebert (R, Co.), two of the twenty Republicans opposing McCarthy as Speaker

Still no Speaker for the new Republican-majority Congress.

What happens when you cross a lunkhead with P.T. Barnum?  The blending of DNA gives you the Republican rump opposing Kevin McCarthy as Speaker and Republican efforts to put the brakes on the Democrats’ scheme to gut America.  Some of the gaggle take after the lunkhead side of the gene pool, others the carnival barker.  For others exhibiting the wild gene in the family tree, nothing but the perfect will do.  The result is a “fecal” (rhymes with chit) show.

If you were looking forward to Republican governance in the House, well, expect to be aghast.  If you weren’t, sit back and watch the drama-queen cast of the Keystone Cops at work.  It should be a great show.  20 Republicans are making a laughingstock of the other 202.  If the rump gets a scalp, such as McCarthy’s, expect scalp-taking to be routine.  Meaning, who’d want the leadership job among this cast of narcissistic dolts?

Donald Trump provided the modern template for the drama queen that lies at the heart of many a politician’s soul, but even he finds Gaetz’s stunt “Sad!”  What’s more striking is that many of these deadenders don’t really mind if the Democrats regain the Speaker’s gavel.  Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News reports that Gaetz, Boebert (R, Co.), and Perry (R, Pa.) told McCarthy in a private meeting that “they don’t mind if the speaker vote goes to plurality and [Dem leader] Hakeem Jeffries is elected [because] they’ll fight him.”  If true, it speaks volumes for the mindset of these clowns.  They want to fight and not govern.  They’re into political theater and not responsible decision-making.

No wonder the Republicans are losing the ‘burbs and the degreed middle class.  The Republicans are presenting a choice between the sweaty histrionics of Republican William Jennings Bryans and the socialist glibness of California Bay Area Democrats.  Many mortgage payers might prefer the glibness to the blustery pandemonium.

To hell with ‘em. Don’t give them a scalp.  If anything, hand them theirs.  The only choice is McCarthy, period.  A disorganized House is clearly their fault.  They will be guilty of any return of the crippling Democrats to the seats of power and control of the House’s agenda and committees.  Primary them!  If they can’t cooperate with fellow Republicans, they can’t cooperate with anybody.  Start planning the campaigns now: money, campaign staffs, and candidates.

May be an image of outdoors

RogerG

Read more here:

* Jake Sherman’s scoop of the private meeting with McCarthy at https://twitter.com/JakeSherman/status/1610275667756679169