A blog in defense of western civilization by Roger Graf
Author: RogerG
I am a retired teacher and coach, Social Science Department chairman, community college instructor in Physical and Human Geography. I have attended 4 colleges with relevant degrees and certificates in History, Religious Studies/Philosophy, Education, and Planning and Community Development. I am also a 3rd generation native Californian, now refugee living in northwest Montana.
* Please read John McCormack’s rebuttal to “2,000 Mules” at https://www.nationalreview.com/…/06/12/sorry-trump-lost/
John McCormack
I have been asked to watch Dinesh D’Souza’s “2,000 Mules” by people who believe it to be gospel on the November 2020 election. I didn’t because spending the money elsewhere mattered more to me. Heaven knows, I got the gist from a host of Trump-friendly publications and websites without the added expense. Being a man on the right, access is no problem. After reading about many of the same sources referenced by D’Souza in the film, D’Souza’s argument ranks up there with anything written by the author Dan Brown (“Angels & Demons”, “The Da Vinci Code”, and “Inferno”, etc.). The only difference between the two D’s is that Brown acknowledges his work to be fiction.
There is a debate here that needs to be aired. Trump, the leading contender for the Republican 2024 crown, is running on … what for it … November 2020. His contention that the election was stolen is the centerpiece of his campaign, along with the long trail of verbal abuse directed at anyone he doesn’t like, normally people who haven’t shown sufficient obeisance. He made it the focus of his return to the center stage, so it deserves a careful examination. John McCormack gives one of the best and most concise critiques of the Trump claims that I’ve come across.
First, from the get-go, the notion that a massive, sprawling plot mostly across five states, maybe more, involving hundreds of thousands of fellow conspirators with none of this huge crowd being detected or slipping up boggles the mind. That alone, without seeing the film, should cause a person to be very leery. There are millions of spine-tingling stories across the internet of mysterious dark forces bringing down the world. How is this one any different? They, like all tall tales of expansive conspiracies, have to maintain an inhuman level of operational secrecy. The absence of at least a few dufuses to spill the beans among the hundreds of thousands of participants (voters, couriers, organizers) simply can’t pass the smell test.
Here’s one rule for rationally assessing conspiracy claims: believability is in inverse proportion to the number of participants.
The “mules” in the film are the 54,000 couriers (not 2,000) who allegedly stuffed ballot boxes in key locations. None has been fingered by Trump’s army of independent bounty hunters, nor law enforcement, to prove the existence of the plot. Nor will the producers and publisher divulge the names of the left’s NGO’s who are supposedly at the center of the scheme. Dominion’s $787 million lawsuit award hangs over the producers and publishers who might be inclined to name some. Apparently, millions of dollars for over-priced attorneys and the need to bribe some in the jury pool is a bit too daunting to run the risk.
The database for the story consists of cellphone pings and security camera footage on adjacent buildings. I’m reminded of the techie acronym gigo: garbage data goes in, garbage comes out. Data doesn’t stand alone; it is massaged by prior assumptions. So, if you go into the issue assuming something is fishy, don’t be surprised that in your imagination a fish pops out. But it’s not a fish; it’s the lingering smell in your nostrils from cleaning the garbage cans the day before. The pings could be delivery and Uber drivers and the surveilled clutches of ballots at drop boxes turn out to be a family member legally depositing ballots for the family.
Not that fraud doesn’t happen. Of course, it does. It occurs in every election, and is made easier by ballot harvesting, no voter ID, and shot gunning ballots through the mail turning election day into election season. But it doesn’t happen like this. When you have elections like this, elections begin to lose respect and you end up fanning the imaginations of the already unhinged. That’s the real lesson of 2020.
Let’s go back to election day being . . . election day, and 70% of the ballots cast in-person. Add voter ID and we might have more people accepting the results. We don’t need to follow a self-serving narcissist into another electoral defeat. The GOP’s self-preservation should trump Trump.
Donald TrumpOedipus, King of ThebesMAGA/Trump supporters, 2023Dr. Faustus selling his soul to the devil
In 2015, I had this sinking feeling that once Trump sunk his tentacles into the GOP, he’d be hard to cleanse from the party’s bloodstream.
He is a tabloid personality with a harsh mouth and revels in political theatrics. Republicans, as it turned out, were in a mood for a drama queen in 2016, and many still are. They wanted somebody to “own the libs”. Trump first gave them drama about Obama’s birth certificate and followed it with a litany of juvenile banter in “crooked Hillary” (honestly, she may be), “slow/low energy/clueless/not a man” Jeb, “I’ve never seen a human being [John Kasich] eat in such a disgusting fashion”, and now he’s progressed all the way to “coward/weak/lazy/low life/gutless pig” Bill Barr. And to think that there are people who still defend this man and his behavior to this day. According to recent polls, he’s the overwhelming choice to be the Republican nominee. Disgusting. It’s enough for a rock-ribbed Republican such as myself to rethink my party registration. Is this what it means to be a Republican?
He’s embarrassing. I’m embarrassed.
The latest Trump dust up is his federal indictment under:
• 18 U.S.C. § 793(e), “Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information” (31 counts)
• 18 USC §1512, “Tampering with a witness, victim, or an informant” (3 counts)
• 18 U.S. Code § 1519, “Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy” (1 count)
• 18 USC § 1001, “Statements or entries generally” (concerns false statements, coverups, etc.) (3 counts)
The first 31 counts draw from Section 793 of the US Code which relates to parts of the old Espionage Act. If you look at the kinds of documents that were bouncing around at his Mar-a-Lago estate and elsewhere – intelligence briefings, contingent US military plans, foreign and domestic military assessments, etc. – this is much more than diary entries, gifts from one head of state to another, personal letters, etc. The highly sensitive nature of the documents demands a different treatment in law. That’s one of the reasons for Section 793 and not the Public Records Act.
The other 7 counts, if true, are evidence of Trump’s pure hubris. I suppose that if you’ve dodged so many bullets, you might come to think of yourself as immune. It’s as if he thinks that he is wearing an invisible Lakota Sioux ghost shirt which makes him invulnerable to the bullets from DC’s henchmen. Like other forms of magic, it works till it doesn’t (the one surviving ghost shirt from the 1890’s has dried blood around holes in it). In this case, there is an evidentiary basis in the indictment for obstruction of justice. They’ve got Trump on tape discussing attempts to mislead investigators and hide the documents, suborning others to commit perjury. Then there’s the corroborative testimony of people in Trump’s inner circle. Granted, the prosecution’s evidence will have to withstand cross examination and counter arguments by Trump’s legal eagles, but if the evidence is valid, it should raise more than a few eyebrows, with the possible exception of the most committed diehards.
Most troubling is the reaction of the media on the right. The commentary can be summed up in “double standard, double standard, double standard”. Very little of it focuses on the contents of the indictment. Some of it is silly in the extreme. Hugh Hewitt, a radio host that I respect for his generally calm and reasoned demeanor on air, expressed his disappointment that a rumored selling by Trump of classified information to the Saudis didn’t materialize in the indictment. His reaction after reading it: “Is that all there is?” Upon hearing that, I said, “What!?” Is the fact that the indictment failed to live up to the wildest speculation on MSNBC or the ladies on The View a real argument against it? Hewitt, you’ve got to be kidding.
He was dismissive of the first 31 counts, the claimed Espionage Act violations, ostensibly because of the unprosecuted transgressions by Biden, Pence, Hillary, and Clinton proteges like Sandy Berger – the double standard argument morphed into an excuse for the mindlessly casual treatment of highly sensitive national security papers. In effect, may as well shred this part of the US Code. This Hewitt response was without seeing the exact nature of the documents, which will come out in court. The prosecutors know this; Trump knows it; the legal eagles know it. If it turns out that all they’ve got is love letters between Trump and “rocket man”, or some such, the DOJ will be wiping egg from its face and providing one more reason to defenestrate the FBI and defang the Garland gang. If these documents prove to be extremely sensitive, the raw egg will be dripping down the face and all over the casual attire of a good portion of the right’s punditry class.
One of those in need of a washcloth will be Mollie Hemingway, a noted commentator in the conservative, pro-Trump firmament. Today (6/13/23), on Hewitt’s show, she ostentatiously proclaimed in hyperbolic bombast, “For me to take this [the fed’s Trump indictment] seriously . . . I need to see hundreds of Russia-collusion-hoax people in jail.” Ruminate on that rant for a moment. Until we retroactively correct for all those who got away, we cannot enforce the law. It’s ludicrous. She’s making the case to selectively not enforce the law à la Alvin Bragg or any of the other Soros-backed DA’s who have been recently inflicted on us. She does this while also admitting that the case against Trump in the indictment is troubling. Is she an advocate of ignoring the evidence till enough Democrat scalps are tied to her lance? Where does this line of illogic stop, at the point where the US Code is effectively eviscerated? Ignore the evidence against Trump till we get Hillary in chains?
If the highly classified nature of the documents proves genuine, while honestly not a fan of Karl Marx, his famous dictum will apply to this current crop of the right’s commentariat: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
The second batch of charges – those involving obstruction (of justice) – at least causes a pregnant pause for some of Trump’s past stalwart defenders. The guest lineup on Fox News was left with stumbling admissions of Trump in serious trouble. That’s when they were forced to elevate their assessment beyond their “double standard” shibboleth and into the details of the indictment. All the talk about “double standard” will ring hollow if in court the highly classified nature of the documents is born out and evidence of Trump’s perfidy and irresponsibility is shown to be valid.
The main problem for the media on the right is that they have manufactured a pickle for themselves. They have not cultivated a conservative audience but instead nurtured a Trump one. The creation of a base reliant on such an unstable personality is asking for trouble. This media runs the risk of alienating this base if they are forced to deal honestly with the facts. That audience is likely to be siloed in their own echo chamber and not appreciative of the exposure of their demigod emperor as not wearing any clothes. For most people, including Trump, nudity will not enhance their appearance.
The media on the right, right now, acts as if they are sitting on pins and needles. They reach for the thin reeds of silly arguments. They fail to come to grips with their central problem: they hitched their wagon to a wild horse. Or more accurately, they made a bargain with the devil. So, Trump is a reincarnation of Sophocles’ Oedipus, King of Thebes (see “Oedipus Rex”), experiencing the wages of his pure hubris, and the Trump base is impersonating Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, selling one’s soul for instant gratification.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Jack Smith’s indictment can be found at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.3.0.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0A-iRN3cPhLLJJwVT7jbt8WOR6ymkohVTX0v7r634xtVjR5SeHV7SeMp0
A photo published by the U.S. Justice Department showing boxes of documents stored in a storage room at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida in 2021. (U.S. Justice Department/Handout via Reuters)
Well, it’s done. Trump is officially indicted by federal prosecutors. Yes, again, but this one may stick. One thing has always been true about Trump: he’s reckless in his language and behavior. He’s so provocative that his opponents want nothing more than to bury him. They tried in bogus impeachments and the outrageous Bragg indictment. But the Jack Smith indictment may be something different. Sometimes braggarts have the mental capacity to be stupid. If you read the indictment, if proven in court before a jury, Trump is not only mulishly stupid but quite possibly criminally so.
Read the indictment for yourself. Here it is: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.3.0.pdf
I should have been more reserved in condemning the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on August 8, 2022. I was furious at what seemed to me to be just another DC hit job on Trump. Regardless, they discovered a treasure trove of classified documents that covered military plans, capabilities, military assessments of our friends and foes, etc., and rashly shared by Trump with friends and apologists like Kid Rock.
If established in court, the double-standard defense quickly loses its force. The acts are so egregious. Anyway, since Hillary, Comey, and Biden avoided prosecution, it is no defense for Trump. It’s an argument to throw the book at Hillary, Comey, Biden . . . and Trump. Constantly, our criminal justice system is wracked with a few convictions in a sea of non-prosecutions and acquittals of nearly identical circumstances. At a certain point, in flagrant situations, the law must be enforced. It’s too bad, though, that the feds, who have soiled themselves so blatantly in the recent past, are now tasked to bring Trump to the bar of justice.
I can understand the skepticism on the right. But we are now duly warned about putting our faith in a man who has the awful habit of being his own worst enemy. Maybe he actually believed his own rhetoric: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”
The ancient Greeks called it hubris which led to nemesis and on to personal destruction. The Trump saga reads like Sophocles’ tragedy, “Oedipus Rex”. Go ahead, go online and read a few synopses of the play. Trump is Oedipus, King of Thebes.
* Please watch the entirety of Chris Christie’s presidential announcement below. It’s a hoot. It shows a guy with the capacity to talk extemporaneously, with good sense, and without the juvenile rhetoric of the man from Mar-a-Lago.
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Today’s pundits frequently refer to America’s political scene as one composed of tribes. Actually, “cults” is more accurate. We have the woke cult (neo-Marxism), a gender fluidity cult, climate cult, the Gaia cult, etc. Well, for some on the right, let’s add the Trump and nonsense cults. Frequently, those two overlap.
So, what is a cult? Words such as “excessive admiration”, “a fashionable person or thing among a particular group”, “veneration or devotion for a particular figure or object” stand out in the dictionaries. Putting it together, it’s a siloed group of people who are transfixed by a person or idea and revel in confirmation bias (seek only information that supports their biases).
Regarding Chris Christie, he has stepped forward to call out the cult in the midst of the Republican base – the cult of the orange man. Prior to him, all Republicans in the Republican presidential derby, and before, pranced around like they were walking on egg shells, afraid to upset the delicate sensibilities of Trump’s rabid followers. Quite frankly, it’s about time the cult was challenged. Thanks to his fortitude, Christie jumped to near the top of my score card.
And Vivek Ramaswamy leaped to the bottom. There is a crazy element in the right’s “populist” base – another aspect of the orange man’s cult – that believes our fiscal problems are driven by excessive spending on . . . foreign aid. Not only that, they think that appeasing aggressors leads to peace. Hmmmm, where have we heard that before? No “Si vis pacem, para bellum” of the Roman general Vegetius for this panderer to the mob – er, cult. If you’re interested, it means, “If you want peace, prepare for war”.
Vivek Ramaswamy
No sure path to appeasement can be imagined than knee-capping the victim by ending their access to U.S. foreign aid. Foreign aid, though, represents less than 1% of our federal budget ($39 billion). That’s 1.7% of our two biggest drivers of the federal budget – Social Security and Medicare – at $2.2 trillion annually. We are not even talking about peanuts. More accurately, we are talking about a particle of a peanut that unhappily fell under the track of an Abrams tank. So, Vivek will lead the charge against the smallest budgetary particle of a particle going to Ukraine on his way to bootlicking a thug, Putin. He’ll have to share the other boot with Trump.
As Christie says of Trump, the man of Mar-a-Largo would quickly end the Ukraine War by giving Ukraine to Russia. And Vivek would be cheerleading the entire way. This duopoly of demagoguery is an insult to rationality. Get this: show your spine to the CCP by showing how quickly you cave to a thug, an ally of the Beijing thug. And this on the heels of the Afghanistan bugout. Abandonment and surrender are a show of strength? How does that work? Chairman Xi must be shaking in his boots, the same boots that Xi shares with Putin, the same ones dripping in Vivek/Trump spittle.
Hooray for Christie bringing all this lunacy to light. I hope that he keeps it up. He’ll steal the stage from a man whose sole theatrical tact is to bully. As for Vivek, fresh from the taste of leather in his mouth, Christie in comparison shows himself to be the adult in the room.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Vivek Ramaswamy’s appeasement policy: “Vivek Ramaswamy willing to give ‘major concessions to Russia’ to end Ukraine war”, Ryan King, Washington Examiner, 6/4/23, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/vivek-ramaswamy-give-concessions-russia-ukraine
* Please watch the discussion below sponsored by the Institute of Public Affairs (Australia). The 43 minutes are an introduction to the other side in the greenie energy debate.
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Are we engaging in a civilization-wide bilateral orchiectomy? At this point in time, it certainly seems so. What I call a civilization-wide castration is actually our attempt to no longer be productive. It’s practically a reversion to the Stone Age. How? We are gutting our ability to maintain our standard of living by first destroying the energy that powers it and by secondly convincing us that it’s the right thing to do. In true totalitarian fashion, robust debate on the subject is killed so only one message – the approved one – gets through by open indoctrination in the schools and the censoring of alternative viewpoints. It’s one part a Soviet school system and second part Inquisition. The result is misery.
The heavy-handed censorship blankets many topics, everything from racial disparities to climate change to transgender ideology. There’s only one approved opinion on these issues so that view must no longer be treated as opinion but as fact. Take the fate of the UK’s Maya Forstater, an accomplished tax consultant and women’s rights activist. She fell afoul of the thought police by saying sex is “real, important, immutable, and not to be conflated with gender identity.” Out of the woodwork emerged the chronically over-sensitive who claimed they were “harmed”. She was dismissed by her employer, the think tank Center for Global Development.
She didn’t blithely accept the punishment but sued. The initial tribunal ruled against her when it announced that her views were “not worthy of respect in a democratic society.” A High Court judge later reversed the decision on appeal. She was given a reprieve, but that didn’t end thought control throughout the western world. “Not worthy of respect” is imposed everywhere.
The groundwork for censorship was laid in the K-grad schools. Kids have been imbued with the theology of the green cult from age 5, if not before on Sesame Street. Apocalyptic climate change is said to be happening, fossil fuels are the principal perpetrator, and “renewables” and “sustainable” enter the lexicon in the form of forests of windmills and expanses of solar panels. No logic, empiricism, or questioning is taught or expected of the pupils, or exposure to another point of view.
I am a retired teacher but still remember the State of California mandating recycling initiatives on the part of every school district in the early 2000’s. As part of it, my high school established an environment student club which, among other things, peddled paper and plastic recycling boxes to every classroom. Most teachers complied, I didn’t. Why? I asked of the students to give me logically and empirically valid reasons for doing it. They responded with the usual litany but when challenged couldn’t take the conversation beyond the rudimentary talking points. I actually used them as guinea pigs in front of my class to illustrate a functioning example of logic and empiricism. I simply asked them to prove it. They couldn’t. Adult others in the movement could probably make the case, but the kids merely expressed propaganda but showed no inkling of being able to practice logic or empiricism, both deductive and inductive reasoning.
This is what we are producing: kids without functioning brains. And kids without functioning brains turn into adults without . . . . The scientific method can’t function without a healthy skepticism. Robust debate can’t either. The mental stultification is happening on the climate change front to the detriment of our long-term prospects.
The whole subject is discussed in an atmosphere purposefully starved of another point of view. If fossil fuels are so bad, what’s the alternative? Windmills and solar panels? Hydrogen, the tides? Any gambit is trumpeted for a while, till the reality sinks in. Right now, wind and solar is the latest faddish panacea. But what happens when the wind stops and the sun is on the other side of the planet or hidden by a blanket of clouds? Simple question, but nothing but crickets. Unstated to the kiddies is the backup maintenance of steamed-up fossil fuel and nuclear plants, or the long anticipated second coming of batteries. Have these evangelists of apocalyptic climate change ever conjured the mental picture of the reality of huge forests of windmills, seas of solar panels, and the massive warehouses of batteries dotting the countryside like so many Amazon distribution centers? Mind you, the massive battery collectives don’t exist, and the financial and environmental costs of trying to make them is monumentally prohibitive. It’s a scandal.
Thomas Sowell was famous for saying, “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” What are the trade-offs for the humongous pursuit of “renewables” and the eradication of fossil fuels? Why, of course, it’s prosperity! Greenie energy is unworkable and hugely expensive. At the end of the day, the trade-off is an increase in the number of people below the poverty line.
Go figure. We’re educating and unthinkingly clawing our way back to the early 19th century.
RogerG
Read more here:
* The travails of Maya Forstater is recounted in “Cancel Culture Harms Us All”, Madeleine Kearns, National Review, 4/24/22, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/cancel-culture-harms-us-all/
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company founder Morris Chang (Sam Yeh/Getty Images)
Mr. Chang’s comment in the title came a mere matter of months after a much-ballyhooed opening of a new Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC) facility in Phoenix, Arizona, a heavily subsidized joint effort with the state of Arizona and the federal government’s CHIPS Act. President Biden gushed during the opening ceremonies that manufacturing in the U.S. “is back, folks.” However, Mr. Chang had a hard look at the financials and concluded that the Arizona plant was a loser and the CHIPS Act ($52 billion in chip subsidies) was a “very expensive exercise in futility.” TSMC is scaling back operations at the new plant.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is building its first fabrication plant in North Phoenix. (TSMC)
Why the harsh assessment? The “folks” at TSMC came to realize that business activity in America is a much more expensive proposition than they had earlier contemplated. We are simply uncompetitive and the freebies – free infrastructure, other giveaways, tax goodies, etc. – can’t make up for the cultural, social, political, and economic deficits. The Rust Belt, California’s economic decrepitude, and the other blue states’ dismal economic futures are not magical, accidental happenstances. They are a byproduct of America’s current – and past – infatuation with government intervention for an ever-expanding list of excuses.
The Democratic Party is the institutional gatekeeper of this our bumbling central planning, with some Republicans tagging along in the hope of sharing in the reflected glory of a big and splashy event. But for the donkey party, they see themselves as the keeper of the lodestar – a sort of Ark of the Covenant – of their vision, and it is none other than the New Deal. It’s a forever template to be repeated endlessly. Of course, one must ignore the fact that it was a disaster. The depression became a Great Depression which persisted for a decade, was interrupted by the emergency of World War II, and was set to resume if subsequent Republican Congresses in the late 1940’s hadn’t interceded to quash much of the madness
Men pushing wheel barrows in Civil Works Administration project in the 1930’s.In spite of the tremendous federal government interventions, unemployment remained high throughout the 1930’s. One can conclude that FDR’s New Deal was a massive failure, hugely ineffectual, or helped to prolong the Depression. Whichever, it was a disaster.
Whenever the donkey party ascends the grimy pole of power, their favorite ploy is to imitate FDR. So, concerns of declining domestic manufacturing – which, if true, was a result of government interventions – is to be addressed by . . . more government intervention. Thus, the CHIPS Act is just another exercise in flooding the zone with taxpayer moneys like in the heady days of FDR’s meddling.
True, today, Trump and his cadre of “populist” Republicans also love the idea of slathering gobs of the public treasury on favorite obsessions such as manufacturing and employing the stick of government intervention in tariffs to protect their golden boy. They don’t have the smarts to understand that it’s central planning by another name. Call it “industrial policy”. It’s a rebranded New Deal for a new era of demagogues and nitwits.
Why did this latest effort at what doesn’t work fail? Mr. Chang belatedly noticed that he entered the snake pit that is America. The Rust Belt of the Upper Midwest became a rusty belt of abandoned factories, expanding slums, chronic unemployment, and a declining tax base because of the unrestrained greed of government-empowered labor unions, onerous taxation, and the country’s ascent to the zenith of reregulating its economy. Much of what made the Rust Belt rusty remains, and gets a boost whenever the donkey party is granted the keys to the kingdom.
Think about all the ways that America is an economic snake pit. Ever since FDR’s New Deal lavishly spent and bullied farmers, workers, and entrepreneurs for a decade, Democrats have assiduously worked to revive the monster. The 1970’s rise of environmentalism replaced the 1930’s corporatism and socialism as the go-to excuse to bring back the Leviathan. Out came the well-intentioned Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and their subsequent amendments, and herd of agencies and regulations.
California has a housing crisis for the same reason that Mr. Chang has a gloomy attitude about chip manufacturing in Arizona, or any other place in America. Permitting and the host of other approvals easily doubles the cost of plant construction as compared to Taiwan. Additionally, labor costs are through the roof: triple, maybe four times the cost of Taiwanese workers when you factor in all the mandated benefits alongside the higher wages and salaries. Don’t expect these numbers to remain the same for long if local lefties discover America’s proven appetite for hiking the minimum wage. The jump in wages for fast food workers ripples through the economy all the way to the plant floor.
The quality of what economists call human capital is another troubling factor. Chief among the attributes of human capital is a robust work ethic, which includes timely, quick responses to problems at work. Shang-yi Chiang, TSMC’s head of research and development, was quoted as saying, “people worked so much harder in Taiwan.” He cites the example of an equipment failure at 1 a.m. being immediately repaired by 2 a.m. in Taiwan. In America, the plant has to wait till 10 a.m. He concludes about the island’s workforce, “They [workers] do not complain, and their spouse does not complain either.”
SEIU picketers chant while sitting and marching during the county union workers (SEIU 1021) strike held at the Solano County Governement Center plaza, Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2015, in Fairfield. (Steve Reczkowski/Daliy Republic)
Of course, panderers at Fox News or MSNBC, and “populists” everywhere, would counter with something about Americans not being wage slaves, or similar rhetoric. But they ignore the time when Taiwan’s Horatio Algierses were actually Americans of the 19th century. A cursory biographical reading of the lives of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Ford, etc., reads like Chaing’s depiction of the average Taiwanese employee. Did we lose our va-va-voom in an avalanche of modern self-satisfaction, self-esteem, and victimhood indoctrination?
Indeed, indoctrination is the watchword in describing much of American public education today. As for teaching math, science, reading, history, literature, and civics, the academic core, NAEP scores have stagnated at embarrassing levels if not fallen. Proficiency in U.S. History and Civics by eighth-graders currently hovers around 14% and 22% respectively. The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) shows a significant step down from Taiwan to the U.S. in academic performance in math and science.
The differential would probably be much worse if the U.S. hadn’t experienced a large influx of Asians over the past few decades who are still somewhat immune from our pop-cultural depredations. They dominate enrollments in elite high schools and college programs in math and science to such an extent that Big Academia practices covert reverse discrimination against them, treating them as “white” in this new era of blatant DEI racial favoritism.
Yes, friendly foreign investors face a snake pit of an ill-prepared labor pool, one with a declining appreciation for hard work, and an economic environment plagued by a host of collectivist busy bodies who are heavily bankrolled by the hyper-wealthy possessing the means to insulate themselves from the insipid consequences of their lofty ideals. Analogies work best in describing this state of affairs. A snake pit is an accurate depiction of the economic ecosystem but flies-to-cow-paddies or maybe piranhas-in-a-feeding-frenzy is a much better fit for our government interventions of regulation and subsidies. American government brings to the table its retinue of rent seekers and socialistic/neo-Marxist partisans to muck up the works. Throw out the money and regulatory power and like flies or piranha this brood shows up to feed on the carcass. Apparently, TSMC doesn’t relish being viewed as cold meat on the side of the road.
Welcoming TSMC with the CHIPS Act, our government hid the regulatory “guardrails” (Biden’s word) that turned the well-intentioned into a feeding frenzy. The law to replant chip manufacturing in the U.S. was saddled with mandates for favored demographics, our adversarial labor unions, greenie canards, and DEI and ESG and all the other acronyms of the hard left’s political project. As in “Arbeit Macht Frei” over the gates of Auschwitz, the “CHIPS Act Notice of Funding Opportunity” welcomes recipients of this government largesse. This gamut of insidiousness in the “Notice” was the translation of the Act’s language by the Department of Commerce and the National Institute of Standards and Technology into an expensive regulatory morass.
Since analogies work best, quicksand is more accurate than “revitalization”. “Revitalization” means to make healthy again, but health isn’t the actual goal. The CHIPS Act was just another vehicle to advance a political and cultural revolution. And these revolutions are expensive, and two centuries of experience shows them to be descents into a life of, in Thomas Hobbes’s words, the “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.
Beware of our government’s handouts. Our dole didn’t benefit the poor – if their neighborhoods are any indication – and they won’t benefit anyone operating with a bottom line.
RogerG
Read more here:
* For a account of the New Deal, go to the following: The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, Amity Shlaes, Harper, 2008. The “forgotten man” in the title is a reference to the average worker, taxpayer, and businessman, not to the Left’s litany of the “oppressed”.
* The situation involving TSMC’s Arizona chips plant is appraised in “Why the CHIPS Act Will Fail”, Jordan McGillis (Manhattan Institute) and Clay Robinson (Arizona State graduate student), National Review, 5/11/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/05/29/why-the-chips-act-will-fail/
* For American student academic performance turn to “US eighth-grade history, civics scores fall to 1990s levels”, NewsNation, 5/3/2023; “Reading and mathematics scores decline during COVID-19 pandemic”, NAEP, National Center for Education Statistics, 2022, at https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2022/
* “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology”, Chris Miller, Scribner, 2022.
esla unveils its new electric semi truck at a presentation in Hawthorne, Calif., in 2017. (Alexandria Sage/Reuters)
I begin with a tripartite revolution, of which the charade is a manifestation.
The sudden onset of a cultural and political revolution is bedeviling us. It’s a three-legged revolution. One leg is the “woke” revolution with its reverse pogrom against the vast majority of the population and the entire civilization itself. Think of it as the reverse of the sanctioned riots – pogroms – against Jews, a small minority in imperial Russia. Currently, a resurrected cadre of Red Guards (of Maoist infamy), defames, and defaces our cherished institutions, beliefs, customs, and commemorations, and are on the hunt to eradicate a mystical and vague “privilege” of “whiteness” or the “rich” or whoever they wish to pillory as their enemy. The parallel with Mao’s carnage is stunning.
That’s not all. With the assault of the “woke” comes the second leg: an intensified zealotry for the battle against “climate change” and a newfound veneration of the pagan goddess Gaia. A suddenly intense and fanatical war on man-made carbon is the tip of the spear of the revolution. States like California are leading the way into what will probably result in a decline much like the descent into Medieval times. One of the chief vehicles to undermine our quality of life is the loosely-defined “green energy”, and that means a love affair with “renewables” and electric everything. In the end, it can only produce a broad, sustained misery.
The third leg is the erection of a monster state to make it happen, for without it, the dreams of utopia will not be realized. This turns the struggle into a war against human nature, the existence of which they have brushed aside in congeries of rhetoric in order to reimagine people as fully malleable to their designs. It’s a calamity at the end of the day. Think of it as a full-court, state-sponsored destruction of prosperity.
The vocabulary of “sustainable” or “renewable” is a chimera and an evisceration of our quality of life. Solar, wind, geothermal, and small hydro is the mantra but their enfeebled productivity is the reality. Lenin’s Bolsheviks toyed with the elimination of a financial system (money, banking, etc.), discovered that it only produced chaos, and settled on state-ownership of the economy. In the end, that system collapsed under the weight of its own internal contradictions. The same fate awaits this latest copy of dreams supplanting reality.
In Bolshevik Russia, a vast array of commissariats was found to be necessary to oversee the state-manipulation of ordinary life. Human beings don’t naturally behave in ways complimentary to the official utopian template. In California and other greenie states, and now the Biden federal government, similar government impositions are required to turn inherently deficient “renewables” into the energy backbone of a state and nation. A flim-flam is necessary to hide the truth, much like the paper-shuffling in the Soviet Gosplan (state economic planning agency). California has AB32 – the official, legally mandated set of commandments for greenie energy – CARB and an assisting regulatory labyrinth of support agencies. Biden has his EPA and the entire federal Leviathan to make the incoherent appear coherent.
Soviet politburo under Gorbachev
How incoherent is the whole scheme in California? One need look no further than the spinoffs and unintended consequences of the greenie energy campaign. To paper over the scant production and the fact that “sustainables” can’t meet energy needs, certificates – Renewable Energy Certificates (REC’s) and Environmental Attributes – are issued to solar, wind, and hydro producers in an elaborate carbon-credit scam who then peddle them, independent of their source, to purchase “dirty” power to make up for the abundant shortfalls. “Dirty” instantly becomes “green” with an REC or Energy Attribute pasted over it.
The energy deficits are real because renewables are chronically untimely and deficient in their production – solar spikes at around 3-4 pm and rapidly declines after, which doesn’t coincide with actual usage; wind only contributes when there’s wind; and hydro adds only when there’s sufficient stream flow. This certificated wallpaper is peddled by Investor Owner Utilities (IUO’s) – PG&E, Southern California Edison, etc. – and a new organizational Frankenstein called Community Choice Aggregators who are smaller energy collectives mostly composed of counties who virtue-signal their commitment to 100% pure renewables (Community Choice Energy), which isn’t, to their chagrin. In the end, after all the gamesmanship, just as much carbon is released into the air as before, just with more bureaucracy, middle men, and paperwork to turn the simple provision of energy into a more expensive shell game.
Got it? If not, you are not alone. Just remember one thing: all of us would benefit from the acknowledgment of a simple facet of the real world – trade-offs. More resources in time, resources, and capital spent on one thing means that they are not available for other things. Greenie energy is more costly in so many ways. How much have we unwittingly given up in new medical cures, inventions to make life easier and more productive, and greater prosperity as we spin our wheels in pursuit of a costly mirage? This is what declining civilizations do.
So, the effort to make crippled electricity everything gave us the PR stunt of Biden tooling around in a parking lot in an electric F150 and extolling its alleged virtues. It absolutely makes no sense. Without the internal combustion engine, the categories of utility vehicles and freight haulers (18-wheelers) would never have come into existence in the first place. Commerce and ranch work would revert back to the Middle Ages without it. Imagine the food supply more dependent on local production and the return of local famines as natural disasters periodically lay waste to the nearby food supply. The supermarket is inconceivable without the internal combustion engine.
The electric vehicle is a tony appurtenance for people who plan a life in a pampered urban cage, a life lacking in self-reliance and reveling in hedonistic indulgence. It’s a tailor-made booster of totalitarianism, whether of the soft or hard variety, since a cooped-up population is easier to control. It’s easier to make people greenie-compatible and keep them that way. Say goodbye to a real functioning citizen republic.
California, of course, is leading the way to this bleak future. The advances in fossil fuels and power efficiencies from better lubricants, tighter manufacturing tolerances, improved materials, fuel injection, solid-state ignition, and emission controls are now to be junked in an overnight leap into lithium batteries. It’s a disaster-in-waiting.
Think about all the “don’ts” you’ll have to anticipate. Don’t charge the ev overnight. It degrades the battery, without which, junk the $60,000 thing in a few years. Don’t buy one if you live in the routine path of hurricanes. Those batteries ignite if submerged in water. Don’t throw luggage into the trunk at the start of that long-anticipated road trip to Yellowstone. You might have to spend the night in the car waiting to be rescued – charging stations being quite sparse outside your urban cocoon. Don’t mindlessly grab that charging wand at some defaced public charging station. Think of the kilovolts passing through the wires just millimeters from your fingers. Insulation breaks down, especially when exposed to weather, vagrants, thousands of careless users jamming the things into their charging ports, and roving bands of teenage delinquents. The utility companies constantly warn us not to touch or go near downed power lines. What’s the difference? At least with gasoline, you’re safe so long as you don’t play with fire while filling up.
And then there’s the weight of the thing – the battery, that is. Weight matters a lot when getting from point A to point B, and when hauling anyone or anything. The family sedan has a thousand-pound one; the Ford F150, 1,500 pounds; the Hummer, 5,000, the weight of a light tank. The more weight, the less you can haul and the less distance you can haul it, making the trip through flyover country an anxiety-plagued, white-knuckled adventure as we are swallowed up in a geographical vacuum of charging stations.
Batteries for an electric pickup
The asylum-by-the-coast called California is showing the world additional ways to muck things up. Along with shoe-horning soccer moms into ev’s, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the state’s preeminent greenie commissariat, is doing the same thing to truckers. It has declared that all new drayage trucks (the ones used around ports) are to be emission-free by 2026. By 2035, all trucks must be. So, getting freight from ship to warehouse could turn into a real comedy skit. No practical alternative to diesel exists to do it.
Better yet, avoid California ports entirely – and while you’re at it, the entire west coast. Gulf Coast governors are waiting to welcome you in open arms. Trucking companies might very well be joining the middle class in fleeing California.
Have you seen the battery-powered 18-wheeler? Tesla has a prototype – MAN, Scalia, Triton, Freightliner, and Volvo too. But what are we giving up as we bow to the climate-change Inquisition? Answer: money (lots of it), reduced hauling capacity, the need for more trucks to make up for the smaller hauls, a vast increase in hauling time, the added expense of a specialized fleet of trucks impractical for anything but specialized use (drayage).
You’ll experience sticker shock at the price of that electric 18-wheeler. Try doubling the price of a new diesel one (around $185,000). A price jump of that nature will limit the number of companies financially capable of competing in a freight hauling market now artificially skewed to the big, big capitalized boys. An already distorted market will be further mangled beyond recognition.
Guess what? That battery powering the contraption makes an ev hauler about 5,400 lbs. heavier than the diesel version. Given the fact that the legal total weight of truck and freight can’t be over 80,000 lbs. without crumbling the roads and bridges, the load in the trailer must be smaller. More hauls, more trucks to do it, and jacked up prices for everything delivered by Amazon and to every brick-and-mortar store. Expect sparser offerings on the shelves and inflation at the register. Out the window goes Amazon Prime’s 3-day shipping and its current price tag.
The whole concept of refueling takes on a new meaning. A diesel truck takes about 15 minutes; the battery-powered behemoth takes hours. The very people driving their trendy Nissan Leaf to Whole Foods will notice the attendant price increases and shortages. Given their pattern of partisan proclivities, the residents have voted to turn their world upside down. Last I checked, Manhattan, or inner-city anywhere, wasn’t famous as a verdant agricultural region or node of food packing and processing. Everything must be trucked into the hipster lair. I wonder how carefree is their lifestyle when scarcity turns from being more than theoretical background noise to real deprivation. Rents may become cheaper since people no longer want to live there, and all of it as a byproduct of hours-long refueling and trucks crippled in their carrying capacity.
Empty produce shelves at Whole Foods Market, Longmont, CO, March 13, 2020
People adjust, and in ways not foreseen by CARB central planners. Their greenie ukases will push the population into crippled transportation and onto a crippled grid. California will have to generate 11.5 gigawatts of more electricity from sources that are already strained to the breaking point to meet the 2026 deadlines. Where’s that coming from? Not from inside the state. More limited and spasmodic energy from wind and solar won’t cut it. I suspect more of the paper flim-flam to disguise the reliance on “dirty” sources. It’s the truth that can’t admitted in polite company.
The state is already experiencing blackouts. Watch produce and other perishables rot as the state scrambles to reenergize the lines. That won’t be the end of it. The ultimate result is a descent by baby steps into a way of life that doesn’t work as well as our grandparents’. The green movement is a social suicide pact.
And to think that I haven’t even mentioned the monumental task of disposing of the batteries, spent solar panels (a lifespan of 10-15 years), and wind mills and their parts. Recycling only eats up more of the grid and consumes other scarce resources. All the toxic materials run the risk of seeping into our ground water. Think of it: we are making such humungous efforts to move our pollution from the air and into the ground, and our way of life will get hammered as never before. Our water supply might end up like the Salton Sea (Remember the MTBE scare? Look it up.). Whew, what a mess.
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832): “Oh what a tangled web we weave when at first we start to deceive.”
RogerG
Read more here:
* For an account of California’s drayage truck mandates: “California’s latest environmental regulation may have unintended consequences for truckers”, Rachel Premack, FREIGHTWAVES, 5/25/2023, at https://www.freightwaves.com/news/californias-latest-trucking-emissions-regulation-may-have-unintended-consequences
* Thanks to Dominic Pino for his piece of 5/25/2023 in National Review Online, “Electric Trucks Are Worse than Diesel Trucks”, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/electric-trucks-are-worse-than-diesel-trucks/
* For an account of the new electric big rigs: “Semi-truck maker Freightliner has a test fleet of 40 rigs, with availability in 2022”, Mark Vaughn, Autoweek, 5/21/2021, at https://www.autoweek.com/news/green-cars/a36506185/electric-big-rig-semi-trucks/
* More on the reduced hauling capacity of electric 18-wheelers: “Electrifying trucking will mean sacrificing critical weight for heavy batteries, eating into already-slim margins”, Bianca Giacobone, Business Insider, 2/2/2023, at https://www.businessinsider.com/electric-trucks-longhaul-batteries-tesla-heavy-cargo-weight-problem-2023-2
* Here’s a little synopsis of the MTBE scare: “MTBE controversy”, Wikipedia, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTBE_controversy
. Frederick Keller’s “The Curse of California”, which appeared in The Wasp on August 19, 1882, is the likely origin of the depiction of the Southern Pacific Railroad monopoly as an octopus.Archibald Cox, first Watergate Special Prosecutorames Comey, FBI Director, and Hillary Clinton. Her campaign originated the Trump-Russia Collusion hoax.John Durham, special counsel into the Trump/Russia charade
*Grab a cup of coffee, sit awhile for I have much to get off my chest. My readings during my recent 10-day eastern Mediterranean cruise have given me much to ponder.
***************
Frank Norris in 1901 had his “The Octopus: A Story of California” published, a novel of crafty control of state government by a railroad monopoly. Today, a different octopus has a grip on the federal government in Washington DC and the blue states. This one has personality traits that are a mixture of the ideology of progressivism with its obsession for perpetually fungible oppressed classes (neo-Marxism) and an overweening administrative state, mindless immersion in the FDR and Kennedy auras, deeply entrenched, and a proven capacity to drain the vitality of a once-great civilization. Ours!
One can get a whiff of the putrefaction (decay) just having to go through TSA/customs at San Francisco airport (SFO), without having to actually step out onto the filthy, crime-plagued streets of the city-by-the-Bay. The labyrinth is mind-boggling, and in stark contrast to the relative ease in old world airports in cities such as Frankfurt, Munich, and Athens. I kept thinking to myself as we were navigating the SFO maze, “This is what civilizational decline looks like”: the meaningless scurrying through an array of channels and corridors, checks and rechecks, picking up luggage and hauling them to additional check-ins, and the near strip-search to add to the one already performed by the German federal police in Munich. And this is for people who never left the confines of airport security walls from Munich to the gulag-type walls of SFO – not much opportunity to acquire a cache of weapons and bombs to further the jihad. It’s reminiscent of the late-stage Ottoman sultanate, and look at what happened to them in 1919. It disappeared, and so is the population of San Francisco and California.
The nation is quickly resembling the condition of California: a society living off the fumes of the past. Its essential infrastructure is crumbling as the state, and now the country, pursues the suicide pact of substituting high-density energy (fossil fuels, nuclear) with low (solar, wind). There’s plenty of money for subsidized abortions up to infanticide, transgender mutilations of tweens absent parental cognizance, the effective repeal of the nation’s immigration laws leading to immense social costs, and million-dollar payments to descendants of ancient relatives of a distant history’s wrongs, but nary a cent to expand water deliveries or clean up the streets of the crime and the mental- and drug-addled. Prices go sky high, nothing seems to work, and that scent of social decay overhangs nearly everything like a suffocating blanket of smog. Welcome to our modern, putrefied sultanate.
The reason why nothing seems to work is that we are governed, essentially managed, by a class apart: the minions of the administrative state and assorted interconnected functionaries in allied institutions – a socially incestuous tribe of Ivy League graduates and academics, the media, and a cadre of self-appointed arbiters of culture. They operate like a hive but resemble an octopus like the railroad monopoly in Frank Norris’s “The Octopus”. It’s an octopus of and for the octopus. Benefitting society’s citizens runs second to power, protections, and rewards for it. They do well, we don’t.
It is vengeful when challenged. We see how it operates by examining the Trump saga and, going back further, to Watergate of the 1970’s. The recently released Durham report draws back the curtain on partisan chicanery targeting Trump by the FBI and Obama holdovers in the Justice Department and lesser minions in the national security agencies. Nearly an entire presidential term was handcuffed in meaningless impeachments and massive investigations. No evidentiary predicate existed to support them. They were efforts of the octopus to remove an interloper – really, the American people through their electoral choices.
It’s the same template used against Nixon. Geoff Shepard in his book, “The Real Watergate Scandal”, from 2015 performed the role of John Durham in exposing this older skullduggery from the early 1970’s. What has come to light since those heady days is a tale of judicial and prosecutorial collusion, serious beaches of due process, and the octopus of mostly networked Democrat operatives from Ivy League campuses filling power positions in DC. They’re amazing in their nearly homogeneous partisan makeup, with only a sprinkling of publicity-hound Republicans joining the phalanx. They form a Praetorium Guard protecting the interests of the Democratic Party and its ruling progressive orthodoxy in the upper reaches of power that is DC.
On Shepard, he was a second-tier assistant to the president, not in any way connected to what came to be called Watergate. He’s got two letters from Watergate prosecutors clearing him of any involvement. As a member of the administration, he knew many of the principal players in the story and oversaw efforts to comply with court orders on such matters as the famous White House audio tapes. On what later came to be popularly referred to as the break-in and cover-up, he had intimate knowledge of the indicted and the so-called evidence. The popular story didn’t compute to him back then and has only been drawn into more question as more information has since come to light.
Foremost, the octopus – or hive if you will – that swarmed Nixon and his people. A cursory examination of the key players in what can only be described as an anti-Nixon jihad would illustrate the workings of octopus. The principal presiding judge, the publicity hound John Sirica, a nominal Republican, barely passed the bar exam. He floundered as a U.S. attorney, went into private practice and faced an even more dismal experience (his “starving time” in his own words) before he was rescued by the eminent Democrat lawyer, fixer, and influencer Edward Bennett Williams. Riding in the wake Williams’s prestige, Sirica got himself appointed to the DC District Court by Eisenhower. The Williams connection and friendship would benefit him for the rest of his life. The DC social Borg at work.
What of the first Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox? Here’s a who’s who from the Ivy League/Kennedy nexus. From Harvard College to Harvard Law to the law school faculty, a lifelong Democrat and Kennedy clan confidant, he advised JFK and wrote many of his speeches in the 1960 campaign. He filled the slot of chief federal litigator as Solicitor General under Attorney General Robert Kennedy, JFK’s brother.
If Cox’s prosecutorial team – often called Cox’s army – faced the inevitable appeals from Sirica’s gung-ho, get-Nixon style, waiting in the wings to handle the appeals was the chief judge of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, David Bazelon with a judicial majority on the Circuit to back him up. A veteran of the Truman administration as assistant attorney general, he was known to harbor a dislike of Nixon since Nixon’s days on the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigating Alger Hiss, another Democrat/FDR protégé but since proven to be a Soviet spy. Compounding the octopus’s Nixon antipathy is Nixon’s 1950 elevation to the Senate through his upset win over the much-loved, former star of stage and screen, firebrand progressive, and favorite, Helen Gahagan Douglas. Nixon was the bête noire of the Democrat DC octopus in an obvious Democrat town.
That’s just a sampling. There’s more, much more. The lineup of hired guns in the Special Prosecutor’s office under Cox and Jaworski exhibited the same partisan and social affinities.
The city’s demographic profile displayed, and continues to display, the same hard-edged partisanship. For instance, the city’s overwhelming electoral base for the Democratic Party is a prosecutorial force multiplier for any judicial proceedings with Republicans in the dock. DC is a Democrat city run by and for Democrats. The city’s growth owes much to FDR’s centralization of power, the patron saint for all subsequent Democrat administrations. Back in the 1970’s, grand and trial juries were drawn from the city’s three-quarters Democrat voter base. Today, it’s worse; 90% is more like it.
The galling Nixon 49-state sweep in 1972 didn’t faze the 78% DC election count for the humiliated Democrat candidate George McGovern. This presents a tricky problem for Republicans elected from the hinterlands and who now must reside in a sea of hostility. Partisan crusades – think Sen. Ted Stevens, Russia collusion, civil proceedings against Trump, anything drummed up against Republicans – will have a good shot at convictions and seeing Republicans in pin stripes. The maw of DC awaited Nixon and still lies in wait for any Republican officeholder today.
The Constitutional protections for a fair trial, fair jury, fair, balanced and conscientious prosecutors, and due process are trampled under foot in this one-party city. If you think that legal mechanisms such as preemptory challenges to remove biased prospective jurors are adequate protection, think again. There aren’t enough challenges to compensate for a 78%-90%+ Democrat jury pool in an atmosphere ginned up by a longstanding local Democrat-friendly media.
A change of venue to a more balanced jurisdiction is laughable when the DC appellate and trial courts collude with prosecutors to ensure prosecution-friendly presiding judges and appellate judges who are noted for their progressive proclivities. Appeals are stymied and so is due process. Once in a DC court, you’re never going to be allowed any other place. Republicans beware if you find yourself before a DC jury.
Washington DC is an obese city gorging itself on the extracted wealth from the provinces – er, states, as in fourth-century Rome. Its output is government, and more government, and has no relation to the generation of goods and services that compose real economic life for the nation’s citizens. It grew and benefitted from the party of government, the party’s progressivism, the party of the administrative state, the Democratic Party. The city’s denizens vote as if they know their benefactors. From this lair, the octopus extends its tentacles to encompass nearly all facets of national life.
The situation has deteriorated to the point that for the nation to thrive, Washington DC must not. The chances of national prosperity improve if DC fell into a deep commercial and residential real estate depression. We have too much government rooted in abstract, ideological crusades, and possessing too much power to interfere in daily life. Shrink the government and acquaint some of the federal workforce to the pink slip. Strip the city of all operatives except for the minimum necessary for physical proximity to the heads of the three branches of government. The functioning headquarters of the Department of Agriculture in Wichita, the base of the FBI and Justice Department in Columbus, Missouri, the operational centers for the four military service branches scattered from Mobile, Alabama, to Minot, South Dakota, might be just a thought, but certainly an appealing one. Oh, how about the headquarters of the EPA ensconced somewhere in Ohio or West Virginia, surrounded by the victims of its regulatory excess?
Strangle the octopus and reinstitute popular sovereignty. The type of people of Archibald Cox’s background have too much sway, and have only proven to possess the capacity to muck things up. How’s that for a path to “make America great again”?
RogerG
Read more here:
* Of all the books that I have read on Watergate, this is the one that resonates: “The Real Watergate Scandal: Collusion, Conspiracy, and the Plot That Brought Nixon Down”, Geoff Shepard, 2015. By now, in light of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, the tale ought to sound like a familiar one. Of particular note, refer to pages 184-5, “The D.C. Jury Pool”, to understand the ingrained partisan prejudice against Republicans in D.C. Please go to “The False Heroes of Watergate”, page 12-17, for a deep dive into the backgrounds of people pursuing Nixon and his people.
* Geoff Shepard’s Watergate account reads like John Durham’s 316-page report of May 12, 2023: “Report on Matters Relating to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns”, John Durham, at https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Durham-Report.pdf
I have no plans to ever return to California for a visit or otherwise, absent a necessity involving a dear friend or relative. Every visit after my relocation to Montana has only reminded me of the reasons for my departure in the first place, and it’s only gotten worse.
Concerns for the state of my birth are not limited to me. Traditional Democrats of many generations, such as the Alioto family of San Francisco, are shocked by the descent of their city into lawlessness. They have yet, though, to come to grips with San Francisco being the canary in the coal mine. Large swaths of the state are sliding into the same dystopia. The problem is more than San Francisco.
For Angela Alioto, ex-member of the SF Board of Supervisors and Board president and daughter of the famous two-term mayor Joseph Alioto, she exclaimed that “It’s not my city” in a recent interview. You can watch it below. Pay close attention to her description of the near-death experience of a retired SF Fire Commissioner confronting violent homeless drug addicts on the request of his elderly mother just below her window and doorstep. He was more than assaulted. He was maimed with a crowbar and left with probable brain damage.
Not every city in the state has fallen into such despair, but they all experience the decay to some extent. Filth and mayhem, like smog, seldom respects boundary lines on a map. One thing’s for sure: no Californian can escape the state’s predilection to decriminalize various social pathologies, remove vagrancy laws off the books, tax and regulate their residents to high heaven, expunge entire criminal statutes through flagrant non-enforcement, etc., etc. When a person is more likely to face hard time for driving an unsmogged car than repeated smash-and-grabs, you know that a majority of the state’s electorate has edged closer to delusional.
Californians won’t get a better run state until a more well-balanced electorate shows up. One must face up to the fact that this state of affairs wasn’t an accident. It was voted into office. Please grab a cup of coffee and watch the interview. It might influence your decision to pay a visit to the City by the Bay.
RogerG
Watch it here:
* If you have difficulty viewing the video, that’s because it went “private”. It happened after I initially linked it on Facebook.
Some people like to compare Donald Trump to some sort of hero who doesn’t conform to the dominant social norms, a kind of heroic anti-hero commonly found in movies and generals who are constantly running afoul of their superiors and the media, but are necessary to set things right. Think of John Wayne’s Ethan in “The Searchers”, Gary Cooper’s Sheriff Will Kane in “High Noon”, Yul Brynner’s band of lovable rogues in “The Magnificent Seven”. Think of Patton, MacArthur, Matthew Ridgeway, William T. Sherman in uniform. Truth be told, Trump is no Ethan, or any of the others. More accurately, “populist charmer” works better, or maybe “demagogue”, and certainly not a “genius”, political or otherwise.
The characterization of Trump as the admirable renegade was used by Victor Davis Hanson to explain Trump’s appeal and his usefulness (see the Hanson video below). It’s an awkward description. The distinctive factor that separates history’s successful outsiders from the man of Mar-a-Lago is the former’s uncanny genius for success, and Trump’s lack of it. Trump won in 2016 not due to any unique insight but to a highly unusual set of circumstances that can only be described as a black swan event. A constellation of factors came together that hasn’t happened since. Trump has failed to repeat his success, having floundered in 2018, 2020, 2022, with prospects not any better for 2024.
The reason is simple. He’s been the center of attention for the past seven years and is too well-known, and repugnantly so. He’s no longer the fresh face that many people were going to take a chance on, as they did in 2016. The 2016 Trump was the new kid on the block facing a notoriously infamous one. Even with that advantage, he lost the popular vote by 3 million and could have fallen short in the Electoral College if 107,000 votes in three states had gone the other way. After that, it has been downhill for Trump. That’s hardly the genius of Patton.
It’ll be more misery if the 2022 midterms prove to be prophetic. Ferreting out the easy Republican victories and those with universal GOP support, and focusing only on the hotly contested races, Trump endorsees were either lackluster or dismal failures. Their poor performance is more than old news because it’s nonetheless real. From Georgia to Arizona to Pennsylvania to eastern Washington State, across the country, Trump monotonously helped snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. This guy is no Matthew Ridgeway stabilizing the lines in Korea after the longest retreat in American military history, recapturing Seoul, and promising more than the one million Communist Chinese casualties that he and his men already inflicted on them. Trump is no Patton who could engineer the dash across France after the Normandy breakout and turn on a dime to rescue Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge. Instead, Trump is channeling William Travis at the Alamo.
Patton (second from left) reviewing a map in his dash to rescue Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge
Already, 2023 polling in dribs and drabs points to a looming GOP disaster in 2024 if Trump headlines the Republican ticket. A massive poll in April of this year shows Trump to be a loser to Biden and DeSantis a winner (see below). Yet, Trump registers a 20+ point lead over DeSantis among Republicans while at the same time Trump remains slightly more repellant in his high unfavorables than Biden to the general electorate. A Nevada poll puts DeSantis ahead of Biden in the state and Trump a loser (see below). Wait for the gauntlet of legal troubles that the Democrats have in store for Trump, of course delayed till after he secures the nomination for maximum effect. Trump will smell worse than the remains of yesterday’s fish catch in a warm garbage can.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis
Clearly, an unflattering image has crystallized about Trump, one that has turned the reliably Republican suburbs into fertile grounds for Democrat votes. Whoever he attracts is more than offset by the numbers who run away. Plus, the Democrats won’t be caught again with their pants down. They have rejiggered voting laws to the advantage of their base’s massive cohorts of the apathetic with the wild expansion of lazy mail-in voting, ballot harvesting, and blocking voter ID and efforts to clean up registration rolls of the dead and moved. What could go wrong? Lots, and none of it to the advantage of Republicans and Trump.
All Trump has to offer is the same stale act: juvenile insults, narcissism, patronizing platitudes, bragging, and bluster. The bragging centers around accomplishments that were impossible without the canniness of others, like the much-abused Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. Trump benefitted from a brief two-year period of unitary GOP control of the elective branches. The economy took off after job-destroying regulations were repealed in a series of Congressional Review Act vetoes in the Ryan/McConnell-led Congress. What Republican wouldn’t greenlight pipelines and expand energy leases on federal lands during the era of the fracking technological revolution? The tax cuts were not Trump’s ideas but were germinating in the Republican congressional caucus for years. Ditto for the judges. The nominees were originalists, the official judicial philosophy of the party, whose prospects would be fruitless without McConnell’s procedural smarts. If you’re a Trumper, please leave room in your praise for Ryan, McConnell, and the Republican “establishment”.
If not, it’s another sign of blinkered cultic behavior that joins the Left’s climate cult ruining livelihoods and the neo-Marxism clan of the woke. Yes, they’re often called tribes, with the Trumpkins becoming just another one as obvious as the Yankton Sioux on the Missouri bluffs encountered by Lewis and Clark in 1804. If not treated very gingerly, a calamity will ensue. Better yet, try to reroute around them, or convince them of the wisdom of abandoning their daft ghost-dancing shaman.
RogerG
Watch and read more here:
* Victor Davis Hanson’s mention of Trump as the useful renegade: “George S. Patton: American Ajax”, Victor Davis Hanson at Hillsdale College, 2/13/2020, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJsC-buIkSE
* An April polling assessment in FiveThirtyEight: “Latest Polls”, FiveThirtyEight, May 4, 2023, at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-primary-r/
* The Nevada poll: “DeSantis leads Trump in Nevada, GOP poll says”, Jessica Hill, Las Vegas Journal-Review, April 24, 2023, at https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/politics-and-government/nevada/desantis-leads-trump-in-nevada-gop-poll-says-2767010/
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