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.
Screenshot of the Portland Police Bureau “LGBTQAI2S+ and Queer Policy – Introduction and Training” video. (photo from Portland Police/YouTube)
Portland’s cops were subjected to a characterization of life that is stranger than anything in George Orwell’s 1984 from 1949 (see below). The “Pronoun Training” was actually pure indoctrination in a set of highly contestable beliefs where self-delusion is to be treated as non-delusion. This episode is stranger than anything Winston and Julia were expected to believe by their interrogator O’Brien in Orwell’s story.
The “stranger than fiction” notion could be attributed to Lord Byron, or maybe it was Mark Twain when he wrote, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” I guess that Twain meant that good fiction must be believable and therefore must stick to possibilities that are limited to the imagination of the author. Real truth, by contrast, isn’t so constrained.
Of course, you’d have to believe in “real truth” which many younger generations have been schooled to assume doesn’t exist. “Real truth”, after all, is a “construct” of the systemic rule of the powerful over the weak, which is the blind faith on our college campuses, and pure Marxism. The stifling dogma leaves the campus mind-censors free to make truth into whatever they claim. Their “truth” became instantly compelling after they succeeded in their long march through the institutions and into the c-suite, government, media, schools, the NGO world, etc., and it’s everywhere.
In such a world, as in Orwell’s 1984, 2+2=5. It is indeed strange for the life of today to conform in so many unexpected ways to the world of Orwell’s 1949 depiction of his fictious Oceania. Language is deformed to make 2+2=5 the “real truth”, or in our case XY people to be treated as XX (and vice versa). Thus, we have many mini-O’Briens running around as consultants getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to convince us that 2+2=5.
By the use of a rhetorical distinction between “gender” and “sex”, the now inconsequential sex-at-birth is magically replaced by the now more compelling sex-of-the-mind, all accomplished with a little word play. And cops, and everyone else, are expected to act as if the artificial reality is actual reality. Whew, the mind reels at the multiple realities like the permutations of the multiverse coming off DC/Marvel drawing boards.
The understandable reaction when confronted with gibberish is to rebel. Believe me, in the span of the 30-year career in education, I’ve been exposed to a lot of “training” in what was absolute drivel. I have an appreciation for the cops’ critical reaction to this latest blather.
“Patronizing,” “childish,” “offensive,” “garbage,” “unnecessary”, “This training is vile”, and the like were indicative of the backlash from attending cops in anonymous feedback (see below). Rather than exercise a little prudent self-criticism and reexamination, the consultants heaped abuse on the recipients by referring to the comments as examples of “racism, ableism, or white supremacy”, and therefore more “trainings” will be necessary to convert the subjects to the approved way of thinking, and a bigger tab beyond the current $440,000 consultant’s fee on the back of Portland’s taxpayers. The paid consultant Dennis Rosenbaum, the O’Brien in this real life story, stands to get richer as he works to convince others that the unbelievable is believable.
This isn’t “training”; it’s indoctrination of the kind routinely found in totalitarian regimes. One can only hope that the indoctrination remains “nice”, but “nice” frequently morphs into “compulsory” with sanctions for not conforming to the zeitgeist. For not having the approved thoughts, which will always slip out in unanticipated ways, your life may be ruined. We’ve gone way beyond accepting 2+2=5. Indeed, modern life is stranger than old fiction.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Much thanks to Ryan Mills in his article, “Portland Cops Rip ‘Hilariously Ridiculous’ Training on How to Interact with ‘LGBTQIA2S+ and Queer Communities’”, 5/2/2023, National Review Online, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/portland-cops-rip-hilariously-ridiculous-training-on-how-to-interact-with-the-lgbtqia2s-and-queer-communities/
* The actual feedback from the “Pronoun Training” can be found at https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Equity_Training_Comments_Redacted-1.pdf
October 2020 – Scientific AmericanNature – 15 October 2020
The communist rulers in the old Soviet Union gradually came to believe that opposition to them was more than a different point of view but symptomatic of mental illness. Dissent from Karl Marx’s mental prism was tantamount to being emotionally disturbed. They developed a form of pseudo-scientific psychiatry to suppress disagreement, and the same thing is germinating in the United States: the distortion of science to pursue political ends.
In the USSR of the 1960’s-80’s, a pseudo-scientific jargon was invented to give The Science the sound of legitimacy. An entire fake science was cobbled together by a professor of Soviet psychiatry, Andrei Snezhnevsky of the impressive sounding USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. His diagnosis of “sluggish schizophrenia” and “delusion of reformism” was applied to anyone whose beliefs led them to renounce their atheism, attempt to immigrate, engage in protests, or practice a faith. If you think that it’s not happening here, think again.
Andrei Snezhnevsky of the USSR Academy of Medical SciencesLeonid Plyushch in 1976, after his release from a mental asylum where he was held for years by the Kremlin. (photo: Agence France-Presse)
Let’s be clear, “The Science” must not be confused with science. It’s an institutionalized variant of science that carries with it all the norms of organizational man/woman/whatever. People in organizations don’t behave like man/woman/whatever in their natural and private settings. A group personality coalesces around shared expectations and norms and frequently morphs into shared opinions. Once a shared attachment to collectivism takes root, for instance, the organizational politicization of science will soon follow. It’s happened, and is happening.
Our science is increasingly politicized to promote highly contentious opinions. Disagreement is persecuted as ignorance and bigotry, and maybe even attributed to a disturbed emotional comportment. Ideologically partisan journalists such as Chris Mooney in his books “The Republican War on Science” (2005) and the follow-up “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science — and Reality” come close to imitating Andrei Snezhnevsky when they hide their glaring political opinions under the cloak of “The Science”.
Chris Mooney
The tactic of branding your political opponents with dementia isn’t limited to Mooney. Express some skepticism about the extravagant and ideologically tinged claims on highly debatable issues from climate change to transgenderism to systemic racism and you’ll face a fusillade of abuse and threats to your livelihood, and maybe jail time if they can get away with it. Having these forbidden thoughts isn’t a career enhancer. You’ll be erased off the ledger of respectable humanity. The word “denier” serves the same purpose as “sluggish schizophrenia”.
Zeks (gulag prisoners) in Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” often referred to “beyond the wire” (or something like it) for the world outside the camp. In today’s politics masquerading as science, the equivalent of zeks, or “deniers”, are accused of straying “beyond the wire” of the approved mental prison – synonymous with “scientific consensus”. Straying beyond the wire is the excuse for the gatekeepers – er, mental prison guards – to put The Science at the service of a particular political party, the Democratic Party, who helps keep the fence electrified, and at the disservice of the other who questions the very existence of the camp in the first place. Political endorsements by science figureheads, organizations, and their publications have followed, and to the detriment of their reputations as they come to be viewed as just another collection of political hacks.
It hasn’t occurred to the guards that naturally non-political organizations and their participants – think professional sports: NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, etc. – alienate half, maybe more, of their clientele when they identify with one side in the country’s political divide. It’s a no-brainer: endorse Democrats, anger Republicans. At least half the public, maybe more, begins to see them as little different from a super-PAC. Buying a ticket or product of the compromised enterprise is perceived as the equivalent of a political donation. The same political self-labeling occurs when scientists step into partisan battles and the culture war.
Phil Jackson, the famous coach of the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers, doesn’t watch the NBA because it’s too political (see below). When players were allowed to festoon their jerseys with political slogans and obscuring their names, his grandkids recounted a particular play with “Justice went to the basket and Equal Opportunity knocked him down.” It’s funny if it wasn’t so tragic to the sport. And now The Science is turning off people in like manner.
The culture war, or revolution, has a clear partisan flavor to it. The high-stakes contest is one of revolution and counterrevolution with the D’s in the vanguard of the revolution and R’s trying to put the brakes on it. The journal “Nature” in 2020 jumped with both feet into the cultural and partisan war in a ringing endorsement of Joe Biden. In an editorial that could have come from Biden’s campaign staff – or Stalin’s chief prosecutor in the show trials, Andrei Vyshinsky – they branded the R’s candidate as “accelerating climate change, razing wilderness, fouling air and killing more wildlife — as well as people.” Trump may be a lot of things, but singlehandedly obliterating the planet is a bit of a stretch. This is the language of the zealot, not a lab scientist grappling with a hypothesis.
Not to be outdone, as if on cue, “Scientific American”, the sister magazine to “Nature” (same publisher, Springer Nature), issued a partisan clarion call in an October 2020 editorial titled “Scientific American Endorses Joe Biden” (see below). Their hyperbole descends into the same political septic tank: “The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science.” The hubris is astounding. They claim to own The Science and the zeks must be kept from straying “beyond the wire”.
Eight term Democrat representative Rush Holt, Jr., was chosen to lead the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the publisher of “Science” and other prominent journals. A partisan bias in The Science?
But they don’t own the science; they own a collection of political opinions. At the root of these opinions is an affection for collectivism. It’s the one thing that unites the denizens of The Science. Somehow, in their mind, collectivism became the thinking man’s (or woman’s/whatever) ideology. They were perhaps blinkered by an academic marination in it without knowing it. It was embedded in their insular classroom instruction as undergrads. Hayek’s freedom-based spontaneous order, or anything like it, was never allowed to grace their intellects.
A constrained education is woven with an endemic apocalypse-mongering which turns all issues into calls for collectivist action: it’s existential and therefore we can’t afford free markets, freedom of conscience, capitalism, or anyone practicing real science which is based on a healthy skepticism of extravagant claims. A healthy scientific intellect would raise eyebrows at hysterical calls to eliminate an entire car fleet and transportation system in the span of twenty years. A healthy scientific intellect would raise eyebrows at burdening an already overstretched grid with electric-everything and radically shifting it to low-density energy after banning high-density. This isn’t science. It’s ideology on the march.
Not unlike The Science in the Soviet Union. The gambit is the same: make the science an adjunct of the politics and then weaponize it against your political opponents. It’s a very dangerous thing to do for a country in an increasingly perilous time. It’ll ruin us. Khruschev did say, after all, “We’ll bury you.” Well, we’ll bury ourselves.
RogerG
Read here for more:
* Much thanks to the work of Christine Rosen of the American Enterprise Institute in “The Folly of Nature’s Biden Endorsement”, 3/30/2023, National Review Online, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/04/17/the-folly-of-natures-biden-endorsement/
* “NBA champion coach Phil Jackson says he doesn’t watch basketball anymore because it got too political”, Lauren Sforza, The Hill, 4/23/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/other/nba-champion-coach-phil-jackson-says-he-doesn-t-watch-basketball-anymore-because-it-got-too-political/ar-AA1aeBfW
* “Scientific American Endorses Joe Biden”, Editors, The Scientific American, 10/1/2020, at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientific-american-endorses-joe-biden1/
Over 100 children and parents with Informed Parents of California (IPOC) protest in Costa Mesa on Friday, May 17, 2019 against the state’s approval of a comprehensive sex education curriculum that includes discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity. (Photo by Michael Fernandez)
Terry McAuliffe, 2021 Democratic candidate for Virginia governor, in a debate said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” It probably cost McAuliffe the election. Today, what was once a huge faux pas is now a plank in the California Democratic Party platform. California is barging ahead full speed to turn McAuliffe’s blunder into policy reality. California parents, if you didn’t have any more reasons, follow the lead of London’s parents during the 1940 Blitz who removed their children to the countryside and get your kids out of the state. That may be the only recourse left to you to protect them.
Don’t think for a moment that a private school will be any refuge. Many of them are infected by the same ideological smog that dominates the rest of the state’s Education Borg. Any holdouts will probably be squashed. Sorry, there’s not likely to be any escape from the psychological scars and indoctrination if you remain within the borders of the state.
What prompts this warning? Two things sound the alarm: the all-powerful California teachers unions are four-square behind porn in school libraries and curricular reading lists, and the introduction of AB 1078. The former illustrates the monopoly power of a special interest in support of psychological scarring of tender young minds, and the latter would handcuff the parents’ ability to stop it.
Regarding the former, the Orange Unified School District Board of Trustees in Orange County, Ca., had a parent come forward to express concerns about some of the approved selections on the district’s reading list for elementary students. The meeting was raucous with the room filled with teachers’ union activists protesting “book burning”, a rhetorical pseudonym for attempts to clean school libraries and curricular reading lists of blatant porn. One parent braved the insults and catcalls of the union activists to step forward to express her concerns about subjecting her children to material that used to be found only on the pages of Hustler magazine. Then the room gradually fell silent as she began to read from one selection, “The Music of What Happens”, which was found on the approved reading list app Sora. To their credit, the board acted with dispatch by removing it the next day. But it took an act of great personal courage to weather the abuse just to get a wildly inappropriate book from reaching the eyes of her kids.
Orange Unified School District School Board listens to parents and teacher union activists Jan. 19, 2023A parent at the school board meeting read sexually explicit passages from The Music of What Happens.
A good part of the problem is the reliance on “experts” who are enthused about pushing the sexual revolution. You can find them throughout the Education Borg, public and private, like Sora. Sora “experts” approved the selections, school districts buy the app, and an “expert”-inspired revolution is advanced with the kids as guinea pigs.
If you as a parent don’t like it, AB 1078, if passed, will stop you from acting on your need to protect your children. Introduced by Assemblyman Corey Jackson (D-Riverside), the bill would prevent local school boards from removing “any instructional materials or books from classrooms and school libraries or ‘ceasing to teach any curriculum’” without approval of the state board of education, which is under the thumb of the California teachers unions.
Assemblyman Corey Jackson (D-Riverside)
With AB 1078, locally elected school boards would become toothless and parent presentations before them would be meaningless. In a one-party state of near totalitarian control of all facets of life, the constitutional guarantees of a republican form of government and the right to petition your government will be trampled to maintain power for a special interest in the vanguard of the sexual revolution. If you’re not onboard the revolution, you’ll be run over.
It’s a war on parents, a war on California parents by California’s state government. Sorry for stating the obvious but you’re only option if you have kids may be to leave the state. The stranglehold of the one-party state government and its featherbedding abettor – a public sector union – might be too strong to break in time to save your kids.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “AB 1078 would strip school boards’ authority over curriculum”, California Policy Center, at https://mailchi.mp/calpolicycenter/join-us-for-cpcs-parent-union-legislative-summit-june-22-376361?e=5436867e20
* “A Parent Complained About A Digital Book. Then An Orange County School Board Suspended The Whole Library”, Jill Replogle and Michael Flores, LAist, 2/3/2023, at https://laist.com/news/education/school-district-book-banning-censorship-app-conservatives-orange-unifed
* “Will Swaim: Here’s what’s really going on at the Orange Unified School District”, Will Swaim, Orange County Register, 2/5/2023, at https://www.ocregister.com/2023/02/05/will-swaim-heres-whats-really-going-on-at-the-orange-unified-school-district/
James Dean and Marlon Brando catapulted to fame on the silver screen playing the rebel or goodhearted bad boy. It works on the silver screen with good acting, directing, and scripts to manufacture a glorious ending for the renegade. In real life, well, most times it’s a different story, but don’t tell your typical Trump fan too beguiled to face unwelcome news. Not only is Trump a bad boy; he’s bad news. The unpalatable evidence is piling daily. This time, it comes from Trump’s own pollster, Tony Fabrizio.
In a Fabrizio poll for the Wall Street Journal, DeSantis does better in a head-to-head matchup with Biden than Trump (see below). DeSantis is up 3 while Trump is down 3. Surely, all within the margin of error but still indicative of a trend that can only get better for DeSantis and worse for Trump.
Trump has hefty baggage that’ll only get heavier, and DeSantis is coming off a 19-point victory in a bellwether state. Trump is a known quantity of repulsiveness, legal troubles, and rabid loyalty from a limited base. DeSantis has the advantage of being the fresh face on the scene with major achievements in the third largest state. DeSantis has a huge upside as a general election campaign proceeds, much like Reagan in 1980. Trump has the stench of Hoover in 1932, but without Hoover’s moral uprightness.
Trump’s stench won’t go away. Despite the double-digit lead over DeSantis in a face-off in a cloistered Republican primary, Trump’s likeability with the general electorate is atrocious. His unfavorables/favorables are slightly worse than Biden’s, in the same doghouse where they’ve been for most of his time in the public eye (see below). Rightly or wrongly, there’s too much of the appalling Trump on tape to fill the multimillion-dollar ad buys by the Democrats’ stable of c-suite billionaires. The Trump schtick is for groupies, not for people raising kids. As for DeSantis, it’s an entirely different story.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.) speaks in Davenport, Iowa, March 10, 2023. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Think of it this way: after the celebrations, confetti, and rousing cheers of Trump victories in the Republican primaries, his boosters will joyously march off to . . . the Alamo. Bad boys sometimes lead others into massacres.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Trump’s Pollster Finds DeSantis Leading Biden and Biden Leading Trump”, John McCormack, National Review Online, 4/21/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trumps-pollster-finds-desantis-leading-biden-and-biden-leading-trump/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
* “Latest Polls”, FiveThirtyEight, 3/21/2023, at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/ron-desantis/. From here, you can toggle over to the other major candidates in the field.
In 1967, William F. Buckley, Jr., laid down his standard when choosing a candidate in a primary election in an interview with Bill Barry. He said, “I’d be for the most right [conservative], viable candidate who could win.” Who could win! Translation: vote for the most conservative electable candidate. Such advice is like whispering to a group of the delusional in a hurricane, such as the third to a half of the Republican franchise who can’t see beyond Donald Trump (DJT).
Fact is, many haven’t come to grips with the forever truth that DJT isn’t very popular beyond their self-reinforcing cloister. Astoundingly, their detachment from reality extends to the amazing and unexamined assumption that he’s won the general if he wins the primary election. Surely, they think without thinking, the guy must be as loved as he is among them. This is the biggest leap of faith to rival anything required of the Branch Davidians (jump in the wayback machine to 1993 and Waco, Tx.).
The numbers and recent elections do the talking. DJT is a loser, writ large. Moving beyond the debacles of 2018, 2020, and the evaporation of a red wave in 2022, polling largely tracks these election results. Repulsiveness isn’t an attractive trait, and DJT has typecast himself for the last eight years as an ogre to at least half the overall electorate to begin any race that he has a role. Then add a quarter who merely find him distasteful. It’s a deplorable way to begin the general.
Also, let’s not forget that he’s the same guy who led a trash-talking tabloid life that would be excusable in a Brooklyn street urchin but disgusting in a 76-year-old man and ex-president. He can’t, and won’t, shake the habit of demagogic bluster and juvenile insults because there’s an appetite for the schtick among his WWF-style fans in the party.
FiveThirtyEight lays it out. DJT consistently, going back to 2016, has double-digit unfavorables over his favorables (55%-, 40%+ as of April 20). That puts him in Biden territory (53%-, 42%+). He polls no better than the guy who has wrecked the economy, unleashed racial favoritism, greenlighted boys into girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms, made getting to work and heating our homes a near impossibility for many, pushes neo-Marxist indoctrination on our kids, and is a roving international embarrassment. Trump honestly, for the most part, did none of these things but he’s so repulsive that a stroke-addled Democrat (Fetterman) and a mental-fatigued oldster (Biden) campaigning from his basement begin to look better to an electorate outside the walls of the Trump asylum.
And then add the Dems’ huge advantage in money and their immense vote-harvesting machine and the Democrats’ ransacking of our way of life for the past few years will matter less and less. The Democrats continue to deliver an opportunity for a Republican victory on a silver platter but the Republicans turn away to the slop on the floor.
It’s what happens when you let the deranged run your affairs, or determine your party’s nominee. Here’s a bit of advice for the Trump-addled: try having an eye on the general. It’s better to win a general election with a person 90% to your liking than to lose with a 100% clone.
Look for yourself at FiveThirtyEight, https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/
Teens swarm into downtown Chicago in a scene of mayhem.Three still frames of a woman getting assaulted by the vicious teens which is the subject of a short Twitter video below.
Cities from the west coast to the Midwest to the east coast are dangerous, filthy nightmares. No exaggeration. Youths in Chicago this weekend welcomed their new lefty, crime-coddling mayor, Brandon Johnson, to office with a rampage through the downtown. His honor limply criticized the behavior and then went on to say, “It is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.”
It is not constructive? To demonize? These kids are demonizing themselves. In fact, they’re demonizing their cities. Watch the Twitter video of a teen swarm beating a woman senseless at:
To catch the viciousness, pay close attention at the very beginning. You’ll see her go down in a maelstrom of fists and kicks. This could happen to anyone, and is happening to anyone. People are leaving these hellscapes and the dimwitted in office have no answer but excuses and more social workers.
That’s right, they promise to hire more sociology majors. It’s what you’d expect from a paid Chicago Teachers Union organizer who is fully marinated in lefty groupthink.
Anecdotes are piling of U-Hauls getting harder to find and businesses seeking safer spaces beyond the reach of the flash-mobs. Whole Foods shut its recently opened store in San Francisco. Heck, it’s getting harder to find a Walgreens or CVS in the city by the bay. REI, that caterer to white-collar trekkers, has decided to close its Portland outlet due to theft and break-ins. You name the place – LA, Minneapolis, Seattle, New York City – and they are turning John Carpenter of “Escape from New York” into a prophet.
I’ve been a Republican as long as I can remember, from Nixon to Trump. The Democrats have been thoroughly repugnant since George McGovern became the standard bearer and ushered in the New Left with its assault on western civilization culminating in the neo-Marxism of today – the woke-stroke – that is currently laying waste to the once and mighty USA. Then, a slice of the GOP started to smell, as if on cue. The locus of foul odor wafted over from the direction of the Matt Gaetz/Majorie Taylor Greene/Loren Boebert/Donald Trump wing of the party. Now, the stench is so bad that I’m beginning to entertain the unthinkable: joining the ranks of independents.
The only thing that causes pause is the desire to stay and fight for a free market and national security/deterrence GOP. That was my party and I did more than vote for it. I contributed money, managed campaigns, fundraised, walked precincts, manned phone banks, the whole litany of activities that define a firm member of the base. Now, a kind of populism has infected the ranks in the form of appeasement on the continent of Europe (Hmmm, is that familiar, circa 1938-41?), a cult of personality that resembles a political death cult (Trump worship), a grossly immature and self-destructive unwillingness to face our entitlement crisis, an embrace of Smoot-Hawley economics, and a history of embarrassing and wild accusations that more reflect the copy rooms of the DC/Marvel universe than a drawing room of serious adults. Who in their right mind would want to be part of that? I know, I know, there are legions who are, but they don’t include me.
Not surprisingly, the latest cringe-worthy episode from the ranks of the unhinged emanated from the Twitter feed of Marjorie Taylor Greene (MTG). Somehow, to her, the buffoonish 21-year-old Massachusetts National Guardsman who plastered top secret documents across the world wide web is a hero. In only her latest outrage, she tweeted:
“Jake Teixeira is white, male, christian, and antiwar.
That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime.
And he told the truth about troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more.
Ask yourself who is the real enemy?
A young low level national guardsmen?
Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine, a non-NATO nation, against nuclear Russia without war powers?”
ake Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guardsman who flashed top secret documents across the world wide web.
Besides the incoherence of “against nuclear Russia without war powers”, the rest of it is as nonsensical as that tidbit. How does she know anything about this kid . . . er, young adult? She doesn’t. Fact: she’s just a hothead. As with all hotheads, their immediate concern is to strike a blow against their political rivals regardless of its harm to the country’s national security. For them, though, merely mentioning the phrase “national security” triggers rantings against the Bushes, “forever wars”, conspiracy paranoias, their serial misuse of “RINO”, and fulminations against a host of “globalists” and “elites”. They are consumed in bumper-sticker logic.
She and they show no sign of recognizing the threat posed by the fire-hosing of “top secret” through the ether. Instead, we get MTG bombast. If she will recall – which is unlikely given the delusionary nature of her thinking – her demigod, Donald Trump, suffered at the hands of a leaker of “top secret” or “privileged”. Remember the Zelensky phone call? Or how about the Comey chicanery in giving the content of a privileged conversation with Trump to a buddy? Or the release of the Steele Dossier into the public domain? Fact is, the MTG types were against leaking before they now praise it. They stole a line from John Kerry. Plagiarism?
The rest of the GOP seems cowed by this noxious wing of the party. And maybe they are right to be. A majority of registered Republicans in recent polls appear ready to place Trump in another faceoff with Biden in 2024. Is the base once again willing to stampede off the cliff like a herd of buffalo? Seems to be. So, Republican heavies do a tap dance to avoid annoying the berserkers in their midst. Kudos to Lindsay Graham for calling out this party embarrassment.
If it wasn’t for a few brave souls like Graham, I’d have already decamped the GOP.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Twitter remarks at https://twitter.com/RepMTG/status/1646615867285708802?s=20
“Democracy dies in darkness.” — From the masthead of The Washington Post.
President Joe Biden speaks about infrastructure spending, much of it greenie, at the La Crosse Municipal Transit Authority, Tuesday, June 29, 2021, in La Crosse, Wisconsin. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
Yes, democracy, and civilization also, dies in darkness – the “darkness” of ignorance and foolishness. Few things today are more foolish than the EV craze and the climate-change mania that undergirds it. Even more absurd is the renewed faith in central planning to ramrod the country into the foolishness. We are reliving the failed Bolshevik experiment.
What precipitated my reaction? I ran into a Yahoo! Finance article by Rick Newman, “Hold on tight to your gas-powered car” (see below). There’s much to recommend the piece, but much of it is still predicated on slipshod, ideologically laden “science”. The people who write about climate change and most everything related to it rely on arguments from authority. That’s the lazy man’s rationale for people who never developed an understanding of science and the scientific method. They’ve got the ideology down – man is an inveterate defiler of the environment – but depend on “experts” who are similarly corrupted by ideological biases to lend a large measure of confirmation bias to the scribbler’s contentions. It’s frilly political theater until it metastasizes into central planning – the Sovietization of life – and then becomes dangerous to the health of a civilization.
At the point of Sovietization, life will spiral downward. Remember the Soviet Union? Maybe not, for anyone who reached puberty after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Biden and his cohorts are busy resurrecting central planning on American soil. A newly announced policy issued from a DC commissariat, the EPA – much like the Bolshevik’s Gosplan (the USSR’s economic planning agency) and its Five-Year Plans – will punish owners and producers of internal combustion engines (ICE) with leaps in emissions’ standards to kill them off and herd the population into EV’s (see below). Classic central planning.
Long lines to buy shoes in 1970’s Soviet Union.Empty shelves in the government stores, 1970’s and 80’s.Waiting in line for clothes at a government clothing store.Long lines waiting to charge for electric vehicles at a California charging station, 2022.
Whether we’re talking about Stalin’s industrialization/dekulakization plans or Biden’s zero-emission schemes, they are reflections of one another and will suffocate prosperity. How? Why? Much of it has to do with Hayek’s knowledge problem: something as multitudinous and multifaceted as a society cannot be managed by a small group of centralized “experts” or “elites” (see below). No one knows and cannot know enough to do it, except God. Not surprisingly, a delusion of godliness is the companion of central planning.
When top/down controls are issued, expect the litany of unintended consequences. In prior efforts to dictate choices regarding fuel efficiency, cars became “light-weighted” and accident fatalities increased. And the gains in fuel efficiency unexpectedly led to more fuel consumption, not less – something heartily detested by the gang at the Sierra Club.
SNAFU, the refrain of WWII GI’s: situation normal all #&?%!@ up. And the prominence of snafu rises with the boldness of the plan, like forcing 330 million people in the span of a couple of decades to relinquish the second biggest investment in their adult lifetime and coerce them into an electrified and inconvenient alternative chosen by their commissars.
Biden’s EPA commissar, Michael Regan, announces new tailpipe emissions standards.
Of course, with this clique of dullards, the failures of central planning are to be met with . . . more central planning. They’ll never admit failure. Don’t underestimate the creativity of these powerful zealots to conjure more reasons to centrally plan, thus this latest round of EPA ukases. The climate-change gambit has been particularly expedient in expanding the Leviathan. A casualty of it all will be the existence of markets, if you discount the mangled kind that limply survives the administrative state’s waterboarding. Central planning and healthy markets are matter/antimatter to each other.
Markets are what happens when buyers and sellers spontaneously come together under conditions of freedom. They cannot exist without personal freedom. As with markets, freedom and central planning cannot coexist. A huge part of the sales job to accept the assault on freedom is to convince a governing chunk of the franchise that freedom is bad, even on the most mundane things. You are shamed for wanting a SUV with a v-8. You see, in repeated shouts of fevered gibberish, you’ll be browbeat into believing that buying that 5.7L Chevy Yukon will rain down on the planet extreme weather and California’s forever-drought. Hysteria works great to make people want to be controlled.
As if in a real-world experiment, watch the home base of the frenzy, California, descend into feudalism.
Biden is following California’s lead. And all for what? The political leverage afforded by politicized “science”? Physics is bastardized into the simplicity of Lego blocks or Lincoln Logs. Forget about the physics of quantum mechanics, the general theory, and energy pathways. The complex workings of nature are debauched by ignorant die-hards with a cause. In their playroom of the mind, the temperature of the multi-layered atmosphere of varying composition can be regulated like a finger pressing a touch screen on a wall thermostat. Need to lower global temperatures? Just command an x-amount reduction in fossil fuel usage for an x-amount temp decrease; it’s all so simple in the mind of a child. But both the prognosis and cure are what you’d expect from people more influenced by the unstable teenager Greta Thunberg than the lessons of real science.
The hysterical teenager Great Thunberg.
Combine the crusaders with scientists who have forsaken science for politics, and we have the makings of central planning. After all, what were the Bolsheviks, as harbingers of central planning? They were Marxists. Marxists are followers of Karl Marx as he tried to turn history into science, the “science” of his totalitarian revolution. Add a little Lenin with his “vanguard elite” to lead the revolution and direct the construction of the utopia and we’re back to central planning. And we get to relive the Soviet experience of an ossified economy of chronic food shortages and empty store shelves.
Karl Marx was right about one thing when he wrote that historical incidences occur “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. Welcome to another one of Biden’s farces, this time through his EPA commissariat.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Hold on tight to your gas-powered car”, Rick Newman, Yahoo! Finance, 4/12/2023, at https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hold-on-tight-to-your-gas-powered-car-193629839.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall
* “Biden administration proposes toughest auto emissions standards yet: The rules, which would dramatically reshape the auto industry, could cut as much as 10 billion tons of carbon emissions by 2050, the EPA projected”, Rose Horowitch, NBC News, 4/12/2023, at https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-administration-proposes-toughest-auto-emissions-standards-yet-rcna79304. —- It’s a press release that solely functions as a rah-rah statement for draconian cuts in vehicle emissions to herd the population into EV’s. You have to dig deeper to find the specific actions that drive the policy.
* “Biden-Harris Administration Proposes Strongest-Ever Pollution Standards for Cars and Trucks to Accelerate Transition to a Clean-Transportation Future”, EPA, 4/12/2023, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-proposes-strongest-ever-pollution-standards-cars-and
* For Hayek’s knowledge problem thesis: “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, F. A. Hayek, at https://fee.org/articles/the-use-of-knowledge-in-society
What was Anheuser-Busch, Inc., thinking? For that matter, what was Disney, Inc., thinking? Dylan Mulvaney as the face of Bud Light? Add the bigs at MLB, the NFL, NBA, and NHL to the socially detached. The list of corporate heavies insulting their customer bases is quite long. They aren’t even aware that they have positioned themselves at the edge of a culture war. A beer brand strongly identified with the lunch-pail crowd decides to make a boy-turned-girl the face of its product. Did it occur to anyone in the c-suite that this could be a problem? I guess not. Why? The mediocrities at the helm of our big corporations are people completely out to lunch, out of touch, or what have you.
I suspect the disconnect has much to do with something identified by Charles Murray in his book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010”. An intensifying social nepotism among people of increasingly uniform background has created an insular managerial class ignorant of the world beyond their bubble, much like the nobility at Versailles. Thus, they are caught flat-footed when an advertising strategy that is broached at a wine soiree goes awry. It only sounds compelling to those similarly closeted. Outside, for the rest of us, it’s absolute looney tunes.
This is a girl, Alissa Heinerscheid, the vice president of marketing for Anheuser-Busch, with the monotonous social resumé of her class: the same elite schooling and social entanglements and experiences. They don’t drink the stuff but are identical to the other inhabitants of corporate headquarters. They have the sensibilities of the Harvard life but lack an acquaintance with regular life. I suspect that the same happenstance applies to every institution under the management of the socially privileged and cocooned.
Alissa Heinerscheid, Anheuser-Busch ad exec.Alissa Heinerscheid as a Harvard undergrad at one of her Isis Club’s bashes.
Credentials are no protection from the bumbling mediocrities who have such great power over livelihoods. We are living through a time when “elite” and “expert” makes one cringe, like watching the face of transgenderism become the face of Bud Light.
Be my guest and watch the Sky News report on the story.
Teacher union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)Janet Protasiewicz speaks at her election night party in Milwaukee after she defeated former Justice Dan Kelly for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. (Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)
Our national decomposition shows little sign of abating. Elections in Wisconsin and Chicago indicate that there remains an appetite for decay.
Another word for decline or decomposition of a culture, civilization, or nation is degringolade. Whichever word is used, however, we are experiencing it. Nature isn’t doing it to us. We are doing it to ourselves. The precipitating factor is what is bouncing between our ears. A sizeable chunk of the electorate, without even knowing it in many cases, is sold on toxic neo-Marxism in the guise of modern progressivism. Today, progressivism and this updated Marxism are synonymous. I’m beginning to sound like a broken record since I’ve certainly mentioned it often enough but can’t get away from it. It’s constantly resurfacing in many places around the country.
This isn’t the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson. As a refresher, this current edition is a relatively modern refashioning of Karl Marx’s paradigm: the systemic oppression of the oppressed who are defined by an ever-fungible list of outgroups covering everything from XY girls to the poor to anyone with high melanin counts. To the rescue in this blinkered ideological schematic is a complete, top to bottom, inside and out, overhaul of all societal arrangements from the family to property, a thoroughgoing Marxist revolution. Sound familiar? Read BLM’s mission statement before it was scrubbed clean of too much revelatory information (see below). We’ve proven to be quite creative in defining the “oppressed”, or victim groups. For greenies, you might add the mother goddess Gaia (earth) to the list. Anyway, this latest edition fairs no better than the kind that lurked behind the Iron Curtain or Mao’s China or is lurking in North Korea and Cuba. It is a sacking of our heritage and thrusting the country into despair.
The canary passing out in the coal mine in this moment of our evisceration is urban America. Our cities are crumbling, and so are the states dominated by them. The story has been acted out before. We are historically rhyming with 4th and 5th-century AD Rome. The Roman Empire didn’t go out in a boom but a whimper. The cities became unlivable, mired in high taxes, crumbling infrastructure, a deterioration of services, lack of security, and overburdening controls. Who’d want to live there? Apparently, many didn’t by the 5th century. The population of the city nearly emptied from over a million in the 1st century AD to 30,000 by the 5th. Other similarly weakened urban places suffered. People flocked to fortified estates, monasteries, and towns with natural defenses. It’s the beginning of feudalism.
Feudalism is returning. Today, in the good ‘ol USA, people are rushing to states and places where 3-strikes laws mean something, where taxes and bureaucracies aren’t bleeding producers white, where parking your car on the street in front of your house isn’t an invitation to vandalism. In other words, where neo-Marxism/progressivism is held in disrepute.
Where boys’ and girls’ bathrooms are separated by a wall. Where nature’s chromosomal distinction hasn’t been buried by the linguistic manipulations of pronouns and “birthing person” for “woman”. It’s just the opposite in our urban neo-Marxist silos. Entirely mired in the mindset, many of our cities and urbanized states are busy advancing the revolution by eliminating other distinctions such as the one between criminal and law-abiding. Judges and local potentates treat criminals as victims and their real victims as . . . well . . . .
As if we need any more evidence, Whole Foods announced yesterday (4/10/2023) that it was “temporarily closing” its 65,000 square foot San Francisco outlet at Eighth and Market, the Trinity section, that it just opened last year. According to a company spokesman, “If we feel we can ensure the safety of our team members in the store, we will evaluate a reopening of our Trinity location.” The area has been plagued by brutal beatings, stabbings, killings, and accidents in recent weeks. Too few cops and law-unenforcement is making San Francisco look like 5th-century Rome (see below).
These arbiters of revolutionary justice in places like San Francisco have their own vocabulary to push this cultural revolution. “Decarceration” is the go-to for releasing offenders to reoffend, just call it “low-level crime”, which is another word for “inconsequential” to Soros-backed DA’s – inconsequential to everyone but the person left battered, bruised, and bleeding in the subway. Barbarian invasions aren’t doing it to us, unless barbarian refers to the urban powerful who have drunk the neo-Marxist Kool-Aid. Your progressive DA, judges, city council, mayor, governor, and state legislature are performing the role of the Visigoths and their King Alaric in laying waste to Rome in 410 AD.
Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD.Minneapolis in the 2020 summer of riots.
The only recourse for those not too fond of the mayhem is to vote with their feet. Get out! But these are democracies – surprise! The corruption is democratic. People are voting for mayhem. How’s that possible? It might have something to do with a little cost/benefit analysis on the run: the rewards of group largesse from the public treasury are greater than the costs of possibly losing your little girl in a drive-by. I know, it’s hard to believe. But, on the other hand, it could just be stupid people being stupid, something not unheard of in the annals of democracy.
Or it could be due to the overall social decomposition extending to our schools. People aren’t taught any better; they don’t know any better; and are easily led into believing nonsense. Yet, policy-nonsense still behaves, as it always has, whether popularly chosen or not, like a drunk behind the wheel. It’s a disaster careening down our thoroughfares. And like most drunks, all-too-often they don’t get sober till they hit bottom. Apparently, our urban electorates haven’t hit bottom. Or it could be that the voter pool has been reduced to the drunks, the sober having fled to safer climes (red states).
A sizeable majority – by ten points – of Wisconsin voters recently failed the field sobriety test but still grabbed the car keys. Some attribute the recent election of the Visigothic Janet Protasiewicz to the State Supreme Court to the abortion issue. Probably true, but Wisconsinites have now let the Visigoths through the gates with a new Visigothic majority on the Court and, as a result, will get much more than carte blanche abortion. Protasiewicz promised during the campaign to rewrite the state’s redistricting maps to the advantage of the neo-Marxists who promise more sacking into the foreseeable future. In addition, expect more teacher-union power to dictate your child’s education, backdoor racism in diversity-equity-inclusion, and higher taxes to finance the revolution. The whole litany of policies to promote the revolution against hypothetical systemic “oppressors” are about to be unleashed. And so will a run on exiting U-Hauls, proving once again that the only thing efficiently produced by Marxism is refugees.
Money is the mother’s milk of politics . . . and revolution. The donkey party neo-Marxists, in spite of their dismal record, are well-funded from a network of similarly intoxicated donors. The precedent was established by Lenin in 1917. The Bolsheviks were bankrolled by Imperial Germany. A revolution rides on more than fulminations.
Money and an election system reshaped to the advantage of their base put Protasiewicz in office, and gave Chicago another Alaric-style mayor, Brandon Johnson, to replace the Visigothic Lori Lightfoot. The guy is marinated in neo-Marxism, like his predecessor. San Francisco, Wisconsin, and Chicago are pointing the way to the future, the same future viewed by 5th-century Romans and early 20th-century Petrograd residents.
If not arrested, our condition will continue to deteriorate . . . until riveting calamities shock us back to our senses. Hopefully, by then, it won’t be too late. Hopefully, we won’t wake up to news of two aircraft carriers sunk in the western Pacific, and our response is crippled by an economy unable to meet the demands of the moment, or a population unwilling to fight after years of anti-western indoctrination in our media and schools. A pool of recruits rattled by gender dysphoria and accusations of white privilege can’t instill much confidence.
The signs of decay aren’t limited to the popularity of chic neo-Marxism among urban sophisticates. Another passed-out canary is plummeting birth rates and closing maternity wards. It’s hard to have a robust generational talent pool to face the threat with a population befuddled by pronouns and fungible sex-identity, all as the population shrinks. We’ve got a lot to worry about. And all the while, neo-Marxism, acting like the Visigoths, is busy hollowing out the nation and its civilization. At this late hour, the odor of national decomposition is beginning to overwhelm the olfactory glands.
RogerG
Read more here:
* BLM’s mission statement included the following:
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.” It’s straight out of the writings of Karl Marx, nothing unusual for the self-professed Marxism of BLM’s founders of Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi.
From the Wayback Machine Archive, Black Lives Matter: “What We Believe”, at https://web.archive.org/web/20200408020723/https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/
* “Whole Foods closes San Francisco flagship store after one year, citing crime”, Jordan Valinsky, CNN, 4/11/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/whole-foods-closes-san-francisco-flagship-store-after-one-year-citing-crime/ar-AA19IDPH
* If you’re interested, here’s a local San Francisco newscast about people getting out during the Covid shutdown: “On The Move: San Francisco residents on the move during the COVID-19 economic downturn” at
