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.
What’s happening to America? I have much reason to be worried about the soundness of popular thinking on some very weighty issues if an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) report on the state of public opinion post-election has any validity. My concern isn’t due to the findings running counter to my opinions. It’s my suspicion – call it an informed suspicion – that there is little awareness of a counter point of view, or much of anything else for that matter. We appear to be well-connected but poorly informed, maybe predominantly non-informed.
Perhaps we have always been this way to a significant degree. Perhaps. But what of all that talk about our “great schools” and vibrant free press? Honestly, that “free press” isn’t so much “free” as it is monotone, at least for the big shots. As for the schooling, never before has so many Americans spent more years behind a desk and come out of it with so little. The prerequisites for sound reasoning are quickly disappearing. Our scandalous press has been much written about, so little need to go there. But what of our schools? The only real snapshot of learning attainment is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NEAP). We are forever exhorted to spend more, trillions more, but are getting less and less. Reading and Math proficiency scores have plummeted from 2017 to 2019 (pre-pandemic): Reading fell from 40% to 34% and Math from 37% to 34%.
And what of those other subjects, like those that contribute to cultural literacy? Could our graduating seniors pass a citizenship test? Call me skeptical given the state of the other subjects.
Money, or the lack of it, isn’t the problem. Something more fundamental is afoot. Are we a healthy society? Is the infrastructure for the schools – college preparation, grad school teacher-training, curricular materials such as textbooks, etc. – healthy? They are festooned with a rigorless leftist ideology, wokeness run amok.
And let’s pull the rug back on our commonly chaotic homes. Now there’s a new normal for you.
No wonder according to AEI, 60+% expressed hostility to the Electoral College. I’ll bet that most don’t understand it and the Founder’s complex reasoning for it. This is a discussion in a vacuum, and a poll result coming out of the vacuum.
Groupthink
The sudden popularity of marijuana is another thing. Let’s strip the debate of the much-ballyhooed medical benefits and get real. This is about getting high, and not much else. The popularity of weed has been on the upswing for at least a couple of generations, as getting high has made a comeback. As these young adherents pass through the age pyramid, they tow along with them the residue of their younger escapades. This might help account for the jump of 22% for legalization in the AEI analysis.
Combine the corrupted education with the increasing frivolity of our new techie world and we get the idea in polls that Biden will unite the country. Where’d that come from? Biden spent all summer threatening many of our jobs and imposing on us the semi-literate musings of a few half-wits in Congress. Unite the country by foisting on us over-complicated junk like hybrids, by having us grow more accustomed to intermittent blackouts and expensive energy, by having fewer guys and gals with guns and more overpaid Sociology majors patrolling our neighborhoods, by Soros-funded DA’s not enforcing the laws and emptying the jails, by freezing your kids out of college slots to benefit other upper middle-class kids who check the right identity boxes, by hiking taxes on job creators, by open-borders caterwauling . . . . ?
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer gets ready to begin her first State of the State address with Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist standing by. (photo: Casey Hull)
This isn’t the stuff of a “uniter”. The whole scheme is based on division and a smear: a parceling out of blame to one group and government bennies to categorical favorites. And then there’s the view in the poll that Biden will do better with COVID. Once again, where’d that come from? Biden is frozen in March 2020 when we didn’t know anything. He wants to double down on stupid. Measures such as lockdowns, school closures, and having us masked-up everywhere at nearly all times may have been appropriate when COVID-knowledge was a blank slate. Now we know a lot more about who is vulnerable (very few), the nature of the bug, and how to treat it. Instead of targeting efforts on the truly vulnerable, Biden and company wants to bring back totalitarianism, the kind of thing that failed at preventing our current second surge. Yeah, doubling down on stupid.
The polling analysis by AEI doesn’t say nearly as much about public opinion as it does about the condition of the minds behind those broader set of opinions. I think that it was Will Rogers who said, “It’s not what he doesn’t know that’s so dangerous. It’s what he knows that ain’t so.” Chew on that.
This configuration doesn’t capture the essence of our modern mode of government. The branch on the left is mostly superfluous. The subterranean one and the one on the right hold sway.
Ours is not a limited government founded upon popular sovereignty. It is something unmoored from any sensible reading of the Constitution. Congress, the legislative branch, is a pointless political soap opera, no longer deliberative and relevant for the most part. The real stuff of governance happens in an alliance between government workers in the executive branch and the courts. The same pattern is repeated in the states. The least democratic parts have the greatest effective power.
No better example of this disfigured mode of governance can be found than the actions of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on September 17 to nullify sections of the state’s election law signed by Democratic governor Tom Wolfe last year. The law stipulated that mail-in ballots had to be received by 8 p.m. on election day. The Court supplanted the plain language in the law with its own judgment of 3 days after the election. Why 3 days? Good question. I’m sure that there’s some rationale but I don’t think that it’s far removed from arbitrary.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court: the state’s second legislature.
On what did the narrow majority of four black-robed potentates hang their hat for their edict? Well, it’s the same tack as finding the right to abortion in emanations and penumbras (Griswold v. Conn. /Roe v. Wade). Find some language in the Constitution (state or federal) clearly meant for something else and stretch it to apply as needed. That way, they can legislate but hide it under “interpretation”.
These legal eagles invented an entirely new elastic clause in the state constitution. The relevant passage in the state constitution, now stretched to satisfy judicial whims, reads, “Elections shall be free and equal; and no power, civil or military, shall at any time interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage.” Of course, if a deadline can be annulled by such reasoning, so can any standard to ensure a credible election. Shower the state with ballots – which was done – and let them come in by wind and clutches at times made fungible by judicial flights of fancy – which was also done.
The federal Constitution lays the power to establish the “manner” of elections with the state legislatures. If, as part of their “manner”, Pennsylvania’s powers-that-be are willing to tolerate the transfer of the legislative power to judges, we’re stuck with it.
What a sorry state of affairs. Legislatures legislate, courts legislate over them, and everyone who likes the result yawns “ho-hum”. No constitutional provision can prevent the reality of sorry governments producing sorry elections. What do you expect from a corrupt oligarchy?
The plutocrats of today: Gates, Bezos, Soros, Zuckerberg (l to r)
Abraham Lincoln on his dire warnings about the possible demise of the United States in his address before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838 (read at http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/…/speeches/lyceum.htm):
A younger Abraham Lincoln at the time of the Lyceum address.
“At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? — Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! — All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
* * * * * * *
Is Lincoln right? Are we about to confirm his prediction of us being the author of our destruction? If so, the rot has begun among our elites and the institutions that they dominate and like gravity it will flow downhill. The rest of us get mindlessly pulled along or find ourselves powerless to resist. Pick any one of today’s fashionable issues – climate change, systemic racism, its cousin “social justice”, “equity”, the preeminence of self-professed identities, transnationalism – and we will drown in it.
Last Sunday, in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Bill Gates, tech billionaire par excellence, made statements about the pandemic that had me shouting at the tube (see below). My wife sought peace in another room. Now, I am no epidemiologist, and neither is he. Look at his bio. The much-abused word “privileged” applies to his upbringing. His father was a prominent lawyer and his mother was on the board of First Interstate BancSystem, Inc., her father being a national bank president. They were well-heeled enough for young Bill to attend Seattle’s exclusive Lakeside Prep School. “Silver spoon” doesn’t go far enough to explain his privilege.
And off to Harvard he went, dropping out after two years, taking mostly math and computer science courses. He made his well-deserved “bank” and retired, with his bank freeing him from the mundane matters of life so he could pursue his philanthropy hobby. In his mind, apparently, his lavish donations qualifies him to pass judgment on matters epidemiological. Tapper treated him as an “expert” . . . which he isn’t! A silver spoon and half a Harvard degree doesn’t qualify him to pontificate on the many ways to destroy our existence, but obviously not his. Yet, here he was at CNN having his ego stroked for his “wisdom”.
Gates’s advocacy of globalism/transnationalism, more lockdowns, and reluctance to give Trump’s Operation Warp Speed any credit for the record time in the development of a vaccine is both informative and disturbing. He twists himself into knots to give credit to others outside of Trump while completely ignoring Trump’s all-important gift of clearing the regulatory way for Big Pharma. Trump gave the keys to the researchers, and gets no recognition for the fact from the muddle-headed Gates.
Pres. Trump announced Operation Warp Speed on May 15, 2020.
What does the personage of Bill Gates say about the condition of our moneyed elites? Lots! This guy, and many others among the techie super-rich, has no real acquaintance with a coal miner, steel worker, grape picker, or anyone in the skilled trades, where and how they live, their values, and not much of anything about them, except as an order to an underling to call one of them to service the mansion’s plumbing. The lives of the average people are an abstraction to be treated abstractly. Lockdowns, compulsory mask wearing, school closings are pressed without the slightest appreciation of the impacts on the common people outside the walls of the gated estate. Their proclamations are easy for them, their wealth and influence being a shield for them and their children.
Not so for the masses of human beings underneath them in the status pyramid. This is an elite unlike any other before, a point made by Victor Davis Hanson in his piece “Where Did the New Mad Left Come From?”. They made their money in ways that insulated them from the earthy existence of manufacturing, mining, lumbering, construction, and the kind of retailing that requires you to meet and interact with customers. Theirs is an apartheid world of wealth where they go from their homogeneous wealthy suburb to the exclusive prep school to the Ivy League to high tech and high finance. In their chosen sector, a life with the hoi polloi isn’t necessary and not evident. They live a life mostly freed from the unwashed masses, except in acts of social penance that appear as gifts that draw the admiration of the Davos crowd.
Warren Buffett, chairman and chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., speaks during an event with Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, not pictured, at Sokol Auditorium in Omaha, Nebraska, U.S., on Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2015. Buffet said at the rally that he was supporting Clinton’s bid for president because they share a commitment to help the less affluent. (Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Take a look at another among the fabulously rich in the tech world, Mark Zuckerberg, or the Google patriarchs, or the money-changing George Soros and you’ll see the same monotone leftist ramblings. Manipulating currencies or a life that keeps you ensconced among others like you isn’t the experience that’ll keep you from flights of utopianism and a predilection for the left side of the political spectrum — which is the same thing. They are the big money behind the billion-dollar prestige-school endowments, collectivist crusades, and neo-socialist/neo-Marxist agitators of the moment. Their money flows from the indoctrination in the colleges to the mobs in the streets to the political adventures that empower the home of lefty America, the Democratic Party.
To be clear, lefty bromides are toxic. Assaults on personal responsibility and the guarantors of morality in a thriving Christianity, and extended adolescence in state dependency aren’t the makings of mental health or personal accomplishment. No society can long endure under this constant abuse. Lincoln could be right in that we nurture our own downfall, and it begins as a rotting head on our social body.
Jack Dorsey of Twitter
I think that I’d have more respect for Gates if he’d give up his castle keep, take up residence in public housing, forego the hired security, and force his kids and grandkids to zoom from a dilapidated computer without expensive tutors and the elite prep school. Furthermore, Bill, freeze access to your bountiful assets so you’ll have greater appreciation for those wondering where their next paycheck will come from after your lockdowns continue into 2021 and maybe onto 2022. My guess is that he won’t last the night.
Are we irreparably divided? When deeply divergent cultural assumptions lie at the root, we could very well be heading for disunion. The only question is, will it be “soft” (peaceful) or “hard” (violent)? Terry Teachout, drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary, comes down on the side of disunion, but it’ll be a “soft” one to him. I’m not so certain, but I hope he’s right if we are to have one.
Terry Teachout
At work are two radically different notions of human nature. On one side lies the near perfectibility of us and our socio-economic-political arrangements. Indeed, a fixed nature is far from their imaginations. This leads to an endlessly meddlesome state. Space is left open in their intellectual firmament for all kinds of socialism: aggressive and velvet glove. In this social scheme, at the top of the governing pyramid is situated people like them, people whose status stems from paper credentials like college degrees and certifications. Today, this crowd increasingly comes with these ontological beliefs in tow.
Obama’s “pajama boy” from the 2010 publicity campaign to pass Obamacare.Steelworkers on a shift change in Braddock, Pa., 2008. (photo: Damon Winter/The New York Times)
On the other side of the cultural divide, we find those more traditionally inclined and the belief that human flourishing requires self-reliance and virtue. Yet, human nature is punctuated with a dark side. Therefore, all-powerful directorates will be populated with agents of a flawed nature like the rest of us. Spending 17-19 years in classrooms won’t change our basic makeup. Lord Acton’s famous quip about the possession of great power accessing our darker side is very relevant here.
Well, some of you might minimize the disagreement as only a difference of opinion. You’d be wrong to trivialize the estrangement. It’s fundamental to the difference between gun confiscation and a Second Amendment, abortion as infanticide and limiting it to the first trimester, free college and personal responsibility for your career path, environmental totalitarianism and environmental prudence, economic growth and the “new normal” of stagnation, religious liberty and state invasions of the pulpit, education freedom and the government classroom monopoly as a lefty finishing school, identity favoritism and equal opportunity, etc. Hardly trivial, this is existential.
In October 2015, Houston’s progressive mayor, Annise Parker, ordered the city’s district attorney to subpoena the sermons of selected pastors whom she suspected of using the pulpit for political purposes.
How did we get to this impasse? I think that the growth of government and its dependencies has seriously eroded the basis for our civilization. But also state-love has seeped into the subconscious of our media-saturated metropolitan areas. It began as a pervasive ethos in our faculty lounges. From there, it was evangelized to succeeding generations. I know of its prevalence as a 30-year teaching veteran in our public schools.
Unexamined lefty assumptions in our citified blue dots have provoked the chasm. Don’t be a bit surprised when you learn that people outside the blue dots have noticed. They have, and are justifiably horrified.
Rush Limbaugh yesterday let out the “S” word: secession (see below).
Over the past few years, I have been ruminating on the topic of secession, and worried that we are essentially two different peoples heading toward it. The differences are so profound that for one to rule the public square, the other is suppressed. Our politics have become a matter of conquest as we have become so deeply divided. It’s natural for the conquered to seek separation.
How different are we? Metropolitan areas are enthralled by a relatively recent nanny-state zealotry. Everywhere else, tradition and self-reliance has a stronger grip on imaginations. It’s the difference between pleasure-seeking materialists and your local church, if you want avatars to encapsulate the two sides.
Mayor Muriel Bowser looks out over a Black Lives Matter sign that was painted on a street, during nationwide protests in Washington, D.C., U.S. June 5, 2020. (Khalid Naji-Allah Executive Office of the Mayor/Handout via REUTERS)
We see it more and more, and all around us. During the Trump presidency, Democrat/Lefty strongholds engaged in John C. Calhoun-style nullification of federal immigration law, which Calhoun was an 1830’s harbinger over a federal tariff.
Now, it’s the traditionalists’ turn. Licentious electoral systems in blue states, and metropolitan cores in red-leaning states, have imposed an executive branch with lefty evangelical zeal on the vast stretches outside the blue dots and the coasts. In 1860, George Templeton Strong put it succinctly when he said, “Get prepared for a hurricane!”
The simple fact is that the urban cores and urban-core dominated states has adopted an aggressive leftism in recent years. They have moved extreme left while the rest of the country has remained more true to our founding beliefs and traditions. This could be a secession sparked by a militant collectivism in like manner as the adoption of a grand theory in defense of race-based chattel slavery in the South in the middle of the 19th century would incite the first go-around. In opposition, the abolitionists were the inheritors of an emancipation that is traced back through Christianity to classical times.
Modern urban bohemiansBlue collar Americans
I am worried. The fundamentals are present for a repeat. Indeed, if wiser heads don’t stop the leftward lurch, “Get prepared for a hurricane!”
While listening to Amazon Music this morning, the playlist presented “I Need You Christmas” by the Jonas Brothers. The song is beautifully performed, and reminded me of all that we are missing as our life has been meaninglessly deformed by the mini-totalitarians in positions of power.
The lockdowns and mitigations have nearly expunged church, most of of our interactions with other people, and removed celebration and spontaneous enjoyment of friendship from our lives. Children are banned from the park and school. They are left to spend most of their lives behind walls and in front of a computer screen. Ours is a deformed existence and not a natural and reasonable response to the spread of illness. This song reminded me of what we are missing, and ought not to.
Christmas should be a time of joy, faith, family, and friends. To be honest, the song makes me melancholy. Still, it’s a wonderful song and beautifully performed. Pease enjoy. And merry Christmas . . . if you can.
If you have a hankerin’, go watch “The Plot Against the President” (trailer below) on Amazon Prime by Amanda Milius, daughter of legendary script writer, producer, and director John Milius. It lays out the scheme by Obama’s courtiers, and Obama himself, to undermine Trump from the moment he won the nomination to the failed impeachment on February 5, 2020. Trump had no traditional “honeymoon”, and neither is Biden deserving of one. There should be a peaceful transfer of power, but it doesn’t have to be a cooperative one.
The post-2016 Democrats were despicable in their embrace of reverse racism, a racial spoils system, turning a blind eye to rioters, and socialism here, there, and everywhere. Their behavior was disgraceful in almost all matters political. Biden’s people should be prohibited from executive branch offices till noon, January 20. A couple of briefings for Biden alone may be alright. Then, he can take the info back to his minions that are holed up in the Office of the President-elect.
Congressional Republicans, keep the heat on from day one. Senators, if you have the majority, take a few scalps, particularly those that belong to Democrats from the California snake pit. Protect Durham and anyone who might be appointed to investigate the Biden family’s influence peddling.
Is this merely a matter of “vengeance”? No. Consider it, to borrow from the romantic texts between the Strzok and Page love birds, an “insurance policy”. It’s insurance to keep the Democrats from turning America into Venezuela.
Will Biden be hampered from doing the people’s business? And what business is that? Going after your livelihood and your $45,000 SUV in your garage? Greasing the skids for the prosecution of police departments and individual officers? More lockdowns to make your kids dumber and dumber? Going after your suburban neighborhood because it is too middle class and too nice? Waking up to learn that tax-the-rich became tax-the-paycheck? More insults to Israel and fist bumps with the mullahs? Your children finding that their college application didn’t check the right genitalia and skin color boxes? Lefty ideology being taught to your kids as “equity”? DMV-style healthcare replacing your doctor? Making it more difficult for you to get a gun as they open the jails, budgetarily strangle your police, and refuse to prosecute the guy breaking into your home and car?
Considering all that the Biden regime plans to offer, gridlock sounds good to me. At least, we’ll be spared the woke and neo-socialist claptrap.
Hugh Hewitt’s radio program is a treasure. I savor his demeanor and interviews of all stripes of opinion-makers. However, his take on the two most important issues of today – the election and pandemic – drives me up the wall. He’s certainly not alone in his display of tunnel vision on these two matters.
Friday, while interviewing Steve Kornacki, NBC’s resident expert on polling, they both strayed into superficial comparisons of the 2020 election with previous ones. Right off the bat, it must be admitted that this election was like no other and hardly analogous. It’s the first election in my memory that a huge bulk, if not the majority, of the ballots cannot be assigned to particular living, breathing, and eligible voters with much certainty. Ballots were shot-gunned to buildings throughout the country, were taken inside, and nobody can legitimately vouch for each ballot’s treatment after that. It’s the exact opposite of the level of security when voting in-person. This election was strange, really strange. How is a comparison with previous elections even possible?
Kornacki blithely tries to do just that with Hewitt in tow. Kornacki cited the increasing urbanization of Georgia and the demographic dominance of the counties within the orbit of greater Atlanta, counties that Hillary won by 30% and Biden wins by 40%, to help explain Biden’s razor thin victory in the state. I’m not convinced the fact has much relevance. Demographic changes don’t occur at the speed of flipping a light switch, even though they are gradually happening in real time. Four years isn’t long enough for that factor to account for a change of 10%.
How can anyone brusquely brush off the possibility of a once-in-a-lifetime loosey-goosey election system accounting for the surge in Biden support? Kornacki and Hewitt might be suffering from glaucoma.
Hewitt would probably respond by saying that there’s no evidence of substantial fraud . . . but fraud is beside the point. He sees most issues as a lawyer would, which he is, in clinging to his conclusion that there isn’t sufficient evidence to throw aspersions on the result. He’s right if all matters must meet the standards of jurisprudence, but that’s a rarified environment involving unique standards. For real people living in the real word, we can’t conduct our lives by measuring all that we do to “beyond a reasonable doubt”. We must act on what is likely to be true.
Evidentiary norms of the courtroom are ill-suited for policy making, decisions about your child’s education, and assessing an election system that incorporated what would have been considered fraud just two years before. The system hid voting behind walls – addresses – and counting procedures that poured ballots into huge anonymous piles like a rain drop landing in a pond. The system legitimized fraud and made it next to impossible to uncover the misbehavior in “sufficient” quantities.
Indeed, this Rube Goldberg election system was a disgrace. Party activists, greased with wads of lefty billionaire cash, became the principle means for distributing the ballots as they scurried to deliver and gather absentee ballot applications from their favorite constituencies, and became the principle means for their collection in legal and “questionable” ballot harvesting operations. Vote-by-mail essentially codified scandalous conduct.
The election was a system with few, if any, authenticity checks. You can’t expect underpaid and overworked poll workers to instantly become forensic handwriting experts. This election became a race to garner the biggest pile of paper, not necessarily voters, because the system was set up to place a premium on paper, not bodies. Under these conditions, paper is made easier to pile than bodies.
Mail-in ballots being prepared for counting. (AP Photo/Don Ryan, File)
Simply put, you can’t correlate each piece of paper with a live body. A leap of faith is required to overcome that problem. Hewitt and Kornacki are unknowingly mired in something akin to a religious act.
And then there’s Hewitt’s stand on the pandemic. He announced that Gov. Newsom “is doing his best” and implored public officials like LA’s Mayor Garcetti to cordially ask the population “to endure just 3 more months of restrictions”. Au contraire, Newsom and Garcetti are deserving of condemnation not compliments and supplications to be nicer.
We’re in the midst of the much-anticipated second surge and many in power act as if they haven’t learned a darn thing. We now know that the truly vulnerable are a narrow slice of the population: the aged with serious health problems. Outside of that demographic sliver, almost all people would probably find influenza a more dangerous threat. And yet, we are told that nearly everyone’s entire way of life must be upended to protect this very small number of people, or protect ourselves from a threat that is no more dangerous than the seasonal flu. The hidden truth is, we can easily protect the vulnerable without making everyone else’s life a living hell.
If we do get it, we have proven therapeutics with vaccines on the way. We won’t die, unless we have the health issues that would imperil some of us every flu season. We had good reason to know this fact at the start but powerful officials got caught up in a hysteria that was incited by grossly inflated death rates. Remember those? But Garcetti, Cuomo in New York, and Whitmer in Michigan still act as if the embarrassingly faulty fatality numbers in March came from the burning bush on Mt. Horeb. They behave as if a spike in “positive” cases equates with a spike in deaths. Few things are further from the truth.
Jay Bhattacharya
Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford in his presentation in Hillsdale College’s October issue of “Imprimis” clears the medical fog of war. Most importantly, he addresses the confusion that paralyzes Whitmer’s and Newsom’s mind on that notorious death rate. The number that corrupts their brains muddles “cases” with “infections”. The former is a much smaller number than the latter, with the former producing a much higher death rate if used as the formula’s denominator. “Infections” is a bigger number because it refers to people with the virus or having had it. “Cases” are just the number of people with the virus that show up at a medical facility. Seroprevalence tests – an analysis of the presence of virus markers in the form of antibodies and proteins – in Santa Clara County, Ca., and replicated in 82 studies around the world, showed 50 times more infections over cases. Thus, the death rate properly calculated must drop behind the decimal point and not in front of it. Bottom line: the virus’s lethality was and is greatly overstated.
Targeted mask-wearing, quarantining and assisting the vulnerable, and an opening of life for 95% of our people should be the order of the day. Above all, get the kids back in school. Increases in positive cases should no longer paralyze us into ruination. If you get it, see your doctor, stay home, and drink plenty of fluids. Sound familiar?
The two issues are linked on account of the virus-panic being used to mutilate our elections, in addition to butchering our entire way of life. Hewitt wallows in misconceptions about the 2020 election and the virus. The school closings and lockdowns are destroying the path to meaningful lives. Our third world-style election system gave us a person of mental incontinence who will be left to populate the executive branch, and the courts, with delusionary leftists. We are going to be in for a rough ride, and the disfigurement of rational treatment of the two events is no good service.
Solar panel array in Irwindale, California. (photo: Ringo Chiu/Zuma)
Here I am with another piece on the ongoing and grotesque burlesque show in my native state of California. This one is about the inevitability of oppressive central planning that grips the progressive mind in the state. There seems to be this fetish for the power to control everything and everyone to get to the ruling claque’s rapturous end state. They need a cataclysm to stampede the state’s hoi polloi into their arms. For them, nothing better fits the bill than their fixation on “climate change” and the companion thought that the Golden State and, if they capture DC, the US will lead the way to the nirvana of Sierra Club policy papers.
I was reading Kevin Williamson’s fairly balanced essay in National Review’s October issue, “The Heart of California’s Darkness”, and it dawned on me that the political power-hunger in the heart of every California progressive (or liberal, or leftist, or whatever) is, in some ways, more complete than anything that came out of the old Soviet Union. The USSR was a contraption that couldn’t run because it combined two incompatible things: complete equality in all things material and a prosperous life filled with conveniences. The former undercut the latter, and down it came after about 80 years. The crazies that run Sacramento are after something more sweeping.
Frankly, they don’t care so much about conveniences as they do about their religious-like adherence to an arbitrary sense of environmentalist purity best articulated by the immature utterances of people like 17-year-old Greta Thunberg and her ideological soulmate, Ocasio-Cortez. They won’t even make allowance for the desire for comfort in life. One of the greatest additions to comfort, alongside the automobile and balloon housing construction (makes the ‘burbs possible), was air conditioning. All of them are on the hit list for eventual elimination.
Ocasio-Cortez and Thunberg
The only problem is that the peasants would be seeking their pitch forks if the zealots shocked them with a huge and immediate dose of their vision. So, the fanatics seek to slowly strangulate our conveniences under think layers of regulations and edicts emanating from a politburo of the ruling party’s elders and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).
The Party has supportive cadres in affiliated institutions such as publicly-funded universities to help them invent new schemes to herd the masses in the desired direction. One such contributor in the achievement of the Party’s goal is comrade Severin Borenstein of UC Berkeley’s Energy Institute at the Haas Business School. He’s an enthusiast for tying electricity rates to the time of day when their most needed. If you don’t find ways to cut back on air conditioning, you’re deserving of bankruptcy in the fevered imaginations of people like Severin.
Severin Borenstein
And this comes at a time when the air is fouled by earlier escapades into environmentalist utopia that turned the forests into a blanket of matchsticks. So, if his wish comes to pass, you, my fair resident of the state, will have the privilege of coming home to a hot and stuffy house to sweat and bake in. That’s what you get for not desiring to live in a cramped and over-priced hovel in the narrow band of real estate hugging the coast. The abject inhumanity at the heart of the worldview is what’s so appalling.
The fact is, California’s version of Lenin’s vanguard elite is trying to shoehorn reality into an unreality. It won’t work any more than the Five-Year Plans of Lenin and his descendants. See, the sun and wind don’t cooperate so you must be made to cooperate. According to the California Energy Commission (another Party affiliate), energy capacity has indeed increased in the past 20 years as the activists in power shifted to renewables. But not so fast. “Capacity” – which could be another one of those statistical fairy tales – must not be confused with “generation”. Generation of electricity has been flat, even declining slightly in the face of population growth. Accepting energy from hydrocarbons from inside or outside the state to make up the difference between demand and supply gives the ruling class the willies, and nuclear power conjures visions of old monster movies. What you end up with is blackouts and/or personal bankruptcy – not exactly an open-arms invitation to move to the state.
This is no way to live. Not surprisingly, 800 businesses have jumped ship in one year from 2018 to 2019 to join thousands of others in the diaspora. California is not the future, so long as its goofy vision is quarantined within its borders. That’s an open question given the fact that California acolytes of central planning are auditioning for national promotions in the new Biden administration.
If left alone, California will suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union. One can only hope . . . and pray. The death of the hot mess is the only thing that’ll keep the rest of us safe and secure. Now that’s real herd immunity.
DETROIT, MI – NOVEMBER 04: A crowd chants “stop the count,” and pounds on the glass windows and doors to the entrance of the Central Counting Board in the TCF Center after partisan election challengers were removed on November 4, 2020 in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by Elaine Cromie/Getty Images)
Biden got 11 million votes – or maybe 15 million – more than Obama in 2008. Trump got 23% more than McCain. And Washington Post columnist Philip Bump brands the 2020 turnout (in “Actually, it makes perfect sense that Biden would get more votes than Obama”) as “not ahistorical”. Amazingly, he then goes on to explain why it was “ahistorical”. What’s up? In 2020, the country was showered with pieces of paper (mailed ballots) that may or may not have been reflective of warm bodies or active brains. It certainly is responsible to ask whether each one of those pieces of paper represents a thinking human being or warm body when ballots were thrown to the wind like Deutsch marks in the hyper-inflationary Germany of 1923 ($1 = 4,210,500,000,000 German marks). Bump presents some sound reasoning and then falls off the cart. In fact, our election system is a joke that became a belly laugh in 2020.
Bump partially attributes the larger turnout to population growth. But that speculation doesn’t pass the smell test. The hordes in the US grew by about 31 million from 2008 to 2020, but those new bodies may not translate into more voters since they increasingly represent demographics that historically don’t vote . . . unless Tammany Hall never went away. The young and immigrants dominate the additions to the vote-eligible legions. The story is more than a myth that new immigrants were met at the docks with a job, a promise to get the oldest daughter married, and a ballot. The young and immigrants with their offspring are too busy with other things on their minds. Voting doesn’t quite catch up on the list of priorities with hooking up or working hard to get established in the new country. Unless, of course, the get-out-the-vote (gotv) campaign consists of cajoling, enticements, or harassment, or worse. Free will gets overwhelmed by the pressure from the political machine.
Thomas Nast cartoon showing Tammany Hall political boss Richard Croker’s tentacles firmly fastened on New York City Hall.
Machines still exist, by the way. Some states and most big cities function as Maduro regimes (of Venezuela fame).
And what to make of that free will? Free will turns into mush after constant pestering, or the election system comes to you in the mail to facilitate “social” voting, the opposite of the secret ballot. Ballots go to buildings and who knows what’s happening behind those walls. Group voting, one person voting for many, peer pressure? It’s highly questionable whether each piece of paper is correlated to the free will of an individual person legally entitled to vote, let alone one above room temperature. It’s hard to say how legitimate the election is when we pull crazy stunts like this. A person can be forgiven for thinking that we systematically and legally promoted fraud and then called it voter enthusiasm, like Bump.
Our intrepid Washington Post columnist is probably correct when he cites higher enthusiasm in this election, as is true of every presidential election cycle. He then tried to pinpoint Trump as the catalyst. In his mind, the greater attention this time around was really a referendum on Trump. The election was a hate-Trump or love-Trump excursion, Biden being the beneficiary of a larger hate-Trump mob.
Could be, but my olfactory glands are once again aroused. This smells too much like east coast, beltway confirmation bias, or wishful thinking, at work. Bump so strongly wishes it to be true that he massages his reasoning to make it true. I can’t say for sure that Bump is a partisan but a person can be forgiven for reaching the conclusion if the writer subject is cloistered in a mass of homogeneous minds to such an extent that he uses the data to validate the suffocating group mind of his surroundings.
By his own reckoning, and Gallup polling, 2020 was no more of an attention-grabbing hullabaloo than 2008. And this, in addition to the increase in non-voting demographics, is supposed to explain the popularity of a candidate with the charisma of a grilled cheese sandwich and the mental acuity of an early stage Alzheimer’s patient? Philip, I’m sorry, this dog won’t hunt.
Gallup has a credibility problem anyway. These people weren’t any more capable of measuring the Trump vote than the others. As it turned out, contra their predictions, 45,000 additional Trump votes in a few states would have Trump crowing before the press of another “landslide” in the face of their glowering stares. Their faulty estimation of the state of the electorate raises serious questions about their ability in measuring something as abstruse as the emotional state – like “enthusiasm” – of that very same public. Citing them isn’t much different than resorting to tarot cards.
The predictions of the polls are reminiscent of the difference between a WAG and SWAG in the realm of probabilities. Both are wild a** guesses, but the latter adds numbers.
Today, our discredited cultural elites tell us to shut up and accept the codger as our new god-in-waiting. Just one year before, they were wringing their hands over the voting public’s decision to install Trump. How could that be, they wondered? Their answer was to throw aspersions on the 2016 election. They ran with the orchestrated lie of a Trump-Putin cabal, and threw in, for good measure, broad complaints about the American election system. Now that’s something I can buy, and I’m not speaking of the Russia charade. Our system is a mess. We are morally disqualified from being members of UN election observer teams.
Pippa Norris of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in January 2019 writing for AP, while most likely wringing her hands over an election system that produced Trump, hit upon some truth before there was a 2020 imbroglio. She wrote a telling piece, “American elections ranked worst among Western democracies. Here’s why.” Portions of her analysis have as much a ring of truth in 2020 as it did for 2016. She cites her own Electoral Integrity Project, an operation that she directs, and the 2014 report of the bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration. Both make some good points.
In her AP article, she heaped abuse on our election system, and rightly so. She particularly mentioned the fractured nature of our election system with many voting regimes scattered among the 50 states and thousands of election boards, all varying in their degrees of efficiency and integrity. In her reckoning, partisanship is allowed to play a huge role in writing the laws and administering the distribution and counting of the pieces of paper in each one of the enclaves, and I agree.
TOPSHOT – Mail-in ballots in their envelopes await processing at the Los Angeles County Registrar Recorders’ mail-in ballot processing center at the Pomona Fairplex in Pomona, California, October 28, 2020. (Photo by Robyn Beck / AFP) (Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images)
That might explain why Montana’s vote is more valid than the ones coming out of urban one-party states. These single-party fiefdoms don’t have competitive opposition to keep them honest. Graft becomes honest graft in the memorable words of George Washington Plunkitt. In other words, electoral fraud becomes easy, legal, or hidden without the presence of a powerful opposition riding herd on the rulers. Little of this will come to light because little is open to effective scrutiny.
It’s especially true in vote-by-mail schemes. Once a mail-in ballot is removed from the envelope and added to the stack, and the privacy envelope with the signature is tossed to the wind, what integrity check is there? The vote gets certified and real skullduggery will be relegated to the mists of urban myth, popular only among the losers.
Lisa Benson
Norris goes off the rails into fantasy when she points to proportional representation gambits and heightening “convenience” as ways to improve the system. The proportional approach splits party representation by the percentage of the vote. It’s most commonly associated with parliamentary systems, which is less problematic when there just two parties, and a disaster when there are many. Splinter parties become kingmakers and coalition governments teeter into instability. Israel in the past year and a half had 3 elections and is probably heading to their fourth. The suggestion piles instability on top of our current mess of chaotic vote regimes and vote procedures that turn election season into a farcical sitcom.
Examining absentee ballots.
As for “convenience”, there’s nothing more convenient than vote-by-mail, and there’s nothing that does more to conjure an absence of faith in the results. The whole artifice abolishes the secret ballot, which ensures that the marks on the piece of paper reflect the conscience of a single person acting independently, while eliminating the close supervision that is only possible from in-person voting. With no secrecy guaranteeing that the vote reflects the will of an individual person and no supervision in the act of voting, what can go wrong, eh? Plenty.
One question that escapes serious consideration is this one: Should every eligible voter vote? The message is rammed home that everyone “should” vote. It’s as if the only expectation for the voter is to mechanically mark the piece of paper, not to bring anything more to the act. I beg to differ. Voting should be left to those who’ve given the matters in question the requisite effort and thought to understand the matters before them. The mentally incontinent and indifferent should be at the top of the list of people who should be shamed from voting – not banned through a poll test, but shamed.
Instead, there’s a concerted effort to bring out the mentally incontinent and indifferent by making the act of voting “convenient”. One thing that this election teaches us is that convenience can only come at the expense of deteriorating credibility. If an election lacks trustworthiness, but is imposed on the population nonetheless, we’ll have all the makings for grave upheaval thereafter.
Our choices are clear regardless of any partisan result. Vote-by-mail should end, with it only justified in very limited and carefully tailored circumstances. Election day should be a holiday to get the 95% of the electorate to appear at the precinct in person. If you have to wait in line, the experience will remind you that the day is set aside for you to vote. Early voting, in-person only, should be limited to a week before election day. Precise national standards should be in place for national elections and a slew of stricter guidelines for all others. DOJ should man-up for swift investigations and prosecutions of violators, with similar requirements at the state level.
Our present system is a farce. We should be rightly viewed as a laughingstock by the rest of the world. Who are we to pass judgment on any poor country’s election system when we have this mess visited upon us very 2 to 4 years? Ours is a third world election system, American style. Maduro has a similar one, Venezuela style.
Allies of Nicolas Maduro’s party made a clean sweep of the Sunday election after the opposition boycotted, July 2017.
