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.
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.
Rev. Al Sharpton speaks, center, flanked by La Raza President Janet Murguia, right, and Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, speaks to reporters about the Voting Rights Act, outside the West Wing of the White House in Washington, Monday, July 29, 2013, after a meeting with President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
If you have any doubts about the fact that Big Tech is seeded throughout their organizational pyramids with leftists, look at what happened to Eli and Shelby Steele’s film, “What Killed Michael Brown?”, on Amazon’s website (see the trailer below).
Shelby Steele. director and writer of “What Killed Michael Brown?”, being interviewed by Fox radio.
The film was initially cancelled. Why? The censors at Amazon rolled out drivel like the film wasn’t “eligible for publishing”, “doesn’t meet Prime Video’s content quality expectations”, and Amazon “will not be accepting resubmission of this title and this decision may not be appealed”. That’s a gobbledygook word salad, with the last phrase an attempt at commercial assassination.
For the incorrigibly naïve ready to believe Bezos’s underlings, go to Amazon Prime and take a look at the boat loads of stuff that shouldn’t be “eligible for publishing”. Who are these people trying to kid? The Steeles, pure and simple, challenge the Black Lives Matter dogma. That’s it! The Steeles’ take on race is too jarring to the straitjacketed minds in our chattering classes of legacy media, the academy, corporate boardrooms, Big Tech and its minions, and the Democratic Party. These socio-economic satraps are different legs of a monocultural centipede that can’t handle an opposing posture. If you have $19.99 to spare, buy it and watch it. You’ll quickly discover that “quality” was a PR word to hide an organizational attack on a different, well-founded point of view. Big Tech is working really hard to get a step on Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.
From left: Amazon Devices chief David Limp, SVP of corporate affairs Jay Carney, and CEO Jeff Bezos. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Later, after an outcry, Amazon relented. If for no other reason, stick your thumb in their eye by purchasing the film on Prime. You’ll also be rewarded by the “quality” and a well-reasoned outlook on the issue of race in America. You’ll quickly come to see that Amazon’s ploy was a lie.
Now, to the film. The Steele perspective on race is analogous to a kind of digestive tract that goes from real historical oppression, to later white guilt/penance, to government coddling to assuage the guilt, to crippling dependency, and to the evolution of a mutually beneficial relationship between the providers and recipients of the largesse. At this last stage of digestion, we have a full-blown race hustling industry ready to treat incidents as if they were a resource – like yesteryear’s Carnegie Steel exploiting Minnesota’s Iron Range – but leaving the cultural landscape in black neighborhoods horribly scarred.
This race-hustling industry has made a new career path in race-hustling. As in most things, the new career is founded on a few presumptions. It begins with the busybody reflex in the progressive mindset: life and people would be better only if they – the self-anointed “expert” – had power to direct their lives. Where did that lead? It led to the War on Poverty and the wholesale demolition of black property ownership and, most terrifyingly, the loss of the full humanness that naturally accrues to all of us. Blacks were put into a special category reserved for people incapable of personal responsibility. A near complete annihilation of their civil society with its faith and family spilled out of this good-intentioned crusade.
And a new market in the penance for “white guilt” arose as white liberals sought exoneration and forgiveness and race-hustlers offer it for a price: wealth and power. In economics, no market can survive without mutual benefit, and indeed Al Sharpton and Democratic Party hegemons get wealth and power and whites earn remission after bending a knee before Black Lives Matter. It matures into a forever thing, a perpetual motion machine built around grievance and shallow identities.
Shelby Steele blows the cover on this hideous marionette show. See “What Killed Michael Brown?”. It might compensate for the deep disappointment after watching Mitt Romney join a horde of Black Lives Matter enthusiasts in the wake of another one of those resourceful incidents, George Floyd.
Photo: MICHELLE BOORSTEIN / THE WASHINGTON POST / GETTY
AEI scholar and contributor Frederick Hess in his piece “The oddest sort of progressivism” lays bare the wacky idea of wiping clean $1.6 trillion in student loan debt.
Chiefly, the idea is pushed most heartily by the people most likely to benefit: the people who staff the 200 progressive organizations – not the purported constituents – who last week petitioned Biden to do it “on day one” with a stroke of his pen. The whole thing is a ploy to transfer wealth from those who didn’t go to college and those who worked their way through cheaper schools to grad school graduates at pricey private schools and those who pursued grievance instruction in identity politics departments. Simply put, the equation goes something like this: money will flow from skilled tradesman and those working their way through school to those who’ll earn about $1 million more in lifetime income and rioters demolishing monuments and blowing up our cities. The former could be excused for thinking themselves to be chumps and suckers as the latter laugh all the way to the bank. This kind of thing turns the shiftless and conniving aristocrats in 18th-century Versailles into paragons of virtue.
People in the skilled trades. Many of these people worked their way through community college or trade school and have little accrued student loan debt, if any. Plus, they are more employable and better able to repay their much smaller loans than those who spent 4 years, in addition to a couple of years of grad school, for their Social Science or law school degree.
The biggest chunk, some 40% of the debt, was accrued for grad study “by doctors, lawyers, and other professionals in pursuit of lucrative credentials” according to Hess. Add to that, the gambit does nothing to address the colleges’ complicity in the skyrocketing tuitions that drive much of the debt. Easy student loans mean more breathing room for college administrations to hike rates and offer instructional silliness. What do you get for the higher price? Certainly not a better education. The grievance industrial complex is too well entrenched in many Humanities, Social Science, and identity politics departments. Many students will matriculate their way through and come out only equipped for political activism, while facing a student loan bill that neither their activism nor barista job can afford.
Here’s an idea: put the colleges on the hook for their graduates’ inability to repay. I can’t think of a better way to use Harvard’s $42 billion endowment. The taxpayers shouldn’t be saddled with a debt that was stimulated by administrative flights of fancy in the absence of accountability. Make them as answerable as we are in meeting our mortgage. As such, all of us will be further advantaged by no longer having to submit to the half-witted sermons of grievance politics graduates. That industry could very well dry up as schools quickly realize that “… Studies” degree programs are drawing down the school’s bank account.
Let’s ignore the crony capitalist pleas of the self-interested and, instead, make the schools responsible for the quality of their instruction and the occupational fate of their students. Now that’s an idea I can support. How about you?
Mail-in ballots in Chicago, Ill., waiting for postal delivery for the November 3 election.
One way to perpetuate the politically useful cause of combatting racism is to proclaim its existence in such a manner as to make the charge unable to be disproven by announcing it to be abstract or systematic. Leaving aside the patent illogic of it all, our political practitioners of irrationality have hit upon something. The form of something, take our election system for instance, is just as important as the content of it. It’s just that the woke crowd’s preferred use of “system” is pure nonsense.
Break the election system into two parts: the distribution and the processing of the ballots. First, the distribution. Thanks to COVID-hysteria, across the country we went on a binge of early voting, voting by mail, ballot harvesting, and essentially eliminating the measures to ensure ballot integrity and validity. In other words, we legalized what in another era used to be called fraud or cheating. Slipping ballots in early used to be one tactic to game an election. Another was to grab a handful of ballots and hand them to God knows who to do God knows what, like in our own time mailing the things to addresses across the universe. In another time, it was considered the fraudulent abuse of the absentee ballot procedure. This set the stage for the party of one-party fiefdoms and urban political machines – Remember Missouri’s Pendergast ring or Gotham’s Tammany Hall? – to legally do overtly what they used to do covertly.
I’m reminded of Robert Caro’s The Means of Ascent, the second volume of his series on the life of the 36th President of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ). Of particular note is LBJ’s successful and dubious elevation to Texas senator in 1948. Much that he did to steal the election from Gov. Coke Stevenson was legalized for today by the “crisis too good to waste”. Late registrations, new ballots mysteriously showing up, the whole mail-in shebang of today making it possible for one person to manufacture unknown multiples of votes, ballot harvesters hunting down warm bodies who can be cajoled to vote – and vote the “right” way – and legally diluted verification measures turned past crimes into permissible election procedures.
No wonder there’s little evidence of widespread fraud. Much of what fell under criminal fraud became, all of a sudden, statutorily permissible, or at least, with a wink and a nod, excusable. There was little fraud because fraud was legitimized by the pandemic.
You don’t need to resort to nefarious activities in processing, or counting, the ballots to manufacture the desired result. The whole system of distribution was fenagled to make a predetermined end more likely.
So, you will hunt in vain for old-style fraud like stuffing the ballot boxes because we’ve made it easy to do the same thing under cover of law in the distribution of the pieces of paper. Try and do the same thing with larceny, murder, and rape and see how far you get. This election was systematically a sham, period.
Mugshots of some of the arrested in the September 2020 BLM riots in Manhattan, NYC. (photo courtesy of the New York Post)
Now that we’ve gotten the Trump v. Biden dustup over with, we can focus on the stories that really resonated from that season of falderol. These overlooked stories should grab attention because they are profound signifiers of deeper and troubling trends in the country. Take a look at this story in the New York Post of September 9, 2020: “Inside the privileged lives of protesters busted for rioting in Manhattan”. Something has entered the brain function of the upper third of America’s wealth pyramid, and it isn’t healthy. I’m wondering if we are breeding our own downfall through the nurturing of a new kind of privileged degenerate.
One of the main points that was raised by Luke Thompson in his recent piece in National Review Online, “Why Democrats Are Winning the Suburbs“, was the demographic shifts in the composition of the ‘burbs. In his estimation, more “minorities” mean a more politically competitive environment for Democrats. He’s probably correct to some degree but I think that he’s missing something much weightier. The suburbs and other upscale districts are breeding Maos, Trotskys, Lenins, Marats, Robespierres, Pol Pots, and Che Guevaras. Our new crop of revolutionaries doesn’t comport to the movie myth of a radical radicalized by some past personal abuse. The newest editions lead a comfortable life, comfortable enough to be free to dabble in extremist matchstick politics without worry of consequence. Not surprisingly, they probably have much in common with many in the latter list.
Just look at the mugshots. All of them suffer from melanin deficiency, a surprising feature given their fanaticism for the oppressed people of color. One, Clara Kraebber from the wealthy Upper East Side of NYC, and daughter of an architect and child psychiatrist with a second home in Connecticut, fits the same mold as the others. Let’s do a deep dive into Clara.
Clara Kraebber at home from Rice University. Clara Kraebber planned to build a ‘BLM focused’ network for ‘wealth redistribution’ in notes seized by law enforcement last week.
She (if I’m allowed to use the “binary”) is quintessentially “privileged” by any of the approved measures of Ibram X. Kendi. Her mom is an accomplished New York City architect with many prestigious projects under her belt. Her dad is a child psychiatrist and professor at Columbia University. These Masters of the Universe were accomplished enough to buy a $1.8 million 16th-floor apartment on Manhattan’s East End Avenue in 2016.
Condo apartment buildings on Manhattan’s East End Avenue.
In addition, the well-heeled elders apparently went on a real estate shopping spree to buy a completely renovated historic home in tony Litchfield County, Conn. These folks aren’t the kind to share the dining room at Burger King with an unemployed steel worker in Ohio. Literally, the working stiffs of the Midwest must be an alien species seeing that the place isn’t visible from 30,000 feet or is nonexistent in a short east coast drive down the freeway to their chic rendezvous in Connecticut.
The Kraebber second home in Litchfield County, Connecticut.
This couple gave birth and raised Clara. Where’d she go to school? She was schooled with others like her, maybe not in skin tone or eye shape but more importantly in socio-economic background. In 2014 she was a freshman at Hunter College High School when she joined up with a crowd protesting the Michael Brown shooting. The school isn’t an American Graffiti high school. It’s an elite prep school at public expense with enrollment proudly proclaimed by the school to be the “top one-quarter of 1% of students in New York City, based on test scores”.
Hunter College High School in Manhattan.
Her lefty politics matriculated with her to Rice University in 2018 where she is an undergrad. She must have been home due to the crazy lockdowns in order to participate in September’s riotous fun in New York City’s Flatiron District where she earned her Bonnie-and-Clyde reputation.
It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the brawling munchkins are the Democrats’ youth brigades in action. Clara was an active member of Rice University’s Young Democrats. Maybe not in action but at least in thought or sympathy, Party leaders share a Vulcan mind melt (Star Trek lingo) with the chanters of “Every city, every town, burn the precinct to the ground!” I can only guess at the intimate conversation in the Kraebber home that helped give rise to this bile.
Clara Kraebber arrested.
The rest of the arrested clan have similar bios. You’ll read about their heartwarming (?) professions of idealism for the “oppressed people of color”, animals, or zealousness for environmentalism. Wokeness and the religion of environmentalism lays them open to socialism and other revolutionary tropes. These are not minds open to reverence for the permanent things, such as the faith of their fathers and mothers. These children are primed to tear it all down.
Shame on the schools and shame on the two-parent families of the comfortably prosperous. The single parent in the ghetto is overworked and frequently incapable of screening out the chaos. Those in the upper third of the wealth pyramid have no such excuse. Their permissiveness, indulgence, and subtle philosophical innuendos make it possible for there to be more people like Clara fulminating in the face of a $50,000-per-year police officer.
We’re going to have to reformulate our political lingo. Country club Republicans is an endangered species, to be overtaken by country club Democrats. We breed them faster today.
I have much to be thankful. God has blessed me with a wonderful wife, two fabulous sons, dear friends and relations, a superb career in teaching, and a beautiful Montana retirement. Mine is a blessed life. Personally, it’s sunny. Extending the purview nationally, though, dark clouds are looming. Much of the dread emanates from Hollywood.
Speaking of the weather, in the language of climate change – the fad-issue of the day – the word of choice is “anthropogenic”, or “man-caused”. Our current political and cultural storm is anthropogenic by definition. Reality is being distorted through the funhouse mirror of Hollywood and the near uniform bias that permeates the great bulk of our media. It’s sad that informed contemplation has been replaced by this stuff.
I’m reminded of our constant flirtation with Hollywood’s diseased mind in the productions that roll off the entertainment industry’s assembly line. Take for example Netflix’s “The Crown”. The third season is upon us and my wife and I have seen them all in binge-watching forays. It’s a soap opera, and it isn’t history; however, there’s not much standing in the way for it, and most of Hollywood’s other affluence, from becoming the History. After all the schooling from K through PhD to the tune of trillions of dollars every year, a 19th century pioneer in an isolated homestead on the Great Plains is better equipped to handle the cultural noise than today’s typical upper classman in a university’s ASB. For them, and probably the bulk of streaming subscribers, the noise is mistaken for the music because there’s not much in the head to contradict it.
After viewing the last episode of season 3, I have a chance to ruminate on what I’ve seen. My conclusion? It’s entertainment, not history – and extremely opinionated entertainment at that. The butchering of important personages in the life of Queen Elizabeth Il, especially those on the right, is all too obvious. Churchill is reduced to a whimpering and emotional wreck. The reality of his forthrightness is hard to perceive in his frequent, blubbering downpour of tears. In an attempt to build up Elizabeth in relation to the old white guy, the script writers concocted the fantasy of a young Queen Elizabeth lecturing the elderly Churchill on some point of the British constitution in season 1. It’s absolutely unbelievable, but maybe believable to a poorly informed audience.
The blubbering Churchill as portrayed by John Lithgow.
Prince Philip comes in for analogous treatment. In the course of 3 seasons, I can’t recall an instance of his influence and advice being treated in a positive and sagacious light. How could somebody spend an entire life and be wrong throughout? I have my doubts. Counterpoint is a useful plot device, but this one presents a towering female Socrates to a bumbling prince consort. Could this be another opportunity for Hollywood to present the “other” upstaging the patriarchy? Maybe not, but it’s a familiar theme in everything from ads to movies. The zeal to correct for a generalized “wrong” leads to a fiction that will be mistaken for non-fiction in a population unable to draw the distinction.
Tobias Menzies as Prince Philip in The Crown.
Take the character of Margaret Thatcher in this last season. Her character is molded into an emotionally scarred, rigid scold with strangely misogynistic tendencies. Imagine it, the worst of Britain’s aristocratic and sexist good ol’ boys in their men-only clubs have nothing on Britain’s first woman prime minister according to the people who put this thing together. The incongruency is profound.
Interestingly as a matter of fact, it’s well-known that she loved her mother.
The hard face of Gillian Anderson’s caricature of Margaret Thatcher in a seated position with her cabinet.
To make this portrayal a functioning theme, the setting of the 1970’s is stripped from the story. Other than a brief reference to strikes that lead to energy shortages during the tenure of Labour prime minister Harold Wilson – who’s portrayed positively by the way – we’re not given much to understand the reasons for the rise of Thatcher.
Let’s plow the fields of real history. In the 1970’s, the UN’s OECD had projected that the UK was on a glide path to the economic status of Albania. The unions had crippled the country with rampant strikes. Garbage wasn’t picked up due to strikes as shortages and inflation plagued consumers. Government-owned industries were mismanaged black holes at huge public expense. Anthony Scargill, President of the National Union of Mineworkers, an avowed Marxist, held the country hostage with his demands and strikes that periodically cut-off of the coal supply. The UK was a mess and ready for Thatcher. Don’t tell me that there wasn’t room for that context in a multi-season serial instead of the excursions into Princess Diana’s anorexia-bulimia.
Piles of rubbish lay uncollected on the streets in the winter of 1978/1979 amid strikes Litter mounted on the streets during the Winter of Discontent as collectors went on strike Gravediggers joined the strike action too, meaning that vans were filled with bodies to be embalmed and stored in disused factories.The miner’s strike crippled the country’s main source of heat and electricity.People queuing outside of bakery during flour shortage (‘the bread strike’) 1977, A sign reading ‘Sorry No Petrol’ outside a UK service station during a petrol shortage on February 1978. (Photograph: Pete Primarello/Getty Images)The unemployment rate began to spike before Thatcher became prime minister and remained high till the country is weaned off of the central planning of Labour’s socialism.
The Falklands War gets all of . . . 10 minutes . . . at most. And then it’s only mentioned as a backdrop to Thatcher’s narcissistic grandstanding. The reawakening of pride of country, and the magnitude of the success, was reduced to the scene of a self-absorbed Thatcher in a victory parade’s grandstand. The fact is lost on the producers that the success in the Falklands War gave Thatcher the breathing space to make headway in de-socializing the country. A much freer economy, a legacy of Thatcher’s reforms, would make possible the more prosperous UK of today.
And then there’s all the intimate dialogue. Where’d that stuff come from? Sure, the script writers have to put together a story by stringing the characters in verbal interaction. But most of it was most certainly contrived. There was no-one in the rooms of private quarters taking dictation on the conversations. It’s a tool in the scriptwriter’s kit to craft the character for certain plot purposes. It’s also how ideological zealotry can infect a story, and replace reality with a politically useful unreality.
Be prepared for next season. It’s likely to be Diana, more Diana, and Diana all the time.
Am I going to hang out in front of the tv when season 4 arrives? I don’t know. I’m inclined not to. I have no appetite for the elevation of ex-Princess Diana to sainthood.
Men sit passed out in a park where heroin users gather to shoot up in the Bronx on May 4, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
America is being trashed from our institutions to our public squares. Look around, roving gangs of cultural and historical illiterates – the uneducated educated – are defacing monuments; downtowns are torched by the very same hordes; public spaces are turned into graffitied homeless encampments with feces and hypodermic needles in a sickening sphere of influence overlapping the places that used to be for rollicking kids and families; and the whole thing spills into our politics. Elections are a pandemonium filled with the hyperbole to remake or tear down America while the chief malefactors designed an election system that made it easy to game. In essence, the rules of the election game function as a game without rules since they are so elastic, confusing, and contradictory with early and earlier voting, voting after election day after the intervention of unconstitutional actors, shot gunning ballots through the mail like the confetti falling from the ceiling after a NCAA national championship game, many jurisdictions lacking the will or ability to verify the ballots, and local Democrat-dominated election boards acting like feudal lords over their fiefdoms and flaunting any rules that do exist. Sounds like the wholesale trashing of America to me.
Mail-in ballots on the floor at the Park East Terrace Apartments, Paterson, NJ, May, 5, 2020.Three mail-in ballots on the ground in the Park East Terrace complex, Paterson, NJ, May 5, 2020.
After the bill is totaled for this parade of the grotesque that we call an election season, we’ll have come to realize that big money was fully on board with the party of big government, the Democrats. Bloomberg was committed to spending $150 million to bring down Trump and his supporters. He ended up ladling $106,000,000. Is there any doubt about the stance of Silicon Valley and its tributaries? Zuckerberg himself answered that question in testimony to Congress – “extremely left-leaning”. Reid Hoffman (Microsoft, LinkedIn) spewed $7.6 million with $1 million each for Schumer’s slush fund and the Biden affiliate Unite the Country. His wife, Michelle Yee, pumped half a million into Biden’s coffers. Allen Blue (LinkedIn), Kevin Scott (Microsoft), Brad Smith (Microsoft), Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook), David Zapolsky (Amazon), Steven Kessel (Amazon), Douglas Vetter (Apple), Eric Schmidt (Alphabet), Reid Hastings and wife (Netflix), and a host of others opened the cash floodgates to the tune of six to seven figures to the left of the decimal point. Do you have any doubts about where K St. and big finance ended up?
Paul McCartney was right in singing “money can’t buy me love”, but it can buy a Mafia-like organization with its many “soldiers” to stretch the waist-line elastic of an election system that was refashioned for any size belly.
George Soros
The drumroll of tycoons backing (or banking) the Democrats includes the usual suspects such as Warren Buffett, George Soros, Tom Steyer, etc., etc., etc. What’s happening with the rich for them to be lining up behind a party whose political carnival barkers profess to hate them . . . or in reality bilk them? The quandary can’t be easily answered except as a commonality of values and worldview. The coed blathering about evils of George Washington as she affixes a rope around his statue’s neck, the corporate heads of Alphabet, and the rest of the Fortune 500 CEO’s have more beliefs in common than they do with the owner of a local hardware store.
The CEO and the miscreant came to the same ideological place because they arose from the same subcultural ether: the upper third of American life. Through their wealthy metropolitan suburbs, prep schools, and the Ivy League, they are of the mind to either bankroll the Democratic Party to the left or subsidize the pillaging of the country, as the Party’s media darlings – from the same subcultural soup, by the way – wobble around trying to justify the madness. For today’s left, some got rich and others hit the streets from their safe perch on campus.
Reid Hoffman, Eric Schmidt, Dustin Moskovitz, and Laurene Powell Jobs, Silicon Valley’s new power set, are instrumental to fulfilling Democrats’ four-year-long quest to oust Donald Trump. People take turns stomping the Christopher Columbus statue after it was toppled in front of the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul, Minn., on Wednesday, June 10, 2020. (photo: Leila Navidi/Star Tribune via Associated Press)
Today’s nouveau riche are accretions to yesterday’s. American has no official aristocracy, but we do have an unofficial one. It’s anyone with the critical mass of wealth. Millionaires alone don’t count any more. A family pedigree with trust-fund millions and multi-billionaires do. Possession of the equivalent of the GDP of a Central American country is the entry point into America’s nobility of today. No invitation from the queen (Michelle Obama?) is required. The newly arrived add to a polymorphous Patricii.
For the old gentry, someone somewhere down the family tree joined the ranks of the filthy rich and passed it to their scions. Do the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Kennedys, and Waltons remind you of anyone? Add to them the newly minted gazillionaires. John Adams writing in the 18th century extensively wrote on the troubling happenstance of a “natural aristocracy” in America. The Rockefellers, Kennedys, et al, would be the Boston Brahmins of the Bradlees, Brinleys, and Lowells to Adams. He saw their narrow-minded ambition and avariciousness as a threat to the republic. They were “always the most dangerous” class and if unrestrained they would be the “destruction of the commonwealth”. That’s the reason for his support for corralling them in their own house of the legislature, a senate. Once penned, they could be flanked by a chief executive and lower house.
Harvard University students in the 1870s. The “Boston Brahmins” and their progeny kept close ties to the most prestigious institutions. (Bettmann Archive via Getty Images)
Today, our Senate is in no position to perform that function after the passage of the 17th Amendment (1913). The hyper-rich with their newly acquired gazillions have nowhere to go but be like Caesar: buy the affections of the plebes with bread and circuses, or lavish campaign contributions. There’s nothing quite like having a mob on-call. Caesar could well understand. George Soros has much in common with Julius.
What has this agglomeration of our “betters” given us? Their influence, after all, is everywhere. Our public squares under this cultural miasma seemed to have been inspired by the spare, stern, and hard face of the “beast of Belsen”, Irma Greese (see below). Look at these spaces, and then at her.
Irma Ida Ilse Grese (7 October 1923 – 13 December 1945) was an SS guard at the Nazi concentration camps of Ravensbrück and Auschwitz, and served as warden of the women’s section of Bergen-Belsen.Boston’s City Hall Plaza
Whether they be an open space in a planned development or a courtyard in front of a high-rise, they resemble military parade grounds studded with an odd, out-of-place thing, a “sculpture”, that has more in common with the glacial eratics dotting the landscape of the Scablands of eastern Washington state. New York City’s Hudson Yards has the freak “Vessel”.
The VesselAn erratic in the Scablands of eastern Washington state. It was deposited here by late ice age glacial floods. Its geology is unrelated to the geology of its current location. It is an “erratic” for this reason.
New York City seems to be dotted with these sculptural eratics. Another one is the now-deceased “Tilted Arc” (by Richard Serra) in Manhattan’s Foley Federal Plaza. It proved to be a visible and physical contradiction, like all walls, to the very purpose for a plaza: social intercourse, interaction, and “inter- “anything involving human beings. Luckily, wiser heads prevailed and the thing was torn down and hauled off to the scrapyard in 1989.
The Tilted ArcA lesson in urban beauty and a counterpoint to our military parade grounds: the gardens of the Fontaine de Nîmes in France. The park had the advantage of incorporating preexisting Roman ruins, and they were with stunning effect. The French architects, Jacques-Philippe Mareschal and Pierre Dardailhon, at the behest of King Louis XV in the 1740’s, created an inviting outdoor experience for pedestrians of all ages. The Walt Disney Concern Hall, Los Angeles, Ca.
The buildings surrounding the parade grounds – aka “plazas” – could be jumbled eyesores like LA’s Disney Concert Hall or the structural boxes that were animated by Germany’s Bauhaus movement or Rommel’s Atlantic Wall. Long gone are the graceful lines of neo-classicism with its adornments. Long gone are the interplay of nature, terraces, columns, and balustrades in our green spaces. It seems that our urban landscapes were inspired by the Soviet Union . . . or worse. The setting for the Vessel would be just as fitting for a guillotine.
A fortification in Rommel’s Atlantic Wall.The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, Marcel Breuer architect.The new House Gropius, designed by Bruno Fioretti Marquez Architects, is built on the basement of the original, the only part to survive the bombings in WW2. (Photo: Christoph Rokitta / Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau)
The only applicable interplay in modern architecture is the one between ideology and design. Speaking of long gone, long gone are defined boundaries and the architectural axis. The limits to a public space are the imposing and ominous structures that resemble Mussolini’s Fascist Party headquarters in Rome, or busy traffic lanes. The spaces are boundless except for the grim and graceless stare of these giants.
Mussolini’s Fascist Party headquarters in Rome.The MetLIfe Building, New York City.The Seagram Building, New York City.
The formlessness comports well with the unquestioned obedience to the belief in the tabula rasa of the mind among our so-called cultural superiors. To many of them, there are no preordained limits, only those that we choose to plug and unplug into our self-identity. If we can’t see their function because our minds are too superficial, they are to be discarded like so much rubble in front of a bulldozer’s blade. Functionalism replaces order and standards.
Michael Lewis, architecture critic, The Wall Street Journal.
Michael Lewis writing in National Review Magazine makes the case: “… after World War I, modernists abolished the axis, as well as a good many thrones and altars, and replaced it with the idea of flowing space. Paths of movement were to be efficient and functional, without any ceremonial hierarchy, suggesting freedom of motion in any direction. Where the public square was once a kind of bounded outdoor room, it was now a mere incident along boundless space.” It’s now considered a social good for people to intellectually and morally emasculate themselves, just like their public spaces.
And, boy, are we emasculating ourselves. The moral and intellectual castration began in earnest when it started its march through our governmental institutions. Official sanction was given for our urban outdoors to be turned into an open sewer. San Francisco began its slide into the gutter when in 1961 it announced that it would no longer enforce its vagrancy laws. The idea went national when the Supreme Court in 1972 issued one of its decrees in Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville that abolished such laws. Contemporaneously, the doors of our mental asylums were flung wide open and the number of inmates plunged from 559,000 in 1955 to 72,000 in 1994. Adding insult to injury, in 1975, the Supreme Court once again piled on with its ruling in O’Connor v. Donaldson. After the Court jumped into the fray with O’Connor, we could no longer reinstitutionalize because another one of the Court’s infamous “tests” made confinement a Sisyphean task.
A woman walks toward friends at a homeless encampment where she lives next to the Interstates 101 and 280 in San Jose, California, on Saturday, February 3, 2018. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group Archives)
Where would the released end up? You guessed it. They congregated in those open spaces meant for kids and families. And thus, our open spaces became informal convention centers for junkies, the mentally troubled, and the bachelor herds that we often call youth gangs. Who wants to go to the park, with or without COVID hysteria? It’s far safer to ride out the horrors beyond your home’s walls with your internet, smartphone, and video games. Hopefully, you’ll have a gun in case what’s outside makes its way inside . . . if your local sovereigns haven’t regulated the 2nd Amendment into oblivion, or, God forbid, defunded the local PD.
COVID became the go-to excuse to further malform our existence. We’re trashing our faces with masks for God’s sake. The masks, social distancing, and lockdowns have killed romance, our children’s schooling, and given us a scorched earth through our economy. Church, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are redubbed super-spreader events.
All of this has come to us not from scientists and medical practitioners, but from lawyers. For some reason, the strong scent of power is irresistible to those who passed the bar. Our governmental pyramid is filled with them. Only a handful have a PhD after their name.
Oh, they, the JD’s, claim that’s what the “science” says. But they don’t understand what the science says any more than my grocery store’s stocking clerk. If I had to bet on the one with the most knowledgeable of science, my money would be on the clerk. To borrow from James Carville, just like one could trawl through a mobile home park with $5 on a fishing line and hook many Paula Joneses, so I could wade my way through the halls of almost any professional building with that very same $5 and hook any number of lawyers.
Anthony Fauci all masked up.
And, also, you might snag a few politicized “experts” along the way. “Experts” are notorious for having the blinders of a racehorse. They frequently have little empathy for competing “experts” and look at the world through their narrow professional prism. If you want a sure path to hell, find yourself a narrow claque of “experts”, follow their advice to the last punctuation mark, and then scramble for excuses as things fall apart, for them and the rest of us.
These trashed times come to us courtesy of a certain political class with cramped cultural antecedents. With a few politicized “experts” in tow, they have left an inhospitable living space in their wake. We can’t go to work, school, church, see grandma, and experience Christmas cheer due to their singular approach to a science that the lawyers don’t understand, but their patronizing “experts” do, but to the exclusion of any other consideration. If we are ever again allowed to go outside, we’d be reacquainted with the marred urban surroundings that they knowingly and unknowingly left behind.
Trashed elections. Smothered public life. Venturing outside is a walk on the wild side. Our cityscapes are an affront to decency and good sense. The waterboarding of life through a return to lockdowns, school closures, mandatory masks, social distancing, and all along knowing it didn’t work the first time. Other than that, what’s there to complain about?
As of now, I see no good reason to vote, especially if you live in one of those deep blue one-party states such as Chicago, California, the Acela Corridor, LA to Seattle, almost any metropolis, any burg with a 40,000-student college campus, or battleground state with Philadelphias crammed within it. What’s the point? The human capital to stay informed, tromping down to the polling place, or spending an hour filling out the thing is wasted when boxes of ballots are filled out by civic illiterates at the conniving of party activists or ballot harvesters reaping unused ballots and filling them out on the side of a van. Again, what’s the point in doing your duty only to have it canceled by the election equivalent of gangland enforcers?
I do have one caveat, though. It’s that the down ballot races, or maybe the mid-terms, retain some legitimacy because they lack a “Gone with the Wind” marquee status of the race for federal head honcho. Those races aren’t likely to attract the sinister gaze of our election system’s villains and therefore we benefit from their inattention. It’s like in a riot when one store is unexpectedly spared while the rest go up in flames. In such races, the pride in voting is replaced by the relief in knowing it will probably count because it won’t be aborted by the 3,000 empty ballots with the exception of one marked bubble next to one presidential candidate dropped in one heave at the registrar.
Undelivered Election Ballots Discarded on Arizona Farm, Nov. 4, 2020.
I was thinking today about the huge vote totals for both presidential candidates in this election. As of now, we have about 145 million ballots cast for president out of a US voting-age population of around 255 million. Of that number, about 169 million were registered to vote. Does each one of those 145 million represent one person above room temperature? Call me skeptical. The closer the vote percentage approaches the full mark, the greater the likelihood that many of those votes are reflecting the wishes of non-souls and the functionally illiterate. You can’t help but scrape more of the muck in the bottom of the pond as it is emptied.
The fix was in when people were allowed to vote a month early, sometimes after election day, and the spray of ballots across the country through the mail. In other words, the muck was thicker than usual this time around. And it ended up in the water supply.
Now the candidate that benefitted the most from this afterbirth of an election will have all the executive power to go COVID crazy. Get prepared, he’s going to go all Gretchen Whitmer on us. The Wuhan virus was used by power-hungry Democrats to destroy nearly everything in our public and private life. Authoritarianism is an addictive drug, and, once used, it will be easier the next time. Watch out every flu season for the mutilation of our social and economic life. Intoxicated with power, nothing will escape the gaze of our new Caesars. This virus, and any others that may befall us in the next four years, will be milked to essentially repeal the Constitution and turn an industrious people into a cowed and subservient one.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.
Our political ethos will not be spared. Supportive riots will be quietly approved through official silence as dissent against the rulers will be quashed. The right of association to protest will go out the window with the rest of the First Amendment. Forget about faith and fellowship. The equal protection of the laws will suffer a similar fate as children in chaotic homes won’t fare as well with Zoom education when compared to those well-heeled enough to form learning pods, tutors, and close parental supervision. It’s a social catastrophe. Watch other issues get thrown into the vortex such as gun control and AOC’s adolescent musings in her Green New Deal. COVID is robust enough for Schumer’s “change America”. This highly dubious election put the fox in the henhouse.
Let’s not look under that rock called the economy once these clowns get their hands around its neck. That important part of our lives involved with making a livelihood will be destroyed under the auspices of a hysteria about a vulnerable few, very few. The vulnerable should stay home and Biden’s efforts should focus on assisting and protecting them. A Sherman’s March through all of American life is a moral monstrosity and hardly justified, but we’re likely to get it anyway. That mound of pieces of paper said so.
One of the things that is lost on the civically illiterate – as they were made kicking and screaming to contribute to the rancid pile – is subtle and not so subtle distinctions. Biden and his crew wallow in a muddled fog between “experts” and policy-making. It works on the easily befuddled. In reality, experts provide advice; policy-making incorporates different points of view alongside an analysis of cost-benefit ramifications. For God’s sake, policy-making isn’t being led around by the nose by a select few “experts” who appeal to your authoritarian instincts. Different actions carry with them huge costs in a people’s social, economic, and political lives. Biden’s selected cabal of “experts” shouldn’t have the first and final say in what is to be done. There are too many in the class of “expert” who disagree. Plus, other experts in affected fields should have a say. That is what is meant by the art of statesmanship. Bringing all this together is the stuff of policy-making, not an act of waiting for Anthony Fauci to emerge from his lair like Punxsutawney Phil to issue his garbled pronouncements.
Punxsutawney PhilAnthony Fauci
Collecting 50%+1 of these pieces of paper in enough states is just what the doctored ordered to resurrect the divine right of kings, or Rousseau’s “general will”, or Lenin’s “vanguard elite”, or whatever you want to call the emasculation of our citizen’s republic. After the Democrats mangled the vote by making the process a farce, there is little that the single citizen can do. It matters not if scant skullduggery can be proven. Follow your nose. You may not be able to identify the source of the stink in the pile, but that won’t stop it from stinking.
