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A Convenient Depression

The word “callous” comes from the Latin “callum”, hardened skin. The idea of a nice pair of Nikes was unknown for most of human existence. A lifetime of barefoot travel means hardened skin and “callouses” on the feet. See the connection? So, can a lifetime of committed political zealotry lead to an emotionally hardened personality, one with a furtive substratum of acceptance of wrecked lives to achieve long-sought ends? “To chop down a forest splinters will fly” was famously invoked by Lenin to signal his desire to build a socialist utopia on a corduroy road of corpses. I’m wondering that somewhere deep down in the psyche of your average Left/Democrat officeholder lies a little Lenin.

Maybe the thought shouldn’t be so surprising given their affection for Lenin’s ends, just without the holocaust … or, then again, I might be too optimistic. There’s no doubt that avowed socialists are piloting the Biden campaign bus in more ways than one. Assisting them along the way are a cadre of public executives at the state and local levels. I can’t think of a better way for them to reach their socio-political nirvana and upend a detested incumbent cruising to reelection than to create the stench of failure around him by fabricating an economic depression and lawlessness in the streets. Instilling a sense of fear and dread in the public works wonders for those seeking power over the body of Donald Trump.

I’m loathed to think that people could be so cruel, but there they sit in their little local soviets. They create their own banners to hide the reality, like Cuomo’s “New York on Pause”. California’s Newsom was the first to jump at closing down 14.6% of the US economy. The others followed suit. Soon 44 million Americans were out of work. Thousands of small businesses were shuttered as “nonessential” while the big boys – supermarkets, big-box stores, etc. – were allowed to reinforce their near-monopoly because they were labeled “essential”. Economic feudalism engineered by government dictat.

The media picks up on the drumbeat. Indeed, they are the drumbeat. The incessant dark message of doom about a virus whose ill-effects were egregiously overstated and whose lethality was highly targeted on a narrow segment of the elderly was churned into an apocalypse … and an excuse for statewide and local totalitarianism.

No wonder that in a recent Axios-Ipsos Coronavirus Index poll 51% of parents were stricken with fear about sending their kids back to school in the fall. Forget about any conception of risk, about any conception that risk is chronologically uneven, that risk follows their kids the moment that they leave the house at any time. Applied consistently, helicopter parents should morph into gulag superintendents.

Soon, a sixth-grader becomes a fourth-grader after “distance learning” under the tutelage of distracted and overwhelmed adults and the ever-present allure of the nearby Xbox. Some parents are wealthy enough to keep the learning spigot flowing with hired help. Economic feudalism will be followed by education feudalism.

Then we have the same culprits in many cases – already experienced at the nullification of federal immigration law – thumbing their noses at the White House by allowing their streets and downtowns to be turned into playgrounds of violent anarchy. Remember Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s “We could have a summer of love!” in CHAZ? In-between the arrests of unmasked joggers in Central Park and the painting of Marxist Black Lives Matter graffiti on New York City’s avenues, Mayor Bill de Blasio slashes the police force, mutes his constitutional role as guardian of public safety, and pronounces justifications for mayhem. The scene is repeated throughout the country in any deep blue bastion.

The economic misery and violence are quietly sanctioned, or at least seems to be. These lefty poobahs don’t seem to be in much of a hurry to quell the disorder, or bring the kids back to school, or get the adults back to work. Oh, I forgot, it’s the virus and “race justice”, they say.

And, by the way, if it ain’t “race justice”, it’s “science”. They have tried to corner the market on “science”. Yes, “science” is helpful in decision making, but these politicos have choices to make. That’s why we elect people: to make choices. Recognizing relevant scientific information, though, isn’t a green light to the Disneyland of Bernie/AOC’s dreams. “Science” can give you the nature of the virus but it can’t tell you the choice to make among competing risks. Socialists like those who run the Democratic Party always think that “science” is their personal handmaiden and, funny, always ends up with them being ensconced in the catbird seat of some all-powerful commissariat. Hogwash! “Science” and despotism aren’t peas in the same pod.

In the end, if polls are any indication, the Lefties have proven successful in creating the stench of failure around Trump, even though, remarkably, they are wholly responsible for the anguish. Which brings to mind the state of education in America. What else could explain the easily-achieved bamboozlement of the American public? The Democrats discovered that enough blue state governors and mayors exist to put American society into a tailspin. Are they calloused enough to do it? Are they cunning enough? I don’t know, but I’m suspicious given the wide lane of misinformation and ignorance open to them.

RogerG

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Condemning Others for Not Being You

People walk past a defaced monument to Confederate soldiers in Centennial Park in Nashville, Tennessee, June 15, 2020.(photo: AP)

The appalling scenes of defacement of our nation’s identity in the destruction of statues, the frenzies over the renaming of established places, and the jihad to expunge illusory “white supremacy” deserve the level of respect that one should reserve for a child’s temper tantrum.

They are founded on the juvenile desire for everything to conform to their wishes. Right now, these seasoned adolescents demand that the past be shoehorned into their closed-minded sense of social order. As such, they condemn long-dead others for not being them.

The situation gets worse when infant maturity has the endorsement of a major political party, the Democratic Party. What is the Party signing onto? They are adopting a campaign to exterminate the past and institute Pol Pot’s year-zero since olden times can’t be rejiggered to fit the fantasy. People in prior eras didn’t have the “advantage” of expensive, university-trained “wokeness”. It would never occur to our self-righteous founts of ignorance that folks in times past might have a slightly different conception of what constitutes the good society. For the street thug, it matters squat. The intolerance of the youthful-and-ignorant zealot is now part of the Party’s platform.

Like it or not, George Washington can’t be made into an advocate of the belief that a person can think themselves into a different sex. For all of Thomas Jefferson’s forays into revolution, he can’t be made into a neo-Marxist. These national paragons were a product of their time every bit as much as a Black Lives Matter/Antifa street hooligan is a product of theirs. It would never occur to the spoiled hood that people in the past were trying to form the good society too. They just had a few different ideas on how to accomplish it.

For the bulk of people in earlier times, and awkward for us to accept today, they might believe that social peace is best advanced through a separation of the races; or a childrearing that requires the woman to be chained to the home; or a peace and stability that is best achieved in a unity of the secular and religious in a person of hereditary authority; or the ancient notion that slavery is just another possible station in society; etc.

But alongside those notions, we see emerge out of Christianity the equality of all souls and our ideas of morality, justice, rule of law, popular sovereignty, due process, equal protection, etc. The woke malcontent can’t grasp the concept of a developing ethos. For these youths, if it doesn’t align with their prejudices of the here and now, it must be ground down by the wheel of history – the jargon of the 20th century’s worst blood-thirsty totalitarianisms.

On Feb. 22, 2017, Middlebury College students disrupt and assault Charles Murray and his academic co-host at the start of a forum on social issues at the college. (photo: Huffington Post)

Our modern street punks really don’t have a mature sense of what constitutes the good society to present to us other than a desire to manufacture equality everywhere and on everything, real or imagined, and overthrow something vaguely referred to as the “system” or “man”.

These simpletons can’t imagine that many wild excursions into ideological frenzy produce inhuman dead ends. In fact, more misery may result. The French Revolution had its Reign of Terror and descent into despotism. The Bolshevik Revolution from the git-go was a woke exercise in stamping absolute equality on everything, and it gave birth to a 74-year nightmare of gulags, a party and personal dictatorship, bloody purges, a huge army of secret police, show trials, the use of famine for ideological ends, and a generally sordid existence. The same experience is being replicated in today’s Venezuela. Ditto for China. Our young fanatic isn’t aware that he or she might be walking in the footsteps of history’s worst killers and harbingers of misery.

Such a thought is inconceivable to our fired-up juvenile wrapping straps around the neck of Christopher Columbus or the Virgin Mary. They are intolerant of others who can’t be them. Sounds to me like a screaming fit posing as a revolution.

RogerG

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Disgusting!

Watch Dan Cathy, CEO of Chick-fil-A, engage in an act of secular humiliation.

Cathy’s heart may be in the right place, but this isn’t an act of humility in the Christian tradition. It has more in common with the mob’s contemptible and often brutal denunciations in the heady days of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Anyone seen as better off than someone else – “privileged” in today’s groupthink – was publicly abased, often with torture and/or death. If you’re keeping a scorecard of misery, the death toll ranged from hundreds of thousands to millions, and only ended when Mao succumbed to join the rest of history’s great monsters in evil’s hall of infamy. “Transformative” revolutions, which Antifa and Black Lives Matter are pursuing, don’t end very well.

He might think that he’s fulfilling the expectations of Christ. In reality, he’s helping to sustain a totalitarian movement which will have disastrous implications for all of us – black, white, et al.

“Black Lives Matter” isn’t limited to the literal meaning of the words any more than “Bolshevik” (the majority) is. It’s the title of a political front that can be loosely organized, sometimes more disciplined, but coalescing around a set of lies and half-truths. The demands around the unprovable “systemic racism”, the calls for reparations and defund/abolish the police, and the always fungible “white privilege” are a replay of the dangerous jargon on Krisallnacht (Germany, 1938), the Petrograd Soviet/Bolshevik Central Committee (1917), Mao’s Chinese Communist Party (1949), the Khmer Rouge (Cambodia, 1975-1979), etc.

A Khmer Rouge soldier waves his pistol and orders store owners to abandon their shops in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, as communist forces take over the capital in April, 1975. (Photo: AP)

Required reading for Cathy and any of our corporate leaders should be the “Black Book of Communism” by Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Andrzej Paczkowski and several other European academics. The “rich” – or “privileged” in today’s jargon – don’t end up in a nice place.

An act of public humiliation at the feet of a Christian rapper is not what this moment requires. It’s steadfastness. This moment necessitates Christians to denounce an anti-Christian crusade, not engage in displays of ostentatious humiliation that do nothing but give it a credence that it doesn’t deserve.

Cathy, get up off your knees and both you and Lecrae condemn a movement who’ll bring nothing but misery to the “privileged” and “unprivileged”.

The whole scene was disgusting, far from righteous. Shame on you, Dan Cathy. You have given me another reason to steer clear of Chick-fil-A.

RogerG

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On Abandoning Professional Sports, Part II

MLB front offices take up the mantra of the neo-Marxist Black Lives Matter, July 10.

“Big Sports” in America has chosen to hitch their wagon to a radical political movement founded upon a mountain of untruths, half-truths, and out and out lies. If the NFL, NBA, MLB and MLS want to join the ranks of the perfidious, I refuse to let them drag me into the position of being an unwitting patron of the deceit. I’m cutting my ties with them. I love athletic competition, not athletic competition tied to a neo-Marxist revolution.

Indeed, since all of us are created in the image of God in the Abrahamic tradition, black lives matter, as do all lives. Black voices matter, as do all voices. Of course, some voices matter more than others if what comes out of the mouth is grounded in reason and empirical data. Sadly, that isn’t always true. Some claims carry an unwarranted ring of truth only because they are repeated so often that the unthinking person becomes even more unthinking and prone to political manipulation. Watch Thomas Sowell provide much for your typical social justice warrior to ponder before they rush off to the next statue-toppling bacchanalia.

Of particular note in this 1981 episode of Firing Line is the rank condescension coming from an established east coast liberal, one with all the respectable Ivy League and professional credentials, Harriet F. Pilpel. She joins Buckley in the questioning of Sowell. She exhibited one the most blatant examples of vile noblesse oblige since the days of rampant serfdom. Some of her queries were predicated on her assertion of the inability of poor black parents to make the “best” choice of education for their children. Without saying it, she was all-in for the overseer of the antebellum South to be replaced by the overseer of the education bureaucrat and the self-serving officers of the teachers’ unions. Frankly, it was disgusting.

And these were the architects of the War on Poverty – a “war” we are still waging … and apparently losing. A Princeton degree is not a license to supplant the parental rights of the poor. The results of these overweening social engineers is not encouraging, what with the annihilation of civic order and the nuclear family in poor neighborhoods. It’s currently playing out on our inner-city streets.

Watch Sowell demolish these false preconceptions.

RogerG

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On Abandoning Professional Sports

Jul 8, 2020; Orlando, FL, Orlando, FL, USA; MLS players participate in a black power salute before the game between the Inter Miami and the Orlando City at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex. Mandatory Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

More correctly, will we leave them or did they leave us?

Corporate America and our professional sports franchises are surrendering to a malicious assemblage of half-literate, quasi-Marxist fanatics and a similarly ill-educated brood of young middle class, mostly white malcontents. Take your spoiled college snowflake and mix them with incendiary black Marxists and you have the crowd that Big Sports wants to ingratiate.

The NBA will paint “Black Lives Matter” on their courts and permit the mob’s sloganeering on player jerseys. The NFL will denigrate the national anthem with a prior performance of something referred to as the “black national anthem”, “Lift Every Voice and Sing”. “Lift Every Voice” has been weaponized by extremists, and has no place as a prelude to our consecrated national anthem. Expect a scourge of kneeling at every game, not just the opening ones, from now on. MLB and MLS will have their own radicalized displays to mar the joy of athletic competition.

Recently, Premier League Football players sport Black Lives Matter endorsements on their jerseys.

I’ve had enough. How about you?

The most disgusting aspect of our current moment is that the perpetrators are zealots for a pack of lies and disastrous notions. “Systemic racism” is a fabrication to be peddled to the truly ignorant, in spite of – or because of – trillions of dollars of national treasure devoted to K-to-grad-school. Disparities aren’t due to some mysterious, skulking “man” but have an origin in social factors such as lifestyle choices and government efforts to subsidize those personal wrong turns. You won’t hear that coming from our over-priced millionaires in team uniforms and the mandarins in the NFL’s New York City headquarters.

Black lives do matter, as do all lives. And black voices matter, especially, as with all voices, the ones who have given these issues more thought than your pampered social justice warrior wrapping cables around a statue. Thomas Sowell is one important voice … and a black one at that. Rather than watch another gaudy season of Big Sports, pay your dues as a citizen by tuning into the antidote to the shouts of the radicals in the streets. Watch other black voices who put to shame the chants and grotesque behavior that parades across your tv screen.

ESPN’s ESPY awards show co-hosts Megan Rapinoe, Sue Bird and Russell Wilson wear t-shirts endorsing the neo-Marxist Black Lives Matter.

Sowell in this video puts the blame for the leftist mania squarely at the feet of an unexamined vision. The vision requires you to believe that bad things are corrected by a new army of government employees peddling more dollars. The vision is rooted in a disparagement of traditions, morality, and institutions such as marriage. The results are horrifying to the most vulnerable, the poor of every stripe.

Check it out, get a cup of coffee for the 53-minute presentation, and be prepared to have your mind stretched. Oh, more videos will follow. Enjoy.

RogerG

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Times That Try Men’s [All Good People’s] Souls

Statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va., after state’s governor announced plans to remove it. (photo: Ryan M. Kelly)

Here’s Tom Payne’s full quote from his tract, The Crisis, in 1776:

“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

America is under assault from a small mob of neo-Marxist firebrands rampaging without restraint. We bred this ill-educated, semi-literate horde in our families and schools and now we face the full fury of their ignorance and folly. Now is not the time for summer soldiers and sunshine patriots. Now is the time for resolve.

The weak-kneed in elite and influential circles are buckling to the temper tantrum. The hissy fit commands that adults seize the moment and impose discipline. Instead, we get tech giants and other Fortune 500 leaders giving support to the outrageous. We see sponsor-boycotts of conservative oriented programs and flagrant censorship of those who disagree. And even more troubling, the schools will put the heinous thought-molding on steroids. Watch that space when schools reopen this fall.

Read Jeff Bezos’s (of Amazon) response to a customer complaint and the mass of illogic that emanates from one of America’s leading corporate leaders. The “disproportionate risk” is utter nonsense. Black crime victims are reporting black suspects that show in the “disproportionate risk” of run-ins with police. Could the “disproportionate risk” have something to do with the disproportionate share of blacks (70%) raised in single parenthood, school dropouts, and violent crimes? Bezos is proof that a person can be good in one thing (online retail) and completely foolish in other things (public policy). He’s another ignorant buffoon when out of his lane.

The KIPP charter school network, for instance, has promised to incorporate the spittle-laced fulminations of the brats into its curricular and pedagogical design. Go here for Frederick Hess’s (of AEI) account if you’re interested.
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Mom and dad, the “transformation” of America is coming for you and your kids. The poison pill of destroyed futures in socialism, Stalinesque purges of the new kulaks in the form of “systemic racism”, and an end to civic order is about to be foisted on you and your children. Never before in recent memory has the country faced such a dire threat.

Where are the adults in the room? Parents, this is not a time to hide. March to your school board; march to the voting booth; flood the automated message system with our demands; boycott businesses, schools, and organizations who play footsie with the delinquents. Now is the time for you to rediscover your spine and demand “Clean it up!”

RogerG

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Stop the Madness

Mask wearing in New York City.

Back in March at the peak of the virus panic, I posted my dismay at the onset of the intentional near-strangulation of human activity from coast to coast, ocean to ocean, border to border. I reasoned back then that we couldn’t and shouldn’t lockdown almost everything and think that we can get away with it for very long. Well, we were beginning to come out of it and, lo and behold, our power-hungry czars are pushing us back into it. This re-strangulation is an affront to reason, prudence, and humanity.

It’s happening across the country. Our potentates of commissioners, mayors, governors, and army of zero-risk utopians hiding under the moniker of “scientific experts” – albeit in contradiction to other “scientific experts” – are re-imposing masks, re-shuttering businesses, and coming as close as they possibly can to making America a sputtering ghost town once again.

A man walks past an apartment building bearing signs of joblessness and worry. (photo: ANDREW HARNIK/AP)

This morning, I learned that the Board of Health of Missoula County has issued a decree for the mandatory wearing of masks in public. And once again, another deep blue urban node (yes, we have those too in Montana) is spearheading the way back into the straitjacket. What’s this with the Left-liberal attraction for the totalitarian temptation (to borrow from Jean Francois Revel’s 1977 best-seller, The Totalitarian Temptation)? They get an erotic giddiness when they sense an opportunity to control the comings and goings and doings of an entire people. This will flounder and fail like the previous bout of authoritarianism.

The totalitarian temptation as an affection for Marx: Karl Marx Monument in Chemnitz, Germany. (animaflora | us.fotolia.com)
2016 election map by precinct: blue for Cinton, red for Trump. The greatest enthusiasm for lockdowns are in those blue dots, places of significant sympathy for the ends and means of Marx.

It’s a twisting in the wind in an attempt to avoid the inevitable. No collection of commissars can control the lives of tens of thousands of people, let alone millions. Somebody will deviate despite their newly minted dictum and out goes the virus. You can “bend the curve” in the short run as you extend the “curve” into the long and longer run … or until the magical elixir of a vaccine is concocted which, as in most viral vaccines, won’t be a silver bullet. Or, better yet for our power-hungry ninnies, they experience the joy of a Biden victory speech on November 4.

The prospect of a vaccine pushes out the government-manufactured misery for at least the next several months, long enough for a depressed electorate to accede to AOC-inspired governance. Biden will be irrelevant since he is nothing but a floating piece of wood in a rampaging river.

Biden in his basement.

We must get away from the strangulation and do what we were getting around to doing as we were opening up: therapies for the infected and isolation for the vulnerable. The development of natural immunities is the only path to health, as opposed to the slow suffocation of life and livelihoods by government dictats leading us into the world of decay and despair for as far as the eye can see.

Stop the madness. If deep blue districts want to smother their societies, those disinclined to that existence should … Move! No society can thrive with an off-and-on switch in the hands of newly empowered despots.

RogerG

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Hostage-Taking

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) joins fellow Democrats from the House and Senate, June 8, 2020.

In 1904, Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli, a Moroccan tribal leader, took hostage Ion Perdicaris and his grandson, Cromwell Varley. President Theodore Roosevelt quickly dispatched warships to Morocco. Secretary of State John Hay put the case very succinctly when he declared, “This government wants Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead.”

US newspaper cartoon on the Perdicaris Affair.

The incident is enticingly analogous, though not perfect, to our current situation. Today, the Perdicaris role could be filled by the American people and Democrat eminences are playing Raisuli. I’m waiting for the American voter to take up the mantle of TR.

In reality, could anyone be so calloused as to hold an entire people hostage in the service of a cold and calculated power grab? I am loath to think so. On the one hand, my fellow citizens with a “D” after their name can be just as good-hearted and well-meaning as those on the opposite side of the aisle. On the other, never has their public statements and policy ideas been more sinister: the caress of socialist revolution in the form of wealth confiscation (the “eat the rich” mentality of “D” politicians); the spread of central planning into more areas of life (Medicare for All, Green New Deal, cementing the monopoly of the government schools, et al); the enthusiasm for totalitarian lockdowns and controls on public and private behavior in response to the virus; the coddling of the Marxist Black Lives Matter and Antifa; and the willingness to unleash criminals on their citizens (no bail laws, refusals to prosecute, the withdrawals of police from riot zones, the slashing of law enforcement budgets).

29-year-old Anthony Robinson of East New York, Brooklyn is seen walking with his 6-year-old daughter in the Bronx Sunday, June 5. The little girl is watching as a car pulls up beside them and her father is fatally shot in the chest.

The contemporary Democratic Party appears to be very ambitious. Could a person be excused for entertaining the idea that the party of Mayor Jenny Durkan (Seattle and CHOP) and AOC has a more utilitarian purpose in mind: namely, the Party desires the creation of as much pandemonium as possible to make Trump impotent and win in November 2020? If so, a nationwide emotional and economic depression would suit their purposes quite nicely.

The most heavy-handed clampdowns and inexcusable sanctions of wanton violence occur in deep blue jurisdictions. Trump has offered help and cajoled governors, mayors, and school superintendents to protect our heritage, end the anarchy, and get the kids back into the classroom. They not only rebuff the assistance; the secessionists – for that is what they are – revel in it. They have resurrected the Party’s historic love of states’ rights, something to warm the heart of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” George Wallace … if it was still beating today. Could they be holding the livelihoods of millions, the safety of multitudes in our cities, and the education of our children hostage to their demand for a Biden presidency?

Do you think for a moment that this government-fabricated misery would continue much past November 3 and a Biden victory? Don’t surprised of its magical disappearance if the American people turn over the reins of power to a person of diminished mental capacity and his coterie of socialists and cultural revolutionaries. Consider it ransom paid.

Biden with the “thought-leaders” – the socialists AOC and Sanders – of today’s Democratic Party.

What other conclusion is possible given the promiscuous smear of the Founders, the mayhem on the streets, and the arbitrary shuttering of the schools? It’s so egregious that a person could be forgiven for concluding that some ulterior, insidious purpose is being served – like political extortion. Could anyone be so stupid as to “abolish/defund the police”, unless something more cunning is afoot?

Our time is rife with wacky conspiracy theories. The nuttiness of the alt-right’s QAnon and the left’s Zinn/Black Lives Matter/the Squad/Anifa/college snowflake roils the minds of folks as far afield as Trump to DC’s Russia-collusion hawkers to the Dem grandstanders mouthing the vaguery of “systemic racism”. I wish not to be in their company.

Yet, the thought of manufactured mayhem for political ends is not unknown (excuse the double negative). The Jacobins and Lenin were up to their ear lobes in it.

Mass killing of more than 200 prisoners in the Châtelet on September 3, 1792.
Bolsheviks condemn and execute a dissident worker.

Sherlock Homes admonished, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” For me, there are two possibilities for the Dems’ leveraging of ruination: cunning or stupidity. The Dems might be cunning as they play chess to the Republicans’ checkers. Or they are just plain stupid in mistakenly believing that the shutdown of life and assaults on police departments will lead to a summer of love. I am reluctant to believe that somebody could be so brutally calculating. Since there is no cure for stupidity and the symptoms are so widely apparent, my money is on stupid. Still, hostage-taking is a favorite on today’s racecard.

RogerG

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The “Systemic Racism” Canard

The scientific method begins with a hypothesis. You notice something happening in the world and ask why. You combine prior experience and facts to stitch together a possible answer. Call it an educated guess as opposed to a mere guess. Then, it must be tested and either confirmed, rejected, or reformulated for further testing. The rules of logic apply at every step along the way. So, I hear the cry of “systemic racism” from agitated marchers in the streets and ask why, why are they saying it? More to the point, is it true? They assert it, but historically speaking, mobs are seldom the founts of goodness, truth, and light.

And mobs they are, if you notice the charred remains of entire blocks in our major cities and vandalized monuments. The angry protesters went right from the post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc fallacy (this therefore that) to the illogic of the general-and-particular confusion (rule of logic: what is true of the particular isn’t necessarily true of the general and vice versa). The angry protesters qualify as mobs not only because of the violence. It’s also because of their track record for irrationality.

Let’s engage the mind of your typical acolyte of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, or your run-of-the-mill college snowflake. The constant pounding of “you (or they) aren’t responsible for your (or their) condition because it’s really the racist man holding you down” is the only truly systemic thing about the mania. The mobsters are voluntary inmates of a reeducation camp, thanks to our schools. They are primed for illogic.

With the unsupported conclusion in tow, they go right to the streets and statues. The only factoid in their cognitive miasma is some number in relation to a group’s proportionality – like police stops in relation to a subject group’s portion of the population. From there, they jump to the “racist man”. Post hoc ergo propter hoc anyone? But could there be any other possible explanation for the factoid other than the racist man? Don’t tax their minds with that question because you will first be met with a pause of blank stares to be followed by spittle-laced shouting in your face or a beating.

A rage-filled protester in Minneapolis.

They’ve turned themselves into Leftist street thugs. As such, they gloss over any alternative hypothesis that might show the blame to lie with the same policies that they hold so dear. It might come as a shock for them to learn that their beloved idea of massive new social programs has already been tried and found wanting. LBJ announced the War on Poverty and proceeded to bulldoze entire neighborhoods and call it “urban renewal”. Welfare budgets ever since have exploded into mountains of cash and new ways to distribute it.

In the meantime, single parenthood became the mainstay in the black community, swelling from 24% in 1965 to over 70% today. In many cities, it’s worse. Alongside of it came increased dropout rates in school and the workforce. Crime rates soared. The litany is too well-documented to deny. Is it more logical to indict a shadowy “racist man” or recognize the fact that a Sherman’s March has been conducted through the families of the poor, many of them black, aided and abetted by the nanny state? Skin color isn’t the cause of these circumstances, but upbringing can be. The little platoons of civilization – the intact family – is an endangered species. How about that possibility?

There is no room in the mind of a late teen or twenty-something for the possibility after the non-stop pounding of tendentious curriculum, teachers, and profs from K to 16 and beyond. I should know. I was witness to it as a functionary in the Education Borg for 30 years.

The indoctrination created a new default position in formative minds. They are ready to plug single instances like a viral video of individual misbehavior into their preset dogmas. Thus, a single bad cop morphs into a cabal of Klansmen in uniform in all police departments and the hair-on-fire protester-run-amok. One or a few cops says little about all cops in much the same way as one shoplifting shopper fails to say anything about all shoppers. The foolishness of the particular-and-general confusion anyone?

Officer Chauvin with his knee on the back of the neck of George Floyd.
A sample of police officers killed in the line of duty over the course of 2018. At that time, from 2018 to the start of 2019, the number of gunfire deaths of police officers was up 67% from the previous year. Violence against police officers had been escalating since Ferguson 2014.

Many of the adults in positions of authority aren’t any better. They are the equal of the mental midgets in the streets. If you wait to get your wisdom from Pelosi, Schumer, AOC, the Squad, Lefty mayors and governors (of which there are legions), and the army of mercenary and partisan pundits on CNN and MSNBC, you are setting yourself up for a fall. They similarly jump, for instance, from black over-representation in the crime statistics to the breezy scapegoat of “systemic racism”.

It never crossed their minds that the crime numbers come from black victims. This is supported by stats for victims and suspects by race. Looking at the numbers for violent crime, 45% of assault victims are black while 53% of suspects fit the same bill. The same is true for murders – 56 and 62 – and shootings – 71 and 74. The vast majority of complaints are brought by victims who overwhelmingly are black. Pelosi and company can only square this circle by mimicking Groucho Marx: “Who are you going to believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?”

Suspect in the murder of two teenage boys in South Chicago, June 21, 2020.

A wild claim of supplanted and delusionary memory on the part of black victims would fall into the same category of illogic as the hoax of “systemic racism” – unproven, unprovable, and demagogic. Still, it is enough to enrage the inmates of the reeducation camps when they are freed to spill out onto our streets. I don’t blame the dupes. I blame the opportunistic adults, many of them with D’s after their names, many of them in tenured teaching positions, and some with R’s after their names who mistake the mob for the voice of the people. Shame on them all.

RogerG

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A Faux Fourth

Remember that scene in “Singin’ in the Rain”? You know, the one of the switch-a-roo when the audience learns that Lina Lamont’s (Jean Hagen) singing is a fraud because the curtain is drawn to expose Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) as the real voice.

Lina was faux singing in much the same manner as we experienced a faux Fourth in PBS’s A Capitol Fourth. It was a desultory performance of retread performances strung together with satellite social-distancing recitals and no audience anywhere. When it came to the fireworks spectacular at the end, it was spectacular but proved as empty as Lina’s voice because the Mall was a ghost town. A celebration needs a crowd, period.

PBS’s A Capitol Fourth 2020 hosted by Vanessa Williams and John Stamos.

Similarly, is this what is meant by the “new normal” for our schools: an hour in front of a computer monitor with the occasional writing prompt and textbook assignments? Some schools may open but your kids will enter a classroom of everyone masked, kept far apart, and wearing gloves, as in a sci-fi horror movie. If so, parents pull your kids out of these schools and away from the silly distance-learning, and run as fast as you can with the kids in tow to more reasonable locales. The tactic is to real learning what child abuse is to proper parenting.

This year’s July Fourth was also Jekyll and Hyde affair. I went from the insipid PBS production on the tube (Hyde) to outside and the vibrant popping and the wonderful flares of explosions and light from skyrockets (Jekyll) all around me. Just knowing that people were gathering with friends and loved ones to ignite the display added so much more to the electricity of the moment. John Adams had it right when he wrote to his wife, Abigail, on July 3, 1776, “It [the Fourth] ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Exactly.

The choice of songs in this year’s PBS edition were suspect, especially in light of the ongoing anarchy in city streets. The producers seemed to be keen on a theme of social healing. The show opened with the song, “Put a Little Love in Your Heart”. Nothing wrong with that, but rioters, looters, and vandals don’t need love; they need to be arrested. The angry marchers in our Democrat-run cities and states were exploiting George Floyd’s body to advance a series of lies in pursuit of an overturning of America. A socialist revolution is an afront to the America that we love. The cries of “systemic racism” are as easily disproven as “defund/abolish the police” could be shown to be deadly. Our times don’t call for a “healing” but demand a complete refutation of the movement’s falsehoods. Our times don’t call for “healing” but demand the re-imposition of decency through arrests, convictions, and incarceration.

People loot Hot Topic at The Pike in Downtown Long Beach, Sunday, May 31, 2020. (Photo by Brandon RIchardson)
Protestors demonstrate outside of a burning fast food restaurant, Friday, May 29, 2020, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

This mangling of our July Fourth was brought to us by policy proscriptions corrupted by politics. The longer that we make our public spaces ghost towns and mar our faces with masks and treat each other like lepers, the more we destroy economic life. The more livelihoods are smashed, the more resentments grow toward the man in the White House. And that’s the ultimate goal: remove Trump, takeover the federal government and impose high taxes, feverishly pursue a quixotic crusade against a shadowy “systemic racism”, foist the totalitarian Green New Deal on us, and straitjacket us in a quicksand of red tape, thanks to a growing army of the administrative state. The Democrats will succeed in producing the results of a lockdown without a virus, to the detriment for the vast majority of Americans – but not for them since they’ll be the new Soviet nomenklatura.

Heck, the Democrats even want to disarm us by turning the Second Amendment into dead letter as they try to “defund” or “abolish” the police. Neither our livelihoods, our persons, or our children’s future will be safe. Every time somebody’s bad actions goes viral, out comes the angry marchers, looters, rioters, and vandals and up goes the torching of businesses, beatings, killings, and another wave of erasures of the symbols of our national heritage. You can do nothing but run for the hills – and maybe not even that if they succeed in criminalizing the oil industry.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer at a news conference after several dams breached in Midland on Wednesday, May 20, 2020. (photo: Rebecca Cook / Reuters)

Why else the resuscitation of the Democrat’s enthusiasm for secession, if not as part of the full court press to get Trump? Since Trump’s inauguration, blue-state governors, county commissioners, school boards, and mayors have done all in their power to nullify federal immigration law in their zones of authority. Public health isn’t immune to their designs. While Trump is consigned to the role of helpmate, the blue-state neo-Napoleons in governor’s mansions strap the lives of their residents. They keep a boot heel on the neck of the people’s comings and goings. They gamble that a depressed people will turn against the man in the oval office.

And when it comes to mayhem in their streets, blue-state suzerains turn a blind eye as Trump is made to look bewildered. Pardon me for suspecting that they harbor designs to make Trump appear impotent.

PBS’s A Capitol Fourth symbolized the worst of our times in both form and content. The program’s musical content, in some instances, was the wrong message for the wrong time. And its form was an implicit sanction for the continued suppression of American social and economic life. I turned to the antidote of a DVD of James Cagney’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy”.

RogerG