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The Cultural Revolution Produces More “Counter-Revolutionaries”

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Bryan and Rebecca Gantt have adopted three children through Vermont’s system. (photo: Alliance Defending Freedom)

This is a revolution, a “gender” mutiny, make no mistake about it.  It’s a revolution into our brain, in how we think and on our elemental outlook on the world.  “Men” and “women”, “male” and “female” no longer make sense in this fantasy world.  Any distinction has been turned into a floating oil slick at the mercy of the unstable currents of a person’s emotional state.  This is a completely new and radical notion.  Biology is relegated to a secondary circumstance.  People who can’t accept the rootlessness of this rebellion are now deemed “unfit”.  A recent series of lawsuits puts a spotlight on this latest phase in our ongoing cultural revolution.

At issue is whether a traditional Christian can help rescue children from situations of despair and abandonment.  You see, the revolution is at war with the faith of generations and millennia for its refusal to bend a knee to the idol of gender fluidity.  However, if you’re of an approved version of the faith, one that follows the fickle winds of fashion, you will be accorded full membership in the civil order.  And you too might be granted the opportunity to adopt or be a foster parent.

Blue states are the Paris Commune of this revolution. From Vermont to the west coast, an additional criterion was put into the list of qualities to be eligible for adoption or provide foster care.  In a recent email from Vermont’s Department of Children and Families (DCF) to foster-care applicants:

“[a foster-care license] is dependent on foster parents and applicants being able to support youth who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, or another diverse identity (LGBTQI+) even if the foster parents hold divergent personal opinions or beliefs.” (see #1 below)

Cutting to the chase, traditional Bible-believing Christians must promise to check their beliefs at the door, in their own home, before the state will allow them to touch a kid.  A faithful Christian joins the ranks of pedophile and spouse-abuser in the eyes of the state.

It happened to Bryan and Rebecca Gantt of Vermont (see #1 and #2 below).  He’s a pastor of a nondenominational church and the Gantts have been prior foster-parents and adoptive parents multiple times, and called “amazing” by child-welfare agents in previous foster and adoption situations.  The only difference now is the mandatory acceptance of the ideology of gender fluidity to qualify.  For them, where’s that in the Bible?

It isn’t.  It’s contra-biblical.  But one doesn’t have to be a fundamentalist to reach a similar conclusion.  Pop-psyche can’t explain away biology, or chromosomes.  Fashionable ideologies try to carve out a niche in the foggy bottom of psychology, but the whole scheme is reliant on the certitude of an adolescent’s emotional state.  Talk about building a house – er, ideology – on sand.

The more that we’ve been forced to live with this thought-fashion, the more problematic it has become.  Like master ideologies of the past, when people were judged for their race-fitness or propensity for class exploitation, it too is found to be extremely wanting.  On grounds of pure reason, it’s bunk.  The zealots attribute suicide and emotional trauma to the ideology’s chief culprit of gender dysphoria, like the rich or the Jews in past frenzies.  It never appears to have occurred to the proponents that the dysphoria itself is a symptom of something deeper than disenchantment with genitalia.  After removing the offending genitalia and ingesting pharmaceuticals, the thoughts of suicide will probably remain.  Then, what have we achieved, nothing but another batch of scarred children who paid a little too much attention to social media?

Delays, rows and legal challenges: inside the stalled new NHS gender identity service | Gender ...
Dr. Hillary Cass of the Cass Report to the NHS England

Other nations are putting the brakes on the institutional malformation of children.  On the heels of the UK’s Cass Report (see #3 and #4 below),  Europe is pulling back from the brink.  Not so in America.  We’ve become the loudest advocates of this generation’s version of eugenics and forced sterilizations.  From the Biden administration to states like Washington, Massachusetts, Oregon, California, and Vermont, it’s full speed ahead (see #5 – #8 below).  These people are making our nation grotesque.

Folks are suing in these bastions of revolution.  They are the counter-revolution.

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Erin Friday, leader of Our Duty, a group of parents supporting policies protecting the right of parent to be notified of gender issues affecting their children, speaks in Sacramento, 8/28/2023.

For the Bible-believing in these states, you have a choice to make: stay and resist (like Alexei Navalny, now deceased in Putin’s gulag) or leave.  Bear in mind that your ability to resist will be effectively curtailed by the ruling politburos.  Look at California AG Rob Bonta’s successful effort to kill the Protect Kids Initiative (see #9 below).  The State of California can’t bring itself to protect children and the right of parents to parent their children.  It’s surprising that they haven’t impeded your right to gather for worship.

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California’s radical AG, Rob Bonta

Even more troubling, if you have children or grandchildren, what of them?  Remember, the revolutionaries control the schools.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. Thanks to Ryan Mills in “Blue States Are Barring Americans with Traditional Views on Gender from Adopting. This Christian Couple Is Fighting Back”, in National Review, 6/19/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/vermont-bars-christian-couple-from-adopting-due-to-traditional-beliefs-about-gender/
2. The lawsuit in US District Court in Vermont: Brian Wuoti; Kaitlyn Wuoti; Michael Gantt; and Rebecca Gantt v. Vermont, et al, Case No.: 2:24-cv-614, at https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/WuotiComplaint.pdf
3. “NHS Report Finds ‘Remarkably Weak Evidence’ to Support Medical Gender Transition for Minors”, Abigail Anthony, National Review, 4/10/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nhs-report-finds-remarkably-weak-evidence-to-support-medical-gender-transition-for-minors/
4. The Final Report of Dr. Hillary Cass on transgender services for children for the NHS England at https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/
5. “Oregon Woman Sues State for Rejecting Adoption Application over Opposition to Child Gender Transition”, Ryan M ills, 4/3/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/oregon-woman-sues-state-for-rejecting-adoption-application-over-opposition-to-child-gender-transition/
6. “‘Their Faith Is Not Supportive’: Massachusetts Bars Catholic Couple from Fostering Children”, Ari Blaff, National Review, 8/9/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/their-faith-is-not-supportive-massachusetts-bars-catholic-couple-from-fostering-children/
7. “How ‘Inclusion’ Excludes Christians: WA couple denied foster care license because of religious beliefs”, Family Policy Institute of Washington, 4/15/2024, at https://fpiw.org/how-inclusion-excludes-christians-wa-couple-denied-foster-care-license-because-of-religious-beliefs/
8. “Religious Discrimination Hurts Kids Waiting to Be Adopted”, Johannes Widmalm-Delphonse, Alliance Defending Freedom, 9/13/2023, at https://adflegal.org/article/religious-discrimination-hurts-kids-waiting-be-adopted
9. “Judge tentatively sides with California AG in fight over ballot measure on students’ gender ID”, Sophie Austin, AP, 4/19/2024, at https://apnews.com/article/california-transgender-parental-notification-schools-372ad55c99a17e19ce8f3f66c4963faf

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We’re Being Fooled, Or Are We Fooling Ourselves?

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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., joined from left by Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., and Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., speaks to reporters before a vote on legislation to protect same-sex and interracial marriages, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2022. (AP Photo: J. Scott Applewhite)

How can a deep red state continue to send a progressive to represent it in the US Senate?  How can a state’s electorate continue to elect people who do things that they don’t like?  The key word is “continue”.  Yet, simultaneously, people consistently register dissatisfaction with the direction of the country in polls.  Wrong-track numbers persistently hover in the 60s.  We need to explore the possibility that we are being fooled, or, more accurately, allowing ourselves to be fooled.  The foolishness is a partnership between political jesters and an impressionable electorate prone to folly.  People don’t like the results but go to the polls and contribute to them.  Does this make any sense?

Two anecdotes point to the nature of the problem.  One is Democrat John Tester’s popularity in red-state Montana.  The other is the decimation of California under a raft of policies that originate in a popularly elected super-majority of Democrats ruling the roost on the state’s populous coastal plain and thus in the state capitol.  If migration patterns within and out of the state are any indication of the level of dissatisfaction, the state is in a world of hurt that ironically is popularly chosen.

Tester’s prominence in my adopted home state of Montana is particularly vexing.  One possible contributing factor is money, the mother’s milk of politics (see #1-#5 below).  Tester is a creation of out-of-state money, and a whole lot of it. He’s a boxer with a potent left-right combination.  He jabs with his left in the form of money flowing into his personal campaign to project his oneness with tradition, the rural lifestyle, domesticity, veterans, the outdoors, guns, and Montana’s working man.  He elicits an image of rubbing elbows with Republicans and Trump, who’s popular in the state.

Tester Ad Features Missing Fingers, Shows How Red-State Dems Still In The Fight - TPM – Talking ...
John Tester in campaign ad

Anyone with half a brain would recognize this to be baloney.  As he washes grease and dirt from his hands in a tv ad, the reality is that he’ll go back to Washington to reelect Chuck Schumer of New York for leader of the Senate.  This is the same Chuck Schumer who’d pack the Supreme Court with lefties, who’d eliminate the filibuster to make it easier for his congressional allies to mangle voting throughout America by removing the few remaining barriers against fraud such as voter ID, who’d ad DC and Puerto Rico as states to create a lock of four more Democrat senators to guarantee such absurdities into the foreseeable future, turning the whole country into New York and California.  Tester is a vote for continued bi-coastal control of the federal Leviathan, with all of their baleful influences.

Tester has the bank for his left jab to burnish his outdoors cred while he has a devastating right in Chuck Schumer’s Last Best Place PAC (LBP) to appeal to the darker angels of a public’s nature.  This is a massive negative campaign to paint his opponent, Tim Sheehy, as an out-of-stater bent on raping Montana.  Get this?  A real out-of-stater from the power elite of New York is smashing Sheehy for allegedly being like him.

Putting aside the fact that Sheehy has beliefs and sentiments more in line with the popular Trump, we need to pull the covers away from Last Best Place PAC (LBP) to expose its rank duplicity.  What we see is the darker underbelly of politics.  The pro-Tester (no pun intended) group leaves a paper and money trail from DNC-patronized banks right to Schumer’s Senate office and right to the anti-Sheehy ad buys flooding Montana’s airwaves – over $5.6 million worth, and counting, as of June 12 of this year according to Open Secrets (see #4 below).

Impact investing tackles dark money in politics

Here’s how the flim-flam works.  Money is laundered from Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC, into Majority Forward PAC – a 501(c)(4) group that doesn’t have to disclose its contributors – and from there into LBP. These expenditures go through Dem-linked banks and consultancies in DC and Alexandria, Va.  Throughout, Tester has plausible deniability.  He can walk the high road of remaining positive about himself while the dirty work of maligning his opponent is performed by mysterious dark forces (see #5 below).  It’s morally scandalous, but it works, as it did in the 2022 midterms.

It only works if the residents of Montana allow it.  The story of this sleight-of-hand has been out for quite some time, since at least mid-2023.  As before a judge, ignorance of it is no excuse.  If you don’t know, you should have.

Its success is dependent on inventing fear, fear of something that doesn’t exist: stoking fear of Sheehy to assist the Democrats in continuing to move the country down the “wrong track”, and in the case of California, dread of an ecological disaster.  The stage is set for a headlong rush to the emasculation of California’s entire way of life, the most striking “wrong track” that one can imagine.

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Chevron gas station in Encinitas, Calif., October 23, 2023 (photo: Mike Blake/Reuters)

The state’s entire governmental apparatus is geared to overturning the simple bases of life through a full-on assault on energy.  Why?  Climate-change hysteria.  The fear factor gets people elected to enact edicts that disrupt how its residents pursue life in the most basic ways, and for the worst.

First, the hysteria.  California’s popular ruling clique is terrorized, and is terrorizing, by a global average increase of 1.34 degree Celsius since 1880, well within the fluctuations in geologic time.  And, besides, warming temps are a much healthier experience for growing food and increasing plant life, and better than the opposite with its plagues and famines and deadly freezes (see #6-7 below).  If CO2 is the culprit, plants love it; and that’s the main reason for questioning it as a pollutant, that and our emission of CO2 every time we exhale.  Are normal body functions now to be the target of regulatory extinction alongside the internal combustion engine?

The fabricated fright is even more outlandish when they try to strike a chord with the economy-minded by magically spawning imaginary threats to our standard of living.  The chutzpah.  At worst, according to Steven Koonin, Obama’s undersecretary for science in the Department of Energy, the warming will have a modest impact.  He decries the hysteria as “shock-journalistic pseudoscience” (see #6 below).  Given all the benefits of warming temps, the recent elevated levels of CO2 may be a net plus.  The only real threat emanates from California’s ruling claque.

If the fanciful prospect of frying us in the skillet of a 1.34 degrees Celsius increase in 144 years won’t do the trick, maybe the story of twisters and hurricanes run amok will.  In today’s politicized jargon, it’s called “extreme weather”.  It may work if the fabulists pursue the Big Lie route.  The fact is, just looking at hurricanes, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study concludes that there appear to be no “… compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in … [catastrophic] hurricane[s] ….” (see #8 below)

The Big Lie, A Cartoon by Award-Winning Bill Day | Smart City Memphis

Fires might manufacture the necessary panic if hurricanes won’t.  But, here again, the world’s total fire-ravaged area hit a new low (see #6 below).  Could California’s recent spate of firestorms be a consequence of its uniquely screwball wildlands management policies and its forcible diversion of utility funds away from grid maintenance to “sustainable” pipe dreams?  California’s governing choices are proving to be the match in the powder magazine.

What about droughts?  Where’s the proof that SUVs and Exxon are triggering droughts?  Others report that CO2 reduces drought – warm air carries more moisture (look at the tropics) – and increases food production (see #6 below).  Anyway, droughts aren’t an unusual circumstance in a Mediterranean climate.  Dry-summer could easily flip into dry-all-year if the normal annual pattern of offshore ocean temps flip, which they normally do in roughly 10-year oscillations.  The window is awfully narrow – 5-6 months – for the state to get its annual allotment of precipitation.  If it falls short at any time during that brief period, it’s in drought for the rest of the year.

But such attempts at realism are a yawner for the power-hungry utopians who are elected to run the state.  Not possessing a shortage of other rhetorical arrows in their quiver, though, they’ll bark out the dubious crisis of rising sea levels.  From 1880 to 2023, annual sea elevations have variously increased by an averaged .08 to .14 inches per year, with .06 being the number for 133 of those years (see #6 below).  At that rate, it’ll be a couple of geological eras before the state’s foothills become beachfront property. Continental drift is faster.

No wonder California is the epitome of “wrong track”.  The climate caterwauling has led to the election of people who pass laws and enforce them to further nudge the state’s residents down the path to dystopia, and it’s about to get worse for the remaining residents of the state.  The state with one of the highest fuel prices in the nation (second only to Hawaii) is dead set on ballooning them to the thermopause (top of the atmosphere).  No remorse, the state’s governing super-majority is cheerleading the pain by using it to make you conform to their chosen lifestyle for you.  By hook or by crook, for instance, they want to make you trade reliability for range anxiety.

Don’t forget, nothing that they’re doing to their own residents will make a difference for the climate.  California’s 38 million (and falling) are pale when compared to China and India’s 2-3 billion.  Newsom and company will do more in reducing emissions if they convince Xi and Modi to stop their nations’ march to prosperity.  In other words, persuade them to do to their countries what the California Dems are busy doing to the golden state.  Good luck, Gavin.

The state’s popularly elected super-majority in Sacramento have created a legal glide path to terminal decline.  What’s bad is about to get worse.  The California Air Resources Board (CARB), one of the state’s principal eco-commissariats, is using the Low Carbon Fuel Standards (LCFS) and cap-and-trade laws to hijack the state’s residents out of their fuel-efficient sedans and big rigs and into dangerously frivolous electric vehicles.

One leg of the double-whammy uses fuel taxes under LCFS.  Diesel taxes provide a glimpse into the fate for regular gas, and all fossil fuels.  CARB’s timetable for ruination ratchets diesel taxes upwards from 59 cents (2025) to 66 (2026) to $2.41 (2041) (see #9 below).  By that time (2041), your perfectly good family sedan and those diesel semi’s trucking down the road will be littering junk yards.  I cringe at the thought of chronically empty store shelves and Amazon warehouses in the state and price hikes on everything.

The other leg utilizes the state’s cap-and-trade folderol.  CARB has scheduled a lowering of the emissions cap each year (see #9 below).  Above that, companies are taxed.  It’s all geared to get you as a person or company to trade the reliable (fossil fuels) for the intermittent and unreliable (the “sustainable” stuff).  If you think that you’ll do just fine in this brave new world, you’re in need of a drug test.  Your prospects only improve if the ruling donkey progressives are stopped electorally.  I’m pessimistic on that score.

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Expect “wrong track” to be only thing that rises – that and prices.  Did “they” do this to us, or did we choose it?  I’m inclined to believe, based on all the evidence, that foolishness is popular.  We don’t like the results but still go ahead and choose the cause of our discontents.  Montanans might very well choose Chuck Schumer (through Tester) and Californians may prefer degradation for their kids and generations to come.  We get the government that we deserve.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “Non-profit files FEC complaint against Super PAC’s spending on anti-Sheehy ads”, Nicole Girten, Daily Montanan, 2/24/2024, at https://dailymontanan.com/2024/02/14/non-profit-files-fec-complaint-against-super-pacs-spending-on-anti-sheehy-ads/
2. “Nine months before the Montana GOP primary, a mysterious super PAC is on the airwaves attacking Tim Sheehy”, Ally Mutnick, Politico, 9/12/2023, at https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2023/09/12/congress/montana-senate-sheehy-pac-ads-00115276
3. “Chuck Schumer Is Behind This Mysterious PAC Meddling in Montana’s GOP Primary”, Joseph Simonson, Washington Free Beacon, 1/26/2024, at https://freebeacon.com/democrats/chuck-schumer-is-behind-this-mysterious-pac-meddling-in-montanas-gop-primary/
4. “Last Best Place PAC Outside Spending”, Open Secrets, according to data reported on 6/12/2024, https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/detail?cmte=C00849729&cycle=2024
5. “Schumer-tied dark money group wires $6 million to GOP primary meddler as Democrats slam anonymous cash”, Gabe Kaminsky, Washington Examiner, 4/24/2024, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/senate/2975704/schumer-dark-money-gop-primary-meddler/
6. “The Green Left Lies Used to Justify Authoritarian Climate Regulation”, John Fund and David Simon, National Reivew, 6/9/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/the-green-left-lies-used-to-justify-authoritarian-climate-regulation/
7. Thanks to Fund and Simon for the following link: “Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study”, 5/20/2015, at https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)62114-0/fulltext
8. Thanks to Fund and Simon for the following link: “Global Warming and Hurricanes”, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), 4/17/2024, at https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/
9. “California Gas Prices to Go from Bad to Worse as Dems Move to Tighten Environmental Regulations”, David Zimmerman, National Reivew, 6/12/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/california-gas-prices-to-go-from-bad-to-worse-as-dems-move-to-tighten-environmental-regulations/

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Do People Understand that Progressivism Is the Problem?

What Happened to California Republicans? | THAT'S WHAT I'M SCREAMING

We don’t have to look very far for the cause of our discontents.  California is the template for what ails us.  It’s the Vatican of new wave progressivism, a movement with the mental genetics of Robespierre, Lenin, and every visionary with the ambition to make an entire population’s thoughts, actions, and way of life conform to their dream.  Woe be to you if you refuse to fit in.  Nothing is allowed to stand in the way, not our institutions, standards of decency, or principles of fair play.  Yep, California is our future . . . if we let it.

This progressivism is monstrous.  It’s an agent of desolation.  Watch them as they go after Trump, or Steve Bannon, or your kids which, in their clutches, are radicalized or placed under the care of the transgender coven.  Watch them as they lay waste to prosperity, your prosperity.  It’s a ticket to Sheol (Hell).

All of us are living it.  The Trump trial and verdict is a hot mess.  As for the Bannon conviction and sentence, it’s technically correct, but also a clear example of politically advantageous prosecution.  Forget about equal treatment before the law, treating like cases alike.  The progressive’s Lady Justice lifts the blindfold from one eye.  If you’re Bannon, you get a broadside.  If you’re Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, sail on.

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Pres. Obama’s AG, Eric Holder, testifying before Congress at the time of the Fast and Furious scandal
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Steve Bannon sits during his appearance at New York Supreme Court after a hearing in New York City, January 12, 2023. (photo: Steve Hirsch/Pool via Reuters)

Compare the two.  Eric Holder in 2011 falsely testified before Congress that he had been aware of Fast and Furious for only few weeks prior to his testimony.  He’s contradicted by the facts.  Justice Department emails to Holder from underlings discussing Fast and Furious date back to July of the previous year.  Holder slow-walks congressional subpoenas for more information and President Obama puts the kibosh to any more cooperation, shielding his AG from congressional oversight under a blanket of executive immunity.  Shortly thereafter, tired of all the nonsense, the House Oversight Committee voted to hold Holder in contempt of Congress.  What happened to Holder’s contempt charge?  Nothing.  It fell into the abyss (see #1-3 below).

Not true for Bannon.  For Biden’s DOJ under AG Merick Garland, it’s full speed ahead.  Bannon is accused of obstructing a congressional investigation, like Holder, because he falsely believed that he was covered by President Trump’s claim of executive immunity.  I say falsely because Bannon wasn’t a presidential aide to be covered by executive immunity, nor was the information in the subpoena probably protected by presidential immunity.  Technically, in accordance with law, Bannon is guilty.  So, don’t blame the judge for sentencing him to jail time.  But Holder should also be wearing an orange jumpsuit if America is still a nation that adheres to basic principles of fair play.

We aren’t that kind of nation any longer.  Thanks, progressives.

Progressives rabidly wanted to get their man, Trump and any person around him, by creating in 2021 a bogus committee, the J6 Committee, to target Trump and his people.  The committee was not legitimate since the minority party (Republicans) weren’t allowed their choices to be on it.  Instead, the thing was stacked with zealous Democrats and a couple of carefully selected Republicans with a publicly announced hatred of Trump.  Any legal actions taken by it were tainted by over-the-top partisanship.

It parallels the Democrats’ other shambolic distortions of justice in the Democrat Jim Crow South.

A Ku Klux Klan rally in Frederick, Maryland, 1980.
A Ku Klux Klan rally in Frederick, Maryland, in 1980. They’re the Democrats’ version of civil society in the old Jim Crow South.

Hanging judges and juries and jury nullification were the stock and trade of Democrat white southerners in charge of the deep South. It’s in the Democrats’ DNA.  Like the couple of whites accused in the torture and murder of Emmitt Till standing before a bigotedly sympathetic jury, Trump and Bannon were similarly hauled before a stacked hearing.  No apologies, just convictions.

Emmett Till's mother, Mamie, weeps as the body of her slain son arrives at a Chicago Rail ...
Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie, weeps as the body of her slain son arrives at a Chicago Rail Station, Sep. 1955

The sad saga doesn’t end there.  Desolation is the consequence of progressivism. Look at the poster child of progressivism, California, its cities, combustible wildlands, teetering grid, collapsing infrastructure, broad assault on the retail trade, fleeing middle class and businesses, overall sense of ugliness and lawlessness, burgeoning public indebtedness, failing schools, eco-fanaticism, etc.  It’s a mess, and some of the progressively minded are beginning to notice it to their chagrin.  They didn’t sign up for this.  Who would?

A mom is still a mom without regard to her party registration.  The progressive agenda is well and good . . . until it places her child in its maw.  It happened to Erin Friday whose daughter was gender transitioned behind her back by public school authorities.  A progressive, Democrat, and supporter of much of the LGBTQ agenda, she was so incensed by this affront to her basic parental authority that she helped organize the Protect Kids Initiative to prevent this from happening to another mother and child in the state (see #6-7 below).

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'RESERVED SB SB107 107 Wiener GENDER-AFFIRMING HEAL AL TH CARE GENDER AFFIRMING HE California State Assembly 농의만합전'
Erin Friday testifying before the California State Assembly

Then she ran into another maw, the new wave progressives who run the state of California.  Their shenanigans killed the Protect Kids Initiative.  How?  Simply make it difficult to collect the required number of signatures.  The antics of state Attorney General Rob Bonta was a dagger to its heart.  State law gives power to the AG to provide a title and summary for the initiative.  The “Protect Kids Initiative” became “Restricts Rights of Transgender Youth”.  The attached summary asserted that the initiative “prohibits gender-affirming health care for transgender patients under 18, even if parents [sic] consent or treatment is medically recommended”.   It’s hard to gain support from an ill-informed California electorate when having to face frowns after reading “Restricts rights” and “prohibits … health care”.  The AG’s hostile language was upheld by a California court.  The thing is dead, dead.

7th California School District Adopts Policy to Notify Parents of Child’s Gender Status Change ...
Rob Bonta, the radical left-wing attorney general of California

On top of everything else that the popularly elected progressive ruling class is doing to the state, parents can’t protect their kids from mental and medical interventions that will scar them for life.  This state is just hostile to children from aborting them up to and including their passage down the birth canal to mutilating them for life, all at public expense.  It’s a malevolent state that has become an Auschwitz for children.

Electing progressives is an invitation to disaster.  For some, they think that their only recourse is Trump, or some such acolyte, which they find distasteful.  Well, how distasteful is our ruined constitutional order or our kids scarred beyond belief?  If California is our national future, flee, flee now to some lonely and isolated outpost in Australia’s outback.  Get out, or vote against any Democrat before they get a chance to bring California to your town.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “Steve Bannon’s Remand Is Consistent with the Law”, Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 6/8/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/steve-bannons-remand-is-consistent-with-the-law/
2. “Why Eric Holder Will Regret His Recklessness”, John Yoo, National Review, 9/25/2014, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-eric-holder-will-regret-his-recklessness-john-yoo/
3. “Fast, Furious, and Loose with the Facts”, The Editors, National Review, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/10/fast-furious-and-loose-facts-editors/
4. “Eric Holder, Once Cited for Contempt in Fast and Furious Probe, Criticizes Barr for ‘Protecting the President’”, Matt Naham, Law and Crime, 5/1/2019, at https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/eric-holder-once-cited-for-contempt-in-fast-and-furious-probe-criticizes-barr-for-protecting-the-president/
5. “Eric Holder’s Contempt Case Trends Amid Bannon Sentence ‘Double Standards’”, Newsweek, 10/21/2022, at https://www.newsweek.com/eric-holder-contempt-case-steve-bannon-sentence-double-standards-1753963
6. “California Parents Are Afraid of Losing Their Kids | Erin Friday”, California Insider (video), with Siyamak Khorrami, at https://californiainsider.com/california-news/videos/california-insider-show/california-parents-are-afraid-of-losing-their-kids-erin-friday-5608600
7. “Parent Group to Sue California Official Over Alleged Misleading Ballot Title, Summary”, Brad Jones, California Insider, 1/9/2024, at https://californiainsider.com/california-news/parent-group-to-sue-california-official-over-alleged-misleading-ballot-title-summary-5560682

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Next Stop for Carnage: UCLA’s Medical School

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The state’s elite medical schools, such as UCLA’s Geffen School of Medicine, aren’t immune from the broad carnage that has swept K-12 in California.  Let’s start off, though, with the lower grades, then move to the current ravaging of UCLA’s med school.

Overall primary and secondary education in California is miserable.  In no educational measure is the state an exemplar.  From Wallet Hub to the Nation’s Report Card, it’s a trail of tears for the state’s K-12 schools (see #1 below). Quoting one source (see #2 below):

“A new study by Wallet Hub [2015], a financial advice company, puts California schools at the bottom of the pack.  California school systems are the ninth worse in the nation.”

The above report was from 9 years ago, and it hasn’t gotten any better; though, teacher salaries have, with a top-ranked annual average of over $95,000 (see #3 below).  But that is eaten up by the humungous cost of living (see #4 below).  It’s big money when compared to other states, but that number relegates a California teacher in their prime to tenement life in LA or the Bay Area.  Forget about a coastal bungalow.

So, why the stratospheric cost of living?  It’s more than the attraction of the climate driving up demand, if that’s what you’re thinking.  The state is all into central planning, copying Lenin’s economic playbook – the state dominating the “commanding heights” kind of thing.  “Transitioning the economy” is central planning.  DEI is central planning.  Official sanctification and propagation of transgenderism is central planning.  What isn’t central planning on the progressive’s wish list?

And central planning is expensive, always has been, in more ways than one.  It’s expensive because it’ll come out of your hide in more than prices, like shortages, blackouts, and declining opportunities.  It’s a replay of the Soviet Union.

California is centrally planned into a housing crisis.  Look at your centrally planned utility bills. The high cost of fuel extends beyond the pump and into sticker prices on everything on store shelves.  The centrally planned jump in the state’s minimum wage is driving up fast food prices and driving out jobs.  Wait for the centrally planned EV mandates to slap you in the face.  Try to build anything in the state as you face the daunting gauntlet of layers of litigation and fees and approvals and disapprovals, and the state’s burgeoning activist groups.  They’ve even managed to centrally plan homelessness into a catastrophe.  The crime problem is centrally planned with “restorative justice” and “equity”.  Filth and crime join unaffordability in the state’s reputation.  For a teacher, $95,000 is as meaningful as 95,000 Weimar Reichsmarks in 1922 (50,000 marks for a pound of potatoes).

Now, what the state’s central planners have done to the cost of living and K-12, they’re excited to bring to the med schools.  UCLA is the epicenter of more than antisemitic encampments and mobs.  The med school’s newly minted admissions approach magically turned the unqualified into qualified by reliance on melanin count, genitalia, home language, and other such markers of medical excellence, sarcastically speaking (see #5 below).  No GPA in the hard sciences or MCAT for these DEI grand viziers.  But it’s one thing to have the unqualified in sociology, quite another to have one in the operating room.  Do you think I’m kidding?

Some federal judges are refusing to offer clerkships to Ivy League law students, the law being replaced by revolutionary doctrines in these law schools.  The same reaction might soon be true of hospitals and patients for graduates of the UCLA Medical School.  A big framed UCLA diploma on the wall behind the newly licensed doctor might be your cue to bolt for the door. The alarm is sounding.  The Washington Free Beacon is working the story, as are many other outlets (see #5 and #6 below).

They are finding sources in the med school willing to speak up.  The Free Beacon writes,

“In interviews with the Free Beacon and complaints to UCLA officials, including investigators in the university’s Discrimination Prevention Office, faculty members with firsthand knowledge of the admissions process say it has prioritized diversity over merit, resulting in progressively less qualified classes that are now struggling to succeed.”

At the tip of the spear in debasing medical education at UCLA is Jennifer Lucero, Associate Dean for Admissions at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine (DGSOM), and the Vice Chair for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) for the Department of Anesthesiology.

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She has openly berated med school admissions committee members for raising questions about the poor qualifications of some matriculants if they happen to fall into one of her “protected” identities, this after she has stacked the committee with fellow believers.  From The Free Beacon: “Speaking on the condition of anonymity, six people who’ve worked with her described a pattern of racially charged incidents that has dispirited officials and pushed some of them to resign from the committee.”

She’s a mess creating a mess.  Staff and faculty complaints about her have been lodged with the school’s Discrimination Prevention Office.  They have much to complain about, and it goes beyond personal treatment.  Each year since her elevation to power, the danger increases that the unqualified and unmerited will slip through the school and into medical practice to the detriment of patients and the school’s reputation.  One admissions committee member recounted,

“I have students on their rotation who don’t know anything.  People get in and they struggle.”

One student assisting in an operation couldn’t identify the major artery when asked.  She then verbally attacked her professor for putting her on the spot.  One professor confessed, “Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students.”

Anecdotes abound.  And it shows in shelf tests, the examinations administered at the end of each clinical rotation.  The failure rate increased ten-fold under her stewardship.  Almost a quarter of the school’s students in the class of 2025 have failed 3 or 4 such tests.  Another professor admitted, “… a third to a half of the medical school is incredibly unqualified.”  If one of these practitioners should be supervising your medical treatment after a car accident, when you come to, demand to see their resume’ and look for an escape.

Major airlines promise to adopt the same approach for pilots.  I may not fly again.  Merit has a place, and it really has a place for 150 passengers at 30,000 feet.

The problems with California run deeper than its so-called ruling elites.  It’s more than governors, legislators, mayors, or even college deans.  All of them, directly or indirectly, owe their positions to popular choices in elections.   People vote for this stuff by electing the people who bring this stuff.  A dean of admissions couldn’t declare war on merit if she wasn’t protected by the nest of an agreed-upon agenda that can be traced back to the elected.  The war on merit is a popular choice, whether understood by the electorate or not.

I refer to H.L. Mencken once again,

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.  No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

Yes, the great masses of the plain people of California.

It’s the difference between government and regime.  Think of “government” as the outward signs of rule: offices, constitutions, its structure and institutions. In contrast, “regime” runs much deeper.  Often used to identify authoritarian systems, it nonetheless has application to democracies.  A particular approach to governance becomes a pattern – red and blue states for instance – due to pervasive and endemic cultural and social norms.  Elections occur within this social matrix, and the “regime” rears its head.

You can’t have an official nod to teenage genital mutilation without at least a vaguely popular toleration of the ideology of transgenderism.  You can’t have a broad war on merit without at least a vaguely popular toleration of the assault.  What else accounts for the ritual pattern of choosing people who bring these policies?  California’s regime, which originates with the state’s people and their tendencies, is responsible.  If anyone is to blame, blame the people of the state.

Those people are a huge part of a socio-political eco-system favoring the advancement of the unqualified.  But who has the time and resources to investigate their doctor to uncover whether they emanated out of this cauldron?  California schools are proving that they don’t come with the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.  We are left with a rule of thumb.  If your doctor came out of California, and especially its med schools, play it safe by shopping around. You’ve got at least 30 or more states to choose from.  A state’s reputation now matters, and matters a lot.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. The Nation’s Report Card at https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=NP&chort=1&sub=MAT&sj=&st=MN&year=2022R3
2. “How Do California Schools Rank Compare to the Rest of the Nation?”, Patch, 8/1/2015, ahttps://patch.com/california/santamonica/how-do-california-schools-rank-compare-rest-nationt
3. “California teachers struggle despite having the highest salaries in the nation”, Malekka Seshardi, EdSource, 5/13/2024, at https://edsource.org/updates/california-teachers-struggle-despite-having-the-highest-salaries-in-the-nation
4. “California ranks last in opportunity due to cost living: U.S. News”, Kenneth Schrupp, The Central Square: California, 5/16/2024, at https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/article_f06f4eec-13c9-11ef-a68c-6f1b9d775308.html
5. “’ A Failed Medical School’: How Racial Preferences, Supposedly Outlawed in California, Have Persisted at UCLA”, Aaron Sibarium, Washington Free Beacon, 5/23/2024, at https://freebeacon.com/campus/a-failed-medical-school-how-racial-preferences-supposedly-outlawed-in-california-have-persisted-at-ucla/
6. “‘Shocking decline’: UCLA med school prioritized racial diversity, leading to decline, report says”, The College Fix, staff, 5/23/2024, at https://www.thecollegefix.com/shocking-decline-ucla-med-school-prioritized-racial-diversity-leading-to-decline-report-says/
7. Special thanks to Jeffrey Blehar in “DEI Will Destroy Our Trust in Doctors”, National Review, 5/23/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dei-will-destroy-our-trust-in-doctors/

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California’s Threat to Nevada and the Constitution’s Commerce Clause

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Gov. Joe Lombardo, Nevada

The federal government is supreme in regulating interstate commerce (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3).  Fact, end of story!

But California is a law unto itself, free to screw up states that have the unhappy circumstance of sharing a border with it.  In a letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday 5/14, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo stated the obvious: California policies are jacking up fuel prices for Nevadans as well as Californios (see #1 below).  You see, much of Nevada’s western fuel market is fed by refineries and pipelines from California, businesses under the thumb of that state’s multifarious politburos.

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Gov. Gavin Newsom, Ca., responds to letter from Gov. Lombardo

Newsom responded to Lombardo in the lingua franca of today’s hard-left Democratic Party by saying that Lombardo is a lackey of “Big Oil”.  As if parroting the editor of the Daily Worker (1924-1941, official newspaper of the Communist Party USA), Newsom said, “. . . [Lombardo] knows full well that oil refiners are driving up gas prices and making massive profits . . ..”  There’s not much room for the CPUSA in our national political corral since that space is increasingly monopolized by the DNC, especially their California affiliate.

Apparently, according to Newsom, refiners are only greedy bloodsuckers in California, and in a few other states acting as cheap knockoffs of the not-so-golden state.  The highest retail gas prices by state are all Democrat fiefdoms.  The prices (as of 5/16/2024) range from California’s average of $5.24/gal. to Mississippi’s $3.06.  No red state rises above Idaho’s $3.83 (see #2 below).  My Montana comes in at $3.48.

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Gas prices at Fairfax Ave. and Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, 5/17/2024

Following the Marxist template, as usual, is the Democrat supermajority in the state legislature as exemplified in the Newsom-signed state Senate Bill X1-2.  The decree would establish a new commissariat to oversee these latest “malefactors of wealth” with power to investigate and recommend penalties to the state’s uber-commissariat, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).

That’ll do the trick.  Just persecute by prosecution the people with whom you rely for your fuel.  This won’t work, unless you believe in the efficacy and efficiency of a slave economy.  Whips and chains and overseers aren’t the best way to get the most out of people.  Unlike the mid-19th century’s era of chattel slavery in the old South, no Fugitive Salve Act exists to compel a people’s acceptance of involuntary servitude to Newsom and company.  Flight is always an option, as it has been for the past few decades for the state’s middle class, families, and many businesses.  What a time to be in the moving business, one of the few growth industries left in the state.

Never do these people look in the mirror.  The state gets sanction from the federal government to exceed the Clean Air Act.  More federalism?  Not! California gets to throw around its market weight in the form of mammoth regulations, mandates, and taxes on refiners that clearly disrupts the interstate commerce in fuel.  Just think, its EV mandate alone by 2035 will force the shipment of fuel onto electric big rigs – or electric trains that don’t exist – further ballooning costs and worsening efficiencies in an already California-tortured industry.

The fuel that flows down its pipelines doesn’t fare any better.  It does so under the lash of the state’s immense panoply of eco-commissariats.  For Nevadans, what comes out the other end is bloated in cost.  Just drive on Interstate 15 up and away from California and you’ll see prices drop the more California recedes in the rear-view mirror.  Test it out for yourself.

It would be a dereliction of duty on the part of Nevada’s governor to not look out for the interests of his state.  Nevada, like all states, has a keen interest in reviving Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce, and end the unwitting delegation of that power to fanatics in Sacramento, if for no other reason than the need to avoid the collateral damage from California’s suicide attempt.

Go get ‘em Gov. Lombardo.  And Congress, dump California’s exemption.  If necessary, federal marshals should seize control of all the state’s ports and repeal the state’s interference in interstate commerce by truck, railroad, plane, ship, and pipeline.  Keep California’s malign effects limited as much as possible to its residents, who regularly vote for the mess.  No state should be forced to live under the political toxicity of another.

Remember, the U.S. Constitution guarantees to each state a republican form of government, not a California government – Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution.

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RogerG

Sources:
1. “Lombardo to Newsom: Act now before gas prices get even higher”, KTNV staff (Las Vegas, Nv.), 5/14/2024, at https://www.ktnv.com/news/lombardo-to-newsom-act-now-before-gas-prices-get-even-higher
2. “Today’s Gas Prices By State”, Kelly Anne Smith and Korrena Bailie, Forbes, 5/16/2024, at https://www.forbes.com/advisor/personal-finance/gas-prices-by-state/#:~:text=California%20has%20the%20highest%20price%20of%20gas%2C%20with,average%20of%20%243.09%20per%20gallon%20of%20regular%20gas.

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The Real Minimum Wage Is Zero

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Thomas Sowell

The esteemed economist Thomas Sowell quipped, “Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero.”  California is sadly learning this hard lesson as we speak.

Many California workers went from “Hurray!” to pink slips after California voters sent zealots into seats of power across the state to enact zany laws, like AB 1228.  Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill last year that raised the minimum wage to $20 per hour for fast-food workers (with an exception for a donor), his legislative super-majorities guaranteeing the outcome.  The lid was off for minimum wage hikes in the state’s other industries and in the many specific locales in the state enthralled by collectivist dreams.  Now, the reality: everyone didn’t get the leap in pay.  Many of those so-called “oppressed” found their hours cut or sent home without any hours, having lost their jobs.

All of this is a reminder of another Sowell witticism: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”  You can only get things after giving up other things. The politicos issued the decree, “Thou shalt pay no one less than $20 per hour”, that led to those still facing a bottom line to cope by reducing the payroll.  So, the numbskulls in power unwittingly created a “nominal” minimum wage, and a “real” one: nominal = $20; real = $0!

Lee E. Ohanian with the Independent Institute chronicles the number of workers who were zeroed out in the ungolden state (see #1 below).  9,500 lost employment in the state’s fast-food industry from fall to January of this year.  Pizza Hut and Roundtable said goodbye to 1,300 delivery personnel.  El Pollo Loco and Jack in the Box are shifting to robots.  Thus, total employment in the state’s private sector during the same interval dropped .2%.  Is this “Bidenomics”, or maybe “Newsomnomics”?

Prices are jumping with the minimum wage boost: Wendy’s 8%, Chipotle 7.5%, Starbucks 7%, and others like McDonalds will be announcing hikes soon.  Fast food is a good with high elasticity (clientele is sensitive to price changes).  So, they can only raise prices to the point when the loss of business begins to eat into the business model.  Scott Roderick, a McDonald’s franchisee, said, “I can’t charge $20 for Happy Meals.”  If he doesn’t, and economically can’t, he may have to close shop.  How many then will join the ranks of the “real” minimum wage?

An economist at the Employment Policies Institute, Rebekah Paxton, lays out more carnage as the fever for $20 spreads to the other surviving remnants of the state’s shrinking private sector (see #2 below).  The neo-Marxist SEIU is chomping at the bit to ruin other businesses in the state.  West Hollywood is a microcosm of the elected lunacy gripping the state.  Making their SEIU donors happy, the city proclaimed a $17.64 minimum wage for hotel workers.  The union used this leverage to make it apply everywhere in the city.  Currently, the “nominal” minimum wage stands at $19.08.

Predictably, many formerly joyous workers in the city are discovering that their services are no longer needed.  Staff cuts of 30-40% are routine. 85 businesses in the city were shuttered last year.  The 30-40% are back to $0.

Since Biden and the poohbahs of the donkey party are keen to hitch the nation to the California train, expect more of us across the nation to suffer, even those of us who fled the People’s Republic.  Nationalizing lunacy is their chief aim.  When will they learn that you can’t suspend the laws of nature, and the laws of economics that rise from them?

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “California Loses Nearly 10,000 Fast-Food Jobs After $20 Minimum Wage Signed Last Fall”, Lee E. Ohanian, The Independent Institute, 4/26/2024, at https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14919&utm_source=FFF+Daily&utm_campaign=252dd0222c-FFF+Daily+2024-05-04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1139d80dff-252dd0222c-318121705
2. “California’s Predictably Disastrous Minimum-Wage Hikes”, Rebekah Paxton, National Review, 5/7/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/californias-predictably-disastrous-minimum-wage-hikes/

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The Insanity of Our Moment

Lack of action on climate change has sparked protests (Photo: Getty)
Climate extinction?

Obviously, Facebook, and probably much of the techie universe for that matter, is enthralled by hair-on-fire climate alarmism.  So much so that they put a “context warning” on a cartoon that was attached to one of my recent posts about the EV craziness sweeping the halls of power, a politicized professoriate, their young charges mobbing the public square, and the beautiful people in the culture. It’s crazy, just think about it.  I’ll explain.

Some people are braving the hostility of today’s unofficial (and official) Inquisition who, like Galileo, just stepped forward to say, “Wait a minute!”  There are voices out there other than the lefty Union of Concerned Scientists.  One such voice is the Cornwall Alliance (https://cornwallalliance.org); there are others.  They raise some glaring questions that few if any denizens in big media newsrooms would know enough to ask.

Right off the bat, Cornwall and most others don’t deny the existence of man-caused (anthropogenic) climate change – i.e., global warming.  They assert, however, that the doom-mongering is not science.  One should never say “the science says”.  “Science” has no vocal cords.  It’s a method that comes close to “trust but verify”, or “where’s the beef”, or simply “prove it”.  Waiting for “science” to say something treats the whole endeavor as if it were a homogenized mass of one mind.  May as well put up a huge picture of Mao to represent all of China, er “science”, in one fell swoop.  People that wallow in “the science says” aren’t scientists and wouldn’t know which end of the telescope to use, or explain a hypothesis, or how to conduct a fitting test for one, the essence of science.  Thus, it’s easy for the scientifically illiterate to jump to doom.

Such stunted science-minds would never consider, or ask, the following:

* What is the nature of the warming?  Much of the available evidence indicates that the warming is concentrated in the upper latitudes and affects average daily low temperatures (mostly at night) and not the highs.

* What are the actual effects of the warming?  Are they all bad?  No, and on balance, they are likely to be positive.  Warmer global temps in the upper latitudes extends the growing season and expands the amount of the earth’s surface for agriculture.  The growing season starts earlier and ends later.  Plants love CO2.  Conversely, history shows that bad things happen with cooling (the Black Death, famine, for instance).

* What about droughts?  They come and go, and are sensitive to localized conditions, like cold/warm water currents.  El Nino is a result of warm ocean water; La Nina is born of cold.  Warm water warms the air above it and warmer air has more room for more water vapor for more rain.  The jet stream accommodates and sends it to one area and away from another.  One place is in drought, and another can’t handle the deluge.  The cycles are called “decadel” because they come and go every 7-12 years on average.  Welcome to nature, and not a soccer mom’s preference for an SUV.

* Are the scare stories of an avalanche of “extreme weather” accurate?  No, the evidence suggests that our current weather patterns haven’t varied from the historical record going back in time using tree rings and core samples.  If anything, they prove that climate, and its short-term equivalent, weather, varies around a mean, sometimes quite dramatically, and also that climate (long term weather patterns of at least 30 years) has never been steady-state.  The earth wobbles on its axis; the orbit slightly shifts; and solar radiation jumps up and down.  And we have always put in and taken out stuff since we ventured out of the cave.  Variation, like all of nature, is the chief characteristic of our weather and climate.

* Is the nation of Micronesia, or the Obama estate on Martha’s Vineyard, about to disappear in rising sea levels?  No, because we are talking about inches in the single digits covering centuries if not thousands of centuries.  It’s manageable.  Talk to the Dutch who’ve been dealing with holding back the North Sea for at least a half of a millennium or more.

So, why are our science semi-literates in power so gung-ho to ruin our lives?  Simple, for them, Chicken Little is a divine oracle.  The apocalypse is nigh. For them, we can’t adapt our way out of the doom.  For them, we must mitigate, and that means turning our lives upside down, declaring war on fossil fuels, and erecting the Soviet to oversee our wants and desires.

Actually, we can adapt, not mitigate, because their Chicken Little is essentially a witch doctor.  A sea wall can handle a few inches of rise in coastal waters protecting Obama’s mansion investment on Martha’s Vineyard and Oprah’s luxurious enclaves in Montecito (Santa Barbara) and Maui.  Receding ice sheets in the polar regions is more than compensated by more land open for farming and a longer growing season.  Feeding more people sounds good to me. More greenery from more CO2 has a tremendous upside.

This war on fossil fuels throws common sense out the window.  What do we gain (benefits) by handcuffing millions and billions of people to a crippled grid and treating the possession of an SUV as a war crime?  What are the costs?  The forced exchange of what works for what doesn’t will mean that more people will enter the ranks of the poor.  Pencil it out.  We’ll have less CO2 in the air and more filth and poverty on the ground.  It’s insane.

Yep, this is our moment of insanity.

RogerG

Sources:

* Additional YouTube presentations on green matters, the other side to the debate:

1. Michael Shellenberger, “Why renewables can’t save the planet”, at https://youtu.be/N-yALPEpV4w?si=-frZCso5LEaCVNIj
2. “’What Percent Of Our Atmosphere Is CO2?’: Doug LaMalfa Stumps Entire Panel With Climate Questions”, Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Ca.), 2023, at https://youtu.be/bJfrKNR3K2k?si=9Cn0wiMwaqa8DQfe
3. Stephen Hayward, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Global Warming”, 2014, at https://youtu.be/RZlICdawHRA?si=WiZZs82W58z6D0ns
4. A balanced assessment of EV’s: The Car Guys, “THE BIG EV LIE. Why They Won’t Save the Planet & All About Dirty Electricity”, 2021, at https://youtu.be/sytWLB4-W-M?si=34ck2aFrRkRiql9n
5. Pete Buttigieg’s slick glibness.  Watch him skate around the immense problems associated with an EV life.  One key problem is generating the electricity to make it all work.  He talks about the grid but not about the sources for an immense expansion of the necessary generation of the electricity. “’Which Uses More Electricity…A Refrigerator When It’s Running Or Electric Car When It’s Charging?’”, in questioning of Buttigieg by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky), 2023, at https://youtu.be/avi9iBC8opU?si=LoSEVadXpLZK09J1

* This is not a comprehensive list but is a sample of a robust debate that exists outside attempts in the media to quash it.  Real science cannot be suppressed.

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A Green Totalitarianism Is Descending Upon Us

Online surveillance bill opens door for Big Brother | CBC News

They are coming for more than your family sedan.  They are going to upend, disrupt the entire system that brings everything to your home, grocery store, et al.  You’re going to be hit big time in your pocketbook and in every facet of your life.  Get prepared for it is coming, if not stopped.

Is Biden determined to turn me into a Trump voter?  Trump, no doubt, is the ugly face of my party, but Biden and his donkey party are trying to construct a totalitarian state on a preposterous green agenda.  Animating the whole venture, as is true with all totalitarian crusades, is a belief system on how best to organize and control people.  To gain popular traction, it’s best for all such crusades to contain a strong apocalyptic element, one powerful enough to justify stampeding the people into acceptance of its dictates and regimentation.  It’s happening before our eyes, right now!  Say goodbye to the republic and hello to the Soviet.

The EPA is the chief engine of the transformation from citizen republic to rule by all-powerful commissars.  Under the guise of “climate change”, we are being ordered to scrap our already immense sunk costs in affordable and reliable transportation for the mirage of something that doesn’t exist, and if it does, it’s a catastrophe as a replacement.  Prepare for a calamity, one that’ll conspicuously fall more seriously upon our children and generations to come.  Your kids will be the real victims.

March is turning into a deadly month for the health of our constitutional republic.  The EPA earlier in the month announced its intention to follow the template of California, one of a few states famous for turning many of its residents into refugees.  Like the authoritarian clown car in Sacramento, tighter emissions for “light duty” vehicles (cars, trucks, many SUV’s) will be imposed from 2027 through 2032, eventually sealing the death warrant for the production of nearly anything with an internal combustion engine (see #1 below).  Say goodbye to more than the citizen republic.  Say goodbye to that thing in your garage that allows you to get the kids to school, or you to work, or pay a visit to grandma for Thanksgiving, for its life will be wrung out of it by regulating and taxing it to death in escalating licensing fees and costs for upkeep, parts, and fuel.  Manufacturers will be forced to eliminate their production.  The comrades in power plan to leave you with no way out but into their approved and glorified golf cart.  This is nothing but totalitarianism “for your own good”.  And, of course, they know better about what’s good for you.  Right?

EPA Says More Diverse Advisory Committees Will Mean More Equitable Decisions - Union of ...

On the heels of that monstrosity, the commissars proclaimed a similar rule for the fleet of big vehicles that bring everything from produce to your grocery store to all things from an Amazon distribution center, everything that fills a shelf (see #3 below).  It’ll be much worse for those people who choose to live outside the controllable and tight confines of an urban area.  Think about it, all that stuff that was affordably made available at your fingertips will be crammed onto battery-powered big rigs (fuel cells create their own immense problems, see #2 below) of limited capacity, range, and tremendous recharging difficulties.

The mammoth costs of so-called “innovating” our way out of these imposed problems will only short-circuit the necessary wealth to satisfy other necessities of life.  These blinkered potentates have no understanding of the gargantuan trade-offs that they are inflicting on us.  Either that or they don’t care.

My bet is that they don’t care.  Why?  They possess a religious fervor for an ideology that justifies, in their mind, taking over more and more of your life.  For them, they are busy saving the planet, even if it means destroying your standard of living.  You see, their religio-ideology is founded upon a robust, promethean definition of “social cost” and “externalities”.  Like a canon law in the church, their “church”, the two doctrines give overriding weight to real or imagined costs for all of society for everything that you do.  Where’s the limits? Practically, there aren’t any.  Thus, the creeds become the supreme, open-ended excuses for the EPA, or any commissariat for that matter, to do anything that they want.

In the past, it was national socialist race justice to prevent defilement of the “race”, or the dictatorship of the proletariat to cram equality of condition on all of humanity to prevent exploitation.  Today, it’s saving the climate, leaving aside the lack of any credible, peer reviewed evidence that anything that they’re doing will positively affect a global atmosphere under which billions of people are acting independently and beyond the reach of the EPA.  Pardon me for concluding that this is nothing but pure stupidity.

In the end, the Biden claque and his Democratic Party are seemingly intent on destroying our way of life and replacing our citizen republic with rule by totalitarian zealots.  It’s Petrograd 1917, Berlin 1933, or Beijing 1949.  Keeping this crowd in power would have us see the end of much that we cherish.  So, if the choice is between the abominable Trump or this gang of totalitarian fanatics, one can be forgiven for preferring boorishness to Big Brother.

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May be an image of car and text that says 'ELECTRICY wm HaynE LANL "Plug in to nearby taxpayer's wallet and she's ready to go!"'

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RogerG

Sources:

1. In Orwellian language, the EPA announcement: “Biden-Harris Administration finalizes strongest-ever pollution standards for cars that position U.S. companies and workers to lead the clean vehicle future, protect public health, address the climate crisis, save drivers money”, March 20, 2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-pollution-standards-cars-position
2. A survey of the literature on the shortcomings of fuel cells:
* “Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Vehicles: Everything You Need to Know”, Car and Driver, 9/26/2022, at https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a41103863/hydrogen-cars-fcev/
* “A review of PEM hydrogen fuel cell contamination: Impacts, mechanisms, and mitigation”, ScienceDirect, 3/20/2007, at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378775306025304
* “Fuel Cells”, University of Illinois, at https://publish.illinois.edu/fuel-cells/benefits-and-disadvantages/
* “How Fuel Cells Work”, How Stuff Works, at https://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/alternative-fuels/fuel-cell.htm

3. The same Orwellian language for heavy-duty vehicles: “Biden-Harris Administration Finalizes Strongest Ever Greenhouse Gas Standards for Heavy-Duty Vehicles to Protect Public Health and Address the Climate Crisis While Keeping the American Economy Moving”, EPA, 3/29/2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-greenhouse-gas-standards-heavy

4. National Review articles that provide excellent overviews of the issues:
* “Biden’s Vehicle-Emissions Gaslighting”, Luther Ray Abel, 3/20/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bidens-vehicle-emissions-gaslighting/
* “Electric Vehicles: The EPA’s Fast Track to Fiasco”, Andrew Stuttaford, 3/25/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/electric-vehicles-the-epas-fast-track-to-fiasco/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=second
* “Biden Admin Imposes Strict Pollution Standards for Buses and Heavy-Duty Vehicles”, Caroline Downey, 3/29/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-admin-imposes-strict-pollution-standards-for-buses-and-heavy-duty-vehicles/

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What Does a Lack of Interest in Government Debt Say About Us? Nothing Good.

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Demonstrators march down Pennsylvania Avenue during a protest against police brutality and racism on June 6, 2020 in Washington, DC. This one end of the voter spectrum. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
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Trump supporters, the other end of the voter spectrum

Debt. Debt. Debt.  Government at all levels is awash in it.  Mountains of bonds and treasuries, unfunded mandates, and government spending galore is bankrupting the country.  The numbers are in the trillions for Washington, D.C., and beyond millions and into the billions in some state and local hives.  California stands out, and is leading the way to massive, harebrained fiscal imbecility, and a dismal future for anyone too young or unborn to vote.

And to think that nobody really cares.  The public doesn’t, just try and do something about it.  What animates the Trump crowd is rhetorical red meat, sticking it to the libs, and other acts of political theater.  No talk of debt, addressing it, or facing the runaway train of our entitlements.

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Donald Trump waves to the crowd at one of his rallies in Florida, 2024.

Nothing in Trump’s past or in his recent four years at the Resolute desk is promising.  The guy is a real estate magnate who fumbled around in debt and bankruptcy most of his adult life.  As president, he just wanted to spend and spend and spend, even chastising Senate Republicans for balking at another spewing of checks across the fruited plain to grease his reelection campaign.  The only problem with his personality kink is the absence of the discipline of a bottom line in a federal government that can issue more debt and dollars at will. No state has a Federal Reserve Board.  Trump is a child in a candy store, and so are his followers.  Enough of this inane talk of having a businessman in the White House, especially this businessman.

The other choice on the political landscape is a band of neo-Marxist central planners who never met a tax, new bottomless social engineering gambit, and outright giveaway that they didn’t like.  The central planning is bad enough, but the vacuuming of more taxpayer dollars from potentially productive endeavors in the private sector into the hands of politicians and their special pleading lackeys is a recipe to repeat 1920s Weimar Germany, or maybe 1920 Bolshevik Russia.

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President Biden delivers remarks regarding student loan debt forgiveness in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in 2022. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images / Getty Images)

Where are the adults?  Do we really want adults in decision-making posts?  Apparently not.  Adults aren’t popular.  Never have we been more in need of someone who will speak truth to power, and that power means the American public who keep electing these clowns.  We, the American voter, are the real “establishment”.  As before, watch demagoguery short-circuit any come-to-Jesus talk.

The numbers are staggering.  The national debt of $34.5 trillion is not far from the country’s total productive output, increasing $1 trillion every 100 days (see #1 and #3 below).  Meaning, we are close to the land of no return.  Compound the nightmare with rising interest rates adding fatter interest payments to the astronomical total and the magnitude of our fiscal immaturity resembles the black hole at the center of the galaxy.  Democrats and Trump only know how to spend, with the Democrats performing a lethal injection of tax hikes into our bloodstream as we drown in the sea of debt.

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If there’s one thing both sides agree on, besides the profligate spending, it is, “Don’t touch Social Security and Medicare!”  As entitlements, both are on spending autopilot.  The spending flies on, but the funding source is deteriorating; the revenue fuel tank of the contraption is shrinking in real time.  The program is set up as pay-as-you-go, so the elderly need to stop saying that they are only getting their contributions back.  Balderdash.  Current retirees are receiving the contributions of current workers.  That’s the truth behind the lies.  When the amount of inflow stagnates or declines due to demography or deteriorating prospects for the young contributors, and the outflow prances forever upward, the fiscal tipsiness is guaranteed to add more huge infusions of red ink.

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How much of an infusion?  Don’t let the banality of these colossal numbers (trillions) habituate you into accepting them as tolerable.  They aren’t.  Euphemistically referred to as “unfunded obligations” among official bean counters, Social Security is scheduled to pour $19.8 trillion into the master “unfunded obligation” of the national debt through 2095.  Medicare promises another $68.1 trillion.  If we take the trend line into the great beyond, in perpetuity, as far as it can be calculated, Social Security raises the ignominy to $59.8 trillion and Medicare $163.2 trillion (see #2 below).  If this was a drunk, the victim would have long ago expired from alcohol poisoning.

California is paving the way to this sordid future, but in their muddled thinking, in their clichéd mind, it’s a compliment – all the talk about “California is the future”.  Well, they got this one right.  California is likely to be the country’s future.  They went right from a state that could conceive and build the California Water Project to inmates running the asylum.  It’s a playground of the insane.  There’s your future.

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California governor Gavin Newsom speaks at a press conference in Beijing, China, October 25, 2023. (Tingshu Wang/Reuters)

The state’s popularly elected governor and legislature discovered, like kids coming downstairs to the Christmas tree, an eye-popping $100 billion pot of gold, or “surplus”, in the summer of 2022.  Chief inmate, Governor Gavin Newsom, gushed, “No other state in American history has ever experienced a surplus as large as this.”  And then he and his fellow adolescents went around showering the largesse in a splurge of incontinence.  23 million of its residents received checks worth as much as $1,050 at a price tag of $9.5 billion.  It then would seem only natural for a self-proclaimed sanctuary state for immigration law violators to bankroll $5 billion for the health care of the same immigration law violators (see #4 below).  Foreign nationals in our country in violation of our laws now get bennies.  Got that?

In their unthinking habit of seeing bigger budgets as success in any social venture – not kids reading better or the number of homeless declining – the Sacramento clown car shoveled $20 billion into the pockets of the professionalized homeless “advocates” in their opulent NGOs, with no positive impact on public defecation, open-air drug dealing and use, crime, or the number of filthy encampments littering city streets.  The state’s potentates could go a long way in curing the problem just by being a little more energetic, as they demonstrated recently in sprucing up grimy San Fransisco for the ruling thug of Red China, Xi.  Instead, you’re likely to see an increase in real estate investments by those professionals in their NGOs.  They don’t have an interest in curing the problem for that would only make them get a real job (see #4 below).

The state’s deficit stands at $78 billion, and rising.  Add the state’s massive overspending to local wantonness and the total debt picture throughout the state approaches $1.6 trillion (see #4 below).  I’m not sure if a cliff or wall is the most appropriate metaphor, but the car is more than driven by the mandarins in city hall or Sacramento.  These nincompoops are popularly elected.  The people of the state have their foot on the pedal.  The people want fiscal insanity.

So, let’s stop blaming some abstract others for this dire situation.  The people voted for it, and continue to do so. I’m reminded of Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror”.

Michael Jackson Man In The Mirror Wallpapers - Wallpaper Cave

As one stanza puts it:

“I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could’ve been any clearer
If they wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change”

Leave it to the King of Pop to issue a come-to-Jesus moment.  It’s astounding to think that a deeply flawed man, who died of a deadly cocktail of drugs, made more sense than the people do in their elections.  Stew on that for a while.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. US Debt Clock at https://www.usdebtclock.org/. You can watch it climb in real time.
2. “The Real Federal Deficit: Social Security And Medicare”, John C. Goodman, Forbes, 2/25/2024, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/johngoodman/2023/02/25/the-real-federal-deficit-social-security-and-medicare/?sh=25189f695679
3. “The U.S. national debt is rising by $1 trillion about every 100 days”, Michelle Fox, CNBC, 3/1/2024, at https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/01/the-us-national-debt-is-rising-by-1-trillion-about-every-100-days.html
4. “California’s Deficit: Bring Your Alibis”, Will Swaim, National Review, 3/18/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/californias-deficit-bring-your-alibis/

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A Freely Elected Feudalism

Feudal Future Podcast – Restoring the California Dream - Joel Kotkin
The Feudal Future Podcast, two Chapman University professors warning of California’s slide into feudalism, or, more accurately, manorialism.

Most historians of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West would admit of centuries of misrule and foreign pressures leading to its disappearance.  The Fall was incremental with most people adjusting to the slowly deteriorating conditions.  Then, on the heels of persistent and growing disorder, the Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD.  The evidence of decline was visible on the ground in the depopulation of many urban centers – Rome’s population in the 5th century had fallen to 50,000 – and in overgrown and decaying infrastructure.  A healthy middle class faded with the weakening of commerce and the spreading lawlessness, and people began to cluster around powerful land barons.  Western Europe became feudal.  And so is California.

Feudal California has been a consistent theme of mine for a number of years.  I’m not alone in this assessment.  Two Chapman University professors (Orange, Ca.), Marshall Toplansky and Joel Kotkin, have been sounding the alarm in their “The Feudal Future” podcast at https://www.feudalfuturepodcast.com/home51396438.  Check it out.

Professor Marshall Toplansky recently sat down for an interview with Siyamak Khorrami (see below) to explain what is happening to the socio-economic profile of California as it is sliding into feudalism.  In sum, California is losing its middle class.  A thriving middle class is a product of a vibrant commerce.  Commerce is fading in the state’s broad system collapse.  Sound familiar?  As the middle class flees for opportunity elsewhere, the leftover population begins to take on the character of the wealthy in their walled manors and a growing mass of the poor to service their needs.  How long will it be before we start calling California’s poor “peasants” or “serfs” and the state’s hyper-rich “Lord”?

This state of affairs wasn’t an accident.  It is a willful consequence of elected choices.  Decline and decay are popularly elected. It’s a one-party state with policy excesses never held to account.  A chief target of the excess is commerce – or more simply, the economy.  Doing business in California is like descending into Dante’s Inferno.  A reputation for hostility is cemented; businesses leave for more welcoming states; air quality improves because the economy is systematically depressed; and the young in their peak family-formation and income years take flight.  “Going green” (ev’s, solar panels, windmills, recycling galore, a war on fossil fuels, etc.) is going-going-gone for the middle class.

Please take time to watch the Toplansky interview.  It should be enlightening for anyone in California or seeking to avoid its fate.

RogerG