California – Page 6 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

July 26, 2022

California, A Sanctuary for Modern Gender Lysenkoism

May be an image of 1 person and text

What is Lysenkoism and what does it have to do with California? Lysenkoism was a Soviet theory of biology that illustrates the corrupting influences of ideology on science. In addition to the bloodthirsty nature of communism, it would prove to be a force multiplier for famine in the 1930’s in the Soviet Union. In like manner, today, transgenderism is just the latest edition of the attempt to have ideology guide science, and still call it “science”. It too will have dire consequences particularly for the young who will be swept into it. California is trying to establish itself as the mecca for this latest thought experiment with our children as guinea pigs.

While pursuing this transgenderism delusion, California has a hard time keeping its people and businesses. For the second straight year, the state has registered an absolute reduction in its population, down some 117,552 in 2021 alone. From 2000 to 2020, the state shed a net of 2.6 million people. Similarly, increasingly, businesses in the state are decamping for parts beyond the reach of California’s legislators, tax collectors, and regulators. The consulting firm Spectrum Solutions counts a total of 265 relocations of California-headquartered enterprises from 2018 to June 2021. It’s undoubtedly an undercount since many fly under the radar – like the number for “apprehensions at the border”.

The published 2021 list of business out-migrations is quite impressive and includes Apple and Oracle (now Austin, Tx.) and Nestle USA (now Arlington, Va.). If the state won’t be hospitable to the spirit of enterprise, the state seems to be salivating at the prospect of becoming a kind of Vatican for the grisly arts: snuffing out unborn life and mutilating the bodies of confused tweens. Abortion from conception to birth (and maybe beyond) is lauded and subsidized, going so far as to advertise for out-of-state “customers”. The “gender affirming care” (euphemisms abound in the grisly arts) of double mastectomies, hormonal injections, castrations, genital reconstruction operations, and psychological indoctrination is favored in ways the real economy is not. Fascinating.

This medical assault on the bodies of the young is justified under “transgenderism”, today’s ideological clone of Lysenkoism. Lysenkoism is an artifact of the Marxist belief system dictating the architecture of science. The inherent qualities in basic biology are rejected – nothing is inherent in Marxism but all is said to be a product of socio-economic power structures. Sound familiar to the rantings of the race hustlers of critical race theory? Trofim Lysenko, Soviet biologist who was heralded in Soviet propaganda as a genius, rejected genetics and based his agriculture advice on discredited 18th century notions of inheritance (Lamarckism). The whole idea easily conformed to the pretensions of Marxism-Leninism. The result was the catastrophic crop failures leading to the Holodomor, the famine in the Ukraine and Donbas, the vast breadbasket of Russia and Europe.

May be a black-and-white image of 1 person — Trofim Lysenko in 1938

Thus, what happens when ideology guides science? You have massive calamities. Like the Soviet-inspired famines, we will have cohorts of impressionable adolescents equally damaged, growing up psychologically scarred and physically mutilated, and it will all be chalked up as “gender affirming”. For many, they’ll end up like the 60-year-old regretting the body-covering tattoos, now fading and wrinkled, of their twenties. Only worse.

Inspired by the conceit of transgenderism, California State Senator Scott Weiner has introduced a bill that would create an interstate underground railroad for sex-change operations, in effect, neutering the laws of the other states, according to Jeremy Redfern, press secretary of the Florida Department of Health. Children from Florida, or wherever, could be placed in California foster care, with or without parental notice and consent, and in essence Mengele-like experiments would be conducted on their bodies (Josef Mengele was the sinister Auschwitz doctor). The bill promises to prohibit the enforcement of another state’s arrest warrant if the warrant is related to that state’s restrictions on sex-change treatments.

May be an image of 1 person — California State Senator Scott Weiner (D, 11th St. Sen. Dist., SF and San Mateo County)

See the source image — Josef Mengele, Auscwitz doctor and eugenics enthusiast, and a trainload of inmates arriving at Auscwitz-Birkenau in May of 1944.

Mengele was galvanized by a faith in another popular pseudoscience of the early 20th century: eugenics, or the idea that we should breed a “better” human being like we could a horse. Many academic, medical, and public health organizations of the day jumped onboard the eugenics train. Transgenderism has the same groupie effect, and sadly it’s frequently reported by the same people who have next to no understanding of science. What’s more astonishing is the ideological capture of people who should know better. The gambit was blown wide open when the American Academy of Pediatricians guidelines on transgenderism were shown to be written by a trans activist with a degree not in science but “women’s, gender and sexuality studies”. All-too-often, such organizational policy stands are written by a narrow claque of activists. It is neither reflective of the science or the membership.

In contrast, the euphoric and headlong rush into transgenderism is taking a pause in Europe and many states, except for the half-witted firebrands running the state of California, ironically as they run people and businesses out of the state. Dutch gender-dysphoria researchers call for “more research” before more definitive actions are taken. One Dutch gender-dysphoria specialist warned of the dangers in using sex-change chemical treatments by saying that “little research has been done so far on treatment with puberty blockers and hormones in young people.” Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare (NBHW) warned that “the risks [of sex-change treatments] outweigh the benefits at present.” They cited the “uncertain science” about the most popular sex-change prognoses. Thus, to put it succinctly, “gender affirming” is a nice way of saying “dangerous”. But still, California wants to go there.

It took 8-10 million dead in the USSR in the 1930’s and chronic crop failures to have Lysenkoism quietly go down the memory hole. What will it take for California to halt its breakneck slide into an “uncertain science”? How many kids will have to be disfigured and emotionally scarred before saner heads take over?

And to think that Governor Gavin Newsom is feted as a presidential contender for 2024. Given all that we know, who’d wish that on any nation, let alone our own?

RogerG

Sources:

*California’s population decline: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/04/us/california-population-decline.html
*Businesses flee California: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adammillsap/2021/08/27/businesses-are-fleeing-california-along-with-its-residents-and-president-biden-should-pay-attention/?sh=6fae8b722327
* Moms for Liberty Locked Out of Twitter after Criticizing California Gender-Transition Bill, National Review Online, Caroline Downey, July 25, 2022, https://www.nationalreview.com/news/moms-for-liberty-locked-out-of-twitter-after-criticizing-california-gender-transition-bill/
* Florida Is Following Europe’s Lead on Gender-Dysphoria Guidelines, National Review Online, Madeleine Kearns, April 27, 2022, https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/florida-is-following-europes-lead-on-gender-dysphoria-guidelines/

July 23, 2022July 23, 2022

Making Energy Sense, Not a Biden Skill

May be an image of 1 person

President Biden is noticing the inverse relationship between gas prices and a politician’s approval rating: one goes up, the other goes down. So, what does he do? Sacrificing intelligibility, ignoring human nature in the laws of supply and demand, and contradicting the crux of his green-energy agenda, he spirited off letters to energy company CEO’s on June 15 haranguing them for taking his war on fossil fuels seriously. He attempted to strongarm them into dropping prices at the pump by threatening,

“. . . at a time of war, refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable. . . . I request that you provide the Secretary with an explanation of any reduction in your refining capacity since 2020, and any ideas that would address the immediate inventory, price, and refining capacity issues in the coming months — including transportation measures to get refined product to market.”

For decades now, our cultural hegemons have inundated the whole of humanity with climate-change doom. The drumbeat is everywhere; can’t miss it. Now, we have a government of doomsayers, who have put combative policy teeth to the apocalypse story. The hostility to the CEO’s principal product – fossil fuels – is impossible to avoid, even for the pressed suits in the c-suites. They’ve adjusted to the cultural lynch mob by running ads touting their greenie bona fides and a redirection of investments to match. They see what’s in the wind. They see a government on an eco-jihad. Cancellation of pipelines, ending new leases on federal lands, greenie Bolsheviks in charge at the EPA, greenie Bolsheviks running the show at Transportation and Energy – indeed, throughout the Article II branch – and the regulatory and permitting process under the zealous gaze of a greenie Cheka (the forerunner to the KGB), isn’t exactly a green light to increase production, “to get refined product to market”. What Lord Biden taketh away, he expects them to give.

May be an image of outdoors and text that says 'Snack Shop Regular 579% 589 599% Plus V-Power Gasoline' — Gas prices in Los Angeles in May of 2022.

Just think like a CEO of a multi-billion-dollar energy behemoth. He or she would be crazy to commit years and $5-15 billion into building a new refinery or maintaining an existing one, which mostly explains why we haven’t added a new one since 1976 and some are closing. Additionally, why commit millions – without commitment to an asylum – to exploring and extracting the stuff that is constantly portrayed to be the environmental equivalent of monkeypox?

Why do that when Biden’s commissariat, and the sub-commissariats in the blue states, have adopted the Stalinesque “Energy Portfolio Standards” (EPS)? EPS’s are Five Year Plans to shoehorn the entire population into the greenie utopia of blackouts, cramped and overpriced housing, expensive ev’s, and filthy, crime-ridden, and time-guzzling public transit, specifically subjecting it on the most hesitant in the aspiring middle class and proletariat (regular or lumpen). Imagine your standard of living being forcibly molded to fit the conscience of the Sierra Cub executive board, or the lunchroom at Google.

Don’t be a bit surprised that your life takes on the appearance of the beneficiaries – err, victims – of the New Deal-inspired urban renewal extravaganzas of the last half of the 20th century. Is Chicago’s Cabrini Green our future writ large?

May be an image of train, railroad and text that says 'not onter ΔE enter tracks' — A key goal of the Green New Deal is to herd the population into mass transit like this in NYC.

May be an image of sky and skyscraper — Another key goal of environmentalists is dense housing, much of it public, like this one in Chicago. It became a hive of crime and drugs and was demolished in 2011.

May be an image of 4 people and people standing — A policewoman searches the jacket of a teenage boy for drugs and weapons in the graffiti-covered Cabrini Green Housing Project.

So, we are set to replace $2-per-gallon gas and air conditioning for the “intermittency problem” of windmills and solar panels, which means regular episodes of things going dark and summer sweltering. The polar vortexes present particularly vexing problems for a grid with an irregular heartbeat. Be prepared for forests of windmills and seas of solar panels to mar the views during the family drive in the expensive ev, which could be a dangerous activity if no one thought to plug it in the night before.

And where will the electricity come from to charge the thing? Not much chance of charging the ev if the town went dark. I always thought that a continuous flow of electricity, one that can be ramped up as needed, was preferable to one interrupted by clouds, the rotation of the earth, or the lack of air movement. If we are so paralyzed by the thought of burning coal that we are willing to rush into the arms of “intermittency”, natural gas and nuclear could offer a way forward without upending the entire system from the generating plant to coffee maker. Building new gas and nuclear plants to power the grid makes more sense than trying to repeal the laws of physics regarding intermittency, energy density (remember the vast panoramic expanses of windmills and solar panels – the very opposite of density), and the dumping of trillions into R and D to make something work that by nature is inclined not to.

May be an image of cloud and twilight — Intermittency in action: Rolling blackouts in Southern California, 2021

May be an image of standing, nature and text — A picture of intermittency: Mojave Desert windmills, California.

May be an image of outdoors — Another picture of intermittency: Solar farm in California’s Mojave Desert

We know much more about natural gas and nuclear generation and the necessary tweaks to make them safer and more efficient. Instead, we are offered the huge opportunity costs of the Green New Deal. Money sunk into this basket of extravagances is money not available for the obvious and accessible. In fact, the obvious and accessible is sacrificed on the altar of will-o’-the-wisp “renewables” as gas-powered turbines are shut down and nuclear power plants closed. Oddly, the most emissions-friendly one, nuclear, has been especially targeted. Globally, nuclear power accounted for 17% of total energy production in 1996. Today, it’s 10%. The picture in the U.S. isn’t any better. Nuclear’s contribution to our energy total is scheduled to fall to 11% by 2050 from the 20% of today. The scare stories of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and the damage to Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plants in 2011 are dredged to make the inefficient – the aforementioned “renewables” – seem plausible.

May be an image of coast and nature — Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, California, scheduled for decommissioning in 2025.

It will turn into the classic example of government-engineered socio-economic devolution. Where will this lead? Think of the Middle Ages, the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Venezuela, North Korea, anywhere coercive utopians seized absolute control of the government to compel others to build their dreamland.

Meanwhile, two words – “carbon” and “capture” – go down the memory hole. A fraction of the money going into R and D for overturning a civilization’s entire way of life could be devoted to “carbon” and “capture” with a much more salutary effect. The remainder of the GND price tag could remain in the pockets of the people. But all that makes too much sense.

And making sense is not the forte of eco-zealots drunk with power in the age of Biden.

May be an image of text

RogerG

Sources:

* Biden’s Full Letter to Oil Companies Demanding Help on Gas Prices, https://www.mediaite.com/news/read-bidens-full-letter-to-oil-companies-demanding-help-on-gas-prices-historically-high-profit-margins-are-unacceptable/
* The Global Nuclear Power Comeback, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-global-nuclear-comeback-green-energy-fossil-fuels-supply-climate-mandates-power-generation-11658170860
* The Blue-State War on Nuclear Power, by Nate Hochman, https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/the-blue-state-war-on-nuclear-power/

July 5, 2022July 5, 2022

Running Out of Puff

May be an image of 1 person, outdoors and text that says 'MAR NIWING 35 VEHIGLE WEMISSION GNP POLICE CE POLICE FXI8 FXI8EEN EEN' — UK police EV

Yes, that’s right. The UK’s Daily Telegraph reported on July 5 “Electric police cars ‘running out of puff’ on way to emergencies”. It’s the kind of thing that Democrat politicos wish for America. Just think, as an angry neighbor is about to go postal and you call 911, the 5-to-6-minute response time turns into . . . never. The cops’ EV ran out of juice on the way. It’s time to call the coroner.

It seems that all the EV’s accessories such as a/c, heater, radio, computers, lights, and siren run off the same battery as the one powering the wheels. The existential crisis of climate change turned into the existential crisis of a dead family member.

Following Biden’s lead, who is following the lead of California, who is following the lead of the UK – a pied piper of delusionals – the “best and brightest” have either outlawed the production of diesel and gas vehicles by date certain (2030 in the UK) or a target date of 2030 or 2035 is set for achieving 100% EV fleets. Utopians are habitual central planners and love numbered targets to force other people into meeting, no matter the disruption or loss of life.

Officers responding to emergencies in EV’s report the well-founded worry of not getting to the crisis. Batteries drain, charging stations haven’t kept up with the government mandates for EV’s, god-awful charging times (45 minutes to 8 hours), and the grid providing the power is being made more precarious at the same time by the same clowns.

It’s a cascade of absurdities. Going all-electric is quickly turning into all-farce, and a deadly one at that.

RogerG

June 29, 2022

The Times They Are A-Changin’

See the source image

That’s right, for the times they are a-changin’. We are in a moment similar to the era of Bob Dylan’s youth. Back then, the target of his ire was the hideous Jim Crow. The same lyrics could equally apply to the reign of the radical left from the halls of power in Washington, DC, to big metropolitan areas and deep blue states. Signs are everywhere that “the times they are a-changin’”.

The lyrics of Bob Dylan’s first stanza are poignant:

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

San Fransisco voted world's filthiest slum — San Francisco homeless encampment in 2018

Watch as the smash and grab phenomena sweeps the country in 2021-2022:

I’ll give you three indications that the ruling radical left of the donkey party might “sink like a stone”: (1) 1.7 million voters changed their registration from Democrat to Republican, a net gain of a 1 million to the R’s, from 2021 to 2022; (2) Arizona’s Gov. Doug Ducey signed a bill that allows the state’s students to take $6,400-per-pupil to a school of their parents’ choice; and (3) a San Diego school district dumped their identity-mongering, DEI-loving Superintendent. Let’s take a closer look at each one of these horsemen of the apocalypse.

The Democrats have a problem: they have a “smell of death” around them (to borrow from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “That Smell”), thanks to “defund the police”, their destruction of livelihoods and standards of living in greenie radicalism, constant campaigns of race and gender warfare, homoerotic curriculums to 7-year-olds, willful refusal to enforce laws, the erasure of the borders of the United States, a concerted effort to suspend the laws of economics in order to bribe and coerce the people into the preferred lifestyle of a fashionable clique, and . . . you get the picture.

The pungent odor that proceeds them has caused 1.7 million voters to flee the smell of the Democrat ship and crawl on board the USS Republican Party. Some 600,000 went the other way for a plus-1-million gain for the GOP, something not seen since the Elder Days (Lord of the Rings lingo). According to the AP, who broke the story, the biggest change occurred in the suburbs, by people who previously found Trump repulsive. Well, Trump’s no longer at the head of the parade. It’s Biden and his cohorts of lefties and greenie utopians at the tiller of state. It’s not a good look for moms and dads who have to regularly fill up the family sedan and balance the checkbook. And what awaits them as they go for a walk? Try ducking stray bullets, avoiding the long strings of homeless encampments, the random assaults by the criminally insane, staying clear of the parks for the drugs and filth and crime, the incessant car and home break-ins, and the schools that aren’t any better, if they’re allowed to be open. It’s heathier to hunker down with Netflix, popcorn, and a 45. As Lynyrd Skynyrd put it, “Ooh-ooh that smell”.

And, boy, did parents get a whiff of what’s happening in their child’s classroom. The lockdowns not only forced parents to sacrifice making ends meet but the end to in-person instruction also showed to many that they could live without the offerings of the teacher unions and the captured education Borg. “School choice” became more popular, and Gov. Ducey of Arizona and legislative Republicans responded with an expansion of the state’s voucher-like Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA’s). If an off-the-charts lefty San Francisco school board majority could be sent packing in, of all places, San Francisco, what do you think can be done in saner locales?

Arizona Governor Doug Ducey in Pheonix on June 17, 2022

It’s amazing to know that the unions’ agitation for school closures also exposed their shenanigans. It took away the barrier of gates and walls that protected them from any scrutiny. Parents are awake everywhere from Loudon County to San Francisco. Arizona has reacted, with other states soon to follow.

Simply put, all that Arizona did was to empower parents with the ability to walk away. Lets’ see how the Borg survives without the gravy train.

All of the ideological bile that runs the schools came to a head in another place, Sand Diego. The San Dieguito Union High School District Superintendent let the cat out of the bag, the feline of identity-mongering that is. The mental straitjacket of diversity-equity-inclusion (DEI) that runs the district came out on YouTube. Take a peek below.

In a training session last week, Superintendent Cheryl James-Ward reduced the kids to a collection of groups. And as groups, the children’s individuality was smothered under generalizations and racial, socioeconomic stereotypes. Like a true Marxist, the main target was the successful, the successful who happen to be labeled Asians. Asians are the Kulaks of Stalin’s fevered imagination in the fevered imagination of James-Ward. Not enough D’s and F’s for Asians and too many for the oppressed, a problem to be corrected by bureaucratic intervention. There you have it: the script for bringing one group down and artificially elevating other groups, all done to make the charts look good. James-Ward would make for an excellent colleague of Orwell’s Winston Smith in the Ministry of Truth of “1984”. The world of Oceania, though, is not to the liking of most people, Asian or otherwise.

San Dieguito UHSD Superintendent Cheryl James-Ward in a local tv interview on April 23. 2022.

She’s gone, fired by the school board, and so are 1.7 million from the Democrat voter registration rolls, and many Arizona parents who now have the financial heft to escape the Borg’s monopoly. To borrow again from Lynyrd Skynyrd:

Oo-oo that smell
Can’t you smell that smell?
Oo-oo that smell
The smell of death’s around you

Bob Dylan got a whiff of the same smell and it drew him to the conclusion that the “The Times They Are A-Changin’”.

Lynyrd Skynyrd performing That Smell:

RogerG

Bibliography:

*AP story on the Democrat’s loss of 1.7 million voter registrations in the past year: https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-biden-covid-health-presidential-e50db07385831e67f866ec45402be8b9

*The story of Sand Diequito School District’s firing of Supt. Cheryl James-Ward: https://www.nationalreview.com/news/california-school-district-fires-superintendent-for-divisive-comments-about-asian-students/

*The story of Arizona’s expanded school choice plan: https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/arizona-passes-universal-school-choice-for-1-1-million-students/

June 27, 2022

A Mass Exodus from the Democrats’ America, Part II

May be an image of 2 people, car and road

Anecdote is proof of nothing but anecdote. So goes logic, but some anecdotes are more notable than others. I was informed by a friend of mine in California that their neighbor moved to a state in the South, a red state of course. I don’t know the reason but it does seem that more and more neighbors have fled the not-so-Golden State over the past few decades. A Washington Examiner editorial sheds more light on the glaringly obvious trend in states run by Democrats. Indeed, “A mass exodus from the Democrats’ America”.

I’ve previously written that California would have lost two to three congressmen after the 2020 census, instead of just the one, if the 2021 population numbers were included. There’s more. 15 of the 15 fastest-growing cities and towns are in states under Republican rule: Arizona, Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and Idaho. 14 of the 15 fastest-declining are in Democrat states. If we combine the 2020-2021 losses for San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, we’d have the population of Miami.

It really doesn’t matter if an individual jurisdiction has more of a Republican lean if it still resides in a state run by Democrats. You can’t avoid the political suffocation coming out of the state capital.

Draconian COVID restrictions of Democrat governors certainly acted as an accelerant for the flight. COVID brought out the inner totalitarian in the governing class of lefty progressives. We should have known the inner totalitarian would be unmasked since wokeness and progressivism are functionally synonymous, and the thuggishness has been on display for quite some time in the “cancellations” on campuses and everywhere else its acolytes hold sway. Giving these people power is an invitation to “cancellation” of basic liberty, and more refugees. Who wants to live and raise kids under that, the governing equivalent of North Korea?

Further, two Democrat states – Colorado and Washington State – fell off the growth list after COVID. Apparently, Democrat governance is toxic to growth. I guess that making your state repellant to its residents is one sure way to achieve the lefty dream of zero population growth.

Chris Stokes, left, and Angel Zickefoose ... — Two Colorado residents openly smoke marijuana during the 4/20 event (day to celebrate pot) at Civic Center Park on April 20, 2017 in Denver. In Colorado, marijuana was legalized for almost any use in 2012.

The California boom of the 1950’s and 60’s is over and is going in the opposite direction. Other states who followed California’s lead into radical lefty rule saw their booms of the 80’s/90’s/early 2000’s evaporate as well. The key to personal, family, and state well-being is NOT to be like California . . . and New York, Washington State, Colorado, Illinois, etc., etc. Biden, are you paying attention? Are the rest of you paying attention?

RogerG

June 19, 2022June 25, 2022

Why I am Opposed to Red Flag Laws

No, it’s not due to a view of the Second Amendment that claims the right of every American to own rapid-fire artillery. My opposition to red flag laws stems from government’s inbred incompetence. The more responsibilities are piled onto government, the more the ineptitude overwhelms. It’s the perfect storm for exploitation by sinister political actors. In the confusion, due process and equal application of the laws gets buried under prejudices and arbitrary and capricious actions. Oh, then add civil service protections and unionization for the hirelings in the people’s government and the people’s government quickly becomes a worker soviet. Get the picture?

As proof, and previously mentioned, Democrats demand expanded background checks for gun purchases when recent violations of the existing background checks seldom go to investigation, let alone charges. Also, state gun-enhancements in the commission of crimes get tossed out the window by progressive – read “soft on crime” – DA’s enthralled with “equity”, meaning racial proportionality, meaning the race-norming of the numbers on the docket so they don’t exceed the race’s 13% of the population. More succinctly, a form of criminal justice affirmative action is implemented to give “protected classes” a head start by discarding the weapons charges entirely. Either way, more embellished background checks, expanded rules and bans on difficult-to-define guns and their appurtenances, and new layers of regulations in red flag laws will not translate into safer communities. An already difficult task was made gargantuan for an already difficult-to-manage government workforce.

Stenographers and typists taking a civil service exam on July 9, 1936.

Don’t think for a moment that hiring more government workers will do the trick. More government workers won’t necessarily mean more work gets done. It’ll just create a larger worker soviet, as California has proven with the CSEA and CTA. It’s a state government of the public employee unions, by the public employee unions, and for the public employee unions. The word “capture” keeps coming to mind. There’s a reason for the California DMV, or CalTrans (the state transportation agency) for that matter, being a nationwide insult to efficiency.

Speaking of California, look at what they’ve done to their election laws. It’s more proof that more laws and an explosion in their attendant regulations means more . . . of a mess. While guns and voting are different arenas, if you fumble one, don’t expect a person in their right mind to give you unfettered access to the other. Chaotic elections give to us a clue about the fate of the Second Amendment.

Led by the mantra to “count every vote” and the rhetoric to fight “voter suppression” by the poohbahs of the one-party state, laws were passed that can only make your eyes roll. An election system is efficient if results are produced in a timely manner and come with the reasonable expectation that vote totals actually reflect legal, honest-to-God votes. Today, nothing can be further from the truth. In an earlier time, election results were frequently known hours after the polls closed. Only three-quarters of the votes were counted in LA’s June mayoral contest after 5 days.

Many things are awry in California’s election zoo. It’s a criminal act in the state for a poll worker to ask a person for ID. Yes, a criminal act! They’ve done this as they’ve made it exceedingly difficult to identify ballot misbehavior. To boot, ballots are shotgunned through the mail, a method famous for election shenanigans. My son, a recent California refugee, got two ballots for this June’s primary election: one from Sanders County, Mt., where he now lives, and one from California. The state mailed the absentee ballot to him at his Montana residence (?). He has a Montana driver’s license to prove it. You’d think that someone in the California county clerk’s office would notice. So much for that thought.

A worker bends over to move ballots from a drop box into gray bags as another worker loads bags into the back of a van — Workers from the Los Angeles County registrar’s office collect ballots from a drop box in Norwalk on Nov. 4. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

He has no inclination for vote fraud, but can we be certain about others, especially if the system is constructed to make it difficult to detect the chicanery? Remember, this is the party of bail funds for rioters, inciters of public incivility against their opponents, mobs to intimidate the administration of justice, and plotters with friends in the administrative state to hound a duly elected president from pre-election to the four years of post-election. Is this a party that would shrink from pushing the envelope on voting if they have a reasonable expectation of never being caught? If you’re naïve enough to think so, I have some Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment to sell you.

I can’t prove fraud, few can, because the system is designed to hide it. Ballots, after being scattered through the mail, are picked up by who-knows-who, taken behind closed doors to be marked by God-knows-who, and then collected in bulk by who-knows-who. California in 2016 made it a matter of law to sanction the “harvesting” of the vote. Uhhhh, what can go wrong?

In a brief moment of sanity, in a holiday from its usual display of Trump derangement syndrome, the LA Times in 2018 condemned the “overly-permissive ballot collection law”. The Times said the law opens “the door to coercion and fraud and should be fixed or repealed.” Precisely!

Voter registration with verified identity, eligibility, and address is made into a Keystone Cops’ comedy skit. Moter-voter – automatic voter registration at the DMV (driver’s license, vehicle registration) – makes a conduit for prohibited persons such as felons, the underaged, non-residents, and illegal immigrants (the “undocumented”). Unknowingly, or knowingly, they can get swept onto the voter rolls. Remember, the whole system is manned (or womanned, or whatever) by proud SEIU-protected state workers.

Federal law requires a regular clean-up of the rolls (removal of the ineligible, dead, inactive, or moved), something that California is notoriously delinquent. California hasn’t been removing “inactive” voters from the lists for 20 years, in spite of a Supreme Court reaffirmation of the requirement in 2019 (Husted v. Randolph Institute). The problem aggravated to such an extent that Judicial Watch forced a consent decree onto the state to fulfill federal law. It is being done in fits and starts or not at all.

Then, compound the problem: the provisional ballot morass allows a person to vote anywhere in the state, away from the precinct registration rolls, which puts more pressure on an election workforce not prone to efficiency to begin with. Don’t expect SEIU-protected underlings to be aficionados of signature analysis in obscure comparisons. When you add to the muddle the ballots allowed to arrive days after the election, it is no wonder election day in California turns into election month(s). And the results . . . ?

Can anyone have faith in California elections? Would you entrust the “the right to bear arms” to the California mentality of government, amply displayed in their crazy-quilt elections laws and regulations? If you are, I suppose that there is a larger clientele for Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment than I thought.

May be a cartoon

RogerG

Bibliography:

*Read John Fund’s piece on California’s election system here: https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/californias-crazy-vote-count-is-a-warning-to-other-states/

*The LA Times editorial against ballot harvesting can be found here: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-mail-ballots-harvesting-20171115-story.html

*For a full accounting of the public employee unions representing California state government workers, refer to here: https://lao.ca.gov/StateWorkforce/BargainingUnits

April 7, 2022April 7, 2022

A New Normal, And a Frightening One at That

Santa Rosa resident who used his 2013 Nissan Leaf to power his house during a four-day blackout in Santa Rosa, Calif., as a result of the Kincade Fire. (photo: Vanessa Romo/NPR)

Surely, this wasn’t the intent of the article (here), but any sentient being could imagine the horrors of an EV world with California’s electricity grid. Remember, the clowns running the state are ecstatic about EV’s but absolutely moronic about the generation of electricity. They seem to be saying, “Hey, go buy one [$40,000 -$60,000] but your charging station will be dependent on the vagaries of the sun and wind, or the combustible, matchstick forests that could flare up at any time. No nuclear power for you.” Go figure.

The reporterette (Vanessa Romo) blithely treated the problem of finding charging stations during blackouts and raging forest fires, a recurring theme in California’s present and probable future, as another wholesome family adventure. One guy was confronting the raging Getty Fire and luckily found an answer to charging his Chevy Bolt from a Facebook group. Since the fire is busy destroying the grid, his hookup to Facebook must be through his phone. That means an operative cell tower nearby, not destroyed by fire, with power, and in range and with an unobstructive path to his phone. What happens if the charge on his cell phone is as low as his Bolt? What happens if cell reception is spotty or nonexistent? This is a theater of the absurd.

Another Sonoma County resident was praised for the “ingenious” use of his Nissan Leaf in an area ravaged by the Kincaid Fire. The subsequent blackout forced him to resort to his Leaf as a generator. Board certification for brain surgery isn’t required to figure out the massive problems with this “advantage”. Using the car as a source of electricity for the house depletes the car battery. This option only works if a charging station with a functioning grid hookup or global-warming fossil fuel generator is nearby. A charging station could be, but the other prerequisites might not be.

By the way, the inverter used in turning DC into the AC for his house could be employed just as well, maybe better, with a Ford-450 Diesel truck, a vehicle more useful than a glorified golf cart. A Leaf, or some such, isn’t necessary for that purpose. So, what’s the benefit for being forced to live in an EV world? You are being shoved into such an existence for no good reason.

The truth of the matter is that the whole charade is pure political theater. Concoct a catastrophe, stampede the public into mistakenly believing that the family sedan is the problem, declare unremittent war on fossil fuels, bribe and punish worker bees with artificially inflated fuel prices, close down the two remaining nuclear power plants, make your public lands combustible nature preserves writ large, and make the whole contraption reliant on the most expensive and unreliable grid in memory, and you too can enjoy the “new normal” of an asylum that calls itself a state.

Get real! Are these people crazy, or what?

See the source image

RogerG

April 1, 2022April 2, 2022

More Bad News If You’re Woke

The Great Skedaddle once referred to the flight of the Union Army from the battlefield in First Bull Run in 1861. No longer. Many cities and states have opted into the woke revolution . . . and people are fleeing, a Great Skedaddle II. What’s more, if we shifted the census from a mid-2020 counting to mid-2021, California would come close to losing 3 seats in the House of Representatives instead of the one. It’s the same in nearly all jurisdictions where Antifa and BLM appeasers reign supreme.

The official census is a centennial affair, but the bureau does annual estimates based on a continuing stream of data. And as a result, it gets worse for blue America. From mid-2020 to mid-2021, 10 states grew by 1% or more; eight are essentially red states. The other two (Delaware and Nevada) have maintained mostly friendly tax regimes in spite of, not because of, Dem dominance, when compared with their high-profile political cousins who routinely vote Democrat by double digits from their bi-coastal, metropolitan enclaves.

Some of the biggest losers are what you’d expect: California (-.76%), New York (-1.81%), Illinois (-1.1%), and Washington, D.C. (-2.83%). Some lost because of the continuing trend of the hollowing-out of the Rust Belt, which is slowing. Where it is accelerating can be pinpointed by county numbers. Manhattan (New York County) lost 6.9% over the one-year period; San Francisco down 6.7%; San Mateo dropped 3.5%. King County, Washington State, the home of Seattle, et al, and the mother lode of lefty votes, took the biggest step backwards in the state. With few exceptions, the county metro areas that grew the most are found in Idaho, Florida, Texas, Utah, and South/North Carolina.

One more interesting aspect to the story: states bordering California are magnets, with the exception of Oregon, thanks to the radical-Left dominance of the Portland/Willamette Valley urban corridor. Nevada did well, but the flight pattern’s sphere of influence extends to Arizona, Utah, Idaho, and my own western Montana. Most of these states would come close to gaining an additional House seat if the count was held just one year later.

Indeed, the pandemic is a contributing factor, but not the sole cause of this trend. COVID ripped off the scab of a festering wound. The population hemorrhagers were more commonly the most zealous in their regulatory suffocation of lives and livelihoods. Then, they go off into climate-change hysteria, transgenderism, slashing police budgets, and a racist Anti-racism crusade. Their schools and urban spaces became open sewers riddled with crime. What’s there to like?

See the source image

Let this be a warning to woke corporate boardrooms: you’ve been betting on the wrong horse. Boycotting states over election laws and protections for girls’ sports, and ads showing your fidelity to the cultural Left, is not a winning strategy. People who vote with their feet are also more inclined to vote with their dollars. Disney, rethink your opposition to parental rights. Your stand may sound glorious in your corporate boardroom, gated community, or lunchroom, but the commoners have a profoundly different take.

Please read the source article for this post here.

See the source image

RogerG

March 31, 2022April 1, 2022

Good God, Is California Seriously Considering the Legalization of Infanticide?

May be an image of baby

At the risk of violating the third commandment, good God, what is California thinking? In a recently introduced bill (AB 2223), California could be on the verge legalizing the killing of newborns. I’m pro-life but also aware of the political complexities of the abortion issue and the need for compromise. But this is madness! Absolutists can be demented, and these abortion Robespierres are proving the point.

Yes, the Democrats are quickly turning into abortion Jacobins. Instead of marching political moderates and monarchists off to the guillotine in days of yore, it’s the youngest of our children, the most helpless among us. The DC Democrats, hiding behind their euphemistic Women’s Health Protection Act, want to strip the parents out of the picture by federal statute when it comes to abortion and their minor children. Now, in the deep blue state of California, it is proposed that the abortion “right” be extended to those babies who successfully exited the womb. This ghastly act is decriminalized by an explicit prohibition of any legal action (investigation or prosecution) against anyone regarding a “pregnancy outcome” and “perinatal” and “postpartum care”. What’s that mean? If a baby ends up dead, there’s no way to determine the reason. All that’s left is to cart off the little lifeless body. The super majority in the California legislature is working overtime to earn a spot next to Josef Mengele and his Auschwitz medical staff in the deepest level of Hell in Dante’s Inferno.

May be an image of 2 people and text that says 'GETTY IMAGES Governor Newsom Reaffirms Abortion Rights In California 013 GettingAnswers.'

We already know that Governor Newsom is a booster of abortion tourism as the state’s next big hospitality industry to add to Disneyland and Knox Berry Farm. Yet, the killing of babies to replace the hit to the state’s coffers from business and middle-class flight seems like a bit of a moral stretch. No, it’s too hideous to even think, let alone legislate.

May be an image of text that says 'Û DURNAL CREATORS. HOW ABOUT CHOOSING to PROTECT MY RIGHT to BECOME A WOMAN? @Ramireztoons michaelpramirez.com'

RogerG

March 26, 2022March 26, 2022

A Religion for High Prices and Neo-Feudalism

An electrical contractor repairs a sign with gasoline fuel prices above six and seven dollars a gallon at the Shell gas station at Fairfax and Olympic Blvd, near a billboard of John Oliver, in Los Angeles, California, on March 8, 2022. (Photo by Patrick T. FALLON / AFP) (Photo by … — Changing prices at a Shell station in Southern California, March 22, 2022.

Economic inelasticity: a measure of an economic activity’s responsiveness to price changes. Inelastic supply is production made unresponsive to price fluctuations.

Market: the spontaneous arrangements that brings buyers and sellers together. Markets can be constrained by natural barriers (geography, availability of resources, etc.) and interventions (government).

*************

Some elements of the Right are deserving of condemnation for their forays into imbecilic isolationism. Their tariff nationalism and sophomoric hostility to our present and natural allies stagger the mind. That said, the biggest and most persistent threat to the welfare of the nation by far is the Democratic Party and its congregation of the Left.

Nuttery has little effect without powerful, organizational patrons. The donkey party has turned itself into the institutional home of the Left; the faculty lounge is the home seminary of the Left; and the seminary’s gospel is a fanciful, semi-religious, but material and messianic apocalyptism. Don’t mistake this for the traditional Second Coming. This endtime arises from glib Gaia-worship, a faith that angles to translate prophesies of doom into power. Its doctrine is in actuality an ideology and the attendant politics amounts to a missionary zeal for conversion, forcible or voluntary.

Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) introduces her Green New Deal, translating alarmism into policy, 2019.

But the appeal of this new faith is limited. Unlike Christianity that has a natural allure to all groups – the equality of all souls – this substitute creed is most attractive to the demographic product of its seminaries (college graduates), who are most prominently, but not solely, the degreed halfwits in the super zips (codes). Their half-wittedness is the fruit of the degraded and narrow education in the tenets of this debased secular faith. These people aren’t trained to question their assumptions. They are zealots that occupy the cultural commanding heights to influence and obtain office to force their form of salvation on the reluctant.

See the source image

Church/state separation be damned, they declare war on prosperity, independent consumer choices, entire industries, and the Constitution while they herd the population into cramped dwellings, ev’s, and mass transit. Freedom is the freedom to live only their way. I’m reminded of Orwell’s 1984:

“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”

And so the zealots march off and into elected office, the staffs of the elected, government employment, techie enterprises, the corporate boardroom, ad agencies, the press, law firms, Hollywood, and into the teacher corps of our schools – what G.K. Chesterton called the “chattering classes”.

The fruit of their endeavors, among other things, is a disfigured economic life, and more misery than what would occur without them running the show. Supply and demand get malformed, made inflexible to the unexpected twists and turns of existence. A pandemic hits and, voilà, we have empty store shelves, supply chain disruptions, inflation, a suppressed work ethic, fiscal insolvency, and the doldrums’ persistence into the foreseeable future.

That’s the thing, it doesn’t take much to maul the gears of an economy and hamper recovery. Demand remains pretty consistent (inelastic) for things like fossil fuels, rising with growth, and only declining when a recession hits, with its lost jobs and business closures. Not good. Supply is hamstrung (made inelastic) to respond to the demands of prosperity after the imposition of utopia. Not good.

And utopia is what it’s all about. Wherever the Dems hold sway in the halls of power – local, state, federal – they are running full speed toward their mirage of eco-nirvana. Democrat state-level fiefdoms are famous for it. The grid is target numero uno. California concocted its 100 Percent Clean Energy Act to command the state’s electricity to be carbon-free by 2045. Washington State’s Clean Energy Transformation Act commands its utilities to be carbon neutral in eight years. New York passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act that commands a net-zero economy by 2050. Hawaii jumps into the fray with its House Bill 623 that commands a 100% renewable energy grid by California’s year. They are declarations of war on fossil fuels, and the energy supply gets bulldozed.

Gov. Jerry Brown signs SB 100, mandating 100 percent renewable energy in California by 2045, on Sept. 10, 2018.

Notice the use of the word “command”, as in “command economy”? Karl Marx would be proud.

These lords of the state capital have jerry-rigged all manner of means to achieve the desired end. All of them, however, take the same tack of regulating traditional energy to death. Jerry Brown (as in jerry-rigged) and Gavin Newsom of the not-so-golden state are gung-ho. Brown, after signing the previously mentioned ukase, boasted, “California is committed to doing whatever is necessary to meet the existential threat of climate change.” There you have it: semi-theological apocalyptics combined with a newly inaugurated command economy.

Not to be outdone, Governors Cuomo and Hochul of New York read from the same prayer book. They, like the suzerains of the San Diego-to-San Francisco corridor (the rest of the state has little political pull), are enthusiasts for bans and regulatory dead weights. No fracking, no new permits, no new gas hookups for homes, and no pipelines. Thus, the residents of New York and anybody east of them get the privilege of paying six times more for natural gas than, say, the lucky folks of Texas or Louisiana. No pipelines are allowed across the empire state to possibly carry the fuel the 400 miles from the Marcellus Shale. Instead, it must be shipped from distant kleptocracies.

The same price penalty applies to everyone living in California. Like everything else in the state – housing, electricity, food, cars, you name it – gasoline runs at a buck-and-half clip above the national average ($5.85 vs. $4.33/gal.) for the commuters on Newsom’s roads, which happen to be among the worst in the nation. What a deal? The “bargain” combines a doom-premium (“existential threat of climate change”) in the form of high taxes and exorbitantly priced energy with crappy pavement. No wonder it’s hard to find a U-Haul to flee the state. Demand has outstripped supply.

If it’s obviously such a great deal for the country, with the utopians professing to be on the same team with the angels, why do they have to wallow in falsehoods? In Biden-speak, he said on March 14, “Make no mistake, the current spike in gas prices is largely the fault of Vladimir Putin — it has nothing to do with the American Rescue Plan.” Translation: It ain’t me! But it is . . . to a great degree. He’s doing his best to make energy supplies inelastic and prone to shocks, whether it be a virus run amok or Putin’s dream of a Greater Russia.

Biden blames Putin and his Ukraine war for the inflation rate and high gas prices. He won’t succeed. — Biden blames Putin and the Ukraine War for high gas prices, March 2022.

The only truism in his corner is cause-and-delayed-effect. Societies don’t operate like toggle switches – instant-on/instant-off. It takes time for policy changes to translate into behavior and effects, both positive and negative. Time is necessary for people to get their act together in the form of land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. Since California is his model, the complete effect of Biden’s pummeling of the energy sector will take years for the whole country to fully feel California’s chronically high energy rates, blackouts, shortages, stagflation, deteriorating roads, trains to nowhere, and bottomless spending on expensive-but-decrepit mass transit, and, lest we forget, the brewing campaign against homes with yards (single-family residential). No space privacy for you and your kids, peasants!

Likewise, it took a number of years for the widespread use of fracking beginning around 2011 and the repeal of the ban on the export of domestic crude in 2015 to turn into Trump’s bluster about energy independence and the US as net exporter. Sometimes, occupying the seat of power at the moment of good times is sufficient to enjoy the afterglow of public adulation.

But Trump and Congressional Republicans are actually deserving of praise because they greased the economic skids instead of throwing sand in the gears as Biden and the donkey party are currently doing. The thinking of Republicans is in the right place. For the R’s, pipelines (XL, Dakota Access) are a good deal. For the R’s, drilling on public lands is a great thing for supply and cheap prices. For the R’s, subsidy briberies for solar and wind and the purchase of Teslas are viewed correctly as an assault on freedom and the public purse, and move us closer to a grid that operates with all the reliability of a utility in Lagos, Nigeria, or California. Not good.

You can only get so much out of wind and solar. It’s called low energy density, an inherent characteristic of the two. As a result, low density must be compensated by the construction of vast plantations of panels and forests of huge propeller towers marring the earth’s surface. Lurking behind the scenes is natural-gas peaker plants to deal with the erratic production (the wind and sun are variable). The whole mammoth charade demands colossal sunk costs in redesigning the grid and the development of a storage system to make the massive contraption the complete energy source for your Netflix streaming addiction. Wouldn’t it be much easier with fewer lost opportunities (i.e., opportunity cost, the real meaning of the word “cost”) to clean up fossil fuels?

Certainly, Biden and the episcopate of the Church of Climate Change are aware of the monstrous costs and disruptions. It’s just that they don’t care. When you’re a believer, you’re a believer. And so, when American voters let Biden and company into command of the executive branch, they are going to get the full effect of the reunion of church and state, California style. It’s Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy all over again.

He didn’t disappoint the faithful from the get-go. Fresh from the chilly inauguration on the west front of the Capitol, Biden ordered an assault on domestic crude oil production by halting new leases, permits, and mining on federal lands, onshore, offshore, anywhere under federal control. Chad Padgett, former senior executive for BLM in Alaska, put it succinctly when he described an Interior Department memo, pursuant to Biden’s ukase, barring the issuance of “any onshore or offshore fossil fuel authorization, including but not limited to a lease, amendment to a lease, affirmative extension of a lease, contract, or other agreement, or permit to drill.” Half the 23 million acres of the Alaska National Petroleum Preserve was made off-limits. Authority over the process was centralized in the hands of Commissar Laura Daniel Davis, then-acting assistant secretary for Lands and Minerals at BLM, creating industrial death from bureaucratic atherosclerosis. Now, inelasticity applies to bureaucracy’s arteries as well as energy supplies.

Biden’s recent blame-Putin schtick to avoid responsibility for his stake in the mess rings hollow. Having spent his entire career in demagoguery and electoral pandering, the guy exhibits little understanding of enterprise of the free variety. People in the real world of business look over the horizon before they sink big bank on a venture. What they see into the near future, and maybe beyond, is Biden’s declaration in a 2020 debate:

“No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period. Ends.”

Can’t get much plainer than that. The delay normally accompanying a policy is reduced when demagogic hostility is combined with the accelerant of pandemic-inspired cuts in production at a time of quick recovery from the nightmare. Why invest in an industry that the donkey party and its administration declared to be the equivalent of kiddie porn?

That’s not all. We’ll enjoy the benefits of California’s sclerotic supplies alongside California’s high-priced everything. All of this will be wrapped in an increasingly feudal way of life. As in the old Soviet Union, a new aristocracy of the party and its nomenklatura will ride on top of a beleaguered class of commoners. Thank you, Democrats.

RogerG