Culture – Page 11 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

February 17, 2023

The Sudden Crusade Against Disinformation; Drought; and the Inner Totalitarian

Lake Mead near the Hoover dam, seen from the Arizona side of the dam near Boulder City, Nev., July 19, 2022. (photo: David Becker/Reuters)

David Mikkelson, founder of Snopes, the site that tracks fakery on the web. He’s in his home office in a nearly 100-year old home in Tacoma. (Greg Gilbert / The Seattle Times, 2018) — David Mikkelson, founder of Snopes, the site that tracks fakery on the web. He’s in his home office in a nearly 100-year old home in Tacoma, Wa. (photo: Greg Gilbert / The Seattle Times, 2018)

Why the sudden crusade against “disinformation”? Is our time plagued by a singular onrush of lying and deceit? Really? According to today’s referees of language – who themselves could be mired in modern cultural/political manias – disinformation is “false information that is spread deliberately and often covertly to influence public opinion or obscure the truth” (Merriam-Webster). Slanting the truth or even outright falsehoods has been the stuff of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (a little Dale Carnegie lingo) since people discovered other people. Moses’s biblical admonition against “bearing false witness” covers the topic quite nicely.

For years, some people insisted that taxing the rich at towering rates leads to more revenue, as if people blindly and willingly, like lemmings, lay themselves prostrate before the IRS. Does the British “brain drain” from high-tax Britain to elsewhere in the Anglosphere of the 1950’s to 1970’s remind you of anything? Tax havens in the Bahamas? For years, even today, some continue to persist in the belief that socialism leads to prosperity despite its long record of failure. Eugenics, at one time, was all the craze even as it treated people as if they were draft animals. I could go on. So, where’s the sudden crisis in bad information? Dis- and its cousin misinformation have been around as long as humans had the capacity for speech. Now the Southwest is in the midst of a harrowing drought. Watch the “disinformation” smears muddy the waters in how to deal with it.

Honestly, cut to the chase, this jihad against “disinformation” is actually a massive censorship campaign. By what standard are the Cassandras of disinformation labeling some opinions or factual claims fraudulent? As it turns out, these arbiters of truth are partisans who rely on partisans. It’s mental gunk relying on mental gunk to produce more mental gunk in order to control what people say. GIGO – garbage in, garbage out.

GIGO case in point: Valerie Wirtschafter of Brookings and her piece, “Audible reckoning: How top political podcasters spread unsubstantiated and false claims” (see below), where she proclaims that the podcast world is too free, with much too much “disinformation”. Where’s she been? The advertising industry would never have been around to launch so many successful Madison Avenue careers without exaggerations and falsehoods. Coke and Pepsi lambasted each other for years with disinformation. Watch any Superbowl’s commercial breaks for your daily diet of disinformation. Joe McCarthy (Sen, Wisc., 1950’s) and the Socialist International would be minor footnotes in history without mis- and disinformation. It’s been the motivation for wars and invasions and the rhetorical bedrock for politicians in their climb up the greasy pole . . . forever. And, all of a sudden, “Dr.” Wirtschafter discovered it’s a problem.

Valerie Wirtschafter

Come on, these are biased people who don’t like what other people have to say. People like Wirtschafter hide behind the aura of other people’s credentials, their government positions, or undeserved media respectability to engineer a “study” to silence still others. To her, the government is always right, and so are the scribblers and mouths that populate the Big Media newsrooms, anyone mentally messaged in endless lecture halls like hers all the way to her “PhD”, and the millennials and Gen-Z’ers filling the cubicles of Snopes and PolitiFact.

Snopes and PolitiFact have been scandalous in their interventions in our political brawls. If it was up to them, we’d never know that there is a strong possibility that COVID-19 came out of a Communist Chinese lab. We’d continue to shutter the schools not knowing that children face a near non-existent threat while ignoring the long-term damage to their emotional and mental development. We’d still be suffocating behind masks, not knowing that masking has little effect in stopping the spread of a respiratory virus. We’d never know that the vaccines don’t stop the spread of the bug or that natural immunity is just as good (see below). Much that we now know to be true about the pandemic would have been strangled in the crib.

Thanks to the people whom Wirtschafter trusts, businesses would still be closed and a couple of adult generations would continue to be nurtured on the idea that they shouldn’t have to go to work. Snopes and PolitiFact would paste as “true” any mention of the low unemployment rate, leaving a below-average labor participation rate lying on the cutting room floor. The low unemployment rate talk is empty absent any discussion of the emaciated labor pool from which the number is calculated. The high portion of employed (and conversely the low number unemployed, hence the low unemployment rate) is drawn from a worker pool that shrunk after the federal government started bribing a good portion of current and potential worker force out of the labor pool with extended pandemic benefits. The money spigot wasn’t shut off till the damage was done. Often referred to as the Great Resignation, quiet quitting, and I Quit Movement, Gen-Z’ers and others have discovered that living in Dad’s basement and receiving a government check (er, debit card) ain’t so bad (see below). Bringing it up might incur the wrath of the self-deputized disinformation bounty hunters.

Partisan-laced industries abound in this age of institutionalized political correctness. Stifling voices is the name of the game in the anti-disinformation industry. Though, how can we see our way clearly on existential threats such as the drought in the Southwest when discussion is monitored by the disinformation police? Having long experience with the lefty tendencies of the classroom and faculty lounge, the kinds of people admired by Wirtschafter, there exists among this group a psychomotor tick for totalitarian lifestyle control. That’s the reason for the affection for the buzzword “conservation” and the knee-jerk suspicion about individual freedom. Any talk of increasing the general water supply so people can be free in their daily lives will be met with a smirk.

Let me send Wirtschafter, Snopes and PolitiFact into a tizzy by mentioning a piece by Ed Ring of the California Policy Center, “How California Can Solve the Colorado Water Deficit” (see below). He lays out the practical possibility that more than conservation is necessary to stave off disaster for states like California: the supply of water has to be increased. But don’t bring that up at the next Sierra Club confab or among the chattering classes attending a Wirtschafter soiree.

Ring points out a number of options to increase supply, even while taking into account the climate-change bugaboo. Climate change doesn’t mean that California will be the newest Sahara Desert in a century. Precipitation will still fluctuate in a wet season and over time and present opportunities to expand supply. One is the installation of French drains underneath the subsurface gravel beds of the San Joaquin/Sacramento Delta’s natural channels. It would capture a portion of the excess flows (flood waters) that flush into SF Bay. The water could then be stored in off-stream reservoirs and delivered to users and/or utilized to recharge the depleted aquifers of California’s Great Central Valley. French drains, think about it.

Expanding and upgrading wastewater reclamation could be an additional route to take. Even if only for non-potable uses such as landscaping or ag irrigation, it would free large quantities of potable sources for human consumption. Of course, that would require budgetary restraint in not wasting money on zany efforts to kill off the next generation in unbridled and subsidized abortions, or turn the state into a parent-free sanctuary for teen sexual mutilation (transgenderism), or find new ways to ladle cash to new and old “oppressed” classes, or drive businesses out of the state in hyper-regulation and -taxation, or sink more public and private money into the thankless task of making unsustainable “sustainable” energy “sustainable”. Keep it simple: just try to maintain water pressure at the faucet.

Desalination is another option if the state can keep its militant eco-utopians and NIMBY’s at bay. It’s expensive, like any of the other options, but, honestly, can you think of a wiser use of taxpayer moneys than the provision of something so important that three days without it brings death? However, I suspect that the inner totalitarian of the conservation-only legion has too great a grip on the minds in Sacramento. These busybodies are just too obsessed with telling other people how to live, and conservation fits the bill. Yep, the inner totalitarian has a grip on power in the state.

Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant protests organized by Abalone Alliance Demonstrators blockade and police arrest at the front gate Photos dated 9/-/1981 — 1981 Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant protests in California organized by Abalone Alliance Demonstrators blockade and police arrest at the front gate. (Photo: Steve Ringman/The Chronicle)

California has an aged 20-million-person water delivery system in a 39-million-person state. Granted, people are leaving so, who knows, maybe its population will eventually come to match its outdated supply. Still, if opportunities aren’t grasped, it’ll be a bumpy ride of brown lawns, metered restrictions and fines, and more of the Great Central Valley resembling the Sudan. Droughts should be anticipated in dry-summer climates but California would rather play the role of woke crusader. With the disinformation inquisition in full swing, you’ll never know that the anguish could have been avoided.

RogerG

Read more here:

* “Audible reckoning: How top political podcasters spread unsubstantiated and false claims”, Dr. Valerie Wirtschafter, Brookings Institute, 2/2023, at https://www.brookings.edu/essay/audible-reckoning-how-top-political-podcasters-spread-unsubstantiated-and-false-claims/

* A critique of the Wirtschafter study can be found here: “The ‘Disinformation Industry’ Is Only One Part of a Larger Scandal”, Jeffrey Blehar, National Review Online, 2/23/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-disinformation-industry-is-only-one-part-of-a-far-larger-media-scandal/

* Dr. Fauci admits to limited effectiveness of the vaccine in stopping the spread of respiratory viruses: “Fauci Changes His Public Tune on Covid Vaccines”, Joel Zinberg, director of Paragon Health Institute’s Public Health and American Well-being Initiative, National Review Online, 2/16/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/fauci-changes-his-public-tune-on-covid-vaccines/

* Excellent piece on unemployment and the labor participation rate: “Unemployment Is Low, But So Is The Labor Force Participation Rate — What’s Going On In The U.S. Labor Market?”, Q.ai, Forbes, 1/23/23, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2023/01/25/unemployment-is-low-but-so-is-the-labor-force-participation-rate—whats-going-on-in-the-us-labor-market/?sh=5ad8aff1244e

* “Inside the rise of ‘antiwork,’ a worker’s strike that wants to turn the labor shortage into a new American Dream”, Juliana Kaplan and Andy Kiersz, Insider, 11/25/21, at https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-antiwork-workers-quit-dont-work-strike-better-conditions-2021-11#:~:text=1%20The%20%22antiwork%22%20movement%20is%20rapidly%20growing%2C%20as,and%20what%20it%20means%20about%20the%20American%20Dream.

* “How California Can Solve the Colorado Water Deficit”, Ed Ring, California Policy Center, in National Review Online, 2/13/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/how-california-can-solve-the-colorado-water-deficit/

February 4, 2023February 5, 2023

California, From Bright Promise to Malignancy

Editorial: California can’t afford neighborhood opposition to homeless housing - SFChronicle.com — Scene of San Fransisco homelessness in 2021.

* The following is my reaction to “Laurel Canyon” and “Helter Skelter” now showing on Amazon Prime. I recommend them but not in ways intended by the creators.

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'GINAL DOCUSERIES JONI MITCHELL CROSBY, STILLS, NASH YOUNG BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD THE BYRDS THE MAMAS THE PAPAS THE DOORS ALICE COOPER THE MONKEES LOVE THE TURTLES JACKSON BROWNE LINDA RONSTADT SOUTHER EAGLES BONNIE RAITT LITTEFE LITTLE FEAT THE FLYING BURRITO BROTHERS Everything They Touched Music. LAUREL Turned to CANYON ePix'

May be an image of 1 person, beard and text

Upon preparing our transition to Montana, some very dear Montana friends advised us to replace our California vehicle plates asap. We did. It was probably the same guidance offered to any Golden State resident making a move to Oregon, Washington, Texas, Colorado, or practically anywhere. Why is the word “California” so disconcerting to our fellow Americans beyond the Sierras? No doubt, the state has a bad reputation. To be blunt, it got it after the Sixties settled in, stayed, and took over the state. Other people see the results, want no part of it, and wish to quarantine the virus.

The Sixties was a utopian cultural revolution with strong political implications that cast a dark shadow expanding up and down the coast and entrenching itself in metropolitan and academic nodes nationwide. What came to be called “the Sixties” set in motion a full-scale assault on traditions and institutions while advancing license with a heavy expansion of state interventions, taxes, and regulations to clean up the concomitant mess and make society conform to a now-discredited utopian vision. The government is by nature ill-equipped to be the cleanup brigade and only compounds the problems. California is thought by many across the nation to be the birthing center of the horror. Daily, the impression is confirmed.

'Laurel Canyon' series showcases unseen footage of '60s era music | Entertainment News | abc10.com — A scene from one of the many residences of rock performers that came to congregate in Laurel Canyon.LA. It looks like Stephen Still (l) of the Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young sitting atop a car with what looks like Peter Tork of Monkees fame.

The march of the Sixties went from San Francisco, Berkeley, Haight-Asbury, LA, Topanga Canyon, Laurel Canyon, Sunset Blvd., through the coastal plain, up and down Highway 1, to the halls of power in Sacramento; all resplendently displayed in “Laurel Canyon” and “Helter Skelter”. Later, bare feet and Levi’s gave way to the tweed of tenured faculty positions and the current legislative supermajorities and a lock on the governor’s mansion and every other statewide elective office in California.

PHOTOS: Another Summer Of Love? | * SUMMER OF OUR DISCONTENT 67' * | Pinterest | Summer of love ... — Haight-Ashbury during the so-called Summer of Love.

Surprisingly, I came away from viewing the two episodes of “Laurel Canyon” and the six of “Helter Skelter” on Amazon Prime with these thoughts in mind. They were a reminder of the times but not necessarily a discovery. I’m a Boomer, having entered junior high in 1964. I’m aware. The films illustrate that the Sixties cultural influence lurks in the background of the great folk-rock of the Laurel Canyon scene of the Sixties and the Manson murders.

Though, don’t be fooled. The Sixties didn’t cause the Manson murders. Manson and his troupe of sycophants are responsible. Yet, the Sixties set the stage for what happened and for what California became.

25 Photographs of the Murderous Manson Family That Shocked the Nation — Charles Manson in one of many photos taken during his 1970 trial.

Image result for manson family spahn ranch — Some of Manson’s “family” on the Spahn Ranch property, 1969.

//Charles manson dead crime scene photos sharon tate with sebering — The bodies of Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring, two of the five victims at the Polanski/Tate residence.

The Sixties (actually from 1965 to the early Seventies), the word, came to refer to a wholesale rejection of convention. Restraint is gone, anything goes, and moral anarchy reigns. The earlier insidiousness of drug use – euphorics, psychedelics – was supplanted by a view of them as a shortcut to genius and God. Psychologist Timothy Leary at a 1966 Golden Gate Park “Human Be-In” set the tone with “Turn on, tune in, drop out”. People caught up in the whirlwind found themselves beset by addictions, sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and the underbelly of the drug culture. Today, the phenomena have spread far beyond the confines of Haight-Ashbury.

At least 30 cannabis farms destroyed in Northern California wildfires - The Cannifornian — California pot farm

The anti-convention of the Sixties ultimately became the convention of today. It’s everywhere but most intense in California, its epicenter. Just take a stroll through a Denver park to smell the spread of the zeitgeist, or travel the epicenter to experience a LA homeless encampment, the filth of the downtowns, the homelessness parked and tented along Highway 1, the growing pot dispensaries dotting the landscape, the legal and illegal pot plantations that make a hike in the California woods dangerous, and sex as recreation with an allied abortion industry to dispose of the consequences.

Belief in traditional Christianity and church attendance is taking a hit and a buttress of civility is crumbling (nationwide numbers below).

In U.S., smaller share of adults identify as Christians, while religious 'nones' have grown

Narcissism and a short-term time horizon were other byproducts. Take away something higher and that leaves the self and an obsession with the present. The future, a fruitful legacy, and personal responsibility be damned. The Sixties-inspired absolute rule of the self overpowers everything to the point that even biological restraints are subjected to the will with enough chemicals and surgeries. Fabricated girls – formerly boys – are free to invade female spaces. The dating scene, already fraught with many uncertainties, will have a few more to contend with.

Socialism is a nice fit for the ongoing fight against convention. It, by definition, is an invasion into the conventionally protected private sphere: private property, home, family, faith, your kids’ schooling, personal economic initiative, and a person’s accumulated earnings. Free love became free-a-lot covering a gamut from healthcare, abortions, racial reparations, an expanding list of other monetary giveaways, and all of it bankrolled by one of the most onerous taxation regimes this side of North Korea. California wants to approximate a hippie commune as close as is humanly possible . . . by dictat.

Environmentalism is the state’s unofficial religion and it’s a two-fer: it’s a cover for more socialism and assists in dismantling the old conventions, their institutions and standards. Eco-fanaticism dictates your choice of car, constructs an unreliable and costly grid that sets the hillsides aflame, inflates energy prices to astronomical levels, stands by as the state’s infrastructure crumbles, and all of it managed by a state government that can’t even manage its lavish unemployment benefits (much of it illegally landed in the hands of the miscreants in the state’s prisons, see below).

And you wonder why a California license plate on a car in a Missoula WinCo parking lot is viewed with a slight undercurrent of contempt by locals? People beyond the Sierras get a daily media dose of the California malignancy. They know. Many areas of the country are only getting redder as a result. The Democratic Party is seen by many people as being under the hypnotic spell of what California has become, so much so that the House Democrat delegation almost split evenly on a resolution on Thursday (2/2/23) to condemn socialism (109 for, 100 against/present, see below). The opponents have their reasons, but they exhibit obfuscation or ignorance of socialism.

The resolution reads in part, “. . . socialist ideology necessitates a concentration of power that has time and time again collapsed into Communist regimes, totalitarian rule, and brutal dictatorships.” Some of the foes trotted out their old stand-by claim that an attack on socialism is a not-so-subtle design to eliminate Social Security and Medicare. However, all serious reforms call for a transition to a more sustainable program, one in line with our time-honored values of personal responsibility, private property, and greater returns. Demagoguing the issue hides an affection for top-down government control and the entrapment of the population into the status of serfs to the state, hallmarks of socialism.

Democratic Socialists of America endorse Maduro’s policies — The Squad in Congress, American marchers for socialism, and the socialist dictator Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela.

Many voting no/present disfigured the meaning of socialism in order to cover an affection for it. Clouding their judgment is a version of socialism coming out of the Sixties love-ins in California. For them, it is a cutesy sharing of everything, whether it be belongings or bed partners. Manson demanded the surrender of all of a person’s possessions, including clothes, before acceptance into the clan. It’s a sentiment familiar to the crowd before Timothy Leary in the Human Be-In of 1966, and morphed into the Democratic Party platform of today.

The red states’ desire to contain the virus may gain strength with more refugees . . . but only to a point. Up to now, the vast majority of California refugees are the low-hanging fruit of people equally disgusted by the turn of events in their home state. They add to the red tendencies of their adopted states. Yet, when others of progressive orientations discover to their joy the availability of progressive culture in burgeoning urban settings like Nashville or Austin, without the onerous taxes, some of these red states might shift to more of a purple hue. Watch out for Colorado-ization.

And so it goes. California wasn’t confined. It took over the culture, one of our two political parties, and is shedding population like my dogs do fur. Why are they fleeing? You know, most have come to dislike California for the same reasons as you might.

More importantly, California is the sheep’s clothing covering the Sixties wolf. The Sixties was a disaster. To say otherwise is smearing lipstick on a pig, er wolf. Watch “Laurel Canyon” and “Helter Skelter” on Amazon Prime and don’t be fooled by the lipstick. If viewed with a jaundiced eye, the films show much more than what their creators intended.

RogerG

Read more here:

* “California sent coronavirus relief money to inmates living in multiple states”, Bethany Blankley, The Center Square, 1/7/2021, at https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/california-sent-coronavirus-relief-money-to-inmates-living-in-multiple-states/article_dfb87e08-5080-11eb-8fd2-5f361329774e.html#:~:text=%28The%20Center%20Square%29%20%E2%80%93%20More%20than%20%2442%20million,prison%20and%20jail%20inmates%2C%20a%20recent%20report%20found.

* More on California’s unemployment insurance scandal: “California’s Unemployment Insurance System in Crisis, Needs a Fix.”, Orange County Register, 1/18/2023, at https://www.ocregister.com/2023/01/18/unemployment-insurance-in-crisis-needs-a-fix/

* “House passes resolution denouncing socialism, vote splits Democrats”, Michael Schnell, The Hill, 2/2/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/house-passes-resolution-denouncing-socialism-vote-splits-democrats/ar-AA172Gvv

* “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace”, Pew Research Center, 10/17/2019, at https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/

February 2, 2023February 5, 2023

A Culture of Lying

Reporter David Lightman | Idaho Statesman — Gov. Newsom of California makes claim that Texans pay more in taxes in recent news conference.

Mehmet Murat ildan, Turkish writer and economist, once quipped for good reason, “One of the greatest responsibilities for the people of our time is to accept everything that he hears in the pro-government media as a lie and to investigate the truth from independent sources personally!” Good advice in this age of serial falsehoods from our self-anointed “betters”.

Mehmet’s point is to keep one’s wits about them. For instance, ask a few questions. Like, what is “government” in “pro-government media”? Former representative and Democratic Party poohbah Barney Frank tried to put an anodyne spin on the term: “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”

Is it really? Mehmet might beg to differ. Today, our western media, the other part of the Mehmet’s phrase, are more than organs of communication. They are part of an incestuous nexus of the college faculty lounge, corporate boardroom, legacy media, Hollywood, government down into its bowels, and a smattering of non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) – a class of people peering from the top of the social pyramid and overwhelmingly leaning left. Indeed, be leery enough to personally “investigate the truth from independent sources”.

In today’s news roundup are two items that touches upon our “betters” malign influence: Gavin Newsom on taxes and the chicanery of Hamilton 68. Both stories are indicative of our modern culture of lying.

In the first one, the serial prevaricator Gov. Gavin Newsom of California mangles the truth about Texas taxes. He has to do it because he’s the used car salesman trying to unload a clunker on a weary costumer, the jalopy being the state of California. Thus, he blurted out this whopper: “95% of Texans pay higher taxes than Californians.” What? Texas has no state income tax and California has the highest one in the nation and taxes everything under the sun (and within Hubbel’s expanding universe, Hubble’s Law: v = H*r). The poor folks of California are pummeled with them.

May be an image of text that says 'RAIRZ 2017 CREATORS. COM COMMON SENSE and COMPETENT GOVERNMENT The ENDANGERED SPECIES on the VERGE of EXTINCTION im CALIFORNIA. @Ramireztoons michaelpramirez.com'

It bodes well for DeMeco Ryans, 49er defensive coordinator, who looks like he’ll take the head coaching gig with the Houston Texans. He’ll get a leap in his salary and be allowed to keep more of it by simply making the move.

What is the basis for Newsom’s attempt at making the implausible plausible? Surely, there must be some grounding for the shocking claim. Well, the guy’s staff rooted through the publications of the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy in the not-so-illustrious state. They cited a 2018 study from the group that doesn’t support the bombast. Even more embarrassing, a spokesperson for the group refuted Newsom by saying, “We do not compute a specific percentage of Californians who pay less/more tax than Texans.” Instead, the focus of the Institute’s study was to illustrate California’s “fairer” tax system, not that it was cheaper. Newsom: liar, liar, pants on fire!

To clear the air, the more reasonable Tax Foundation went through the numbers comparing Texas and California, just looking at income, property, and sales taxes, and avoiding California’s morass of regulatory and business taxes. Here’s the results using a $100,000 income in both states: the person in Texas pays $6,335 and the poor Californio’s burden almost doubled to $11,946. The biggest reason for the gap is that Texans pay $0 in state income taxes because Texas doesn’t have one. Add a lighter tax burden to the cheaper cost of living and a sensible person can understand the attraction of Texas to a California middle-class family of four or Elon Musk.

Plus, one doesn’t have to put up with the eco-nuttery, crazed and infanticidal abortion, being locked into abysmal public schools, the widespread urban decay, and their daughters having to share with boys the girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and running and swimming lanes. There’s a lot to be said for loading up a U-Haul.

Newsom has to gaslight us to cover up his mounting mess. Hamilton 68 lies to maintain its death grip on power. What is it? It’s another one of those transnational groupies of the well-heeled and people accustomed to power and influence. It’s a Who’s Who of powerful insiders. It was birthed by an entity called the Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD) which in turn was created by the German Marshall Fund, which is bankrolled by European and the US governments. Got that? It sounds like an old fashioned, meandering money laundering scheme, like much of today’s politics when the powerful want to hide their machinations.

Former FBI counterintelligence agent and “disinformation” expert Clint Watts, the spokesman for Hamilton

Their key obsession is “misinformation”. So, they fight so-called “misinformation” with “disinformation”. It was all uncovered by Elon Musk’s clean-up crew at Twitter. Hamilton 68 was part of the cabal to tar the 2016 election as a product of a Russian skullduggery. They stuck around to be the source for the wild claims of Russia collusion for MSNBC, legacy media, and the disreputable fact-checking operations of Snopes and Politifact.

Hamilton purported to find hundreds (644) of Russian bots actively at work since 2015-16. In reality, according to Twitter execs at the time in their Musk-released emails, the Hamilton’s hundreds shrunk to the reality of 34, most of them related to RT (Russia Times). Swept up in the tarring were conservatives such as Michael Horowitz, and others with much fewer Twitter followers, for merely expressing a point of view contrary to the center-left’s transnational zeitgeist.

Apparently, they’ve been snooping Twitter accounts, not unusual since they are joined at the hip with the “intel community” and Silicon Valley muckety-mucks. Many of Hamilton’s members are well-connected to the amorphous glob. And just think, US taxpayers are forced to bankroll an operation (the German Marshall Fund) targeting themselves. Hamilton 68 is a huge con job that besmirched the 2016 election with lies and was bent on libeling anyone aligned with the result. It’s outrageous.

With Hamilton 68 and Newsom’s falsehoods, one has to wonder about the legitimacy of those preening and peering from the top of the social pyramid. Their culture of lies is smothering us.

RogerG

Read more here:

* Mehmet Murat ildan’s quote from Goodreads, “Lies Politics Quotes” at https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/lies-politics , and more on Mehmet at https://mehmetmuratildanresmiwebsitesi.wordpress.com/

* Barney Frank quote from “The Intolerant State”, Matt Welch, Reason Magazine, Dec. 2013, at https://reason.com/2013/11/11/the-intolerant-state/#:~:text=%22Government%20is%20simply%20the%20name%20we%20give%20to,to%20opposite%20sides%20of%20America%27s%20bitter%20ideological%20divide.

* “Newsom says 95% of Texans pay more than Californians in taxes. But is he correct?”, David Lightman, The Sacramento Bee, 1/18/23, at https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article271288017.html#storylink=cpy

* “Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud”, Matt Taibbi, Racket, 1/27/23, at https://www.racket.news/p/move-over-jayson-blair-meet-hamilton

* More on Hamilton 68 at “The Right Underreacts”, Michael Brandon Dougherty, National Review Online, 1/31/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-right-underreacts/

* Also on my website at libertatevirtute.com
* Also in my Substack feed, The Golden Mean, at https://rogerlgraf.substack.com/

January 20, 2023January 21, 2023

The 21st Century’s Kabuki Theater

May be an image of 5 people, people standing and text that says 'SAFER AMERICA WILKES-BARRE,PA' — President Joe Biden delivers remarks on gun crime and his “Safer America Plan” during an event in Wilkes Barre, Pa., August 30, 2022. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

* Kabuki Theater: euphemism meaning posturing and diplomatic ritual to excess. Posturing can include effecting a stance in support of your party’s radicalism. Excessive diplomatic ritual can include today’s virtue signaling.

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

Why must science be littered with non-science and public discussions revel in incoherent banalities? Even in seemingly sensible write-ups that rely on scientific expertise, we’ll run into the occasional assertion that jumps the evidence and logic. Furthermore, public figures babble in a string of emotive, highly charged phrases without much support or reasoning that advance understanding. The drivel rears most prominently when talk strays to climate change and guns.

Science is inductive, the scientific method, evidence, empiricism, falsifiability. That isn’t true when it comes to climate change, formerly known by a host of other monikers. In an otherwise sane piece by Richard Luthy, Stanford prof of civil and environmental engineering, on how California could harness the recent storm runoff to address water needs, he polluted his sensible suggestion about using aquifers as cisterns to store the runoff with the hackneyed contention that man has made a shambles of the climate. It certainly gets the ruling donkey party off the hook for running the state into the ground . . . instead of the storm water.

Like its poorly maintained forests that erupt into historic conflagrations, rickety electricity grid, and an aging water system built for 10 million fewer people, the state’s dangerous water shortage is a consequence of a ruling ideological orthodoxy translated into policy that has run roughshod over the state for decades.

It’s not that California voters didn’t punch the ticket for billions for water projects. Prop 1 in 2014 set aside $7.1 billion, and Props 68 and 3 in 2018 added almost $13 billion. Out of the $20 billion, about a third went to “Habitat Restoration”, play money for the eco-zealots. “Water Infrastructure” and “Reservoir Storage” account for only 43% of the total.

Officials inspect Oroville Dam's crippled spillway Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2017, in Oroville, Calif ... — Officials inspect Oroville Dam’s crippled spillway Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2017, in Oroville, Calif. California water authorities stopped the flow of water down the spillway, Monday, allowing workers to begin clearing out massive debris that’s blocking a hydroelectric plant from operating. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Californians thought that they were getting more water, but obviously aren’t. Where’s the new reservoirs, aqueducts, and recharge basins? It’s been eight years. I suspect that water projects face the same fate of any big construction in the state. They get strangled in the crib by California red tape and the delaying tactics of eco-activists (lawsuits, political skullduggery, etc.). Compounding the morass is the ideological affinity between the state’s bureaucratic minions and the zealots. So, in the end, you get the eco stuff, which is unchallenged, and not an ounce of additional water for you.

Don’t lay the problem at the feet of fossil fuels. Dry years should be expected in dry-summer climates. The Mediterranean climate that hovers over most of the state, with its dry-summer regime, only produces an annual precipitation average of 6-25 inches. The drier the climate, the more erratic is the precipitation. California has experienced 11 periods of drought since 1841, some lasting as long as seven years. At the time of the Middle Ages in Europe, California was mired in two long droughts, one lasted 220 years and the other 140. Dry-summer means a short window to get moisture, and if you don’t get it in those few months, you go without. Drought is a feature, not a stranger to the area, and not an effect of our love affair with the automobile, suburbia, and indoor lighting. The phenomena happened when only hunter-gatherers were around.

California drought is the most severe in at least 1,200 years — Tree rings show megadrought 1,200 years ago in California.

An engineer and scientist like Luthy should know better. The mention, as he does, of dry periods since 2000 is scant reason to let the Sacramento clown car off the hook. It’s even more of a scandal to science to use the incidents since 2000 as proof of climate change being the root of our evils. It’s hooey. The simple fact of the matter is that two-thirds of the water falls over the sparsely populated one-third of the state, in a region prone to drought since the end of the last ice age. Someone should take notice rather than foolishly run interference for the dolts in Sacramento and the state’s electorate.

The national electorate fairs no better sometimes. We’ve got a guy in the oval office who would be better off in a retirement home under close medical supervision. It must be admitted that Biden has an excuse – he’s old – but the under-50’s in the party sound no more intelligible. Mention “guns” and the limbic part of their brain takes over. Images of tv/movie shootouts immediately overwhelm what little they know on the subject. For Biden, as ossified in the brain as he is, he trots out one banality after another leaving the public in a state of bewilderment.

Charles C. W. Cooke writes of Biden’s use of trite rhetorical phrases when he talks about firearms. Biden trundles them out like Bill Clinton’s stock of pickup lines for seducing the hired help. Some of Biden’s juicy ones include “You can’t buy a cannon”, “Deer don’t wear Kevlar”, and my personal favorite, “If you want to take on the federal government, you need some F-15s, not an AR-15.” When in the history of our citizen republic is it proper for government to tell you what you need? Any government that can tell you what you need is one that treats its public as a collection of wooden puppets. Government as puppet master turns the popular sovereignty thing upside down.

The late George Orwell had some interesting things to say, per Cooke, about your alleged need for “some F-15s” to take on the federal government. For Orwell, government’s possession of sophisticated weaponry in relation to the citizen was a prerequisite for despotism: “Ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance.” Rifles and grenades are inherently democratic, and F-15s, aircraft carriers, and hypersonics are not. Biden’s formulation reduces the citizen to prostrate serfs, only getting the weapons that meet the approval of Biden’s commissars.

He completely misses the point of the Second Amendment. Cooke reminds us that the Constitution was made by a bunch of “insurrectionists” – people who birthed a country in armed revolt against a tyrannical government. The act of taking up arms against their government was memorialized in the Declaration of Independence: “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it . . . .” Thankfully, we aren’t there yet.

But lately, there’s been some extended eyebrow raising. Your government school indoctrinates your kids in neo-Marxist revolutionary dogmas; the attempt to establish censorship boards under the guise of “misinformation”; the attacks on the faithful for their refusal to violate their creeds when they refuse to kowtow to the government-approved zeitgeist; the loose talk among some of the powerful calling for gun confiscation; the refusal to enforce laws to protect people, property, and businesses; threats of taking away our gas stoves and cars and fuel under color of “saving the planet”; our children are prevented from receiving awards of excellence, such as National Merit Scholarships, because of government’s slavish devotion to neo-Marxist “equity”; our immigration laws are not enforced which tosses down the border exposing us to intensified villainy; our girls aren’t safe in their locker rooms, bathrooms, and in competitions; infanticide under the rhetorical rubric of “abortion”; child genital mutilation under “gender-affirming care” without parental knowledge and consent; and government turning a conspicuous blind eye as investment houses play revolutionary footsie (ESG) with my retirement. Did I miss anything?

Now Biden wants to tell me how many cartridges I can have in my gun. He forgets that the citizen’s right to firearms stems from a tradition that goes back to before the English Bill of Rights (1689). Those “Protestants” in the English Bill of Rights wanted their weapons to protect themselves from more than a burglar. Speaking of the limbic system of government apparatchiks, buried deep within it is the knowledge that the country’s citizens are armed thanks to the Second Amendment. American citizens aren’t prostrate serfs.

One of the key purposes of the Second Amendment is the right of the people to protect themselves not from government but the people in the government, the kind of people who would force citizens into acts that violate their faith, censor their speech, and make their life a living hell. Much of that government knavery is sanctioned carte blanche by climate change delirium. Combine the revolutionary dictums with Biden’s butchery of the country’s founding and we end up impoverished and manacled before our rulers.

It’s an insidious Kabuki Theater.

RogerG

Read more here:

* “Rain finally came to California. We blew our chance to use it”, Richard G. Luthy, San Francisco Chronicle, 1/17/23, at https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Rain-came-to-California-we-blew-chance-to-use-it-17723529.php#:~:text=Rain%20finally%20came%20to%20California.%20We%20blew%20our,received.%20Patrick%20Tehan%20%2F%20Special%20to%20the%20Chronicle
* “How Much California Water Bond Money Is For Storage?”, Edward Ring, 8/9/2018, California Policy Center, at https://californiapolicycenter.org/how-much-california-water-bond-money-is-for-storage/
* “California drought: Past dry periods have lasted more than 200 years, scientists say”, The Mercury News, at https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/01/25/california-drought-past-dry-periods-have-lasted-more-than-200-years-scientists-say/
* “Severe Ancient Droughts: A Warning to California”, New York Times, 7/19/1994, at https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/19/science/severe-ancient-droughts-a-warning-to-california.html
* “Tree-Ring Study Reveals Historical Drought Record in Southern California”, 3/12/2018, California Dept. of Water Resources, at https://water.ca.gov/News/News-Releases/2018/March-18/Tree-Ring-Study-Reveals-Historical-Drought-Record-in-Southern-California
* “Biden’s Most Grotesque Gun-Control Argument”, Charles C.W. Cooke, National Review Online, 1/17/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/bidens-most-grotesque-gun-control-argument/

January 16, 2023January 17, 2023

Putting Lipstick on a Pig

May be an image of 1 person and standing — Governor Gavin Newsom gives the inaugural address after taking the oath of office at his inauguration ceremony at the Capitol Mall in Sacramento, Calif., January 6, 2023. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Gavin Newsom regaled a state capitol audience with an attempt to apply makeup to a hog in his January 6 inaugural address. The “lipstick on a pig” is more than a cliché. How best to describe a surreal bid to portray a long-running fiasco as a “personal embrace of freedom”? Will Swaim of the California Policy Center in his morning’s piece (1/15/23, see below) makes clear the state’s predicament to anyone with eyes to see. California is a mess, big time!

Heck, California lost a congressman and has lost population for the third year in a row, not just a decline in the rate of growth when compare to other states, but actually went negative. The state is shrinking. It’s been building for decades only to accelerate in numbers that resemble the crowds stampeding the southern border. Instead of heading north, they’re rushing east. Apparently, many of the state’s existing and former residents don’t like the smell of Newsom’s “personal embrace of freedom”. And the clowns that dominate the state government keep making the smell ever more pungent.

Swaim chronicles a growing list of recent executive and legislative perniciousness that is driving people pell-mell out the state, something Newsom blithely pretends isn’t happening. The compendium of noxiousness knows no bounds. Newsom berates “Red state politicians” (read DeSantis and Abbot) in his speech as possessing “authoritarian impulses” while he retains emergency powers, the go-to for history’s real Fascists. Hitler didn’t replace the Weimar Constitution but ruled throughout under its Article 48 emergency powers up to his last days in the bunker. Likewise, Newsom locked down the state and shuttered the schools longer than anywhere else, proving that when you scratch a progressive, a dogmatic authoritarian is exposed.

If you happen to be a doctor in the state, you might face prosecution under Newsom’s “misinformation” law since it is illegal to register qualms about the state’s medical proclamations because they are deified as the “contemporary scientific consensus”. Patriotism isn’t the last refuge of the scoundrel. “Contemporary scientific consensus” is! Past contemporary scientific consensuses included the luminiferous ether (space isn’t a vacuum), the heavenly vault (Copernicus’s ceiling beyond the solar system), Lamarckism (animal behavior determines mutations, not genetic diversity), etc. The concept of “scientific consensus” as determinant of truth is ludicrous, but the state’s doctors will have to acquiesce in silence to avoid Galileo’s fate before the Inquisition. Careerwise, it’s healthier to jump the Sierras seeking a post in a Boise hospital. This is California “freedom”? This is California’s new “liberty”?

Diagram with which Copernicus changed for the conception of the cosmos — For Copernicus, the solar system was the universe with the stars comprising a heavenly vault.

The state’s finances are drowning in unfunded mandates. Rather than address this beast, Newsom and his goofs in Sacramento have proposed to ladle a reparations payment of $223,000 for each member of a supportive voting block: descendants of African slaves. How do you determine the award winners? I’m sure that they’ll come up with some cockamamie formula – they’ll have to – but watch the prospect of six-figure money attract Caucasians, Asians, Hispanics, transplanted Jamaicans, anyone who’ll claim mysterious ancestors who suffered under Simon Legree’s lash, much like Elizabeth Warren seeking Native American affirmative action points or others probing a cut of the casino profits.

For the Sacramento clown car and its voter base, running the oppression lottery ranks higher than the provision of . . . water, without which we’d die after 3 days. No new damns, reservoirs, or aqueducts have been added since the state’s population was 23 million in 1980. It’s 39 million today (and shrinking). And that 100- to 40-year-old infrastructure wears out. No alternative sources such as desalinization are on the horizon. Last year, California’s bureaucratic behemoth, the Coastal Commission, rejected a proposed plant near Costa Mesa. No additional water for you, California. You have nothing to look forward to but draconian state rationing and brown lawns, withering crops, and 30-second showers every other day by state edict. Don’t expect the recent downpours to rescue you. The water is flushing out to the sea and not to your shower head.

Lake Oroville reaches all-time low level; hydroelectric plant shuts down for first time ever — Lake Oroville, the head of the State Water Project, in 2022 after years of drought.

The people of California asked for this. Somehow, the seed of Lefty aesthetics was planted deep under the popular cranium as far back as 1972 when Pop 20 was popularly approved to create the California Coastal Commission. The original purpose was to protect the coast from overdevelopment. It did, and is now busy dehydrating the 14 million people on the coastal plain. Obviously, it’s a blueprint for the rest of the state: blame some bogeyman – climate change – as Newsom did in his screed, and don’t do anything but rail against the people and shove them into electric cars hooked up to a grid that they are making unstable. Go figure.

In a certain sense, Californians, you are doing it to yourself. Lunacy is popular in the state.

If you’re a fast-food worker and think that hiking the minimum wage to $15.50/hour is such a great idea, think again. If you still have a job – a big “if” – you’ll notice fewer colleagues and more machines surrounding you. The order to boost the minimum wage is in reality the depress-labor-participation-and-increase-automation act since fewer people can be afforded and machines pay dividends far into the future when compared to the alternative — you!

Job Killer: McDonald's Adding Automated Order Machines to All Restaurants - YouTube — An automated McDonalds in California

Owners of the outlets don’t fair any better. The governor, super-majorities of both legislative houses, and the state’s gargantuan bureaucracies want to impose unionization on you. Like doctors, get out! Help Boise grow.

Hey, truckers and owners of trucking firms, the guy and his minions are after you. Closed union shops will befall you the longer you stay. Great weather can’t compensate for decreasing competitiveness.

The state desires not to be a haven for jobs and business. Instead, it heartily seeks the moniker of sanctuary for abortionists and sexual mutilators of children. So radical are they about abortion that escaping the womb while still breathing won’t save the baby. The state considers the baby not be human, rather to be treated like the mother’s infected tonsils. Unlike the mother’s tonsils, however, the baby has its own DNA profile independent of the mother. It is not an organ of the mother, which is the first indication that the unborn young are to be treated differently than a hang nail. Such is the Clockwork Orange nature of the state (read A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess).

Unborn Baby Miraculously Survives Abortion Pill Taken By Mother - Opposing Views — An ultrasound of a baby who survived an abortion pill.

The grotesqueries don’t end there. A child’s sexual organs are to be treated like pregnancy: an inconvenience to be surgically or pharmaceutically manipulated. If your kid happens to find their way to transgenderism’s underground railroad to California without your knowledge, the State of California protects the mutilator and the child’s wishes to be mutilated unbeknownst to you. It’s truly appalling what the state has become. It’s more than A Clockwork Orange. It’s the Island of Doctor Moreau (H.G. Wells author).

A Clockwork Orange | Film Review | Slant Magazine — A scene from A Clockwork Orange, the movie.

The Island of Dr. Moreau: Evil in Adaptation #TBT — Scene from The Island of Doctor Moreau, the movie.

These are just some of the “successes” mentioned by the state’s gubernatorial Dr. Moreau. The assault on business continues unabated. The state’s malformations only get grander. To remain, at this point, comes close to quiet acquiescence.

I’m reminded of the silent German citizens who resided next to Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, or Buchenwald. Said nothing, did nothing, until Patton arrived at Buchenwald in March of 1945. Sickened and horrified, he ordered the surrounding residents out of their homes to view the horrors that were conducted in their name. Californians, look around you at the actions that are being taken in your name. Infanticidal abortion and child sexual mutilation are no small things.

German civilians parading past piles of the dead at Buchenwald in April 1945. Notice the woman shielding her eyes.

Many Californians regularly vote against this kind of thing. They are to be applauded, but they need more people like them at a time when many of the people who do have fled. That means a change of heart among a good portion of the Lefty voter base. And that is going to be hard, oh so very hard. Meanwhile, the state potentates will be applying lipstick on a pig. Nay, lipstick on a wild boar.

May be an illustration of 1 person, standing and text that says '2 SVEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL CREATORS.COM CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR NEWSOM SIGNED A BILL to STUDY REPARATIONS for SLAVERY. BUT CALIFORNIA ENTERED the UNION AS "FREE STATE. WE NEED REPARATIONS for HAVING AN IMBECILE forA GOVERNOR @Ramireztoons michaelpramirez.com'

RogerG

Read more here:

* “Newsom’s Hollow Ring of Freedom”, Will Swaim, National Review Online, 1/15/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/newsoms-hollow-ring-of-freedom/
* “California regulator rejects desalination plant despite historic drought”, Daniel Trotta, Reuters, 5/13/22, at https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-regulator-rejects-plan-desalination-plant-2022-05-13/
* “California’s Tyrannical Covid ‘Misinformation’ Law”, Pradheep J. Shanker, National Review Online, 10/6/22, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/californias-tyrannical-covid-misinformation-law/
* “Liberals Finally Admit That California Is Shrinking but Still Don’t Accept Blame”, Will Swaim, Nationa,l Review Online, 5/15/22, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/05/liberals-finally-admit-that-california-is-shrinking-but-still-dont-accept-blame/
* “The Buchenwald Concentration Camp: Patton’s Bastardly Discovery”, Flint Whitlock, Warfare History Network, Summer 2019, at https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/buchenwald-concentration-camp-general-pattons-bastardly-discovery/

January 14, 2023

The Economic Philosophy of Ghostbusters: A Wakeup Call for Pete Buttigieg

Overthinking Ghostbusters: Shot by Shot — Venkman (l) and Stantz after they were ejected from the university in “Ghostbusters”.

We should put a brake on our headlong rush to inflate our government. Imagine, we have a sizeable chunk of our electorate who actually believe that government can, and ought to, achieve equality of result in all aspects of life. California, have you looked at your roads, schools, crime-ridden communities, rampant vagrancy, and firestorms in your forests?

Just one look at our Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, should dispel any illusion of something called “government efficiency”. If there ever was an oxymoron, this is it. Look at the months it took for the city-owned Port of Los Angeles to whittle down the 100-ship backlog anchored over the horizon? Buttigieg passes the responsibility to the Labor Secretary to avert a rail strike stoppage to add to the misery at the ports. Then, along comes a winter storm and my grandson, like thousands of others across the country, faced massive cancellations, and stranded a thousand miles from home. Can this guy think out of the box, or is he simply a blockhead, one with pedigreed credentials?

Could Buttigieg survive in the real private sector? Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) faces the fear of having to earn of living outside the protective academic cocoon, and this after the three paranormal “scientists” were thrown out on their ear by the university administration. Stantz to Venkman: “You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.” Maybe our Secretary’s vision would be broadened by a job repairing train tracks once the rest of us are relieved of him.

Progressives Accuse Pete Buttigieg Of Racism For Using The Word 'Heartland' In A Tweet — Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg

Really, what did you expect? Mayor Pete’s overwhelming life experience was at a desk. From a bluestocking extended stay at elite schools to McKinsey to small-city mayor to ensign in the Navy to politics, the guy was far removed from the practical day-to-day consequences of his work. I can picture him in the emotional state of Dr. Stantz in 2024. Take a look.

RogerG

January 13, 2023January 14, 2023

The Political Philosophy of Ghostbusters

Ghostbusters: Original Cast's Net Worth, Ranked | TheRichest — (L to R) Main characters Stantz, Venkman, and Zeddemore in “Ghostbusters”.

Of course, I’m thinking of “Ghostbusters”, the movie. The story follows a group of academics in a semi-academic field – the paranormal – who don’t, and won’t, conform to the demands of the campus powers-that-be. They bust out on their own, form a business, and run into the widening tentacles of the eco-regulators in the person of Walter Peck, inspector of the EPA, third district of New York City. Please watch below.

Making the tale more relevant, Biden’s EPA is a clone of California and New York’s entangling web of eco-regulators. So filled with arrogance and hubris, they are busy jettisoning their middle class and a good portion of their economies to other states, just like Peter Venkman and company fled the campus and opened shop in the commercial district of 1980’s NYC. The script’s parallels with our times are nothing short of fascinating.

Back to the real, Mark Wahlberg has put his Los Angeles 12-bedroom, 20-bath mansion on the market and is decamping for Nevada. The reason is the same as the one for 300,000 other people who have bolted the state over the past couple of years. He’s an entrepreneur and family man and finds Nevada a better place for his economic health as Ghostbusters’ Venkman, Stantz, and Spengler would discover in fleeing the college.

Mark Wahlberg, here in April, opened up about a recent move he made with his family. — Mark Wahlberg in April 2022

About the only occupational category whose growth prospects look sunny in California, for instance, is government regulator/inspector. The equation is simple: more laws, more regulations, more state government employees. Each year, the buffoons in the asylum formerly known as the state legislature add to the number of Pecks. One law taking affect this year would require more inspectors of private insurance to enforce a ban on co-pays for abortions. The state’s minimum wage is on legal auto-pilot and is scheduled to jump to $15.50/hour which means more investigators. A new law, effective Jan. 1, 2023, would add to the government workforce to compel compliance with the state’s newfound role of sanctuary for the mutilators of children in transgender medical procedures. New state land use laws will layer more complexity, and regulators, on an already suffocating building industry. In total, Newsom signed 997 new laws, most to take effect on Jan. 1 of this year.

California New Laws | State | wvgazettemail.com — California Gov. Gavin Newsom displays a state bill signed by him shielding abortion providers and volunteers, June 24, 2022.

Thus, California has turned itself into a sanctuary for immigration lawbreakers, child sexual mutilators, and the country’s budding Walter Pecks.

Kathy Hochul’s State of New York is California, Jr. How appropriate that the setting for “Ghostbusters” is New York City. It may as well be Los Angeles or the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area. These blue havens are awash in Peck-like busybodies. No wonder Texas and Florida added congressmen and the Bear Flag Republic and the Empire State lost some. Expect it to continue.

The Movie Rewatch of Great Nostalgia: Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II | Tor.com — Walter Peck, the EPA guy, in “Ghostbusters”

RogerG

Read more here:
* Mark Wahlberg’s departure from California to Nevada: “Mark Wahlberg left California for Nevada to give his kids ‘a better life’”, Marianne Garvey, CNN, 10/13/22, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/13/entertainment/mark-wahlberg-california-nevada-move/index.html
* “New California Laws on Abortion, Jaywalking, Rap Lyrics”, AP, USN&WP, 12/30/22, at https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/california/articles/2022-12-30/new-california-laws-on-abortion-jaywalking-rap-lyrics

January 12, 2023January 12, 2023

60 Minutes Is the Real Jurassic Park

Jurassic Park Series | Dinopedia | FANDOM powered by Wikia

'60 Minutes' Exhumes Enviro Cult Leader for a New Round of ... — Paul Ehrlich on 60 Minutes

The late great Michael Crichton placed Jurassic Park on a tropical island, but CBS programming execs showed signs that they seized the thing and replanted it in 60 Minutes. As proof, the show welcomed the new year with the fossil discovery of . . . Paul Ehrlich. Yep, the Stanford prof and dinosaur is still alive and vigorous at age 90, alive enough to push his signature doomsaying, and 60 Minutes obliged by trotting him out (see below).

What’s with Stanford University? They seem to be a hotbed for the kind of kooks who are frocked in PhD’s and flock to the limelight like a moth to a porch light. It’s a tradition at Stanford. Remember William Shockley, the engineer and Nobel Prize-winning co-inventor of the transistor and inveterate purveyor of racialist mumbo jumbo? Well, move over Shockley to make room for Ehrlich and colleagues like Tony Barnosky. Science is their vocation and doom is their game. Chicken Little has nothing on these folks.

But they’re scientists, right? They ought to know, right? Yes, they ought to, but don’t. They represent a peculiar species of scientist who pushes science beyond its capacities and right into divination. They take a slice of present data, conjure a trend, and then laser-like project it into the future. No understanding of history; no understanding of mitigating circumstances. Based on the results, their soothsaying is no more accurate, maybe less so, than bibliomancy – the practice of closing one’s eyes, randomly opening a book to a page, and pointing the index finger to a line of verse to extract the future.

Bibliomancy has the Answer – Dayology.com

In the past, Ehrlich predicted an earth suffocating under the weight of 4 billion souls (earth’s population in the 1960’s), mass starvation, resource exhaustion, and ecological collapse. Now, the siren song is mass species extinction under 8 billion souls. His misses are many and include the famous 1980 lost bet with U. of Maryland economist Julian Simon. Ehrlich chose five industrial metals and bet that their price would be higher in ten years, expecting the subsequent shortages would lead to price increases. He lost. You see, Ehrlich probably wouldn’t make for a good economist. Ehrlich is blind to financier Henry Clews’s insight in 1918 when Clews wrote “the best cure for high prices is high prices”: prices go up, efficiencies increase, new sources discovered, and prices drop. For Ehrlich, mitigations be damned, adjustments be damned, and full speed to the apocalypse.

Julian Simon on Optimism and Progress | National Review — Economist Julian Simon

Human capital doesn’t exist in Ehrlich’s mind. We’re only animals eating up everything that we can get our hands on. Yet, human beings change their circumstances with innovations. As a consequence, more food is produced with greater efficiency, wealth increases, fertility declines, urbanization intensifies, and pressure on the wildlands decreases. So much for the alleged cataclysm of mass extinction. People like Ehrlich are chronically wrong.

Interestingly, the same 60 Minutes chart of past mass extinctions also shows a recovery afterwards. And the recovery was hundreds of thousands of years before Lenin’s invention of central planning. No need for technocrats like Ehrlich and Barnosky to herd the masses back into the Middle Ages to avoid these shamans’ predictions of doom.

MY HAIR IS ON FIRE!! - YouTube

Ehrlich and his sidekick Barnosky are programmed to fail in their prognostications. The problem is entrenched is their reliance on a loose extrapolation from a large area to a smaller one (see below). The data can also be fraught with hypotheticals in interpretation. Out of the conjury comes hair-on-fire Armageddons that turn out to be wrong. We are constantly afflicted with it in everything from plastics to the end of the world in climate change. We are kept on the edge of our seats in a pass-the-baton series of dooms.

60 Minutes’s resurrection of the fossil Ehrlich proves that hysteria is a natural feature of the human condition, and the barkers will always have a place at the table. Ironically, progressives pride themselves in their alleged immunity to it and see themselves at war with it, while they are preoccupied with it. They are the chief purveyors. Self-delusion has no bounds.

RogerG

Read more here:
* “60 Minutes Promotes Paul Ehrlich’s Failed Doomsaying One More Time”, Ronald Bailey, Reason, 1/3/23, at https://reason.com/2023/01/03/60-minutes-promotes-paul-ehrlichs-failed-doomsaying-one-more-time/
* “Paul Ehrlich: Wrong on 60 Minutes and for Almost 60 Years”, Peter Jacobsen, Foundation for Economic Education, 1/4/23, at https://fee.org/articles/paul-ehrlich-wrong-on-60-minutes-and-for-almost-60-years/
* The reason for the error in Ehrlich and Barnosky’s predictions can be understood by reading “Species–area relationships always overestimate extinction rates from habitat loss”, Fangliang He and Stephen P. Hubbell, Nature, 5/18/2011, at https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09985

January 10, 2023January 12, 2023

Whew, What a Blowout! Georgia 65 – TCU 7.

As of now, the South is the king of football, with competition from the upper Midwest. It’s much more than the SEC. It’s regional dominance. There are places where physical, masculine virtues still prevail. Football thrives in a culture that has a place for such attributes.

I invite others to do a detailed analysis of the region’s productivity of top-tier football talent throughout the NCAA top 20. I’ll admit that it’s more than the South, though. California still gives the country some of the most highly recruited players in the country: C.J. Stroud (The Ohio State), Bryce Young (Alabama), Brock Bowers (Georgia), to name a few. Up and down the west coast, schools constantly dip into the state’s talent pool. Where would Oregon be without California talent?

But the state is shedding population (114,000 last year and almost 118,000 for 2021) and its reigning culture isn’t conducive to the exaltation of virility. The state is too busy becoming the Mecca of transgenderism, which says a lot about where that social eco-system is heading. Persistent pockets of male virtue exist, but the trend is increasingly inhospitable.

Texas, like the rest of the South, produces much talent that is diluted among many schools in the region. So does Florida. The performance of those states’ schools says little because of the chronic raiding.

In addition, the powerhouse schools of the South have a tendency to dominate because they are assisted by coaches who have the magic elixir to draw in much of the region’s pool of talent: Dabo Sweeney (Clemson), Nick Saban (Alabama), Kirby Smart (Georgia) for instance. There will always be exceptions, but they confirm what Cicero of ancient Rome said in Latin, exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis, which means the exception confirms the rule in cases not excepted. In my mind, the generality of the South’s preeminence rings true.

As for the Midwest, they compete with the South. The Ohio State, Michigan, and Penn State compete with the best of the South. Based on what I saw in this year’s playoff games, the real national championship game was between The Ohio State and Georgia. This region’s dominance, like the South, draws on the same residue of cultural male virtue.

This shift of football power may partially explain USC and UCLA’s move to the Big Ten in 2025. Some say that it’s all about the money. Yes, it is, and money follows success. It’s striking to realize that these big schools have to turn to red America to maintain competitiveness.

Some of my dear friends and family in California may find this assessment jarring, but it’s my judgment of the state of play circa 2023. I could be wrong, and the situation could change. There’s nothing more permanent than flux in human affairs.

RogerG

Read more here:

* On California’s precarious demographic situation:

“For Second Straight Year, California Sees a Population Decline”, Tim Arango, NY Times, May 4, 2022, at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/04/us/california-population-decline.html

“California’s shrinking population has big impacts”, Dan Walters, CalMatters, April 10, 2022, at https://calmatters.org/commentary/2022/04/california-population-decline/

“California’s population keeps shrinking”, Marc Sternfield, KTLA, Dec. 26, 2022, at https://ktla.com/news/california/californias-population-keeps-shrinking/

January 7, 2023January 8, 2023

One More Reason to Avoid Primetime FNC

I pulled this Carlson rant from Mediate (below), an admittedly left-wing site. The website can be disreputable but here is Carlson in the all-too-familiar raiment of the contrarian. That’s it, he’s crafted this persona of being a contrarian, an inveterate opponent of whatever any large group wants – or as he oftentimes prattles, a foe of “lying, pomposity, smugness, and groupthink”. It’s a simple-minded reflex to defend the smaller number against the many, even if the “underdog” happens to be a Al Capone. It’s ludicrous.

* Watch here: https://www.mediaite.com/tv/tucker-carlson-blasts-fox-news-contributor-ben-domenech-as-a-moron-and-a-buffoon-for-his-speakership-take/

He sprays vituperation and smug giggles at both the condemnable and reasonable, apparently showing no sign of being able to distinguish between the risible MSNBC nutcases and the sensible others. The only discernable metric being the number: the smaller good, the larger bad. In regard to the Republican leadership fight, he’s a bigot against the 200 and patron saint of the 20. By that standard, if the guy was around Petrograd in 1917, he’d be giddy over the little cluster of Bolsheviks around Lenin. No serious analysis of the demands and antics of the 20 is presented. It’s rabbit-hole logic.

How Far Right Are The 20 Republicans Who Voted Against McCarthy - PHP ... — The 20 Republicans opposing McCarthy

Communist leader defends Bolsheviks from Putin’s treason charges — RT Russian politics — Bolshevik leadership: Lenin in middle row, second from right.

The contrarian schtick has its limitations. Tucker, try leveling your gaze at the 20 as you do the 200. Surely, there’s something more to the imbroglio than the size of the two sides. Hannity, to his credit, has exposed the 20’s most outspoken rabble rousers to some cross examination. After all the chest thumping, the clique demands attention, chaos, and power over the wishes of the other 200. Tucker didn’t portray them for what they are: a conspiratorial rump of the likes frequently seen in history from the Jacobins to the Khmer Rouge.

McCarthy finally won the Speakership on the 15th vote, and that with 216 votes, not the 218 that was repeated ad nauseum because of the kinks of plurality voting in House rules. 6 of the kamikazes still preferred going down in flames.

In the end, McCarthy is, as Phil Klein of National Review said in this morning’s piece, “Speaker in name only”. A weakened Speaker will grant free range for these deadenders to rampage across the Republican caucus all the way to a drubbing in 2024. According to the surrender agreement with the clique, McCarthy must face a vote to fire him whenever a single Republican gets his or her panties in a bunch. The Freedom Caucus and its rump has greater weight than any other group on the omnipotent Rules Committee.

The fact is, the rump can’t, as they say, “deliver results for the American people”. The boast exhibits no understanding of the Constitution, even a rudimentary awareness of separation of powers. The Dems control half of Article I (the Senate) and the Article II branch (executive). The rump’s sparsely supported designs face a deep-sixing in the Senate and Biden’s veto pen. Oversight investigations will ensue in the House, but that would occur without these embarrassing histrionics. Looking down the road, 20 halfwits could very well spell doom for the GOP and increase the likelihood of untrammeled Democrat neo-socialism after 2024.

Thank you, the carnival barkers of FNC, for making it easier for Democrats to ram through their plans to gut what used to be the United States of America. My only hope is that the bulk of the American people will see through the nonsense, in spite of the 20 clowns in the House Republican Conference under the protective aura of the FNC commentariat.

I’m hoping for 20 well-funded primary challenges in 2024. And that includes you, Matt Rosendale (R, Montana 2nd congressional district).

RogerG

Read more here:

* “Kevin McCarthy Elected Speaker in Name Only”, Philip Klein, Narional Review Online, 1/7/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/kevin-mccarthy-elected-speaker-in-name-only/