Electric vehicle catches fire in Florida after Hurricane Ian.
In Rob Reiner’s “This Is Spinal Tap”, the boys in the band are asked about the unexpected deaths of some of their drummers, including one who mysteriously erupted in spontaneous combustion.
It’s hilarious, but not so funny for Florida electric vehicle (EV) owners in the wake of Hurricane Ian. We now know that water and EV batteries don’t mix. The things don’t need a spark. After the deluge and submersion in flood waters, they’ll just quietly simmer in a super-hot chemical reaction, smoke a little, and then erupt. Watch the Good Morning in America (GMA) report below.
The EV is the darling of our eco-central planners and the eco-acolytes who sit atop many of our institutions. For the elected ones, they didn’t gain their seats of power and influence by accident. We chose them. Through the franchise and Electoral College, we made the choice to give power to those who would force us out of our deep family investments in clean and fuel-efficient sedans, mini-vans, and SUV’s and into the thing that could set a packed parking lot and neighborhood ablaze. Add to that the range anxiety from inoperable, scarce, and inconvenient charging stations; dishonestly advertised operational distances if one takes into account running life-support and other systems like air conditioning and the heater; and the threat of hypothermia as we wait the hour or two for enough juice to get the thing up and running in a Michigan winter.
Wait, there’s more. The same folks who are foisting the EV on us are creating the most unstable grid distributing the most expensive electricity. An ever-growing expanse of giant windmill forests and broadening seas of solar panels marring ever greater portions of the earth’s surface will be our future if they have their way. And if that isn’t enough, much of that grid is exposed to the annual seven-month firestorm season from eco-crazed forestry practices that annually belches millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air, like the 130 million tons from last year’s conflagrations in California – the equivalent CO2 of 25 million regular autos. So, they shove everyone into EV’s to allegedly save the planet as they encourage the buildup of debris to burn it up. Go figure.
Trees and brush erupt in flames in a California wildfire from 2019.
Incidentally, try to find a place to charge up the thing if you happen to be in the path of the flames, the lines are down, and the cell towers are incinerated. It’s a perpetual motion machine of eco-nuttery. Lesson: Don’t sell that old Camry with the regular unleaded in the gas tank.
Who’s at fault? We are. We elected the clowns who thought that showering the country in paper money was economically righteous and think that eco-central planning is somehow different from the Soviet variety.
It’s not that the donkey party hid it from us. Nancy Pelosi and The Squad have been busy concocting the Green New Deal since Pelosi took the gavel (2019) and Biden the oath of office (2021). Anyone above the sentience level of a worm should have known. Biden repeatedly bellowed their intent when he, for instance, looked into the eyes of a teenage girl (a real XX-chromosome one) in 2019 and said,
“I want you to look at my eyes. I guarantee you. I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.”
Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden pumps his fist as he speaks during a campaign stop, Friday, Sept. 6, 2019, in Laconia, N.H. (AP Photo/Mary Schwalm)
True to his word, he’s trying to euthanize the entire industry: practically ending oil development on federal lands and offshore, axing pipelines, lavish spending on loopy “sustainables”, and a quiet strangulation of the energy companies by frightening financial capital away from them. For this gang, real, affordable energy is a dragon to be slain.
The choice of candidates in the 2020 presidential race was between the uncouth with the right policies (for the most part) and a revolutionary ethos of class warfare, neo-Marxist race-baiting, transgenderism, open borders, law unenforcement, and greenie fanaticism. As it turned out, a majority preferred the revolution. Look no further than the mirror for the cause of our troubles if you thought that the uncouth drove you into the arms of the revolutionary. A candidate is much more than the fact that he’s not the other guy.
RogerG
Read here for more:
* “Red Tape Is Making Wildfires Worse”, Shawn Regan and Tate Watkins, National Review Online, Oct. 4, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/red-tape-is-making-wildfires-worse/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=third
* “About Those Green Jobs . . . They Keep Vanishing”, Andrew Follett, National Review Online, Oct. 15, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/about-those-green-jobs-they-keep-vanishing/
* “Climate Policy Should Pay More Attention to Climate Economics”, John H. Cochrane, National Review Online, Sept, 3, 2021, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/climate-policy-should-pay-more-attention-to-climate-economics/
* “In intimate moment, Biden vows to ‘end fossil fuel'”, Steve Peoples, ABC News, Sept, 6, 2019, at https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/intimate-moment-biden-vows-end-fossil-fuel-65442382
Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez at the gala for The Rings of Power
In Tom Wolfe’s novel, “A Man in Full”, the main protagonist is the successful Atlanta entrepreneur Charlie Croker who seems to have everything but tranquility and satisfaction. His corporation is mired in crushing debt but he has all the trappings of material success, and a new, younger trophy wife. He divorced his first wife, Martha, after decades of marriage. She begins to resume her life without him by getting back in shape. She joins a gym and quickly realizes that women have changed, particularly in body type. Gone is the hour-glass figure and everywhere she notices the absence of hips among the female fitness fanatics. A female ideal has changed. She dubs these women “boys with breasts”.
Harvey C. Mansfield, Harvard professor of political philosophy, wrote the book “Manliness” in 2006. In it, he distinguished between masculinity and manliness. Masculinity can, but not always, stray into beastly behavior (“toxic masculinity”). By contrast, manliness in the ancient Greek is synonymous with “courage” and therefore tied to virtue. A manly person – for women can also exhibit manliness – would protect the weak. Bluster, bullying, and abuse is not the stuff of manliness.
Harvey C. Mansfield
Manliness must be differentiated from the modern slang of “BDE”, or “big d*** energy”. At a recent campaign rally, Keri Lake (Arizona gubernatorial candidate) introduced Ron DeSantis using the earthy initials. People enamored of Trump use it. Manliness should not be confused with brutish bellicosity.
Why mention “boys with breasts” and manliness in connection with Amazon’s Rings of Power? Simple, if the masterminds of the series, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, wanted to create a Middle-earth matriarchy, they could find no better device than to turn Galadriel into an Aragorn with breasts and refocus Tolkien’s tale on one of the three queens of Númenor, a total of three among the twenty-five rulers of the land in the legendarium. The women’s characters were crafted to portray Mansfield’s manliness but lack the charisma to inspire a drug addict into an opium den. And why the decision to exercise the creative arts to distort Tolkien’s story in this manner? I suspect that something more fundamental is afoot, like the politico-cultural prejudices of a narrow social claque that gave us Jane’s Revenge (pro-abortion terrorism) and cancel culture. They are the same crowd that ate up as gospel the wild smears against Brett Kavanaugh. The bias is everywhere in our institutions and now unsurprisingly could be corrupting this rendition of Tolkien’s Middle-earth in the second age.
J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay
Or, conversely, it could be just a terrible misreading of the public’s desires from the top of the cultural pyramid above the clouds. McKay and Payne may be doing it without awareness, mistakenly thinking that’s what the public wants.
Either way, we got an incoherent mess in this the first season. The creation of Mordor was so off-the-wall that it could have been the product of an all-night LSD-laced bull session. Tolkien’s Mordor was created by the evil super-spirit Melkor to be a land of volcanic activity. Payne/McKay make it a product of the mechanical operation of turning a sword hilt like a key and voilà we have volcanic eruptions, bursting aquifers, and pyroclastic flows. By the way, this pyroclastic flow doesn’t behave like a real pyroclastic flow. Amazingly, magically, the hurricane of super-heated deadly gasses and fine ash doesn’t kill everyone in its path. Galadriel, the queen of Numenor, and many others walk away as if they were only plastered with the dust from a shaken vacuum cleaner filter. A pyroclastic flow buried Pompeii in AD 70. Talk to anyone who fled the 1980 Mt. St. Helens eruption. Fantasy is riveting if it has some relationship to the real. This falls into the category of laughingstock.
The speeches of the matriarchy are not, shall we say, awe-inspiring. It’s not because they were made by women. They are just simply stale. Compare any of them to Margaret Thatcher’s refusal to bow to the pressure to compromise at the October 1980 conference of the British Conservative Party: “The Lady’s not for turning” (see below). Or, closer to home, Peter Jackson/Fran Walsh managed the stirring words for Aragorn at the Black Gate of Mordor in “The Return of the King” (see below), or Theoden’s rallying cry before the Rohirrim’s charge into the orc ranks in the Battle of Pelennor Fields (see below). They would steel the spine of anyone facing long odds. In comparison, the words of the Payne/McKay matriarchy are an insipid string of gibberish.
Then we have the disjunction of physical prowess and the natural female musculature and skeletal fragility of, say, the Aragorn with breasts, Galadriel. There’s a reason why actors as diverse as Christian Bale to Chris Pratt to Michael B. Jordan bulk up. It’s intuitive to match in some sense the physical action of a role with the appropriate appearance. While it’s a stretch at times, it’s an easier visual sell. But take Morfydd Clark’s Galadriel and her domineering physical antics alongside her frail muscle mass. These are muscles that would have difficulty crushing a grape, let alone wielding a heavy sword to take down the mighty men of Numenor. They’d be better casting a female MMA fighter for the role. At least the gap between the action and her appearance would be lessened. But better yet, reshape Galadriel’s character to fit Tolkien’s strengths for her.
Morfydd Clark as Galadriel in The Rings of Power
Ludicrously beefing up the female roles was evident throughout, to the point of relegating the men to subsidiary positions in the story. The Payne/McKay men are weak, petulant, or stubbornly wrongheaded. All of a sudden, Tolkien’s mighty men of Numenor become . . . ? ? ? . . . . One is left to wonder how they became so pivotal and deserving of great respect in the later trilogy. Now, in the hands of Payne/McKay, the two sagas don’t relate in a basic sense. What we have with the Rings of Power is something that appears to be an artifact of the present moment of millennials who were raised on identity politics and cultural reparations, warping everything to fit the manias of the present. Some would say that this is a “woke” LOR and in many ways they would be right.
Even for the Harfoots (proto hobbits), while they have a male leader, it’s two teenage girls in the tribe who carry the action and wisdom of the group. They dictate the clan’s thread in the story. The males are limited to being sperm donors, objects of pity, and comic relief.
Women, women, girls, girls everywhere may be alright in another context, but it isn’t Tolkien. Galadriel was strong in character, and according to Tolkien sparred with the boys, and had special gifts. She is deserving of a prominent role in any production under the byline of Tolkien. But Aragorn, or even Legolas, she is not. Tolkien’s conception for her would parallel the English history of powerful monarchs like Elizabeth I. Elizabeth was wily and shrewd, but not known for her swordplay with the Earl of Essex. An adult Galadriel would use her feminine guile, wisdom, and special powers of foresight to command a situation. Watching this production left me with the idea that this is Tolkien as the women of The View would have him.
We are not viewing Tolkien’s legendarium. In the hands of Payne/McKay, it became another exercise in the modern fixation to turn women into boys with breasts. No wonder transgenderism has gone viral and men seem to be settling into the role that Hollywood has assigned for them – as they are seemingly dropping out of the workforce, marriage, and college in substantial numbers. Will I be watching any more of it? Maybe. I’d be interested in seeing how much further this thing descends into our modern cultural rabbit hole.
Could be, I don’t know. We fellow Boomers weren’t so smart. We rebelled against self-restraint and got a world without self-restraint. Now, a pleasant afternoon stroll in Denver or New York City will be through a smokey haze of people lighting up blunts amid the staccato bursts of drive-bys.
You can’t say that the times are the best for kids. If we aren’t pummeling their future prospects with eco-nuttery and $31 trillion of debt, we are destroying their mental capacities under a barrage of toxic neo-Marxism and a campaign to turn teenage emotional instability into gender dysphoric mutilations. Not only that, with all the cultural poison at their I-phone fingertips, we suffocate their leaning behind masks, plexiglass, social distancing and an end to in-person instruction under the threat of teacher union die-hards. The results? This is the most anti-child era in living memory, if not all time, and I haven’t got to the zealous push to abort them from conception to just before the slap on the back side after exiting the birth canal. Maybe after that too. A few data points are illustrative.
Item #1: ACT Scores dropped to their lowest level in 30 years. The ACT is a snapshot of the mental astuteness of this year’s incoming college freshman class. The shamings, lockdowns, school closures, and kids living their lives in the glow of flat video screens have produced one of the most ill-prepared incoming classes of matriculants. We did it to them under the pseudo-claims of “follow the science” and “experts”. Progressivism’s blind faith in a professional-but-politicized class of bureaucrats led us straight into a dark hole, and an even darker and deeper one for our kids.
And once they get to the ivy-covered walls of state U, more stupidity awaits them. Look at what our isolated hyper-wealthy in the isolation of their hyper-wealthy foundations consider “genius”, a “genius” that will flush through the lecture halls. Item #2: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation released this year’s 25 winners of their no-strings-attached “genius” cash awards ($800,000). They’re left-wing activists. They’re “geniuses” because of it. Really. I don’t know of any veterans of the Young Americans for Freedom or Federalist Society getting the phone call.
The winners check all the preferred boxes of today’s race/gender neurotics. Two-thirds are women and 19 of the 25 were recruited from the so-called “marginalized”, all of the approved biases. No Candice Owens or Winsome Sears (Virginia lt. gov.) types were obviously considered. Somewhere, among the sanctified, you might find someone of the wrong genitalia and melanin count but still certainly, along with the rest, of the right ideological orientation.
Patrisse Colours, Black Lives Matter co-founder and the picture of “intersectionality”, Black/female/Gay.
Patronizing mediocre artists (Amanda Williams) and a chattering class of whiners (Kiese Laymon, etc.) with the title of “genius” will degrade it like “real estate agent” after the collapse and serial fraud in the Florida Land boom in 1926. “Genius” was applied to Reuben Jonathan Miller, U. of Chicago prof and peddler of the “mass incarceration” nonsense. The crusade against “mass incarceration” means “mass decarceration” and is turning many of our neighborhoods into war zones. Thanks “genius”. How many more vapid treatments of anything “indigenous” do we need? Robin Kimmerer serves up another one in “Braiding Sweetgrass”. The more-in-tune-with-nature schtick is an attack on air conditioning, the family mini-van, and the single-family home. This stuff is as old as the hippie commune and is as equally bankrupt. And this makes her a “genius”? The WaPo reporter tried to buck up Kimmerer’s status by writing that her book “has gone from surprise hit to juggernaut bestseller”. No, only if “juggernaut” is 4,474 in Amazon’s rankings (paperback, 1,504 in Kindle, 3,313 in hardcover).
Robin Kimmerer
Are these our educational influencers? These are only geniuses among people who are gullible enough to believe it. As a teacher of 30 years and annually exposed to the blatherings of credentialed activists telling us how to teach, I’ve watched them wilt under even mild cross examination. The phrase “empty suit” was tailored for this type. Yes, they’re empty suits but now they’re also rich “geniuses”. As for the kids, they’re languishing.
Watch Kmele Foster’s excellent observations on the decline in ACT scores, but don’t expect an $800,000 “genius” award for him coming from the MacArthurs. Use the link below.
* “ACT Test Scores Drop to Lowest in 30 Years Following School Closures”, Cheyanne Mumphrey, RealClear Politics, 10/13/2022, at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/10/13/act_test_scores_drop_to_lowest_in_30_years_following_school_closures_148318.html .
* “Meet the new MacArthur ‘genius grant’ winners”, Karen Heller, Washington Post, 10/12/2022, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/12/macarthur-genius-grant-fellows/ .
Have you caught this? Melissa Fleming, U.N. under-secretary-general for global communications, at a recent World Economic Forum (WEF) panel on disinformation declared, “. . . we own the science and we think that the world should know it.” Who’s the “we”? They are the claque sitting atop our cultural commanding heights with their narrow-minded and nearly uniform biases. This is a group who claim the privilege to announce the “science” not because the science says so but because they do (watch Fleming below). On the law, it’s the same approach by the same isolated and mentally constrained practitioners in our law schools – forget about popular sovereignty, federalism, diversity of opinion by state, separation of powers, and even the rule of law. It’s their way or the highway. It’s the rule of arrogance by the same aggrandizing and increasingly undeserving few, not the rule of law or real science.
In that sense, it’s nihilism because this privileged and tiny cluster reject overarching and universal standards which could restrain their actions leaving their biases as the only guidance. Thus, the whole mental state devolves into a naked exercise of power. Reason, logic, morality, constitutional restraints, and the scientific method must bend to their will. It’s the will to power. Ummm, where have we heard that before? (Hint: See Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” on the 1934 National Socialist rally at Nuremburg.)
Fleming goes on to extoll the collaboration of the U.N. with Google to suppress dissenting voices on climate-change orthodoxy as if the only views allowed are those in accord with their prejudice to force conformity to their lifestyle choices. She goes on, “We partnered with Google. For example, if you Google ‘climate change,’ you will, at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of U.N. resources.” She was driven by surprise at the fact that there might be others who disagreed with her: “[We, U.N. officials, were] shocked to see that when we Googled ‘climate change,’ we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top.” Distorted information? Cut to the chase: Disagreeing with her and the Google boardroom and lunchroom is the equivalent of a thoughtcrime.
Bear in mind, I don’t think that there are too many climate scientists filling the ranks of Google or the UN’s communications department. Fleming herself is a graduate of Oberlin College in German Studies and an MA in broadcast journalism, and a penchant for hobnobbing with transnational organizations. For sure, she can rely on a gaggle of scientists corrupted by grants and government subsidies. Meet the nest of Big Global Governance, Big Tech, Big NGO’s, Big Academia, and DC. Remove the pretense and what you have is an end to scientific inquiry if it contradicts the approved dogmas. Just label the insights of those with contrary views “distorted information”, then strip the nonconformists of their positions, tenure, and ability to publish and get notice. Somewhere in a Google search you might find divergent outlooks from the little hivemind, but they’ll be relegated to page 10 and beyond.
Refuseniks in Stalin’s gulags would recount how Stalin “had the power to say what reality is”. Their refusal to accept his omnipotence explains how they ended up as zeks (gulag inmates). Right now, our cultural nomenklatura is content with vocational excommunication and muzzling opposition; though, don’t expect the current cultural junta to remain so “mild” in their punishments for straying from the party line.
The sight of refuseniks to the UN/Google’s grand vision produces the same conniptions in the law school professoriate when confronting originalists on the bench. Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern in his piece “The Supreme Court Is Blowing Up Law School, Too: Inside the growing furor among professors who have had enough” (Oct. 2, 2022) describes a typical reaction:
“When the [Dobbs] decision came down, [UC–Berkeley School of Law professor Khiara Bridges] got a migraine for the first time in a decade. The image of the court as a majestic guardian of liberty was, she concluded, ‘a complete lie.’” Stern continues, “Now [Khiara Bridges] had to teach her students about the work of an institution that made her sick to contemplate. . ..”
These people can’t handle disagreement . . . or maybe it will be tolerated only if the dissenters are ostracized and powerless. Like their ideological cousins in the Big Tech/UN cartel, debate and disagreement is beyond their cognition. They’ve had a jolly good time for the past 70 years with the courts granting carte blanche to the regulation-happy wing of their movement, shunting orthodox Christianity out of public view, limiting legislation to the social preferences of libertine jurists, inventing rights, making eunuchs of state governments and centralizing power in DC, etc. It was their glory days, but jurisprudence didn’t begin or end with Earl Warren and Roe v. Wade. The past 70 years is a blip in history.
These boosters of the rule by judicial oligopoly were ecstatic when the black robes sided with them. They thought it was the end of history. But two recent decisions in particular incensed them: Citizens United (2010) and Dobbs (2022). The first stopped their power grab to curb political speech and the second resuscitated the states’ police powers which are guaranteed in the Constitution’s 10th Amendment. No more can the Constitution be used to silence their political opponents (Citizens United) or prevent a state from responding to the will of its electorate to restrict the wanton destruction of the generations-to-be (Dobbs). Now, the shoe is on the other foot and they’re having a nervous breakdown.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and British Columbia Premier John Horgan sign a climate agreement on Thursday Oct. 6, 2022 at the Presidio in San Francisco. (Photo: California Governor’s Office)
This statist priesthood exerts its control and influence from inner-city, academic, and bicoastal blue redoubts. If you live under their sway, woe will befall you. And it is only getting worse. Heralding more troubled times ahead, doubling down on stupid, the governors of California, Oregon, Washington, and the premiere of Canada’s British Columbia inked an agreement to further impoverish their residents. They promise to impose more greenie energy with its blackouts and escalating rates; more discomfort in herding their populations into impractical EV’s; and more public spending to accelerate the dystopia. Arrogance reaches toxic levels when it is combined with idiocy.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “The Supreme Court Is Blowing Up Law School, Too: Inside the growing furor among professors who have had enough.”, Mark Joseph Stern, Slate, Oct. 2, 2022, at https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/10/supreme-court-scotus-decisions-law-school-professors.html .
* A rebuttal to Stern: “The Emotional Meltdown in American Law Schools”, Dan McClaughlin, National Review Online, Oct. 4, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/the-emotional-meltdown-in-american-law-schools/ .
* Search Wikipedia for “Melissa Fleming” for her background.
* “West Coast leaders sign bold new climate agreement in San Francisco”, Edie Frederick, MSN/KCBS Radio San Francisco, Oct. 6, 2022, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/west-coast-leaders-sign-bold-new-climate-agreement-in-san-francisco/ar-AA12G1J4 .
Michigan Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow enthused about receiving her new electric car (EV) by saying in a June 7 Senate hearing, “I got it [EV] and drove it from Michigan to here [Washington DC] this last weekend and went by every single gas station, and it didn’t matter how high it was.” Adding, “And so I’m looking forward to the opportunity for us to move to vehicles that aren’t going to be dependent on the whims of the oil companies and the international markets.” Well, the Wall Street Journal had eight of its reporters in four countries, most in the U.S., spend three weeks of their lives in reliance on an EV as their principal mode of personal transportation (watch below). One main conclusion: Don’t underestimate the ability of partisan ideology to cloud a senator’s mature judgment. Either that, or she’s lying.
Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat from Michigan, speaks during a hearing in Washington, D.C., US, on Tuesday, June 7, 2022. (Photographer: Sarah Silbiger/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Here’s some takeaways from WSJ’s experiment. First, some of the people with power in the corporate boardroom are looney. Take GM’s Rick Spina, VP of EV Infrastructure. He details three reasons for the shift to EV’s in the industry: (1) “public opinion, public awareness of climate change”; (2) “there’s legislation around the world supporting the move”; and (3) “in the long run, electric vehicles are going to be cheaper to own and operate”. Two of the three reasons are political, not empirical, in nature. The highly touted wave of climate change concern might show in opinion polls, but it hasn’t translated into a rush to the showroom to buy them. Why? They’re impractical . . . as you will see.
Spina’s claim of the supposed rise of “public awareness” in climate change ranks a fourth-place tie with health care behind the economy, immigration, and abortion in a recent University of Massachusetts Amherst survey. And “awareness” doesn’t mean a broad public embrace of the EV as the solution. The public is simply not buying them in sustainable numbers. The climate change concern could just as easily translate into greater support for the increased use of natural gas and nuclear power than a willingness to pay a $10,000-$20,000 premium on a car of limited practicality. GM is making a bet on something that isn’t a clean match with the so-called “awareness”.
#2 in his rationale is purely political. Legislation is politics pure and simple. Politics has never been shown to bring the greatest good to the greatest number. When politics becomes the arbiter to separate winners from losers, life quickly becomes a zero-sum game: some people win only at the expense of others. Boat loads of subsidies, cash, capital, tax preferences, and punishments for making the politically incorrect decision deprive resources to other pleasant and more appealing alternatives. The economic concepts of opportunity costs and tradeoffs explain the reality. People are herded like cattle down the wrong chute, or the chute that they wouldn’t take voluntarily. Free markets do that – operate on voluntarism, that is – but people like Stabenow and her colleagues want to substitute their judgment for ours. The result is the Soviet world of central planning, queuing up, shortages, and junk nobody wants, and no amelioration of “climate change”.
The last of Spina’s justifications is based on hope, the wishful thinking that the things will be cheaper . . . in the future. They might be more affordable if we sink enough government coercion and largesse into them, but remember, you’ll never realize the things that you gave up (after all, the government aborted them before they were allowed to be real) as gazillions are pumped into making the EV work. It’s like taking one step forward and then three steps back in terms of prosperity.
Enough of Spina. Back to the real world. Notice the appearance of “range anxiety”, the worry that you’re running low on juice and may be stranded before you get to a charging station? It’s much more than a shortage of charging stations. It’s the whole technology. More charging stations means more opportunities to wait hours. It might mean spending a Michigan winter night in the car waiting for a station to free up and charge the batteries so you can get to safety. Speaking of those outside temperatures below freezing, those lithium-ion batteries don’t like the cold. They take even longer to charge. And don’t forget, the batteries that power the wheels energize the heater element and blower to keep you and your kids from hypothermia. More anxiety. A 10-hour trip quickly became 30-hour one.
Which brings up another matter: “gaming” the technology to get more range out of it. What does that mean? You’ve got to turn off all systems to free up more power to the wheels making for an interesting experience driving from LA to Las Vegas in 100+ degree weather on Interstate 15, not to mention a winter drive up the MIchigan peninsula. Range anxiety is instantly transformed into survival anxiety.
Another interesting aside is the identification of EV success with tyrannical regimes, like Red China, the only place with fewer complaints in the test. It makes sense for a system whose stock-and-trade is social engineering. The politburo can simply order an all-EV existence, no great surprise for a Big Brother regime controlling individual conscience, religion, massive surveillance of the population, and genocide, with a gargantuan secret police to make it all happen. Pushing EV’s is small potatoes. But still, if you watch closely, the air is filthy as an American auto exec in China is driven around Shanghai or Beijing. The totalitarians may be shoving their people out of gas cars, but they aren’t so deluded as to think that windmills and solar panels will be sufficient to charge the all-electric things. They are a prime customer for American coal. Imagine, if you will, EV traffic jams in polluted air basins. Has anything about climate really changed?
Beijing in 2015
The WSJ report proved that the EV is almost purely an urban artifact. They’re great for people who live their lives within the city limits running errands. Get out on the open road and range and survival anxiety overhangs the excursion. Plus, unsurprisingly, the published 250–300-mile range is a fantasy. Due to weather and the use of the car’s other system’s such as cabin climate and entertainment, the purported range evaporates. All of this doesn’t matter to a person whose idea of a road trip is to the airport. The EV is a car for a strictly urban life. Outside of that, life is riskier in it.
That’s why some participants in the test suggested a gas-powered car to supplement the EV. So, in Stabenow’s version of the proper life, a one-car purchase is suddenly a two-car purchase. For a family struggling to make ends meet in an existence crafted by Stabenow’s policies, a $40,000 compact EV requires an additional $30,000 fossil fuel sedan if the family wants to have a vacation and family visits beyond the city limits. Maybe in the millionaires’ club called the U.S. Senate, living in domiciles with multi-car garages, having two SUV’s in both modes is pro forma. For the rest of us reeling from inflation, crime, high taxes, rampant homelessness, skyrocketing housing costs, spikes in utility costs, poor schools, and transgenderism threatening to change the lives of our kids forever, an additional car purchase to make the first one practical is lunacy.
That’s why one of the reporters exclaimed in a sigh of relief after the test that “Fumes never smelled so sweet.” First, watch the video if you’re inclined to heed the advice of Gavin Newsom. Don’t say that you haven’t been warned.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Michigan Democrat brags about driving expensive electric car to DC, avoiding gas stations amid historic prices”, Jessica Chasmar, Fox News, at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/michigan-democrat-electric-car-expensive-dc-gas-prices .
* “Poll: Economy, Immigration Top List of Most Important 2022 Election Issues”, Hannah Bleau, Breitbart, May 14, 2022, at https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/05/14/poll-economy-immigration-top-list-of-most-important-2022-election-issues/ .
* “Running on Fumes”, Heather Wilhelm, National Review, Sept, 29, 2022, at fumes/https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/10/17/running-on-fumes/ .
* “Pollution prompts 2nd Beijing “red alert” in a month”, CBS News, Dec. 18, 2015, at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-second-smog-red-alert-beijing-air-pollution-in-month/ .
Today, the word “politician” is considered foul language in political discourse. Well, what about “revolutionary”? If you are repelled by politicians, what do you get when uncompromising ideological activists are swept into power? These people are defined by a radical vision to transform your life. We’ve seen this before, and it isn’t pretty. And the Democratic Party is in the grip of it. Biden lied in Philadelphia, September 1, for the threat isn’t coming from “MAGA Republicans”. He needs to look at himself and those running the show in his party.
2022 is starting to resemble 1793 in more ways than one. France, in a maelstrom of revolution since 1789, was divided between those who favored a constitutional monarchy in the mode of Britain, those who wanted to rip the Ancien Régime (Old Regime) of divine right and aristocracy, root and branch, out of the country, and a mushy middle that shifted between the two. It’s the beginning of our commonplace political jargon of right/center/left.
Jacobins on the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror
Today’s Democratic Party has evolved into 1793’s The Montagnard (The Mountain) of the legislative National Convention in Paris. The Left of the revolution clustered in the seats high up in the chamber and used the Jacobin Club to gather and plot. Quickly, they succeeded in gaining control of the Convention and set the country on the path to the Reign of Terror. The similarity between the Democratic Party of today and the Montagnards isn’t in the advocacy of a bloodbath but in their radical dream of a refashioned society. The people of our modern Left, like the protégés of Robespierre, aren’t content with tinkering and adjustments – no “politicians” need apply – but in radical transformations in everything from the definition of male and female to the meaning of infanticide. Traditional institutions are to be steamrolled and constitutional checks-and-balances obliterated. Make no mistake about it. They’re advocating a revolution.
This is a political party, if given unitary control of our federal government, that would make our country unrecognizable. Rattle off their agenda: out goes the filibuster and in comes the rule of momentary majorities to rock the country between extremes; in comes court packing and a Supreme Court to rubber stamp the revolution; the Equality Act which would pit the federal government against Bible-based Christianity and anyone who would seek its guidance on matters of marriage, faith, morals, and family; the requisition and creation of huge sums of money to fund the revolution (Build Back Better), inflation be damned; a pseudo-ecotopia to destroy our way of life; say goodbye to a border; say hello to easy to vote and easy to cheat (For the People Act); the equity crusade to indoctrinate our kids and dole out rewards by race and other politically favored identities; the unleashing of crime under “restorative justice” and equity schemes; the passage of the “Women’s Health Protection Act” to green light all abortions up to birth and force conscientious objectors out of the medical profession; the single-minded pursuit of “gender affirming care” to practice chemical infertility and sex-change surgeries on our children — without parental consent; a general disarming of the public and demonization of the firearms industry; . . . . And this is what they’ve publicly announced.
How could a suburban soccer mom endorse this kind of thing? If truth be told, she probably doesn’t, but they hear something about the Dobbs decision ending all abortions and unknowingly end up voting for our modern Montagnards’ agenda. They don’t know any better because our mainstream, legacy media is complicit in hiding the agenda’s dark side.
Take for instance the Washington Post’s fact-checking guru, Glenn Kessler. He felt compelled to correct Marco Rubio’s legitimate contention that the Democrats’ “Women’s Health Protection Act” (WHPA) would authorize abortion up to birth. In truth, Kessler doesn’t correct Rubio. The woman’s “health” provision in the Act would encompass “all factors physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age” (Supreme Court in Doe v. Bolton) to sanction abortion throughout the pregnancy. Late-term abortion would be codified. Instead, the WaPo’s intrepid reporter tried to undercut Rubio’s statement by mentioning something that Rubio never said. Kessler goes on a tangent about the rarity of such abortions. That’s not Rubio’s point! The Act grants carte blanche to any “health care provider”, whether it be a midwife, nurse, or doctor, to approve the ending of the life of a fully formed baby if they judge it to be a threat to the broadly defined “health” of the mother. The number of such abortions is irrelevant. The WHPA sanctions an act that should shock the conscience of any normal human being.
But when you’re in a fevered pitch for revolution, “normal” is an enemy to the desired ends. Revolutionaries don’t want normal. The Montagnard of the Democratic Party want a radical change in everything about us: our self-perception, social and economic arrangements, and political institutions. This is a thoroughgoing revolution, totalitarian in scope. This is what is on the November ballot. Punching a ballot next to a Democrat candidate is an endorsement of much more than the person.
“Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true.” Whoever first coined the quip was onto something.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “The GOP claim that Democrats support abortion ‘up to moment of birth’”, Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post, Sept. 22, 2022, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/22/gop-claim-that-democrats-support-abortion-up-moment-birth/ .
* “Questions for Glenn Kessler on Late-Term Abortion”, John McCormack, National Reivew, Sept, 22, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/09/questions-for-glenn-kessler-on-late-term-abortion/ .
* “If the Dems Win It All”, John McCormack, National Review, Sept. 15, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/10/03/if-the-dems-win-it-all/
Karine Jean-Pierre, Pres. Biden’s press secretary, tries to explain away Biden’s search for a knowingly deceased congresswoman.
Watch buffoons in the national media and the upper rungs of the government sound technocratic, which means that they claim to be the inheritors of the “science”, the “experts”, and the “best and brightest” from our academic bubbles in the grip of, truth be told, cultural extremism. And watch our life get measurably worse.
Politics corrupts judgment, and no more fevered environment exists than one just before an election. Today, the word “transition” is employed to hide many sins. Just a week ago, Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s press secretary, announced, “. . . what we are seeing . . . is a transition to a more steady and stable growth.” Transition frequently crosses her lips on nearly everything that could foretell troubled times ahead. Biden, the donkey party powerful, and blue-state potentates are also especially fond of the word. It’s their current favorite to sound wise.
The jargon is a reflex of progressivism. Progressivism built its reputation on replacing the compromises, clashing interests, “smoke-filled rooms”, and bargaining of messy democracy with the credentialed “expert”. They actually believed that society can be managed by fine-tuning, like a technician adjusting an old-style carburetor. A little turn of the fiscal and regulatory screw here and there and bliss will be upon us. So, if fighting climate change and pursuing social justice (ergo blatant racial favoritism) are your goals, an agency of degreed “experts” and appropriate decrees from on high will seamlessly float the people in the right direction without pain. It’s all a bunch of hooey.
Hundreds of millions of free souls will not be rigidly controlled by a claque of government employees who lack the humility of admitting that they don’t know half as much as they claim, and a good portion of what they do know is wrong. The economist Friedrich Hayek warned of the inherent “knowledge problem” in government. It’s playing out before our eyes.
“Transition” conceals a troubling winter. Fuel prices normally experience seasonal gyrations, but the Biden people raised the water level of those fluctuations by over half. Prices undulate at a rate of 50% to 100% over a year or two ago. Be prepared for a jump in electricity rates this winter on the east coast, Northeast, and other blue bubbles, which is not surprising given that they are most enthusiastic about rule by “expert” – all according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, an agency that is limited to measuring reality, and not to be confused with the “experts” of the climate change and equity freakouts.
“Transition” is often coupled with “soft landing”. President Clinton caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar, once parsed on the meaning of “is” in his perjury before a federal grand jury. The same is true for the treatment of “transition” and “soft landing” by the gaggle of progressives dominating the regime. The words are rhetorical cosmetic surgery for probable layoffs and business retrenchment. You don’t have to look far for proof. The economy only recently reached its pre-pandemic total employment numbers, which doesn’t take into account population growth. The laggard pace of employment screws up the unemployment rate. Vigorous job growth coming out of a shutdown by government fiat isn’t surprising. But a 3.7% unemployment rate out of a pool of adults shrunk by huge numbers opting out of the workforce makes the unemployment number almost superfluous.
Retrenchment is in the winds. Big Tech and others are beginning to trim some fat. Meta, Twilio, and Snap are jettisoning workers. Gap, Boeing, and Walmart are lopping administrative overhead. Real estate is taking a big hit as Wells Fargo, RE/MAX, and Redfin cut employees and agents as the Fed raises interest rates to combat another Fed-induced problem: inflation. And Biden and company still want to fight inflation – too much money chasing too few goods – by amazingly throwing more money at it. Never has a fire been successfully fought by pouring jet fuel on it.
Local businesses are hard it. The 2020 summer of riots didn’t help. Downtowns resemble ghost towns. Cities can’t proclaim a welcome mat for business when the sidewalks are open sewers and wanton theft, even serial assault, are ho-hum to district attorneys. Now we get to the cultural dimensions of “transition” and “soft landing”.
“Transition” to an “equity” society entails racial discrimination (against Asians and white males), lawlessness, crime victims, property destruction, XY-chromosome girls in XX-chromosome girls sports, and extremist indoctrination (eco-cultism, CRT, transgenderism, socialism) in the schools. No place is safe from the transitioners, not the home, not parenthood. Listen to Nikole Hannah-Jones – a symbol of the intersectionality of Black, female, and extremist cultural revolutionary – expounding on the danger of parents having a say in their children’s education (see below). It encapsulates the foolishness of “transition” and “soft landing” by “experts”.
Dropping the pretense of deceptive verbiage would be a great start. The so-called reformers are revolutionaries and should be forced to lay out their vision of how to create the new person for their new world. It’s totalitarian in scope. They need to lay their cards on the table so we are aware that the “soft landing” will be hard and brutal, as all such movements have proven to be. It won’t end well.
RogerG
Read more here:
* The U.S. Energy Information Agency’s electricity rate forecast of Sept. 7, 2022 can be found at https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/electricity.php .
* Jim Geraghty of National Review wrote an excellent piece on the subject in “The Economy Is Starting to Buckle”, National Review Online, Sept, 26, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-economy-is-starting-to-buckle/ .
* The normally suspect Bloomberg News announced the achievement of the employment milestone In “Employment in US Has Finally Exceeded Its Pre-Pandemic Level” at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-02/employment-in-us-has-finally-exceeded-its-pre-pandemic-level?leadSource=uverify%20wall .
Thomas Sowell: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” (Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles)
Dead fish on the shore of Lake Merritt, an estuary of San Francisco Bay.
Sowell is right, and it’s playing out in California’s San Francisco Bay. The Bay is beginning to resemble a toxic waste dump. One of the chief culprits is Heterosigma akashiwo, an organism responsible for one of the biggest threats to aquatic life in the Bay. It feeds on wastewater rich in nitrogen and phosphorous which streams into the Bay from the area’s sewage treatment plants and storm drains. The subsequent algae bloom suffocates the natural plant and animal life in these waters. One would think that the millions and billions shoveled out to fashionable victims’ groups (illegal immigrants, etc.), abortion tourism (anyone from anywhere gets an all-expenses-paid trip to end unborn life on the California taxpayers’ dime), the dole, and the Sierra Club’s greenie utopia could be redirected to cleaning up the Bay. Sorry, in this case, ecotopia cancels real ecology, the ecology of the Bay. A classic tradeoff: eco-calamity in exchange for the progressives’ dreamland.
Birds float on an algal bloom in the Bay near Berkeley. (photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle)An algal bloom at Lake Merritt in Oakland. (photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle)
That’s right, a tradeoff is actually about how one thing subsidizes another. Not covertly, but in reality. More money for one thing is less money available for something else, like updating and maintaining the area’s sewage treatment plants, and getting the region’s homeless off the streets and keeping them from turning the sidewalks, gutters, and storm drains into a huge open toilet. That stuff gets directly flushed into the Bay. And they used to say about Mexico, “Don’t drink the water.”
The Bay area’s descent into pre-modern times is what the residents unknowingly – and maybe knowingly – voted for. They chose in their elections to be distracted by a progressive pseudo-nirvana and into boom-and-bust electricity, and therefore blackouts, massive wildfires from eco-crazed forestry practices, and decaying infrastructure in everything from some of the nation’s worst roads to its overburdened aqueducts and empty reservoirs. Eco-nirvana makes it easy to pillage public safety in campaigns to defund the police – oh, I mean “reform the police”. Crime spikes and smash-and-grabs frighten retailers out of the state. The regulatory strangulation of the state’s housing industry has created a supply for the 20 million of the 60’s and not the 39.2 million (and rapidly declining) of today. This was a broad political choice to trade prosperity for devolution. The classic tradeoff.
Pedestrians walk near a pothole at McCadden Place and 4th Street in Hancock Park, from Los Angeles Times article titled “Road conditions in L.A. region judged worst in country”. (photo: Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
Don’t blame “climate change”. Be honest, the science is unsettled, and, anyway, California can’t do squat about it. 2.8 billion in India and China, and their cheap electricity, cancels the Golden State’s mere 39 million (and rapidly declining) and its EV’s and expensive and unreliable juice. It’s amazing that Newsom retains approvals in the 90’s among the state’s Democrats, who easily double the registration share of Republicans in the state. Lunacy is popular.
The cause of the Bay’s aquatic predicament is something very simple: If you’re going to have 7.75 million people packed around the Bay, an upgraded sewage treatment system is a necessity to match the 2 million flushing toilets and the expansive open-air john that is the preferred choice of its huge drug-addled, mentally disturbed constituency on the streets and in the parks. Don’t hold your breath waiting for something benign to happen. The necessary upgrades could double or triple property taxes and water rates. There’s one thing that these people are: they are overwhelmingly lefties, yes, but they like to keep as much of their money as anyone on the farm. They are already the most heavily taxed population in the nation, if not the planet. On top of everything else, I don’t think they’ll be in a mood to be taxed into the poorhouse, which is what will have to happen if they are to have their eco pseudo-heaven and a healthy Bay.
Something will have to give. How about exchanging some of the eco-nuttiness and giveaways for a healthier Bay? Sorry, San Francisco and California, you can’t suspend tradeoffs, or have it both ways, unless you’re in the mood for rapid depopulation. People still have to balance checking accounts.
You can read more on the issue here:
* Read about the decline of the Bay at “Poop and pee fueled the huge algae bloom in San Francisco Bay. Fixing the problem could cost $14 billion”, San Francisco Chronicle, Tarra Duggan, Sept. 5, 2022, at https://archive.ph/hAhrn#selection-137.0-137.104.
* Further reading on the problem can be found at “Wastewater, Not Climate, Fueled Massive Algae Bloom in ‘Epicenter of Supposed Environmentalism’”, Ryan Mills, National Review, Sept. 23, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/wastewater-not-climate-fueled-massive-algae-bloom-in-epicenter-of-supposed-environmentalism/.
* An account of San Francisco’s descent can be read at “San Francisco’s Slow-Motion Suicide”, Michael Gibson, founder of the venture-capital 1517 Fund, National Review, April 8, 2019, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/san-francisco-decline-failed-government-policies/.
* California’s designation as having the nation’s worst roads (tied with DC) can be found in “These States Have the Worst Roads”, US News and World Report, Dec. 4, 2020, at https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2020-12-04/these-states-have-the-worst-roads-in-america.
San Francisco 49ers safety Tashaun Gipson Sr. (31) celebrates after intercepting the football against the Seattle Seahawks during the second quarter at Levi’s Stadium on Sept. 18, 2022. (photo: Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports)Los Angeles Skid Row in recent photographSanta Cruz, Ca., homeless encampmentSan Francisco homeless encampmentA homeless encampment along 112th Street Southwest in Everett, Wa., near Seattle. (photo: Mike Siegel / The Seattle Times)
Probably due to past loyalty, I sat down to watch the San Francisco 49ers v. Seattle Seahawks game last Sunday (SF won 27-7); however, I must admit that my enthusiasm for professional sports has waned. I can’t remove from my mind Big Sports’ enrollment in the radical left. Neither can I erase the images of these two cities’ decline into urban chaos, as is true of most of the other NFL home cities. These cities willingly chose that path. A smothering cloud of ideologically driven misrule overhangs the stadium crowd, the broadcast, and the team organizations. With few exceptions, the NFL schedule has turned into a series of Dystopia Bowls: one team booster of the radical left agenda from a radical left dystopia playing another with an identical image.
I didn’t politicize the sport. Previously, I had no clue about the political leanings of those composing the team organizations and the league, and didn’t care. As for the cities, they upheld for the most part some sense of decency. Not anymore. The sport concerned itself, pure and simple, with athletic competition at the highest level. Not anymore.
How did the NFL and their urban homes allow themselves to descend into such depravity? The movie “All the President’s Men” made popular the modern cynic’s favorite principle: “Follow the money”. That’s not true by a long shot. If you want to accurately follow the course of human events, “Follow the ideas”. It’s how we got to a compromised NFL and today’s unlivable cities.
It begins with one word: Socialism. Yes, that word, a rhetorical vessel wherein the perennial hopes and dreams of human betterment can be realized, despite its track record of abysmal failure. Its oppressed/oppressor dialectic is so appealing that it escapes any final verdict on its failure. It’s the vampire that won’t stay dead.
In one sense, what began with Marx and Engels, passed through the 60’s New Left, and would end up in today’s BLM, Antifa, college campuses everywhere, and the Democratic Party platform. In the good ‘ol days of the 19th century Socialist International, the oppressed was the industrial revolution’s urban working class (proletariat). But the dreams of revolution by the proletariat fizzled and where they did succeed in a takeover, it was a litany of nightmares: 100 million deaths in the 20th century by one accounting of a group of French historians in The Black Book of Communism.
Yet, something happened on the way to the collectivist Emerald City of Oz to keep the flame burning. Two things: new groups auditioned for the roles of oppressor (the white patriarchy) and oppressed (minorities and a plethora of hypothetical outcasts), and the real threat was said to come from an abstract “system”. And voilà, new life was breathed into the disgraced Marx.
The home of The Frankfurt School in Frankfurt, Germany, in the 1930’s.
Pointing the way were disgruntled Marxists ensconced in what came to be called the Frankfurt School. They followed the line of thought of Antonio Gramsci who tried to explain away the reluctance of workers to be enthusiasts of revolution by pinning the blame on “cultural hegemony” – the values, mores, institutions, and ways of life that keep them supposedly docile. In modern lingo, synonyms would be “the man”, “the system”, or “the establishment”. Inspired by Gramsci’s gambit, European activist academics banded together and formed the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, which would later be dubbed The Frankfurt School. Hitler, however, set them packing in the 1930’s. Many of them made their way to the United States – the Frankfurt School set up shop in New York City – to eventually take up academic posts to proselytize the American young in their babble.
Antonio Gramsci
Theordor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, et al, and the risible Herbert Marcuse lent their thoughts and encouragement to the burgeoning 60’s counterculture and the extremist New Left to continue the erosion of the foundations of western civilization. The physical consequences were plagues of drugs and STD’s. The political offshoots were the SDS, Weather Underground, Black Panthers, Symbionese Liberation Army, etc. Crime and urban riots erupted, and campuses were paralyzed in protest and violence. It would appear that the trail of these ideas is one of tears. Some liberals were shocked into neo-conservatism by the 1970’s and 1980’s.
Herbert Marcuse
Once again, disaster, and, once again, someone will appear to pick up the torch to fling it. It’s proof that gullibility like the poor will always be with us. In our social media world, glibness reigns supreme in the form of stitching together words into appealing quips that remain just as erroneous as they did before. The glibness of the BLM politburo, Nikole Hannah-Jones (the lead founder behind the intellectually bankrupt The 1619 Project), Bernie, the Biden crowd, the CRT demagogues, AOC and her Squad, and the big wheels of the Democratic Party can only put lipstick on a pig and cannot with a wave of the hand turn the porcine beast into Miss Universe. I don’t believe in shapeshifting. Do you?
Today is different, though. Whereas before, the nuttiness infected the fringes of society, only occasionally bursting forth to wreak havoc. Today, it’s everywhere and especially among the those who occupy the commanding heights of the culture. Why does big business from Major League Baseball to Coca-Cola to Delta Airlines to Disney risk alienating two-thirds of their customer base, unless they actually believe this bunk? There must be something more at work than fear of the race hustlers’ shakedown racket.
Rudi Dutschke, a German missionary of the 60’s New Left, pointed the way by espousing a “long march through the institutions”. He elaborated, “Revolution is a long complicated process in which people have to change.” He meant to shove aside and replace established civil society and government. But others realized that a root-and-branch approach wasn’t necessary, that today’s unkept radicals in blue jeans could be tomorrow’s tenured staff in tweed. Welcome to your kid’s nest of revolution, errr, college.
Rudi Dutschke
Simply put, the barbarians at the gates became the barbarians inside the gates. Lo and behold, the neo-socialism is dogma among the beautiful people residing in their super-zip code (Martha’s Vineyard, Chappaqua, NY, Atherton, Ca., Malibu, Ca., etc.), any place where hyper-wealth screens people from the consequences of their beliefs. Of course, part of the uniform for this new aristocracy is a degree from a legacy university, preferably Ivy League. They have all the outward signs of manners and outlook of a college pedigree, and the inward signs of proper breeding in fealty to the dogma. The Fortune 500 is no longer the Republican Party at work. It’s an alumni booster club for the neo-socialism of the campus.
The minions of this new privilege infiltrate beyond the boardroom and into all positions of power and influence. Since FDR made DC into the new Rome, and swelled its politico-cultural influence beyond the District and into the surrounding states of Maryland and Virginia, the neo-socialism has at its disposal the aggrandized power of the federal government. Any popular threat to its monopoly can be squashed under the banner of another German rhetorical import: streitbare Demokratie, or defensive democracy. It normally shows up as censorship. It’s the speech control in “hate” and “extremist” statutes and regulations in the European Union, UK, Austria, Germany, etc. You hear it out of the mouths of Pelosi, Schumer, Biden in “defending our democracy”, which is code for thought control by pasting contrary views with “misinformation”. Biden has attempted an institutionalization of the censorship by creating “misinformation” ministries in his administration, all stymied as of now.
Pres. Biden’s speech in Philadelphia on Sept. 1, 2022, branded “MAGA Republicans” dangerous “extremists”.
Streitbare demokratie seeks to freeze in amber the gains of the long march of neo-socialism through the institutions. The effects are physically observable in viral gender confusions among the young, uninhabitable downtowns, a plague of crime, radical indoctrination of the young, an ecotopia that forcibly reverts life back to medieval times, and a crumbling infrastructure that can’t deliver safe roads, sewers, water, or affordable and reliable electricity. Hillsides aflame, high taxes, inflation, and gargantuan government waste characterize life in this “democracy”. It’s like the decay of Rome in the 5th and 6th centuries after repeated barbarian conquests and misrule. Soon, much of the place is abandoned only to fall into rubble, to be later uncovered by the new field of 19th century archeology. Is that the fate of New York City, Baltimore, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, et al?
A late 19th century photo of ancient ruins in Rome. Or could it be today’s Seattle or San Francisco?
The stench of watching it unfold in real time overpowers the senses. The knowledge of the occurrence overwhelms any enjoyment of watching a football game. Sorry.
RogerG
Sources:
* An account of the super-zip codes can be read here: “Super ZIPs: New map reveals who is part of the rich ‘isolated elite”, Deseret News, Nov. 18, 2013, at https://www.deseret.com/2013/11/18/20529811/super-zips-new-map-reveals-who-is-part-of-the-rich-isolated-elite#:~:text=In%20the%20Wall%20Street%20Journal%20and%20his%20book%2C,5%2010514%3A%20Chappaqua%2C%20N.Y.%20%28New%20York%20City%20area%29
* A rudimentary internet search of “streitbare Demokratie”, Rudi Dutschke, The Frankfurt School, the guiding lights of the School, Antonio Gramsci, will shed light on today’s neo-socialism.
Here’s a story for you. University of South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley refuses to admit that she was mistaken in recently cancelling her team’s basketball games with BYU. In a statement to a reporter, she said, “I continue to stand by my position.”
Dawn Staley, University of South Carolina women’s basketball coach
Why cancel games with BYU? Staley was reacting to a charge by a Duke University volleyball player, Rachel Richardson, who claimed some BYU fans heckled her with racial slurs. An exhaustive review by BYU of all available video and audio recordings and interviews with over 50 nearby spectators uncovered no evidence of the insults. Still, Staley refuses to back down. Why cling to an unfounded decision in spite of the evidence? She isn’t the only one. Lately, over at least a decade, and more incidents recently, we’ve gone through mass derangements over climate change, systemic racism, and COVID. Facts don’t matter. Despite, or maybe because of, trillions spent on education and the most intense networks of information ever devised, we seem not to be particularly inoculated from mass psychosis.
Investors should be aware of this thing called mass psychosis, typically referred to as mass formation psychosis. It happens in markets and occurs anywhere a large group of interconnected people exists. One source defined it in the following way:
“Psychosis is when people lose some contact with reality. Mass formation psychosis is when a large part of a society focuses its attention to a leader(s) or a series of events and their attention focuses on one small point or issue. Followers can be hypnotized and be led anywhere, regardless of data proving otherwise. A key aspect of the phenomena is that the people they identify as the leaders – the one’s that can solve the problem or issue alone – they will follow that leader(s) regardless of any new information or data. Furthermore, anybody who questions the leader’s narrative are attacked and disregarded.” (Source: see below)
Evidence, proof, and real scientific inquiry are abandoned. Take the long-running issue of climate change with the adjective “apocalyptic” added for good measure. Beyond the reasonable assertion on the contribution of CO2 and fossil fuels, much else strays into the realm of speculation or mysticism. So many other questions on the subject – other contributing factors, their interplay, and impacts – cannot be answered with reasonable certainty, unless pure ideological bias qualifies for seasoned judgment. How’s that any different from the Heaven’s Gate cult? Besides, flagellating the most fuel efficient and clean society on the planet – ours – is pointless as over 2.8 billion people in China and India discover the joys of rising incomes, air conditioning, and affordable transportation. All made possible from the majesty of fossil fuels.
Biden’s Climate Special Envoy, John Kerry, disembarks his private jet.
John Kerry is paid by us to jet around the world to cajole foreign rulers whose interests do not align with his fellow comfortable elites in their super-zip estates. He must be seen by them as a clown to be tolerated, maybe indulged a bit for photo-ops, but otherwise ignored.
John Kerry’s model is California. The cliché has it that California leads the way to the future. Maybe so, if that future is characterized by a mass psychosis in the mysticism of climate change. The rest of the country gets a bird’s-eye view of that fate. The state’s grid has been turned into a health hazard as the landscape dries out from the dry-summer climate’s periodic droughts. The state has made it difficult for anyone to clean out the surface debris in its wildlands, and 100 million dead trees await a spark. And eventually one will be provided by nature or from one of the state’s many urchins from its urban chaos.
The same psychosis that has turned the state into a fire trap is utterly destroying any concept of reliable, affordable energy. The altar of wind and solar isn’t a sensible means to appease Gaia. They are intermittent by nature, which strains the grid. Power lines are made for steady streams of electricity, not the boom and bust that is endemic in sunlight and bursts of air movement. Any grid under this steady strain breaks down if not assiduously maintained, which it isn’t. It just so happens, though, that California experiences an annual 5-month dry spell, alongside its endemic droughts, for the ruptures to send thousands fleeing the attendant flames hoping that they have enough charge in their EV to escape death-by-firestorm.
A California driver fleeing the Camp Fire in Paradise, Ca., in 2018.
But don’t let the facts get in the way.
California is a self-made disaster. Their infatuation with air movement and sunlight energy has unknowingly made them dependent on steady-stream sources – fossil fuel, co-gen, hydro, nuclear – to buck up the losses from the night and calm days. But the state is busy torpedoing most of this backbone. Co-gen is mostly irrelevant. For the state’s ruling class, natural gas and coal are the devil’s brew. Hydro is undermined by eco-mandates for steady stream flows that has helped to turn the state’s reservoirs into puddles. Don’t only blame the drought. Every year is not a drought year, and no effort is made to store during the wetter times. Riparian habitats and dreams of the return of ancient salmon runs checkmate any other use.
The state’s dams have become the equivalent of Egypt’s pyramids. They are monumental but, as opposed to the pyramids, aren’t likely to attract many visitors three-quarters empty. The same fate has befallen the state’s two nuclear power plants: San Onofre and Diablo Canyon. Delayed maintenance while the state bullied the utilities into greenie fantasies put the kibosh to San Onofre, which cost the state 2.2 gigawatts of power. Diablo Canyon was scheduled for death in 2025. Blackouts have forced the state’s ruling party to back down on that one. How long? Well, it’ll probably remain open until the next spate of wet years gin up hydro for awhile, waiting for the next dry spell to once again reasserts itself to overtax the seas of solar panels and vast windmill forests that mar a once beautiful state. It’s a cycle of futility buttressed by a mass psychosis: a mystical belief in horrors that fact, reason, and science cannot dispel.
A truck crosses a bridge over the shrinking Lake Oroville, the headwaters of the California Water Project, in a photo from July 2022.
None of this matters one twit to the zealots who run the state. Evidence be damned. Electoral majorities in the state are in the grip of a mass mania that jettisons all reason and fact. All that remains is blackouts, skyrocketing electricity rates, hillsides aflame, and no effect on climate change.
Would it be better to simply enjoy the extended growing season and build more nuclear and low-emission power plants to enjoy the glories of air conditioning? Regardless, India and China will see to it that CO2 emissions continue to glut the atmosphere with or without the ministrations of John Kerry or the ladies on The View.
Climate change isn’t the only opportunity to go crazy. We have another one in “systemic racism”. What is systemic racism? Does it exist? Hard to say since “systemic” means that it is hidden and therefore not directly observable. Thus, we have to rely on others to simply announce its existence as they make an affluent living on their soothsaying.
The racism “experts” are actually grifters. Racial disparities occur in all sorts of areas such as incarceration rates, educational outcomes, birth rates, marriage, incomes, and social status. Thus, they insist that racism persists, but not in the Jim Crow way: obvious, in-your-face, and therefore open to rational inquiry. It’s easier for them to proclaim that the disparities are the proof of racism, even though they haven’t proven it, because they can’t, because the imprecision of the thing makes it immune to empirical testing (falsifiability). The “ghost in the machine” kind of thing. Instead, they claim to possess the special gnosis to expose it and how to remediate it as they go to the bank with thousands, if not millions, in book sales, consultant fees, and speeches. A new industry of charlatans is born. It’s as if astrology and the four humors in medicine are making a comeback.
Kimberle Crenshaw
The parallels with medieval medicine are glaring. People in earlier times noticed that fevers were reduced by bleeding a patient. The ancient Greek philosopher Galen and his four-humors paradigm was proven correct, or so they thought. It was, however, the classic post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc fallacy at work: two events occur sequentially with the first one assumed to be the cause. For our current race hustlers – Kimberle Crenshaw, Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DeAngelo, et al – systemic racism is proven by unequal outcomes by race. Poor educational outcomes on assessment tests by race, for instance, must mean that the test and its providers are “systemically” racist. It’s tantamount to saying, “Fever fell after bleeding, and patient is cured.” It’s nonsense.
Still, two full seasons after the death of George Floyd, “End Racism” dons the helmets of some NFL players. Viewers and our kids are barraged by the effort to ferret out something mysteriously within them and lurking in everything that surrounds them. It’s tantamount to the 17th century Salem witch trials in the modern form of a bogeyman in a Klan outfit.
The whole campaign rides on the inequalities in academic measures by race. The cause is presumed – racism – but only because “family structure” is excluded. Kids swim around in social circumstances that have greater impact on academic performance than melanin count or more money in the bank accounts of the NEA membership. Commissioned by the US Office of Education in 1966, the Coleman Report levelled a blow at the ego of the education industry’s special interests when it concluded, “. . . the inequalities imposed on children by their home, neighborhood, and peer environment are carried along to become the inequalities with which they confront adult life at the end of school.” Yep, chaotic home life and slums have greater bearing on admission to MIT than school funding, teacher salaries, and the racism bogeyman. But you won’t find outcomes by family structure anywhere in the various measures. Strange. You’ll see math, reading, and science scores by race, gender, ethnicity, economic status, etc., but nary a word about the home.
Chicago police at a crime scene comforting a child in a photo taken in 2020.
The missing link between the social measures and their cause is never filled with anything resembling empirical proof. Unequal stats by race are said to automatically point to racism. That’s it, and we’re off to the races to follow the “experts” in the secret gnosis. COVID gave to us another example of the same phenomena: trust the “experts” to fill the gap between a development and its treatment.
Filling the shoes of Kimberle Crenshaw, one of the overpaid founders of CRT, is Dr. Fauci and his peers in government, the NGO’s, many in BIG Pharma, Democratic Party potentates, et al. The lockdowns, school closures, mandatory masking, social distancing, the vaccine decrees, the overall suffocation of a society, were persistently avowed without a real scientific basis. Other approaches to maintain the functioning of civilization and protect the vulnerable were treated to covert and tacit censorship. Therapeutics, targeting safeguards on those with certain health conditions, natural immunity, the costs to children, the canceled or forgone medical appointments, the strain on a population quarantined in the four walls of their home (many more walls if you live in the super-zips), and the huge economic losses from the waterboarding of work and production were shunted aside in a mad rush to stamp out the virus, the very opposite of “follow the science”.
Once the “experts” had their foot on the pedal, they never let up, in spite of the growing evidence that they were prescribing a suicide pill. By summer 2020, it was widely established that the young ran little risk. So, forcing kids into filthy masks and into isolation behind plexiglass in schools that opened their doors was more than pointless. It was harmful. The schools most beholden to the blinkered “experts” were in Democrat strongholds, the inner cities, and they closed the longest. The academic performance gap morphed into a Grand Canyon. To no great surprise, the principal victims of this enthusiastic pursuit of school lockdowns and other tortures were minorities, putting a lie to “black lives matter”, especially for young ones.
Data began to stumble out that the states who were the most religious in following Fauci and CDC mysticism fared no better than those who were more agnostic about what Florida’s Gov. DeSantis called “Fauciism” (see below). Claims were made by our health elites in power that the lockdowns, masking, social distancing, school closures, mandatory vaccines, et al, would “stop the spread” or “bend the curve” when one of the tiniest things in biology and profusely evolving – a virus – will in all likelihood evade the best laid plans of mice and men. Their interventions were heralded as the holy grail and natural immunity was ridiculed. Two years after the pandemic’s onset, we’re still grappling with a shape-shifting virus and infections persist.
Who’s to blame for this disorder by mass psychosis? Certainly, trillions spent annually on schools from K to grad school have monumentally failed at truly and broadly educating the population. Education is enlightenment. Are we enlightened? Evidence to date says “no”. Conversely, it may be the source of much of this mass psychosis.
What then is the value of our enormous communication network on the net and through satellites, cables, Wi-Fi, cell towers, and the infinite variety of radio signals? What are they communicating? Much that is spewed spikes mass psychosis. We seem to be great at inventing things but no so good at using them.
All our inventions haven’t altered the crooked timber of humanity. They have only magnified its prese nce. Immanuel Kant’s famous line from the 18th century remains true: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Credentials are certainly no guarantor. Civilizations over millennia have created civil society to grapple with our fundamental pretzel character. You know, faith, family, morals, and neighborly affiliations in local self-help organizations came into being. People like Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Robert Nisbet wrote of the virtues of these “little platoons”. Well, the centralized welfare state carpet-bombed their importance.
We just created more bullhorns for mass psychosis.
RogerG
Sources:
* “What is Mass Formation Psychosis?”, SWFI, 1/2/22, at https://www.swfinstitute.org/news/90470/what-is-mass-formation-psychosis
* Ivan Rowe at the American Enterprise Institute wrote of the missing ingredient of family structure in most reports of our social condition. One column on this subject can be read at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/08/29/students-family-background-matters/.
* Skepticism is always warranted when people go beyond what the science gives. Climate change ideology is a classic example of the phenomena. Those in the field of science who have managed to keep their wits exist. Princeton’s Freeman Dyson outlined his critique in the NYT Magazine at https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?sq=Freeman. Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg is another. Kevin Shapiro’s review of his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, can be found in Commentary Magazine at https://www.commentary.org/articles/kevin-shapiro-2/the-skeptical-environmentalist-by-bjorn-lomborg/. Japanese scientist Kiminori Itoh argues for more complexity in the dynamics of the atmosphere than John Kerry would admit. An account of his views can be found in the Orange County Register at https://www.ocregister.com/2008/06/18/japanese-ipcc-scientists-says-global-warming-worst-scientific-scandal/. The Norwegian physicist Ivar Giaever, and Nobel Prize winner, equates the climate change crusade with a religion. A talk by him on the subject is available through Foreign Policy Journal at https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2016/01/01/nobel-laureate-ivar-giaever-on-climate-change/. There are many others out there.
* The Federal Bureau of Economic Research in spring 2022 issued a report on how states fared in their response to COVID-19. Biases marred the analysis of the report. Some with blue-state leanings say that the BER paper proved the wisdom of aggressive COVID measures, while others of a red-state tint say the opposite. Blue-state biases downplayed or ignored the secondary damages of children’s developmental and education losses, the harms from delayed or absent medical treatment, the increase in suicides and depression, the massive disruption to the economic life of the country, etc. One analysis from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity appears more accurate than most. It can be read at https://committeetounleashprosperity.com/final-report-card-on-state-responses-to-covid-19/.
* A report on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on student achievement was made by the Brookings Institute in March 2022 and can be read at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2022/03/03/the-pandemic-has-had-devastating-impacts-on-learning-what-will-it-take-to-help-students-catch-up/.
