Culture – Page 21 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

December 13, 2021December 13, 2021

Systemic Falsehoods

Jessie Smollett (l) with Robin Roberts of ABC News on GMA in February of 2019.

After Jussie Smollett’s arrest and her on-air interview with him, Robin Roberts said, “It’s [his arest] a setback for race relations, homophobia, MAGA supporters – the fingers were pointed at them [MAGA supporters].” She added, “I cannot think of another case where there’s this anger on so many sides, and you can understand why there would be.”

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Some like to say racism is systemic. Well, so can fallacies. In fact, today, systemic falsehoods are far more real and far more dangerous than any mythical resurgence of the Klan.

Three stories tell the tale of systemic falsehoods: two in America and one in Germany, all in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The first, chronologically, occurred in October 1938 after the Nazi government ordered its initial expulsion of German Jews. One of those was the Grynszpan family who had a son living in Paris with an uncle, 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan. A week later, Herschel walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot to death German diplomat Ernst vom Rath. After it, the virulent Jew-hatred of the Nazi Party would take to the streets throughout Germany in the organized assaults on Jews on 9-10 November called Kristallnacht, thus inaugurating the Holocaust. An excuse presented itself to implement a key part of the National Socialist revolutionary program and thought. Their revolutionary racism was solely based on a systemic falsehood, and millions would end up dead.

The second happened in America in 1955. It was the lynching and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till by a white mob in Mississippi in August 1955. The scurrilous racism in the minds of some Southern whites of the tarring of all Blacks with a dollop of depravity is much more than a systemic racism. It’s a systemic falsehood.

But a systemic racism in the Jim Crow South of 1955 would be matched later by a systemic falsehood for today’s revolutionaries in Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Inc., and the Democratic Party. Yes, they’re revolutionaries. For them, it’s forever Jim Crow in America, the better to overturn the “system” (revolution), not just reform it or even acknowledge the improvements. Germany’s National Socialists exploited one killing to carry out millions; today’s left-wing zealots do the same (with Michael Brown, George Floyd, whoever). Yet, facts on the ground don’t match their hype, but that won’t stop the torching of America’s cities nor the falsehood’s infiltration of the classroom, the donkey party, Congress, and the Biden administration.

The third incident is Jussie Smollett. He peddled the falsehood of an alleged assault by fictitious Maga supporters in 2018. A patently false story, now proven in court, would, in the ensuing years, help perpetuate the falsehood of ever-present systemic racism as if nothing has changed since 1955. For the disciples of this false catechism, our landscape was, is, and will be forever littered with Emmett Tills and Bull Connors. The fiction penetrated all channels of news and entertainment from the classroom to 30 Rock (NBC headquarters). Our cosseted cultural elites peddled the lie and “systemic racism” entered the lexicon as a fact, when it is no such thing – not any truer than the Big Lie was for the goons torching synagogues in 1938.

Jussie’s Smollett’s booking photograph after he turned himself into Chicago police on charges of filing a false police report.

Smollett got away with it for 3 years because our cultural avatars were predisposed to believe the lie due to the monotone influences in their cultural and educational bubbles. For a couple of years, they propagated Smollett’s lie until evidence of the hoax came to light and then they went silent. Smollett’s December 9 conviction on five counts of disorderly conduct for filing a false police report puts all those in the media who helped him peddle the lie in the dock alongside him. His desire to concoct the hoax and their desire to push it exposed a systemic gullibility stemming from a deeply embedded systemic falsehood: it’s forever Jim Crow in America. For this crowd, the nation is forever guilty.

Ideas have consequences, and so does this one. Crime is spiking all over America. Amazingly, some have contorted logic to blame the cops. In their muddled minds, police lack legitimacy in the eyes of the public and so crime is transformed into a form of protest. People perceive racist cops and feel justified in performing mayhem according to this flight of fancy.

It’s nonsense. Perception is key. Views about policing are too often guided by the media’s it-leads-if-it bleeds philosophy, only tailored to fit the popular systemic racism/racist cop scenario. No wonder Americans – left, right, and center – in various polls and studies (one by the Skeptic Research Center) have an exaggerated view of police shootings of unarmed black men, by a factor of 50.

What do you expect would happen after the public is fed a steady stream of the rare but viral videos of a shooting? Part of the blame lies with a media eager to validate their prejudices, and part is attributed to millions carrying in the palms of their hands a video camera. The public is armed with the things, social media spreads them at light speed, and media mavens cull them for the confirmation of their biases. Would we be a more balanced people without the things and the instantaneous social media hookups? Interesting question.

All the while, branding cops as racist isn’t exactly a booster to recruitment and retention. Who wants to join a profession that might bankrupt you in lawsuits or land you in prison, and/or tar you as a uniformed mob looking for more Emmett Tills to kill? In a great skedaddle, cops are leaving and recruits are scant. There are fewer people to man the cruisers and telephones, walk the beat, and investigate crime. Nationwide, the Police Executive Research Forum in June reported midsized departments showing a 26% drop in hiring and large ones recording a 36% fall, some with a 50% drop in applicants. The total number of sworn officers dropped from 720,000 in 2013 to 690,000 in 2018, and the slide continues.

Retirements are up, way up. Deep blue bastions are particularly feeling the pinch. The Chicago force experienced a 30% retirement increase in 2020 (560) from the previous year. Portland, that lefty playground, saw 117 (and counting) officers leave since July of 2020. The men in NYC blue, under the radical Bill de Blasio, saw 2,600 officers vacate their positions. The story is the same across the country. Amputated budgets (“defund the police”) and a dispirited force don’t make for public safety.

A little-known truth: fewer cops mean more crime. There’s a stronger correlation between these two criteria than the more popular one in elite circles of the lack of respect for cops leading to an epidemic of murders, torchings, robberies, and beatings. Using 911 calls as the metric, studies show that high-profile police killings don’t affect the number of calls (studies by Harvard’s Michael Zoorob, Tanaya Devi, and Roland Fryer in 2020), the exact opposite of what you’d expect if there was a general disgust with cops. Not surprisingly, after all the budget cuts, lambastings by media hogs, force draw-downs and stand-downs, and a disheartened rank-and-file, mayhem has returned. Everyone not enthralled by stupidity has recognized since creation of the London police force in the 19th century that more cops mean safer streets.

So, we’ve come to this pass: Can we trust any longer an elite so enraptured to systemic falsehoods? In the end, we’ll have nowhere to turn. Remember, they’re the same people who want to take your guns. Now, they want to take your cops.

RogerG

December 8, 2021December 10, 2021

MERS, SARS, COVID-19 and Natural Immunity

One question about our current epidemic: Does previous exposure to MERS (2003) and SARS (H1N1, 2009) improve a person’s immunological response to COVID-19? I’m an absolute layman on these types of issues and I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn. Personal experiences raise this query, however. Our brains don’t stop functioning if we don’t wear a lab coat.

I am and was a healthy and fit teacher during my 30-year career. During the time periods of the spread of MERS and SARS, I became so ill that I took 2-3 days of sick leave, something un-heard of in my long career. Later, after retirement, I came down with fatigue and a low-grade fever that lasted 2 days, actually overnight, in spring 2020. It came and went and life quickly returned to normal. Was it COVID-19? I can’t say, but I haven’t had a bout of illness since then in spite of frequent and broad exposure, no vaccine, and the fact that I’m in a vulnerable cohort (age 69) during this latest contagion.

The similarities of the three bugs are manifest (see below). All three are of the Coronaviridae family. They mostly show as respiratory illnesses. COVID-19 could be different in that it was a product of gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab. Thus, it had a far more serious pathological footprint. Still, could their biological likenesses arm a person’s immune system against all three?

No photo description available. — MERS virus

If so, the swath of the population with natural immunity is larger than previously thought. Again, if so, the politicization of the pandemic can be turned down a notch or two. Threats, mandates, and the one-trick-pony of vaccination-only can be laid to rest.

When science is drafted to a political cause, nasty things happen. Science is no longer “science” and politics becomes authoritarian (if not totalitarian). Marxism and its theoretical cousin, critical theory, are attempts to make a “science” of history and ideological sophistry. Its results are laid bare on our cities’ streets and in the radical left turn of the Democratic Party. This political scientization of our life is creating havoc with our civilization.

I’m sure that many people can shed more light on my question than I. I eagerly await enlightenment.

RogerG

December 7, 2021

December 7, A Day in Infamy

Operation Z commenced without warning at 7:48 a.m., Sunday, December 7, 1941. After the last wave of Japanese aircraft left Pearl Harbor, 2,402 were killed and 1,178 wounded. On this day, every American should be reminded that it is one of the highest civic acts to visit the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor at least once in their life to pay their respects. I did in 2016.

The USS Arizona as a burning hulk, Dec. 7. 1,177 sailors and Marines were killed.

Certain days provide cringing lessons. We’ve had a few since that harrowing day. The heart-wrenching scenes of the evacuation of the US embassy in Saigon in 1975 would be one. Another would be 9/11. Now, Kabul airport in August of 2021 would qualify as still another. Two of these were at the hands of others while two were the culmination of our own actions. Two rallied the nation to confront the threats. Two were disgraceful and will result in calamitous decades to follow.

Honor the sacrifices, remember the dead, and learn the lessons of history . . . if history isn’t molested in the classroom by a fashionably extremist ideology so it can’t be remembered properly. Remember, but remember well.

RogerG

November 24, 2021December 2, 2021

How’s That EQUITY Working Out for You?

May be an image of 3 people and outdoors — Darrell Brooks’ SUV racing through the Waukesha Christmas parade.

May be an image of 7 people and outdoors — Victims on the ground in the wake of his passage.

Why the 2020 summer of riots, the chronic indulgence of violence and behavioral ugliness in our cities, the Rittenhouse trial, Waukesha, et al? Equity, baby, Equity.

Ibram X. Kendi (Ibram Henry Rogers), a godfather of Equity lingo: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination”.

Is Kendi’s governing principle that much different from George Wallace’s in 1963 when Wallace said, “. . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever”? Segregation, discrimination, they both draw distinctions based on melanin count, genitalia, bed partner, and many combinations thereof. And put an end to equality before the law. Think of Kendi as a black John C. Calhoun, the figurehead of a new discrimination.

Kendi (born in 1982) is proof that the caricature of the muddle-headed millennial is more than a caricature, and an embarrassment to the generational many who aren’t. Kendi’s goof-thought is hidden behind the façade of Equity. It’s wordplay. To this guy and his fellow delusionals, Equity is code for anger over things not turning out equal across the demography. The Equity word is cover for forced equality of outcome through blatant discrimination.

Calhoun, an unacknowledged Kendi mentor, has his mental fingerprints all over Equity. It found its way into the bloodstream of the past and present Democratic Party, back to LBJ, and the Biden administration in the form of militant affirmative action executive orders and banal press briefings. Remember “affirmative action”? In case you forgot, it conferred advantages to a gaggle of new honorees, the hackneyed “historically oppressed”. The camel’s nose poked under the tent.

It remained somewhat innocuous so long as it was restricted to government employment, contracting, and college admissions. Certainly, it was grossly unfair for anyone falling on the wrong side of the genital/color divide, but the ill-effects didn’t end up threatening your life. Not true now.

The forced leveling spread to criminal justice. Since crime stats aren’t equal across the color spectrum, they must be made to be equal, like the effort in admissions and employment. So, gambits such as refusals to prosecute, passage of no-cash bail laws, approval of propositions to lower a plethora of crimes to misdemeanors (California’s Prop 47), etc., sent a green light to miscreants everywhere. Equity suddenly became dangerous.

These Equity enthusiasts are really into profiles. Kyle Rittenhouse was tossed into the Equity meat grinder because he clicked the bigoted bullet-pointed traits reserved for the vile by the ladies on The View: he’s white, male, and carried an “assault” rifle. Equity demanded that the immense resources of the state of Wisconsin be thrown at a 17-year-old because he fit the Equity industry’s enemy sketch. Self-defense be damned, the industry’s brain trust will rebrand it racist. The goal isn’t justice; it’s Equity in the form of a conviction and hard time. Think of this new age of lynching as a morality play for the self-anointed with a white guy in the noose this time. Everyone is expected to feel better, except, of course, the white guy in the dock.

If Equity requires that we must get a white guy no matter what, it also demands that we rebrand riots as “mostly peaceful protests” to herd all of society kicking and screaming to Equity. Tell that to David Dorn in St. Louis who was murdered by “mostly peaceful protesters”. Public authorities ordered police to withdraw and stand down; bail funds were established for looters and arsonists; DA’s refused to prosecute the hoodlums; and governors rejected requests for national guardsmen to restore order.

Retired St. Louis police captain David Dorn.

Once more, riots and mayhem – er, “peaceful protests” – are rebranded as noble endeavors to instill Equity. Tell that to a local businessperson – many are of the “other” – who must now stand before their life’s work in smoldering ruins.

People flee, and not just from California, as Equity’s disorder reigns. Corporate retail giants such as Walgreens and Target – and other paragons of the corporate woke – suddenly realized that “woke” looting, boarded up doors and windows, and smash-and-grab mobs aren’t healthy for the bottom line. That model of Equity rule, San Francisco, and playground for mob-shoplifting, has seen Walgreens close 22 stores. Target and Safeway cut hours to limit their exposure to Equity’s rampant revenge. Need I mention the recent mob assaults on Nordstrom and Louis Vuitton? Equity carries costs way beyond the price tag for gauzy corporate rainbow ads.

The real-world effects of Equity cause capital to look for the exits. For goons and lowlifes, Equity also supplements a widened exit door with a revolving one in the criminal justice system. The Equity logic (or illogic) demands that we can’t have too many convictions of one color. Turn ‘em loose, but bloody incidents inconveniently arise. Prime example: Darrell Brooks of Waukesha Christmas parade fame. After plowing through the Dancing Grannies, bands, and spectators, it came to light that this guy made “career” a functioning modifier attached to “criminal”.

The Brooks rap sheet extends back to 1999 and through a variety of violent interactions with others. It includes a lust for underaged girls and an outstanding warrant for his arrest. His savage history and penchant for jumping bail didn’t stop the Milwaukee DA, John Chisholm, from lowering his bail to $1,000 for using his weapon of choice, his SUV, on his girlfriend. A couple of weeks later, he showed up at the Christmas parade.

Chisholm (D) is a unique piece of work. He’s the DA who went after Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) and his staff in 2010 for rumors of illegal campaign coordination between Walker’s campaign and supportive PAC’s. Ironically, the insinuation is equally at home with Democrats. The fishing expedition uncovered nothing and was only closed this year. (Read about the case here)

Apparently, not a word was raised about the cozy relationship between Chisholm and his teachers’ union activist wife. In the heady days of 2010, Walker was trying to bring to heel the uncontrollable teachers’ unions and succeeded – a necessity that should be on the front burner of parents in California and Loudon County. The whole affair stinks of politics and shows Chisholm to be a swimmer in the currents of fashionable Democratic Party belief. Brooks’ easy release fits neatly into the Party’s Equity zealotry. Anyway, Brooks was out in the public to commit a mass casualty event thanks to the indulgence of Chisholm’s office.

See, Equity is an amorphous concept that can cover everything from race-conscious hiring and admissions to giving multiple opportunities for thugs to destroy our livelihoods and kill us. Equity should join communism on the ash heap of history but, alas, it is thriving in blue America. If Equity comes to your state and locality, move!

RogerG

November 22, 2021December 1, 2021

Dem-lusions of Grandeur

May be an image of 2 people and people standing — Jon Meacham (r) and Biden in split screen on the night of Biden’s November victory speech, which Meacham helped compose. Meacham also organized the historian conclave in March.

Pedigreed historians congregated in the White House earlier this year to arouse the latent inner-FDR that resides in the heart of any Democrat who happens to land in the oval office. Certainly, these guests aren’t solely responsible for what followed but they goaded it. What followed was an end to energy independence, unenforced borders, eco-fanaticism, neo-Marxist racialism, and WWII-scale spending bills in the face of galloping inflation. Gird your loins; we’ve seen this before and it wasn’t pretty.

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Politicians can be like football head coaches of prestigious teams. They are inflated with high expectations that seldom survive the first clash of shoulder pads. As a USC fan, oh how I know this. The players’ and coaches’ heads are filled with sycophantic praise by local big media. Then the indulged egos start to go bust by the first half of the first game.

Sounds like Biden and his social revolutionary inner-circle’s March meeting with politically sympathetic historians who were taking on the role of the lick-spittle sports media. In the room according to Axios were Doris Kearns Goodwin, and “Michael Beschloss, author Michael Eric Dyson, Yale’s Joanne Freeman, Princeton’s Eddie Glaude Jr., Harvard’s Annette Gordon-Reed and Walter Isaacson”. The Party revolutionaries don’t need much encouragement to upturn everything, but then in comes people with high reputation to incite them into doing what they are chomping at the bit to do anyway. Inevitably, they will face the truth of having no mandate in the paper-thin majorities in Congress and the 2020 presidential vote. Acting like they have one won’t change the reality.

If you want to know what’s wrong with your kids’ school, the answer walked into the White House on that 2021 March day. The history profession resembles what happened to the social sciences in general. They have become a vast apologia for fashionable and radical ideologies whose tentacles reach into a deep and abiding FDR-love. All history textbooks that I’m aware as a teacher (of almost 30 years) and Social Science Department chair worship FDR and the New Deal. None of them rate higher than a “C” – most are “D” or “F”; none are “A” or “B” – by the center-right Fordham Institute. Bluntly put, it’s indoctrination. The brainwashing makes it easy to fill the ranks of the activists in the Democratic Party and those burning Portland to the ground.

In my role as a department chair and teachers union president, I pressed upon my superintendent the fact that we are making good little Democrats. Much like the blatherings of the revolutionaries in the current edition of the donkey party, none of the textbook Great Depression stories made any sense. Roosevelt gets elected and inaugurates feverish activity (the New Deals), and the Depression becomes Great, persisting for the rest of the 1930’s, then took a WWII hiatus as unemployment was cured by putting the jobless in uniform and employing them in making the weapons to destroy Germany and Imperial Japan (Italy was a nonentity by 1943), and was set to resume in 1946 after the wartime recess ended. After the surrenders, there’s not much of a demand for a Sherman tank in the garage or a Norton bombsite in the refrigerator’s spot. The ugly conditions were set to return but avoided by a relaxation of the wartime and New Deal taxes and controls.

Probably, the “illustrious” historians filled the heads of our mentally deficient president and his party’s big wheels with delusions of grandeur of being the next FDR, which will only produce the same miasma for the rest of us. Alongside a Fed currently greasing the skids of inflation through mismanagement of money supply (30% increase with more coming) and the raising of taxes and the reregulation of the economy, Biden and his Party promise another disaster.

May be a cartoon of text that says 'VEGAS RA REVIEW-JOURNAL nea VIRTUAL UAL AOC is SPELLED WITH INDOCTRINATION AN AN"I"... "T" nea nea SSOCATION DUCATION nea @Ramireztoons nea michaelpramirez.com'

Historians of many book deals should know better. But, sadly, they don’t. Don’t expect your kids’ school teachers to stand athwart the all-enveloping orthodoxy of falsehoods. In the end, we have tumult because a party with razor-thin majorities has been deluded into thinking that they can remake America like the earlier crowd around FDR. The only difference: FDR had a real mandate. This crowd doesn’t.

Overall, the lefty oldsters of the 1930’s made healthy exertions; they’re modern political progeny is trying again; and the American people will suffer . . . as in olden days. Same ol’ same ol’.

RogerG

November 19, 2021December 1, 2021

Rittenhouse Not Guilty. At Last, Justice.

Kyle Rittenhouse hugs one his lawyers after his verdict of not guilty on November 19.

The verdict was just and proper. Rather, instead, the real indictment is of the radical-left progressive authorities who allowed their cities to fall into bedlam, leaving it to private citizens to defend themselves, their property, and a civilized society. The verdict should focus the spotlight on these monstrous officials and their sudden embrace with religious zeal of a malicious ideology of strident racialism while shredding the fundamental decency of our founding principles. Along with the surprisingly strong showing by congressional Republicans in November 2020 and the Virginia results earlier this month, this verdict is another step away from the brink.

For Kyle, he went through hell. He shot 3 people, two died. All were agents of carnage and all attacked him. The only difference was that, unlike David Dorn in St. Louis, he had the means to protect himself. As MSNBC anchors ridiculed his emotional breakdown on the stand, evidence increasingly showed the malign intent of Rittenhouse’s attackers, and all the while the proceedings were coupled with flagrant prosecutorial misconduct. Justice only left one verdict, the one after four days of deliberations.

I must admit with great reluctance that we needed someone to “walk through hell” for the “world to be much better for this”, that “one man sore and covered with scars”, to break this cancerous fever. Too bad the duty fell on the shoulders of a 17-year-old.

The song, Impossible Dream, is more poignant now than ever. Please listen below to Josh Groban’s rendition.

RogerG

November 11, 2021November 13, 2021

Revolutionary Justice

Have you been paying attention to the Rittenhouse trial? A frightening prospect is presenting itself. “Justice” is quickly becoming a handmaiden to a radical cause. Justice doesn’t look like justice. It looks like political vengeance. That’s because it’s Revolutionary Justice and not anything like the kind that you or I would recognize as justice.

The die was cast in summer 2020. Riots flared in American cities without a word of condemnation from one of America’s major political institutions, the Democratic Party. The party’s power elite sided with goons and mobs as businesses were torched, a dozen people or more were murdered on the streets, and entire downtowns resembled Richmond in 1865.

Some of the party’s shrillest voices sounded like cheerleaders for the violence and cut checks to the bail funds for the arrested hooligans. One happens to be our sitting Vice President.

Kamala Harris, then presidential candidate, contributed to “Minnesota Freedom Fund” that bailed out arrested rioters in Minneapolis during the George Floyd riots.

In juxtaposition, the sword of something officially titled as justice is enthusiastically unsheathed against the politically unfashionable. The uncouth is defined by a cloistered cultural elite isolated in blue bubbles. Throw the book at Sitting Bull and his Capitol trespassers on January 6th and seek murder convictions against a 17-year-old defending himself from the kind of thugs who turned Kenosha, Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis into hellholes. Furthermore, if parents are unwilling to surrender their kids to the propaganda ministry’s commissars, the DOJ and its armed wing, the FBI, stand ready to force compliance.

May be an image of 1 person and standing — Loudon County parents protesting before their school board

A counter-revolution is brewing. The National School Board Association’s letter to the DOJ alienated a good portion of their state affiliates. The group portrayed the protests of incensed parents to be the “the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes” in a letter to AG Garland. In coordination with the NSBA, Garland dutifully responded with an order to the FBI to coordinate a Parent Scare to rival A. Mitchell Palmer’s Red Scare of 1919-1920. That’s right, justice now means an enforced conformity to the party line.

AG Garland in testimony before Congress in October

*Update: The Garland memo to the FBI to investigate parent activities at local school board meetings was more than a response to the NSBA letter. Newly obtained documents indicate some level of coordination between the NSBA and the Biden White House in mid-September which was before the Garland/FBI memo in October. Read about it here.

It’s a bridge too far for many state school boards. 20 state associations have ended the relationship, suspended their dues payments, or in various ways are distancing themselves from the NSBA. The national group is taking on the same partisan branding as MLB, the NBA, the NFL, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, and Big Tech’s lunchrooms in this period of radical political fervor. Buying a ticket or soft drink, and showing up at a school board meeting, is either a political act or will draw the gaze of the ever-watchful eyes of the commissars of state security.

Yesterday, the judge in the Rittenhouse trial was clearly fuming about prosecutorial misconduct. Prosecution witnesses sounded like defense witnesses. Wisconsin is an open-carry state; even the restrictions on minors is nebulous to say the least. Sum it up: regardless of the jury’s verdict under mob threat, obvious conditions of self-defense exonerate the kid under our time-honored rules of justice.

Astonishingly, knowing the shoddy nature of their case, prosecutors may be trying to incite the judge into ordering a mistrial without prejudice; meaning a retrial to torture the kid more. It’s scandalous.

We’ve had much experience with “revolutionary” justice. It came in the form of the Reign of Terror’s tribunals in the France of 1793-4. The guillotine was made a popular totem. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and lesser miscreants holding to the same creed left mounds of dead and archipelagos of gulags in service to it. One group of French scholars put the death toll at around 100 million in the 20th century’s long-running flirtation with Marx-inspired “justice”. Following their lead, the woke universe’s hitching of justice to their political crusade is leading us to a repetition of the nightmare.

Lavoisier’s trial. Historical artwork of the French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) being tried during the French Revolution by a radical, revolutionary tribunal. Lavoisier (standing, at left) was one of the leading French scientists and the father of modern chemistry. He was prosecuted because he had been a tax official, even though he had tried to introduce reforms. The president of the tribunal claimed that ‘the Republic has no need of scientists’. Lavoisier was guillotined on 8 May 1794.

Veterans, on this Veterans Day, is this what you were fighting for?

RogerG

November 10, 2021November 13, 2021

The “Critical” of Today’s Marxism

If you want to win a major public debate, first and foremost, mischaracterize the issue. This is actively being done by our self-anointed and overweening media custodians who don’t bother to explain critical race theory (CRT) in any meaningful way, especially its ideological heredity. The absence of a usable description is combined with an erroneous depiction of its opponents. Those standing athwart its injection into their children’s classrooms are portrayed as hostile to the teaching of slavery and racial discrimination in our history. So, we get a befuddled population with no understanding of what it is and the impression that the opposition must be a bunch of rubes, Bull Connors, and Klan sympathizers.

Frederick M. Hess, resident education scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, correctly states (read here), “… news accounts seem to suggest that the argument is really about whether ‘schools should teach slavery.’” As Hess poignantly presents, the argument over CRT has nothing to do with the teaching of slavery and Jim Crow. The contest is about whether the schools should be training grounds for Marxist revolutionaries. CRT is revolutionary indoctrination.

As I’ve written many times before, CRT is rooted in Marxist political theory. It traces nearly all disparities to racism, or any of the other filling-in-the-prefix phobias, and ultimately to a systematic oppression of the “outs” by the “ins”. Out of this percolates rhetoric like “systemic racism”, “white rage”, to the host of other theoretical oppressions in feminist theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, postmodern theory, etc. It’s classic post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc lunacy – one thing (racism) is assumed to be the cause of what follows (modern disparities) without ever having made the evidentiary connection – but the illogic of it hasn’t stopped these over-paid consultants from spewing the nonsense, and scurrying down to the bank to deposit the fees. Scurrilous nonsense pays very well.

Two hucksters of critical race theory, Robin Diangelo (l) and Ibram X. Kendi at a seminar at Roger Williams University.

“Critical” is the key word. CRT is an offshoot of critical theory which blossomed into critical legal theory and critical pedagogy. See, there’s lots of “crits” out there, but they all owe their existence to Marx’s battle of groups (the dialectic). For those ill-informed journalists, CRT is being taught in its various ideological pieces in the classroom, and is the latest craze in teacher training colleges.

Paulo Freire, a godfather of critical pedagogy

In schools of education, it’s called critical pedagogy. Paulo Freire is the Mao figure in this movement. In his “little red book” of writings, like his 1968 “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, the purpose of teaching is to produce a “critical consciousness” in students. What’s that mean? Make radicals to go out and burn things, get elected to construct the mega-state to dictate the solutions, and for all practical purposes be the militant wing of the Democratic Party.

“Critical” everything shows up in the local DA office, the school staffs that have your kids 6 hours for 5 days a week, their textbooks, and anyone with a degree is exposed to it from the civil engineer to the underemployed barista who got elected to Congress. It’s everywhere. Remember, “critical” is just a pseudonym for Marxist. If you want to avert your children from joining an American Viet Cong, stand up, call it out, and insist that it stop being presented as a “truth”. Don’t be cowed into submission.

RogerG

November 7, 2021November 13, 2021

Veterans Day in a Time of Troubles

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, at a press conference in July of 202021.

This is a no-brainer: honor our vets. The people who sacrificed a part of their lives, maybe their limbs and entire lives, deserve our highest respect. This is their day. I humbly salute all veterans.

And what better time to also bring to light a sickness that has entered the services? Nearly all corners of our society are subjected, including the ranks and service academies, to a noxious and radical neo-Marxist ideology. It comes under a number of monikers like Critical Race Theory, ESG (“Environment and social governance” in business), DEI (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”), “Anti-racism” training, and “The 1619 Project” pedagogy. It has penetrated the upper echelons of command. Who can forget Gen. Mark Milley’s infamous endorsement of this neo-Marxism, “I want to understand white rage, and I’m white”? The comment was more than a reaction to January 6 and any “extremism” in the ranks. The “white rage” in Milley’s blast was presented as a factual premise, not a call for analysis and debate. And now the officer corps is getting a steady dose of it in their academy coursework. That’s right, we are training officers to hate the country that they are expected to defend. Now, all of us in our fair land are in jeopardy.

The neo-Marxist, race-based radicalism shows up in theater commander reading lists and into academy classrooms. Former cadets have come forward to describe the insidious indoctrination (see below). As one recounted, “I found myself instead in the classroom learning about how to be more sensitive.” She continued, “And this woke ideology that had taken over West Point really surprised me.” As a tutor for some students, she recalled cadets writing essays sympathetic with critical race theory and socialism. The students exclaimed that’s what they thought their profs wanted.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/story/west-point-glorifies-ignorant-submission-and-unethical-behavior-former-cadet/vi-AAQl1Z5

It appears in guidance reports about “diversity” and “inclusion” plans for West Point (see report here). Favoritism in admissions to certain races, alt-genders (?), and orientations hides under the cloak of “inclusion” and “diversity” – all this because the numbskulls in the Pentagon think that this gibberish is what the younger generation wants. And I quote from one report: “We must create an environment that appeals to the aspirations of American’s younger generation.” How do they, or any of us, know that these are the “aspirations” of the youth? And should it matter? Come on, wokeness, like the fear of leaving home, needs to be broken to create the kind of person who can kill our enemies and destroy their things.

Where will this lead if not stopped in its tracks? History provides a lesson in the Russia of 1917. Much revolutionary trouble for the Czar came from the newly drafted reserves billeted and milling around the capitol, Petrograd (fully described in Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel series and the writings of the historian Richard Pipes) . Radical socialists and Bolshevik agitators frequented the barracks of these large masses of idle soldiers. The troops participated in strikes and demonstrations and on numerous occasions marched to the homes and offices of civil authorities threatening their lives and creating ferment and instability. The navy anchored offshore proved to be a special hotbed of revolutionary fervor. Many of these same individuals were later recruited into the ranks of Lenin’s secret police, the Cheka, and Red Army to conduct the Red Terror. We seem to be repeating the grievous error. Bolshevik-like activists have found a home at West Point, Annapolis, Colorado Springs, etc.

The radicalized Preobrazhensky regiment marching on Nevsky Prospect, St. Petersburg. It’s a main street in Petersburg and designed by Czar Peter the Great as the route south to Novgorod and Moscow

What better way to celebrate the sacrifices of our vets by cleaning house at the Pentagon, throughout the command structure, and our service academies? Our country deserves something better than a restive and neo-revolutionary armed forces, or one so dispirited that it will fold in the face of the People’s Liberation Army.

RogerG

October 30, 2021October 30, 2021

The Electric Car Scam

Our new god, The State, speaks: “Thou shalt drive an electric car.” When this god-imposter speaks, run!

Something normally left to individual choice, along with vacation destinations, is now the province of The State. Combine a neurotic over-reaction to unprovable threats (climate change hysterics) with a growing State impulse to engineer the person along the lines of the neurosis and the result will be a pure, unadulterated mess. The State is a hammer-for-everything when a shed full of tools is the actual necessity. Our lives will begin to look like the incessant and crude pummeling of a hammer. Translation: live less well.

And, God almighty, are they out to get the internal combustion engine. Gavin Newsom, governor of the looney bin formerly known as the State of California, and emboldened by his survival of the recall, signed the death warrant for the gasoline car in the state, the lethal injection to be performed by 2035. From DC, Biden’s Build Back Better – errrr Worse – has $13.5 billion for scarring the roads and interstates hither and yon with plug-ins for the things. To make sure that you use those plug-ins, the feds will bribe you with other people’s money – to the tune of $12,500 per purchase – to buy the contraption and junk your quite functional family sedan. That’s right, replace something that works for a will-‘o-the-wisp.

*Read about the EV and its heart and soul, the battery, here.

I equate the EV craze to gender reassignment surgery. Surgeons jettison the Hippocratic Oath by destroying perfectly healthy organs to align a person’s physique to their imagination. Ditto for Build Back so-called Better: mutilate the transportation grid to better fit the fancies of the half-witted representative from NY’s 14th congressional district.

And what are we going to get out of it, besides the will-‘o-the-wisp? A mess, a big mess. How much of a mess? Just think it through. Those holiday trips to grandma’s house will be measured in battery capacity. Don’t take too many long trips, commutes, or otherwise because the trip’s mandatory half-hour quick charges degrade the batteries. Don’t expect 100,000 miles out of the thing. And just think, you were forced to give up something that works very well for . . . God only knows what. Wait for this to percolate through the economy and into higher unemployment figures and higher grocery bills and poorer diets.

That’s a ticket for a return journey to the Middle Ages.

And what of those now-common California blackouts? After all, the greenie grid functions like the greenie car. The physics of the substitution of high-density energy with low-density doesn’t add up. The trillions spent on trying to make it work is an attempt to bend the laws of nature to the half-literate musings of The Squad. What will you do with an EV with no juice to its umbilical cord and plug? Commutes will be made more formidable, the suburbs will atrophy, and its back to cramped apartment life at the mercy of Lori Lightfoot’s or Bill de Blasio’s defund-the-police rantings. Is raising kids in decrepit schools and on streets filled with gangs, the homeless, needles, and feces supposed to be “Build Back Better”?

Remember, the trillions and trillions going into this bottomless pit is money not spent on other things. An adult, not the eco-fanatics in Congress, would recognize this as trade-offs. Our decaying military will make it possible for the Pacific to become a CCP lake. Try a supply chain under that regime. Reliance on more expensive and unstable energy and less functional vehicles means less productivity, and productivity is the name of the game for prosperity. More money going into greenie infatuations is less money for R&D for the next wave of world-impacting innovation. Add it up . . . and cringe.

Have we lost our minds? Our car fleet is more efficient and less polluting than nearly any outside the Anglosphere and Europe. We are now expected to dispense with the great strides in the use of fossil fuels and jump headlong into electricity-everything, just at the time when they plan to make the production of it more unstable and vulnerable. It’s crazy, absolutely crazy

Nearly empty shelves in an American Walmart.

So much pain for so little gain.

RogerG