The 2020 Census shows more than the scoreboard of the number of congressmen per state. It’s a comprehensive snapshot of the country’s population after 10 years. What does this census tell us about ourselves? Among other things, it told us that there are more people 80 and over than 2 and younger. That’s a catastrophe!
If you think it’s great, think again. Who’s going to wheel you out into the sun from your nursing home room? Who’s going to be around in sufficient numbers to pump money into the fund for your Social Security payments and Medicare benefits? Who’s going to man the labs to find a cure for Alzheimer’s? What’ll happen to entrepreneurialism if more and more of it will be expected to be performed by people suffering from age-related memory loss? This is more than a trifling happenstance.
We need kids at more than at replacement levels. So, how did we get here? Two things worked hand-in-glove: (1) the cultural infantilization of adults and (2) the unstated acceptance of the population-bomb myth.
First, mature judgment is hard to achieve when narcissism is a widespread national trait. Today, in my estimation, self-actualization is the hidden goal of far too many Americans. Self-absorption has proceeded apace as religious commitment has reached the event horizon of the cultural black hole. A life of personal fixations doesn’t bode well for thoughts about posterity like family formation.
Too few of these.
Second, people seem to recoil at the words “population growth”. Maybe it’s due to too many images of Calcutta or the teeming hordes of Shanghai. Certainly, the notion gets a boost by the writings of popularizing academics like Paul Ehrlich and his 1968 book, The Population Bomb. Sci-fi horror movies and programs fortify the misperception. In my college and high school classes as an instructor, I would ask some form of the question, “Is it worse to have many people or fewer?” Whether I reversed the order or restated it, it made no difference. The vast majority chose many. Something has seeped into the popular imagination that doesn’t bode well for having a robust next generation.
We are about to experience a live-action social experiment. Numbers point to the following shift: today’s scenes of old folks in the care of sons and daughters with the assistance of state programs morphs into the likelihood of the aged herded into state institutions, alone in their isolation, waiting for death. There being no one around to care.
House Democratic Party leaders: Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Jerry Nadler.
Today, we might be sensing the whiff of the kind of social decay that earlier laid open the ancient classical world to Christianity. A fatigued civilization, for whatever reason, can’t generate the resistance to something else filling the void. In the Greco-Roman world, the emptiness was filled with the beauty of Christianity. In our own time, it’s the onrush of the vile postmodernism and its depraved cousin, critical race theory, that is attempting to displace Christianity. The elites of all stations get caught up in the mania for this latest new thing, even if it is a moral and logical mess. We are entering a really dark place. Yet, hope lies in the fact that we’ve had trials before, and Christianity has proven to be remarkably resilient.
Sparse attendance at an United Methodist Church.
The current decline of Christianity in modern America is stunning. A Pew survey of American religiosity from 2019 shows the dire situation in just 10 years. In a nutshell, adherents of Catholicism and Protestantism are down (51% to 43%), and agnosticism, “nothing in particular”, and atheists are up . . . in just 10 years! Plowing the field deeper, the drops are most significant among those in the East, the college-educated, Democrats, and the young, with Millennials taking first place among the youthful disaffiliated. Nothing about his should be surprising if you’ve followed the culture.
The decline can be traced to the failure of our institutions. Marriage has been redefined into a near oblivion with easy no-fault divorce, thereby leaving behind a tranche of emotionally-scarred children. The schools, in an effort to maintain religious neutrality by bleaching any hint of God from the curriculum, are training grounds for materialism (the material world is all that there is). The family provides no corrective since it has been incubated in the singular quest for material pleasure. The state reinforces the materialism by the transformation of its core mission into the nation’s nanny. All it can do is affect a person’s material condition, not their spirit or soul, if you will. In the end, the ever-expansive state crowds out the church and its essential social mission. It’s more and more a world without God.
The experience of the 20th century shows that the displacement of God tends to lead to the emplacement of man in His place. God goes down the memory hole and man gets deified. The deification occurs in the sanctification of the words of certain trendy persons. Their words are worshipped like Moses receiving the Commandments from the burning bush. They require no proof for their validity. They are simply announced and off to the barricades the zealots go.
The new gospel is postmodernism. It rejects a single, overarching truth, and makes all claims of truth to be dependencies of who and what is in power. Truth isn’t objective; it’s relative to those in a position to impose it. The problem: it justifies a skepticism of all claims and ends in a belief in nothing. A person under its sway will be forever in a state of second-guessing themselves. They end up where G.K. Chesterton found them:
“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
The “anything” could be modern “critical race theory”, “systemic racism”, or the neo-Marxism rampaging in the streets of Portland, anything put forward by anyone with a platform and power to push it. So, a philosophical movement meant to question power comes around to being a chief exponent of it: power in its most crass expression.
Herbert Marcuse
Enter Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse, an acolyte of the Frankfurt School (Institute of Social Research) in Germany, took the oppressor/oppressed dialectic of Marx and postmodernism’s chaining of truth to power to concoct the “critical theory” of today’s “critical race theory” (CRT). In Marcuse, the consciousness bit is hyped to present truth, and our awareness of the truth, to be a product of our power position in society. The powerful – the “privileged” in CRT – can be defined by race, gender, ethnicity, any one of a number of materially-based categories. Your consciousness – your values, intentions, beliefs, your head – is locked in place by your melanin count, et al. If you fall into the lighter side of the color spectrum, for example, you can say nothing to deny your “privilege” – code for power. You are as guilty as the darker pigments are founts of wisdom since they are deemed “oppressed”. Logic, reason, the scientific method, and any prior civilizational core tenet cannot be allowed to contravene the yapping of the race-hustlers on MSNBC, The View, the streets of Minneapolis, or the Democratic Party’s big cheeses. After all, their “truth” is covered by the claim that they give voice to the voiceless, a banality in common use in such circles.
If you haven’t noticed, their contradictory circular logic leads them back to a power grab to impose a “truth”. The whole thing is a hot mess, and a dangerous one at that.
LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers
What happens when the oppressors and oppressed switch roles: the oppressed become the oppressors? Of course, all of this is nonsense. Most single moms in a crime-ridden slum aren’t storming a Baltimore Target. The barking is coming from multi-millionaires and billionaires like Oprah or LeBron James, or a host of others of the oppressed-by-skin-color who have estates on Martha’s Vineyard and attended elite prep schools. The skin-color matrix breaks down as the new “privileged” take on the mantle of Lenin’s vanguard elite. In the end, we’ve got a new slate of “oppressors” as the consciousness bit is weaponized to crush opposition. The new “truth” that is not beholden to logic, law, the scientific method, math, or reason is set loose with no barrier to its realization. Are you sensing a whiff of totalitarianism?
Maxine Waters (D, Ca.)
Maxine Waters (D, Ca.) cavorts to Minneapolis to incite street extortion for her preferred verdict, and shouts “shut your mouth” to Rep. Jim Jordan (R, Oh.). Mazie Hirono (D, Ha.) goes before cameras to demand that men “Just shut up” if they attempt to prevent her from performing a career lynching of Brett Kavanaugh. Biden and Harris jump to cameras after the Chauvin verdict to announce a crusade against “systemic racism” without a shred of logic, reason, or evidence to justify the inquisition. Biden turns loose the powers of the federal authorities to indoctrinate the young in the contemptible “critical race theory” by reversing Trump’s order to stop the mental devastation in the federal government. Things are happening that should send chills down your spine, and all because some suburbanites had angst about Trump’s comportment.
Yep, elections have consequences, and many of them are hellish. The period between the present and the 2022 elections is a race, a race to see how much damage the New-Left-in-Democrat-clothes can inflict on the country before they are stopped in a vote of the people. The political charlatans currently running the show have a window of opportunity for them to unwittingly push the country into a major rupture. If they are successful in DC in ramming through their revolution, there’s too much of the rest of the country that won’t abide by it.
Ironically, states and cities under the sway of the New Left showed the way for red states who wish not to join their revolution. Leftists in power declared their jurisdictions to be sanctuary cities and states for illegal immigrants. As per blue states, red states are forming an expanding list of Second Amendment sanctuary states. Disunion, if it does happen, began with the Left’s flaunting of the clear Constitutional federal authority over immigration and may end with the two-thirds of the other states whose citizens don’t wish to be remain in a union with states who are striving to relegate them to second-class political status.
Gabrielle Clark, mother of the 12th-grader, who is suing her school and district for the imposition of critical race theory curriculum.
More pushback is germinating. Critical race theory’s totalitarian indoctrination is being challenged in court and before school boards. Examples are many. A father publicly pulled his daughter out of Brearley, an elite $54,000 per year New York private school for propaganda acts such as a school-sponsored student “Anti-racism pledge”. He says the school’s antiracism actions were “misguided, divisive, counterproductive and cancerous”. Gabrielle Clark, mother of a twelfth-grader in a Nevada charter school, filed suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada in December 2020. In her complaint, her son’s school “inserted consciousness raising and conditioning exercises under the banner of ‘Intersectionality’ and ‘Critical Race Theory.’” Further, “The lesson categorized certain racial and religious identities as inherently ‘oppressive,’ . . . and instructed pupils including [her son] who fell into these categories to accept the label ‘oppressor.’” This is Khmer Rouge stuff, and happening all over the country, and likely to intensify as the full resources of the federal government are brought to bear in service of the jihad.
How much more can the union endure? These are tumultuous times. May cooler heads prevail.
A possibility?
RogerG *Thanks for the informational contributions and insights of Peter J. Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute, Bari Weiss, former New York Times editor, and Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in their book, Cynical Theories.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., speaks as Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, listens on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, April 20, 2021, after the jury returned guilty verdicts on all three charges in the murder trial of former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin in the death of George Floyd. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Good public leaders don’t attempt to ride a wave of falsehoods. Right now, our mediocre leadership does! Take today’s enthusiasm for race-hustling among many of our elected leaders at the top of our political establishment. The whole edifice of “critical race theory” and its companion charge of “systemic racism” rides on a blatant mangling of facts, inventing them in many instances. The George Floyd case has turned into another example in the sorry saga.
Universal connectivity now makes it possible for cat videos, daily cop interactions with the public, and acts of rank stupidity to spread like the 1906 San Francisco Fire in the immediate wake of the 7.9 earthquake. Back then, fire-storms rampaged almost unimpeded, like the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Today, fire-storms are limited to wildlands; however, another kind is let loose on the public. Under conditions of instant connectivity, everyone gets to see what somebody else has taken with their cellphone, and frequently, before it has a chance to go virile, someone will have cropped it to fit a crazed political fetish. Sadly, not unexpectedly, it happened again regarding the arrest of George Floyd.
Watch the video below of the prologue to the famous 9-minute Chauvin segment that was hyped by our race-hustling halfwits in elected positions. I’ve said it before: resisting arrest increases the risk of an encounter ending in a bad place. Add the facts of the suspect being high as a kite, universal cell-phone cinematography, and near-illiterate revolutionary fervor of a narrow clique running at a fever pitch, and we get to see our cities explode.
Does anyone do real risk assessment anymore? Many of our leaders go overboard into authoritarianism to pursue zero risk because of a virus, but find excuses for resisting arrest as if the risk of refusing to follow officer requests is negligible in the haste to brand cops as covert KKK members. Little risk is permissible in one while high-risk behavior is ignored in the other. How does that work?
Do we produce good leaders anymore who can sensibly navigate the nonsense? If we don’t find some soon, get prepared for a major rupture in our national cohesion. Red-state locales won’t countenance the craziness that appears to ride at the top of our society.
Biden and Harris after the Chauvin verdict was announced.
It seems that we go through periods of poor public leadership like the spate of presidents prior to the Civil War (Pres. James Buchanan?). Great leaders don’t get caught up in momentary public manias, nor are they demagogues grasping for approval and feeding the passions of extremists who they mistake for a fount of wisdom. Dead ends and discord are the results, which is horribly and amply displayed in our history.
The quality of our leadership of late came to mind after surveying the campaigns of the 2020 election season and its aftermath down to the present. Of particular note is the reaction of Congressional leadership and Biden and Harris to the inflammatory Chauvin case. Either through ignorance or demagoguery, after the verdict, they paraded before cameras and went from the abuse of a single police officer right to “systemic racism”. It’s a leap without a scintilla of evidence. It wasn’t even an argument made by prosecutors, nor was any evidence presented that implied that Chauvin was a racist. So how do these public luminaries get from “A” to “Z”? Easy, just say it!
The whole edifice of “systemic racism” is similarly constructed. The ideology’s enthusiasts go from statistical disparities right to racism. They can’t imagine any other explanation for the inequalities in the numbers across demographic groups. They childishly paste “systemic” to “racism” so they don’t have to prove it. In the Chauvin matter, the scandal doesn’t only lay in the abuse by a single cop but in the ritual abuse of good sense by an increasingly radicalized wing of our political establishment. Where’s the leadership to reign in the foolishness?
One of the chief propagandists for “critical race theory” and “systemic racism”, Ibram X. Kendi, at his lectern at Boston U.
A review of the trial record makes clear the reality of the Chauvin case.
First, George Floyd died from asphyxiation from Chauvin’s persistent and excessive pressure to Floyd’s neck and back. Chauvin was responsible for his death.
Second, the cops weren’t on a hunt for black people to harm. They had a legitimate reason for attending to George Floyd. Cops were responding to a call of a criminal act: the use of a counterfeit $20 bill. On prompting from the store clerk, cops – not Chauvin – approached Floyd, who was obviously under the influence, possessed a second phony bill in the car, along with drugs and pills with Floyd’s saliva on them.
Third, Floyd resisted the initial officers’ attempts to bring him into custody, with Chauvin and his partner arriving later, and for Chauvin to make matters worse. Throughout this early phase of the arrest, before Chauvin, it is interesting to note that Floyd made claims of “I can’t breathe” with no one having him in a stranglehold or knee on his back.
Fourth, no evidence was presented by the prosecution of Chauvin’s, or anyone else’s, alleged racism. Not a hint, inference, or otherwise. Possibly, one could argue, this was due to the need to keep the trial focused on Chauvin’s actions. Still, if Chauvin was a raging bigot, something would come light that would lead a person to believe it. Nada.
Fifth, so how do we go from bad cop to racist America? The answer lies in pure demagoguery. A virile video clip of the actions of a bad cop, combined with a mania to find authority figures, preferably white, to publicly humiliate, breeds the ill-starred crusade of our crazies in elective office. It brings out the worst in our current crop of abysmal leaders.
However, it must be admitted that these people were elected. If there is a broader guilt to be assessed, we must bear some of the blame. Enough of us chose them. Could it be that we get the leadership that we deserve, or could it be that some of us just made a poor guess? I think the latter.
Have you noticed the pervasive use of “systemic racism” and “equity” in public utterances by eminences in our society? The two are key elements of “critical race theory”, an idea akin to Marx’s Scientific Socialism.
Honestly, the terms are a real head-scratcher to most sensible people. The former (systemic racism) is assumed to be real and bad, and the latter (equity) carries a vague aura of something good, being phonetically similar to “equality”. The reality is that both are warmed-over Marxisms, Marxisms for the obsessive identity-mongering of our time. It’s the oppressed/oppressor schtick of Marxism with the ranks of the “oppressed” filled with “people of color”, women (however defined), and that catch-all, the “other”. The “oppressors” are those of a pale shade and male. Notice that personal actions have nothing to do with the assignation.
You are judged by melanin count and genitalia. Sounds like good old fashioned racism and sexism to me, just practiced by different people.
Anyway, all of this is nonsense since racial intermingling has a made a hash of “people of color”. Soon, the only people reasonably without color are those at room temperature.
“Equity” began in English common law as the means to fill in the gaps, address loopholes, and to realize the goals of the common law: fairness and justice. The spirit-of-the-law stuff, as opposed to the letter.
That ain’t true today! It has the rancid odor of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It’s the century-plus bid to force equality in the strictest terms possible among the preferred categories (above).
Acts of public shaming during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Virtual reality training in a business conference room to identify and correct for “systemic racism”. (Photo: Forbes)
What does this mean to the common American as this noxious ideology embeds itself into everything from the Fortune 500 to the schools, especially the schools? Munchkins in elementary schools are asked to demean themselves in rankings of racial “power and privilege” (Cupertino, Ca.). During a middle school teacher in-service (i.e., training), a shaming session is conducted for Christian white males to confess their “privilege” – aka, “sin” – and admit their oppression of the “other” (Springfield, Mo.). Fifth-graders are compelled to celebrate “Black communism” and engage in a protest to free 1960’s radical Angela Davis who was, by the way, charged with murder (Philadelphia). In Seattle, the school district administration issued a memo that described white teachers as guilty of “spirit murder” of black children. Think, this totalitarian indoctrination is happening to your children and the people teaching them.
This isn’t education; it’s child abuse!
Ibram X. Kendi, formerly known as Ibram Henry Rogers, the warlock of critical race theory mysticism, demands a federal Antiracism Department, independent of the elective branches. No homage to popular sovereignty for this guy.
It’s just the tip of the iceberg. The abuse to logic and decency is evident everywhere from the military academies, the Pentagon, the labyrinth of state, local, and federal governments, corporate HR departments, et al. Just like the prior Marxisms, this one will end up in another pathetic existence for the people forced to live under it.
And you were worried about Trump’s comportment in 2020? Waiting in the wings is something far more horrifying, whether you realized it or not.
In 1917, many Russians didn’t like the czar. Then, they helped overthrow him and eventually got Lenin, Stalin, and communist totalitarianism for about 80 years. 10-12 million deaths later (due to civil war, famine, mass executions, and state-sanctioned murder) Russians got what few wanted at the onset.
Be careful for what you ask for. You are about to live the consequences. Here’s a photo gallery of one of the consequences, using the example of Minneapolis:
Onlookers watch as smoke smolders from a destroyed fast food restaurant near the Minneapolis Police Third Precinct, Thursday, May 28, 2020, after a night of rioting and looting as protests continue over the death of George Floyd. (Photo: AP Photo/Jim Mone) People stand on a burned up car as fires burn near a Target Store after a night of unrest and protests in the death of George Floyd early Thursday, May 28, 2020 in downtown Minneapolis. (Photo: David Joles/Star Tribune via AP)A man poses for a photo in the parking lot of an AutoZone store in flames, while protesters hold a rally for George Floyd in Minneapolis on Wednesday, May 27, 2020. (Photo: Carlos Gonzalez/Star Tribune via AP)A man poses for photos in front of a fire at an AutoZone store, while protesters hold a rally for George Floyd in Minneapolis on Wednesday, May 27, 2020. (Photo: Carlos Gonzalez/Star Tribune via AP)People break into a Target store, while protesters hold a rally for George Floyd in Minneapolis on Wednesday, May 27, 2020. (Photo: Aaron Lavinsky/Star Tribune via AP)People get out of a Target store with merchandise, while protesters hold a rally for George Floyd in Minneapolis on Wednesday, May 27, 2020. (Photo: Aaron Lavinsky/Star Tribune via AP)A man, center, sorts for items left in grocery carts strewn in the Target parking lot near the Minneapolis Police Third Precinct, Thursday, May 28, 2020, following a night of rioting and looting as protests continue over the arrest of George Floyd who died in police custody. (Photo: AP Photo/Jim Mone)
Seen from Hiawatha Avenue, a large fire burns Thursday, May 28, 2020, in Minneapolis during a third night of unrest following the death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody. (David Joles/Star Tribune via AP)
It happens to civilizations: the episodic spasms of chaos, conflict, and self-annihilation. The Greco-Roman world was beset by invasions, civil war, mob bedlam, warring political factions, among other things. In spite of it, it still lasted about a combined 10 centuries. Other refined ways of life weren’t so lucky; they collapsed, sometimes in quick order. Today, we are in the midst of another one of our perilous times. The big question is, is what we’re experiencing today a portent of our imminent demise? I don’t know, since we’ve survived earlier catastrophes, but the pessimism is understandable when you’re living through the furor. This one could be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.
This strife is different in that it is based on a broad self-loathing. We hate ourselves and each other because many of us think that stealthy conspiracies exist to ruin us. Infantile notions of conspiratorial cabals of all stripes are feeding the discord. On the right, we have QAnon and the cry that a host of plotters are seeking to destroy America, in secret of course. Many of them fomented the capitol riot and lurk in the background of some scattered protests. On the left, we have the ill-defined “systemic racism” and its kindred threat of “white privilege”. Add to the left’s paranoia, the devout belief in capitalism’s plot to destroy the planet in the fervently-held dogma of apocalyptic climate change.
San Francisco rally led by Sunrise Movement in 2019. (Photo: Peg Hunter)
Right now, the left’s lunacies are manning the cockpit of our society. They have the upper hand, with the unhinged on the right relegated to microscopic niches. The left’s manias are ascendant in corporate suites, our schools, government, Big Entertainment, Big Sports, throughout the cultural commanding heights. There’s nowhere for a person of a conservative bent to go to avoid the inanities. Who would have thought that simply buying a soft drink, or a Dodgers’ jersey, or going to Disneyland was a quiet endorsement of the Democratic Party’s revolutionary jihad? Now, small, formerly innocent pleasures feed the revolution. Everything is politicized.
The Chauvin verdict will be exploited by those in the cultural and political catbird seat to advance the left’s holy war. Biden’s AG is set to lead an inquisition to ferret out the witches who are fomenting persistent “systemic racism” in the Minneapolis PD, the first of many future inquisitions. The two-word banality slithered off the wagging tongues of Biden and his zealous lieutenant Harris shortly after the verdict was announced. The judge barely had time to take a breath after reading the verdict before the radicalized demigods at the head of the Article II branch ran to the cameras. They’re hardly a reassuring presence when they announced that half the electorate and the thin blue line have bulls’-eyes tattooed to their backs. For all of us, whether we realize it or not, their words are threats to public tranquility, public safety, and our Constitution.
Pres. Biden and VP Harris at the podium after the Chauvin verdict.
A false impetus will be ginned up for pushing DC and Puerto Rico into statehood, and four more senators to make it easier to advance the revolution. That’s not all. They have on their agenda the desire to castrate the Electoral College and make flyover country, and two-thirds of the states, politically irrelevant. I can’t think of any other single act that could do more to provoke Civil War II. They’re not done. They won’t be happy till they make a shambles of election integrity by the elimination of the secret ballot and voter ID through the unconstitutional vacuuming of power over elections to their grubby little DC hands. Don’t expect the courts to stand in the way. Let’s not forget their rank bullying of the Supreme Court with the cudgel of court-packing to frighten the robes into slinking into the background. When they’re done, America will be a hellish, unrecognizable place.
Expect the exodus from the political bastions of the lunacy to intensify. The geographical centers of the left, however, hope to counter the losses with an open border for the world’s poor. The more, the merrier . . . for them. But it will do nothing but escalate the divisions that’ll make Civil War II inevitable; though, I sincerely hope not.
And you thought that jailing Chauvin would be the end of it. No, it isn’t as simple as that because the ascendant left won’t let it be. We are in for an existential time of troubles.
Defense attorney Eric Nelson, left, and defendant former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin listen as Assistant Minnesota Attorney General Matthew Frank, questions witness Christopher Martin during the Chauvin trial.
If you think that the conviction of Derek Chauvin is the end of it, you’re a fool. Winston Churchill said it best in 1942: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” There was a ring of hope in Churchill’s words for Brits after the Battle of Britain; not so for us. Now, America, we are really going to be in for it.
This is more than about Chauvin. The Chauvin trial should have been about a police officer’s abuse of his power. Instead, it was taken along in a flood of revolutionary fervor to change America beyond recognition. The verdict only fed the beast, the beast being the organized hustle of “systemic racism”; and the beast needs more feeding. Like everything else, the Chauvin/Floyd incident was thrown into this mythical-racism maelstrom. These radicals won’t be satisfied with a single conviction. Their goal is to make America unrecognizable and, hence, unlivable for the rest of us.
BLM protesters in Minneapolis.
After reading the press reports this morning, a common reaction to the verdict is a collective “sigh of relief” with calls to “reimagine” policing and continue the fight against the spectral “systemic racism”. In both cases, we’re going to be screwed with more violent streets, an epidemic of resisting arrest, riots, and a bloated federal monster rooting around in nearly all aspects of our lives. Yes, we’re going to be in for it.
The oft-quoted “sigh” concerns the relief that the mob got what it wanted and we’re safe from them torching our cities . . . for now. That’s the ticket: public tranquility guaranteed by indulging the mob. You don’t have to look very far to see what we’re in store for. Kids will tell you what it’s like in a playground with a few bullies and no adults. Make no mistake about it, we are entering a time of public policy and justice under the gun of mob intimidation. The collective “sigh” is worrisome in the extreme.
The trial was organized at the outset to be exposed to the mob. The judge amazingly refused to grant a change of venue or even sequester the jury. The jury during the trial could have been pummeled by media stories of the mayhem 10 miles up the interstate from the courtroom (and home to one of the jurors), the Maxine Waters flame-thrower inciting more violence, the intimidation of a defense witness, the general turmoil outside the courtroom, and the year-long mayhem across blue-America. We won’t know if they were affected by the intense rancor till many moons later, but nonetheless the judge’s decisions will forever taint the trial.
The tactic of intimidation to further the ends of the revolution isn’t limited to the miscreants of Black Lives Matter on the streets of Minneapolis. The tactic of court-packing by the Jacobins of the donkey party isn’t solely meant to land four new lefties on the Supreme Court. It serves the function of intimidating the court. Justice, the cement of a civilized society, could be compromised by justices, like the institutionalist John Roberts, constantly looking over their shoulders at the threats coming from the mob soldiers running the show in Congress and the senescent Biden administration. They will have won without seating more radicals if the Court caves. Remember, in the end, back in the thirties, FDR won without successfully packing it.
Evil winds are blowing. Given all that has happened, and likely to happen, this is not a time to go into law enforcement. It’s a perilous profession that will be “reimagined” into more peril for those in its ranks. If you’re already in it, and of a ripe age, fill out the retirement papers. If you’re younger than that, you have a big decision to make: stay or leave. If you’re a young whippersnapper looking to join, consider becoming an astronaut. I hear that a mission to Mars is in the offing.
For the regular Joe and Judy six-pack, don’t expect 911 to matter anymore. We’re on our own.
Correlation isn’t causation but it certainly is intriguing. A suspicion about a causal relationship between two factors will arise if a change in one is accompanied by a change in the other (with the caveat of “all other factors being equal”). Take for example increasing secularism – which includes materialism, agnosticism, atheism, and a decline in church attendance – and a rise in the belief of a “climate emergency”. Yes, the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy lurks as a cautionary tale for any attempted linkage between happenstances, but that can’t be an excuse to flippantly reject a possible, maybe probable, connection when reason and evidence bolster the case.
Today, pews are empty and John Kerry jets off to China to enlist the communist regime in a jihad against “climate change”. Suburban women and other excitable voting blocs have night-sweats over ubiquitously broadcast fears of extreme weather and rising seas flooding their neighborhoods. The great lords of the donkey party proclaim it to be the central issue of our time, and a singular, stand-alone, and existential threat to such an extent that its amelioration must be pursued even to the detriment of national prosperity and security. Who’s pushing the crusade? Science dunces.
Why would secularists be more likely to be hair-on-fire about climate change? Deductively speaking, and with a little support from inductive reasoning (i.e., evidence), a reasonable connection can be drawn. Secularists have nothing to rely upon for all that happens other than human agency, there being nothing beyond us and the material world. It’s easy for them to fall for crusades that are postulated on man being the principal cause of our ills. They are less inclined to accept that some matters are consigned to fate or beyond our ken. They are irresistibly drawn to man as the cause and the material reform of man as the solution – aka, the Green New Deal and Lenin and his Bolsheviks, et al.
1920’s Bolshevik leadership from left: Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky
Religionists are more resistant to the compunction. After all, for them, God is the ultimate sovereign of all things, not man and his SUV. In contrast, secularists are alone in the universe in a heightened sense of anxiety, ready recruits for the ballyhoo of the political circus. Researchers Aimee Lopes and Christopher Jones in ScienceDirect found such a connection when they concluded in their survey,
“Secular participants expressed anxiety in relation to environmental issues, especially climate change. Lack of belief in an afterlife or divine intervention led secular participants to focus on human responsibility and the need for action . . . .”
This leads me to the triple bogey of hypothetical thinking: the degree of secularism, the level of science literacy, and the fervency of belief in the secular crusade. Is it possible for a high degree of cultural secularism, combined with a low level of science understanding, to lead to an inability to distinguish climate hysterics from real science and, consequently, a frenzy for climate eschatology? It’s not only possible; it’s probable.
Publicity hounds barking about it as in so many Chicken Littles seem to run in the same lane of questionable scientific literacy. For instance, Al Gore, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ed Markey, Joe Biden, and his political consort, Kamala Harris, aren’t scientists. Far from it. Gore graduated from Harvard with a degree in government, and according to Wikipedia, “he did not do well in science classes and avoided taking math.” Mmmmmmmmmmm.
A corpulent Al Gore from 2010.Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey delivers remarks on the Green New Deal in 2019.
AOC is an urchin of government from her education to her internship under Ted Kennedy. Her degree is in one of those academic amalgams in the “arts”: international relations and economics (?). Bear in mind that a BA in a particular field doesn’t guarantee practical competence in it. As for her science acumen, she’s puffed up for her second-place finish in a high school ISEF competition. There’s much in the story that doesn’t pass the smell test. An asteroid – discovered in 1992 when she was 3 – named after her for a SECOND-PLACE finish in a high school science fair? What’s behind that? An alleged science whiz that ends up in Boston U. pursuing “international relations”? What? Mmmmmmmmmmm.
A teenage AOC at her high school science fair project.
The rest of her résumé, or what has been commonly said of her, is similarly odoriferous. Intel giving her a scholarship to an expensive college to pursue a non-science degree? They don’t do that! Mmmmmm.
Then there’s what doesn’t appear in her résumé, or has gone down the memory hole. The girl was bouncing around after graduation; nothing unusual in that. Without any technical expertise of the kind evident in a science background, she gravitated to the chattering vocations that are typical of the chattering classes. She used a government-subsidized communal workplace to “incubate” a book publishing business (Brook Avenue Press) that failed to produce a single book and jumped on board one of those trendy self-improvement consultancies, GAGEis (Gage Strategies), that ended up as successful as the book publishing enterprise. And to think that this genius is leading the effort to overturn our personal fortunes to address her climate-change hysterics. (this part of her story can be found here )
The rest of the gang isn’t any more scientifically impressive. Ed Markey (D, Mass.) earned a Bachelor of Arts degree and his JD at Boston College. Law and government are his gigs. From there, he’ll spend rest of his life at taxpayer expense.
Sen. Ed Markey (D, Mass.)
Another long-in-the-tooth Dem and recent Green New Deal enthusiast, Joe Biden, got his BA in history and political science from the U. of Delaware. He then matriculated to the U. of Syracuse Law School where he met his wife and finished at the bottom of his law school class (76th of 85). (see here)
A younger Joe Biden.
And then we have Biden’s sidekick, Kamala Harris. Does she bring a trained eye for science to her lofty political platitudes? That’s hard to believe since she graduated from Howard U. with an “arts” degree in political science and – here we go again – economics. And of course, after that, she flies to law school like Gore, Markey, and Biden before her. In the end, what we have is a cohort that proves the relationship between a high level of gullibility for climate-change pablum and a paucity of actual science competence.
VP Kamala Harris.
To be sure, they can get away with a lack of science acuity if they have a back bench of politicized “experts” to buck them up. In this regard, the corruption of science by politics has reached a crescendo as government, led by its science dunces, has increasingly regulated and subsidized the science industry. The influence of politics is palpable. And add to this the failure of the academic science departments in preventing the lefty lunacies in the broader campus from bleeding into their faculties and research. Increasingly, science is no longer science in places where science is expected to be conducted.
Thus, at this juncture, it is pertinent to ask, what is science? It isn’t critical race theory and its illegitimate offspring. “Follow the science” would require a person to actually follow science, the real science, the scientific method. It begins with a mental disposition to recognize a real scientific proposition, or hypothesis: one that is presented in a testable way, tested by the scientific method. “Systemic white racism” isn’t it. It is presumed to exist, and is accompanied by a trail of verbiage that only works to excite the demagogues’ fellow-travelers. Ditto for the trendy climate-change craze.
Known hustlers of “critical race theory”: Ibram X. Kendi (l) and Robin Diangelo.
For the record, climate change is happening, as it has since shortly after the formation of the planet, and the planet had one. Climate isn’t static. The big question isn’t over the existence of climatic changes but whether we are triggering a climate catastrophe today. It’s provocative idea, but one better suited for Hollywood scriptwriters and not one befitting a scientist.
Those scientists willing to go down that path are letting their political biases cloud their scientific judgment. They, and we, must be reminded of a few pertinent scientific facts. First, since we started having a climate, about 4.6 billion years ago, it has acted as a gaseous membrane. Some of the sun’s energy to the surface gets delayed and absorbed in the atmosphere thus keeping our temperatures from dropping to Martian levels (ranging +70⁰ to -220⁰ F, averaging -80⁰). Clouds, water vapor, methane, and carbon dioxide especially do the trick, and all of them predate the human discovery of fire. The global greenhouse was one of God’s best inventions.
This image depicts the effects of clouds absorbing longwave rays emitted from the Earth, which are then reemitted back to the surface. This tends to result in overall warming of the Earth during the nighttime.
Next, global warming is better than global cooling, hands down. But, as with most things in nature, the picture is complex. A warming climate extends the growing season which is great for lifespans, prosperity, and civilizations. Greenland became green over more of it, and hospitable to Norse settlement. A cooling one is a cataclysm for bringing marauding invasions (the fall of the Roman Empire; the Rhine froze over), end-times pandemics (the Black Death in multiple waves), and famines (surplus-destroying fungi; crop-destroying freezes; and a shrunken growing season). Yet, for the early Puritan settlement of Massachusetts, The Little Ice Age (1303-1860 AD) worked to their benefit in certain ways: malaria, yellow fever, and dysentery weren’t as severe as elsewhere; enteritis, the bane for children at the time, wasn’t as big a problem; and the cold New England winters posed an elevated health risk to sub-Saharan Africans so slavery couldn’t take root.
Lucas van Valckenborch painted a cold winter landscape set near Antwerp, Belgium, in 1575, when Europe was in the midst of the Little Ice Age.
On balance, though, it must be admitted that warm periods presaged good times. As for slavery, the moral stain would be removed by 650,000 deaths on the battlefield.
Politicians exaggerate – nothing new in that – and politicized “experts” adopt the habit. The only difference in the two theatrical acts lies in the fact that politicians start out as activists, and later morph into snout-trough-burying careerists, but our politicized “experts” remain in the initial political larvae stage of activist. The compromised expert is giddy at the prospect to distort the science in support of his activism. For example, CO₂, a gaseous byproduct of job creation, is inflated to the status of an archvillain. So, methane, clouds, water vapor, volcanoes, sunspot activity, and anything else that helps our atmosphere hold onto solar energy for the sake of our long-term health, are ignored in order to get right to “evil” CO₂. Thus, the increase in the gas from .03% to .04% of atmospheric molecules in the past 100 years is crafted into a nightmare.
Activist professor Michael Mann of Penn St. U.
For the activist in a lab coat, forget about CO₂ being a vitamin for plants in the production of oxygen. For them, CO₂ carries Revelations’ mark of the beast, despite the observation that a doubling of it would only increase temperatures by 1.8⁰F, which is amply verified in the geologic and climactic record. But that piddling amount must be magnified into a “tipping point” and reinforced in the virtual gaming of their computer models. They overdo the principle of “positive feedbacks” – a process that works to increase the effects of a change in a system – and integrates the bias into their models that function as magic lanterns.
They do this to explain away Le Chatelier’s principle: “when a settled system is disturbed, it will adjust to diminish the change that has been made to it.” Over time, a disturbance in a natural system will be mitigated, not magnified as in “positive feedbacks”. So, the influence of a spike in atmospheric CO₂ will be absorbed and blunted by adjustments of the other factors in the system thereby lessening the impact. “Positive feedbacks” is prominent in alarmist algorithms; Le Chatelier is functionally absent. Thus, they can flood the zone with scary predictions of coastal real estate moving inland, unhinged extreme weather predictions that make their way into recent movie scripts, and all sorts of other wild and hypothetical calamities and prognostications.
At the end of the day, we get to endure our political buffoons standing before cameras to ignorantly chastise anyone with a head still on their shoulders. It’s enough to make a person wonder if we’re living in an asylum run by the inmates.
The whole scene brings to mind another word: kakistocracy. It is a noun for a “government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state.” Not surprisingly, it’s of Greek origin. The prefix, kakistos, means “worst”. Add the suffix, -cracy, or “rule”, and we get an accurate depiction of the Biden administration, the Dem head-honchos in Congress, and the cowards in corporate suites. It’s enough to make one live off-the-grid.
Rioters stomping on a police cruiser in Brooklyn Center, Minn., April 12, 2021.A patient is wheeled out of Cobble Hill Health Center by emergency medical workers, Friday, April 17, 2020, in the Brooklyn borough of New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Can anyone make sense of the common use of the word “risk”? In one sense, it’s eliminated altogether in sentences that begin with “If it saves one life . . ..” Any expense and other dangers are ignored in the pursuit of some influential person’s, or group’s, particular action. It makes a mockery of the reality of tradeoffs in life. In another sense, it’s a non-factor in bee-lining straight to a revolutionary gang’s favorite end state, or utopia, as in the “critical race theory” crowd’s headlong rush to make equal by fiat all skin shades in all socio-economic measures. They call it “equity”, thereby soiling another word with the mud of extremist politics.
The pandemic accorded the perfect opportunity to do the former: public administrators and executives, mostly blue-state and blue-Biden and company, forcefully neglected any serious consideration other than stopping the virus. Admirable, yes, but adolescent thinking at its worst. There were options other than the destruction of other aspects of life – schooling the young, careers, worship, social gatherings from the movies to Thanksgiving, etc. – but it all depends on a mature assessment of risk and the accompanying tradeoffs. Other choices were available without the never-ending masks (double and triple) – quickly becoming our new burqa – and the formation of a writ-large leper colony in six-foot social distancing and the solitary confinement of the lockdowns.
The wet blanket on life may have been justified in the first few months till we got a handle on therapeutics and some understanding of vulnerable populations. As we knew more, the controls should have been gradually lifted with concentrated efforts on protecting groups especially susceptible to lethal repercussions. Instead, we got the shuttering of life – which Fauci and Biden and company show no signs of lessening – and the subsequent rash of suicides, failed students, substance and domestic abuses, undetected diseases, destroyed careers, and the unending loneliness in our solitary confinement. Are these tradeoffs worth it? Was it acceptable to incur these risks?
No serious assessment was ever laid out to the public. The tactic was to strangle society, and keep strangling it. We were sold on the gambit to “stop the spread”. In essence, all of us were labeled walking super-spreaders. All-of-a-sudden, we lost our humanity, optimism, and future. No wonder people turned to drink, reefer, crack, and, for some, a bullet to the head. Kids languished in a cognitive miasma; Zooming their educations turned into a disaster. These risks were dismissed or blatantly ignored in the tunnel vision of “If it saves one life”.
Risk is maligned in another context: resist arrest and crap happens. Nick Saban once said,
“One thing I always tell players is that there are three bad things: Nothing good happens after midnight, nothing good happens when you’re around guns unless you’re going hunting, and you don’t want to mess around with women that you don’t know because a lot of times, bad things happen.”
Good advice, and one which requires the addition of resisting arrest to his list.
George Zimmerman after his confrontation with Trayvon Martin, 2014.
Black Lives Matter as a neo-Marxist movement par excellence came to the fore on resisting arrest. The Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman imbroglio was a small spark, but the thuggish Michael Brown/Officer Darren Wilson confrontation in Ferguson, Mo., of 2014 jump-started it to a national cause. As it turned out, Brown was spoiling for a fight with a cop and got one, and got killed, and hence giving us the “Ferguson effect”: cops pull back and crime jumps, a replay of LA’s Rodney King riots of 1992 (funny thing: another act of resisting arrest). And the whole thing is due to resisting arrest.
Remember, a nasty risk is attached to resisting arrest.
There’s more to Black Lives Matter ascending the respectability ladder to the chic status of a favorite Fortune-500 charity. More incidences followed, in this age of the ubiquitous cell-phone and universal connectivity, to give a false aura of righteousness to this Marxist band, more instances of ignoring the risks of resisting arrest. With the exception of Eric Garner (NYC, 2014), high profile instances of resisting arrest were caught on tape to be viewed by any youngster with access to a cell phone. The elevation of George Floyd to sainthood is one shining example of the tendency of resisting arrest heightening the chances of someone’s death. To deny Floyd’s uncooperative actions is to indulge in a fantasy. Floyd, a big man with an extensive criminal background, was subdued by a cop’s possible overreaction in a stressful situation of resisting arrest. Once again, crap happened.
Or take this celebrated incident in Atlanta at a time of rioting to “honor” George Floyd: Rayshard Brooks resisted arrest, scuffled with cops, grabbed a cop’s taser, fled after tasering the cop, and was shot and killed. The poor Wendy’s was torched, more rioting, and another reason is given to leave America’s urban centers.
Rioting in Kenosha, Wisc., 2020.
Jump forward to August 2020, Kenosha, Wisc., and Jacob Blake. Police answering a domestic disturbance call confronted Jacob Blake, a man with a warrant for his arrest who resisted officer requests, strove to his car (whose car is open to question), and a melee erupted with Blake being shot. Like after midnight, nothing good happens from defying officer requests. It ends in the worst sort of place for all concerned. It’s a lesson that should have sunken in, instead of being used as another excuse for widespread mayhem.
Or take this most recent episode in greater Minneapolis. Cops pull over Daunte Wright, he attempts to flee, and in the heat of the moment an officer grabs the wrong weapon and inadvertently shoots Wright. You’d think that it was common knowledge that police have a tendency of not dealing with church choir members. The self-preservation instinct is very much alive in an occupation known for its interaction with some of our nastiest people. They wear body armor as part of the uniform, after all. You’d think that people would know and act accordingly, but, alas, some don’t, run the risk, and we get exposed to more Black Lives Matter jive.
Rioting and looting in Brooklyn Center, Minn., April 12, 2021.
As a side note, don’t choose a career in law enforcement in this day and age. It’s a risky business for your health and freedom as you stay out of the clutches of vengeful DA’s, the media and politician mobs, defunding campaigns, and judges and juries who could be poisoned by the same thoughts in the heads of the street mobs. Why take the risk?
Risk is not well understood, and in some cases not even considered. The foolishness has resulted in a shattered society, the destructive looniness of the “systemic racism” crusade, and a risky but necessary public service becoming a threat to life, limb, and future for all who aspire to join its ranks. Just think, these same BLM boosters want to strip the people of their guns at a time when they have made the streets an unruly mess. Soon, the only thing left for us to do in the face violent miscreants is to huddle in prayer. But the moment we seek refuge in a sanctuary to do likewise, these very same beleaguered officers will be called upon to arrest us for violating the ban on indoor social gatherings.
What a strange world that we have created for ourselves.
How smart are the American people, myself included, or any electorate for that matter? By smart, I mean the tendency to know at least a few critical things. Here’s a head-scratcher to be leveled at a common homebody: Do you believe that the value (price) of a product is based on the labor that went into it? I cringe at the likely answer of “yes” by far too many. That little postulate is the pebble that starts an avalanche. From “yes” we get to “Workers of the world unite!”; the dictatorship of the proletariat; the interminable whining about systemic oppression with the “oppressed” filled by any identity outside of white male; a gulag to be populated with anyone who can’t play along; a secret police to prop up the heinous political deformity; and influential goofs talking economics and not knowing it.
Imagine the devastation to the republic if Democratic Party politicians discovered the popularity of “yes”. “Shhhhhhhh!” before they find out.
For the record, the answer in the affirmative is an absurdity. As proof, look at all the unsold crafts at a flea market. A lot of effort – labor – went into the stuff but a good chunk of it nobody wanted. It’s inventory-reduction time for our weekend merchant. Clearance sales mean price reductions. See, prices are determined by the valuations of buyers and not the producer’s sweat equity.
I have the same concern about the public’s smartness when Rasmussen came out with its recent survey on MLB’s abandonment of Atlanta due to Georgia’s election law. 40% called it a “good idea” and 46% labeled it a “bad idea”. 60% of Democrats liked MLB’s political navel-gazing. No push questions were part of the survey to plumb the depths of respondents’ knowledge on the issue, like the contents of the Georgia law. (see the poll here)
Robert Manfred, MLB Commissioner
Is the public any better informed on the election law in question than Commissioner Robert Manfred and the rest of MLB, Inc.? Other than knowing that MLB’s action took place, is there anything more rattling around in the heads of the 40%, or 60% of Democrats? I’m of a mind to doubt it. We need no more confirmation of Churchill’s insight when he said in the House of Commons in 1947 that “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried.”
Yet, as per Churchill in his qualifier, an acceptance of popular ignorance is better than turning over decision-making to a clique of self-anointed demi-gods operating as bureaucratic “experts”. Give me the halfwit voter over the rule of a powerful commissariat with dreams of grandeur. At least with the halfwit, I’ve got a 50% chance of them getting it right. If not, there’s always the next time. For the demi-gods, it’s likely to be one person/one vote/one time in a Constitution that is interpreted out of existence.
What would be waiting for us in rule by a clique? The old USSR lights the way. The class of “experts” to manage the Soviet economy were ensconced in Gosplan, the government planning agency. The Soviets were great at producing city-busting nuclear ICBM’s but couldn’t manage sufficient quantities of tooth paste, toilet paper, et al. It’s great for brinksmanship but rather disappointing if forced to use old copies of Izvestiya after performing one of life’s necessities.
Soviet-era public housing, contemporary Moscow
I hope that our citizens are never polled on this question: Should we be ruled by experts? Personally, uncontrollable shutters would return if the expected large numbers of yesses are turned into successful Democrat campaign slogans. Somehow, their popular “save our democracy” chant would quickly acquire a hollow ring, and the Democrats’ “managed decline”, once reserved for fossil fuels, would have a much broader application, with the exception of a few huge public monoliths like bullet trains to nowhere.
A viaduct built in Madera for California’s high-speed rail project in the sparsely-populated Central Valley.(High-Speed Rail Authority)
