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Do People Understand that Progressivism Is the Problem?

What Happened to California Republicans? | THAT'S WHAT I'M SCREAMING

We don’t have to look very far for the cause of our discontents.  California is the template for what ails us.  It’s the Vatican of new wave progressivism, a movement with the mental genetics of Robespierre, Lenin, and every visionary with the ambition to make an entire population’s thoughts, actions, and way of life conform to their dream.  Woe be to you if you refuse to fit in.  Nothing is allowed to stand in the way, not our institutions, standards of decency, or principles of fair play.  Yep, California is our future . . . if we let it.

This progressivism is monstrous.  It’s an agent of desolation.  Watch them as they go after Trump, or Steve Bannon, or your kids which, in their clutches, are radicalized or placed under the care of the transgender coven.  Watch them as they lay waste to prosperity, your prosperity.  It’s a ticket to Sheol (Hell).

All of us are living it.  The Trump trial and verdict is a hot mess.  As for the Bannon conviction and sentence, it’s technically correct, but also a clear example of politically advantageous prosecution.  Forget about equal treatment before the law, treating like cases alike.  The progressive’s Lady Justice lifts the blindfold from one eye.  If you’re Bannon, you get a broadside.  If you’re Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, sail on.

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Pres. Obama’s AG, Eric Holder, testifying before Congress at the time of the Fast and Furious scandal
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Steve Bannon sits during his appearance at New York Supreme Court after a hearing in New York City, January 12, 2023. (photo: Steve Hirsch/Pool via Reuters)

Compare the two.  Eric Holder in 2011 falsely testified before Congress that he had been aware of Fast and Furious for only few weeks prior to his testimony.  He’s contradicted by the facts.  Justice Department emails to Holder from underlings discussing Fast and Furious date back to July of the previous year.  Holder slow-walks congressional subpoenas for more information and President Obama puts the kibosh to any more cooperation, shielding his AG from congressional oversight under a blanket of executive immunity.  Shortly thereafter, tired of all the nonsense, the House Oversight Committee voted to hold Holder in contempt of Congress.  What happened to Holder’s contempt charge?  Nothing.  It fell into the abyss (see #1-3 below).

Not true for Bannon.  For Biden’s DOJ under AG Merick Garland, it’s full speed ahead.  Bannon is accused of obstructing a congressional investigation, like Holder, because he falsely believed that he was covered by President Trump’s claim of executive immunity.  I say falsely because Bannon wasn’t a presidential aide to be covered by executive immunity, nor was the information in the subpoena probably protected by presidential immunity.  Technically, in accordance with law, Bannon is guilty.  So, don’t blame the judge for sentencing him to jail time.  But Holder should also be wearing an orange jumpsuit if America is still a nation that adheres to basic principles of fair play.

We aren’t that kind of nation any longer.  Thanks, progressives.

Progressives rabidly wanted to get their man, Trump and any person around him, by creating in 2021 a bogus committee, the J6 Committee, to target Trump and his people.  The committee was not legitimate since the minority party (Republicans) weren’t allowed their choices to be on it.  Instead, the thing was stacked with zealous Democrats and a couple of carefully selected Republicans with a publicly announced hatred of Trump.  Any legal actions taken by it were tainted by over-the-top partisanship.

It parallels the Democrats’ other shambolic distortions of justice in the Democrat Jim Crow South.

A Ku Klux Klan rally in Frederick, Maryland, 1980.
A Ku Klux Klan rally in Frederick, Maryland, in 1980. They’re the Democrats’ version of civil society in the old Jim Crow South.

Hanging judges and juries and jury nullification were the stock and trade of Democrat white southerners in charge of the deep South. It’s in the Democrats’ DNA.  Like the couple of whites accused in the torture and murder of Emmitt Till standing before a bigotedly sympathetic jury, Trump and Bannon were similarly hauled before a stacked hearing.  No apologies, just convictions.

Emmett Till's mother, Mamie, weeps as the body of her slain son arrives at a Chicago Rail ...
Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie, weeps as the body of her slain son arrives at a Chicago Rail Station, Sep. 1955

The sad saga doesn’t end there.  Desolation is the consequence of progressivism. Look at the poster child of progressivism, California, its cities, combustible wildlands, teetering grid, collapsing infrastructure, broad assault on the retail trade, fleeing middle class and businesses, overall sense of ugliness and lawlessness, burgeoning public indebtedness, failing schools, eco-fanaticism, etc.  It’s a mess, and some of the progressively minded are beginning to notice it to their chagrin.  They didn’t sign up for this.  Who would?

A mom is still a mom without regard to her party registration.  The progressive agenda is well and good . . . until it places her child in its maw.  It happened to Erin Friday whose daughter was gender transitioned behind her back by public school authorities.  A progressive, Democrat, and supporter of much of the LGBTQ agenda, she was so incensed by this affront to her basic parental authority that she helped organize the Protect Kids Initiative to prevent this from happening to another mother and child in the state (see #6-7 below).

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Erin Friday testifying before the California State Assembly

Then she ran into another maw, the new wave progressives who run the state of California.  Their shenanigans killed the Protect Kids Initiative.  How?  Simply make it difficult to collect the required number of signatures.  The antics of state Attorney General Rob Bonta was a dagger to its heart.  State law gives power to the AG to provide a title and summary for the initiative.  The “Protect Kids Initiative” became “Restricts Rights of Transgender Youth”.  The attached summary asserted that the initiative “prohibits gender-affirming health care for transgender patients under 18, even if parents [sic] consent or treatment is medically recommended”.   It’s hard to gain support from an ill-informed California electorate when having to face frowns after reading “Restricts rights” and “prohibits … health care”.  The AG’s hostile language was upheld by a California court.  The thing is dead, dead.

7th California School District Adopts Policy to Notify Parents of Child’s Gender Status Change ...
Rob Bonta, the radical left-wing attorney general of California

On top of everything else that the popularly elected progressive ruling class is doing to the state, parents can’t protect their kids from mental and medical interventions that will scar them for life.  This state is just hostile to children from aborting them up to and including their passage down the birth canal to mutilating them for life, all at public expense.  It’s a malevolent state that has become an Auschwitz for children.

Electing progressives is an invitation to disaster.  For some, they think that their only recourse is Trump, or some such acolyte, which they find distasteful.  Well, how distasteful is our ruined constitutional order or our kids scarred beyond belief?  If California is our national future, flee, flee now to some lonely and isolated outpost in Australia’s outback.  Get out, or vote against any Democrat before they get a chance to bring California to your town.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “Steve Bannon’s Remand Is Consistent with the Law”, Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 6/8/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/steve-bannons-remand-is-consistent-with-the-law/
2. “Why Eric Holder Will Regret His Recklessness”, John Yoo, National Review, 9/25/2014, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-eric-holder-will-regret-his-recklessness-john-yoo/
3. “Fast, Furious, and Loose with the Facts”, The Editors, National Review, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/10/fast-furious-and-loose-facts-editors/
4. “Eric Holder, Once Cited for Contempt in Fast and Furious Probe, Criticizes Barr for ‘Protecting the President’”, Matt Naham, Law and Crime, 5/1/2019, at https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/eric-holder-once-cited-for-contempt-in-fast-and-furious-probe-criticizes-barr-for-protecting-the-president/
5. “Eric Holder’s Contempt Case Trends Amid Bannon Sentence ‘Double Standards’”, Newsweek, 10/21/2022, at https://www.newsweek.com/eric-holder-contempt-case-steve-bannon-sentence-double-standards-1753963
6. “California Parents Are Afraid of Losing Their Kids | Erin Friday”, California Insider (video), with Siyamak Khorrami, at https://californiainsider.com/california-news/videos/california-insider-show/california-parents-are-afraid-of-losing-their-kids-erin-friday-5608600
7. “Parent Group to Sue California Official Over Alleged Misleading Ballot Title, Summary”, Brad Jones, California Insider, 1/9/2024, at https://californiainsider.com/california-news/parent-group-to-sue-california-official-over-alleged-misleading-ballot-title-summary-5560682

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The U.S., A Third-Rate Country? Part II of the Trump Verdict

Trump guilty verdict: What happened in court as judge read decision
Alvin Bragg, Manhattan DA
Who Is Justice Juan Merchan?
Judge Merchan in the so-called Trump hush-money trail

In the old parlance of the Cold War, the world was divided between a First World (the wealthy nations mostly aligned with the West), a Second World (the communist bloc), and a Third World (everyone else, mostly the poor, corrupt, and so-called nonaligned).  The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR blotted out most of the Second, leaving the First and an amorphous blob of everyone else.  As the widely recognized head of the First, the U.S. of today has willfully, not inevitably, decided to make its way down into the blob.  No better sign of the descent into the corruption thicket can be found than the recent Trump verdict.

It’s more than the political prosecution of an obscure local politician that occurs from time to time.  It’s the chutzpah to target one of highest profile figures in this important decision-making year, the chief opponent of the reigning president, and to do so on alarmingly spurious charges.  One is left to only admire the ingeniousness in crafting a malign charade out of a patchwork of legal mumbo-jumbo.  In the America of today, there’s no need for a seizure of the presidential compound and barbarous firing squads.  Just use our mountainous legal code to accomplish the same end.  The gambit is all Third World.

Let’s take a look at the travesty. It begins with a jumbled understanding of a “conspiracy” (see #1 below). In the law, a criminal conspiracy is one or more people coordinating the means to achieve an illegal objective, a crime.  Absent a criminal end, there is no conspiracy.  Think it through.  For a bank robbery, you might have three people: one to buy the masks and gun, one to drive the getaway car, and one to rush into the bank to take the money.  There are two crimes: the robbery which makes for the second crime, the conspiracy to do it.  Without the criminal objective, the disguises were for a masked ball, the driver is a chauffeur, and the third person is making a savings account withdrawal.

In the Trump saga, where’s the crime?  Non-disclosure agreements (NDA) aren’t illegal.  The bookkeeping entries for payments in the NDAs may or may not be infractions (misdemeanors), but that’s irrelevant since the 2-year statute of limitations had long since expired.  When your paramount goal is not to lose power, just use obscure laws in convoluted ways in an intensely partisan jurisdiction before an intensely partisan judge and jury to hang your opponent; and you too can have your country join the ranks of Burundi-style electioneering (in Africa, the Fund for Peace’s most unstable country).

Rest assured; they won’t let a little thing like a statute of limitations stand in the way any more than a generalissimo would.  Just magically turn the misdemeanors into felonies and therefore leap over the time limit.  The cabal needs a second crime though.  How to manufacture one?  Establish a conspiracy using the highly dubious Article 17-152 of New York’s election law which oddly defines conspiracy as the use of unlawful means to “to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office” (see #1 below).  Let that sink in.  Normally, the means become unlawful because the objective is a crime, but promoting or negatively campaigning against a person for office is not a crime.  It can’t be.  It’s the stuff of campaigns.  Bragg did not even prove an “unlawful means” for the second crime that translates the misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records into felonies.

Instead, Bragg and the judge gave the jury a choice of three unindicted possibilities (whew, think that one through): a Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) violation, hypothetical bookkeeping infractions other than the original 34, or some other tax illegality.  The whole thing is rubbish.  Bragg and a Manhattan court aren’t empowered to enforce FECA, a federal law forbidding Bragg’s, Judge Merchan’s, and a dimwitted jury’s meddling.  Regarding the other two, while keeping them silent in the indictment, Bragg and the trial court stampeded over Trump’s Sixth Amendment right to know the charges.

And then for the legal morass to work, proof of intent is still required – evidence of Trump’s state of mind to commit fraud – which Bragg never established for charges that he never indicted.  The trial and the verdict are an absolute disgrace.

Not surprisingly, Biden’s number three at DOJ, Matthew Colangelo, left in December 2022 to join Bragg’s team.  Coincidence? Call me . . . skeptical.  Who leaves a high-status DC post to be an underling to a local DA unless something else is afoot?  This stinks to high heaven.

It’s an embarrassment to the U.S. and us, its citizens.  Bragg, Merchan, and the numbskull jury made us a laughingstock to the world.  What makes our “justice” any different from the CCP’s “People’s Tribunals” to imprison or execute “enemies of the people”?  Some say democracy is messy.  No, that’s too nice.  This makes us third-rate, all of us.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. Andrew C. McCarthy’s work on the trial is invaluable in his “The ‘Other Crime’ in the Trump Trial: Conflating Ends and Means”, National Review, 6/3/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/the-other-crime-in-the-trump-trial-conflating-ends-and-means/

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Progressivism’s Totalitarian Streak Exposed: The Trump Verdict

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Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg (l)

What is totalitarianism?  Some described it this way: authoritarianism wants obedience; totalitarianism wants belief.  An authoritarian controls what you do; a totalitarian controls that and what you think, what’s in your head and heart.  Today’s progressivism is developing before our eyes the authoritarian means to pursue totalitarian ends.  The Trump verdict is the latest piece in this sordid puzzle.

The case is absurd.  The highly debatable misdemeanor bookkeeping violations in New York law were legally dead having gone beyond New York’s statute of limitations.  The “fraud” was Trump doing what Bill Clinton did: allegedly attempting to hide adultery.  The shame of adultery is not a crime.  Perjury is; nondisclosure agreements are not.  According to Andrew C. McCarthy on the principal Bragg allegation of fraud in the bookkeeping to hide a campaign expense, “… [a campaign] expense has to be an obligation that relates directly to the campaign and would not exist absent the campaign” (see #1 below).  This clearly wasn’t, which explains why the feds didn’t pursue it.  The 34 charges were one charge cloned 34 times to embellish this Bragg quackery.  The resuscitation of the defunct minor allegations, and the elevation of the flummery to felonies, was conjured by connecting these to a mysterious fraud in hypothetical and uncharged federal campaign finance violations or some other unknown and unproven derelictions, a clear and unmistakable violation of the Sixth Amendment’s right of a defendant to know the charges, even the hidden one used to leap over the statute of limitations and into a felony.  The judge’s behavior was egregiously partisan.  This trial and verdict have “reversible error” (overturned on appeal) written all over them.

But the dam of restraint on political prosecutions has been breached.  A hideous precedent is set.  Blue-state and blue-precinct soviets are quickly becoming the ruling norm in pockets around the country.  The template to be the target of this Beria brand of persecution (Stalin’s NKVD head: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”) is now established: be conservative, occupy a position of influence, be outspoken, and be a political threat to the reigning soviet, and “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime” comes into play.

Lavrenti Beria – Soviet politician - Russian Personalities
Lavrenti Beria (l) and Stalin, 1930s or 40s

Stalin only carried the title of General Secretary of the Communist Party throughout his entire tenure at the head of the country.  So, a powerful party is essential to spearhead the complete revolution in thought and action.  We have one in the Democratic Party as the ideological home for this revolution.  And now they do not shrink from Beria-like actions, rule of law be damned.

The Party is not alone in the endeavor.  Their sympathizers dominate in newsrooms, academia, much of the c-suite, the media, and entertainment, almost complete domination of the cultural commanding heights, to assist the Party in building their new order.  They’re free to sexualize your kids into transgenderism, indoctrinate them in the neo-Marxism of oppressor/oppressed, shoehorn every facet of your existence into their eco-vision, and reserve the power to force not only compliance but also love for their revolution.  And this isn’t totalitarianism in practice?

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China’s CCP only replicates what Bragg achieved before a Manhattan judge and jury in the CCP’s recent arrest and persecution of dissidents in Hong Kong.  It’d be rank hypocrisy for anyone in the donkey party to complain.  The jargon of “hatred” and “incite netizens [sic] to organize or participate in illegal activities” could have easily come out of Bragg’s or Jack Smith’s offices (see #2 below).  Our soviets in New York and Washington, D.C., have no grounds to condemn Red China’s CCP after imitating them in a Manhattan courtroom.  Beijing has “courtrooms” too.

None are safe from the drumbeat.  The conservative, original-intent majority on the Supreme Court is particularly in the Party’s crosshairs.  After decades of dominating the Court, they now want to pillory the new majority that might contest the Constitutional worthiness of the Party’s designs.  From attacks on flags to accusations of “extreme closeness to his wife” (see #3 below), the Party’s minions shower invective to silence opposing voices.  In Congress, they strive to pack the Court with fellow travelers, impeach and recuse dissenters, and extend an unconstitutional executive and legislative branch jurisdiction over the Court, anything to force the Court into conformity, like everyone else.

It’s enough to turn a Trump skeptic into a Trump supporter, if for no other reason than to stop this totalitarian trainwreck.  John Yoo of UC Berkeley’s school of law put it succinctly (see #4 below): “To limit and undo that damage and restore the rule of law, Republicans may have no choice but to respond in kind.”  In order to reestablish deterrence against this kind of behavior, the revolution’s partisans must experience the sting of a political prosecution that they enunciated.  Think of it as engendering a new respect for mutual assured destruction.  Watch out Barack Obama, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, et al, as one red state AG or DA after another hauls you before a local grand jury and into a local criminal court before a local judge.  I can envisage criminal charges stemming from the assassination of an American citizen overseas, criminal misuse of sensitive government communications (emails), influence peddling as Vice President or acting as an unregistered foreign agent, being a middle man funneling bribes to the “big man”, inflicting harm on border communities due to willful dereliction of legally mandated responsibilities, etc.

Additionally, Republican officeholders, don’t step foot into DC, New York City, Chicago, California, any city dominated by a college campus, or any other blue bastion.  Go further.  Move all federal offices outside the reach of the Alvin Braggs and Fani Willises of the world.  If need be, Zoom it.

In the meantime, prepare for a hurricane.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “Bragg Falsifies Business-Records Charges against Trump”, Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 3/23/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/bragg-falsifies-business-records-charges-against-trump/
2. “Hong Kong police arrest 6 people accused of violating the city’s new national security law”, Kanis Leung, AP, 5/28/2024, at https://www.abc27.com/international/ap-hong-kong-police-arrest-6-people-accused-of-violating-the-citys-new-national-security-law/
3. “New York Times Op-Ed: Does Clarence Thomas Love His Wife Too Much?”, Noah Rothman, National Review, 5/21/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-york-times-op-ed-does-clarence-thomas-love-his-wife-too-much/
4. “Trump’s Trial Has Already Damaged the Office of the Presidency”, John Yoo, National Review, 5/29/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/trumps-trial-has-already-damaged-the-office-of-the-presidency/

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Memorial Day, 2024

Below is a rendition of Major Sullivan Ballou’s last letter to his wife before he was killed in the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861.  It captures the loss that we must feel as we visit the graves of the fallen on this Memorial Day.  As we walk among the headstones, we realize that war took another brother, son, father, daughter, but not for nothing.  It’s a sad commentary on humanity that war has been necessary to stop the worst of our fellow man.  Someone must step forward to block them.  These graves are of those who did, at the cost of their future years.

Please remember, please commemorate, and please view Sullivan’s last letter home.

RogerG

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Next Stop for Carnage: UCLA’s Medical School

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The state’s elite medical schools, such as UCLA’s Geffen School of Medicine, aren’t immune from the broad carnage that has swept K-12 in California.  Let’s start off, though, with the lower grades, then move to the current ravaging of UCLA’s med school.

Overall primary and secondary education in California is miserable.  In no educational measure is the state an exemplar.  From Wallet Hub to the Nation’s Report Card, it’s a trail of tears for the state’s K-12 schools (see #1 below). Quoting one source (see #2 below):

“A new study by Wallet Hub [2015], a financial advice company, puts California schools at the bottom of the pack.  California school systems are the ninth worse in the nation.”

The above report was from 9 years ago, and it hasn’t gotten any better; though, teacher salaries have, with a top-ranked annual average of over $95,000 (see #3 below).  But that is eaten up by the humungous cost of living (see #4 below).  It’s big money when compared to other states, but that number relegates a California teacher in their prime to tenement life in LA or the Bay Area.  Forget about a coastal bungalow.

So, why the stratospheric cost of living?  It’s more than the attraction of the climate driving up demand, if that’s what you’re thinking.  The state is all into central planning, copying Lenin’s economic playbook – the state dominating the “commanding heights” kind of thing.  “Transitioning the economy” is central planning.  DEI is central planning.  Official sanctification and propagation of transgenderism is central planning.  What isn’t central planning on the progressive’s wish list?

And central planning is expensive, always has been, in more ways than one.  It’s expensive because it’ll come out of your hide in more than prices, like shortages, blackouts, and declining opportunities.  It’s a replay of the Soviet Union.

California is centrally planned into a housing crisis.  Look at your centrally planned utility bills. The high cost of fuel extends beyond the pump and into sticker prices on everything on store shelves.  The centrally planned jump in the state’s minimum wage is driving up fast food prices and driving out jobs.  Wait for the centrally planned EV mandates to slap you in the face.  Try to build anything in the state as you face the daunting gauntlet of layers of litigation and fees and approvals and disapprovals, and the state’s burgeoning activist groups.  They’ve even managed to centrally plan homelessness into a catastrophe.  The crime problem is centrally planned with “restorative justice” and “equity”.  Filth and crime join unaffordability in the state’s reputation.  For a teacher, $95,000 is as meaningful as 95,000 Weimar Reichsmarks in 1922 (50,000 marks for a pound of potatoes).

Now, what the state’s central planners have done to the cost of living and K-12, they’re excited to bring to the med schools.  UCLA is the epicenter of more than antisemitic encampments and mobs.  The med school’s newly minted admissions approach magically turned the unqualified into qualified by reliance on melanin count, genitalia, home language, and other such markers of medical excellence, sarcastically speaking (see #5 below).  No GPA in the hard sciences or MCAT for these DEI grand viziers.  But it’s one thing to have the unqualified in sociology, quite another to have one in the operating room.  Do you think I’m kidding?

Some federal judges are refusing to offer clerkships to Ivy League law students, the law being replaced by revolutionary doctrines in these law schools.  The same reaction might soon be true of hospitals and patients for graduates of the UCLA Medical School.  A big framed UCLA diploma on the wall behind the newly licensed doctor might be your cue to bolt for the door. The alarm is sounding.  The Washington Free Beacon is working the story, as are many other outlets (see #5 and #6 below).

They are finding sources in the med school willing to speak up.  The Free Beacon writes,

“In interviews with the Free Beacon and complaints to UCLA officials, including investigators in the university’s Discrimination Prevention Office, faculty members with firsthand knowledge of the admissions process say it has prioritized diversity over merit, resulting in progressively less qualified classes that are now struggling to succeed.”

At the tip of the spear in debasing medical education at UCLA is Jennifer Lucero, Associate Dean for Admissions at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine (DGSOM), and the Vice Chair for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) for the Department of Anesthesiology.

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She has openly berated med school admissions committee members for raising questions about the poor qualifications of some matriculants if they happen to fall into one of her “protected” identities, this after she has stacked the committee with fellow believers.  From The Free Beacon: “Speaking on the condition of anonymity, six people who’ve worked with her described a pattern of racially charged incidents that has dispirited officials and pushed some of them to resign from the committee.”

She’s a mess creating a mess.  Staff and faculty complaints about her have been lodged with the school’s Discrimination Prevention Office.  They have much to complain about, and it goes beyond personal treatment.  Each year since her elevation to power, the danger increases that the unqualified and unmerited will slip through the school and into medical practice to the detriment of patients and the school’s reputation.  One admissions committee member recounted,

“I have students on their rotation who don’t know anything.  People get in and they struggle.”

One student assisting in an operation couldn’t identify the major artery when asked.  She then verbally attacked her professor for putting her on the spot.  One professor confessed, “Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students.”

Anecdotes abound.  And it shows in shelf tests, the examinations administered at the end of each clinical rotation.  The failure rate increased ten-fold under her stewardship.  Almost a quarter of the school’s students in the class of 2025 have failed 3 or 4 such tests.  Another professor admitted, “… a third to a half of the medical school is incredibly unqualified.”  If one of these practitioners should be supervising your medical treatment after a car accident, when you come to, demand to see their resume’ and look for an escape.

Major airlines promise to adopt the same approach for pilots.  I may not fly again.  Merit has a place, and it really has a place for 150 passengers at 30,000 feet.

The problems with California run deeper than its so-called ruling elites.  It’s more than governors, legislators, mayors, or even college deans.  All of them, directly or indirectly, owe their positions to popular choices in elections.   People vote for this stuff by electing the people who bring this stuff.  A dean of admissions couldn’t declare war on merit if she wasn’t protected by the nest of an agreed-upon agenda that can be traced back to the elected.  The war on merit is a popular choice, whether understood by the electorate or not.

I refer to H.L. Mencken once again,

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.  No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

Yes, the great masses of the plain people of California.

It’s the difference between government and regime.  Think of “government” as the outward signs of rule: offices, constitutions, its structure and institutions. In contrast, “regime” runs much deeper.  Often used to identify authoritarian systems, it nonetheless has application to democracies.  A particular approach to governance becomes a pattern – red and blue states for instance – due to pervasive and endemic cultural and social norms.  Elections occur within this social matrix, and the “regime” rears its head.

You can’t have an official nod to teenage genital mutilation without at least a vaguely popular toleration of the ideology of transgenderism.  You can’t have a broad war on merit without at least a vaguely popular toleration of the assault.  What else accounts for the ritual pattern of choosing people who bring these policies?  California’s regime, which originates with the state’s people and their tendencies, is responsible.  If anyone is to blame, blame the people of the state.

Those people are a huge part of a socio-political eco-system favoring the advancement of the unqualified.  But who has the time and resources to investigate their doctor to uncover whether they emanated out of this cauldron?  California schools are proving that they don’t come with the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.  We are left with a rule of thumb.  If your doctor came out of California, and especially its med schools, play it safe by shopping around. You’ve got at least 30 or more states to choose from.  A state’s reputation now matters, and matters a lot.

May be an image of ‎1 person, helicopter, blimp and ‎text that says '‎IEVCaIC TLIAVEOKGREVIEW-JOURNAL. REVIEW-SOTRNAT, 20200 20200. com CUT! WENEED CUT!WENEED NEED WE SOME TRANSGENDER NUNS and A ACOUPLE တ ASIAN VONTRAPPS... are ALIVE ת TheHILLS The HILLS SOUND of MUSIC... WITHthe 県花 @Ramireztoons michaelpramirez.com‎'‎‎

RogerG

Sources:

1. The Nation’s Report Card at https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=NP&chort=1&sub=MAT&sj=&st=MN&year=2022R3
2. “How Do California Schools Rank Compare to the Rest of the Nation?”, Patch, 8/1/2015, ahttps://patch.com/california/santamonica/how-do-california-schools-rank-compare-rest-nationt
3. “California teachers struggle despite having the highest salaries in the nation”, Malekka Seshardi, EdSource, 5/13/2024, at https://edsource.org/updates/california-teachers-struggle-despite-having-the-highest-salaries-in-the-nation
4. “California ranks last in opportunity due to cost living: U.S. News”, Kenneth Schrupp, The Central Square: California, 5/16/2024, at https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/article_f06f4eec-13c9-11ef-a68c-6f1b9d775308.html
5. “’ A Failed Medical School’: How Racial Preferences, Supposedly Outlawed in California, Have Persisted at UCLA”, Aaron Sibarium, Washington Free Beacon, 5/23/2024, at https://freebeacon.com/campus/a-failed-medical-school-how-racial-preferences-supposedly-outlawed-in-california-have-persisted-at-ucla/
6. “‘Shocking decline’: UCLA med school prioritized racial diversity, leading to decline, report says”, The College Fix, staff, 5/23/2024, at https://www.thecollegefix.com/shocking-decline-ucla-med-school-prioritized-racial-diversity-leading-to-decline-report-says/
7. Special thanks to Jeffrey Blehar in “DEI Will Destroy Our Trust in Doctors”, National Review, 5/23/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dei-will-destroy-our-trust-in-doctors/

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This Is What College Kids in America Support

3 minutes of horror – Chilling footage from kidnapping of IDF female troops aired
Screenshot of female IDF soldiers taken captive by Hamas on 10/7

Below is raw Hamas footage of the taking of female IDF soldiers at a base near the Gaza/Israel border on 10/7.  How many of them were raped?  How many of them will survive?  It’s hard to say.

But we don’t need to see American politicians and a bunch of college kids preaching to us about “genocide” and a “ceasefire”.  The only genocide occurred on 10/7 and a ceasefire is a Hamas rescue mission.

Let’s not forget that these savages took them back into Gaza for more torture amid the cheers of Gazan spectators along the way.  The savages then hunkered down among the mostly cheerleading civilians, using the population of Gaza as one big human shield, waiting for our decrepit youth and politicians to come to the rescue.

Many of our college kids are proving themselves to be underserving of the largesse showered upon them.  They are proving that much of college is toxic.

Please watch the video.  Double click or got to youtu.be/PZRlrWHHRoU?si=bsJDjkcgHOumb3mw to see the video.

RogerG

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From Eco-Consciousness to Eco-Totalitarianism

Family Farms Continue to Power U.S. Agriculture | USDA
Georgia small farm

Please watch the 20-minute video of the current predicament of small agricultural producers in Oregon.  You’ll see how green ideology leads to totalitarianism, or complete micromanagement of a people.  It’s a lesson in how the tapestry of individual liberty is crushed under mass controls.  It’s happening across the country.  And you wonder why Trump remains popular in many quarters.

Trump is the middle finger to this ideologically driven straitjacket.  Trumpism, loosely referred to as “populism”, isn’t a refined set of beliefs so much as it is a temperament, an attitude, a posture toward the smothering of personal, mundane choices.

It’s a consequence of the ruling eco-left’s attempt to herd people into an officially preferred lifestyle, one that is easily concentrated and thus managed in urban locations.  The war on the internal combustion engine, and on fossil fuels, is one means to that end. It’s a war on personal mobility.  If you can’t make the EV work for you or your family, or afford it, lying below the surface, unstated, remains their ultimate selection for you: unaccommodating, grimy, and unsafe government mass transit.

The 19th-century Bronx

The impracticality of electric vehicles – their only choice left for you – will force you back into the equivalent of tenements anyway, exactly where the charging infrastructure is most efficiently provided.  The concomitant range anxiety will do much to keep you condensed into apartment life for the rest of your family’s existence.  No swing set or doll house for your daughter, the government’s park in all its seedy glory being the only remaining option for her.  That, or the streets.

Tenement Housing: 10+ Photos Show the Tragic Lives of New York City’s Immigrants in the 1800s ...
Tenement, New York City, undated

The desire for control doesn’t stop there.  The increasing grip on urban folk is extended to those who are scattered in places where the grip of the central planners is more tenuous, in the outback.  Small agriculture is targeted like the individual family in their individual car in their individual bungalow.  Climate-change hysteria is the ramrod for empowering the state.  Other hypothetical eco-disasters – groundwater use and pollution for instance – are similarly used to police the guy or gal with a few sheep, horses, cattle, chickens, or surplus vegetables.  The way is left open for greater concentration for the already highly concentrated operators, those big enough to stand toe-to-toe with big government.

USA_AG_BEEF_15_xs.jpg | Peter Menzel
Harris Ranch, Ca., feedlot for 100,000 head of cattle

Anyway, it’s an easy sell to ideologically domesticated urbanites once they accept the premise that cattle flatulence is a mortal threat to Gaia, or the choices of those rural “deplorables” must be made to fit the mold of their urban cousins.  Urbanites outvote the “deplorables”, so it is a popularly elected totalitarianism.  Somehow, the chant of “save our democracy” rings rather hollow.

Again, please watch the video of eco-consciousness turning into eco-totalitarianism.

RogerG

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Those Living in an Urban Disneyland, Part II

Science is Red in Tooth and Claw: Biologists vs Physicists vs Biologists | by Paul Austin Murphy ...

Previously, I painted a picture of the mindset that gave us our urban hellscapes.  Referring to this social element as the “REI crowd”, they live in an artificial world that breeds an outlook favorable for the creation of dystopia.  Below is a touch of reality for those whose view of nature is a park.  They’d never bring a gun on the hike, and REI won’t sell you one.

This guy got off easy. Others didn’t.  Those that survived don’t look the same.

Come on, let’s get real.  Guns are handy things to have in a nature that is truly like nature.  And now, additionally, they’re really handy in those urban enclaves under threat of a new kind of apex predator, the kind nurtured under the banner of “social justice”.

Please watch the video.

RogerG

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Those Living in an Urban Disneyland, Part I

Black Lives Matter - BLM Yard Sign | Passion Works Studio

I’ve noticed it during my college years and into my 30-year stint in teaching.  Noticed what?  It is the values and outlook of people divorced from many of the very real cruelties of life.  These people live in an insulated social womb, free to think of the wilderness, for instance, as a park.  Quiet, leafy suburbs and districts of swank penthouses, and jetting from suburban high school or elite prep school to higher ed to white-collar status, allows flights of fancy and grand ideas similarly divorced from the real world.  The pampered lifestyle breeds pampered politics and pampered voting patterns.

It reminds me of my last visit to Disneyland in Anaheim, Ca., and the view of the park from the fifth floor of the park’s hotel.  Anaheim by the first decade of the 21st century had become a grimy and seedy place.  Inside the park’s fences, it was an oasis surrounded by an increasingly man-made dystopia.

Sadly, the cosseted life produces the stilted politics that abets the breakdown of civil order and broad prosperity.  The love affair with “sustainability” and “equity”, for example, is an attack on upward mobility for anyone but themselves.  It’s how just yesterday’s savagery becomes today’s victims in the minds of many on our college campuses.  It’s how the gradual warming of the climate after the Little Ice Age can be turned into a full-frontal assault on your car and home appliances, and the pursuit of single-family residential for me, but not for thee.  It’s how workers, shoppers, residents, and businesses must flee the gauntlet of the drug-addled, mentally troubled, and troops of barbarous urban youth that are allowed to congregate under the banner of “compassion” and “tolerance” and “social justice”.  It’s how the call of “rights” now includes teenage genital mutilation.  It’s come full circle: the eradication of the dangers of the real world incubated new dangers of the real world.

I’ve referred to this naïve and blinkered social set as the “REI crowd”. Recreational Equipment, Inc., (REI) epitomizes a business model for these babes in the woods.  They don’t sell guns.  They sell the great brands that keep you comfy as you walk through and sleep in nature, not a thing that’ll stop an apex predator that resides in that nature.  Forget about bear spray.  Sometimes it works, and sometimes it . . . .  Well, let’s just say that at that moment nothing really matters, except a helicopter ride to a trauma center if you’re lucky.

E.g., REI recently tried to equate nature-love with “gender equity”, a trendy cause for those who devote much of their disposable income on trendy hiking paraphernalia.  Watch it below.  Then, on the accompanying post, look at nature’s reality.  The experience must be similar to the hellscape that they’ve created for themselves inside their bubble.

RogerG

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The Radicalization Began Much Earlier

NYPD officers patrol as pro-Palestine protestors demonstrate outside of Columbia University’s campus
NYPD officers patrol as pro-Palestine protestors demonstrate outside of Columbia University’s campus in New York City on Thursday, April 18, 2024. Multiple students were arrested as officers cleared an encampment on the campus’ lawn. (Peter Gerber for Fox News Digital)

In many cases, if not most, the students (and non-students) occupying buildings, entire swaths of many campuses, supporting the barbarism of Hamas and expressing Jew-hatred, were radicalized before they arrived in higher ed.  They didn’t suddenly discover their inner Marx in their college Sociology class.  Predating the college acceptance letter, they were long marinated in the revolutionary dialectic, probably without even knowing it.

Parents, dropping your kids off at school for six hours and off you go on your merry way meant relegating their minds to God knows what.  Well, we’re getting a glimpse of the consequence at places like Columbia, et al.

Robert P. George, professor and scholar at Princeton and other schools, acknowledges as much. See at https://www.foxnews.com/video/6352285225112.

Red Mass speaker Robert P. George announced - Today's Catholic
Prof. Robert P. George, Princeton University

RogerG