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Ghost of Stalin in the Green Movement

Stalin’s Poltergeist 

Today’s environmental activist owes much to Stalin.  Oh, this is not the Stalin of the secret police, gulags, and purges.  No greenie would stand for that … I hope.  Rather, it’s the Stalin of muscular and hypothetically rational central planning.  The commissars, operating as “experts”, establish the goals that are deemed critical to national and world survival and then hector society to achieve it.  In our country, the browbeating occurs without the mass arrests.  Rather, the hectoring encompasses the carrots of bribes (subsidies) and the sticks of regulations and taxes to engineer the “proper” individual behaviors to reach the target.  Though, the whip-hand of the state always lurks in the background.  The zealots don’t give either the goal or the rationale behind it a second thought.  It’s full steam ahead … until reality hits.

Not surprisingly, an unintended and unpleasant reality for the enthusiasts and the rest of us will eventually hit.  In the meantime, play up an impending doom to stampede people into accepting the grand design.  For today, the holy grail is “clean” and “sustainable” energy in order to avoid Earth becoming Venus.

An artist’s conception of the surface of Venus.

So the goal of 100% “clean” and “sustainable” energy by X date is popping up in deep blue states.  How’s that any different from Stalin’s Gosplan (Soviet economic central planning agency) announcing X amount of steel and wheat for each of year of the 5-Year Plan?

1948 USSR propaganda poster. It reads, “Let’s carry out the five-year plan in four years”.

Corporate America, increasingly simpatico with Earth First, is all-in for the crusade, especially the tekkie companies.  Watch Verizon’s latest ad now running on tv screens nationwide (https://youtu.be/Sv1OVlyUyNY).

To reach Hawaii’s centrally planned goal, the beautiful Hawaii countryside will be scarred with vast solar and wind farms.  Enviros bemoan the loss of the rainforest, except when it comes to solar panels and wind turbines.  Apparently, food production takes a back seat to energy utopia.

Not to be outdone by lowly Hawaii, Governor Brown and the rest of the California politburo have jumped in with SB100.  It proclaims the state to be  100% carbon-free by 2045, like Hawaii – a twisting of the old and venerable 5-year plan into a 27-year one.  Anyway, a central plan is a central plan.

How’s that to be actualized?  Geothermal and nuclear might be accepted into the “clean”family, but they will be the red-headed stepchildren.  Pride of place for today’s greenie central planners goes to wind and solar.  To make it all happen,  let’s not forget the plentiful taxpayer subsidies, rate increases, burgeoning regulations, higher taxes, and, oh, a little rationing thrown in for good measure.

Be prepared on your next Hawaii hike or excursion to Mammoth to run into the likes of the following:

Wind turbines dot the landscape in Mojave, Calif.
The 200-acre Waianae Solar Project in West Oahu, Hawaii.

Reaching the green goal will require an expansion of the forests of 300-foot towers with 100-foot blades – and their unceasing hum – and the Levittowns of black panels.  Leaving aside the technical and cost burdens of the whole scheme, the landscape will be as different as Stalin’s Russia after the construction of his collective farms and contrived industrial projects … with similar results.  More likely, prior to public and private bankruptcy, these efforts will begin to look like the abandoned towns and collective farms of Soviet Russia.

The abandoned Soviet city of Chukotka, eastern Siberia.
Abandoned Soviet-era collective farm.

Markets Do It Better But Don’t Tell the Central Planners

That appears to be a more than a rare outcome in these best-laid plans of mice and men (to borrow from the poet, Robert Burns).  Part of the problem is the nature of the people who are commandeering society: utopia-mongering fanatics and politicized “experts”.  In both cases, we have people who claim to know more than they really do.  Couple this with the fact that no one person or small group can know all the details and circumstances to manage the thousands and millions (if not billions) of individuals interacting in a society.  Millions end up doing without as they live among the sun-bleached bones of decaying grandiose projects.

Hayek addresses a class at the London School of Economics in 1948.

F.A. Hayek called it the “knowledge problem”.  He wrote,

“The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never [my emphasis] exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed [my emphasis] bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” (9)

Boy, that’s a huge slice of humble pie for our budding central planners in Sacramento, Hawaii, and Verizon corporate headquarters.  Honestly, the Verizon folks are in it for a piece of the action, thereby affixing “crony” to “capitalism”.

What?  They don’t know it all?  Of course not, but that won’t stop them form forging ahead because they know the important stuff, or so they believe.  If there are hiccups along the way and a few people get ruined, well, be like Stalin’s head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yeszhov, when he said, “When you chop wood, chips fly”.  Eh, que será, será … and stay out of the way.

Stalin and Yezhov, 1937.

The chips?

The Holodomor, the Stalin-engineered famine in the Ukraine of 1932-33, as captured in an American newspaper from the time. Massive starvation was the result of a Soviet takeover of agriculture as per the 5-Year Plan, and the use of starvation as a weapon to quell opposition.

Hey, I Can’t Afford My Electricy Bill!

And there will be hiccups.  Like the Ukrainian peasants in the Holodomor (see above), those wood chips will strike the most vulnerable: those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.  The rich can always afford to go green.  Boutique food stores and boutique energy, with a Tesla in the garage, easily fall within the financials of the well-heeled.  But a person living paycheck-to-paycheck, or residing in a South-Central LA rental, must skip some things in order to pay the state-contrived electricity bill.  By all means, get air conditioning but don’t use it.  Sweat.

As for that utility bill in the mail, a visit to Southern California Edison website will give new meaning to the folly of the bake-a-cake-by-committee logic.  There’s no simple answer to the question, how much do you pay per kWhr?  The price is a “structure” with a morass of “tiers”, “time-of-use”, “baselines”, “incentives”, “high usage charges”, etc.  The thing makes King Minos’s Labyrinth appear as straightforward as a Kansas highway. (1)  Go to the footnote and see if you can make sense of it.

Example of a High Usage Charge on a Southern California Edison bill from their website.

The bloody thing, though, points in one direction: Californians pay 50-60% (depending on the calculations given the word salad of California regulations) more than the national average for seeking cool air, warmth, fresh food, and clean clothes. (2)  You can avoid the whipping to your pocketbook by succumbing to solar panels on your roof.  What you do at the end of their 10-15 year lifespan is hard to say.  Still, you’ll get a ratepayer/taxpayer provided subsidy and the utility will be hogtied into accepting your feeble production into its grid.  All of which means that somebody has to foot the bill.  And that somebody is, as always, you, the ratepayer and taxpayer.  Going green doesn’t mean going cheap, particularly if you want to avoid Lancaster’s 110° heat.

The Peasants Are Coming And They Look Angry.

The flinging wood chips don’t end with the heart-stopping utility bills.  You’ve heard of racial disparities, right?  Well, now we have greenie-inspired economic disparities which have a racial tinge.  The poor, and really anybody below the per capita income of Malibu, will pay more as a portion of income to keep the lights on.  And you know what?  The peasants are looking for their pitchforks.  The scene of a torchlight mob marching on Frankenstein’s castle may have some metaphorical relevance.

Not surprisingly, somebody has come forward to sue the California commissariat for its flirtation into greenie-energy wonderland.  A consortium of civic-minded community leaders – The Two Hundred –  has the gumption to sue the state for its bilge of laws and regulations that push the Sierra Club’s vision at the expense of anyone who won’t reduce nature to a Disney cartoon. (3)  Expect the smear campaign from the usual suspects of powerful lefty hotheads in the state legislature, the well-funded collection of politically powerful environmentalist klans, not to mention the governor, to brand those who dare to rebel as greedy, self-serving Big Real Estate, Big Oil, Big Developers, Big Polluters, Big ….

Throwing out pejorative labels is a favorite tactic, that way they don’t have to be burdened with addressing the litigants’ arguments.  Brand them and wait for the sympathetic legacy media to repeatedly broadcast the slander.  It’s a well-worn script.

It’s interesting to ponder the rationale behind the lawsuit.  The plaintiffs point to CARB’s recent greenhouse-gas mandates on new housing as having “a disparate negative impact on minority communities and are discriminatory against minority communities and their members”.  One member of The Two Hundred, John Gamboa, put it more bluntly, “They [the state’s powerful green politicos and regulators] care more about spotted owls than brown babies”.

The logic is unassailable.  Piling on the regulations and mandates will have a negative effect on the cost of everything from air conditioning to a bungalow to a pound of cabbage.  The costs ripple through the supply chain of everything in the consumer market.  No Mensa membership is required to foresee the pernicious impacts on anyone without an inherited portfolio.  Already the state with the highest poverty rate (21%) –  and ballooning to 8 million when housing costs are factored – California’s enviro extremism is slamming the already-exposed to even more exposure.

Germany’s natives were exposed to the ploy at the same time as it became fashionable in West Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Manhattan, Humanities Departments, and Fortune 500 corporate soirées.  The Deutsche planners declared an 80% cut in demon CO2 by 2050, began closing down nuclear power plants, and went hell-bent into the dreamland of “renewables”.  A hausfrau saw her electricity bill jump 50% in 10 years and realized that she was saddled with highest-priced juice in the EU ($0.37 per kilowatt-hour). (5)  The road to ecotopia is paved with unpaid electricity bills.

Ecotopia?

Ontario, Canada, and Australia jumped on the same train to the asylum with ditto results.

So, seeking to end the slide to social and economic melancholia, The Two Hundred is suing the collective pants and REI-purchased hiking shoes off California’s eco-panderers in the state nomenklatura.  It seems that the plaintiffs have available a whole bunch of laws to ban “disparate impacts”of a racial cast, and the laws are at the ready to weaponize legal briefs.  The state’s Fair Employment and Housing Act and US Federal Housing Act stand poised to be used.  If an employer can be dragged before the EEOC for too few hires in a “protected” category, why not haul into court for the same reason the gaggle of Sierra Club diehards in CARB (Calif. Air Resources Board)?  Should eco-lefties with political power be immune to the identical sanctions faced by anyone else trying to make a living?

California Air Resources Board chairwoman, Mary D. Nichols.
Nichols’s inspiration? Nikolai K. Baibakov, head of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) 1955-57 and 1965-85.

Success in court isn’t likely.  The courts have a long track record of protecting government desk-jockeys from the consequences of their actions.  Maybe that’s how it should be.  If popular sovereignty means anything, we could simply vote the bastards out, except for the bulk of civil service and union-protected lifers in the bureaucracy’s bowels – and maybe that’s how it shouldn’t be.  The growth of the administrative state has made the franchise nearly mute.

The empowered eco-central planners in the Dem one-party states only muck up the works.  They claim to know what needs to be done and what is best for all 300+ million Americans as well as all other earthlings.  Stalin would be proud of his progeny.

RogerG

Footnotes and Bibliography:

  1. “Time-Of-Use (TOU) Rate Plans”, Southern California Edison,  https://www.sce.com/wps/portal/home/residential/rates/Time-Of-Use-Residential-Rate-Plans/!ut/p/b1/pVJNc4IwEP0tHjhiNgQl7S1tLcL4UcVW4eIEjEgHA0Ja2_76RseL06p1mtPuztuXt7sPRWiGIsnfs5SrrJA83-VRe-57Dwy7tuUNg4EDDAedvjvqkQ6zNSDUADjxGOz7MXVZ1wvAc59aNni-MwHHCTB9dNAURShKpCrVCoV1IuZJIZWQai6kAYfYgErU2UJHGc91wpWoj2pmmXO5IyqTbIHCFudtGtOlyTERpk1jbHJHpxQvktgWLRILfBB-RtmFwf1Lk-kPrKp_30-1LK5WZiaXBZr9UL1fwBHT2LE000unN7zDFlDrALhxodP1hxowGRHwyAgGAWMEoH0AnDmCFpvmRbw_aMhkTKhWVYmlqETVfKt0eaVUWd8aYMB2u22mRZHmopkUawN-a1kVtUKzYyQK9Uad0ysjKLjyROcJR3A1of8HN2evm03EtCd33vvQU_7PlOX6eU3JpxnF7XH3qyemJo8pkFaeNhrfvJkzbg!!/dl4/d5/L2dBISEvZ0FBIS9nQSEh/
  2. “Californians are paying billions for power they don’t need”, LA Times, Feb. 5, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-capacity/
  3. A description of “The Two Hundred” can be found from their website: http://www.ccbuilders.org/project/the-two-hundred-project/
  4. “California Climate Policies Facing Revolt from Civil-Rights Groups”, Robert Bryce, National Review Online, Sept. 15, 2018,  https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/california-climate-change-policy-hits-poor-residents-hardest/
  5. “Germany Could Be a Model for How We’ll Get Power in the Future”, Robert Kunzig, National Geographic Magazine, November 2015,   https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2015/11/germany-renewable-energy-revolution/
  6. “Why California Has the Nation’s Worst Poverty Rate”, Ryan McMaken, Mises Institute, 1/17/2018,  https://mises.org/wire/why-california-has-nations-worst-poverty-rate-1
  7. “On the relevance of Hayek: centralized economic planning is dead”, Alex Cartwright, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 6/10/2013,   https://home.isi.org/relevance-hayek-centralized-economic-planning-dead
  8. “Beyond Hayek: A Critique of Central Planning”, Tibor R. Machan, 6/1/1988,   https://fee.org/articles/beyond-hayek-a-critique-of-central-planning/
  9. “Hayek: The Knowledge Problem”, Jeffrey A. Tucker, Foundation for Economic Education, 10/28/2014,  https://fee.org/articles/hayek-the-knowledge-problem/
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The Monoculture: Google Therapy Session After Hillary’s Loss

Watch this scene of traumatized Googlers trying to make sense of the fact that a good chunk of the country doesn’t have their “values”, and it showed by putting Trump in the White House. By all means, Googlers, don’t question the universality of your peculiar beliefs; question the motives of those who disagree with you. Heck, Googlers can’t even recognize their views as “peculiar” since they aren’t likely to rub elbows with those who think different. They get their prejudices reinforced, and reinforced ….

The leftist stream of consciousness on the Google campus stage on that November day of 2016 was littered with politicized code words. Take the word “values”, as in “our values” by Sergey Brin. The word is freighted with other words like “diversity”, and it ain’t the diversity of the opinion kind. For this monocultural groupthink, all diversity is limited to race, genitalia, and sexual appetites. Mix enough hijab-wearing lesbians into the workplace and, voilà, the only meaningful kind of “diversity” is created for this diversity-is-our-strength gang. Conservatives are tolerated … so long as they lie low. The other kind of diversity – as in diversity of thought – will be a casualty. In fact, it might be excised as “hate speech”.

 

James Damore, ex-Google senior engineer, after his 2017 firing for publishing on the company’s “free speech” forum an essay, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”.

It’s as if Googlers found themselves rejected by the election results, and rejection is a powerful source of anxiety for those ensconced in their self-reinforced and pampered cocoons. How to make sense of it since the mind must still grapple with the reality? Well, brand your opposition as morally and intellectually deficient. The other side is said to suffer from “tribalism” and “fear”. It’s not that adversaries simply disagree, but their disagreement is a product of an unrestrained id, a libido run amok. People like our Googlers have such a high self-regard that no concession can be made to the validity of an opposing point of view. Therapy on the Google campus was reduced to fortifying the attendees’ sense of superiority and convincing them that Darwin’s missing link resides in red America.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin at the post-election confab.

There was an early light-hearted moment. A rousing cheer came from the crestfallen when Brin announced the success of pot legalization. Now that says something. Either intoxication is a preferred state of mind for Googlers, or many of them have all the seriousness of Animal House’s Bluto at a frat party. Or it could simply be a Brin joke. Anyway, it probably isn’t Joe Sixpack material.

The expected response came out of the Google inner sanctum after the video went viral. The declaration went along the lines of “we’re biased but trust us”. Here’s a good portion of it: “Nothing was said at that meeting, or any other meeting, to suggest that any political bias [we’re biased] ever influences the way we build or operate our products [trust us]. To the contrary, our products are built for everyone, and we design them with extraordinary care to be a trustworthy source of information for everyone, without regard to political viewpoint [trust us]”.

Maybe the word “monoculture” is inadequate. The Borg of Star Trek fame is gaining relevance as the more appropriate metaphor.

The Borg or Silicon Valley/blue America?
Borg drones or the Google workforce?

RogerG

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The Monoculture: The Zuckerbeg Testimony (April 2018)

WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 11: Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill April 11, 2018 in Washington, DC. This is the second day of testimony before Congress by Zuckerberg, 33, after it was reported that 87 million Facebook users had their personal information harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The term “monoculture” had its origins in farming with the production of a single crop. A monoculture does exist, but it isn’t a horticultural one or the type often measured by melanin counts or genitalia by hyperactive SJW’s. Socially speaking, we have a singular, smothering orientation to the world – a monoculture of the mind – chauvanistically present in the leadership and dwellers of our key social institutions: media, arts, entertainment, education, government agencies, foundations, etc., with tentacles deep into the corporate boardroom. Today’s left is obsessed over a monocultural patriarchy. Ironically, it is they, left-progressives, who have prevailed in creating an unacknowledged monoculture of the mind. In the video below, Zuckerberg admits to Silicon Valley being “an extremely left-leaning place”.

I bring this up not to parrot the crowd in the Sean Hannity zone. Heaven knows, Zuckerberg is in a difficult spot with Facebook’s problems with privacy and complaints of political censorship. Before the Senate, he looked like an exposed adulterous husband trying to keep his marriage together. Pity is only natural as he occupies the lonely seat in front of our elected publicity hounds.

Next comes the tortuous ritual of admitting the left-wing preeminence while denying any effect of it. It’s a claim of superhuman qualities once reserved for the heavenly host. Apparently, left-wing people don’t produce left-wing products. Mark me skeptical.

RogerG

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Just Saw it, Just Blew It

The Nike ad.

I just saw the full Nike ad on Thursday Night Football. It was repeated in college football broadcasts Saturday. It was a seemingly innocuous message mostly in homage to the “marginalized”, replete with a girl boxer wearing the mandatory hijab — I don’t know how that squares with the early feminist sacramental act of bra-burning. The whole kaleidoscope was emceed by a resurrected Kaepernick, the guy who soiled himself by soiling the flag. The message was never to be dissuaded from your “dreams”, an adolescent primal scream without an inkling of mature judgment if there ever was one.

Honor goes to Michael Ramirez for his capture of the ludicrous spectacle in a single image. Here it is:

RogerG

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Just Do It, Even if “It” Means Desecration of Our Country

 

Once again, many American citizens can’t avert being affronted doing something as simple as going to the store to buy a pair of running shoes. Nike has given a paycheck to a person whose claim to fame is using the national anthem as the opportunity to express his radical social views. A NFL fan had to put up with it during the 2017 season and now Nike, with Kaepernick unemployed, has hired him to peddle their wares. Nike has the freedom to hire him; Kaepernick has the freedom to push his babble; and I have the freedom not to subsidize his extremist views. I’ll refuse to participate by steering clear of the “swoosh”.

Oh how muddled is the thinking of some. George Takei of Star Trek fame tweeted the rubbish, “Protest is patriotic”, during Kaepernick’s 2017 kneeling crusade – a takeoff of the old mental kabuki, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism”. The saying has no provable author, but the left from Howard Zinn to the 60’s neo-socialist SDS have tried to attribute it to Jefferson – wrongly – or exploit it to justify spitting on returning Vietnam vets.

If Nike thinks nobility lies in hawking Kaepernick, they are mistaken. No, dissent isn’t the highest form of patriotism. Follow the logic. If dissent is patriotic, treason is the highest form of dissent, and, therefore, treason must be the highest form of patriotism (Thanks Jonah Goldberg for the witticism). George, it’s called a syllogism. Now we’re in the land of Timothy Leary and psychedelics.

Soiling the flag and anthem while forcing others to bear the spectacle is an unhealthy way to run a league or shoe company. Nike can burnish indecency as decency and Americans can avoid the corruption by staying away. Shame on you, Nike.

RogerG

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Trade War: Trump Gets It and Doesn’t Get It

I’ve been watching the trade war talk heat up as our president pursues something mystically called “fair” trade. I’m all in favor of free and fair trade. Furthermore, I agree with the president that trade deals should be “reciprocal”. But, in a sense, on trade, Trump gets it and doesn’t get it.

Certainly, the broad general benefits of our free trade agreements are real. Yet, those very real gains aren’t evenly distributed. The negative repercussions seem to be concentrated in the industrial middle part of the country. Even though, to be honest, the problem had been building long before NAFTA and WTO. It’s the coastal urban financial centers, though, who have garnered most of the dough. That’s the “gets it” part, if we can construe his comments to be some roundabout recognition of free trade’s spotty effects.

FILE – In this Dec. 11, 2008 file photo, pedestrians walk by the abandoned Packard plant in Detroit. Dominic Cristini, who claims ownership of the Packard plant through Bioresource Inc., is awaiting demolition permits. He says he wants to start demolition within a month. He estimates it will cost $6 million to raze the plant. The plant closed in the mid 1950s. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio, File)

As for the “doesn’t get it” part, he talks about $500 billion trade deficits as if the money is lost from our country. Really? No, it isn’t lost. For instance, China gets dollars for its exports to us. What are they going to do with the dollars? They can’t use them as currency in China or any other foreign country for that matter. They have to either spend them in the US or park the dollars in US financial assets. I suppose that they could hunt around on the international money markets to unload them but that just shifts the problem to somebody else. No, Mr. President, the money isn’t lost from us. Really, the things never left.

Now, here’s where it gets tricky. Most of the dollars end up in our financial centers. Read: mostly our coastal urban cores and Chicago. This does much to explain the bull market in California coastal real estate despite its Venezuela-type government. Trendy blue dots, with their lefty culture in tow, prosper.

Trendy Laguna Beach, Ca.

Ironically, as recent events will attest, free international markets end up feeding the places that are busy destroying them. The dem-socialist darling of the Dem Party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, could only get elected in one of those pampered locales.

She’s proof that an economics degree did her no more good than Trump’s self-taught trade “wisdom” did for him. It’s the age of gibberish.

RogerG

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2016 Hayseed Racists? NO!

I’ve been reading Salena Zito and Brad Todd’s The Great Revolt, an exegesis of the 2016 election. Villification of one’s opponents after the shocking loss has reached new heights, enough to obscure the reality. Tune into the halfwit but snarky late-night comedians and you’ll get a flavor of it.

The authors Brad Todd (c) and Salena Zito (r) on C-SPAN Book TV.

No, the voters opposing Hillary cannot be reduced to rural bigots left behind by “progress”. Many other things were at root to explain Trump’s winning coalition: condescension, social and political bias, and too many deaf ears in too many places of cultural authority. Those places correspond to urban and academic dots, socio-political monasteries walled off into insular echo chambers. The roiling in the backcountry therefore came as a shock to those comfortably nestled behind the walls – which means most everybody in the dots, or mentally influenced by the dots.

The book dispels these real urban myths with a grand survey of Trump voters and a series of vignettes in locales that flipped 15-30 points from solidly Democrat to Trump in the rust belt. In a nutshell, they were so fed up with the long-running disparagement that not even Trump’s boorishness would slacken their momentum to the polls.

Main Street, USA, the epicenter of the Great Revolt.

Main Street rebelled against the Acela corridor, the left coast, intense urban clusters, and the disconnected college campus. Zito and Todd make abundantly clear it was a revolt and not a Klan march. Many Obama voters became Trump voters and the rest is history.

RogerG

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A Chance Meeting and Not Connecting the Dots, 5/26/2018

An accidental meeting on a forest road with a semi-Californian/Montanan – he spends his winters in California (understandable) – showcases much that has gone astray in the America of today. Our biggest threat doesn’t arise from material circumstances but from what rolls around in our heads. Occupying the synapses are an excess of unexamined assumptions and the crazes that they feed.

Let me explain. While riding our ATV’s through the forests near our property, my wife and I came upon a man on a motor-bike. Pleasantries and friendly conversation arose. It turns out that the man haled from Redding, Ca. He had few nice things to say about the winters and complained of the shrinking longevity of restaurants in the area. I mentioned that we had lost our appetite for our native state after one of many recent visits. Prohibitions, high prices, and petty annoyances – the plastic bag carousels are empty at the stores for instance – have soured us.

He complained about the plastic litter in a feeble defense of the ban. I don’t think that he, and many others, connected the dots between the propensity for prohibition and the new feudalism that is taking shape in the so-called golden state. Many off-the-cuff reactions to a hypothetical evil produce unexpected effects. Too much plastic bag litter? Ban them. Too many poor people? Tax the rich. Don’t like carbon? Command people to put solar panels on their roofs or punish them with high utility bills – or both. Don’t like suburbia? Strangle it in a maze of land-use controls. The only problem is: growth suffocates; the middle-class flees; and the cost of living inflates. The result is a new feudalism of the hyper-rich in their manorial enclaves surrounded by a growing low-wage servant class.

As for the limited restaurants in our area, our friend showed no acknowledgement of rudimentary cause-and-effect. Enterprise has been suffering in industrial and rural America for quite some time. Take away the primary industries – mining and lumbering in our case – in those places dependent on them and poverty, meth use, and social chaos erupts. Tourism is a very poor substitute.

Many of these ruminations were kept to myself. He did say that he didn’t like mining for its scarring of the land. I responded with the obvious: without it, he and I wouldn’t be on our vehicles. He dismissed the claim with a cursory, “I’ll buy it from China”.

There you have it. Don’t think of employing our own people; export our wish-fulfillment to foreign lands; and don’t give a second thought about the repercussions. As long as the consequences are invisible to us, and we remain ensconced in our comfortable illusions, all is right with the world. Right?

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” Luke 23:34

RogerG

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The Free State of … San Bernadino

US President Donald Trump makes remarks at a roundtable meeting on sanctuary cities May 16, 2018, in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington, DC. Orange County Supervisor Michelle Steel is 3rd from left.(Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)

From 1864 to 1865, Jones County, Mississippi, and its immediate environs were in open revolt against the Confederate state of Mississippi and its governor, Charles Clark – a Democrat by the way. The so-called “Free State of Jones”. Numerous state officials were assaulted and harassed, some probably killed. Clearly, this was a pro-union constituency. Project forward to May 16, 2018 and a meeting of disgruntled California local leaders with President Trump. A parallel anyone?

Some firebrands of the left – who rule the roost in California – are as incensed about federal immigration law as the South was about abolitionism and tariffs. They have made cooperation with ICE the equivalent of assisting child porn traffickers. What’s next, an act of secession?

Well, some in the state are having none of it. They have approached the president, as surely as some in 1864 Jones County would relish a confab with Lincoln.

History seldom repeats, but it does rhyme. (Reputedly stated by Mark Twain)

RogerG

* See “Orange County, Inland Empire leaders talk immigration with Trump in White House”, Roxana Kopetman, Orange County Register, 5/17/2018, https://www.pe.com/2018/05/16/trump-meeting-today-with-leaders-from-orange-county-inland-empire/

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Happy Mother’s Day, 2018

If we can’t celebrate our moms on a special day for her, how can we, in good conscience, show deep and personal gratitude to anyone? A she – with the momentary assistance of a he – brought us into the world. In an age when women are pressured to stretch themselves thin by being a master of the universe, motherhood still makes all those other competing roles fade to insignificance. Literally, my very existence came from her. I thank God every day for having had my mom.

It’s time to resurrect motherhood in this era of declining birth rates and turmoil over marriage and genders. Mom, dad, and home need some burnishing, now more than ever. We can start by resurrecting the writings of Phyllis McGinley.

“Women are the fulfilled sex. Through our children we are able to produce our own immortality, so we lack that divine restlessness which sends men charging off in pursuit of fortune or fame or an imagined Utopia . . . the wholesome oyster wears no pearl, the healthy whale no ambergris, and as long as we can keep on adding to the race, we harbor a sort of health within ourselves.”

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms.

RogerG