Our National Decomposition Continues Apace

Union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
Teacher union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)
Supreme Court candidate Janet Protasiewicz reacts while speaking at her election night watch party in Milwaukee, Wis., on Tuesday, April 4, 2023. Protasiewicz, 60, defeated former Justice Dan Kelly, who previously worked for Republicans and had support from the state's leading anti-abortion groups. (Mike De Sisti /Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel via AP)
Janet Protasiewicz speaks at her election night party in Milwaukee after she defeated former Justice Dan Kelly for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. (Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)

 

Our national decomposition shows little sign of abating.  Elections in Wisconsin and Chicago indicate that there remains an appetite for decay.

Another word for decline or decomposition of a culture, civilization, or nation is degringolade.  Whichever word is used, however, we are experiencing it.  Nature isn’t doing it to us.  We are doing it to ourselves.  The precipitating factor is what is bouncing between our ears.  A sizeable chunk of the electorate, without even knowing it in many cases, is sold on toxic neo-Marxism in the guise of modern progressivism.  Today, progressivism and this updated Marxism are synonymous.  I’m beginning to sound like a broken record since I’ve certainly mentioned it often enough but can’t get away from it.  It’s constantly resurfacing in many places around the country.

This isn’t the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson.  As a refresher, this current edition is a relatively modern refashioning of Karl Marx’s paradigm: the systemic oppression of the oppressed who are defined by an ever-fungible list of outgroups covering everything from XY girls to the poor to anyone with high melanin counts.  To the rescue in this blinkered ideological schematic is a complete, top to bottom, inside and out, overhaul of all societal arrangements from the family to property, a thoroughgoing Marxist revolution.  Sound familiar?  Read BLM’s mission statement before it was scrubbed clean of too much revelatory information (see below).  We’ve proven to be quite creative in defining the “oppressed”, or victim groups.  For greenies, you might add the mother goddess Gaia (earth) to the list.  Anyway, this latest edition fairs no better than the kind that lurked behind the Iron Curtain or Mao’s China or is lurking in North Korea and Cuba.  It is a sacking of our heritage and thrusting the country into despair.

The canary passing out in the coal mine in this moment of our evisceration is urban America.  Our cities are crumbling, and so are the states dominated by them. The story has been acted out before.  We are historically rhyming with 4th and 5th-century AD Rome.  The Roman Empire didn’t go out in a boom but a whimper.  The cities became unlivable, mired in high taxes, crumbling infrastructure, a deterioration of services, lack of security, and overburdening controls.  Who’d want to live there?  Apparently, many didn’t by the 5th century.  The population of the city nearly emptied from over a million in the 1st century AD to 30,000 by the 5th.  Other similarly weakened urban places suffered.  People flocked to fortified estates, monasteries, and towns with natural defenses.  It’s the beginning of feudalism.

visigoths+%281%29.jpg 1,405×1,005 pixels | Vikings | Pinterest | Roman empire and Roman legion

Feudalism is returning.  Today, in the good ‘ol USA, people are rushing to states and places where 3-strikes laws mean something, where taxes and bureaucracies aren’t bleeding producers white, where parking your car on the street in front of your house isn’t an invitation to vandalism.  In other words, where neo-Marxism/progressivism is held in disrepute.

Where boys’ and girls’ bathrooms are separated by a wall.  Where nature’s chromosomal distinction hasn’t been buried by the linguistic manipulations of pronouns and “birthing person” for “woman”.  It’s just the opposite in our urban neo-Marxist silos.  Entirely mired in the mindset, many of our cities and urbanized states are busy advancing the revolution by eliminating other distinctions such as the one between criminal and law-abiding.  Judges and local potentates treat criminals as victims and their real victims as . . . well . . . .

As if we need any more evidence, Whole Foods announced yesterday (4/10/2023) that it was “temporarily closing” its 65,000 square foot San Francisco outlet at Eighth and Market, the Trinity section, that it just opened last year.  According to a company spokesman, “If we feel we can ensure the safety of our team members in the store, we will evaluate a reopening of our Trinity location.”  The area has been plagued by brutal beatings, stabbings, killings, and accidents in recent weeks.  Too few cops and law-unenforcement is making San Francisco look like 5th-century Rome (see below).

These arbiters of revolutionary justice in places like San Francisco have their own vocabulary to push this cultural revolution. “Decarceration” is the go-to for releasing offenders to reoffend, just call it “low-level crime”, which is another word for “inconsequential” to Soros-backed DA’s – inconsequential to everyone but the person left battered, bruised, and bleeding in the subway.  Barbarian invasions aren’t doing it to us, unless barbarian refers to the urban powerful who have drunk the neo-Marxist Kool-Aid. Your progressive DA, judges, city council, mayor, governor, and state legislature are performing the role of the Visigoths and their King Alaric in laying waste to Rome in 410 AD.

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Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD.
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Minneapolis in the 2020 summer of riots.

The only recourse for those not too fond of the mayhem is to vote with their feet.  Get out!  But these are democracies – surprise!  The corruption is democratic.  People are voting for mayhem. How’s that possible?  It might have something to do with a little cost/benefit analysis on the run: the rewards of group largesse from the public treasury are greater than the costs of possibly losing your little girl in a drive-by.  I know, it’s hard to believe.  But, on the other hand, it could just be stupid people being stupid, something not unheard of in the annals of democracy.

Or it could be due to the overall social decomposition extending to our schools.  People aren’t taught any better; they don’t know any better; and are easily led into believing nonsense.  Yet, policy-nonsense still behaves, as it always has, whether popularly chosen or not, like a drunk behind the wheel.  It’s a disaster careening down our thoroughfares.  And like most drunks, all-too-often they don’t get sober till they hit bottom.  Apparently, our urban electorates haven’t hit bottom.  Or it could be that the voter pool has been reduced to the drunks, the sober having fled to safer climes (red states).

A sizeable majority – by ten points – of Wisconsin voters recently failed the field sobriety test but still grabbed the car keys.  Some attribute the recent election of the Visigothic Janet Protasiewicz to the State Supreme Court to the abortion issue.  Probably true, but Wisconsinites have now let the Visigoths through the gates with a new Visigothic majority on the Court and, as a result, will get much more than carte blanche abortion.  Protasiewicz promised during the campaign to rewrite the state’s redistricting maps to the advantage of the neo-Marxists who promise more sacking into the foreseeable future.  In addition, expect more teacher-union power to dictate your child’s education, backdoor racism in diversity-equity-inclusion, and higher taxes to finance the revolution.  The whole litany of policies to promote the revolution against hypothetical systemic “oppressors” are about to be unleashed.  And so will a run on exiting U-Hauls, proving once again that the only thing efficiently produced by Marxism is refugees.

Money is the mother’s milk of politics . . . and revolution.  The donkey party neo-Marxists, in spite of their dismal record, are well-funded from a network of similarly intoxicated donors.  The precedent was established by Lenin in 1917.  The Bolsheviks were bankrolled by Imperial Germany. A revolution rides on more than fulminations.

Money and an election system reshaped to the advantage of their base put Protasiewicz in office, and gave Chicago another Alaric-style mayor, Brandon Johnson, to replace the Visigothic Lori Lightfoot.  The guy is marinated in neo-Marxism, like his predecessor.  San Francisco, Wisconsin, and Chicago are pointing the way to the future, the same future viewed by 5th-century Romans and early 20th-century Petrograd residents.

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If not arrested, our condition will continue to deteriorate . . . until riveting calamities shock us back to our senses.  Hopefully, by then, it won’t be too late.  Hopefully, we won’t wake up to news of two aircraft carriers sunk in the western Pacific, and our response is crippled by an economy unable to meet the demands of the moment, or a population unwilling to fight after years of anti-western indoctrination in our media and schools.  A pool of recruits rattled by gender dysphoria and accusations of white privilege can’t instill much confidence.

The signs of decay aren’t limited to the popularity of chic neo-Marxism among urban sophisticates.  Another passed-out canary is plummeting birth rates and closing maternity wards.  It’s hard to have a robust generational talent pool to face the threat with a population befuddled by pronouns and fungible sex-identity, all as the population shrinks.  We’ve got a lot to worry about.  And all the while, neo-Marxism, acting like the Visigoths, is busy hollowing out the nation and its civilization.  At this late hour, the odor of national decomposition is beginning to overwhelm the olfactory glands.

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RogerG

Read more here:

* BLM’s mission statement included the following:
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.” It’s straight out of the writings of Karl Marx, nothing unusual for the self-professed Marxism of BLM’s founders of Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi.

From the Wayback Machine Archive, Black Lives Matter: “What We Believe”, at https://web.archive.org/web/20200408020723/https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/

* “Whole Foods closes San Francisco flagship store after one year, citing crime”, Jordan Valinsky, CNN, 4/11/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/whole-foods-closes-san-francisco-flagship-store-after-one-year-citing-crime/ar-AA19IDPH

* If you’re interested, here’s a local San Francisco newscast about people getting out during the Covid shutdown: “On The Move: San Francisco residents on the move during the COVID-19 economic downturn” at

The Economic Philosophy of Ghostbusters: A Wakeup Call for Pete Buttigieg

Overthinking Ghostbusters: Shot by Shot
Venkman (l) and Stantz after they were ejected from the university in “Ghostbusters”.

We should put a brake on our headlong rush to inflate our government.  Imagine, we have a sizeable chunk of our electorate who actually believe that government can, and ought to, achieve equality of result in all aspects of life.  California, have you looked at your roads, schools, crime-ridden communities, rampant vagrancy, and firestorms in your forests?

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Just one look at our Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, should dispel any illusion of something called “government efficiency”.  If there ever was an oxymoron, this is it.  Look at the months it took for the city-owned Port of Los Angeles to whittle down the 100-ship backlog anchored over the horizon?  Buttigieg passes the responsibility to the Labor Secretary to avert a rail strike stoppage to add to the misery at the ports.  Then, along comes a winter storm and my grandson, like thousands of others across the country, faced massive cancellations, and stranded a thousand miles from home.  Can this guy think out of the box, or is he simply a blockhead, one with pedigreed credentials?

US airline services temporarily disrupted, several…

Could Buttigieg survive in the real private sector?  Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) faces the fear of having to earn of living outside the protective academic cocoon, and this after the three paranormal “scientists” were thrown out on their ear by the university administration.  Stantz to Venkman: “You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.”  Maybe our Secretary’s vision would be broadened by a job repairing train tracks once the rest of us are relieved of him.

Progressives Accuse Pete Buttigieg Of Racism For Using The Word 'Heartland' In A Tweet
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg

Really, what did you expect?  Mayor Pete’s overwhelming life experience was at a desk.  From a bluestocking extended stay at elite schools to McKinsey to small-city mayor to ensign in the Navy to politics, the guy was far removed from the practical day-to-day consequences of his work.  I can picture him in the emotional state of Dr. Stantz in 2024.  Take a look.

RogerG

Stakeholders Can Ruin Your Life

COVID-19 canceled mass protests. Here’s what youth climate activists are doing instead. | Grist
Climate activists, and so-called “stakeholders”, 2019

Stakeholder: noun; a person with an interest or concern in something, especially a business. (Google)

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Cut to the chase, a “stakeholder” is someone with no direct invested risk (land, labor, capital) in an enterprise who wants the power to impose their political opinions on those that do.  Stakeholder is a euphemism for those who want to screw up your investment for their benefit, however defined.  “Stakeholder” is a buzzword, for instance, that strives to create the stampede to end the internal combustion engine (ICE) and push everyone into electric vehicles (ev’s).

I can’t, and we oughtn’t, leave this phenomenon of the ev alone.

As a 30-year veteran of the public schools, I’m well aware of “stakeholders”.  Instead of the simple equation of producers (teachers, principals) and consumers (students, parents), we’ve got “stakeholders” to give us diversity/equity/inclusion (DEI), the principal tenets of critical race theory (CRT), “restorative justice” for classroom disruptors, gender-identity grooming, and the rest of the neo-socialistic chaos of the modern classroom.  Student performance in the academic core craters but all of that is brushed aside by the education industry’s “stakeholders”.  And you and your kids are the guinea pigs, not the principal “stakeholders” of the whole enterprise.  For most of the “stakeholders” and their kids, elite prep schools await.

Now the jive is overtaking the relationship between car buyer and car producer.  It works like this: create a mania (the role of “stakeholders”), politicize the mania (the role of “stakeholders”), the subsequent politicization transmutes into government mandates (jobs for “stakeholders”), and the rest of us get to live a life imposed by those far removed by from our needs and wants.  This isn’t a free economy at work; it’s politics.  “Stakeholders” are political activists!

And as is true with all ideological ninnies who want power to tell us how to live, we end up grappling with their crackpot choices. Classic example: the ev.  And you know what?  A “silent majority” in the auto industry c-suite in their quieter moments recognize the shambolic nature of the scam.  Others in the know are beginning to write about it.  The Wall Street Journal and National Review’s Andrew Stuttaford, among others, are part of a growing chorus writing about this shortsighted stampede to the ev.

Take the recent comments by the CEOs of Suzuki (Maruti Suzuki India, Ltd), Toyota, Nissan, and Stellantis (Fiat Chrysler/Peugeot) who have expressed misgivings.  In the drumbeat of NFL game ads and the enthusiasm blanketing the whole gamut of media, you’d never know of their anxiety.  Producers can’t completely ignore the manufactured mania, but amidst the monotonous din some drum up the courage to say the obvious: the “stakeholders” are looney.

It’s like the manufacturers being caught on an open mic.  President Akio Toyoda of Toyota Motor Corp. was reported in The Wall Street Journal as being “among the auto industry’s silent majority in questioning whether electric vehicles should be pursued exclusively, comments that reflect a growing uneasiness about how quickly car companies can transition.” Oh, they can abruptly transition, but how much carnage would follow in its wake?  Interesting question.

Akio Toyoda, CEO of Toyota Motor Corp.

In January 2022, the CEO of Stellantis was quoted as saying, “What is clear is that electrification [of cars] is a technology chosen by politicians [and their stakeholders], not by industry . . .”  Further, according to him, it takes about 44,000 miles to begin to experience the carbon benefit of an ev over your ICE.  By that time, your ev is half worn out.  Then, what do you do with the toxic thing with its toxic batteries?  Recycle?  Hogwash.  You can’t cost-effectively refurbish the things in the quantities that they will have to be produced.  And you thought that your fossil-fuel contraption was an eco-disaster.

The 2022 Power List 100; Carlos Tavares at the top | Autocar
Carlos Tavares, CEO of Stellantis

Chairman R.C. Bhargava of Maruti Suzuki India Lt. was encapsulated in a Bloomberg report, “. . . the automaker that sells every other car on the nation’s roads [India], believes electric vehicles aren’t the answer to reducing carbon emissions in the world’s third-biggest releaser of greenhouse gases — at least not in the immediate future.”  Yep, because millions of Indians in ev’s requires a steady flood of electricity from – you guessed it – coal and natural gas.  See, the stakeholders’ central planners are all about the glitz in the flashy tv ads, like the stakeholders themselves, and are not into the grimy details.  Don’t expect practical advice from political activists posing as “stakeholders”.  They’ll get you into trouble.

Making radical changes in the way we work due to pandemic, says RC Bhargava | Business News,The ...
Chairman R.C. Bhargava of Maruti Suzuki India Lt.

Nissan Chief Executive Uchida Makoto predicates more ev production on government help in the form of regulations to herd consumers into his products and cash payouts from taxpayers to his company’s pocket to make the things.  It’s the same attitude that turned Detroit’s Big Three into basket cases in the 1970’s and required TARP in 2008.  After WWII, Europe and Japan were wrecked and Detroit was riding high.  Then, our competitors’ stone age ended in the 1960s and 70s and Detroit and its featherbedding unions turned to Uncle Sam for protection.  Ironically, another European import, the Fascists’ idea of corporatism (the tripartite alliance of big corporations, big government, and big labor), entered the go-to manual for American policy makers and their “stakeholders”.  It was already resplendent in FDR’s New Deal as a policy maker’s template.

Uchida: Nissan's return to growth requires patience - Today News Post
Uchida Makoto, CEO of Nissan Motor Co.

American automakers are well-versed in taking hat in hand to Washington, D.C.  Uchida likes the idea, and so does GM.  GM pledges to go all electric by 2035.  Of course, when things get sticky, they’ll expect Uncle Sam to continue to manufacture the market for them.  In the throes of eco-stakeholders, DC will comply.  In other words, we’re back to where we were with TARP . . . and a bunch of impractical four-wheelers crowding our driveways

We’ll then experience déjà vu for that fuel-injected ICE under a dusty cover in the garage.  Remember the time when a fill-up took a couple of minutes, and the a/c didn’t cause a frantic search for an open charger in the 110-degree Texas/Mojave heat?

<i> Image: Twitter </i>
Mountain View, Ca., Teslas waiting in line for a charge.

You see, the electric vehicle has nothing to do with the creative freedom of entrepreneurs and voluntary interaction of free consumers and producers, the stuff of an economy in a free society.  It’s a central planner’s dream.  A central planner is a government employee.  “Stakeholders” use political clout to make government empower central planners to make you live according to their lights.  Out of the mire comes the ev and your struggles to get the kids to school, show up on time at work, and visit grandma for Thanksgiving.  Of course, the “stakeholder” says that you don’t have to do any of that.  The whole crusade is soft totalitarianism, soft because of the absence of a massive extra-legal secret police, but then again there’s the unceasing state indoctrination in teacher training and control of the curriculum in nearly every classroom K to grad school.  It sounds to me like a totalitarian perpetual motion machine self-generating the support for power to the state’s “stakeholders”.

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Interestingly, the problem is not with the electric vehicle itself. It’s the forcing of the things on the entire public.  A golf cart made to look like your car is your future, whether you like it or not.  The concerns of the auto industry’s execs stem from the exclusive focus on the ev.  Hybrids, alternative fuels (biomass, compressed hydrogen, etc.), our trusty reduced-emissions ICE, and many others should also be part of the mix in a truly free society, one without the so-called “stakeholders” running the show.  Yeah, it used to be called a free market.

The “stakeholders” aren’t into freedom, or a market with “free” – the autonomous soul – in front of it.  They’re into making you think like them.  Your life is to be rigged by them to be loyal clients of big-corp whose production decisions have been constricted by big-government under the influence of big-activists, aka “stakeholders”.  Once government has a “stake” in electric vehicles, it’s going to make you buy them.  Count on your state to resemble the hellscape of California.

California Is Falling Apart - YouTube

RogerG

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* “Toyota Chief Says ‘Silent Majority’ Has Doubts About Pursuing Only EVs”, River Davis and Sean McLain, The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 18, 2022, at https://www.wsj.com/articles/toyota-president-says-silent-majority-has-doubts-about-pursuing-only-evs-11671372223

* “Electric Vehicles: Mr. Toyoda is Worried”, Andrew Stuttaford, National Review Online, Jan. 1, 2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/electric-vehicles-mr-toyoda-is-worried/

* “India’s Top Carmaker Bets on Hybrids Over EVs in Clean Shift”, Ragini Saxena, Bloomberg, Jan. 26, 2022, at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-26/india-s-top-carmaker-bets-on-hybrids-over-evs-in-clean-shift?cmpid=BBD062722_GREENDAILY&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=220627&utm_campaign=greendaily&sref=KgEBWdKh&leadSource=uverify%20wall

The Youth Are the Problem. They’re Moonbat Crazy.

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Okay, I’ll come out and say it: The young are moonbat crazy.  Not all, but stunningly large numbers are. “Moonbat”, what’s that?  Crazy is the easy part.  The word “moonbat” in this context has been attributed to conservative commentator Howie Carr in referring to California governor Jerry Brown, Jr., who was caricatured in an online poster, “Before Moonbats, there was Jerry ‘Moonbeam’ Brown”.

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It appears to be getting worse – the moonbat craziness, that is.

I know about youthful kookiness because “Been there, done that”, as any child of the 60’s should know.  “Drugs, sex, and rock ‘n roll” isn’t exactly a clarion call for mature judgment.  The nutty stuff is rooted in the young’s unappreciation for the arduous path that was trod by others to get to the present.  It stems from the young’s newness to the world.  All they really know is what’s around them.

They can be taught history, but they have no experience with prior struggles, and telling and showing them won’t be enough, even if someone lectured them.  My WWII-generation parents experienced life before air conditioning, and when capable of acquiring it, they did in a heartbeat.  Today, large percentages of the young, pampered by modern conveniences, prefer to end a/c in a holy war to defeat climate change.  Yet, they wouldn’t last long without it, along with their trendy ev’s and obsession with connectivity.  There’s only so much room on the coastal plain to accommodate the added millions fleeing the oppressive heat everywhere else.  And the attendant blackouts and spiking utility bills won’t be good for streaming and the apps on their cellphones that direct them to the nearest Starbucks and car charger that won’t charge, the cell towers and relay centers absent the juice to run.

The moonbat in our young came out in all its glory in the last few elections.  No, this conclusion isn’t ageist prejudice.  Once again, “Been there, done that.” Epidemics of STD’s and drug abuse, riots, and mass displays of self-righteous posturing were as characteristic of my youth as flower power.  The peace movement’s catastrophic demand to withdraw from South Vietnam led to the fall of Southeast Asia and millions exterminated and millions more shoved into tortuous reeducation camps.  Not quite a Dark Age – for us, that is, a Dark Age for SE Asia – but certainly the quality-of-life lights were dimmed.

Well, the young are at it again.  Kristen Soltis Anderson, pollster and partner of Echelon Insights, unknowingly lays out the evidence for moonbat craziness in the under-40’s.  Large portions of youthful voters are committed to social and economic suicide.  On the social side, they aren’t marrying and having kids at levels of previous generations, support sexual unions that can’t produce them, and want to treat pregnancy as a disease.  I guess to make it all go down easier, they favor legal and social approval of THC intoxication in today’s highly potent, selectively cultivated pot (5 to 6 times more lusty than the kind passed around in the smoking circles of my youth).

The economic side of the self-abasement is a toxic embrace of socialism and eco-madness.  Unknowingly for them, the socialist paradise of North Korea didn’t invent the microchip.  No socialist Shangri-la had a hand in that.  It’s a product of free-enterprise entrepreneurialism, capitalism.  You know, private property and profits, all that “evil” stuff.  Socialism is an assault on private property, profits, and the rich who got rich because they brought all that stuff to the Antifa zealots so they could virally coordinate to close down Portland.

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The eco-madness is their poorly thought out but loudly espoused mitigations of “climate change”.  Well, prove it.  Prove that “climate change” is a man-caused apocalypse. Prove that your chic measures – ev’s, a grid reliant on windmills and solar panels, and chicken-coop housing in today’s urban hellscapes – will make more than a dimple of improvement on the hypothetical crisis.  Convince me that it won’t lead to central planning, the ideological cousin of totalitarianism.  Convince me that it won’t lead to the iron fist of totalitarianism to socially engineer the Sierra Club’s ideal person.  History shows a link between moonbat utopianism in power and thuggery.  What makes the young so confident in thinking that the historically evident travel from an imposed fantasy to full-throated coercion can be successfully suspended?  History isn’t encouraging.

Here’s Soltis’s scoop on the political status of the young: they are strong Democrats, stronger than earlier renditions of youthfulness.  The upper end of millennials has reached 40 and they punched the Democrat ticket by nine points in 2022.  The bulk of them, though, are in their 30’s, and combined with the twenty-somethings, they favored the Democrats by 28 points!  The Republicans are in a world of hurt with them.  It’s been particularly true in the last three election cycles.

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Long lines of students waiting to vote at a Michigan college.

What animates these young folks to ignore the urban filth and crime, inflation, a looming recession, the wildlands as open-air combustion chambers, the blackouts, the crippling national debt, the invasion of boys into girls’ sports and bathrooms, and schools that function more as lefty finishing schools than places of learning?  The affection for the donkey party can’t solely be laid at the feet of Trump.  The young obviously care more about other things. Among those under 30, 53% want abortion to be legal “under any circumstance”.  That could unthinkingly include late term/partial birth abortions, ending the life of babies who survive the procedure, sex-selection abortions, and excusing those mothers who see a baby as an obstacle in the climb up the greasy corporate pole.

“Under any circumstance” is an awfully grizzly affair.  Many of the young seem to be fully onboard with the “right” to abortion translating into the “right” of the mother and doctor to be executioners.  Or do they?  “Under any circumstance” precludes any consideration of viability.  Pardon me, but I can’t accept the claim that 53% of the young are so inhuman.  For many in the polling, I speculate, the response was a visceral reaction to Dobbs, which was caricatured by a similarly ill-informed press as a ban on abortion.  But explaining the decision as a return to federalism would require an understanding of federalism.  The trillions of dollars spent on the schools has yet to succeed at reading, writing, and math (NAEP scores).  What makes you think that they will be any better at conveying the meaning of federalism?

Trillions more and dismal results (NAEP scores).  Dismal results and political illiteracy.  Political illiteracy and hitching a ride on the Democrats’ train of affection for government as super daddy.

Economic illiteracy too.  Young people support labor unions because they supposedly have a “positive impact on the country”, more so than the church and the military.  As long as we keep the discussion out of reality, America’s adversarial unions are seen in poorly developed young minds as fighting the battle against the exploitation of innocent workers by robber barons.  But it isn’t that simple.  A strong historical case can be made that industrial labor unions killed Detroit and sent American steel into a tailspin.  Unionization was contorted into corporate and job euthanasia.  Their extravagant demands, wrapped in a promiscuous right to strike and lavish collective bargaining agreements, paved the way for the rise of Toyota and the other Asian and European automakers.  The industrial heartland became deindustrialized to a great extent by their workers.

Abandoned office/industrial building in Detroit.

The Rust Belt became as rusty as its unions.  Who wants to invest in a dive into the jaws of our labor unions, so long as we still have the freedom to decide where to put our money?  Better to avoid the Upper Midwest Rust Belt and go to friendlier places, like the American South, who are without laws that grant power to unions to force everyone into their clutches.  “Right to work” laws in the South weren’t a ban on labor unions, but merely made them voluntary.  Such nuances aren’t the stuff of K-to-grad school curriculums.  We’ve trained a generation in AFL-CIO urban myths.

It doesn’t end there.  More immediately, our young folks seem to be okay with not getting the latest edition of the I-phone, or even underwear. Those container ships anchored over the horizon at San Pedro were a gift of the Pacific Maritime Association (an affiliate of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union) representing dock workers.  As of October 2022, 77 ships remain anchored outside the port.  Our supply chain is dependent on the featherbedding of $171,000/year dock workers (2019 numbers).  Monopolies of labor have the funny tendency of behaving like any other monopoly.

Even “the most pro-union president” (Biden) is feeling the heat of another possible disruption from a rail strike.  Once the containers get off the ship, the most congested docks face the most congested railyard in the country.  Its expansion faces the usual suspects: organized eco-zealots and California’s exhaustive eco-regulations.  The state’s EIR’s (environmental impact reports), to go along with the fed’s EIS’s (environmental impact statements), to go along with multiple layers of bureaucratic meddling, prompted endless delays and lawsuits.  We may get the expansion, but not without a taxpayer breaking and company busting and bloated price tag, not an unusual experience in the Democrats’ Mecca and Medina of California.  Remember the state’s high-speed rail monolith to nowhere?

Not canceled! High-speed rail is, in fact, already under construction in Fresno, California.
Unfinished California high-speed elevated rail line outside Fresno, Ca.

Such episodes don’t register with the young.  I think that too many of the young are into the excitement and drama normally found in their personal diversions and aren’t attracted to the boring and tedious work of reading and contemplation.  They won’t read a magazine of substance but will glance at Twitter burps and anything on their Instagram feed.

Why bother to vote If that is the case?  Has anyone ever pondered the possibility that voting could be an immoral act?  Think about it.  An uninformed vote is the equal of an informed one, a frivolous one equal to a serious one.  As in a fraudulent vote, one cancels the other.  If you don’t know, don’t care, and won’t inform yourself, don’t you have a moral responsibility to stay away from the ballot . . . and power tools?  Such an ethic of responsibility cannot be encapsulated in a law, but it should be implanted in our minds – to go along with honesty, charity, and love – from a young age.  Before you do something, do it responsibly.

Today’s young are less inclined to be responsible because some parents and most of our schools have failed to prepare them to face the issues of their time.  Take marriage as an example, same-zex marriage in particular. The young favor it by upwards to three-quarters in recent polling.

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But is same-sex marriage an oxymoron?  Has the thought ever graced their mind?  Same-sex marriage might be sensible if marriage is construed as nothing but assuaging the interests of adults.  In history, however, marriage has always been tied to civilization’s stake in procreation.  For that to happen, heterosexual behavior is required.  Not every married couple of a heterosexual complexion can or chooses to have children.  That’s not the point.  The long nurturing process of our young requires the tight bond of the people who brought them into being.  The state and its disconnected operatives are no stand-in.

That tight bond is marriage, and it should be reserved for heterosexual pairings.  Whether they have children or not is a personal matter.  Other conceptions (civil unions, etc.) with many of the privileges and protections of marriage can be made available for same-sex couples.  But heterosexuality is a privileged coupling because without it, there is no next generation.  A society of the incontinent and gray-haired, because we have elevated everything else but childbearing and childrearing, doesn’t bode well for survival.  Heterosexuality must be privileged.  Marriage is the way, born of necessity, to do it.

The reservation of marriage for complimentary sexual pairings isn’t a prudish ban on “loving who you want”.  That’s pure sophistry.  Marriage is society’s minimal requirement for there to be a next generation.

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Has this argument ever been presented to the three-quarters who think that same-sex marriage is a great idea?  The overwhelming numbers in support of something is not proof of the thing’s validity.  More accurately, it’s evidence of a lack of exposure to the history of our institutions, and to a real debate.  Like much else involving the young, they don’t know any better and nobody told them.

It comes back to maturity.  One element of maturity is tied up in the economic concept of tradeoffs: you can’t have it all.  No one can.  We give up one thing to obtain another. So, for our fulminating statue-topplers and Antifa zealots, and our twenty-somethings whose education didn’t educate, you can’t simultaneously have your socialism and 5G and the next generation of connectivity.  That stuff is born of freedom, the freedom to live a life, to think anew, to acquire, without undermining the prerequisites for their being generations to come.  It’s not the freedom of bureaucrats to meddle.

The young are just moonbat crazy.  Is this what degringolade (downfall) looks like?

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RogerG

Read here for more:

* “Republicans’ Lost Youth”, Kristen Soltis Anderson, National Review, Dec. 1, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/12/19/republicans-lost-youth/

* “NAEP national test scores fall to lowest levels in decades!”, Anthony Picciano of CUNY, Sept, 2, 2022, at https://apicciano.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2022/09/02/naep-national-test-scores-fall-to-lowest-levels-in-decades/#:~:text=Driving%20the%20news%3A%20The%20results%20on%20the%20NAEP%2C,in%20learning%20outcomes%20were%20starkest%20among%20lower-performing%20students.

* “77 box vessels waiting outside San Pedro Bay ports”, World Cargo News, Oct. 25, 2022, at https://www.worldcargonews.com/news/news/77-box-vessels-waiting-outside-san-pedro-bay-ports-67501#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Marine%20Exchange%20of%20Southern%20California%2C,Los%20Angeles%20are%20due%20to%20arrive%20at%20anchor.

A Picture Says a Thousand Words

The Great Awokening in the wake of George Floyd, and spurred on by Obama’s decade-long sermonizing, was actually The Great Disconnect for the Democratic Party.  The Party is simply out of touch.  No better example can be found of the Party’s separation from most people’s lives than the picture of a hard-working and dirty coal miner attending a University of Kentucky basketball game with his son (see below).  This coal miner is as far removed from the funhouse/playhouse campus of Twitter as one can imagine – in ways more than geography.  The picture captures the Democrats’ predicament.

The Democratic Party traded blue-collars for the pampered denizens of faculty lounges and white-collars sheltered in air-conditioned offices and free to be enraptured without consequences by gauzy ideologies.  The hunt to combat climate change, an undefinable racism, and transphobia jumped to the front and center and over the concerns of people facing worsening family budgets, schools, and safety.

What do the Democrats have to offer?  Nothing but misery.  They’re after that guy’s job.  Biden goes out on the stump and proclaims an end to drilling and the use of coal.  The Party is all agog in fantasies of forests of windmills and vast expanses of solar panels replacing nuclear, coal, and natural gas.  And why are they so enthusiastic about taking away that man’s livelihood?  Answer: a climate-change hysteria that is as unscientific as it is illogical.  It’s more religious than anything.  It can only be entertained in the isolated and pleasant indoor climates made possible by the toil and sweat of people like that dirty miner in the stands with his son.  The Party has become an institutional affront to most of working America.

Do you think that only he knows the dirty secret of the Party turning its back on him?  To borrow from Biden, come on, man.  Working America encompasses both sexes and all races and ethnicities.  Work is color and gender blind.  So, regardless of melanin count and genitalia, many are walking away from a party much more identified with techie billionaires, Antifa, and Sierra Club conferees. Thus, a rising GOP black and Latino vote.

For a Democrat, the picture below should hit you in the gut. What are you doing to that man and his son?

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Michael McGuire covered in soot after a shift in the mines. He rushed to be with his son, Easton, for the first live basketball game together at the University of Kentucky. (photo: WKYT)

RogerG

Our Politics Are a Mess. Shame on the Culprits.

President Joe Biden delivers remarks on prescription drug costs, Social Security and Medicare, during a campaign event, in Joliet, Ill., November 5, 2022. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Election Day is nigh, and our politics are a mess.  Shame on the Culprits.

Biden goes on a rant about the “idiots” who actually take the Democrats for their word: the Democrats are “socialists” if not in self-acclamation, then in deeds.  But you are an “idiot” for noticing. Trump fulminates in his usual adolescent way by insulting a potential rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis, as “DeSanctimonious”.  When will that 20% of the GOP electorate actually grow up? Our 2024 choices at this juncture could be between the revolutionaries’ old fart (Biden) or an old-but-narcissistic browbeater (Trump).  It’s a real binary because only one of the two could be inflicted on us after 2024.

Former President Donald Trump speaks during a pre-election rally to support Republican candidates in Latrobe, Pa., November 5, 2022. (Mike Segar/Reuters)

How did we end up with two septuagenarian-to-octogenarian figures to represent our political divide?  One is clearly senile and the other is an embarrassing oaf who hasn’t outgrown schoolyard bullying because it sells in our hyperactive digital age.  While the two mouthpieces have an equal measure of their own version of decrepitude, the two parties are not as equivalent in their rot.  The Democratic Party went off their rocker into full-blown ultra-Left fanaticism.  The Republican Party is the one left to buttress the nation against the lunacy, being now the only adult left in the room, but, sadly, they are anchored down by the telegenic buffoon.  He just might get a second shot at it in 2024.

The GOP’s barker, Trump, had his 4-year turn with the brass ring but ran into a buzzsaw of Left/bureaucratic hostility that dominates our increasingly putrefying culture and administrative state.  The thing that attracts clicks and cameras – a dramatic persona, or BDE (look it up) in the words of Trumpkins – also stirred the entrenched Left to attempt to shred our Constitutional order, which they tried to do in short order after they were returned to power under the senescent Biden in January 2021 in calls for court packing, elimination of the Electoral College, engineering four new Senate seats for themselves, calling for an elimination of any voice for the minority in the Senate (it is said that the filibuster is a “relic” of Jim Crow), pushing a federal takeover of elections to legalize election fraud to expand their voter base and ensure dominance over the horizon, etc.

And then the wheels came off the nation under their refashioned version of Il Duce’s old slogan of “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”  No energy for you if it didn’t come from a windmill or solar panel.  No car for you if it doesn’t take 2 hours to 2 days to charge, and won’t burst into flames after being inundated in a storm surge.  The Green New Deal central planners are going to hogtie you into their utopian rabbit hole with or without your consent.

As for your sidewalks and parks, be careful because addiction on the streets and in the green spaces is “decriminalized”.  Plus, you get the opportunity to see nihilism in practice with the rampant smash-and-grab mobs, property crime, and raging assaults – Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange” brought to life.  Heck, just keep your mayhem under $950, and even if you don’t, no-cash-bail and non-prosecution ensures that the miscreants will never get a chance to look from the wrong side of bars.  It’s a huge subsidy for Hobbes’s old prediction of the “war of all against all”.

Our girls’ locker rooms have been invaded by XY “girls”.  Our daughters aren’t safe, and their lifetime efforts and achievements cut short by XY “women” athletes.  All of this brought to you by a party that wants to make all things a matter of human will.  No obvious boys and girls, and all is subject to choice and human interventions.  High school dances are now a real adventure for all concerned.

The so-called kitchen table isn’t exempt because you are increasingly unable to afford much to put on it.  Your nest egg (401k, pension) has tanked.  Shortages are disguised in euphemisms like “supply chain crisis”.  It’s always a crisis with these central-planning folks.  Central planning has its shortcomings.  And, if you had a job, the highways just became useless since you can’t afford the juice to turn the wheels of your car, or the home charger was made inert by a blackout.  “Sustainable” also has its shortcomings.

The ultimate in central planning – the pandemic lockdowns, closures of businesses, schools, and civil life, and the mandates, and the incessant tinkering with essential and nonessential – has contributed to much of the disruption of ordinary life that we experience today, setting back our kids for a year or two.  COVID central planning is like Soviet central planning or the kind run out of Pyongyang: shortages and a stunted existence.

But what’s there to complain about?  Much, oh so very much.  The blathering blowhard of the GOP won’t be on the ballot till 2024, but Biden’s “idiots” – the average person that makes the country click by living and working – face an existential threat: Biden and his big-government party.  Vote like your life depended on it, because it actually does.

You’re the Lifeguard?

Terrifier

Picture

RogerG

Read more here:

* “Biden calls anti-socialism protesters ‘idiots’ in Illinois stump speech attacking GOP”, Washington Times, Nov. 5, 2022, at https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/nov/5/biden-calls-anti-socialism-protesters-idiots-illin/ .

* “Trump hits DeSantis as ‘Ron DeSanctimonious’ at rally amid 2024 announcement rumors”, Washington Times, Nov. 5, 2022, at https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/nov/5/trump-hits-ron-desantis-ron-desanctimonious-rally-/ .

 

Can I Sue?

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California State Teachers Retirement System headquarters in Sacramento, Ca.

Really, can I sue California’s STRS, the state’s teacher pension system?  I would think that I have standing.  After all, I am receiving a CalSTRS pension.  Why would I sue?  They are imperiling my pension.  Simple.

How are they harming the integrity of my pension?  It comes in three letters – ESG – and, to no great surprise, California is all into it.  The initials stand for “environment, social, governance” and the plan is to impose these political abstractions on the entire business sector including finance, which also includes pension investing.  In practical terms, ESG means the grab bag of leftwing causes from transgender ideology to the crusade against “systemic racism” to climate-change apocalyptics.  The purpose is to strongarm businesses into leftwing causes with the use of the mother’s milk of business – capital – capital even from pension members.

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A leading advocate among mega-financiers for ESG under label of “sustainable” is Chairman and Chief Executive of BlackRock, Laurence Fink. Here he speaks during a session at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos January 25, 2014. (REUTERS/Ruben Sprich)

The State of Utah is suing – that is, suing Standard and Poor’s (S&P) for assessing the state’s financial stability and credit worthiness according to leftwing metrics (ESG), or how diligent the state is in furthering leftwing causes such as hostility to the firearms industry and energy companies.  Since the electorate of Utah doesn’t have the political sensibilities of gun controllers, BLM, the progressive ladies of The View, or the Sierra Club, the state’s financial status and bonds get downgraded by S&P acting in the role of the Left’s hatchet man.  If the state’s electorate doesn’t pay heed to the fascinations of a college Sociology faculty, their bonds get branded “B” (junk).  The purpose is to jeopardize the state’s financial health if they don’t come to heel.

Public-employee pension funds are particularly prone to the sway of the zealots, especially CalPers and CalSTRS in California, already under the direct thumb of an off-the-charts progressive one-party state.  Out goes the standard fiduciary rule of working in the best interests of the client, in comes a redefinition of “best interests” to involve the political inclinations of those like Gavin Newsom wanting to risk the pensioners’ contributions and ultimate payout on Solyndra-type ventures and away from investments that until yesterday were pro forma.

In the case of a public-employee pension system, “best interest” can’t be limited to managers taking dictates from powerful and ideologically pretentious politicos.  Contributions come from everyone from Marxists to NRA members in general funds like CalSTRS.  The only real requirement is to be a teacher of the requisite number of years.  The one thing that they all have in common is being retired and spoiling their grandkids.  If any of them want to fund the antics of The Squad, they can do it from their pre- or post-retirement income, not beforehand after a deterioration of potential payouts to every beneficiary by Gavin Newsom’s preferences.

Kentucky’s AG, Daniel Cameron, senses the chicanery as well.  He hit the mark with a letter to the state’s pension fund managers when he warned them about ESG investing because it would “violate statutory and contractual fiduciary duties.”  He continued, “There is an increasing trend among some investment management firms to use money in public and state employee pension plans — that is, other people’s money — to push their own political agendas and force social change.”  Those fiduciary duties might apply to California as well.

Daniel Cameron
Daniel Cameron, Kentucky’s AG

A favorite tactic to make ESG seem legitimate is to label the opinions of the Left a matter of “science” and a product of a “consensus”, therefore irrefutable, therefore “misinformation” if challenged, therefore above and beyond the standard rules of fiduciary responsibility.  This new “science” – the scientific truth (?) of Leftist opinion – is actually a “science” without the scientific method.  Think about it: What scientist comes from an experimental test of his/her hypothesis with the observation that the results are wrong because they violate a “consensus”?  The whole exercise is as nonsensical as handing over my pension’s investment portfolio to the screeching ministrations of Greta Thunberg or Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

But here we are at a place where we can’t challenge the destruction of a pension because anyone who disagrees is censored as a “denier”.  So, the Left gets carte blanche with the money for my old age.  I don’t think so.  Send lawyers, guns, and money.  Oh, drop the “guns” part and let’s sue.

I identify with Warren Zevon’s predicament in his song “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”.  The lyics:

“I went home with the waitress, the way I always do
How was I to know, she was with the Russians, too?

I was gambling in Havana, I took a little risk
Send lawyers, guns and money, dad, get me out of this, ha

I’m the innocent bystander
Somehow I got stuck between the rock and a hard place
And I’m down on my luck, yes I’m down on my luck
Well, I’m down on my luck

And I’m hiding in Honduras
I’m a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns, and money
The shit has hit the fan

Alright, send lawyers, guns, and money
Huh, yeah
Send lawyers, guns, and money
Uh
Send lawyers, guns, and money
Hey
Send lawyers, guns, and money
Oo, yeah
Yeah
Yeah”

Zevon’s performance of “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”:

RogerG

Read here for more:

* “Follow Daniel Cameron’s lead, purge every hint of ESG from your state’s finances”, Washington Examiner, Nov. 4, 2022, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/faith-freedom-self-reliance/follow-daniel-camerons-lead-purge-every-hint-of-esg-from-your-states-finances .

* “Utah pushes back against pro-Putin ESG financial analysis”, Washington Examiner, May 2, 2022, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/utah-pushes-back-against-pro-putin-esg-financial-analysis .

Today’s Opportunities for a Columnist with Flair, Heather Wilhelm

charging-station-california
Electric cars sit charging in a parking garage at the University of California, Irvine, in Irvine, Calif., 2015. (photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

I get a kick out of Heather Wilhelm’s columns. She writes for The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, National Review, etc., and calls Austin, Tx., home. She has a flair, as in a recent piece “Running on Fumes”. The topic is California’s fetish for electric cars. As I’ve written many times, it’s a looney idea. Wilhelm agrees . . . with flair.

Here’s some juicy tidbits from the column, with a few quips of my own:

* “. . . America’s favorite loopy wine-swilling communist aunt who dabbles in astrology and mushrooms — I’m speaking, of course, of the government of California . . . .” — What a great distillation of Sacramento.

* “What could go wrong?” [A reference to California’s brain fart to end gas-powered cars by 2035 coupled with the state’s grid operator recently requesting a stop to EV charging from 4 pm to 9 pm.] Putting it in more laymen terms in a fictional expansion of the announcement, she wrote, “ . . . freeze, just like a statue, between the hours of 4 p.m. and 9 p.m., avoiding movement that could cause an injury, lest you have to walk 16 miles to the ER with a broken scapula. Please also refrain from having any personal emergencies that might require a car during this specific time window. And for heaven’s sake, do not — please do not — go into labor between the hours of 4 p.m. and 9 p.m.”

* Then she quotes a Newsom spokesperson: “We’re not saying don’t charge them. We’re just saying don’t charge them between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m.” — You can’t make this stuff up. California is an SNL skit in real time.

* “Ah. Remember: If you’re going to get appendicitis, don’t.” — Need I say more?

* “California is a gorgeous state filled with natural wonders and wonderful people, but pretty soon the only way to get out of the place might involve the few remaining clusters of beleaguered residents’ begging Ron DeSantis to fly them to Martha’s Vineyard.” — Nicely put.

* On EV road trips: “Electric cars are great, unless you actually want to go somewhere that’s, you know, far.” Further, “. . . if you want to take a road trip with a car that plugs in, in a vast, sprawling country with multiple wilderness areas that will likely never have an abundance of places to plug it in . . . well, you might want to give the whole idea a second thought.” — You say?

* Or this line about her: “I believe in self-sufficiency, am a bit of a prepper, and always keep my gas tank at half full or higher in case the apocalypse breaks out or Beto O’Rourke somehow gets elected to some form of public office.” – The latter hypothetical would be proof that the electorate went mad. Again, hope that DeSantis will fly you to Martha’s Vineyard.

* Lastly, this jab at the airheaded central planners like Newsom and his coterie of sadomasochistic Green New Dealers: “I’d bet on the free market to do a better job than a guy like Gavin Newsom.” Precisely, let people decide – it’s called a free market – and not some shortsighted drunk-on-power goofs with an adolescent vision.

Radical visionaries seldom trouble themselves with consequences. With the “sustainable” grid chronically down, a heat wave means that you’ll . . . sweat, hopefully not into stroke. No electricity, no air conditioning. After controlling your usage with “smart” thermostats – beware of Alexa – the same geniuses might mandate the return to the Victorian 13-foot ceiling and ban air conditioning to go along with your gas-powered car. In one fell swoop, the state’s housing stock of 8-foot ceilings will be made obsolete. Our airheads follow in the footsteps of the many totalitarians who have gone before. They will make you into their better person even if it’ll ruin you.

Heather Wihelm’s full article is at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/10/17/running-on-fumes/.

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RogerG

Ukraine and the Bursting of Bubbles

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Alas, Tulsi Gabbard left the Democratic Party after some years of abuse typified by Hilary Clinton branding her a Russian agent.  I can’t say I blame her. She went from the Democratic Congressional Caucus to the arms of the Fox News punditry, a go-to for Tucker Carlson and the “populist” Right.  There’s wisdom in crowds – the idea that crowds are wiser than “experts”, thus “populism” – and also mass mania, unfortunately another facet of “populism”.  Right now, the foreign policy fad of the moment on the “populist” Right is a retreat to fortress America.  It’s incoherent, but there it is.  Bubble #1.

That’s not all.  Bubble #2 is the grip of climate-change ideology among our so-called elites.  The simple fact that climate changes is exploited for a wholesale revamping of our way of life.  This won’t end well since we are starting to see the first signs of its horrendous fallout as Putin utilizes his oil/gas/coal weapon.

Commissar Putin’s invasion of Ukraine carries the pin to pop both bubbles.  In the first fantasy, the limits of collective security, collective solidarity, collectively imposed anything are borne out.  One overriding behemoth must be available to thump the world’s worst malefactors.  In the 19th century the role was filled by Britain and her navy; the baton passed to the U.S. in the 20th and 21st centuries, like it or not.  Sorry Tulsi and Tucker.  One nation must fill the role of the one power who scoundrels must watch over their shoulders.  Is this carte blanche for intervention?  No, but we must be in a position to act when necessary, Tulsi and Tucker be damned.  When a vacuum exists, we get the barbarian 5th-century sacking of Rome and the descent into Hobbesian chaos, Europe as a Napoleonic grand duchy, the slaughter pens of the WWI trenches, blitzkrieg and the Holocaust, and communist expansion at the barrel of a gun (or tank, or ICBM) and more mass slaughter in the late 20th.  Weakness invites horrors.

Collective solidarity gambits like the UN or EU are no substitute for the behemoth.  A majority of the UN could probably fit into the international malefactors’ caucus, which makes the occupants of the building on Turtle Bay a dubious enforcer of goodness and light.  As for the EU, it is proof that once an ideological frenzy like climate-change ideology grips continental elites all the nations in the club will step back a century in prosperity.  The result is a decline in energy freedom and a fall into a dependence on the whims of Putin and his Kremlin kleptocrats, and a choice between wintertime of mass hypothermia or quietude on the rape of Ukraine.

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Russian energy giant Gazprom
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Working on the Nordstream 2 pipeline in December 2019, now halted due to Russia’s Ukraine invasion. (The times of London photo)

Make no mistake about it, today’s thugs-with-nuclear-weapons act like Jack the Ripper, always looking to see if the night watchman is distracted or asleep.  For 10 years, in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union, the world chose to be spectators as Russia suppressed Chenya.  The appetite wasn’t whetted with a few Chechens so Putin turned his gaze to the bigger prize of the Ukraine in his campaign to reconstitute the USSR.  Interestingly, the role of night watchman at the time was filled by Obama, but Obama was busy with the eight-year run of his apology tour.  Obama was caught promising Putin a dismantlement of missile defense in Poland and the Czech Republic if Putin would play nice for his reelection campaign.  Done deal.  Obama gets reelected and afterwards Putin invaded and annexed Crimea and used proxies to lop off two eastern districts of the Ukrainian Donbass.  After the Trump interregnum, Putin pounced with Obama II, Joe Biden, at the helm fumbling Afghanistan, dispiriting the American military with an inquisition to ferret out the nefarious kulaks of “white supremacy” in the ranks, and wrecking the US economy in wild spending and a full-frontal assault on our bountiful energy resources – a textbook example of how to voluntarily dismantle a nation.

In the meantime, Tucker and Tulsi are aghast that the semi-senescent Biden would dare empty US weapons inventories in support of a Ukrainian fighting force of high esprit de corps.  And the Ukrainians are giving a good accounting of themselves.  But Tucker, Tulsi, and the “populist” Right in the podcastry are in the grip of fear of Russia’s nuclear arsenal.  What do they propose to do as Putin brazenly invades?  I don’t know, they won’t say, but they heap scorn on Zelensky and his country.  Odd.  It’s perplexing.  Is it due to an unstated love affair with nationalism, even if it is of the Russian variety?

Anyway, no better inducement for nuclear proliferation cannot be imagined.  Go nuclear, and you too can establish the caliphate, starve your people and unite the Korean peninsula under a monomaniacal family junta, or fulfill your wish to reimpose the iron fist of the USSR.  Just get the bomb and watch the “populist” Right media sweat bullets if our government should dare arm the victims.

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Victims of Russian atrocities in Bucha, Ukraine, waiting for burial.

No nation should put itself at the mercy of nuclear blackmail.  The possession of nuclear weapons should not mean that a nation’s rulers have the winning lottery ticket to the mega-prize as the rest of the world cowers in acceptance.  Cowering is no answer; deterrence is, as it always has. Sī vīs pācem, parā bellum: “If you want peace, prepare for war.”  Not even diplomacy works without it.  That is, make the cost of using these WMD’s far greater than any benefit.  The cost can come in the form of nuclear retaliation and/or Russia’s status as a pariah in the full sense of the word and/or threats to Putin’s personal safety.  Being Interpol’s no. 1 fugitive will not contribute to an autocrat’s peace of mind.  State the costs up front and be prepared to carry it out.  Sweating bullets is for Putin, not the pundits in the Fox News studios.

The formula applies to us as well.  To stand by, appease, or sanction aggression will only green-light more of it.  The costs of the populist Right’s dithering and fear are far greater than any benefits.  Why shouldn’t Red China initiate a “special military operation” on Taiwan since the politburo in Beijing has nuclear weapons too?  Say goodbye to Taiwan.  Speaking of a Hobbesian world beset by anyone with the “bomb” license.  No matter what the Right’s appeasement caucus has to say, you can’t replace a calculation that is as old as humankind with dithering and fear.

Ukraine is forcing another cost/benefit dose of reality and the bursting of Bubble #2.  Putin’s ambitions are smashing any illusions of a costless “transition” to a carbon-free ecotopia.  Indeed, the wakeup call of the cure being worse than the disease may be the one Putin gift to the world from the Ukraine imbroglio.  The so-called cure of greenie energy promises a devolution to a 19th century GDP, with very little likelihood of any impact on global temperatures.  The world watching a voluntary descent into economic struggles isn’t likely to inspire much of a following.  Self-immolation isn’t a successful recruitment tool.

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North Sea windmills

Germany called it Energiewende (energy transition), their effort in reality to transition from industrial powerhouse to Putin concubine.  Under the EU’s own Green Deal, the continent is to be carbon free by 2050, and all the while cementing an addiction for Putin energy as their backbone, and particularly for Germany: 55 percent of Germany’s natural gas, a third of its oil, and half its coal.  Try running the factories of Mercedes-Benz Group AG on the kind of electricity that makes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez smile.

Unsaid about the “transition” is the absolute need for a fossil fuel backbone to buck-up those ugly and vast arrays of Bunyanesque windmills and solar panels.  But the electricity production is unavoidably spasmodic. The hours of full sunlight in Germany, for instance, translate into the annual daylength equivalent of 158 days, or conversely 207 days of cloud cover.  And sometimes, inexplicably, the North Sea wind fails to blow, which happened in September 2021 and lasted weeks.  When nature didn’t cooperate with the dream of Berlin’s central planners, Germany double downed on stupid by closing the three remaining nuclear power plants (now delayed).  Germany learned that zero-carbon/zero-nuclear means blackouts, rationing, skyrocketing rates, job losses, and the prospect of widespread hypothermia deaths in this and future winters if they refused to pay the Khan’s ransom.

In the upside-down logic of the greenie crowd, not paying the ransom means an even greater attachment for Alices’ Wonderland.  For these dreamers, Putin’s cutoff is more of an excuse to transition to . . . blackouts, rationing, skyrocketing rates, job losses, and the prospect of widespread hypothermia deaths in this and future winters.  Alice’s logic is evident on the “populist” Right.  Their substitute for “peace through strength” is . . . dithering and fear.  Diplomacy driven by dithering and fear leads to a dark place.  At this juncture, the loons of the Left, enveloped in eco-madness, and the loons of the “populist” Right, in the grip of Russian nuke-fear paralysis, have nothing to offer but wreckage.

This resembles a mid-winter scene after the second day of snow in Chisinau, Moldova
Late spring freeze in Europe, 2017. This scene is from Chisinau, Moldova. Try heating your home or getting to work with no nuclear power and Putin reducing your fossil fuel supply by a third to a half. Don’t expect much help from “sustainables”.

RogerG

We Did It to Ourselves

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Electric vehicle catches fire in Florida after Hurricane Ian.

In Rob Reiner’s “This Is Spinal Tap”, the boys in the band are asked about the unexpected deaths of some of their drummers, including one who mysteriously erupted in spontaneous combustion.

It’s hilarious, but not so funny for Florida electric vehicle (EV) owners in the wake of Hurricane Ian.  We now know that water and EV batteries don’t mix.  The things don’t need a spark.  After the deluge and submersion in flood waters, they’ll just quietly simmer in a super-hot chemical reaction, smoke a little, and then erupt.  Watch the Good Morning in America (GMA) report below.

The EV is the darling of our eco-central planners and the eco-acolytes who sit atop many of our institutions.  For the elected ones, they didn’t gain their seats of power and influence by accident.  We chose them.  Through the franchise and Electoral College, we made the choice to give power to those who would force us out of our deep family investments in clean and fuel-efficient sedans, mini-vans, and SUV’s and into the thing that could set a packed parking lot and neighborhood ablaze.  Add to that the range anxiety from inoperable, scarce, and inconvenient charging stations; dishonestly advertised operational distances if one takes into account running life-support and other systems like air conditioning and the heater; and the threat of hypothermia as we wait the hour or two for enough juice to get the thing up and running in a Michigan winter.

Wait, there’s more.  The same folks who are foisting the EV on us are creating the most unstable grid distributing the most expensive electricity.  An ever-growing expanse of giant windmill forests and broadening seas of solar panels marring ever greater portions of the earth’s surface will be our future if they have their way.  And if that isn’t enough, much of that grid is exposed to the annual seven-month firestorm season from eco-crazed forestry practices that annually belches millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air, like the 130 million tons from last year’s conflagrations in California – the equivalent CO2 of 25 million regular autos.  So, they shove everyone into EV’s to allegedly save the planet as they encourage the buildup of debris to burn it up.  Go figure.

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Trees and brush erupt in flames in a California wildfire from 2019.

Incidentally, try to find a place to charge up the thing if you happen to be in the path of the flames, the lines are down, and the cell towers are incinerated.  It’s a perpetual motion machine of eco-nuttery.  Lesson: Don’t sell that old Camry with the regular unleaded in the gas tank.

Who’s at fault?  We are.  We elected the clowns who thought that showering the country in paper money was economically righteous and think that eco-central planning is somehow different from the Soviet variety.

It’s not that the donkey party hid it from us.  Nancy Pelosi and The Squad have been busy concocting the Green New Deal since Pelosi took the gavel (2019) and Biden the oath of office (2021).  Anyone above the sentience level of a worm should have known.  Biden repeatedly bellowed their intent when he, for instance, looked into the eyes of a teenage girl (a real XX-chromosome one) in 2019 and said,

“I want you to look at my eyes. I guarantee you. I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.”

Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden pumps his fist as he speaks during a campaign stop, Friday, Sept. 6, 2019, in Laconia, N.H. (AP Photo/Mary Schwalm)
Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden pumps his fist as he speaks during a campaign stop, Friday, Sept. 6, 2019, in Laconia, N.H. (AP Photo/Mary Schwalm)

True to his word, he’s trying to euthanize the entire industry: practically ending oil development on federal lands and offshore, axing pipelines, lavish spending on loopy “sustainables”, and a quiet strangulation of the energy companies by frightening financial capital away from them.  For this gang, real, affordable energy is a dragon to be slain.

The choice of candidates in the 2020 presidential race was between the uncouth with the right policies (for the most part) and a revolutionary ethos of class warfare, neo-Marxist race-baiting, transgenderism, open borders, law unenforcement, and greenie fanaticism.  As it turned out, a majority preferred the revolution.  Look no further than the mirror for the cause of our troubles if you thought that the uncouth drove you into the arms of the revolutionary.  A candidate is much more than the fact that he’s not the other guy.

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RogerG

Read here for more:

* “Red Tape Is Making Wildfires Worse”, Shawn Regan and Tate Watkins, National Review Online, Oct. 4, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/red-tape-is-making-wildfires-worse/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=third

* “About Those Green Jobs . . . They Keep Vanishing”, Andrew Follett, National Review Online, Oct. 15, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/about-those-green-jobs-they-keep-vanishing/

* “Climate Policy Should Pay More Attention to Climate Economics”, John H. Cochrane, National Review Online, Sept, 3, 2021, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/climate-policy-should-pay-more-attention-to-climate-economics/

* “In intimate moment, Biden vows to ‘end fossil fuel'”, Steve Peoples, ABC News, Sept, 6, 2019, at https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/intimate-moment-biden-vows-end-fossil-fuel-65442382