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Brainstorming Our Way to a Medieval Life, Part II

Intentional blackouts caused widespread damage and outrage throughout California over the past couple of years. (photo: JOSH EDELSON/AFP )

Part I in this series was about hysterics over the virus driving a people to mommy-state absolutism and the consequent slide to greater poverty, and a Medieval life. Part II concerns the climate-change delirium that promises to depress much of what’s left of our generally benevolent quality of life.

I’m reminded of Eastwood’s 2019 film, “Richard Jewell”. Shortly after the 1996 bombing in Atlanta’s Olympic Park, the FBI and a big-city newsroom moved from “lone bomber” to “hero syndrome” to Richard Jewell, the man who discovered the bomb and saved hundreds by evacuating the area before the explosion. Instead, he was turned into the lead suspect, which was broadcast to the world for months. Later, after months of FBI aspersions and negative press coverage, he was finally cleared and the actual culprit convicted.

Why mention this? Simple, organizations exhibit psychoses like individuals. Call it a social psychosis. An erroneous idea enters the organization’s social bloodstream, is reinforced by the mores of the group, and is hard to shake despite little evidence. It is so entrenched that caution and humanity get tossed to the wind. It is an alternative reality for them. The effect is magnified when allied organizations, such as a big-city newsroom and the FBI in the case of Jewel, feed each other’s prejudices.

Today, instead of some organizations’ blind embrace of the “hero syndrome” to guide their judgments, we’re experiencing another socially entrenched idea, climate change, that promises to deliver much greater and longer-term harm, and not in the ways intended by Earth First.

As before, allied organizations intensify a belief’s impact. These entities are less independent of each other as they reflect more homogeneous backgrounds such as college, intermarriage, and family status. Background examinations of the membership and employment lists of the Ford Foundation, Sierra Club, Department of Energy, US Forest Service, EPA, and much of the administrative state, etc., including the desk jockeys in national security, are an excursion from campus to campus and white collar to white collar. Increasingly, social homogeneity means a greater ideological homogeneity. The same mental bugs, such as the supposedly imminent threat of climate change, has resonance and force.

EPA employees joined the People’s Climate March rallies in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, and Denver as part of the 370 events held April 29, 2017. The AFGE in the banner on the right stands for American Federation of Government Employees which is the largest federal employee union representing 700,000 federal and D.C. government workers nationwide and overseas.

We everywhere hear of climate change as a “fact”, hidden under verbal constructions like “scientific consensus”. Science isn’t about “consensus”. It’s about research, labs, and the constant testing and reformulation of hypotheses, not Gallup opinion surveys. A majority opinion is just another thing to be tested, not an end to the process so activists can rush off to write The Green New Deal.

What do these prophets of climactic doom have in store of us? Hmmm. It’s obvious they don’t like people or individuals organized in free societies. They’re utopians in the mold of Karl Marx with all the “alienation” nonsense (human alienation from nature) and the militant reflex to engineer a “better” person. Their 20th-century literary and ideological Trail of Tears goes from Rachel Carson’s fear of chemicals (’62, Silent Spring) to Paul Ehrlich’s fear of more people (’67, The Population Bomb) to Charles Reich’s greenie-Marxist totalitarianism (’70, The Greening of America) to Murray Bookchin’s open advocacy of eco-socialism (’86, The Modern Crisis) to Michael Mann’s graphic global temperature “hockey stick” (’98) to AOC’s declaration of the end of the world in 12 years. Rhetorically, they went from legitimate concern to doomsday in the span of 60 years, all in the campaign to impose their control over the most intimate details of our lives. Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot would be envious.

As in the devastations of Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot, little good and great harm will come of it. Take a look at what sits before Congress today. In the mold of “the power to tax is the power to destroy”, the Democrats’ budget monstrosity of $3.5 trillion ($5 trillion by sober analysts), the reconciliation bill, is chock full of tax increases, all excused under “fair share” rhetoric. Hikes are to occur nearly everywhere in the tax code: capital gains, inheritance, the income tax’s top rate, business taxes, retirement savings, almost anything material and immaterial. If that isn’t enough, they’ve got a carbon tax bouncing around to hike the cost of your commute, keep the lights on, and prevent you from freezing this winter.

Democrats in Congress push their massive greenie social engineering scheme in a presser at the Capitol.

The tax haul is hawked by Democrats at $3.5 trillion so they can astoundingly claim “zero cost”, or as they euphemistically say, “paid for”. Odd, how so terribly odd. Taxes aren’t about “zero cost”; they’re about making somebody pay, and pay a lot, $3.5 trillion a lot.

Do you actually think that the Dems’ math calculations are an accurate depiction of reality? Under their greedy eye shades, they make some artificial sense, but that assumes people won’t try to avoid the whip hand of the IRS, who, by the way, will be given an additional $78 billion to hunt us down. In the real world, they won’t get that much, but the money spigot will still be cranked wide open from the Treasury Department to the Fed’s open market operations to a flood of dollars chasing fewer goods. Meaning . . . i-n-f-l-a-t-i-o-n, big time.

We don’t need Milton Friedman to remind us “inflation is the cruelest tax of all”. We’ll live it. So, add this monster extraction on top of all the other abuse. You’ll wake up one morning with a phone call from your accountant frantically advising you to change your portfolio, pronto, as your wife discovers at the grocery store that the price of everything in the basket doubled.

Scratch that long-planned family vacation to Disney World.

Why are we being forced to live this way? The answer lies deep in the synapses of the Democratic Party. For them, no social problem can be addressed without more government welfare spending. Also, their inner eco-totalitarian can only be satisfied with more crony capitalism and the power to coerce the population to live according AOC’s tweets, Congress’s airhead-in-chief.


Commissar Ed Markey (D, Mass.) put it quite succinctly, “. . . the Green New Deal is in the DNA [of the reconciliation bill].” For instance, the greenies get their own version of the Young Pioneers (official USSR communist youth group), or Red Guards (of Maoist fame), called the Civilian Climate Corps, to conduct unspecified “green” actions. It could mean anything from door-to-door canvassing to pressure residents to turn down their thermostat to Portland-style “peaceful” protests.

And trillions of dollars in giveaways for electric bikes, solar panels (of course), advocacy of “environmental justice” (anything “justice” in their mouths means CRT), university grants to push the agenda, massive greenie “weatherization” campaigns, worker retraining away from the things people actually want (cars, trucks, air conditioning, single-family homes) etc., etc. Combined with the tax punishment, we’ll end up with a life of California-style energy prices, California-style capital flight, California-style welfare dependency, California-style shortages and inflation, California-style dirty commutes in gang-infested mass transit, and the rest of the social and economic miasma that is California. And our airhead-in-chief will call this Shangri-La.

Do you think that they’ll stop with the federal budget? Hogwash. Remember, they’re totalitarians, and, as such, they care just as much about what you think as what you do. The indoctrination will be pressed into the minds of the kids by curriculums and teachers. Nothing will escape the commissars’ gaze. Criticism of your diet will be part of the lesson plans: meat bad, veganism good. Just picture the teacher in her reading session with the kiddies seated around as she reads “Heather Has Two Vegan Mommies”.

The way is gradually being set for a Stalin-like war on the peasants, or actually the farmer, for producing the stuff that goes into my burger-and-a-Bud. Cattle flatulence, stockyards, farming the plains and woodlands, production of implements and fertilizer, and much more, disrupt the greenie utopia. So, expect the now-common shaming campaigns, penalties, and bountiful awards from the public treasury corrupted by gazillions of meaningless dollars. “Let them eat cake” is readjusted to “Let them eat tofu”.

Is this any way to live? Our economic and social lives are wrecked by COVID-hysterics, the public fisc of a drunken sailor that is an insult to drunken sailors, and militant social engineering based on the loony platitudes of The Squad — and the rare pleasure of a cheese burger and fries will be treated as deviant as pedophilia. My only solace lies in the fact that the Russian people managed to put up with it for 80 years and survived . . . albeit with a Putin helmsman-for-life, rampant alcoholism, a stagnant economy, and a disappearing birth rate.

Reading time for the kindergarteners might be better served by preparing the kids for a life of perpetual COVID shutdowns under an eco-Politburo. “Heather Lives with Her Mommies in a Dirt Floor Hut and Her Sisters Died in Infancy” might be a better choice for reading time. By the way, Heather cries a lot.

Ii comes down to a basic question: How many body blows can a nation endure before it is irreparably damaged? I don’t know, but these hits come from the worst possible source: our wildest imaginations put to practice absent much restraint.

RogerG

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Left-Wing Glamour at War with Physics and Economics

Biden in the Ford F150 Lightning.

Remember Biden behind the wheel of Ford’s F150 Lightning, a propaganda stunt to make EV’s appealing to rednecks (like me)? Anyone, though, with a smidgen of brain function will notice the silliness of the whole exercise. Ford’s newest addition to its truck lineup is a Rube Goldberg contraption whose purpose is a political one, not a practical one that can only emerge from the many confrontations with reality over time, like the iconic F150. It’s what happens when greenie fantasies declare war on physics and economics.

A Rube Goldberg machine.

The saga begins with greenie dreams of heaven on earth and hatred for those not so enthralled with the dreamscape. When the dream captures the imagination of people similarly cocooned, people removed from the hoi polloi and rustics, but powerfully influential, it is shoved onto everyone else. So, if hair-on-fire congresswomen from gerrymandered, gentrified districts scream the climate-change apocalypse, out comes the snooty vilification and pressure on the corporate bigs to play along if they want to remain in the cool persons’ club.

Our excitable hair-on-fire congresswomen from NY’s 14th Congressional District.

Of course, the way is greased with other people’s money in tax credits and subsidies. To get on board the money train, the bigs conjure something that . . . works . . . but . . . . Thus, we get the Ford F150 Lightning with its 1,800 pound battery that takes 12.5 hours to recharge. The problem with EV’s has always been the battery. For the Lightning, a longer range and heavier battery is an option; the behemoth becomes a real behemoth. The problem is still the battery.

Now, imagine yourself the kind of person who actually likes, and needs, trucks. By the way, they aren’t the kind who reside in Greenwich Village flats, shop at Whole Foods, and whose personal transportation needs are satisfied by an electric golf cart masquerading as an EV car and Uber and Lyft. I’m talking about the type of people producing the grain that goes into our Boston University graduate’s plant-based Awesome Burger. An EV is as practical as a Gucci suit at a barn raising.

In such locales in the fruited plains, distance means distance, as in many, many miles. What happens when the twenty-something offspring took the sleek thing on a beer run the night before but forgot to plug it in? On your monthly trip to Costco the next day – 300 miles round trip – the contraption stops dead on the interstate. What do you do? The thing is heavy, takes 12.5 hours to charge, and nothing as simple as a five-gallon gas can offers a solution. If you are on the interstate, call for a heavy-lift, flat-bed tow truck. If you are stuck on a dirt road in a sea of rolling hills on the northern plains in the middle of winter, you die.

The northern Great Plains of the United States.

For our congresswoman from her gerrymandered, gentrified perch in the megalopolis, the answer is The Green New Deal. Capital meant for better devices and more energy will now go into upending the grid and bribing people with other people’s money to buy the contrivances, by force of law. We’ll end up with a mountain of the impractical and a lot less of the stuff that works. The state will simply step in to command the laws of economics and physics to disappear.

The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali, 1931.

Welcome to 21st century America. It’s a world that Salvador Dali made famous in his paintings. No, it’s not a real world, but it is to our hair-on-fire congresswoman from the Bronx/Queens. She actually believes in “her truth”, a “truth” at war with the laws of physics and economics. Biden also believes in her truth. This style of “reality” may be appealing as art in a Dali exhibit at the Met but is not so agreeable as policy to a South Dakota farmer stuck as the snow begins to fall with no cell reception.

A Russian teen found frozen to death in a car in 2020.

Left-wing glamour confronts the plain facts of existence and the results aren’t pretty.

RogerG

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Dégringolade of a Once Mighty Nation

Dégringolade: noun; a rapid decline or deterioration (as in strength, position, or condition), downfall.

Pres. Biden and Senators in front of the White House, August 12

The Democrats running the show in DC have passed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill – $550 billion billed as “additional spending” – and approved on a party-line vote (50-49) the Socialist Bernie Sanders’s $3.5 trillion “reconciliation” blue print. We are throwing money to the wind and will reap the whirlwind. We’ll get little for it but a national wasteland.

We could end up as the next Argentina. Argentina presents an abject lesson in the effects of drunken-sailor public finance. The Latin American country in 1970’s and 1980’s faced a debt crisis and began to wildly print money to address it. The result was an annual inflation rate that averaged 300% from 1975 to 1990. Middle-class purchasing power shrunk 30%. What is waiting in the wings as we embark on our own colossal spending binge, almost all of it from borrowing, bloating the national debt to such astronomical levels that the only way out is the one paved by Argentina? Could this be the beginning of the USA as simply another failed state?

Dire? Yes, because the numbers point in that direction. The national debt is scheduled to balloon from $17 trillion to $40 trillion over the next decade.* To put it in perspective, 1 trillion square miles would cover the surface of 5,000 earths; 40 of them would amount to 200,000 planet earths. There’s no solace in the fact that I won’t be around to experience the worst of it. My kids and grandkids will live to see their country become a basket case.

Much of this bloat will be swallowed up under “infrastructure”, which the most recent little and big sister editions aren’t. It’s a race-mongering, greenie utopian, nation-building exercise. It’s infrastructure to produce a faculty-lounge Soviet Union.

Leaving that aside, let’s take a closer look at the $550 billion mini-monster (remember, it’s $550 billion in $1.2 trillion) coming down the pike. Simple question: Is it even necessary? No. State and local governments currently spend $500 billion on real infrastructure. It’s not that there’s no infrastructure expenditures without this monstrosity. The drunken sailors in charge of the federal fisc are burying the cupcake of state spending under a gargantuan load of ice cream of federal cash. Don’t expect a cherry on top. Look forward to a belly ache and diabetes.

So, there’s no shortage of cash for “infrastructure”, if we understand that 500 billion hours ago would place us in the onset of the Early Eocene Period, which would leave another 56,762,626 more years before we started to walk upright. What happened to this interstellar load of dollars to justify an additional intergalactic heap? Well, it’s essentially wasted. Once again, the numbers are dispiriting.

Spending reform isn’t in the cards, just more cash. The problem isn’t that we don’t spend enough. It’s that we squander so much of it. Union featherbedding in the form of Davis-Bacon, and the little Davis-Bacons (state), bloat the cost of these projects by 22%. With federal Project Labor Agreements, labor costs are ballooned 30% when more workers are mandated than comparable projects in the European Union. It’s a sweet gig for the union hall, but in the end, we’ll still be plagued with crumbling bridges and interstates and a national debt that’ll relegate more of our children to pauper status.

Remember Obama’s measly $787 billion stimulus bill of 2009 which was supposed to produce those “shovel-ready jobs”? “Shovel-ready” ran into the buzz saw of entrenched environmentalism. Those lovable Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) in federal law, to be combined with Environmental Impact Reports (EIR) in states like California, empower environmental jihadists to delay and run up costs till they have squashed the thing and the proponents throw up their hands in disgust.

Nearly every step on the approval path is plagued with public hearings. A great idea, right? It seems peachy till you notice who’s attending. Let me tell you it isn’t the young family breadwinners negotiating clogged freeway traffic trying to get to work or the grocery store. It’s the traveling troupe of eco-zealots who seek to make mincemeat of planning commissioners and building department officals. If that isn’t enough, the laws give the same lunatics the right to sue, which frequently shoves the project back to the EIR/EIS level and a restart of the whole rigmarole.

California set the tone at the state level with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and the creation of new commissions and boards like the Coastal Commission. Others were empowered like the Air Resources Board and the sundry Air Quality Management Districts scattered throughout the state. Other states followed suit. California gave us Silicon Valley . . . and Ottoman regulatory efficiency. As a result, will we go the way of the Ottoman Empire, courtesy of the golden state?

Putting a number to the scene, EIS’s take 7-25 years to complete, depending on the availability of legal talent and motivation to mash up the works. Eco-zealots have both in ample supply. I’m reminded of Rachel Maddow standing before the Hoover Dam in 2011 wondering why we don’t seem to be able to accomplish big-scale feats anymore. Apparently, it never occurred to her that her eco-allies had something to do with it.

Rachel Maddow in front of the Hoover Dam, 2011

Disgorging a couple of humungous bills through Congress can only be considered a win in one sense. They were examples of a group of overpaid, insular politicos in DC getting more votes than the opposition in a couple of rooms in the capitol building. They won’t be wins for the American people, particularly the young and the ones yet to be born. Our children will be burdened with a legacy of dégringolade.

RogerG

*“Time to Move On from COVID Capitalism”, Kevin D. Williamson, National Review, April 5, 2021

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Our Marxist Zeitgeist

Scene from “Raya and the Last Dragon”

While reading Ross Douthat’s (NYT film critic) review of Disney’s “Raya and the Last Dragon”, I was struck by how art may be imitating life, or vice versa. Honestly, I haven’t seen the movie, and won’t. But his depiction of the movie sheds light on what is happening on our streets and in power circles of the Democratic Party.

We are in a peculiar zeitgeist. The word “zeitgeist” became popular among poets (Goethe) and philosophers (Hegel) in the 1800’s to refer to the spirit of a time. How did we get to the zeitgeist of official neo-Marxist indoctrination of the kids (CRT, campaigns against systemic racism, etc.) and Green New Deal socialism? This is much more ambitious than simply punishing an individual political actor, party, or business. This political endeavor is a much, much grander thing: a revolution.

Ross Douthat

Douthat’s film review brings to light certain aspects at play in the newly constructed modern mind, especially amongst the people who dwell in our cultural commanding heights. He cites the fact that older Disney animated movies held to a particular set of plot devices that have disappeared from their newer offerings. Snow White, for instance, depicted an older fairy tale with a protagonist prince or princess, a romance, and a villain. The plot was simple and endearing.

What does Disney offer us today? The protagonist is still there, but the villain turns out to be an abstract threat, “some impersonal force, some moral or spiritual disturbance”. The romance is replaced by a sibling or platonic bond. These two characteristics speak volumes about today’s ethos.

The romance of man and woman is either reduced to pure physicality or, as in the case of “Raya”, gone. Why gone? Fear of the adjective “heteronormative”. Someone in the audience might be offended by the prevalence of the only sexual attraction tied to procreation. Let’s face it, LGBTQ is the chic victim group of our time. So, the man/woman attraction is replaced by something more neutral. In that way the prominence of heteronormativity is suppressed in order to raise the status of the other sexual arrangements.

Next, the absence of personalized evil – like a Simon Legree in Uncle Tom’s Cabin – in popular media. Evil is nebulous, in the form of “some impersonal force, some moral or spiritual disturbance”. A constant inundation of this plot device gets us into thinking of our alleged problems as the product of abstract forces. This might go a long way in explaining the resort to the abstract “system” in the scurrilous writings of the Anti-Racism crusaders Robin DeAngelo or Ibram X. Kendi. It’s the justification for the “systematic” reordering of the economy, and the omnipresent life associated with it, in the Green New Deal, and all of society in CRT. This is not reform, but revolution.

We probably got to the destination of our current Marxist moment with the assistance of popular entertainment. It’s easy to pour blood on a cop’s home, or maybe shoot him or her, or topple statues, or ransack a downtown business district if such actions are instrumental in bringing down the hypothetical, abstracted evil. It’s easier to push the nihilism through organs of the state if the population has been softened by a warped version of reality.

Something to think about, don’t you think?

RogerG

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Livin’ on a Premise

Bon Jovi’s ballad “Livin’ on a Prayer” (see below) is a story of a working-class couple struggling to make ends meet. The dream – synonymous with prayer in this usage – of them rising above their current circumstance keeps them going. Prayers, or dreams, come in many shapes and sizes. Some are unattainable fantasies and eventually lead to ruin. This darker side of illusory end-states riddles much of today’s political debates.

Dreams seek to become premises when cloaked in the jargon of “science” as in the cliché “follow the science”. To be clear, a premise is “a proposition antecedently supposed or proved as a basis of argument or inference” according to Webster. Emphasis is on “supposed” since many are unproven and unprovable, and therefore unscientific by definition, and more a statement of feeling than objective reality. A classic example is the trite qualifier “if it saves one life”. It’s a ticket to the straitjacket of complete risk-aversion if not balanced against the very real costs.

One such “dream” is the fallacy of interventions nearly eliminating risk, as in another clamp down against COVID. The dream of risk-aversion is king. The flat-lining of social and economic life is commonly the result. The toxicity in this latest drive to utopia is found in the rejection of life being a long series of trade-offs. The economist Thomas Sowell, an accomplished amateur photographer, would explain the concept to be like the contest between aperture and shutter speed. The taking of pictures is analogous to the balancing of risk of infection and prosperity. The elevation of concern for one depresses the other. That kind of mature thinking is jettisoned in the headlong rush to prevent anyone from getting the sniffles.

“If it saves one life” is the hidden mantra, and underlying premise. If that is the standard, why get up in the morning? We’ve known for quite some time that the virus, like all infections, carries greater dangers for the slender segments of the population with prior medical difficulties. The “saves one life” supposition is weaponized to eliminate any thought of the costs and off we go to eight-year-olds stuck as six-year-olds in academic maturity, lifetimes of personal fortunes destroyed in business closures, an evisceration of social life behind creepy masks and social distancing, and grandma’s hug being reduced to digibytes on a computer screen. It’s monstrous.

The delta variant is the excuse du jour for a return to a form of authoritarianism that’s beginning to awfully look like totalitarianism. It’s used to force people into taking the jabs (vaccine passports, threats of job loss, an end to travel and schooling). Any concerns about the vaccines or applicability to individual circumstances are officially suppressed as “bad thoughts”. The rallying of businesses to the cause carries the stink of fascism of early and mid-20th-century Germany or Italy.

It doesn’t stop there. The science of epidemiology is taking on the appearance of the “science” of race in National Socialist ideology. Totally disreputable, both are the gilding for a power grab and raw utopianism. Lost in the furor are some simple questions. Like, what is the difference between natural and man-made immunity? Is one more efficacious than the other? Pardon me, but isn’t a vaccine an attempt to replicate an infection in order to stimulate the body’s immune system, the one that God gave us? As such, the 99% COVID survival rate has produced a huge number of people with natural immunity. Is this swath of the population better protected than those with the jabs? Crickets by Jen Psaki.

The relative newness in historical terms of the current pandemic prevents many hard and fast answers. I wish that the folks at MSNBC would be more cautious about their bloviating. As for the natural vs. artificial immunity debate, a recent Cleveland Clinic study must be thrown into the hopper for consideration because it raises the scepter of equivalent if not better protection for the survival class. So, why the crisis-mongering for proof of vaccination if a good chunk of the population has equal if not better immunity without it?

More damage is incurred by the risk-averse obsessives in our public health bureaucracies when they resort to agitprop and end up soiling the very real advantages of the vaccines. The recent spike in hospitalizations is routinely characterized as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”? The phrase is parroted with some glittery number like 97% of cases. I’m sorry but I’m skeptical, and they’ve earned it. On what numbers did they derive their percentage? Some have suggested that they are based on January to June figures, a period when few had the vaccine and thus skewing the result toward the unvaccinated. Conversely, other spot data might confirm the oft-repeated claim. However, the CDC’s Walensky recently let slip that they don’t have up-to-date numbers. Boasts of certainty under conditions of real uncertainty only besmirches the reputations of authority figures and their vaunted “experts”.

Anyway, much of this is an angel-waltz on the head of a pin. The discussion misses the critical issue: Is risk to be avoided at all costs? What are the limits to risk-aversion? Our public gurus act like the 1% – the flip side of the 99% survival rate – is grounds to suffocate civilization. It ignores the fact that some periods carry more dangers than others since nothing in nature is evenly distributed, including hazards. The manic attempt to make all of life for perpetuity equally safe will end in a cataclysm. The premise, or supposition – “if it saves one life” – isn’t a moral imperative. It’s a formula for disaster.

Another calamity awaits in the headlong rush to expunge the phantom threat of systemic racism. Like the fit over COVID, this one is founded on a supposition that, in good ol’ boy fashion, is a dog that won’t hunt. It can’t hunt because it has no legs. The allegory works because the idea has no proof to prop it up. The racism is assumed to exist and it’s off to the drive for wholesale indoctrination.

Under the guise of critical race theory (CRT) and other anti-racism programs, minds are shaped around an unfounded assertion, or premise, in ubiquitous shaming sessions. It’s a simple mental equation for the hustlers: unequal outcomes mean . . . RACISM! To avoid having to identify individual racist actors, it’s loudest barkers point to a shadowy, evil presence. It’s “systemic”, because in their minds unequal stats MUST derive from RACSISM. Not logical but it works politically. Making the malefactor spectral, clears them of having to identify individual racists, which would be hard to find in the upper echelons, or too few anywhere else. It’s a familiar tactic in administrative conflict avoidance: send out a mass memo to address the misbehavior of one or two.

Karl Marx

By making the problem the society, or “system”, the way is paved for revolution. That’s what they’re really after. Their soul mate, Karl Marx, wasn’t satisfied with waiting for another round of elections to impose socialism, something pushed by the Fabians and Mensheviks. He wanted to tear the whole thing down right now. So do they, the hucksters who provide the theoretical framework for the munchkins to tear down Portland. In their minds, after they’ve mangled logic, a corrupt system requires the overturning of an entire way of life root and branch. Imagine it, an entire way of life relegated to the historical ash heap for an empty premise.

The premise of inequality-equals-racism is a scandal to logic, but it doesn’t stop there. We are in the midst of a wrecking campaign for the American economy. Why are we trying to mass devastate livelihoods? This time, the culprit is “climate change”. The charge is that man has wrecked the climate with our grid, cars, and suburbs. It’s said to be crisis, but is it? Now that’s hard to tell, but “crisis” is certainly useful if you want to stampeded the public into draconian self-flagellation.

Faulty, jump-to-conclusions premises abound in this latest round of modern hysteria. What constitutes a “crisis”? Does the available evidence support a “crisis”? Who are the major purveyors of CO₂? Mind you, it isn’t the total amount of CO₂ but an accurate formulation relies on the number per unit of GDP. Would a single country, or state within that country (California for instance), make a dent? Would any of the suggested measures make much of a difference? And, going back to Sowell’s photography metaphor, what are the trade-offs? And costs there will be in a tunnel vision focus on warming.

Our giddy, 31-year-old sophomore class president now serving as the representative of NY’s 14th congressional district (the firebrand known by the moniker AOC) would have you believe that we have 12 more years – oops, 11 more years – before the Sahara covers the globe, Arizona becomes beachfront property, and the islands of the South Pacific have to be removed from maps like the old Soviet Union. John Kerry is tasked with the mission to recruit international converts to the self-mutilation as Biden executes a go-it-alone strategy. All for what, a degree Celsius in a century?

The goal is breathtaking with nothing much behind it but the premise of a crisis. For the true believers, all-too-often with as much scientific understanding as my border collies, it’s an absolute certainty that requires you to surrender your liberty to them. Never mind that the “crisis” lacks any observable clarity, that China and India with 36% of the total world population aren’t about to sign onto a return to life in the dirt, and that Americans won’t long tolerate a grid designed by the greenie wizards of California with California results.

Amazingly, the governing elites in rich countries, mostly the Anglospehere and western Europe, are stupid enough to go along, which says volumes about the state of education in the birthplace of Horace Mann and the modern university. We are flooded by advanced degrees but can’t master simple logic. Has education evolved into a grandiose system of befuddlement? Is education actually de-education?

Something must account for the ignorance of the scientific method and abandonment of sound reasoning. Today, the substitute for a sound education is a computer model. Computer algorithms, i.e. models, are the go-to approach to make certain what is uncertain. Data goes in and predictions pop out, trend lines and whatnot. But the models didn’t suddenly materialize from a burning bush. Humans construct them and play with them and their results. In other words, they are product of us, with all our biases. So, data is entered and weighed, more numbers pop out, and Al Gore jets off to Davos and more $50,000 speaking gigs.

Al Gore, the emissary of climate change apocalyptics

Loose premises are the stuff of many of our most influential political movements. Our schools haven’t inoculated us from the mental plague. Ironically, they function as super-spreader events. As a result, we lurch from the suffocation of our kids behind masks in our schools, businesses forced to operate on a knife’s edge, colossal public debt, to the psychological scarring of ritual shaming sessions under the guise of anti-racism commissars, to a wholesale bulldozing of an entire way of life in a sinister crusade to eliminate something that the rest of the world won’t forego to satisfy the greenie fixations of Santa Clara County.

These aren’t premises in the proper sense of the word. They are leaps of faith, leaps of a materialistic faith, like Marx’s dialectical materialism, and have nothing to do with the spiritual kind. In fact, this new faith appears to be the only kind increasingly congenial among a people who have abandoned the pew or prayer rug. But far from being enlightened, we’ve laid ourselves open to a new kind of sky god: the sky god of ourselves with all our hysterias, stunted cognitive development, and flights of pure fancy. Welcome to livin’ on a premise, and many a faulty one at that.

RogerG

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Wreckers

US Steel’s Mon Valley Works, Braddock, Pa.

Biden can’t have his cake and eat it too. I mean that he can’t be a firebrand for eco-extremism and an advocate of American manufacturing. The core problem lies in the so-called rubber meeting the road. His eco-allies won’t tolerate the reality of a manufacturing plant while he announces an airy platitude about eco-manufacturing from the rarified altitude of Mount Washington, DC. You know, like his professed fondness for the manufacturing of wind turbines here in America. He must realize that eco-zealots will torpedo, or wreck, the actual building of an actual manufacturing facility. A total disconnect is at work here.

This is what a business faces: activist-generated protest over a proposed approval natural gas generating plant in New Orleans, 2018.

Eco-zealots, by definition, can’t allow it. These acolytes of the religion of Environmentalism are stuck in the memory of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland catching fire 52 years ago. They can’t handle the idea that today’s manufacturing isn’t the manufacturing of 1969. They lie down in the brush waiting for a project to appear and pounce.

Well, it happened. The Allegheny County Health Department torpedoed US Steel’s $1.5 billion improvement and expansion project at its Mon Valley Works in the Pittsburgh area, and a thousand direct jobs, along with thousands of indirect ones, disappeared. You can read about it here.

Braddock, Pa., with the Mon Valley Works in the distance.
Dr. Debra Bogen, the newest director of the Allegheny County Health Department, speaks at a press conference announcing her new position on Wednesday, March 4, 2020.

Stalin used “wreckers” to hide his monumental mistakes in his grand industrialization plan. It included extracting farm produce from the peasants – some 80-90% of the population – in order to finance it. It, in turn, resulted in the Holodomor famine of the 1930’s – 8-10 million starved to death. Stalin’s new plants produced a lot of rubbish and the country’s breadbasket would forever come up short.

Peasants accused of wrecking in one of Stalin’s many show trials of the 1930’s.

Biden’s “wreckers” aren’t mere scapegoats as they were for Stalin. Biden’s wreckers lie in his coalition: eco-fanatics don’t mix with his alleged fondness for manufacturing. He can bellow all he wants, but try to get a real plant approved. That’s the problem when a walking contradiction gets elevated to power. Crap happens.

Please read the article.

RogerG

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We Are Birth-Controlling Ourselves to Death

The 2020 Census shows more than the scoreboard of the number of congressmen per state. It’s a comprehensive snapshot of the country’s population after 10 years. What does this census tell us about ourselves? Among other things, it told us that there are more people 80 and over than 2 and younger. That’s a catastrophe!

A synopsis of the report can be found here.

If you think it’s great, think again. Who’s going to wheel you out into the sun from your nursing home room? Who’s going to be around in sufficient numbers to pump money into the fund for your Social Security payments and Medicare benefits? Who’s going to man the labs to find a cure for Alzheimer’s? What’ll happen to entrepreneurialism if more and more of it will be expected to be performed by people suffering from age-related memory loss? This is more than a trifling happenstance.

We need kids at more than at replacement levels. So, how did we get here? Two things worked hand-in-glove: (1) the cultural infantilization of adults and (2) the unstated acceptance of the population-bomb myth.

First, mature judgment is hard to achieve when narcissism is a widespread national trait. Today, in my estimation, self-actualization is the hidden goal of far too many Americans. Self-absorption has proceeded apace as religious commitment has reached the event horizon of the cultural black hole. A life of personal fixations doesn’t bode well for thoughts about posterity like family formation.

Too few of these.

Second, people seem to recoil at the words “population growth”. Maybe it’s due to too many images of Calcutta or the teeming hordes of Shanghai. Certainly, the notion gets a boost by the writings of popularizing academics like Paul Ehrlich and his 1968 book, The Population Bomb. Sci-fi horror movies and programs fortify the misperception. In my college and high school classes as an instructor, I would ask some form of the question, “Is it worse to have many people or fewer?” Whether I reversed the order or restated it, it made no difference. The vast majority chose many. Something has seeped into the popular imagination that doesn’t bode well for having a robust next generation.

We are about to experience a live-action social experiment. Numbers point to the following shift: today’s scenes of old folks in the care of sons and daughters with the assistance of state programs morphs into the likelihood of the aged herded into state institutions, alone in their isolation, waiting for death. There being no one around to care.

Too much of this.

What a self-fulfilling dystopia.

RogerG

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The Post-Chauvin Time of Troubles

Seen from Hiawatha Avenue, a large fire burns Thursday, May 28, 2020, in Minneapolis during a third night of unrest following the death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody. (David Joles/Star Tribune via AP)

It happens to civilizations: the episodic spasms of chaos, conflict, and self-annihilation. The Greco-Roman world was beset by invasions, civil war, mob bedlam, warring political factions, among other things. In spite of it, it still lasted about a combined 10 centuries. Other refined ways of life weren’t so lucky; they collapsed, sometimes in quick order. Today, we are in the midst of another one of our perilous times. The big question is, is what we’re experiencing today a portent of our imminent demise? I don’t know, since we’ve survived earlier catastrophes, but the pessimism is understandable when you’re living through the furor. This one could be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

This strife is different in that it is based on a broad self-loathing. We hate ourselves and each other because many of us think that stealthy conspiracies exist to ruin us. Infantile notions of conspiratorial cabals of all stripes are feeding the discord. On the right, we have QAnon and the cry that a host of plotters are seeking to destroy America, in secret of course. Many of them fomented the capitol riot and lurk in the background of some scattered protests. On the left, we have the ill-defined “systemic racism” and its kindred threat of “white privilege”. Add to the left’s paranoia, the devout belief in capitalism’s plot to destroy the planet in the fervently-held dogma of apocalyptic climate change.

San Francisco rally led by Sunrise Movement in 2019. (Photo: Peg Hunter)

Right now, the left’s lunacies are manning the cockpit of our society. They have the upper hand, with the unhinged on the right relegated to microscopic niches. The left’s manias are ascendant in corporate suites, our schools, government, Big Entertainment, Big Sports, throughout the cultural commanding heights. There’s nowhere for a person of a conservative bent to go to avoid the inanities. Who would have thought that simply buying a soft drink, or a Dodgers’ jersey, or going to Disneyland was a quiet endorsement of the Democratic Party’s revolutionary jihad? Now, small, formerly innocent pleasures feed the revolution. Everything is politicized.

The Chauvin verdict will be exploited by those in the cultural and political catbird seat to advance the left’s holy war. Biden’s AG is set to lead an inquisition to ferret out the witches who are fomenting persistent “systemic racism” in the Minneapolis PD, the first of many future inquisitions. The two-word banality slithered off the wagging tongues of Biden and his zealous lieutenant Harris shortly after the verdict was announced. The judge barely had time to take a breath after reading the verdict before the radicalized demigods at the head of the Article II branch ran to the cameras. They’re hardly a reassuring presence when they announced that half the electorate and the thin blue line have bulls’-eyes tattooed to their backs. For all of us, whether we realize it or not, their words are threats to public tranquility, public safety, and our Constitution.

Pres. Biden and VP Harris at the podium after the Chauvin verdict.

A false impetus will be ginned up for pushing DC and Puerto Rico into statehood, and four more senators to make it easier to advance the revolution. That’s not all. They have on their agenda the desire to castrate the Electoral College and make flyover country, and two-thirds of the states, politically irrelevant. I can’t think of any other single act that could do more to provoke Civil War II. They’re not done. They won’t be happy till they make a shambles of election integrity by the elimination of the secret ballot and voter ID through the unconstitutional vacuuming of power over elections to their grubby little DC hands. Don’t expect the courts to stand in the way. Let’s not forget their rank bullying of the Supreme Court with the cudgel of court-packing to frighten the robes into slinking into the background. When they’re done, America will be a hellish, unrecognizable place.

Expect the exodus from the political bastions of the lunacy to intensify. The geographical centers of the left, however, hope to counter the losses with an open border for the world’s poor. The more, the merrier . . . for them. But it will do nothing but escalate the divisions that’ll make Civil War II inevitable; though, I sincerely hope not.

And you thought that jailing Chauvin would be the end of it. No, it isn’t as simple as that because the ascendant left won’t let it be. We are in for an existential time of troubles.

RogerG

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Another Excursion into the Institutional Left in National Geographic Magazine

Someone adds fuel to a fire set in downtown Portland during protests on Friday, May 29, 2020, in downtown Portland. (photo: Mark Graves/The Oregonian)

People wonder where we got the screaming college students who demand the immediate surrender to their opinions by everyone. People also might wonder where we got the roaming gangs of radical left twenty-somethings who claim the wisdom to pass judgment on centuries-old personages not advantaged from sitting at the feet of narrowly doctrinaire professors like they did. Seldom can it be said that fanatics are born. They are bred in the culture, family, and schools. Probably, the first two set the stage for the influence of the third.

Then these twisted minds filter out into corporate boardrooms, the professions, media, and teaching positions to perpetuate the cycle. I was reminded of the phenomena after reading a back issue of National Geographic Magazine from December 2018.

After the first four articles, I began to wonder whether I was reading “Mother Jones Magazine” under another title. They amounted to a single op-ed for bigger-getting-bigger government of the international variety, of cultural left agitprop, socialist redistribution, and the lionization of a once honorable activist who descended into rank partisanship (John Lewis, D, Md.). The National Geographic Society has been absorbed into collectivism’s Borg.

One common technique in the arsenal of today’s Left is “branding”. Subsuming totalitarianism under a catchy phrase – or “brand” – frequently does the trick. For example, the conservative-looking President and CEO of the National Geographic Society, Tracy Wolstencroft, opined on the need for a “Planet in Balance”. What does that mean? I’ll tell you what it means: it means Control, control of the mind and everything else through government power.

Tracy Wolstencroft

It’s the same old ploy first pushed by Stanford’s great gift to the cause, Paul Ehrlich and his “The Population Bomb”. First Ehrlich postulates X number of people and Y number of resources and, voilà, we have disaster – unless we adopt Ehrlich’s tome to replace the Bible, erect a plethora of government carrots and sticks, and implement mammoth brainwashing in the schools-turned-reeducation-camps.

Wolstencroft goes through the trite litany of the usual suspects of overpopulation, apocalyptic climate change, and no more tigers, et al, and we arrive at the all-too-familiar ground of environmental totalitarianism. His unacknowledged eco-socialism, like all socialisms, has an alluring fetish for eco-totalitarianism. Of course, Wolstencroft’s gazillions earned in the securities industry will insulate him from the consequences of his beliefs while everyone else enters the new normal of personal malaise common to all socialisms. His kids will be okay; as for everyone else’s …?

Following Wolstencrofts’ sermon was chief editor Susan Goldberg’s softball interview of John Lewis in a piece titled “We Can Lay Down the Burden of Race”. Au contraire, Lewis can hardly put it down. He has spent a lifetime in the fever swamps of race politics. For Lewis, it’s Jim Crow and 1955 Montgomery, Alabama, forever.

John Lewis

He makes much of the Charlottesville “riot” (2017) but was dismissive of the rioting and looting in Ferguson, Mo., (2014). He called for an end to the violence in Minneapolis (2020), to his credit, but couldn’t avoid the society-wide “justice denied” mantra for which he clung till his last breath. He didn’t seem too concerned for the rights of property owners (black or white), the right to self-defense (black or white), the right to equal protection for Asians and “whites” in college admissions, while advancing the cause of other nations’ citizens who happen to be in our country in violation of our laws: an odd stance for someone who claimed to be a stalwart of justice for African-Americans as he ironically pushed the interests of another group (the “undocumented”) to the detriment of his own.

He just couldn’t let go of the race thing when he said, “… the scars and stings of racism are still deeply embedded in our society ….” He never wanted to get rid of it and kept moving the goal posts to retain its usefulness as a whipping boy. He’s like Christopher Reeves who couldn’t shed the stereotype of Superman. Lewis rose to fame fighting Jim Crow and he would forever claim its presence, even when the nation did all it could to eradicate it. Unlike Reeves, though, Lewis reveled in his race-baiting persona and rode it to fame and a career in politics.

There was no pushback by our stalwart (?) member of the fourth estate, Susan Goldberg.

The socialism line was front and center in the next piece on the Inupiat people of Alaska. A frequently repeated angle in the story was the tendency of the glorious Inupiat people to equally share the proceeds of the glorious hunt. All well and good for a small tribe wishing to remain the same, except they weren’t … remaining the same, that is. These folks weren’t wearing animal skins and possessed weapons and tools that didn’t come from the bones of the bowhead whale, the tools and weapons of choice for their ancestors. The outfit of an Inupiat hunter pictured in the article belied the impression of an indigenous people at one with nature. The rifle slung over the shoulder came from one of those factories belching pollution and exploiting hundreds of wage slaves in a scheme to bilk unearned profits from the masses, or so the young writer might have written if he wasn’t so enamored with patronizing another non-white colonized people (using the lingo of the “social justice warrior”).

Inupiaq Eskimo hunters carry a rifle and walking stick while walking over the shore ice along the Chukchi Sea, Barrow, Alaska. (photo: Design Pics Inc/Alamy)

To be honest, the depiction was one of manifest incongruency. Some association with capitalism must have its appeal for the brave Inupiat people. They seem to want a lot of our stuff. I would too if I was beset by a polar bear and had to resort to a sharpened piece of whale bone at the tip of a wooden shaft.

Wanting a lot of our stuff was one theme in the next excursion into a mind that tilts left. Who’d the editors choose to join the lineup? It was Jared Diamond, UCLA Geography prof and author of Guns, Germs, and Steel. He presented an incoherent piece of punditry that rambled through the 9/11 hijackers, ebola, social envy, and to his main point: inequality is the single biggest threat to harmony and the march to kumbaya (pidgin English for “Lord, come be here”).

Jared Diamond

Let’s take a timeout to unwrap the “inequality” thing. Definitions first. Don’t confuse “same” with “equality”. Things don’t have to be the “same” to be “equal”, and vice versa. It depends on your metric for both. If your measuring stick is quantity of wealth, as it seems to be for Diamond, he obviously means the equality in wealth and not a demand for people to be the same in all things as they pursue it. Diamond’s obsession is with “wealth”.

But is the inequality of it always and forever bad? Is it the principle cause of all bad things today? Color me skeptical. Inequality is found everywhere in nature. Why not with us? Everything from rocks to trees and from snakes to apes are not equal. Watch a herd of hippos and the dominant alpha male protect his harem. He’s got more than the rest of the male pachyderms. I’ve got a forest of pines on my property and none of them are equal. Some have obviously hogged more light. The only way for equality to exist is our forcible intervention to cultivate uniformity in a tree farm behind fences, something reminiscent of a gulag.

So with people. Individuals, tribes, groups, and societies vary in their accumulated wealth. I suppose that the riches could be resented if it was capriciously extracted by force. But what if it was sanctioned by time-honored custom? What if it was an outcome of some person’s natural affinity for acquiring it and having the freedom to pursue the natural affinity? Ditto for societies. Some possess an ethos that comports well with rising standards of living, and the acceptance of some having more, they being the catalyst for the wealth that unavoidably spreads to many, many others.

Got it? If not, read a little from Joseph Schumpeter.

Fon Ndofoa Zofoa III of Babungo, the Northwest province of Cameroon. He inherited 72 wives and 500 children after his father’s death. (photo: CNN)

Diamond can’t seem to grasp the naturalness of inequality. And he can’t grasp the fact that when you try to impose it, as in a tree farm, you never really get rid of it. You only changed the protocols for it. Instead of a Vanderbilt getting rich from providing a cheaper and more luxurious service to the public, the Bolsheviks created the grasping party and state apparatchik – the nomenklatura in Soviet-speak. If you want to talk about arbitrary, that’s arbitrary. The whole system is only possible if the state is the sole proprietor of the guns in the place – i.e., the police, secret and otherwise, and the armed forces (no posse comitatus laws here). Those unwilling to tolerate the scheme disappear or find themselves in the “tree farm”. Inequality oozes out despite their best efforts to eradicate it.

A Soviet-era poster of the heroes of the Soviet state.

Nonetheless, Diamond charges forward into his diagnosis of our greatest sin: inequality. You see, in Diamond’s words, the 9/11 killers were born of “inequality” in his final analysis. You see, in Diamond’s words, the conduit for inequality is globalization. From the interconnectedness of globalization, we are supposed to get envy on the part of the non-white everywhere. And envy translates into resentment, and then he gets back to the terrorism thing. His whole schema is a binge of rambling incongruity.

Yes, Jared, ease of travel and communication makes it much easier to spread the hatred of America as the Great Satan and provide the opportunity for boxcutter-wielding fanatics to turn airliners into missiles. But what genuinely animated them? Was it really their anger at not possessing a house in the ‘burbs? If you listen to their words, they are bitter about Western decadence. Remember, these are the same people who throw homosexuals off of six-story buildings. They want a return to their seventh century. Diamond, go ahead, try to uncover their hidden motivations through Jungian projection. I’ll rely on their words.

ISIS fighters.

The internet and diesel and fan turbines don’t make murderous zealots. People do that quite on their own. Who knows the origins of the world’s worst bad ideas? They have popped up since man first put stylus to clay. The last century and into our own was especially plagued by them. And some of them reside in the cranium of Jared Diamond. One could be Diamond’s infatuation with levelling. He won’t come out and say it but it’s all about international and national socialism. According to him, we must flood the zone – the zone being everywhere America’s upper and pampered middle-class are horrified – with dollars. Government-engineered Robin Hood is another way of saying “socialism”. Diamond is all into it.

But we’ve been doing it since the US first emerged as the numero uno economy at the dawn of the 20th century. After WWII, we jumped in with both feet with the Marshal Plan and endless foreign aid ever since. What has it earned us? We got the moniker of Great Satan and despots in poor countries peddling socialism as the path to power, and more inequality under their thumb. Redistribution, the go-to for the myopic like Diamond, hasn’t worked. It hasn’t even worked here with our own interminable War on Poverty. Is Diamond insane, following the well-known formula for its presence: repeating the same mistake but still expecting it to succeed?

A vacant and blighted home on Detroit’s east side. (photo: Rebecca Cook/Reuters)

The error will be repeated so long as there is a constituency for it. The more, the merrier. One way to inflate the fan base is to internationalize it. Marx saw the advantage: Workers of the world unite! Diamond has no more use for the nation than Marx. He invents an “evil” – inequality – and pushes on to internationalism. People like Diamond have an instinct for it and quickly move to empower unaccountable international authorities to take what didn’t work in America – a War on Poverty – and implant it in a UN commissariat without the slightest say-so from the people who had their money appropriated. Internationalization is essentially autocratic bureaucratization. For Diamond, he doesn’t get it. He’s still wallowing in the ether of the heady days of the First International (1864), the agglomeration of 19th century socialist pinheads. He’s there with our century’s edition of the silly trope.

After four articles, the pressure had built up in me to such an extent that I had to respond. This is what goes for as “mainstream”. Nothing can be further from the truth, unless the poison of the past has suddenly become broadly chic again. In that case, we’re back to broadly popular insanity. If that is true, we’re in more trouble than I thought.

National Geographic Society and its signature publication is part of the problem, not the solution.

RogerG

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A Basket of Deplorables, the Democrats’ Version

The Democratic presidential hopefuls in debate in South Carolina, Feb. 25, 2020.

Hillary Clinton, September 9, 2016:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.  Right?  The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it.”

Hillary Clinton speaking at a fundraiser in New York City, Sept. 9, 2016, where she made the infamous “basket of deplorables” comment.

Clinton slimed an entire demographic for mere partisan political advantage.  Well, I’d like to inform Ms. Clinton that “deplorables” exist in her own party.  They were on display in South Carolina last night.  It was an extremely ironic episode in shaming Bernie for his “socialism” while the other 6 advanced different degrees of it.  Medicare For All, the Green New Deal, Free…, named and unnamed boosts in taxes, open borders, etc., are, in their own ways, heralding a socialist future.

To add to the irony, 2 billionaires were on the stage.  How could big-moneyed men be so socialistic, whether under Steyer’s environmental radicalism or Bloomberg’s nanny statism/gun grabs/Green New Deal?  They’re either grossly ignorant or simply pathetic.

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn in his The Red Wheel series on the Russian Revolution recounts a realistic conversation in 1916 between Lenin and Alexander Parvus, a long-time socialist (indeed, “democratic socialist” as they all called themselves, and was the title of Lenin’s publication, Social Democrat) and successful businessman.  In Solzhenitsyn’s rendering, Parvus concocted the scheme of enlisting the financial help of Kaiser’s Germany to fund Lenin’s seizure of power in Russia.  German money, indeed, kept the Bolsheviks afloat in Russia as a revolutionary enterprise in 1916 and 1917.  Parvus was rich – like Bloomberg and Steyer – and was free with his money to advance the cause.

Alexander Parvus

Lenin’s old trope about using the money from the rich to buy ropes to hang them would be quite appealing to Bernie bros.  But why are Mike and Tom so eager to walk under the noose?  The contradiction is so glaring that the only practical conclusion is that they are fools.

That’s another reason to keep the whole gang from ever getting close to the White House.

Watch the debate highlights below.

RogerG