Posted on

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

Posted on

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

Posted on

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

Posted on

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

Posted on

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

Posted on

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

Posted on

Making a Mess of the Grid

A sign calling for utility company PG&E to turn the power back on is seen on the side of the road during a statewide blackout in Calistoga, Ca., Oct. 10, 2019. (Photo by John Edelson/AFP)

In my mid-twenties, I was trying to find a way to turn my History/Religious Studies degree into meaningful employment to support what was to be a burgeoning family.  While in grad school, and taking a cue from a friend, I explored two avenues of study for employment: urban planning and teaching.  I ended up in teaching.  It slowly began to dawn on me, though, that the education and training in these fields was a grand muddle.  Delving into urban planning wasn’t really scholarship but indoctrination into an ideology.  Teacher training courses were frequently excursions into Summer-of-Love hippiedom and John Dewey’s socialism – a socialism applied to the classroom.

Inside the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in its earliest days. The clinic opened on June 7, 1967.  Many of these people would go into the college schools of education, the teachers of teachers.

Parents, beware, your schools are hip deep in the junk to an even greater extent today.  The balderdash remains and accounts to some extent for our population of college snowflakes.

Muddling (i.e., the action or process of bringing something into a disordered or confusing state), in fact, is what we do.  Take for instance the ideology/science muddle. It’s the essence of environmentalism, or the effort to stitch together science factoids in support of a political scheme – i.e., socialism.  What happens in real life when a muddle is at the root of public policy?  A mess!

No better example can be found than in the latest craze to sweep the hominid world: greenie (“sustainable”, “renewable”, etc.) energy.  Toward that end, we have the crazy-quilt of “net metering”.  What’s that?  It’s a ploy to bilk one energy consumer to benefit another.  How?  Stay tuned.

I was reading about it this morning.  40 states plus DC have elaborate schemes to force utility companies to buy the extra and unreliable electricity from mostly rooftop solar panels of homeowners – net-metering.  Sounds like a great gig for the soccer mom/dads of suburbia.  Right?  No, it falls into the too-good-to-be-true category.

The burlesque of net-metering.

The problem lies in the “unreliable” part of the ruse.  No one wants to buy a good or service if it cannot be expected to be there when needed.  It’s every bit as true when contracting for lawn-mowing service as it is for PG&E or, up here, Northern Lights.  The sun doesn’t align itself to the wishes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC).  The utility must revamp it’s grid for the on-again/off-again nature of rooftop solar.  The utility’s legal mandate to provide reliable 24/7 energy must be made to mesh with the unpredictable production of soccer mom/dad’s pigeon-shading solar panels.  That’s expensive for the utility company to make work and maintain.  It’ll show up in your bill, or in utility bankruptcy, or, also as in California, poorly maintained power poles going up in flames.  The consequences of the muddling of “unreliable” with “reliable” will appear in many ways, many of them not good.

The alternative is simple.  If you want the things, you pay and take full responsibility for them.  Sounds like something that my dad told me when I was a teenager.  Don’t try and get somebody else – the utility or the consumer who prizes simple reliability – to pay for your actions.  But the allure of the seemingly something-for-nothing – either through tax rebates, subsidies, utility mandates, or all of the above – allows soccer mom/dad to delude themselves.  The scheme is more productive of delusions than reliable energy.

For those attuned to the scam, the scheme is sold as a sacrifice for the good of the planet.  Remember though, “sacrifice” is the very essence of utopia-mongering.  You know, the ends-justify-means stuff. Or, as Nikolai Yezhov, head of Stain’s NKVD (Bolshevik secret police) would put it, “When you chop wood, chips fly.”  AOC has interesting company.

Nikolai Yezhov, far right, next to Stalin.

Don’t buy into the racket.  Furthering our descent into third-world status won’t alter India’s and China’s belching of CO2.  The planet won’t be saved, our grid will resemble Venezuela’s, and we will have proven that a “smart” grid is essentially a “dumb” one.  What does that say about us?

RogerG

Posted on

Not Making Sense

The Getty Fire burns near the Getty Center along the 405 freeway north of Los Angeles, California, U.S. October 28, 2019. (REUTERS/ Gene Blevins)

We aren’t well-served by the mass of our journalists or schools.  Frequently as a simple reader or teacher I’ve come away from an article or textbook treatment of a topic with a lingering sense of bafflement.  The stories don’t make much sense.

As a History teacher, for example, the common treatment of the Great Depression is awash in incoherence.  Blame is placed on greed and “over-production”.  What?!  “Over-production” is everywhere present in an economy and is corrected by sell-offs with no hint of a depression, let alone a “great” one.  As for “greed”, it’s been with us since Eve met the serpent, maybe before.  It wasn’t invented by the 1920’s.

The New Deal’s answer for “overproduction” and the decline in agricultural prices.

Plus, the authors don’t attempt to explain why the thing lasted so long.  The greed and over-production mantras are presented as a set-up for a love affair with FDR and all things New Deal. Interestingly the horror persisted and even worsened in ’36-’37.  Textbooks and teacher training are composed of the long march of banalities, and we’re spreading the bunk to the youngins.

Ditto for news stories.  Descriptions of today’s happenings are often muddled.  Take for instance The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey in her piece, “California Is Becoming Unlivable”.  The “unlivable” part of California is ascribed to the underlying factors of climate change and high housing costs.  Both, according to Lowrey, led to California’s fires.  The high cost of housing forced development into the wildland urban interface (WUI). Her answer is the totalitarian urge to herd people into apartment complexes, something the commissars in Sacramento have been trying to accomplish for at least a couple of decades.  Could this have something to do with the high cost of housing?  Something about the dementia of “doing the same thing and expecting a different result” comes to mind.

Could this be their vision for the future of California housing?

Mulberry Street, NYC, circa 1900.

Of course they won’t leave the topic without throwing the fire epidemic into the climate change vortex.  But the climate change god doesn’t just pick on California.  It’s a global phenomenon.  What has turned California into matchsticks is a combination of its dry-summer climate, with its El Diablo winds, and the clowns in Sacramento.  Wildland fire suppression tactics are so passé among the ruling class of lefties in Sacramento.  Though, in the dry-summer chaparral biomes, it’s like playing with firecrackers in a refinery.

The clowns try to hide their incompetence behind a barrage of charges against the utility companies.  They can only get away with it under conditions of collective amnesia.  PG&E and the rest of the gang are under the PUC’s thumb and its lefty hobby horses.  Hardening the grid in a dry-summer climate takes second fiddle to dreams of a greenie energy utopia.  After piling up the firewood under the weakly-maintained power lines, the goofs are shocked that physics takes over.  Astounding!

A power line goes up in flames along a hillside as the Cocos Fire continues to burn in San Marcos, California May 15, 2014. (REUTERS/Mike Blake)

Parents beware of the indoctrination of your kids.  Additionally, you have to be leery of the network news and print and digital publications.  I’m beginning to wonder about the benefits of ignorance when compared to propaganda.  Mmmm, something to think about?

RogerG

Posted on

The Correlation of Forces in the Trump Era

The Democrat House leadership.

I was drawn back to the Soviet concept of the “correlation of forces” after reading Yuval Levin’s piece from over a week ago (Sept. 27), “The Impeachment Train”.  The Soviet notion was fully researched by one of our Defense Dept.’s agencies (DARPA) in a report, “The Soviet Concept of the Correlation of Forces”, in 1976.

Soviet era propaganda poster.

The Soviets sought to exploit what they considered to be favorable circumstances to advance their foreign policy goals at our expense – “the correlation of forces” so-called.  The current period in our country’s history has all the ingredients for another “correlation of forces”, one that could drive the nation into strongly hostile camps resembling the antebellum divisions of the 1820’s to 1860, hopefully without the violence.  The “correlation of forces” are present for all to see.

The divide has been described as a blue/red and urban/rural one.  It’s true; we are deeply split in those two ways.  I’ve written about this often.  Since the divide is culturally-based, it has the capacity to be even more combustible.  Enter Donald Trump.  A divide that has been building for quite some time is deepened and widened by Trump’s style of politicking and personal mannerisms.  Those manners drive people to their corners.

Part of the blame lies at Trump’s lack of a filter when he speaks (or Tweets). He’s not Bill Clinton who can compartmentalize.  Trump in private is nearly the same as Trump in public.  He doesn’t distinguish that much between a locker room and moments before microphones and cameras.  He cares not about whether he’s talking to foreign dignitaries in private phone calls or crowds at one of his rallies.  With Trump, you get what you see … everywhere.  He’s unfiltered and inflammatory.

Trump rally, August 2019.

Thus, he elicits strong reactions.  Trump’s presence isn’t a soothing one.  Sparky talk incites sparky actions.  Newton’s third law of motion comes to mind: for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction.

And for hypersensitive Dems, their over-the-top reactions are easily facilitated when the party has been lurching ever leftward for the past few decades.  Today, there’s not much difference between them and the radical left of the 60’s. Much of it is driven by the cultural radicalization of our urban and suburban areas.  The radical has become mainstream in the party.  Sure, Trump makes it easier for them to embrace extremist policies as they seek to distinguish themselves from what they considered to be a wholly detestable figure.  As the cultural undertow pulls the middle of the party to the left, the more moderate elements get dragged along.  Of course, Trump’s behavior is no excuse to foist the poison of socialism on the country.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (right) speak during a press conference to announce Green New Deal legislation on Feb. 7. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

Trump is not the reason for the Democrats’ love affair with socialism and their leftward leap.  Environmentalism is.  Environmentalism is a pseudo-religious ideology.  It’s religious for its faith in a materialistic explanation of reality.  Interestingly, the combination of “religious” and “materialistic” in the same sentence makes for a classic oxymoron.  Recognition of the fact by the cultural left won’t stop them from papering over the disjunction by turning Jesus and the Bible into citadels of wokeness, to go along with the long-desired surrender of humanity to a semi-deity, mother nature.  It’s pantheism at best.  The dogmas are grotesquely incoherent.

Environmentalism provides excellent cover, though, for socialism’s expansion of government power into every facet of life.  Is it really all that surprising for the party of government to be a party of socialism?  Environmentalism satisfies the Democrats’ itch for government control.  The modern Democratic Party is so immersed in its socialism that it doesn’t take much for their opponents to be cast as evil.  They don’t need a Trump. Anyone not drinking the Kool-Aid can be branded a “denier”, “racist”, “xenophobe”, “fascist”, and on and on.  They didn’t wait for Trump to brand George W. Bush a religious fanatic, a hater, a wanton killer in the chant “Bush lied, people died”, a fascist, a corrupt stooge of Big Oil, an instigator of 9-11, etc., etc.

Code Pink at the White House, about 2005.

A protester calling for the impeachment of Bush in June 16, 2005.

The word “impeachment” frequently graced their lips.  Trump’s crude mannerisms make for an even easier target for their ideologically-driven hypersensitivities.

The entire gamut of woke communities – on our campuses, in our cities, among our super-rich tech and finance tycoons, amidst white collar public employees, et al – can be energized for lefty activism as need arises.  Ask Brett Kavanaugh.  Without a shred of evidence, accusers came out of the woodwork to level the worst kind of human conduct at him: perversion, rape, gang rape, a reveler in the grossest bacchanalias, you name it.  Even the most “credible” accuser, Blasey Ford, turned out to be “incredible”.  In law, we must keep in mind that a story is fiction till its proven.  These were never proven, and probably couldn’t ever be proven.  They are lies.

Brett Kavanaugh at confirmation hearings, September 2018.

Protesters demonstrating against the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh on the steps of the Supreme Court.

The discredited and unsubstantiated Kavanaugh accusers.

The script is repeated on Trump. Instead of an engineered line of supposed female victims, we have the denizens of public employment near the top of the Leviathan pyramid coming forward under the cover of “whistleblower”.  They are proof of the existence of a government worker subculture with its own set of norms, values, and expectations that are distinct from their reason for existence. Some of those norms are ideological and partisan.  Though, it must be admitted in the case of Trump that a “D” and “R” designation isn’t as relevant as the collective judgment at the water cooler that Trump is reprehensible.  Nonetheless, there are vastly more D’s than R’s on the rolls of taxpayer-funded employment.  Virginia is blue for the fact.  The administrative state isn’t exactly a level playing field.

The ginning up of the activists will require additional gripes to increase the credibility of the charges as per the Kavanaugh caper.  It doesn’t matter if the tales are true or not.  What matters is the number.  The one “whistleblower” story will be followed by others.  As I write, a new complaint against Trump is currently percolating from the depths of the Leviathan.

Could Trump adjust by dialing down the bombast?  Yeah, but not likely.  Trump is like the big post man in basketball who drains a 3-pointer in the beginning of the game.  After that, he cannot be found anywhere near the bucket for the rest of the game.  Trump believes that his outspoken and unfiltered self is the reason for his shocking victory in 2016, while ignoring the loss of the ‘burbs and married women.  So, that’s what we’re going to get for the rest of his time in the White House.  He’ll continue to do it till he faces defeat.

But who knows, he may turn out to be a great 3-point shooter.  Color me skeptical.

Trump’s saving grace is … today’s Democratic Party.  All the talk about Trump’s incivility ignores the Democrats’ irresponsible embrace of socialism and the cultural left.  Trump’s behavior may be deplorable, but the Democrats cannot be trusted with our nation.  This is one of the weaknesses of some of the criticisms coming from the center-right, like Yuval Levin’s column.  I don’t know of anyone who can claim that a dethronement of Trump won’t lead to an empowerment of the Democrats’ socialism.  For the average citizen, their choices appear bleak: continue the Trump drama or ruin the nation by handing the keys of power to the Democrats’ leftism.

Levin is right when he says the biggest victim will be a loss of faith in our institutions.  Yet, it’s not as if those institutions weren’t deserving of disrepute.  The Supreme Court, and the courts in general, have been way out of their lane.  Modern presidents have turned the presidency into an almost divine-right branch.  Obama had his phone and pen.  Congress is a eunuch that performs like a clown show.  The administrative state is a law unto itself, so huge as to be unmanageable.  The Constitution is made an empty document and open to the manipulations of the whims of men.  We have the rule of men, not laws.

At the center of this governance by malfeasance is the institutional presence and power of the Democratic Party and its socialism-at-all-costs ethic. Trump may be personally repulsive; the Democrats are thoroughly unfit for office.  The correlation of forces is lining up for a real brouhaha.  The modern correlation of forces are a divisive figure in the White House, the Democratic Party’s muscular socialism, the ongoing cultural substitution of Christianity with Environmentalism, the emergence of a very partisan administrative state as the fourth branch of government, and the media serving as a megaphone for the advancement of the Democrats’ socialism and its cultural leftism.   Many of these malignant forces are emanating from those blue dots on the electoral map.

Buckle up because impeachment promises to be a real donnybrook.

RogerG

Posted on

The Right to Impose

Piedmont, Ca., seventh-graders participate in the global strike for climate change in San Francisco on Sept. 20, 2019. (Credit: Andrew Reed/EdSource)

Overton Window: noun; the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse, also known as the window of discourse. The term is named after Joseph P. Overton, who stated that an idea’s political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range.

A Google search produced the above definition (more on the concept here).  We are experiencing an attempt to impose the limits of acceptable opinion on certain issues.  That word, imposition and its derivatives, will occur a lot in this piece.  No better example can be found than the construction of an Overton window on the issue of climate change.  As with any imposition, the range of acceptability is being forced upon all, while also being arbitrary with the mode of enforcement more indicative of mob behavior.  A highly excitable throng endeavors to manhandle the window leftward.

The Global Climate Strike of students of September 20-27, 2019, brought to mind the idea of the Overton window.  Here we have young people ranging in age from elementary to college boycotting their classes to engage in protests demanding more government power to control people for the purpose of “saving the planet”.  I have my doubts about whether the goal is to “save the planet” or simply expand government power to impose a political clique’s narrow vision of the good.

Means and ends get muddled here.  I was a college adjunct instructor in Physical Geography and was continually exposed to the ideological dogmas of climate change – “climate change” being the more robust and useful term as compared to the mere “global warming”.  “Ideological” is the correct adjective for the belief system that riddles the curriculum, support materials (textbooks, et al), and teacher preparation.  There is much about the movement’s claims to scientifically question.  Yet, the movement glosses over the uncertainty about the climate issue’s severity, the exact nature of the phenomena, and the realities of proposed solutions to immediately rush to the goal of revolutionary social, economic, and political reorganization.

However, before the zealots get to their beloved revolution, prudence requires the rest of us to seriously consider a simple question: Are the zealots’ claims correct?  Much has been said and written about the issue but only a small slice gets the light of day.  To be clear, the purpose of this article is not to present a detailed examination of the activists’ assertions about “climate change”, but to report on a singular episode – the students’ Global Climate Strike – as part of an ongoing campaign to use politicized science so one may foist on the general public a drastic alteration in our settled social, economic, and political arrangements and confer near-totalitarian power in the hands of a select few.

If interested, if you have 32 minutes, below is a reminder that an honest debate on the science of climate change actually exists, something the fanatics would like to squelch and close the Overton window..

What happens when fanaticism replaces scientific inquiry?  Well, we get young and impressionable minds ditching school for a day to help stampede lawmakers into creating the environmentalists’ Leviathan.  How were the kids primed?  Well, the ideology-as-science corrupted the dogma’s purveyors, the teachers, and permeates the kids’ media-rich social ecosystem.  I know; I’ve been there, particularly at the campaign’s pedagogical front.

It’s interesting to know that the professional and degreed people with the least scientific background take up positions as the most prominent mouthpieces of the movement, some in taxpayer-funded government posts and some riding their earlier name-recognition in politics to a new and very lucrative career in climate change.  Does the name “Al Gore” come to mind?

Almost any metropolis and city with a university presence will have a municipal position solely devoted to the issue of climate change.  For instance, in my state of Montana, Chase Jones serves as the Energy Conservation Coordinator for the City of Missoula with the portfolio of developing and coordinating the city’s climate plan.

Chase Jones, City of Missoula Energy Conservation Coordinator

In a radio interview, he stipulated that he has a degree in Communications from University of West Virginia.  He cut his teeth in Montana environmentalism through the Montana Conservation Corps, an environmental non-profit.  The Chairperson of the Corps’s Board of Directors is Jan Lombardi who has a rich personal history in Democratic Party politics, Planned Parenthood, National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), etc.  Another member of the Board is Chris Pope, the Democrat representative of Montana House District 65 and possessor of a Spanish Degree from University of Oregon and Masters in Public and Private Management from Yale.  Chase’s background and the résumés  of those around him are symptomatic of the kinds of experiences that inclines them to accept broad and general scientific claims, especially if they confirm ideological biases, while they lack the detailed understanding  to debate the substance of any of the many scientific aspects of a meta-issue like climate change.

Jan Lombardi (center), chairperson of the Montana Conservation Corps

These people are impressed by the pronouncements of large groups, as if the announcements put finis to any further scientific inquiry, and closes the Overton window to those who dispute them.  They then can announce a “consensus” to dismiss the irritating queries of those of a more scientifically skeptical mind.  All the while, they ignore the vast scholarship on groupthink and Public Choice Theory which does more to explain the behavior of large associations and bureaucracies in perverting pure science.  The stance may work for the politically-motivated non-scientist, but it isn’t science.  It’s partisan politics masquerading under the rubric of science.

Non-scientists are pushing the issue with the assistance of politicized scientists and their politicized associations.  Large and long-established professional associations are particularly prone to fashionable political moods.  Blacklisting is common.  Remember McCarthyism?  In regards to climate, remember nuclear winter, global cooling, and now global warming?  Remember the Union of Concerned Scientists and their Doomsday Clock during Reagan’s defense buildup to counter the Soviet threat?  Remember the blowback to Reagan’s idea of missile defense?  Going back further, how about scientists’ enthusiasm for eugenics that would ultimately seep into the Final Solution?  The wreckage is astounding whenever science is mingled with politics.

“Best Baby” contests promoted eugenics at the Oregon State Fair in the early 1900s. (courtesy of The Oregonian)

“Selection” of Hungarian Jews on the ramp at the death camp Auschwitz-II (Birkenau) in Poland during German occupation, May/June 1944. (Wikimedia Commons/Yad Vashem)

Inevitably, science will be the handmaiden to politics when the two are merged, with disastrous consequences.

The loudest advocates of a Green New Deal are likely to have the least acquaintance with real science.  If anything, they have just enough exposure to be dangerous.  Their stunted view is propagated to the young in a never-ending torrent from one grade to the next, from one movie to the next, and from one social media post to the next .  The stage is set for a critical mass of people who lack the tolerance for opinions cynical of the artificial zeitgeist.  The radical all of a sudden becomes the popularly “sensible” and those outside of this favored cohort will be dismissed, or worse.  The eco-revolutionaries, hiding behind the innocence of youth, are well on their way to the kind of power to upend our way of life and build a new green order.

Some concessions to popular consent will have to be made, but the threat of an opposing majority will have been lessened by a demography-wide closed mind.  It will be a constituency willing to cede great power to a set of elite experts in the arts of the eco-gnosis.   But to be on the cusp of power in the first place requires more than indoctrination.  It’s necessary but not sufficient.  To tip the edifice into a revolution, a panic must be created through crisis-mongering, or as long-dead progressive/socialist leading lights would have called it, the moral equivalent of war.  What goes for the “conscience” of the Democratic Party, our giddy sophomore class president and congressional blowhard from NY’s 14th congressional district (AOC), parrots the war line along with sycophants in the party’s presidential derby.   After the panic attack produces electoral success, once in power, they aren’t going to give it up because the population happens to be profoundly discomforted by the mandated changes.  In this ends-justifies-means world, popular sovereignty will be luxury that can no longer be afforded.  The whole scheme could end up being one man (or woman, et al)/one vote/one time.

A 1968 Cultural Revolution poster. The caption reads: “Destroy the old world; Forge the new world.” Today’s eco-activism is reminiscent of Mao’s campaign to reinvigorate the revolution.

This is more than a slippery slope.  It’s a well-trodden path through the pages of history.  Why are eco-activists so intent on repeating the horrifying record?  Interesting question but the answer is obvious.  They think that they’re immune to the trap many others have fallen into over the past couple of millennia.

They are kidding themselves.  Over those very same millennia, power has proven to be quite an intoxicant.  It overwhelms a person’s conciliatory and moderating nature.  The goal of eco-purity will crowd out everything including tolerance for the opposition.  To borrow from Lenin, a vanguard elite leading the way to the green future won’t trifle with elections unless they can be manipulated into validating predetermined decisions.  Pure and simple, it comes down to imposing a small group’s preferred mode of living on a broad population who may be unaware of what is happening.

The 1920 Presidium of the 9th Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Seated from left to right are Enukidze, Kalinin, Bukharin, Tomsky, Lashevich, Kamenev, Preobrazhensky, Serebryakov, Lenin and Rykov.

I’m reminded of the circumstances in Russia in the few decades before the Revolution of 1917.  One is struck by the wide acceptance of radicalism among the educated classes (teachers, the professoriate, students), many circles in urban populations, and some of the well-off gentry in the years leading up to the Revolution.  It even penetrated the military’s officer corps.  Denunciations bordering on treason, even advocating the assassination of government officials from the czar on down, riddled the last couple of decades of the regime.  Socialism of a variety of shades was trendy, as is the “green future” and “sustainability” today.

Policy mistakes compounded the troubles.  One was the decision in 1906 to confer a safe space from police intervention for university campuses.  It was hoped that the policy would quiet things down on the campuses.  It did no such thing.  The radicalism was allowed to fester and boil over to nearly all sectors of society.  The radicalized young of 1905 became the violent revolutionaries of 1917 and later Lenin’s shock troops in the imposition of the Bolshevik conception of the good.

Russia, 1917: Mass political meeting of workers at the giant Putilov factory.  Bolshevik and other radical student agitators were active in fomenting strikes and other upheavals Tsarist Rusia.

Sound familiar as you view the images of the young faces demanding a Green New Deal in the Global Climate Strike?  Those scenes of a radicalized youth who are radicalized by a radicalized curriculum, sustained over the many years of their matriculation, should send shivers down the spines of anyone knowledgeable of Russian history circa 1890 to 1921.  In the end, a radicalized caste will get the opportunity to impose their narrow vision of the good on a population ignorant of their own children’s indoctrination.

The Overton window of tolerance for opposing views is shifting left.  The zealot’s politicized science will be the only approved form of science.  That means that the only accepted version of science will be the kind that has garnered the assent of the governing elite.  It must, like everything else, serve the ends of the secular dogma’s dream of the good life.  It’s so Orwellian.

Climate protesters September 24, 2019.

In the end, prepare to retreat back a couple of centuries in quality of life.  These vision quests aren’t concerned about the production of wealth so much as dictating the smallest details of living for 330 million people.  Conditions gradually deteriorate as the legacy of prior affluence begins to erode.  Some flee and others adjust to a world without variance from the rules of the eco-commissars.

I’ll end this piece where it started: the student Global Climate Strike.  Watch the speech of a sincere but naive youngster before a UN panel as she tearfully pleads for the erection of the eco-Leviathan.  Also observe the shamelessness of the adults as they exploit a child whose personal identity has been supplanted by a fanatic’s nightmare of impending doom.  Watching her as she gives her speech is wrenching enough, but remembering what has been done to her is much more terrifying.

RogerG