Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)
A blog in defense of western civilization by Roger Graf
Here’s a thought, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (waitress/batender/sophmore class president) makes it easy to imagine: AOC is proof of the mistake of extending the vote to 16-year-olds. With the exception of age, what’s the difference between her and Molly Ringwald’s character in “Sixteen Candles”? Answer: not much.
RogerG
To be blunt, telling a person what to think is not wrong; claiming the power to make another person think that way is wrong. The former is necessary for dialogue in a community of free association. Before there is a voluntary dialogue of views, one must first have a view contra another’s. The second half of the first sentence is the Green New Deal (GND), which is grounded in the rationalized Prussian state and more fully implemented in the full-mobilization governments of the warring parties of WWI – what was called War Socialism.
Let me explain. After the humiliations of Prussia at the hands of Napoleon, the Prussian state was rationalized around the administration of academics under the Hohenzollern monarchy as the cure for what ailed the nation. For people like the philosopher Hegel (Google him), it was the perfection of political organization.
This gave rise to his history-as-progress thing, and would flower into Obama’s silly talk of being on the right side of it – which means to agree with him. Add a dose of “experts” rooted in opinionated “science” and you’ve just short-circuited popular sovereignty. Oh, lip service is paid to “democracy”, but it’s only of the kind that is allowed to agree with the stale and calcified opinions of a claque of “experts”. Thus, we have the unelected administrative state and the Green New Deal demand for a whole lot more of it.
Modern industrialized war provides the opportunity to put the grotesque plan into operation. Since it’s all about government controls in time of war, it’s socialism, thus War Socialism. It also explains the constant search for the “moral equivalent of war”. Declaring a war-like situation is the go-to excuse to marshal the state, create new claques of “experts”, bust the budget, and control the lives of people. Once again, welcome to the Green New Deal.
The parallels with that other high priest of the “laws” of history, Karl Marx, are aplenty. He announced the need for a lot of consciousness-raising by a prescient few. Lenin called them the “vanguard elite”. As in the Communist Manifesto, so in the Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal. Who else but the few self-anointed gnostics, schooled in the theology of the global warming apocalypse, can be entrusted to lead us to the promised land?
Don’t dare, you “frontline communities”, use your democratic voice to build coal-fired power plants to sell electricity to communities stuck in the brave new world of windmills and solar farms. If you try, the full force of the soviet will descend upon you.
Speaking of soviets, the GND has them too. The vague references to local community councils will be nothing but warrens of left-wing activists, just like the soviets of revolutionary Russia. The boilerplate title of “workers, soldiers, and peasants” was nothing but cover for Bolshevik militancy.
And so we are to go the way of Venezuela, Cuba, the Soviet Union, etc., etc.
Ocasio-Cortez, our teenage central planner, symbolizes the extreme myopia of many that are treading a well-worn path from the post-Napoleonic Prussian state to the garrison governments of the world wars and the spawning of systematize totalitarianism. Don’t expect the realization to suddenly dawn on her and her Twitter followers. She is to erudition what an oil slick is to water. It only floats on the surface and there ain’t much beyond that.
RogerG
Here we go again. PG&E filed bankruptcy. The utility’s previous filing for insolvency was in 2001. The purported reason for this latest at-bat in Chapter 11 is the fear of lawsuits from devastating wildfires over the past few years (17 in 2017). Yes, the state has been burning up. A multi-year severe drought hasn’t helped. Exacerbating the problem is rural residents’ preference for suburbia in wildlands. The explosive nature of the fires is kindled by wild land management practices of an eco-crazed state government. In this maelstrom sits a huge uility. Greenie mandates on the utility industry run rampant which divert revenues from day-to-day maintenance and upgrades. With some of the highest utility rates known to man, it’s perplexing that the hardening of its infrastructure is woefully lacking. The whole situation screams of a collapse waiting to happen. Well, here we go again.
Please watch the Wall Street Journal video on the infrastructure shortcomings of the utility.
RogerG
Think of this as a personal letter to Alexandra Ocasio Cortez. My purpose is to remind her that she’s 29, not 16, and should think like it.
Move over you establishment types, the youngins are elbowing their way in, and they fully intend to impose their fantasies on how the world works. Many happen to be Bernie-bros/gals/? and are fully marinated in identity pandering and socialism, the bane of millennials everywhere. The current sensation is Alexandra Ocasio Cortez (AOC), all of 29 years old and ready to lecture everyone on the need to reshape their lives to match her dream. Her beau-ideal is a hyper version of California – take California and sprinkle a heavy dose of the looney-left-on-speed. She wants to take this uber-cousin of California national, and international.
If you find this kind of thing appealing, sharp objects, intoxicants, and land salesmen shouldn’t be within reach. Personally, I think she is simpleminded. She’s proof that anyone can get a college degree and come out of it dense as granite. Oh, she can put a sentence together but it’s all so glib. She can’t help it since she knows and understands so little.
Her ignorance is only matched by her bravado, something common in a youthful zealot. There’s nothing in her background to prove otherwise. The Wikipedia bio on her reads like an inflated paper resume’. Look for yourself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez
During her formative years, she was immersed in all things Hispanic. She was coddled and favored within the cramped confines of Hispanic activism. Not surprisingly, ethnic identity matters a lot to her and it shows in the inanities that roll out her mouth.
One of the oddities in social research is the fondness in the offspring of the comfortable middle and upper classes for lefty causes. AOC fits the bill since she was raised in a Westchester County, NY, a region with 2-3 times the per capita income of the district that she now represents. Things got financially dicey for the family upon the death of her father, but her general outlook had already been cemented by then. Once it had solidified, everything else would be funneled through the mental prism.
Her education didn’t correct for the silliness, and probably made it worse. Think of it: her Boston University BA in International Relations with a minor in Economics led her to … socialism. Socialism isn’t economics; it’s public administration. Socialism occurs when the government controls most of everything, ergo the public administration. Those decisions of buying and selling are taken from individuals and turned over to government bureaus. Does she know that? Was she ever schooled in its failures? Real economics either didn’t stick for Alexandra or it was the largest category of units to be cobbled together to make for a paper minor. Either way, her socialism is ipso facto proof that she doesn’t understand the subject.
A stroll down memory lane would help fill her huge knowledge deficits, but she’s also got an experience handicap in having been born in 1989. Her mother gave birth as Reagan slipped off into retirement. The last dose of domestic socialism in the mid-60’s to the late 70’s would be only a history book recitation for her, if that. The horrors of the international variety likewise. In the US, the period’s skyrocketing crime, the pandemics of STD’s and drugs, a near decade of inflationary recession, the Sovietizing of housing in urban renewal, the dole’s destruction of the inner-city family, etc., would be conceptual at best and therefore easy to dismiss once she settled on a weltanschauung.
Overseas, the era’s wreckage was even more stark. Did it penetrate AOC’s brain? If so, there’s no evidence of it. There’s a reason for socialism’s black eye in the fall of the Berlin Wall, collapse of the Soviet Union, the Tienanmen Square massacre, the gulags and reeducation camps, the mass exterminations, and Eastern Europe throwing off its shackles and joining the West. She might have in mind the welfare states of Scandinavia as her template for socialism, but how much does she understand their situations? My guess is that she wouldn’t let any discomforting thoughts spoil the fairy tale.
All the evidence points to deep and abiding ignorance. Take a look at this typical example of her airy pronouncements:
“When we talk about the word ‘socialism,’ I think what it really means is just democratic participation in our economic dignity and our economic, social, and racial dignity. It is about direct representation and people actually having power and stake over their economic and social wellness, at the end of the day.”
She’s in substantial agreement with Marx when he once said, “Democracy is the road to socialism.” Alexandra just resurrected the old codger whether she realizes it or not. My bet is that she’s oblivious.
She can’t comprehend that mixing “socialism” with “democracy” is just introducing more politics into the provisioning of wants and needs. More and more of life is exposed to ambitious politicos, campaigning, political donations, busybody activists, lobbying, and civil service-protected government workers. It’s unavoidable. That’s AOC’s socialism, and that’s ruination. Come on, Alexandra, do we really need more of our existence to be put to a vote? She apparently believes so.
The resurgence under Reagan and the public intellectual debate that proceeded it appear to be beyond her familiarity. A new cadre of free-market economists at the time convincingly showed that the long-neglected production side of the economic equation was, and still is, an important answer to the doldrums.
It’s based on a simple truism: an economy’s good fortune doesn’t ride on the job-creating potential of poor people. You need rich people for jobs. Rather than fleece them and cause their dollars to go underground, reduce their punishment and allow them to keep more their earnings. Ditto for the rest of population. It’s called “tax cuts” and they were successfully implemented by JFK and Reagan. The AOCs of the world want government to abscond with more of people’s earnings so a collection of short-sighted and politically powerful activists can decide. It’s why they’re socialists, and it’s why they ought not to be trusted with power.
Others in this grand discussion of the 70’s and 80’s – before AOC was even a blastocyst – started to notice the social dissolution that arose during and after the Great Society splurge. Government largesse in entitlements seemed to foster a dependency that isn’t conducive to human well-being. Work requirements for welfare, broken windows policing, block granting to the states, and removing the subsidy for underage motherhood came out of this grand rethink. Words like accountability, responsibility, and self-reliance made a comeback. Though, not for Alexandra. She’s clueless.
Alexandra, watch this short report from 1970 NBC News on Chicago’s Cabrini Green housing project.
She in her makeshift reasoning unknowingly wants a return to those days of Carter’s famous one-word description, malaise.
Hardly is she forward looking. She’s stuck in the past. Ocasio Cortez and others like her are still planted in the mind of Bernie Sanders and his world of 1988 when he was 37 and honeymooning in the Soviet Union. Actually, her ideological lineage goes back further to Tom Hayden, the SDS, and Port Huron Statement. Her’s is a reactionary perspective, not a revolutionary one. Alexandra, here’s news for you: been there, done that. It’s old hat.
Certain basic realities haven’t set into her brain about her favorite hobbyhorse. Socialism, for instance, has peculiar centralizing tendencies. You can’t have it without a central planner. If you allow freedom and pursue only a more local variety of it, the ensuing jurisdictional competition and free choice would kill it off with great fanfare as shortages and long lines cause rapid depopulation away from the grip of local zealots like her. The only way to implement the monstrosity is to nationally impose the misery from a central point under the sway of all-powerful ideological oligarchs. Lenin realized it, but he was smarter and more dangerous than her.
In the end, a Socialist someone with plenipotentiary powers has to decide the answers to the basic livelihood questions: (1) What is to be produced?; (2) How is it to be produced?; and (3) Who’s to get it? If you allow people to freely determine these matters, some will be better at it than others and get rich. Can’t have that in Alexandra’s fantasy world. Better we have equality and squalor than inequality and plenty in her twisted mind.
Be prepared to be inundated with her inanities through a sycophantic media now that she’s moved her shtick to DC . Not long after arriving, she presented her latest foray into nonsense, something dubbed the Green New Deal. Don’t think for a moment the idea is original with her. She latched onto buzz words circulating the lefty hive.
Not that the first New Deal edition was any great success. A compressed summary of the 1930’s would be as follows: (1) a depression beginning in ’29-’32; (2) the New Deal of intense government intervention, following Hoover’s, inaugurated in ’33; (3) unemployment hovered between 33% to 14% throughout the 30’s; (4) industrial production similarly languished; (5) WWII was a recess with the depression getting set to resume after; and (6) a recovery finally took hold when Congress, starting in ’47, dismantled much of the wartime/New Deal political and economic machinery.
It’s a history that won’t comport with AOC’s clichéd version of it. For people like her, the War ended the Great Depression. Rubbish. The War was the excuse to continue a steroid-induced version of the New Deal. The unemployment problem was cured by putting much of the workforce in uniform to kill Germans and Japanese and herding what’s left over into factories to arm those in uniform to kill Germans and Japanese. Industrial production went up, but factories weren’t making cars and refrigerators for the average person to enjoy. They made the stuff that was useful in killing Germans and Japanese, with much of it destroyed on the battlefield or at the bottom of the ocean. What kind of “end” is it when unemployment is solved by making millions of soldiers – a good number of them killed or maimed – and a rekindling of industrial production that leads to shortages and rationing, a set of circumstances not much different from the years before?
Here’s an unsettling historical fact for Alexandra: the New Deal in one of its first incarnations, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), had a whiff of fascism about it. It attempted to militarize the US economy as Mussolini did in Italy. The taint isn’t surprising given the fact that Mussolini was lionized in the early 30’s for providing a hypothetical antidote to the failure of capitalism. FDR and the National Recovery Administration’s Hugh Johnson had kind words at the time for the tyrant.
Like Mussolini’s corporatism, the NIRA tried to concentrate all of economic life into 3 monolithic entities (government, business, labor) to set prices, wages, and production. The thing floundered not only because of its inherent contradictions but also because it didn’t jibe with our Constitution. The Supreme Court in 1935 put a stake through the monster’s heart when some Jewish butchers (the Schechters) challenged the National Recovery Administration’s attempt to fine and jail them for violating its ukases on chicken. Is this what Alexandra means by a Green New Deal? Her thoughts on the subject were likely shaped by the mental prison of people like Howard Zinn.
If the real New Deal, if she was aware of it, would be unnerving to AOC, wait till she finds out that the real recovery from the Great Depression occurred when the evil Republicans gained the majority in the 80th Congress (’47-’49) and began to dismantle a good portion of the administrative state and its nomenklatura. Down came the War Production Board, the War Labor Board, and Office of Price Administration. Government spending was slashed. Maybe as many as a million civilian government workers had to get out of the business of telling others what to do and get real jobs. After that, we had the 50’s boom. Surely deregulation and smaller government can’t be what AOC is talking about, even though that’s what worked.
Bad ideas are immune to death, mainly because a new generation of the gullible hears them for the first time and mistakes them once again for divine wisdom. Absent are the reservations and the caution of maturing experience and a lifetime of study. If you expect additional years in our bankrupt public schools to correct for the deficiency – K through grad school – you’re a fool. There, the mental bankruptcy will be reinforced, not cured.
Old lefty nostrums are recirculated and repackaged to the birdbrained innocent. Every generation when young will be rich in the species. For many in today’s youth cohort, the latest craze in junk thought is the “Green New Deal”. Nothing really new here that in many ways hadn’t already been touted by Eugene Debs, Gus Hall, Earl Browder, and the aforementioned SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) of 60’s radical-Left fame. Most fundamentally, it’s a return of central planning.
Since central planning is key to the scheme, the Left’s latest rendition of the New Deal moniker isn’t much different from anything that hadn’t already come out of Gosplan, the Soviet Union’s economic planning agency, or Stalin’s notorious Five-Year Plans. Only this one is in the service of international greenie fanatics, not the maniacs fighting some vague oppression of the international proletariat.
Step back, there’s elements of the latter in the former. The similarities of Five-Year Plans and the Green New Deal make them near identical twins of the mind. They are encrusted with lofty goals and then hemorrhage the spending and coercive means to achieve them.
But even prior to that, the plots hinge on a rigid conception of the world. G.K. Chesterton called it “the clean well-lit prison of a single idea”. It’s the notion that people need to be directed according to the likes of activists caught up in their own mental prison. Their cognitive jail is the relentless pursuit of oppressors, many invented to justify the means to the desired end. The would-be bogeymen are, for both Marxists and eco-zealots alike, capitalists or anyone who pursues a livelihood in ways the militants deem “selfish” or “greedy”. Welcome to the mental detention center lying between the ears of Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and others with the same hangup.
Those who disagree are more than opponents. They are “enemies of the people” to be vanquished. This wafts with the odor of totalitarianism. Their intense gaze isn’t just directed at what you do, but also in what you think and say. In the jurisdictional hothouses where this mental smog reigns – California, New York, and Massachussets, are you listening? – the odor has gotten stronger as powerful mandarins seek to outlaw the speech of anyone who dares to disagree with the high priests of Climate Change.
They won’t be satisfied with the chump change of subsidies and test projects for their utopia. They’re into lifestyle management. You must live, think, and speak like them. Already, the schools, with their lefty curriculum and lefty teacher training, and comrades in big city media have become the boot camps for generating the latest version of Stalin’s Young Pioneers. AOC would have fit in quite nicely.
It’s so reminiscent of Stalin’s collectivization of farming, extensive network of eyes and secret police covering homes and workplaces, and internal passports, leaving aside the gulags where malcontents – real or imagined – were penned. No wonder this is nothing but a prescription for producing refugees.
So, what’s in this latest edition of the 5-Year Plan … er, New Deal? Some sense of it can be found in AOC’s draft request for a “Select Committee For A Green New Deal”. (5) Here’s a taste:
What’s the upshot? What does all this really mean for all Americans? David Roberts in a sympathetic piece for Vox stated it quite clearly,
“… the GND is not just a climate change policy. It is a vision for a new kind of economy, built around a new set of social and economic relationships. It is not merely a way to reduce emissions, but also to ameliorate the other symptoms and dysfunctions of a late capitalist economy: growing inequality and concentration of power at the top.” (2)
The Green New Deal is a plot against the fundamental principles of our constitutional order and civilization. It’s in the same vein as the grand pronouncements of the Marxist scolds of the past. GND boosters are out to manufacture a new person for a new society. What will happen to those who resist? Well, coercion is absolutely essential or it won’t work – or, more accurately, it won’t work as the history of communism attests, but the utopian bullies won’t even get the chance if they don’t do some silencing. Monkey wrenches will not be allowed on the path to their heaven/hell on earth.
Alexandra’s belief system is a product of profound immaturity of thought. Her thinking is grounded only in Lefty boilerplate. In many ways, she acts with all the excitement of a teenager who was introduced to some factoid for the first time but lacks the seasoned judgment to process it. In a recent twitter storm with Republican Steve Scalise, the 29-year-old Alexandra tried to correct the 53-year-old Scalise by repeatedly instructing him on the meaning of “marginal tax rates”. I think that everyone in the capitol knows term, but Alexandra acts as if she only became aware of the concept in the past few days.
She can find no fault in a marginal tax rate of 70% for the “wealthy” since she’s blind to the 60-year public debate on the matter. Apparently, her economics education didn’t inform her of the dispute between Keynesian dogmatics and the free-market ideas of the Vienna School of Economics. Hayek and Milton and Rose Friedman weren’t on her reading list.
As such, she’s probably not aware that she’s gearing up to imitate Joseph Stalin. Because there’s not much rolling around in that head, the problems of our times seem so simple. They always do for the young when there’s nothing else in the cranium to cause pause. She’s the equivalent of a teenage central planner but is completely ignorant of the fact.
Alexandra Ocasio Cortez is proof that there is a place for people like her. It just shouldn’t be in a room with adults. She might be a great ASB president, but her flights of fancy disqualify her from babysitting.
RogerG
California has taken a page from Mao’s book of rule, wittingly or unwittingly. On top of all the crony gimmies to solar, the state has ordered all new homes to have solar panels from 2020 on.
Mao in his fevered imagination thought that he could order a massive increase in iron production by turning peasants into iron workers with their own “backyard smelters”. In like manner, California’s “Great Helmsmen” have similarly declared every homeowner to be a rooftop electricity producer. It all makes so much sense to the mandarins of the Party, Communist (China) or Democratic (Ca.). Details be damned.
Such a detail as economies of scale hasn’t really graced their mind. Instead, visions of millions backyard smelters, or rooftop solar panels, churning out iron, or electricity, excites their fancy.
California’s Great Leap Forward may end up like the last one: a disaster. China’s iron production went up for a brief moment but many other things went down. Ditto for California, just replace solar for iron. One of the things to go down will be home ownership. In a state already suffering from over-inflated home prices, they will be jacked up by a further $8,400 on average. That equates with pricing 444,385 families out of the market.
Whether the number of the negatively impacted is accurate or not, it is an effort to quantify another economic fact of life: the margin. The margin is the place of action in an economy. It defines prosperity and depression by referring to people who are sensitive to price changes. A rise in prices results in a slice of the buying public being cut out.
Want a home to raise your kids? Move to Texas.
It has always mesmerized me how a few hundred thousand rooftop solar panels are supposed to reverse the impact of China’s and India’s many huge dirty-coal plants. Only in the eco-dreamland can solar’s capacity factor of 18% correct for the nearly 60% of coal-fired plants. How’s that to happen?
Do we need any more proof that the term “well-managed” doesn’t apply to one-party states?
Please read the following sources:
https://thehill.com/…/387270-the-problem-with-california-go…
https://www.latimes.com/…/la-fi-solar-mandate-20181214-stor…
https://openei.org/wiki/Definition:Capacity_factor
RogerG
If you’ve got time (about an hour and 20 minutes), please listen to this conversation between 2 radio hosts and Prof. Peter Kolb of the U. of Montana’s Dept. of Forest Management about the recent and deadly fires in California (below at the bottom). Prof. Kolb was a native Californian with family still living in the state. The “burning” question for most everyone concerns the extent California state policies have contributed to the danger of destructive wildland fires in the state. The quick and short answer shouldn’t be a quick and short answer. Yet, the prevailing climate of governing opinion in the state can’t be ignored, a view that leans in the direction of environmental preservation at nearly all costs. It is a factor bunched together with California’s unique conditions.
Here are some often-mentioned points to ponder:
(1) Climate change: Yes, we’re in a warming trend, but long term climate changes can’t be adjusted like your wall thermostat. Besides, unless you’re able to convince 2 billion Chinese and Indians to stop they’re economic growth, global mitigations are highly unlikely. Greenie energy like wind and solar aren’t a substitute for fossil fuels in propelling a poor country into prosperity. Period.
(2) Drought: It’s a fact of life regardless of warming trends, and it’s only exacerbated by the state’s hot dry-summer climate. This raises the concerns about the state’s measures, if any, to alleviate the annually recurring dry spells. Do they intensify or lessen the fire danger? There’s reason to doubt the efficacy of many of the policies that might exist.
(3) Foliage: California has biomes uniquely suited to its annual and extensive dry periods such as chaparral on the coasts and foothills . These are plants that can survive the dry periods alongside the dry grasses and dead forest litter. If the under-story of “fine fuels” ignites, a fire will race through with mounting intensity.
(4) El Diablo, the Santa Anas: These eastern hot and dry winds are a natural feature of California’s climate. They exist regardless of climate change. Since they are as persistent as the coastal surf, what has the state done to deal with their inevitable consequences? My guess: nothing much.
(5) Development practices in WUI (Wild-Urban-Interface): This refers to the aesthetic preference of many residents in the state for trees and brush against building walls in that uneven zone between wildlands and structures. It’s a disaster-in-waiting in times of hot, dry, and windy conditions in California’s dry-summer biomes.
(6) California’s policies: It’s a state in the grip of environmentalism. The “ism” is a single-minded preference for a form of nature preservation without humans. Wildland management policies reflect this bias. Fuel builds up in the hinterlands due to restrictions on measures to reduce the fuel load. Such as, the state requires a “forest management plan” to remove dead trees and brush on a person’s property. Of course, the rule and regulations about it are enforced by an elaborate bureaucracy. Be prepared to spend $5,000-$10,000.
(7) California’s decaying infrastructure: The state’s water storage and delivery systems are now approaching 5 decades or older and were built for a population half the size. In like manner, decades of greenie mandates and regulations are corrupting the state’s grid. Rising electricity demands on an aging grid can contribute to mishaps like the one just outside of Paradise, Ca. California’s answer is to raise taxes on an already over-taxed population, all the while undermining the physical grid by forcing the utilities to subsidize greenie visions of utopia at the expense of maintenance. And of course, the governing classes will answer with a call to raise rates.
In the end, California has the worst roads, a dilapidated water system, an energy grid that is environmentally snazzy but aging into incontinence, and the all-too-familiar recurrence of fires capable of reproducing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Just saying.
Please watch the video (see below).
RogerG
The video link:
https://www.facebook.com/newstalkkgvo/videos/369303803803244/?t=2
Californians in November meekly went to the polls to shoot down an attempt to lower their gas taxes. Over the recent number of days, rural and blue-collar French hit the streets of Paris to riot against a 5% increase in taxes on gasoline prices already exceeding $6/gal. The contrast is striking (no pun intended).
Why the outburst in Paris? The citizens in the countryside and the blue-collar middle class are tired of shouldering the burden of the climate-change fixations of their urban and wealthier “betters”. “Climate change” is more than a scientific matter. It’s code for the fixers in the nomenklatura/academy alliance, buttressed by the upscale elect and their fashionable beliefs, to manipulate the lives of those not so privileged.
So, we get with the French a replay of 1789; while in California, docility. Interesting. Will the meek inherit the earth, or will it be adult firmness? My bet is on “meekness” till it becomes unbearable.
Viva la gilets jaunes (yellow vests)! But put a hold on the violence.
RogerG
The “Society” in the title refers to a loose body of people and organizations who have similar backgrounds and enough of a common orthodoxy to distinguish as an identifiable social element, like, for instance, Protestants. In this case, it’s the background identifiers of degreed/middle-to-upper-class/urban/seemingly-professional and progressive/left in their philosophical orthodoxy. The “Puff Piece” in the title is the all-too-familiar journalistic softball interview with overtones of saccharine flattery that’s reserved for prominent people in the news who confirm the Society’s biases.
Case in point: “Seeking a Safe, Green Colombia” in National Geographic Magazine of January 2018 about Colombia’s ex-president, Juan Manuel Santos. He gets the treatment because he’s said to be about “peace” and he chants the clerisy’s doctrines on “climate change”. He knows the lingo and says all the right things. Thus, he’s beatified. Look at the magazine’s saintly photo from the article.
The “peace” part of his beatification has to do with his cramming down the throats of Colombians a detested agreement with FARC, the narco-terrorist organization. When put on the ballot, Colombians rejected it despite the weight of the world coming down on them to approve it. So, Santos got around those pesky voters with a jam-down in the legislature.
And what of the agreement? First off, Colombians hate FARC. Next, the settlement gave amnesty to murderers, bribed the killers to stop the killing and mayhem, and rewarded them with seats in parliament. For millions of FARC’s victims, what’s not to like?
And for that, the guy wins the Nobel Peace Prize. But what really earns his elevation to sainthood is his expressed worship of the clerisy’s iconography of “climate change” with statements like “… we are destroying Mother Earth”. For the Society’s parishioners, that’ll do it.
No such treatment was accorded the previous president, Alvaro Uribe, the winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. But he doesn’t sing the Society’s doctrines and he opposed the terrorist cave-in. What a flawed world we live in.
RogerG
Today’s environmental activist owes much to Stalin. Oh, this is not the Stalin of the secret police, gulags, and purges. No greenie would stand for that … I hope. Rather, it’s the Stalin of muscular and hypothetically rational central planning. The commissars, operating as “experts”, establish the goals that are deemed critical to national and world survival and then hector society to achieve it. In our country, the browbeating occurs without the mass arrests. Rather, the hectoring encompasses the carrots of bribes (subsidies) and the sticks of regulations and taxes to engineer the “proper” individual behaviors to reach the target. Though, the whip-hand of the state always lurks in the background. The zealots don’t give either the goal or the rationale behind it a second thought. It’s full steam ahead … until reality hits.
Not surprisingly, an unintended and unpleasant reality for the enthusiasts and the rest of us will eventually hit. In the meantime, play up an impending doom to stampede people into accepting the grand design. For today, the holy grail is “clean” and “sustainable” energy in order to avoid Earth becoming Venus.
So the goal of 100% “clean” and “sustainable” energy by X date is popping up in deep blue states. How’s that any different from Stalin’s Gosplan (Soviet economic central planning agency) announcing X amount of steel and wheat for each of year of the 5-Year Plan?
Corporate America, increasingly simpatico with Earth First, is all-in for the crusade, especially the tekkie companies. Watch Verizon’s latest ad now running on tv screens nationwide (https://youtu.be/Sv1OVlyUyNY).
To reach Hawaii’s centrally planned goal, the beautiful Hawaii countryside will be scarred with vast solar and wind farms. Enviros bemoan the loss of the rainforest, except when it comes to solar panels and wind turbines. Apparently, food production takes a back seat to energy utopia.
Not to be outdone by lowly Hawaii, Governor Brown and the rest of the California politburo have jumped in with SB100. It proclaims the state to be 100% carbon-free by 2045, like Hawaii – a twisting of the old and venerable 5-year plan into a 27-year one. Anyway, a central plan is a central plan.
How’s that to be actualized? Geothermal and nuclear might be accepted into the “clean”family, but they will be the red-headed stepchildren. Pride of place for today’s greenie central planners goes to wind and solar. To make it all happen, let’s not forget the plentiful taxpayer subsidies, rate increases, burgeoning regulations, higher taxes, and, oh, a little rationing thrown in for good measure.
Be prepared on your next Hawaii hike or excursion to Mammoth to run into the likes of the following:
Reaching the green goal will require an expansion of the forests of 300-foot towers with 100-foot blades – and their unceasing hum – and the Levittowns of black panels. Leaving aside the technical and cost burdens of the whole scheme, the landscape will be as different as Stalin’s Russia after the construction of his collective farms and contrived industrial projects … with similar results. More likely, prior to public and private bankruptcy, these efforts will begin to look like the abandoned towns and collective farms of Soviet Russia.
That appears to be a more than a rare outcome in these best-laid plans of mice and men (to borrow from the poet, Robert Burns). Part of the problem is the nature of the people who are commandeering society: utopia-mongering fanatics and politicized “experts”. In both cases, we have people who claim to know more than they really do. Couple this with the fact that no one person or small group can know all the details and circumstances to manage the thousands and millions (if not billions) of individuals interacting in a society. Millions end up doing without as they live among the sun-bleached bones of decaying grandiose projects.
F.A. Hayek called it the “knowledge problem”. He wrote,
“The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never [my emphasis] exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed [my emphasis] bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” (9)
Boy, that’s a huge slice of humble pie for our budding central planners in Sacramento, Hawaii, and Verizon corporate headquarters. Honestly, the Verizon folks are in it for a piece of the action, thereby affixing “crony” to “capitalism”.
What? They don’t know it all? Of course not, but that won’t stop them form forging ahead because they know the important stuff, or so they believe. If there are hiccups along the way and a few people get ruined, well, be like Stalin’s head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yeszhov, when he said, “When you chop wood, chips fly”. Eh, que será, será … and stay out of the way.
The chips?
And there will be hiccups. Like the Ukrainian peasants in the Holodomor (see above), those wood chips will strike the most vulnerable: those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. The rich can always afford to go green. Boutique food stores and boutique energy, with a Tesla in the garage, easily fall within the financials of the well-heeled. But a person living paycheck-to-paycheck, or residing in a South-Central LA rental, must skip some things in order to pay the state-contrived electricity bill. By all means, get air conditioning but don’t use it. Sweat.
As for that utility bill in the mail, a visit to Southern California Edison website will give new meaning to the folly of the bake-a-cake-by-committee logic. There’s no simple answer to the question, how much do you pay per kWhr? The price is a “structure” with a morass of “tiers”, “time-of-use”, “baselines”, “incentives”, “high usage charges”, etc. The thing makes King Minos’s Labyrinth appear as straightforward as a Kansas highway. (1) Go to the footnote and see if you can make sense of it.
The bloody thing, though, points in one direction: Californians pay 50-60% (depending on the calculations given the word salad of California regulations) more than the national average for seeking cool air, warmth, fresh food, and clean clothes. (2) You can avoid the whipping to your pocketbook by succumbing to solar panels on your roof. What you do at the end of their 10-15 year lifespan is hard to say. Still, you’ll get a ratepayer/taxpayer provided subsidy and the utility will be hogtied into accepting your feeble production into its grid. All of which means that somebody has to foot the bill. And that somebody is, as always, you, the ratepayer and taxpayer. Going green doesn’t mean going cheap, particularly if you want to avoid Lancaster’s 110° heat.
The flinging wood chips don’t end with the heart-stopping utility bills. You’ve heard of racial disparities, right? Well, now we have greenie-inspired economic disparities which have a racial tinge. The poor, and really anybody below the per capita income of Malibu, will pay more as a portion of income to keep the lights on. And you know what? The peasants are looking for their pitchforks. The scene of a torchlight mob marching on Frankenstein’s castle may have some metaphorical relevance.
Not surprisingly, somebody has come forward to sue the California commissariat for its flirtation into greenie-energy wonderland. A consortium of civic-minded community leaders – The Two Hundred – has the gumption to sue the state for its bilge of laws and regulations that push the Sierra Club’s vision at the expense of anyone who won’t reduce nature to a Disney cartoon. (3) Expect the smear campaign from the usual suspects of powerful lefty hotheads in the state legislature, the well-funded collection of politically powerful environmentalist klans, not to mention the governor, to brand those who dare to rebel as greedy, self-serving Big Real Estate, Big Oil, Big Developers, Big Polluters, Big ….
Throwing out pejorative labels is a favorite tactic, that way they don’t have to be burdened with addressing the litigants’ arguments. Brand them and wait for the sympathetic legacy media to repeatedly broadcast the slander. It’s a well-worn script.
It’s interesting to ponder the rationale behind the lawsuit. The plaintiffs point to CARB’s recent greenhouse-gas mandates on new housing as having “a disparate negative impact on minority communities and are discriminatory against minority communities and their members”. One member of The Two Hundred, John Gamboa, put it more bluntly, “They [the state’s powerful green politicos and regulators] care more about spotted owls than brown babies”.
The logic is unassailable. Piling on the regulations and mandates will have a negative effect on the cost of everything from air conditioning to a bungalow to a pound of cabbage. The costs ripple through the supply chain of everything in the consumer market. No Mensa membership is required to foresee the pernicious impacts on anyone without an inherited portfolio. Already the state with the highest poverty rate (21%) – and ballooning to 8 million when housing costs are factored – California’s enviro extremism is slamming the already-exposed to even more exposure.
Germany’s natives were exposed to the ploy at the same time as it became fashionable in West Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Manhattan, Humanities Departments, and Fortune 500 corporate soirées. The Deutsche planners declared an 80% cut in demon CO2 by 2050, began closing down nuclear power plants, and went hell-bent into the dreamland of “renewables”. A hausfrau saw her electricity bill jump 50% in 10 years and realized that she was saddled with highest-priced juice in the EU ($0.37 per kilowatt-hour). (5) The road to ecotopia is paved with unpaid electricity bills.
Ontario, Canada, and Australia jumped on the same train to the asylum with ditto results.
So, seeking to end the slide to social and economic melancholia, The Two Hundred is suing the collective pants and REI-purchased hiking shoes off California’s eco-panderers in the state nomenklatura. It seems that the plaintiffs have available a whole bunch of laws to ban “disparate impacts”of a racial cast, and the laws are at the ready to weaponize legal briefs. The state’s Fair Employment and Housing Act and US Federal Housing Act stand poised to be used. If an employer can be dragged before the EEOC for too few hires in a “protected” category, why not haul into court for the same reason the gaggle of Sierra Club diehards in CARB (Calif. Air Resources Board)? Should eco-lefties with political power be immune to the identical sanctions faced by anyone else trying to make a living?
Success in court isn’t likely. The courts have a long track record of protecting government desk-jockeys from the consequences of their actions. Maybe that’s how it should be. If popular sovereignty means anything, we could simply vote the bastards out, except for the bulk of civil service and union-protected lifers in the bureaucracy’s bowels – and maybe that’s how it shouldn’t be. The growth of the administrative state has made the franchise nearly mute.
The empowered eco-central planners in the Dem one-party states only muck up the works. They claim to know what needs to be done and what is best for all 300+ million Americans as well as all other earthlings. Stalin would be proud of his progeny.
RogerG
Footnotes and Bibliography:
I’m drawn to Ronald Reagan’s famous witticism, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.” Refashioned to our current political climate, it could very well be “America didn’t leave the blue dots, the blue dots left America” (mentioned in an earlier post). By blue dots I mean those densely packed, urbanized blue specks scattered across the electoral maps of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
What makes them distinct from the sea of red? It’s a relatively recent but deeply embedded and culturally partisan mentality, to the point of being an ambient governing doctrine, among the critical cultural and political influencers in the dots. The creed is part temperament in the form of arrogance in an assumed monopoly on facts and science, and part constipated intellectual imagination – a kind of myopia – in the form of a congenital rejection of earlier and widely accepted propositions. The blue dots have their foot on the pedal with their creed in tow leaving the rest of America behind.
Today’s National Geographic magazine reflects the soul of blue America. If you want a barometer on the state of play in our blue clusters, the magazine won’t disappoint.
Susan Goldberg, the editor-in-chief, is taking the magazine full blue.
Take the May and June issues of this year (2018). The May issue featured an in-depth portrait of Picasso as genius. For June, the title might as well be “The Plastic Apocalypse” of Goldberg’s introduction. Both profoundly reveal planks of today’s progressive (aka “of the left”) catechism, the prevalent philosophy of life in the blue dots.
A key part of the left’s dogma is the unshaken belief that circumstance is all. The historical setting, social environment, and economic backdrop are accepted as the forces of consequence for defining a person. Today’s lefty and urban writers wreak of the idea. Claudia Kalb, the author of “Intense, Provocative, Disturbing, Captivating, Genius Picasso” in the May issue, is an evangelist of this secular gospel.
The piece is a Godless sermon that unleashes two basic assumptions. First, since circumstance is all and circumstances change, so all standards must adapt to keep up. Einstein’s scientific relativity is expanded into the relativity of all things, and, by so doing, elevating to metaphysical importance all things circumstantial in a person’s experience . Out the window go overarching norms … as well as the basis for simple judgment.
Well, maybe not fully. While lefties talk a good game, they can’t live it. Nobody can. The word “disturbing” in Kalb’s title hints at the faint pulse of morality – those nasty overarching norms – that makes it possible for her to elicit uneasiness at certain aspects of Picasso’s life (like his womanizing). Thus, a Newtonian universe of fixed laws (morality) is jumbled together with Einstein’s general theory (relativity in the form of circumstance is all). Oh well, coherence may not be a hallmark of the outlook.
Freed of the straitjacket of an enveloping order to the human universe, the second horse in the lefty stable bursts out of the gate, assumption #2: the compulsion for reform. All we have to do in their estimation is examine our setting with the methodical precision of a gene-splicing lab tech, understand the workings of the discovered social elements, and manipulate them into a better person and world. Voilà, social engineering is born with its resulting wreckage.
It’s not that a person’s surroundings aren’t important. It’s what the lefties do with the info. Traditionalists profess the need for certain requirements for human flourishing, regardless of era or setting, then match the facts on the ground with these necessities . They recognize the existence of a permanent natural order for humanity like the one in the physical universe. Today’s progressives have a sense of order but their model is evolution, not Newton. For them, history presents a new stage that makes much of the older wisdom as obsolete as the woolly mammoth. Once they are convinced that they have a grip on the social evolutionary process and its direction, they scurry around as relentless busybodies to make the better world … in their estimation.
Watch President Obama – that bluest of all presidents – enunciate the folderol in a speech in support of Hillary’s candidacy on November 3, 2016. (Click on the caption. *Thanks to NBC News.)
The talk of “bending the arc of history” is straight out of the lefty playbook. The rhetoric appealed to Martin Luther King because of his inherent optimism. It is singularly cherished, though, by today’s leftists. Leftists claim to know the path of history and the means to speed it along and tweak it toward nirvana. They see themselves as social engineers with a scientist’s touch. People who think otherwise are treated as dinosaurs waiting for the asteroid.
The confidence in their possession of the scientists’ touch breeds an arrogance to brand those who disagree as “deplorables” (Hillary’s famous 2016 characterization), or as Barack Obama put it in 2008: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”. (1) There you have it. Opponents are ignorant rubes when compared to the purported clinical brilliance of progressives.
They claim sole ownership of rationality and science. In publications such as the May 2018 issue of National Geographic we see the reflex to connect whatever is written to something resembling a laboratory experiment no matter the precariousness of the relationship.
It’s an attempt to validate a tendentious viewpoint with a patina of science, as if disagreement with them connotes dumbness. Woven into Kalb’s story of Picasso’s genius is a tangent into neurology.
But more telling as a window into Kalb’s progressive soul is her comment about the factors leading to Picasso’s genius:
“All the elements are there: a family that cultivated his creative passion, intellectual curiosity and grit, clusters of peers who inspired him, and the good fortune to be born at a time when ideas in science, literature, and music energized his work and the advent of mass media catapulted him to fame.” (2)
All but one of the determinants is either social or historical. The perspective invites efforts to duplicate the ostensible formula to manufacture more geniuses as one would follow the Betty Crocker cookbook.
Or will it, leaving aside the dangers of raising a generation of puerile know-it-alls? Who knows, but it most certainly will lead to an endless rejiggering of the public schools and the family to do it. Prepare for boundless parental how-to therapies and school reform consultancies. Helicoptering urban and suburban parents will have new and experimental reasons to micromanage their kids’ lives. The likely consequence is never-ending upheaval in the family and the schools without any glide path to improvement.
It’s the arrogance of people without much scientific acumen but possessed with media connections and some writing ability. Their writings bleed with the arrogance of a teenager’s first exposure to the rudiments of AP Physics. They know enough to profess opinions but not enough to draw back from them. They lack the deeper understanding that comes with years of study and experience with disappointments and dead ends. It’s the first blush of innocence, not wisdom.
Arrogance and myopia are related. Arrogance blinds a person to other possibilities — like, you could be wrong. He or she wallows in a mental rut, lacking the means to question prior assumptions. In fact, the person’s imagination can’t go very far since many hunches about reality go unrecognized.
Such is true in the June issue’s jeremiad against plastic. Arrogance and myopia go hand-in-hand.
More telling than Goldberg’s editorial stance against plastic is the location for the scene at the top of her page (above). It depicts a huge mound of plastic bottles in … Bangladesh. Do we have a global plastic problem or a disposal problem in poor countries? Goldberg would have us leap over that question and go right to a global ban, or some approximation of it. So, a litter problem in South Asia means an American motorist can’t buy an affordable and accessible bottle of water at a convenience store on a hot summer day? Forgetting your canteen when you jump in the car may mean a meandering hunt for a water fountain in a strange town.
Indubitably, activists would recognize the complication and address it with the tried-and-true “surcharge”, CRV, etc., to be layered on top of all the others of prior crusades. They’ll justify it as a down payment on their favorite rhetorical gambit, “social cost”. The term is flexible enough to encompass any penalty for behavior that doesn’t hew to their wishes. Myopic do-goodism has a built-in inflation factor.
People being people, they will adapt to this new normal as the recent CRV assessments and plastic bag and straw bans have shown. To feel better about it, though, any number of academics can be recruited to add a gloss of “science” to what is, in essence, an ideological expedition. Right away, starting on p. 15, we get exposed to “Greed vs. the Common Good” by Dylan Selterman.
The piece is, at root, an attempt to condone an expanding array of governmental measures to control individuals. This is how Selterman does it. First, he accepts as a given Garret Hardin’s famous pet theory, the “tragedy of the commons”. The tragedy, according to Hardin, lies in the natural incentive to overuse and abuse things held in common, such as air, land, and most other resources. The reasoning is that you don’t own it; you don’t care; you wish to grab as much of it for yourself as possible; and consequences be damned. Selterman concocts a game to convince the youngins in his University of Maryland psychology classes of the divinity of the concept.
Though, is it true? As in many misleading beliefs, a faint inkling of truth can be buried deep within. Yes, things owned by nobody, least of all the user, can quickly look the worst for wear. Ask any parent handing the car keys to the teenage son. Unpleasant side effects normally accrue to things lacking a personal and direct investment on the part of the user. Expect the car to look different when you get up in the morning.
The last time I checked, parents can still impose controls on the minors under their roof. Now we get to the rub of it all: Selterman/Hardin/Goldberg turn our basic conception of government on its head. To avoid the “tragedy”, their logic places government in the parental role as the citizens are relegated to wayward children in need of a leash. Forget about the “government of the people, by the people” parts of Lincoln’s famous line, or Jefferson’s admonition “that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God”. (3) Instead, these mavens call for an unaccountable EPA commissariat from the international level down to one’s humble abode. Ineluctably, popular sovereignty is mangled into one man/one vote/one time as power increasingly accrues to an army of apparatchiks.
Yet, must the “tragedy” logic lead to despotism? No. Rather than resort to commissars, the despoliation can be avoided with more private ownership, not less. The enclosure movement in England of the 17th century, spurred by acts of Parliament, did more to ignite the second agricultural revolution than any other single event. Land became fenced with personal title of ownership. It became more productive and resulted in the beautiful rural English countryside of today. No tragedy there.
Furthermore, the title of Selterman’s article is a false dichotomy by positing a hostility between “greed” and the “common good”. The war between the two isn’t the done deal that Selterman would have us believe. Adam Smith became the famous Adam Smith due to his articulate exposition of the beneficial intersection of “greed” and “common good”. As Smith laid it out, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”. The insight explains the difference between an American supermarket and the streets and stores of today’s Caracas, Venezuela.
The problem with the obsession over the “common good” is the unavoidable question about whose “common good”. Maduro and company of Venezuela have an answer. Theirs!
Positioning an unaccountable United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) – with our unaccountable EPA hitched – into the role of arbiters of human activity would be to supplant popular sovereignty with a board of Maduros. The new potentates can’t possess enough knowledge for decision-making without massive and negative unintended consequences. We’ve been down this road many times before in the USSR, the countries behind the Iron Curtain, Mao’s China, Maduro’s Venezuela – indeed anywhere the “common good” was the excuse to translate good intentions into sweeping state controls.
The real tragedy would be to recapitulate the dreadful history of the USSR’s experience with its cadre of overseers. America’s blue dots are replaying the scenario. High taxes and powerful buttinsky bureaus proliferate in places run by de Blasio clones. Bans on everything from super-sized drinks to happy meals to all things plastic are blue-dot chic, now actively seeking a home in DC’s halls of power. Not content with localized efforts, the activists seek the whip hand of a centralized state, the one most removed from people’s daily lives. The crusade is revving up with Susan Goldberg’s National Geographic magazine at the tip of the spear.
Back to the June cover story. Biography is telling. Well, who is Laura Parker, the author of June’s “Plastic” cover story? She’s a journalist and self-employed writer with past and current homes in Seattle, Detroit, Washington DC, and maybe New York City. Her education consists of a BA in Communications – the degree of choice for today’s journos – from the University of Washington, and appears quite proud of her Neiman Fellowship at Harvard.
She conspicuously displays one of the fetishes among our urban “elect” (to borrow John Calvin’s famous term for the “saved”): environmentalism. From her LinkedIn page she writes, “As a staff writer at National Geographic, I cover climate change and water–including the decline of underground aquifers to sea-level rise and the huge mess that plastic trash is making of the world’s seas” – a concise confession of faith in the citified dogma if there ever was one.
The worldly church of environmentalism brooks little confidence in capitalism while fondling a conviction for social engineering. It’s the quintessential doctrine for reimposing a form of feudalism with its new aristocracy: politicized technocrats and degreed ideologues. The models are Robespierre and Lenin, not the disinterested “experts” of the early progressives’ dreams.
Marx tried to turn history into a science inexorably leading to his preferred social order. Robespierre, Saint-Just, and the rest of the Jacobin crowd of 1793 imposed their version of rationality as “pure reason”. Lenin, the community organizer par excellence, took Marx’s rhetorical pugilism and cooked up the political means to impose it. The Jacobin brain trust and their Committee of Public Safety marched off in 13 months 16,594 souls to the guillotine and other creative methods of execution. The real history – not the “science” of Marx’s fevered imagination – is a sorrowful tale of the rule of centralized pedants.
Our blue dots are awash in the philosophical underpinnings of self-righteous pedantry. Pregnant with implications is the fact that the French Revolution was a Paris affair with its mob in the vanguard. Similarly, Lenin’s claque extended control from Petrograd and Moscow with the help of urban radicals, his so-called “vanguard elite”. A slog through the multi-part series on the Russian Revolution by both Aleksander Solzhenitsyn and Richard Pipes, with Simon Schama’s Citizens (French Revolution) thrown in for good measure, would prove enlightening.
The cities are famous for their innovations in the arts and technology, but also in new forms of inhumanity.
The zealotry for environmentalism – the only thing that functions as a vibrant religion in metropolitan America – cries for some definition. It has many postulates. First among equals is man’s bastard status in relation to nature. Nature is often mindlessly inferred as a unitary being by the movement’s clergy (Pope Gore?). The concept has all kinds of room for Planned Parenthood, unbridled abortion, euthanasia as both mercy and merciless killing, PETA, and any greenie scheme to control and remake us in appeasement to the mother goddess. The word “balance” seems out of place in the paradigm. It’s meant to.
The normal, run-of-the-mill utilization of nature – you know, like mining, lumbering, building homes and factories – becomes much more difficult as people struggle through the state organs run by a new godless clergy with the enlightened gnosis. Since only the new secular priesthood are entrusted with the mysterious truths, the hoi polloi must be supervised. The emphasis – and emphasis makes the big difference between popular sovereignty and Pol Pot – is “control” and not the greatest possible freedom in accord with decency. Thus the love of bans like the current political fad of blackballing plastic.
Parker’s article in National Geographic is an example of their disfigurement of Kierkegaard’s leap of faith. There’s a leap, but it’s a jump from plastic in the oceans to plastic elimination. She mentions the source of much of the problem – Asia – but she appears to be in a hurry to get to her favorite solution: eradication of the stuff. She’s got the impatience of Lenin.
Laura, let’s slow down. If the source of the problem is in Asia, then the solution is in Asia. But before we get to the talk of solution, as the saying goes, context is everything. Asia’s context in many places is one of grinding poverty from which much of it is just beginning to emerge as free market capitalism makes its halting, contorted, and meandering march around the world. Public sanitation is a persistent problem. One basic choice for the masses in such places is between potable water in a plastic bottle from a Nestlé factory or cholera in the village well. It’s a mistake that a friend experienced in the Philippines when he avoided the tap water but not the ice cubes in his hotel room’s freezer. Montezuma was avenged.
Under these circumstances, clean water is more reliably and inexpensively distributed in plastic bottles than anything else known to man or woman, or the other 38 or so genders imagined by our urban betters. Until an expensive sanitary grid is in place for taps, the 16-ounce bottled water of Nestlé , Unilever, and assorted knock-offs are the only practical option for a Bangkok worker on the go.
And what does the worker do with the bottle when finished? Of course, he throws it out the window. It’s what we used to do before the crying Indian public service ads of the 60’s and 70’s. It’s what poor people in poor countries still do without blinking. It’s a matter of values. Outside the super-rich enclaves in most places around the world, filth is common; litter is common.
A poor resident of Guatemala City isn’t so concerned about Santa Barbara urban aesthetics as he or she struggles to survive on a dollar a day. Talk to a rich-country anyone who’s spent many years outside the Anglosphere and Europe. You become inured to the litter, and when you return home, a formerly considered filthy area suddenly looks like the home of a germaphobe (a person with a compulsion to clean excessively).
If there’s a need for consciousness raising, it’s at the level of the denizen of the third world and not a people who look upon littering as a sin akin to assault and battery. But when our hypersensitivities meet with third world reality, we frequently end up as Green Peace activists.
Something the first world activists won’t recognize is the real source of their anxiety. It’s something that they can’t handle nor recognize. These scions of our suburban/urban sophisticates can’t come to grips with the realization that the mass of the world’s population don’t share their neatness values. What muddles their thinking and makes it easy to avoid the obvious conclusion is the airy notion that all cultures are equal. The idea disarms our privileged activists. It might be considered the second doctrine of environmentalism, and every other lefty cause for that matter. So, plastic must be banned everywhere and not just for the people who produced the dilemma.
The approach is a blind alley when practiced in other fields. A teacher can’t establish classroom discipline by constantly admonishing the whole class. The problem is concentrated on a few individuals. It’s easier to make a general indictment than engage in the unpleasantness of one-on-one encounters with the few malefactors. As a consequence, the innocents begin to dislike the teacher as much as the hellions. From there, it’s downhill. Such is the lefty approach to the problem of plastic litter. In the end, we avoid coming to grips with the principal cause: South Asia has a litter problem!
And more than that, it has a sanitation problem. And more than that, it has a government problem. And more than that, it has a wrenching poverty problem. And more than that, it has a corruption problem. And more than that, it has an infrastructure problem. And more than that …. Such countries aren’t going to look like the manicured landscapes of Bel Air.
But anyway off we go on the merry crusade to eliminate plastic from the face of the earth. The circus may be fun, replete with bucket-list trips to exotic locales and foundation-funded conferences in affluent resorts to meet with the like-minded. But is the scare well founded? Is plastic really a bonafide boogeyman? The answer requires more of Parker than a chronicle of littered beaches and breakdowns of plastic bags into nano-particles.
A comparison of alternatives would prove useful before we pack for the Davos trip. Surrogates for the typical light-weight plastic bag (high density polyethylene, HDPE) come up short for their harmful environmental impact, or so says a 2011 study by the Environmental Agency of England. Alternatives to the light-weight plastic bag included bags composed of HDPE laced for decomposition, bio-degradable starch/polyester, paper, heavy-duty low-density polyethylene(“bags for life”), heavier duty polypropylene (“bags for life”), and cotton (“bags for life”).
Consider the “bags for life”. They must be reused between 4 to 131 times (cotton) before they equal the environmental benefits of the disposable kind. Counter-intuitive? Maybe, if your exposure to science is limited to “Bill, the Science Guy”. (4)
What about cross-contamination and the hazards of washing chemicals associated with “bags for life”? Cross-contamination involves the danger of spreading pathogens from an unwashed bag to the contents of your Safeway cart. From there, who knows where it spreads.
It has happened. Check out this story from 2010. An Oregon teenage soccer player fell ill with an awful norovirus that quickly spread to teammates. As NBC reported, “The girl had been very ill in the hotel bathroom, spreading an aerosol of norovirus that landed everywhere, including on the reusable grocery bag hanging in the room. When scientists checked the bag, it tested positive for the bug, even two weeks later.” The snacks in the reusable shopping bags feeding the kids then infected the team. (4)
How many people are going to wash the things after every visit to the supermarket? One study presents good grounds for skepticism. You should be too.
Rather than wipe out an entire industry, wouldn’t it be better to run the familiar public service ads, organize voluntary trash collections, and establish something kindred to solid waste management in the developing world? They would have to do it anyway as poor people in poor countries become richer to afford more stuff, much of it disposable, with or without plastic. The people in these countries now have the wherewithal to access potable water that also happens to portable … in plastic bottles. Whereas before, they wallowed in sewage and cholera. Next on the national development list is anti-litter campaigns and solid waste management. Speaking of evolution, that appears to be the normal progression if our experience is any guide.
Do we really need to resort to death squads on a mission to destroy the plastics industry? Take it away and we have a mess. Saran Wrap works wonders in protecting our foods from insects and airborne pathogens. It functions better than blood-soaked wrapping paper seeping onto a “bag for life”. In short order in tropical climates things start to stink. Plastic is cheap – thus making things affordable for the average person – and wonderful for human health. Plastic provides too many benefits to ignore. Now poor countries need to stop being poor in the means to dispose of all forms of rubbish, let alone plastic. Also, try some crying ads.
Inconvenience seems to be an important part of the blue-dot weltenschauung. Its urban purveyors won’t be happy until they run us out of our air conditioning, bungalows, cars, guns, and almost anything sold at a Walmart. All this while afflicting us with high taxes, high-priced everything, and the entanglements of nanny state regulations.
Hedonism, though, is ok, particularly of the sexual variety. It’s part-and-parcel of the disrepute in the blue-dot world for old standards and norms. It is ironic that nearly everything is subject to control and governmental manipulation except matters dealing with sex and gender. The irony might dissipate if one sees it as additional site preparation for the brave new world.
There is little self-reflection by these politicized technocrats and degreed ideologues in our urban centers. For them, it all makes so much sense as they wallow in their confined mutual admiration society. They may not even be aware of their biases. In that sense they are both myopic and arrogant as they brook no opposition. The Bible, conservative Christians, Christian bakers, gun owners, advocates of limiting marriage to couplings who can consummate it, etc., are to be steam-rolled in the paving of the road to nirvana – a blue-dot nirvana.
At its most basic level, the divide in our politics is a philosophical one with a geographic dimension.
RogerG
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