38-year-old Vivek Ramaswamy running for the Republican presidential nominationInside Pride Month 2023 at TargetDylan Mulvaney and Bud Light
Two things are on today’s docket: Vivek Ramaswamy’s star is rising and Bud Light and Target are still crashing. Regarding the former, Ramaswamy is pandering to the Trumpkins in the GOP. He’s trying to be a 38-year-old Trump but without the ugliness. He’s risen to second place in some state polls. Astonishingly, Bud Light and Target have jumped onto the gender-confusion/teenage-genital-mutilation bandwagon, as if their customers want to hear from them on the culture war. In both cases, what foolishness. Who in their right mind would think that any of this would pass the smell test?
Trump’s powerful presence in the GOP is making the party a reflection of his unlikeable persona for a functioning majority of the national electorate. By that, I mean disliked by those not siloed behind the increasingly constricted walls of MAGA world. As many Trumpers cling ever so tightly to him with each indictment, other and far more numerous GOP-leaning demographics fly the coop, no matter the imbecilities of the Biden clan on the other side of the political ledger. Democrats win by making the other guy more detested than them.
Vivek wants the nomination and will say anything to get it. For him, as an investment guru, everything, including politics, is transactional – i.e., you get something (the nomination) by paying something (pandering to the Trump crowd). What comes out is pure, unadulterated poppycock.
Have you heard Hugh Hewitt’s interview of Vivek from August 14, 2023 (transcript and audio below)? Vivek announced to the world a green light for Red Cina to invade Taiwan after 2028. You heard me right. Imitating his mentor (DJT) in the use of blunt and stark terms, no matter how asinine, he declared,
“I’m being very clear: Xi Jinping should not mess with Taiwan until we have achieved semiconductor independence, until the end of my first term when I will lead us there. And after that, our commitments to Taiwan, our commitments to be willing to go to military conflict, will change after that, because that’s rationally in our self-interest.”
There you have it in Ramaswamy’s words: Don’t mess with us until after my term ends and we have transplanted Taiwan Semiconductor and/or a good portion of the world’s semiconductor industry to our shores within reach of our IRS, EPA, and our ascendant neo-Marxists. After that, Taiwan, my friend, you’re on your own. Done.
MAGA is thrilled because no more “forever wars”. A President Ramaswamy looks tough in announcing a four-year delayed abandonment in “Trumpian” words. Well, for Taiwan, starting in 2029, enjoy the Taipei May Day parades of the People’s Liberation Army.
When pressed by Hewitt about the astounding repercussions, Vivek began repeated non-clarifications with “Let me make myself perfectly clear.” Making oneself “perfectly clear” is a poker-tell that you’re not going to be clear. He continued to insist on sending a huge naval force to the area but backed away from the will to use it. What’s the point? Thugs need to face real threats, not an armada that would blithely move out of the way for the PLA’s amphibious and aerial assault. The will to use it must be conveyed along with the deployment of the Pacific Fleet. Without the will, it’s an empty bluff.
Vivek, try to be something more than talking like Trump while acting like Jimmy Carter, Obama, or Joe Biden. It isn’t a good look for you, nor is it good for the country.
I would say, “Thank God, this guy isn’t president”, but then I have to glance over at the current occupant. Whew, what a mess, what a choice. Sadly, for this investment exec, transactional thinking doesn’t necessarily incorporate strategic calculus, such as the loss of Taiwan producing a gaping hole in the first island chain for the burgeoning PLA Navy to flood the Pacific. Vivek will do nothing but reinforce among our allies our habit of abandonment when things get messy. Remember Vietnam, Bill Clinton’s 1990s dithering with Al-Qaeda, Obama’s Iraq pullout and red line in Syria, and Biden’s Afghanistan bugout? And now Taiwan?
Our potential and current friends and allies will certainly remember. A lack of steadfastness and reliability won’t bode well for alliance-making. Who’d want to be our friend?
At that point, it will be America alone as the export part of our economy dries up in the face of a cordon of CCP satraps. If you think that Biden and company is making a hash of our way of life, wait for a President Ramaswamy and his 20-30% hit (value of our exports) to US GDP after his forced retreat to fortress America. We would be in Great Depression territory. Speaking of transactional thinking, Vivek’s pandering to the no-more-forever-wars constituency will have real world costs. We’ll quickly learn the value of alliances as we get crushed under a depression-ignited, debt-fueled, and bulging safety net.
Vivek’s foolishness can be chalked up to youthful rashness. What’s the excuse for the seasoned big wheels at Anheuser-Busch and Target? Or, are they “seasoned”, by whom, where? Who thought that a man (Dylan Mulvaney) trying to compete and look like a bulk of their customers’ wives and girlfriends would be a nice way to expand the Bud Light brand? Who thought that the family-friendly Target, with many a mother with children in tow, would be an excellent venue to advocate gender confusion and same-sex amory? It’s unfathomable.
At this time, Bud Light’s sales continue to plummet. They can’t give away the stuff. Whereas, at the beginning of the year, it ranked #1.
Alissa Heinerscheid, the Bud Light advertising exec behind the Dylan Mulvaney endorsement
The person most responsible for the debacle was Bug Light’s 39-year-old advertising exec Alissa Heinerscheid. Her classroom pedigree is impressive: Groton, Harvard, Wharton. But is such a distinguished pedigree a marker for success for the company and its products? We’re at a stage in our history when people need to question the idea that business acumen is a product of overhyped degrees from institutions who have been diminishing in excellence for years.
It probably never occurred to Alissa that expanding the brand in one direction could lead to lead to a dramatic contraction in another. This is a person who was marinated in a cocoon far removed from the lives of the people who buy the goods. She may know of the average Americans’ way of life, but it’s a kind of knowing absent the intimacy of actually having lived it. For her, “beer” meant European or craft. In her rarified social atmosphere, sex rebels are a cute social appurtenance; they’re kind of cool.
However, for the bulk of Bug Light’s consumers, it’s a movement to revolutionize their lives and expose their kids to emotional harm in their crucial developmental years. They want a beer to drink at the bar-be-cue not one that is curated to advance a disturbing cause. Who would have thought that in a week someone like Heinerscheid could turn a popular product into an icon of a left-wing cultural revolution? Bud Light’s sales have dropped for 17 straight weeks. “Expanding the brand” turned into subtracting the core, and out goes Alissa, and down goes Bud Light.
It’s a similar pattern with Target. Pride Month 2023 in June heralded a drop in sales which continues into the third quarter after the geniuses in the c-suite thought that it was a good idea to plaster the kids’ department in pride flags, introduce a line of “tuck friendly” girls’ swimsuits, and carry children’s products from Abprallen, famous for their Satanist line. What accounts for what can only be described as bizarre decisions? Like Bud Light and its determination to link with a TikTok “influencer” for transgenderism, these decisions arise out of people who were acculturated in a peculiar environment at odds to the life lived by most people who’ll never experience the Groton-to-Wharton social pipeline. The c-suite is simply out of touch, and grossly so. It’s as if they came from a different planet, and don’t realize it.
A Pride Month display at a Target store in Dickson City, Pa. (photo: Ted Shaffrey/AP)Idealized Target board meeting from its website. They’ve certainly got the look of the ignorant and naive.
Both cases are abject lessons in how to clog the bankruptcy courts by making yourself detested. The quality and affordability of the good or service is made irrelevant. Simply seen walking from the parking lot into the store, or being seen with the blue can in your fridge, now could brand you as an endorser of extremist causes.
It’s more complicated than “go woke, go broke”. The turn-off won’t come from the Groton-to-Wharton crowd. Anyway, their Maserati won’t be seen in the parking lot or with a 12-pack in the passenger seat. More accurately, it’s “go woke and half the country will be suspicious of what you’re selling”.
Meanwhile, from the right comes the youngish business savant, anxious to be president, who is completely out of his league regarding foreign relations and national security, adding greater urgency to the possible uses of the phrase “idiot savant”. Along with much of the c-suite, their self-confidence is so grand that they will court disaster for all of us.
Michael Ramirez is great for a comical portrayal of our current condition. Could fear of being “cancelled” drive the corporate brain trust to endorse left-wing cultural causes?
RogerG
Read more here:
* Transcript and audio of High Hewitt’s complete 8/14/23 interview of Vivek Ramaswamy: “Vivek Ramaswamy On All Things National Security” at https://hughhewitt.com/vivek-ramaswamy-on-all-things-national-security?highlight=vivek%20ramaswamy
* “Who Will Heed the Lessons of Target and Bud Light?”, Jim Geraghty, National Review Online, 8/17/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/who-will-heed-the-lessons-of-target-and-bud-light/
County of San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Mayor Londond Breed centerSan Francisco Mayor London Breed
Many of our debates are vastly off-kilter. It begins with hugely consequential things. Republicans seem intent on foisting Donald Trump on the country again. The Democrats are focused on making a shambles of our country. The former makes the latter more likely. The abhorrent DJT is simply too ugly a face for the GOP to succeed among a national electorate.
It doesn’t stop there. The so-called solutions have the maturity and depth of understanding of locker room humor. Trumpkins insinuate that the country needs a Tasmanian Devil (of Looney Tunes fame) to fight, fight anyone, anyone coming from any direction, making enemies of friends. The Dems and their fellow cultural revolutionaries (their inspiration: Mao), after creating swaths of wreckage from their cuckoo ideas, want the help of people, who they have habitually tarred, to clean up their mess.
For the revolutionaries in power, more cops to reverse the doom loop of places like San Franscisco is much less feasible of an option after years of decriminalizing criminality and the branding of cops as racists. What they just don’t get is the fact that once the slide is initiated, like an avalanche, it’s awfully hard to stop. This class of revolutionary ruler is emotionally and mentally ill-equipped to address the situation.
The carnage is glaringly obvious to all. Type “doom loop” and/or “San Francisco” in YouTube’s search field and you’ll see. The list of major retailers abandoning the city is too well-known to require mention here. The two largest downtown hoteliers prefer foreclosure to continuing operations among the filth and crime. The iconic Westfield Mall has discovered a similar affection for foreclosure. San Francisco is the donkey party’s policies taken to their logical conclusion.
Mayor London Breed quipped in support of additional funding for public safety, “San Francisco must be a safe and just city for all”, and her fellow-travelling potentates on the Board of Supervisors responded with an additional $60 million in funding for the Police Department and 220 more officers. I don’t know what 220 more cops will be able to accomplish for residents, under the guise of the same ravenous Red Guards who created the situation, except spend a whole lot more money for more uniforms, training, equipment, and compensation with little real power to do anything to clear the public spaces. What high-quality candidate for SFPD recruitment would be willing to step into that minefield?
My guess is, if the same clowns are running the show, that things might marginally improve, but “marginally improve” is a bit like “marginally mugged”. It’s still going to be horrible, and managers responsible for many employees will recommend Zooming (stay home) if at all possible, instead of running the gauntlet.
A view of the troubling walk to the entrance of the San Francisco’s Federal Building
And that includes federal employees at the downtown federal building. HHS Assistant Secretary for Administration Cheryl R. Campbell issued the following advisory to SF district managers earlier this month, “In light of the conditions at the (Federal Building) we recommend employees … maximize the use of telework for the foreseeable future.” Even with the added cops, any return to the office workstation won’t survive the next assault.
Nancy Pelosi’s well-publicized pleas won’t matter squat if the people in charge fundamentally still think like her. That’s the crux of the matter: the critical mass of politics in San Francisco is infatuated with the power of the state to create Shangri-la and the view of the world through the lens of systemic victimization. So long as that sticks between the ears, decline becomes more than an option. It’s a perpetual reality.
Ideas matter, and boy do they matter. The clowns in San Francisco City Hall just don’t get it.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “HOW SAN FRANCISCO BECAME A FAILED CITY”, Nellie Bowles, The Atlantic, June 8, 2022, at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-francisco-became-failed-city/661199/
* “Federal workers in San Francisco told to work remotely ‘for the foreseeable future’ because local crime is so bad”, Chris Morris, Fortune Magazine, August 14, 2023, at https://fortune.com/2023/08/14/remote-work-federal-workers-san-francisco-work-from-home-crime-drugs/
Creating the New Soviet Man (and woman, and whatever) necessitates control of the social mechanisms that transmit culture. The German leftist of the 1960’s, Rudi Dutschke, coined the slogan “der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen” – the long march through the institutions – and thus compacted the strategy to a neat little quip.
Let’s face it, a radical leftist is a Marxist who has adopted the rhetorical flair of a claque of history’s Marxists – Antonio Gramsci, The Frankfurt School (Institute for Social Research and Herbert Marcuse, et al) – in expanding the list of the oppressed to include the “nots”: not white; not white and male; not white, male, hetero – you get the picture. The doctrine then begins to overwhelm the culture once the revolutionaries shed their shaggy hair, jeans, and sandals and don tweed, professorial beards, pant suits, and gain tenure. After that, their nonsensical ideological peccadillos permeate everything from Supreme Court opinions to PBS’s “American Experience” films.
The crux of the strategy involves conjuring a statistical disparity between a hypothetical gender/race overclass and the radicals’ favored “minorities” – aka the “oppressed” – and then a jump to one of the many “isms” and “phobias” (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia) as the cause. The numbers are connected to a preconceived cause – a predetermined ism/phobia – by only tenuous threads of logic and fact, at best. Once you hear or read the shambolic reasoning, if you haven’t been previously indoctrinated and still retain your wits, you will be left scratching your head at the flight of fancy’s chutzpah.
That titan of pure reason, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who refused to define woman in her confirmation hearing, injected an extension of the tactic (statistical disparity and leap to predetermined cause) in her dissenting opinion in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC. According to her, without the racial favoritism of “diversity” gamesmanship in college admissions, black babies will die. Citing a study in one of those prestigious but newly radicalized science journals in the “long march through the institutions” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), she expounded with all the confidence of an excessively opinionated sophomore, “. . . for high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.” So, in her ill-reasoned reasoning, a B-average student from a poorly performing school should have precedence over a straight-A one who faced a more demanding curriculum, with race being the deciding factor. Got that? We’re back to racism.
The problem: Jackson’s study is bogus. Even the study cites a miniscule five one-hundredths of a percent (99.96% v. 99.91%) difference in the survival rate of black newborns between black and white doctors. Diving into the flotsam of this shipwreck, the number of infants is too small to support such a tiny difference and the study’s conclusions. The study’s methodology screams “high margin of error”.
Not only that, it relied on generalized Census data which meant that in many cases the race of the attending physician couldn’t be determined, or whether the treatment was from a nurse, physician’s assistant, midwife, or a doctor. Other relevant factors were left on the cutting room floor, such as the plethora of social factors that aren’t evenly distributed through the population under any circumstances. To conclude that these social disparities are further proof of systemic racism merely nestles one more logic-leap into the general logic-leap. Welcome to the mental miasma of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Our intertwined schools and media prepare the ground for this buffoonery. Many teachers incorporate PBS documentaries into their curriculum (I did). Today’s “American Experience” (AE), though, isn’t the AE of a decade ago. It’s gone woke. Two episodes – “American Oz” and “Flood in the Desert” – illustrate the corruption. Many of the contributing “experts” clearly worship at the altar of the groupthink. If you wanted to learn a little about L. Frank Baum and his Oz creations, you would, along with a heavy dose of racism, sexism, and genocide against “indigenous peoples”, adding at least another 30 minutes to the program. The collapse of St. Francis Dam north of Los Angeles in the 1920’s can’t proceed without cis-gender white male racism, sexism, and the overall patriarchal contemptuousness for Gaia.
The productions are littered with interesting facts . . . and a heavy dose of generational sneering. It’s as if the production staff see themselves as a class of pure, enlightened deities passing judgment on those in the past who didn’t have the opportunity to be civilized at the feet of the great master, Marcuse.
The films are dripping with hubris, but what have these Marcuse acolytes wrought? Inspired by the same mindset – maybe without the Molotov cocktails, riots, killings, and arson of their Antifa military wing – many of our cities, at the mercy of this governing philosophy, are in a doom-loop. Go ahead, spend time travelling the surface streets of the doom-loop corridor from Seattle to San Diego, or Chicago (hire a protective private army), or the Bos-Wash corridor on the east coast. If you avoid hepatitis or HIV, or cholera, from the litter of hypodermic needles and the open-air poop on the sidewalks, you may not survive the mugging. The only thing in abundance, besides the filth, is the desire of residents to flee. Marcuse-thought is a boon to U-Haul.
Who should be sneering, today’s half-witted who think themselves Olympian in their wisdom, or our ancestors? Let Mark Twain cut to the quick:
“What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
And our modern nincompoops know a whole lot that “ain’t so”. . . to our peril.
The New Man (or woman, or whatever) is a new man, woman, or whatever, mired in a hellscape. San Francisco is the canary in the coal mine. The bird is passed out on the floor of the cage. Go ahead, YouTube search “San Francisco doom loop”. Watch the video clip below, and this is what our post-modernist, neo-Marxist big wheels are proud of? It’s shameful, absolutely shameful.
Here’s another one from a slightly different angle with the same conclusions:
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Dissent Repeats Debunked Claim About Black Doctors”, Sarah Weaver, The Daily Caller, July 2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/justice-ketanji-brown-jacksons-dissent-repeats-debunked-claim-about-black-doctors/ar-AA1dgRln
* The study that Jackson cites: “Physician–patient racial concordance and disparities in birthing mortality for newborns”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, August 17, 2020, at https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1913405117
* Both “American Oz” and “Flood in the Desert” can be view on YouTube.
Protester yells at cop in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing
Have you ever been confronted by young activists with a cocksure belief in their righteousness and your malevolence? I have as an academic of way too many years. Unbeknownst to the youthful firebrand, their understanding is as shallow as a street puddle, and filled with rhetorical generalizations for which they have devoted too little time and thought to review.
Shout the slogans and it’s off to the barricades. It’s the plague of our time, the plague of arrogance of the young and too many adults who should know better.
Of course, I am referring to our woke moment. Being “woke” is the neo-Marxism (often called post-modernism) of reducing all our social reality to a dialectic of oppressor/oppressed with power, explicit or implicit, covert or overt, governing all relationships, public and private. Karl Marx devised the scheme for socioeconomic class. Others in the 20th century chimed in with race, gender, and sexual orientation. It’s the same old spiel of reducing everyone to faceless groupings by pigment, genitalia, and bed partner.
There’s no need for individuals in the paradigm. Toss out the corpus of Christianity, the Ten Commandments, and individual accountability and redemption while you’re at it.
Our time is lacking humility, especially among the youth on our college campuses. While shouting down an appeals court judge – as what happened recently at Stanford – the disruptors were consumed in their self-anointed rectitude and acted like it. Their condemnations of American and western man past and present are absent any of the reserve of the thoughtful.
The indispensability of humility was captured in the music of Kenneth Branagh’s “Henry V”, particularly “Non Nobis Domine” after the Battle of Agincourt. The piece stems from a composition by Philip van Wilder in the 16th century to commemorate the advent of Christ and thanksgiving. The line in the lyrics from Psalms 113:9 that captures the theme is “Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but to thy name give the glory” (KJV) (Latin: Nōn nōbīs, Domine, nōn nōbīs, sed nōminī tuō dā glōriam).
It’s an admonition against pride and its accompanying arrogance. Today’s young campus extremists would do well to take notice.
Dr. Meredithe McNamara testifies as an “expert” witness on gender-affirming care to Congress, July 12, 2023.
As if to warn us of the “expert” trap, Christopher Baur of University College London wrote in Research Square,
“Expert opinion is the lowest level of evidence because it is highly prone to bias. Compared to all levels of evidence above, experts are more likely to selectively choose evidence that confirms their prior assumptions or beliefs, may be more prone to conflicts of interest, and may be so selectively focused on one field that they lose sight of the broader picture, which biases their perspective. Expert opinion should be viewed cautiously and not necessarily taken at face value.” (see below)
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Please watch Rep. Dan Crenshaw take apart Dr. Meredithe McNamara, an “expert” of gender-affirming care – i.e., chemical and surgical interventions in adolescents. If you want to see an example of an “expert” debasing themselves, the clip is very enlightening.
First, notice the “expert’s” self-confidence bordering on arrogance when she began a response to Crenshaw with “Sir, are you aware . . .”, when he was. Many “experts” aren’t aware that they are partisan activists for an ideology. Yes, ideology. Break it down; it isn’t rocket science, or any other real science. The care begins with a child’s self-diagnosis and from there many children could very well be placed on a treadmill to transition, i.e., puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and the removal of body parts. If it was my child, I wouldn’t let the kid come within 10 degrees of longitude of that “doctor”.
People like McNamara aren’t “experts”. Truth be known, they are social revolutionaries. She couldn’t, when pushed, name a single scientific review of extant studies to buck up her opinion. Her only refrain was a banal recourse to “Standards of Care” of the movement’s evangelists in the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). Given the group’s stridency, it may as well be WARPATH.
Dr. Meredithe McNamara tried the same schtick in testimony before the Florida joint medical board committee on her favorite hobby horse: gender-affirming care – i.e., chemical and surgical interventions in adolescents. You can read about it here: “Pro-Pediatric Gender Transition Doc Gets Slammed By Medical Professionals For ‘False Claims’”, Christina Buttons, Daily Wire, Nov. 19, 2022, at https://www.dailywire.com/news/pro-pediatric-gender-transition-doc-gets-slammed-by-medical-professionals-for-false-claims.
With “experts” like these, we might be better off with tribal shamans.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Christopher Baur can be read at “What is the Hierarchy of Evidence?”, Research Square, Nov. 17, 2021, at https://www.researchsquare.com/blog/what-is-the-hierarchy-of-evidence
Transgenders going topless at the White House recently
Iran’s ruling class of fanatical mullahs regularly bashes the United States as the Great Satan. The question is, are we at this juncture trying to prove the rabid imams right?
American embassies display the LGBTQ+ flag throughout the world, including societies who maintain millenniums-old proscriptions on homosexual and other unconventional sex-related behavior. Such norms are deeply, culturally embedded and thus resistant to change by embassy flag waving or ambassadorial pronouncements. U.S. government interference in domestic affairs will probably be met with a native-born counter revolution. An Ibo tribesman walking the streets of Lagos might not give much thought to the rainbow flag on the U.S. embassy building, but once informed, chances are, he’ll meet the flag’s meaning with disfavor, and, by so doing, begin the long mental process of seeing America as the enemy of his way of life.
The pride flag on the US embassy to the Vatican, of all places
The view of the United States in these traditional societies may emerge as one resembling Babylon in much traditional Christian eschatology. Babylon symbolizes evil. God’s wrath awaits it in the last days. Similar apocalyptic scenarios exist in Islam. Certainly, discrimination, execution, and torture of homosexuality is an affront to decency, but don’t expect societies with little in common with San Francisco to be so gung-ho in embracing our sexual revolution.
Are we alienating more than the vast majority of the world’s population who live in traditional societies? On many fronts such as pushing pernicious pedagogy, glamorizing our hedonistic cultural revolution in our movies, the propagation of our faddish neo-Marxist “equities” nonsense (the woke stuff), greenie extremism, etc., America is at the tip of the spear. And, now, we have staked out the most extreme position on transgenderism and “gender affirming care” (GAC), far beyond where our European colleagues in western civilization are willing to go.
Consider: gender dysphoria is the only branch of health care in which a self-diagnosis is the basis of treatment. More commonly, your doctor’s most requested input from you is, “It hurts there.” Then, he would apply his training, knowledge, and experience. In many places today, anyone, a kid or adult, can come into a health care facility and express disenchantment with their gender and from there it could easily be a quick path to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and reassignment surgery – the so-called “gender-affirming care” (GAC). It’s the kind of logic-jumping that one associates with an ideologue, for that is what transgenderism is. How do you turn the self-diagnosis of “I feel” into objective, physical, empirically-validated truth? It’s nonsense. It’s simply the possession of a strongly-held belief and it’s off to radical action. Caution, alternatives, and disagreement cannot be tolerated, the true signs of an ideology at work.
As one would expect, California has its fingerprints all over America’s newfound sexual extremism. As is true with all extremists, there’s no room for other views, which leads the radicals to try to control the state in order to criminalize disagreement. “Gender-Affirming Care” (GAC) is all the rage for America’s progressive ruling class. The treatment formula is simple: GAC = drugs and surgery, with a little psychological push known as “counseling” for good measure. Those who disagree may even lose their kids. California is busy passing laws to lay the long arm of the law on parents who dissent from the California legislature’s party line.
More about California in a moment but one thing must be made clear: unsurprisingly, many of its most enthusiastic proponents come from people who’ve “transitioned” or parents who encouraged their own children to embark on this irreversible course. The transgender Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine is the current US Assistant Secretary of Health, and vocal advocate of doing to kids what he/she did to himself/herself. To keep justifying his decisions to himself, and seeking solace in making it easier for others to follow the same path, he engages in outright lies when he says, “. . . there is no argument among medical professionals about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.” Anything goes for an ideologue. The lie is obvious, as you’ll see in a bit.
US Assistant Secretary of Health Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine
Such arrogant and condescending overconfidence is displayed by California Assemblywoman Lori Wilson. So strongly does she seek reaffirmation for her encouragement of gender transition for her own child that she wrote AB 957. Her choice, her opinion of “gender affirming care”, is written into the bill, and parents who favor a different approach could lose custody of their children in divorce proceedings. If it’s such a good idea for custody battles in cases of divorce, there’s no obstacle to its application to all families. Previously, the California Department of Social Services issued a mandate for fealty to “gender-affirming care” (drugs and surgery) for foster-parent applicants. Anything goes for an ideologue like Wilson and California regulators. These zealots reside in a state whose governing class thinks – or, more honestly, wishes – that the issue is settled when most clearly it is not.
California Assemblywoman Lori Wilson
Wilson’s legislative monstrosity is the latest in a line of California-sponsored extremism on transgender experimentation, with our kids as guinea pigs, sometimes over the protests of the kids’ parents. Residing in another state is no protection. If your child in Florida is bombarded with hints of gender dysphoria on TikTok and is anxious about his or her parents’ reaction, that anxiety can find a release without parental consent or knowledge in an underground railroad to California under SB 107 (2022, effective Jan.1, 2023). Your kid arrives in California, God knows how, the state takes your kid into “protective custody”, the child can undergo “transition”, and the Golden State’s authorities are prohibited from notifying the parents if the offending state restricts the medicinal and surgical mutilation of adolescents.
In an act of life imitating art, California has turned itself into H.G. Wells’ “Island of Dr. Moreau”, a place where a Dr. Moreau creates hybrid animal/humans by vivisection. California has turned itself into an island where hybrid boy/girls with an irreversible chromosomal composition in almost every cell of their body will now be subjected to puberty blockers, constant and life-long infusions of cross-sex hormones, and extensive reconstructive plastic surgeries to create XY girls or XX boys. Call it human gender vivisection.
A scene from 1977 film adaptation of “The Island of Dr. Moreau”
Of course, the zealots need a crisis to stampede an unknowing public into accepting these drastic measures. An alleged epidemic of teen suicide fits the bill. There simply is no credible evidence that anything pushed by Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine or Lori Wilson – their “gender-affirming care”- has any positive effect on the suicidal tendencies of self-proclaimed gender dysphoric teens. Historically, the crisis-of-the-moment tactic is a favorite of radicals wishing to rationalize their extremism. But if you strip away the rhetoric, stare at the issue with strict rationality, it’s horrific.
A warning label should be affixed to California: “Warning: this state is dangerous to your mental and physical health.” One California State Senator, Scott Wilk of Santa Clarita, put it succinctly on June 13, 2023, in referring to Wilson’s bill, “If you love your children, you need to flee California.” Los Angeles resident and journalist Abigail Shrier, who is facing social persecution for not adhering to the party line, advises parents with children in schools afflicted with a transgender social contagion, “The moment you hear that [your child’s friends are transitioning or using “non-binary” language to describe themselves], get your kids out of that school!” To effectively do that, you may have to go state-shopping.
California State Senator Scott Wilk (R, Santa Clarita)
California has become a threat to the nation and world because what you see passing through the state legislature and across the governor’s desk is also the official outlook of the state’s fellow travelers running the show in the federal government. It’s going national. The loyal opposition is cornered in a narrow majority in one half of Congress. The executive branch and its ruling donkey party ape the donkey party’s super-majorities in the California legislature. And what they are doing is swimming upstream as our cultural amigos in Europe are having second thoughts about the transgender zealotry.
Clearly, for many in the European continent’s health care establishments, this rush to malform a child’s body has become deeply troubling. While formerly in the forefront of “transition” therapies in “gender-affirming care”, lately they have decided to pull back. In the UK, the brakes were put on it by a lawsuit. 23-year-old Keira Bell sued the National Health Service (NHS) and its Tavistock Centre gender identity clinic for improper care and treatment of her gender dysphoria beginning at age 16. Other young victims are waiting in line to take their crack at the country’s medical malpractice.
Keira Bell, as a boy after transition (r) and now after detransition
An independent investigation by pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass chronicled practices at the clinic like the hurried and inordinate use of puberty blockers – by the way, originally used for chemical castration – which were prescribed for Bell after only three visits. In a report, the BBC’s Alison Holt wrote of Tavistock, “Former staff at the clinic have raised concerns that teenagers who want to transition to a different gender are being given puberty blockers without adequate assessment or psychological work.” It’s been a persistent complaint going back to at least 2009. A year of puberty blockers for Bell was followed by three more years of male hormones and a double mastectomy (breast removal). Indeed, “without adequate assessment” appears to be the nature of “gender-affirming care” at Tavistock and elsewhere, and the core complaint of the suing victims. Bell won. In the end, after the Cass report, the July 2022 obituary for the Tavistock Centre was announced by the UK’s National Health Service.
The Travitock Centre in London
Scandinavia, long a pioneer in transgender treatments, is having serious second thoughts and is making a mockery of Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine’s boast of one mind among “experts” in lockstep support of drug and cutting-induced changes to a child’s body. The Dutch let loose the tiger of “gender-affirming care” (GAC) for children in the 1990’s, but now are saying “Whooooaaaaa”! They are in the process of revising their earlier enthusiasm for what later came to be called “The Dutch Protocol”. As Dutch researchers Jan Kuitenbrouwer and Peter Vasterman wrote in their report on “The Dutch Protocol” about the use of puberty blockers, the first medical intervention in “transition”,
“More and more is becoming known about the long-term side effects of puberty blockers. They interfere with physical sexual development, hinder the development of the bones, can cause anorgasmia and infertility and interfere with the ability to make rational decisions.”
The Swedes, Finns, and Norwegians haven’t ignored the mounting evidence by 2022. A Finnish review of “gender-affirming care” recommended restrictions and a preference for talking therapy. Sweden’s medical authorities warn that the risks of GAC “currently outweigh the benefits.” Norway’s health care regulators expressed similar caution. French medical authorities chimed in with much the same worries. As it turns out, America stands out as the “wild west” in nearly unrestrained teenage genital mutilation in service of a radical ideology.
The appearance of a rising number of detransitioners and a growing recognition of a social contagion in gender dysphoria is making the contentions of Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine preposterous. Many young people regretting the hash that people like Levine have made of their lives will end up ranking “gender-affirming care” right up there with the race theories of Dr. Walter Gross, Hauptstellenleiter of the National Socialist Office of Racial Policy. Studies of detransitioners are all over the map but one U.S. study found that nearly 30% of transitioners stopped and reversed their medical interventions within 4 years, this in spite of the great social pressure to go through with it. For the push for transition, we don’t need droplets to spread a virus since the cell phone will do quite nicely.
Dr. Walter Gross, Hauptstellenleiter of the National Socialist Office of Racial PolicyNorman Spack of Boston’s Children’s Hospital and an early enthusiast of “gender-affirming care”
The social pressure comes in the form of a social contagion. Unlike COVID-19 whose vulnerable are older adults, the vulnerable are the impressionable, the young who are digitally getting the gender dysphoria virus. All of a sudden, it’s tween and teen girls, instead of boys, who are overpowering the stats according to Lisa Littman, formerly of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine and currently Director of The Institute for Comprehensive Gender Dysphoria Research. How did this happen? The culprit rides in that rectangular device planted in your teen’s pocket. Social media on that screen plays to the comorbidities of gender dysphoria such as teen girls’ insecurities, mental conditions like autism, an exaggerated sense of envy, etc. Gender-affirming care’s reliance on teen self-diagnosis skips over the real problems. The mask is mistaken for the real face and off we go into the mutilation of children.
Any adult worth his or her salt, particularly those who raised kids, would know that kids aren’t very good at medical analysis. But the official policy of the U.S. is to not know any better than a teen as we push the rest of the world to join us in treating children as lab rats. Worse: practice gender vivisection to create hybrid boys and girls out of our offspring. Imagine America as the avatar of teenage genital mutilation. I’m sorry but that’s not a good look.
RogerG
Read more here:
* California Assemblywoman Lori Wilson’s AB 957 can be accessed at https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB957/id/2698894/California-2023-AB957-Introduced.html
* California’s SB 107 is described at “Newsom signs bill to make California a refuge for transgender youth and families”, Brooke Migdon, The Hill: Changing America, 9/30/22, at https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/equality/3668922-newsom-signs-bill-to-make-california-a-refuge-for-transgender-youth-and-families/. The bill can be read at https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220SB107.
* An examination of gender dysphoric suicide can be read at “Does ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ For Trans Kids Actually Prevent Suicide? Here’s What The Data Say”, Jay P. Greene, Ph.D., Heritage Foundation, 6/15/2022, https://www.heritage.org/gender/commentary/does-gender-affirming-care-trans-kids-actually-prevent-suicide-heres-what-the
* Scott Wilk’s comment on the danger that California poses for the state’s children can be found at “State Senator Warns About New Gender-Affirmation Law: ‘If You Love Your Children, You Need To Flee California’”, Real Clear Politics, 6/15/23, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2023/06/15/california_state_senator_warns_if_you_love_your_children_you_need_to_flee_california.html
* The story on Keira Bell and the UK’s Tavistock gender identity clinic:
• “Tavistock transgender clinic could face mass legal action ‘from 1,000 families of children who claim they were rushed into taking life-altering puberty blockers’ weeks after NHS shut it down in wake of damning report”, Martin Beckford, The Daily Mail, 8/11/2022, at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11101661/Tavistock-transgender-clinic-facing-mass-legal-action-1-000-families.html
• “UK court rules against trans clinic over treatment for children”, Rachel Savage, et al, Reuters, 11/20/2020, at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-lgbt-transgender-trfn-idUSKBN28B3AV
• “NHS gender clinic ‘should have challenged me [Keira Bell] more’ over transition”, Alison Holt, BBC News, 3/1/2020, at https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51676020
• “Shuttering the Tavistock”, Bernard Lane, Quillette, 8/5/2022, at https://quillette.com/2022/08/05/closing-the-tavistock-is-an-important-step/
• “Courage of the parents, patients and whistleblowers who refused to be silenced is revealed as controversial Tavistock children’s transgender clinic is to SHUT after damning report warned it was ‘not safe’”, Martin Beckford, The Daily Mail, 7/29/2022, at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11059641/Courage-parents-patients-whistleblowers-revealed-Tavistock-childrens-clinic-SHUT.html
* National Review has been forthright is presenting counter-arguments to the ones advanced by transgender activists:
• “California Is Losing Its Mind”, the editors, 6/14/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/06/california-is-losing-its-mind/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second
• “The World Is Turning against Gender Experiments on Children”, the editors, 6/13/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/06/the-world-is-turning-against-gender-experiments-on-children/
• “The U.S. Is an Outlier in ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Minors”, Madeleine Kearns, National Review Magazine, 5/25/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/06/12/the-u-s-is-an-outlier-in-gender-affirming-care-for-minors/
* The Dutch are beginning to recognize caution in regards to “gender-affirming care”: “The Dutch Model is falling apart”, Rose Kelleher, Genspect, 1/2/23, at https://genspect.org/the-dutch-model-is-falling-apart/#:~:text=The%20decision%20of%20the%20well-respected%20Dutch%20newspaper%20NRC,and%20impairs%20their%20future%20ability%20to%20have%20children.
• The Dutch rethink about GAC began with a report in the Dutch newspaper NRC: “Trans Care Must Also Meet Medical-Scientific Standards”, Jan Kuitenbrouwer and Peter Vasterman, NRC, 12/30/22, at https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2022/12/30/ook-transzorg-moet-aan-medisch-wetenschappelijke-standaarden-voldoen-a4152945
* A review of the issue of detransition, though generally supportive of transgender treatments but acknowledging the persistent presence of large numbers of people who regret their “transition”, can be read here: “Take Detransitioners Seriously”, Daniela Valdes and Kinnon McKinnon, The Atlantic, 1/18/23, at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/detransition-transgender-nonbinary-gender-affirming-care/672745/
* Lisa Littman’s groundbreaking report on rapid-onset gender dysphoria can be read at “Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria”, Lisa Littman, PLOS ONE, 8/16/2018, at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0202330
* More on rapid-onset gender dysphoria can be read in “Study of 1,655 Cases Supports the ‘Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria’ Hypothesis”, Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), 3/30/23, at https://segm.org/study-of-1655-cases-lends-support-to-ROGD
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company founder Morris Chang (Sam Yeh/Getty Images)
Mr. Chang’s comment in the title came a mere matter of months after a much-ballyhooed opening of a new Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC) facility in Phoenix, Arizona, a heavily subsidized joint effort with the state of Arizona and the federal government’s CHIPS Act. President Biden gushed during the opening ceremonies that manufacturing in the U.S. “is back, folks.” However, Mr. Chang had a hard look at the financials and concluded that the Arizona plant was a loser and the CHIPS Act ($52 billion in chip subsidies) was a “very expensive exercise in futility.” TSMC is scaling back operations at the new plant.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is building its first fabrication plant in North Phoenix. (TSMC)
Why the harsh assessment? The “folks” at TSMC came to realize that business activity in America is a much more expensive proposition than they had earlier contemplated. We are simply uncompetitive and the freebies – free infrastructure, other giveaways, tax goodies, etc. – can’t make up for the cultural, social, political, and economic deficits. The Rust Belt, California’s economic decrepitude, and the other blue states’ dismal economic futures are not magical, accidental happenstances. They are a byproduct of America’s current – and past – infatuation with government intervention for an ever-expanding list of excuses.
The Democratic Party is the institutional gatekeeper of this our bumbling central planning, with some Republicans tagging along in the hope of sharing in the reflected glory of a big and splashy event. But for the donkey party, they see themselves as the keeper of the lodestar – a sort of Ark of the Covenant – of their vision, and it is none other than the New Deal. It’s a forever template to be repeated endlessly. Of course, one must ignore the fact that it was a disaster. The depression became a Great Depression which persisted for a decade, was interrupted by the emergency of World War II, and was set to resume if subsequent Republican Congresses in the late 1940’s hadn’t interceded to quash much of the madness
Men pushing wheel barrows in Civil Works Administration project in the 1930’s.In spite of the tremendous federal government interventions, unemployment remained high throughout the 1930’s. One can conclude that FDR’s New Deal was a massive failure, hugely ineffectual, or helped to prolong the Depression. Whichever, it was a disaster.
Whenever the donkey party ascends the grimy pole of power, their favorite ploy is to imitate FDR. So, concerns of declining domestic manufacturing – which, if true, was a result of government interventions – is to be addressed by . . . more government intervention. Thus, the CHIPS Act is just another exercise in flooding the zone with taxpayer moneys like in the heady days of FDR’s meddling.
True, today, Trump and his cadre of “populist” Republicans also love the idea of slathering gobs of the public treasury on favorite obsessions such as manufacturing and employing the stick of government intervention in tariffs to protect their golden boy. They don’t have the smarts to understand that it’s central planning by another name. Call it “industrial policy”. It’s a rebranded New Deal for a new era of demagogues and nitwits.
Why did this latest effort at what doesn’t work fail? Mr. Chang belatedly noticed that he entered the snake pit that is America. The Rust Belt of the Upper Midwest became a rusty belt of abandoned factories, expanding slums, chronic unemployment, and a declining tax base because of the unrestrained greed of government-empowered labor unions, onerous taxation, and the country’s ascent to the zenith of reregulating its economy. Much of what made the Rust Belt rusty remains, and gets a boost whenever the donkey party is granted the keys to the kingdom.
Think about all the ways that America is an economic snake pit. Ever since FDR’s New Deal lavishly spent and bullied farmers, workers, and entrepreneurs for a decade, Democrats have assiduously worked to revive the monster. The 1970’s rise of environmentalism replaced the 1930’s corporatism and socialism as the go-to excuse to bring back the Leviathan. Out came the well-intentioned Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and their subsequent amendments, and herd of agencies and regulations.
California has a housing crisis for the same reason that Mr. Chang has a gloomy attitude about chip manufacturing in Arizona, or any other place in America. Permitting and the host of other approvals easily doubles the cost of plant construction as compared to Taiwan. Additionally, labor costs are through the roof: triple, maybe four times the cost of Taiwanese workers when you factor in all the mandated benefits alongside the higher wages and salaries. Don’t expect these numbers to remain the same for long if local lefties discover America’s proven appetite for hiking the minimum wage. The jump in wages for fast food workers ripples through the economy all the way to the plant floor.
The quality of what economists call human capital is another troubling factor. Chief among the attributes of human capital is a robust work ethic, which includes timely, quick responses to problems at work. Shang-yi Chiang, TSMC’s head of research and development, was quoted as saying, “people worked so much harder in Taiwan.” He cites the example of an equipment failure at 1 a.m. being immediately repaired by 2 a.m. in Taiwan. In America, the plant has to wait till 10 a.m. He concludes about the island’s workforce, “They [workers] do not complain, and their spouse does not complain either.”
SEIU picketers chant while sitting and marching during the county union workers (SEIU 1021) strike held at the Solano County Governement Center plaza, Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2015, in Fairfield. (Steve Reczkowski/Daliy Republic)
Of course, panderers at Fox News or MSNBC, and “populists” everywhere, would counter with something about Americans not being wage slaves, or similar rhetoric. But they ignore the time when Taiwan’s Horatio Algierses were actually Americans of the 19th century. A cursory biographical reading of the lives of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Ford, etc., reads like Chaing’s depiction of the average Taiwanese employee. Did we lose our va-va-voom in an avalanche of modern self-satisfaction, self-esteem, and victimhood indoctrination?
Indeed, indoctrination is the watchword in describing much of American public education today. As for teaching math, science, reading, history, literature, and civics, the academic core, NAEP scores have stagnated at embarrassing levels if not fallen. Proficiency in U.S. History and Civics by eighth-graders currently hovers around 14% and 22% respectively. The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) shows a significant step down from Taiwan to the U.S. in academic performance in math and science.
The differential would probably be much worse if the U.S. hadn’t experienced a large influx of Asians over the past few decades who are still somewhat immune from our pop-cultural depredations. They dominate enrollments in elite high schools and college programs in math and science to such an extent that Big Academia practices covert reverse discrimination against them, treating them as “white” in this new era of blatant DEI racial favoritism.
Yes, friendly foreign investors face a snake pit of an ill-prepared labor pool, one with a declining appreciation for hard work, and an economic environment plagued by a host of collectivist busy bodies who are heavily bankrolled by the hyper-wealthy possessing the means to insulate themselves from the insipid consequences of their lofty ideals. Analogies work best in describing this state of affairs. A snake pit is an accurate depiction of the economic ecosystem but flies-to-cow-paddies or maybe piranhas-in-a-feeding-frenzy is a much better fit for our government interventions of regulation and subsidies. American government brings to the table its retinue of rent seekers and socialistic/neo-Marxist partisans to muck up the works. Throw out the money and regulatory power and like flies or piranha this brood shows up to feed on the carcass. Apparently, TSMC doesn’t relish being viewed as cold meat on the side of the road.
Welcoming TSMC with the CHIPS Act, our government hid the regulatory “guardrails” (Biden’s word) that turned the well-intentioned into a feeding frenzy. The law to replant chip manufacturing in the U.S. was saddled with mandates for favored demographics, our adversarial labor unions, greenie canards, and DEI and ESG and all the other acronyms of the hard left’s political project. As in “Arbeit Macht Frei” over the gates of Auschwitz, the “CHIPS Act Notice of Funding Opportunity” welcomes recipients of this government largesse. This gamut of insidiousness in the “Notice” was the translation of the Act’s language by the Department of Commerce and the National Institute of Standards and Technology into an expensive regulatory morass.
Since analogies work best, quicksand is more accurate than “revitalization”. “Revitalization” means to make healthy again, but health isn’t the actual goal. The CHIPS Act was just another vehicle to advance a political and cultural revolution. And these revolutions are expensive, and two centuries of experience shows them to be descents into a life of, in Thomas Hobbes’s words, the “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.
Beware of our government’s handouts. Our dole didn’t benefit the poor – if their neighborhoods are any indication – and they won’t benefit anyone operating with a bottom line.
RogerG
Read more here:
* For a account of the New Deal, go to the following: The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, Amity Shlaes, Harper, 2008. The “forgotten man” in the title is a reference to the average worker, taxpayer, and businessman, not to the Left’s litany of the “oppressed”.
* The situation involving TSMC’s Arizona chips plant is appraised in “Why the CHIPS Act Will Fail”, Jordan McGillis (Manhattan Institute) and Clay Robinson (Arizona State graduate student), National Review, 5/11/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/05/29/why-the-chips-act-will-fail/
* For American student academic performance turn to “US eighth-grade history, civics scores fall to 1990s levels”, NewsNation, 5/3/2023; “Reading and mathematics scores decline during COVID-19 pandemic”, NAEP, National Center for Education Statistics, 2022, at https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2022/
* “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology”, Chris Miller, Scribner, 2022.
I have no plans to ever return to California for a visit or otherwise, absent a necessity involving a dear friend or relative. Every visit after my relocation to Montana has only reminded me of the reasons for my departure in the first place, and it’s only gotten worse.
Concerns for the state of my birth are not limited to me. Traditional Democrats of many generations, such as the Alioto family of San Francisco, are shocked by the descent of their city into lawlessness. They have yet, though, to come to grips with San Francisco being the canary in the coal mine. Large swaths of the state are sliding into the same dystopia. The problem is more than San Francisco.
For Angela Alioto, ex-member of the SF Board of Supervisors and Board president and daughter of the famous two-term mayor Joseph Alioto, she exclaimed that “It’s not my city” in a recent interview. You can watch it below. Pay close attention to her description of the near-death experience of a retired SF Fire Commissioner confronting violent homeless drug addicts on the request of his elderly mother just below her window and doorstep. He was more than assaulted. He was maimed with a crowbar and left with probable brain damage.
Not every city in the state has fallen into such despair, but they all experience the decay to some extent. Filth and mayhem, like smog, seldom respects boundary lines on a map. One thing’s for sure: no Californian can escape the state’s predilection to decriminalize various social pathologies, remove vagrancy laws off the books, tax and regulate their residents to high heaven, expunge entire criminal statutes through flagrant non-enforcement, etc., etc. When a person is more likely to face hard time for driving an unsmogged car than repeated smash-and-grabs, you know that a majority of the state’s electorate has edged closer to delusional.
Californians won’t get a better run state until a more well-balanced electorate shows up. One must face up to the fact that this state of affairs wasn’t an accident. It was voted into office. Please grab a cup of coffee and watch the interview. It might influence your decision to pay a visit to the City by the Bay.
RogerG
Watch it here:
* If you have difficulty viewing the video, that’s because it went “private”. It happened after I initially linked it on Facebook.
Screenshot of the Portland Police Bureau “LGBTQAI2S+ and Queer Policy – Introduction and Training” video. (photo from Portland Police/YouTube)
Portland’s cops were subjected to a characterization of life that is stranger than anything in George Orwell’s 1984 from 1949 (see below). The “Pronoun Training” was actually pure indoctrination in a set of highly contestable beliefs where self-delusion is to be treated as non-delusion. This episode is stranger than anything Winston and Julia were expected to believe by their interrogator O’Brien in Orwell’s story.
The “stranger than fiction” notion could be attributed to Lord Byron, or maybe it was Mark Twain when he wrote, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” I guess that Twain meant that good fiction must be believable and therefore must stick to possibilities that are limited to the imagination of the author. Real truth, by contrast, isn’t so constrained.
Of course, you’d have to believe in “real truth” which many younger generations have been schooled to assume doesn’t exist. “Real truth”, after all, is a “construct” of the systemic rule of the powerful over the weak, which is the blind faith on our college campuses, and pure Marxism. The stifling dogma leaves the campus mind-censors free to make truth into whatever they claim. Their “truth” became instantly compelling after they succeeded in their long march through the institutions and into the c-suite, government, media, schools, the NGO world, etc., and it’s everywhere.
In such a world, as in Orwell’s 1984, 2+2=5. It is indeed strange for the life of today to conform in so many unexpected ways to the world of Orwell’s 1949 depiction of his fictious Oceania. Language is deformed to make 2+2=5 the “real truth”, or in our case XY people to be treated as XX (and vice versa). Thus, we have many mini-O’Briens running around as consultants getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to convince us that 2+2=5.
By the use of a rhetorical distinction between “gender” and “sex”, the now inconsequential sex-at-birth is magically replaced by the now more compelling sex-of-the-mind, all accomplished with a little word play. And cops, and everyone else, are expected to act as if the artificial reality is actual reality. Whew, the mind reels at the multiple realities like the permutations of the multiverse coming off DC/Marvel drawing boards.
The understandable reaction when confronted with gibberish is to rebel. Believe me, in the span of the 30-year career in education, I’ve been exposed to a lot of “training” in what was absolute drivel. I have an appreciation for the cops’ critical reaction to this latest blather.
“Patronizing,” “childish,” “offensive,” “garbage,” “unnecessary”, “This training is vile”, and the like were indicative of the backlash from attending cops in anonymous feedback (see below). Rather than exercise a little prudent self-criticism and reexamination, the consultants heaped abuse on the recipients by referring to the comments as examples of “racism, ableism, or white supremacy”, and therefore more “trainings” will be necessary to convert the subjects to the approved way of thinking, and a bigger tab beyond the current $440,000 consultant’s fee on the back of Portland’s taxpayers. The paid consultant Dennis Rosenbaum, the O’Brien in this real life story, stands to get richer as he works to convince others that the unbelievable is believable.
This isn’t “training”; it’s indoctrination of the kind routinely found in totalitarian regimes. One can only hope that the indoctrination remains “nice”, but “nice” frequently morphs into “compulsory” with sanctions for not conforming to the zeitgeist. For not having the approved thoughts, which will always slip out in unanticipated ways, your life may be ruined. We’ve gone way beyond accepting 2+2=5. Indeed, modern life is stranger than old fiction.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Much thanks to Ryan Mills in his article, “Portland Cops Rip ‘Hilariously Ridiculous’ Training on How to Interact with ‘LGBTQIA2S+ and Queer Communities’”, 5/2/2023, National Review Online, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/portland-cops-rip-hilariously-ridiculous-training-on-how-to-interact-with-the-lgbtqia2s-and-queer-communities/
* The actual feedback from the “Pronoun Training” can be found at https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Equity_Training_Comments_Redacted-1.pdf
October 2020 – Scientific AmericanNature – 15 October 2020
The communist rulers in the old Soviet Union gradually came to believe that opposition to them was more than a different point of view but symptomatic of mental illness. Dissent from Karl Marx’s mental prism was tantamount to being emotionally disturbed. They developed a form of pseudo-scientific psychiatry to suppress disagreement, and the same thing is germinating in the United States: the distortion of science to pursue political ends.
In the USSR of the 1960’s-80’s, a pseudo-scientific jargon was invented to give The Science the sound of legitimacy. An entire fake science was cobbled together by a professor of Soviet psychiatry, Andrei Snezhnevsky of the impressive sounding USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. His diagnosis of “sluggish schizophrenia” and “delusion of reformism” was applied to anyone whose beliefs led them to renounce their atheism, attempt to immigrate, engage in protests, or practice a faith. If you think that it’s not happening here, think again.
Andrei Snezhnevsky of the USSR Academy of Medical SciencesLeonid Plyushch in 1976, after his release from a mental asylum where he was held for years by the Kremlin. (photo: Agence France-Presse)
Let’s be clear, “The Science” must not be confused with science. It’s an institutionalized variant of science that carries with it all the norms of organizational man/woman/whatever. People in organizations don’t behave like man/woman/whatever in their natural and private settings. A group personality coalesces around shared expectations and norms and frequently morphs into shared opinions. Once a shared attachment to collectivism takes root, for instance, the organizational politicization of science will soon follow. It’s happened, and is happening.
Our science is increasingly politicized to promote highly contentious opinions. Disagreement is persecuted as ignorance and bigotry, and maybe even attributed to a disturbed emotional comportment. Ideologically partisan journalists such as Chris Mooney in his books “The Republican War on Science” (2005) and the follow-up “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science — and Reality” come close to imitating Andrei Snezhnevsky when they hide their glaring political opinions under the cloak of “The Science”.
Chris Mooney
The tactic of branding your political opponents with dementia isn’t limited to Mooney. Express some skepticism about the extravagant and ideologically tinged claims on highly debatable issues from climate change to transgenderism to systemic racism and you’ll face a fusillade of abuse and threats to your livelihood, and maybe jail time if they can get away with it. Having these forbidden thoughts isn’t a career enhancer. You’ll be erased off the ledger of respectable humanity. The word “denier” serves the same purpose as “sluggish schizophrenia”.
Zeks (gulag prisoners) in Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” often referred to “beyond the wire” (or something like it) for the world outside the camp. In today’s politics masquerading as science, the equivalent of zeks, or “deniers”, are accused of straying “beyond the wire” of the approved mental prison – synonymous with “scientific consensus”. Straying beyond the wire is the excuse for the gatekeepers – er, mental prison guards – to put The Science at the service of a particular political party, the Democratic Party, who helps keep the fence electrified, and at the disservice of the other who questions the very existence of the camp in the first place. Political endorsements by science figureheads, organizations, and their publications have followed, and to the detriment of their reputations as they come to be viewed as just another collection of political hacks.
It hasn’t occurred to the guards that naturally non-political organizations and their participants – think professional sports: NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, etc. – alienate half, maybe more, of their clientele when they identify with one side in the country’s political divide. It’s a no-brainer: endorse Democrats, anger Republicans. At least half the public, maybe more, begins to see them as little different from a super-PAC. Buying a ticket or product of the compromised enterprise is perceived as the equivalent of a political donation. The same political self-labeling occurs when scientists step into partisan battles and the culture war.
Phil Jackson, the famous coach of the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers, doesn’t watch the NBA because it’s too political (see below). When players were allowed to festoon their jerseys with political slogans and obscuring their names, his grandkids recounted a particular play with “Justice went to the basket and Equal Opportunity knocked him down.” It’s funny if it wasn’t so tragic to the sport. And now The Science is turning off people in like manner.
The culture war, or revolution, has a clear partisan flavor to it. The high-stakes contest is one of revolution and counterrevolution with the D’s in the vanguard of the revolution and R’s trying to put the brakes on it. The journal “Nature” in 2020 jumped with both feet into the cultural and partisan war in a ringing endorsement of Joe Biden. In an editorial that could have come from Biden’s campaign staff – or Stalin’s chief prosecutor in the show trials, Andrei Vyshinsky – they branded the R’s candidate as “accelerating climate change, razing wilderness, fouling air and killing more wildlife — as well as people.” Trump may be a lot of things, but singlehandedly obliterating the planet is a bit of a stretch. This is the language of the zealot, not a lab scientist grappling with a hypothesis.
Not to be outdone, as if on cue, “Scientific American”, the sister magazine to “Nature” (same publisher, Springer Nature), issued a partisan clarion call in an October 2020 editorial titled “Scientific American Endorses Joe Biden” (see below). Their hyperbole descends into the same political septic tank: “The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science.” The hubris is astounding. They claim to own The Science and the zeks must be kept from straying “beyond the wire”.
Eight term Democrat representative Rush Holt, Jr., was chosen to lead the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the publisher of “Science” and other prominent journals. A partisan bias in The Science?
But they don’t own the science; they own a collection of political opinions. At the root of these opinions is an affection for collectivism. It’s the one thing that unites the denizens of The Science. Somehow, in their mind, collectivism became the thinking man’s (or woman’s/whatever) ideology. They were perhaps blinkered by an academic marination in it without knowing it. It was embedded in their insular classroom instruction as undergrads. Hayek’s freedom-based spontaneous order, or anything like it, was never allowed to grace their intellects.
A constrained education is woven with an endemic apocalypse-mongering which turns all issues into calls for collectivist action: it’s existential and therefore we can’t afford free markets, freedom of conscience, capitalism, or anyone practicing real science which is based on a healthy skepticism of extravagant claims. A healthy scientific intellect would raise eyebrows at hysterical calls to eliminate an entire car fleet and transportation system in the span of twenty years. A healthy scientific intellect would raise eyebrows at burdening an already overstretched grid with electric-everything and radically shifting it to low-density energy after banning high-density. This isn’t science. It’s ideology on the march.
Not unlike The Science in the Soviet Union. The gambit is the same: make the science an adjunct of the politics and then weaponize it against your political opponents. It’s a very dangerous thing to do for a country in an increasingly perilous time. It’ll ruin us. Khruschev did say, after all, “We’ll bury you.” Well, we’ll bury ourselves.
RogerG
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* Much thanks to the work of Christine Rosen of the American Enterprise Institute in “The Folly of Nature’s Biden Endorsement”, 3/30/2023, National Review Online, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/04/17/the-folly-of-natures-biden-endorsement/
* “NBA champion coach Phil Jackson says he doesn’t watch basketball anymore because it got too political”, Lauren Sforza, The Hill, 4/23/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/other/nba-champion-coach-phil-jackson-says-he-doesn-t-watch-basketball-anymore-because-it-got-too-political/ar-AA1aeBfW
* “Scientific American Endorses Joe Biden”, Editors, The Scientific American, 10/1/2020, at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientific-american-endorses-joe-biden1/
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