California State Teachers Retirement System headquarters in Sacramento, Ca.
Really, can I sue California’s STRS, the state’s teacher pension system? I would think that I have standing. After all, I am receiving a CalSTRS pension. Why would I sue? They are imperiling my pension. Simple.
How are they harming the integrity of my pension? It comes in three letters – ESG – and, to no great surprise, California is all into it. The initials stand for “environment, social, governance” and the plan is to impose these political abstractions on the entire business sector including finance, which also includes pension investing. In practical terms, ESG means the grab bag of leftwing causes from transgender ideology to the crusade against “systemic racism” to climate-change apocalyptics. The purpose is to strongarm businesses into leftwing causes with the use of the mother’s milk of business – capital – capital even from pension members.
A leading advocate among mega-financiers for ESG under label of “sustainable” is Chairman and Chief Executive of BlackRock, Laurence Fink. Here he speaks during a session at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos January 25, 2014. (REUTERS/Ruben Sprich)
The State of Utah is suing – that is, suing Standard and Poor’s (S&P) for assessing the state’s financial stability and credit worthiness according to leftwing metrics (ESG), or how diligent the state is in furthering leftwing causes such as hostility to the firearms industry and energy companies. Since the electorate of Utah doesn’t have the political sensibilities of gun controllers, BLM, the progressive ladies of The View, or the Sierra Club, the state’s financial status and bonds get downgraded by S&P acting in the role of the Left’s hatchet man. If the state’s electorate doesn’t pay heed to the fascinations of a college Sociology faculty, their bonds get branded “B” (junk). The purpose is to jeopardize the state’s financial health if they don’t come to heel.
Public-employee pension funds are particularly prone to the sway of the zealots, especially CalPers and CalSTRS in California, already under the direct thumb of an off-the-charts progressive one-party state. Out goes the standard fiduciary rule of working in the best interests of the client, in comes a redefinition of “best interests” to involve the political inclinations of those like Gavin Newsom wanting to risk the pensioners’ contributions and ultimate payout on Solyndra-type ventures and away from investments that until yesterday were pro forma.
In the case of a public-employee pension system, “best interest” can’t be limited to managers taking dictates from powerful and ideologically pretentious politicos. Contributions come from everyone from Marxists to NRA members in general funds like CalSTRS. The only real requirement is to be a teacher of the requisite number of years. The one thing that they all have in common is being retired and spoiling their grandkids. If any of them want to fund the antics of The Squad, they can do it from their pre- or post-retirement income, not beforehand after a deterioration of potential payouts to every beneficiary by Gavin Newsom’s preferences.
Kentucky’s AG, Daniel Cameron, senses the chicanery as well. He hit the mark with a letter to the state’s pension fund managers when he warned them about ESG investing because it would “violate statutory and contractual fiduciary duties.” He continued, “There is an increasing trend among some investment management firms to use money in public and state employee pension plans — that is, other people’s money — to push their own political agendas and force social change.” Those fiduciary duties might apply to California as well.
Daniel Cameron, Kentucky’s AG
A favorite tactic to make ESG seem legitimate is to label the opinions of the Left a matter of “science” and a product of a “consensus”, therefore irrefutable, therefore “misinformation” if challenged, therefore above and beyond the standard rules of fiduciary responsibility. This new “science” – the scientific truth (?) of Leftist opinion – is actually a “science” without the scientific method. Think about it: What scientist comes from an experimental test of his/her hypothesis with the observation that the results are wrong because they violate a “consensus”? The whole exercise is as nonsensical as handing over my pension’s investment portfolio to the screeching ministrations of Greta Thunberg or Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
But here we are at a place where we can’t challenge the destruction of a pension because anyone who disagrees is censored as a “denier”. So, the Left gets carte blanche with the money for my old age. I don’t think so. Send lawyers, guns, and money. Oh, drop the “guns” part and let’s sue.
I identify with Warren Zevon’s predicament in his song “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”. The lyics:
“I went home with the waitress, the way I always do
How was I to know, she was with the Russians, too?
I was gambling in Havana, I took a little risk
Send lawyers, guns and money, dad, get me out of this, ha
I’m the innocent bystander
Somehow I got stuck between the rock and a hard place
And I’m down on my luck, yes I’m down on my luck
Well, I’m down on my luck
And I’m hiding in Honduras
I’m a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns, and money
The shit has hit the fan
Alright, send lawyers, guns, and money
Huh, yeah
Send lawyers, guns, and money
Uh
Send lawyers, guns, and money
Hey
Send lawyers, guns, and money
Oo, yeah
Yeah
Yeah”
Zevon’s performance of “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”:
RogerG
Read here for more:
* “Follow Daniel Cameron’s lead, purge every hint of ESG from your state’s finances”, Washington Examiner, Nov. 4, 2022, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/faith-freedom-self-reliance/follow-daniel-camerons-lead-purge-every-hint-of-esg-from-your-states-finances .
* “Utah pushes back against pro-Putin ESG financial analysis”, Washington Examiner, May 2, 2022, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/utah-pushes-back-against-pro-putin-esg-financial-analysis .
The admissions building at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (HADLEY GREEN / The New York Times, file)
Benjamin Disraeli (19th century British politician, Prime Minister, and writer/philosopher) in his book “Sybil, Or the Two Nations” wrote of the deep split of a people into two camps, almost nations, each completely estranged from the other:
“Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws . . . . THE RICH AND THE POOR.”
Benjamin Disraeli
For him, the divide was between the rich and the poor, an artifact of a time of much greater hardship. For us, it is between the blue silos of a radical Left cultural ethos and the red hinterlands of the traditions of standards, faith, the rule of law, equality before the law, and popular sovereignty under constitutional checks. The former wishes to overthrow the latter.
In these isolated little blue enclaves, overwhelmingly inner cities and college campuses, the hyper-wealthy and academics can entertain ideological fancies far afield from the lives of the vast majority of people living outside, people who are actually struggling with the daily realities of living and not secure from them by walls, money, and tenured academic freedom.
How could the corporate boardroom – in the past immune – become so enthralled by this revolutionary ethos? The answer lies in the social realities of living in a narrowly confined space of limited interactions. A homogeneous mind incubates in a scene of intermarriage, secluded social engagements in a protective cocoon, and an upbringing that transmits the same campus cultural revolution in these secluded social petri dishes.
Security gate at a Beverly Hills estate
Adapting Mao’s Long March mythology, Rudy Dutschke, a leader of the German radical Left of the 1960s, advocated a long march through institutions in that 1967 time of troubles of strikes, riots, and massive protests in the West. Rather than tear the institution down, take them over, he said. Well, it happened. Yesteryear’s student radical is today’s tenured college faculty with matriculated mental offspring littered throughout the Fortune 500.
What brings this to mind? Eighty-two American companies expressed their official support for race-based college admissions, loosely referred to as affirmative action, in two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court involving the University of North Carolina and Harvard (see their briefs below). Big corporate players such as Google, Apple, JetBlue, and General Electric produced briefs utilizing the same old neo-Marxist rhetoric of group-conscious oppression. Rhetorically, the table is set for the talisman of “diversity”. Merit is redefined as being a member of the proper race or possessing the proper genitalia and calling it “diversity”. No, this isn’t diversity of opinion. It’s the diversity of immutable characteristics. Competence and a special gnosis, it is assumed, emanates from melanin count and genitalia, not from observable qualifications. It’s preposterous.
The pretzel logic required to make this scheme marketable boggles the mind. In Monday’s hearing before the Supreme Court, defense counsel emphasized the gambit of race as one among many factors but couldn’t escape withering cross examination from Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito and Barrett. The inescapable fact is that at least some admissions will be based on race, and thusly a violation of statute and the Constitutional guarantees of equal protection. Trying to hide race among the weeds doesn’t eliminate the fact that race will be determinative to award advantages to some to the detriment of others not so privileged with the right skin color and genital comportment.
How could they get away with this after a Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment, Brown v. Board of Education, and the various Civil Rights Acts in the long campaign to end the award of benefits and/or disabilities based on race or other immutable factors? The whole enterprise relies on rhetorical legerdemain and a mountain of verbiage in bastardized “studies” to the point that “studies have shown” has gained the reputation as a tipoff for ideological skullduggery. It’s a new Jim Crow favoring the radical Left’s “oppressed”.
And an afront to most people’s practical sense of fairness. There’s a reason why lady justice wears a blindfold.
Not surprisingly given their backgrounds, corporate titans have bought into it. Read the briefs and you’ll find the ritual abuse of “diversity” and “qualified”, as in “Classroom diversity is crucial to producing employable, productive, value-adding citizens in business.” Or, how about the claim that the favoritism produces “a pipeline of highly qualified future workers and business leaders”? “Highly qualified” just became an oxymoron. “Qualification” now means the right melanin count and genitalia.
The whole thing is a legal, moral, and rational trainwreck. To borrow a movie line, “Yes, Virginia, there is institutional racism”, but it’s coming from the folks who brought you The 1619 Project, CRT, the 2020 summer of BLM riots, home appliances, and annual college admission letters. Amazing, the campaign against institution racism was always about furthering institutional racism.
RogerG
Read more here:
* The corporate briefs in Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, and Harvard, can be found at https://www.naacpldf.org/wp-content/uploads/Brief-for-Major-American-Business-Enterprises-Supporting-Respondents-FINAL.pdf .
* An excellent synopsis of the case by Brittany Bernstein can be found at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/dozens-of-major-u-s-companies-urge-supreme-court-to-uphold-race-based-college-admissions/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=next-article&utm_term=first
Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez at the gala for The Rings of Power
In Tom Wolfe’s novel, “A Man in Full”, the main protagonist is the successful Atlanta entrepreneur Charlie Croker who seems to have everything but tranquility and satisfaction. His corporation is mired in crushing debt but he has all the trappings of material success, and a new, younger trophy wife. He divorced his first wife, Martha, after decades of marriage. She begins to resume her life without him by getting back in shape. She joins a gym and quickly realizes that women have changed, particularly in body type. Gone is the hour-glass figure and everywhere she notices the absence of hips among the female fitness fanatics. A female ideal has changed. She dubs these women “boys with breasts”.
Harvey C. Mansfield, Harvard professor of political philosophy, wrote the book “Manliness” in 2006. In it, he distinguished between masculinity and manliness. Masculinity can, but not always, stray into beastly behavior (“toxic masculinity”). By contrast, manliness in the ancient Greek is synonymous with “courage” and therefore tied to virtue. A manly person – for women can also exhibit manliness – would protect the weak. Bluster, bullying, and abuse is not the stuff of manliness.
Harvey C. Mansfield
Manliness must be differentiated from the modern slang of “BDE”, or “big d*** energy”. At a recent campaign rally, Keri Lake (Arizona gubernatorial candidate) introduced Ron DeSantis using the earthy initials. People enamored of Trump use it. Manliness should not be confused with brutish bellicosity.
Why mention “boys with breasts” and manliness in connection with Amazon’s Rings of Power? Simple, if the masterminds of the series, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, wanted to create a Middle-earth matriarchy, they could find no better device than to turn Galadriel into an Aragorn with breasts and refocus Tolkien’s tale on one of the three queens of Númenor, a total of three among the twenty-five rulers of the land in the legendarium. The women’s characters were crafted to portray Mansfield’s manliness but lack the charisma to inspire a drug addict into an opium den. And why the decision to exercise the creative arts to distort Tolkien’s story in this manner? I suspect that something more fundamental is afoot, like the politico-cultural prejudices of a narrow social claque that gave us Jane’s Revenge (pro-abortion terrorism) and cancel culture. They are the same crowd that ate up as gospel the wild smears against Brett Kavanaugh. The bias is everywhere in our institutions and now unsurprisingly could be corrupting this rendition of Tolkien’s Middle-earth in the second age.
J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay
Or, conversely, it could be just a terrible misreading of the public’s desires from the top of the cultural pyramid above the clouds. McKay and Payne may be doing it without awareness, mistakenly thinking that’s what the public wants.
Either way, we got an incoherent mess in this the first season. The creation of Mordor was so off-the-wall that it could have been the product of an all-night LSD-laced bull session. Tolkien’s Mordor was created by the evil super-spirit Melkor to be a land of volcanic activity. Payne/McKay make it a product of the mechanical operation of turning a sword hilt like a key and voilà we have volcanic eruptions, bursting aquifers, and pyroclastic flows. By the way, this pyroclastic flow doesn’t behave like a real pyroclastic flow. Amazingly, magically, the hurricane of super-heated deadly gasses and fine ash doesn’t kill everyone in its path. Galadriel, the queen of Numenor, and many others walk away as if they were only plastered with the dust from a shaken vacuum cleaner filter. A pyroclastic flow buried Pompeii in AD 70. Talk to anyone who fled the 1980 Mt. St. Helens eruption. Fantasy is riveting if it has some relationship to the real. This falls into the category of laughingstock.
The speeches of the matriarchy are not, shall we say, awe-inspiring. It’s not because they were made by women. They are just simply stale. Compare any of them to Margaret Thatcher’s refusal to bow to the pressure to compromise at the October 1980 conference of the British Conservative Party: “The Lady’s not for turning” (see below). Or, closer to home, Peter Jackson/Fran Walsh managed the stirring words for Aragorn at the Black Gate of Mordor in “The Return of the King” (see below), or Theoden’s rallying cry before the Rohirrim’s charge into the orc ranks in the Battle of Pelennor Fields (see below). They would steel the spine of anyone facing long odds. In comparison, the words of the Payne/McKay matriarchy are an insipid string of gibberish.
Then we have the disjunction of physical prowess and the natural female musculature and skeletal fragility of, say, the Aragorn with breasts, Galadriel. There’s a reason why actors as diverse as Christian Bale to Chris Pratt to Michael B. Jordan bulk up. It’s intuitive to match in some sense the physical action of a role with the appropriate appearance. While it’s a stretch at times, it’s an easier visual sell. But take Morfydd Clark’s Galadriel and her domineering physical antics alongside her frail muscle mass. These are muscles that would have difficulty crushing a grape, let alone wielding a heavy sword to take down the mighty men of Numenor. They’d be better casting a female MMA fighter for the role. At least the gap between the action and her appearance would be lessened. But better yet, reshape Galadriel’s character to fit Tolkien’s strengths for her.
Morfydd Clark as Galadriel in The Rings of Power
Ludicrously beefing up the female roles was evident throughout, to the point of relegating the men to subsidiary positions in the story. The Payne/McKay men are weak, petulant, or stubbornly wrongheaded. All of a sudden, Tolkien’s mighty men of Numenor become . . . ? ? ? . . . . One is left to wonder how they became so pivotal and deserving of great respect in the later trilogy. Now, in the hands of Payne/McKay, the two sagas don’t relate in a basic sense. What we have with the Rings of Power is something that appears to be an artifact of the present moment of millennials who were raised on identity politics and cultural reparations, warping everything to fit the manias of the present. Some would say that this is a “woke” LOR and in many ways they would be right.
Even for the Harfoots (proto hobbits), while they have a male leader, it’s two teenage girls in the tribe who carry the action and wisdom of the group. They dictate the clan’s thread in the story. The males are limited to being sperm donors, objects of pity, and comic relief.
Women, women, girls, girls everywhere may be alright in another context, but it isn’t Tolkien. Galadriel was strong in character, and according to Tolkien sparred with the boys, and had special gifts. She is deserving of a prominent role in any production under the byline of Tolkien. But Aragorn, or even Legolas, she is not. Tolkien’s conception for her would parallel the English history of powerful monarchs like Elizabeth I. Elizabeth was wily and shrewd, but not known for her swordplay with the Earl of Essex. An adult Galadriel would use her feminine guile, wisdom, and special powers of foresight to command a situation. Watching this production left me with the idea that this is Tolkien as the women of The View would have him.
We are not viewing Tolkien’s legendarium. In the hands of Payne/McKay, it became another exercise in the modern fixation to turn women into boys with breasts. No wonder transgenderism has gone viral and men seem to be settling into the role that Hollywood has assigned for them – as they are seemingly dropping out of the workforce, marriage, and college in substantial numbers. Will I be watching any more of it? Maybe. I’d be interested in seeing how much further this thing descends into our modern cultural rabbit hole.
Could be, I don’t know. We fellow Boomers weren’t so smart. We rebelled against self-restraint and got a world without self-restraint. Now, a pleasant afternoon stroll in Denver or New York City will be through a smokey haze of people lighting up blunts amid the staccato bursts of drive-bys.
You can’t say that the times are the best for kids. If we aren’t pummeling their future prospects with eco-nuttery and $31 trillion of debt, we are destroying their mental capacities under a barrage of toxic neo-Marxism and a campaign to turn teenage emotional instability into gender dysphoric mutilations. Not only that, with all the cultural poison at their I-phone fingertips, we suffocate their leaning behind masks, plexiglass, social distancing and an end to in-person instruction under the threat of teacher union die-hards. The results? This is the most anti-child era in living memory, if not all time, and I haven’t got to the zealous push to abort them from conception to just before the slap on the back side after exiting the birth canal. Maybe after that too. A few data points are illustrative.
Item #1: ACT Scores dropped to their lowest level in 30 years. The ACT is a snapshot of the mental astuteness of this year’s incoming college freshman class. The shamings, lockdowns, school closures, and kids living their lives in the glow of flat video screens have produced one of the most ill-prepared incoming classes of matriculants. We did it to them under the pseudo-claims of “follow the science” and “experts”. Progressivism’s blind faith in a professional-but-politicized class of bureaucrats led us straight into a dark hole, and an even darker and deeper one for our kids.
And once they get to the ivy-covered walls of state U, more stupidity awaits them. Look at what our isolated hyper-wealthy in the isolation of their hyper-wealthy foundations consider “genius”, a “genius” that will flush through the lecture halls. Item #2: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation released this year’s 25 winners of their no-strings-attached “genius” cash awards ($800,000). They’re left-wing activists. They’re “geniuses” because of it. Really. I don’t know of any veterans of the Young Americans for Freedom or Federalist Society getting the phone call.
The winners check all the preferred boxes of today’s race/gender neurotics. Two-thirds are women and 19 of the 25 were recruited from the so-called “marginalized”, all of the approved biases. No Candice Owens or Winsome Sears (Virginia lt. gov.) types were obviously considered. Somewhere, among the sanctified, you might find someone of the wrong genitalia and melanin count but still certainly, along with the rest, of the right ideological orientation.
Patrisse Colours, Black Lives Matter co-founder and the picture of “intersectionality”, Black/female/Gay.
Patronizing mediocre artists (Amanda Williams) and a chattering class of whiners (Kiese Laymon, etc.) with the title of “genius” will degrade it like “real estate agent” after the collapse and serial fraud in the Florida Land boom in 1926. “Genius” was applied to Reuben Jonathan Miller, U. of Chicago prof and peddler of the “mass incarceration” nonsense. The crusade against “mass incarceration” means “mass decarceration” and is turning many of our neighborhoods into war zones. Thanks “genius”. How many more vapid treatments of anything “indigenous” do we need? Robin Kimmerer serves up another one in “Braiding Sweetgrass”. The more-in-tune-with-nature schtick is an attack on air conditioning, the family mini-van, and the single-family home. This stuff is as old as the hippie commune and is as equally bankrupt. And this makes her a “genius”? The WaPo reporter tried to buck up Kimmerer’s status by writing that her book “has gone from surprise hit to juggernaut bestseller”. No, only if “juggernaut” is 4,474 in Amazon’s rankings (paperback, 1,504 in Kindle, 3,313 in hardcover).
Robin Kimmerer
Are these our educational influencers? These are only geniuses among people who are gullible enough to believe it. As a teacher of 30 years and annually exposed to the blatherings of credentialed activists telling us how to teach, I’ve watched them wilt under even mild cross examination. The phrase “empty suit” was tailored for this type. Yes, they’re empty suits but now they’re also rich “geniuses”. As for the kids, they’re languishing.
Watch Kmele Foster’s excellent observations on the decline in ACT scores, but don’t expect an $800,000 “genius” award for him coming from the MacArthurs. Use the link below.
* “ACT Test Scores Drop to Lowest in 30 Years Following School Closures”, Cheyanne Mumphrey, RealClear Politics, 10/13/2022, at https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/10/13/act_test_scores_drop_to_lowest_in_30_years_following_school_closures_148318.html .
* “Meet the new MacArthur ‘genius grant’ winners”, Karen Heller, Washington Post, 10/12/2022, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/12/macarthur-genius-grant-fellows/ .
Today, the word “politician” is considered foul language in political discourse. Well, what about “revolutionary”? If you are repelled by politicians, what do you get when uncompromising ideological activists are swept into power? These people are defined by a radical vision to transform your life. We’ve seen this before, and it isn’t pretty. And the Democratic Party is in the grip of it. Biden lied in Philadelphia, September 1, for the threat isn’t coming from “MAGA Republicans”. He needs to look at himself and those running the show in his party.
2022 is starting to resemble 1793 in more ways than one. France, in a maelstrom of revolution since 1789, was divided between those who favored a constitutional monarchy in the mode of Britain, those who wanted to rip the Ancien Régime (Old Regime) of divine right and aristocracy, root and branch, out of the country, and a mushy middle that shifted between the two. It’s the beginning of our commonplace political jargon of right/center/left.
Jacobins on the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror
Today’s Democratic Party has evolved into 1793’s The Montagnard (The Mountain) of the legislative National Convention in Paris. The Left of the revolution clustered in the seats high up in the chamber and used the Jacobin Club to gather and plot. Quickly, they succeeded in gaining control of the Convention and set the country on the path to the Reign of Terror. The similarity between the Democratic Party of today and the Montagnards isn’t in the advocacy of a bloodbath but in their radical dream of a refashioned society. The people of our modern Left, like the protégés of Robespierre, aren’t content with tinkering and adjustments – no “politicians” need apply – but in radical transformations in everything from the definition of male and female to the meaning of infanticide. Traditional institutions are to be steamrolled and constitutional checks-and-balances obliterated. Make no mistake about it. They’re advocating a revolution.
This is a political party, if given unitary control of our federal government, that would make our country unrecognizable. Rattle off their agenda: out goes the filibuster and in comes the rule of momentary majorities to rock the country between extremes; in comes court packing and a Supreme Court to rubber stamp the revolution; the Equality Act which would pit the federal government against Bible-based Christianity and anyone who would seek its guidance on matters of marriage, faith, morals, and family; the requisition and creation of huge sums of money to fund the revolution (Build Back Better), inflation be damned; a pseudo-ecotopia to destroy our way of life; say goodbye to a border; say hello to easy to vote and easy to cheat (For the People Act); the equity crusade to indoctrinate our kids and dole out rewards by race and other politically favored identities; the unleashing of crime under “restorative justice” and equity schemes; the passage of the “Women’s Health Protection Act” to green light all abortions up to birth and force conscientious objectors out of the medical profession; the single-minded pursuit of “gender affirming care” to practice chemical infertility and sex-change surgeries on our children — without parental consent; a general disarming of the public and demonization of the firearms industry; . . . . And this is what they’ve publicly announced.
How could a suburban soccer mom endorse this kind of thing? If truth be told, she probably doesn’t, but they hear something about the Dobbs decision ending all abortions and unknowingly end up voting for our modern Montagnards’ agenda. They don’t know any better because our mainstream, legacy media is complicit in hiding the agenda’s dark side.
Take for instance the Washington Post’s fact-checking guru, Glenn Kessler. He felt compelled to correct Marco Rubio’s legitimate contention that the Democrats’ “Women’s Health Protection Act” (WHPA) would authorize abortion up to birth. In truth, Kessler doesn’t correct Rubio. The woman’s “health” provision in the Act would encompass “all factors physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age” (Supreme Court in Doe v. Bolton) to sanction abortion throughout the pregnancy. Late-term abortion would be codified. Instead, the WaPo’s intrepid reporter tried to undercut Rubio’s statement by mentioning something that Rubio never said. Kessler goes on a tangent about the rarity of such abortions. That’s not Rubio’s point! The Act grants carte blanche to any “health care provider”, whether it be a midwife, nurse, or doctor, to approve the ending of the life of a fully formed baby if they judge it to be a threat to the broadly defined “health” of the mother. The number of such abortions is irrelevant. The WHPA sanctions an act that should shock the conscience of any normal human being.
But when you’re in a fevered pitch for revolution, “normal” is an enemy to the desired ends. Revolutionaries don’t want normal. The Montagnard of the Democratic Party want a radical change in everything about us: our self-perception, social and economic arrangements, and political institutions. This is a thoroughgoing revolution, totalitarian in scope. This is what is on the November ballot. Punching a ballot next to a Democrat candidate is an endorsement of much more than the person.
“Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true.” Whoever first coined the quip was onto something.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “The GOP claim that Democrats support abortion ‘up to moment of birth’”, Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post, Sept. 22, 2022, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/22/gop-claim-that-democrats-support-abortion-up-moment-birth/ .
* “Questions for Glenn Kessler on Late-Term Abortion”, John McCormack, National Reivew, Sept, 22, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/09/questions-for-glenn-kessler-on-late-term-abortion/ .
* “If the Dems Win It All”, John McCormack, National Review, Sept. 15, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/10/03/if-the-dems-win-it-all/
Karine Jean-Pierre, Pres. Biden’s press secretary, tries to explain away Biden’s search for a knowingly deceased congresswoman.
Watch buffoons in the national media and the upper rungs of the government sound technocratic, which means that they claim to be the inheritors of the “science”, the “experts”, and the “best and brightest” from our academic bubbles in the grip of, truth be told, cultural extremism. And watch our life get measurably worse.
Politics corrupts judgment, and no more fevered environment exists than one just before an election. Today, the word “transition” is employed to hide many sins. Just a week ago, Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s press secretary, announced, “. . . what we are seeing . . . is a transition to a more steady and stable growth.” Transition frequently crosses her lips on nearly everything that could foretell troubled times ahead. Biden, the donkey party powerful, and blue-state potentates are also especially fond of the word. It’s their current favorite to sound wise.
The jargon is a reflex of progressivism. Progressivism built its reputation on replacing the compromises, clashing interests, “smoke-filled rooms”, and bargaining of messy democracy with the credentialed “expert”. They actually believed that society can be managed by fine-tuning, like a technician adjusting an old-style carburetor. A little turn of the fiscal and regulatory screw here and there and bliss will be upon us. So, if fighting climate change and pursuing social justice (ergo blatant racial favoritism) are your goals, an agency of degreed “experts” and appropriate decrees from on high will seamlessly float the people in the right direction without pain. It’s all a bunch of hooey.
Hundreds of millions of free souls will not be rigidly controlled by a claque of government employees who lack the humility of admitting that they don’t know half as much as they claim, and a good portion of what they do know is wrong. The economist Friedrich Hayek warned of the inherent “knowledge problem” in government. It’s playing out before our eyes.
“Transition” conceals a troubling winter. Fuel prices normally experience seasonal gyrations, but the Biden people raised the water level of those fluctuations by over half. Prices undulate at a rate of 50% to 100% over a year or two ago. Be prepared for a jump in electricity rates this winter on the east coast, Northeast, and other blue bubbles, which is not surprising given that they are most enthusiastic about rule by “expert” – all according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, an agency that is limited to measuring reality, and not to be confused with the “experts” of the climate change and equity freakouts.
“Transition” is often coupled with “soft landing”. President Clinton caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar, once parsed on the meaning of “is” in his perjury before a federal grand jury. The same is true for the treatment of “transition” and “soft landing” by the gaggle of progressives dominating the regime. The words are rhetorical cosmetic surgery for probable layoffs and business retrenchment. You don’t have to look far for proof. The economy only recently reached its pre-pandemic total employment numbers, which doesn’t take into account population growth. The laggard pace of employment screws up the unemployment rate. Vigorous job growth coming out of a shutdown by government fiat isn’t surprising. But a 3.7% unemployment rate out of a pool of adults shrunk by huge numbers opting out of the workforce makes the unemployment number almost superfluous.
Retrenchment is in the winds. Big Tech and others are beginning to trim some fat. Meta, Twilio, and Snap are jettisoning workers. Gap, Boeing, and Walmart are lopping administrative overhead. Real estate is taking a big hit as Wells Fargo, RE/MAX, and Redfin cut employees and agents as the Fed raises interest rates to combat another Fed-induced problem: inflation. And Biden and company still want to fight inflation – too much money chasing too few goods – by amazingly throwing more money at it. Never has a fire been successfully fought by pouring jet fuel on it.
Local businesses are hard it. The 2020 summer of riots didn’t help. Downtowns resemble ghost towns. Cities can’t proclaim a welcome mat for business when the sidewalks are open sewers and wanton theft, even serial assault, are ho-hum to district attorneys. Now we get to the cultural dimensions of “transition” and “soft landing”.
“Transition” to an “equity” society entails racial discrimination (against Asians and white males), lawlessness, crime victims, property destruction, XY-chromosome girls in XX-chromosome girls sports, and extremist indoctrination (eco-cultism, CRT, transgenderism, socialism) in the schools. No place is safe from the transitioners, not the home, not parenthood. Listen to Nikole Hannah-Jones – a symbol of the intersectionality of Black, female, and extremist cultural revolutionary – expounding on the danger of parents having a say in their children’s education (see below). It encapsulates the foolishness of “transition” and “soft landing” by “experts”.
Dropping the pretense of deceptive verbiage would be a great start. The so-called reformers are revolutionaries and should be forced to lay out their vision of how to create the new person for their new world. It’s totalitarian in scope. They need to lay their cards on the table so we are aware that the “soft landing” will be hard and brutal, as all such movements have proven to be. It won’t end well.
RogerG
Read more here:
* The U.S. Energy Information Agency’s electricity rate forecast of Sept. 7, 2022 can be found at https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/electricity.php .
* Jim Geraghty of National Review wrote an excellent piece on the subject in “The Economy Is Starting to Buckle”, National Review Online, Sept, 26, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/the-economy-is-starting-to-buckle/ .
* The normally suspect Bloomberg News announced the achievement of the employment milestone In “Employment in US Has Finally Exceeded Its Pre-Pandemic Level” at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-02/employment-in-us-has-finally-exceeded-its-pre-pandemic-level?leadSource=uverify%20wall .
San Francisco 49ers safety Tashaun Gipson Sr. (31) celebrates after intercepting the football against the Seattle Seahawks during the second quarter at Levi’s Stadium on Sept. 18, 2022. (photo: Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports)Los Angeles Skid Row in recent photographSanta Cruz, Ca., homeless encampmentSan Francisco homeless encampmentA homeless encampment along 112th Street Southwest in Everett, Wa., near Seattle. (photo: Mike Siegel / The Seattle Times)
Probably due to past loyalty, I sat down to watch the San Francisco 49ers v. Seattle Seahawks game last Sunday (SF won 27-7); however, I must admit that my enthusiasm for professional sports has waned. I can’t remove from my mind Big Sports’ enrollment in the radical left. Neither can I erase the images of these two cities’ decline into urban chaos, as is true of most of the other NFL home cities. These cities willingly chose that path. A smothering cloud of ideologically driven misrule overhangs the stadium crowd, the broadcast, and the team organizations. With few exceptions, the NFL schedule has turned into a series of Dystopia Bowls: one team booster of the radical left agenda from a radical left dystopia playing another with an identical image.
I didn’t politicize the sport. Previously, I had no clue about the political leanings of those composing the team organizations and the league, and didn’t care. As for the cities, they upheld for the most part some sense of decency. Not anymore. The sport concerned itself, pure and simple, with athletic competition at the highest level. Not anymore.
How did the NFL and their urban homes allow themselves to descend into such depravity? The movie “All the President’s Men” made popular the modern cynic’s favorite principle: “Follow the money”. That’s not true by a long shot. If you want to accurately follow the course of human events, “Follow the ideas”. It’s how we got to a compromised NFL and today’s unlivable cities.
It begins with one word: Socialism. Yes, that word, a rhetorical vessel wherein the perennial hopes and dreams of human betterment can be realized, despite its track record of abysmal failure. Its oppressed/oppressor dialectic is so appealing that it escapes any final verdict on its failure. It’s the vampire that won’t stay dead.
In one sense, what began with Marx and Engels, passed through the 60’s New Left, and would end up in today’s BLM, Antifa, college campuses everywhere, and the Democratic Party platform. In the good ‘ol days of the 19th century Socialist International, the oppressed was the industrial revolution’s urban working class (proletariat). But the dreams of revolution by the proletariat fizzled and where they did succeed in a takeover, it was a litany of nightmares: 100 million deaths in the 20th century by one accounting of a group of French historians in The Black Book of Communism.
Yet, something happened on the way to the collectivist Emerald City of Oz to keep the flame burning. Two things: new groups auditioned for the roles of oppressor (the white patriarchy) and oppressed (minorities and a plethora of hypothetical outcasts), and the real threat was said to come from an abstract “system”. And voilà, new life was breathed into the disgraced Marx.
The home of The Frankfurt School in Frankfurt, Germany, in the 1930’s.
Pointing the way were disgruntled Marxists ensconced in what came to be called the Frankfurt School. They followed the line of thought of Antonio Gramsci who tried to explain away the reluctance of workers to be enthusiasts of revolution by pinning the blame on “cultural hegemony” – the values, mores, institutions, and ways of life that keep them supposedly docile. In modern lingo, synonyms would be “the man”, “the system”, or “the establishment”. Inspired by Gramsci’s gambit, European activist academics banded together and formed the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, which would later be dubbed The Frankfurt School. Hitler, however, set them packing in the 1930’s. Many of them made their way to the United States – the Frankfurt School set up shop in New York City – to eventually take up academic posts to proselytize the American young in their babble.
Antonio Gramsci
Theordor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, et al, and the risible Herbert Marcuse lent their thoughts and encouragement to the burgeoning 60’s counterculture and the extremist New Left to continue the erosion of the foundations of western civilization. The physical consequences were plagues of drugs and STD’s. The political offshoots were the SDS, Weather Underground, Black Panthers, Symbionese Liberation Army, etc. Crime and urban riots erupted, and campuses were paralyzed in protest and violence. It would appear that the trail of these ideas is one of tears. Some liberals were shocked into neo-conservatism by the 1970’s and 1980’s.
Herbert Marcuse
Once again, disaster, and, once again, someone will appear to pick up the torch to fling it. It’s proof that gullibility like the poor will always be with us. In our social media world, glibness reigns supreme in the form of stitching together words into appealing quips that remain just as erroneous as they did before. The glibness of the BLM politburo, Nikole Hannah-Jones (the lead founder behind the intellectually bankrupt The 1619 Project), Bernie, the Biden crowd, the CRT demagogues, AOC and her Squad, and the big wheels of the Democratic Party can only put lipstick on a pig and cannot with a wave of the hand turn the porcine beast into Miss Universe. I don’t believe in shapeshifting. Do you?
Today is different, though. Whereas before, the nuttiness infected the fringes of society, only occasionally bursting forth to wreak havoc. Today, it’s everywhere and especially among the those who occupy the commanding heights of the culture. Why does big business from Major League Baseball to Coca-Cola to Delta Airlines to Disney risk alienating two-thirds of their customer base, unless they actually believe this bunk? There must be something more at work than fear of the race hustlers’ shakedown racket.
Rudi Dutschke, a German missionary of the 60’s New Left, pointed the way by espousing a “long march through the institutions”. He elaborated, “Revolution is a long complicated process in which people have to change.” He meant to shove aside and replace established civil society and government. But others realized that a root-and-branch approach wasn’t necessary, that today’s unkept radicals in blue jeans could be tomorrow’s tenured staff in tweed. Welcome to your kid’s nest of revolution, errr, college.
Rudi Dutschke
Simply put, the barbarians at the gates became the barbarians inside the gates. Lo and behold, the neo-socialism is dogma among the beautiful people residing in their super-zip code (Martha’s Vineyard, Chappaqua, NY, Atherton, Ca., Malibu, Ca., etc.), any place where hyper-wealth screens people from the consequences of their beliefs. Of course, part of the uniform for this new aristocracy is a degree from a legacy university, preferably Ivy League. They have all the outward signs of manners and outlook of a college pedigree, and the inward signs of proper breeding in fealty to the dogma. The Fortune 500 is no longer the Republican Party at work. It’s an alumni booster club for the neo-socialism of the campus.
The minions of this new privilege infiltrate beyond the boardroom and into all positions of power and influence. Since FDR made DC into the new Rome, and swelled its politico-cultural influence beyond the District and into the surrounding states of Maryland and Virginia, the neo-socialism has at its disposal the aggrandized power of the federal government. Any popular threat to its monopoly can be squashed under the banner of another German rhetorical import: streitbare Demokratie, or defensive democracy. It normally shows up as censorship. It’s the speech control in “hate” and “extremist” statutes and regulations in the European Union, UK, Austria, Germany, etc. You hear it out of the mouths of Pelosi, Schumer, Biden in “defending our democracy”, which is code for thought control by pasting contrary views with “misinformation”. Biden has attempted an institutionalization of the censorship by creating “misinformation” ministries in his administration, all stymied as of now.
Pres. Biden’s speech in Philadelphia on Sept. 1, 2022, branded “MAGA Republicans” dangerous “extremists”.
Streitbare demokratie seeks to freeze in amber the gains of the long march of neo-socialism through the institutions. The effects are physically observable in viral gender confusions among the young, uninhabitable downtowns, a plague of crime, radical indoctrination of the young, an ecotopia that forcibly reverts life back to medieval times, and a crumbling infrastructure that can’t deliver safe roads, sewers, water, or affordable and reliable electricity. Hillsides aflame, high taxes, inflation, and gargantuan government waste characterize life in this “democracy”. It’s like the decay of Rome in the 5th and 6th centuries after repeated barbarian conquests and misrule. Soon, much of the place is abandoned only to fall into rubble, to be later uncovered by the new field of 19th century archeology. Is that the fate of New York City, Baltimore, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, et al?
A late 19th century photo of ancient ruins in Rome. Or could it be today’s Seattle or San Francisco?
The stench of watching it unfold in real time overpowers the senses. The knowledge of the occurrence overwhelms any enjoyment of watching a football game. Sorry.
RogerG
Sources:
* An account of the super-zip codes can be read here: “Super ZIPs: New map reveals who is part of the rich ‘isolated elite”, Deseret News, Nov. 18, 2013, at https://www.deseret.com/2013/11/18/20529811/super-zips-new-map-reveals-who-is-part-of-the-rich-isolated-elite#:~:text=In%20the%20Wall%20Street%20Journal%20and%20his%20book%2C,5%2010514%3A%20Chappaqua%2C%20N.Y.%20%28New%20York%20City%20area%29
* A rudimentary internet search of “streitbare Demokratie”, Rudi Dutschke, The Frankfurt School, the guiding lights of the School, Antonio Gramsci, will shed light on today’s neo-socialism.
Here’s a story for you. University of South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley refuses to admit that she was mistaken in recently cancelling her team’s basketball games with BYU. In a statement to a reporter, she said, “I continue to stand by my position.”
Dawn Staley, University of South Carolina women’s basketball coach
Why cancel games with BYU? Staley was reacting to a charge by a Duke University volleyball player, Rachel Richardson, who claimed some BYU fans heckled her with racial slurs. An exhaustive review by BYU of all available video and audio recordings and interviews with over 50 nearby spectators uncovered no evidence of the insults. Still, Staley refuses to back down. Why cling to an unfounded decision in spite of the evidence? She isn’t the only one. Lately, over at least a decade, and more incidents recently, we’ve gone through mass derangements over climate change, systemic racism, and COVID. Facts don’t matter. Despite, or maybe because of, trillions spent on education and the most intense networks of information ever devised, we seem not to be particularly inoculated from mass psychosis.
Investors should be aware of this thing called mass psychosis, typically referred to as mass formation psychosis. It happens in markets and occurs anywhere a large group of interconnected people exists. One source defined it in the following way:
“Psychosis is when people lose some contact with reality. Mass formation psychosis is when a large part of a society focuses its attention to a leader(s) or a series of events and their attention focuses on one small point or issue. Followers can be hypnotized and be led anywhere, regardless of data proving otherwise. A key aspect of the phenomena is that the people they identify as the leaders – the one’s that can solve the problem or issue alone – they will follow that leader(s) regardless of any new information or data. Furthermore, anybody who questions the leader’s narrative are attacked and disregarded.” (Source: see below)
Evidence, proof, and real scientific inquiry are abandoned. Take the long-running issue of climate change with the adjective “apocalyptic” added for good measure. Beyond the reasonable assertion on the contribution of CO2 and fossil fuels, much else strays into the realm of speculation or mysticism. So many other questions on the subject – other contributing factors, their interplay, and impacts – cannot be answered with reasonable certainty, unless pure ideological bias qualifies for seasoned judgment. How’s that any different from the Heaven’s Gate cult? Besides, flagellating the most fuel efficient and clean society on the planet – ours – is pointless as over 2.8 billion people in China and India discover the joys of rising incomes, air conditioning, and affordable transportation. All made possible from the majesty of fossil fuels.
Biden’s Climate Special Envoy, John Kerry, disembarks his private jet.
John Kerry is paid by us to jet around the world to cajole foreign rulers whose interests do not align with his fellow comfortable elites in their super-zip estates. He must be seen by them as a clown to be tolerated, maybe indulged a bit for photo-ops, but otherwise ignored.
John Kerry’s model is California. The cliché has it that California leads the way to the future. Maybe so, if that future is characterized by a mass psychosis in the mysticism of climate change. The rest of the country gets a bird’s-eye view of that fate. The state’s grid has been turned into a health hazard as the landscape dries out from the dry-summer climate’s periodic droughts. The state has made it difficult for anyone to clean out the surface debris in its wildlands, and 100 million dead trees await a spark. And eventually one will be provided by nature or from one of the state’s many urchins from its urban chaos.
The same psychosis that has turned the state into a fire trap is utterly destroying any concept of reliable, affordable energy. The altar of wind and solar isn’t a sensible means to appease Gaia. They are intermittent by nature, which strains the grid. Power lines are made for steady streams of electricity, not the boom and bust that is endemic in sunlight and bursts of air movement. Any grid under this steady strain breaks down if not assiduously maintained, which it isn’t. It just so happens, though, that California experiences an annual 5-month dry spell, alongside its endemic droughts, for the ruptures to send thousands fleeing the attendant flames hoping that they have enough charge in their EV to escape death-by-firestorm.
A California driver fleeing the Camp Fire in Paradise, Ca., in 2018.
But don’t let the facts get in the way.
California is a self-made disaster. Their infatuation with air movement and sunlight energy has unknowingly made them dependent on steady-stream sources – fossil fuel, co-gen, hydro, nuclear – to buck up the losses from the night and calm days. But the state is busy torpedoing most of this backbone. Co-gen is mostly irrelevant. For the state’s ruling class, natural gas and coal are the devil’s brew. Hydro is undermined by eco-mandates for steady stream flows that has helped to turn the state’s reservoirs into puddles. Don’t only blame the drought. Every year is not a drought year, and no effort is made to store during the wetter times. Riparian habitats and dreams of the return of ancient salmon runs checkmate any other use.
The state’s dams have become the equivalent of Egypt’s pyramids. They are monumental but, as opposed to the pyramids, aren’t likely to attract many visitors three-quarters empty. The same fate has befallen the state’s two nuclear power plants: San Onofre and Diablo Canyon. Delayed maintenance while the state bullied the utilities into greenie fantasies put the kibosh to San Onofre, which cost the state 2.2 gigawatts of power. Diablo Canyon was scheduled for death in 2025. Blackouts have forced the state’s ruling party to back down on that one. How long? Well, it’ll probably remain open until the next spate of wet years gin up hydro for awhile, waiting for the next dry spell to once again reasserts itself to overtax the seas of solar panels and vast windmill forests that mar a once beautiful state. It’s a cycle of futility buttressed by a mass psychosis: a mystical belief in horrors that fact, reason, and science cannot dispel.
A truck crosses a bridge over the shrinking Lake Oroville, the headwaters of the California Water Project, in a photo from July 2022.
None of this matters one twit to the zealots who run the state. Evidence be damned. Electoral majorities in the state are in the grip of a mass mania that jettisons all reason and fact. All that remains is blackouts, skyrocketing electricity rates, hillsides aflame, and no effect on climate change.
Would it be better to simply enjoy the extended growing season and build more nuclear and low-emission power plants to enjoy the glories of air conditioning? Regardless, India and China will see to it that CO2 emissions continue to glut the atmosphere with or without the ministrations of John Kerry or the ladies on The View.
Climate change isn’t the only opportunity to go crazy. We have another one in “systemic racism”. What is systemic racism? Does it exist? Hard to say since “systemic” means that it is hidden and therefore not directly observable. Thus, we have to rely on others to simply announce its existence as they make an affluent living on their soothsaying.
The racism “experts” are actually grifters. Racial disparities occur in all sorts of areas such as incarceration rates, educational outcomes, birth rates, marriage, incomes, and social status. Thus, they insist that racism persists, but not in the Jim Crow way: obvious, in-your-face, and therefore open to rational inquiry. It’s easier for them to proclaim that the disparities are the proof of racism, even though they haven’t proven it, because they can’t, because the imprecision of the thing makes it immune to empirical testing (falsifiability). The “ghost in the machine” kind of thing. Instead, they claim to possess the special gnosis to expose it and how to remediate it as they go to the bank with thousands, if not millions, in book sales, consultant fees, and speeches. A new industry of charlatans is born. It’s as if astrology and the four humors in medicine are making a comeback.
Kimberle Crenshaw
The parallels with medieval medicine are glaring. People in earlier times noticed that fevers were reduced by bleeding a patient. The ancient Greek philosopher Galen and his four-humors paradigm was proven correct, or so they thought. It was, however, the classic post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc fallacy at work: two events occur sequentially with the first one assumed to be the cause. For our current race hustlers – Kimberle Crenshaw, Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DeAngelo, et al – systemic racism is proven by unequal outcomes by race. Poor educational outcomes on assessment tests by race, for instance, must mean that the test and its providers are “systemically” racist. It’s tantamount to saying, “Fever fell after bleeding, and patient is cured.” It’s nonsense.
Still, two full seasons after the death of George Floyd, “End Racism” dons the helmets of some NFL players. Viewers and our kids are barraged by the effort to ferret out something mysteriously within them and lurking in everything that surrounds them. It’s tantamount to the 17th century Salem witch trials in the modern form of a bogeyman in a Klan outfit.
The whole campaign rides on the inequalities in academic measures by race. The cause is presumed – racism – but only because “family structure” is excluded. Kids swim around in social circumstances that have greater impact on academic performance than melanin count or more money in the bank accounts of the NEA membership. Commissioned by the US Office of Education in 1966, the Coleman Report levelled a blow at the ego of the education industry’s special interests when it concluded, “. . . the inequalities imposed on children by their home, neighborhood, and peer environment are carried along to become the inequalities with which they confront adult life at the end of school.” Yep, chaotic home life and slums have greater bearing on admission to MIT than school funding, teacher salaries, and the racism bogeyman. But you won’t find outcomes by family structure anywhere in the various measures. Strange. You’ll see math, reading, and science scores by race, gender, ethnicity, economic status, etc., but nary a word about the home.
Chicago police at a crime scene comforting a child in a photo taken in 2020.
The missing link between the social measures and their cause is never filled with anything resembling empirical proof. Unequal stats by race are said to automatically point to racism. That’s it, and we’re off to the races to follow the “experts” in the secret gnosis. COVID gave to us another example of the same phenomena: trust the “experts” to fill the gap between a development and its treatment.
Filling the shoes of Kimberle Crenshaw, one of the overpaid founders of CRT, is Dr. Fauci and his peers in government, the NGO’s, many in BIG Pharma, Democratic Party potentates, et al. The lockdowns, school closures, mandatory masking, social distancing, the vaccine decrees, the overall suffocation of a society, were persistently avowed without a real scientific basis. Other approaches to maintain the functioning of civilization and protect the vulnerable were treated to covert and tacit censorship. Therapeutics, targeting safeguards on those with certain health conditions, natural immunity, the costs to children, the canceled or forgone medical appointments, the strain on a population quarantined in the four walls of their home (many more walls if you live in the super-zips), and the huge economic losses from the waterboarding of work and production were shunted aside in a mad rush to stamp out the virus, the very opposite of “follow the science”.
Once the “experts” had their foot on the pedal, they never let up, in spite of the growing evidence that they were prescribing a suicide pill. By summer 2020, it was widely established that the young ran little risk. So, forcing kids into filthy masks and into isolation behind plexiglass in schools that opened their doors was more than pointless. It was harmful. The schools most beholden to the blinkered “experts” were in Democrat strongholds, the inner cities, and they closed the longest. The academic performance gap morphed into a Grand Canyon. To no great surprise, the principal victims of this enthusiastic pursuit of school lockdowns and other tortures were minorities, putting a lie to “black lives matter”, especially for young ones.
Data began to stumble out that the states who were the most religious in following Fauci and CDC mysticism fared no better than those who were more agnostic about what Florida’s Gov. DeSantis called “Fauciism” (see below). Claims were made by our health elites in power that the lockdowns, masking, social distancing, school closures, mandatory vaccines, et al, would “stop the spread” or “bend the curve” when one of the tiniest things in biology and profusely evolving – a virus – will in all likelihood evade the best laid plans of mice and men. Their interventions were heralded as the holy grail and natural immunity was ridiculed. Two years after the pandemic’s onset, we’re still grappling with a shape-shifting virus and infections persist.
Who’s to blame for this disorder by mass psychosis? Certainly, trillions spent annually on schools from K to grad school have monumentally failed at truly and broadly educating the population. Education is enlightenment. Are we enlightened? Evidence to date says “no”. Conversely, it may be the source of much of this mass psychosis.
What then is the value of our enormous communication network on the net and through satellites, cables, Wi-Fi, cell towers, and the infinite variety of radio signals? What are they communicating? Much that is spewed spikes mass psychosis. We seem to be great at inventing things but no so good at using them.
All our inventions haven’t altered the crooked timber of humanity. They have only magnified its prese nce. Immanuel Kant’s famous line from the 18th century remains true: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Credentials are certainly no guarantor. Civilizations over millennia have created civil society to grapple with our fundamental pretzel character. You know, faith, family, morals, and neighborly affiliations in local self-help organizations came into being. People like Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Robert Nisbet wrote of the virtues of these “little platoons”. Well, the centralized welfare state carpet-bombed their importance.
We just created more bullhorns for mass psychosis.
RogerG
Sources:
* “What is Mass Formation Psychosis?”, SWFI, 1/2/22, at https://www.swfinstitute.org/news/90470/what-is-mass-formation-psychosis
* Ivan Rowe at the American Enterprise Institute wrote of the missing ingredient of family structure in most reports of our social condition. One column on this subject can be read at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/08/29/students-family-background-matters/.
* Skepticism is always warranted when people go beyond what the science gives. Climate change ideology is a classic example of the phenomena. Those in the field of science who have managed to keep their wits exist. Princeton’s Freeman Dyson outlined his critique in the NYT Magazine at https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?sq=Freeman. Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg is another. Kevin Shapiro’s review of his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, can be found in Commentary Magazine at https://www.commentary.org/articles/kevin-shapiro-2/the-skeptical-environmentalist-by-bjorn-lomborg/. Japanese scientist Kiminori Itoh argues for more complexity in the dynamics of the atmosphere than John Kerry would admit. An account of his views can be found in the Orange County Register at https://www.ocregister.com/2008/06/18/japanese-ipcc-scientists-says-global-warming-worst-scientific-scandal/. The Norwegian physicist Ivar Giaever, and Nobel Prize winner, equates the climate change crusade with a religion. A talk by him on the subject is available through Foreign Policy Journal at https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2016/01/01/nobel-laureate-ivar-giaever-on-climate-change/. There are many others out there.
* The Federal Bureau of Economic Research in spring 2022 issued a report on how states fared in their response to COVID-19. Biases marred the analysis of the report. Some with blue-state leanings say that the BER paper proved the wisdom of aggressive COVID measures, while others of a red-state tint say the opposite. Blue-state biases downplayed or ignored the secondary damages of children’s developmental and education losses, the harms from delayed or absent medical treatment, the increase in suicides and depression, the massive disruption to the economic life of the country, etc. One analysis from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity appears more accurate than most. It can be read at https://committeetounleashprosperity.com/final-report-card-on-state-responses-to-covid-19/.
* A report on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on student achievement was made by the Brookings Institute in March 2022 and can be read at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2022/03/03/the-pandemic-has-had-devastating-impacts-on-learning-what-will-it-take-to-help-students-catch-up/.
An example of the crazies in California: boosters of transgender ideology pressure a charter school board in Rocklin, Ca., in 2017 to prevent parents from opting out of lessons on transgenderism.
The old warning on a pack of cigarettes went like this: “SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, and May Complicate Pregnancy”. With some simplification, a warning label could be pasted on all maps: “Parents, California is dangerous to your child’s health.” How? Its eco-fanaticism will deprive them of a future, surely, if extended nationally, but California S.B. 107 promises to put the entire weight of California government in opposition to your natural right to raise your children. It’s on Governor Newsom’s desk waiting for his signature.
Go read the bill. It’s below. Under the title “Gender-affirming care”, the bill expressly prohibits medical and insurance providers in the state from releasing the identity of any child from anywhere seeking gender transition treatments even if the child’s state or local jurisdiction has laws that restricts such practices. You’ll never know as a Florida parent that your 14-year-old, in a phase of gender confusion, is taking puberty blockers, opposite-sex hormones, and sex-change surgeries in California. That’s not all. All relevant California authorities are forbidden from interceding on your behalf and retuning your child to your custody. Read it. It’s astounding.
Just think, unknown to you, your 14-year-old child may spend too much time on social media and gets caught up in a social contagion of gender confusion. Those same social media platforms will also spread information on the medical interventions, all forever life-altering, and how to get to California to satisfy the urge. Then, after filing a missing person report to your local sheriff, you get a text from your daughter of her double mastectomy and her metoidioplasty (create an artificial penis) in a California hospital. Your daughter, without your knowledge and approval, has turned herself into your pseudo-son. All thanks to the elected lunatics running California.
If any state action screams “unconstitutional”, this is it. Ever since 1824 and Gibbons v. Ogden, the Constitution gives to Congress the sole power to regulate interstate commerce. Furthermore, the contracts clause in the Constitution impairs a state’s ability to nullify agreements made in another state. n A state cannot undermine one state’s power to regulate matters within its borders simply because the resident stepped foot in another state. Kidnapping is still kidnapping if the victim is transported to a different state. Any differences between the states’ kidnapping laws are irrelevant.
Scott Wiener (D, San Mateo) introduced S.B. 107. It passed both houses of the California legislature and awaits Gov. Newsom’s signature.
Come to think of it, assisting a child in travel against the wishes of the parent could be construed as kidnapping. Gavin Newsom and Scott Wiener (D, State Senator, San Mateo) could be eligible for indictment. Remember, Panama’s dictator Manuel Noriega was indicted by a federal grand jury in Miami and arrested by US Navy SEALs under orders of President Bush 41. If it could happen to a foreign despot, why not to a sitting state governor and head honcho in the state legislature? Newsom, I’d think twice before signing this monstrosity.
The absurdity of this action by California zealots is easily understood if roles were reversed. Lets’ say, Florida passes a law to make it a felony for any person wherever they reside to knowingly authorize and protect individuals who engage in medical practices on the state’s resident minors without parental knowledge and consent. If California can expressly shield violators of another state’s laws, why can’t the offended state seek redress by taking into custody these offenders, whether they be medical practitioners or state officials, when they come into contact with lawful authorities of the offended state? Interstate interference is interstate interference. If one is sanctioned, so is the other. Goose and gander equality anyone?
It’s a useful thought experiment, and a sign of how harmful California has become to the rest of the nation. Let’s get on with it. Put the warning label on our maps.
RogerG
Sources:
* The full text of California SB 107 can be read at https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220SB107
* For more on the story, read the column by Sharon Supp, a senior research analyst for the Alliance Defending Freedom at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/09/california-declares-war-on-parents-in-all-50-states-with-gender-transition-sanctuary-state-law/
Parents protest the teaching of Critical Race Theory during a Placentia Yorba Linda School Board meeting in Yorba Linda, Calif., November 16, 2021. (Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Our public and many private schools are a mess, but the vast majority of the blame shouldn’t be directed at the teachers. The onus should be shouldered by an intellectually bankrupted overclass that sits atop a sprawling education industry from coast to coast, much like the Janissaries of the old Ottoman Empire or the self-indulgent and self-serving aristocracy in 18th-century Versailles. Unexamined and unaware, its members reside in a world apart from the rest of society. It’s an isolated existence with its own values and assumptions about the workings of the world. Born of 19th century progressivism and its administrative state, their zeal for “reform” has bred a missionary class of consultants, hyped in the latest fads of thought driven by a near uniform set of ideological sympathies. Duly papered in now-devalued credentials and degrees, they descend upon the schools and make a real hash of things.
Parents might be waking up. Zooming to their children during the pandemic by means of the family computer, right in front of them, was the chic radicalism from a world apart where lefty radicalism is assumed to be a virtue. The veil of secrecy was blown off. The fashionable neo-Marxist theory of systemic group oppression and guilt flashed before their eyes. Racism was mangled into a public good as a means to fight purely hypothetical but politically useful villains. They saw how adolescent feelings of gender confusion became the rigid theory of transgender ideology. Now, their daughters are no longer safe in the bathroom or locker room.
Other fancies were exposed such as the religion of environmentalism, a mystical faith masquerading as a not-to-be-challenged scientific fact. The crooked timber of humanity was somehow, magically straightened depending on your self-professed identity. Bankers bad, workers always and forever angelic. Whenever a woman or racial, sexual, or ethnic minority graces the page, it’s always in the context of exploitation. Tradition is lambasted and morality is fashioned to serve the interests of the latest chic reform. America is evil and in need of a revolution. That’s what they’re attempting to groom: little revolutionaries.
As a teacher in the public schools for almost 30 years, I’ve witnessed it firsthand. Teachers are forced through “professional growth” mandates to be constantly exposed to the latest in stylish radicalism emanating from the academic bubble. School districts regularly take their teachers away from their students for multiple days of the school year – sometimes called “inservice days” – to get steady doses of the latest in leftist dogma. Students lose a few days of learning so their teachers can be indoctrinated. The result is almost always a few steps backward for both the students and teachers.
Teacher training
To boot, many of the presenters don’t know the radical philosophical roots of what they’re presenting. It says volumes about the academic preparation and forethought of those pretending to be Zeus on Mt. Olympus. Two incidents stand out in my long career. In one, a richly paid consultant was brought in to instruct us on his favorite pedological pet, “cooperative learning”. Midway through the presentation I got the drift of where this was heading. I politely asked him if the basis for his approach was “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” If you’re wondering, it’s straight out of Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto”. He said, “Yes”, apparently unaware, or maybe quite aware, of his idea’s ideological parentage. Shortly after that, I quietly slipped away to my classroom to grade papers and prepare instruction for the week, a much better use of the time.
Another example came about as a result of administrative pressure to attend a paid training session on a Saturday, which I was reluctantly to do for certain reasons. Well, this session just so happened to be founded on the theory of multiple intelligences, a highly contestable notion for which the presenter was unfamiliar with the debate. Common sense tells us that kids can have excellences in different skill and knowledge areas. But these aren’t “intelligences”. They are talents. In contrast, intelligence is a unique measure of cognitive ability that is innate to a person for various biological and social reasons. The interplay of the two is open to much debate.
All of this is glossed over to get to the hidden purpose of this questionable idea: everyone gets a trophy, which is born of Marx’s obsession with equality of result. For people following in the footsteps of Karl Marx, a society of goodness and light can only be achieved if everyone is equal in everything from intelligence to possessions, just institutionally redefine intelligence in a multitude of ways for instance. Without saying it, but following the logic, unequal performances among students in the form of grades or scores is automatically and morally suspect. So, classrooms and instruction must be refashioned to make them more equal. How? Design and implement multifarious instructional approaches to access the hard to determine but assumed to be numerous “intelligences” in the classroom. If the task is too cumbersome or inequalities persist, the burden is on the teacher to make things equal. Marx blames the social system, the educrats blame classroom teaching, i.e., the teacher. Thus, the schools engage in the perpetual search to weed out systemic oppression in the form of inequalities through incessant “training”. No time here for placing responsibility on the student or home life.
The Marxian equality of result permeates everywhere in the school. Merit – a sense of deserving through hard work – is disparaged and replaced with racial, gender, and sexual orientational reparatory contrivances in discipline, instruction, management, and grading (or no grades). As a teacher scrambles to devise an ever-increasing number of pedagogies for an ever-increasing number of “intelligences” in the classroom, if hell busts loose, punishment is made to adhere to the god of equality of result like everything else. If someone tallies the expulsions and discovers a “protected-class” excess beyond its demographic proportion, the school is turned upside down by conforming to the newest euphemism to downgrade the effectiveness of a school: restorative justice. Watch the ratio of non-teachers to teachers explode. The biggest building in the school will no longer be the one for Language Arts but the sprawling one housing the army of functionaries of the social services for the multitude of interventions required to create the illusion of identity-group equality.
If you think it’s such a great idea, this thing called “restorative justice”, then move to LA, SF, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York City, or any place suffering under permissive Soros-backed DA’s. They’re all into “restorative justice” and all that goes with it. You’ve just endorsed the transplanting of the chaos of San Francisco streets to your kids’ classrooms.
Nothing escapes the Marxist obsession with equality of result. It’s embedded in your teacher’s training in college, and it’s constantly dragged before staffs every school year by an army of consultants. It’s a very lucrative flim-flam as CRT evangelists like Ibram X. Kendi can attest. He got $20,000 from Fairfax County taxpayers for a 45-minute virtual training video for the Virginia county’s public schools. His fellow grifter, Robin DeAngelo, author of “White Fragility”, rakes in $14,000 per event earning a lusty $700,000 a year. It’s a sweet gig if you can get it. (See the column below by the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick M. Hess.)
What do they really have to offer? Nothing good, and everything deeply troublesome. If you think that statue-toppling or joining the ranks of the militant wings of the Democratic Party is not an appropriate career path for your children, it is incumbent on parents to help bring to heel this wayward mass of detached educrats by electing state and local public officials who’ll clean house at the governing boards and make our colleges accountable for the undermining of our way of life.
There, we have our task.
RogerG
Sources:
* “Defund the Teacher-Trainers”, Frederick M. Hess, Aug. 11, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/08/29/defund-the-teacher-trainers/?fbclid=IwAR10uTGkoMNTRebq74lRN6aC2638Z8-Mhw_rhuuJpzbnVSysv8ciOB6LHHg
