Identity Politics – Page 8 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

March 7, 2022March 7, 2022

Zora Neale Hurston and Stewardship Properly Understood

Lest we find ourselves distracted by all things Ukraine at the moment, we should not suffer temporary blindness to the ongoing threats closer to home. If you’ll recall, we are engaged in a wholesale demolition of our cultural inheritance under the guise of a landslide of hackneyed buzzwords: diversity, equity, inclusion (curiously in that order to avoid the acronym DIE), social justice, systemic racism, white supremacy, et al. An older but truer meaning of the word stewardship comes to mind.

See 1 Peter 4:10:
“As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.”

See Genisis 2:15:
“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.”

The ransacking of the legacy flies in the face of the obvious meaning of stewardship. Throughout the Bible it is used to remind us that God is the ultimate source of all gifts (broadly defined) and His expectation that we are to wisely use these favors. It is not a cover for political enthusiasms such as recycling regimes, anti-plastic crusades, climate-change manias, the assault on fossil fuels, government handouts for windmills and solar panels, the punishment of workers in certain commodity industries, the promotion of guilt-trips for owning an SUV, the policies of herding families en masse into cramped apartments, the demonization of single-family-residential, and the relegation of the public lands to mere hikers’ paradises and no one else need enter. God’s gifts are conferred on a businessman exercising property rights to extract mineral wealth from the earth as they are for white collar public employees wealthy and organized enough to politically force everyone else to live according to their preferences. At present, there the mutilated corpse of stewardship lies.

If I hear another clergyman spout from the pulpit stewardship as the guise for greenie agendas, I’ll scream.

The insipid mangling of stewardship has manifested beyond Green New Deals and into a frenzy for an inflated race-consciousness. Hyper-sensitive race-awareness tars everything to the point of a wholesale dismantlement of our grand cultural inheritance. Statue-toppling, the insidious doctrines of race-obsessiveness in instruction to the young, the rantings and bullying in social media, the loud advocacy of the extinction of personal freedoms in free markets, and the espousal of life under massively intrusive government commands will mean the death knell for God’s gifts. “Stewardship” undermining stewardship. Go figure.

A rereading of the writings of Zora Neale Hurston are the antidote to what she referred to as the “race man”, the carnival barkers for perpetual race-victimhood, people like the barely coherent Ibram X. Kendi or the insufferable Maxine Waters.

Check out this gem from Hurston’s essay “Art and Such”, wherein she decries the tendency of the “race man” to reduce the entire black experience to oppression and sorrow:

“Can the black poet sing a song to the morning? Upsprings the song to his lips but it is fought back. He says to himself, . . . ‘Ought I not to be singing of our sorrows? That is what is expected of me and . . . if I do not some will even call me a coward. The one subject for a Negro is the Race and its sufferings and so the song of the morning must be choked back. I will write of a lynching instead.’ So the same old theme, the same old phrases get done again. . . . The writer thinks that he has been brave in following in the groove of the Race champions, when the truth is, it is the line of least resistance and least originality.”

Zora sets the record straight. This latest campaign to ravage our inheritance is absolutely mind-numbing. The soul-destroying dogmas reduce thought to mindless chants. These people aren’t capable of originality and can add nothing to our inheritance. They only pillage. A painter’s palette is replaced by a sledge hammer.

So much for the stewardship in 1 Peter 4:10.

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RogerG

February 16, 2022February 16, 2022

What? San Franciscans Slammed the Hard, Hard Left in Recall Election.

FILE - Alison Collins, right, speaks during a meeting in San Francisco, on Sept. 26, 2018. In a city with the lowest percentage of children of all major American cities, school board elections in San Francisco have often been an afterthought. A special election on Feb. 15, 2022, will decide the fate of three school board members, all Democrats, including Collins, in a vote that has divided the famously liberal city. (Liz Hafalia/San Francisco Chronicle via AP) — Alison Collins, right, speaks during a meeting in San Francisco, on Sept. 26, 2018. (Liz Hafalia/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)

Yep, you read it right. Who would have thought it possible, in San Francisco of all places? Voters on Tuesday sent packing three true-believing social justice warriors on the school board for wrecking the educations of the city’s children: school board President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison Collins. Granted, the city’s school-age cohort is proportionally the smallest of any major US city, but residents of all stripes have had their fill of turning the most vulnerable – children – into lab rats for chic political crusades.

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Even more striking is the reaction of the city’s Asian-American population. They quickly grasped where this was heading. School board member Collins let the cat out of the bag. She tweeted, and never apologized, that the city’s Asians were cognitively “white supremacists” for complaining of school closures, the obsessive effort expended to rename 44 schools, the erasure of any semblance of merit in doing things like the rejection of competitive admissions for the district’s elite Lowell High School. The woke blokes and blokettes just learned a powerful lesson. Don’t mess with tiger moms!

One parent, Siva Raj, cut to the chase. He said,

“The city of San Francisco has risen up and said this is not acceptable to put our kids last. Talk is not going to educate our children, it’s action. It’s not about symbolic action, it’s not about changing the name on a school, it is about helping kids inside the school building read and learn math.”

Right! Now, what will this portend for the future? Could woke school boards across the country be heading to electoral guillotines as parents across the nation rise up as the newest edition of Committees of Public Safety? The spirit of Robespierre is ripe in the land.

Read the AP story.

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RogerG

February 9, 2022February 16, 2022

The Super Bowl LVI, Meh (So-So)

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Rapper 50 Cent performs during the Pepsi Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show at SoFi Stadium on February 13, 2022 in Inglewood, California. (Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)

Let me start by saying, I don’t care. As a Florida allegator hunter might put it, I don’t have a dog in that hunt. The game pits two teams for which it’s hard to conjure any enthusiasm. The Bengals are from Ohio and the Rams have never been, for me, an object of affection. So, what will I do . . . if you’re even interested? I’ll record the thing to zip out all the hype, including the unbearable half-time show. I’ll get the result and later see how it ended that way. In other words, I’ll view the spectacle in my old role of a coach analyzing game tape.

My only interest, and it’s a slight one, is in the underdog (LA is favored) and maybe watching the next Tom Brady in the making: Joe Burrow. After that, meh! My appetite has been ruined. The NFL, like the rest of the big-metro blue bubbles, has shown itself to be duly immersed in the cloistered zeitgeist of the fashionable neo-Marxist critical theory, pushing radical BLM slogans throughout the season. A game not about politics came to be about politics. It’s hard to get up for the America sellout (the NFL).

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How appropriate for the game to be played in a lefty metropolitan funhouse in the leftward most governed state on the furthest leftward edge of the continent. I pity the athletes for they will pay the greatest pound of flesh for playing a game in the highest taxed state outside of North Korea. But what does it matter if you earn a million and have to turn over a couple hundred thousand to subsidize a fiscal and cultural nightmare?

Once again, meh.

RogerG

February 7, 2022February 8, 2022

Leadership Is the Problem in Our Schools

In other words, where are our school leaders leading us?

Parents talk before rally to oppose critical race theory in Loudon County schools, June 12, 2021.

Please listen to the last 30 minutes of the Radion Free California podcast and capture Will Swaim’s (of the California Public Policy Center) interview of Dr. Lance Izumi, Senior Director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute. Click on Dr. Izumi’s picture for the interesting conversation. You’ll find it compelling if you’re worried about the condition of your child’s school.

To be clear, let’s not tar everyone with the same brush. Not every Trump voter cheered the January 6 riot, not every Democrat is, figuratively speaking, in bed with the socialistas of The Squad, and not by a long shot is every teacher responsible for the mediocrity of the schools. During my near 30 years as a public high school teacher, I have seen the great variability in teacher quality but few, very few, fit the bill as truly incompetent and uncaring. Some, like me, failed at their first bite of the apple, but learned the lesson that effectiveness is a dynamic process, experience being the best stylist of good teaching.

Yet, undeniably, something is amiss in our schools, and most emphatically in our public schools. Pre-pandemic, the failings spared no socioeconomic group. Certainly, the pandemic panic exacerbated the situation. Using the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) as the benchmark, schools with overwhelming middle-class enrollment produced dismal results with over half performing at below grade level. It only gets worse when we look at schools with the entire student body on the school lunch program. So, moving to a “better” neighborhood for the “better” schools is a fool’s errand. You’re only getting a student body in nicer clothes and cars, not a better education.

If I was to choose one overriding factor for the dreary situation, it would come down to rotten leadership. And I don’t mean to make administrators as a group the brunt. Poor captaincy stretches from many school board members to professors to superintendents through an administrative descent to the individual school, and, lest I forget, their directors and abettors in state and federal government. Most of this leadership crowd is pickled in a brine of progressive ideology emanating from the political arena and the gatekeepers of credentialing, the collegiate schools of education.

Teachers must also traverse the same gauntlet.

If you’re shocked by racial shaming sessions in your child’s Zoomed Social Studies lesson, well, what did you expect? Today’s progressivism is synonymous with the militant wokeness of neo-Marxist critical theory and it percolates through ed courses and the teams of “educators” who produce the curricula. It’s everywhere and everywhere destructive.

People hold up signs during a rally against “critical race theory” (CRT) being taught in schools at the Loudoun County Government center in Leesburg, Virginia on June 12, 2021. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP)

If you want better schools, clean house of the poison and install leaders with their heads screwed on straight. Start with the state leadership and move like Sherman’s March through the collegiate schools of education and the people who run the local districts. The rot begins at the top, so start there. In the end, the teachers will be better for it.

Oh, before I leave the topic, an important cog in this Borg is the teacher unions. They need to stop being a conduit for this ideological mania. If they are to continue to exist, they must stop seeing themselves in the vanguard of a revolution and more as shapers of patriotic and productive citizens. Got it?

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RogerG

February 7, 2022February 7, 2022

Hillsdale College Riles the Hive in the Land of Gavin Newsom

Site of Hillsdale College campus in Placer County near Roseville.

I kid you not: Hillsdale College is coming to California and the true believers of the ruling groupthink are going bonkers. The state is hemorrhaging legacy-cost red ink, businesses, and residents as it is mired in COVID totalitarianism, homelessness everywhere, a crime wave, debased schools, welfare dependency, expensive everything, and public spaces that aren’t fit for children (and adults). And to think that they are frazzled beyond restraint by the appearance of a classical liberal arts college within their playpen. Amazing, absolutely amazing.

If you want to know the reason for the state’s looniness, no better candidate can be found than in the loopy thought processes of many of the state’s college graduates who then scatter into the state’s institutions for employment. An example of the phenomena is 24-year-old Hannah Holzer, “opinion assistant” at the Sacramento Bee. She penned an op ed – really, more of a screed – on January 23 titled “A conspiracy-peddling college is coming to Placer County. That should scare us all” (read here). What does she bring to the table other than vapid sloganeering and ad hominems? Let’s see.

Her LinkedIn resume’ mentions a 4-year stint at UC Davis with an “English – professional writer” degree. Her post-graduate journey winds its way through a news internship at the Bee, a DC communications internship, editor of The California Aggie, editor at SF Weekly, and finally Bee assistant opinion editor/Sunset Beacon freelance reporter at the wizened age of 24. She had plenty of opportunity to ply her trade while infusing her journalism with left wing nuttery.

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And it shows. Read the piece. It’s a mental fingerprint of unexamined assumptions and left-wing boilerplate. The opening paragraph is an unacknowledged tribute to the Unibomber’s Manifesto. It’s ripe with “ultra-conservative” (Hillsdale College) and this gem, “. . . extremist institution [Hillsdale College], perpetuating alternative facts and harmful conspiracy theories.” Plowing deeper into the tirade, one finds an excoriation of Hillsdale’s rejection of the lefty bromides of “social justice” and “multicultural diversity”. She then unabashedly and unthinkingly equates the two with “a just nation”. What? A “just nation” is created by the racial discrimination of a racial favoritism? For our intrepid reporterette, lady justice is not to wear a blindfold.

There’s more. She adopts the vocabulary – “dog whistle” – of Democratic Party electioneering. Of course, the phrase is attached to the opponents of the neo-Marxist critical theory and its offspring, critical race theory, leading to this whopper: “. . . they [Hillsdale] view the practice of accurately teaching America’s complex history to students as a threat to white supremacy.” There you have it. “White supremacy” has come full circle to include those who take Martin Luther King seriously.

Hillsdale’s sin is its unwillingness to kowtow to the fashionable tomfoolery that is so commonplace in the modern academy. Hillsdale is an unflinching advocate of classical education – classical means rooted in Western civilization. It’s the same civilization that gave birth to the university, the higher ed that has currently been bastardized to produce the youngins who can’t wait to dismantle it in their ignorance.

Hey, California, the doctor has arrived with a little tough love in the form of Hillsdale College.

RogerG

January 27, 2022January 27, 2022

Biden’s First Supreme Court Nominee. She’ll Be a Doozy.

Justice Stephen Breyer is stepping down. Since the Supreme Court has insinuated itself in all matters of life, there’s much at stake when choosing a juridical potentate for a lifetime appointment. President Biden set down his criteria for filling the seat and, guess what, it has little to do with merit. It has everything to do with melanin count and genitalia. But does it, really?

In a pandering applause line to a radicalized party base in a debate, Biden boasted of a “black” and “women” choice. Do you think for a moment that’s what he’s really after? Do you think the “black” part is encapsulated in a Clarence Thomas? Do you think “black woman” means a Condoleezza Rice (NS advisor to Bush 43, former provost to Stanford University, Dir. of the Hoover Institution, and concert-quality pianist) or Winsome Sears (Lt. Gov. of Virginia)? No, the closest equivalent is Corey Bush, charter member of The Squad. Many of the women that he chooses are lefties, so much so that it’s hard to avoid the descriptor “socialist”.

Take for example his floundered choice for comptroller of the currency, Saul Omarova, a graduate of Moscow State University pre-Soviet collapse. This Cornell University prof favors a Fed takeover of banking, a proposal that would make Lenin’s corpse smile. Get the idea?

In a debate, Biden plaintively cried, “Do I look like a socialist?” I don’t know what a socialist “looks” like since many of them look like they stepped off the pages of style magazines. But I do expect a full-blown lefty of the kind that’ll produce the gibberish of a Sonia Sotomayor. Once installed, the appointee better have an army of clerks to clean up the mess in her opinions.

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Get ready for a Supreme Court that looks like America: six sane ones, two Kool-Aid-drinking lefties, and one lefty trying to avoid the scat left by the other two.

RogerG

January 23, 2022January 27, 2022

The Woke Bowl

It looks like two-thirds of the key elements for a woke Super Bowl are lined up: a woke team and a woke location (plus the racial anthem and BLM sloganeering on team attire). The NFC championship game will be represented by two urban dystopias in a dystopian state – San Francisco and Los Angeles in California. One woke city or another from a woke state will land in Inglewood, an enclave in one of the worst governed metropolitan areas in the worst governed state. Either the Bengals, Chiefs, or the Bills of the AFC will have to play in wokedom (Bills and Chiefs are tied as of this writing).

May be an image of 3 people and people playing football — 49ers celebrate after the winning field goal against the Packers, 1/22/22.

May be an image of 4 people and people playing sports — Rams players celebrate after defeating the Buccaneers, 1/23/22.

That’s not the end of it. The geographic center of wokedom, the state of California, will get its grubby hands on a good chunk of the players’ earnings. Over half will be taken in income taxes once the tax-thirsty Sacramento goons with their highest state income tax in the nation thrust their mitts into each player’s till. It’d be better if the game was played in Texas or Florida. They don’t have a state income tax.

If you’re wondering how the scam works, California fine-tuned in 1991 the gambit of any professional athlete performing in the state to be subject to the state’s highest in the nation income tax. The state dubs the teams’ visits “duty days” which includes all days for the visit. The players for the Rams, 49ers, and Chargers really get whacked for at least 6 home games. All other teams face the ordeal at most only two times, absent any playoff games in the tax hellhole. The Woke Bowl in Inglewood may not be as joyous of an event if the players’ tax accountants run the numbers and get word to their clients.

As for me, the game is “Meh”. The Woke Bowl has little appeal. I’m not sure if I’ll watch it. It depends on what’s showing at the theater.

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RogerG

January 21, 2022

The Babylon Bee: The Return of Satire

As a follow-up to “Buddy can you spare a U-Haul” in a previous post, check out this bit of humor from the uproarious The Babylon Bee under the headline, “U-Haul Introduces Armored War Rigs For Californians Trying To Flee State’s Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland”. If you think that satire is dead with the downfall of SNL, it is alive and well on The Babylon Bee.

On the same link you’ll find this gem of a headline: “Christian plumber under fire for refusing same-sex fittings.” Parody is an excellent vehicle to unmask the ditzy pretensions of the Left. The whole belief system is a slipshod amalgam of demonstrably proven silliness.

Long live satire, an admirable tradition going back to Aristophanes of the 5th century BC. I just hope that the lefty die-hards who permeate our cultural commanding heights can take it as well as conservatives in the past century and a half.

Go to the link below. It’s a hoot.

RogerG

January 19, 2022January 19, 2022

Our Defiled Brahmin Caste

At the top of our society is a Brahmin caste of an elect in possession of prestigious degrees. Their high status is drawn from their educations, but the claim can only have legitimacy if their many years of formal instruction truly enlightened. The evidence for that is weakening by the day. Instead, these paragons were marinated in a hot house of radical ideology. It was political activism masquerading as scholarship. Still, off they go to fill positions of power and influence in our culture. They’re everywhere.

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Prime example: professional sports, or Big Sports, Inc. An aristocracy of athletic talent earning six figures, sometimes seven, eight, or nine, is managed by a metropolitan administrative apparatus of people marked by paper credentials. It’s an insular social caste far removed from the fan base that is not so well-endowed with these modern markers of prestige. The interests, tastes, social norms, and biases of this caste in the clouds escapes serious cross-examination due to uniform social reinforcement. Nearly everybody around them thinks the same way. It’s the dumb lacking any self-awareness of their dumbness.

How else can the sloganeering of campus neo-Marxists seep onto the helmets of athletes with astronomical salaries, the normal expression of patriotic unity in opening ceremonies be debased by overt racial anthems, and the change of venue of a long-scheduled all-star game after the wailing of small-minded activists be realized? Radicalism becomes fashionable when there’s no competing voices.

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Nothing escapes infection including the on-field attire. The NFL has an approved list of slogans for their helmets that includes “Stop Hate”, “End Racism”, and “Black Lives Matter”, all of them taken from people who previously chanted “pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon”. We know from where the adoption of extremist slogans come. It comes from people whose agenda exceeds the simple and generic meaning of the words. “Stop Hate”? What hate? Do they mean the garden variety of hate exhibited in domestic abuse, or the kind shown by a thief pistol-whipping a store clerk for resisting, or a jihadist taking synagogue worshippers hostage? I think not. The whole “Stop Hate” gambit became a cause because a viral video of an abusive cop was exploited as evidence of a systemic racial hatred. In point of fact, it was a singular incident of a bad cop, not proof of the KKK in blue.

It says more about our time’s hyper-communicability of bad behavior to every corner of the planet, whereas before it would be put in the context of a local incident to be handled locally.

“End Racism”? What racism? Widespread racial animus shows up in no respectable poll. In fact, whatever it is, it’s declining and widely condemned as shameful. So, where’s the “racism” that needs to be “ended”? Instead, a revolutionary agenda is at work. Cutting to the quick, our new fashionable revolutionary cadre want to end “acting white”, the Enlightenment, rationality, math, the scientific method, the constitutional order, anything that they assert stands in the way perfect categorical equality. This is the “racism” that they’re trying to “end”. Of course, none of this is achievable without a totalitarian state. That’s how you really kill the Enlightenment. Mao or Che would be proud.

As for “Black Lives Matter”, it came into vogue as if people needed to be reminded of the obvious: black lives do matter. Though, try saying “All lives matter”, the essence of the Gospels, and see how quickly the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion Department and Twitter mob pounce. All lives don’t matter to the chic radicals because they are consumed by the oppressor/oppressed shtick of Karl Marx and his later kindred spirits, of which there are many in the country’s thousands of faculty lounges. Things don’t turn out equal in racial enumerations, so the egregious non sequitur “use racism to combat racism” – in the immortal words of the high priest of Anti-Racism, Ibram X. Kendi (Ibram Henry Rogers) – becomes the latest slogan to be turned into policy preference. Until the numbers come out equal, ALL lives don’t matter in this sewer of the mind.

Look to the knit caps worn by people on the sidelines. Prominently stitched is the word “Equity”. Just yesterday, “equity” was consonant with justice. Today, it’s consonant with racial vengeance. It’s back to Kendi’s bunk of “use racism to end racism”. That’s right, enact cash payouts for being black (reparations). Hiring, promotions, and admissions should place race as the topmost criteria. If one race shows up too prominently in the crime stats, redefine crime, end bail, and avoid prosecutions. If you haven’t enough miscreants of other racial categories in the prosecutor’s hopper, invent them in campaigns to ferret out “white supremacy” as the new “domestic terrorism”, but define it broadly so you can bag your political opponents.

Why is it that “equity” crusades all too often stray into the ugliest despotism?

We can’t even watch a football game without getting a steady diet of the politicized word salad. I can’t think of my San Francisco 49ers without Colin Kaepernick and the kneeling craze crossing my mind. Ditto for the San Francisco Giants. Taking it further, San Francisco is more aptly “San Fransicko” (Michael Schellenberger’s book of the same title). The city’s muddied reputation proceeds all. Ditto for California.

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May be an image of 7 people and people standing — Most members of the San Francisco Giants kneel during a moment of silence prior to an opening day baseball game against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Thursday, July 23, 2020, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)

May be an image of 3 people, people playing sports, people standing and text that says 'BLACK LIVES MATTER' — Hunter Pence #8 of the San Francisco Giants looks on during batting practice before the game against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Dodger Stadium on July 23, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)

And corporate-boardroom NFL parades across our TV screens BLM/Antifa slogans. It’s just one big “Meh”. No enthusiasm and don’t care. I tried to watch 49ers/Cowboys and Rams/Cardinals but, once again, “Meh”. Time to switch to Netflix.

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P.S.: The politicization of professional associations is next.

RogerG

January 14, 2022January 15, 2022

The Pariah State

California Governor Gavin Newsom makes an appearance after the polls close on the recall election at the California Democratic Party headquarters in Sacramento, Calif., September 14, 2021. (Fred Greaves/Reuters)

“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”, what a hot mess. Extending it, what happens in California stays in California. Few things falser can be imagined. What happens in and for California invades the whole country without anyone’s consent. California’s manias have become our manias. It’s time to treat California as the pariah state that it is. Pariahs are isolated to quarantine their deadly influence.

Will Swaim of the California Policy Center provides sound reason to place California on the same list with North Korea (read about it here).

The Rocky Mountain states get to inhale the consequences of California’s desire to maintain combustible forests. Why? The state’s periodic droughts, normal in Mediterranean climates, blanket the golden state in a thick layer of matchsticks if not cleared. Guess what? The state’s wildlands aren’t cleared due to a glowing hatred of logging and prescribed burns. In addition, the spark, literally the spark, frequently comes from the state’s aging and neglected grid because of the state’s Public Utilities Commission fixation on the greenie fantasies of wind and solar. Anyone can see the results from their car window as they flee the flames: the ubiquitous forests of humongous windmills scarring the landscape, extensive seas of solar panels, and the costliest electricity rates with the greatest unreliability. The state’s folly now becomes our filthy air.

What about the epidemic of “out of stock” online and off? A huge link in the supply chain lies parked off the Southern California coast. Controlling the docks in the most incompetent way possible is the ILWU, the longshoreman’s union, which fully exploits the generous powers granted to it by the state’s maniacally pro-Big Labor laws. If those containers finally get off the ship, there are few trucks to pick them up because of the state’s uniquely intense jihad against fossil fuels, half the available trucking fleet having been made illegal by state diktats. The state’s pathological obsessive/compulsiveness in regards to emissions is now a gross obstacle to interstate commerce. It’s unsettling to discover that Billings supermarkets are so heavily impacted by lunatics in Sacramento.

Container ships and oil tankers waiting in the ocean outside the Port of Long Beach in California in April 2021. (photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

The price of meat is rising. Well, expect it to go higher for the whole country as producers scramble to meet the commands of California’s Prop 12, the Farm Animal Confinement Initiative. The state has ordered all producers from Fresno to Iowa to Canberra (Au.), wherever, to meet its demands if they want to peddle their goods in this asylum with an elected government. So, their meat products will be more expensive everywhere as producers scramble to cater to the state’s ninnies. Nobody voted for this outside this looney bin’s precincts.

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The same tactic is at work in forcing the state’s climate change feverishness on all of us. First in the crosshairs are the carbon consuming and emitting conveyances in your garage, no matter the state. For years, California’s fastidious phobias on emissions shows up on all vehicles whether sold in Los Angeles or Lubbock. The Zanyland’s mammoth market share and the dictates of production efficiencies force all of us to share in the dementia. Call it the California premium that everyone has to pay. This is the second instance of California getting to set its psychotic agenda on all states with corporate America as a co-conspirator. More about this later.

Interstate commerce isn’t managed out of Congress according to the Constitution’s Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3, but effectively out of Sacramento. And, as it turns out, neither is immigration (Clause 4). The state’s official immigration policy – it’s been a sanctuary state since 2017 – routinely ignores federal law and its enforcement personnel, going so far as to make it a crime ($10,000 fine) for businesses in the state to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. Further, the state subsidizes nonprofits assisting in the law-breaking while at the same time lavishing entitlements on the law-breakers. Clearly, the state is at war with the Constitution (Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl. 4)

Pro-illegal immigration protest, California 2019.

The state is one huge affront to the rule of law: the US Constitution. The use of the state’s police powers to block interstate and international commerce should be no more tolerated than its zany regulations be allowed to affect consumers who had no voice in their creation. The state must be brought to heel. The situation has aggravated beyond a mere irritant. It’s getting close to being an existential threat to the nation.

A corrective begins with the recognition of the state as a pariah, one that habitually operates outside the bounds of our Constitution. Quarantine the madness to make certain that Californios bear the full freight of their lunacy. Take the management of their ports away from them. Institute forest management practices by sidelining the state’s powerful eco-crazed lobbies. State interference in the enforcement of federal immigration law should be treated as acts of secession. Federal legislation should prevent interstate producers from imposing costs of meeting California’s frenzies on the entire national market. What happens in California should be made to stay in California.

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Over time, the need for explicit action may wane as people continue to do what they have been doing: flee the asylum run by the inmates. The state’s overbearing market share is fading as the number of outbounded moving trucks continues to mount. The problem is taking care of itself, but a little legal protection for the rest of the nation is needed along the way.

RogerG