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A Disturbing Future

What’s in store for us in the not-too-distant future? The tea leaves before us aren’t so encouraging.

Most of the threats to our well-being emanate from our imagination running wild, but the resulting anxiety seriously alters our behaviors. Among the troubling trends is the possibility of hysterics routinely finding a home in government policy. The corresponding shocks to our workaday lives promise an endemic decline in the standard of living. The disruptions in our economic lives foretells disorder in our social, cultural, and religious spheres. Psychologically, we’ll forever be scarred by a gripping fear of contagions and hypothetical health crises. Crises, mostly imaginary, won’t be limited to the next virus. An accelerant for a mindset of terror is seen in the steady drumbeat of more speculative dooms. Our progeny will be swept up in it. In addition, progressive authoritarianism is waiting in the wings which will play havoc with our settled legal and political arrangements. The list may not be long enough, but it’s sufficient to present a vision that should keep you awake at night.

And, just think, we’re doing it to ourselves. No external enemy need apply as agent.

The response to corona pointed the way. A population now inured to mandatory isolations will find it easier to fall in line in regards to more mundane contagions to follow. The flu vaccine is taking on the rhetorical trappings of the COVID vaccine in popular media and public health bureaucracies. Reality could easily follow the rhetoric. Soon, masking, social distancing, stay-at-home orders, and business and school closures could be a recurring feature of life. A society in the perpetual grip of fear is one on the cusp of disintegration . . . or conquest.

Don’t expect an economy to thrive in this condition of instability. Investing for the long term will be replaced by retrenchment – the focus on the protection of life, immediate family, and assets. Hunkering down will be the order of the day, not the rambunctious risk-taking that makes for the economic expansion that is necessary to absorb the coming generations. The uncertainty could set the stage for a revival of medievalism, its increasing isolation, and a corresponding decline in the quality of life.

Look around you. Our quality of life is under stress. Shortages abound either due to hording, a lack of labor, or government’s infatuation with environmentalism’s inbred prejudice against commerce and its energy needs. COVID is the excuse to retard business activity while at the same time bribing much of the workforce to stay home with inflated government benefits.

What happens to the social maturation of children in this atmosphere of isolation? What happens to young adults when dating customs becomes more cumbersome? What then happens to marriage and the birthrate? What happens to family and friends when the holidays are zoomed? And, indeed, for adolescents and young adults, when education is zoomed? Graduating high school seniors at the junior high educational level does not bode well for upward mobility or social peace. Feudal-sized gaps in educational attainment will appear as the richer demographic cohorts utilize their willingness and means to break free of the straitjacketed and zoomed public schools.

Of course, that education will be increasingly festooned with the hysterias-of-the-moment. “Climate change” is at the top of the list. Evidence strongly suggests that “climate change” is happening and man has a role, with the pollution-belching power plants of China and India as the chief suspects: 2.8 billion in combined population, 35% of the world’s total humanity, and developing an affection for air conditioning and upwardly-mobile jobs.

The burning of coal at a Chinese steel plant.

But how much of a role? The widely parroted eco-apocalypse is a stretch to say the least, and any benefits – longer growing season, CO2 as fertilizer – largely ignored. Off-the-shelf mitigations – sun screen, more efficient housing design, natural gas/nuclear/hydro power – are readily available. And all this riding on a projected 1.1° C increase by the end of the century. Even this prognostication is more of a WAG (wild a** guess) or SWAG (affix numbers to the wild a** guess) than anything else. The extent of man’s role, the intensity of impact of GHG (greenhouse gases), and longevity of the temp spike is more up in the air (no pun intended) than is admitted. Yet, it’s hair-on-fire time. And off we go to a mutilation of our way of life, all made more palatable by the opinionated lab coats in the CDC or the University of East Anglia.

The craziness extends beyond a politicized science. The politicized lab is an indicator of the reign of progressive authoritarianism throughout the high status, elite sectors of our society. Much has been written on this. Muscular progressivism has become a status marker and overwhelmingly dominant in top drawer institutions. Society’s upper echelons are an ideological and social monoculture maintained through intermarriage (homogamy) and discrimination. It shows up everywhere from the Ivy League to the campus of Google to the boardrooms of the multinationals to the faculty senate to the newsroom to the people around the broadcast camera and movie studio. It’s ubiquitous and exceedingly stifling.

Prejudice abounds. Surveys from 2019 and 2020 show rising ideological intolerance among the self-designated “better” people; the most perfidious bigotry comes from the much larger progressive-left cohort. Dating sites such as eHarmony show a greater prevalence for partisan affiliations as filters: the left refusing to have romantic relationships with the right in much greater percentages than the other way around.

Not only are student bodies increasingly radical-left but they’ll easily jettison “free speech” for something tyrannically defined as “safety”. The “safety” is a euphemism for the abstracted threats to fashionable and recently-minted victim groups. The threat to that “safety” is the feeling of rejection by the alleged victim from someone simply expressing disbelief for their claim of victimhood and self-description. At this point, “safety” is cover for thought control when it’s translated into speech codes, “safe spaces”, and into curriculum. And today’s twenty-somethings and younger are four-square behind it.

The thinking muddles institutional autonomy and individual autonomy. Popularly elected legislatures and governors are castigated for trying to restrict an institution’s power to trample individual rights at the insistence of a radical student clique. Ironies of all ironies: institutional academic freedom is transmuted into a prohibition of basic individual rights.

The prejudice and bigotry of the young will be carried into their adult lives. Whether it be the classroom, tenure, boardroom, government, or employment, power positions will be the province of the progressive-left. If you want an example of the Kendi’s marriage of prejudice and power, here it is, albeit without the race-obsession. Here’s systemic bigotry staring back at them in the mirror. They have met the enemy and it is them.

What does this mean for our constitutional order? It means a simultaneous mixture of “expert” authoritarianism (meaning more power for people like them) and the dismantlement of hesitant Constitutional institutions such as a conservative Court, the Senate, and Electoral College. Anything is laid waste if it stands athwart the left’s path to the holy land of self-defined “equity”.

NEW YORK, NY – OCTOBER 25: People march across the Brooklyn Bridge to protest the Covid-19 vaccine mandate for municipal workers on October 25, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)

To make the revolution permanent, unchecked and unassimilated immigration and control of the schools is essential for guaranteeing a pliable electorate. Empowered by a socially engineered electorate, the country’s traditional principles and ideals will end up on the trash heap for this permanent governing class. No more is justice to be fair – i.e., blind and neutral. Lady Justice must peek under her blindfold to grant favorable rulings to people of the right race, genitalia, gender self-designation, or intersectionality (combination) of any of the previous. No more is there to be fealty to equal protection of the laws. Far from it. Awards and penalties are to be assigned by race, et al. Paying heed to the geographical and cultural diversity (real diversity) of the country through federalism or other governing institutions will be discarded for the imposition of a left-wing conformity from an administrative center (DC). Consensual government is transformed into the North Korean kind. Elections will be of the perfunctory type.

Others, many more than I, have raised the alarm. Our world is changing before our eyes, and not in a wholesome way. At root, many of our young people are proving that an education can make you stupid as well as wise. The breadth and depth of understanding of past generations is lacking. In the end, many college graduates manifest the traits of a cult. They have beliefs that are, in essence, unexamined assumptions, unprovable and highly questionable. And to think that this is the generation that threatens to sweep way the legacy of a thousand of years.

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34)

And so, many of you might still say that we have nothing to fear. Really?

RogerG

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Should Biden Be Impeached?

The U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 3:
“. . . he [President] shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed . . . .”

The U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 4:
“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Presidential Oath of Office:
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Drone photo of crowds of illegal immigrants at the International Bridge on the southern border in Texas, Sept. 16, 2021.
President Biden after signing a stack of executive orders shortly after taking office to reverse many of Trump’s actions.

Yes, but he won’t be.

How to rein in the President when occupants from both parties, but particularly the donkey party, have overstepped and shirked their legal responsibilities? Do we have to wait four years to correct the abuse?

Well, no. Impeachment stands at the ready. The Democrats tried it twice in Trump’s one term. They may have debased its utility by frivolous and failed overuse. Yet, it has become commonplace for federal officers throughout the three branches to egregiously overstep their powers while flagrantly ignoring their clear constitutional responsibilities. Most recently, President Biden refuses to enforce the immigration laws. He has, by execute order(s), simply repealed enforcement of the border. That’s a dereliction of a clear compulsory-in-law duty.

Could it qualify as a “high crime” when an elected officer grievously neglects his or her lawfully required responsibility? Biden’s executive orders are a clear violation of the oath of office to “faithfully execute” the constitutional position. You can’t “faithfully execute” if you refuse to do your job. You’re willfully derelict. Willful, persistent dereliction is a willful, persistent violation of the Constitution. “High crime” anyone?

The scenes at the southern border are gut-wrenching for all the people allured by illegal presidential promises to not enforce the law. The human tidal waves passing through without paying heed to legal strictures, while enabling passage throughout the country of said violators, is tantamount to presidential complicity in crimes. This isn’t an indictment based on a phone call or overheated rhetoric at a rally. It is a shredding of the oath and Constitution. What can be a more serious “high crime” than to blatantly violate the highest law?

The donkey party’s abettors of the behavior will try to hang their hat on “prosecutorial discretion”. Where’s the discretion? Is it “discretion” to take an entire class of law and pretend it doesn’t exist? Not only that, but to assist in the violation of the laws? Hardly. It’s the practice of euphemism to provide cover for criminal conduct. “Prosecutorial discretion” turns a bank robbery into an “unauthorized withdrawal”.

It’s time to rethink our obese federal Leviathan. The level of government headquartered in DC has been unhinged from Constitutional moorings for quite some time. Impeachment might be one useful tool to once again align the branches within the bounds of our charter – i.e., return them to legal status.

However, I’m under no illusion that anybody in either party has the stomach for such medicine. We’ll, as before, muddle along and be content with the results of an electorate equally as unhinged as the people they elect. And surveys will continue, as before, to show deep disenchantment with the people they choose.

Pogo in Walt Kelly’s comic strip famously said in 1970, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Kelly meant the statement for the plague of pollution. He’d probably be surprised to learn that Pogo’s quip has a much more robust application.

RogerG

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The Census Hustle

SACRAMENTO, CA – JULY 29: Secretary of State Alex Padilla is photographed in his office on Monday, July 29, 2019, in Sacramento, Calif. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)

I’ll be a “census enumerator” for a couple of months to do my very small bit to prevent declining blue states – like California – from poaching a representative or two from the others.  Actually, the motive is more than altruism.  They’re paying me $17/hr plus mileage.  But the probable antics of the deteriorating coastal-corridor states to pilfer what rightly belongs to others got me off my duff to join the fray.

California is pouring $187 million – compared to $10 million in 2010 – to find and/or invent humans so as to inflate its count.  They’re even implementing a phone survey, not knowing who’s really on the other end and possibly doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the count from the other end of the line.  Homelessness is rampant so tallying those folks – when they may not be around next week, next month, next year, or even in the land of the living – will make for abundant opportunities for hanky-panky.  For the chief statewide Democrat ward healer, Sec. of State Alex Padilla, keeping the state’s congressional count at 53 is a matter of life and death.

The most commonly cited number for the flight of native Californians from the state over the past decade is about 400,000, nearly equal to the loss of one House seat.  Meanwhile, other and more deserving states (mostly red) have blossomed.  With foreign immigration declining (legal and illegal), the state can’t count on that source to makeup for the losses to red states like Texas and Florida.

Make no mistake about it, this is about the maintenance of raw, partisan political power.  Padilla put it quite succinctly: “If people [bodies – real or imaginary – in California] don’t participate in the census, Trump wins. If we are successful in counting every Californian, Trump loses.” Translation: Screw the Republicans!

You can read more about the hustle in an August 15, 2019, interview with Padilla in the San Jose Mercury News here.

RogerG

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Barr Reigns in Secessionitis

William Barr at a press conference on Feb.11 announcing court filings against California, King County, Wa., and New Jersey.

“All the indications are that this treasonable inflammation – ‘secessionitis’ – keeps on making steady progress week-by-week.  If disunion becomes an established fact, we have one consolation.  The self-amputated members were diseased beyond immediate cure and their virus will infect our system no longer.” — George Templeton Strong in his diary as Southern states voted to leave the union in 1861.

George Templeton Strong

Once again, we are replaying the scene in the immediate aftermath of the presidential election of 1860.  Local and state entities, under the spell of radical multiculturalism, have decided shortly after the election of Donald Trump to effectively negate federal immigration law in their jurisdictions.  “Sanctuary” cities and states have taken the place of South Carolina and the ten other Southern states of 1860-1.  This time, the sanctuaries’ target is immigration law and not the tariff or the spread of slavery.  Attorney General William Barr, like Lincoln before him, has decided to reign in the “diseased members”, in Strong’s words, by announcing federal court action against California, King County, Wa., and New Jersey for inhibiting federal enforcement of immigration law.  Barr’s press conference was the equivalent of Lincoln’s call for volunteers after the firing on Ft. Sumter.

Hurray, it’s finally on!

The sham logic of the seceding jurisdictions goes something like this: we need to maintain the cooperation of immigrant neighborhoods by not assisting federal immigration authorities as we enforce our laws, so we will ignore Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1996.  Section 287(g) empowers state and local authorities to assist in the transfer of illegal immigrants with federal criminal violations.  One of the sheriff’s elected in 2018 with the support of $175,000 from the ACLU was Gary McFadden in Mecklenburg County, NC.  He crowed on election night, “287(g) is going to be history!”

McFadden runs for Mecklenburg County sheriff with the support of Maxine Waters (D, Ca.)

Leftists like McFadden use rationales that are invented to hide a real purpose, which in this case is the goal of advancing the idea of a nation of disjointed tribes (radical multiculturalism).  Immigration law stands in the way of bringing about this utopia – or dystopia in reality.

If you think about it, the rationale succeeds at reaching new heights of silliness.  Why single out immigration law for this exclusive treatment?  The same logic could apply to federal larceny, counterfeiting, contraband, and kidnapping suspects who were taken into custody by local authorities on state charges.  Illegal immigrants are by definition lawbreakers and are preternaturally nervous whenever ICE officers appear anywhere for anything.  Whether it’s the receipt of stolen identities, drug dealing, the kidnapping of an adolescent girl across state lines, or nothing, by an “undocumented” neighbor, the rest of the “undocumented” will concentrate on remaining under the fed’s radar.  The “woke” localists’ reasoning is actually a call for an abandonment of all federal law anywhere a large concentration of illegal immigrants exists.  And we have massive concentrations of millions of the “undocumented” (10-22 million, anyone’s guess) since the spigot of immigration – legal and illegal – was first thrown wide open in 1965.

Migrants who crossed the US-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. (photo: Photo: AP / US Customs and Border Protection)

The secessionists hang their hat on their interpretation of 287(g) as “voluntary”.  Voluntary or no, a state or local government can’t inhibit the federal government from carrying out its constitutional powers.  Court rulings have protected state and local governments from being forced to financially support a federal responsibility.  But when does “voluntary” and “not being forced” stray into interference?  Do these jurisdictions generally withhold cooperation with other local jurisdictions, other than the federal government on immigration law?  Are the costs for holding a local suspect for violations of federal law so burdensome?  In a federated republic, like ours, the police powers are shared; therefore, law enforcement in a governmental arrangement of overlapping layers ipso facto mandates the incurring of costs of cooperation since criminal activity strays across the nation and levels of government.  Call it the costs of doing business in a federated republic.

In the end, we are left with radical left-wing localities and states who have in effect nullified federal immigration law as if they have the power to pick and choose the federal government’s constitutional powers that they will recognize.  They refuse to share information and release suspects before the feds can get their hands on them.  The behavior goes beyond the exercise of state and local sovereignty and into blocking the enforcement of federal law.

Segregationists of the old South would be proud.  No state or local government has the power to act as if the 14th Amendment or federal immigration law has been repealed.  The costs of intergovernmental cooperation aren’t burdensome when they are limited to briefly holding suspects or sharing information.  It’s nonsense to conclude that any cost is the equivalent of the forceful conscription of local government for the benefit of the feds.  Otherwise, we are the United Nations General Assembly and not the United States of America.

Go get ‘em Barr.

RogerG

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Stalking Horses

“Approaching the fowl with stalking-horse”, an 1875 illustration. (en.wikipedia.org)

Stalking horse: noun; a false pretext concealing someone’s real intentions. (Oxford Dictionary)

In the context of the verbal brawl that occurs in today’s America, the eagerness for gun control and large-scale immigration is a stalking horse for deeper and mostly urban cultural trends.  The popularity of gun control takes place in the urban womb of government services.  Think of it as mass infantilization.  Nearly unrestrained immigration is fashionable in districts whose knowledge of immigrants is limited to the domestic help of the cheap nanny, housekeeper, and landscaper.  Do you really think that they ever venture into the blighted neighborhoods that the hired help retreats into after work?  Ignorance of guns and the actual lives of immigrants plagues our cultural “betters” in our cities and their academic playgrounds, and ironically informs (“informs”, maybe a bad choice of words) their political enthusiasms.

In May of 2019, Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker (D, NJ) called for national gun registration.

In August, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris expressed the willingness to send cops to people’s homes to confiscate banned firearms. (Washington Examiner)

What brought this personal reflection to mind was Michael Lind’s piece in American Affairs, “Classless Utopia versus Class Compromise” (Summer 2018, Vol. II, Number 2).

The article is about the large scale social, economic, and political trends mostly affecting native blue collar workers.  In it, Lind makes the point that nearly unfettered immigration has led to the evisceration of native low-skilled and blue collar workers, no matter their ethnic or racial backgrounds.  He writes, “… globalization, operating mainly through corporate-orchestrated labor arbitrage—in the form of offshoring jobs to foreign workers or importing immigrants to compete with native workers—weakened the bargaining power of immobile native workers in the developed democracies.”  Do you think that the loss of bargaining power for the native lower-skilled worker crossed the minds of upper-middle-to-upper-class urbanites?  For them, it’s simply a matter of compassion and nannies.

Victorina Morales, undocumented worker at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J.

Also, I must admit that it could be something more sinister.  For everyone else outside their pampered social circles, though, massive immigration had a devastating effect.

Think of it this way: open borders is a stalking horse for gutting the power and influence of the hoi polloi, knowingly or unknowingly.  Regarding the stalking horse of gun control, it’s a matter of everyone being forced to adopt an urban lifestyle with its norms, expectations, and requisite politically correct views, no matter its unfitness for folks outside the suburban/urban bubbles.

Stalking horses are stalking about these days.

RogerG

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The Citizenship Question

A group of migrants gather at the Chaparral border crossing in Tijuana, Mexico, Sunday, Nov. 25, 2018, as they try to pressure their way into the U.S.
Rodrigo Abd/AP

The citizenship question should be on the ballot, and please don’t psychoanalyze repressed racism as is the wont of the pseudo-Freudians in the Democratic presidential field. It’s simply a matter of pure reason. However, there’s more to the story according to John Yoo (UC Berkeley law professor) and James Phillips (Stanford law professor). They see a silver lining in the Supreme Court’s decision (Dept. of Commerce v. New York) blocking the inclusion of the citizenship question for those concerned about rule by unelected administrative apparatchiks (“Roberts Thwarted Trump, but the Census Ruling Has a Second Purpose”, The Atlantic, see here).

FILE PHOTO: U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Associate Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan listen during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., January 30, 2018. REUTERS/Win McNamee/Pool/File Photo – RC183E07BA00

First, pure reason dictates the presence of the question. The Democrats’ lollapalooza of giveaways includes the extension of benefits to citizens of other nations in residence here, legal and illegal. How could you determine the fiscal impact of the lunacy if you can’t count the beneficiaries? Mayor Pete (Buttigieg) pulls 11 million out of the hat for the undocumented alone. MIT says its more like 22 million. A range of double means that we don’t know. Though, who would you trust for scientific rigor, Mayor Pete or MIT?

Mayor Pete

An additional reason cries for the inclusion of the query. I suspect that the foreign-born make up a huge slice of the population. If you want a data base on the nature of the current population for policy reasons – which is one of the reasons for having a census – to exclude a descriptor that stares at you as you drive through almost any hamlet, town, or city in California (and Chicago, New York City, etc., etc.) would limit the census to only being a tool to inflate Democrat representation in Congress. Get real, ferret out the non-citizens and their status.

Secondly, Yoo and Phillips see a positive in the Court’s majority opinion for those with qualms about omnicompetent administrative governance, particularly the promiscuous delegation of Congressional authority to the president and his administrative minions. Since Wilson and FDR, it has been the dream of “progressives” to supplant popular sovereignty with the rule of “experts”, never mind that the rule of experts can resemble the rule of Boss Tweed (“collusion” anyone?). The decision could be interpreted as a slap at “Chevron deference” (courts deferring to administrative judgment) and power-hungry power centers like the EPA.

If we still are prevented from knowing much about the people who are flooding into our country, at least we might be comforted by the realization that the EPA can’t kick us out of our house.

Read the Yoo and Phillips article.

RogerG

Postscript: On Friday, 7/12/2019, Pres. Trump issued an executive order to use other data bases to determine residency status of the population for the 2020 census.  Expect more lawsuits in attempts to obscure the actual number.

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Irritating Abuse of Language

On Jan. 30, 2017, CNN’s Jake Tapper was critical of White House spokesman Sean Spicer’s words in describing Trump’s executive order restricting some Muslim immigrants.

We are not well-served by our telegenic punditry class on cable TV nor our increasingly demagogic hucksters running for high office in order to gain power to tell us what to do.  Particularly irksome is the collection of verbiage to avoid using “illegal immigrant” to refer to those who crossed our borders in violation of our laws.  The rhetorical gymnastics are astounding, and misleading.

A favorite euphemism is the phrase “the undocumented”, meaning those “without papers”.  Yes, in a superficial sense, these words work.  Even “illegal immigrant” works, but all have an important ingredient missing.  What’s absent is any indication that the objects of the phraseology are citizens.  Yes, they are “citizens”, but not of here.  These people are the citizens of other countries.  They are not stateless people.

Central American migrants attempt to rush the border fence between Tijuana and San Diego and are dispersed with tear gas by the Border Patrol, 2018.

Putting it all together: “the undocumented” are citizens of other countries who willingly broke our laws to reside in our nation.  The fact that they are the citizens of other countries puts the issue of what to do with them in an entirely new light.

So, extending universal health insurance coverage as some have proposed, subsidized by American citizens, to citizens of Guatemala (or any country for that matter) in our country in violation of our laws is an invitation for them to get here by any means available and partake of our fantastic medical professionals and facilities.  American citizens get the honor of paying for the healthcare of Guatemala citizens.  If the point is to rub away the distinction between foreign citizens and American ones, the idea accomplishes the feat in a quick stroke.

Patients wait to be seen in the emergency room of an LA hospital, 2012.

Trump’s citizenship question might have to be reworded.  He’ll have to replace “United States” in front of “citizen” with “world” since U.S. citizens, functioning as taxpayers, become the world’s taxpayers for the world’s needy.  Thus, “Are you a world citizen?”

I present the point not as mere sarcasm. If your concern is the treatment of a bleeding Guatemala citizen in our country in violation of our laws, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986 takes care of it.  The hucksters, though, are brandishing cradle-to-grave healthcare for … Guatemala citizens, or any country’s citizens who happen to get here by any means available.  American citizenship be damned.

Ludicrousness continues in the call for non-citizens to vote in local elections.  Imagine the spectacle of city council elections turning into UN affairs.  Citizens of Guatemala – or Honduras, El Salvador, Russia, etc. – if they account for a majority in a district due to the laxed enforcement of our immigration laws, get to tell US citizens what to do. So, nonmembers – national membership is the essence of citizenship – govern members.  How does that make sense?

From now on, please clean up the language.  All people are born in some country and therefore citizens of it – with but a few arcane exceptions.  The anomalies are probably focused on the jet-set rich who can afford to be above it all.  For the rest of us, citizenship goes with our presence on the earth.  Let’s talk like we understand the fact.

RogerG

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Hypocrisy Has Long Legs in Politics, And So Does Never Admitting a Mistake

CNN’s Jake Tapper interviewing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, June 27, 2019.

Remember the cry from Republicans that “character counts” during the Clinton impeachment battle?  Now, nary a word of condemnation from them about Trump’s present public and past private (and not so private) behavior.  Don’t worry, the Dems are a mountain of hypocrisies too.  Remember Barbara Jordan (D, Tx.) and her U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform of 1994-1996?  Her restrictionist views on immigration once found a home in the Democratic Party.  If alive today, not only would she never make the stage in either of the recent Dem debates, she would be wiping spittle off her face after a visit to a local DC restaurant.

Don’t expect either party to offer a duplicity-free environment.  Maybe it has to do with life constantly throwing monkey wrenches into our preconceived notions.  What we once condemned – or loved – turns around and bites us in our posterior.

Barbara Jordan (D, Tx.)

Jordan said the following about immigration policy: “… it is both a right and a responsibility of a democratic society to manage immigration so that it serves the national interest.”  Further, she wrote, “For immigration to continue to serve our national interest, it must be lawful.  There are people who argue that some illegal aliens contribute to our community because they may work, pay taxes, send their children to our schools, and in all respects except one, obey the law.  Let me be clear: that is not enough.”  From there on, she continues to sound more and more like Trump.

The hood ornament for open borders is our giddy sophomore class president, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY).  Lately, she strode into the land of Nazi-shaming about our immigrant holding centers, calling them “concentration camps”.  It’s true that when a person resorts to making anything a clone of the Nazis, you’re close to admitting the sterility of your point.  Game over, Alexandria.

What does she do when confronted with her banality?  She dodges.  In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, she was questioned, “… there were also ‘concentration camps’ under Obama and under Bill Clinton…. did you call them concentration camps at the time when Obama was president?”

Her awkward response was, “Well, at the time, I was working in a restaurant.”  She tried to recover by additionally saying, “… I absolutely was outspoken against Obama’s immigration policies and the detention of families then.”  He didn’t ask her about her past opposition.  He queried her about equating our detention centers under Obama to what is colloquially understood to mean Auschwitz.  She rhetorically zigzags like an Allied troop ship in a u-boat killing zone.

Quibbling is another favorite tactic when caught tasting your feet.  She attempts to bring up a more benign and arcane definition of “concentration camp”.  The over-caffeinated Ocasio-Cortez exhibits all the signs of a zealot caught being a zealot.

Baffoonishness is now a qualification for the political limelight.

Read the story of the Tapper/Cortez interview here.

RogerG

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Bastardizing the Language

U.S. workers are seen next to heavy machinery while working on a new bollard wall in El Paso, Texas, as seen from the Mexican side of the border in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico September 26, 2018. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez.

Too much heat can destroy things.  The same is true of political heat.  It wreaks havoc on the language.  For instance, take the word “old”, like walls being “old technology”.

I was thinking this morning of the amazing things that we are doing with technology.  I bluetoothed my phone with my bedroom radio/receiver for the umpteenth time to listen to Pandora.  It’s wonderful to know that we have crammed so much capability in a cellphone smaller than a chest-pocket notepad. In the end, though, the cellphone functions as a radio of days of yore.  All the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities are just radio signals.  It’s “old” in today’s corrupted parlance.

Radio and its signals weren’t understood until a nerdy and inventive kid, Edwin Howard Armstrong, figured out how it worked and came up with the components in the 1910’s-1930’s to make AM and FM radio, and television for that matter, possible.  Apple and Android are riding on his back.

Armstrong explaining the superregenerative circuit, New York, 1922.

The cellphone has a lot more of “old” in it.  Thanks to the gang at Bell Labs and Robert Noyce and his band of lusty fellows at Fairchild Semiconductor of the 1950’s and 1960’s we have the semiconductor and planar process.  Without these things, no cellphone … and our kids would be normal.

“Old” is all around us.  It seems foolish to call them “old” because they are as fundamental as gravity. It sounds jarring to speak of gravity as “old”.  Newton and Einstein didn’t invent gravity.  They attempted to understand it. Armstrong didn’t invent the EM spectrum.  He just found a way to use it.  Bell Labs and Robert Noyce didn’t invent silicon or electricity.  They just found ways to use it for sending electrical signals (the integrated circuit).

Noyce and Gordon Moore in front of the Intel SC1 building in Santa Clara in 1970.

“Old” is everywhere.  If it wasn’t for another “old” process, we wouldn’t be here … if we escaped the clutches of Planned Parenthood and our parents ignored the loony congresswoman from the Bronx (AOC).

“Old” is one of those words facing disfigurement by our partisan hotheads.  Trump wants a wall; the Dems want power.  Power to do what?  Power to remake America. “Old” is attached to “walls” to frustrate efforts to limit and manage the human tide crashing our borders.  Walls do work; ask any celebrity seeking privacy.  The Dems, in their heart of hearts, don’t want anything that really works.  That’s because they are predisposed to be more comfortable with open borders than they are with controlled borders.

Of course, the Dems need an alternative or surrender the field.  Their favorite rejoinder is to attach “more” and “new” to “technology” and “more” to “personnel”.  Sounds great, and is.  The only problem is that the other side has long wanted this stuff … and walls.

The gambit of only “new technology” and “more personnel”, though, serves the Dems’ interests in two ways.  First, the tech stuff can be easily turned off and the personnel moved away from the border if the political winds should blow their way.  Secondly, it’s a hot opportunity to funnel some taxpayer cash to their rich donors in Silicon Valley.  Construction companies and their workers building a wall aren’t likely to be a rich source of support anyway.

Sometimes such words are combined with others to produce nonsense, as in “diversity” combined with “is our strength”.  What football team achieved BCS ranking by allowing the offensive line to be “diverse” in their blocking?  It’s balderdash.

Bastardize is defined as “change (something) in such a way as to lower its quality or value, typically by adding new elements”.  “Old” and “diversity” have been bastardized beyond recognition.  Simply by affixing “old” to anything has convinced the Dems that they have won the argument.  No, they’re just playing fast and loose with the language.  Now there’s a scandal, a linguistic one with disastrous consequences.

RogerG

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An Assassination Attempt on Citizenship

Americans, a noxious notion has seeped into your kid’s school curriculum.  It’s called “world citizen”.  It’s happening to your kids, prep school to inner-city.

As a retired teacher of 30 years, I was perplexed.  Is this an attempt to erase borders or proclaim allegiance to the UN or both?  Anyway, the original concept of citizenship may go the way of plastic straws.  The modus operandi is to fiddle with the minds of the youngins and tie the project’s prospects to the fortunes of the Democratic Party.

These Democrats aren’t kidding.  They are actively trying to erase the border as they erase the distinction between citizen and non-citizen, and even legal and illegal resident.  The cultural appropriator Beto (as in Robert O’Rourke) absconded with Reagan’s old line, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”, absent the reference to Gorbachev.  12 Dem-heavy states and DC already are issuing driver’s licenses to people whose presence in the country is in violation of our laws, thus creating havoc with motor-voter laws.

Robert O’Rourke at a rally at the El Paso border.

That bastion of insanity, California, has taken the chant of “healthcare for all” literally to mean “all”, as in any of the world’s denizens who can get here.  Oh, Bernie in his 2016 concoction of the concept tried to stop migrants from receiving the benefits if they enter for that reason.  The restriction is meaningless. How could it be enforced without a mind-reading machine?  Sander’s 2017 version, the one tucked to the bosom of Dem candidates seeking to oust Trump, ended the masquerade.  “Residents” are eligible for the freebie; the adjectives “legal” and “illegal” are absent.

Gillibrand goes further than the cultural appropriator with calls to dismantle ICE and the wall.  She’s in good company with many in the Dem congressional caucus.  And once these foreign citizens get here, it’s now wrong to count them as “non-citizens”, as per Manhattan Federal District Court Judge Jessie M. Furman (Obama appointee).  Not only are we not to stop the citizens of other countries from entering but we are to be kept in the dark about how many are here.

Federal District Court Judge Jessie Furmam.

“Foreign-born” is the approved moniker for everyone born on foreign soil and taking up stakes here. If they are non-citizens – which we can’t tell thanks to Judge Jessie – they are still citizens, citizens of another country.  That makes for an interesting situation when voting rights for foreign citizens in the US gets traction among the Dem rank-and-file.  Other countries’ citizens get to help choose what happens to US citizens.  Soon, with the erasure of the border, every US election will require shipping ballots to Moscow, Mexico City, Managua, Capetown, etc., etc.  With the Dems, what’s in a border anyway?

Voting rights is making the rounds among Dem strongholds in the US.  Stacey Abrams (failed Dem candidate for Georgia governor) announced her support for the craziness in local elections.  SF, of course, and some Maryland localities have already broken the ice (not ICE).  They excuse the folderol with cries that non-citizens – legal or illegal (which we can’t tell thanks to Judge Jessie) – pay taxes.  In tax-happy cities and states, yes, they pay some exactions.  The legal ones pay but don’t have to mess around with jury duty and draft registration.  Illegals ditto, but they don’t pay Social Security taxes and the like, unless they commit document fraud – which many have since that’s the only way for them to get paid. Advantages abound for those keeping their foreign citizenship.  They avoid the flip side of rights: responsibilities.

Today’s Dem Party is clearly out to blur the line between citizen and non-citizen.  And why not?  It’s a rich vein of votes.  It works to elect Democrats.  In 50 Dem congressional districts, the foreign-born comprise more than 20% of the population (only 11 Republican districts meet the standard).  Sandy Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was elected in a 25% foreign-born locale (almost 50% Hispanic).  In-migration and out-migration combine to bend the partisan balance beam of a neighborhood.

If we take the words of the donkey party’s candidates at face value – And how could we take them otherwise? – what’s the point of being a citizen?  Simply renting on American soil is enough to get all the bennies of the nanny state, condones massive document fraud, avoids certain inconvenient responsibilities of citizenship, and is a qualification for the franchise.  For all practical purposes, naturalization is irrelevant.  Now, that’s one way to repeal Art. 1, Sec. 8, Cl. 4 (naturalization power) of the Constitution.

Say bye, bye to the border. And isn’t that the point?

RogerG

* Thanks for the contributions of Howard Husock of “City Journal” and Matthew Continetti of “National Review”.