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Democracy, Schmuckocracy

(Schmuck: a foolish or contemptable person; origin in the Yiddish schmok, i.e. penis)

Is it time to ditch 'NIMBYism'? - Phillips Group
NIMBYs, schmucks

The chant “Save our democracy”, it’s flung like so many shotgun pellets at anyone viewed as an opponent.  What about the people, the people doing the flinging?  The reality is that we have more “democracy” than ever before, and the dissatisfaction with our plight has never been greater.  How does that compute: more democracy equals more discontent?  Can the collective, also known as “the people”, act in the manner of schmucks, harming themselves?  Democracy, schmuckocracy?

The level of discontent is palpable in polls.  Here’s one: Gallup’s recent survey of public confidence in major institutions ranging from the governmental to the social and economic, public and private (see #1 and #2 below).  11 of the 16 measured entities experienced declines; not one turned in a sterling performance.  Much of the public’s lackluster assessment of our institutions can be attributed to their current conduct.  Biden’s infirmity, an engineered chaos at the border, the embarrassing bugout from Kabul, the highly destructive endeavor to shut down nearly all human activity during a viral episode, inflation, the unaffordability of shelter, the unaffordability of energy, crime, nothing seems to work, boys in girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms, etc., goes a long way to heaping scorn on government, on “our democracy”, on any of our institutions that had a hand in the degeneracy.

Military Clears Crew of Plane That Took Flight as Afghans Fell to Their Deaths - The New York Times
eople running alongside a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane as it moved down a runway of the international airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, in August, in 2021. (photo: Associated Press)
Olympics 2024: Boxer Angela Carini quits after 46 seconds against Imane Khelif amid eligibility row
An alleged transgender boxer consoles Italian boxer who quit after 46 seconds in Olympic female boxing match.

It doesn’t end there.  Many private ones – “big business”, big tech, the media – get slammed, and maybe deservedly so.

The Supreme Court takes a hit as well.  That might be due to another feature of a democracy: the people’s tendency to be acclimated to bunk.  Since 1973 when the Court imperiously invented a provision in the Constitution that established a national right to take unborn life, “the people” grew accustomed to it.  A 51-year odyssey ensued to do it.  So, by today, people crave their newly minted national license to end the life of people who haven’t exited the womb.  The Court’s Dobbs decision just struck the word “national” from the license, not the license itself.  But don’t expect “the people” to understand such subtlety.

Combine this with the habit of the public to be persuaded by jargon, such as “assault rifle”, and therefore unwittingly consign the Second Amendment to the mercy of demagogues, and we have another journey down Alice’s rabbit hole.  The Constitution stands in the way of the passion of the moment so “the people” turn on it and the Court in demanding a shortcut around the cumbersome task of properly amending it.  Understanding isn’t a feature of the mob, which sadly is another trait of democracy.

We’ve injected so much unrestrained democracy into our system that our founders’ original design seems strange to anyone born after the Great Depression.  Reading the Constitution must seem like a bizarre experience for a population raised on a steady diet of democracy this and democracy that.  An example would be the abuse heaped on the Electoral College.  Once a powerful faction loses the presidency by it, but wins the popular vote, they agitate to dismantle it and make the head of the executive branch conform to the wishes of the crowds on the two coasts and every urban center with a college campus.  It’s not enough that a form of direct democracy is the operative principle of the lower house of Congress in the Constitution.  The will of the mob must be made to dominate throughout.

Lest we forget, checking democracy and its mobs was an important goal of the founders.  Here’s a sampling of their views:

“Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.” – James Madison

“It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government.  Experience has proved that no position is more false than this.  The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government.  Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.” – Alexander Hamilton

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.  There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” – John Adams

“It is one of the evils of democratical governments, that the people, not always seeing and frequently misled, must often feel before they can act.” – George Washington

There was never a more searing indictment of democracy than that of Ambrose Bierce when he wrote toward the end of the 19th century, “Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.”

“The people” aren’t cognizant of our already mammoth strides away from the founders’ restraints on the lustful will of “the people”.  Even for the House of Representatives, that bastion of the popular will in the original framing, a state’s representation became determined by single-district direct elections and not by the state legislatures by the late 19th to early 20th centuries.  That was only the beginning of the state legislatures’ attempt to neuter themselves in a mad dash away the founders’ wisdom.

The state legislatures were further taken out of the picture with the 17th Amendment: the direct election of senators.  They would no longer have any say in the selection of the state’s two senators.  Then came the initiative, referendum, and recall – “the people” make law, reject law, and reverse elections.  These ideas were championed by 19th century progressives who were more intent on removing the obstacles to their rise to power.  Smoke-filled back rooms were replaced by the big-government, neo-Marxist lunatics of the faculty lounge, the so-called “experts”, the constituency of our modern progressive gang, the people mostly responsible for our discontents when you think about it.

In the irony of all ironies, like the state legislatures, “the people” chose people who then took strides to remove “the people” from self-government, and thus enunciated the rise of the massive and unaccountable administrative state.  This new Leviathan can make law (regulations), execute their law, and adjudicate on their law without much input of an electorate.  Where’s the democracy?  It’s here: “the people” elect progressives, and continue to elect progressives particularly in the populous blue jurisdictions, who then heap more layers on the mountainous administrative state like the many bands piling upward in a mature stratovolcano.

No wonder we’re in a hell of a mess.  Pressure will build, and it’ll blow like a proverbial Vesuvius, but make sure that you’re not in the path of the political pyroclastic flow that follows.  In 2020, a cop-beating video clip went viral and progressives seized the opportunity to dismantle law enforcement, elect DAs who won’t prosecute, decriminalize criminality, riots erupted, people and property were torched, and many cities descend into the dysfunction and lawlessness where they lie today.  The only real export of LA and New York City are people as they flee the pyroclastic flow.

Seattle police at scene of riots in 2020 (photo: KOMO News, Seattle)
Antifa and anarchists co-opted an otherwise peaceful Justice for George Floyd demonstration in Seattle on Saturday, turning it into a riot. The next day, scores of employees and volunteers came together to help clean up the mess Antifa and the anarchists made. (Photo: Jason Rantz)
Seattle the day after the occupation by so-called anarchists and Antifa, 2020 (photo: KTTH 770, Seattle)

One word describes the hidden potential of the “our democracy” chant: California.  The taxes, the crime, the sordidness, the inner-city dysfunction, and the pervading sense of overall decay envelop the state and its “democracy”.  “The people” in the state chose it, and continue to choose it.  California’s “our democracy” is a Democratic one-party state.

Unfortunately, the state’s Democratic Party dominates the national Democratic Party.  The socialism of the state’s ruling Dems is the guiding philosophy of the national Dems.  The state’s Dems wreck the state’s economy and the national Dems work to imitate the wreckage everywhere else.  Quite a tag-team duo.

The state’s Dems lay waste to social life in making a mockery of nature’s male and female.  Boys rhetorically become girls and the next thing we see is that they’re in the girls’ locker rooms, bathrooms, and on their swim, track, volleyball teams, etc.  The state’s public schools are required to disseminate the gender confusion in the curriculum.  Taking his cues from California, Biden announces changes to Title IX of the Civil Rights Act to include the transgendered as a protected class thereby codifying rhetorical girls and boys into everywhere (see #3 below).

The not-so-golden state’s administrative state is imperial thanks to the ruling party’s zeal for upending an entire way of life in a senseless and manic effort to modulate the earth’s atmosphere.  That’s right, one state of 39 million people (and declining) is gung-ho about sacrificing its people’s standard of living on the altar of climate-change ideology, acting like they hold the thermostat to the global atmosphere.  They’d like to take the suicide attempt national, and Biden is accommodating.  In May of this year, the EPA issued new power plant regulations that’ll function as a death warrant to reliable, affordable electricity by mandating expensive efforts (carbon capture, etc.) to reduce emissions in fossil fuel plants (see #4-6 below).  It’s death by regulation, parroting California’s lunacy, and Europe’s.  However, Europe backed away, not so for the zealots in California and D.C.

The blackout was underway Friday as most of the state was issued Stage 3 emergency

Do “the people’s” government in America care?  Do “the people” even have enough of a pulse to care?  As for the first question, no, they don’t care a lick about your plight.  As for the second, no sé.  These activists in power are true-believers, with all the heart of a Bergen-Belsen commandant.  They are coming to get more than your sedan.  They sneer at your air conditioner, which is a lifesaver for anyone not living in Malibu (see #7 below).  This is totalitarianism pure and simple.  Like a rabid Marxist, their ultimate goal is to reengineer humanity, making the new man, woman, whatever.  You’ll be forced to live in the world that they have created for you.  And, like previous crusades for heaven on earth, it’ll be the opposite.

Watch as we relive the travel from hubris to nemesis in Greek tragedy.  The hubris hides ignorance and arrogance which leads to the disaster of nemesis.  Welcome to the base of the Democratic Party and the EPA.

We are living the nemesis that arose out of the hubristic arrogance and ignorance of a clan of firebrands, firebrands that we elected.  Don’t like Trump, voted for Biden, maybe vote for Harris in 2024?  Reality sets in: you avoid the ogre but get the greenie neo-Marxists and ruination.

Both sides decry the escalating cost of housing, the loss of the “American dream”.  The problem can’t be laid at the feet of high interest rates or inflation since it predated Biden’s spiking of the money supply in trillions of new spending.  No, speaking of supply, it’s a supply problem.  It’s been building for decades.  Look around you and you’ll hear hostility to housing construction: “The new people crowd my streets and schools”; “I’ve lost my small town”; “The new developments spoiled the scenery; they’re ugly”; “It’s destroying my property values”; “My property taxes have jumped to pay for their infrastructure and public services.”  Who’s there to speak for the young’s access to the “American dream”?  Nobody.  The only ones filling the hearing rooms and filing the lawsuits are NIMBYs galore and eco-revolutionaries.

This Northern California county tops national list for unaffordable housing

This method of governance was pioneered by California.  Growth control incubated in northern California (Petaluma, 1961).  In that instance, “the people” elected county and city officials to freeze in amber the “character” of the place.  What do you think happened to the housing supply?  Regulations and delays only added to the cost of whatever survives the local gauntlet.

In fact, the brutal gauntlet was extended.  “The people” of California gave to the world the California Coastal Commission (CCC) in approving Prop 20 in 1972, providing more avenues to block, impede, and knock out new housing, or make it so expensive that nobody in their right mind would want to pour a foundation in the “coastal zone”,  which is another one of those politically fungible concepts that prove useful to all eco-utopians and would-be social engineers statewide.

The CCC is one of many regulatory behemoths that “the people” of the state have created with their own hand in propositions or through their elected representatives to make it difficult to get the nod to nail two studs together.  Eco-obsessions reign supreme.  The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is the mother of all hoops to jump.  It empowers the California Department of Fish and Game, the various Air Quality Management Districts, anything conservation oriented, anything eco-utopian, who can only be pacified by project defeat, endless delays, and burdensome costs.  It’s a veritable goat rope.

In a microcosm of the state’s protracted assault on housing, a small 4-lot housing development in Los Osos, San Louis Obispo County, was approved as per the state and the CCC-ratified Local Coastal Program (LCP) of the county.  Later, the CCC discovered a sand dune on the property, declared it to be in an Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area (ESHA), and repealed the permits (see #8 below).  The developers are fighting back in the California Supreme Court.  I’m pessimistic because the state’s courts reflect the longstanding and overweening one-party state.

Gauntlets bedevil the entire state.  It’s so prevalent, according to the California Association of Realtor’s (C.A.R.) Housing Affordability Index, only one in five home buyers can afford a median-priced house in the state (see #9 below).  According to Zillow, of those prospective home buyers, 70% are married and 44% have children (see #10 below).  Where do the underhoused with kids go instead of just another rental in a cramped apartment complex?  Good question.  Possibly, a U-Haul barreling east on Interstate 10 might be their best option.

But do the powerful really care?  Do they understand supply and demand or possess even a rudimentary grasp of trade-offs?  Eco-purity is expensive, very expensive.  So-called saving the coastal zone or preserving the habitat of the blunt-nosed leopard lizard, the gnat catcher, kangaroo rat, mountain lion, or whatever happens to dance across the screen of the hawkers of biodiversity, comes at the price of more than a house or rent.  The price tag shows as lost opportunities for the young and generations to come.  Their “American dream” will be stillborn.  But who shows up at the hearings or has an army of “public interest” law firms ready to file suit in court?  It’s the current homeowner who already has their slice of the dream and the eco-zealot who doesn’t care about the dream and would be quite happy with a repeal of the Industrial Revolution and upward mobility.  They’d be overjoyed with the return of the Middle Ages.

All of this can be traced back to “the people”, to “our democracy”, to the four wolves deciding the fate of the lamb.  The people chose societal collapse.  It didn’t magically appear out of the ether.  And it shows in the names on the ballot.  The parties gave them to us, or, more accurately, the party bases.  The political parties are more democratic than ever before, and their choices are miserable for anyone outside the “bases”.  For that is what democracy led to: the rise of the “base”.  Think of the “base” as a mob, an assemblage animated by jive.  For the Democrats, they’re enraptured by Marx and his ideological cousins in the Frankfurt School and faculty lounges everywhere.  All of this is unstated, mostly unknown to them since their beliefs never came with source footnotes.  They deny it while implementing it.  Anybody reaching the top of their slimy pole must sacrifice their good sense at the altar of the base’s groupthink.

portrait of critical theorists frankfurt school
Prominent Marxists – “critical theorists” (CRT, being woke) – of the Frankfurt School, who would be influential in the West. From top-left; Oskar Negt, Jurgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Claus Offe

The Republicans have discovered their own inner mob, or “base”.  It’s a cult around Donald J. Trump.  People were right to admire his policy successes but they were a product of Reaganism and not anything that might be construed as Trumpism.  Social conservatives and free marketeers populated his administration giving the country border control, tax cuts, deterrence, a burgeoning economy, and a Supreme Court that acts like a court and not a legislature – the very essence of Reaganism.

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The socialist Bernie Sanders in 2020
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AOC and powerful Dems announcing their Green New Deal
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MAGA from 2023 (?)

What would a second Trump term bring?  I suspect that it’ll be more like Trump and less like Reagan.  In economic policy, he’ll pursue his own form of central planning which is called industrial policy with a flurry of tariffs and taxpayer-funded benefits to his own favorites.  Right-to-work – freedom from coerced unionization – may take a back seat in a bid for the union vote.  Trade protectionism will be combined with a new isolationism, which is nothing more than America alone.  We might even see an abandonment of Ukraine.  Would any of this be popular among the general public?  It’s hard to say, but it sells with the “base”.

How did we get saddled with an inevitable neo-Marxist and Donald Trump when both are detested?  Trump in a good week never rises above the upper 40’s in his favorability.  The popularity of the Dems’ neo-Marxism is hard to gauge since it’s never exposed as such.  People probably wouldn’t embrace the public pronouncements of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party platform if saw the line-by-line plagiarism from the writings of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School or the eugenics of Margaret Sanger.

As of today (8/3/2024), Trump’s favorability stands at 43.3% and is viewed unfavorably by a whopping 51.7% (according to FiveThirtyEight, see #10 below).  He’s a consistent stinker.  In the same poll aggregation, Kamala Harris’s standing isn’t much better with 42.4 favorable and 49.1% unfavorable.  She’s about the same in the pungency factor, even with a honeymoon of media praise, near worship, after her rise to donkey-party heir apparent.

The Dems’ neo-Marxism and its espousal by its candidates is joined by the GOP’s transformation into a personality cult.  For both parties, it’s the culmination of a century and a half of the democratization of their operations, and like the injection of direct democracy into more of our politics, dissatisfaction increases with the results.

Political extremists love the democracy rhetoric, aiming to recreate the Paris mob of the French Revolution.  Late 19th century progressives – many of whom were socialists (ex.: John Dewey) – pushed for the direct primary to replace party caucuses.  Primaries to choose delegates became routine starting in the 1970s for the Democrats and 1980s for the GOP.  It resulted in mass fealty to a person or to a groupthink among the base, thus the rise of the Dems’ Bernie Bros and the woke and the Republicans’ MAGA (see #11 below), with a corresponding rise in public disillusionment.

Democratization means rule by the base, not by the franchise.  Interparty rivalries get stamped out by a normally radical groupthink that captures the imagination of the party’s activist base.  For Dems, the groupthink is an enthusiasm for a campaign to ferret out white/heteronormative/male privilege, to expand the unacknowledged footprint of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School’s principal creed.  They’ll hide it because they have to.  The stench of the “socialist” label still pervades.

It’s so widespread that party big wheels – long-in-the-tooth politicos and big donors – had to step into the breech in 2020 to sidestep the frenzy for the Bernie Bros by resurrecting the doddering Biden, and later to swap the infirmed Biden for the younger-but-babbling Kamala Harris.  At least the Democrats have some adult guardrails which is a backhanded admission that too much democracy can get you into trouble.

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Guardrails don’t seem evident in the GOP.  Trump romped from primary to primary despite the fact that he’s the weakest candidate in a general election matchup.  Trump is popular with the base, unpopular to the those outside of it.  An infirm Biden managed to keep it close with Trump, and now the dullard Kamala Harris has drawn even with the man from Mar-a-Lago.  Ironically, with Trump in the picture, execrable socialism is still in play, thanks to mob rule in both parties and a broad apathy compounded by ignorance.

It must be hard to admit that schmucks exist in more places than among elites.  Look around you, maybe take a long hard look in the mirror.  Me too!  More direct democracy exposed the likelihood that schmucks have a broader presence than we’ve been willing to admit.  Party bases can be full of them.  The general public too.  “The people” can desire things that they ought not get.  The demands of half-witted utopians and adults who’ve already got theirs trample the prospects of the young and those yet to be born.  The adults of today confiscate the opportunities of those too young to vote and future generations.

It’s disgusting, and brought to you by . . . democracy.  Democracy, schmuckocracy.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “Historically Low Faith in U.S. Institutions Continues”, Lydia Saad, Gallup, 7/6/2024, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/508169/historically-low-faith-institutions-continues.aspx
2. “Confidence in U.S. Institutions Down; Average at New Low”, Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup, 7/5/2024, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-institutions-down-average-new-low.aspx
3. “Biden Administration: Title IX Protections Extend to Transgender Students”, Lauren Camera, US News and World Report, 6/16/2021, at https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-06-16/biden-administration-title-ix-protections-extend-to-transgender-students
4. “Greenhouse Gas Standards and Guidelines for Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants”, EPA, at https://www.epa.gov/stationary-sources-air-pollution/greenhouse-gas-standards-and-guidelines-fossil-fuel-fired-power
5. “4 Things to Know About US EPA’s New Power Plant Rules”, Dan Lashof, Lori Bird, and Jennifer Rennicks, World Resources Institute, 5/3/2024, at https://www.wri.org/insights/epa-power-plant-rules-explained
6. Much thanks to Gordon Hughes of the National Center for Energy Analytics in “The EPA’s Proposals for Power Plants Satisfy the Definition of Insanity”, National Review, 5/13/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/the-epas-proposals-for-power-plants-satisfy-the-definition-of-insanity/
7. “It’s time to rethink air conditioning”, Rebecca Leber, Vox, 8/26/2021, at https://www.vox.com/22638093/air-conditioning-worsens-climate-change-ac
8. “California Coastal Commission unlawfully blocks home construction”, Pacific Legal Foundation, describing their lawsuit against the CCC in Shear Development Co., LLC v. California Coastal Commission, at https://pacificlegal.org/case/shear-california-coastal-commission/
9. “2nd Quarter California housing affordability”, California Association of Realtors, 8/11/2023, at https://www.car.org/en/aboutus/mediacenter/newsreleases/2023-News-Releases/2qtr2023hai#:~:text=Fewer%20than%20one%20in%20five%20%2816%20percent%29%20home,according%20to%20C.A.R.%E2%80%99s%20Traditional%20Housing%20Affordability%20Index%20%28HAI%29.
10. FiveThirtyEight’s Aug. 3, 2024 poll aggregation at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/
11. “10.1 History of American Political Parties”, Open Library, at https://open.lib.umn.edu/americangovernment/chapter/10-1-history-of-american-political-parties/

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Biden’s Decline Is Part of a Bigger Story

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Illustration from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes”

Biden’s decline is part of a massive swindle, at once intentional and in other ways stupefyingly unintentional, and involves much more than a single person’s descent into senility.  We are constantly confronted with demands to believe in the unbelievable.  Many of us do.  It’s as if we want to be swindled.  It’s become routine, and we are shocked when the list of unbelievabilities turns out to be, just that, falsehoods and fiascos.

Of course, the story begins with the revelation of the not-so-revelatory story of Biden’s mental deterioration.  It should have been clear to anyone observing Biden’s 2020 “basement” campaign.  It succeeded.  We elected a basement president.  In that protracted war room of the left, which is composed of the natural alliance of the legacy media and the Democratic Party, all of a sudden it’s now safe to say that the president is a cognitive mess.

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President Biden from the 6/27 debate
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More of our president

They even admit that they buried the story and knew for quite some time.  The leader of Biden’s praetorian guard, Ron Klain, only feeds the news in the President’s Daily Briefing that won’t trigger explosions of anger in the president.  According to Politico, dealing with Biden is like coping with an unstable mental patient (see #1 and #2 below):

“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official.  “It’s a Rorschach test, not a briefing.  Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed.  It’s very difficult, and people are scared s***less of him.”

The dean of the left’s war room, the Washington Post’s Carl Bernstein, spilled the beans.  On CNN he divulged (see #3 below),

“[Thursday’s debate] is not a one off, that there have been 15, 20 occasions in the last year and a half when the president has appeared somewhat as he did in that horror show that we witnessed [the debate].”

Those around Biden knew and the media’s co-conspirators knew.  They gaslighted us, till 50 million people tuned in last Thursday night (6/27) and saw the glaring reality.  Shame on them, and shame on many of us for our willingness to keep Biden in the game.  Actually, get real, they’re torturing the poor guy.

It doesn’t end there.  There’s a popular belief in the government’s ability to rescue us from all of life’s travails.  Speaking of the belief in the unbelievable.  Why is it that no one will mention the looming catastrophes of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid?  Not Trump, not anybody.  If you do, the left’s war room will descend on you like a flock of buzzards.  The programs were built with a design flaw: demographics.  Increasing numbers of old folks will clash with proportionally fewer working young folks.  Taxes going in don’t cover benefits going out, and the national debt continues to balloon.  This won’t end well.  It never does.  The root of it is our preference for the unbelievable.

Let’s move on to the pandemic and our misplaced faith in government employees in the administrative state.  Doctors all, and, as it turned out, not to be trusted.

Look at what they gave us.  You’ll still see people masking themselves in public when before the triumvirate of Fauci/Collins/Birx rose to prominence, they wouldn’t dream of it.  The new paralyzing fear of the simplest public engagement is combined with children still trying to cognitively and developmentally recover from the isolation of Zoomed screens and closed playgrounds.  The rush to forcibly vaccinate all of humanity came with a suffocation of the production of therapeutics even as the virus mutated and continued to spread.  They even tried to blot out the ingrained human tendency to produce for oneself and family.  It was an assault on our very nature.  The waterboarding of society lasted longer in blue states, those places with a particularly gripping faith in government “experts”.  We’re still living with the consequences in endemic inflation and a stubbornly low labor participation rate.

Who would have thought that they could destroy what makes us human?  They tried really hard.

Our stunted nature is evident in a whole line of other unbelievabilities.  How did we ever get to the point of assassinating our standard of living in the eco-fantasies of “sustainability” in the span of a decade?  Somehow, energy density no longer mattered.  Physics no longer matters.  Extensive forests of windmills and floodplains of solar panels wrecking the landscape are billed as the salvation from the left’s wet dream of an apocalypse.  Suddenly, our finely honed sedan is to be junked in favor of an obese array of batteries, or something else that doesn’t even exist.  The already strained grid is to be burdened further.  All the while, we’re chained to a chronological escalator to a new world order that resembles something conjured from the imagination of Salvador Dali or Hieronymus Bosch.

XY-people get to pretend that they are XX-people, and vice versa, and the rest of us are ordered to play along.  The insecurities of tween and teen girls and boys are used as proof to herd them into the same pretend world.

It’s astounding, our willingness to believe in the unbelievable. Hans Christian Andersen meant more than he intended in his story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (see #4 below).  In the tale, two shyster weavers convince the emperor that they will produce raiment that only a fool cannot see.  Fearful of being thought stupid, the emperor and his ministers see nothing but go along and pays them for their services.  Then, with his new “clothes”, the emperor parades out in public to greet his subjects.  No one in the crowd wants to be thought a fool till a child blurts out the obvious.  See the parallel?

Fear of being thought a fool makes dunces of us all.  People of the left believed in Biden’s sharpness so as not to be called MAGA.  A challenge to Fauci/Collins/Birx was said to be proof of the existence of neanderthals among us.  Ibram X. Kendi and the rest of the CRT cabal were made into geniuses to avoid the epithet of being called a closet racist.  Fear of being labeled an implicit bigot in the c-suite has led to a rush call for the “marginalized” and quasi-obese in advertising campaigns.  Anything less is a demand for more shaming sessions in the corporate world.  Having an EV in the garage is proof that you’re not a denier, that you’re “smart”, despite the fact that you are afraid to venture 40 miles from your home charger.  You’ll have to hide the essential internal combustion engine vehicle parked next to your four-wheeled symbol of virtue.  We’re made to pretend that we’re not fools, as we prove that we are.

From Biden to California’s eco-nuttery, we are encouraged to pretend that we’re not making fools of ourselves.  Ironically, our enemies are the child in the crowd who isn’t afraid to laugh.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. Thanks to Jim Geraghty of National Review for the analysis and sources in “So Now It’s Okay to Talk about Biden’s ‘Cognitive Decline’”, 7/2/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/so-now-its-okay-to-talk-about-bidens-cognitive-decline/
2. “‘We’ve all enabled the situation’: Dems turn on Biden’s inner sanctum post debate”, Eli Stokols, et al, Politico, 7/2/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/02/biden-campaign-debate-inner-circle-00166160
3. “‘Not a one-off’: Bernstein’s sources say concerns about Biden have been growing for a year”, Anderson Cooper interview of Carl Bernstein, CNN, video on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhFmaAMC1_Q
4. “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, complete story by Hans Christian Andersen, at https://americanliterature.com/author/hans-christian-andersen/short-story/the-emperors-new-clothes/

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Medicine’s Racism Witch Hunt

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Duke University Hospital, Raleigh, NC

Gibberish has penetrated the doctor’s office and operating room.  In a field exclusively reliant on science – in other words, on accurate depictions of what is – medical administrators turned their backs on it and instead became practitioners of voodoo, sorcery.  If you’re a doctor and find yourself now in the equivalent of a coven, you might get fired for publicly expressing your amazement.  It happened to Dr. Kendall Conger of Duke University Health.

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Dr. Kendall Conger

Here’s the upshot. Duke University Health president Dr. Barbara Griffith sits atop an organization that magically discovered a “public health crisis” of racism in 2021, a racism so prevalent that we must drop common sense, reason, logic, and verifiable evidence to jump onboard the frenzy.  Dr. Conger in the hospital’s emergency room noticed it, said so, and was fired.

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Dr. Barbara Griffith, Duke University Health president

Duke’s “antiracism pledge” was purported to be “guided by science”.  Dr. Conger asked, what science?  In fact, they couldn’t produce any, just more gibberish.  The zealots’ sensory response when caught off-guard is to wondrously make the racism “implicit racism”.  Make it shadowy, vague, and thus unscientific, that’s how.  When responding to Dr. Conger’s query, one Duke official admitted, “I concede that I cannot find a [clinical] trial that proves implicit bias is the cause of worse health outcomes for African Americans.  Believe me.  I have looked.”

It’s more than that.  The “implicit bias” is unprovable by nature; it’s “implicit”.  You must resort to racial bean counting of providers and patients and then leap to worse health outcomes, skipping over a vast ocean of other variables.  Gibberish, absolute gibberish, and by people who might have to remove your infected spleen.  What’s next, scapulimancy (divination from an examination of an animal’s shoulder blades)?  Jump off the gurney and run for the exits if you view the slitting of a cow’s throat in an adjacent room.  What’s the difference?

Dr. Conger was fired for publicly drawing into question a partisan pledge of dubious validity.  A taxpayer subsidized organization takes a partisan position in a contentious public debate and suddenly all its employees must clamp their mouths shut?  All this proves that bureaucracies are more sensitive to public embarrassment than in their commitment to science.  Dr. Barbara Griffith and her coterie stepped on a rake, but you could get fired for warning them.

Oh, the times that we live.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. Thanks to Mike Markham at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal in “Duke Health Fires Conservative Doctor”, 7/1/2024, at https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2024/07/duke-health-fires-conservative-doctor/
2. Thanks to George Leef of National Review for drawing my attention to Markham’s piece in “Doctors Must Not Dissent”, 7/1/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/doctors-must-not-dissent/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=second

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Have We Lost Our Mind, Or What?

Ex-NHS psychologists warn children are being over-diagnosed, over-medicated for gender dysphoria ...

Some people believe in things that are completely nuts.  Look at “gender-affirming care” and the adults in positions of authority who have bought into it.  Think about it: the self-diagnosis of a toddler or tween is sufficient to invoke a permanent life-altering trajectory as the result of a medical intervention that screams malpractice.  Despite the indoctrination that is mislabeled as counseling, the kid will never be the same, either emotionally or physically, and can’t return to their former self.

After the victims’ exposure to the counseling/indoctrination, Lupron (AbbVie’s chemical castration drug and puberty blocker), cross-sex hormones, and surgeries, we’re starting to see regret in the form of the word “detransitioner”.  Later comes the realization, after all of the changes to the body and mind, that the tween’s rash self-diagnosis for sex-transition can’t be fully undone.  Cutting to the chase, this whole thing is c-r-a-z-y!

Of course, the response of the adult enthusiasts in the transition Borg when confronted with any reluctance to the treatment is a resort to the rhetorical equivalent of Defcon 1 (nuclear war is imminent or has already begun) – “Do you want a dead daughter or an alive son?”  Heck, the affected are still committing suicide . . . after the transition.

I give you three cases of regret: one ends in suicide; the other is ending in a lawsuit; and still another concerns a whistleblower at a gender clinic.

The situation involving David Reimer (the full account below) will turn out to be a refutation of the behaviorist’s chief insight, that social conditions overwhelmingly define a person’s development.  It was believed by some that the influences of biology can be replaced by the social engineering of “expert” interventions.  Reimer was thrust into the trap of a psychologist’s effort – John Money, a Johns Hopkins University psychologist – to reengineer David from a boy to girl.  It didn’t work.  David committed suicide at age 38.

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David Reimer as Brenda (l) and the Reimer family
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John Money, Johns Hopkins University psychologist

The story begins 8 months after David’s birth in 1965 when his penis was accidentally removed during a surgical procedure.  After consultation with John Money, his parents agreed to interventions to turn David into Brenda.  14 months later, David’s remaining male genitals were removed, artificial and rudimentary female genitals installed, and he started a regular regimen of estrogen injections.  His upbringing as Brenda ensued.

An uneasiness would plague him for the rest of his life.  And then he learned what happened to him.  He would “detransition” back to David and replace his artificial female genitalia with artificial male genitalia.  He got married, adopted 3 children, but continued to be consumed by depression up to the moment of his fateful decision to take his life.

He was misdiagnosed as an adult with “gender dysphoria” because he wasn’t “in the wrong body” so to speak – or maybe he was, put there by an “expert” whose ideological inclinations would prevent him from realizing the obvious truth that XY chromosomes signal the release of male hormones to the body and brain.  The potential for harm is as great for the modern version of the John Money approach, “gender-affirming care”.

That brings me to the case filing of Chloe Cole v. Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, Inc, in early 2023.  At age 13, Chloe fell into the arms of Kaiser’s gender team. According to her filing (see below), “a team of doctors (i.e., the Defendants) . . . decided to perform a mutilating, mimicry sex change experiment on Chloe.”  Even more damning is the treating practitioners single-minded commitment to one approach – gender-affirming care – without adequately divulging the controversial nature of the treatment, risks, and the shortcomings of much of the research into it.  How could anyone, let alone a 13-year-old, exercise informed consent under the pressure of doctrinaire activists in white smocks?  Chloe’s formal complaint reads,

“Defendants [i.e., Kaiser] obscured and concealed important information such as the following: the conflicting studies in this area; the high quality evidence demonstrating poor mental health outcomes; the existence of only low to very low-quality studies purportedly supporting this treatment; the significant likelihood that desired outcomes would not be attained; the significant possibility of desistence, detransition and regret; and the lack of accurate models for predicting desistence and detransition.”

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Chloe Cole

Chloe detransitioned at age 17 and is now seeking legal redress for what can only be described as mental and physical mutilation by a branch of the medical industry that is more beholden to an ideology than real medical science.  It’s nearly as horrific as anything that came out of the German SS Race and Settlement Main Office or the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics of the 1930’s with its fixation on other forms of malevolent flights of fancy under cover of “science”.

Now, other clinics and hospitals have earned suspicion and scrutiny for engaging in practices that can only be described as licensed mutilation.  Jamie Reed, a former pediatric gender clinician at Washington University Transgender Center, St. Louis Children’s Hospital, blew the whistle on the hasty and obsessive herding of minors into gender-affirming care.

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Jamie Reed

Former employee of St. Louis transgender clinic reaffirms allegations of misconduct • Missouri ...

Even the New York Times, frequently dismissive of such charges, has confirmed much of Reed’s story.  They validated many instances of the facility’s staff jumping to transition counseling and testosterone before any underlying emotional issues were addressed.  It became commonplace at the clinic, facing a social contagion of gender dysphoria among adolescents, particularly young girls, to reach for short cuts in processing the horde with a reliance on highly dubious outside examiners and the snap push into cross-sex hormones and the indoctrination of the patient into accepting that they’re the opposite of their chromosomes.

Manias based on dubious “truths” aren’t unusual in history.  Astrology, phrenology (skull shape is determinative of a person’s nature), and bleeding (opening a vein, leeches) were integral elements of medical training and practice.  Pre-Civil War, some races were said to be best suited for subjugation (slavery for instance, John C. Calhoun).  It carried over into Jim Crow.  An incomplete and rudimentary understanding of heredity led to the horrors of eugenics which fed into the Supreme Court’s Oliver Wendell Holmes’ stupefying opinion in Buck v. Bell (1927) – “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” – and Auschwitz, et al.  Karl Marx was intent on uncovering a “science” of history which, when put into practice in the 20th century, led to over 110 million deaths.  Far from enlightening, some “scientific truths” have been the harbinger of much misery.

Who knows, climate change in its current ideological form may join history’s many delusional offramps from real science.

Meanwhile, the self-diagnosis of tweens as a proper basis for life-altering treatment is farcical.  Euphemisms like “gender-affirming care” can’t hide the ugly reality.  Which leads to another profound question: Why does it seem that the vulnerable – the mentally limited, those powerless in slavery, the subjugated by military conquest, the people stripped of their power of self-defense, children – are chosen to be the guinea pigs?  Harvard grads don’t usually show up in the casualty lists.

RogerG

Read more here:

* The story of the David Reimer and Dr. John Money can be read at “John Money Gender Experiment: Reimer Twins”, Julia Simkus, Research Assistant at Princeton University, review by Saul McCleod, PhD, in Simply Psychology, June 23, 2023, https://www.simplypsychology.org/david-reimer.html#:~:text=The%20John%20Money%20Experiment%20involved%20David%20Reimer%2C%20a,identity%20and%20transitioned%20back%20to%20male%20in%20adolescence.

* An excellent introduction to the Cole v. Kaiser can can be accessed here: “Cole claims that Kaiser Hospital physicians encouraged her to undergo irreversible, gender-affirming procedures without exploring alternate options, such as psychotherapy”, Ryan J. Farrick, Legal Reader, Feb. 23. 2023, at https://www.legalreader.com/detransitioner-chloe-cole-lawsuit-kaiser-hospitals/. Also here: “Chloe Cole v. Kaiser Permanente”, Dhillon Law Group (representing Chloe), at https://www.dhillonlaw.com/lawsuits/chloe-cole-v-kaiser-permanente/.

* The story of Jamie Reed’s allegations can be read at “How a Small Gender Clinic Landed in a Political Storm”, NYT, August 23, 2023, at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/23/health/transgender-youth-st-louis-jamie-reed.html

* More on Jamie Reed’s allegations can be read at “I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle”, Jamie Reed, The Free Press, Feb. 9, 2023, at https://www.thefp.com/p/i-thought-i-was-saving-trans-kids

* Excellent reportage on the troubles with gender-affirming care can be read at National Review Online. For example, “New York Times Confirms St. Louis Gender Clinic Whistleblower’s Claim That Adolescents Were Rushed into ‘Affirming’ Care”, Ari Blaff, NR, Aug. 23, 2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/new-york-times-confirms-st-louis-gender-clinic-whistleblowers-claim-that-adolescents-were-rushed-into-affirming-care/. Also in “Chloe Cole v. Kaiser Permanente”, Madeleine Kearns, NR, March 14, 2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/chloe-cole-v-kaiser-permanente/.

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The Sudden Crusade Against Disinformation; Drought; and the Inner Totalitarian

Lake Mead near the Hoover dam, seen from the Arizona side of the dam near Boulder City, Nev., July 19, 2022. (photo: David Becker/Reuters)
David Mikkelson, founder of Snopes, the site that tracks fakery on the web. He’s in his home office in a nearly 100-year old home in Tacoma. (Greg Gilbert / The Seattle Times, 2018)
David Mikkelson, founder of Snopes, the site that tracks fakery on the web. He’s in his home office in a nearly 100-year old home in Tacoma, Wa. (photo: Greg Gilbert / The Seattle Times, 2018)

Why the sudden crusade against “disinformation”?  Is our time plagued by a singular onrush of lying and deceit?  Really?  According to today’s referees of language – who themselves could be mired in modern cultural/political manias – disinformation is “false information that is spread deliberately and often covertly to influence public opinion or obscure the truth” (Merriam-Webster).  Slanting the truth or even outright falsehoods has been the stuff of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (a little Dale Carnegie lingo) since people discovered other people.  Moses’s biblical admonition against “bearing false witness” covers the topic quite nicely.

For years, some people insisted that taxing the rich at towering rates leads to more revenue, as if people blindly and willingly, like lemmings, lay themselves prostrate before the IRS.  Does the British “brain drain” from high-tax Britain to elsewhere in the Anglosphere of the 1950’s to 1970’s remind you of anything?  Tax havens in the Bahamas?  For years, even today, some continue to persist in the belief that socialism leads to prosperity despite its long record of failure.  Eugenics, at one time, was all the craze even as it treated people as if they were draft animals.  I could go on.  So, where’s the sudden crisis in bad information?  Dis- and its cousin misinformation have been around as long as humans had the capacity for speech.  Now the Southwest is in the midst of a harrowing drought.  Watch the “disinformation” smears muddy the waters in how to deal with it.

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Honestly, cut to the chase, this jihad against “disinformation” is actually a massive censorship campaign.  By what standard are the Cassandras of disinformation labeling some opinions or factual claims fraudulent?  As it turns out, these arbiters of truth are partisans who rely on partisans.  It’s mental gunk relying on mental gunk to produce more mental gunk in order to control what people say.  GIGO – garbage in, garbage out.

GIGO case in point: Valerie Wirtschafter of Brookings and her piece, “Audible reckoning: How top political podcasters spread unsubstantiated and false claims” (see below), where she proclaims that the podcast world is too free, with much too much “disinformation”.  Where’s she been?  The advertising industry would never have been around to launch so many successful Madison Avenue careers without exaggerations and falsehoods.  Coke and Pepsi lambasted each other for years with disinformation.  Watch any Superbowl’s commercial breaks for your daily diet of disinformation.  Joe McCarthy (Sen, Wisc., 1950’s) and the Socialist International would be minor footnotes in history without mis- and disinformation.  It’s been the motivation for wars and invasions and the rhetorical bedrock for politicians in their climb up the greasy pole . . . forever.  And, all of a sudden, “Dr.” Wirtschafter discovered it’s a problem.

Summer Institute in Computational Social Science
Valerie Wirtschafter

Come on, these are biased people who don’t like what other people have to say.  People like Wirtschafter hide behind the aura of other people’s credentials, their government positions, or undeserved media respectability to engineer a “study” to silence still others.  To her, the government is always right, and so are the scribblers and mouths that populate the Big Media newsrooms, anyone mentally messaged in endless lecture halls like hers all the way to her “PhD”, and the millennials and Gen-Z’ers filling the cubicles of Snopes and PolitiFact.

Snopes and PolitiFact have been scandalous in their interventions in our political brawls.  If it was up to them, we’d never know that there is a strong possibility that COVID-19 came out of a Communist Chinese lab.  We’d continue to shutter the schools not knowing that children face a near non-existent threat while ignoring the long-term damage to their emotional and mental development.  We’d still be suffocating behind masks, not knowing that masking has little effect in stopping the spread of a respiratory virus.  We’d never know that the vaccines don’t stop the spread of the bug or that natural immunity is just as good (see below).  Much that we now know to be true about the pandemic would have been strangled in the crib.

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Thanks to the people whom Wirtschafter trusts, businesses would still be closed and a couple of adult generations would continue to be nurtured on the idea that they shouldn’t have to go to work.  Snopes and PolitiFact would paste as “true” any mention of the low unemployment rate, leaving a below-average labor participation rate lying on the cutting room floor.  The low unemployment rate talk is empty absent any discussion of the emaciated labor pool from which the number is calculated.  The high portion of employed (and conversely the low number unemployed, hence the low unemployment rate) is drawn from a worker pool that shrunk after the federal government started bribing a good portion of current and potential worker force out of the labor pool with extended pandemic benefits.  The money spigot wasn’t shut off till the damage was done.  Often referred to as the Great Resignation, quiet quitting, and I Quit Movement, Gen-Z’ers and others have discovered that living in Dad’s basement and receiving a government check (er, debit card) ain’t so bad (see below).  Bringing it up might incur the wrath of the self-deputized disinformation bounty hunters.

Should we pay for pajama boy’s college?

Partisan-laced industries abound in this age of institutionalized political correctness.  Stifling voices is the name of the game in the anti-disinformation industry.  Though, how can we see our way clearly on existential threats such as the drought in the Southwest when discussion is monitored by the disinformation police?  Having long experience with the lefty tendencies of the classroom and faculty lounge, the kinds of people admired by Wirtschafter, there exists among this group a psychomotor tick for totalitarian lifestyle control.  That’s the reason for the affection for the buzzword “conservation” and the knee-jerk suspicion about individual freedom.  Any talk of increasing the general water supply so people can be free in their daily lives will be met with a smirk.

Let me send Wirtschafter, Snopes and PolitiFact into a tizzy by mentioning a piece by Ed Ring of the California Policy Center, “How California Can Solve the Colorado Water Deficit” (see below).  He lays out the practical possibility that more than conservation is necessary to stave off disaster for states like California: the supply of water has to be increased.  But don’t bring that up at the next Sierra Club confab or among the chattering classes attending a Wirtschafter soiree.

Ring points out a number of options to increase supply, even while taking into account the climate-change bugaboo.  Climate change doesn’t mean that California will be the newest Sahara Desert in a century.  Precipitation will still fluctuate in a wet season and over time and present opportunities to expand supply.  One is the installation of French drains underneath the subsurface gravel beds of the San Joaquin/Sacramento Delta’s natural channels.  It would capture a portion of the excess flows (flood waters) that flush into SF Bay.  The water could then be stored in off-stream reservoirs and delivered to users and/or utilized to recharge the depleted aquifers of California’s Great Central Valley.  French drains, think about it.

Expanding and upgrading wastewater reclamation could be an additional route to take.  Even if only for non-potable uses such as landscaping or ag irrigation, it would free large quantities of potable sources for human consumption.  Of course, that would require budgetary restraint in not wasting money on zany efforts to kill off the next generation in unbridled and subsidized abortions, or turn the state into a parent-free sanctuary for teen sexual mutilation (transgenderism), or find new ways to ladle cash to new and old “oppressed” classes, or drive businesses out of the state in hyper-regulation and -taxation, or sink more public and private money into the thankless task of making unsustainable “sustainable” energy “sustainable”.  Keep it simple: just try to maintain water pressure at the faucet.

Desalination is another option if the state can keep its militant eco-utopians and NIMBY’s at bay.  It’s expensive, like any of the other options, but, honestly, can you think of a wiser use of taxpayer moneys than the provision of something so important that three days without it brings death?  However, I suspect that the inner totalitarian of the conservation-only legion has too great a grip on the minds in Sacramento.  These busybodies are just too obsessed with telling other people how to live, and conservation fits the bill.  Yep, the inner totalitarian has a grip on power in the state.

Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant protests organized by Abalone Alliance Demonstrators blockade and police arrest at the front gate Photos dated 9/-/1981
1981 Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant protests in California organized by Abalone Alliance Demonstrators blockade and police arrest at the front gate. (Photo: Steve Ringman/The Chronicle)

California has an aged 20-million-person water delivery system in a 39-million-person state.  Granted, people are leaving so, who knows, maybe its population will eventually come to match its outdated supply.  Still, if opportunities aren’t grasped, it’ll be a bumpy ride of brown lawns, metered restrictions and fines, and more of the Great Central Valley resembling the Sudan.  Droughts should be anticipated in dry-summer climates but California would rather play the role of woke crusader.  With the disinformation inquisition in full swing, you’ll never know that the anguish could have been avoided.

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RogerG

Read more here:

* “Audible reckoning: How top political podcasters spread unsubstantiated and false claims”, Dr. Valerie Wirtschafter, Brookings Institute, 2/2023, at https://www.brookings.edu/essay/audible-reckoning-how-top-political-podcasters-spread-unsubstantiated-and-false-claims/

* A critique of the Wirtschafter study can be found here: “The ‘Disinformation Industry’ Is Only One Part of a Larger Scandal”, Jeffrey Blehar, National Review Online, 2/23/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-disinformation-industry-is-only-one-part-of-a-far-larger-media-scandal/

* Dr. Fauci admits to limited effectiveness of the vaccine in stopping the spread of respiratory viruses: “Fauci Changes His Public Tune on Covid Vaccines”, Joel Zinberg, director of Paragon Health Institute’s Public Health and American Well-being Initiative, National Review Online, 2/16/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/fauci-changes-his-public-tune-on-covid-vaccines/

* Excellent piece on unemployment and the labor participation rate: “Unemployment Is Low, But So Is The Labor Force Participation Rate — What’s Going On In The U.S. Labor Market?”, Q.ai, Forbes, 1/23/23, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/qai/2023/01/25/unemployment-is-low-but-so-is-the-labor-force-participation-rate—whats-going-on-in-the-us-labor-market/?sh=5ad8aff1244e

* “Inside the rise of ‘antiwork,’ a worker’s strike that wants to turn the labor shortage into a new American Dream”, Juliana Kaplan and Andy Kiersz, Insider, 11/25/21, at https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-antiwork-workers-quit-dont-work-strike-better-conditions-2021-11#:~:text=1%20The%20%22antiwork%22%20movement%20is%20rapidly%20growing%2C%20as,and%20what%20it%20means%20about%20the%20American%20Dream.

* “How California Can Solve the Colorado Water Deficit”, Ed Ring, California Policy Center, in National Review Online, 2/13/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/how-california-can-solve-the-colorado-water-deficit/

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Modern Mass Psychosis in Climate Change, Systemic Racism, and COVID

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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/.

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California, A Sanctuary for Modern Gender Lysenkoism

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What is Lysenkoism and what does it have to do with California?  Lysenkoism was a Soviet theory of biology that illustrates the corrupting influences of ideology on science.  In addition to the bloodthirsty nature of communism, it would prove to be a force multiplier for famine in the 1930’s in the Soviet Union.  In like manner, today, transgenderism is just the latest edition of the attempt to have ideology guide science, and still call it “science”.  It too will have dire consequences particularly for the young who will be swept into it.  California is trying to establish itself as the mecca for this latest thought experiment with our children as guinea pigs.

While pursuing this transgenderism delusion, California has a hard time keeping its people and businesses.  For the second straight year, the state has registered an absolute reduction in its population, down some 117,552 in 2021 alone.  From 2000 to 2020, the state shed a net of 2.6 million people.  Similarly, increasingly, businesses in the state are decamping for parts beyond the reach of California’s legislators, tax collectors, and regulators.  The consulting firm Spectrum Solutions counts a total of 265 relocations of California-headquartered enterprises from 2018 to June 2021.  It’s undoubtedly an undercount since many fly under the radar – like the number for “apprehensions at the border”.

The published 2021 list of business out-migrations is quite impressive and includes Apple and Oracle (now Austin, Tx.) and Nestle USA (now Arlington, Va.).  If the state won’t be hospitable to the spirit of enterprise, the state seems to be salivating at the prospect of becoming a kind of Vatican for the grisly arts: snuffing out unborn life and mutilating the bodies of confused tweens.  Abortion from conception to birth (and maybe beyond) is lauded and subsidized, going so far as to advertise for out-of-state “customers”.  The “gender affirming care” (euphemisms abound in the grisly arts) of double mastectomies, hormonal injections, castrations, genital reconstruction operations, and psychological indoctrination is favored in ways the real economy is not.  Fascinating.

This medical assault on the bodies of the young is justified under “transgenderism”, today’s ideological clone of Lysenkoism.  Lysenkoism is an artifact of the Marxist belief system dictating the architecture of science.  The inherent qualities in basic biology are rejected – nothing is inherent in Marxism but all is said to be a product of socio-economic power structures.  Sound familiar to the rantings of the race hustlers of critical race theory?  Trofim Lysenko, Soviet biologist who was heralded in Soviet propaganda as a genius, rejected genetics and based his agriculture advice on discredited 18th century notions of inheritance (Lamarckism).  The whole idea easily conformed to the pretensions of Marxism-Leninism.  The result was the catastrophic crop failures leading to the Holodomor, the famine in the Ukraine and Donbas, the vast breadbasket of Russia and Europe.

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Trofim Lysenko in 1938

Thus, what happens when ideology guides science?  You have massive calamities.  Like the Soviet-inspired famines, we will have cohorts of impressionable adolescents equally damaged, growing up psychologically scarred and physically mutilated, and it will all be chalked up as “gender affirming”.  For many, they’ll end up like the 60-year-old regretting the body-covering tattoos, now fading and wrinkled, of their twenties.  Only worse.

Inspired by the conceit of transgenderism, California State Senator Scott Weiner has introduced a bill that would create an interstate underground railroad for sex-change operations, in effect, neutering the laws of the other states, according to Jeremy Redfern, press secretary of the Florida Department of Health.  Children from Florida, or wherever, could be placed in California foster care, with or without parental notice and consent, and in essence Mengele-like experiments would be conducted on their bodies (Josef Mengele was the sinister Auschwitz doctor).  The bill promises to prohibit the enforcement of another state’s arrest warrant if the warrant is related to that state’s restrictions on sex-change treatments.

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California State Senator Scott Weiner (D, 11th St. Sen. Dist., SF and San Mateo County)
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Josef Mengele, Auscwitz doctor and eugenics enthusiast, and a trainload of inmates arriving at Auscwitz-Birkenau in May of 1944.

Mengele was galvanized by a faith in another popular pseudoscience of the early 20th century: eugenics, or the idea that we should breed a “better” human being like we could a horse.  Many academic, medical, and public health organizations of the day jumped onboard the eugenics train.  Transgenderism has the same groupie effect, and sadly it’s frequently reported by the same people who have next to no understanding of science.  What’s more astonishing is the ideological capture of people who should know better.  The gambit was blown wide open when the American Academy of Pediatricians guidelines on transgenderism were shown to be written by a trans activist with a degree not in science but “women’s, gender and sexuality studies”.  All-too-often, such organizational policy stands are written by a narrow claque of activists.  It is neither reflective of the science or the membership.

In contrast, the euphoric and headlong rush into transgenderism is taking a pause in Europe and many states, except for the half-witted firebrands running the state of California, ironically as they run people and businesses out of the state.  Dutch gender-dysphoria researchers call for “more research” before more definitive actions are taken.  One Dutch gender-dysphoria specialist warned of the dangers in using sex-change chemical treatments by saying that “little research has been done so far on treatment with puberty blockers and hormones in young people.”  Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare (NBHW) warned that “the risks [of sex-change treatments] outweigh the benefits at present.”  They cited the “uncertain science” about the most popular sex-change prognoses.  Thus, to put it succinctly, “gender affirming” is a nice way of saying “dangerous”.  But still, California wants to go there.

It took 8-10 million dead in the USSR in the 1930’s and chronic crop failures to have Lysenkoism quietly go down the memory hole.  What will it take for California to halt its breakneck slide into an “uncertain science”?  How many kids will have to be disfigured and emotionally scarred before saner heads take over?

And to think that Governor Gavin Newsom is feted as a presidential contender for 2024.  Given all that we know, who’d wish that on any nation, let alone our own?

RogerG

Sources:

*California’s population decline: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/04/us/california-population-decline.html
*Businesses flee California: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adammillsap/2021/08/27/businesses-are-fleeing-california-along-with-its-residents-and-president-biden-should-pay-attention/?sh=6fae8b722327
* Moms for Liberty Locked Out of Twitter after Criticizing California Gender-Transition Bill, National Review Online, Caroline Downey, July 25, 2022, https://www.nationalreview.com/news/moms-for-liberty-locked-out-of-twitter-after-criticizing-california-gender-transition-bill/
* Florida Is Following Europe’s Lead on Gender-Dysphoria Guidelines, National Review Online, Madeleine Kearns, April 27, 2022, https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/florida-is-following-europes-lead-on-gender-dysphoria-guidelines/

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A Mass Exodus from the Democrats’ America, Part II

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Anecdote is proof of nothing but anecdote.  So goes logic, but some anecdotes are more notable than others.  I was informed by a friend of mine in California that their neighbor moved to a state in the South, a red state of course.  I don’t know the reason but it does seem that more and more neighbors have fled the not-so-Golden State over the past few decades.  A Washington Examiner editorial sheds more light on the glaringly obvious trend in states run by Democrats.  Indeed, “A mass exodus from the Democrats’ America”.

I’ve previously written that California would have lost two to three congressmen after the 2020 census, instead of just the one, if the 2021 population numbers were included.  There’s more.  15 of the 15 fastest-growing cities and towns are in states under Republican rule: Arizona, Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and Idaho.  14 of the 15 fastest-declining are in Democrat states.  If we combine the 2020-2021 losses for San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, we’d have the population of Miami.

It really doesn’t matter if an individual jurisdiction has more of a Republican lean if it still resides in a state run by Democrats.  You can’t avoid the political suffocation coming out of the state capital.

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California 2012 Presidential election results by county. Notice the red counties are overwhelmed by the population concentrations on the coast. San Diego-to-San Francisco controls Sacramento.

Draconian COVID restrictions of Democrat governors certainly acted as an accelerant for the flight.  COVID brought out the inner totalitarian in the governing class of lefty progressives.  We should have known the inner totalitarian would be unmasked since wokeness and progressivism are functionally synonymous, and the thuggishness has been on display for quite some time in the “cancellations” on campuses and everywhere else its acolytes hold sway.  Giving these people power is an invitation to “cancellation” of basic liberty, and more refugees.  Who wants to live and raise kids under that, the governing equivalent of North Korea?

Further, two Democrat states – Colorado and Washington State – fell off the growth list after COVID.  Apparently, Democrat governance is toxic to growth.  I guess that making your state repellant to its residents is one sure way to achieve the lefty dream of zero population growth.

Chris Stokes, left, and Angel Zickefoose ...
Two Colorado residents openly smoke marijuana during the 4/20 event (day to celebrate pot) at Civic Center Park on April 20, 2017 in Denver. In Colorado, marijuana was legalized for almost any use in 2012.

The California boom of the 1950’s and 60’s is over and is going in the opposite direction.  Other states who followed California’s lead into radical lefty rule saw their booms of the 80’s/90’s/early 2000’s evaporate as well.  The key to personal, family, and state well-being is NOT to be like California . . . and New York, Washington State, Colorado, Illinois, etc., etc.  Biden, are you paying attention?  Are the rest of you paying attention?

RogerG

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Add Progressivism to History’s Failures (Eugenics, Fascism, Socialism, Communism): Look No Further Than the Response to the Pandemic

*It’s the unstated point in Jeffrey Anderson’s “The Masking of America: Faceless people make compliant subjects, not good citizens” in the Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2021.

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Homeless encampment along the beachfront of the LA area.

Hillary Clinton in a 2015 Anderson Cooper interview on CNN: “I’m a progressive, but I’m a progressive that likes to get things done.”  Well, what is it that she claims to be in order to “get things done”?  However defined, she isn’t alone.  Today’s Democratic Party is almost the exclusive home base of it.

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Progressivism should not be confused with “progress”.  Progress is a trend of improvement.  Progressivism is an ideology, a belief system similar to a religion but without the supernatural.  Call it a secular religion – and thusly an oxymoron – but that hasn’t stopped it from having its moment in the sun, which it still enjoys.  The glow won’t last forever.  At a certain point, it’s botches are too glaring to ignore.  Is the trucker protest a sign of the dethronement?

Call it prog-thought.  Many hear of it but few can describe it.  Don’t expect to be enlightened by the schools.  The schools give it curt treatment because emphasis is given to actions and historical personages, all of which they approve because they are caught up in prog-thought.

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Homeless encampment near downtown LA.

What you won’t get from the instructor is the fact that the ideological edifice is built upon Hegel’s idea of history as a chronology of improvements, one piling on top of the others over time.  Improvement is defined as the heightened status of rationality in decision making, and rationality is best embodied in people like him, Hegel (professor at Heidelberg and Berlin Universities) – credentialed, degreed, many years of formal schooling.  The purported efficiencies of the post-Napoleonic bureaucracies of his native Prussia were his ideal, which would blossom after his death under Bismarck and the Kaisers.  Notice the absence of popular sovereignty in the scheme.  The perspective’s early acolytes included 19th century Americans trained in German universities.  It’s the beginning of the movement to train the apostles of the administrative state in the home of specialized PhD’s (college) who would infiltrate the subsequent and growing alphabet soup of unaccountable agencies.

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Today, we are governed by the alphabet soup more than our elected representatives.  Agency letter groups proliferated in the 20th century’s new and expanding field of public health in the FDA, CDC, NIH, NIMH, NIAID, etc., and the proliferation of state and local entities.  The field of public health came to be the province of advanced-degreed specialists – the specialist possessing governmental power in the service of their specialty.  The narrowness of perspective of the specialist is sharpened by a work life in the unique social eco-system in this expanding bureaucracy.

A climb up the greasy pole (in Churchill’s words) of career advancement places a premium on risk-aversion.  The routine for career advancement remains the same throughout: don’t stand out, except as a compliant, ingratiating subordinate while avoiding black marks on evaluations.  Steering clear of risks to one’s institutional reputation and the blinkered view of life spent in a specialty shapes a constrained, risk-averse personality for decision making.  It showed during the Covid scare.

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Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease,

At the onset of the pandemic, instead of admitting ignorance of the virus, Fauci and others flip-flop on masks until resting on masking-forever, sometimes triple-layered.  He must be seen as doing something and the default position is obsessive risk avoidance.  It reaches absurd lengths, and a complete lack of common sense.  Take a look at this gem of guidance for children from the WHO: “Before putting on the mask, children should clean their hands…at least 40 seconds if using soap and water…. Children should not touch the front of the mask [or] pull it under the chin…. After taking off their mask, they should store it in a bag or container and clean their hands.”  Riiiiight!  Picture that!

Fact is, the mitigations of mandatory-everything – lockdowns, church and school closings, masking, social distancing, vaccinations, deserted central business districts, the Zooming of life, etc. – is unprecedented.  According to the historian Niall Ferguson, it wasn’t done in 1918 (Spanish flu), 1957 (Asian flu), or 1968 (Hong Kong flu).  Back then, more people were cognizant of life’s risk calculus.  Risk accompanies everything we do.  As for diseases, they came and went with the suffering that is the flip side of life.  The only difference is that today we have raised a population on the belief in a faux phalanx of “experts” to shield us from life’s vagaries.

How American life carried on as normal during the lethal 1968 pandemic
The 1968 Hong Kong flu didn’t interrupt the Woodstock festival, lilled 100,000 Americans, and infected President Johnson and the Apollo crew.

To no surprise, we have bred a mass of neurotics: people wearing masks while worshipping at the feet of tunnel-visioned experts and believing their pronouncements to be “the science”.  You’ll see them everywhere in the Covid era from the masked while driving alone to the lonely outside jogger with labored breathing enveloped in the thing.  A time traveler from the 1950’s, while viewing the scene, could be excused for thinking that the doomsday movies of his time were akin to biblical prophesies.

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Empty Times Square, 2020

The heralded “science” becomes less the search for truth and more the reflection of the more immediate needs of bureaucrats and their progressive patrons.  Absent, or in spite of, the gold standard of randomized clinical trials, they reach for observational studies.  The difference between the two is profound.  The latter can have difficulty in determining causation.  That won’t stop interested parties – bureaucrats and politicians – from manipulating and interpreting the observed findings.

We saw the corrupted practice during the pandemic.  For example, New York under lockdown had fewer cases than wide open Florida at a certain moment.  But New York’s results are due to unrelated factors peculiar to the state, and, given enough time, theirs jumps ahead of Florida.  Averaged over the two-year lifespan of the pandemic, the experiences of the two are roughly the same — only Floridians are happier.  During the interim, in the risk-averse blue bubbles, the populace became guinea pigs to placate the biases of politicized and narrowly-informed specialists.

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Epidemiologist at work in the lab.

In spite of it all, you can’t say that the actions of the hyper-active state worked.  The virus continued to afflict more than the unvaccinated.  It mutated and still spread.  The guidance went from 15 days to stop the spread, to lockdowns to bend the curve, to school closures for up to two years, to mandatory mask-wearing and vaccination, to an end to fellowship in worship, to a retarded work ethic, to a crippling of small business, to the debilitating alternative reality of Zoom (or Skype).

What did we get for it?  Looking across the immediate history, we got a summer of riots (2020), an emerging police state to squash resistance to the administrative state and party in power, inflation, empty store shelves, an unwillingness to return to work, loosey-goosey elections, and a loss of at least one academic year of educational achievement for kids in homes below the median income.  It is a catastrophe for which we may have difficulty recovering.

We should not be surprised that the expertocracy led us to this impasse.  These administrative functionaries are people with a very pinched background living a secluded life, and, as it turns out, residing in selective and exclusive locations as well.  Fauci, Walensky, and the others hobnob in the blue bubble.  Their social circumstances, and educational backgrounds, are as limited as their range of understanding.  It’s an exclusive club populated by progressives.  The club’s perimeters are policed by the high costs and exclusive zoning that require an ample income to afford the 5 or 6 Benjamins to take the family to a Senators game.  For your information, Fauci’s annual take from the federal treasury is only $16,000 less ($384,000) than Biden’s ($400,000), and that doesn’t include his abundant investment portfolios from years of unstated influence peddling.

I don’t think that there’s a chance that we’ll see Fauci enjoying beer and chips with an Akron plumber, or any plumber for that matter, for the Superbowl.  He and the rest of them live a world apart, and the world beyond the blue bubble is beginning to be weary of the expertocracy.  Its reputation has taken a hit in polls and surveys.  The CDC’s esteem in one survey fell from 60% in March 2020 to 41% in December 2021.  The public’s opinion of the federal government flipped from a high of 70% in 1972 to 39% in 2021 in one Gallup poll.  Pew put it at 73% in 1957 and 24% in 2021. The results are richly deserved.

Super Bowl LVI Scoreboard

Is a peasant revolt brewing?  Truckers have had it.  Moms and dads have had it.  The only remaining question is this: Does the average person understand the connection between our current predicament and the reigning orthodoxy of progressivism as promulgated by an expertocratic priesthood?  The root of all evil in the modern era is not mammon, but is more likely to be found in a blind faith in apparatchiks.  It’s the one thing that eugenics, communism, socialism, fascism, and progressivism have in common.

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Covid-restriction protest in New Zealand.

RogerG

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A Second American Revolution?

“. . . nothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get in the hands of experts.  Expert knowledge is limited knowledge, and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows where it hurts is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialized character.” ― Winston Churchill

Please watch a Virginia mom on February 3 lower the hammer on her school board’s policy of mandatory masks in school.

Something is afoot.  In the first edition of the American Revolution, it was portrayed as a fight against aristocratic rule.  That’s misleading.  More correctly, it was a fight against violations of the rights of Englishmen.  Key to the rights of Englishmen is self-rule.  We rule ourselves though our elected representatives, thus the cry against taxation without representation.  The king and Parliament were an ocean away and the colonists had no representation of their own choosing.

In this possibly emerging second edition, unaccountable experts have supplanted self-rule.  The expertocracy, like the aristocracy of old, claim a kind of divine right, and too many of a leftist persuasion bend a knee before them.  It’s the very essence of progressivism.

The pandemic is proving Churchill right.  In an understandable reaction, moms and dads are raising the flag of opposition.  Self-rule and the rights of Englishmen are making a comeback.

Marianne Jenson, go get ’em.

RogerG