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Next Stop for Carnage: UCLA’s Medical School

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The state’s elite medical schools, such as UCLA’s Geffen School of Medicine, aren’t immune from the broad carnage that has swept K-12 in California.  Let’s start off, though, with the lower grades, then move to the current ravaging of UCLA’s med school.

Overall primary and secondary education in California is miserable.  In no educational measure is the state an exemplar.  From Wallet Hub to the Nation’s Report Card, it’s a trail of tears for the state’s K-12 schools (see #1 below). Quoting one source (see #2 below):

“A new study by Wallet Hub [2015], a financial advice company, puts California schools at the bottom of the pack.  California school systems are the ninth worse in the nation.”

The above report was from 9 years ago, and it hasn’t gotten any better; though, teacher salaries have, with a top-ranked annual average of over $95,000 (see #3 below).  But that is eaten up by the humungous cost of living (see #4 below).  It’s big money when compared to other states, but that number relegates a California teacher in their prime to tenement life in LA or the Bay Area.  Forget about a coastal bungalow.

So, why the stratospheric cost of living?  It’s more than the attraction of the climate driving up demand, if that’s what you’re thinking.  The state is all into central planning, copying Lenin’s economic playbook – the state dominating the “commanding heights” kind of thing.  “Transitioning the economy” is central planning.  DEI is central planning.  Official sanctification and propagation of transgenderism is central planning.  What isn’t central planning on the progressive’s wish list?

And central planning is expensive, always has been, in more ways than one.  It’s expensive because it’ll come out of your hide in more than prices, like shortages, blackouts, and declining opportunities.  It’s a replay of the Soviet Union.

California is centrally planned into a housing crisis.  Look at your centrally planned utility bills. The high cost of fuel extends beyond the pump and into sticker prices on everything on store shelves.  The centrally planned jump in the state’s minimum wage is driving up fast food prices and driving out jobs.  Wait for the centrally planned EV mandates to slap you in the face.  Try to build anything in the state as you face the daunting gauntlet of layers of litigation and fees and approvals and disapprovals, and the state’s burgeoning activist groups.  They’ve even managed to centrally plan homelessness into a catastrophe.  The crime problem is centrally planned with “restorative justice” and “equity”.  Filth and crime join unaffordability in the state’s reputation.  For a teacher, $95,000 is as meaningful as 95,000 Weimar Reichsmarks in 1922 (50,000 marks for a pound of potatoes).

Now, what the state’s central planners have done to the cost of living and K-12, they’re excited to bring to the med schools.  UCLA is the epicenter of more than antisemitic encampments and mobs.  The med school’s newly minted admissions approach magically turned the unqualified into qualified by reliance on melanin count, genitalia, home language, and other such markers of medical excellence, sarcastically speaking (see #5 below).  No GPA in the hard sciences or MCAT for these DEI grand viziers.  But it’s one thing to have the unqualified in sociology, quite another to have one in the operating room.  Do you think I’m kidding?

Some federal judges are refusing to offer clerkships to Ivy League law students, the law being replaced by revolutionary doctrines in these law schools.  The same reaction might soon be true of hospitals and patients for graduates of the UCLA Medical School.  A big framed UCLA diploma on the wall behind the newly licensed doctor might be your cue to bolt for the door. The alarm is sounding.  The Washington Free Beacon is working the story, as are many other outlets (see #5 and #6 below).

They are finding sources in the med school willing to speak up.  The Free Beacon writes,

“In interviews with the Free Beacon and complaints to UCLA officials, including investigators in the university’s Discrimination Prevention Office, faculty members with firsthand knowledge of the admissions process say it has prioritized diversity over merit, resulting in progressively less qualified classes that are now struggling to succeed.”

At the tip of the spear in debasing medical education at UCLA is Jennifer Lucero, Associate Dean for Admissions at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine (DGSOM), and the Vice Chair for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) for the Department of Anesthesiology.

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'Americar AmericanSocietyof can Society Anesthesiologists JENNIFER LUCERO, MD, MA ANESTHESIOLOGY AND PERIOPERATIVE MEDICINE'

She has openly berated med school admissions committee members for raising questions about the poor qualifications of some matriculants if they happen to fall into one of her “protected” identities, this after she has stacked the committee with fellow believers.  From The Free Beacon: “Speaking on the condition of anonymity, six people who’ve worked with her described a pattern of racially charged incidents that has dispirited officials and pushed some of them to resign from the committee.”

She’s a mess creating a mess.  Staff and faculty complaints about her have been lodged with the school’s Discrimination Prevention Office.  They have much to complain about, and it goes beyond personal treatment.  Each year since her elevation to power, the danger increases that the unqualified and unmerited will slip through the school and into medical practice to the detriment of patients and the school’s reputation.  One admissions committee member recounted,

“I have students on their rotation who don’t know anything.  People get in and they struggle.”

One student assisting in an operation couldn’t identify the major artery when asked.  She then verbally attacked her professor for putting her on the spot.  One professor confessed, “Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students.”

Anecdotes abound.  And it shows in shelf tests, the examinations administered at the end of each clinical rotation.  The failure rate increased ten-fold under her stewardship.  Almost a quarter of the school’s students in the class of 2025 have failed 3 or 4 such tests.  Another professor admitted, “… a third to a half of the medical school is incredibly unqualified.”  If one of these practitioners should be supervising your medical treatment after a car accident, when you come to, demand to see their resume’ and look for an escape.

Major airlines promise to adopt the same approach for pilots.  I may not fly again.  Merit has a place, and it really has a place for 150 passengers at 30,000 feet.

The problems with California run deeper than its so-called ruling elites.  It’s more than governors, legislators, mayors, or even college deans.  All of them, directly or indirectly, owe their positions to popular choices in elections.   People vote for this stuff by electing the people who bring this stuff.  A dean of admissions couldn’t declare war on merit if she wasn’t protected by the nest of an agreed-upon agenda that can be traced back to the elected.  The war on merit is a popular choice, whether understood by the electorate or not.

I refer to H.L. Mencken once again,

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.  No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

Yes, the great masses of the plain people of California.

It’s the difference between government and regime.  Think of “government” as the outward signs of rule: offices, constitutions, its structure and institutions. In contrast, “regime” runs much deeper.  Often used to identify authoritarian systems, it nonetheless has application to democracies.  A particular approach to governance becomes a pattern – red and blue states for instance – due to pervasive and endemic cultural and social norms.  Elections occur within this social matrix, and the “regime” rears its head.

You can’t have an official nod to teenage genital mutilation without at least a vaguely popular toleration of the ideology of transgenderism.  You can’t have a broad war on merit without at least a vaguely popular toleration of the assault.  What else accounts for the ritual pattern of choosing people who bring these policies?  California’s regime, which originates with the state’s people and their tendencies, is responsible.  If anyone is to blame, blame the people of the state.

Those people are a huge part of a socio-political eco-system favoring the advancement of the unqualified.  But who has the time and resources to investigate their doctor to uncover whether they emanated out of this cauldron?  California schools are proving that they don’t come with the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.  We are left with a rule of thumb.  If your doctor came out of California, and especially its med schools, play it safe by shopping around. You’ve got at least 30 or more states to choose from.  A state’s reputation now matters, and matters a lot.

May be an image of ‎1 person, helicopter, blimp and ‎text that says '‎IEVCaIC TLIAVEOKGREVIEW-JOURNAL. REVIEW-SOTRNAT, 20200 20200. com CUT! WENEED CUT!WENEED NEED WE SOME TRANSGENDER NUNS and A ACOUPLE တ ASIAN VONTRAPPS... are ALIVE ת TheHILLS The HILLS SOUND of MUSIC... WITHthe 県花 @Ramireztoons michaelpramirez.com‎'‎‎

RogerG

Sources:

1. The Nation’s Report Card at https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/stateprofile?sfj=NP&chort=1&sub=MAT&sj=&st=MN&year=2022R3
2. “How Do California Schools Rank Compare to the Rest of the Nation?”, Patch, 8/1/2015, ahttps://patch.com/california/santamonica/how-do-california-schools-rank-compare-rest-nationt
3. “California teachers struggle despite having the highest salaries in the nation”, Malekka Seshardi, EdSource, 5/13/2024, at https://edsource.org/updates/california-teachers-struggle-despite-having-the-highest-salaries-in-the-nation
4. “California ranks last in opportunity due to cost living: U.S. News”, Kenneth Schrupp, The Central Square: California, 5/16/2024, at https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/article_f06f4eec-13c9-11ef-a68c-6f1b9d775308.html
5. “’ A Failed Medical School’: How Racial Preferences, Supposedly Outlawed in California, Have Persisted at UCLA”, Aaron Sibarium, Washington Free Beacon, 5/23/2024, at https://freebeacon.com/campus/a-failed-medical-school-how-racial-preferences-supposedly-outlawed-in-california-have-persisted-at-ucla/
6. “‘Shocking decline’: UCLA med school prioritized racial diversity, leading to decline, report says”, The College Fix, staff, 5/23/2024, at https://www.thecollegefix.com/shocking-decline-ucla-med-school-prioritized-racial-diversity-leading-to-decline-report-says/
7. Special thanks to Jeffrey Blehar in “DEI Will Destroy Our Trust in Doctors”, National Review, 5/23/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dei-will-destroy-our-trust-in-doctors/

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This Is What College Kids in America Support

3 minutes of horror – Chilling footage from kidnapping of IDF female troops aired
Screenshot of female IDF soldiers taken captive by Hamas on 10/7

Below is raw Hamas footage of the taking of female IDF soldiers at a base near the Gaza/Israel border on 10/7.  How many of them were raped?  How many of them will survive?  It’s hard to say.

But we don’t need to see American politicians and a bunch of college kids preaching to us about “genocide” and a “ceasefire”.  The only genocide occurred on 10/7 and a ceasefire is a Hamas rescue mission.

Let’s not forget that these savages took them back into Gaza for more torture amid the cheers of Gazan spectators along the way.  The savages then hunkered down among the mostly cheerleading civilians, using the population of Gaza as one big human shield, waiting for our decrepit youth and politicians to come to the rescue.

Many of our college kids are proving themselves to be underserving of the largesse showered upon them.  They are proving that much of college is toxic.

Please watch the video.  Double click or got to youtu.be/PZRlrWHHRoU?si=bsJDjkcgHOumb3mw to see the video.

RogerG

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Antisemitism Is in the Money

Soros ATM

The song – “We’re in the Money” – immediately came to mind after learning of the money trail for the misnamed Jewish Voices for Peace.  They’ve been active with anti-Israel malcontents since the October 7 massacre.  Radicalism on the Left is an ecumenical ideology not restricted to the fashionable identities.  Your physical characteristics, background, and choice of bed partner says little about what is rolling around in your head.  There are Jews who are all into self-negation as there are in any group in or out of the “protected classes”.  And a Daddy War Bucks can always be found to fund your efforts at self-negation.

Take the aforementioned Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP).  Here’s a list of the fat cats who dug deep to bankroll the extremist group (and the fellow-travelling IfNotNow) from 2019 to 2021 (see Sources below).  The Daddies War Bucks include the $650,000 from Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Kaphan Foundation’s $441,510, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s $340,000, the Schwab Charitable Fund’s $654,233, the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund’s $260,705, $175,600 from Morgan Stanley Global Impact, the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program’s $98,650, and the Tides Foundation’s $75,000.  No mere chump change, lefty revolution is expensive.

No wonder the encampments seemed so well provisioned and coached.  It’s because they could sing along, “We’re in the money, we’re in the money . . . “.  Enjoy the rendition in the clip below as you view the campus chaos.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “George Soros Funds Groups Behind DNC Riot Where Protesters Assaulted Cops”, Chuck Ross, The Washington Free Beacon, 11/16/23, at https://freebeacon.com/democrats/george-soros-funds-groups-behind-dnc-riot-where-protesters-assaulted-cops/
2. “Jewish Voice for Peace’s Funding Network”, NGO Monitor, 11/13/23, at https://www.ngo-monitor.org/reports/jewish-voice-for-peaces-funding-network/
3. A special thanks to Brittany Bernstein in “Activist Groups behind Violent DNC Protest Have Long History of Defending Terrorism, Receive Funding from Major Corporations”, National Review, 11/17/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/activist-groups-behind-violent-dnc-protest-have-long-history-of-defending-terrorism-receive-funding-from-major-corporations/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=more-in-tag&utm_term=second

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An Israeli PhD Student at Stanford Mugged by Reality

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A man in a Hamas terrorist costume this week at Stanford University (photo from Daniel Gordis’s post)

Irving Kristol once wrote, “[A neoconservative is] a liberal who has been mugged by reality.  A neoliberal is a liberal who got mugged by reality but has not pressed charges.”

Below (Sources #1) is a link to a liberal Israeli PhD student at Stanford who was “mugged by reality”.  His account is enlightening because it comes from the ground at one of America’s “elite” universities (the word “elite” is in quotes because they are tarnishing the title).

A key takeaway from his piece is his sudden realization of the popularity of Donald Trump, from a person who would never vote for him if he could.

“This year I finally got it [Trump’s popularity in America].  No, if I were an American I still wouldn’t vote for Trump.  But I now understand those who vote for him. Donald Trump is some Americans’ answer to the madness on the other side, a madness I didn’t notice until it turned its face in my direction.  A madness no less terrible than Trumps’s madness.  No, if I had the right to vote, I would not vote for Donald Trump. But America deserves him.”

The madness isn’t only epidemic on college campuses.  High schoolers are seeking to join the madness (see #2 below).  Chicago area high schools are a hotbed of pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas activism, many of them “elite” prep schools.  Add Seattle schools to the educational sink hole.  How did we get to a place where 16 and 17-year-olds rush to join the madness in higher ed?  The answer lies in the curricular rot from teacher training and their undergrad coursework to the textbooks.  When you drop your kid off at school or the bus stop, your kid is getting a steady diet of the oppressor/oppressed Marxist schtick.

And you thought your kid was learning the three R’s.  Let me clue you, they’re getting much more than Algebra.

It’s everywhere.  It’s on YouTube.  For example, recently I watched a Gen X or Millennial academic who was commenting on something as innocuous as British castles and couldn’t resist continual references to the oppression of the lower classes.  It’s a highly distorted portrayal of a period that lasted half a millennium or more.  No concession was made to the possible benefits of socio-political hierarchy, let alone a moral hierarchy (some things are objectively good or bad).  It was a simple message repeated ad nauseum: the rich and powerful bad, poor folk good.  16-year-old kiddies sitting in their desks, imbibing this blinkered view of the world, have their minds prepped for tramping on over to DePaul or University of Chicago in the “Chicago Youth For Justice” to link arms with an “abolitionist, anti-imperialist network of students”.  You know the banter.

This Israeli PHD student noticed the mental rot right away.  Most fundamentally, these firebrands are attacking more than Israel but lurking underneath is an assault on logic and reason itself.  For these young people, everything is subjective, there being no objective truth, no facts, only feelings.  Quoting him:

“I’m not referring here to those who express the opinion that it is difficult to get to the truth, or who think that the courts do not always succeed in finding out what the facts are, or who hold that different ideas are perceived differently through different eyes.  I’m speaking about those who say unequivocally that there is no such thing as truth.  They are not interested in presenting facts to support their arguments because they do not believe there is such a thing as facts, and they say so explicitly.  They think that it is forbidden to use the term “jihadist” in front of jihadists, or to call supporters of terrorism by their names, because feelings are more important than facts (although, of course, first and foremost their feelings).”

Parents, sit down with your kids and query them about whether they believe in objective truth.  You might be surprised at the answer.

There’s nothing like being mugged by reality to focus the mind.  The sad reality is that this foreign student was mugged by American college students who, in turn, were mugged by their schooling in the good ol’ USA.

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RogerG

Sources:
1. “I saw the American progressive movement … as an ally. That was a mistake.”, by Yotam Berger, in Daniel Gordis’s Israel from the Inside, at https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/i-saw-the-american-progressive-movement
2. “Pro-Hamas Craze Starts in K–12”, Haley Strack, National Review Online, 5/2/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/pro-hamas-craze-starts-in-k-12/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

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Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be . . . College Students

Students spray paint pro-Palestinian messages at a protest encampment at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., April 28, 2024. (David Ryder/Reuters)

Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings in a song admonished mothers to not “… let your babies grow up to be cowboys”.  As the saying goes, that was then, this is now.  It’s not cowboys that we ought to be worried about.  It’s college students. College is in the process of demolishing itself.  Look no further than the Ivy League.  From there, a degradation has taken root that has spread like a cerebral small pox epidemic, infecting the vast majority of campuses.  They’re proving themselves to be embarrassments.  The rot extends right through the administrations to the faculty and passes into the students.  Beware, parents, your kids may leave the house leaning right but may return with a criminal record for defacing veterans’ cemeteries.

To be fair, not all of higher ed is an intellectual cesspool, but the problem is so pervasive that it has begun to besmirch nearly anyone with a degree on their resumé.  Add Sociology or Humanities or English Lit or any of the “soft sciences” and their paper bio could be well on its way to the circular file.

The recent antisemitic pro-Palestinian encampments and protests are telling us the time of day.  The fixation with the “marginalized” now includes a sanction for the genocidal butchery of 10/7.  So warped is the thinking that the charge of “genocidal butchery” has become monopolized by those who committed actual “genocidal butchery” – the kind that you saw with your own eyes on 10/7 – and daily perform war crimes using civilian human shields, not shirking from hiding their military caches and facilities in and under schools, hospitals, orphanages, and housing complexes.  Thus, savagery is excused.  The natural apprehension about civilian casualties is distorted to pardon unspeakable barbarism in practice.  What a warped universe.

Israeli soldiers carry the body of a victim of an attack at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, in southern Israel, on October 10.
sraeli soldiers carry the body of a victim of an attack at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, in southern Israel, on October 10. (Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters)
Hamas terror attacks
Hamas body cam photo of terrorist shooting indiscriminately into a house in Israeli kibbutz near Gaza border. (Israel Defense Forces via AP)

Don’t expect many of today’s college students to get it, having been raised on a steady diet of the oppressor/oppressed falderol throughout K-grad school, from public and elite prep schools all the way to the identity-mongering college curriculums.  The curriculum of entire college academic departments, many of them mandatory for graduation, are based on this narrow little looking glass.  The kids’ minds are forced shut, unable to exercise any kind of self-examination.

Student demonstrators occupy the pro-Palestinian "Gaza Solidarity Encampment" on the West Lawn of Columbia University on April 24, in New York City.
Anti-Israel tent encampment at Columbia University
Pro-Palestinian student protesters continue demonstrations on the eighth day of the 'Gaza Solidarity Encampment' at Columbia University in New York on April 24.
Pro-Palestinian student protesters continue demonstrations on the eighth day of the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ at Columbia University in New York on April 24. (Fatih Aktas/Anadolu/Getty Images)

For instance, a radicalized Columbia faculty senate in a 62-14 vote on Friday (4/26/24) approved a resolution to investigate the administration of an already weak and vacillating college president for finally taking action against an illegal campus encampment and student-led pogrom targeting Jewish students.  Aleksander Solzhenitsyn wrote of a strikingly similar situation in his three-volume The Red Wheel, a novelized account of the socio-political setting leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution.  He’s got the same mix of characters of academic adults and youths who’ve been radicalized.  There’s something about the violent potential in socialism.

Not that all socialists are militant fanatics, mind you.  It’s just that socialism is a systematic critique of a society, and there’s few things more thrilling for those immersed in a bubble divorced from realities, for four years or in a life of tenure, than the exciting prospect of overthrowing everything.  Bulls in china shops are electrifying things to be for such young and stilted minds.  The narrow-minded don’t know that they’re blinkered because they don’t know or understand or appreciate any alternatives.  These are the reincarnated “comrade children” of the Khmer Rouge, alongside their adult abettors.  Welcome to Columbia’s faculty senate and a chunk of the student body.  The best and brightest or the worst and barbaric?

Not surprisingly, the faculty is as extreme as the youths given the fact that they curated this mess.  It doesn’t take much to uncover the concomitant antisemitic student rage.  Take, for instance, Khymani James, leader of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) cell who announced (see #1 below), “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”  Such bombast would be treated as isolated anecdote until one notices that the school’s Jewish students were advised to stay home due to rampant Jew-hatred on campus (see #2 below).

Khymani James
Khymani James, shown in this photo from 2021

Ya think?  This neo-Marxist antisemitism is in the academic ether, and in more than faculty offices and campus greens.  George Washington University exploded and since the Jacobins also control the Washington, D.C., city government, the city won’t help the school enforce its rules.  It declined the school’s request for police assistance.  In the worst governed cities, we find the worst behavior.  Get out of DC if you can and move the college to more civilized environs.  The nation’s capital is a hot mess, and has been for quite some time.

As usual, Texas is showing how to handle the miscreants.  The Austin chapter of the Palestine Solidarity Committee called for another one of these campus intifadas and were promptly arrested and carted off. UT’s Office of the Dean of Students declared to the group, “The University of Texas at Austin will not allow this campus to be ‘taken’ and protesters to derail our mission in ways that groups affiliated with your national organization have accomplished elsewhere.”  Enough said.  Call momma for the bail money.

Pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrate at the University of Texas on April 24, in Austin, Texas.
Pro-Palestinian protesters on the campus of UT, Austin

Yale and Princeton followed suit in showing more backbone than Columbia.  As soon as the tents went up on Princeton, the school authorities ordered them down “now”.  Down they went and the waifs then resorted to their usual standby, a sit-in.  Yale’s campus police did the work of clearing the foolishness by arresting around 45 (see #4 below).  Mom, expect a call.

Los Angeles’s USC constructed a pickle for itself.  It’s got the usual intifada circus on campus but it is happening at graduation time.  They really stepped into it when they chose a self-styled pro-Palestinian activist to be the valedictorian, Asna Tabassum.  This one is a real winner.  Her Instagram profile links to a pro-Palestinian website that proclaims,

“Zionism is a racist settler-colonialist ideology.  One Palestinian state would mean Palestinian liberation and the complete abolishment of the state of Israel.”

USC student Asna Tabassum speaks to ABC News, April 16, 2024 (Video screenshot)
USC student Asna Tabassum speaks to ABC News, April 16, 2024 (Video screenshot)

The choice of speaker amid the broader call for intifada ignited a real hornet’s nest.  The school canceled the school-wide graduation (see #4 below).

How did this person get into a position to be valedictorian?  Good grades, high GPA?  Well, today, given rampant grade hyper-inflation, they have as much value as the Turkish lira (54.8% inflation).  Watch her tying herself in knots in an attempt to avoid the charge of Jew-hatred.  Like many of her fellow protesters, she is a contortionist in concocting a hypothetical distinction between venom for Zionism and antisemitism.  It’s a difference without a difference.

An overly inflated GPA must be the culprit since one need not be a genius to see that a one-state “river to the sea”, with the obvious right of return, would lead to another wholesale slaughter of the Jews.  Just take today’s Iran and graft it onto the narrow trip between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.  Combine the Sharia viciousness of Hamas and gross misgovernance of the PLO and see what you get.  Get the idea?

Living cheek by jowl with people who’ve been raised on a steady diet of characterizations of you as evil incarnate isn’t a recipe for kumbaya (see #5 below).  Sorry, Miss Tabassum.  Ditto for the munchkins in our classrooms.  Parents, another four years in a neo-Marxist bubble isn’t necessarily a pathway to betterment for your offspring.  As the song goes, mommas don’t let your babies grow up to be . . . college students.  Beware, oh, beware.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “‘Zionists Don’t Deserve To Live’: Meet The Leader Of Columbia University’s Anti-Israel Encampment”, Kassy Akiva, The Daily Wire, 4/25/24, at https://www.dailywire.com/news/zionists-dont-deserve-to-live-meet-the-leader-of-columbia-universitys-anti-israel-encampment
2. “Columbia rabbi warns Jewish students to go home, don’t come back to campus because of ‘extreme antisemitism’”, Doree Lewak and Isabel Keane, New York Post, 4/21/24, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/columbia-rabbi-warns-jewish-students-to-go-home-don-t-come-back-to-campus-because-of-extreme-antisemitism/ar-AA1nouyc
3. “George Washington University Suspends Students for Organizing Anti-Israel Encampment”, James Lynch, National Review Online, 4/27/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/george-washington-university-suspends-students-for-organizing-anti-israel-encampment/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second
4. “USC Cancels Graduation Ceremony over Anti-Israel Protests”, Brittany Bernstein, National Review Online, 4/25/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/usc-cancels-graduation-ceremony-over-anti-israel-protests/
5. An accurate window into what Israel is facing can be found at the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) at https://www.memri.org/

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Grandma Is a Lefty

These four climate cases are changing how we can tackle climate change - Greenpeace International
The Senior Women for Climate Protection (KlimaSeniorinnen)

Here’s a story that caught my eye a while back.  In March, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) declared that the Swiss government is a human rights abuser on a par with Iran, North Korea, the CCP, et al.  How did the ECHR get to this judgment?  Do the Swiss possess a pervasive secret police that piles people into dark, dank prisons never to be heard from again, like the CCP does to the Uyghurs?  No.  Switzerland became a target of opportunity for the usual assemblage of lefties that crops up from time to time to shout and litigate their way to imposing their views on everybody else.

This one, the Senior Women for Climate Protection (KlimaSeniorinnen), made up of lefty oldsters, brought suit against the Swiss government for not capping greenhouse gas emissions.  In a story in the NYT (see below) on the Court ruling, it read in part,

“By not acting ‘in good time and in an appropriate and consistent manner,’ the ruling said, the Swiss government had failed to protect its citizens’ rights”.

The Court became a legislature.  A legislature is the legitimate place where partisan contests are settled, among the people’s elected representatives, not a court.  The “climate change” brouhaha is, most emphatically, a battle of competing viewpoints.  There’s much to debate about the issue; there’s much unsettled about the issue.  If the people want caps on such emissions, their reps can pass a law.  If they want to remove the caps, they can do that also.  The Court, instead, took the partisan opinion of a partisan group of lefty old folks and made their opinion a matter of law where there is no law.

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The European Court of Human Rights

Remember that’s the complaint of the lefty grandmas.  They want a law even though their elected reps have chosen not to make one.  Rather, they have taken their little opinion and wrapped it into a lawsuit that asked the Court to act as if there was one.  The tortilla for this partisan burrito was “human rights”.  According to the ECHR, the opinion of a narrow group of lefties is to be shoved down the throats of the entire population of Switzerland, just under the guise of “human rights”.  Now, it’s a “human right” to handcuff, and impoverish, a people against their will.

Without doubt, the so-called “caps” that have been morphed into a “human right” would turn the people’s lives upside down.  Getting real, the “caps”, and its cousin “decarbonization”, would mean more intense electrification – i.e., reliance on a grid made more unstable by greenie generation (wind, solar, tides, you name it).  The costs of the “transition” are mammoth.  As a result, a lot of somebodies are going to be “ground down by the wheel of history” (a little Bolshevik lingo).

Tractors stop traffic in the Netherlands in protest of enviro rules
Farmers gather with their vehicles next to a Germany/Netherlands border sign during a protest on the A1 highway, near Rijssen, on June 29, 2022, against the Dutch Government’s nitrogen plans. (Photo by Vincent Jannink / ANP / AFP)

If the “caps” are a “human right”, is avoidance of the costs of the caps also a human right?  Increasing the financial stress on a beleaguered population must be a threat to human rights. Ipso facto, the Senior Women for Climate Protection are human rights abusers.  Should they be incarcerated to join the Uyghurs to protect our right not be subjected to their nonsense?  The logic is inescapable.

Lefty grandmas are no different from lefty youngsters shutting down the colleges in an exercise of Hamas-love.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “In Landmark Climate Ruling, European Court Faults Switzerland”, Isabel Kwai and Emma Bubola, New York Times, 4/9/2024, at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/09/world/europe/climate-human-rights.html?auth=login-google1tap&login=google1tap

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A Green Totalitarianism Is Descending Upon Us

Online surveillance bill opens door for Big Brother | CBC News

They are coming for more than your family sedan.  They are going to upend, disrupt the entire system that brings everything to your home, grocery store, et al.  You’re going to be hit big time in your pocketbook and in every facet of your life.  Get prepared for it is coming, if not stopped.

Is Biden determined to turn me into a Trump voter?  Trump, no doubt, is the ugly face of my party, but Biden and his donkey party are trying to construct a totalitarian state on a preposterous green agenda.  Animating the whole venture, as is true with all totalitarian crusades, is a belief system on how best to organize and control people.  To gain popular traction, it’s best for all such crusades to contain a strong apocalyptic element, one powerful enough to justify stampeding the people into acceptance of its dictates and regimentation.  It’s happening before our eyes, right now!  Say goodbye to the republic and hello to the Soviet.

The EPA is the chief engine of the transformation from citizen republic to rule by all-powerful commissars.  Under the guise of “climate change”, we are being ordered to scrap our already immense sunk costs in affordable and reliable transportation for the mirage of something that doesn’t exist, and if it does, it’s a catastrophe as a replacement.  Prepare for a calamity, one that’ll conspicuously fall more seriously upon our children and generations to come.  Your kids will be the real victims.

March is turning into a deadly month for the health of our constitutional republic.  The EPA earlier in the month announced its intention to follow the template of California, one of a few states famous for turning many of its residents into refugees.  Like the authoritarian clown car in Sacramento, tighter emissions for “light duty” vehicles (cars, trucks, many SUV’s) will be imposed from 2027 through 2032, eventually sealing the death warrant for the production of nearly anything with an internal combustion engine (see #1 below).  Say goodbye to more than the citizen republic.  Say goodbye to that thing in your garage that allows you to get the kids to school, or you to work, or pay a visit to grandma for Thanksgiving, for its life will be wrung out of it by regulating and taxing it to death in escalating licensing fees and costs for upkeep, parts, and fuel.  Manufacturers will be forced to eliminate their production.  The comrades in power plan to leave you with no way out but into their approved and glorified golf cart.  This is nothing but totalitarianism “for your own good”.  And, of course, they know better about what’s good for you.  Right?

EPA Says More Diverse Advisory Committees Will Mean More Equitable Decisions - Union of ...

On the heels of that monstrosity, the commissars proclaimed a similar rule for the fleet of big vehicles that bring everything from produce to your grocery store to all things from an Amazon distribution center, everything that fills a shelf (see #3 below).  It’ll be much worse for those people who choose to live outside the controllable and tight confines of an urban area.  Think about it, all that stuff that was affordably made available at your fingertips will be crammed onto battery-powered big rigs (fuel cells create their own immense problems, see #2 below) of limited capacity, range, and tremendous recharging difficulties.

The mammoth costs of so-called “innovating” our way out of these imposed problems will only short-circuit the necessary wealth to satisfy other necessities of life.  These blinkered potentates have no understanding of the gargantuan trade-offs that they are inflicting on us.  Either that or they don’t care.

My bet is that they don’t care.  Why?  They possess a religious fervor for an ideology that justifies, in their mind, taking over more and more of your life.  For them, they are busy saving the planet, even if it means destroying your standard of living.  You see, their religio-ideology is founded upon a robust, promethean definition of “social cost” and “externalities”.  Like a canon law in the church, their “church”, the two doctrines give overriding weight to real or imagined costs for all of society for everything that you do.  Where’s the limits? Practically, there aren’t any.  Thus, the creeds become the supreme, open-ended excuses for the EPA, or any commissariat for that matter, to do anything that they want.

In the past, it was national socialist race justice to prevent defilement of the “race”, or the dictatorship of the proletariat to cram equality of condition on all of humanity to prevent exploitation.  Today, it’s saving the climate, leaving aside the lack of any credible, peer reviewed evidence that anything that they’re doing will positively affect a global atmosphere under which billions of people are acting independently and beyond the reach of the EPA.  Pardon me for concluding that this is nothing but pure stupidity.

In the end, the Biden claque and his Democratic Party are seemingly intent on destroying our way of life and replacing our citizen republic with rule by totalitarian zealots.  It’s Petrograd 1917, Berlin 1933, or Beijing 1949.  Keeping this crowd in power would have us see the end of much that we cherish.  So, if the choice is between the abominable Trump or this gang of totalitarian fanatics, one can be forgiven for preferring boorishness to Big Brother.

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May be a doodle of car and text

May be an image of car and text that says 'ELECTRICY wm HaynE LANL "Plug in to nearby taxpayer's wallet and she's ready to go!"'

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RogerG

Sources:

1. In Orwellian language, the EPA announcement: “Biden-Harris Administration finalizes strongest-ever pollution standards for cars that position U.S. companies and workers to lead the clean vehicle future, protect public health, address the climate crisis, save drivers money”, March 20, 2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-pollution-standards-cars-position
2. A survey of the literature on the shortcomings of fuel cells:
* “Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Vehicles: Everything You Need to Know”, Car and Driver, 9/26/2022, at https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a41103863/hydrogen-cars-fcev/
* “A review of PEM hydrogen fuel cell contamination: Impacts, mechanisms, and mitigation”, ScienceDirect, 3/20/2007, at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378775306025304
* “Fuel Cells”, University of Illinois, at https://publish.illinois.edu/fuel-cells/benefits-and-disadvantages/
* “How Fuel Cells Work”, How Stuff Works, at https://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/alternative-fuels/fuel-cell.htm

3. The same Orwellian language for heavy-duty vehicles: “Biden-Harris Administration Finalizes Strongest Ever Greenhouse Gas Standards for Heavy-Duty Vehicles to Protect Public Health and Address the Climate Crisis While Keeping the American Economy Moving”, EPA, 3/29/2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-greenhouse-gas-standards-heavy

4. National Review articles that provide excellent overviews of the issues:
* “Biden’s Vehicle-Emissions Gaslighting”, Luther Ray Abel, 3/20/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bidens-vehicle-emissions-gaslighting/
* “Electric Vehicles: The EPA’s Fast Track to Fiasco”, Andrew Stuttaford, 3/25/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/electric-vehicles-the-epas-fast-track-to-fiasco/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=second
* “Biden Admin Imposes Strict Pollution Standards for Buses and Heavy-Duty Vehicles”, Caroline Downey, 3/29/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-admin-imposes-strict-pollution-standards-for-buses-and-heavy-duty-vehicles/

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It Stinks to High Heaven

Wind-solar hybrids in India: Windmills and solar panels used together can maximise renewables ...
Solar panels and windmills in India. The scene is familiar in the USA, especially California.
Tired of shocking unexpected electricity bills? Go Solar!
Utility bill shock thanks to “sustainable” energy

King Claudius: “O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven.  It hath the primal eldest curse upon it. A brother’s murder.” — Hamlet, William Shakespeare

TBT: Rethinking Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (1990)
King Claudius in Zeffirelli’s “Hamlet” from 1990

Claudius’s lament was over the festering memory of his murder of his brother to gain the throne.  Today, similarly, we have much to lament.  People who should know better, but don’t, are our bane.  It’s unsettling as we watch the barbarous takeover occurring before our eyes.  The religio-ideology of environmentalism and genderism is poisoning us as Claudius did his brother King Hamlet.

The offenses to good order are mounting daily.  In some west coast states (Washington, California for example), mental health professionals are forbidden by law to use any other approach to gender dysphoria than acceptance of a teen’s declaration of their new sexual identity.  For the parents, they are straitjacketed into only assent to juvenile whims.  Any other response is treated as criminal child abuse.  It’s a command for fully irreversible teenage mental and genital mutilation.  In some states, even famously conservative ones, voters have approved in clever wording an open license to expunge the next generation.  People are tramping to the polls to give individuals the power to end human life from conception to the moment of exit from the birth canal, and maybe after as well.  Don’t be fooled with the feigned “health of the mother” check since it’s been interpreted out of existence.  On the eco front, climate-change is the cudgel to brow-beat people into a depreciation of their own and their children’s prosperity. Disfigured children, abortion mills, and a completely fabricated and permanent mass decline in the standard of living could be our lot if we continue down this path.

Massachusetts to cover gender-reassignment surgery
Sex change operation. Massachusetts mandates insurers cover sex-change treatments.

A mass propaganda push ensues to manufacture broad compliance with this dystopia. Search engines are in the vanguard.  Try a Google or Bing search for “states who ban alternatives to gender affirming care”.  You’ll get the opposite: states who ban gender affirming care, not those who banned alternatives.  It’s the wrong end of the telescope.  You have to come up with the partisan jargon employed by the revolutionaries against their opponents to get an inkling, albeit a distorted one, of the proper state of play.  For instance, the rhetorical contrivance “conversion therapy” must be employed, which in actuality is talking therapies to help a person come to grips with their birth gender, but is now freighted with sinister connotations throughout most of the search offerings.

Likewise, the campaigns of illogic and ideological activism litter the search results on climate change.  “Criticisms of climate change ideology” in Bing actually listed criticisms of the critics of climate change ideology.  In third place, right behind the left-wing Guardian’s “’Word salad of nonsense’: scientists denounce Jordan Peterson’s comments on climate models” and ExxonMobil’s PR-kowtowing to the hysteria, was David Vetter’s piece in Forbes, “5 Big Lies About Climate Change [from critics], And How Researchers Trained A Machine To Spot Them” (see below).  I’m amply familiar with the arguments having taught college-level Physical Geography for years.

David Vetter is an architype of the activist journalist with some exposure to science, actually an ideologically-laden version of science, not “science” as such. His LinkedIn page tells the tale.  He matriculated through Cardiff University to a masters in International Journalism, and then he’s off to Oxford for a masters in Science – not anything approaching Physics, mind you, but the science of “Sustainability, Enterprise, & Environment”.  It’s a little bit of science, only enough to buttress the activism, and a whole lot of ideology.

David Vetter’s Profile | Forbes Journalist | Muck Rack
David Vetter (Forbes profile pic)

His article immediately produced the poker tell of non-science masquerading as science.  In the very first sentence he gave away the store: “the science is settled”.  What?  The science of something as complex as our climate is “settled”, settled in the sense that we can move immediately to hammering in the coffin nails to our personal prosperity, justifying an end to cheap, reliable energy?  Understanding the relationships between the many elements of our atmosphere and the natural and human injections into it is a perpetual scientific enterprise.  “The science is settled” doesn’t cut it.  It’s the pitch of the activist, not the scientist who wants to be respected as a scientist.

The sleight-of-hand of “the science is settled” leads to attempts to make the chicanery seem unassailable.  One way is to construct a black box which will conjure condemnations of their critics. Vetter in his piece uncritically describes exactly that. Politicized scientists devised software to tar opinions that they don’t like.  They’ve come up with a way to artificially make their opinions superior to those of their critics without having to scientifically prove it. It’s more sleight-of-hand to hide the initial sleight-of-hand. Garbage in, garbage out.

Target #1 for the hysterics like Vetter is the grid.  Prepare yourself for vast stretches of the landscape and seascape consumed under huge blankets of solar panels and forests of mammoth windmills stretching over the horizon, and intermittency, brownouts, blackouts, and bankrupting energy bills.  Target #2 is your car.

Your car must fit into this central planner’s dream.  That’s no easy task.  Today’s common vehicle with its internal combustion engine (ICE) was the result of decades, a century and a half, of trial-and-error and interplay of many generations of tinkerers, producers and consumers.  Now, the economics of organic development are to be suddenly replaced by the central commands of politicians and their government bureaus.  Out of politics – for government is politics and politics is government – come the central planners’ edicts in the form of numerical quotas on date certain.  Collectivists of all stripes love blunt commands to bring everyone into line.  It’s the mental fingerprint of totalitarians. Stalin loved his Five-Year Plans.  The CCP loved their one-child policy and forced abortions on a grand scale.  From today (2023) to 2050, the plan is for all of us to be shoehorned into their choice for us.

Soviet Plan
Extolling the virtues of central planning in the Soviet Union

Would you fly on a plane designed in a confab between technocrats of the Department of Commerce and the staff of Bernie Sanders?  Count me out.  The electric vehicle isn’t that much different.  Oh, the cabal won’t engineer the thing from the ground up.  They don’t have to.  Stalin’s potentates in Gosplan (Soviet central planning agency) and the politburo didn’t.  They just ordered the heavy-manufactured thing into existence like God in Genesis, but left the dirty details to less-than-benighted underlings.  In America, failure is rewarded in unionization and civil service protections, something called tenure.  For Stalin and the gang, failure in living up to the fancies of the junta means show trials for “wreckers”, zek-status in the Gulag Archipelago, or a mass grave in Kurapaty Forest.

Our ruling over-caffeinated simpletons are following a movie script, “Field of Dreams”.  The farmer Ray in the movie hears a voice telling him, “If you build it, he will come”.  It’s the activists’ voice in the heads of Gov. Gavin Newsom, his super majority of totalitarian utopians in the state legislature, everywhere the donkey party is in power, and the entire Democratic Party ensconced in DC.  Translation: “Build the EV, and we’ll force the others to buy it.”  But the thing ordered into mass production, and the forced scuttling of the second largest family investment, is a mass incoherency.

As a golf cart in a Florida planned-unit-development, it’s a great concept.  Try selling the thing to anyone travelling a couple of hours to do their once-a-month Costco shopping, visit grandma, or road-tripping to Yellowstone.  Try selling the idea to anyone responsible for distributing the tonnage from port to Amazon warehouse to your suburban doorstep waiting for thieves to take it.  Not everyone lives in the tightly packed confines of our urban hellscapes.  Not everyone lives within reach of California’s coastal Highway 1.  The EV is designed for pampered urbanites living in mild climates, and close to the frequently vandalized charging stations – much like everything else vandalized in our cities – which are tied to a grid made unreliable by the same geniuses forcing you into the EV. Does any of this compute?

The ridiculousness of it all is intensified by the flight of the middle class from our decaying cities.  It seems that people with kids don’t appreciate over-taxation, skyrocketing housing costs, a cost of living made unsustainable by those things labeled “sustainable”, the crime and broad urban dysfunction, the Soviet-style schools, and the horrible thought that once your kid is infected with the social contagion of gender confusion, they’ll fall into the clutches of those who are striving to permanently scar their minds and bodies, and you won’t be able to do anything about it.  Imagine it: H.G. Wells’s “Island of Dr. Moreau” made real.

Of course, the advocates of dystopia will face declining congressional representation each new census.  But, wait, the activists in and out of government have an answer for this new unintended consequence of coercing others to live the activists’ dreams.  They’ll just open the immigration floodgates to the global poor.  Then, these teeming hordes will be shuttled in sufficient volume to fill the vacuum left by the skedaddling middle class in time for the next census.

Still, more of the taxpaying middle class will be scattered over flyover country, in places unsuitable for the bi-coastal, urban zeitgeist of EV-love.  The weather doesn’t cooperate, and the long distances can quickly turn the EV into a death trap.  Oh, well, they’ll vote Republican; so, who cares?  Right?

Electric Cars In Cold Weather: Tips For Caring For Your EV This Winter | ZenAuto
Stuck in an EV in winter waiting for a charge

The whole incongruency – in exchanging what works for what doesn’t – glares at you in the face.  When it comes time to get rid of the EV, there isn’t much of a resale market for it (see below).  Once used, who wants it, because who knows how those delicate batteries were treated?  Not staying within the optimal charging window of 20%-80% and frequent fast-charges permanently sap it.  Has anyone religiously followed the strictures in charging their cellphone, or anything for that matter run on a rechargeable battery?  What makes you think that it’ll be any different with the Biden-car?  You can’t order an end to quick-charging if you want to sell the thing to anyone with a life, nor will mandatory gizmos to prevent over-charging be any more effective.  You’ll have to perform the mental trick of 80% becoming 100%.  300 miles of range is actually 240; but long before that, systems start shutting down to preserve power to the wheels.  Playing it safe by over-charging is the norm.  And do you think that people in the resale market don’t know this?  If they don’t, they’ll soon discover it.

Electric car cemetery in France - Imgflip
Our future?

Let’s put numbers to the absurdity.  The numbskulls in central planning realize that everyone, including the unwashed masses trying to get to work and the kids to school and soccer practice, must be in an EV to create the illusion of mass acceptance of the contraption.  The rich can afford anything, including Elon Musk’s latest offering, with or without a government bribe, er, subsidy, er, rebate, er, fully refundable tax credit.  So, the bribes ($7,500) are concocted with income ceilings: $300,000 for married couples filing jointly, $150,000 for individuals (see below).  And you won’t have to wait to file your taxes to get it.

To keep leasing within the totalitarian fold, it’s even easier to garner the bribe since the dealer and you don’t have to worry much about the red tape of the domestic content and manufacture folderol of an outright purchase.

The problem is, with leasing and rentals, they’re swelling the used-EV supply.  But dealers and rental companies can’t get rid of them.  They’re stuck with something quickly losing its value.  EVs are the worst segment in the used car market, their value collapsing nearly 50% in five years after purchase.  Rental companies are limiting their purchases and some such as Sixt SE won’t buy any more Teslas.  And to think that the zealots in power want you to buy the thing where it’ll occupy half the floor space in your garage next to the thing that works, the thing for which you are holding onto in a death grip – your good ‘ol fossil-fueled sedan.  Indeed, the central planners’ dream stinks to high heaven, while collecting dust among all the other junk in your garage.

To hide the disruption and devastation in the automobile industry, the euphemism “transition” will be applied and a host of subsidies, kickbacks, tax largesse, and domestic-content favoritism will be showered on Detroit. Meanwhile, as lunch-pail Joe shows solidarity with UAW strikers, his administration is bribing and coercing their employer into reducing the payroll. The planners’ forecast of growing employment in the EV’s “battery belt” to replace losses elsewhere should ring hollow to UAW members since America’s “belt” is mostly in the non-union South.  Still, net jobs in the industry could very well be negative.  Hints abound of things to come.  Stellantis, parent of Chrysler, announced in December 2023 that they plan to cut 3,600 jobs in the unionized Midwest due to California’s increasingly draconian fuel-efficiency standards.  Mandatory EV sales targets as a percentage of all sales and these blunt mpg targets encourage compliance by not necessarily increasing production of EVs, or expanding total production, but lowering production across the board.  It’s a side effect of California zealotry, and, after all, Biden’s and Schumer’s DC is California, Jr.

Where California goes, the donkey party’s national potentates follow.  It’s said of California that lately the only thing that it produces in abundance is refugees in an imitation of Marxism-Leninism behind the Iron Curtain.  Wrong. It’s bad ideas.  CARB (California Air Resources Board) has ordered into existence something that doesn’t exist: “zero-emission” locomotives (see below).  First, the CARB authoritarians have ordered the train companies to squirrel away money in preparation for their 2035 deadline when all new locomotives will be, magically, “zero emission”.

Of course, if you throw enough money at any Salvador Dali-like adventure into surrealism, reality can be forcibly contorted to fit the vision, but who wants to live in the result?  Who can live in the result?  The things carrying the freight will likely be battery-powered with less toque and horsepower, less range, less hauling capacity.  It’s the same approach in the state’s edicts for tractor/trailers, the trucking industry.  The consequence is batteries, batteries everywhere, and diminishment of your well-being.  Shortages, jumps in distribution costs, and mounting difficulties in getting anything for producers and consumers will translate into you living poorer.  The average person will get smacked, and royally.

The reality of California’s battery-powered locomotive?

But your well-being is beside the point for utopians drunk with power.  Without a doubt, this is state tyranny as obvious as slavery in the ante-bellum South.  A state in the grip of lunacy shouldn’t be allowed to drag everyone else into its self-imposed quicksand, which is the current state of affairs.  Clearly, ports, trucking, and trains are the stuff of interstate commerce, and the feds in the Constitution govern it (Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl. 3).  Also, clearly, California is interfering with it, obstructing it.  Any state action so egregiously injurious to interstate commerce should be brought to heel.  Existing Supreme Court case law affirms the Constitution’s plain language in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), Wickard v. Filburn (1942), Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (1964), Katzenbach v. McClung (1964), et al.

So, the power is there; why isn’t it exercised?  Our federal government is crippled by two evenly matched and irreconcilable sides.  One is in the grip of neo-Marxism and the other, the antidote, is consumed in a repulsive cult of personality.  Much of the blame for this sorry deadlock lies with the electorate, for they are equally befuddled by two unpalatable options, or they’re boosters of the nonsense.  They won’t, and maybe can’t, give the antidote the requisite overwhelming majorities in Congress and the executive branch to right the ship.  We end up muddling through with California idiocy pulling the rest of the country into a morass.

It’s all so worrisome as we inch closer to a government-engineered suppression of our personal prospects.

More could be said of California’s inspiration in the federal government’s latest assault on the ubiquitous electric motors used in all American manufacturing.  It’s more of the same ilk.  They want to onshore manufacturing while they pummel manufacturers with an additional cost of $20,000 per employee in new regulations.  It’s like the EV and batteries, batteries everywhere. Something stinks to high heaven; or, more accurately, it’s as toxic as phosgene or chlorine gas wafting over WWI battlefields.  King Claudius has nothing on these dunces.

Low Battery

RogerG

Sources:

* “5 Big Lies About Climate Change, And How Researchers Trained A Machine To Spot Them”, David Vetter, Forbes, 11/19/21, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2021/11/19/5-big-lies-about-climate-change-and-why-researchers-trained-a-machine-to-spot-them/?sh=9d2a24349f47

* “2023 Study Shows Electric Vehicles Are Worst for Resale Value”, Marc Wiley, MotorBiscuit, 11/14/23, at https://www.motorbiscuit.com/studies-show-electric-vehicles-worst-resale-value/

* “Top 25 Cars That Hold Their Value the Best – and the 25 Worst: Electric vehicles are the worst at holding their value, while hybrids, sports cars and trucks depreciate the least”, ISeeCars, 11/6/23, at https://www.iseecars.com/cars-that-hold-their-value-study#v=2023

* “The $7,500 tax credit for electric cars will see big changes in 2024. What to know”, Camila Domonoske, NPR, 12/28/23, at https://www.npr.org/2023/12/28/1219158071/ev-electric-vehicles-tax-credit-car-shopping-tesla-ford-vw-gm

* For a horror story with a rental EV: “Car-Rental Companies Are Ruining EVs: Good luck charging your surprise electric rental car.”, Saahil Desai, The Atlantic, 6/16/2023, at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/06/electric-vehicle-rental-cars-hertz-chargers/674429/

* “No one wants to buy used EVs and they’re piling up in weed-infested graveyards”, Monica Raymunt and Bloomberg, Fortune, 12/22/23, at https://fortune.com/2023/12/22/no-one-wants-to-buy-used-ev-piling-weed-infested-graveyards-tesla-bmw-vw/amp/

* “California Kills Auto Jobs in Toledo: Stellantis warns of layoffs in the Midwest owing to the Golden State’s electric-vehicle mandate.”, The Editorial Board, The Wall Street Journal, 12/11/23, at https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-kills-auto-jobs-in-toledo-electric-vehicle-mandate-15c44a5c?mod=hp_opin_pos_1

* “California Mandates Green Trains That Don’t Exist”, Dominic Pino, National Review, 12/28/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/california-mandates-green-trains-that-dont-exist/

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They’re Still Leaving as of Friday, 12/29/23

Local Moving Labor | U-Haul

In “Poltergeist II”, the little girl stares into the snow of the TV screen and announces, “They’re baaaaack!”.  Who’s back?  The ghosts, of course.  For those chronicling the decline of California, the iconic declaration must be reworked.  A person staring at their daily news feed comes away with stories of people leaving the state saying, “They’re leeeeeeeeeeaving!”  This time, it’s Time magazine in “Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time” (see below).

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The little girl from “Poltergeist II”

And I quote from the story: “Los Angeles was not at the top of the list [of places to move to], instead becoming the area residents were most likely to move away from.”  According to a Redfin report, “That marks the first time on record [LA] has been the number one place homebuyers are leaving, and the first time in over two years the Bay Area has dropped out of the number one spot.”

A dubious distinction for the not-so-Golden State.  LA occupies the top spot, but the rest of the list is a who’s who of American urban dystopia, all of them Democratic Party satraps. San Francisco, New York City, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit and Denver are kryptonite to businesses and the middle class.  People are voting with their feet as they have for millennia.  Hell on earth is not a magnet.

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A common strip of homelessness in Los Angeles
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Litter from the chronic mobs of thieves along rail lines in Los Angeles

Welcome to urban America, and for the globe-trotting foreign traveler, reconsider that visit to the City by the Bay or Disneyland. Unless you’re a member of a major bowl game broadcast crew like the ESPN team reporting from the floor of the Rose Bowl, who’ll speed from the airport to hotel to the Rose Bowl in a limousine, you’ll risk face-to-face encounters with urban dysfunction.

For Californians, get out. For visitors, stay away.

business exodus people leaving california

RogerG

Source:
* “Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time”, Suzanne Blake, Time, 12/29/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/americans-are-fleeing-los-angeles-more-than-anywhere-else-for-first-time/ar-AA1md8sC?ocid=msedgntp&pc=LCTS&cvid=483db5997a504d34a10fb00840ed94db&ei=52

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Patrice Lumumba Universities, USA

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Democratic Socialists of America banners
Pro-Hamas demonstration, NYC, Oct. 8

During the Cold War, the Soviets in their efforts to harness to their side the so-called Third World – mostly poorer, developing and nominally nonaligned countries (at least officially not tied to the western or communist bloc) – created a “university” to train the next generation of Marxist revolutionaries.  Modeled on Soviet “education”, the schooling is premised, straitjacketed, on the absolute truth of Karl Marx’s revolutionary dialectic.  Deeply implanted is the alleged Marxist reality of systemic oppression, the same kind of thing now commonplace in our schools of higher ed, and lower.

The Soviet tactic was to hide the indoctrination behind the name of a popular “hero” like Patrice Lumumba. Officially titled Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow implanted Marxist thought in the next generation of revolutionaries and activists from around the world.  Notable alumni include a long list of murderous malcontents such as the terrorist Carlos the Jackal, Iran’s totalitarian mullah Ali Khamenei, the Sandinista dictator Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, and the one-man-one-vote-one-time ruler Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority.

USSR Pictures on Twitter: "The Peoples' Friendship University 'Patrice Lumumba' in Moscow, 1985 ...
Students at Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, 1985
Sebelum Teroris Berkedok Agama Marak, Ada Carlos the Jackal
Carlos the Jackal

The politicized heirs could include much of the college graduating classes in the U.S. going back at least a decade or two.  The Marxist-thought concept is infectious and is now established ideological orthodoxy throughout the college landscape across America.  Scholarship is bastardized by Marxist jargon, politically weighted vocabulary for which no one is allowed question.  Thought begins with the boilerplate, ends with the boilerplate.  This passes for learning in America (and elsewhere).

In a previous post, I wrote of the troubles at Bakersfield College, the Kern Community College District, and the Community College System in California.  Clearly, the intellectual rot doesn’t begin or end there.  The results are found in the polling of the under-24s.  The recent Harvard/Harris poll shows 51% of the 18-to-24 cohort supported the ending of the state of Israel and turning it over “to Hamas and the Palestinians”.  Increasingly, these people aren’t just liberal; they’re Marxist, having applied the Marxist rhetoric of oppressor and colonizer to Israel. It is what is meant by “not being liberal enough”.  Translation: being Marxist.  Welcome to America’s future.

We’d be much more honest with ourselves if we renamed all American higher ed Patrice Lumumba Universities because that is what they are.  Parents, beware, you might be subsidizing the future authors of the next holocaust.

The bodies of people, some of them elderly, lie on a street after they were killed during a mass-infiltration by Hamas gunmen from the Gaza Strip, in Sderot, southern Israel, Oct. 7, 2023. (Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad)

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RogerG

Sources:

* “Poll: Most young Americans think Israel should be ‘ended and given to Hamas’”, Toi Staff, The Times of Israel, 12/17/23, at https://www.timesofisrael.com/poll-most-young-americans-back-ending-israel-many-find-jewish-genocide-calls-okay/