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The Cause of Our Discontents

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Trump supporter and Antifa member confront each other, 2017.

“We are divorced, North from South, because we have hated each other so.” — Mary Boykin Chestnut from her diary at the onset of the American Civil War.

Today, one could substitute “urban from rural” for “North from South”.  Please be cautioned, though, that some blowhards will manage to warp the nature of the divide.  Marjorie Taylor Greene, that grand dame of unhinged hyperbole on the right, recently tweeted and repeated on Sean Hannity, “We need a national divorce.”  She added, “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.”  Her national divorce is incomprehensible since her blue/red dividing lines don’t neatly conform to state boundaries.  It is more intrastate than anything, between a plethora of blue freckles against a sea of red across the entire national domain.  That reality captures the essence of the current impasse.  The root of our disjunction is cultural.  A fundamental difference of ethos separates the blue dots from the red swaths.

The split consists of mutually incompatible mindsets with one being revolutionary and the other defensive of America’s founding.  Both sides didn’t mutually move way from each other.  One leaped from the other as if it had the plague.  The key precipitating factor is the adoption of a radical cultural revolution by social, commercial and political elites in concentrated urban and academic nodes.  Ronald Reagan once said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.”  Well, America didn’t leave rural areas, but it certainly was kicked out of these nodes of concentrated power and influence.  The separation is the logical outgrowth of the radicalization of our cultural elites.

The radicalization of the blue dots – what today makes them blue (actually red in its historical meaning) – consists in the adoption of a particular Marxist’s ideas on how to advance the revolution in spite of popular resistance to it.  Antonio Gramsci in the 1930’s penciled out his grand strategy to advance the worldwide revolution.  Karl Marx’s original idea was the organic development of a worker class consciousness which would culminate in the seizure of the means of production and set the world on the path to utopia.  Others, including Lenin and Gramsci, noticed that it wasn’t happening as predicted.  Lenin’s solution was a vanguard elite to precipitate the overthrow of the existing order.  For his part, Gramsci advocated a “long march” through cultural institutions and civil society, the social elements that lie mostly between the people and government (civil society: churches, charities, social organizations, schools, businesses).

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Antonio Gramsci

Lenin’s coup d’état expired with the implosion of the USSR in 1991 – speaking of internal contradictions that culminate in revolution (typical Marxist rhetoric).  Gramsci, who died before he was set to be released from Mussolini’s jail in 1937, would posthumously succeed beyond his wildest dreams.  He became the darling of the 1960’s New Left that would quickly morph into today’s progressivism.  A hive of intertwined Gramsci acolytes dominates many of our important institutions such as the schools, the Fortune 500 c-suite, media, entertainment, foundations, charities, mainline churches, the administrative state, the Democratic Party, and of course higher ed.

The danger of this new Gramscian upper class to the rest of the country, so isolated as they are, was best expressed by Charles Murray in his book, Coming Apart:

“Many of the members of the new upper class are balkanized. Furthermore, their ignorance about other Americans is more problematic than the ignorance of other Americans about them.  It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors.  It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisers cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers.  It is inevitable that people have large areas of ignorance about how others live, but that makes it all the more important that the members of the new upper class be aware of the breadth and depth of their ignorance.”

Truckers Shutting Down DC To Protest The Federal Government And Its "Bulls**t"
Truckers descend on DC in 2022.

So ubiquitous are Gramsci’s ideas that you at least know them intuitively.  They are everywhere. The notorious CRT is just the application of Gramsci’s Critical Theory to racial matters.  It’s the same formula when considering gender, ethnicity, or mixtures of the host of identities (intersectionality) encompassed within the “other”, the so-called oppressed.  Favoritism and oppression in the Gramscian hivemind are embedded in the culture, even if it has been superficially expunged from government.  It’s systemic in the culture, they say.  Real revolution won’t happen if the broader culture isn’t enlisted in the effort.  Today, they succeeded for the most part.

The influence of the hivemind may be what John O’Sullivan had in mind in his law of organizational behavior: all organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.  The prevalent hivemind is too powerful to ignore.  The evidence is all around.  TV commercials are replete with representations of the “other” far beyond any reasonable relationship to their portion of the population.  Those same ads are boosters for the ideology’s favorite products such as ev’s, as well as campaigns against the hated plastics and fossil fuels, alongside a push for the stakeholder corporate-management nonsense that threatens the health of my pension.  MLB moved the Allstar Game; the NFL diluted the national anthem with the addition of an identity anthem; the kneelings; the black power fist thrusts.  Popular entertainment and their awards extravaganzas are not without their ritual display of the putative threat of systemic racism and illusory attacks on the “other”.  DEI and CRT are everywhere in curriculums, hiring, and admissions, with a baleful effect on standards and morale.

An entire industry has appeared overnight to cater and push the agenda on adults and their children.  All of it is meant to bend the mind to accept the advantaging of one group at the expense of another, all of it based on race, gender, and ethnicity identity.  We’re back to a new Jim Crow.

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The assault on the minds of children is the most outrageous.  Outright pornography is introduced to adolescents under the guise of furthering tolerance for the sexual “other” (transgendered, etc.).  The distinction between mere tolerance and ideological recruitment won’t be fully appreciated on the part of the teacher-as-propagandist or obviously an impressionable high school sophomore, thereby artificially swelling the ranks of this new “other” in a social contagion.  Behavior and language – if presented on radio or television, they would be eligible for a fine or loss of license – is now part of school and training curriculums, and the inventories of school libraries, for 8-year-olds in some places.  Child abuse laws in states like California have been warped to shield children from parental interference in a minor’s choice to engage in essentially experimental sex-change interventions.

California has gone so far as declared itself to be the newest kind of sanctuary: a haven for a minor’s decision to break free of their parents’ influence, from any place, state, or country of origin.  An underground railroad to the golden state for legally protected child sexual mutilation will soon follow.

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A child’s newfound identity as a gender “other” will be reinforced by an absence of countervailing views, opposing opinions having been quashed by entrenched activists dominating society’s institutions.  The struggle in the newsroom at the NY Times is instructive.  Prior to 2021, the paper treated the issue of trans ideology as if there was only one side, the trans activists’ side.  You know, it’s the same one given to your kids in their school: sex isn’t binary; denial of gender identity is bigotry; refusals to affirm a child’s self-diagnosis are akin to murder by suicide; a medical consensus exists in support of all things trans; the recent increase in teen trans self-identity isn’t evidence of a social contagion.  Truth be told, a defensible counterpoint can be made to each one of these contentions, but it didn’t appear on the pages of the Times.  Then, dissenters found other outlets like Bari Weiss’s Substack page.

After activists in the newsroom got opinion editor James Bennet to resign for approving a Tom Cotton op-ed, his replacements began to show some spine in not kowtowing to the radicals in their midst.  Some opinion pieces questioning the newsroom orthodoxy began to appear.  The hive was riled about having to face an opposing point of view.  LGBTQ+ activist groups penned a letter to the paper condemning the openness.  A group of contributors sent one railing against the simple recognition of another side in the debate.  For them, there is no debate.

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Their mind is closed and want to see everyone’s mind similarly clamped shut.  In one of the letters, they declared, “. . . stop questioning science that is SETTLED.”  Where have we heard that before?  End a debate by simply issuing the fatwah of “SETTLED” without stooping so low as to prove their position.

The censorship makes the unproven and untrue seem plausible.  At this point, the Gramscian “long march” sheds its cloak of tolerance to expose its true totalitarian nature.  The philosopher Robert P. George has an eloquent description of the difference between an authoritarian and totalitarian:

“Ordinary authoritarians are content to forbid people from speaking truths.  Totalitarians insist on forcing people to speak untruths.”

Cancel culture is forcing the gullible to speak untruths.  We are running the danger of an entire generation being coaxed into believing contestable ideas are uncontestable.  That’s dangerous.  It’s one sure way for humaneness to disappear from humanity.  People are frog-marched out of their jobs and free speech and conscience are suppressed.  Public intellectuals, academics, and people of professional accomplishment who disagree are dismissed as “deniers”, “. . . phobics”, haters, and blocked from outlets.

The reigning neo-Marxists have, maybe forever, mutilated the meaning of words such as “consensus”.  Their “consensus” – “the science is SETTLED” – is the wedge that is driving rural from urban.  The blue nodes are the nexus of this Gramscian cultural revolution.  Pardon people in the countryside for noticing this lurch into insanity.  A good portion of the country doesn’t want to go where DEI consultants want to lead it.

Previously travelled routes to the socialist hyper-state have only led to misery.  Now, will I be “cancelled” for saying it?

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RogerG

Read more here:

* Charles Murray’s book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010” is an excellent place to start research into our current predicament.

* “Biography of Antonio Gramsci”, Nicki Lia Cole, PHD, ThoughtCo.com, 8/14/2019, at https://www.thoughtco.com/antonio-gramsci-3026471

* An additional concise survey of the life and influence of Antonio Gramsci can be found here: “The Long March Back”, Nate Hochman, National Review Online, 2/16/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-long-march-back/

* A brief account of the philosophy of Princeton’s Robert P. George can be found here: “The Georgian Way”, Andrew T. Walker, fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, National Review Magazine, 3/6/2023

* The struggle in the NY Times newsroom is captured here: “All the News That’s Fit to Debate”, Madeine Kearns, National Review Magazine, 3/20/2023

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The Cultural Commanding Heights Do Not Like the Hinterlands

A mural by street artist PBOY depicting yellow vest protesters inspired by Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People. (photo: Philippe Lopez/AFP)

“The green dreams of urbanites spark outrage in rural areas.” – Joel Klotkin, executive director of the Urban Reform Institute, and respectively Presidential and Washington Fellow at Chapman and Claremont Universities

Joel Klotkin’s newest piece on the urban/rural divide would be a revelation for those comfortable in their biases and lifestyle in their insulated, well-to-do urban enclaves (see below).

Joel Kotkin quoted in NYTimes OpEd About 2020 Election - Joel Kotkin
Joel Klotkin

They control urban-dominated states like California and are conducting a Sherman-esque scorched-earth march through the hinterlands to make them “howl” in forced conformity to a dubious enviro ideology.  Their William Tecumseh Sherman flanking strategy involves the annihilation of vast stretches of flyover country in windmill forests and blankets of solar panels in conjunction with attacks on the farmers’ products and production inputs.  Make no mistake about it, it’s at least a cold war, and occasionally a hot one, on those who feed the world’s hungry and provide the material backbone for the cultural commissariat’s own luxurious lifestyle.

Ironically, it’s an attack on themselves if they only thought deeper than a star-struck Davos groupie totally consumed in enviro agitprop.  Anyway, they’re relaxed because it’ll bankrupt others further down the wealth pyramid first.  They’re like Rome’s patricians laughing at Nero fiddling as the flames slowly approach their villas.

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It’s an ideological crusade centering on climate change and should not be mistaken for real science.  Leaps of faith are required to overcome huge holes in logic and fact.  Here’s some “What’s” to ponder.  What’s the degree of human impact on climate to ascertain urgency?  What’s the level of positive effect on climate from a sudden shackling of the U.S. population to unreliable and expensive energy?  What’s the influence on other countries, or will it be ignored?  No amount of computer modeling can overcome these holes in the train of logic since software has always been susceptible to GIGO – garbage in, garbage out.  The model is only as good as its designer.  Artificial intelligence isn’t immune.  On this topic, ideology trumps scientific objectivity all too often.

One fact constantly escapes the synapses of this secular faith’s upscale adherents: energy density.  No amount of “we’ll innovate our way through the problem” can mask this ugly reality.  Their favorite sources for energy “sustainability” are the feebly dense wind and solar – they need an awful lot of space to be practical.  These contraptions require vast state-sized stretches of landscape on the order of magnitude of Tennessee to Texas, depending on how close you want to get to “net zero” in carbon emissions.  What does that mean?  It means the consumption of huge swaths of open space, wilderness, and land devoted to food and fiber.  A dystopian future awaits in the nerve-rending and constant hum of wind turbines and a consigning of small town and rural residents to a hellish view of much of their surroundings under expansive pavements of solar panels or intimidating chorus lines of giant towers extending over the horizon.  Watch real estate values and quality of life plummet for rural, small town, exurban residents.

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A wind project in Michigan farm area in 2013.
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A sea of solar panels in Portugal.

And guess what?  You still need fossil fuel backup which adds to the cost misery of the whole scheme.  If batteries are to be your lifeline around the problem of blackouts and having to fire up backup gas-powered steam turbines, remember, the law of tradeoffs isn’t suspended.  More resources pumped into this black hole translates into lost investment in medicine, manufacturing technology, food production and distribution, water, etc.  The alternatives sacrificed are too numerous to mention.

That’s the glory of free markets, though; the voluntary choices of thousands, if not millions, sort this out.  The rule of bureaucrats and pandering demagogues in elective office, when given billions and trillions of dollars to play with, are more famous for boondoggles.  Remember Solyndra or California’s train to nowhere, parts languishing and graffitied like a LA Stonehenge in the Central Valley?  I don’t expect Millennials, Gen Z’ers, and those following to have an inkling of life in the old USSR under a vast bureaucracy’s central planning, given the sorry state of our schools.  California is chugging full speed into this fog of ignorance.

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California’s upper crust may be the most visibly intoxicated by the eco-jihad but the mania is evident worldwide.  Farmers and rural and small-town residents around the world are about to be engulfed in a plundering of their spaces by the half-witted infatuations of zealots with money and influence.  But a counterrevolution is kicking in.  In Europe, French truckdrivers and farmers rose up in the “gilets jaunes” (yellow vests) protests in November 2018 against the new greenie fuel taxes.  Dutch farmers were brimming with hostility over crippling emissions and fertilizer regulations just last year.  So devastating are the potential impacts of the new rules that a projected 3,000 Dutch farms may be lost in the next few decades.

Europe isn’t alone.  African countries like Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa have registered similar protests to Davos flights of fancy.  The path to the ecotopia is lined with appropriated farmland, farmers, and everyone else who provide the hands, backs, and brains for the jet set to live in luxurious isolation.

Yep, ecomania among the insular well-to-do is poison to blue collars and everyone outside a country’s super zips.  Joel Klotkin is right to use the world “colonize” in describing the imperial designs of cultural power brokers for the areas of the country who don’t vote and live like them.  Occasionally, colonists rise up.  Does Lexington and Concord remind you of anything?

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The yellow vest protests in Paris, November 2018.
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Farmers gather with their vehicles next to a Germany/Netherlands border sign during a protest on the A1 highway near Rijssen, Netherlands, June 29. They are protesting the Dutch Government’s nitrogen plans, which would eliminate a sizable number of farms. (photo: Vincent Jannink / AFP via Getty Images)

Please read Joel Klotkin’s piece below.

RogerG

Read more here:

* Much thanks to Joel Klotkin for his research in “Energy Colonialism Will Worsen the Urban-Rural Divide”, Joel Klotkin, National Review Online, 3/3/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/03/energy-colonialism-will-worsen-the-urban-rural-divide/

* “’Yellow Vests’: The elites talk about the end of the world, when we talk about the end of the month”, Le Monde, 11/24/2018, at https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2018/11/24/gilets-jaunes-les-elites-parlent-de-fin-du-monde-quand-nous-on-parle-de-fin-du-mois_5387968_823448.html

* “Farmers’ Protest in Netherlands Reflects Rise of Popular Revolts in Europe”, National Catholic Register, 7/29/2022, at https://www.ncregister.com/news/farmers-protest-in-netherlands-reflects-rise-of-popular-revolts-in-europe

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The GOP Needs to Get Its House in Order

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The ancients had much to say about hypocrisy and willful blindness in respect to problems.  The prophet Isaiah admonished King Hezekiah on his deathbed (2Kings 20:1, NIV), “Put your house in order, because you are going to die; you will not recover.”  And then there is this famous line against pretense from Luke’s gospel (6:42, NIV):

“How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”

The Left – meaning today’s progressives and liberals – is nearly beyond redemption, philosophically and in many cases behaviorally.  Its neo-Marxist collectivism is a national suicide pact. But a sizeable element of the Right is similarly proving itself unworthy.  It is immersed in a performative style of politics, a politics as therapy – “Stick it to the libs, I feel better” – that lacks direction other than the desire to humiliate the other side in staged mini-dramas.  They may get an emotional rush from the rhetoric and theatrical antics but it is repulsive to large swaths of the nation’s electorate.  Principally for this reason, the last three election cycles have proven to be disappointments for those of a more conservative disposition.

Call it the Trump contagion.  It entered the GOP’s bloodstream in 2015 and is proving resistant to cure.  Trump still conjures a 43% plurality, 15 points better than second-place DeSantis, among Republican voters in the latest Fox News poll (see below).  43% are hungry for a four-peat of disappointment – to add to 2018, 2020, and 2022.  Einstein’s famous insanity formulation keeps coming to mind.  This large faction of Republicans remains oblivious to the fact that a candidate that survives them may not, and increasingly will not, survive the general electorate if the party’s base continues to choose candidates based on theatrics and their longings for an emotional release in their politics.  The hardheaded on the Right need to understand one inescapable fact: first, as a party, to accomplish anything, you’ve got to win . . . the general!  The stalwarts might celebrate victory in the intraparty feud in spring but after the dust settles in November, the donkey-party Left will still be making policy in the seats of power.

The contagion has overtaken the official GOP apparatus in some red/purple states.  The effect of the takeover is turning some purple states blue.  In places where it is deeply embedded, the infected exhibit the tendencies of those immersed in the blue bubbles, only this time, in a red one.  Secure in the cloister of others like them, they are awkward when forced to confront people who disagree and promptly jump to condemnation.  It’s true for both silos.  Remember Obama’s “bitter clingers”, Hillary’s “deplorables”, and ritual abuse of the word “establishment” and “elites” by Fox News’s primetime “populists”, and Trump’s litany of juvenile insults?

Professor Alberto Coll of DePaul University School of Law, and an astute critic of today’s defunct civic education, is concerned about the decline of the republican civic virtues of prudence, deliberation, and moderation (see below).  They are most fundamentally missing from K-12 and have been drummed out of higher ed, increasingly replaced by habitual Marxist oppressor-shaming.  It’s an ideology more at home as a bankrupt theology with its unexaminable assumptions and heaven-on-earth end state.  Not surprisingly, they behave much like jihadis with their statue-toppling, silencings on campuses, itinerant mobs, and the forcible injection of their ideology into all facets of the culture.

The Left’s inhumanity has elicited an analogous reaction on the Right.  Gone is any semblance of prudence.  Prudence dictates the recognition of complexities, consequences, and trade-offs.  Instead, everything seems so simple in a constant branding of everyone as either evil (them) or good (us).

The Left’s infantilism shows as an attempt to facetiously adduce cause from correlation: socio-economic stats are unequal among identity groups therefore bigotry is at fault, or so they assume.  If they can’t find sufficient numbers of bigots, they’ll make it airily “systemic”, which leads them right into the strawman fallacy.  It’s ludicrous.

The Right sometimes stumbles into the “systemic” quicksand.  They have a vocabulary of vague pejoratives to feed their obsessions such as the aforementioned “establishment” and “elites”.  Anyone who has been around too long in the public arena is automatically suspect by that logic, especially if previously identified as one by the movement’s carnival barkers (Hello, primetime Fox News.).  The terms encourage an instant distrust of credentials so academics, scholars, people in the professions, political figures, and leaders in business and civil society that disagree with them are summarily rejected.  It’s another form of bigotry, something familiar to Antifa and Biden, Schumer, Pelosi, and The Squad in their usual hivemind.

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Deliberation goes the way of prudence.  Adults don’t display it. It begins with listening which is clearly absent from the halls of Congress.  Have you seen the expansive number of empty seats on C-SPAN during speeches on the House and Senate floors?  People talk past each other in party-approved talking points.  The kids don’t see it modeled by adults in their media, or in their schools’ curriculums that refuse to establish a good grounding in language, the best of Western literature (Bible, Shakespeare), history, philosophy, and logic. They’ve been turned into vehicles for the voguish neo-Marxist orthodoxy.

I must admit that it’s hard on deliberation when one party – the Democrats – is committed to a revolution as complete as anything begun in 1917 Petrograd (see below about Antonio Gramsci).

As for moderation, what do you think after prudence and deliberation have been kicked to the wayside?  The socialism of AOC becomes mainstream Democrat, and the kookery of the Marjorie Taylor Greene/Gaetz/Boebert/Trump clique seizes the reins of a Republican House caucus with the narrowest of majorities.  43% of the Republican base and the nearly entire elected Democratic Party, and maybe three-quarters of the Dem base, stand athwart each other separated with firehoses spewing rhetorical slime.

Since 57% of the Republican base retains some attachment to reality, the country’s hopes for a functioning republic reside with them.  A pushback may have begun with Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp.  He courageously stood against the Georgia state GOP that backed his opponent in the primary and went on to thump the Trump-backed shill in the primary and the odious Stacey Abrams in the general by 7.5 points.  The victory means that the guy has street cred.

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp makes remarks during a visit to Adventure Outdoors gun shop in Smyrna, Ga., January 5, 2022. (photo: Alyssa Pointer/Reuters)

He warned big donors in the Georgians First Leadership Committee at a recent luncheon, “. . . we can no longer rely on the traditional party infrastructure to win in the future.”  “Infrastructure” is a $10 word for a Trump-crazed state central committee.  The state party’s chairman, David Shafer, was so humiliated by the defeat of the committee/Trump-endorsed choices up and down the ballot in the party’s primary that he’s given up pursuing another term.  The state committee’s stance was stupid on steroids.  Shafer and his endorsements may be simpatico with Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene but not to a huge majority of registered Republicans, let alone the general electorate.  Successful politics is about addition, and not subtraction and performance-art politics. It means that the public wants good and safe schools, the potholes to be filled, crime to be defeated, and the sewers and garbage collection to function as billed.  “Owning the libs” won’t suffice.

The same is true for the Trump fanatics officially running the GOP in states like Arizona.  The writer Dan McLaughlin put it succinctly when he wrote, “It’s time to take the party back from the party.” Kemp is doing his part (see below).

The fallout from the 2022 elections is a siren-call warning to the GOP.  Of course, the country appears evenly divided when one of the parties weakens its standing with choices lathered in the general odium of Trump and sloganeering psychodramas.  The Democrats’ problem is the neo-Marxist Democratic Party and a hash that they’ve made of parts of the country under their control.  The Republicans have the Trump millstone around their neck. Given that dynamic, of course we have parity . . . of foolishness.

A few examples illustrate the reflexive Republican foot-shooting that makes it easier on the neo-Marxist Democrats thereby levelling the playing field in a country overwhelmingly not fond of the hammer and sickle.  In one heavily Republican Ohio congressional district, the Trump-endorsed/Q-Anon-dabbling J. R. Majewski lost in the general.  Moving over to a Michigan House race, Joe Gibbs beat incumbent Peter Meijir in a Republican primary campaign wallowing on Meijir’s vote to impeach Trump, only to lose in the general by double digits.  In Washington State, the Republican incumbent Jaime Herrera Beutler narrowly lost to Joe Kent in the primary with her vote to impeach Trump a key factor.  Kent, saddled with ties to white nationalists and other elements of the unhinged right, and fully immersed in the hyperbolic language of the Trump caucus, lost in the general.  No wonder that the expected red wave turned into scattered rain drops.

Republicans, if you don’t like rule by a commissariat, field better candidates with an eye to winning elections.  Try that.  Dah!  Send Trump packing, and for his cadre of groupies, grow up and follow Mick Jagger’s advice: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.”

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RogerG

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* “Young Americans Are Increasingly Ungrateful. Here’s What to Do about It”, Alberto Coll, National Review Online, 2/26/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/young-americans-are-increasingly-ungrateful-heres-what-to-do-about-it/

* “Fox News Poll: Trump, DeSantis top 2024 Republican preference”, Dana Blanton, Fox News, 2/26/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fox-news-poll-trump-desantis-top-2024-republican-preference/ar-AA17X7hn

* “Brian Kemp: Time for the Georgia GOP to Leave the Georgia GOP”, Dan McLaughlin, National Review Online, 2/23/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/brian-kemp-time-for-the-georgia-gop-to-leave-the-georgia-gop/

* “Kemp moves to take command of GOP, leaving state party behind”, Greg Bluestein, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 2/23/23, at https://www.ajc.com/politics/politics-blog/kemp-moves-to-take-command-of-gop-leaving-state-party-behind/H6EYBMRZDFFCXBYNPPP3PY4WQA/

* An excellent summary of the influence of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci of the 1920’s and 30’s on today’s neo-Marxism in the Democratic Party and the commanding heights of the culture can be read here: “The Long March Back”, Nate Hochman, National Review Online, 2/16/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-long-march-back/

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The California Housing Crisis: The Intersectionality of Hypocrisy and Central Planning

A professional basketball player in a jersey that says Golden State Warriors.
Golden State Warriors guard Steph Curry, in an April 21, 2022, game in Denver, has voiced his opposition to townhomes near his San Francisco Bay Area mansion. (David Zalubowski / Associated Press)

Have you heard this?  Steph Curry of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors doesn’t want a 1.5 acre, 16-unit “affordable” townhouse development near his $30 million mansion in the exclusive Bay Area community of Atherton (see below).  It’s too easy to expose the obvious hypocrisy given the guy’s outspoken progressive views.  Rich people of lefty inclinations seem to run away from their lefty beliefs as soon as the consequences get too close.  But Curry has legitimate concerns of safety and privacy for a celebrity like himself and his family.  The bigger issue, though, isn’t affordable housing in a state woefully deficient of it.  It’s the central planning that inherently comes with lefty/progressive thinking of the type running the show in California.

It’s borrowed from Stalin, a fellow lefty.  He abandoned his orthodox seminary as a young man and radicalized himself into an atheist revolutionary.  Off went the priestly frock and traditional beliefs and on came the drive to build the utopia on totalitarianism in league with a clique of fellow bomb throwers and statue topplers.  Sound familiar?  Portland?  Almost any urban complex or campus in the so-called golden state?  Central planning is one of the quintessential expressions of totalitarianism.

Stalin 5 Year Plan poster | Year plan, Propaganda posters, Travel posters
Soviet poster proclaiming the Five-Year Plan of industrialization.

Now in control, to Stalin, the utopia means industrialization at breakneck speed no matter the cost and turmoil to people’s lives.  Sound similar to “zero carbon”, the Green New Deal, Biden announcing the end of fossil fuels, Newson and his one-party state destroying energy production and herding the entire population of the state into ev’s?  As for Stalin, he ordered more steel from his politburo to Gosplan (state economic planning agency) who then gets the furnaces billowing at full blast to produce more of something that few can and want to use.  It piles in heaps outside the foundries.

Ditto for Governor Newsom and housing.  Not enough affordable housing?  He ordered the regional governments in the state (like SoCal Area Governments – SCAG – for instance) to create precise plans for more “affordable housing”.  Atherton, within ABAG (Assoc. of Bay Area Governments), did its part with 348 new housing units – 16 of which are to be plunked down next to the Curry estate.

Aerial Photography Atherton - Airview Online
Aerial view of Atherton, Ca.
Atherton Homes | Floor plans, Atherton, House styles
New home development in Atherton with bungalows starting from between a stripped-down $620,000 to three-quarters of a million.
Steph and Ayesha Curry are selling their Mediterranean-style estate in Walnut Creek for $3.2 million.
The $3.2 million mansion sold by Steph Curry and wife.
Il campione della Nba Stephen Curry acquista una villa da 31 milioni in California — idealista/news
Rear view of Curry’s new $31 million mansion in Atherton, Ca

That’s how central planning works.  Need something like cheaper housing? Well, just order it as Stalin did steel, while ignoring the Russian realities of the absence of a trained workforce, the infrastructure for a supply chain, whether the stuff is any good, the absence of contingent enterprises that could use it.  Equally oblivious as Newsom is, the land in question in Atherton probably goes for $8 million per acre. Do the math: $12 million for the land and sixteen “affordable” units at $250,000 each will bring in . . . wait for it . . . $4 million.  Oops, it doesn’t add up.

Watch “affordable housing” turn into “unaffordable housing”.  To cover just land costs, each unit will have to go for $750,000.  Add other incidentals like labor, engineering, materials, energy (fuel, electricity, etc.), the inevitable California delays, fees, taxes, and approvals, and you’re back to California’s housing crisis.  Stalin ended up with the world’s largest steel ingot and crappy tractors.  Newsom commands cheaper housing and ends up with fewer units and a huge subsidy bill to fund from the depleted state, county, and municipal treasuries and the state’s beleaguered taxpayers.  My bet: the units don’t get built.

Don’t worry, Steph.  The state’s buffoonish central planning and incompetence will protect you.

The housing situation won’t improve because the political eco-system for development in the state hasn’t changed.  It’s the same one that caused the problem.  Layer upon layer of bureaucracy smothers the housing industry. Powerful interest groups perch like vultures waiting to pounce.  EIR’s and EIS’s and related “public” hearings filled with NIMBY’s and the state’s militant eco-utopians make a mockery of the process.  CEQA, the Coastal Commission, the planning agencies in every jurisdiction in the state, the overlay of air quality management districts throughout the state, Cal. Fish and Game, USFWS, and their endangered species lists are poised to tear their claws into the project.

Critically Endangered Insects Make History at San Diego Zoo - Times of San Diego
The endangered Lord Howe Island stick insect (female). Photo Courtesy San Diego Zoo.

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California NIMBYs don't love their children | OC Housing News

To tell the truth, the state has a housing crisis because it wants one.  They must want it, or they’re insane.  Anyone with an ounce of common sense must know that punishing a behavior, like building more housing, will mean less of the behavior.  It’s been the reality since the eco-industrial complex discovered the Delta Smelt, the Tipton Kangaroo Rat, and the evil of humans attempting to live better.

It gets worse.  Newsom’s affordable housing imperial decree is ready to clash with a recent California court’s decree extending California Endangered Species Act protections to invertebrates – i.e., insects (see below).  Californios will quickly learn that bumble bees count more than anything affordable in the state.  Karl Marx was wrong about much, but he got one thing right: “. . . history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

Stalin’s central planning created the Holodomor and dekulakization which devastated the Ukraine, the Donbas, the Russian peasantry and agriculture, and created the stirrings of the bloody purges in the hunt for “wreckers”.  Newsom thinks that he can wave the magic wand of an imperial decree and, voilà, “affordable housing” appears.  Just announce it and it will be so.  Forget about Marx’s tragedy stage; the state quickly jumped to farce.

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RogerG

Read more here:

* “NBA’s Steph Curry joins neighbors in opposing affordable-housing plan for ritzy Atherton”, Howard Blume, LA Times, 2/3/23, at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-02-03/nba-star-steph-curry-fights-affordable-housing-atherton

* “California court ruling opens door for protection of insects as endangered species”, Liz Kimbrough, Mongabay, 6/2/22, at https://news.mongabay.com/2022/06/california-court-ruling-opens-door-for-protection-of-insects-as-endangered-species/

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California, From Bright Promise to Malignancy

Editorial: California can’t afford neighborhood opposition to homeless housing - SFChronicle.com
Scene of San Fransisco homelessness in 2021.

* The following is my reaction to “Laurel Canyon” and “Helter Skelter” now showing on Amazon Prime.  I recommend them but not in ways intended by the creators.

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Upon preparing our transition to Montana, some very dear Montana friends advised us to replace our California vehicle plates asap.  We did.  It was probably the same guidance offered to any Golden State resident making a move to Oregon, Washington, Texas, Colorado, or practically anywhere.  Why is the word “California” so disconcerting to our fellow Americans beyond the Sierras?  No doubt, the state has a bad reputation.  To be blunt, it got it after the Sixties settled in, stayed, and took over the state.  Other people see the results, want no part of it, and wish to quarantine the virus.

The Sixties was a utopian cultural revolution with strong political implications that cast a dark shadow expanding up and down the coast and entrenching itself in metropolitan and academic nodes nationwide.  What came to be called “the Sixties” set in motion a full-scale assault on traditions and institutions while advancing license with a heavy expansion of state interventions, taxes, and regulations to clean up the concomitant mess and make society conform to a now-discredited utopian vision.  The government is by nature ill-equipped to be the cleanup brigade and only compounds the problems.  California is thought by many across the nation to be the birthing center of the horror.  Daily, the impression is confirmed.

'Laurel Canyon' series showcases unseen footage of '60s era music | Entertainment News | abc10.com
A scene from one of the many residences of rock performers that came to congregate in Laurel Canyon.LA. It looks like Stephen Still (l) of the Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young sitting atop a car with what looks like Peter Tork of Monkees fame.

The march of the Sixties went from San Francisco, Berkeley, Haight-Asbury, LA, Topanga Canyon, Laurel Canyon, Sunset Blvd., through the coastal plain, up and down Highway 1, to the halls of power in Sacramento; all resplendently displayed in “Laurel Canyon” and “Helter Skelter”.  Later, bare feet and Levi’s gave way to the tweed of tenured faculty positions and the current legislative supermajorities and a lock on the governor’s mansion and every other statewide elective office in California.

PHOTOS: Another Summer Of Love? | * SUMMER OF OUR DISCONTENT 67' * | Pinterest | Summer of love ...
Haight-Ashbury during the so-called Summer of Love.

Surprisingly, I came away from viewing the two episodes of “Laurel Canyon” and the six of “Helter Skelter” on Amazon Prime with these thoughts in mind.  They were a reminder of the times but not necessarily a discovery.  I’m a Boomer, having entered junior high in 1964.  I’m aware.  The films illustrate that the Sixties cultural influence lurks in the background of the great folk-rock of the Laurel Canyon scene of the Sixties and the Manson murders.

Though, don’t be fooled.  The Sixties didn’t cause the Manson murders.  Manson and his troupe of sycophants are responsible.  Yet, the Sixties set the stage for what happened and for what California became.

25 Photographs of the Murderous Manson Family That Shocked the Nation
Charles Manson in one of many photos taken during his 1970 trial.
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Some of Manson’s “family” on the Spahn Ranch property, 1969.
//Charles manson dead crime scene photos sharon tate with sebering
The bodies of Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring, two of the five victims at the Polanski/Tate residence.

The Sixties (actually from 1965 to the early Seventies), the word, came to refer to a wholesale rejection of convention.  Restraint is gone, anything goes, and moral anarchy reigns.  The earlier insidiousness of drug use – euphorics, psychedelics – was supplanted by a view of them as a shortcut to genius and God. Psychologist Timothy Leary at a 1966 Golden Gate Park “Human Be-In” set the tone with “Turn on, tune in, drop out”.  People caught up in the whirlwind found themselves beset by addictions, sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, and the underbelly of the drug culture.  Today, the phenomena have spread far beyond the confines of Haight-Ashbury.

At least 30 cannabis farms destroyed in Northern California wildfires - The Cannifornian
California pot farm

The anti-convention of the Sixties ultimately became the convention of today. It’s everywhere but most intense in California, its epicenter.  Just take a stroll through a Denver park to smell the spread of the zeitgeist, or travel the epicenter to experience a LA homeless encampment, the filth of the downtowns, the homelessness parked and tented along Highway 1, the growing pot dispensaries dotting the landscape, the legal and illegal pot plantations that make a hike in the California woods dangerous, and sex as recreation with an allied abortion industry to dispose of the consequences.

Belief in traditional Christianity and church attendance is taking a hit and a buttress of civility is crumbling (nationwide numbers below).

In U.S., smaller share of adults identify as Christians, while religious 'nones' have grown

Narcissism and a short-term time horizon were other byproducts.  Take away something higher and that leaves the self and an obsession with the present.  The future, a fruitful legacy, and personal responsibility be damned.  The Sixties-inspired absolute rule of the self overpowers everything to the point that even biological restraints are subjected to the will with enough chemicals and surgeries.  Fabricated girls – formerly boys – are free to invade female spaces.  The dating scene, already fraught with many uncertainties, will have a few more to contend with.

Socialism is a nice fit for the ongoing fight against convention.  It, by definition, is an invasion into the conventionally protected private sphere: private property, home, family, faith, your kids’ schooling, personal economic initiative, and a person’s accumulated earnings.  Free love became free-a-lot covering a gamut from healthcare, abortions, racial reparations, an expanding list of other monetary giveaways, and all of it bankrolled by one of the most onerous taxation regimes this side of North Korea.  California wants to approximate a hippie commune as close as is humanly possible . . . by dictat.

Environmentalism is the state’s unofficial religion and it’s a two-fer: it’s a cover for more socialism and assists in dismantling the old conventions, their institutions and standards.  Eco-fanaticism dictates your choice of car, constructs an unreliable and costly grid that sets the hillsides aflame, inflates energy prices to astronomical levels, stands by as the state’s infrastructure crumbles, and all of it managed by a state government that can’t even manage its lavish unemployment benefits (much of it illegally landed in the hands of the miscreants in the state’s prisons, see below).

And you wonder why a California license plate on a car in a Missoula WinCo parking lot is viewed with a slight undercurrent of contempt by locals?  People beyond the Sierras get a daily media dose of the California malignancy.  They know.  Many areas of the country are only getting redder as a result.  The Democratic Party is seen by many people as being under the hypnotic spell of what California has become, so much so that the House Democrat delegation almost split evenly on a resolution on Thursday (2/2/23) to condemn socialism (109 for, 100 against/present, see below).  The opponents have their reasons, but they exhibit obfuscation or ignorance of socialism.

The resolution reads in part, “. . . socialist ideology necessitates a concentration of power that has time and time again collapsed into Communist regimes, totalitarian rule, and brutal dictatorships.”  Some of the foes trotted out their old stand-by claim that an attack on socialism is a not-so-subtle design to eliminate Social Security and Medicare.  However, all serious reforms call for a transition to a more sustainable program, one in line with our time-honored values of personal responsibility, private property, and greater returns.  Demagoguing the issue hides an affection for top-down government control and the entrapment of the population into the status of serfs to the state, hallmarks of socialism.

Democratic Socialists of America endorse Maduro’s policies
The Squad in Congress, American marchers for socialism, and the socialist dictator Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela.

Many voting no/present disfigured the meaning of socialism in order to cover an affection for it.  Clouding their judgment is a version of socialism coming out of the Sixties love-ins in California.  For them, it is a cutesy sharing of everything, whether it be belongings or bed partners.  Manson demanded the surrender of all of a person’s possessions, including clothes, before acceptance into the clan.  It’s a sentiment familiar to the crowd before Timothy Leary in the Human Be-In of 1966, and morphed into the Democratic Party platform of today.

The red states’ desire to contain the virus may gain strength with more refugees . . . but only to a point.  Up to now, the vast majority of California refugees are the low-hanging fruit of people equally disgusted by the turn of events in their home state.  They add to the red tendencies of their adopted states.  Yet, when others of progressive orientations discover to their joy the availability of progressive culture in burgeoning urban settings like Nashville or Austin, without the onerous taxes, some of these red states might shift to more of a purple hue.  Watch out for Colorado-ization.

And so it goes. California wasn’t confined. It took over the culture, one of our two political parties, and is shedding population like my dogs do fur. Why are they fleeing? You know, most have come to dislike California for the same reasons as you might.

More importantly, California is the sheep’s clothing covering the Sixties wolf.  The Sixties was a disaster.  To say otherwise is smearing lipstick on a pig, er wolf.  Watch “Laurel Canyon” and “Helter Skelter” on Amazon Prime and don’t be fooled by the lipstick.  If viewed with a jaundiced eye, the films show much more than what their creators intended.

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RogerG

Read more here:

* “California sent coronavirus relief money to inmates living in multiple states”, Bethany Blankley, The Center Square, 1/7/2021, at https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/california-sent-coronavirus-relief-money-to-inmates-living-in-multiple-states/article_dfb87e08-5080-11eb-8fd2-5f361329774e.html#:~:text=%28The%20Center%20Square%29%20%E2%80%93%20More%20than%20%2442%20million,prison%20and%20jail%20inmates%2C%20a%20recent%20report%20found.

* More on California’s unemployment insurance scandal: “California’s Unemployment Insurance System in Crisis, Needs a Fix.”, Orange County Register, 1/18/2023, at https://www.ocregister.com/2023/01/18/unemployment-insurance-in-crisis-needs-a-fix/

* “House passes resolution denouncing socialism, vote splits Democrats”, Michael Schnell, The Hill, 2/2/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/house-passes-resolution-denouncing-socialism-vote-splits-democrats/ar-AA172Gvv

* “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace”, Pew Research Center, 10/17/2019, at https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace/

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A Time of Political Insanity

Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene won't commit to Capitol rally in support of Jan. 6 rioters ...
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R, Fla.) and Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene (R, Ga.)
Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) and Pres. Joe Biden at the microphone

When does just being wrong cross over into insanity?  Einstein had an answer during his debate with the proponents of quantum theory (mechanics) in the 1920’s.  The quantum theory presented the possibility of unpredictability in the atomic and subatomic world: identical circumstances can produce different results.  Flippantly, Einstein threw off the one-line response, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”  Thus, according to Einstein, quantum theory proponents such as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were engaging in folly.

Black and white photo showing Bohr and Einstein sitting side by side in conversation.
Niels Bohr (left) with Albert Einstein in the late 1920s, when quantum mechanics was in its infancy. (Photo credit: Emilio Segre Visual Archives/AIP/SPL)

Today, we have good reason to know better.  Micro reality behaves differently than macro.  Einstein’s explanation of the cosmos (macro) can’t account for activity in the atomic and subatomic realm (micro).

However, applying Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to human affairs would be an invitation to chaos.  Out the window would go any universal principles like deductive/inductive reasoning, equal protection of the laws, rules of due process, standards of decency, human rights, anything regarding the proper regulation of human conduct in a society, the scientific method itself if taken to an extreme.  Yet, that is where we are going.  We are heading back into places that were known to be thickets of danger and malevolence.

Passion and bias overwhelm good sense.  Indeed, that happenstance may be the only true constant in human conduct through the ages, down to the present, and into the future.

We pride ourselves in being better than our ancestors, progressives being the most hubristic.  Their entire belief system is based on it.  Yet, an earlier incarnation of today’s progressives produced improvements in how a democracy registers the will of the people, advances that modern progressives are busy dismantling.  Is this “progress” or a return to an atavistic past, one that their ideological ancestors were trying to escape?

Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall cartoon by Thomas Nast | American History | Pinterest | Tammany hall ...
Thomas Nast cartoon of Boss Tweed of the Tammany Hall Democrat political machine of NYC.

Einstein’s insanity definition is fully operational when it comes to the Democratic Party’s efforts to shred the accomplishments of 19th century progressives.  Back then, progressives were aghast at the corruption of a powerful few in smoke-filled backrooms.  Their efforts at broad political, economic, and social reform were thwarted by a clique with the power to manipulate elections.  Before they could accomplish anything, elections must be cleaned up.  The process must be professionalized with nonpartisan administration of elections, clean voter rolls, the secret ballot, and diligent prosecution of fraud.  Only then, they believed, could they circumvent the self-serving few stuffing the ballot boxes.

Professor Richard T. Ely of Johns Hopkins U. and the U. of Wisconsin, influenced Woodrow Wilson, Rober La Follette, Theodore Roosevelt, etc. (photo: public domain/via Wikimedia)

After, other election reforms would kick in: the popular election of Senators, popular vote primaries, the referendum, initiative, and recall.  More democratization, but first in clean elections, was thought to be the cure.  Now, it’s back to stuffing the ballot box.  Democrats resist efforts to make voter rolls match the actual eligible warm bodies in a precinct, like removal of the dead and noncitizens or those who moved.  They thwart voter ID initiatives, whose purpose is to ensure that the person showing up to vote is actually the person on the list.  And they are enthusiastic proponents of mail-in balloting, unmonitored drop boxes, the third party harvesting of ballots, same-day registration, voting beyond election day, the kinds of proposals that place a huge question mark over election integrity.  What could go wrong?  Is it completely unreasonable to find these ideas at least troubling?

Not for Democrats.  They don’t have misgivings, blinded as they are by the rhetorical device of “disenfranchisement”, the bogeyman of systemic racism, a zeal to win elections at all costs, and making it so easy to vote that the insentient, uninterested, and those desiring to vote and vote often have an open field.  Public faith in the result is sacrificed in the fury of everyone, dead or alive, having a ballot(s) in their hand.  My sons still receive California absentee ballots years after ID and registration in Montana.

The New York Times in a brief moment of sanity declared, “Voting by mail is now common enough and problematic enough that election experts say there have been multiple elections in which no one can say with confidence which candidate was the deserved winner” (see below).  My faith in elections has taken a hit since easy-to-voting/easy-to-cheat has become the official doctrine of the Party and in jurisdictions under its control.

Their whole scheme was encapsulated in the Democrats’ Senate Bill 1 of 2021, the horribly misnamed “For the People Act”.  All of the above would be imposed on the entire country if a couple of Democrat Senators had decided to follow the rest of the lemmings over the cliff.

Far from leaving the Democrats’ Tammany Hall past in the dust, they are now embracing it.  The single biggest threat to election integrity is the mail-in ballot.  Think about it: instead of a ballot given to a confirmed eligible voter in front of many witnesses, and the person is observed going to a booth to secretly mark it, and it is dropped into the box under the eye of a nonpartisan official, the Democrats want to shotgun ballots in the mail.  Yes, participation will increase . . . but by whom?

Mail-in ballots on the floor at the Park East Terrace Apartments.
Absentee ballots below the mailboxes at a Paterson, NJ, apartment complex, May 2020.

The ballots lie on the floor in piles in apartment mailrooms.  Multiple ballots are delivered to a single residence and what happens to them once taken inside is anyone’s guess.  The sole bow to authentication is a Boy-Scout-oath signature on a perjury line.  So much for the single ballot reflecting the conscience of a single person.  It doesn’t take the imagination of Lewis Carroll to picture what might be happening beyond the domicile’s door.  Add the likelihood of a partisan activist delivering and collecting the things (ballot harvesting) – and who knows what else they’re doing – and no wonder I’m ready to throw up my hands and be done with voting.

The Democrats forestall any steps to allay concerns.  They glibly point to the rarity of voter fraud prosecutions.  Get real, they’ve created a system that makes it hard to identify fraud.  The signature on a mail-in ballot is no guarantee of authenticity because it was produced in the same manner as the marked ballot – behind a closed door.  Once the things are collected and delivered, they are shorn of their envelopes and placed in piles.  Authentication is gone, gone forever.

How can fraud be uncovered at this point?  People have to be extremely stupid to be caught.  Prosecutions are a measure of stupidity and not election integrity.  The secret ballot is dead, dead!

Slipshod voting is as bad as slipshod policing. In the latter, you may get killed, pistol-whipped, or face wrongful prosecution. With the former, you will be ruined by political hucksters. Come to think about it, what’s the difference?

Under the skin of today’s Democratic Party progressives is an old-fashioned and venal Tammany Hall ward heeler.  They are back to a deeply rooted behavior that progressives of an earlier incarnation would find abhorrent and a bit insane.

The other party, the current Republican Party, hews even more closely to Einstein’s definition.  A significant block of the Party can’t shake its fetish for Donald Trump no matter how many times he embarrasses the Party and its electoral chances.  This influential chunk of the Party’s base would rather die on the hill of confrontation than make room for the part of the electorate who are 70% with them but can’t take the juvenile boorishness.  This blinkered part of the party can’t get their heads around the fact that politics is about addition and not subtraction.  Reliance on the cult-of-personality cohort in the party’s base to choose nominees will only guarantee more Democrat inaugurals.

2022 Midterms: Dr. Mehmet Oz calls John Fetterman to concede Pennsylvania's US Senate race
Mehmet Oz concedes to John Fetterman, Nov. 9, 2022.

You’d think that the November 2022 midterms would wake them up.  No such luck.  Back then, in many key primary races when a more experienced and more popular candidate in relation to the Democrat frontrunner squared off against a Trump-endorsed one for statewide offices (Senator for example), the Trumpist won and then proceeded to lose the general.  The current Democrat majority in the Senate owes much to Trump’s endorsement of untested and “anti-establishment” candidates.

Einstein’s insanity still afflicts a majority of the party’s base.  They are proving it weekly.  A spate of polls in January 2023 exhibits the same tendency. Emerson, Morning Consult, and Harvard Harris show Trump besting DeSantis by 26, 19, and 20 points respectively for the nomination.  Public opinion is fluid with polls providing only a snapshot, albeit a fuzzy one.  Still, Republicans show that they can’t seem to kick their Trump fix.

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Trump’s stature with the general electorate is more troubling.  A deep dive into the Harris poll shows him besting Biden by 5 points.  DeSantis does so by 3. Good news for Trump?  Not so fast.  Biden is standing atop a wrecked economy, border, culture, schools, and public safety – underwater by 14 in his favorables.  Yet, Trump only looks marginally better than a wholly discredited Biden.  Among possible Republican challengers, Trump shares negative likeability numbers (-3) with Ted Cruz (-2) and Mike Pompeo (-4).  DeSantis beams brightly, up by 13 in the sunny uplands of likeability.  Amazingly, Republicans in the poll still favored the one with the higher negatives, and therefore with weaker prospects.  At this juncture, they are poised to do to America what Arizona and Pennsylvania Republicans did to their states.  Knowingly choosing weakness might be an additional definition of insanity.

It won’t require much donor cash from the Democrats’ cadre of billionaire smear merchants to remind people of Trump’s vulgarity.  The guy daily confirms the worst about him: occasionally cavorting with the lunatic fringe and incessant recourse to worn out narcissisms.

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He opens his mouth and middle-class suburbanites cringe.  The schtick leaves only the diehards who revel in politics as performance art – “owning the libs”, “Trump being Trump”.  Thus, the Trump following is starting to resemble Grateful Dead groupies: bellicose, aging, and regularly depleted by admissions to nursing homes and funeral parlors.  Don’t look here for a winning coalition.

 

With Democrats professing affection for Marxist folly (in CRT, systemic oppression, the too-numerous …phobias, eat the rich), and resorting to Tammany Hall electoral tactics, one has to wonder about their grip on sanity, or honesty, or at least good sense.

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Republicans are proving themselves to be no better.  Shockingly, many, maybe a majority, have come to fondle crassness and crudity as some kind of winner.  Combine those bestialities with inexperience and naivete in candidate choice and we end up with Democrats getting a Mulligan (second chance) to make more hash of our lives.  Republicans don’t have a grip on the first rule of politics: first, you’ve got to win elections.  Republicans hitching their wagon to Trump, and candidates like him, will only guarantee another wild ride over the cliff.

We can’t even discuss these matters sanely, intelligently.  Our vocabulary is riddled with empty generalities.  Mostly they are straw-man figures of hate.  A good portion of the chattering classes on the right lambast the “establishment” and “RHINOS” without much definition beyond somebody who might have governing experienced and lacks a hair-trigger Defcon 3 personality.  Democrats are straitjacketed by a paranoia about a fascist under every rug, “systemic” racism when you can’t find real racism, Gaia-worship in climate-change mania, and an ever-expanding list of “protective classes” in need of their paternalistic care . . . at our expense.  Listening to Tucker Carlson or Matt Gaetz on the right is as shrill to the ears as Biden, MSNBC, or AOC on the left.  If they aren’t insane, why do they talk like it?

Whew, woe be to the American republic at this degenerate phase in its life cycle. We appear to be so insane.

RogerG

Read more here:
* “Trio of polls show Trump clawing back momentum from DeSantis”, Zachary Basu, Axios, 1/24/23, at https://www.axios.com/2023/01/24/trump-desantis-polls-2024-presidential-election
* Harvard-Harris Poll, January 18-19, 2024, at https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/HHP_Jan2023_KeyResults.pdf
* NYT skepticism of mail-in voting can be found in “It Takes a Superspreader to Know a Superspreader: Whether Sturgis, BLM, or voting by mail, the media chooses narrative over facts every time.”, Gerald Baker, Wall Street Journal, 9/14/2020, at https://www.wsj.com/articles/it-takes-a-superspreader-to-know-a-superspreader-11600097758
* Additionally, NYT’s skepticism can be found here: “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises” at https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-by-mail-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html
* The differences between modern progressives and their 19th century cousins can be found here: “Modern Vs. 19th-Century Progressives”, Jason Merchey, 11/22/2017, at https://valuesofthewise.com/modern-vs-19th-century-progressives/

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The 21st Century’s Kabuki Theater

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President Joe Biden delivers remarks on gun crime and his “Safer America Plan” during an event in Wilkes Barre, Pa., August 30, 2022. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

* Kabuki Theater: euphemism meaning posturing and diplomatic ritual to excess.  Posturing can include effecting a stance in support of your party’s radicalism.  Excessive diplomatic ritual can include today’s virtue signaling.

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Why must science be littered with non-science and public discussions revel in incoherent banalities?  Even in seemingly sensible write-ups that rely on scientific expertise, we’ll run into the occasional assertion that jumps the evidence and logic.  Furthermore, public figures babble in a string of emotive, highly charged phrases without much support or reasoning that advance understanding.  The drivel rears most prominently when talk strays to climate change and guns.

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Science is inductive, the scientific method, evidence, empiricism, falsifiability.  That isn’t true when it comes to climate change, formerly known by a host of other monikers.  In an otherwise sane piece by Richard Luthy, Stanford prof of civil and environmental engineering, on how California could harness the recent storm runoff to address water needs, he polluted his sensible suggestion about using aquifers as cisterns to store the runoff with the hackneyed contention that man has made a shambles of the climate.  It certainly gets the ruling donkey party off the hook for running the state into the ground . . . instead of the storm water.

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Like its poorly maintained forests that erupt into historic conflagrations, rickety electricity grid, and an aging water system built for 10 million fewer people, the state’s dangerous water shortage is a consequence of a ruling ideological orthodoxy translated into policy that has run roughshod over the state for decades.

It’s not that California voters didn’t punch the ticket for billions for water projects.  Prop 1 in 2014 set aside $7.1 billion, and Props 68 and 3 in 2018 added almost $13 billion.  Out of the $20 billion, about a third went to “Habitat Restoration”, play money for the eco-zealots. “Water Infrastructure” and “Reservoir Storage” account for only 43% of the total.

Officials inspect Oroville Dam's crippled spillway Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2017, in Oroville, Calif ...
Officials inspect Oroville Dam’s crippled spillway Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2017, in Oroville, Calif. California water authorities stopped the flow of water down the spillway, Monday, allowing workers to begin clearing out massive debris that’s blocking a hydroelectric plant from operating. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

Californians thought that they were getting more water, but obviously aren’t.  Where’s the new reservoirs, aqueducts, and recharge basins?  It’s been eight years.  I suspect that water projects face the same fate of any big construction in the state.  They get strangled in the crib by California red tape and the delaying tactics of eco-activists (lawsuits, political skullduggery, etc.).  Compounding the morass is the ideological affinity between the state’s bureaucratic minions and the zealots.  So, in the end, you get the eco stuff, which is unchallenged, and not an ounce of additional water for you.

Don’t lay the problem at the feet of fossil fuels.  Dry years should be expected in dry-summer climates.  The Mediterranean climate that hovers over most of the state, with its dry-summer regime, only produces an annual precipitation average of 6-25 inches.  The drier the climate, the more erratic is the precipitation.  California has experienced 11 periods of drought since 1841, some lasting as long as seven years.  At the time of the Middle Ages in Europe, California was mired in two long droughts, one lasted 220 years and the other 140.  Dry-summer means a short window to get moisture, and if you don’t get it in those few months, you go without.  Drought is a feature, not a stranger to the area, and not an effect of our love affair with the automobile, suburbia, and indoor lighting.  The phenomena happened when only hunter-gatherers were around.

California drought is the most severe in at least 1,200 years
Tree rings show megadrought 1,200 years ago in California.

An engineer and scientist like Luthy should know better.  The mention, as he does, of dry periods since 2000 is scant reason to let the Sacramento clown car off the hook.  It’s even more of a scandal to science to use the incidents since 2000 as proof of climate change being the root of our evils.  It’s hooey.  The simple fact of the matter is that two-thirds of the water falls over the sparsely populated one-third of the state, in a region prone to drought since the end of the last ice age.  Someone should take notice rather than foolishly run interference for the dolts in Sacramento and the state’s electorate.

The national electorate fairs no better sometimes.  We’ve got a guy in the oval office who would be better off in a retirement home under close medical supervision.  It must be admitted that Biden has an excuse – he’s old – but the under-50’s in the party sound no more intelligible.  Mention “guns” and the limbic part of their brain takes over.  Images of tv/movie shootouts immediately overwhelm what little they know on the subject.  For Biden, as ossified in the brain as he is, he trots out one banality after another leaving the public in a state of bewilderment.

Charles C. W. Cooke writes of Biden’s use of trite rhetorical phrases when he talks about firearms.  Biden trundles them out like Bill Clinton’s stock of pickup lines for seducing the hired help.  Some of Biden’s juicy ones include “You can’t buy a cannon”, “Deer don’t wear Kevlar”, and my personal favorite, “If you want to take on the federal government, you need some F-15s, not an AR-15.”  When in the history of our citizen republic is it proper for government to tell you what you need?  Any government that can tell you what you need is one that treats its public as a collection of wooden puppets.  Government as puppet master turns the popular sovereignty thing upside down.

Cartoon of the Day: The Political Puppet Master - Essex Watch

The late George Orwell had some interesting things to say, per Cooke, about your alleged need for “some F-15s” to take on the federal government.  For Orwell, government’s possession of sophisticated weaponry in relation to the citizen was a prerequisite for despotism: “Ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance.”  Rifles and grenades are inherently democratic, and F-15s, aircraft carriers, and hypersonics are not.  Biden’s formulation reduces the citizen to prostrate serfs, only getting the weapons that meet the approval of Biden’s commissars.

He completely misses the point of the Second Amendment.  Cooke reminds us that the Constitution was made by a bunch of “insurrectionists” – people who birthed a country in armed revolt against a tyrannical government.  The act of taking up arms against their government was memorialized in the Declaration of Independence: “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it . . . .”  Thankfully, we aren’t there yet.

But lately, there’s been some extended eyebrow raising.  Your government school indoctrinates your kids in neo-Marxist revolutionary dogmas; the attempt to establish censorship boards under the guise of “misinformation”; the attacks on the faithful for their refusal to violate their creeds when they refuse to kowtow to the government-approved zeitgeist; the loose talk among some of the powerful calling for gun confiscation; the refusal to enforce laws to protect people, property, and businesses; threats of taking away our gas stoves and cars and fuel under color of “saving the planet”; our children are prevented from receiving awards of excellence, such as National Merit Scholarships, because of government’s slavish devotion to neo-Marxist “equity”; our immigration laws are not enforced which tosses down the border exposing us to intensified villainy; our girls aren’t safe in their locker rooms, bathrooms, and in competitions; infanticide under the rhetorical rubric of “abortion”; child genital mutilation under “gender-affirming care” without parental knowledge and consent; and government turning a conspicuous blind eye as investment houses play revolutionary footsie (ESG) with my retirement.  Did I miss anything?

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Now Biden wants to tell me how many cartridges I can have in my gun.  He forgets that the citizen’s right to firearms stems from a tradition that goes back to before the English Bill of Rights (1689).  Those “Protestants” in the English Bill of Rights wanted their weapons to protect themselves from more than a burglar.  Speaking of the limbic system of government apparatchiks, buried deep within it is the knowledge that the country’s citizens are armed thanks to the Second Amendment.  American citizens aren’t prostrate serfs.

One of the key purposes of the Second Amendment is the right of the people to protect themselves not from government but the people in the government, the kind of people who would force citizens into acts that violate their faith, censor their speech, and make their life a living hell.  Much of that government knavery is sanctioned carte blanche by climate change delirium.  Combine the revolutionary dictums with Biden’s butchery of the country’s founding and we end up impoverished and manacled before our rulers.

It’s an insidious Kabuki Theater.

May be a cartoon of text that says '7DEAD, 25 WOUNDED M TEXÁS. WE NEED STRICT GUN CONTROL to PREVENT these MASS KILLINGS... utch LIKE the STRICT GUN CONTROL LAWS HERE in CHICAGO? CHICAGOLAB SHOOTINGS 7DEAD @Ramireztoons michaelpramirez.com'

RogerG

Read more here:

* “Rain finally came to California. We blew our chance to use it”, Richard G. Luthy, San Francisco Chronicle, 1/17/23, at https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Rain-came-to-California-we-blew-chance-to-use-it-17723529.php#:~:text=Rain%20finally%20came%20to%20California.%20We%20blew%20our,received.%20Patrick%20Tehan%20%2F%20Special%20to%20the%20Chronicle
* “How Much California Water Bond Money Is For Storage?”, Edward Ring, 8/9/2018, California Policy Center, at https://californiapolicycenter.org/how-much-california-water-bond-money-is-for-storage/
* “California drought: Past dry periods have lasted more than 200 years, scientists say”, The Mercury News, at https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/01/25/california-drought-past-dry-periods-have-lasted-more-than-200-years-scientists-say/
* “Severe Ancient Droughts: A Warning to California”, New York Times, 7/19/1994, at https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/19/science/severe-ancient-droughts-a-warning-to-california.html
* “Tree-Ring Study Reveals Historical Drought Record in Southern California”, 3/12/2018, California Dept. of Water Resources, at https://water.ca.gov/News/News-Releases/2018/March-18/Tree-Ring-Study-Reveals-Historical-Drought-Record-in-Southern-California
* “Biden’s Most Grotesque Gun-Control Argument”, Charles C.W. Cooke, National Review Online, 1/17/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/bidens-most-grotesque-gun-control-argument/

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Biden, the Prevaricator-In-Chief; Trump, the Obstacle; and an Eviscerated Energy Industry

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Biden’s a liar, but the Republicans have to contend with Trump.  What a pickle for the American people.  Trump makes it possible for Biden to rule and make a hash of our lives.  It’s hard for Republicans to make the case when they’re constantly trying to live down one of the most repugnant characters on the political scene campaigning under their banner.

There is a chunk of the GOP base that remains enthralled by Trump.  They are stuck in 2016.  Back then, Trump was the fresh face with an outsized personality and no political track record to excoriate.  He won and we quickly learned that it wasn’t an act.  He gave us four years of repellant behavior and hasn’t stopped.  Like it or not, he became the easily caricatured face of the party, and the necessary distraction for the Democratic Party to avoid accountability for their descent of the country into “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Thomas Hobbes, 17th century).  The embrace of Trump has allowed the Democrats to get away with it.

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Smath-and-grab in a high-end store in Los Angeles, November 2021

Trump is a big turn-off, and he’s turning off more.  The act is getting old.  He has a vendetta against people who have no vendetta against him, but against whom he might play second fiddle.  Governor Ron DeSantis was insulted with “DeSanctimonious”.  Governor Youngkin was pasted with an anti-Asian slur on Truth Social: “Young Kin (now that’s an interesting take. Sounds Chinese, doesn’t it?) in Virginia couldn’t have won without me.”  What a narcissist.  Because National Review isn’t sufficiently worshipful, he blasts them “as being led by lightweights that couldn’t shine the shoes of Bill Buckley.”  Speaking of Buckley, he laid out the common-sense approach to choosing a candidate by advising conservatives to vote for the most conservative ELECTABLE contender.  After three losing election cycles – 2018, 2020, and 2022 – Trumpkins are showing themselves to be a kamikaze brigade, and willing to take down the party with them.  He isn’t the most conservative and he’s far from the most electable.  Need more proof?

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Republicans need to excise Trump’s influence from the party before we can hold Biden and the Democrats accountable for their engineered misery.  No mistake about it, Biden gave us a 360-degree world of hurt.  Energy is at the root of all that we do, especially economically.  It’s hard to imagine prosperity with a Biden-imposed recession in the energy industry.  Biden chose to take the advice of the teenage Greta Thunberg and lead us into a greenie fantasyland.  And he’s lying about it.

Biden trotted out Energy Secretary Granholm in June 2022 to perpetuate the don’t-blame-me and the gaslight-the-public PR strategies.  Granholm: “We are now at close to record levels of [domestic] oil production here in the U.S. . . . .”  Lie.  See chart below.  Biden in October 2022: “Today, the most common price of gas in America is $3.39 – down from over $5 when I took office.”  Lie.  What other word qualifies when it’s as demonstrable as my current runny nose?

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Energy Sec. Granholm at a press conference

There’s more where those came from.  It’s as if Orwell’s Ministry of Truth leapt off the pages of “1984” and landed in D.C. Economist Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago puts it plainly when he wrote in October of 2022, “. . . we are well short of the production levels and trends that were occurring just three to four years ago.”  The pandemic crushed everything, and we haven’t bounced back.  Keep in mind that fracking made us into the Saudi Arabia of the western hemisphere.  We have the abundant capacity so why haven’t we upped our game?  Why hasn’t the supply side of the market responded as it always had before to price increases?  The answer is found in the fact that the Thunberg-influenced Biden is signing executive orders to turn America’s grid into California’s.  No big pipelines for you, America.  Oh, let’s tax and EPA-regulate production on federal lands and offshore into near oblivion.  Of course, let’s lie about it.  While we’re at it, let’s herd the population into ev’s so we all can experience “range anxiety” together.  If that isn’t enough, let’s strangle producers’ access to capital with new lefty ESG regulations from the SEC.

A natural gas wellhead.
A capped oil well in the US.

Former Fed chairman Greenspan spoke of “animal spirits” in the market.  Fear is an animal spirit.  So is hostility.  You’d have to be in a cryogenic state not to get the clues that the federal Leviathan hates you if you’re a supplier of the stuff that keeps people from freezing in the winter.  Better to play along with algae, corn, tides, or anything that pops into the heads of the yoga-room minions on the Meta campus.  Forget about more refineries and more exploration.  Pardon an oil company CEO for not seeing the guillotine as the Welcome Wagon.

The concept of supply elasticity clearly stretches the mental capacity of the eco-fantasists around Biden.  The responsiveness of supply to price changes has inexplicably taken a hiatus under Biden.  Take my memory of the Kern River oilfields outside Bakersfield, Ca.  Price goes up, wells are uncapped and the secondary-recovery generators turned on.  Price goes down, there’s no justification for the expenses.  It’s topsy-turvy if you’re Jimmy Carter of the 1970’s and put your foot on the neck of producers with a cap on domestic crude oil prices.  Biden of 2021 put his foot back on the neck of producers to the point that the law of supply elasticity disappeared.  Then he lambasts them for responding to his hostility by restraining their capital investments.  It’s a replay of Stalin’s hunt for “wreckers” or “kulaks” after the blunders of his Five Year Plans in the 1930’s.

Lesson: Don’t expect the equivalent of the DMV to beneficially determine what to produce, how much of it to produce, and who’s to get it for everyone, everywhere, always.  It’s a cluster*#&@.  Welcome to Biden world.

Biden’s escape from the real world can be seen in his October price boast.  Gas wasn’t $5 per gallon when he took office.  It was $2.39.  Is this old age infirmity at work or prevarication?   Remember, this guy has a long history of wild exaggerations and untruths.  Going back to his college days, blatant plagiarism and embellishment of his record were standard for him.   Today, I’m not certain if it’s pure senility or the serial untruths of his youth ossifying into imaginary truths in a decaying brain.  Is this a difference without a difference?  Can’t say.

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Fuel prices in Los Angeles, March 2022

Fuel prices normally gyrate through the year.  It’s not month-to-month changes that are most relevant.  It’s year-to-year, or June 2022 compared to June 2021.  Biden is responsible for the elevated gyration plateau of 2021/2022 when compared to the gyration valley of 2019/2020 or 2020/2021 and before.  For me, Biden’s falsehoods are true to form with a kicker of infirmity.

The lie reduced to one line has more appeal in this age of the internet attention span of a five-year-old than a reasoned analysis in a three-thousand-word essay.  People can’t sit still long enough when Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and YouTube are beckoning.  Biden ritually does it.  Trump too, but he’s brazenly repugnant as he does it.  Republicans would do the country a great service by putting Trump out to pasture.  With him out of the way, the country might be in a mood to open up space in the same field for Biden and his lefty coterie.  Something to ponder.

Glenn Russell/The Burlington Free Press via AP
Then-VP Joe Biden finds two quarters on the sidewalk in Burlington, Vt., 2016. “I found two quarters.”
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Biden’s inauguration

RogerG

Read more here:

* The administration lying to the press at a June 2022 press briefing: “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm”, The White House, June 22, 2022, at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2022/06/22/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-karine-jean-pierre-and-secretary-of-energy-jennifer-granholm/

* Biden’s false claim of cheaper gas prices: “Fact check: Biden falsely claims the most common gas price was over $5 when he took office”, CNN, Oct. 28, 2022, at https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/28/politics/fact-check-biden-gas-prices/index.html

* Casey Mulligan’s piece: “Biden Has Bungled Fossil-Fuel Policy”, National Review Online, Nov. 2, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/biden-has-bungled-fossil-fuel-policy/

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The Michigan Election and How to Get People to Ignore Their Lyin’ Eyes

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Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2021

The Democrats know how to play political hardball.  After all, they are the party of government.  They want it, worship it, and are highly motivated to take it over.  They need it because they have so much to accomplish, like make all of us into them.  Not surprisingly, they’re socialists, the American edition of Europe’s many Social Democratic Parties.  No name-calling here. They just are, despite their face-saving protestations to the contrary.  The 2022 midterm was their template for dominating the government.  It illustrated how to make people ignore their lyin’ eyes.

The fly in the ointment is that this socialism doesn’t work, never will.  Government’s control of the means of production, using a little Marxist lingo, is simply turning over nearly all the important stuff to an entity that operates like the DMV.  Government is a sloth and can never be a cheetah no matter the volume of synthetic hormones or gender reassignment surgeries.  The Squad and the self-deluded Bernie Sanders keep harkening to a Scandinavia that no longer exists, the region having long since eschewed the poison.  Yet, the dream never died, notwithstanding its long record of failure.  To avoid a shellacking, the Democrats discovered the recipe to electorally prosper despite their socialism’s inherent fiascos.

The Michigander and auto critic Henry Payne recently performed an interesting autopsy on Michigan’s election.  Whitmer and the rest of the authoritarian gang overwhelmed the party of government restraint (GOP).  Amazingly, the donkey party found a campaign strategy to make it possible for people to prefer the sewer that the Democrats made of their lives.

First, the party of government used their control of Michigan state government to choose their opponents.  This sounds like Xi Jinping at work – by the way, another socialist.  Credible opposition was ordered off the Michigan ballot, much like Xi commanding the removal of ex-CCP president Hu Jintao from the recent Party Congress.  The Michigan Board of State Canvassers was convened under the overseership of the Soros-backed Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and on a pure party line vote of 2-2 disqualified the Republican front-runner James Craig, the former Detroit police chief with a huge following, and four other Republicans allegedly for fraudulent signatures on their petitions.  The tie means that they’re gone.  No Democrats were ever affected, just Republicans.  It’s fishy as you get into the weeds of the case.  In the end, the Republican primary ballot was amputated to include only the weak with Tudor Dixon winning the primary.

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Michigan Board of State Canvassers earlier in 2022

That’s not all by a long shot.  The party knows how to exploit and champion the cultural barbarity that is now resplendent in certain demographics: the young, single women, mostly professional, and the quasi-educated with degrees.  Of course, I’m speaking of some groups’ love affair with terminating pregnancies.  Abortion has moved from trauma to a personal state of ecstasy in the psyche of some.  We shouldn’t be surprised since the sex act has lost its procreational purpose and has become purely recreational in the minds of some.  Humans being human, we get lazy and sloppy and babies unintentionally result.  We can disagree on the starting line for human life, and compromise is possible between a complete ban and carte blanche to the moment of exit from the birth canal.  All that is lost in the hubbub once the fear of losing power is on the table.  Dobbs was mangled by the donkey party to fit the purpose of stampeding the base to quickly mark their mailed ballot.

Speaking of those mailed ballots, previously (2018), Michigan voters exhibited the now common and strange attraction for Rube Goldberg changes to their government through ballot initiatives.  It’s an interstate phenomenon.  For instance, the superficial glow of term limits in deeply blue California merely ended up replacing seasoned leftists with immature ones.  The state’s adoption of the jungle primary means the routine choice between leftists in the general.  Alaskans chose to mutilate their elections with ranked voting.  For Michiganders, they chose in 2018 to grease the skids for the donkey party’s base, heavily populated as it is with low-information and low-motivated voters.  Adult expectations of reasonable civic effort and responsibility has been reduced to nil with election-day registration and voting thereby complicating the tasks of verification for a government that can barely count them.  Additionally, the no-fault absentee ballot – a device that makes mockery of the secret ballot – means that a person can remain in their pajamas and pause their Xbox hand controller for a short interval to vote their state into California-style chaos.

Shredded boxes and packages are seen at a section of the Union Pacific train tracks in downtown Los Angeles Friday, Jan. 14, 2022. Thieves have been raiding cargo containers aboard trains nearing downtown Los Angeles for months.
Shredded boxes and packages are seen at a section of the Union Pacific train tracks in downtown Los Angeles Friday, Jan. 14, 2022. Thieves have been raiding cargo containers aboard trains nearing downtown Los Angeles for months. (AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu)

With the election system duly lubricated, the ginned-up hysteria about Dobbs can be exploited by another contraption in the form of a state proposition: Proposition 3 to place in the Michigan state constitution alongside the usual Bill of Rights the “reproductive freedom” to end the existence of a fully formed baby in utero.  The “protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant individual” language is pure jargon for infanticide.  Notice that they can’t say “woman”; it’s “individual”.  This whole thing is a monstrous theater of the absurd.

But it does work to get the sex-as-recreation crowd to vote early and often.  Remember, this is a demographic at the start not too keen on the Dobbs’s federalism rationale.  For them, federalism, what’s federalism?  Anyway, the polyamorous are energized to show up and vote the state into oblivion.

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Like chain immigration, chain-propositions bring in tow the scandalously authoritarian politicos. It’s a strange authoritarianism though.  Freedom is the mantra, but freedom isn’t the result.  There’s no freedom for in utero babies. What about the “freedom froms”?  There’s certainly no freedom from car thieves, smash-and-grabs, killers, burglaries, muggings, drive-bys, and the mentally unstable and addicts turning our sidewalks and parks into open sewers.  Watch where you step.

The use of hysteria-propositions to elect and reelect people who ignore what they should be doing in order to pursue what they ought not to do is folly on stilts.  Whitmer garroted life in Michigan from closing the schools to pronouncing an end to gardening and boating without a scintilla of “science”.  And election 2022 showed how you can get away with it.  Gauging by the returns, terminating pregnancies mattered more than the kids’ lost education and the decline into barbarity.  The kids experienced a double whammy in the election.  Was this the most anti-child electorate ever from womb to classroom?  One has to wonder.

I will not try to absolve the electorate’s responsibility for this descent into dégringolade (rapid decline or deterioration).  Don’t pretend that democracy always translates into wisdom.  A majority vote is not proof of righteousness.  It is only evidence that certain campaign tactics work: construct a well-funded political machine; rearrange the election system to enhance the operation of the political machine; incite the base with fabrications; and with initiatives, distract the people from the politicos’ manifest failures.

It worked.  Expect to see more of it.  As in the fable of Nero, election 2022 showed how to pass out fiddles to the electorate as Rome (Michigan) burned.

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RogerG

Read more here:

* “The Lessons for Republicans from Michigan’s Midterm Disaster”, Henry Payne, National Review, November 17, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/the-lessons-for-republicans-from-michigans-midterm-disaster/

* “Five Michigan GOP gubernatorial candidates booted from primary ballot”, Washington Examiner, May 26, 2022, at https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/five-michigan-gop-gubernatorial-candidates-booted-from-primary-ballot

* “Gretchen Whitmer Can’t Hide Her Track Record Of Shutting Michigan Children Out Of School”, Shawn Fleetwood, The Federalist, Nov. 1, 2022, at https://thefederalist.com/2022/11/01/gretchen-whitmer-cant-hide-her-track-record-of-shutting-michigan-children-out-of-school/

* An analysis of how strategically timed ballot initiatives can enhance a campaign’s electoral chances: “How ballot initiatives will impact voter turnout in the 2018 midterms”, John Hudack, Brookings, Oct. 22, 2018, at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brookings-now/2018/10/22/how-ballot-initiatives-will-impact-voter-turnout-in-the-2018-midterms/

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A Picture Says a Thousand Words

The Great Awokening in the wake of George Floyd, and spurred on by Obama’s decade-long sermonizing, was actually The Great Disconnect for the Democratic Party.  The Party is simply out of touch.  No better example can be found of the Party’s separation from most people’s lives than the picture of a hard-working and dirty coal miner attending a University of Kentucky basketball game with his son (see below).  This coal miner is as far removed from the funhouse/playhouse campus of Twitter as one can imagine – in ways more than geography.  The picture captures the Democrats’ predicament.

The Democratic Party traded blue-collars for the pampered denizens of faculty lounges and white-collars sheltered in air-conditioned offices and free to be enraptured without consequences by gauzy ideologies.  The hunt to combat climate change, an undefinable racism, and transphobia jumped to the front and center and over the concerns of people facing worsening family budgets, schools, and safety.

What do the Democrats have to offer?  Nothing but misery.  They’re after that guy’s job.  Biden goes out on the stump and proclaims an end to drilling and the use of coal.  The Party is all agog in fantasies of forests of windmills and vast expanses of solar panels replacing nuclear, coal, and natural gas.  And why are they so enthusiastic about taking away that man’s livelihood?  Answer: a climate-change hysteria that is as unscientific as it is illogical.  It’s more religious than anything.  It can only be entertained in the isolated and pleasant indoor climates made possible by the toil and sweat of people like that dirty miner in the stands with his son.  The Party has become an institutional affront to most of working America.

Do you think that only he knows the dirty secret of the Party turning its back on him?  To borrow from Biden, come on, man.  Working America encompasses both sexes and all races and ethnicities.  Work is color and gender blind.  So, regardless of melanin count and genitalia, many are walking away from a party much more identified with techie billionaires, Antifa, and Sierra Club conferees. Thus, a rising GOP black and Latino vote.

For a Democrat, the picture below should hit you in the gut. What are you doing to that man and his son?

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Michael McGuire covered in soot after a shift in the mines. He rushed to be with his son, Easton, for the first live basketball game together at the University of Kentucky. (photo: WKYT)

RogerG