Santa Rosa resident who used his 2013 Nissan Leaf to power his house during a four-day blackout in Santa Rosa, Calif., as a result of the Kincade Fire. (photo: Vanessa Romo/NPR)
Surely, this wasn’t the intent of the article (here), but any sentient being could imagine the horrors of an EV world with California’s electricity grid. Remember, the clowns running the state are ecstatic about EV’s but absolutely moronic about the generation of electricity. They seem to be saying, “Hey, go buy one [$40,000 -$60,000] but your charging station will be dependent on the vagaries of the sun and wind, or the combustible, matchstick forests that could flare up at any time. No nuclear power for you.” Go figure.
The reporterette (Vanessa Romo) blithely treated the problem of finding charging stations during blackouts and raging forest fires, a recurring theme in California’s present and probable future, as another wholesome family adventure. One guy was confronting the raging Getty Fire and luckily found an answer to charging his Chevy Bolt from a Facebook group. Since the fire is busy destroying the grid, his hookup to Facebook must be through his phone. That means an operative cell tower nearby, not destroyed by fire, with power, and in range and with an unobstructive path to his phone. What happens if the charge on his cell phone is as low as his Bolt? What happens if cell reception is spotty or nonexistent? This is a theater of the absurd.
Venessa Romo of NPRCalifornia’s Getty Fire, 2019.The Holy Fire (2018) in Orange and Riverside Counties comes close to communication towers.California blackout
Another Sonoma County resident was praised for the “ingenious” use of his Nissan Leaf in an area ravaged by the Kincaid Fire. The subsequent blackout forced him to resort to his Leaf as a generator. Board certification for brain surgery isn’t required to figure out the massive problems with this “advantage”. Using the car as a source of electricity for the house depletes the car battery. This option only works if a charging station with a functioning grid hookup or global-warming fossil fuel generator is nearby. A charging station could be, but the other prerequisites might not be.
By the way, the inverter used in turning DC into the AC for his house could be employed just as well, maybe better, with a Ford-450 Diesel truck, a vehicle more useful than a glorified golf cart. A Leaf, or some such, isn’t necessary for that purpose. So, what’s the benefit for being forced to live in an EV world? You are being shoved into such an existence for no good reason.
Ford F-450 diesel
Nissan Leaf charging up.
The truth of the matter is that the whole charade is pure political theater. Concoct a catastrophe, stampede the public into mistakenly believing that the family sedan is the problem, declare unremittent war on fossil fuels, bribe and punish worker bees with artificially inflated fuel prices, close down the two remaining nuclear power plants, make your public lands combustible nature preserves writ large, and make the whole contraption reliant on the most expensive and unreliable grid in memory, and you too can enjoy the “new normal” of an asylum that calls itself a state.
Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, on July 6, 2021: “Let’s be clear: critical race theory is not taught in elementary schools or high schools.” Not only is this statement not true. It borders on a lie. CRT and its ideological home in critical theory are ingrained throughout teacher training programs and much of the college curriculum. No “CRT 101”, but it’s everywhere in college instruction and course syllabi. Young adults come out of the colleges marinated in the stuff and into your child’s classroom.
Pease read a study on CRT in teacher prep programs by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal (JMC).
In the late 1970s when I went through teacher training at UC, Santa Barbara, John Dewey’s “child-centeredness” – synonymous with the inmates running the asylum, make no mistake about it – was all the rage with “democracy in the classroom” and “values clarification”. Forget about the nuts and bolts of delivering curriculum and maintaining order. Instead, we got expositions on message therapy and hypnosis in helping us to discover our “true teaching selves”.
Turning to the 1980s, the field of education was polluted with “cooperative learning” (Marxism as pedagogy) and Howard Gardner’s “multiple intelligences” (a falsehood to make people believe that everyone is equally smart). Today, it’s another neo-Marxism in full flower.
Randi Weingarten, AFT head, vows legal action against parents for challenging CRT in schools at press conference in July of 2021.
The JMC study found, low and behold, topping the course reading lists Gloria Ladson-Billings, who pioneered back in 1995 the injection of the neo-Marxist CRT into pedagogy. She’s an Ed prof’s favorite. Also, right alongside her as another crowd favorite in the faculty lounge is Paulo Freire and his unabashed “critical pedagogy”. It’s a scandal, and a profoundly neo-Marxist worldview.
As a teacher of almost 30 years, I’ve been there as these corrosive ideologies wash over the teacher candidate. Unless you are inoculated by a rock-solid set of beliefs, the poison will creep into your mental framework, lying there as a lurking suspicion that the “system” is rigged against the “oppressed”. The whole theoretical mishmash is great if your goal is revolution. What better way to train little Lenins for a new Bolshevik Revolution?
Don’t kid yourself in hoping that private, parochial, and a better neighborhood makes a difference. I’ve seen the same colleagues teaching out of the same textbooks with the same approaches in all three settings. The students might be more well-mannered and better dressed, but it’s the same crap washing over them as it washed over their teachers in all-too-many instances.
Parents, don’t be cowed by the lies. There’s a reason for many of our schools’ mediocrity. It began in college and is everywhere from the administrative office to the classroom. Get real.
Changing prices at a Shell station in Southern California, March 22, 2022.
Economic inelasticity: a measure of an economic activity’s responsiveness to price changes. Inelastic supply is production made unresponsive to price fluctuations.
Market: the spontaneous arrangements that brings buyers and sellers together. Markets can be constrained by natural barriers (geography, availability of resources, etc.) and interventions (government).
*************
Some elements of the Right are deserving of condemnation for their forays into imbecilic isolationism. Their tariff nationalism and sophomoric hostility to our present and natural allies stagger the mind. That said, the biggest and most persistent threat to the welfare of the nation by far is the Democratic Party and its congregation of the Left.
Nuttery has little effect without powerful, organizational patrons. The donkey party has turned itself into the institutional home of the Left; the faculty lounge is the home seminary of the Left; and the seminary’s gospel is a fanciful, semi-religious, but material and messianic apocalyptism. Don’t mistake this for the traditional Second Coming. This endtime arises from glib Gaia-worship, a faith that angles to translate prophesies of doom into power. Its doctrine is in actuality an ideology and the attendant politics amounts to a missionary zeal for conversion, forcible or voluntary.
Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) introduces her Green New Deal, translating alarmism into policy, 2019.
But the appeal of this new faith is limited. Unlike Christianity that has a natural allure to all groups – the equality of all souls – this substitute creed is most attractive to the demographic product of its seminaries (college graduates), who are most prominently, but not solely, the degreed halfwits in the super zips (codes). Their half-wittedness is the fruit of the degraded and narrow education in the tenets of this debased secular faith. These people aren’t trained to question their assumptions. They are zealots that occupy the cultural commanding heights to influence and obtain office to force their form of salvation on the reluctant.
Church/state separation be damned, they declare war on prosperity, independent consumer choices, entire industries, and the Constitution while they herd the population into cramped dwellings, ev’s, and mass transit. Freedom is the freedom to live only their way. I’m reminded of Orwell’s 1984:
“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”
And so the zealots march off and into elected office, the staffs of the elected, government employment, techie enterprises, the corporate boardroom, ad agencies, the press, law firms, Hollywood, and into the teacher corps of our schools – what G.K. Chesterton called the “chattering classes”.
The fruit of their endeavors, among other things, is a disfigured economic life, and more misery than what would occur without them running the show. Supply and demand get malformed, made inflexible to the unexpected twists and turns of existence. A pandemic hits and, voilà, we have empty store shelves, supply chain disruptions, inflation, a suppressed work ethic, fiscal insolvency, and the doldrums’ persistence into the foreseeable future.
That’s the thing, it doesn’t take much to maul the gears of an economy and hamper recovery. Demand remains pretty consistent (inelastic) for things like fossil fuels, rising with growth, and only declining when a recession hits, with its lost jobs and business closures. Not good. Supply is hamstrung (made inelastic) to respond to the demands of prosperity after the imposition of utopia. Not good.
And utopia is what it’s all about. Wherever the Dems hold sway in the halls of power – local, state, federal – they are running full speed toward their mirage of eco-nirvana. Democrat state-level fiefdoms are famous for it. The grid is target numero uno. California concocted its 100 Percent Clean Energy Act to command the state’s electricity to be carbon-free by 2045. Washington State’s Clean Energy Transformation Act commands its utilities to be carbon neutral in eight years. New York passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act that commands a net-zero economy by 2050. Hawaii jumps into the fray with its House Bill 623 that commands a 100% renewable energy grid by California’s year. They are declarations of war on fossil fuels, and the energy supply gets bulldozed.
Gov. Jerry Brown signs SB 100, mandating 100 percent renewable energy in California by 2045, on Sept. 10, 2018.
Notice the use of the word “command”, as in “command economy”? Karl Marx would be proud.
These lords of the state capital have jerry-rigged all manner of means to achieve the desired end. All of them, however, take the same tack of regulating traditional energy to death. Jerry Brown (as in jerry-rigged) and Gavin Newsom of the not-so-golden state are gung-ho. Brown, after signing the previously mentioned ukase, boasted, “California is committed to doing whatever is necessary to meet the existential threat of climate change.” There you have it: semi-theological apocalyptics combined with a newly inaugurated command economy.
Not to be outdone, Governors Cuomo and Hochul of New York read from the same prayer book. They, like the suzerains of the San Diego-to-San Francisco corridor (the rest of the state has little political pull), are enthusiasts for bans and regulatory dead weights. No fracking, no new permits, no new gas hookups for homes, and no pipelines. Thus, the residents of New York and anybody east of them get the privilege of paying six times more for natural gas than, say, the lucky folks of Texas or Louisiana. No pipelines are allowed across the empire state to possibly carry the fuel the 400 miles from the Marcellus Shale. Instead, it must be shipped from distant kleptocracies.
Protest against the fossil fuel industry – pipelines, et al – in New York in 2012.
The same price penalty applies to everyone living in California. Like everything else in the state – housing, electricity, food, cars, you name it – gasoline runs at a buck-and-half clip above the national average ($5.85 vs. $4.33/gal.) for the commuters on Newsom’s roads, which happen to be among the worst in the nation. What a deal? The “bargain” combines a doom-premium (“existential threat of climate change”) in the form of high taxes and exorbitantly priced energy with crappy pavement. No wonder it’s hard to find a U-Haul to flee the state. Demand has outstripped supply.
If it’s obviously such a great deal for the country, with the utopians professing to be on the same team with the angels, why do they have to wallow in falsehoods? In Biden-speak, he said on March 14, “Make no mistake, the current spike in gas prices is largely the fault of Vladimir Putin — it has nothing to do with the American Rescue Plan.” Translation: It ain’t me! But it is . . . to a great degree. He’s doing his best to make energy supplies inelastic and prone to shocks, whether it be a virus run amok or Putin’s dream of a Greater Russia.
Biden blames Putin and the Ukraine War for high gas prices, March 2022.
The only truism in his corner is cause-and-delayed-effect. Societies don’t operate like toggle switches – instant-on/instant-off. It takes time for policy changes to translate into behavior and effects, both positive and negative. Time is necessary for people to get their act together in the form of land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. Since California is his model, the complete effect of Biden’s pummeling of the energy sector will take years for the whole country to fully feel California’s chronically high energy rates, blackouts, shortages, stagflation, deteriorating roads, trains to nowhere, and bottomless spending on expensive-but-decrepit mass transit, and, lest we forget, the brewing campaign against homes with yards (single-family residential). No space privacy for you and your kids, peasants!
Likewise, it took a number of years for the widespread use of fracking beginning around 2011 and the repeal of the ban on the export of domestic crude in 2015 to turn into Trump’s bluster about energy independence and the US as net exporter. Sometimes, occupying the seat of power at the moment of good times is sufficient to enjoy the afterglow of public adulation.
But Trump and Congressional Republicans are actually deserving of praise because they greased the economic skids instead of throwing sand in the gears as Biden and the donkey party are currently doing. The thinking of Republicans is in the right place. For the R’s, pipelines (XL, Dakota Access) are a good deal. For the R’s, drilling on public lands is a great thing for supply and cheap prices. For the R’s, subsidy briberies for solar and wind and the purchase of Teslas are viewed correctly as an assault on freedom and the public purse, and move us closer to a grid that operates with all the reliability of a utility in Lagos, Nigeria, or California. Not good.
Rolling blackout in California, 2021.
You can only get so much out of wind and solar. It’s called low energy density, an inherent characteristic of the two. As a result, low density must be compensated by the construction of vast plantations of panels and forests of huge propeller towers marring the earth’s surface. Lurking behind the scenes is natural-gas peaker plants to deal with the erratic production (the wind and sun are variable). The whole mammoth charade demands colossal sunk costs in redesigning the grid and the development of a storage system to make the massive contraption the complete energy source for your Netflix streaming addiction. Wouldn’t it be much easier with fewer lost opportunities (i.e., opportunity cost, the real meaning of the word “cost”) to clean up fossil fuels?
Certainly, Biden and the episcopate of the Church of Climate Change are aware of the monstrous costs and disruptions. It’s just that they don’t care. When you’re a believer, you’re a believer. And so, when American voters let Biden and company into command of the executive branch, they are going to get the full effect of the reunion of church and state, California style. It’s Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy all over again.
He didn’t disappoint the faithful from the get-go. Fresh from the chilly inauguration on the west front of the Capitol, Biden ordered an assault on domestic crude oil production by halting new leases, permits, and mining on federal lands, onshore, offshore, anywhere under federal control. Chad Padgett, former senior executive for BLM in Alaska, put it succinctly when he described an Interior Department memo, pursuant to Biden’s ukase, barring the issuance of “any onshore or offshore fossil fuel authorization, including but not limited to a lease, amendment to a lease, affirmative extension of a lease, contract, or other agreement, or permit to drill.” Half the 23 million acres of the Alaska National Petroleum Preserve was made off-limits. Authority over the process was centralized in the hands of Commissar Laura Daniel Davis, then-acting assistant secretary for Lands and Minerals at BLM, creating industrial death from bureaucratic atherosclerosis. Now, inelasticity applies to bureaucracy’s arteries as well as energy supplies.
Operating well in ANPR.
Biden’s recent blame-Putin schtick to avoid responsibility for his stake in the mess rings hollow. Having spent his entire career in demagoguery and electoral pandering, the guy exhibits little understanding of enterprise of the free variety. People in the real world of business look over the horizon before they sink big bank on a venture. What they see into the near future, and maybe beyond, is Biden’s declaration in a 2020 debate:
“No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period. Ends.”
Biden announces his opposition to fossil fuels in 2020 debate.
Can’t get much plainer than that. The delay normally accompanying a policy is reduced when demagogic hostility is combined with the accelerant of pandemic-inspired cuts in production at a time of quick recovery from the nightmare. Why invest in an industry that the donkey party and its administration declared to be the equivalent of kiddie porn?
That’s not all. We’ll enjoy the benefits of California’s sclerotic supplies alongside California’s high-priced everything. All of this will be wrapped in an increasingly feudal way of life. As in the old Soviet Union, a new aristocracy of the party and its nomenklatura will ride on top of a beleaguered class of commoners. Thank you, Democrats.
Eau Claire Area School District Administration Building, Eau Claire, Wisconsin.Naval War College, Newport, R.I., and near Barrington, R.I.
What are they doing to our soldiers? Indeed, what are they doing to our children? The “they”? They go by various titles: “cultural curators (Salena Zito), “cultural commanding heights” (mine), “elites”, “limousine liberals”, “establishment”, “progressives”, “blue-check Twitter”, alongside a host of disparaging terms for anyone outside these tightly-packed super zip codes in the cartography of America. A tell-tale sign is glaringly evident in almost any place with a college of extortionate social and economic (and by extension political) influence. Three recent incidents are case studies of their baleful clout.
Who’s educating our children? It might be the same people like the staff of University of Wisconsin Eau Claire’s Gender & Sexuality Research Center (GSRC) who conducted a teacher training session for the Eau Claire Area School District in late February on the whole gamut of woke ideology. Safe spaces, the evils of heteronormativity and meritocracy and systemic racism and white privilege, and the need to freeze parents out of their children’s gender identity issues were taught as unassailable truths to the government employees who have the residents’ children under their control for 6-8 hours per weekday. The whole thing might have flown under the residents’ radar, pre-pandemic, but parent groups, post-pandemic, were tipped off.
Thankfully, word got out. Parents learned that teachers were told in power-point slides,
“. . . parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities. That knowledge must be earned. Teachers are often straddling this complex situation. In ECASD, our priority is supporting the student.”
In essence, the area’s children were treated as property of the school district. The arrogance is startling. Chris Jorgenson, the director of the GSRC, was impertinent enough to declare to the throng of teachers, “But much like we wouldn’t act as stand-ins for abuse in other circumstances, we cannot let parents’ rejection of their children guide teachers’ reactions and actions and advocacy for our students.” If you can make sense of the word salad, the presentation of gender-identity ideology – sometimes referred to as transgenderism – makes an enemy of parents who understandably reject the ideology by calling the repudiation parental “child abuse”. The whole falderol was sanctioned by the district’s superintendent, Michael Johnson, in classic bureaucratese when he said the district “prides itself on being a school district that makes all students feel welcome and safe in our schools.” The effrontery of our cultural curators was on full display.
Culprit #1: Chris Jorgenson, director of UW Eau Claire’s Gender & Sexuality Research Center
It doesn’t end there. Barrington, R.I., is home for many veterans and staff of the Naval War College (NWC), and what we see in the faculty lounge of UW Eau Claire is clearly evident among its professoriate, and it spills over into the town of Barrington. Don’t forget, the NWC educates the officer corps of one of the institutions that is assigned the sole task of protecting us from foreign aggressors who wish to inflict abject harm on us. The first decades of this century have made the threat abundantly clear.
Instead, like the teachers and children of Eau Claire, Marine and Naval officers are being indoctrinated with the same ideology of self-flagellation. Think about it: what effect will it have on morale in the ranks? General George C. Marshal warned us in the tumultuous days of World War II, “It is not enough to fight. It is the spirit we bring to the fight that decides the issue. It is morale that wins the victory.” Who would want to defend a nation that has been characterized barely this side of Nazi Germany?
At issue in Barrington is the sponsorship of this year’s Memorial Day activities. For the past number of years, it was the Barrington United Veterans Coalition (BUVC). Well, not this year. The town’s Master of Ceremonies will not be the head of BUVC but the role will be turned over to a NWC professor, Frank Douglas, who previously spoke in favor of flying the Black Lives Matter flag at city hall. The Veterans Coalition had opposed the proposal to grant BLM the same honor as the POW-MIA banner. Douglas, according to town council minutes, played the trite “diversity” card when he said, “… there is diversity in the veteran community because they [BUVC] do not speak for all veterans.”
Culprit #2: Frank Douglas, Naval War College professor
Our intrepid NWC prof, Frank Douglas, is probably confusing the neologism BLM as a concept with the group. But flying a flag is quite different from simply endorsing the obvious truth that black lives matter. A flag denotes a group, and the BLM group is a scandal in belief and practice. A person who isn’t aware of the group’s neo-Marxist program has been living in a closet. Ditto for the bookkeeping shenanigans. Flying the BLM flag isn’t much different from flying the Viet Cong flag.
I’m not surprised. Douglas’s resume’ reads like a travelogue through academic bubbles – Georgetown U. (BSFS, Int. Affairs, 1993), Johns Hopkins U. (MA, Int. Relations, 1997), Harriman Institute (M.Phil., PoliSci, 2001), and Columbia U. (PhD, PoliSci, 2005). Clearly, this guy has the impression that some form of wisdom and competence is granted to someone with a litany of letters after their name . . . or it simply could be the desire for a cushy job.
As for his uniformed experience – he’s a commissioned officer in the Naval Reserve – his bio on the NWC’s website lists staff jobs in and out of theater from 2004 to 2018. Actual combat experience isn’t evident. I could be wrong but he appears to be a desk jockey. He might be the military’s version of a teacher quickly transitioning to administration. The old saying in education has a ring of truth: If you can’t teach, administrate. In the social ecosystem of the Pentagon, if you find the life of the grunt personally repellant, cram your resume’ with academic honors and be above the grime of actual combat, and, while you’re at it, engorge yourself on the thought-fads of academia.
If I’ve got it wrong, Douglas, please tell me.
The staff overhead of the Pentagon and its academic appurtenances frequently show the very same neo-Marxist influence as in Eau Claire Area School District’s headquarters. Who can forget General Mark Milley’s (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) statement before the House Armed Services Committee in June of 2021: “I want to understand white rage, and I’m white”? The pinning of “white rage” on the January 6 rioters and protesters sounds like The Squad’s camera-hogging howls. The lunch room at the Pentagon may not be much different from the UW Eau Claire’s faculty lounge.
Culprit #3: Pauline Shanks Kaurin, Naval War College professor
Back to the NWC, another prof, Pauline Shanks Kaurin, delivered a lecture to sailors in June of 2021 that treated Meghan Markle’s fully unsubstantiated accusations of racism in the royal family as analogous to the alleged systemic racism in American society. She went further in slamming classical liberalism in its focus on the individual. If you want more of the mental gobbledygook, she continued to ineptly wax as follows:
“… [racism] is not a case of a few bad apples. This is, as the Duchess of Sussex said, she said, racism, racist is not rude….
This is not a matter of people who are being mean or rude or ignorant individuals. We tend to think of racism or sexism as, ‘this is a problem with individuals’. It’s not a problem with individuals. It’s not a problem with individuals only, it’s a problem of individuals within a structure, within a society, within a system.”
This is the stuff promulgated to the people trained to kill. Those in charge should be held accountable for wrongly presenting this bombast. And if they won’t be responsible, keep it out entirely. The nonsense should be treated as the bone of contention that it is. That means that you don’t deliver it from a lectern, as from a pulpit, even if discussion is permitted. The setting grants to the presenter the power to frame the discussion. Rather, it only deserves the full debate treatment: two sides cognitively armed to argue the merits, or lack thereof.
If not, keep it away from our troops, and keep it away from our children. It’s noxious neo-Marxism whether flying under the BLM banner or anti-racism ideology in teacher training, and needs to be confronted, and not in any way presented as truth. Our men and women in uniform and school-age children merit better. Schooling should not be a national suicide pill.
Ask yourself a couple of simple questions. How could a governor coldly announce the end of the internal combustion in 15 years without any recognition of the upheaval – i.e., human cost – that it’ll create? In September of 2020, Governor Newson of California did:
“In the next 15 years we will eliminate in the state of California the sales of internal combustion engines. We will move forward to green and decarbonize our vehicle fleet … substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well as oxide nitrogen, in so doing, we’ll improve air quality and improve the economic climate here in the state of California.”
Governor Gavin Newsom announces an end to the sale of the cars with internal combustion engines.
How could Black Lives Matter declare economic war on white-owned businesses? Oh, but they did on Twitter in December 2021:
“Time to: #BuildBlack – Support Black-led-Black-serving organizations. #BuyBlack – Skip the Black Friday sales and buy exclusively from Black-owned businesses. #BankBlack – Move your money out of white-corporate banks that finance our oppression and open accounts with Black-owned banks. . . . White-supremacist-capitalism uses policing to protect profits and steal Black life. . . . Let’s use every tool in our toolbox…including our dollars…to end white-supremacist-capitalism.”
When not announcing an end to the traditional family, calling for the death of cops (“fry ‘em like bacon”), or excusing riots and murder in our cities, they applied the same old tired rhetoric in declaring their own version of apartheid nirvana.
Businesses torched in downtown Minneapolis during the George Floyd riots of 2020.
What’s happening? Well, it’s what happens when a person becomes incapable of examining their own assumptions. They blindly accept a set of propositions and then act upon them.
Something is missing from their mental comportment. The thing that is absent is the life of the personal. The life of the personal – also referred to as interiority – involves reflection, comprehension, and the private space to do it. For these avatars of a new world order, no time for that. That private space is to be treated as suspicious pods of conspiracy to stop them. The personal life is branded “counterrevolutionary”. For them, it’s time to light up the Molotov cocktails and torch the entire civilization and end the life of the personal.
However, it’s out of the life of the personal that arises all those things that we call private. You know, the private sector, private property, civil society, church. The life of the personal is more than emotions and the arts, even though it certainly encompasses them. It incorporates our tendency to gravitate to form family, a deeper form of intimacy than mere eroticism can satisfy. It includes our personal choices to make a living, whether to follow in the footsteps of mom and dad or not. It encompasses the natural inclination to acquire things unto ourselves – private property, private enterprise. It embraces the grappling to understand the nature of things, which includes the spiritual. Thus, churches arise.
All these things lie outside the revolution, because revolution is what these people are all about. They’re not into deep private reflection. They are consumed by ends (a complete revolution) sanctioning means (unbridled callousness). They desire to let loose an eruption to overturn nearly everything to make life conform to their unexamined vision.
No better illustration can be found than in a clip from director David Lean’s film from 1965, “Dr. Zhivago”, based on Boris Pasternak’s novel. In the scene, Dr. Yuri Zhivago is brought before the revolutionary commander Strelnikov in the heady days of the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War (Whites vs. Reds). They met earlier before the Revolution but only briefly. The exchange is enlightening. Please watch the clip.
In other words, where are our school leaders leading us?
Parents talk before rally to oppose critical race theory in Loudon County schools, June 12, 2021.
Please listen to the last 30 minutes of the Radion Free California podcast and capture Will Swaim’s (of the California Public Policy Center) interview of Dr. Lance Izumi, Senior Director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute. Click on Dr. Izumi’s picture for the interesting conversation. You’ll find it compelling if you’re worried about the condition of your child’s school.
Dr. Lance Izumi
To be clear, let’s not tar everyone with the same brush. Not every Trump voter cheered the January 6 riot, not every Democrat is, figuratively speaking, in bed with the socialistas of The Squad, and not by a long shot is every teacher responsible for the mediocrity of the schools. During my near 30 years as a public high school teacher, I have seen the great variability in teacher quality but few, very few, fit the bill as truly incompetent and uncaring. Some, like me, failed at their first bite of the apple, but learned the lesson that effectiveness is a dynamic process, experience being the best stylist of good teaching.
Yet, undeniably, something is amiss in our schools, and most emphatically in our public schools. Pre-pandemic, the failings spared no socioeconomic group. Certainly, the pandemic panic exacerbated the situation. Using the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) as the benchmark, schools with overwhelming middle-class enrollment produced dismal results with over half performing at below grade level. It only gets worse when we look at schools with the entire student body on the school lunch program. So, moving to a “better” neighborhood for the “better” schools is a fool’s errand. You’re only getting a student body in nicer clothes and cars, not a better education.
If I was to choose one overriding factor for the dreary situation, it would come down to rotten leadership. And I don’t mean to make administrators as a group the brunt. Poor captaincy stretches from many school board members to professors to superintendents through an administrative descent to the individual school, and, lest I forget, their directors and abettors in state and federal government. Most of this leadership crowd is pickled in a brine of progressive ideology emanating from the political arena and the gatekeepers of credentialing, the collegiate schools of education.
Teachers must also traverse the same gauntlet.
If you’re shocked by racial shaming sessions in your child’s Zoomed Social Studies lesson, well, what did you expect? Today’s progressivism is synonymous with the militant wokeness of neo-Marxist critical theory and it percolates through ed courses and the teams of “educators” who produce the curricula. It’s everywhere and everywhere destructive.
People hold up signs during a rally against “critical race theory” (CRT) being taught in schools at the Loudoun County Government center in Leesburg, Virginia on June 12, 2021. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP)
If you want better schools, clean house of the poison and install leaders with their heads screwed on straight. Start with the state leadership and move like Sherman’s March through the collegiate schools of education and the people who run the local districts. The rot begins at the top, so start there. In the end, the teachers will be better for it.
Oh, before I leave the topic, an important cog in this Borg is the teacher unions. They need to stop being a conduit for this ideological mania. If they are to continue to exist, they must stop seeing themselves in the vanguard of a revolution and more as shapers of patriotic and productive citizens. Got it?
Hillsdale College in Michigan.Student walks past statue of Ronald Reagan on the campus of Hillsdale College.Site of Hillsdale College campus in Placer County near Roseville.
I kid you not: Hillsdale College is coming to California and the true believers of the ruling groupthink are going bonkers. The state is hemorrhaging legacy-cost red ink, businesses, and residents as it is mired in COVID totalitarianism, homelessness everywhere, a crime wave, debased schools, welfare dependency, expensive everything, and public spaces that aren’t fit for children (and adults). And to think that they are frazzled beyond restraint by the appearance of a classical liberal arts college within their playpen. Amazing, absolutely amazing.
If you want to know the reason for the state’s looniness, no better candidate can be found than in the loopy thought processes of many of the state’s college graduates who then scatter into the state’s institutions for employment. An example of the phenomena is 24-year-old Hannah Holzer, “opinion assistant” at the Sacramento Bee. She penned an op ed – really, more of a screed – on January 23 titled “A conspiracy-peddling college is coming to Placer County. That should scare us all” (read here). What does she bring to the table other than vapid sloganeering and ad hominems? Let’s see.
Hannah Holzer
Her LinkedIn resume’ mentions a 4-year stint at UC Davis with an “English – professional writer” degree. Her post-graduate journey winds its way through a news internship at the Bee, a DC communications internship, editor of The California Aggie, editor at SF Weekly, and finally Bee assistant opinion editor/Sunset Beacon freelance reporter at the wizened age of 24. She had plenty of opportunity to ply her trade while infusing her journalism with left wing nuttery.
And it shows. Read the piece. It’s a mental fingerprint of unexamined assumptions and left-wing boilerplate. The opening paragraph is an unacknowledged tribute to the Unibomber’s Manifesto. It’s ripe with “ultra-conservative” (Hillsdale College) and this gem, “. . . extremist institution [Hillsdale College], perpetuating alternative facts and harmful conspiracy theories.” Plowing deeper into the tirade, one finds an excoriation of Hillsdale’s rejection of the lefty bromides of “social justice” and “multicultural diversity”. She then unabashedly and unthinkingly equates the two with “a just nation”. What? A “just nation” is created by the racial discrimination of a racial favoritism? For our intrepid reporterette, lady justice is not to wear a blindfold.
There’s more. She adopts the vocabulary – “dog whistle” – of Democratic Party electioneering. Of course, the phrase is attached to the opponents of the neo-Marxist critical theory and its offspring, critical race theory, leading to this whopper: “. . . they [Hillsdale] view the practice of accurately teaching America’s complex history to students as a threat to white supremacy.” There you have it. “White supremacy” has come full circle to include those who take Martin Luther King seriously.
Hillsdale’s sin is its unwillingness to kowtow to the fashionable tomfoolery that is so commonplace in the modern academy. Hillsdale is an unflinching advocate of classical education – classical means rooted in Western civilization. It’s the same civilization that gave birth to the university, the higher ed that has currently been bastardized to produce the youngins who can’t wait to dismantle it in their ignorance.
Hey, California, the doctor has arrived with a little tough love in the form of Hillsdale College.
At the top of our society is a Brahmin caste of an elect in possession of prestigious degrees. Their high status is drawn from their educations, but the claim can only have legitimacy if their many years of formal instruction truly enlightened. The evidence for that is weakening by the day. Instead, these paragons were marinated in a hot house of radical ideology. It was political activism masquerading as scholarship. Still, off they go to fill positions of power and influence in our culture. They’re everywhere.
Prime example: professional sports, or Big Sports, Inc. An aristocracy of athletic talent earning six figures, sometimes seven, eight, or nine, is managed by a metropolitan administrative apparatus of people marked by paper credentials. It’s an insular social caste far removed from the fan base that is not so well-endowed with these modern markers of prestige. The interests, tastes, social norms, and biases of this caste in the clouds escapes serious cross-examination due to uniform social reinforcement. Nearly everybody around them thinks the same way. It’s the dumb lacking any self-awareness of their dumbness.
How else can the sloganeering of campus neo-Marxists seep onto the helmets of athletes with astronomical salaries, the normal expression of patriotic unity in opening ceremonies be debased by overt racial anthems, and the change of venue of a long-scheduled all-star game after the wailing of small-minded activists be realized? Radicalism becomes fashionable when there’s no competing voices.
Nothing escapes infection including the on-field attire. The NFL has an approved list of slogans for their helmets that includes “Stop Hate”, “End Racism”, and “Black Lives Matter”, all of them taken from people who previously chanted “pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon”. We know from where the adoption of extremist slogans come. It comes from people whose agenda exceeds the simple and generic meaning of the words. “Stop Hate”? What hate? Do they mean the garden variety of hate exhibited in domestic abuse, or the kind shown by a thief pistol-whipping a store clerk for resisting, or a jihadist taking synagogue worshippers hostage? I think not. The whole “Stop Hate” gambit became a cause because a viral video of an abusive cop was exploited as evidence of a systemic racial hatred. In point of fact, it was a singular incident of a bad cop, not proof of the KKK in blue.
It says more about our time’s hyper-communicability of bad behavior to every corner of the planet, whereas before it would be put in the context of a local incident to be handled locally.
“End Racism”? What racism? Widespread racial animus shows up in no respectable poll. In fact, whatever it is, it’s declining and widely condemned as shameful. So, where’s the “racism” that needs to be “ended”? Instead, a revolutionary agenda is at work. Cutting to the quick, our new fashionable revolutionary cadre want to end “acting white”, the Enlightenment, rationality, math, the scientific method, the constitutional order, anything that they assert stands in the way perfect categorical equality. This is the “racism” that they’re trying to “end”. Of course, none of this is achievable without a totalitarian state. That’s how you really kill the Enlightenment. Mao or Che would be proud.
As for “Black Lives Matter”, it came into vogue as if people needed to be reminded of the obvious: black lives do matter. Though, try saying “All lives matter”, the essence of the Gospels, and see how quickly the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion Department and Twitter mob pounce. All lives don’t matter to the chic radicals because they are consumed by the oppressor/oppressed shtick of Karl Marx and his later kindred spirits, of which there are many in the country’s thousands of faculty lounges. Things don’t turn out equal in racial enumerations, so the egregious non sequitur “use racism to combat racism” – in the immortal words of the high priest of Anti-Racism, Ibram X. Kendi (Ibram Henry Rogers) – becomes the latest slogan to be turned into policy preference. Until the numbers come out equal, ALL lives don’t matter in this sewer of the mind.
Look to the knit caps worn by people on the sidelines. Prominently stitched is the word “Equity”. Just yesterday, “equity” was consonant with justice. Today, it’s consonant with racial vengeance. It’s back to Kendi’s bunk of “use racism to end racism”. That’s right, enact cash payouts for being black (reparations). Hiring, promotions, and admissions should place race as the topmost criteria. If one race shows up too prominently in the crime stats, redefine crime, end bail, and avoid prosecutions. If you haven’t enough miscreants of other racial categories in the prosecutor’s hopper, invent them in campaigns to ferret out “white supremacy” as the new “domestic terrorism”, but define it broadly so you can bag your political opponents.
Why is it that “equity” crusades all too often stray into the ugliest despotism?
We can’t even watch a football game without getting a steady diet of the politicized word salad. I can’t think of my San Francisco 49ers without Colin Kaepernick and the kneeling craze crossing my mind. Ditto for the San Francisco Giants. Taking it further, San Francisco is more aptly “San Fransicko” (Michael Schellenberger’s book of the same title). The city’s muddied reputation proceeds all. Ditto for California.
Most members of the San Francisco Giants kneel during a moment of silence prior to an opening day baseball game against the Los Angeles Dodgers, Thursday, July 23, 2020, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)Hunter Pence #8 of the San Francisco Giants looks on during batting practice before the game against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Dodger Stadium on July 23, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)
And corporate-boardroom NFL parades across our TV screens BLM/Antifa slogans. It’s just one big “Meh”. No enthusiasm and don’t care. I tried to watch 49ers/Cowboys and Rams/Cardinals but, once again, “Meh”. Time to switch to Netflix.
P.S.: The politicization of professional associations is next.
California Governor Gavin Newsom makes an appearance after the polls close on the recall election at the California Democratic Party headquarters in Sacramento, Calif., September 14, 2021. (Fred Greaves/Reuters)
“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”, what a hot mess. Extending it, what happens in California stays in California. Few things falser can be imagined. What happens in and for California invades the whole country without anyone’s consent. California’s manias have become our manias. It’s time to treat California as the pariah state that it is. Pariahs are isolated to quarantine their deadly influence.
Will Swaim of the California Policy Center provides sound reason to place California on the same list with North Korea (read about it here).
The Rocky Mountain states get to inhale the consequences of California’s desire to maintain combustible forests. Why? The state’s periodic droughts, normal in Mediterranean climates, blanket the golden state in a thick layer of matchsticks if not cleared. Guess what? The state’s wildlands aren’t cleared due to a glowing hatred of logging and prescribed burns. In addition, the spark, literally the spark, frequently comes from the state’s aging and neglected grid because of the state’s Public Utilities Commission fixation on the greenie fantasies of wind and solar. Anyone can see the results from their car window as they flee the flames: the ubiquitous forests of humongous windmills scarring the landscape, extensive seas of solar panels, and the costliest electricity rates with the greatest unreliability. The state’s folly now becomes our filthy air.
California wildfire smoke wafting over the skies in the Northwest and southern Canada.
What about the epidemic of “out of stock” online and off? A huge link in the supply chain lies parked off the Southern California coast. Controlling the docks in the most incompetent way possible is the ILWU, the longshoreman’s union, which fully exploits the generous powers granted to it by the state’s maniacally pro-Big Labor laws. If those containers finally get off the ship, there are few trucks to pick them up because of the state’s uniquely intense jihad against fossil fuels, half the available trucking fleet having been made illegal by state diktats. The state’s pathological obsessive/compulsiveness in regards to emissions is now a gross obstacle to interstate commerce. It’s unsettling to discover that Billings supermarkets are so heavily impacted by lunatics in Sacramento.
Container ships and oil tankers waiting in the ocean outside the Port of Long Beach in California in April 2021. (photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)
The price of meat is rising. Well, expect it to go higher for the whole country as producers scramble to meet the commands of California’s Prop 12, the Farm Animal Confinement Initiative. The state has ordered all producers from Fresno to Iowa to Canberra (Au.), wherever, to meet its demands if they want to peddle their goods in this asylum with an elected government. So, their meat products will be more expensive everywhere as producers scramble to cater to the state’s ninnies. Nobody voted for this outside this looney bin’s precincts.
The same tactic is at work in forcing the state’s climate change feverishness on all of us. First in the crosshairs are the carbon consuming and emitting conveyances in your garage, no matter the state. For years, California’s fastidious phobias on emissions shows up on all vehicles whether sold in Los Angeles or Lubbock. The Zanyland’s mammoth market share and the dictates of production efficiencies force all of us to share in the dementia. Call it the California premium that everyone has to pay. This is the second instance of California getting to set its psychotic agenda on all states with corporate America as a co-conspirator. More about this later.
A ubiquitous California smog test
Interstate commerce isn’t managed out of Congress according to the Constitution’s Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3, but effectively out of Sacramento. And, as it turns out, neither is immigration (Clause 4). The state’s official immigration policy – it’s been a sanctuary state since 2017 – routinely ignores federal law and its enforcement personnel, going so far as to make it a crime ($10,000 fine) for businesses in the state to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. Further, the state subsidizes nonprofits assisting in the law-breaking while at the same time lavishing entitlements on the law-breakers. Clearly, the state is at war with the Constitution (Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl. 4)
Pro-illegal immigration protest, California 2019.
The state is one huge affront to the rule of law: the US Constitution. The use of the state’s police powers to block interstate and international commerce should be no more tolerated than its zany regulations be allowed to affect consumers who had no voice in their creation. The state must be brought to heel. The situation has aggravated beyond a mere irritant. It’s getting close to being an existential threat to the nation.
A corrective begins with the recognition of the state as a pariah, one that habitually operates outside the bounds of our Constitution. Quarantine the madness to make certain that Californios bear the full freight of their lunacy. Take the management of their ports away from them. Institute forest management practices by sidelining the state’s powerful eco-crazed lobbies. State interference in the enforcement of federal immigration law should be treated as acts of secession. Federal legislation should prevent interstate producers from imposing costs of meeting California’s frenzies on the entire national market. What happens in California should be made to stay in California.
Over time, the need for explicit action may wane as people continue to do what they have been doing: flee the asylum run by the inmates. The state’s overbearing market share is fading as the number of outbounded moving trucks continues to mount. The problem is taking care of itself, but a little legal protection for the rest of the nation is needed along the way.
USC safeties coach Craig Naivar, center, runs players through drills during spring 2020 practice at USC. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)
Like a homeowner noticing termite shavings on the floor at the bottom of a wall, the urban folk of the metropolitan west coast might be awakening to the manufactured decay that is beginning to overtake them. The rot is “manufactured” (man-created) because of the bewildering decisions by public officials of their own choosing. Schools aren’t preparing the young for adulthood but are fermenting as radical indoctrination centers. The urban public square is littered with the homeless, the psychotic, needles and feces, roving gangs of thieves and extremist goons, boarded up store fronts, and no one in office seems to care, at least care enough to do anything about it, other than make it worse.
Homeless encampment in Portland in 2016.
The dégringolade (decline) ranges up and down the coastal plain. Nearly 60% of United Van Lines’s California hauls in 2021 were outbound, and it’s a poor metric due to its high cost. The more affordable U-Haul has become less affordable – 4 times the price for inboud – when trying to load up and skedaddle the Bear Flag Republic. Portlanders have acquired an affection for Boise, Idaho, according to UVL and Business Insider. The situation is summed up quite nicely by Greg Goodman, the co-president of the Portland Downtown Development Group: “If you know a retail or office broker, give them a call and ask them how many clients they have are trying to leave.” The exodus is palpable wherever progressivism reigns.
The east coast fares even worse by United’s numbers. New Jersey (69.5%) and New York (67%) rank #1 and #2 for the Great Migration out.
Is the decline and flight observable in organized athletic prowess? Is this trait a new canary in the coal mine alongside UVL and U-Haul numbers? As of now, in 2021/22, the PAC-12 is winless in bowl games for the second straight year. The last best hope for the conference, Utah, went down to Ohio State in the Rose Bowl on a last second field goal. Even the fact that Utah came close could be an additional sign of the new dynamism of people fleeing the coastal blight. The PAC-12 might have to switch its status ranking with the Mid-Atlantic Conference. It’s the “Conference of Champions” for volleyball or softball, but apparently not for anything exuding testosterone, which ironically is then forced to subsidize the former two.
UCLA lost its chance to break the losing streak by cancelling its appearance in the Sun Bowl after an outbreak of COVID on the team. COVID still raked the team after some of the most heavy-handed, authoritarian edicts by California’s recall-surviving governor and some of the most fear-paralyzed school administrations in the country. Remember “bend the curve” and “stop the spread”? The only thing “bent” or “stopped” was the hopes and dreams of the young men in shoulder pads. Try that as a recruitment angle.
Last year’s performance, the notorious year of COVID, was explained away, like the election laws, as a byproduct of the pandemic. Once again, nothing the prelates of the conference did changed a thing in regards to the rampage of the disease. It mutated and the crisis-too-good-to-waste registered as a wild-eyed panic to end athletic futures. Such overwrought reactions have a home in the same places that sanction violence and filth.
Another little-noticed and unremarked factoid is the appearance of four-star recruits from California showing up on the team rosters in the real power conferences. I tuned into the Georgia/Michigan game in time to watch Georgia’s tight end, Bowers, from northern California, receive a touchdown pass. Bryce Young, Alabama’s QB, and alumni of Mater Dei in Los Angeles, earned a 106 quarterback rating against Cincinnati. Ohio State/Utah was a battle between two California quarterbacks: Stroud and Rising. Are these mere anecdotes or a trend that has many similarities to prior demographic shifts in the country’s history?
Alabama’s Bryce Young (Photo by Ron Jenkins/Getty Images)Utah’s Cameron RisingOhio State’s C.J. StroudGeorgia’s Brock Bowers
California’s loss of one congressional seat after the last census understates the seriousness of its self-immolation. The state made strenuous efforts to hide the flight of its middle class and businesses with campaigns to count every soul, living and non-living and legal and illegal. But everyone knows what is happening, and it’s now appearing on the playing fields.
