Electric vehicle catches fire in Florida after Hurricane Ian.
In Rob Reiner’s “This Is Spinal Tap”, the boys in the band are asked about the unexpected deaths of some of their drummers, including one who mysteriously erupted in spontaneous combustion.
It’s hilarious, but not so funny for Florida electric vehicle (EV) owners in the wake of Hurricane Ian. We now know that water and EV batteries don’t mix. The things don’t need a spark. After the deluge and submersion in flood waters, they’ll just quietly simmer in a super-hot chemical reaction, smoke a little, and then erupt. Watch the Good Morning in America (GMA) report below.
The EV is the darling of our eco-central planners and the eco-acolytes who sit atop many of our institutions. For the elected ones, they didn’t gain their seats of power and influence by accident. We chose them. Through the franchise and Electoral College, we made the choice to give power to those who would force us out of our deep family investments in clean and fuel-efficient sedans, mini-vans, and SUV’s and into the thing that could set a packed parking lot and neighborhood ablaze. Add to that the range anxiety from inoperable, scarce, and inconvenient charging stations; dishonestly advertised operational distances if one takes into account running life-support and other systems like air conditioning and the heater; and the threat of hypothermia as we wait the hour or two for enough juice to get the thing up and running in a Michigan winter.
Wait, there’s more. The same folks who are foisting the EV on us are creating the most unstable grid distributing the most expensive electricity. An ever-growing expanse of giant windmill forests and broadening seas of solar panels marring ever greater portions of the earth’s surface will be our future if they have their way. And if that isn’t enough, much of that grid is exposed to the annual seven-month firestorm season from eco-crazed forestry practices that annually belches millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air, like the 130 million tons from last year’s conflagrations in California – the equivalent CO2 of 25 million regular autos. So, they shove everyone into EV’s to allegedly save the planet as they encourage the buildup of debris to burn it up. Go figure.
Trees and brush erupt in flames in a California wildfire from 2019.
Incidentally, try to find a place to charge up the thing if you happen to be in the path of the flames, the lines are down, and the cell towers are incinerated. It’s a perpetual motion machine of eco-nuttery. Lesson: Don’t sell that old Camry with the regular unleaded in the gas tank.
Who’s at fault? We are. We elected the clowns who thought that showering the country in paper money was economically righteous and think that eco-central planning is somehow different from the Soviet variety.
It’s not that the donkey party hid it from us. Nancy Pelosi and The Squad have been busy concocting the Green New Deal since Pelosi took the gavel (2019) and Biden the oath of office (2021). Anyone above the sentience level of a worm should have known. Biden repeatedly bellowed their intent when he, for instance, looked into the eyes of a teenage girl (a real XX-chromosome one) in 2019 and said,
“I want you to look at my eyes. I guarantee you. I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.”
Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden pumps his fist as he speaks during a campaign stop, Friday, Sept. 6, 2019, in Laconia, N.H. (AP Photo/Mary Schwalm)
True to his word, he’s trying to euthanize the entire industry: practically ending oil development on federal lands and offshore, axing pipelines, lavish spending on loopy “sustainables”, and a quiet strangulation of the energy companies by frightening financial capital away from them. For this gang, real, affordable energy is a dragon to be slain.
The choice of candidates in the 2020 presidential race was between the uncouth with the right policies (for the most part) and a revolutionary ethos of class warfare, neo-Marxist race-baiting, transgenderism, open borders, law unenforcement, and greenie fanaticism. As it turned out, a majority preferred the revolution. Look no further than the mirror for the cause of our troubles if you thought that the uncouth drove you into the arms of the revolutionary. A candidate is much more than the fact that he’s not the other guy.
RogerG
Read here for more:
* “Red Tape Is Making Wildfires Worse”, Shawn Regan and Tate Watkins, National Review Online, Oct. 4, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/red-tape-is-making-wildfires-worse/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=third
* “About Those Green Jobs . . . They Keep Vanishing”, Andrew Follett, National Review Online, Oct. 15, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/about-those-green-jobs-they-keep-vanishing/
* “Climate Policy Should Pay More Attention to Climate Economics”, John H. Cochrane, National Review Online, Sept, 3, 2021, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/climate-policy-should-pay-more-attention-to-climate-economics/
* “In intimate moment, Biden vows to ‘end fossil fuel'”, Steve Peoples, ABC News, Sept, 6, 2019, at https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/intimate-moment-biden-vows-end-fossil-fuel-65442382
President Biden during his speech on Thursday, 8/1/22, in Philadelphia.
Biden’s speech of last Thursday in Philadelphia was red meat for a Red base. Breaking it apart, “red meat” is rhetoric “that is forceful and poignant, as will excite or inflame their supporters”, and “Red” to characterize a political faction isn’t to be confused with the red/blue designations on US political maps. “Red” is drawn from the traditional color assigned to adherents of the socialist movement. It’s historical and dates back to the 19th century Socialist International with its red flag and workers-of-the-world-unite anthem, of which Karl Marx was the titular figure. Just to be clear.
The Democratic Party of today is the American manifestation of the many socialist parties around the world. The heart of the party’s most fervent members lies in the broader socialist movement. Notwithstanding the leaders’ proforma denials, the party’s political program meshes quite nicely with the socialist aim of greater government control of the economy and life, the same advocacy found in the Labor Party of the UK or any of the other European socialist parties. There’s a reason why Bernie, the Senate’s self-described socialist, caucuses with the Democrats. Birds of a feather. Don’t be fooled by the brush-off.
It was certainly fitting that the camera view of Biden at the lectern had a background bathed in red. From it, Biden spewed inflammatory words that had little place in rational discourse. This isn’t the tone of your local crisis counselor. It was a red speech for a Red cause.
I delayed my commentary till I could hear the speech in total and unfiltered. Bluntly put, it was shocking. Its only conceivable purpose was to rev up the base to forestall a long-anticipated Republican wave in November. It was filled with raw appeals to emotion, stoking fears, incoherent, and riddled with hypocrisy. It was the kind of stemwinder used to get the Parisian mob to storm the Bastille. And if you know anything about the Bastille events on July 14, 1789, you’ll know that the place only imprisoned a few, and they were the most heinous miscreants (the Marque de Sade among them). After the surrender, the guards were butchered, their heads cut off and mounted on pikes and paraded around Paris. Biden lifted a page from the playbook of the hate-filled rabble-rouser Paul Marat; I hope without the detached heads.
Contemporaneous illustration of the Bastille guards with their heads on pikes after their surrender on July 14, 1789.
To kindle his partisans, he stood behind the trappings of the presidential office to deliver language more appropriate for a fire-breathing sermon. One ploy was the abundant use of the phrase “MAGA Republicans”. Mao wannabes need a neat word or phrase to encapsulate the “enemy”, a target, to roll up the opposition. Marx invented “capitalist” as a focal point of opprobrium, Stalin had his kulaks, and for Biden, his “MAGA Republicans”. Soon, afterwards, it was all over the airwaves as if the party’s media sycophants got the robo chain text.
Do you think that he limited his gaze to the MAGA subspecies of Republican? Not on your life. The speech’s language was fungible enough to tar any Republican, even the ones that Trump hates, if they continually stand athwart the political thrusts of his party’s radicalized base. Just lather them with “intimidated”, another gambit in the speech.
Rhetorical ground was laid to attack all of them since being pro-life and following the Apostle Paul on marriage were lumped together with January 6 “insurrectionists”. The constant reference to “going backwards” is the well-worn refrain of all revolutionaries. Progress is synonymous with revolution and neither has any room for the venerable and time-tested, no matter the allusion to the Constitution and rule of law. Both were cynically and repeatedly violated by this man bathed in red light.
I was waiting for the tag on Republicans as defenders of slavery (Biden golden oldie: “put you all back in chains”) and Jim Crow, completely oblivious to the fact that it was the Democratic Party that rammed through the secessionitis defense of slavery of the Civil War and constructed Jim Crow in the aftermath. These historical Democrat actions came about as reactions to the rise of the Republican Party. Biden and Democrats, get your facts straight!
In essence, Biden condemned the “MAGA Republicans” as subversives to our civil order under the banality of a “threat to our democracy”, leaving unsaid the simple fact that we don’t have a “democracy”. It’s a constitutional republic, something a bit more sophisticated than a simpleton’s 50%-plus-1 standard of mail-in ballots to decide public issues. The Constitution and the rule of law belts our public officials in all kinds of restraints in spite of Gallup.
Really, the threat that Biden had in mind wasn’t the clearly observable 574 riots, $2 billion in damage, 2,000 police casualties, and anywhere from 17 to 35 killed as a consequence of the 2020 Antifa/BLM summer of riots. No, for Biden, it was January 6 with the only death accruing to a Trump supporter. Sorry, Biden, no men in blue died in it.
The bombast left unsaid the many ways that he was soiling the Constitution and rule of law. No separation of powers for Biden with the lawmaking authority in a Congress and a president limited to executing the laws. In 2021, he tried to extend an eviction moratorium although simultaneously recognizing its illegality. He knew that he was violating the Constitution, which was later confirmed by a Supreme Court decision (Alabama Association of Realtors, et al v. Dept. of Health and Human Services, et al, Aug. 26, 2021). Most recently, he invented student loan forgiveness out of thin air in direct contradiction to the previously announced position in June of his fellow-traveler, Speaker Pelosi.
It’s not just his cutting loose from the Article II restraints which limits him to carrying out laws made in Article I (Congress). He even ignores his Constitutional duty to perform the carrying out. Item #1: immigration law. The US code is chock full of provisions that define law-abiding and non-law-abiding immigration. Word has spread like wildfire in the troubled regions of the world that the border is such an open sieve that localities east and south have been emptied of their residents to join caravans in the long trek to a border manned by a Border Patrol that has been morphed into a Welcome Wagon. After a greeting by the Border Patrol, the illegal crossers are awarded plane travel to a destination of their choice.
Caravan of immigrants approaching the US southern border in 2021.
Don’t forget, these aren’t refugees from Cuba or Middle Eastern jihadist goons. Biden, in effect, has redefined refugee in such a way as to declare 8 US Code Section 12 (Immigration and Nationality) null and void under the guise of “prosecutorial discretion”. That’s right, “discretion” is stretched to cover the nearly blanket non-enforcement of 8 US Code Section 12 by imperial presidential dictat. Hardly can Biden wrap himself in the Constitution and rule of law when his actions make him eligible for impeachment. The word is projection: hiding your intentions behind false accusations of your opponents doing what you have done.
A pattern of Democrat campaigning is evident: don’t tack to the middle, but gin-up your party’s normally uninterested, ill-informed, and lackadaisical voter base to counter the enthusiasm of the other side. It worked for Obama in 2012, Pelosi and Schumer in 2018, and Biden in 2020. The heart of the strategy is to embrace the Left, not run from it. Use absurdities, gross hyperbole, and illusory threats to get your people to the polls. For 2022, it is to make the campaign a referendum on Trump and not on the party in power with much to answer for. And all of this bombast was present in Biden’s speech.
The speech was an insult to the office of the presidency. Fear of the electorate punishing your party at the polls is no excuse for turning Independence Hall into a Nuremburg Rally. People quite rightly have an aversion to escalating food and fuel prices, shortages, crime surges, their cities becoming open sewers, their children suffocating behind filthy masks, their schools being turned into woke reeducation camps, blackouts, greenie fanaticism, the socialism – i.e., the general Democratic Party program and its consequences. Biden would profit from Clinton’s dose of sobriety after the Republican blowout in the 1994 midterms (the R’s gained 54 House seats): “The era of big government is over.” Instead, Biden gave us red meat for his Red base.
Doubling down on stupid may work if it gets Biden’s Red-oriented base to show up. Sad, but true.
RogerG
Sources:
* Numbers of casualties and damage attributed to the 2020 summer riots are curiously hard to come by. They can be found if a person expands the search beyond Wikipedia, the CNN/MSNBC nexus, and legacy media. Other than vague generalities, specifics are nowhere to be found in those venues. Here’s a list of some sources with specifics:
“More Than 2,000 Officers Injured in Summer’s Protests and Riots”, Police Magazine, Dec. 3, 2020, at https://www.policemag.com/585160/more-than-2-000-officers-injured-in-summers-protests-and-riots
“Riot deaths ignored by major networks; watchdog finds 99.3% of protest coverage focused elsewhere”, Washington Times, June 4, 2020, at https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jun/4/riot-deaths-ignored-by-major-networks-watchdog-fin/
“2020 BLM/Antifa Riot Deaths”, National Conservative, at https://national-conservative.com/extremist-files/2020-blm-antifa-deaths/
“Police chief association releases number of officers injured during violent riots”, Fox News, Dec. 1, 2020, at https://www.foxnews.com/us/police-chief-officers-injured-riots?fbclid=IwAR0wFsq7Ndyhr7HyBQQnZ10Gn4WI_eJz4gH67vbg5ehPJ8u6WBGCKgF80H8
“RIOTS BY THE NUMBERS: POLICE CASUALTIES, PEOPLE KILLED DURING ‘PEACEFUL PROTESTS’”, Louder with Crowder, July 31, 2020, at https://www.louderwithcrowder.com/riots-by-the-numbers-police-casualties-people-killed-during-peaceful-protests
KBJ before the Senate Judiciary Committee considering her nomination for the Supreme Court.
We have reached the point of personal ideology being a disqualification for office. Progressivism has long been subversive of the rule of law. One commentator of recent memory called the progressive’s “living constitution” an ongoing, never-ending constitutional convention. Jurists under its sway can make and enforce law at will. No longer content with simply applying the law in court cases, they’ll force us back into the jungle of the rule of men (or women, or . . .), and away from the rule of law. We don’t need any more judges as potentates. That means a healthy “No” to KBJ.
KBJ is an embodiment of the threat to our civilizational order. It’s more than her refusal to define a woman when asked. Some of her rulings are just way out there, as in contortions to ignore the restraints in the job description in order to achieve long-sought lefty ends. She’s more of a revolutionary than a judge.
One example of the radical’s monstrous rationale came to the fore in committee hearings considering her nomination. Sen. Grassley (R, Iowa) brought to light her ruling as a DC District Court judge in Make the Road New York v. McAleenan, (2019). She, with a stroke of her pen, made a ruling in violation of the law. At issue is the power of the AG or Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS) to exercise “unreviewable” (by the courts) discretion to determine the classes of aliens eligible for expedited removal from the country (Immigration and Naturalization Act, section 1225). So, what did she do? She went ahead and “reviewed” the DHS decision.
She tried to hang her hat on the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), as if it was the wormhole to make reviewable what was clearly not reviewable. So astounded was the normally liberal DC Circuit Court of Appeals that a panel of the Court reversed and admonished her by ruling that,
“There could hardly be a more definitive expression of congressional intent to leave the decision about the scope of expedited removal, within statutory bounds, to the Secretary’s independent judgment.”
She was so intent on bashing the Trump administration’s immigration policies that she violated the law when making a decision on the law. Try to make sense of that. Some could try, given that many are completely unaware that Article III of the Constitution gives to Congress the power to set the federal courts’ appellate jurisdiction. In other words, by statute, “unreviewable” means “unreviewable” by KBJ, et al.
The APA is not to be confused, as she apparently did, with the Constitution. This person is a radical, an unhinged progressive, or maybe even a revolutionary. As such, her nomination should be rejected, if not setting her to face impeachment.
The lower house, the House of Representatives, of the Montana legislature in Helena in 2019.
A measure before the Montana legislature (LC 1551) would add Montana to the list of states calling for a Convention of the States to write and approve a Balanced Budget Amendment to the US Constitution. Once again, if the legislature approves the resolution, and two-thirds of the other states agree, we’ll put our faith in ink on paper to resolve our fiscal ills. If successful, watch the whole endeavor not change things a twit.
The principal problem with our federal government isn’t some structural defect in our Constitution. It’s the people that we elect. It would be true with or without the constitutional addition. Right now, littered throughout our federal behemoth are progressives who are dyed-in-the-wool evolutionists when it comes to words. Look at what they’ve done to the commerce clause and due process/equal protection provisions of the 14th Amendment. Limited and enumerated powers nearly became unlimited, with any enforceable restrictions hanging by the narrow thread of a black-robed jurist’s opinion. Ink on paper hasn’t stopped these people.
The fact of the matter is, if you want a better government, elect better people. Ink won’t correct for incompetent electoral choices.
Many jurisdictions have elected hordes of these linguistic gymnasts (progressives). When a convention is called, guess who’ll attend? It won’t be only people like you or me. Included will be people from AOC’s Twitter feed and all those from the many deep blue satraps. Any amendment will be massaged by this crowd’s fingers. Watch a balanced budget become a warrant to raise taxes. It’s the only reason that they’ll agree to the thing. Remember, a conservative’s goal is to restrain the federal government. Their ambition is to inflate it. The middle will be a license to increase taxes. In the end, we’ll be back to where we started. Depending on who is in power, we’ll still have either a bloated or restrained government. Nothing will have changed.
Structural gimmicks never work! California is a prime example. Reading parts of the California Constitution reads like a conservative’s dream. They’ve got a state balanced budget amendment, approved as Prop 58 in 2004 by a hefty 71% of the vote. It’s all just smoke and mirrors. Just reclassify legacy costs and debt out of the equation, along with a few other pricey tidbits, and a powerful progressive is home free. The highest taxed state became also the most fiscally incontinent.
They’ve got a “bi-partisan” redistricting commission that rubber stamps Democratic Party hegemony in the state for perpetuity. Prop 13 didn’t curtail the tax burden. They just inflated all the others. The state has terms limits written into their framework. It only replaced simple progressives with the zealous and foolish kind. Bad was made worse.
Conservatives won’t gain anything from adding more words to the Constitution. We’ll have wasted immense political capital on a wrong-headed endeavor, instead of increasing our presence in those blue enclaves to change their hue. Chasing mirages won’t change a thing. The facts on the ground remain the same. If you want a better government, elect better people.
Darrell Brooks’ SUV racing through the Waukesha Christmas parade.Victims on the ground in the wake of his passage.
Why the 2020 summer of riots, the chronic indulgence of violence and behavioral ugliness in our cities, the Rittenhouse trial, Waukesha, et al? Equity, baby, Equity.
Ibram X. Kendi (Ibram Henry Rogers), a godfather of Equity lingo: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination”.
Ibram X. KendiAlabama Gov. George Wallace standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama defying a federal court order in 1963.
Is Kendi’s governing principle that much different from George Wallace’s in 1963 when Wallace said, “. . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever”? Segregation, discrimination, they both draw distinctions based on melanin count, genitalia, bed partner, and many combinations thereof. And put an end to equality before the law. Think of Kendi as a black John C. Calhoun, the figurehead of a new discrimination.
Kendi (born in 1982) is proof that the caricature of the muddle-headed millennial is more than a caricature, and an embarrassment to the generational many who aren’t. Kendi’s goof-thought is hidden behind the façade of Equity. It’s wordplay. To this guy and his fellow delusionals, Equity is code for anger over things not turning out equal across the demography. The Equity word is cover for forced equality of outcome through blatant discrimination.
Calhoun, an unacknowledged Kendi mentor, has his mental fingerprints all over Equity. It found its way into the bloodstream of the past and present Democratic Party, back to LBJ, and the Biden administration in the form of militant affirmative action executive orders and banal press briefings. Remember “affirmative action”? In case you forgot, it conferred advantages to a gaggle of new honorees, the hackneyed “historically oppressed”. The camel’s nose poked under the tent.
It remained somewhat innocuous so long as it was restricted to government employment, contracting, and college admissions. Certainly, it was grossly unfair for anyone falling on the wrong side of the genital/color divide, but the ill-effects didn’t end up threatening your life. Not true now.
The forced leveling spread to criminal justice. Since crime stats aren’t equal across the color spectrum, they must be made to be equal, like the effort in admissions and employment. So, gambits such as refusals to prosecute, passage of no-cash bail laws, approval of propositions to lower a plethora of crimes to misdemeanors (California’s Prop 47), etc., sent a green light to miscreants everywhere. Equity suddenly became dangerous.
Kyle Rittenhouse brought into court for his trial in 2021.
These Equity enthusiasts are really into profiles. Kyle Rittenhouse was tossed into the Equity meat grinder because he clicked the bigoted bullet-pointed traits reserved for the vile by the ladies on The View: he’s white, male, and carried an “assault” rifle. Equity demanded that the immense resources of the state of Wisconsin be thrown at a 17-year-old because he fit the Equity industry’s enemy sketch. Self-defense be damned, the industry’s brain trust will rebrand it racist. The goal isn’t justice; it’s Equity in the form of a conviction and hard time. Think of this new age of lynching as a morality play for the self-anointed with a white guy in the noose this time. Everyone is expected to feel better, except, of course, the white guy in the dock.
If Equity requires that we must get a white guy no matter what, it also demands that we rebrand riots as “mostly peaceful protests” to herd all of society kicking and screaming to Equity. Tell that to David Dorn in St. Louis who was murdered by “mostly peaceful protesters”. Public authorities ordered police to withdraw and stand down; bail funds were established for looters and arsonists; DA’s refused to prosecute the hoodlums; and governors rejected requests for national guardsmen to restore order.
The murderer of David Dorn during the St. Louis riots.Retired St. Louis police captain David Dorn.
Once more, riots and mayhem – er, “peaceful protests” – are rebranded as noble endeavors to instill Equity. Tell that to a local businessperson – many are of the “other” – who must now stand before their life’s work in smoldering ruins.
People flee, and not just from California, as Equity’s disorder reigns. Corporate retail giants such as Walgreens and Target – and other paragons of the corporate woke – suddenly realized that “woke” looting, boarded up doors and windows, and smash-and-grab mobs aren’t healthy for the bottom line. That model of Equity rule, San Francisco, and playground for mob-shoplifting, has seen Walgreens close 22 stores. Target and Safeway cut hours to limit their exposure to Equity’s rampant revenge. Need I mention the recent mob assaults on Nordstrom and Louis Vuitton? Equity carries costs way beyond the price tag for gauzy corporate rainbow ads.
The real-world effects of Equity cause capital to look for the exits. For goons and lowlifes, Equity also supplements a widened exit door with a revolving one in the criminal justice system. The Equity logic (or illogic) demands that we can’t have too many convictions of one color. Turn ‘em loose, but bloody incidents inconveniently arise. Prime example: Darrell Brooks of Waukesha Christmas parade fame. After plowing through the Dancing Grannies, bands, and spectators, it came to light that this guy made “career” a functioning modifier attached to “criminal”.
The Brooks rap sheet extends back to 1999 and through a variety of violent interactions with others. It includes a lust for underaged girls and an outstanding warrant for his arrest. His savage history and penchant for jumping bail didn’t stop the Milwaukee DA, John Chisholm, from lowering his bail to $1,000 for using his weapon of choice, his SUV, on his girlfriend. A couple of weeks later, he showed up at the Christmas parade.
John Chisholm, Milwaukee DA, reduced bail to $1,000 for Darrell Brooks (r) before Brooks drove his vehicle into the Waukesha Christmas parade.
Chisholm (D) is a unique piece of work. He’s the DA who went after Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) and his staff in 2010 for rumors of illegal campaign coordination between Walker’s campaign and supportive PAC’s. Ironically, the insinuation is equally at home with Democrats. The fishing expedition uncovered nothing and was only closed this year. (Read about the case here)
Apparently, not a word was raised about the cozy relationship between Chisholm and his teachers’ union activist wife. In the heady days of 2010, Walker was trying to bring to heel the uncontrollable teachers’ unions and succeeded – a necessity that should be on the front burner of parents in California and Loudon County. The whole affair stinks of politics and shows Chisholm to be a swimmer in the currents of fashionable Democratic Party belief. Brooks’ easy release fits neatly into the Party’s Equity zealotry. Anyway, Brooks was out in the public to commit a mass casualty event thanks to the indulgence of Chisholm’s office.
See, Equity is an amorphous concept that can cover everything from race-conscious hiring and admissions to giving multiple opportunities for thugs to destroy our livelihoods and kill us. Equity should join communism on the ash heap of history but, alas, it is thriving in blue America. If Equity comes to your state and locality, move!
Jon Meacham (r) and Biden in split screen on the night of Biden’s November victory speech, which Meacham helped compose. Meacham also organized the historian conclave in March.
Pedigreed historians congregated in the White House earlier this year to arouse the latent inner-FDR that resides in the heart of any Democrat who happens to land in the oval office. Certainly, these guests aren’t solely responsible for what followed but they goaded it. What followed was an end to energy independence, unenforced borders, eco-fanaticism, neo-Marxist racialism, and WWII-scale spending bills in the face of galloping inflation. Gird your loins; we’ve seen this before and it wasn’t pretty.
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Politicians can be like football head coaches of prestigious teams. They are inflated with high expectations that seldom survive the first clash of shoulder pads. As a USC fan, oh how I know this. The players’ and coaches’ heads are filled with sycophantic praise by local big media. Then the indulged egos start to go bust by the first half of the first game.
Sounds like Biden and his social revolutionary inner-circle’s March meeting with politically sympathetic historians who were taking on the role of the lick-spittle sports media. In the room according to Axios were Doris Kearns Goodwin, and “Michael Beschloss, author Michael Eric Dyson, Yale’s Joanne Freeman, Princeton’s Eddie Glaude Jr., Harvard’s Annette Gordon-Reed and Walter Isaacson”. The Party revolutionaries don’t need much encouragement to upturn everything, but then in comes people with high reputation to incite them into doing what they are chomping at the bit to do anyway. Inevitably, they will face the truth of having no mandate in the paper-thin majorities in Congress and the 2020 presidential vote. Acting like they have one won’t change the reality.
If you want to know what’s wrong with your kids’ school, the answer walked into the White House on that 2021 March day. The history profession resembles what happened to the social sciences in general. They have become a vast apologia for fashionable and radical ideologies whose tentacles reach into a deep and abiding FDR-love. All history textbooks that I’m aware as a teacher (of almost 30 years) and Social Science Department chair worship FDR and the New Deal. None of them rate higher than a “C” – most are “D” or “F”; none are “A” or “B” – by the center-right Fordham Institute. Bluntly put, it’s indoctrination. The brainwashing makes it easy to fill the ranks of the activists in the Democratic Party and those burning Portland to the ground.
Antifa in Portland, 2020
In my role as a department chair and teachers union president, I pressed upon my superintendent the fact that we are making good little Democrats. Much like the blatherings of the revolutionaries in the current edition of the donkey party, none of the textbook Great Depression stories made any sense. Roosevelt gets elected and inaugurates feverish activity (the New Deals), and the Depression becomes Great, persisting for the rest of the 1930’s, then took a WWII hiatus as unemployment was cured by putting the jobless in uniform and employing them in making the weapons to destroy Germany and Imperial Japan (Italy was a nonentity by 1943), and was set to resume in 1946 after the wartime recess ended. After the surrenders, there’s not much of a demand for a Sherman tank in the garage or a Norton bombsite in the refrigerator’s spot. The ugly conditions were set to return but avoided by a relaxation of the wartime and New Deal taxes and controls.
Probably, the “illustrious” historians filled the heads of our mentally deficient president and his party’s big wheels with delusions of grandeur of being the next FDR, which will only produce the same miasma for the rest of us. Alongside a Fed currently greasing the skids of inflation through mismanagement of money supply (30% increase with more coming) and the raising of taxes and the reregulation of the economy, Biden and his Party promise another disaster.
Historians of many book deals should know better. But, sadly, they don’t. Don’t expect your kids’ school teachers to stand athwart the all-enveloping orthodoxy of falsehoods. In the end, we have tumult because a party with razor-thin majorities has been deluded into thinking that they can remake America like the earlier crowd around FDR. The only difference: FDR had a real mandate. This crowd doesn’t.
Overall, the lefty oldsters of the 1930’s made healthy exertions; they’re modern political progeny is trying again; and the American people will suffer . . . as in olden days. Same ol’ same ol’.
“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.” H.L. Mencken
Are the people pushing “Build Back Better” (BBB) proving Mencken right? As if we need any further examples, we’ve already got the person who nosed across the finish line first in the 2020 presidential derby sounding grossly incoherent on most matters, and especially on his bigger-than-WWII lollapalooza — the “BBB”. He’s not alone. Listen to Psaki at pressers, and Pelosi, Schumer, and the rest of the big wheels running the show in Congress.
Here’s the head-scratcher: How can you have “costs nothing” and “paid for” in conjoining sentences? They’ve said it regularly, and with a straight face. If it costs nothing, it’s free. Right? If it’s “paid for”, somebody, probably many somebodies, paid for it. Reality sets in. It will be taken out of one group’s hide to fatten the financial accounts of others, least of all the beneficiary down-and-outs.
The Congressional Budget Office just scored the latest edition of BBB. Surprise, it comes up short, way short. The DC capos (as in mafia “captain”) invented a number – $400 billion – from various BBB empowerments to the IRS. The CBO awakened the conjurers from their wet dream by downgrading the number to $120 billion. And this may be an overestimate since the law of unintended consequences will be unleashed as it was for LBJ’s Great Society of the 1960’s.
The poster child of the failures of the Great Society: the east side of Detroit as seen in a recent video.
Bear in mind that the whole shebang is designed to turn your life upside down and give you wasteful government services that you don’t want and won’t like. That’s not the end of it.
Just think, if it fuels inflation, interest rates rise and interest payments of the accumulated debt jump to new levels. Financing “paid for” will eat up the budget, and say goodbye to our blue water navy and a sane dollar. Of course, we could be a banana republic and repudiate the debt. It’s easy, don’t pay it, and we’re off to oblivion.
How do politicians lie? This way. Yep, our recent edition of the clowns is making Mencken’s point.
Have you been paying attention to the Rittenhouse trial? A frightening prospect is presenting itself. “Justice” is quickly becoming a handmaiden to a radical cause. Justice doesn’t look like justice. It looks like political vengeance. That’s because it’s Revolutionary Justice and not anything like the kind that you or I would recognize as justice.
The die was cast in summer 2020. Riots flared in American cities without a word of condemnation from one of America’s major political institutions, the Democratic Party. The party’s power elite sided with goons and mobs as businesses were torched, a dozen people or more were murdered on the streets, and entire downtowns resembled Richmond in 1865.
Richmond, 1865
Some of the party’s shrillest voices sounded like cheerleaders for the violence and cut checks to the bail funds for the arrested hooligans. One happens to be our sitting Vice President.
Kamala Harris, then presidential candidate, contributed to “Minnesota Freedom Fund” that bailed out arrested rioters in Minneapolis during the George Floyd riots.
In juxtaposition, the sword of something officially titled as justice is enthusiastically unsheathed against the politically unfashionable. The uncouth is defined by a cloistered cultural elite isolated in blue bubbles. Throw the book at Sitting Bull and his Capitol trespassers on January 6th and seek murder convictions against a 17-year-old defending himself from the kind of thugs who turned Kenosha, Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis into hellholes. Furthermore, if parents are unwilling to surrender their kids to the propaganda ministry’s commissars, the DOJ and its armed wing, the FBI, stand ready to force compliance.
Loudon County parents protesting before their school board
A counter-revolution is brewing. The National School Board Association’s letter to the DOJ alienated a good portion of their state affiliates. The group portrayed the protests of incensed parents to be the “the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes” in a letter to AG Garland. In coordination with the NSBA, Garland dutifully responded with an order to the FBI to coordinate a Parent Scare to rival A. Mitchell Palmer’s Red Scare of 1919-1920. That’s right, justice now means an enforced conformity to the party line.
AG Garland in testimony before Congress in October
*Update: The Garland memo to the FBI to investigate parent activities at local school board meetings was more than a response to the NSBA letter. Newly obtained documents indicate some level of coordination between the NSBA and the Biden White House in mid-September which was before the Garland/FBI memo in October. Read about it here.
It’s a bridge too far for many state school boards. 20 state associations have ended the relationship, suspended their dues payments, or in various ways are distancing themselves from the NSBA. The national group is taking on the same partisan branding as MLB, the NBA, the NFL, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, and Big Tech’s lunchrooms in this period of radical political fervor. Buying a ticket or soft drink, and showing up at a school board meeting, is either a political act or will draw the gaze of the ever-watchful eyes of the commissars of state security.
Yesterday, the judge in the Rittenhouse trial was clearly fuming about prosecutorial misconduct. Prosecution witnesses sounded like defense witnesses. Wisconsin is an open-carry state; even the restrictions on minors is nebulous to say the least. Sum it up: regardless of the jury’s verdict under mob threat, obvious conditions of self-defense exonerate the kid under our time-honored rules of justice.
Astonishingly, knowing the shoddy nature of their case, prosecutors may be trying to incite the judge into ordering a mistrial without prejudice; meaning a retrial to torture the kid more. It’s scandalous.
We’ve had much experience with “revolutionary” justice. It came in the form of the Reign of Terror’s tribunals in the France of 1793-4. The guillotine was made a popular totem. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and lesser miscreants holding to the same creed left mounds of dead and archipelagos of gulags in service to it. One group of French scholars put the death toll at around 100 million in the 20th century’s long-running flirtation with Marx-inspired “justice”. Following their lead, the woke universe’s hitching of justice to their political crusade is leading us to a repetition of the nightmare.
Lavoisier’s trial. Historical artwork of the French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) being tried during the French Revolution by a radical, revolutionary tribunal. Lavoisier (standing, at left) was one of the leading French scientists and the father of modern chemistry. He was prosecuted because he had been a tax official, even though he had tried to introduce reforms. The president of the tribunal claimed that ‘the Republic has no need of scientists’. Lavoisier was guillotined on 8 May 1794.
Veterans, on this Veterans Day, is this what you were fighting for?
What’s in store for us in the not-too-distant future? The tea leaves before us aren’t so encouraging.
Most of the threats to our well-being emanate from our imagination running wild, but the resulting anxiety seriously alters our behaviors. Among the troubling trends is the possibility of hysterics routinely finding a home in government policy. The corresponding shocks to our workaday lives promise an endemic decline in the standard of living. The disruptions in our economic lives foretells disorder in our social, cultural, and religious spheres. Psychologically, we’ll forever be scarred by a gripping fear of contagions and hypothetical health crises. Crises, mostly imaginary, won’t be limited to the next virus. An accelerant for a mindset of terror is seen in the steady drumbeat of more speculative dooms. Our progeny will be swept up in it. In addition, progressive authoritarianism is waiting in the wings which will play havoc with our settled legal and political arrangements. The list may not be long enough, but it’s sufficient to present a vision that should keep you awake at night.
And, just think, we’re doing it to ourselves. No external enemy need apply as agent.
The response to corona pointed the way. A population now inured to mandatory isolations will find it easier to fall in line in regards to more mundane contagions to follow. The flu vaccine is taking on the rhetorical trappings of the COVID vaccine in popular media and public health bureaucracies. Reality could easily follow the rhetoric. Soon, masking, social distancing, stay-at-home orders, and business and school closures could be a recurring feature of life. A society in the perpetual grip of fear is one on the cusp of disintegration . . . or conquest.
Don’t expect an economy to thrive in this condition of instability. Investing for the long term will be replaced by retrenchment – the focus on the protection of life, immediate family, and assets. Hunkering down will be the order of the day, not the rambunctious risk-taking that makes for the economic expansion that is necessary to absorb the coming generations. The uncertainty could set the stage for a revival of medievalism, its increasing isolation, and a corresponding decline in the quality of life.
Look around you. Our quality of life is under stress. Shortages abound either due to hording, a lack of labor, or government’s infatuation with environmentalism’s inbred prejudice against commerce and its energy needs. COVID is the excuse to retard business activity while at the same time bribing much of the workforce to stay home with inflated government benefits.
What happens to the social maturation of children in this atmosphere of isolation? What happens to young adults when dating customs becomes more cumbersome? What then happens to marriage and the birthrate? What happens to family and friends when the holidays are zoomed? And, indeed, for adolescents and young adults, when education is zoomed? Graduating high school seniors at the junior high educational level does not bode well for upward mobility or social peace. Feudal-sized gaps in educational attainment will appear as the richer demographic cohorts utilize their willingness and means to break free of the straitjacketed and zoomed public schools.
Of course, that education will be increasingly festooned with the hysterias-of-the-moment. “Climate change” is at the top of the list. Evidence strongly suggests that “climate change” is happening and man has a role, with the pollution-belching power plants of China and India as the chief suspects: 2.8 billion in combined population, 35% of the world’s total humanity, and developing an affection for air conditioning and upwardly-mobile jobs.
The burning of coal at a Chinese steel plant.
But how much of a role? The widely parroted eco-apocalypse is a stretch to say the least, and any benefits – longer growing season, CO2 as fertilizer – largely ignored. Off-the-shelf mitigations – sun screen, more efficient housing design, natural gas/nuclear/hydro power – are readily available. And all this riding on a projected 1.1° C increase by the end of the century. Even this prognostication is more of a WAG (wild a** guess) or SWAG (affix numbers to the wild a** guess) than anything else. The extent of man’s role, the intensity of impact of GHG (greenhouse gases), and longevity of the temp spike is more up in the air (no pun intended) than is admitted. Yet, it’s hair-on-fire time. And off we go to a mutilation of our way of life, all made more palatable by the opinionated lab coats in the CDC or the University of East Anglia.
The craziness extends beyond a politicized science. The politicized lab is an indicator of the reign of progressive authoritarianism throughout the high status, elite sectors of our society. Much has been written on this. Muscular progressivism has become a status marker and overwhelmingly dominant in top drawer institutions. Society’s upper echelons are an ideological and social monoculture maintained through intermarriage (homogamy) and discrimination. It shows up everywhere from the Ivy League to the campus of Google to the boardrooms of the multinationals to the faculty senate to the newsroom to the people around the broadcast camera and movie studio. It’s ubiquitous and exceedingly stifling.
Prejudice abounds. Surveys from 2019 and 2020 show rising ideological intolerance among the self-designated “better” people; the most perfidious bigotry comes from the much larger progressive-left cohort. Dating sites such as eHarmony show a greater prevalence for partisan affiliations as filters: the left refusing to have romantic relationships with the right in much greater percentages than the other way around.
Not only are student bodies increasingly radical-left but they’ll easily jettison “free speech” for something tyrannically defined as “safety”. The “safety” is a euphemism for the abstracted threats to fashionable and recently-minted victim groups. The threat to that “safety” is the feeling of rejection by the alleged victim from someone simply expressing disbelief for their claim of victimhood and self-description. At this point, “safety” is cover for thought control when it’s translated into speech codes, “safe spaces”, and into curriculum. And today’s twenty-somethings and younger are four-square behind it.
The thinking muddles institutional autonomy and individual autonomy. Popularly elected legislatures and governors are castigated for trying to restrict an institution’s power to trample individual rights at the insistence of a radical student clique. Ironies of all ironies: institutional academic freedom is transmuted into a prohibition of basic individual rights.
The prejudice and bigotry of the young will be carried into their adult lives. Whether it be the classroom, tenure, boardroom, government, or employment, power positions will be the province of the progressive-left. If you want an example of the Kendi’s marriage of prejudice and power, here it is, albeit without the race-obsession. Here’s systemic bigotry staring back at them in the mirror. They have met the enemy and it is them.
What does this mean for our constitutional order? It means a simultaneous mixture of “expert” authoritarianism (meaning more power for people like them) and the dismantlement of hesitant Constitutional institutions such as a conservative Court, the Senate, and Electoral College. Anything is laid waste if it stands athwart the left’s path to the holy land of self-defined “equity”.
NEW YORK, NY – OCTOBER 25: People march across the Brooklyn Bridge to protest the Covid-19 vaccine mandate for municipal workers on October 25, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)
To make the revolution permanent, unchecked and unassimilated immigration and control of the schools is essential for guaranteeing a pliable electorate. Empowered by a socially engineered electorate, the country’s traditional principles and ideals will end up on the trash heap for this permanent governing class. No more is justice to be fair – i.e., blind and neutral. Lady Justice must peek under her blindfold to grant favorable rulings to people of the right race, genitalia, gender self-designation, or intersectionality (combination) of any of the previous. No more is there to be fealty to equal protection of the laws. Far from it. Awards and penalties are to be assigned by race, et al. Paying heed to the geographical and cultural diversity (real diversity) of the country through federalism or other governing institutions will be discarded for the imposition of a left-wing conformity from an administrative center (DC). Consensual government is transformed into the North Korean kind. Elections will be of the perfunctory type.
Others, many more than I, have raised the alarm. Our world is changing before our eyes, and not in a wholesome way. At root, many of our young people are proving that an education can make you stupid as well as wise. The breadth and depth of understanding of past generations is lacking. In the end, many college graduates manifest the traits of a cult. They have beliefs that are, in essence, unexamined assumptions, unprovable and highly questionable. And to think that this is the generation that threatens to sweep way the legacy of a thousand of years.
“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34)
And so, many of you might still say that we have nothing to fear. Really?
A shopper walks past empty shelves where bread is normally displayed in a supermarket, Sunday, March 15, 2020, in Boston. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
The April, 8, 1966 issue of Time magazine had as its cover story “Is God Dead?”. No, He isn’t dead but increasingly many have relegated Him to the attic with the rest of the old bric-a-brac. Nature hates a vacuum and so do we in our lives. When God is dethroned, the state will be enthroned. Well, alas, it came fully to pass, thanks to the pandemic.
If we should have learned anything from the 20th century, we should have grasped the obvious reality that the state is a very poor repository of our hopes and dreams. Central planning was a catastrophe both in material and immaterial ways. Most of us knew this; yet here we are: galloping inflation, a labor supply willingly eschewing labor, authoritarianism everywhere, and empty store shelves. We’re starting to look like those 1970’s photographs of the Soviet people queuing up to enter Soviet stores to find . . . nothing much.
Soviet citizens waiting outside a Soviet store in the 1970’s.1970’s Russian shopper looking at an empty meat cooler.
How did we get here? Look no further than the frantic reaction to the virus. Please excuse me for crowing a bit but back in March 2020, I bellowed that we ought not be doing this. The “this” is the extended lockdowns, the silly parsing of “essential” from “nonessential”, universal and mandatory masking, rampant social distancing, business and school closures, and an end to social and organized religious life. We are now paying the piper for this sin, and a host of others which accreted like barnacles to our ship’s hull.
We got to central planning through the back door. The Bolsheviks, instead, simply banged down the front door. We nurtured ours over a century-plus, and when COVID hit, the “crisis too good to waste” brought out in full regalia the inner autocrat. Concentrating power over things large and small in the hands of a Bill DeBlasio, Gavin Newsom, or Joe Biden runs square into Hayek’s knowledge problem: no small group of people has the knowledge and expertise to manage something as varied and multitudinous as a nation’s economy. In the end, crap will happen. And it did.
Ships waiting for entry off the California coast.
Some blame the 95 cargo ships lining up outside the ports of Long Beach and San Pedro on the Longshoreman’s Union. Granted, their featherbedding and labor contracts can make life a living hell. Some mention the neglect of our nation’s ports. Some could rightly point the finger at the eco-craziness of California’s war on diesel trucks and trains – and anything fossil fuel that keeps us warm and gets us to work. I don’t know of many interstate truckers who relish driving in the state. All true, but all of it preceded the current mess and shelves were brimming at the time.
Biden and company have hit upon the canard of trying to convince us that a mess isn’t a mess, but is actually a sign of good times. It’s gaslighting as state PR. This headscratcher ignores his role in bribing workers to stay home. Drive around in that over-priced electric car of yours and you’ll see Help Wanted signs as ubiquitously as Biden/Harris 2020 yards signs in the DC metropolitan area. Employers will take anyone breathing, and maybe not.
Need more be said?
What of his – and the rest of the Democrat gubernatorial lineup – mandates and threats? It’s hard to run a business when suffocating the workforce behind masks and forcing unwanted vax jabs on the 30% who are reluctant. Who’d want to come back to work? Better to take the unemployment comp festooned with an extra $300 a week and enjoy the extended staycation.
Economic life is disrupted. And once down, overburdened with a dump truck load of taxes and regulations, it can’t get up. Like the weightlifter, we can add the weights to the bar when he’s already erect with it. But from a deadlift? The hysterical reaction to the virus knocked the economy down and they piled dumbbells on the corpse. The result is the long line of ships waiting offshore and ships’ anchors tearing holes in pipelines, which will be used to further the war on fossil fuels. Go figure.
Go ahead, don’t let God get in your way, continue to replace the old priesthood with the credentialed “expert” and their computer models, and welcome to the Soviet lifestyle.
