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Democracy, Schmuckocracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Northern California county tops national list for unaffordable housing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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RogerG

Sources:

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

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Biden’s Decline Is Part of a Bigger Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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RogerG

Sources:

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

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The Limits of the Protected/Unprotected Paradigm

John Kerry Windsurfs On A Sea Of Tears After Trump’s Iran Deal Pullout | The Daily Caller
The Protected: John Kerry windsurfing
East Palestine Residents Chant 'No More Joe,' Wave 'Trump Won' Flags - Slay News
The Unprotected: residents of East Palestine, Ohio, waving Trump flags, Feb. 2023

Peggy Noonan’s growing “political dynamic” of our times (from 2016):

“There are the protected and the unprotected.  The protected make public policy.  The unprotected live in it …. The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it.  They are protected from much of the roughness of the world.  More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created [emphasis in the original].”

Peggy Noonan: Trump 'is the problem,' not his staff
Peggy Noonan in a speech from 2017

She’s right, and it should gall anyone with half a brain.

************

I had a little time Wednesday, 1/3/24, while exercising to listen to Hugh Hewitt’s radio show.  He inspired me to take a third look at Peggy Noonan’s piece from 2016, “Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected” (see below).  Hewitt used the article as a launching point to discuss the fall of Claudine Gay, the disgraced president of Harvard.  His point was that the vast majority of working Americans don’t care squat about the problems of a Harvard president.  If anything, the episode reminds the common person of the rank favoritism of those who have placed themselves above the mire that they have made for everyone else.  Good point, but it only goes so far.

Lets’ face it, Gay was not hired for her high achievements in scholarship or administrative skill.  She fit the new ideologically laced identity standards of our insulated, self-anointed aristocracy: black, female, immigrant-affiliated, and predictably left-wing.  She fits the superficial bill.  She was placed on a fast track to a fully tenured professorship, Dean of the Arts and Sciences, and the Harvard presidency.  Yet, she’s an empty suit with a checkered resumé.  It should rankle the parents of any working-class kid who was booted for the same infractions committed by the appointed sovereign of Harvard College, one whose academic accomplishments are extremely thin and plagued by charges of academic fraud, plagiarism (see below).

The disgraced Claudine Gay, and protected, at a Harvard graduation

Don’t think for a moment that she’s relegated to a bread line after her resignation.  She’ll still garner $900,000 a year as a Harvard professor.  She’s protected no matter how bad she’s been.  If that doesn’t pore salt into the open wound of the “unprotected”, nothing will.

Yet, where does the recognition of this new political battle line take us?  Nowhere, and fast.

Politically, it could easily end in a disaster.  Are the animated “unprotected” sufficient in number to constitute a governing electoral majority?  Recent history makes that possibility very tenuous.  The Trump victory of 2016 was by the skin of his teeth.  With narrow majorities for both parties in Congress during his term, it teetered wildly between Reaganite measures and Trump impeachment.  By 2018 and 2020, the Republican congressional footprint shrunk.  The expected GOP banner year of 2022 would go down as the Great Disappointment.  It is apparent that a rebellion of the bellicose “unprotected” isn’t enough.  Plus, you have to factor into the political calculus what is lost in a stance catering to the shrillest in those ranks.

And that brings me to Donald Trump.  As a character on our political stage, he’s both the middle finger to the “protected” and repulsive, repugnant to large swaths of the voting public open to the GOP being the antidote to the left-wing lunacy coming from our so-called “betters”( the “protected”), the supporting mass of the Democrats’ progressivism.  Is the goal of a political campaign to win or simply be a stage for venting?  Losing leaves only the wallowing in wild conspiratorial excuses.

Chief among the excuses is the charge that the system is rigged.  It is, and the complainers (the “unprotected”) are right to be up in arms.  The pandemic brought it all into the spotlight.  Protests for thee but not for me.  Private and open schools for thee and closed ones and distance-learning for my kids.  Then, parents learned of the hard-core porn and neo-Marxist indoctrination that were being inculcated into their children.  The “unprotected” experienced the loss of one to two years of learning while the “protected” raced forward in their exclusive private academies.  Small and medium businesses were shuttered and jobs lost leaving a monopoly for the bigs.  Cops closing down church services as rioters were free to torch the downtowns and federal courthouses from one megalopolis to the next.  2020 to 21 was a disgrace, courtesy of the “protected”.

Time to Adjust COVID-19 Restrictions

Plato Academy Palm Harbor closed due to COVID-19, will reopen Friday

Though, admittedly, the rigged-system charge sounds eerily like the banal Marxist complaint, the one wholly embraced by the “protected” Left.  When a complaint goes “systematic”, that’s carte blanche to tear down the society, the system, a totalitarian uprising.  This time from the right, Donald Trump hinted as much when he suggested that his followers should not adhere to the niceties of the Constitution.  To correct the alleged fraud of his election loss, on Truth Social in late 2022, Trump called for “the termination of all rules . . . even those found in the Constitution” (see below).  He quickly took a rhetorical two-step away from it.  But still, root-and-branch actions to upend the “system” was broached by a figurehead on the Right.  The Constitution to the woke snowflakes is a white man’s slavery compact. For Trumpers, and Trump himself, it is a compact for sinecures of the “protected” Left and election fraud.  For both sides, the ends justify the means.  History is not encouraging about the repercussions of that tact.

I’m not quite ready for the Hobbesian life of solitary, nasty, brutish, and short outside the rule of law.  Yet, that’s a possible destination for the country for both sides.

As we head into election season 2024, the faces of both parties – Biden and Trump – appear ugly to overwhelming numbers of voters.  It’s a battle of the repulsive.  FiveThirtyEight’s list of current polls consistently register disgust.  Media and the incendiary commentariat focus on the head-to-head matchup.  Trump is up, Biden is down, but regardless, 52% to 55% consistently view both with a jaundiced eye (see below).  If Biden v. Trump II was pay-for-view, the investors would face a ratings disaster.

In tamer debate, Trump and Biden clash (again) on president’s pandemic response | Salon.com

My worry is the down-ballot.  If Trump should win, it won’t be by much, and he won’t have coattails, never has.  If Biden wins, ditto.  If elected, I expect Trump to be immediately impeached if the Democrats ascend to the majority in the House and Senate.  If roles were reversed and Biden wins, Republicans will impeach not only Biden but his entire cabinet, leaving the VP to giggle and uptalk her way through the next four years.  Unitary GOP government would give us more chief executive flamboyance and impulsiveness, and Trump isolationism and protectionism.  Unitary donkey party rule will be an attempt to turn the country into California.  Either way, the “unprotected” will get screwed either as part-and-parcel of them getting what they want – Trump elected and proving the failure of protectionism, isolationism, and chaos in the executive once again – or being the target of command-and-control social engineering after another Trump election failure and more donkey party eco-totalitarianism.

The “unprotected”, by themselves, don’t make an electoral majority.  Their middle finger to the “protected”, in the person of Donald Trump, is repugnant to the vast center of the electorate.  The goal of politics in democracies is to win and the “unprotected” don’t have the numbers by themselves.  Trump is a divisive figure, not a unifying one.  After all, he’s a middle finger, not a statesman.  Thus, by default, given the narrow appeal of the orange man, the “protected” have a good chance of remaining protected and in power to continue to make hash of our lives.  We need to move beyond a mere repeat of the same contest and practice a little more election calculus.  The equation ends in the unavoidable conclusion: if the “unprotected” want protection, first, win elections!

RogerG

Sources:

* “Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected”, Peggy Noonan, originally published in the Wall Street Journal, 2/25/2016, at https://peggynoonan.com/trump-and-the-rise-of-the-unprotected/

* “Is Claudine Gay a Plagiarist?”, Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet, 12/10/23, at https://christopherrufo.com/p/is-claudine-gay-a-plagiarist

* “Trump Backtracks On Calling For ‘Termination’ Of Constitution Following Backlash”, Sara Dorn, Forbes, 12/5/22, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2022/12/05/trump-backtracks-on-calling-for-termination-of-constitution-following-backlash/?sh=7118d1d74161

* FiveThirtyEight latest polls at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/

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The Red Wave that Wasn’t. Thank You, Donald J. Trump.

Republican election night party in Washington, D.C., at 9:15 pm EST on 11/8/22. (photo: Luther Abel/National Review)
Republican election night party in Washington, D.C., at 2:45 am EST on 11/9/22. (photo: Luther Abel/National Review)

“Populist” Republican voters made Trump appear to be a winner in the 2022 primaries. Now, with the midterm election results trickling in, not so much. Trump is a millstone around the neck of the party. I once compared Trump’s antics during his term in office as the big man in a basketball starting lineup, not known for his outside shooting, miraculously making a 3-pointer at the start of the game and for the rest of the game, he’s throwing bricks from the 3-point line rather than playing strong inside. Trump actually thought his 2016 surprise victory was an endorsement of his behavior; so, he repeated it throughout his term and thereafter. Well, the same analogy applies to a significant part of the GOP’s base, and now it’s this “populist” constituency who is tossing bricks.

“Trumpian” became a popular word, a compliment, in the lexicon of some. It’s popularity, however, is only discernable in a narrow socio-political silo, places of rabid confirmation bias like all such cloisters. I’ve often complained of the blue bubbles or silos. There are also red ones. Opinions are constantly reinforced and a person quickly loses sight of the fact that not everyone sees the world like them. The implausible appears plausible, and the boorish and disgusting are distorted into the attractive. These clusters are carnival funhouses of warped mirrors.

Former President Donald Trump talks to the press on the grounds of his Mar-a-Lago resort on midterm elections night in Palm Beach, Florida, November 8, 2022. (photo: Ricardo Arduengo/Reuters)

That said, the country should be as frightened of the Democrat mantra of “Save our democracy” as many are of Trump. What democracy? What kind of “democracy” are the Democrats trying to save? We know that they are opposed to almost any accountability checks in elections: voter ID, regular and mandatory cleanup of the registration rolls, and efforts to ban the fraud-laden practice of ballot harvesting or place restrictions on open and broad mail-in voting. The Republican chant of “easy to vote, hard to cheat” is essentially countered by the Democrats’ “easy to vote, easy to cheat”. Whose voice is being recorded here? Frankly, it’s getting harder to say.

The core of the problem is the first half of both parties’ chant: “easy to vote”. No, it shouldn’t be hard, but it depends on what is meant by “hard”. Is it “hard” to expect people to be willing to break away from the Xbox to trundle down to the polling place to cast their “voice”? Is it hard to expect some civic and issue literacy before a person casts their vote? Instead, it’s just “vote, vote, vote”. The NFL during broadcasts pushed the mantra, even going so far as to turn their stadiums into repositories of ballots from God knows where and God knows who. These aren’t polling places staffed by neighbors with a list of registered voters from the neighborhood. Ballots come in from everywhere, overwhelmingly mail-in, which are the most problematic in terms of “one person, one vote”. Who knows who’s marking the things once they’re taken inside a domicile, later to be harvested by activists.

I doubt if Americans understand how freakishly unusual our voting procedures have become in a country who prides itself in being the gold standard of “democracy” . . . or how similar we’ve become to Third World kleptocracies, totalitarian “democracies”, and brutal thuggeries like Putin’s Russia. When mail-in voting replaces in-person, with many other now-legalized loosey-goosey practices, we are depressing the incentives for the serious voter, serious enough to get off their tush to go down the few blocks to a voting booth. Why vote only to have it canceled by a semi-literate blockhead?

The trends according to MIT should be considered shocking (see chart below). In 1992, 8% of ballots cast were mail-in. In 2020, it’s about half. And many of those are in states with no-excuse or universal, automatic broadcasting of ballots through the mail. And to think that most of it is from dirty registration rolls. Could it get any murkier?

May be an image of text that says 'Ballots cast by modes of voting over time 90% 75% 60% %0 aaterr 45% 30% 15% Early, person Election Day Mail/absentee 0% 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 2012 2016 2020 Year Source: Voting and Registration Supplement the Current Population Survey (1992 2018) Survey Performance American Elections (2020) h/'

Israel restricts about 95% of its voting to in-person. Exceptions are only allowed for certain military or diplomatic personnel. We’ve gone the other way toward a government of whom?, by whom?, and for whom?

Advantage, Democrats. Why? They control the culture and the messaging to low-information, unmotivated voters. The Netflix viewership is primed for the Democrats’ childish themes of oppression and meanie white guys in suits. Low-information and unmotivated voters can be found across the spectrum, but the Democrats, I suspect, have richer veins to mine.

As of this writing, it isn’t all bleak news for Republicans. Many races are still undecided. It must be admitted, though, that the Republicans always had a cultural/media headwind to fight. Now, they must admit that have a Trumpian one to contribute to the gust.

Expect two more years of “wrong track”!

I’ll have more to say later after the dust clears.

RogerG

Read more here:

* “Voting By Mail and Absentee Voting”, MIT, March 2021, at https://electionlab.mit.edu/research/voting-mail-and-absentee-voting .

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

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Here’s a story for you.  University of South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley refuses to admit that she was mistaken in recently cancelling her team’s basketball games with BYU.  In a statement to a reporter, she said, “I continue to stand by my position.”

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Dawn Staley, University of South Carolina women’s basketball coach

Why cancel games with BYU?  Staley was reacting to a charge by a Duke University volleyball player, Rachel Richardson, who claimed some BYU fans heckled her with racial slurs.  An exhaustive review by BYU of all available video and audio recordings and interviews with over 50 nearby spectators uncovered no evidence of the insults.  Still, Staley refuses to back down.  Why cling to an unfounded decision in spite of the evidence?  She isn’t the only one.  Lately, over at least a decade, and more incidents recently, we’ve gone through mass derangements over climate change, systemic racism, and COVID.  Facts don’t matter.  Despite, or maybe because of, trillions spent on education and the most intense networks of information ever devised, we seem not to be particularly inoculated from mass psychosis.

Investors should be aware of this thing called mass psychosis, typically referred to as mass formation psychosis.  It happens in markets and occurs anywhere a large group of interconnected people exists.  One source defined it in the following way:

“Psychosis is when people lose some contact with reality.  Mass formation psychosis is when a large part of a society focuses its attention to a leader(s) or a series of events and their attention focuses on one small point or issue.  Followers can be hypnotized and be led anywhere, regardless of data proving otherwise.  A key aspect of the phenomena is that the people they identify as the leaders – the one’s that can solve the problem or issue alone – they will follow that leader(s) regardless of any new information or data.  Furthermore, anybody who questions the leader’s narrative are attacked and disregarded.” (Source: see below)

Evidence, proof, and real scientific inquiry are abandoned.  Take the long-running issue of climate change with the adjective “apocalyptic” added for good measure.  Beyond the reasonable assertion on the contribution of CO2 and fossil fuels, much else strays into the realm of speculation or mysticism.  So many other questions on the subject – other contributing factors, their interplay, and impacts – cannot be answered with reasonable certainty, unless pure ideological bias qualifies for seasoned judgment.  How’s that any different from the Heaven’s Gate cult?  Besides, flagellating the most fuel efficient and clean society on the planet – ours – is pointless as over 2.8 billion people in China and India discover the joys of rising incomes, air conditioning, and affordable transportation.  All made possible from the majesty of fossil fuels.

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Biden’s Climate Special Envoy, John Kerry, disembarks his private jet.

John Kerry is paid by us to jet around the world to cajole foreign rulers whose interests do not align with his fellow comfortable elites in their super-zip estates.  He must be seen by them as a clown to be tolerated, maybe indulged a bit for photo-ops, but otherwise ignored.

John Kerry’s model is California.  The cliché has it that California leads the way to the future.  Maybe so, if that future is characterized by a mass psychosis in the mysticism of climate change.  The rest of the country gets a bird’s-eye view of that fate.  The state’s grid has been turned into a health hazard as the landscape dries out from the dry-summer climate’s periodic droughts.  The state has made it difficult for anyone to clean out the surface debris in its wildlands, and 100 million dead trees await a spark.  And eventually one will be provided by nature or from one of the state’s many urchins from its urban chaos.

The same psychosis that has turned the state into a fire trap is utterly destroying any concept of reliable, affordable energy.  The altar of wind and solar isn’t a sensible means to appease Gaia.  They are intermittent by nature, which strains the grid.  Power lines are made for steady streams of electricity, not the boom and bust that is endemic in sunlight and bursts of air movement.  Any grid under this steady strain breaks down if not assiduously maintained, which it isn’t.  It just so happens, though, that California experiences an annual 5-month dry spell, alongside its endemic droughts, for the ruptures to send thousands fleeing the attendant flames hoping that they have enough charge in their EV to escape death-by-firestorm.

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A California driver fleeing the Camp Fire in Paradise, Ca., in 2018.

But don’t let the facts get in the way.

California is a self-made disaster.  Their infatuation with air movement and sunlight energy has unknowingly made them dependent on steady-stream sources – fossil fuel, co-gen, hydro, nuclear – to buck up the losses from the night and calm days.  But the state is busy torpedoing most of this backbone.  Co-gen is mostly irrelevant.  For the state’s ruling class, natural gas and coal are the devil’s brew.  Hydro is undermined by eco-mandates for steady stream flows that has helped to turn the state’s reservoirs into puddles.  Don’t only blame the drought.  Every year is not a drought year, and no effort is made to store during the wetter times.  Riparian habitats and dreams of the return of ancient salmon runs checkmate any other use.

The state’s dams have become the equivalent of Egypt’s pyramids.  They are monumental but, as opposed to the pyramids, aren’t likely to attract many visitors three-quarters empty.  The same fate has befallen the state’s two nuclear power plants: San Onofre and Diablo Canyon.  Delayed maintenance while the state bullied the utilities into greenie fantasies put the kibosh to San Onofre, which cost the state 2.2 gigawatts of power.  Diablo Canyon was scheduled for death in 2025.  Blackouts have forced the state’s ruling party to back down on that one.  How long?  Well, it’ll probably remain open until the next spate of wet years gin up hydro for awhile, waiting for the next dry spell to once again reasserts itself to overtax the seas of solar panels and vast windmill forests that mar a once beautiful state.  It’s a cycle of futility buttressed by a mass psychosis: a mystical belief in horrors that fact, reason, and science cannot dispel.

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A truck crosses a bridge over the shrinking Lake Oroville, the headwaters of the California Water Project, in a photo from July 2022.

None of this matters one twit to the zealots who run the state.  Evidence be damned.  Electoral majorities in the state are in the grip of a mass mania that jettisons all reason and fact.  All that remains is blackouts, skyrocketing electricity rates, hillsides aflame, and no effect on climate change.

Would it be better to simply enjoy the extended growing season and build more nuclear and low-emission power plants to enjoy the glories of air conditioning?  Regardless, India and China will see to it that CO2 emissions continue to glut the atmosphere with or without the ministrations of John Kerry or the ladies on The View.

Climate change isn’t the only opportunity to go crazy.  We have another one in “systemic racism”.  What is systemic racism?  Does it exist?  Hard to say since “systemic” means that it is hidden and therefore not directly observable.  Thus, we have to rely on others to simply announce its existence as they make an affluent living on their soothsaying.

The racism “experts” are actually grifters.  Racial disparities occur in all sorts of areas such as incarceration rates, educational outcomes, birth rates, marriage, incomes, and social status.  Thus, they insist that racism persists, but not in the Jim Crow way: obvious, in-your-face, and therefore open to rational inquiry.  It’s easier for them to proclaim that the disparities are the proof of racism, even though they haven’t proven it, because they can’t, because the imprecision of the thing makes it immune to empirical testing (falsifiability).  The “ghost in the machine” kind of thing.  Instead, they claim to possess the special gnosis to expose it and how to remediate it as they go to the bank with thousands, if not millions, in book sales, consultant fees, and speeches.  A new industry of charlatans is born.  It’s as if astrology and the four humors in medicine are making a comeback.

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Kimberle Crenshaw

The parallels with medieval medicine are glaring.  People in earlier times noticed that fevers were reduced by bleeding a patient.  The ancient Greek philosopher Galen and his four-humors paradigm was proven correct, or so they thought.  It was, however, the classic post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc fallacy at work: two events occur sequentially with the first one assumed to be the cause.  For our current race hustlers – Kimberle Crenshaw, Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DeAngelo, et al – systemic racism is proven by unequal outcomes by race.  Poor educational outcomes on assessment tests by race, for instance, must mean that the test and its providers are “systemically” racist.  It’s tantamount to saying, “Fever fell after bleeding, and patient is cured.”  It’s nonsense.

Still, two full seasons after the death of George Floyd, “End Racism” dons the helmets of some NFL players.  Viewers and our kids are barraged by the effort to ferret out something mysteriously within them and lurking in everything that surrounds them.  It’s tantamount to the 17th century Salem witch trials in the modern form of a bogeyman in a Klan outfit.

The whole campaign rides on the inequalities in academic measures by race.  The cause is presumed – racism – but only because “family structure” is excluded.  Kids swim around in social circumstances that have greater impact on academic performance than melanin count or more money in the bank accounts of the NEA membership.  Commissioned by the US Office of Education in 1966, the Coleman Report levelled a blow at the ego of the education industry’s special interests when it concluded, “. . . the inequalities imposed on children by their home, neighborhood, and peer environment are carried along to become the inequalities with which they confront adult life at the end of school.”  Yep, chaotic home life and slums have greater bearing on admission to MIT than school funding, teacher salaries, and the racism bogeyman.  But you won’t find outcomes by family structure anywhere in the various measures.  Strange.  You’ll see math, reading, and science scores by race, gender, ethnicity, economic status, etc., but nary a word about the home.

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Chicago police at a crime scene comforting a child in a photo taken in 2020.

The missing link between the social measures and their cause is never filled with anything resembling empirical proof.  Unequal stats by race are said to automatically point to racism.  That’s it, and we’re off to the races to follow the “experts” in the secret gnosis.  COVID gave to us another example of the same phenomena: trust the “experts” to fill the gap between a development and its treatment.

Filling the shoes of Kimberle Crenshaw, one of the overpaid founders of CRT, is Dr. Fauci and his peers in government, the NGO’s, many in BIG Pharma, Democratic Party potentates, et al.  The lockdowns, school closures, mandatory masking, social distancing, the vaccine decrees, the overall suffocation of a society, were persistently avowed without a real scientific basis.  Other approaches to maintain the functioning of civilization and protect the vulnerable were treated to covert and tacit censorship.  Therapeutics, targeting safeguards on those with certain health conditions, natural immunity, the costs to children, the canceled or forgone medical appointments, the strain on a population quarantined in the four walls of their home (many more walls if you live in the super-zips), and the huge economic losses from the waterboarding of work and production were shunted aside in a mad rush to stamp out the virus, the very opposite of “follow the science”.

Once the “experts” had their foot on the pedal, they never let up, in spite of the growing evidence that they were prescribing a suicide pill.  By summer 2020, it was widely established that the young ran little risk.  So, forcing kids into filthy masks and into isolation behind plexiglass in schools that opened their doors was more than pointless.  It was harmful.  The schools most beholden to the blinkered “experts” were in Democrat strongholds, the inner cities, and they closed the longest.  The academic performance gap morphed into a Grand Canyon.  To no great surprise, the principal victims of this enthusiastic pursuit of school lockdowns and other tortures were minorities, putting a lie to “black lives matter”, especially for young ones.

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Data began to stumble out that the states who were the most religious in following Fauci and CDC mysticism fared no better than those who were more agnostic about what Florida’s Gov. DeSantis called “Fauciism” (see below).  Claims were made by our health elites in power that the lockdowns, masking, social distancing, school closures, mandatory vaccines, et al, would “stop the spread” or “bend the curve” when one of the tiniest things in biology and profusely evolving – a virus – will in all likelihood evade the best laid plans of mice and men.  Their interventions were heralded as the holy grail and natural immunity was ridiculed.  Two years after the pandemic’s onset, we’re still grappling with a shape-shifting virus and infections persist.

Who’s to blame for this disorder by mass psychosis?  Certainly, trillions spent annually on schools from K to grad school have monumentally failed at truly and broadly educating the population.  Education is enlightenment.  Are we enlightened?  Evidence to date says “no”.  Conversely, it may be the source of much of this mass psychosis.

What then is the value of our enormous communication network on the net and through satellites, cables, Wi-Fi, cell towers, and the infinite variety of radio signals?  What are they communicating?  Much that is spewed spikes mass psychosis.  We seem to be great at inventing things but no so good at using them.

All our inventions haven’t altered the crooked timber of humanity.  They have only magnified its prese nce.  Immanuel Kant’s famous line from the 18th century remains true: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Credentials are certainly no guarantor.  Civilizations over millennia have created civil society to grapple with our fundamental pretzel character.  You know, faith, family, morals, and neighborly affiliations in local self-help organizations came into being.  People like Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Robert Nisbet wrote of the virtues of these “little platoons”. Well, the centralized welfare state carpet-bombed their importance.

We just created more bullhorns for mass psychosis.

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RogerG

Sources:

* “What is Mass Formation Psychosis?”, SWFI, 1/2/22, at https://www.swfinstitute.org/news/90470/what-is-mass-formation-psychosis

* Ivan Rowe at the American Enterprise Institute wrote of the missing ingredient of family structure in most reports of our social condition. One column on this subject can be read at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/08/29/students-family-background-matters/.

* Skepticism is always warranted when people go beyond what the science gives. Climate change ideology is a classic example of the phenomena. Those in the field of science who have managed to keep their wits exist. Princeton’s Freeman Dyson outlined his critique in the NYT Magazine at https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?sq=Freeman. Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg is another. Kevin Shapiro’s review of his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, can be found in Commentary Magazine at https://www.commentary.org/articles/kevin-shapiro-2/the-skeptical-environmentalist-by-bjorn-lomborg/. Japanese scientist Kiminori Itoh argues for more complexity in the dynamics of the atmosphere than John Kerry would admit. An account of his views can be found in the Orange County Register at https://www.ocregister.com/2008/06/18/japanese-ipcc-scientists-says-global-warming-worst-scientific-scandal/. The Norwegian physicist Ivar Giaever, and Nobel Prize winner, equates the climate change crusade with a religion. A talk by him on the subject is available through Foreign Policy Journal at https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2016/01/01/nobel-laureate-ivar-giaever-on-climate-change/. There are many others out there.

* The Federal Bureau of Economic Research in spring 2022 issued a report on how states fared in their response to COVID-19. Biases marred the analysis of the report. Some with blue-state leanings say that the BER paper proved the wisdom of aggressive COVID measures, while others of a red-state tint say the opposite. Blue-state biases downplayed or ignored the secondary damages of children’s developmental and education losses, the harms from delayed or absent medical treatment, the increase in suicides and depression, the massive disruption to the economic life of the country, etc. One analysis from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity appears more accurate than most. It can be read at https://committeetounleashprosperity.com/final-report-card-on-state-responses-to-covid-19/.

* A report on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on student achievement was made by the Brookings Institute in March 2022 and can be read at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2022/03/03/the-pandemic-has-had-devastating-impacts-on-learning-what-will-it-take-to-help-students-catch-up/.

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A Mass Exodus from the Democrats’ America, Part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG

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

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

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Homeless encampment along the beachfront of the LA area.

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

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

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

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Homeless encampment near downtown LA.

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

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Empty Times Square, 2020

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

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

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Epidemiologist at work in the lab.

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

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

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

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

Super Bowl LVI Scoreboard

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

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Covid-restriction protest in New Zealand.

RogerG

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A Second American Revolution?

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

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

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

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

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

Marianne Jenson, go get ’em.

RogerG

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The Mendacious Scientific Consensus

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Dr. Rochelle Walensky of the FDA and Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief White House medical adviser, testifying before the Senate Health Committee on Jan. 11, 2022.

In March of 2020, near the start of the government’s forceful reaction to the pandemic, I fretted that “We can’t do this!”, the this being the lockdowns and all the other strangulations of human interaction.  I was worried that the virus would still get out and we would have nothing to show for it but a mutilation of our own well-being.  Others more knowledgeable than I are starting to chime in.  Most recently, a Johns Hopkins University study by Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, and Steve H. Hanke paint a dismal picture of what we’ve done to ourselves in our COVID panic.

Cutting to the chase, the researchers concluded,

“They [lockdowns] have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy. These costs to society must be compared to the benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are marginal at best . . . . lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument.”

Hindsight has not been kind to the “scientific consensus”.  Fauci and company, and hyperactive and panic-riddled governors and mayors, mostly in the blue bubbles, have soiled themselves, and continue to do so.  As a consequence, many people are coming to the realization that “scientific consensus” is not science.  It’s an easy cover for people who don’t know science to lay claim to it for political advantage.  As such, when the opinions hiding under the phrase’s veneer get exposed for their erroneousness, it starts to lack credibility . . . as if it ever had any.

Beware, beware of the “scientific consensus” on climate change.  It is bandied about by the same actors pursuing similar goals in similar organizations with similar backgrounds and homogeneous worldviews.

Some have complained that the pandemic shouldn’t be about politics.  Really?  When has a “crisis too good to waste” not been about politics?  Of all people, Clausewitz gave us the proper insight: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.”  Just replace “war” with “scientific consensus”.

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RogerG

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Our Lousy Public Discourse

“Freedom is not simply the right of intellectuals to circulate their merchandise. It is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their ‘betters’.”  Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell

Sowell’s truism about freedom came to mind as more gibberish spewed from the mind of the self-styled Wise Latina on the Supreme Court, justice Sonia Sotomayor.  In oral arguments in the Biden vaccine mandate case, she hysterically proclaimed, “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.”  First thing, it’s not true!  4 Pinocchios!  Next, public imminences can’t be trusted any longer.  And, really, should they ever have been?

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Justice Sonia Sotomayor

The latest plague apocalypse to go viral is Omicron.  It’s certainly launching into our society.  It may have launched into me.  I can’t tell – wasn’t tested – but it turned out to be a 4-day flu.  Tested or not, it was the flu whether as the ominous Omicron or not – a virus by any other name.  Earlier in 2020, I had a brief bout with first-wave COVID and it was 2 days one-and-done.  Both were characterized by a low-grade fever and fatigue and that’s it.  The death cart making its regular rounds didn’t come knocking and I quickly resumed my domestic role as regular irritant to my wife.

According to the over-billed “experts”, I’ve got 2 strikes against me: I’m 69 and voted for Trump.  Yet, no comorbidities, not obese, regular exercise, daily vitamin and mineral supplements, and no vices (other than popcorn and “The Lord of the Rings”) may have worked to counteract the age factor.  As for the vote, sorry Rachel Maddow, I won’t do anything about it since I can’t endorse a doddering puppet of left-wing lunatics.  That “comorbidity” stays.

Our time is not a period of calm reason.  Wannabe totalitarians are out to make everyone, literally everyone, conform to their vision of vaccinations, endless boosters, Zoom school for the kids, and masks.  These blinkered despots can’t bring themselves to even mention natural immunity and treatments.  I’m up-armored by nature against the COVIDs going back to MERS and SARS.  Vaccines are obviously part of the public health arsenal, not the entirety of it.  Not a peep, though, from Walensky and company and The Big Wheels about natural immunity, monoclonal antibodies, and antivirals.  When asked, they act like the kid in the cafeteria buffet line who can’t bring himself to request the broccoli in spite of mom’s insistence before leaving for school.

Instead, we’ve got a truncated public interplay between Vaccine/Vaccine/Vaccine/… on one side and on the other Vaccine/Microchip/One World Order by the people who gave us Q Anon and Death Rays from Space during fire season.  Why can’t vaccines be an important element in a strategy without it being the focus of all our efforts?  The nutter right, you can drop the resurgent John Bircherism anytime.

Tunnel vision behind the wheel doesn’t end well.

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RogerG