The cartoon below captures the delirium of our times. It’s safetyism run amok. The obsessive/compulsive nature of safety-at-all-costs is destroying us.
It took a virus to expose this latest contagion (pun intended) of the mind. We’ve lost all sense of balance. Safety-alone in all instances is as silly as having to wear a seat belt after a bad sunburn in a mad rush to the hospital for my wife to deliver our baby. No weighing of cost and benefit, comfort and discomfort, likes and dislikes, and personal assessment of risk. Somebody else – the government or the population of ninnies – claims the power to force us into their phobias.
If you really want to know the reason for the broad loss of credibility on the part of government-deputized “experts”, just look at their abundantly displayed lack of recognition of any other consideration other than the factoids of their narrow specialty. Fauci and Walensky wail about infections in a carpet-bombing of all the other things that make us human. Close the schools or open them with the kids isolated in pods, masks, plexiglass, and jabs; the germophobes screaming at other airline passengers for their refusal to continue suffocating behind a mask while eating; politicians ordering universal vaccination when the vaccine neither prevents additional infection nor its transmission; make it as difficult as possible for anyone to earn a living; prevent us as from seeking fellowship in worship; and effectually banish two thousand years of Christmas. Shocking and amazing.
The vaccines armor the many from hospitalization, but they can only do so much. They are not the “philosopher’s stone” of immunology. In fact, the unvaccinated 18 to 29 cohort run about the same risk as the vaccinated 50 to 64 according to OSHA’s own assessment (see https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/scotus-should-nix-bidens-vaccine-mandates/).
All the advice for sensible policy making isn’t limited to the kind coming out of a room full of lab coats. Their contributions are necessary but not sufficient. Necessary/sufficient isn’t a cliché. It’s a fact! I only wish politicians weren’t so eager to use the factoids of science as arrows in their political quiver. They end up besmirching themselves and science.
USC safeties coach Craig Naivar, center, runs players through drills during spring 2020 practice at USC. (Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/SCNG)
Like a homeowner noticing termite shavings on the floor at the bottom of a wall, the urban folk of the metropolitan west coast might be awakening to the manufactured decay that is beginning to overtake them. The rot is “manufactured” (man-created) because of the bewildering decisions by public officials of their own choosing. Schools aren’t preparing the young for adulthood but are fermenting as radical indoctrination centers. The urban public square is littered with the homeless, the psychotic, needles and feces, roving gangs of thieves and extremist goons, boarded up store fronts, and no one in office seems to care, at least care enough to do anything about it, other than make it worse.
Homeless encampment in Portland in 2016.
The dégringolade (decline) ranges up and down the coastal plain. Nearly 60% of United Van Lines’s California hauls in 2021 were outbound, and it’s a poor metric due to its high cost. The more affordable U-Haul has become less affordable – 4 times the price for inboud – when trying to load up and skedaddle the Bear Flag Republic. Portlanders have acquired an affection for Boise, Idaho, according to UVL and Business Insider. The situation is summed up quite nicely by Greg Goodman, the co-president of the Portland Downtown Development Group: “If you know a retail or office broker, give them a call and ask them how many clients they have are trying to leave.” The exodus is palpable wherever progressivism reigns.
The east coast fares even worse by United’s numbers. New Jersey (69.5%) and New York (67%) rank #1 and #2 for the Great Migration out.
Is the decline and flight observable in organized athletic prowess? Is this trait a new canary in the coal mine alongside UVL and U-Haul numbers? As of now, in 2021/22, the PAC-12 is winless in bowl games for the second straight year. The last best hope for the conference, Utah, went down to Ohio State in the Rose Bowl on a last second field goal. Even the fact that Utah came close could be an additional sign of the new dynamism of people fleeing the coastal blight. The PAC-12 might have to switch its status ranking with the Mid-Atlantic Conference. It’s the “Conference of Champions” for volleyball or softball, but apparently not for anything exuding testosterone, which ironically is then forced to subsidize the former two.
UCLA lost its chance to break the losing streak by cancelling its appearance in the Sun Bowl after an outbreak of COVID on the team. COVID still raked the team after some of the most heavy-handed, authoritarian edicts by California’s recall-surviving governor and some of the most fear-paralyzed school administrations in the country. Remember “bend the curve” and “stop the spread”? The only thing “bent” or “stopped” was the hopes and dreams of the young men in shoulder pads. Try that as a recruitment angle.
Last year’s performance, the notorious year of COVID, was explained away, like the election laws, as a byproduct of the pandemic. Once again, nothing the prelates of the conference did changed a thing in regards to the rampage of the disease. It mutated and the crisis-too-good-to-waste registered as a wild-eyed panic to end athletic futures. Such overwrought reactions have a home in the same places that sanction violence and filth.
Another little-noticed and unremarked factoid is the appearance of four-star recruits from California showing up on the team rosters in the real power conferences. I tuned into the Georgia/Michigan game in time to watch Georgia’s tight end, Bowers, from northern California, receive a touchdown pass. Bryce Young, Alabama’s QB, and alumni of Mater Dei in Los Angeles, earned a 106 quarterback rating against Cincinnati. Ohio State/Utah was a battle between two California quarterbacks: Stroud and Rising. Are these mere anecdotes or a trend that has many similarities to prior demographic shifts in the country’s history?
Alabama’s Bryce Young (Photo by Ron Jenkins/Getty Images)Utah’s Cameron RisingOhio State’s C.J. StroudGeorgia’s Brock Bowers
California’s loss of one congressional seat after the last census understates the seriousness of its self-immolation. The state made strenuous efforts to hide the flight of its middle class and businesses with campaigns to count every soul, living and non-living and legal and illegal. But everyone knows what is happening, and it’s now appearing on the playing fields.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks during the daily briefing at the White House, Dec. 1, 2021, in Washington. (photo: Susan Walsh/AP)
Going back to March 2020, I lamented the lockdowns and all the other grotesque deformations of the past year or two, unleashing unbounded social, economic, and psychological harm just to show fealty to a new ideology, or theology, called safteyism. The work ethic was euthanized for many. Kids were allowed to cognitively, behaviorally, and emotionally atrophy. Labor and capital entered a forced coma; no wonder supply chains are frazzled and inflation is enflamed – it’s more than the Democrats’ and the fed’s overheated money machine. The same people who wrecked community life across the country also wrecked our public square. The streets were set afire in riots and raging crime, and littered with filthy tent encampments, needles, and feces. The year(s) of COVID were made into a dark age.
Assisting in the civilizational collapse, the Biden gang persists in a collective Retinitis Pigmentosa (tunnel vision). All they can see is vaccine, and force everyone, literally everyone, to get it. It’s coercive utopianism. They are fruitlessly forcing a naturally heterogenous population on medical practices into being an imaginary homogeneous one. In the end, 15-25% won’t get it, no matter what, but we’ll be forced to endure the threats, mandates, and the loss of many of the basic functions of life in pursuit of the unattainable. It’s foolish.
An obvious alternative exists. It’s the same one during any health scourge: get vaccinated if you choose, stay healthy, and if you catch the bug, rest at home, see a doctor, and seek many of the prescribed and over-the-counter treatments. Curling up with a couple of glasses of cognac probably wouldn’t hurt.
Thus, therapeutics are a big part of epidemiology if we can escape the mental prison of vaccine-only, and our big wheels jettison their commitment to sucking the air from therapeutics and toward their favorite pet of vaccine-only. Anti-malarial drugs such as Atovaquone show promise. Pfizer’s Paxlovid and Merck and Biotherapeutics’ Molnupiravir are medications that don’t require the intravenous apparatus of the monoclonal antibodies. But the FDA is dragging their feet in granting them the same emergency authorization that it did for the vaccines.
Resident of Battle Creek, Mi., recieves monoclonal antibody treatment outside a Detroit hospital, December 2021. (photo: Kimberly Mitchell, Detroit Free Press)
Really, let’s face it, the masking, social distancing, and avoidance of crowds should be limited to the vulnerable and frightened. Home delivery, curbside pickup, and Zoom are for them. For everyone else, go to work, got to school, shop, attend a game, see a movie, hit the gym, and pay a visit to grandma and grandpa. Stop forcing all of society to bend to the will of the small portion who can’t physically or emotionally handle it.
One question about our current epidemic: Does previous exposure to MERS (2003) and SARS (H1N1, 2009) improve a person’s immunological response to COVID-19? I’m an absolute layman on these types of issues and I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn. Personal experiences raise this query, however. Our brains don’t stop functioning if we don’t wear a lab coat.
I am and was a healthy and fit teacher during my 30-year career. During the time periods of the spread of MERS and SARS, I became so ill that I took 2-3 days of sick leave, something un-heard of in my long career. Later, after retirement, I came down with fatigue and a low-grade fever that lasted 2 days, actually overnight, in spring 2020. It came and went and life quickly returned to normal. Was it COVID-19? I can’t say, but I haven’t had a bout of illness since then in spite of frequent and broad exposure, no vaccine, and the fact that I’m in a vulnerable cohort (age 69) during this latest contagion.
The similarities of the three bugs are manifest (see below). All three are of the Coronaviridae family. They mostly show as respiratory illnesses. COVID-19 could be different in that it was a product of gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab. Thus, it had a far more serious pathological footprint. Still, could their biological likenesses arm a person’s immune system against all three?
MERS virusSARS virusCOVID-19
If so, the swath of the population with natural immunity is larger than previously thought. Again, if so, the politicization of the pandemic can be turned down a notch or two. Threats, mandates, and the one-trick-pony of vaccination-only can be laid to rest.
When science is drafted to a political cause, nasty things happen. Science is no longer “science” and politics becomes authoritarian (if not totalitarian). Marxism and its theoretical cousin, critical theory, are attempts to make a “science” of history and ideological sophistry. Its results are laid bare on our cities’ streets and in the radical left turn of the Democratic Party. This political scientization of our life is creating havoc with our civilization.
I’m sure that many people can shed more light on my question than I. I eagerly await enlightenment.
“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.” P.J. O’Rourke
Intoxicated with Equity, people in the seat of power have handcuffed police – not criminals – and turned a blind eye to wanton violence. Convinced of their infallibility, they are foisting inflation and destroying our livelihoods stalking a greenie utopia. The four corners of our existence are being upended for a pure ideological fantasy.
There’s more in a blast from the past.
A young Anthony Fauci in the 1980’s.
Remember AIDS of the 1980’s? Doctors Fauci and Redfield, familiar apparatchiks of today, back then ignited an AIDS scare by peddling the idea of a “heterosexual breakout”. Life magazine crowed with a cover, “Now No One Is Safe from AIDS”. Later, researchers discovered the odds of transmission from vaginal intercourse to be 1 in 5 million. Intravenous drug use and male homosexual activity were the drivers of the disease. Bureaucrats Fauci and Redfield ignored their own epidemiologists to scare Congress into approving bigger budgets. The same culprits are, and were, in charge this time around. (Read about it here in a piece originally from the WSJ)
Life magazine cover from 1985.
The political realm is festooned with people who can warp history, science, and due process to advance rabid zealotry. Our latest case in point: COVID.
Throughout March and the rest of 2020 and into 2021, in the heat of the COVID panic, I condemned the lockdowns and threw aspersions at unbridled masking, school closures, and the decimation of small business. From the beginning, our federal government’s response was a clown car brimming with buffoons, the worst offenders in blue jurisdictions. They imposed the authoritarianism and the death toll continued to mount. Later, the virus receded, probably due to natural factors, the strangulations relaxed, and then the variants appeared, and what didn’t work the first time was brought back with a vengeance. First Delta, now Omicron.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo became embroiled in the controversy over nursing home COVID deaths due to his policies.
Biden took over the White House and the worst of California went national. Scapegoating of the unvaccinated is routine. The only thing missing is a yellow star on the lapel. If acts of public humiliation won’t bring them to heel, then mandates will threaten to take away their livelihoods, movements, religious fellowship, and the simplest human interaction. Is forced relocation to walled ghettos next? The administration is a one trick pony: get vaccinated or else.
80% of Americans over 12 are vaccinated with at least one dose. Getting to 100% is like reaching the speed of light in Einstein’s General Theory. The closer you get, the harder it is to go faster till you realize that you’ll never get there. 100% is pie in the sky. 80% is quite probably their max. So, why all the threats and abuse?
Could the answer lie in the totalitarian progressive’s reflexive refusal to accept disagreement? Are these aspiring tyrants so blinded with fury to admit of other approaches? Fact is, being vaccinated is neither a guarantee of not spreading the virus or getting it in any of its variants, unless the goal is to turn the people into 330 million voodoo dolls with needle jabs till kingdom come, not to mention the disordered emotional and cognitive development of our zoomed children.
Vaccines or no, where’s the therapies, i.e., treatments? If you get it in whatever form, we should be in the position to see our doctor, get a prescription, stay in bed, drink plenty of fluids (non-alcoholic), and watch old Law and Order reruns. You’re not going to get 100% of a nine-figure population to fall in line with your singular approach. Grow up, admit it. Treatments for everyone, vaccinated or unvaccinated. We are going to have to do it anyway as the virus spins off an endless chain of cellular cousins to outflank our jabs.
Demand the discovery of more and varied treatments. The vaccine moon shot should be equaled by one for treatments. Unlike the greenie junk and bloated giveaways, Operation Therapies is a real Build Back Better. Lest we forget, it has the additional advantage of making the overwhelming majority of us the incubators of the most powerful immunity, the natural kind.
Vaccines are good, the choking of social and economic life is not, and we should have more than one trick up our sleeves.
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.
Utah quarterback, Cameron Rising, from Ventura, Ca., via Texas, celebrates a touchdown in Utah’s 42-26 win over USC in the LA Coliseum Saturday night, 10/9.
My answers are, I can’t say for sure and I can’t say for sure. But hints are scattered about. My principal guess is that the breeding ground for football success lies in . . . wait for it . . . the regional culture. This is not the southern California of USC’s John McKay or the entire PAC-8 of Washington’s Warren Moon any longer. The whole west coast shifted deep blue which might prove to be the catalyst for a deemphasis of the manly arts (as Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield would put it), like the manliest of all sports, football. Trump might have had a better chance to win California’s 52 electoral votes if the electorate was limited to the LA Coliseum’s attendance, but that isn’t the case. There’s more Bernie Bros in the state than college football fans. Socialism and love of the nanny state undermines fan and program support and player development. Again, my guess.
Hugh Hewitt last week raised an interesting point. He observed that college football is a “red” sport. The top 25 has only two slots for teams from “blue” states: Oregon (#9) and San Diego State (#24). The rest is a monotonous rendition of “red” to “purple” states, mostly “red”. In the last decade, only one “blue” team by the end of the season with any regularity has been in the running for the college football playoffs – Oregon.
Take a look at something as simple as stadium capacity. The top three are in the Big Ten – Michigan (purple, red part of the state, 107,601), Penn State (purple, red part of the state, 106,572), and The Ohio State (red, 102,780). Eleven of the top 25 are in the SEC – which should change its initials to RSC, the Red State Conference. We won’t find a blue state facility till UCLA’s Rose Bowl at #10 (91,136) and USC’s Coliseum at #20 (77,500) – both very ancient and for the most part half empty on Saturday.
The Ohio State’s “The Shoe”
Interesting anecdote: Iowa’s quarterback, Spencer Petras from Greenbrae, Ca., chose the Iowa corn fields because he wanted to play in the electric atmosphere of a Big Ten stadium, according to yesterday’s broadcast team for the Penn State/Iowa game.
Iowa’s quarterback Spencer Petras in Iowa’s 23-20 win against Penn State.Fans swarm the field after Iowa’s victory against Penn State.Jubilant Iowa fans on the field.
Helicopter-parent government of the blue states nurture Pajama Boys (Remember the ads for Obamacare?), not football players. The attitude spills over into athletic policy. Arizona State’s punter, Michael Turk, one of the top punters in the country, transferred to Oklahoma due to ASU’s vaccine mandate for away games. Washington State’s head coach, Nick Rolovich, is reported to have a date with the guillotine for refusing to take the vaccine.
No surprise there, college bubbles everywhere are replete with “safe spaces” and triggering hyper-sensitivities. Blue states are nothing but the college bubbles writ large. However, if the surrounding culture won’t play by the campus’s snowflake rules, COVID paranoia will play second fiddle to the gate. MSNBC anchors may go bonkers with the Chicken Little hysteria of “super-spreader events”, but many folks prefer to live in the real world of risk and are voting with their tickets to have a good time. Damn the mommy spoil-sports. Welcome to the “red” states.
Now 3-3, in USC’s losses, their opponents scored 42+ points. Swiss cheese comes to mind when talking about the team’s defense, whether in the run box or the defensive backfield. As a consequence, Utah, like Oregon State and Stanford before them, looked like Alabama when lining up across the USC defensive line. USC attracts some flashy offensive skills players but the rest of the roster looks mediocre. Since the defense can’t hold the more physical offenses, those stars get fewer opportunities to shine. By the third quarter, the team is down 24 points, the game’s tenor has been set, and the LA media darling in cardinal and gold watches his star fade.
Lapses like USC’s have been a concern up and down the west coast. The occasional good team can still be found, something unavoidable in the eight teams from LA to Puget Sound. Beyond the Coast and Cascade Ranges, the picture might look a bit different. Arizona prohibits vaccine mandates in schools, a far cry from California’s Gavin Newsom, Oregon’s Kate Brown, and Washington’s Jay Inslee – cultural socialists all. The off-putting social milieu of those states might be a huge drag on recruitment for Utah, the Arizona schools, and Colorado as they are corralled with the nanny staters. Flying from liberty zones to the lands of COVID fascism in inter-conference play creates difficulties for scheduling and compliance. A five-star recruit, young and healthy with a greater chance of serious medical problems from a frat party than COVID, has a choice between a Chernobyl-like college life or a normal experience in the SEC’s Mississippi or the Big-10’s Iowa. This might be the reason for more California talent showing up in the big schools of flyover country.
A worker at Lumen Field holds a sign stating the stadium’s mask requirement before an NFL football game between the Seattle Seahawks and the Tennessee Titans, Sunday, Sept. 19, 2021, in Seattle. (AP Photo/John Froschauer)
I hear that the Big-12 is shopping for some replacements for the defections of Oklahoma and Texas to the SEC. Hear that, Arizona, Arizona State, Utah, and Colorado? Maybe a move to the Mountain West might be an improvement.
I am prepared for a long run of mediocrity for my much-loved PAC-12 teams. Once the rot of cultural Marxism gets fully established, the malaise infects everything from the economy to the practice field.
Intentional blackouts caused widespread damage and outrage throughout California over the past couple of years. (photo: JOSH EDELSON/AFP )
Part I in this series was about hysterics over the virus driving a people to mommy-state absolutism and the consequent slide to greater poverty, and a Medieval life. Part II concerns the climate-change delirium that promises to depress much of what’s left of our generally benevolent quality of life.
I’m reminded of Eastwood’s 2019 film, “Richard Jewell”. Shortly after the 1996 bombing in Atlanta’s Olympic Park, the FBI and a big-city newsroom moved from “lone bomber” to “hero syndrome” to Richard Jewell, the man who discovered the bomb and saved hundreds by evacuating the area before the explosion. Instead, he was turned into the lead suspect, which was broadcast to the world for months. Later, after months of FBI aspersions and negative press coverage, he was finally cleared and the actual culprit convicted.
Why mention this? Simple, organizations exhibit psychoses like individuals. Call it a social psychosis. An erroneous idea enters the organization’s social bloodstream, is reinforced by the mores of the group, and is hard to shake despite little evidence. It is so entrenched that caution and humanity get tossed to the wind. It is an alternative reality for them. The effect is magnified when allied organizations, such as a big-city newsroom and the FBI in the case of Jewel, feed each other’s prejudices.
Today, instead of some organizations’ blind embrace of the “hero syndrome” to guide their judgments, we’re experiencing another socially entrenched idea, climate change, that promises to deliver much greater and longer-term harm, and not in the ways intended by Earth First.
As before, allied organizations intensify a belief’s impact. These entities are less independent of each other as they reflect more homogeneous backgrounds such as college, intermarriage, and family status. Background examinations of the membership and employment lists of the Ford Foundation, Sierra Club, Department of Energy, US Forest Service, EPA, and much of the administrative state, etc., including the desk jockeys in national security, are an excursion from campus to campus and white collar to white collar. Increasingly, social homogeneity means a greater ideological homogeneity. The same mental bugs, such as the supposedly imminent threat of climate change, has resonance and force.
EPA employees joined the People’s Climate March rallies in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, and Denver as part of the 370 events held April 29, 2017. The AFGE in the banner on the right stands for American Federation of Government Employees which is the largest federal employee union representing 700,000 federal and D.C. government workers nationwide and overseas.
We everywhere hear of climate change as a “fact”, hidden under verbal constructions like “scientific consensus”. Science isn’t about “consensus”. It’s about research, labs, and the constant testing and reformulation of hypotheses, not Gallup opinion surveys. A majority opinion is just another thing to be tested, not an end to the process so activists can rush off to write The Green New Deal.
What do these prophets of climactic doom have in store of us? Hmmm. It’s obvious they don’t like people or individuals organized in free societies. They’re utopians in the mold of Karl Marx with all the “alienation” nonsense (human alienation from nature) and the militant reflex to engineer a “better” person. Their 20th-century literary and ideological Trail of Tears goes from Rachel Carson’s fear of chemicals (’62, Silent Spring) to Paul Ehrlich’s fear of more people (’67, The Population Bomb) to Charles Reich’s greenie-Marxist totalitarianism (’70, The Greening of America) to Murray Bookchin’s open advocacy of eco-socialism (’86, The Modern Crisis) to Michael Mann’s graphic global temperature “hockey stick” (’98) to AOC’s declaration of the end of the world in 12 years. Rhetorically, they went from legitimate concern to doomsday in the span of 60 years, all in the campaign to impose their control over the most intimate details of our lives. Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot would be envious.
As in the devastations of Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot, little good and great harm will come of it. Take a look at what sits before Congress today. In the mold of “the power to tax is the power to destroy”, the Democrats’ budget monstrosity of $3.5 trillion ($5 trillion by sober analysts), the reconciliation bill, is chock full of tax increases, all excused under “fair share” rhetoric. Hikes are to occur nearly everywhere in the tax code: capital gains, inheritance, the income tax’s top rate, business taxes, retirement savings, almost anything material and immaterial. If that isn’t enough, they’ve got a carbon tax bouncing around to hike the cost of your commute, keep the lights on, and prevent you from freezing this winter.
Democrats in Congress push their massive greenie social engineering scheme in a presser at the Capitol.
The tax haul is hawked by Democrats at $3.5 trillion so they can astoundingly claim “zero cost”, or as they euphemistically say, “paid for”. Odd, how so terribly odd. Taxes aren’t about “zero cost”; they’re about making somebody pay, and pay a lot, $3.5 trillion a lot.
Do you actually think that the Dems’ math calculations are an accurate depiction of reality? Under their greedy eye shades, they make some artificial sense, but that assumes people won’t try to avoid the whip hand of the IRS, who, by the way, will be given an additional $78 billion to hunt us down. In the real world, they won’t get that much, but the money spigot will still be cranked wide open from the Treasury Department to the Fed’s open market operations to a flood of dollars chasing fewer goods. Meaning . . . i-n-f-l-a-t-i-o-n, big time.
We don’t need Milton Friedman to remind us “inflation is the cruelest tax of all”. We’ll live it. So, add this monster extraction on top of all the other abuse. You’ll wake up one morning with a phone call from your accountant frantically advising you to change your portfolio, pronto, as your wife discovers at the grocery store that the price of everything in the basket doubled.
Scratch that long-planned family vacation to Disney World.
Why are we being forced to live this way? The answer lies deep in the synapses of the Democratic Party. For them, no social problem can be addressed without more government welfare spending. Also, their inner eco-totalitarian can only be satisfied with more crony capitalism and the power to coerce the population to live according AOC’s tweets, Congress’s airhead-in-chief.
Commissar Ed Markey (D, Mass.) put it quite succinctly, “. . . the Green New Deal is in the DNA [of the reconciliation bill].” For instance, the greenies get their own version of the Young Pioneers (official USSR communist youth group), or Red Guards (of Maoist fame), called the Civilian Climate Corps, to conduct unspecified “green” actions. It could mean anything from door-to-door canvassing to pressure residents to turn down their thermostat to Portland-style “peaceful” protests.
And trillions of dollars in giveaways for electric bikes, solar panels (of course), advocacy of “environmental justice” (anything “justice” in their mouths means CRT), university grants to push the agenda, massive greenie “weatherization” campaigns, worker retraining away from the things people actually want (cars, trucks, air conditioning, single-family homes) etc., etc. Combined with the tax punishment, we’ll end up with a life of California-style energy prices, California-style capital flight, California-style welfare dependency, California-style shortages and inflation, California-style dirty commutes in gang-infested mass transit, and the rest of the social and economic miasma that is California. And our airhead-in-chief will call this Shangri-La.
Do you think that they’ll stop with the federal budget? Hogwash. Remember, they’re totalitarians, and, as such, they care just as much about what you think as what you do. The indoctrination will be pressed into the minds of the kids by curriculums and teachers. Nothing will escape the commissars’ gaze. Criticism of your diet will be part of the lesson plans: meat bad, veganism good. Just picture the teacher in her reading session with the kiddies seated around as she reads “Heather Has Two Vegan Mommies”.
The way is gradually being set for a Stalin-like war on the peasants, or actually the farmer, for producing the stuff that goes into my burger-and-a-Bud. Cattle flatulence, stockyards, farming the plains and woodlands, production of implements and fertilizer, and much more, disrupt the greenie utopia. So, expect the now-common shaming campaigns, penalties, and bountiful awards from the public treasury corrupted by gazillions of meaningless dollars. “Let them eat cake” is readjusted to “Let them eat tofu”.
Is this any way to live? Our economic and social lives are wrecked by COVID-hysterics, the public fisc of a drunken sailor that is an insult to drunken sailors, and militant social engineering based on the loony platitudes of The Squad — and the rare pleasure of a cheese burger and fries will be treated as deviant as pedophilia. My only solace lies in the fact that the Russian people managed to put up with it for 80 years and survived . . . albeit with a Putin helmsman-for-life, rampant alcoholism, a stagnant economy, and a disappearing birth rate.
Reading time for the kindergarteners might be better served by preparing the kids for a life of perpetual COVID shutdowns under an eco-Politburo. “Heather Lives with Her Mommies in a Dirt Floor Hut and Her Sisters Died in Infancy” might be a better choice for reading time. By the way, Heather cries a lot.
Ii comes down to a basic question: How many body blows can a nation endure before it is irreparably damaged? I don’t know, but these hits come from the worst possible source: our wildest imaginations put to practice absent much restraint.
Red, the Morgan Freeman character, and fellow inmate from The Shawshank Redemption.
Red, the Morgan Freeman character in The Shawshank Redemption:
“These walls are funny. First you hate them, then you get used to them. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That’s ‘institutionalized’.”
Kyle Smith in his article, “Team Fear” (NR, June 1, 2021):
“. . . Blue America receives each nonsensical new government edict [Biden, Dr. Fauci, CDC, etc.] as reverently as if it were carved on stone tablets, then erased and recarved as necessary. These tablets, they’re a lot like Etch A Sketches.”
Mask wearing in an American subway.
Welcome to modern America, a land populated by people who’ve invented a new class of shamans; only these are in white coats. A large portion of the nation seem to treat them as if they are the new Moses attending to the burning bush. The believers show no cognizance of the fact that these soothsayers are specialists, people who can only contribute a piece of the puzzle in developing something as grand as a government response to a serious challenge like COVID – the other pieces being the social, economic, and sensible legal/Constitutional dimensions.
Particularly irksome is the slavish devotion to their every word. Red might say, “That’s ‘institutionalized’.” These new-age Linuses (of Peanuts fame) can’t let go of the security blanket of government control. So, the masking while jogging, the euthanasia of the restaurant industry, the 6-hour suffocation of children behind dirty masks in school (if they’re allowed back in the classroom), an end to grandma visits, etc. The madness, sadly, is political in nature. Or more specifically, I should say, it’s ideological in nature.
Ideological prevalence is color-coded, by state and local jurisdiction. Blue is the color of institutionalization, aka progressivism. It’s the place of big, expensive, intrusive mommy government. It’s the place of absolute faith in the government “expert”. It’s a target-rich environment for the white-coated, careerist bureaucrat. They’re the new clergy for an irreligious time. People sell their soul to this new clergy, since the old one is increasingly looking out onto empty pews.
The new secular clergy is disgracing itself like some in the old. It’s the same old story: the more fame, wealth, prestige, and exposure they get, the greater the temptation to soil themselves and not even be aware of it. The story is as familiar as Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.
Hans Christian Anderson provided an insightful allegory in his “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. A vain and pompous ruler, lavish in his attire, is convinced by a couple of trickster hucksters that they will make an ensemble that only the foolish and stupid can’t see. The emperor and his advisers visit the workshop, see nothing, but pretend otherwise to avoid being thought idiots. The people join in the hustle out of fear as the emperor parades in public, until a child shouts the obvious. I can’t get past the clear association with Biden and his coterie of appointees and administrative sycophants.
An illustration from the published book by Han Christian Andersen, The Emperor’s New Clothes.
The child in Anderson’s tale blurts out, “. . . he isn’t wearing anything at all!” Well, here’s a parallel: “Look, the vaccinated are wearing masks as if the vaccine doesn’t work, but it does work.” Leave it to an innocent child to make clear that masks were made irrelevant by Operation Warp Speed.
Don’t expect Biden and his people to mention it. They are espousing COVID nonsense that a child could identify. Vaccines are great. Get jabbed. But a response to an epidemic is more than taking the jab, much more. The emperor’s magical clothes are synonymous with the goal of 95% of 330 million – or the world’s 7.9 billion – getting poked. Five percent unvaccinated is worse than utopian; it’s hallucinogenic. We’re probably already near practical statistical saturation with the vaccine, taking into account the hesitant for whatever reason, those for whom the vaccine is a medical threat, and the vast numbers of the naturally immune.
Bottom line: the bug will get out and it’ll be off to the races to more lockdowns and another bank-busting moonshot vaccine discovery, unless we learn to live with it. Try as we might, try as we squirm, this thing will get out in one form or another.
Right now, the careerist, bureaucratic white coats can’t let go of their power to straitjacket the country. And there are hordes of fervent believers in those blue states waiting and wanting to be straitjacketed. They are a people, like those with a natural addiction affinity, who are prone to developing an institutionalized personality. Their ideology, filled as it is with a host of unexamined assumptions, paved the way. These people are acculturated to mommy government to such as extent that it shows in the masking in such innocuous activities as hiking the 7,000-foot Logan Pass in Glacier National Park.
This is not a population open to common sense. If the vaunted “experts” say mask, close or “hybrid” the schools, turn the private sector into Stasi hall monitors, get vaccinated or else, this crowd will jump to it. The lunacy of it all escapes them. It’s get vaccinated, get vaccinated, and nothing else. But there is something else. In addition to the wonderous vaccines, there’s therapeutics.
If you get the bug in any of its mutations, we have therapies at the ready for respiratory illnesses like this one. If we don’t have enough of them, get them. There are many on the shelf that are efficacious (Remdesivir and a variety of medicinal cocktails). Is this view understood by the institutionalized? It certainly isn’t the message that they’re getting from their secular saints in the bureaucracies.
People will get the bug no matter the success of the campaign to vaccinate. I think that our message should not be “get vaccinated or die”. If it is, not only are we showing ourselves to be gruesome believers in magical clothes, we are institutionalized to the point of dispensing with the obvious to maintain a religious devotion to a class of people whose claims of divine inspiration derived from a classroom and government board, and have only shown themselves to possess the skills at climbing the bureaucratic greasy pole.
Are we so institutionalized that gibberish suddenly becomes wisdom if it is mouthed by a government employee?
