Neurotic (adj.), neurosis (noun): mental, emotional, or physical reactions that are drastic and irrational. At its root, a neurotic behavior is an automatic, unconscious effort to manage deep anxiety. (From WebMD)
We (wife, son, sister-in-law, myself) were in a Denny’s in Grand Junction, Colorado, and I couldn’t help but notice the greater prevalence of mask-wearing in the state. Sitting across from me while waiting for our table were two gentlemen in masks, one double-masked. At our table, looking out the window, I watched a solitary woman on her morning walk wearing a mask . . . outdoors! The scene struck me as odd since few, if any, wear masks in Idaho and Montana. Passing through my home state of Montana and Idaho on our way to Grand Junction, even at major venues like Walmart, I could count on one hand the number of people wearing masks. Not so in blue-state Colorado, at least as evident in Grand Junction. Could blue-state/red-state socio-political dynamics account for the behavior? After all, politics is downstream of culture.
Watch this scene from North Hollywood, California.
By all accounts, left-coast culture has come to dominate Denver and Aspen which has come to dominate Colorado. Blue culture equals blue state.
We were in Grand Junction for a wedding. To be honest, nobody at the night-before social, nor at the wedding and reception, could give a rip about Fauci’s pronouncements, and all were thankfully unmasked. Anyway, it wasn’t a crowd receptive to the dictates of the federal authoritarians. Beyond the perimeter of the festivities, however, life seemed to be more corseted.
Red states seem to want to get back to normal, and “normal” doesn’t mean getting used to soul-destroying mandates for us and our kids. Blue states push for the “new normal”. They follow in lock-step with blue-media, which happen to be headquartered in blue states. CNN, the flagship of blue-media, on Sunday and Monday went on a rant about maskless crowds at football stadiums after the first weekend of college football in 2021 (see below).
*PS: As an aside, take a look at this reaction to Pres. Biden by some in various stadium crowds.
Bigtime college football – the major D1A schools are in red states – is a “red” sport. The values of most folks in red states don’t coincide with government acting like our forever-helicopter parents. Perhaps those of us in the red states have had it with the micro-controls. Maybe we’ve noticed that all the masking, vaccines orders, social distancing, euthanizing the restaurant industry, and school closures didn’t make a lick of difference. The bug did what bugs do: they evolve! So, we’re back to authoritarianism – or totalitarianism if you will.
It’s not that the vaccines didn’t work. It’s that the bug became something different, and the jabs become less relevant since the bug changed the ground rules by changing. Our wannabe nannies now have the excuse to slide back into their preferred habit of authoritarianism. What was once “bend the curve” turned into COVID-forever. We’re going onto two years of ginned-up hysteria, almost to the point of generating a permanent social neurosis, particularly in blue states.
The obvious answer would be to get back to a real normal, not a “new” one. You know, life like it was before China foisted the bug on the world. Open the schools, open the restaurants, open the downtowns, open the stadiums, get back to work and church, and rely on therapeutics. Take the vaccine if you wish, but, regardless, have plenty of therapies on hand to treat the vast, vast majority of the infected who will have a bad case of the flu. Each year’s flu season doesn’t shut down society. Why should this?
We are twisting ourselves into knots to avoid what is clear as a bell. We’re going to have to gut our way through it. To me, it’s been clear for quite some time that the straitjacketing has only delayed the spread of the virus, thus leaving it to erupt again, again, and again.
We have plenty of therapeutics, something unavailable in 1918. It won’t be Fauci who’ll lead us out of this. It will be nature, and our own therapies that’ll allow us to weather the storm. It increasingly looks like natural immunity will have a bigger role to play than the jabs.
It’s better to recognize the obvious reality than to hang onto Fauci’s and Walensky’s feelings-of-the-moment. They’re only succeeding at making hordes of neurotics, and making blue the color of statewide neurosis. Is that what they mean by a “new normal”?
Hot in the news is the flight from Afghanistan – not flight as in air travel but as in skedaddle. It’s so bad that only explanatory expletives do it justice. Simply put, we apparently have some of the world’s worst blank slates running the show in DC. In addition to the botch taking place in Afghanistan, this group of mediocrities is attempting to strangle the country in perpetual mutilation of life with unending COVID-variants as the excuse. It’s insane.
As we watch in real time the bungle in Kabul, Biden goes out Wednesday before cameras to announce threats to governors for refusing to countenance the suffocation of children behind masks. Vaccine ID papers are beginning to be required everywhere. Businesses not big enough to function in a warehouse (Costco, Walmart, Home Depot, etc.), that haven’t already gone defunct, will be pushed over the edge this time around. Terms of employment are being rewritten to conform to the hysteria. So, our “best and brightest” from the White House to the Pentagon to the CDC abandon us to the fate of psychotic killers in Kabul while those of us still at home face an existence that is beginning to resemble life under the jackboot in the waning days of the Soviet Union or the CCP’s hyper-surveillance state.
UC San Francisco researcher conducts COVID testing as part of neighborhood-wide testing and vaccination program in San Francisco.
The lunacy of the approach to the virus was apparent early on. We dither over fatalities rates – whether 1% or 1.5% – and transmissibility R factors and completely miss the obvious: bugs evolve because they will always find a host to incubate despite your best efforts at perfection, as in perfect compliance with the demands of our overseers. It’s impossible with 330 million people . . . and counting since our borders are open sieves. Variants bust out and off we go into the world of sci-fi fantasy.
The thing that transpires before your eyes as you walk outside in many locales is Franz Kafka’s imagination made real.
Scene from Orwell’s 1984: the Two minutes of Hate.
The rescue plan from this Kafkaesque existence was mistakenly based on a vaccine. Now it’s coming to light that the jabs have a shelf life of only six months. The booster becomes the next front in the campaign for coerced compliance. Of course, this will only be true till the next edition of the bug erupts. And it’s back to what didn’t work before. Remember the definition of insanity?
When will we grow up and realize that some periods require more perseverance than others? At a certain point, life must go on. Mitigate wherever practical, develop and utilize therapeutics, and balance the mitigations with the acknowledgement that humans can’t be stopped from being human. Safety-obsession leads to a life not worth living.
From Biden’s brain to Fauci’s and Gen. Mark Milley’s mouths, incompetence rules. How many times can a great country continue to take body blows and still stand? Our allies are running from us as fast as our citizens are running from our “experts”. Amazing, absolutely amazing, that things have come to this pass.
Pres. Biden, Sec. of Defense Lloyd Austin, and Gen. Mark Milley
Just think, a majority voted for this. This is popularly-elected incompetence.
Bon Jovi’s ballad “Livin’ on a Prayer” (see below) is a story of a working-class couple struggling to make ends meet. The dream – synonymous with prayer in this usage – of them rising above their current circumstance keeps them going. Prayers, or dreams, come in many shapes and sizes. Some are unattainable fantasies and eventually lead to ruin. This darker side of illusory end-states riddles much of today’s political debates.
Dreams seek to become premises when cloaked in the jargon of “science” as in the cliché “follow the science”. To be clear, a premise is “a proposition antecedently supposed or proved as a basis of argument or inference” according to Webster. Emphasis is on “supposed” since many are unproven and unprovable, and therefore unscientific by definition, and more a statement of feeling than objective reality. A classic example is the trite qualifier “if it saves one life”. It’s a ticket to the straitjacket of complete risk-aversion if not balanced against the very real costs.
One such “dream” is the fallacy of interventions nearly eliminating risk, as in another clamp down against COVID. The dream of risk-aversion is king. The flat-lining of social and economic life is commonly the result. The toxicity in this latest drive to utopia is found in the rejection of life being a long series of trade-offs. The economist Thomas Sowell, an accomplished amateur photographer, would explain the concept to be like the contest between aperture and shutter speed. The taking of pictures is analogous to the balancing of risk of infection and prosperity. The elevation of concern for one depresses the other. That kind of mature thinking is jettisoned in the headlong rush to prevent anyone from getting the sniffles.
“If it saves one life” is the hidden mantra, and underlying premise. If that is the standard, why get up in the morning? We’ve known for quite some time that the virus, like all infections, carries greater dangers for the slender segments of the population with prior medical difficulties. The “saves one life” supposition is weaponized to eliminate any thought of the costs and off we go to eight-year-olds stuck as six-year-olds in academic maturity, lifetimes of personal fortunes destroyed in business closures, an evisceration of social life behind creepy masks and social distancing, and grandma’s hug being reduced to digibytes on a computer screen. It’s monstrous.
The delta variant is the excuse du jour for a return to a form of authoritarianism that’s beginning to awfully look like totalitarianism. It’s used to force people into taking the jabs (vaccine passports, threats of job loss, an end to travel and schooling). Any concerns about the vaccines or applicability to individual circumstances are officially suppressed as “bad thoughts”. The rallying of businesses to the cause carries the stink of fascism of early and mid-20th-century Germany or Italy.
It doesn’t stop there. The science of epidemiology is taking on the appearance of the “science” of race in National Socialist ideology. Totally disreputable, both are the gilding for a power grab and raw utopianism. Lost in the furor are some simple questions. Like, what is the difference between natural and man-made immunity? Is one more efficacious than the other? Pardon me, but isn’t a vaccine an attempt to replicate an infection in order to stimulate the body’s immune system, the one that God gave us? As such, the 99% COVID survival rate has produced a huge number of people with natural immunity. Is this swath of the population better protected than those with the jabs? Crickets by Jen Psaki.
The relative newness in historical terms of the current pandemic prevents many hard and fast answers. I wish that the folks at MSNBC would be more cautious about their bloviating. As for the natural vs. artificial immunity debate, a recent Cleveland Clinic study must be thrown into the hopper for consideration because it raises the scepter of equivalent if not better protection for the survival class. So, why the crisis-mongering for proof of vaccination if a good chunk of the population has equal if not better immunity without it?
More damage is incurred by the risk-averse obsessives in our public health bureaucracies when they resort to agitprop and end up soiling the very real advantages of the vaccines. The recent spike in hospitalizations is routinely characterized as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”? The phrase is parroted with some glittery number like 97% of cases. I’m sorry but I’m skeptical, and they’ve earned it. On what numbers did they derive their percentage? Some have suggested that they are based on January to June figures, a period when few had the vaccine and thus skewing the result toward the unvaccinated. Conversely, other spot data might confirm the oft-repeated claim. However, the CDC’s Walensky recently let slip that they don’t have up-to-date numbers. Boasts of certainty under conditions of real uncertainty only besmirches the reputations of authority figures and their vaunted “experts”.
Anyway, much of this is an angel-waltz on the head of a pin. The discussion misses the critical issue: Is risk to be avoided at all costs? What are the limits to risk-aversion? Our public gurus act like the 1% – the flip side of the 99% survival rate – is grounds to suffocate civilization. It ignores the fact that some periods carry more dangers than others since nothing in nature is evenly distributed, including hazards. The manic attempt to make all of life for perpetuity equally safe will end in a cataclysm. The premise, or supposition – “if it saves one life” – isn’t a moral imperative. It’s a formula for disaster.
Another calamity awaits in the headlong rush to expunge the phantom threat of systemic racism. Like the fit over COVID, this one is founded on a supposition that, in good ol’ boy fashion, is a dog that won’t hunt. It can’t hunt because it has no legs. The allegory works because the idea has no proof to prop it up. The racism is assumed to exist and it’s off to the drive for wholesale indoctrination.
Under the guise of critical race theory (CRT) and other anti-racism programs, minds are shaped around an unfounded assertion, or premise, in ubiquitous shaming sessions. It’s a simple mental equation for the hustlers: unequal outcomes mean . . . RACISM! To avoid having to identify individual racist actors, it’s loudest barkers point to a shadowy, evil presence. It’s “systemic”, because in their minds unequal stats MUST derive from RACSISM. Not logical but it works politically. Making the malefactor spectral, clears them of having to identify individual racists, which would be hard to find in the upper echelons, or too few anywhere else. It’s a familiar tactic in administrative conflict avoidance: send out a mass memo to address the misbehavior of one or two.
Karl Marx
By making the problem the society, or “system”, the way is paved for revolution. That’s what they’re really after. Their soul mate, Karl Marx, wasn’t satisfied with waiting for another round of elections to impose socialism, something pushed by the Fabians and Mensheviks. He wanted to tear the whole thing down right now. So do they, the hucksters who provide the theoretical framework for the munchkins to tear down Portland. In their minds, after they’ve mangled logic, a corrupt system requires the overturning of an entire way of life root and branch. Imagine it, an entire way of life relegated to the historical ash heap for an empty premise.
The premise of inequality-equals-racism is a scandal to logic, but it doesn’t stop there. We are in the midst of a wrecking campaign for the American economy. Why are we trying to mass devastate livelihoods? This time, the culprit is “climate change”. The charge is that man has wrecked the climate with our grid, cars, and suburbs. It’s said to be crisis, but is it? Now that’s hard to tell, but “crisis” is certainly useful if you want to stampeded the public into draconian self-flagellation.
Faulty, jump-to-conclusions premises abound in this latest round of modern hysteria. What constitutes a “crisis”? Does the available evidence support a “crisis”? Who are the major purveyors of CO₂? Mind you, it isn’t the total amount of CO₂ but an accurate formulation relies on the number per unit of GDP. Would a single country, or state within that country (California for instance), make a dent? Would any of the suggested measures make much of a difference? And, going back to Sowell’s photography metaphor, what are the trade-offs? And costs there will be in a tunnel vision focus on warming.
Our giddy, 31-year-old sophomore class president now serving as the representative of NY’s 14th congressional district (the firebrand known by the moniker AOC) would have you believe that we have 12 more years – oops, 11 more years – before the Sahara covers the globe, Arizona becomes beachfront property, and the islands of the South Pacific have to be removed from maps like the old Soviet Union. John Kerry is tasked with the mission to recruit international converts to the self-mutilation as Biden executes a go-it-alone strategy. All for what, a degree Celsius in a century?
The goal is breathtaking with nothing much behind it but the premise of a crisis. For the true believers, all-too-often with as much scientific understanding as my border collies, it’s an absolute certainty that requires you to surrender your liberty to them. Never mind that the “crisis” lacks any observable clarity, that China and India with 36% of the total world population aren’t about to sign onto a return to life in the dirt, and that Americans won’t long tolerate a grid designed by the greenie wizards of California with California results.
Amazingly, the governing elites in rich countries, mostly the Anglospehere and western Europe, are stupid enough to go along, which says volumes about the state of education in the birthplace of Horace Mann and the modern university. We are flooded by advanced degrees but can’t master simple logic. Has education evolved into a grandiose system of befuddlement? Is education actually de-education?
Something must account for the ignorance of the scientific method and abandonment of sound reasoning. Today, the substitute for a sound education is a computer model. Computer algorithms, i.e. models, are the go-to approach to make certain what is uncertain. Data goes in and predictions pop out, trend lines and whatnot. But the models didn’t suddenly materialize from a burning bush. Humans construct them and play with them and their results. In other words, they are product of us, with all our biases. So, data is entered and weighed, more numbers pop out, and Al Gore jets off to Davos and more $50,000 speaking gigs.
Al Gore, the emissary of climate change apocalyptics
Loose premises are the stuff of many of our most influential political movements. Our schools haven’t inoculated us from the mental plague. Ironically, they function as super-spreader events. As a result, we lurch from the suffocation of our kids behind masks in our schools, businesses forced to operate on a knife’s edge, colossal public debt, to the psychological scarring of ritual shaming sessions under the guise of anti-racism commissars, to a wholesale bulldozing of an entire way of life in a sinister crusade to eliminate something that the rest of the world won’t forego to satisfy the greenie fixations of Santa Clara County.
These aren’t premises in the proper sense of the word. They are leaps of faith, leaps of a materialistic faith, like Marx’s dialectical materialism, and have nothing to do with the spiritual kind. In fact, this new faith appears to be the only kind increasingly congenial among a people who have abandoned the pew or prayer rug. But far from being enlightened, we’ve laid ourselves open to a new kind of sky god: the sky god of ourselves with all our hysterias, stunted cognitive development, and flights of pure fancy. Welcome to livin’ on a premise, and many a faulty one at that.
PolitiFact staff at the 2012 RNC in Tampa (submitted photo).
At the top of Politifact’s website lies the banner “Stand up for the Facts”. Hogwash! It is just another preening part of the progressive (meaning left-wing) blob.
Check this out: Politifact conjures a distinction without a distinction in an attempt to distance Biden and Harris from their 2020 campaign rhetoric. In 2020 Biden and Harris were in full campaign mode throwing aspersions on Trump and his administration’s efforts to develop a vaccine. The apparatchiks at Politifact tried to run interference for the Dem politicos by claiming that they weren’t vaccine deniers in the run up to the vote. According to the young techno-demigods at Politifact, Biden/Harris were merely smearing Trump, not the vaccine. Hogwash!
Harris trumpeted, with Biden rapping in similar words, “If Donald Trump tells us to take it, I’m not taking it.” With invective, she went after the medical scientists in Operation Warp Speed (OWS) by dismissing them as weak-kneed shills for Trump, saying they “will be muzzled, they will be suppressed, they will be sidelined, because he’s looking at an election coming up in less than 60 days. . . .”
Kamala Harris in September of 2020 declaring that she doesn’t trust Trump’s vaccine.
The lead OWS scientist was Moncef Slaoui and he countered her bombast by saying “the approach is 100 percent based on facts and data and nothing else.”
And to say, as Politifact does, that Biden/Harris weren’t disparaging the vaccine? How do you avoid smearing the vaccine when you go after the credibility of the people who produced it? Why else would Harris declare “I’m not taking it”?
The buffoonery of Politifact is amazing beyond belief. Now, our new potentates are trying to stampede the reluctant into taking the jabs by imposing many of the old lockdown measures. The bunglers running the show in DC want to take away our lives in order to achieve perfect compliance with a vaccine that 8 months before they were ridiculing.
And to think that this duo got 81 million votes. Now I see why. The usual suspects, like Politifact, were in the tank for them. You can read Politifact’s twaddle here.
Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer addresses the media, May 20, 2020. (Rebecca Cook/Reuters)
The Progressives’ ideological DNA orients them to a lust for power. No better example can be found than in Michigan’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. She’s currently dithering between clamping down again or opening up under a regime of continuing restrictions such as masking, restaurant dining caps (50), and pleas to get vaccinated. Obviously, opening up means something different to a progressive than a normal person. They just can’t let people be free even when they loosen the reins. If they can get way with it, their reins will still be firmly attached to the popular bridle.
Read about Whitmer in a piece by Ingrid Jacques, deputy editorial page editor at the Detroit News.
Unbeknownst to our mandarins, the vaccine changed the entire virus paradigm. If you took the jabs, you’re risks for getting or spreading the bug are greatly diminished. When sick, the symptoms are manageable. You’re not a super-spreader and not likely to be an occupant of an ICU. You’re free . . . or should be.
If you choose to avoid the shots, it’s totally on you. You attend the public square at your own risk . . . or maybe the threat is still miniscule because of good health, being young, or you possess the antibodies due to prior infection or the fact that you’re just plain biologically gifted. What’s the point to the masking and closures if the means to escape its clutches is abundantly available and the only ones left in the danger zone are those willingly choosing to remain exposed?
If you’re a hypochondriac or borderline obsessive/compulsive, quarantine yourself. Walmart has home delivery and curbside pickup. Amazon and the rest of the online retailers would be happy to take your money without disrupting the tranquility of the couch.
Oh, I can hear the refrain from our progressive brethren that the refuseniks are costing us in higher insurance premiums, federal outlays, and hospital beds. Come on, that’s the “social cost” gambit run amok. It’s a dodge because it has no limiting principle and is therefore a blank check for state control of all aspects of our lives. Robust “social cost” and liberty are the matter and antimatter of a constitutional order.
Risk is a part of life. Get used to it. And some periods have greater risk than others. The Whitmers of our political landscape have no leg to stand on. It comes down to a lust for power by authoritarian busybodies riding under the banner of progressivism.
Jefferson put it quite succinctly: “The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”
Biden’s tail-chasing health team. Clockwise left to right: Dr. Rochelle Walensky, Natalie Quillian, Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Jeff Zients and Xavier Becerra
Have you noticed that some government heavies, mostly in the donkey party, are inching closer to resuming last year’s social and economic straitjacket? They can’t let it go. The virus variants and June-to-July spikes are said to be driving the fervor. But have you wondered that this is beginning to resemble a dog chasing its tail? The evolutionary twists and turns of microscopic bugs have always been with us. The CDC can’t repeal evolution. As soon as we get a vaccine, out pops a resistant strain and it’s off to the races to lockdowns and another “moral equivalent of war” to develop another vaccine. It’s turning into a never-ending cycle, or the dog not quite being able to seize its tail.
We did the lockdowns and the strangulation of social and economic life with the horrendous masking, school closures, home shut-ins, and the social distancing that treats everyone as a plague carrier. What’s all this doing to our psyches? Are we going at this all wrong? Yes, develop vaccines, but work even more fervently to uncover therapeutics. We already have a great head start.
In fact, more money and effort should go into treatments than vaccines. After the equivalent of a moon-shot dash to vaccinate for the current bug, we’re off to another spike facing an up-armored relative. If that is our focus, nothing changes. It would make more sense to make the bug less lethal through successful treatments. For vulnerable groups – and we know who they are – quarantining may be advisable till the danger passes. We should never again smother everyone because certain individuals have heightened sensitivities. We are learning what happens when you try to stop human beings from being human.
Our motto should be “Never again!” Target protections for the vulnerable, develop and maintain an inventory of the requisite therapeutics, work on vaccines, and, for God’s sake, allow us to be human again.
On second thought, keep this in mind: our government doesn’t “allow” us to be human. That’s the shtick of the Castro’s in Havana. They’re all into “allow” and “disallow”. All government actions in our country must be taken within the contours of our God-given rights. Think about that.
Shira Steinbeck, the parent of an 11-year-old in Pleasant Hill, recites an anti-distance-learning poem at the Mount Diablo Unified School District board meeting on Wednesday, February 10, 2021. (Screenshot)
An article in today’s San Jose Mercury News article is about the attempted recall of five members of the Mt. Diablo Unified school board. One unintended outgrowth of the pandemic was the self-besmirching of a growing class of “experts”. These scientific and technical professionals quickly confused scholarship with activism. Others, such as elected officials skilled in the arts of public utterances and little else, seek the confirmatory esteem of a science that they scarcely understand. They bring with them an unexamined assumption which elevates a near-utopian sense of pristine safety to the exclusion of everything else. The result is a society with the wheels coming off . . . and parents irate over their shuttered multi-billion dollar schools.
Once we knew the nature of the virus, which we did within a couple of months, and had a collection of therapies, efforts should have focused on the vulnerable. Instead, universal masking, distancing, and a shuttering of lives and livelihoods proceeded apace. Schools were closed, or nearly so, and children lost a year-and-a-half of learning, something that’ll be difficult if not impossible to recapture. Of course, inequality will be magnified as those with the wherewithal continue to excel and those not so well situated languish. It’s amazing that those most concerned about “equity” are doing the most to worsen it.
The absence of a vaccine is frankly irrelevant at this stage.
The reigning safetyism is a disabling crutch. The ill-fruits are all around us. Massive academic failures for our Zoomed children, a riddled economy on the cusp of rampant inflation, the decay of personal agency in the government bribes (lavish unemployment benefits) to stay at home, and growing political and social discord are abundantly on display. Waiting in the wings are escalating interest rates and a gargantuan federal debt service for the exploding red ink that’ll eat up the federal budget.
The most stringent measures were universalized in a mammoth wet blanket that some potentates worshipping at the altar of safetyism can’t find within themselves to lift.
I say this not as a political partisan. Both parties were and are culpable. Many of the commentariat – left, right, and center – perpetuated the strangulation. Looking back on it, within a few months of the outbreak, measures should have targeted those facing the greatest harm. Concentrated measures were ignored in favor of totalitarianism.
Now it’s time for the common man and woman to find their inner Patrick Henry and right the ship. Go get ’em parents.
Anti-lockdown protesters gather outside the Tinhorn Flats Saloon in Burbank, Calif.
So, there’s a bit of the spit-in-your-eye gumption left in the Golden State. The “Battle of Tinhorn Flats” was inaugurated by the son of the owner while his dad was overseas on business, with full approval of dad. While it didn’t end well – the eatery still fell under the iron boot of Newsom’s Council of Commissars like all the others – the episode showed that the spirit 1776 has a pulse in the People’s Republic. I’m inspired.
Check out this exchange between father and son at the onset of the imbroglio:
Son, Baret Lepejian, expresses the desire to reopen in spite of Newsom’s edicts and his father says that there are 30,000 closed restaurants in LA.
The younger Lepejian recalled: “100 percent fully aware, and I said there’s going to be 29,999, and there’s going to be one motherf***er that’s going to be open, and that’s going to be us.”
It’s reminiscent of Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe’s response to a German demand for the surrender of American forces in besieged Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, December 1944. He replied, “Nuts!” He was right in the end, and rescued by Patton, and the Germans lost. Which side do you think Newsom mirrors?
Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, left, and Col. Harry W.O. Kinnard at Bastogne, December 1944.
The Leperjians fought Newsom’s Stalinesque requisition squads down to Baret’s stays in goal and $50,000 in fines. When a judge orders the cut-off of power, employees brought in generators. When doors were chained and locked, employees used saws. When agents installed a chain-link barrier around the building, they set up a food truck and grill serving “non-comply tacos” and “freedom burgers”.
Baret’s son, Lucas, before his arrest.Police armed and ready for the assault on a place guilty for serving food.
It turns out that gumption is more scientific than the self-important decrees of the state’s Ministry of Truth. The pandemic still raged in spite of all the lockdowns. Blanketing everyone’s face behind a secular burka didn’t stem the tide. School closures treated the young-ins the same as nursing home residents in complete disregard of the science (As for the teachers, they are essential workers like doctors, nurses, and truckers). The public square was awash in hypocrisies. I could go on, and none of it worked.
Newsom is only opening up to save his own political bacon, and before the rest of the state packs up and leaves.
“Remember Tinhorn Flats” will join “Remember the Alamo” in the annals of rallying cries for freedom. Please read the article about it.
Robert Manfred, MLB Commissioner, in April announced the relocation of the Allstar Game out of Atlanta. The reason? In his own words: “Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box.”
Robert Manfred, JD, MLB Commissioner
Of course, he was lambasting Georgia’s new election law which was meant to correct some of the impromptu and ill-conceived, panic-inspired changes to voting last year. The law included the hated but popular – hated by radical activists – “voter id” for all voting, absentee and in-person. What led Manfred to hitch MLB’s wagon to the horse of radical politics? It was more than talks with radicalized groups associated with Al Sharpton, Stacey Abrams, and Big Sports’ mega-millionaires like Lebron James (worth $500 million+). The sport is bureaucratized and, as such, is as isolated as LeBron James in his sprawling estate in Akron or his $20.5 million mansion in Brentwood. When you’ve become separated from the fan base, it’s easy to mistake the barking of a few well-situated extremists for a popular groundswell.
LeBron James, one of the NBA’s activist mega-millionairesLeBron James’s Brentwood mansion
Just last October, at the World Series trophy ceremony in Los Angeles, Manfred was stunned after being heartily booed by the remaining fans in the stadium. Earlier, he had truncated the season to 60 games in a COVID-panic. From his lawyer’s mind, he tried to upend a century of baseball tradition with “pace-of-play” rules. Honestly, some of the rules might be justified, but lawyers are famous for producing a host of unintended ill-consequences. And, quite frankly, the whole scene is another one of those big-moneyed Harvard lawyers in a pin-striped suit telling main street America what’s best for them.
Yes, Manfred was a labor lawyer for Morgan, Lewis, and Bockius, LLP, when he came to the attention of the MLB big wheels in New York City, home of MLB, Inc. The guy is only familiar with the corporate suite and has less familiarity with the locker room than the queen of England. She has more exposure to reality since her love of horses and horse racing regularly took her into the stables.
The detachment leads to dealings only with groups, groups that aren’t representative of the people buying the tickets, gear, or putting their eyes and ears to the broadcasts. Manfred is an organizational man, far removed from the lives of ordinary wage-earners.
Organizational men and women are, by definition, bureaucrats, functionaries in an administrative state. We can see this unique social eco-system gestating in MLB in the 1970’s. It was abundantly on display in the short history of the Portland Mavericks as portrayed in “The Battered Bastards of Baseball”, currently showing on Netflix.
Bing Russell with his players and batboy.
MLB is sport as entertainment, as is true of all professional sports. The fan goes to the park to root for the team in a drama whose uncertain outcome has to be played out on the field. Bing Russell, the founder of the Mavericks, understood better than the corporate heads what drives fans, all fans. He gave them people to root for, care for, and have an emotional investment in. He didn’t see his single-A franchise as another cog in the wheel of the corporate machine. He loved being around the players and fans. To people like Manfred, it’s the opposite: the hoi polloi are statistical abstractions that are buried in the corporate balance sheet.
Bing reminded me of the early swashbucklers of Silicon Valley, or the Howard Hugheses in the young years of aviation: take chances and fly by the seat of your pants. That world is alien to a person whose chief qualification arose in matriculation from Cornell to Harvard Law to a federal clerkship to a law partnership to legal retainerships with the corporate suits.
In the end, we get a homogenized product without any of the grit of the qualities that make for personal attachment. We also get the blunders of an insulated nomenklatura. And all of us should know what happened to the Soviet Union by 1991.
See “The Battered Bastards of Baseball” on Netflix. You’ll enjoy it, and get a glimpse into MLB’s current condition. Oh, by the way, Bing’s son is Kurt Russell, the actor, who obviously has important memories to contribute to the story.
Kurt Russell in “The Battered Bastards of Baseball”
