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The Cult of Caesar

In a phone conversation with a friend from the Golden State, he mentioned a remark from an acquaintance justifying the COVID restrictions. According to him, his interlocutor quoted a line from Jesus (Matt. 22:21): “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” I responded by saying, “When you engage in the battle of the verses, you’d better make sure that the arrows in your quiver are more numerous than the number in the other person’s.” And there are other arrows to be found in her opponent’s quiver. In fact, many, many, many of them.

I suspect that the arrows dealing with idolatry alone would be sufficient to overwhelm her fusillade. One source identifies 30 including the famous Exodus 20:4: “You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth.” It’s the main reason that Christians endured three centuries of persecution. They wouldn’t bend a knee to the altar of Caesar. For the ambitious Progressives of our time, government is the resurrected Cult of Caesar for which all must bend a knee. This is no longer simply “rendering unto Caesar” but bowing before the altar of a new set of god-kings, a new Cult of Caesar.

Christian persecutions in the Coliseum, Rome, 2nd or 3rd centuries CE.

I look around and see the Cult of Caesar nearly everywhere. “Follow the science” is one of the mystic chants of the cult, even as they ignore the real thing. The priesthood of politicized “experts” is just one group of high initiates to guard the Cult’s Inner Sanctum. There are other sources for the Cult’s men of the cloth. Many cut their teeth on the Cult’s lefty politics in the bowels of the Democratic Party and rose to power in the Cult’s geographic strongholds: namely blue states and municipalities, and in DC with the ascension of a new High Priest in the Oval Office that now serves as the seat of the Vicar of the Cult.

Let’s not leave out the numerous seminaries, our colleges, who germinate the Cult’s zealots, the militant Jesuits (Antifa, BLM, etc.) whose duty is to proselytize the faith and do battle with the small pockets of unbelievers. These militia of the faithful were groomed in very comfortable surroundings and received elite training in elite institutions, which are now almost solely devoted to the key tenets of the Cult. They spread out as rampaging mobs (Minneapolis watch out), dominate the commanding heights of the culture, fill the ranks of the Cult’s chief evangelists in seats of power (Pelosi, Maxine Waters, The Squad, and true-believers in the Senate, and staffs), and into corporate boardrooms that have been remarkably receptive to the Cult’s ministrations.

Progressivism is the modern manifestation of the Cult of Caesar. One of its early prophets from the turn into the 20th century was Herbert Croly, not exactly a household name.

Herbert Croly

He went up to the proverbial Mt. Sinai of his mind and brought down his great epistle, The Promise of American Life (1909). It, and his voluminous other writings in the journal that he co-founded, The New Republic, were all into “give unto Caesar”. Why? Because Croly’s Caesar has two qualities of a true god: the powers of heaven and the concomitant power to make perfect. And I quote from him, “[T]he sincere democrat is obliged to assume the power of heaven.” And again, “Democracy must stand or fall on a platform of human perfectibility.” The quotes aren’t taken out of context. They form the core of his theology – or theology disguised as ideology.

It’s interesting that he intermingled the idea of the state “assum[ing] the power of heaven” with democracy. Croly like all Democrats profess a love for democracy, but only so long as it produces the right outcomes, their outcomes. If it doesn’t, democracy must be reengineered to fit the desired ends.

Thus, the Democrats’ demand for HR1, the omnibus bill that seeks to enshrine the electoral practices of Tammany Hall. Want unaccountable voting? Scatter ballots to the wind (i.e., mail), institute automatic registration when you have any interaction with the state (get a driver’s license, pay a fine, get a business license, make a lunch date with the clerk, etc.), eliminate election day by voting before and after “election day”, allow the zealots to sow and reap ballots, and forbid voter verification will do the trick.

Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall, NYC

The Cult’s high priesthood claim to expand democracy, but do it by destroying it. Why vote, knowing that your vote will be canceled by a mysterious downpour of ballots from the ether that nobody can or is willing to validate? Even the minimal qualification of consciousness can be ignored . . . since really nobody is checking. Breathing on a respirator while flatlining is no disqualifier.

I can’t think of a greater downer for voter turnout than this monstrosity. The whole contraption requires nothing of the disinterested voter. The ballot is delivered to you and will be picked up for return by somebody else. Nothing will be expected of the voter. The only thing missing is somebody to direct your hand as you vote – or maybe that is next. No hassles and no civic responsibility are the order of the day. Thus, for the voter with a brain, why vote? After all, the result may be preordained, and as honest as a mob-run casino.

The Cult’s newly installed High Priest recently gave a speech on one of the Cult’s chief challenges: the pandemic. The talk took the form of a papal bull and was replete with the assumed powers of heaven in the body of our latest Caesar. The Heavenly Leader’s proclamation was part plea to follow His injunctions – get vaccinated, wear masks, practice social distancing, etc. – and if we bow to His wishes, He offers a return of our normal lives by Independence Day. If we don’t, or nature throws us a curve ball, He will exercise the powers of heaven to smash our dreams and livelihoods. This isn’t a citizen republic. It’s a theocracy with a god-man/woman/it and a College of Cardinals in charge.

Watch out! They’re not done. The High Priesthood is looking to disarm the unbelievers. The Second Amendment is about to become as much of a dead letter as the Mosaic Dietary Laws in the Book of Leviticus. That’s next for the reigning Cult of Caesar.

I feel like Cicero – hopefully without the same end (execution) – who witnessed, and resisted, the rise of Julius Caesar and the end of the Roman Republic. The new imperium was established with the old institutions kept alive in empty form only. Rome achieved the revolution through civil war. We may have reached the same end by passive acquiescence to a new faith: the Progressive Cult of Caesar.

Hail Caesar!

RogerG

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BUNKUM: noun; nonsense. Synonyms include rubbish, balderdash, gibberish, claptrap, blarney, etc.

Pres. Biden in his CVOID speech from the White House on 3/11/2021.

Did you tune into Pres. Biden’s COVID speech last night (3/11/2021)? I did, and bunkum works as its chief characteristic.

The first part of the pitch was devoted to empathy for the lives cut short, the businesses ruined, the miseducation of the young, and the demolition of a country’s social life. He said this as if it occurred by magic. It didn’t. These were outcomes of deliberate government actions that were most enthusiastically implemented by Democrat overlords, and are still clutched by them with a death grip. It’s extremely odd to express empathy for fallout that people like him caused. It’s absolutely mindboggling to watch.

The middle part of the truncated harangue could be summed up as vaccine, vaccine, vaccine. Not mentioned was the fact that the vaccines were Trump vaccines with a Trump rollout that was cut aborted by a semi-election of mail-in ballots.

Also, to be sure, getting vaccinated is a good thing, but getting our lives back is equally, if not more, important. We have known since the middle of last year who is vulnerable and how to treat the bug with a host of therapeutics, with or without a vaccine. It’s clear that the most stringent measures should have been targeted on the vulnerable rather than a strangulation of the lives of everyone. To be honest, I could do without Biden’s cries of empathy as he promises to prolong the agony.

We now know that the straitjacket didn’t do much good. Federalism provided a live experiment, and it showed that cemeteries didn’t get any fuller in the more open states in comparison to the ones in perpetual lockdown.

The worst was saved for last: The Threat. If we don’t follow the mindless decrees of his power-hungry appointees and bureaucrats-as-“experts”, we may as well shred what remains of our Constitution. There will be no back to “normal”, and we’ll be forever stuck under the thumb of our new autocracy.

The spiel would have made more sense if Biden was Dorothy and he/she was tripping down the yellow brick road.

RogerG

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Another Failure of Our “Experts”

*Today’s short comment is mostly based on the work of Nicholas Eberstadt, the Henry Wendt Chair of Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute.

Our “experts”, the ones that grab the attention of the mathematically and scientifically illiterate in Big Media, are essentially bureaucrats in Big Government’s agencies of public health, corporate Big Pharma, and the university schools of public health. And all of them were asleep at the switch, the switch to throw the alarm on the catastrophic jump in working class “deaths of despair”: drug overdoses, cirrhosis of the liver, and suicides. Putting a number on it would be over 300,000 premature deaths from 1999 to 2015. And these are our gurus on all matters public health. With friends like these, do we need any enemies?

The disaster occurred under the noses of Clinton, Dubya, and the first term-and-a-half of Obama. Obama didn’t notice it, and maybe didn’t care. The alarm was tripped by Princeton’s Anne Case and Angus Deacon during Obama’s second term. Don’t forget that at this time, Obama was too busy lambasting the blue collars of western Pennsylvania as “bitter clingers” to their sky god and guns.

These same bureaucrats were the ones who fed the prejudices of the Big Government Left in the Democratic Party and the Party’s allies in Big Media during COVID. Fauci and company were elevated to sainthood. Behind the scenes, as our social and economic lives were castrated on the advice of these very same desk-jockeys, the death toll in “deaths of despair” accelerated.

Ryan Halligan, age 13, committed suicide by hanging on Oct. 7, 2013.
Picture of Jo’Vianni. age 15, in the hand of her mother. She committed suicide in April of 2020.
Bethany Palmer, age 17, of Greater Manchester, UK, committed suicide in April of 2020.
Rally to raise awareness of deaths of despair in 2017.

These “experts” are said to be public servants. But which public are they serving? I can’t avoid the insights of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in their famous work in public choice theory. They start with the simple premise of self-interest: it applies to everyone. It’s true every bit as much among GS-level employees and their politicized head honchos as it does for any budding entrepreneur. The cloistered ecosystem of the bureau, combined with occupational self-absorption, make for a unique animal who misses a whole lot.

Just think, with the Green New Deal and the jihads against “systemic racism” and for genderism, these same fools will be put in charge of nearly every aspect of our lives. If that doesn’t startle you, I don’t know what will.

RogerG

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Strangled by the Administrative State

Example: Delano Jt. Union High School District (DJUHSD) Reopening Plan, California

Not everyone is a scientist, but everyone can have a scientific mentality. Fact is, most don’t, and many of those become sneering haranguers like the CNN reporter condemning the Tampa Bay Super Bowl crowd at a popular eatery for not wearing masks. She doesn’t possess a scientific mentality because, if she had, she would have to hedge her judgment about masks with many caveats, like a real scientist. There are many scientific reasons to question the efficaciousness of masks, and many of the other COVID measures that have stripped us of our livelihoods and humanity.

Many of the assertions on COVID that entered the brain of our CNN reporter came from scientists who are more bureaucrat than scientist. They are accorded the final word as if the whole of science can be shoe-horned into the behavioral norms in the rarified atmosphere of the government office building. Their science is a stunted one suffering under the interplay of government employees jostling for job security and career advancement. It’s a unique social ecosystem that mangles science, usually to the lowest, or most stringent, common denominator to avoid blame for failure and a black mark in their personnel file.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, currently Biden’s Chief Medical Adviser, previously Director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

The rest of us outside the world of government employment are expected to bend a knee.

The attitude is more prevalent in the states and localities who are immersed in a love affair with government as the most important agent for human betterment – i.e., where progressivism has an iron grip on thought (blue states and localities). Anything out of the mouth of Anthony Fauci is treated as gospel, and off they go to public shaming and kneeling before the latest round of edicts out of the mouths of bureaucrats, that essentially act as “cya” for job security.

By so doing, our kids are approaching a full year without meaningful instruction. It’s clear that children aren’t walking super-spreader events. Yet, another class of government employee, the unionized public-school teacher, refuses to go back to educating them. Believe me, zooming isn’t teaching. It’s a form of play-acting: teachers sit in front of the computer camera and screen and who know what is happening at the other end, and everyone from the school board to the teachers to the principal’s secretary act as if the real thing is happening. It isn’t, as evidenced by kids dropping out, and off the servers, and the record number of F’s across the nation.

“Distance Learning”

A scan of my old employer’s website (www.djuhsd.org) brought to light a system – bureaucrats are infatuated with “systems” – that a King Minos, the developer of the maze to hold the Minotaur, would appreciate. At the top of pyramid – or maze – is the California Department of Public Health and its map of color-coded tiers of county infections rates to guide all government actions. And on top of them is the entire apparatus of the one-party state. Like a kaleidoscope of constantly changing hues, a county would find itself flipping back and forth from draconian to looser controls in a chaos that would make radical disruption a normal part of life. Interpretation of the continually changing map is the responsibility of another set of bureaucrats, the county department of public health.

Any plan for reopening the schools must adhere to the noise coming from the state and the county’s interpretation of the noise. The district issues their own plan with “phases” while adhering to the fluid and unpredictable circumstances. One week is the announcement of schools’ reopening; the next week is a lockdown. The bottom line for your kids: zooming for God knows how long.

And the striking fact about all the heavy-handedness is that it isn’t making a difference. More mask wearing, school closures, social distancing, and lockdowns hasn’t made an appreciable difference lowering infection rates and deaths. For instance, Texas and California are quite similar, except for the unemployment rate (7.2% to 9.9% respectively), and one being more open and the other in near perpetual lockdown. At least in Texas, a person can still go to work, to a restaurant, and school and run the same risk as a Californian who is stuck in the house, or marked by such gripping fear to refrain from even going to the park.

Maybe it’s as Ross Douthat said in his recent New York Times column: many of us, particular those in our culturally progressive urban areas, are longing for a secular messiah – a god-politician or god-expert – to deliver us from our travails. Politics and bureaucracy are poor places to look for deliverance.

In the meantime, many kids are getting dumber. It looks like we’ll have to inflate the number of H1B visas for engineers from the CCP’s China. Zooming in America won’t produce them here.

RogerG

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Perversion of Science

US President-elect Joe Biden, arrives with Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris to announces his economic team at The Queen Theater in Wilmington, Delaware, on December 1, 2020. (Photo by Chandan KHANNA / AFP) (Photo by CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images)

Today, science is routinely weaponized for political ends. Not surprisingly, it’s the people who know the least about it who abuse it the most, like the power-seekers whose educational preparation is limited to the verbose college subjects – subjects reliant on the manipulation of the written and spoken word, the “soft sciences”. Graduates of international relations and communications studies, for instance, promiscuously trot out “science” to boost their ideological prejudices. So, for them, “science” becomes their go-to means to feed their socialist inclinations. It’s the bane of our times.

Take two cases to illustrate the point: climate change and the pandemic. Climate change – “global warming” in an earlier incarnation – is riddled with Donald Rumsfeld’s known unknowns. And many unknown unknowns by the way. We definitely can take temperatures readings throughout the layers of the atmosphere and at the exosphere (top). We know pollution in the form of carbonates, etc., and cloud cover, can create a warming effect. But beyond those facts, politically exploitable grand predictions are the rankest of speculation. The unknowns are trampled asunder to get right to the activists’ solution of giving them and their fellow-travelers power, to the ruin of us all.

As the Gospels reported Jesus as saying on the cross, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Jim Geraghty, a reporter for National Review, in a recent article illustrates the persistence of the many unknowns about the pandemic. In the beginning of the COVID affair – or I should say when we first noticed its presence – we didn’t know much. Nonetheless, confident announcements obscured the ignorance.

At this time of innocence, prudence justified strong but short-term measures: lockdowns, school closures, masking, social distancing. The development of therapeutics and the knowledge of who is vulnerable should have led to a lessening of the grip. It didn’t. Once power is acquired, it’s awfully hard to give it up, proving once again that power is intoxicating.

Dr. Fauci testifying before Congress in June 2020.

At this juncture, many confidently talked about the date that the virus first entered the U.S. Now we’re getting the idea that we really don’t know, and neither do our masters. Honestly, our “experts” were aping each other in confusing the moment when they first noticed it with its actual appearance in the country or the world. With each new tranche of evidence, we’ve had to push back the start date in halting steps. This has significant implications about the virus and our response to it.

The official appearance of the bug in China has been moved back from December to October to “late summer and early fall” of 2019. Geraghty quotes the South China Post, NBC News, and US intelligence sources to raise suspicions of a far earlier pandemic birth date. Cell-phone activity in the Wuhan lab vicinity suddenly went dark for 17 days in October and satellites pictured unusually-packed Wuhan hospital parking lots “in the months before the pandemic became international news”. How much time before October was it mistaken for the common flu? “Late summer and early fall”?

Satellite photo of Wuhan parking lot unusually filled with cars, October 2019 (source: Taiwan Times)

If it had an earlier start date in China, did it have an earlier start date in other parts of the world? China didn’t shutdown flights to other parts of China till the last week of January 2020, and other countries didn’t stop travel till the next month. If the virus first appeared in “late summer and early fall” 2019, for how much time was it mistaken for the flu? Since international travel wasn’t suspended for the whole of the last third of 2019, and the virus was active, there was ample opportunity for the virus to spread to God knows where. It could be anywhere floating about on cruise ships, visits to American college campuses, malls, Disneyland/Disney World, Las Vegas, etc. How many Americans contracted it and nobody knew, least of all the patient, doctor, and our vaunted public health experts?

Visiting group of undergrads from the PRC to Stanford’s School of Engineering, 2017.
Recent photo of PRC tourists at a Las Vegas casino.

During this time of ignorance, many people who may have had it didn’t die, were treated, and a few may have succumbed, which matches our experience with any virus. For 90+% of the population, symptoms range from a cold to a nasty flu. As in all outbreaks, the vulnerable are the people with weakened immune systems, the aged with age-related conditions, and for that matter anyone with serious medical problems.

It’s entirely possible for the thing to fly under the radar for an extensive period of time before somebody with a microphone hits the panic button. Was the panic justified? Yes, maybe no. I’m reluctant to draw a hard and fast conclusion, but let’s just say that my BS-sonar is registering pings. Stringent measures in the beginning are excusable, but when we know more – not when we get a handle on its spread – they should be adjusted to fit that better understanding. So, instead of nearly everyone under stay-at-home orders, lockdowns with accommodations should have been limited to the vulnerable. Similar targeting should apply to masking, social distancing, and school in-person attendance. Instead, our scalpels were put away in favor of sledge hammers.

Social distancing in an American park.

We have mangled science and our lives. Back in March of 2020, I proclaimed that “We Can’t Do This”, the “this” being lockdowns. The costs in the trade-offs were too severe. Now we know that many of the powerful were making decisions to wreck our lives as if there were no gaps in their knowledge. Heck, as it turns out, they still don’t know when the bug started to circulate. It’s probably been with us much longer than anyone knew.

In the end, our power-hungry politicos and their supporting cast of lickspittle and self-aggrandizing “experts” have soiled the reputation of science. A good reputation once lost is hard to regain.

RogerG

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Anthropogenic (Man-Caused) Hysteria and the End of a Free Republic

Empty New York City streets after 2020 lockdown.

When we look back on today, will we view it as our crazy time? Or will we see this time, and the history before the virus, through the eyes of a broadly neurotic people publicly nurtured into the obsessive cleanliness variant of the obsessive-compulsive disorder? With the new administration, I’m beginning to wonder. I’m starting to doubt whether we will be ever allowed to be fully human again.

If so, say goodbye to a free republic and hello to a nanny state on meth.

Jake Tapper and Rochelle Walensky, CDC Director, from Sunday, Feb. 14, 2021.

Hints of the omnipresent and muscular nanny state have been arising out of the Biden administration. Rochelle Walensky, Biden’s CDC Director, announced earlier this month the need to get back to some sense of normality by reopening the schools even without a complete vaccination of all teachers. She walked back the statement a week later. On “Face the Nation”, she worried about a new variant, the UK variant (B.1.1.7), and the likelihood of more. Later, Jake Tapper of CNN pressed her on reopening the schools, and that means in-person instruction. She back-peddled. She stated that over 90% of children live in “red zones” of high infection rates and thus limited classrooms to K-5 with the mandatory butchering of the classroom experience behind desk and face shields, compulsive cleansing, and the scattering of kids behind 6-foot DMZ’s. She tied any return to something resembling normal to infection rates. In other words, with the perceived threat of variants and the persistence of the outbreaks, we might be hovering in a forever state of totalitarian controls and shutdowns. Is that any way to live?

That’s not all. Clearly, totalitarianism lurks at the core of the policy. Any return to a normal human life will hinge on “universal” – meaning perfect – obedience to the state’s edicts.

If “universal” masking is ordered, it had better be followed by everyone to the letter at all times. But that’s impossible. Remember, in the case of the schools, these are kids. In the case of adults, people slip. Absolute compliance is an impossible standard. Or maybe I should amend my account by saying that it might be possible with the kind of police state that would make the Castros envious. The same would have to be true throughout the regime on everything from perfect compliance on 6-foot social distancing to stay-at-home orders to the banishment of social and economic life. Perfect, compete obedience with the long arm of the state . . . forever.

Police arrest parishioners in Moscow, Idaho, as they participated in a public psalm sing in defiance of mask and social distancing mandates, September 23, 2020.

It’ll have to be forever because the virus may not, probably will not, completely disappear. If it hangs around like the lazy, obnoxious relative after Christmas, it’s 2020 forever, there being no limiting principle. What was sanctioned in March of 2020 is the precedent for an unending contortion of existence – if not for this bug, for any pathogen of mysterious origin. After all, mother nature is infinitely creative.

And this will be true in spite of a vaccine. Any new variant and new pathogen will incite the suffocation of society. If history is any indication, and given our knowledge of nature, new threats will appear. The acts of simple living could be forcibly ended nearly at the beginning of each flu season, till another herculean effort to create a vaccine succeeds. We may spend more time in lockdown than out of it.

Imagine an entire existence of a people living in a constant state of pins and needles. This could be our future . . . until the peasants with pitchforks (the guns having been taken in prior decrees) rise up in rebellion and expel the commissars. A point of saturation will have to be reached at some point. The experience of peasant rebellions in history isn’t a pleasant one.

One question overhangs the entire episode: Why do the American people seem so docile? Have we bred citizens or sheep? There are good reasons to challenge our response to the virus, not the science about it. Why haven’t we rose up in broad acts of civil disobedience, as in MLK’s campaign against Jim Crow? At this juncture in our history, I can’t avoid the strong conjecture that the citizens of today aren’t citizens of the 19th-century settlement of the frontier. We are different, profoundly different.

Sheeple?

The change is palpable, and something to worry about. The truculent John Adams was more direct: “But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.”

Or, how about this gem: “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There [was] never a democracy that did not commit suicide.” Are we about to prove him right?

The current hysteria is anthropogenic, and could well spell doom to a free republic.

RogerG

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The Puzzling 2020 Election

New York election workers coping with a deluge of absentee ballots, November 3, 2020.

No, I can’t leave the 2021 election alone, nor should anyone else. As of now, though, it is, as per Churchill’s quip about the Soviet Union, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. Analysis varies so much and is often infected with wishful thinking and partisan bias. Maybe it’s just that it’s too soon to tell. Maybe we’ll just have to wait for analytical competence. I don’t know.

Part of the problem lies in our affection for generalizations. Generalizations stray into oversimplifications. Many Republicans ask themselves the question, can we have Trump without Trump? Meaning, can we have Trump’s good parts and not his bad parts? The answer frequently swirls around stats that compare his numbers with R’s down ballot in an attempt to measure his toxicity. And that picture is murky. He did better in some places and worse in others. In the battleground ‘burbs, the scene is equally cloudy. The plain fact is that the numbers are all over the map making general conclusions difficult.

In addition, the raw vote totals for Trump don’t paint a clear picture. He added to his vote totals in some states, counties, and precincts, but in many of those places so do did Biden. In Texas for instance, Trump added 1.2 million more votes, but Biden added 1.3 million. In other locations, he didn’t. Thus, the percentage differential between him and Biden fluctuated wildly. Post-election boasts from either side is probably pablum.

Processing ballots in Michigan, November 3, 2020.

Two factors missing from the analysis are secularization and the weird election system that was concocted this time around. Secularization is a trend that predates Trump. Broadly speaking, it has been on the march long before Trump, even in places that have been Republican strongholds. How much has it weakened the strength of the elephant party? As of yet, I haven’t seen any numbers for this election. I suspect – and suspicion is all that I have at this point – that it has continued its onward march. Religiosity has been known to have a clear relationship to political affiliation and voting patterns. The trend has been going ill for Republicans.

2012 Secular Society march.

And then there’s COVID. The virus was destructive, and so was our reaction to it. The economy, the schools, our social life was laid waste. Elections weren’t spared. Distance voting joined social distancing and distance learning and distance working in our lives, with equally deleterious effects. It was imposed by purely authoritarian means, and out the window went voter authentication at the point of voting, which was the precinct polling place in normal times. Not this time. The point of voting happened to be a home with any number of people to fill them out, cajole, harangue. The person alone with their conscience became a social affair.

Increasingly conducting an election by mail is fraught with serious credibility problems. In many states, the simple authenticating act of presenting an ID to a precinct worker in normal in-person suffrage was replaced by county registrar worker bees functioning as graphologists. I didn’t know that handwriting expertise could be so easily performed by temporary, underpaid, and overwhelmed election workers. Software can help, but I wonder about its efficacy. This and other mutilations of our vote system resulted in mail-in votes accounting for over 60% of the total cast. This election system was weird, very weird, making comparisons highly suspect.

What would never have been tolerated in prior elections was done with zeal in this one. In some states, ballots were shot-gunned through the mail from voter registration lists littered with inaccuracies. Absentee ballots laid in clumps beneath mail boxes in apartment complexes in some documented cases. Forget about voter verification; forget about knowing what happens behind a home’s four walls to the four ballots that arrived. Out the window went the secret ballot. The normal election system was completely upended in many states.

The process so skewed the vote numbers that this election stands as a one-of-a-kind phenomenon, hardly analogous to any other. The process dictated the outcome to a great degree. The Democrats have long maintained the advantage in the suspicious kind of voting that doesn’t require your presence. Combine this with their longstanding vetoes of voter authentication measures and efforts to clean up the voter lists and you have an election system that feeds into their wheelhouse. They now have a legalized means to round up the large cohorts of the uninterested and ill-informed in their potential fan base. Their numbers were inflated in ways that hopefully will be never replicated again. All numbers were artificially inflated, with COVID-panic as the underlying excuse. As a result, once again, any comparisons with earlier elections to draw out trends will be fraught with misperceptions.

Since vote-by-mail asks so little of the voter – after all, the ballot comes to them so they don’t even have to go get it – it places premium on the uncaring and moron voter. In normal times, they won’t get off their couch. I intuit – and intuition is all that many of us have at this time – that a large increase in the moron vote in this election had some effect. To whose benefit? Can’t say. I have my suspicions.

Then we have the person of Trump, a third underappreciated element in this campaign season. How did his outsized personality affect the results? The spectrum of reactions to him ranged from repulsed to merely tolerated to loved, with not much between the markers. The personality-driven election may have made it possible for Biden to run his “not Trump” campaign from his basement and thereby hide his mental incontinence by simply laying back to garner the repulsed, something easy to do with ballots scattered by mail and postage-free voting. Trump here, there, and everywhere may have altered the normal election landscape.

In so many ways, this was an election like no other. It stands alone, and may not be comparable at all. So, when I see talking heads make bold claims, I shake my head in wonder at the silliness. They take the black swan election of 2020 and place it in a line with previous ones. But that’s like bringing onto the stage the 7’2” Kareem Abdul Jabbar and then claiming that he’s proof that we’re getting taller.

To the editors of publications of the literary set: 2020 was a huge black swan event which mangled everything within its calendar. Please exercise caution before you spout.

RogerG

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Pray for America

Supporters of President Donald Trump climb the west wall of the the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The pandemic gave us a death toll and a politically motivated overreaction that is actively mauling the foundations of America’s greatness. The consequences are frightening as yesterday’s troubling events indicated. My guess is that more disturbances are coming because some Americans will not be passive observers as others wreck their world. I’m not advocating it. I’m predicting it . . . if cooler heads don’t prevail.

From where came the time of troubles? It can be traced to the longstanding machinations of the donkey party and their cultural and institutional allies. The Democrats used the virus to nearly eliminate faith in the last vestige of free and independent citizen control of their government: the election. They’ve worked tirelessly to prevent ID verification, turn voter registration over to the DMV, push same-day registration, persist in maintaining sloppy voter lists, earlier and earlier voting, and now, with the pandemic, remove most remaining guardrails by shot gunning ballots through the mail and thereby throwing mud on the results, and all the while facetiously spouting “voter suppression” to silence opposition. Today, who can trust election processes that would make an Iraqi cringe? No refuge there.

Look at Georgia. How does a state go from reliably conservative to neo-Marxist without any transition? Something is afoot, and it ain’t a new pair of sneakers. Mail-in voting shifts the premium from the independent voter to the moron voter. You don’t have to know the candidates, their positions, and make sense of it all because a generic “D”, which today is a generic socialist, is all that is needed when you’re harvesting pre-packaged early votes in a well-funded processing operation. Interesting . . . and appalling.

Voters drop off their presidential primary mail-in ballots at a drop box at King County Elections in Renton, Washington on March 10, 2020. (Photo by Jason Redmond / AFP) (Photo by JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images)

Now, all institutions of critical societal mass are organs and tools of the cultural left, which is a direct pathway to the political left. For instance, the schools, K to grad school, have indoctrinated your teachers and kids in material and moral relativism, the philosophical mainstay of the many socialisms at the heart of the Democratic Party. In essence, they are the finishing schools of the cultural/political left. No refuge there.

Using the metric of political donations, the corporate boardrooms from Silicon Valley to Wall Street are overwhelmingly populated with acolytes of the cultural/political left. Money poured into the coffers of the donkey party from these deep pockets, and made it possible to fund Stacey Abrams’s vast political mining operation that gave us two more neo-Marxists in the Senate. Corporate America is no longer a trustworthy bastion to defend American civilization. Their ads are increasingly endorsements of left-wing sloganeering and the collectivism of the super-state. The robber barons of today aren’t robbing your purse. They are stealing your country. No refuge there.

A war is brewing between Wall Street and Main Street.

And of course, there’s Big Media. The stuff creeping through your tv screen is resplendent in lefty values and causes. Big Tech reinforces the bias by acting as gatekeepers of “acceptable” thought. Big Entertainment and Big Information are channeled in only one cultural and political direction. Lefty groupthink is pervasive. The ChiComs would find much to like. No refuge there.

At this point, I’m beginning to wonder if, indeed, bigness is badness.

The pulpit is coming under increasing fire. For those denominations unwilling to submit – some mainline ones already have – the power of the state will be used to impose the agenda of coerced participation in abortion, transgenderism, and every other trendy surrender to the human will to come down the pike. If you are a church who takes seriously the mission to help the lost and the least, you are in the public square and subject to their gaze. Your church may remain something of a refuge if you remain locked in the sanctuary.

Boxing people into a corner with no outlet is not a prescription for civility. Some might resort to violence rather surrender to the central planning of the Green New Deal. Some might resist rather than submit to gun confiscation. Some might resist rather than see the path to prosperity for their children hampered by the color of their skin. Some might resist rather than accept the full emasculation of their state by a donkey party- and DC-engineered neutering of the Electoral College. Some might resist rather than submit to self-serving manipulation of the size of the Supreme Court, or accept the edicts of a cowed Court under constant threat of impeachment. These are dark times.

I hear the faint sounds of a militia in training. I hope and pray it never comes to that. My only recourse is prayer. Pray for America.

RogerG

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The Party on New Year’s Day

Friday, New Year’s Day, I broke down and watched a couple of College Football Playoff games, the Rose and Sugar Bowls. I soon realized that I was taken into the world of Winston Smith of Orwell’s 1984. The parallels between 1984 and the telecasts are glaring. Oceania was governed by The Party – Ingsoc (English Socialism) – with Big Brother’s visage and voice everywhere from every bathroom’s two-way monitor to the daily and public Two Minutes of Hate. The message is the same and omnipresent for the denizens of Oceania. Ditto in the broadcast and on the field of the bowl games. Oceania and today’s media big brothers are obsessed with making a common mind no matter how ludicrous.

The message from Friday’s broadcast was that African-Americans are always oppressed by an enemy every bit as nebulous as the “enemy” engineered by Ingsoc and reified with names such as Emmanuel Goldstein (Orwell), or today’s “systemic racism”. Murky, ill-defined threats are perfect for mind control. They can’t be easily refuted because you can’t get your head or hands around a cloud.

I put up with it for about two-thirds of the second game and at that point I reached saturation. I changed the channel. What were they doing? Why, pay attention. All of Ohio State’s helmets had “Equality” stenciled on the back. This isn’t “equality of opportunity”, for The Party’s acolytes believe it to be code for – you guessed it – “systemic racism”. “Equality” has a more aggressive meaning to the zealots: equality of outcome. The players were ignorantly endorsing a pernicious revolutionary and totalitarian slogan.

If you didn’t get the message from the helmets, the leagues’ infomercials (example below) were resplendent with calls for an assault on the unstated and unproven “systemic racism”, like the imaginary threat of Emmanuel Goldstein in Oceania. It’s amazing how even respectable people get caught up in our own time’s Two Minutes of Hate.

For The Party’s activists, “systemic racism” must exist because of the statistical mirage of “disparate impact”. That’s the sole basis for its “truth”. In other words, if bad stats are larger than a group’s proportionality, everything must be turned upside down to make it “right”. It never crossed these geniuses’ minds that the numbers don’t jive because the causes are far removed from their racism hang-up. Lower incomes are more likely due to lower graduation rates, for instance.

Not content with pushing The Party’s line on “systemic racism”, Big Business – in this case Ford – chimed in with advocacy of The Party’s strangulations of the economy and social life.

Many of the measures pushed by the visuals and words, such as universal mask-wearing, social isolation, and a rubber-stamping of lockdowns, were excuse-mongering for Newsom, Cuomo, and the rest of the blue-state potentates. The commercials made no mention of the fact that last March’s draconian edicts did nothing to prevent the second surge. Flattening the curve meant flattening our lives. What side of deranged do we have to look to find a rationale for this lunacy? Not a word from Ford on the palpable incongruency.

The NCAA and corporate America are carrying water for lefty theatrics. They are trying to make unassailable what they cannot prove. Sounds like good old-fashioned propaganda to me, the kind that oozed out of Oceania’s Ministry of Truth.

RogerG

**Also on my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/rgraf0829/.

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Our Schools May Be Hazardous to Our Health. For Proof, Look Around.

2017 graduation at The Ohio State University.

A caveat to begin with: I refuse to paint with a broad brush. I had the pleasure of working with some of the most wonderful and dedicated people on the planet in my 30 years as a public high school and community college teacher. Yet, over those many years, I also became aware of the cancerous rot that has penetrated almost every square inch of the system. It’s amazing that some teachers succeed in spite of the decay. Lately, their task has been made worse by the intensification of the putrefaction. I worry for the kids and many of my colleagues still in the system.

One of the most dreadful notions to fly under the radar is the idea that human relations can be tuned like an old-style carburetor with a turn of a screw. A carburetor is childishly simple when compared to the ultrafine mesh of a civilization. The attempt to adjust one set of connections unravels and distorts others. To the over-confident and over-credentialed “expert”, unknowingly wearing blinders, and many a government officeholder who began their rise to prominence in the same manner as the degreed master – with a college degree – the temptation for busybody interference is too great to resist. The schools are the principal purveyors of this facetiousness.

To be honest, the idea of a small and centralized group of henchmen running national affairs has been around for centuries. As a case in point, the notion was crystalized in economic terms in the 17th century by the equivalent of France’s Commerce/Treasury Secretary under King Louis XIV, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and called mercantilism. Mercantilism is so simplistically alluring: sell more than you buy as a nation and your nation will get rich. The fact is, any benefits are concentrated on a few while the costs are many and more broadly distributed. For any politician and most others in our ill-educated media, the glorious ribbon-cutting ceremony is more glamorous than the many other people up and down the economic food chain who gradually find their lives made more difficult. It’s a fool’s errand but one perpetuated by the belief in the omniscience of the degreed or credentialed “expert” to manage things. We’d be far better off if our culture and schools did more to esteem humility than mass-produce framed paper affixed to office or home walls.

Trump swallowed the idea of societal manipulator hook, line, and sinker in his affection for tariffs, but don’t think for a moment that the Democrats are off the hook. The foolishness is the heart of their progressivism. They believe in “industrial policy”, an idea that is akin to a people’s life being best managed by a class of social and economic technicians. Of course, the technocrats will be churned out by our degree mills, the colleges, and not surprisingly it has led to wisdom dilution, inflated tuitions, and soaring college debt. Amazingly, our grasping for societal betterment became a disaster to be “solved” by more national debt.

The Democrats want to manipulate the system for the benefit of anyone not white and male, no matter how you define the sexual divide. Genitalia and melanin matter much to them. If truth be told, though, a history of lefty activism would have to be added to their list of preferred traits. So, clearly, it’s lefty women and men in dark pigments who are the objects of their sympathies and cares.

The intersectionality of the superficial, and having little to do with character.

In contrast, Trump’s darlings are blue collar workers. If I had to choose, my sympathies lie with the working stiffs who keep things humming along. Regardless, though, such targeted sympathies do not ensure good policy for a nation.

No better example can be found than Trump’s tariff escapades on aluminum (see here). The on-again, off-again exactions wreaked havoc for aluminum users such as beer and soft drink producers. Given the peculiarities of the beer and soft drink markets – the industry’s consumers are highly sensitive to price changes – the tariffs made precarious the livelihoods of thousands beyond the few hundred who have an increased lock on job security among the few remaining domestic producers of aluminum sheet metal. Trump had more zeal for ribbon-cutting while others were left seething at Budweiser, Coca-Cola, etc. Many in the bigger economy might be able to connect the dots. The possibility may have been missed, or simply ignored, by Trump and his advisers.

Where were the schools in teaching basic economics to the millions who pass through their doors? Where were the “experts” in educating your sons and daughters? Either the lessons didn’t stick or were never taught. Maybe people were never held accountable for either learning the lessons or teaching them. Either way, there’s a vacant spot in many minds to be filled with socialist nonsense or the belief that a puppet master or grand vizier will manipulate our lives to paradise. Actually, both possibilities are mirror images of each other.

We’ve seen this picture before. The vacuous thinking was resplendent in the streets of ancient Athens to those of Weimar Germany to the avenues of today’s Seattle, Portland, LA, Chicago, New York City, and any place in America beyond a threshold of population density. The “science” and “experts” haven’t freed us from the turmoil and ignorance. In fact, they may be contributing to it.

Take for instance, our “experts” in epidemiology – especially those that fill government posts – a field of understandable media attention during a pandemic. They have set us on the road to lockdowns, mandatory and universal mask wearing, abolition of Christian fellowship, the end of Thanksgiving and Christmas, the destruction of much of our economy, and putting the kibosh to real education for our kids. Has our educational system given us the same breed of “expert” who foisted on us the 1960’s-and-beyond War on Poverty?

They came right out of college knowing a lot about microscopic organisms and very little about the Laffer Curve, creative destruction, supply and demand curves, or crowd-induced hysteria. It’s easy for them to say, “If it saves one life, it’s worth it.” In their isolated world of labs and microscopes, it might make sense. As a governing philosophy, it’s a disaster. Just think of all the salutary advances from the rule of law to artificial power (steam, natural gas, nuclear, et al) that came from someone somewhere gambling. We’d still be in tribes in constant war with each other or huddled in caves next to open fires if we decided all matters by “If it saves one life …”.

And we are slowly reverting back to that prehistory with the lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, mandates for donning semi-burkas at all times in all places, and everyone treating everyone else as an alien species with the unceasing entreaties for social distancing. The crazy orders are depriving people of producing sustenance – i.e., boundless business closings and zooming (no pun intended) unemployment.

You know, sustenance, the kind of thing that’s been around since hunting and gathering. Many in our ruling class have made a conscious decision to replicate primordial existence, or at least the Great Depression. Once you take a meat axe to capital – thank you, Gavin Newsom and the other would-be Napoleons – it’s hard to bring it back. According to the National Restaurant Association, 40 to 50 percent of eateries won’t, if ever.

An empty downtown street amid the Covid-19 lockdown in Chicago, March 21. (photo: KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE)

Guess who’ll suffer the most? To find the susceptible, you’ll have to move down the social status and income pyramid: small businesses and the social rungs below those in exclusive zip codes. Without a doubt, the not-so-privileged, in the lingo of the day, will be the most vulnerable, not just to get the virus but also to lose their livelihoods (see here). Guess what happens to the woke crowd’s much-esteemed goal of “equity” as Newsom and company smother their economies? Guess who’ll cry the loudest for a “bailout” for their draconian measures? Mensa membership isn’t necessary for an answer.

The service industry is decimated, and much of the 15 million middle-income jobs with it. What do you think happens to your average barista? Hello, AOC. The president of a leftist activist group, Diane Yentel of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, proclaimed, “The majority of the up to 17 million households at risk of losing their homes this winter are people of color.” The lockdowns are an assault on the much-ballyhooed “equity”.

Taking a page from the Weimar Germany book of 1923, the response is to shower the country with paper money, with the same result, and non-expulsion edicts. Paper money being shoveled into the economy while euthanizing much production isn’t an expression of sanity in public policy.

It’s all due to “If it saves one life …”. Thank you, our schools, for giving us a powerful cadre of small-minded but powerful people.

Arising out of our colleges is much more than blinkered, busybody “experts”. Insanity dressed up in arcane academic rhetoric emanates out of these gilded hot houses. For example, take equality and turn it into equality of outcome, mash it into ruminations about our electoral system, and out comes “vote reparations”, and out goes “one man, one vote”. You’ve got that right: a black vote should count twice, or some similar formulation. Really? Brandon Hasbrouck, law professor at Washington and Lee University, hatched the idea to address the fact that there aren’t enough blacks in Wyoming and Nebraska, and too many in Chicago, Detroit, and the urban dots on the mid-Atlantic coast (see here). Yeah, African-Americans aren’t evenly distributed enough, he says, or in large enough numbers to protect their interests in a constitutional republic. So, he demands to jerry rig the system to the advantage of 13% of the population and end the constitutional republic that we’ve come to know.

Brandon Hasbrouck

The possibilities would be endless for advocates. For instance, divide LA’s Watts, Compton, and Southcentral neighborhoods into 20 congressional districts. Let’s put Eldridge Gerry’s salamander, the Gerrymander, on fertility drugs.

Printed in March 1812, this political cartoon was made in reaction to the newly drawn state senate election district of South Essex created by the Massachusetts legislature to favor the Democratic-Republican Party. The caricature satirizes the bizarre shape of the district as a dragon-like “monster”, and Federalist newspaper editors and others at the time likened it to a salamander.

Crazy? You bet, but something that gets a serious hearing among those in padded cells and faculty lounges.

Our schools, now at all levels, are quickly becoming breeding grounds for the sort of deadly mental pathogens that spell doom to any healthy society. At the entrance to every school – grade school to college – the following caution should be required under the school’s name in an official font size: “Warning: The activity in this place is hazardous to your cognitive development and the health of your country”.

RogerG