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The Rot is Beginning at the Top

The plutocrats of today: Gates, Bezos, Soros, Zuckerberg (l to r)

Abraham Lincoln on his dire warnings about the possible demise of the United States in his address before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838 (read at http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/…/speeches/lyceum.htm):

A younger Abraham Lincoln at the time of the Lyceum address.

“At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? — Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! — All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

* * * * * * *

Is Lincoln right? Are we about to confirm his prediction of us being the author of our destruction? If so, the rot has begun among our elites and the institutions that they dominate and like gravity it will flow downhill. The rest of us get mindlessly pulled along or find ourselves powerless to resist. Pick any one of today’s fashionable issues – climate change, systemic racism, its cousin “social justice”, “equity”, the preeminence of self-professed identities, transnationalism – and we will drown in it.

Last Sunday, in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Bill Gates, tech billionaire par excellence, made statements about the pandemic that had me shouting at the tube (see below). My wife sought peace in another room. Now, I am no epidemiologist, and neither is he. Look at his bio. The much-abused word “privileged” applies to his upbringing. His father was a prominent lawyer and his mother was on the board of First Interstate BancSystem, Inc., her father being a national bank president. They were well-heeled enough for young Bill to attend Seattle’s exclusive Lakeside Prep School. “Silver spoon” doesn’t go far enough to explain his privilege.

And off to Harvard he went, dropping out after two years, taking mostly math and computer science courses. He made his well-deserved “bank” and retired, with his bank freeing him from the mundane matters of life so he could pursue his philanthropy hobby. In his mind, apparently, his lavish donations qualifies him to pass judgment on matters epidemiological. Tapper treated him as an “expert” . . . which he isn’t! A silver spoon and half a Harvard degree doesn’t qualify him to pontificate on the many ways to destroy our existence, but obviously not his. Yet, here he was at CNN having his ego stroked for his “wisdom”.

Gates’s advocacy of globalism/transnationalism, more lockdowns, and reluctance to give Trump’s Operation Warp Speed any credit for the record time in the development of a vaccine is both informative and disturbing. He twists himself into knots to give credit to others outside of Trump while completely ignoring Trump’s all-important gift of clearing the regulatory way for Big Pharma. Trump gave the keys to the researchers, and gets no recognition for the fact from the muddle-headed Gates.

Pres. Trump announced Operation Warp Speed on May 15, 2020.

What does the personage of Bill Gates say about the condition of our moneyed elites? Lots! This guy, and many others among the techie super-rich, has no real acquaintance with a coal miner, steel worker, grape picker, or anyone in the skilled trades, where and how they live, their values, and not much of anything about them, except as an order to an underling to call one of them to service the mansion’s plumbing. The lives of the average people are an abstraction to be treated abstractly. Lockdowns, compulsory mask wearing, school closings are pressed without the slightest appreciation of the impacts on the common people outside the walls of the gated estate. Their proclamations are easy for them, their wealth and influence being a shield for them and their children.

Not so for the masses of human beings underneath them in the status pyramid. This is an elite unlike any other before, a point made by Victor Davis Hanson in his piece “Where Did the New Mad Left Come From?”. They made their money in ways that insulated them from the earthy existence of manufacturing, mining, lumbering, construction, and the kind of retailing that requires you to meet and interact with customers. Theirs is an apartheid world of wealth where they go from their homogeneous wealthy suburb to the exclusive prep school to the Ivy League to high tech and high finance. In their chosen sector, a life with the hoi polloi isn’t necessary and not evident. They live a life mostly freed from the unwashed masses, except in acts of social penance that appear as gifts that draw the admiration of the Davos crowd.

Warren Buffett, chairman and chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., speaks during an event with Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, not pictured, at Sokol Auditorium in Omaha, Nebraska, U.S., on Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2015. Buffet said at the rally that he was supporting Clinton’s bid for president because they share a commitment to help the less affluent. (Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Take a look at another among the fabulously rich in the tech world, Mark Zuckerberg, or the Google patriarchs, or the money-changing George Soros and you’ll see the same monotone leftist ramblings. Manipulating currencies or a life that keeps you ensconced among others like you isn’t the experience that’ll keep you from flights of utopianism and a predilection for the left side of the political spectrum — which is the same thing. They are the big money behind the billion-dollar prestige-school endowments, collectivist crusades, and neo-socialist/neo-Marxist agitators of the moment. Their money flows from the indoctrination in the colleges to the mobs in the streets to the political adventures that empower the home of lefty America, the Democratic Party.

To be clear, lefty bromides are toxic. Assaults on personal responsibility and the guarantors of morality in a thriving Christianity, and extended adolescence in state dependency aren’t the makings of mental health or personal accomplishment. No society can long endure under this constant abuse. Lincoln could be right in that we nurture our own downfall, and it begins as a rotting head on our social body.

Jack Dorsey of Twitter

I think that I’d have more respect for Gates if he’d give up his castle keep, take up residence in public housing, forego the hired security, and force his kids and grandkids to zoom from a dilapidated computer without expensive tutors and the elite prep school. Furthermore, Bill, freeze access to your bountiful assets so you’ll have greater appreciation for those wondering where their next paycheck will come from after your lockdowns continue into 2021 and maybe onto 2022. My guess is that he won’t last the night.

RogerG

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I Need You Christmas, Jonas Brothers

While listening to Amazon Music this morning, the playlist presented “I Need You Christmas” by the Jonas Brothers. The song is beautifully performed, and reminded me of all that we are missing as our life has been meaninglessly deformed by the mini-totalitarians in positions of power.

The lockdowns and mitigations have nearly expunged church, most of of our interactions with other people, and removed celebration and spontaneous enjoyment of friendship from our lives. Children are banned from the park and school. They are left to spend most of their lives behind walls and in front of a computer screen. Ours is a deformed existence and not a natural and reasonable response to the spread of illness. This song reminded me of what we are missing, and ought not to.

Christmas should be a time of joy, faith, family, and friends. To be honest, the song makes me melancholy. Still, it’s a wonderful song and beautifully performed. Pease enjoy. And merry Christmas . . . if you can.

RogerG

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Getting the Pandemic and Election Wrong

Hugh Hewitt’s radio program is a treasure. I savor his demeanor and interviews of all stripes of opinion-makers. However, his take on the two most important issues of today – the election and pandemic – drives me up the wall. He’s certainly not alone in his display of tunnel vision on these two matters.

Friday, while interviewing Steve Kornacki, NBC’s resident expert on polling, they both strayed into superficial comparisons of the 2020 election with previous ones. Right off the bat, it must be admitted that this election was like no other and hardly analogous. It’s the first election in my memory that a huge bulk, if not the majority, of the ballots cannot be assigned to particular living, breathing, and eligible voters with much certainty. Ballots were shot-gunned to buildings throughout the country, were taken inside, and nobody can legitimately vouch for each ballot’s treatment after that. It’s the exact opposite of the level of security when voting in-person. This election was strange, really strange. How is a comparison with previous elections even possible?

Kornacki blithely tries to do just that with Hewitt in tow. Kornacki cited the increasing urbanization of Georgia and the demographic dominance of the counties within the orbit of greater Atlanta, counties that Hillary won by 30% and Biden wins by 40%, to help explain Biden’s razor thin victory in the state. I’m not convinced the fact has much relevance. Demographic changes don’t occur at the speed of flipping a light switch, even though they are gradually happening in real time. Four years isn’t long enough for that factor to account for a change of 10%.

How can anyone brusquely brush off the possibility of a once-in-a-lifetime loosey-goosey election system accounting for the surge in Biden support? Kornacki and Hewitt might be suffering from glaucoma.

Hewitt would probably respond by saying that there’s no evidence of substantial fraud . . . but fraud is beside the point. He sees most issues as a lawyer would, which he is, in clinging to his conclusion that there isn’t sufficient evidence to throw aspersions on the result. He’s right if all matters must meet the standards of jurisprudence, but that’s a rarified environment involving unique standards. For real people living in the real word, we can’t conduct our lives by measuring all that we do to “beyond a reasonable doubt”. We must act on what is likely to be true.

Evidentiary norms of the courtroom are ill-suited for policy making, decisions about your child’s education, and assessing an election system that incorporated what would have been considered fraud just two years before. The system hid voting behind walls – addresses – and counting procedures that poured ballots into huge anonymous piles like a rain drop landing in a pond. The system legitimized fraud and made it next to impossible to uncover the misbehavior in “sufficient” quantities.

Indeed, this Rube Goldberg election system was a disgrace. Party activists, greased with wads of lefty billionaire cash, became the principle means for distributing the ballots as they scurried to deliver and gather absentee ballot applications from their favorite constituencies, and became the principle means for their collection in legal and “questionable” ballot harvesting operations. Vote-by-mail essentially codified scandalous conduct.

The election was a system with few, if any, authenticity checks. You can’t expect underpaid and overworked poll workers to instantly become forensic handwriting experts. This election became a race to garner the biggest pile of paper, not necessarily voters, because the system was set up to place a premium on paper, not bodies. Under these conditions, paper is made easier to pile than bodies.

Mail-in ballots being prepared for counting. (AP Photo/Don Ryan, File)

Simply put, you can’t correlate each piece of paper with a live body. A leap of faith is required to overcome that problem. Hewitt and Kornacki are unknowingly mired in something akin to a religious act.

And then there’s Hewitt’s stand on the pandemic. He announced that Gov. Newsom “is doing his best” and implored public officials like LA’s Mayor Garcetti to cordially ask the population “to endure just 3 more months of restrictions”. Au contraire, Newsom and Garcetti are deserving of condemnation not compliments and supplications to be nicer.

We’re in the midst of the much-anticipated second surge and many in power act as if they haven’t learned a darn thing. We now know that the truly vulnerable are a narrow slice of the population: the aged with serious health problems. Outside of that demographic sliver, almost all people would probably find influenza a more dangerous threat. And yet, we are told that nearly everyone’s entire way of life must be upended to protect this very small number of people, or protect ourselves from a threat that is no more dangerous than the seasonal flu. The hidden truth is, we can easily protect the vulnerable without making everyone else’s life a living hell.

If we do get it, we have proven therapeutics with vaccines on the way. We won’t die, unless we have the health issues that would imperil some of us every flu season. We had good reason to know this fact at the start but powerful officials got caught up in a hysteria that was incited by grossly inflated death rates. Remember those? But Garcetti, Cuomo in New York, and Whitmer in Michigan still act as if the embarrassingly faulty fatality numbers in March came from the burning bush on Mt. Horeb. They behave as if a spike in “positive” cases equates with a spike in deaths. Few things are further from the truth.

Jay Bhattacharya

Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford in his presentation in Hillsdale College’s October issue of “Imprimis” clears the medical fog of war. Most importantly, he addresses the confusion that paralyzes Whitmer’s and Newsom’s mind on that notorious death rate. The number that corrupts their brains muddles “cases” with “infections”. The former is a much smaller number than the latter, with the former producing a much higher death rate if used as the formula’s denominator. “Infections” is a bigger number because it refers to people with the virus or having had it. “Cases” are just the number of people with the virus that show up at a medical facility. Seroprevalence tests – an analysis of the presence of virus markers in the form of antibodies and proteins – in Santa Clara County, Ca., and replicated in 82 studies around the world, showed 50 times more infections over cases. Thus, the death rate properly calculated must drop behind the decimal point and not in front of it. Bottom line: the virus’s lethality was and is greatly overstated.

Targeted mask-wearing, quarantining and assisting the vulnerable, and an opening of life for 95% of our people should be the order of the day. Above all, get the kids back in school. Increases in positive cases should no longer paralyze us into ruination. If you get it, see your doctor, stay home, and drink plenty of fluids. Sound familiar?

The two issues are linked on account of the virus-panic being used to mutilate our elections, in addition to butchering our entire way of life. Hewitt wallows in misconceptions about the 2020 election and the virus. The school closings and lockdowns are destroying the path to meaningful lives. Our third world-style election system gave us a person of mental incontinence who will be left to populate the executive branch, and the courts, with delusionary leftists. We are going to be in for a rough ride, and the disfigurement of rational treatment of the two events is no good service.

RogerG

*Also on my Facebook page.

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That Crazy Election

Mail-in ballots in Chicago, Ill., waiting for postal delivery for the November 3 election.

One way to perpetuate the politically useful cause of combatting racism is to proclaim its existence in such a manner as to make the charge unable to be disproven by announcing it to be abstract or systematic. Leaving aside the patent illogic of it all, our political practitioners of irrationality have hit upon something. The form of something, take our election system for instance, is just as important as the content of it. It’s just that the woke crowd’s preferred use of “system” is pure nonsense.

Break the election system into two parts: the distribution and the processing of the ballots. First, the distribution. Thanks to COVID-hysteria, across the country we went on a binge of early voting, voting by mail, ballot harvesting, and essentially eliminating the measures to ensure ballot integrity and validity. In other words, we legalized what in another era used to be called fraud or cheating. Slipping ballots in early used to be one tactic to game an election. Another was to grab a handful of ballots and hand them to God knows who to do God knows what, like in our own time mailing the things to addresses across the universe. In another time, it was considered the fraudulent abuse of the absentee ballot procedure. This set the stage for the party of one-party fiefdoms and urban political machines – Remember Missouri’s Pendergast ring or Gotham’s Tammany Hall? – to legally do overtly what they used to do covertly.

I’m reminded of Robert Caro’s The Means of Ascent, the second volume of his series on the life of the 36th President of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ). Of particular note is LBJ’s successful and dubious elevation to Texas senator in 1948. Much that he did to steal the election from Gov. Coke Stevenson was legalized for today by the “crisis too good to waste”. Late registrations, new ballots mysteriously showing up, the whole mail-in shebang of today making it possible for one person to manufacture unknown multiples of votes, ballot harvesters hunting down warm bodies who can be cajoled to vote – and vote the “right” way – and legally diluted verification measures turned past crimes into permissible election procedures.

No wonder there’s little evidence of widespread fraud. Much of what fell under criminal fraud became, all of a sudden, statutorily permissible, or at least, with a wink and a nod, excusable. There was little fraud because fraud was legitimized by the pandemic.

You don’t need to resort to nefarious activities in processing, or counting, the ballots to manufacture the desired result. The whole system of distribution was fenagled to make a predetermined end more likely.

So, you will hunt in vain for old-style fraud like stuffing the ballot boxes because we’ve made it easy to do the same thing under cover of law in the distribution of the pieces of paper. Try and do the same thing with larceny, murder, and rape and see how far you get. This election was systematically a sham, period.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

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Why Vote?

As of now, I see no good reason to vote, especially if you live in one of those deep blue one-party states such as Chicago, California, the Acela Corridor, LA to Seattle, almost any metropolis, any burg with a 40,000-student college campus, or battleground state with Philadelphias crammed within it. What’s the point? The human capital to stay informed, tromping down to the polling place, or spending an hour filling out the thing is wasted when boxes of ballots are filled out by civic illiterates at the conniving of party activists or ballot harvesters reaping unused ballots and filling them out on the side of a van. Again, what’s the point in doing your duty only to have it canceled by the election equivalent of gangland enforcers?

I do have one caveat, though. It’s that the down ballot races, or maybe the mid-terms, retain some legitimacy because they lack a “Gone with the Wind” marquee status of the race for federal head honcho. Those races aren’t likely to attract the sinister gaze of our election system’s villains and therefore we benefit from their inattention. It’s like in a riot when one store is unexpectedly spared while the rest go up in flames. In such races, the pride in voting is replaced by the relief in knowing it will probably count because it won’t be aborted by the 3,000 empty ballots with the exception of one marked bubble next to one presidential candidate dropped in one heave at the registrar.

Undelivered Election Ballots Discarded on Arizona Farm, Nov. 4, 2020.

I was thinking today about the huge vote totals for both presidential candidates in this election. As of now, we have about 145 million ballots cast for president out of a US voting-age population of around 255 million. Of that number, about 169 million were registered to vote. Does each one of those 145 million represent one person above room temperature? Call me skeptical. The closer the vote percentage approaches the full mark, the greater the likelihood that many of those votes are reflecting the wishes of non-souls and the functionally illiterate. You can’t help but scrape more of the muck in the bottom of the pond as it is emptied.

The fix was in when people were allowed to vote a month early, sometimes after election day, and the spray of ballots across the country through the mail. In other words, the muck was thicker than usual this time around. And it ended up in the water supply.

Now the candidate that benefitted the most from this afterbirth of an election will have all the executive power to go COVID crazy. Get prepared, he’s going to go all Gretchen Whitmer on us. The Wuhan virus was used by power-hungry Democrats to destroy nearly everything in our public and private life. Authoritarianism is an addictive drug, and, once used, it will be easier the next time. Watch out every flu season for the mutilation of our social and economic life. Intoxicated with power, nothing will escape the gaze of our new Caesars. This virus, and any others that may befall us in the next four years, will be milked to essentially repeal the Constitution and turn an industrious people into a cowed and subservient one.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.

Our political ethos will not be spared. Supportive riots will be quietly approved through official silence as dissent against the rulers will be quashed. The right of association to protest will go out the window with the rest of the First Amendment. Forget about faith and fellowship. The equal protection of the laws will suffer a similar fate as children in chaotic homes won’t fare as well with Zoom education when compared to those well-heeled enough to form learning pods, tutors, and close parental supervision. It’s a social catastrophe. Watch other issues get thrown into the vortex such as gun control and AOC’s adolescent musings in her Green New Deal. COVID is robust enough for Schumer’s “change America”. This highly dubious election put the fox in the henhouse.

Let’s not look under that rock called the economy once these clowns get their hands around its neck. That important part of our lives involved with making a livelihood will be destroyed under the auspices of a hysteria about a vulnerable few, very few. The vulnerable should stay home and Biden’s efforts should focus on assisting and protecting them. A Sherman’s March through all of American life is a moral monstrosity and hardly justified, but we’re likely to get it anyway. That mound of pieces of paper said so.

One of the things that is lost on the civically illiterate – as they were made kicking and screaming to contribute to the rancid pile – is subtle and not so subtle distinctions. Biden and his crew wallow in a muddled fog between “experts” and policy-making. It works on the easily befuddled. In reality, experts provide advice; policy-making incorporates different points of view alongside an analysis of cost-benefit ramifications. For God’s sake, policy-making isn’t being led around by the nose by a select few “experts” who appeal to your authoritarian instincts. Different actions carry with them huge costs in a people’s social, economic, and political lives. Biden’s selected cabal of “experts” shouldn’t have the first and final say in what is to be done. There are too many in the class of “expert” who disagree. Plus, other experts in affected fields should have a say. That is what is meant by the art of statesmanship. Bringing all this together is the stuff of policy-making, not an act of waiting for Anthony Fauci to emerge from his lair like Punxsutawney Phil to issue his garbled pronouncements.

Punxsutawney Phil
Anthony Fauci

Collecting 50%+1 of these pieces of paper in enough states is just what the doctored ordered to resurrect the divine right of kings, or Rousseau’s “general will”, or Lenin’s “vanguard elite”, or whatever you want to call the emasculation of our citizen’s republic. After the Democrats mangled the vote by making the process a farce, there is little that the single citizen can do. It matters not if scant skullduggery can be proven. Follow your nose. You may not be able to identify the source of the stink in the pile, but that won’t stop it from stinking.

RogerG

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Is an Election the Voice of the People?

South Floridians stood in long lines Sunday during the last day of early voting in Miami, Oct. 31, 2020. (photo: Alan Diaz/AP)

The direct answer to the question is “no”, but it’s what we’re stuck with. All the other governance choices are even more dangerously spurious. Autocracy, aristocracy, and oligarchy take the powers of a mob and put them in the hands of one or a few egos. Still, to admit that a broad franchise is the only remaining sensible option is a far cry from it filling the role of the holy grail. Our world is flawed and so are the people in it. All we can say with certainty after an election is that one candidate was first past the post, that one person got more of the little pieces of paper than the others. Any attempt to tease out of the result something more significant is a recourse to divination. You know, like trying to uncover the will of the gods from haruspicy (inspection of animal entrails) or ornithomancy (interpretation of bird actions).

This man in Rhumsiki, Cameroon, attempts to tell the future by interpreting the changes in position of various objects as caused by a freshwater crab through the practice of nggàm. Does he have better accuracy than our pollsters?

It looks like Biden is our president for the next four years. What does it mean? It’s simple: Biden got more of the little pieces of paper than the other guy. That’s it! It was just as true in 2016 as it is today.

The possible reasons for an electoral outcome are as numerous as the number of hair follicles on a silverback ape. Back in 2016, Trump got more of the slips in key states than Hillary, but was it mostly because a sufficient bulk of voters in those places didn’t like Hillary or was it due to love for the orange man? Was it an outrage vote against suffocating political correctness? Was it a rebellion of the middle of the income spectrum without college degrees? Was it a cry from flyover country? Was it an uprising against halfwit elites awash in money, influence, social status, and discreditable educations from Ivy League schools? Was it because the other side was simply caught off guard? Can’t say, but that won’t stop the crystal ball gazers at Fox News and the leftist cabal at MSNBC/CNN/NBC/CBS/ABC/WaPo/NYT/Newsweek/Time /Slate/Politico. There’s no shortage of seers (pundits, talking heads) when dollars-for-mouth is dangled before some with past or present clout. It’s a sweet gig if you can get it.

MSNBC host and former Bush-Cheney Communications Director Nicole Wallace speaks to John McCain 2008 campaign strategist Steve Schmidt.

2020 offered some intriguing results. Biden pulled out a squeaker. But how? Let’s start with a few things that are objectively true. First, we are in the midst of a virus-panic. The hysteria contorted nearly everything from livelihoods to educating the young to Thanksgiving to elections to romance. How can anyone get a date while marring the face with the look of a bank robber? It’s hard to even get started with a stranger when eyes meet but the rest is a mystery. As for the holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas are to be relegated to computer screens. Ugh!

Back to elections, they were deformed by throwing caution to the wind, just what Democrats have been trying to achieve for decades. For them, many deep blue jurisdictions functioning as one-party states tossed ballots to every addressee on the voter rolls. Please, if you will, compare that to going to the old tried-and-true voting booth. The ballot is accounted from poll worker to voter to the secrecy of the booth to the observed placement of the ballot in the box in front of the poll worker. Surely, chicanery is still possible but it becomes viral in massive vote-by-mail schemes when ballots are thrown about like supermarket ads into mail boxes or on the ground next to them. The only real stopgap for integrity is the Boy Scout oath. Ugh!

Check out this scenario: party activist is alerted to the date of the mailing, is assigned a voter registrar list to visit addresses, helps persons answering the door to fill it out, assists them in getting a replacement if they threw the thing out with the supermarket ads, helps those delinquents in filling it out, and reaps the ballots from any leftovers, and all the while getting paid for it. Some of this is illegal, but how can you prove it? It all happened before anyone was alerted and ends up in the vote count. And then it’s off to the microphones after the things have been counted to admit the presence of fraud but claim it’s inconsequential. The reliance on the moral integrity of political activists is a sorry basis for an election system.

Secondly, all the pieces of paper are treated equal by the counters, as they should be. But are they in reality? Do they truly reflect an equal mental comportment for voting? Some people don’t care. Some people don’t care enough to devote the mental energy to be informed, or even vote if left to themselves. An election might be reduced to the success either side experiences in galvanizing the non-informed and uncaring. Under these auspices, an election is a race to collect pieces of paper from both sides’ dunces.

Where’s the buy-in on the part of voter? I don’t think it’s asking too much of the citizen to sacrifice a portion of their lunch hour to fulfill their chief civic responsibility. It says much about you if you’ll only do your duty if the ballot is delivered to you, someone helps you fill it out, get it to the registrar, or worse, bribes you into voting with holidays, free rides, and free lunches. Still, that vote from a blank slate has the same weight as the one from a person who understands that a ban on fracking will destroy their livelihoods and children’s future while doing nothing to mitigate “climate change”.

Democrats are the main instigators of a loosey-goosey election system. COVID gave them the prime opportunity to saddle us with choices of their multitudinous uncaring and ill-informed.

True, both sides have ample minions in the dunce category, but ample doesn’t mean equal. The Democrats seem to incorporate a bumper crop of dolts who are all-too-willing to believe in bunkum. The absurdities aren’t limited to the person who can’t break away from The View or the Ellen DeGeneres Show. Profound inanities proliferate from Democrat head honchos on down. The vagina-head protests at the time of Trump’s inauguration – a good sample of the D base – were populated with people who are now ecstatic about the head grifter of a family of grifters with a creepy personal history ascending to power. Pelosi, Biden, and the rest of the big cheeses are alright with sovietizing healthcare, as if bankrupting the nation will make it all better. The Green New Deal is Soviet central planning no matter how you shake it. The destruction of the livelihoods of millions will come at no change in Climate Change since the two biggest CO2 polluters don’t hone their policies to the wishes of the Sierra Club and are too ecstatic about leaving the stone age. The Dem’s bastardization of the confirmation process is now legendary after they tried to conduct a lynch party on Kavanaugh on the basis of nothing more than the baseless and raw accusation of single person, a person without evidence and littered with contradictions. The Senate hearing room and the mob in the street – the Democrat base in full view – were enflamed with the slander. Speaking of dunces, who else but a dunce could believe this bunk? The rabid D base could.

Women’s March, Washington, DC, Jan. 21, 2017.

And I haven’t mentioned the bilge that came to be known as “collusion” and an impeachment that was solely based on a singular phone call in the president’s exercise of foreign policy. A request for assistance in an American investigation on the grifting habits of the Biden family was turned into coup against the 2016 election. The manner in which the conversation made its way to the wolves in the Dem leadership in Congress speaks volumes. As it turns out, the “whistleblower” was an Obama leftover partisan hack in the bowels of the NSA. From there, the salivating wolves running Congress ran wild with impeachment at a time when a dangerous virus was insinuating itself into the country.

Collusion like impeachment was pure hooey, as Mueller had to reluctantly conclude. The only proven collusion turned out to be an unwitting (or witting) kind between Hillary/DNC and a partisan zealot and a sometime Russian intelligence operative, which ended up in the form of a smear known as the “dossier”, and then to the wolf pack. Who could believe this stuff? Dunces could, especially if clouded by untrammeled hatred and a lust for power. This disreputable cast of characters made up the “loyal opposition” in 2020. Biden was only a surfer riding the wave.

Robert Mueller testifies before the House Intelligence Committee, July 2019. (CSPAN)

Interestingly, Trump’s earlier request to the Ukrainian president unexpectedly gained additional legs in the week before this November election. By then, though, it was too little, too late. The scandal known as “early voting” – a month or earlier – became standard and the Dems exploited it to the hilt. The non-voting tendencies of their demographic base could be corrected by the mailed ballot and ballot harvesting. They already had millions in the bank before the good news about the vaccine, the recovering economy, and Tony Bobulinski’s revelations of Biden and his family’s time-honored tradition of peddling influence to become millionaires and maybe next door neighbors to the Obamas with a Martha’s Vineyard estate of their own. The party of big government is self-interested in it becoming bigger because it will make millionaires of them all. Grifting is a profession for this clan.

Joe Biden (middle), his son Hunter and his sister Valerie Biden Owens in 2016. Recent attacks on the former vice president pivot off the lucrative business activities of his son during the Obama administration. (photo: Visar Kryeziu/AP)

The picture of the 2020 election is more complicated than the elevation of an incontinent grifter to the presidency. The Republican down ballot did slightly better than the top of the ticket. The Republicans are in a stronger position to flood the zone with proposals to restore integrity to our elections. Voter ID, putting an end to early voting, reducing the prevalence of mail-in voting, establishing stronger federal standards in federal elections, and instituting criminal penalties for public officials who violate those official norms are some ideas that should make their way into bills. Let the Democrats play their “suppressing the vote” gambit. These measures poll well. Republicans, get on with it and make some hay.

With Republican successes down ballot, what is the “voice” of the people? Some voters believe this, some believe that, and some are just morons. The last category might be more numerous because it includes the folks who believe in things that aren’t true. Progressivism and socialism are plagued with things that aren’t true. These two related worldviews have a head start in the fantasy department. How many voters are firmly entrenched in them? My guess is that there are many. So, the “voice” of the people is a cacophony with a healthy dollop of the farcical.

So much for elections.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

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How to Ruin a First Lady’s Reputation

Barack and Michelle Obama superimposed over their plush Martha’s Vineyard estate.

First ladies normally leave office with high approvals because they aren’t sullied by the messiness of politics and are normally remembered for their high-minded crusades. Think of Nancy Reagan (just say no), Laura Bush (literacy), the pre-activist Michelle Obama (child nutrition), and Melania Trump (child well-being). When they choose to get into the muck, however, you realize that they were willing participants in a four-year choreographed charade – or 8 years in Michelle’s case. Michelle Obama, very rich and secure, residing in her $11.75 million Martha’s Vineyard 7,000 square foot estate, lectures us on our incipient racism and her opponents’ vileness. It’s beyond despicable; it’s ignominious and disgusting. She’s proof that elections can bring out the worst in us. It is doing it do her.

The discreditable side of Michelle Obama has been volubly evident this election. Her latest podcast monologue (see below) is chock full of partisan rhetoric, the kind of bombast that can be easily dismissed by anyone with a brain.

She blithely blasts Trump for no COVID plan. No one has a “plan” till they know the nature of the problem. By her measure, neither did her beloved husband during the Ebola, SARS, swine flu (H1N1) and Zika outbreaks. Biden advisor at the time, Ron Klain, recalled about H1N1,

“It is purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history. It had nothing to do with us doing anything right. It just had to do with luck.”

Not surprisingly, Michelle didn’t say a word about her husband’s neglect of the mandated stockpiles of PPE and medical supplies such as ventilators.

Plans don’t take shape till you know the disposition of the enemy. The liberation of Europe in 1944 couldn’t begin until we had some idea of where the Germans were and their capabilities. COVID-19 was special, very special. It’s identification, transmissibility, spread, symptoms, and lethality were unknown in January to … everybody! Once we began to know the enemy, travel bans, quarantines, lockdowns, expansion of medical facilities, therapeutics, and a Manhattan Project for a vaccine were pushed into place. Her podcast harangue was an empty rant without benefit of any suggestions for how she, or Biden, would do it differently. If you buy her balderdash, then, please, for your own sake, stay away from real estate offices. Michelle, you should know better.

Then she goes into a rant about Trump’s mask-wearing tendencies. Apparently, she wants universal mask-wearing at all times, even during moments when the science shows it to be ridiculous. Transmissibility of the virus outdoors has not been established even at this late date. The fear-mongering about the loss of “countless lives” is pure political hot air from science illiterates who are eager to employ generalities to pursue a naked partisan aim.

A real scientific mind, which Michelle shows no indication of having, would recognize the uneven impact on the population. Mitigations need to be targeted on the vulnerable, and, as it turns out, few of us are. Anyone healthy who is infected will have a case of the flu. We know that now; understandably we didn’t in the beginning. Michelle is stuck in January. She shows no sign of recognition of the destroyed lives in emotional depression, delayed medical procedures, job loss, bankrupted fortunes, retarding a child’s mental development, etc., from her favorite mitigations.

A mature adult acknowledges every day that life is a balancing of risk, even down to the decision to get up in the morning. Michelle’s authoritarianism is a recipe for civilizational collapse in a destructive crusade for zero-risk. Michelle, you should know better.

The rant continues in her attack on Trump for “sowing division and hatred” against black and brown people. Her entire line of attack is shattered by the reality on the ground. Residents and shop owners in our urban centers know who’s torching and assaulting people in their neighborhoods. Hint: it isn’t solely “people of color”. Michelle is right if her purpose is to deflect blame for the destruction from black and brown people. As it turns out, it’s white people from her socioeconomic strata who are instigating the mayhem. And, Michelle, mayhem it is. You are gaslighting, not Trump, by asking people to ignore their lyin’ eyes as they watch the Antifa and BLM-inspired pandemonium. Au contraire, you, Michelle, and your Democratic Party allies are complicit in “sowing division and hatred” by manufacturing hypothetical grievances under an unprovable abstraction, systemic racism. It’s a disgraceful attempt to invent racism when you can’t prove it, but you need it as a foil in furtherance of a power grab. Michelle, you should know better.

Michelle, no one, Trump included, has called for the arrest of protesters. That’s straw man demagoguery. The demand for law and order concerns the looting, vandalism, assaults, killings, and the setting of businesses ablaze.

Riot-damaged Kenosha, Wisc., 2020.

The many protests around the country are irrelevant to the shooting of cops, the spittle-laced fulminations in their face, the wanton infliction of injury, the homicidal acts of arson at federal buildings, etc., etc. It matters not if the ratio of protest to violence is 10 to 1. Simple protests don’t draw the attention of federal authorities. The 10 riots among the 100 protests is an immediate concern for the victims caught up in the havoc. And when you and your political allies quietly sanction the violence through misdirection, you’re an accomplice. As a mother, Michelle, you should understand this. Michelle, you should know better.

Michelle Obama’s behavior during this election season is a primer on how to destroy a first lady’s reputation.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

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Have We Lost Our Minds?

In case you haven’t seen it, here is the clip of the woman who was tasered and arrested for not wearing a mask at her son’s football game.

A couple of immediate observations are in order. (1) Is outdoor mask wearing under the condition of social distancing efficacious? I have very good reason to doubt it. If irrelevant, the rule is madness and its enforcement to the extent of tasering and cuffing is dastardly. (2) The mild reaction of bystanders is deeply disturbing. The mindless compliance with probable stupidity and meekness while viewing the manhandling of a person is astounding. Something deep has happened to us, our leaders and us. Troubling, very troubling.

Across the country, we are experiencing despotism from state executives on down – the federal component being more restrained. Mostly, these encounters occur in “blue” jurisdictions even though the municipality might be in a “red” state. This says volumes about a common political DNA between progressive (Left-leaning) governments and the smothering of popular common sense. We are into the 9th month of the pandemic and many nations and would-be despots in our country are threatening to reimpose their totalitarian edicts as if they have learned nothing since January.

Either science has stood still or our rulers are blockheads. My money is on the latter.

Lockdowns, or versions of them, are much talked about, despite the ineffectiveness of the first go-around as evidenced by the resurgence of the virus in various locales. Universal mask-wearing is commanded, even outdoors, in spite of the absence of evidence of the bug’s spread in the open air in dispersed situations. Incidentally, the fear spread to the almost 7,000-ft. Logan Pass trail in Glacier National Park (Aug. 2020). The sight of people masking-up is shocking to me to this day for what is says about us as a people.

Schools are shuttered in many districts – and the mass of 4th graders remaining 4th graders into their 5th-grade year – without any evidence after 9 months of the bug’s spread among children and to adults. Astounding.

Whoever said it was spot-on (and it probably wasn’t Einstein): “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Repeating ineffective earlier actions may reflect the quixotic and paralyzing belief in no-risk. Combined with progressivism’s despotism streak, we have a population willing to stand by as a person displays more common sense than the people who are tasering and cuffing her. Astounding, absolutely astounding.

RogerG

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Walking Billboards of Fear

A family wearing masks walks in downtown Los Angeles on March 22. (Apu Gomes/AFP/Getty Images)

Alexis de Tocqueville travelled to America in 1831 to initially examine our penal systems. His observations quickly expanded to include the distinctive nature of the American character in contrast to Europeans. He described an American as more rambunctious, independent, and more likely to accept risk. Using sailing ships to illustrate the point, even though the seamanship and vessels were quite similar, American ships got to Canton for a load of tea with one stop at port in a two-year voyage while European voyages consisted of multiple stops. Needless to say, Americans had a higher return-on-investment.

As he writes, “… the European navigator is cautious about venturing onto the high seas. He sets sail only when the weather is inviting.” An American “sets sail while the storm still rages” and “often ends in shipwreck, yet no one else plies the seas as rapidly as he does.” Further, highlighting self-reliance, “Americans are taught from birth that they must overcome life’s woes and impediments on their own.”

Daniel (1734-1820) and his wife Rebecca travelling westwards to Kentucky, by George Caleb Bingham, 1851 or 1852. In the 18th and 19th centuries, our ancestors flooded over the Appalachian Mtns. How many Americans today could withstand the ardors of the trek and cut a living out of the wilderness? I suspect a diminishing few..

Are we the same people as our ancestors? I wonder. Some have concluded that we have been “feminized”, meaning that we increasingly dread risk in the same manner as a mother is apoplectic about the most minimal discomfort to her baby. We might be about as far removed from our 19th century predecessors as the domestic dog (Canis familiaris) is from its gray wolf ancestor (Canis lupus), about 14,000 years, for good or for ill.

Take for instance the ready submission to the wearing of masks in regards to COVID-19. One pundit referred to the compunction for mask wearing as “walking billboards of fear”. She’s right! Many of these people are strolling advertisements of gripping phobias.

The docility doesn’t stop there. It extends to the willing acceptance without questioning of authoritarian decrees for lockdowns, six-foot social distancing, an end to common worship, etc. The meek may inherit the earth, but our inheritance will resemble an existence in a padded cell overseen by a cadre of wardens and guards.

The economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote of the indispensable role of the entrepreneur as economic adventurer. Everyone else rides in his or her wake, not everyone being so compose by temperament or ability. These economic adventurers aren’t mommies but swashbucklers of risk and innovation. We still produce them but they are easily counterbalanced by a growing army of power-hungry “experts” and a growing national population inured and dependent on the credentialed with political power.

The ground has been prepared for a new public ethos. It’s a mental state among a critical mass of the population that hovers between three semi-mystical orders: the cults of safety, the “expert”, and the state who embodies them. Combine the longing for a zero-risk utopia, a class of certified shamans with the hidden gnosis, and an authority with the power to make it happen and you have a society more at home in the World State of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World than the Federalist Papers. Safety and little tolerance for risk surpasses every other consideration and the public timidly goes along.

Helicopter parents of today – a byproduct of the cult of safety.
Kids on bikes in helmets. Today, to jump on a bike without one is considered recklessness of the highest order.
Kids on bikes in a photo from the 1950’s. How did we ever survive?

We have a population riddled with the submissive and the dependent, a dependency on the state and its credentialed overseers. The situation cultivates a population in paralysis when the promised services disappear because state and local authorities reneged on their civic responsibility in places like Kenosha, Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, New York City, Atlanta, Los Angeles, etc., etc., etc. Few citizens are willing, able, and emotionally ready to stop the annihilation of their communities. They have boxed themselves into a corner with the only recourse being the scramble to flee. Popular docility means that we go from the acceptance of authoritarian decrees to a bewilderment in the face of mobs who rampage with the quiet endorsement of the powerful.

This is not meant to be a piece against the wearing of masks. The use of masks should be, like all mitigations, conditional, conditional, conditional. It should not be a papal bull emanating out of the state capitol or DC. And if it does, there will be moments when the surviving residue of self-reliance and personal responsibility will have to rear its head to check an overweening state.

Can we recover from the stupor inculcated by the modern, progressive state? I don’t know. We are becoming a different breed of citizen. Indeed, are we more subject than citizen?

I hope, I pray that I’m wrong.

RogerG

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A Convenient Depression

The word “callous” comes from the Latin “callum”, hardened skin. The idea of a nice pair of Nikes was unknown for most of human existence. A lifetime of barefoot travel means hardened skin and “callouses” on the feet. See the connection? So, can a lifetime of committed political zealotry lead to an emotionally hardened personality, one with a furtive substratum of acceptance of wrecked lives to achieve long-sought ends? “To chop down a forest splinters will fly” was famously invoked by Lenin to signal his desire to build a socialist utopia on a corduroy road of corpses. I’m wondering that somewhere deep down in the psyche of your average Left/Democrat officeholder lies a little Lenin.

Maybe the thought shouldn’t be so surprising given their affection for Lenin’s ends, just without the holocaust … or, then again, I might be too optimistic. There’s no doubt that avowed socialists are piloting the Biden campaign bus in more ways than one. Assisting them along the way are a cadre of public executives at the state and local levels. I can’t think of a better way for them to reach their socio-political nirvana and upend a detested incumbent cruising to reelection than to create the stench of failure around him by fabricating an economic depression and lawlessness in the streets. Instilling a sense of fear and dread in the public works wonders for those seeking power over the body of Donald Trump.

I’m loathed to think that people could be so cruel, but there they sit in their little local soviets. They create their own banners to hide the reality, like Cuomo’s “New York on Pause”. California’s Newsom was the first to jump at closing down 14.6% of the US economy. The others followed suit. Soon 44 million Americans were out of work. Thousands of small businesses were shuttered as “nonessential” while the big boys – supermarkets, big-box stores, etc. – were allowed to reinforce their near-monopoly because they were labeled “essential”. Economic feudalism engineered by government dictat.

The media picks up on the drumbeat. Indeed, they are the drumbeat. The incessant dark message of doom about a virus whose ill-effects were egregiously overstated and whose lethality was highly targeted on a narrow segment of the elderly was churned into an apocalypse … and an excuse for statewide and local totalitarianism.

No wonder that in a recent Axios-Ipsos Coronavirus Index poll 51% of parents were stricken with fear about sending their kids back to school in the fall. Forget about any conception of risk, about any conception that risk is chronologically uneven, that risk follows their kids the moment that they leave the house at any time. Applied consistently, helicopter parents should morph into gulag superintendents.

Soon, a sixth-grader becomes a fourth-grader after “distance learning” under the tutelage of distracted and overwhelmed adults and the ever-present allure of the nearby Xbox. Some parents are wealthy enough to keep the learning spigot flowing with hired help. Economic feudalism will be followed by education feudalism.

Then we have the same culprits in many cases – already experienced at the nullification of federal immigration law – thumbing their noses at the White House by allowing their streets and downtowns to be turned into playgrounds of violent anarchy. Remember Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s “We could have a summer of love!” in CHAZ? In-between the arrests of unmasked joggers in Central Park and the painting of Marxist Black Lives Matter graffiti on New York City’s avenues, Mayor Bill de Blasio slashes the police force, mutes his constitutional role as guardian of public safety, and pronounces justifications for mayhem. The scene is repeated throughout the country in any deep blue bastion.

The economic misery and violence are quietly sanctioned, or at least seems to be. These lefty poobahs don’t seem to be in much of a hurry to quell the disorder, or bring the kids back to school, or get the adults back to work. Oh, I forgot, it’s the virus and “race justice”, they say.

And, by the way, if it ain’t “race justice”, it’s “science”. They have tried to corner the market on “science”. Yes, “science” is helpful in decision making, but these politicos have choices to make. That’s why we elect people: to make choices. Recognizing relevant scientific information, though, isn’t a green light to the Disneyland of Bernie/AOC’s dreams. “Science” can give you the nature of the virus but it can’t tell you the choice to make among competing risks. Socialists like those who run the Democratic Party always think that “science” is their personal handmaiden and, funny, always ends up with them being ensconced in the catbird seat of some all-powerful commissariat. Hogwash! “Science” and despotism aren’t peas in the same pod.

In the end, if polls are any indication, the Lefties have proven successful in creating the stench of failure around Trump, even though, remarkably, they are wholly responsible for the anguish. Which brings to mind the state of education in America. What else could explain the easily-achieved bamboozlement of the American public? The Democrats discovered that enough blue state governors and mayors exist to put American society into a tailspin. Are they calloused enough to do it? Are they cunning enough? I don’t know, but I’m suspicious given the wide lane of misinformation and ignorance open to them.

RogerG