Thomas Sowell: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” (Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles)
Dead fish on the shore of Lake Merritt, an estuary of San Francisco Bay.
Sowell is right, and it’s playing out in California’s San Francisco Bay. The Bay is beginning to resemble a toxic waste dump. One of the chief culprits is Heterosigma akashiwo, an organism responsible for one of the biggest threats to aquatic life in the Bay. It feeds on wastewater rich in nitrogen and phosphorous which streams into the Bay from the area’s sewage treatment plants and storm drains. The subsequent algae bloom suffocates the natural plant and animal life in these waters. One would think that the millions and billions shoveled out to fashionable victims’ groups (illegal immigrants, etc.), abortion tourism (anyone from anywhere gets an all-expenses-paid trip to end unborn life on the California taxpayers’ dime), the dole, and the Sierra Club’s greenie utopia could be redirected to cleaning up the Bay. Sorry, in this case, ecotopia cancels real ecology, the ecology of the Bay. A classic tradeoff: eco-calamity in exchange for the progressives’ dreamland.
Birds float on an algal bloom in the Bay near Berkeley. (photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle)An algal bloom at Lake Merritt in Oakland. (photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle)
That’s right, a tradeoff is actually about how one thing subsidizes another. Not covertly, but in reality. More money for one thing is less money available for something else, like updating and maintaining the area’s sewage treatment plants, and getting the region’s homeless off the streets and keeping them from turning the sidewalks, gutters, and storm drains into a huge open toilet. That stuff gets directly flushed into the Bay. And they used to say about Mexico, “Don’t drink the water.”
The Bay area’s descent into pre-modern times is what the residents unknowingly – and maybe knowingly – voted for. They chose in their elections to be distracted by a progressive pseudo-nirvana and into boom-and-bust electricity, and therefore blackouts, massive wildfires from eco-crazed forestry practices, and decaying infrastructure in everything from some of the nation’s worst roads to its overburdened aqueducts and empty reservoirs. Eco-nirvana makes it easy to pillage public safety in campaigns to defund the police – oh, I mean “reform the police”. Crime spikes and smash-and-grabs frighten retailers out of the state. The regulatory strangulation of the state’s housing industry has created a supply for the 20 million of the 60’s and not the 39.2 million (and rapidly declining) of today. This was a broad political choice to trade prosperity for devolution. The classic tradeoff.
Pedestrians walk near a pothole at McCadden Place and 4th Street in Hancock Park, from Los Angeles Times article titled “Road conditions in L.A. region judged worst in country”. (photo: Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
Don’t blame “climate change”. Be honest, the science is unsettled, and, anyway, California can’t do squat about it. 2.8 billion in India and China, and their cheap electricity, cancels the Golden State’s mere 39 million (and rapidly declining) and its EV’s and expensive and unreliable juice. It’s amazing that Newsom retains approvals in the 90’s among the state’s Democrats, who easily double the registration share of Republicans in the state. Lunacy is popular.
The cause of the Bay’s aquatic predicament is something very simple: If you’re going to have 7.75 million people packed around the Bay, an upgraded sewage treatment system is a necessity to match the 2 million flushing toilets and the expansive open-air john that is the preferred choice of its huge drug-addled, mentally disturbed constituency on the streets and in the parks. Don’t hold your breath waiting for something benign to happen. The necessary upgrades could double or triple property taxes and water rates. There’s one thing that these people are: they are overwhelmingly lefties, yes, but they like to keep as much of their money as anyone on the farm. They are already the most heavily taxed population in the nation, if not the planet. On top of everything else, I don’t think they’ll be in a mood to be taxed into the poorhouse, which is what will have to happen if they are to have their eco pseudo-heaven and a healthy Bay.
Something will have to give. How about exchanging some of the eco-nuttiness and giveaways for a healthier Bay? Sorry, San Francisco and California, you can’t suspend tradeoffs, or have it both ways, unless you’re in the mood for rapid depopulation. People still have to balance checking accounts.
You can read more on the issue here:
* Read about the decline of the Bay at “Poop and pee fueled the huge algae bloom in San Francisco Bay. Fixing the problem could cost $14 billion”, San Francisco Chronicle, Tarra Duggan, Sept. 5, 2022, at https://archive.ph/hAhrn#selection-137.0-137.104.
* Further reading on the problem can be found at “Wastewater, Not Climate, Fueled Massive Algae Bloom in ‘Epicenter of Supposed Environmentalism’”, Ryan Mills, National Review, Sept. 23, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/wastewater-not-climate-fueled-massive-algae-bloom-in-epicenter-of-supposed-environmentalism/.
* An account of San Francisco’s descent can be read at “San Francisco’s Slow-Motion Suicide”, Michael Gibson, founder of the venture-capital 1517 Fund, National Review, April 8, 2019, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/san-francisco-decline-failed-government-policies/.
* California’s designation as having the nation’s worst roads (tied with DC) can be found in “These States Have the Worst Roads”, US News and World Report, Dec. 4, 2020, at https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2020-12-04/these-states-have-the-worst-roads-in-america.
San Francisco 49ers safety Tashaun Gipson Sr. (31) celebrates after intercepting the football against the Seattle Seahawks during the second quarter at Levi’s Stadium on Sept. 18, 2022. (photo: Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports)Los Angeles Skid Row in recent photographSanta Cruz, Ca., homeless encampmentSan Francisco homeless encampmentA homeless encampment along 112th Street Southwest in Everett, Wa., near Seattle. (photo: Mike Siegel / The Seattle Times)
Probably due to past loyalty, I sat down to watch the San Francisco 49ers v. Seattle Seahawks game last Sunday (SF won 27-7); however, I must admit that my enthusiasm for professional sports has waned. I can’t remove from my mind Big Sports’ enrollment in the radical left. Neither can I erase the images of these two cities’ decline into urban chaos, as is true of most of the other NFL home cities. These cities willingly chose that path. A smothering cloud of ideologically driven misrule overhangs the stadium crowd, the broadcast, and the team organizations. With few exceptions, the NFL schedule has turned into a series of Dystopia Bowls: one team booster of the radical left agenda from a radical left dystopia playing another with an identical image.
I didn’t politicize the sport. Previously, I had no clue about the political leanings of those composing the team organizations and the league, and didn’t care. As for the cities, they upheld for the most part some sense of decency. Not anymore. The sport concerned itself, pure and simple, with athletic competition at the highest level. Not anymore.
How did the NFL and their urban homes allow themselves to descend into such depravity? The movie “All the President’s Men” made popular the modern cynic’s favorite principle: “Follow the money”. That’s not true by a long shot. If you want to accurately follow the course of human events, “Follow the ideas”. It’s how we got to a compromised NFL and today’s unlivable cities.
It begins with one word: Socialism. Yes, that word, a rhetorical vessel wherein the perennial hopes and dreams of human betterment can be realized, despite its track record of abysmal failure. Its oppressed/oppressor dialectic is so appealing that it escapes any final verdict on its failure. It’s the vampire that won’t stay dead.
In one sense, what began with Marx and Engels, passed through the 60’s New Left, and would end up in today’s BLM, Antifa, college campuses everywhere, and the Democratic Party platform. In the good ‘ol days of the 19th century Socialist International, the oppressed was the industrial revolution’s urban working class (proletariat). But the dreams of revolution by the proletariat fizzled and where they did succeed in a takeover, it was a litany of nightmares: 100 million deaths in the 20th century by one accounting of a group of French historians in The Black Book of Communism.
Yet, something happened on the way to the collectivist Emerald City of Oz to keep the flame burning. Two things: new groups auditioned for the roles of oppressor (the white patriarchy) and oppressed (minorities and a plethora of hypothetical outcasts), and the real threat was said to come from an abstract “system”. And voilà, new life was breathed into the disgraced Marx.
The home of The Frankfurt School in Frankfurt, Germany, in the 1930’s.
Pointing the way were disgruntled Marxists ensconced in what came to be called the Frankfurt School. They followed the line of thought of Antonio Gramsci who tried to explain away the reluctance of workers to be enthusiasts of revolution by pinning the blame on “cultural hegemony” – the values, mores, institutions, and ways of life that keep them supposedly docile. In modern lingo, synonyms would be “the man”, “the system”, or “the establishment”. Inspired by Gramsci’s gambit, European activist academics banded together and formed the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, which would later be dubbed The Frankfurt School. Hitler, however, set them packing in the 1930’s. Many of them made their way to the United States – the Frankfurt School set up shop in New York City – to eventually take up academic posts to proselytize the American young in their babble.
Antonio Gramsci
Theordor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, et al, and the risible Herbert Marcuse lent their thoughts and encouragement to the burgeoning 60’s counterculture and the extremist New Left to continue the erosion of the foundations of western civilization. The physical consequences were plagues of drugs and STD’s. The political offshoots were the SDS, Weather Underground, Black Panthers, Symbionese Liberation Army, etc. Crime and urban riots erupted, and campuses were paralyzed in protest and violence. It would appear that the trail of these ideas is one of tears. Some liberals were shocked into neo-conservatism by the 1970’s and 1980’s.
Herbert Marcuse
Once again, disaster, and, once again, someone will appear to pick up the torch to fling it. It’s proof that gullibility like the poor will always be with us. In our social media world, glibness reigns supreme in the form of stitching together words into appealing quips that remain just as erroneous as they did before. The glibness of the BLM politburo, Nikole Hannah-Jones (the lead founder behind the intellectually bankrupt The 1619 Project), Bernie, the Biden crowd, the CRT demagogues, AOC and her Squad, and the big wheels of the Democratic Party can only put lipstick on a pig and cannot with a wave of the hand turn the porcine beast into Miss Universe. I don’t believe in shapeshifting. Do you?
Today is different, though. Whereas before, the nuttiness infected the fringes of society, only occasionally bursting forth to wreak havoc. Today, it’s everywhere and especially among the those who occupy the commanding heights of the culture. Why does big business from Major League Baseball to Coca-Cola to Delta Airlines to Disney risk alienating two-thirds of their customer base, unless they actually believe this bunk? There must be something more at work than fear of the race hustlers’ shakedown racket.
Rudi Dutschke, a German missionary of the 60’s New Left, pointed the way by espousing a “long march through the institutions”. He elaborated, “Revolution is a long complicated process in which people have to change.” He meant to shove aside and replace established civil society and government. But others realized that a root-and-branch approach wasn’t necessary, that today’s unkept radicals in blue jeans could be tomorrow’s tenured staff in tweed. Welcome to your kid’s nest of revolution, errr, college.
Rudi Dutschke
Simply put, the barbarians at the gates became the barbarians inside the gates. Lo and behold, the neo-socialism is dogma among the beautiful people residing in their super-zip code (Martha’s Vineyard, Chappaqua, NY, Atherton, Ca., Malibu, Ca., etc.), any place where hyper-wealth screens people from the consequences of their beliefs. Of course, part of the uniform for this new aristocracy is a degree from a legacy university, preferably Ivy League. They have all the outward signs of manners and outlook of a college pedigree, and the inward signs of proper breeding in fealty to the dogma. The Fortune 500 is no longer the Republican Party at work. It’s an alumni booster club for the neo-socialism of the campus.
The minions of this new privilege infiltrate beyond the boardroom and into all positions of power and influence. Since FDR made DC into the new Rome, and swelled its politico-cultural influence beyond the District and into the surrounding states of Maryland and Virginia, the neo-socialism has at its disposal the aggrandized power of the federal government. Any popular threat to its monopoly can be squashed under the banner of another German rhetorical import: streitbare Demokratie, or defensive democracy. It normally shows up as censorship. It’s the speech control in “hate” and “extremist” statutes and regulations in the European Union, UK, Austria, Germany, etc. You hear it out of the mouths of Pelosi, Schumer, Biden in “defending our democracy”, which is code for thought control by pasting contrary views with “misinformation”. Biden has attempted an institutionalization of the censorship by creating “misinformation” ministries in his administration, all stymied as of now.
Pres. Biden’s speech in Philadelphia on Sept. 1, 2022, branded “MAGA Republicans” dangerous “extremists”.
Streitbare demokratie seeks to freeze in amber the gains of the long march of neo-socialism through the institutions. The effects are physically observable in viral gender confusions among the young, uninhabitable downtowns, a plague of crime, radical indoctrination of the young, an ecotopia that forcibly reverts life back to medieval times, and a crumbling infrastructure that can’t deliver safe roads, sewers, water, or affordable and reliable electricity. Hillsides aflame, high taxes, inflation, and gargantuan government waste characterize life in this “democracy”. It’s like the decay of Rome in the 5th and 6th centuries after repeated barbarian conquests and misrule. Soon, much of the place is abandoned only to fall into rubble, to be later uncovered by the new field of 19th century archeology. Is that the fate of New York City, Baltimore, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, et al?
A late 19th century photo of ancient ruins in Rome. Or could it be today’s Seattle or San Francisco?
The stench of watching it unfold in real time overpowers the senses. The knowledge of the occurrence overwhelms any enjoyment of watching a football game. Sorry.
RogerG
Sources:
* An account of the super-zip codes can be read here: “Super ZIPs: New map reveals who is part of the rich ‘isolated elite”, Deseret News, Nov. 18, 2013, at https://www.deseret.com/2013/11/18/20529811/super-zips-new-map-reveals-who-is-part-of-the-rich-isolated-elite#:~:text=In%20the%20Wall%20Street%20Journal%20and%20his%20book%2C,5%2010514%3A%20Chappaqua%2C%20N.Y.%20%28New%20York%20City%20area%29
* A rudimentary internet search of “streitbare Demokratie”, Rudi Dutschke, The Frankfurt School, the guiding lights of the School, Antonio Gramsci, will shed light on today’s neo-socialism.
Here’s a story for you. University of South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley refuses to admit that she was mistaken in recently cancelling her team’s basketball games with BYU. In a statement to a reporter, she said, “I continue to stand by my position.”
Dawn Staley, University of South Carolina women’s basketball coach
Why cancel games with BYU? Staley was reacting to a charge by a Duke University volleyball player, Rachel Richardson, who claimed some BYU fans heckled her with racial slurs. An exhaustive review by BYU of all available video and audio recordings and interviews with over 50 nearby spectators uncovered no evidence of the insults. Still, Staley refuses to back down. Why cling to an unfounded decision in spite of the evidence? She isn’t the only one. Lately, over at least a decade, and more incidents recently, we’ve gone through mass derangements over climate change, systemic racism, and COVID. Facts don’t matter. Despite, or maybe because of, trillions spent on education and the most intense networks of information ever devised, we seem not to be particularly inoculated from mass psychosis.
Investors should be aware of this thing called mass psychosis, typically referred to as mass formation psychosis. It happens in markets and occurs anywhere a large group of interconnected people exists. One source defined it in the following way:
“Psychosis is when people lose some contact with reality. Mass formation psychosis is when a large part of a society focuses its attention to a leader(s) or a series of events and their attention focuses on one small point or issue. Followers can be hypnotized and be led anywhere, regardless of data proving otherwise. A key aspect of the phenomena is that the people they identify as the leaders – the one’s that can solve the problem or issue alone – they will follow that leader(s) regardless of any new information or data. Furthermore, anybody who questions the leader’s narrative are attacked and disregarded.” (Source: see below)
Evidence, proof, and real scientific inquiry are abandoned. Take the long-running issue of climate change with the adjective “apocalyptic” added for good measure. Beyond the reasonable assertion on the contribution of CO2 and fossil fuels, much else strays into the realm of speculation or mysticism. So many other questions on the subject – other contributing factors, their interplay, and impacts – cannot be answered with reasonable certainty, unless pure ideological bias qualifies for seasoned judgment. How’s that any different from the Heaven’s Gate cult? Besides, flagellating the most fuel efficient and clean society on the planet – ours – is pointless as over 2.8 billion people in China and India discover the joys of rising incomes, air conditioning, and affordable transportation. All made possible from the majesty of fossil fuels.
Biden’s Climate Special Envoy, John Kerry, disembarks his private jet.
John Kerry is paid by us to jet around the world to cajole foreign rulers whose interests do not align with his fellow comfortable elites in their super-zip estates. He must be seen by them as a clown to be tolerated, maybe indulged a bit for photo-ops, but otherwise ignored.
John Kerry’s model is California. The cliché has it that California leads the way to the future. Maybe so, if that future is characterized by a mass psychosis in the mysticism of climate change. The rest of the country gets a bird’s-eye view of that fate. The state’s grid has been turned into a health hazard as the landscape dries out from the dry-summer climate’s periodic droughts. The state has made it difficult for anyone to clean out the surface debris in its wildlands, and 100 million dead trees await a spark. And eventually one will be provided by nature or from one of the state’s many urchins from its urban chaos.
The same psychosis that has turned the state into a fire trap is utterly destroying any concept of reliable, affordable energy. The altar of wind and solar isn’t a sensible means to appease Gaia. They are intermittent by nature, which strains the grid. Power lines are made for steady streams of electricity, not the boom and bust that is endemic in sunlight and bursts of air movement. Any grid under this steady strain breaks down if not assiduously maintained, which it isn’t. It just so happens, though, that California experiences an annual 5-month dry spell, alongside its endemic droughts, for the ruptures to send thousands fleeing the attendant flames hoping that they have enough charge in their EV to escape death-by-firestorm.
A California driver fleeing the Camp Fire in Paradise, Ca., in 2018.
But don’t let the facts get in the way.
California is a self-made disaster. Their infatuation with air movement and sunlight energy has unknowingly made them dependent on steady-stream sources – fossil fuel, co-gen, hydro, nuclear – to buck up the losses from the night and calm days. But the state is busy torpedoing most of this backbone. Co-gen is mostly irrelevant. For the state’s ruling class, natural gas and coal are the devil’s brew. Hydro is undermined by eco-mandates for steady stream flows that has helped to turn the state’s reservoirs into puddles. Don’t only blame the drought. Every year is not a drought year, and no effort is made to store during the wetter times. Riparian habitats and dreams of the return of ancient salmon runs checkmate any other use.
The state’s dams have become the equivalent of Egypt’s pyramids. They are monumental but, as opposed to the pyramids, aren’t likely to attract many visitors three-quarters empty. The same fate has befallen the state’s two nuclear power plants: San Onofre and Diablo Canyon. Delayed maintenance while the state bullied the utilities into greenie fantasies put the kibosh to San Onofre, which cost the state 2.2 gigawatts of power. Diablo Canyon was scheduled for death in 2025. Blackouts have forced the state’s ruling party to back down on that one. How long? Well, it’ll probably remain open until the next spate of wet years gin up hydro for awhile, waiting for the next dry spell to once again reasserts itself to overtax the seas of solar panels and vast windmill forests that mar a once beautiful state. It’s a cycle of futility buttressed by a mass psychosis: a mystical belief in horrors that fact, reason, and science cannot dispel.
A truck crosses a bridge over the shrinking Lake Oroville, the headwaters of the California Water Project, in a photo from July 2022.
None of this matters one twit to the zealots who run the state. Evidence be damned. Electoral majorities in the state are in the grip of a mass mania that jettisons all reason and fact. All that remains is blackouts, skyrocketing electricity rates, hillsides aflame, and no effect on climate change.
Would it be better to simply enjoy the extended growing season and build more nuclear and low-emission power plants to enjoy the glories of air conditioning? Regardless, India and China will see to it that CO2 emissions continue to glut the atmosphere with or without the ministrations of John Kerry or the ladies on The View.
Climate change isn’t the only opportunity to go crazy. We have another one in “systemic racism”. What is systemic racism? Does it exist? Hard to say since “systemic” means that it is hidden and therefore not directly observable. Thus, we have to rely on others to simply announce its existence as they make an affluent living on their soothsaying.
The racism “experts” are actually grifters. Racial disparities occur in all sorts of areas such as incarceration rates, educational outcomes, birth rates, marriage, incomes, and social status. Thus, they insist that racism persists, but not in the Jim Crow way: obvious, in-your-face, and therefore open to rational inquiry. It’s easier for them to proclaim that the disparities are the proof of racism, even though they haven’t proven it, because they can’t, because the imprecision of the thing makes it immune to empirical testing (falsifiability). The “ghost in the machine” kind of thing. Instead, they claim to possess the special gnosis to expose it and how to remediate it as they go to the bank with thousands, if not millions, in book sales, consultant fees, and speeches. A new industry of charlatans is born. It’s as if astrology and the four humors in medicine are making a comeback.
Kimberle Crenshaw
The parallels with medieval medicine are glaring. People in earlier times noticed that fevers were reduced by bleeding a patient. The ancient Greek philosopher Galen and his four-humors paradigm was proven correct, or so they thought. It was, however, the classic post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc fallacy at work: two events occur sequentially with the first one assumed to be the cause. For our current race hustlers – Kimberle Crenshaw, Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DeAngelo, et al – systemic racism is proven by unequal outcomes by race. Poor educational outcomes on assessment tests by race, for instance, must mean that the test and its providers are “systemically” racist. It’s tantamount to saying, “Fever fell after bleeding, and patient is cured.” It’s nonsense.
Still, two full seasons after the death of George Floyd, “End Racism” dons the helmets of some NFL players. Viewers and our kids are barraged by the effort to ferret out something mysteriously within them and lurking in everything that surrounds them. It’s tantamount to the 17th century Salem witch trials in the modern form of a bogeyman in a Klan outfit.
The whole campaign rides on the inequalities in academic measures by race. The cause is presumed – racism – but only because “family structure” is excluded. Kids swim around in social circumstances that have greater impact on academic performance than melanin count or more money in the bank accounts of the NEA membership. Commissioned by the US Office of Education in 1966, the Coleman Report levelled a blow at the ego of the education industry’s special interests when it concluded, “. . . the inequalities imposed on children by their home, neighborhood, and peer environment are carried along to become the inequalities with which they confront adult life at the end of school.” Yep, chaotic home life and slums have greater bearing on admission to MIT than school funding, teacher salaries, and the racism bogeyman. But you won’t find outcomes by family structure anywhere in the various measures. Strange. You’ll see math, reading, and science scores by race, gender, ethnicity, economic status, etc., but nary a word about the home.
Chicago police at a crime scene comforting a child in a photo taken in 2020.
The missing link between the social measures and their cause is never filled with anything resembling empirical proof. Unequal stats by race are said to automatically point to racism. That’s it, and we’re off to the races to follow the “experts” in the secret gnosis. COVID gave to us another example of the same phenomena: trust the “experts” to fill the gap between a development and its treatment.
Filling the shoes of Kimberle Crenshaw, one of the overpaid founders of CRT, is Dr. Fauci and his peers in government, the NGO’s, many in BIG Pharma, Democratic Party potentates, et al. The lockdowns, school closures, mandatory masking, social distancing, the vaccine decrees, the overall suffocation of a society, were persistently avowed without a real scientific basis. Other approaches to maintain the functioning of civilization and protect the vulnerable were treated to covert and tacit censorship. Therapeutics, targeting safeguards on those with certain health conditions, natural immunity, the costs to children, the canceled or forgone medical appointments, the strain on a population quarantined in the four walls of their home (many more walls if you live in the super-zips), and the huge economic losses from the waterboarding of work and production were shunted aside in a mad rush to stamp out the virus, the very opposite of “follow the science”.
Once the “experts” had their foot on the pedal, they never let up, in spite of the growing evidence that they were prescribing a suicide pill. By summer 2020, it was widely established that the young ran little risk. So, forcing kids into filthy masks and into isolation behind plexiglass in schools that opened their doors was more than pointless. It was harmful. The schools most beholden to the blinkered “experts” were in Democrat strongholds, the inner cities, and they closed the longest. The academic performance gap morphed into a Grand Canyon. To no great surprise, the principal victims of this enthusiastic pursuit of school lockdowns and other tortures were minorities, putting a lie to “black lives matter”, especially for young ones.
Data began to stumble out that the states who were the most religious in following Fauci and CDC mysticism fared no better than those who were more agnostic about what Florida’s Gov. DeSantis called “Fauciism” (see below). Claims were made by our health elites in power that the lockdowns, masking, social distancing, school closures, mandatory vaccines, et al, would “stop the spread” or “bend the curve” when one of the tiniest things in biology and profusely evolving – a virus – will in all likelihood evade the best laid plans of mice and men. Their interventions were heralded as the holy grail and natural immunity was ridiculed. Two years after the pandemic’s onset, we’re still grappling with a shape-shifting virus and infections persist.
Who’s to blame for this disorder by mass psychosis? Certainly, trillions spent annually on schools from K to grad school have monumentally failed at truly and broadly educating the population. Education is enlightenment. Are we enlightened? Evidence to date says “no”. Conversely, it may be the source of much of this mass psychosis.
What then is the value of our enormous communication network on the net and through satellites, cables, Wi-Fi, cell towers, and the infinite variety of radio signals? What are they communicating? Much that is spewed spikes mass psychosis. We seem to be great at inventing things but no so good at using them.
All our inventions haven’t altered the crooked timber of humanity. They have only magnified its prese nce. Immanuel Kant’s famous line from the 18th century remains true: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Credentials are certainly no guarantor. Civilizations over millennia have created civil society to grapple with our fundamental pretzel character. You know, faith, family, morals, and neighborly affiliations in local self-help organizations came into being. People like Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Robert Nisbet wrote of the virtues of these “little platoons”. Well, the centralized welfare state carpet-bombed their importance.
We just created more bullhorns for mass psychosis.
RogerG
Sources:
* “What is Mass Formation Psychosis?”, SWFI, 1/2/22, at https://www.swfinstitute.org/news/90470/what-is-mass-formation-psychosis
* Ivan Rowe at the American Enterprise Institute wrote of the missing ingredient of family structure in most reports of our social condition. One column on this subject can be read at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/08/29/students-family-background-matters/.
* Skepticism is always warranted when people go beyond what the science gives. Climate change ideology is a classic example of the phenomena. Those in the field of science who have managed to keep their wits exist. Princeton’s Freeman Dyson outlined his critique in the NYT Magazine at https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?sq=Freeman. Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg is another. Kevin Shapiro’s review of his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, can be found in Commentary Magazine at https://www.commentary.org/articles/kevin-shapiro-2/the-skeptical-environmentalist-by-bjorn-lomborg/. Japanese scientist Kiminori Itoh argues for more complexity in the dynamics of the atmosphere than John Kerry would admit. An account of his views can be found in the Orange County Register at https://www.ocregister.com/2008/06/18/japanese-ipcc-scientists-says-global-warming-worst-scientific-scandal/. The Norwegian physicist Ivar Giaever, and Nobel Prize winner, equates the climate change crusade with a religion. A talk by him on the subject is available through Foreign Policy Journal at https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2016/01/01/nobel-laureate-ivar-giaever-on-climate-change/. There are many others out there.
* The Federal Bureau of Economic Research in spring 2022 issued a report on how states fared in their response to COVID-19. Biases marred the analysis of the report. Some with blue-state leanings say that the BER paper proved the wisdom of aggressive COVID measures, while others of a red-state tint say the opposite. Blue-state biases downplayed or ignored the secondary damages of children’s developmental and education losses, the harms from delayed or absent medical treatment, the increase in suicides and depression, the massive disruption to the economic life of the country, etc. One analysis from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity appears more accurate than most. It can be read at https://committeetounleashprosperity.com/final-report-card-on-state-responses-to-covid-19/.
* A report on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on student achievement was made by the Brookings Institute in March 2022 and can be read at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2022/03/03/the-pandemic-has-had-devastating-impacts-on-learning-what-will-it-take-to-help-students-catch-up/.
You should know that I was a second-generation California native of 62 years who no longer lives in the state as of 2015. I am retired but had been disgruntled with the state for the previous couple of decades. The state is worn down, falling apart, and progressive utopias were, and still are, pursued at every turn. At least I got out before the blackouts.
Already, at the time, $400-$500 monthly electricity bills in the summertime heat of Bakersfield were financially strapping us. The high rates are a form of extortion to compel a resident into poorly-thought-out wind and solar schemes at a time when the powerful were beginning to kill off nuclear, natural gas, and other streams of reliable electricity. I fled a state with a current average of 25 cents per KWh to a place with 8 cents (national average: 15 cents). The state’s population is being fleeced for a blackout-riddled energy product, with rates running so high that depopulation of the Central Valley and desert regions is the unmentioned but logical consequence. What good is accomplished when you must swelter in the darkness?
Average electricity rates in 9/3/22. (Source: energysage.com)
The con is hidden behind the threat of “climate change”, which became the rhetorical substitute for the old “global warming”. CO2 is the go-to scapegoat, and it probably has a role. How much? Hard to say. Water vapor does to, but the sound of crickets resonates in media gabfests. People who claim to know don’t, and lack realistic scientific humility. They fail to admit that there remain huge gaps in our understanding of the dynamics of the atmosphere.
We do know that we live at a time when a plethora of global sensors – terrestrial, atmospheric, in space – produce a flood of data as never before. The problem isn’t the paucity of data. Gosh, we can see every weather system around the world. The problem lies in the processing of the visuals and numbers. What do they mean? Nearly everywhere across the airwaves and the net, ideology goes where scientific theory dare not tread. When they don’t know, they rely on their biases to hide the fact. Mediagenic mouthpieces declare that it must be man-caused, which leads the unthinking right into the wheelhouse of the progressive utopians: redesign the human being to fit into the utopians’ preferred lifestyle. We have left real scientific inquiry long ago. The results are played out in California with the mauling of the state in massive wildfires that are ignited by ideologically driven forestry practices and ideologically driven state agencies mandating and pressuring public utilities away from simple things like grid maintenance. And now, the regular blackouts.
Power lines in Siskiyou County, Ca., the same ones that would be blamed for the McKinney Fire. (9/4/22)
Have you heard about PG&E’s guilty plea in causing the deaths of 84 people in the 2018 Camp Fire? Poorly maintained power lines touched off the firestorm. But why so poorly maintained? PG&E may be guilty at some level, but so are the eco-driven mandarins in Sacramento and their henchmen in state agencies such as the PUC, one of the state’s utility regulatory agencies. The political inmates running the asylum in Sacramento in their infinite wisdom foisted on the utilities the “Renewables Portfolio Standard” in 2002, 13 years before my flight from the state. The state has been in a pell-mell rush to shoehorn its grid into “renewables”, essentially wind and solar, 60% of all sources by 2030, in a mere 8 years! More money spent on the utopia is less money to prevent sparks from igniting the poorly maintained hillsides. PG&E was in the dock, but where were the activists, agency heads, and politicians? They deserve a perp-walk too.
It’s amazing that this is done as mandates for roof-top solar has reduced incoming company revenue. The utilities are hit by the double whammy of less coming in and more going out. It’s surprising that more of the state hasn’t been charred, and much more CO2 convulsed into the atmosphere than from the state’s 800,000 internal combustion engines in the residents’ possession.
And to think that now they want everyone out of their dependable car and into a $60,000-$70,000 electric vehicle. Nothing like doubling down on stupid.
RogerG
Sources:
* “Cost of electricity in California”, updated 9/3/22, at https://www.energysage.com/local-data/electricity-cost/ca/
* “Wind Energy in California”, California Energy Commission, at https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/california-power-generation-and-power-sources/wind-energy-california#:~:text=Wind%20energy%2C%20an%20integral%20part%20of%20California%27s%20electricity,the%20south%20to%20Shasta%20County%20in%20the%20north.
* “RPS [Renewables Portfolio Standard] Program Overview”, Public Utilities Commission, at https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/RPS_Overview/#:~:text=California%27s%20Renewables%20Portfolio%20Standard%20%28RPS%29%20is%20one%20of,portfolio%20from%20eligible%20renewable%20energy%20resources%20by%202030
* “PG&E pleads guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter in devastating Camp Fire”, NBC News, June 16, 2022, at https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pg-e-pleads-guilty-84-counts-manslaughter-devastating-camp-fire-n1231256
An example of the crazies in California: boosters of transgender ideology pressure a charter school board in Rocklin, Ca., in 2017 to prevent parents from opting out of lessons on transgenderism.
The old warning on a pack of cigarettes went like this: “SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, and May Complicate Pregnancy”. With some simplification, a warning label could be pasted on all maps: “Parents, California is dangerous to your child’s health.” How? Its eco-fanaticism will deprive them of a future, surely, if extended nationally, but California S.B. 107 promises to put the entire weight of California government in opposition to your natural right to raise your children. It’s on Governor Newsom’s desk waiting for his signature.
Go read the bill. It’s below. Under the title “Gender-affirming care”, the bill expressly prohibits medical and insurance providers in the state from releasing the identity of any child from anywhere seeking gender transition treatments even if the child’s state or local jurisdiction has laws that restricts such practices. You’ll never know as a Florida parent that your 14-year-old, in a phase of gender confusion, is taking puberty blockers, opposite-sex hormones, and sex-change surgeries in California. That’s not all. All relevant California authorities are forbidden from interceding on your behalf and retuning your child to your custody. Read it. It’s astounding.
Just think, unknown to you, your 14-year-old child may spend too much time on social media and gets caught up in a social contagion of gender confusion. Those same social media platforms will also spread information on the medical interventions, all forever life-altering, and how to get to California to satisfy the urge. Then, after filing a missing person report to your local sheriff, you get a text from your daughter of her double mastectomy and her metoidioplasty (create an artificial penis) in a California hospital. Your daughter, without your knowledge and approval, has turned herself into your pseudo-son. All thanks to the elected lunatics running California.
If any state action screams “unconstitutional”, this is it. Ever since 1824 and Gibbons v. Ogden, the Constitution gives to Congress the sole power to regulate interstate commerce. Furthermore, the contracts clause in the Constitution impairs a state’s ability to nullify agreements made in another state. n A state cannot undermine one state’s power to regulate matters within its borders simply because the resident stepped foot in another state. Kidnapping is still kidnapping if the victim is transported to a different state. Any differences between the states’ kidnapping laws are irrelevant.
Scott Wiener (D, San Mateo) introduced S.B. 107. It passed both houses of the California legislature and awaits Gov. Newsom’s signature.
Come to think of it, assisting a child in travel against the wishes of the parent could be construed as kidnapping. Gavin Newsom and Scott Wiener (D, State Senator, San Mateo) could be eligible for indictment. Remember, Panama’s dictator Manuel Noriega was indicted by a federal grand jury in Miami and arrested by US Navy SEALs under orders of President Bush 41. If it could happen to a foreign despot, why not to a sitting state governor and head honcho in the state legislature? Newsom, I’d think twice before signing this monstrosity.
The absurdity of this action by California zealots is easily understood if roles were reversed. Lets’ say, Florida passes a law to make it a felony for any person wherever they reside to knowingly authorize and protect individuals who engage in medical practices on the state’s resident minors without parental knowledge and consent. If California can expressly shield violators of another state’s laws, why can’t the offended state seek redress by taking into custody these offenders, whether they be medical practitioners or state officials, when they come into contact with lawful authorities of the offended state? Interstate interference is interstate interference. If one is sanctioned, so is the other. Goose and gander equality anyone?
It’s a useful thought experiment, and a sign of how harmful California has become to the rest of the nation. Let’s get on with it. Put the warning label on our maps.
RogerG
Sources:
* The full text of California SB 107 can be read at https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220SB107
* For more on the story, read the column by Sharon Supp, a senior research analyst for the Alliance Defending Freedom at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/09/california-declares-war-on-parents-in-all-50-states-with-gender-transition-sanctuary-state-law/
President Biden during his speech on Thursday, 8/1/22, in Philadelphia.
Biden’s speech of last Thursday in Philadelphia was red meat for a Red base. Breaking it apart, “red meat” is rhetoric “that is forceful and poignant, as will excite or inflame their supporters”, and “Red” to characterize a political faction isn’t to be confused with the red/blue designations on US political maps. “Red” is drawn from the traditional color assigned to adherents of the socialist movement. It’s historical and dates back to the 19th century Socialist International with its red flag and workers-of-the-world-unite anthem, of which Karl Marx was the titular figure. Just to be clear.
The Democratic Party of today is the American manifestation of the many socialist parties around the world. The heart of the party’s most fervent members lies in the broader socialist movement. Notwithstanding the leaders’ proforma denials, the party’s political program meshes quite nicely with the socialist aim of greater government control of the economy and life, the same advocacy found in the Labor Party of the UK or any of the other European socialist parties. There’s a reason why Bernie, the Senate’s self-described socialist, caucuses with the Democrats. Birds of a feather. Don’t be fooled by the brush-off.
It was certainly fitting that the camera view of Biden at the lectern had a background bathed in red. From it, Biden spewed inflammatory words that had little place in rational discourse. This isn’t the tone of your local crisis counselor. It was a red speech for a Red cause.
I delayed my commentary till I could hear the speech in total and unfiltered. Bluntly put, it was shocking. Its only conceivable purpose was to rev up the base to forestall a long-anticipated Republican wave in November. It was filled with raw appeals to emotion, stoking fears, incoherent, and riddled with hypocrisy. It was the kind of stemwinder used to get the Parisian mob to storm the Bastille. And if you know anything about the Bastille events on July 14, 1789, you’ll know that the place only imprisoned a few, and they were the most heinous miscreants (the Marque de Sade among them). After the surrender, the guards were butchered, their heads cut off and mounted on pikes and paraded around Paris. Biden lifted a page from the playbook of the hate-filled rabble-rouser Paul Marat; I hope without the detached heads.
Contemporaneous illustration of the Bastille guards with their heads on pikes after their surrender on July 14, 1789.
To kindle his partisans, he stood behind the trappings of the presidential office to deliver language more appropriate for a fire-breathing sermon. One ploy was the abundant use of the phrase “MAGA Republicans”. Mao wannabes need a neat word or phrase to encapsulate the “enemy”, a target, to roll up the opposition. Marx invented “capitalist” as a focal point of opprobrium, Stalin had his kulaks, and for Biden, his “MAGA Republicans”. Soon, afterwards, it was all over the airwaves as if the party’s media sycophants got the robo chain text.
Do you think that he limited his gaze to the MAGA subspecies of Republican? Not on your life. The speech’s language was fungible enough to tar any Republican, even the ones that Trump hates, if they continually stand athwart the political thrusts of his party’s radicalized base. Just lather them with “intimidated”, another gambit in the speech.
Rhetorical ground was laid to attack all of them since being pro-life and following the Apostle Paul on marriage were lumped together with January 6 “insurrectionists”. The constant reference to “going backwards” is the well-worn refrain of all revolutionaries. Progress is synonymous with revolution and neither has any room for the venerable and time-tested, no matter the allusion to the Constitution and rule of law. Both were cynically and repeatedly violated by this man bathed in red light.
I was waiting for the tag on Republicans as defenders of slavery (Biden golden oldie: “put you all back in chains”) and Jim Crow, completely oblivious to the fact that it was the Democratic Party that rammed through the secessionitis defense of slavery of the Civil War and constructed Jim Crow in the aftermath. These historical Democrat actions came about as reactions to the rise of the Republican Party. Biden and Democrats, get your facts straight!
In essence, Biden condemned the “MAGA Republicans” as subversives to our civil order under the banality of a “threat to our democracy”, leaving unsaid the simple fact that we don’t have a “democracy”. It’s a constitutional republic, something a bit more sophisticated than a simpleton’s 50%-plus-1 standard of mail-in ballots to decide public issues. The Constitution and the rule of law belts our public officials in all kinds of restraints in spite of Gallup.
Really, the threat that Biden had in mind wasn’t the clearly observable 574 riots, $2 billion in damage, 2,000 police casualties, and anywhere from 17 to 35 killed as a consequence of the 2020 Antifa/BLM summer of riots. No, for Biden, it was January 6 with the only death accruing to a Trump supporter. Sorry, Biden, no men in blue died in it.
The bombast left unsaid the many ways that he was soiling the Constitution and rule of law. No separation of powers for Biden with the lawmaking authority in a Congress and a president limited to executing the laws. In 2021, he tried to extend an eviction moratorium although simultaneously recognizing its illegality. He knew that he was violating the Constitution, which was later confirmed by a Supreme Court decision (Alabama Association of Realtors, et al v. Dept. of Health and Human Services, et al, Aug. 26, 2021). Most recently, he invented student loan forgiveness out of thin air in direct contradiction to the previously announced position in June of his fellow-traveler, Speaker Pelosi.
It’s not just his cutting loose from the Article II restraints which limits him to carrying out laws made in Article I (Congress). He even ignores his Constitutional duty to perform the carrying out. Item #1: immigration law. The US code is chock full of provisions that define law-abiding and non-law-abiding immigration. Word has spread like wildfire in the troubled regions of the world that the border is such an open sieve that localities east and south have been emptied of their residents to join caravans in the long trek to a border manned by a Border Patrol that has been morphed into a Welcome Wagon. After a greeting by the Border Patrol, the illegal crossers are awarded plane travel to a destination of their choice.
Caravan of immigrants approaching the US southern border in 2021.
Don’t forget, these aren’t refugees from Cuba or Middle Eastern jihadist goons. Biden, in effect, has redefined refugee in such a way as to declare 8 US Code Section 12 (Immigration and Nationality) null and void under the guise of “prosecutorial discretion”. That’s right, “discretion” is stretched to cover the nearly blanket non-enforcement of 8 US Code Section 12 by imperial presidential dictat. Hardly can Biden wrap himself in the Constitution and rule of law when his actions make him eligible for impeachment. The word is projection: hiding your intentions behind false accusations of your opponents doing what you have done.
A pattern of Democrat campaigning is evident: don’t tack to the middle, but gin-up your party’s normally uninterested, ill-informed, and lackadaisical voter base to counter the enthusiasm of the other side. It worked for Obama in 2012, Pelosi and Schumer in 2018, and Biden in 2020. The heart of the strategy is to embrace the Left, not run from it. Use absurdities, gross hyperbole, and illusory threats to get your people to the polls. For 2022, it is to make the campaign a referendum on Trump and not on the party in power with much to answer for. And all of this bombast was present in Biden’s speech.
The speech was an insult to the office of the presidency. Fear of the electorate punishing your party at the polls is no excuse for turning Independence Hall into a Nuremburg Rally. People quite rightly have an aversion to escalating food and fuel prices, shortages, crime surges, their cities becoming open sewers, their children suffocating behind filthy masks, their schools being turned into woke reeducation camps, blackouts, greenie fanaticism, the socialism – i.e., the general Democratic Party program and its consequences. Biden would profit from Clinton’s dose of sobriety after the Republican blowout in the 1994 midterms (the R’s gained 54 House seats): “The era of big government is over.” Instead, Biden gave us red meat for his Red base.
Doubling down on stupid may work if it gets Biden’s Red-oriented base to show up. Sad, but true.
RogerG
Sources:
* Numbers of casualties and damage attributed to the 2020 summer riots are curiously hard to come by. They can be found if a person expands the search beyond Wikipedia, the CNN/MSNBC nexus, and legacy media. Other than vague generalities, specifics are nowhere to be found in those venues. Here’s a list of some sources with specifics:
“More Than 2,000 Officers Injured in Summer’s Protests and Riots”, Police Magazine, Dec. 3, 2020, at https://www.policemag.com/585160/more-than-2-000-officers-injured-in-summers-protests-and-riots
“Riot deaths ignored by major networks; watchdog finds 99.3% of protest coverage focused elsewhere”, Washington Times, June 4, 2020, at https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jun/4/riot-deaths-ignored-by-major-networks-watchdog-fin/
“2020 BLM/Antifa Riot Deaths”, National Conservative, at https://national-conservative.com/extremist-files/2020-blm-antifa-deaths/
“Police chief association releases number of officers injured during violent riots”, Fox News, Dec. 1, 2020, at https://www.foxnews.com/us/police-chief-officers-injured-riots?fbclid=IwAR0wFsq7Ndyhr7HyBQQnZ10Gn4WI_eJz4gH67vbg5ehPJ8u6WBGCKgF80H8
“RIOTS BY THE NUMBERS: POLICE CASUALTIES, PEOPLE KILLED DURING ‘PEACEFUL PROTESTS’”, Louder with Crowder, July 31, 2020, at https://www.louderwithcrowder.com/riots-by-the-numbers-police-casualties-people-killed-during-peaceful-protests
Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks to Matt Gutman of ABC News about the August 2022 vote by the California Air Resources Board to ban gas powered cars in the state of California by 2035. (ABC News)
The people running the state of California have issued a ban on the sale of new gas-powered cars, minivans, SUV’s, and pickups by 2035. A centrally planned edict, with little sound reasoning, will descend upon everyone in the state. Of course, the commissars’ dream is to force the lunacy on the entire country. The irony is that California is losing population at a rapid pace – over a quarter million from 2020 to 2021 alone – but the kulturkampf crackpots ruling the state fantasize that the state’s weight of population will force upon the whole country the lifestyle preferences of the California coastal plain. I hope not. In the meantime, Californios, get out while you still can.
If you’re the owner of a business or a person planning to make a huge investment in a home, a car, retiring, or settling your kids into one of the many schools in the state, you might be making one of the biggest mistakes in your life. California is no place to make life-shaping commitments. Millions already got a whiff and fled over the past number of decades. A decline in the rate of increase in previous decades has been replaced by an absolute reduction. 39.5 million became 39.2 million from July 2020 to June 2021. The same people that think they can dictate their lifestyle preferences to the nation are the same ones who can’t keep their people.
Their justification for imposing their choices gets weaker with each passing year. California must be stopped from dictating to the rest of the nation. They get away with this by throwing their demographic weight around which intimidates the Fortune 500. A ban on the sale of conventional cars in cuckoo land, it is hoped, will soon have Topeka and Wichita dealerships flooding Kansas with ev’s against the wishes of the sunflower state’s consumers. That’s the hope of Sacramento’s potentates. But watch the dream get dashed by a lack of appreciation for unintended consequences, which is a persistent blind spot for this breed of power-hungry zealot.
That’s right, they pretend that the unintended consequences are fabrications of “deniers” at the same time that the “fabrications” come crashing into the quality of life. Unintended consequences are either a product of child-like naivete or the belief that the economic law of tradeoffs can be dismissed with a wave of the hand. The central planners’ assault on living standards will happen nonetheless. There is no future in boarded up gas stations and skyrocketing fuel and utility rates. An already decrepit grid teetering into chronic blackouts will be expected to power the state’s new fleet of personal transportation by fiat. Get real. No smothering of the state in a widening blanket of windmills and solar panels can turn intermittent into non-intermittent. Money subtracted from grid maintenance shows up in the massive expansion of “renewables” (tradeoffs), turning the dilapidating grid into a gargantuan arsonist of cataclysmic wildfires. The fires aren’t due to climate change but are the unintended consequence of people obsessed with climate change.
Aerial detection survey photo of dead and dying trees on the Sequoia and Sierra National forests, August 2016. (USFS photo)Firefighters attack the Thomas Fire’s north flank with backfires as they continue to fight a massive wildfire north of Los Angeles, near Ojai, California, Dec. 9, 2017. (photo: Reuters)
There’s more. Going back to those abandoned gas stations, the price of fuel will rise as it becomes harder to get because the market is forcibly shrunk by government dictat. For the diesel heavy vehicles and equipment, their fueling costs will skyrocket since the fuel market dwindled to cover only them. Truck stops are rarer.
The immense total societal investment of over a century in personal conveyances will have been wiped out virtually overnight. In its place will come disposable cars, thrown away because the heart of them, the batteries, is no longer composed of moving parts. The great and proven reservoir of human capital (experience, skills, and knowledge) in mechanics will no longer have a place in this new way of life, having been made useless not by the voluntary choices of people in a free market but by edicts of an activist nomenklatura.
Scrap yards, fields, or overgrown back lots will fill up with the things, scavenged for the few things sellable. If the track record of recycling is any clue, subsidies for the recycling of the batteries will be required. All government subsidies are a replay of the student loan forgiveness scam. One group gets a benefit at the expense of another. I don’t care how it’s configured. If a benefit flowed to one group (recyclers) by government command, it must be shaken from the consumer or taxpayer at the end of the day. Any burden on the manufacturer is a pass-through down to the buyer.
The huge battery packs for the bliss of all-electric will come from the ChiComs, unstable and unfriendly Third World kleptocracies, or domestic oligarchs like US RareEarth. I have yet to see an eco-activist with a love of mining, especially of the open pit variety. Where will the rare earths (lithium, gallium, hafnium, zirconium) and magnets come from? The enthusiasts don’t have a clue. They just have faith in a “market” that they detest. The grand viziers dictate and people must bow to suit. The only innovations are those contrived to fit the commands. They aren’t a product of liberty, for they are a product of kowtowing to the state. Few in their right mind would stake a trip to the emergency room on a vehicle that doesn’t perform well in a blackout. The contraption works best if you don’t live far from the emergency room, and, better yet, if you’re a block away and can quickly push the wheelchair that far.
Pray to God that the ambulances aren’t electric. If they are, you’re screwed in a blackout, and doubly so if they’ve had a number of runs that night. The station house might have a generator but it relies on the same fossil fuel from the same rapidly disappearing fuel supply. All in all, you’re still screwed.
An all-electric future is no nirvana. Even so, they tell us, we’ll benefit from saving the planet. Will we? How are 39.2 million souls, and falling, going to counteract the voracious energy appetite of 2.82 billion? India and Red China have no qualms about burning coal, even our coal. They love jobs and air conditioning too. Get this straight: we are expected to believe that 1.4% of the population of India and Red China will save the planet. Uh?
My greatest sympathy goes to the rest of the state east of the Coast Range. Crossing the Coast Range west to east is departing one cultural entity and entering another. California is two states: the nearly 27 million west along the coastal plain has Sandinista sympathies and the 12 million remainder to the east would hang Sandinistas. It’s a schizophrenic state with the largest portion of the state’s brain psychotic. The diseased two-thirds overwhelms the sensible third. If the analogy was perfect, the healthy cells would seek an escape to a healthier body, which many are doing at a fast clip. They can jettison the state since we have a US Constitution which makes us citizens of the USA and merely residents of a state. We have the right to travel.
So, travel. Get out while you still can.
RogerG
Sources:
* “California to ban sale of all new gasoline-powered cars starting in 2035, a “historic turning point”, The Mercury News, August 27, 2022, at https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/08/24/california-to-ban-sale-of-all-new-gasoline-powered-cars-starting-in-2035-a-historic-turning-point/?utm_email=7532E23EB4C725A2B431242632&g2i_eui=4hjus%2bKiCR9WZhjuKq1urjE8uS5QtgSd&g2i_source=newsletter&lctg=7532E23EB4C725A2B431242632&active=no&utm_source=listrak&utm_medium=email&utm_term=https%3a%2f%2fwww.mercurynews.com%2f2022%2f08%2f24%2fcalifornia-to-ban-sale-of-all-new-gasoline-powered-cars-starting-in-2035-a-historic-turning-point%2f&utm_campaign=bang-mult-nl-weekend-morning-report-nl&utm_content=manual
* “Editorial: Yes! California just banned the sale of new gas cars. This is a big deal”, LA Times, August 26, 2022, at https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-08-26/california-gas-car-ban-zero-emission
* “A New Demographic Surprise for California: Population Loss”, NY Times, May, 7, 2021, at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/us/california-population-loss.html
* “These 10 maps explain California’s changing population: The state lost more than a quarter-million residents during the first year of the pandemic, but some counties grew and shrank for different reasons”, The Mercury News, April 4, 2022, at https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/04/04/these-10-maps-explain-californias-changing-population/
* “US Needs 10X More Rare Earth Metals To Hit Biden’s Electric Vehicle Goals”, Forbes, Sept. 29, 2021, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/09/29/us-needs-10x-more-rare-earth-metals-to-hit-bidens-electric-vehicle-goals/?sh=70e13a093e41
* The east/west breakdown of California’s population in “Economics and Demographics”, NOAA, Office for Coastal Management, at https://coast.noaa.gov/states/fast-facts/economics-and-demographics.html#:~:text=California%20tops%20the%20coastal%20populations%20chart%20with%2026.7,6.8%20million.%205%20461%20People%20per%20Square%20Mile
FBI agents block one of the gates at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago during the raid on August 8.
What stinks? The FBI’s newly released affidavit in support of a search warrant, that’s what (see below). Oh, it’s heavily redacted but what it does expose is the insidious operational habits of the Washington Insiders Club, of which the upper echelons of the FBI are charter members. And to think that a judicial officer approved this monstrosity. Amazing.
The first big tip-off was the author and chief protagonist for the Trump investigation and the search warrant being “a Special Agent with the FBI assigned to the Washington Field Office”. I smell a rat, the same set of rodents that scamper the hallways of the J. Edgar Hoover Building (FBI), the Executive Office Building, Langley (CIA), and Pentagon, not to mention the incestuous political den of lobbyists and big-wheel legal eagles who wallow in the same rarified DC cauldron.
The second thing that glaringly stood out was the “referral” to the FBI from the administrators at the National Archives. It seems that, when it comes to Donald Trump, the big wheels in DC snap to 11, to borrow a little from “This is Spinal Tap”. They’re on a hair trigger. In January 2022, the Archives received 15 boxes of materials from Trump. Hardly did a month go by and they’re off to the FBI demanding a criminal investigation of Trump. Mmmm, does Hillary/Clinton in 2015 and 2016 remind you of anything?
This is completely unprecedented. The people who run the National Archives are not gods. Their demands do not attain the automatic status of the Ten Commandments from the hand of God. Implicitly recognizing this fact, there’s normally an extended period of negotiations after the transition from one administration to another. And Trump was cooperating. Who among that claque would have dared to behave in this manner with Barack Obama?
The statutory basis for the warrant is astoundingly absurd. The affidavit is junked-up with references to the Presidential Records Act and various provisions on the handling of classified materials. There’s even a startling mention of an executive order. What? Executive Orders exist at the whim of the president. They are a creature of him and his office. They only count if he chooses, or unchooses, to make them count. This only shows that the vigilantes wanted to throw the kitchen sink at Trump.
For the rest of the statutory laundry list, there’s the litany of what constitutes classified materials and the improper handling of them. When I read this part of the screed, the thought of Hillary Clinton kept popping into my head. Wasn’t she conducting the nation’s foreign policy from her own private server and cellphone? And, interestingly as it turned out, there was evidence of the hacking of her devices. Trump is accused of hypothetical carelessness; Hillary actually did it to the advantage of foreign adversaries. There’s evidence of it. And then-Director Comey goes before the press in 2016 to announce that “there really wasn’t a prosecutable case”. And there is on Trump? Incredible.
The lack of inquisitiveness and what constitutes a “prosecutable case” has an obvious partisan lean to them. The affidavit supporting a warrant on Hillary would sound much like the one served on Trump, except there was more evidentiary basis of actual harm to the nation on Hillary’s home server and her personal cellphone. This should have gone to trial. And the hush, hush in regards to the laptop of the scion of the Biden dynasty, Hunter, going so far as to troop out other DC partisans who never saw the laptop to tout the line that it was “Russian disinformation” without a shred of evidence, is execrable. The brazen double standard screams injustice.
Then, if you notice, the warrant’s author engages in an opinion spat with supporters of Trump. It’s something that belongs on Twitter or the op-ed pages of his/her favorite NY Times or WaPo, going so far as to cite a TV news report of “‘Moving Trucks Spotted At Mar-a-Lago” (item #30). That’s worse than hearsay. No one is placed under a presumption of legal sanction to tell the truth in such stories, and they are notorious for casting events to fit a preconceived view.
In what has all the appearances of petty spite, the producer of this gem writes like Paul Krugman picking a fight with Larry Kudlow on Twitter. He/she targets Breitbart and Kash Patel for special abuse (item #53). It’s very unseemly in a document meant to justify a government invasion of a person’s home. This kind of government behavior should anger any American as it did John Hancock, enough to have him sign with a flourish the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
What of the redactions in the affidavit? If the denizens of the DC snake pit can go before the press to tout the laptop as “Russian disinformation” with no proof, then this discredited crowd has no grounds to dismiss my speculation on the blotted-out names, sources, and methods of investigation. They boil down to Trump’s possession of classified materials or an assessment of Trump’s evil intent by a group of long-discredited people. The possession of classified materials by a recent ex-president shouldn’t be surprising. Negotiations, compromise, and a back-and-forth period are to be expected. Just because the demi-gods of the Archives in a pique of Trump animus want to go to 11 doesn’t mean that the public ought to tolerate this partisan jihad.
The affidavit still stinks to high heaven. I am convinced now more than ever that the FBI and the rest of the agencies, bureaus, departments in DC should be farmed out to rest of the country, far beyond the Beltway. Breakup DC! Only the most essential skeleton staff should remain. People like the “Special Agent with the FBI assigned to the Washington Field Office” should get a daily dose of what the rest of the country thinks of them.
RogerG
Source:
* The affidavit at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.617854/gov.uscourts.flsd.617854.102.1.pdf
Parents protest the teaching of Critical Race Theory during a Placentia Yorba Linda School Board meeting in Yorba Linda, Calif., November 16, 2021. (Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Our public and many private schools are a mess, but the vast majority of the blame shouldn’t be directed at the teachers. The onus should be shouldered by an intellectually bankrupted overclass that sits atop a sprawling education industry from coast to coast, much like the Janissaries of the old Ottoman Empire or the self-indulgent and self-serving aristocracy in 18th-century Versailles. Unexamined and unaware, its members reside in a world apart from the rest of society. It’s an isolated existence with its own values and assumptions about the workings of the world. Born of 19th century progressivism and its administrative state, their zeal for “reform” has bred a missionary class of consultants, hyped in the latest fads of thought driven by a near uniform set of ideological sympathies. Duly papered in now-devalued credentials and degrees, they descend upon the schools and make a real hash of things.
Parents might be waking up. Zooming to their children during the pandemic by means of the family computer, right in front of them, was the chic radicalism from a world apart where lefty radicalism is assumed to be a virtue. The veil of secrecy was blown off. The fashionable neo-Marxist theory of systemic group oppression and guilt flashed before their eyes. Racism was mangled into a public good as a means to fight purely hypothetical but politically useful villains. They saw how adolescent feelings of gender confusion became the rigid theory of transgender ideology. Now, their daughters are no longer safe in the bathroom or locker room.
Other fancies were exposed such as the religion of environmentalism, a mystical faith masquerading as a not-to-be-challenged scientific fact. The crooked timber of humanity was somehow, magically straightened depending on your self-professed identity. Bankers bad, workers always and forever angelic. Whenever a woman or racial, sexual, or ethnic minority graces the page, it’s always in the context of exploitation. Tradition is lambasted and morality is fashioned to serve the interests of the latest chic reform. America is evil and in need of a revolution. That’s what they’re attempting to groom: little revolutionaries.
As a teacher in the public schools for almost 30 years, I’ve witnessed it firsthand. Teachers are forced through “professional growth” mandates to be constantly exposed to the latest in stylish radicalism emanating from the academic bubble. School districts regularly take their teachers away from their students for multiple days of the school year – sometimes called “inservice days” – to get steady doses of the latest in leftist dogma. Students lose a few days of learning so their teachers can be indoctrinated. The result is almost always a few steps backward for both the students and teachers.
Teacher training
To boot, many of the presenters don’t know the radical philosophical roots of what they’re presenting. It says volumes about the academic preparation and forethought of those pretending to be Zeus on Mt. Olympus. Two incidents stand out in my long career. In one, a richly paid consultant was brought in to instruct us on his favorite pedological pet, “cooperative learning”. Midway through the presentation I got the drift of where this was heading. I politely asked him if the basis for his approach was “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” If you’re wondering, it’s straight out of Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto”. He said, “Yes”, apparently unaware, or maybe quite aware, of his idea’s ideological parentage. Shortly after that, I quietly slipped away to my classroom to grade papers and prepare instruction for the week, a much better use of the time.
Another example came about as a result of administrative pressure to attend a paid training session on a Saturday, which I was reluctantly to do for certain reasons. Well, this session just so happened to be founded on the theory of multiple intelligences, a highly contestable notion for which the presenter was unfamiliar with the debate. Common sense tells us that kids can have excellences in different skill and knowledge areas. But these aren’t “intelligences”. They are talents. In contrast, intelligence is a unique measure of cognitive ability that is innate to a person for various biological and social reasons. The interplay of the two is open to much debate.
All of this is glossed over to get to the hidden purpose of this questionable idea: everyone gets a trophy, which is born of Marx’s obsession with equality of result. For people following in the footsteps of Karl Marx, a society of goodness and light can only be achieved if everyone is equal in everything from intelligence to possessions, just institutionally redefine intelligence in a multitude of ways for instance. Without saying it, but following the logic, unequal performances among students in the form of grades or scores is automatically and morally suspect. So, classrooms and instruction must be refashioned to make them more equal. How? Design and implement multifarious instructional approaches to access the hard to determine but assumed to be numerous “intelligences” in the classroom. If the task is too cumbersome or inequalities persist, the burden is on the teacher to make things equal. Marx blames the social system, the educrats blame classroom teaching, i.e., the teacher. Thus, the schools engage in the perpetual search to weed out systemic oppression in the form of inequalities through incessant “training”. No time here for placing responsibility on the student or home life.
The Marxian equality of result permeates everywhere in the school. Merit – a sense of deserving through hard work – is disparaged and replaced with racial, gender, and sexual orientational reparatory contrivances in discipline, instruction, management, and grading (or no grades). As a teacher scrambles to devise an ever-increasing number of pedagogies for an ever-increasing number of “intelligences” in the classroom, if hell busts loose, punishment is made to adhere to the god of equality of result like everything else. If someone tallies the expulsions and discovers a “protected-class” excess beyond its demographic proportion, the school is turned upside down by conforming to the newest euphemism to downgrade the effectiveness of a school: restorative justice. Watch the ratio of non-teachers to teachers explode. The biggest building in the school will no longer be the one for Language Arts but the sprawling one housing the army of functionaries of the social services for the multitude of interventions required to create the illusion of identity-group equality.
If you think it’s such a great idea, this thing called “restorative justice”, then move to LA, SF, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York City, or any place suffering under permissive Soros-backed DA’s. They’re all into “restorative justice” and all that goes with it. You’ve just endorsed the transplanting of the chaos of San Francisco streets to your kids’ classrooms.
Nothing escapes the Marxist obsession with equality of result. It’s embedded in your teacher’s training in college, and it’s constantly dragged before staffs every school year by an army of consultants. It’s a very lucrative flim-flam as CRT evangelists like Ibram X. Kendi can attest. He got $20,000 from Fairfax County taxpayers for a 45-minute virtual training video for the Virginia county’s public schools. His fellow grifter, Robin DeAngelo, author of “White Fragility”, rakes in $14,000 per event earning a lusty $700,000 a year. It’s a sweet gig if you can get it. (See the column below by the American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick M. Hess.)
What do they really have to offer? Nothing good, and everything deeply troublesome. If you think that statue-toppling or joining the ranks of the militant wings of the Democratic Party is not an appropriate career path for your children, it is incumbent on parents to help bring to heel this wayward mass of detached educrats by electing state and local public officials who’ll clean house at the governing boards and make our colleges accountable for the undermining of our way of life.
There, we have our task.
RogerG
Sources:
* “Defund the Teacher-Trainers”, Frederick M. Hess, Aug. 11, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/08/29/defund-the-teacher-trainers/?fbclid=IwAR10uTGkoMNTRebq74lRN6aC2638Z8-Mhw_rhuuJpzbnVSysv8ciOB6LHHg
Randy Weingarten, AFT president, and empty classroomRally for John Fetterman with Bernie Sanders at Philadelphia City Hall in 2018 (photo:Jared Guenwald)
What seems to be happening in the dog days of summer 2022? On the one hand, 1.5 million students went kapoof in national public-school enrollment from 2020 to 2021. And more recently, opinion polls show an improvement in Democrat fortunes. After all that has happened in the past two years, what gives? The former is not surprising. The latter is downright insane given the riots, the overall urban breakdown of civil order, the schools being turned into revolutionary propaganda mills, the mandatory masking and school closures, the inflation and shortages, the “transition” of energy from affordable and available to extortionate and unreliable, and the full-throated attack on the family sedan to, by hook or by crook, force people into the lifestyle preferences of the DNC donor class. The economy is in a shambles.
The Greeks and Romans of antiquity saw the Mediterranean heat of mid-to-late summer changing people into mad dogs, thus the “dog days of summer”. Are parents mad for leaving the public schools in droves? Hardly. A clue can be found in the places with the greatest defection numbers. Big city districts are quickly losing the warm bodies to fill the desks. NYC Mayor Eric Adams put it succinctly when he called it a “massive hemorrhaging of students.” The city’s public schools, the largest school district in the nation, lost 4 percent at the start of the 2020-2021 school year, and nearly another 2 percent in 2021-2022, a total of 64,000 youngsters. Over the last five years, the total runs to 120,000. Democrat bastions are experiencing the greatest disaffection.
Flipping over to the west coast, Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest, has fallen from 737,00 to 430,000 over the last 21 years, and the picture gets even bleaker with the district projecting a further 30 precent erosion to 309,000 into the next ten years. It’s a dismal picture for other big cities such as Detroit and Chicago.
The losses in places like Los Angeles can only be partially explained by the very real Great California Exodus. New York State, in one year alone, 2020-1, in the midst of its own exodus, lost over 319,000 residents, the largest decline of any state. Yes, Democrat-governed states dominate the flight statistics. The classroom overcrowding problem of a few decades ago has shifted to states like Texas and Florida.
Another facet of the trend has little to do with loading a U-Haul. Increasingly, parents are developing a love affair with options that free their kids from the grip of Randy Weingarten’s (AFT) and Becky Pringle’s (NEA) teachers’ unions.
Fifth-grade teacher Madeline Schmitt directs her students at St. Patrick School in Huntington, N.Y., on Sept. 9, 2020. Most Catholic schools returned to in-person learning earlier than public schools during the Covid-19 pandemic. (CNS photo/Gregory A. Shemitz)
Private, sectarian, charter, micro (private with 15 students or less), and home schools are some choices rising in popularity. Maybe the pandemic exposed to parents who’s running their kids’ classrooms. The racism-against-racism CRT claptrap and sex-change ideology, with the attendant display and glorification of sex-addiction behavior to adolescents, and the thought of their daughter sharing bathrooms and locker rooms with penis-girls, have shocked parents out of their lethargy. Many are coming to the conclusion that the trillions of “investment” in government schools is a monumental loser, more of a jobs program for special-interest clients of the DNC. It isn’t about the kids. That’s just empty rhetoric for the plebes.
Simultaneously, as school boards are reintroduced to the socio-political phenomena of people voting with their feet due to a growing revulsion of Democrat-led schooling, the political prospects of Democrats have brightened a bit, amazingly. Opinion polls show a tightening in the generic ballot. In key Senate races, Dem neo-socialists hold leads. In North Carolina and Ohio, it’s a dead heat. Oz is down double digits in Pennsylvania to a stroke-addled Bernie Sanders acolyte. How is it possible given the complete Dem-inspired unraveling of civilization from the summer of 2020 to summer 2022?
My best guess is a trifecta: it’s still the “dog days”; the Dem’s Trump campaign strategy; and inherent Republican political disabilities. Oh, the polls are junk, so it’s actually a quadra-fecta. Taken together, this is a bad time to gauge the state of play.
The “dog days” don’t have to mean madness. Sometimes, the dog of public opinion sleeps or is distracted during these hazy, lazy days of summer. Assessing what the public thinks at a time when people are vacationing and cramming bar-b-ques, ball games, concerts, yard work, and activities, activities, and activities, and expecting it to be authoritative, is absurd. Unless you are Antifa and BLM and have the convenience of a viral video to exploit and bountiful free time to indulge in recreational rioting, most people have other things on their minds.
The public is generally distracted and the Democrats want to keep diverting their eyes away from the disorder and decay all around them. Look, over there, it’s Trump, they say. In the 2018 midterms, they made it all about Trump and swept the near octogenarian, now octogenarian, Nancy Pelosi into the speakership. In 2020, they did same thing to such an extent that they got away with another near octogenarian, Joe Biden, campaigning from a basement computer. Governor Gavin Newsom in the recall election hung Trump around the neck of Larry Elder and the effort to remove him from office. They’re at it again.
Though, it’s hard for the shopper who just experienced sticker shock after a look at the supermarket cash register receipt. At the pump, at the utility meter, at the hardware store, you name it, the sense of dystopia surrounds us. The Dem’s best strategy, a proven winner, at a time when they have soiled themselves and us so badly, is to somehow make the election about Trump. Could that be behind the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago?
All of a sudden, it’s all about Trump again. Trump squeezes other GOP hopefuls out of prime-time news coverage. Trump sops up media attention and fundraising cash that might have gone to down-ballot races. At least for a short while, the raid jumbled the complexion of the federal midterm races.
Former President Donald Trump speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Fla., February 26, 2022. (Octavio Jones/Reuters)
It – the raid – may have worked in a perverse way. Trump’s personal approvals tick up and the GOP’s tick down. Trump gets to play the part of victim, which he could very well be, and the rest of the GOP gets momentarily lost in the news cycle. For the Democrats, the strategy is to avert the public’s attention from the representative and senator who defended rioters, defund the police, the DA’s who unilaterally ignore most of the criminal code to the detriment of us and our property, voted for more inflation through trillions of new spending, and have assisted in dismantling what it means to be woman. For those potentially in the gravitational pull of the Democratic Party, the prospect of an imminent Trump reappearance trumps everything. The strategy worked in 2018 and to a great extent in 2020. Why not this time around?
We’ll see how long the Democrat hall-of-mirrors campaign obscures the horrifying facts of life for most Americans under Democrat rule. We’ll also see how GOP command central responds. They’re lack of aggression and the Trump anchor may militate against a powerful counter. Working against them is . . . Trump. Just think, if that $100 million in Trump’s war chest had gone to Oz or to the National Republican Senate Committee (NRSC), the current donkey party bump would have been compressed to a micro-second blip. Trump in his semi-retirement has all the time in the world, two years away from the next presidential election, and is frenetic in his fundraising far earlier than any other braggart in history. The rest of the GOP is left to be the dog licking the crumbs falling from the table.
Trump is a mega-magnet due to his ego-run-amok. His overbearing brashness is a cheap imitation of what Alice Roosevelt Longworth said of her father, Theodore Roosevelt: “My father always wanted to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.” I reckon that Trump prefers to see a lot of TR in himself. He sucks media attention out of a room, and fundraising cash out of the pool of GOP donors.
Maybe he’ll shovel some of his cash to his preferred candidates, making them even more beholden to him. Some of those selections in Senate primaries were . . . bizarre. In some cases, the weakest general election candidate was endorsed. But Oz, only recently a convert to the GOP and with no previous political footprint, and a man with carpetbagger and national loyalty liabilities? The same consternation in Ohio (J.D. Vance). The same in Arizona (Blake Edwards). But Eric Greitens in Missouri, wife beater and abuser of his children?
Dr. Oz in recent campaign ad
What explains the choices? The most controversial endorsements reflect what Trump sees in himself: “anti-establishment” and “outsider”, meaningless words that frequently grace the lips of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. The “establishment”? Well, after a process of elimination, it must mean anyone in the party opposed to Trump. It’s that simple. Anyone finding Trump abhorrent is automatically assumed to be a country clubber. It’s an outdated cliché since the millionaire and billionaire class is just as likely, if not more likely, to be a Democrat booster than a Republican one. As for “outsider”, history is littered with them from Paul Marat (Parisian mob rabble rouser of the French Revolution) to Lenin’s Bolsheviks to Jane’s Revenge. “Outsider” isn’t limited to being a moniker for someone with a fresh perspective. It could, and mostly does, mean a person so revolting to broad sensibilities to cause people to cringe and keep them at arm’s length.
Still, these are the Trump chosen in Senate races that he has fobbed off on us, and a large tranche of Republican voters have foisted on us in their primaries. In the general election, important races will pit a campus-socialist Democrat against a Republican with both feet immersed in the narrow habitat of the Trump cult. I fail to see why this shouldn’t be a red-tsunami year, given all the carnage that the Democrats have gifted to Republicans. Instead, much of the Republican base, enchanted by Trump’s self-serving verbiage, have turned sure-winners and easier gets into toss-ups and double-digit holes. Indeed, at this juncture, Biden may have a radical-Left Senate majority in January 2023 to rubber stamp us into an inflationary spiral and the centrally planned existence of the Green New Deal by executive edict.
Democracy is not synonymous with wisdom. The crooked timber of humanity is evident at the micro and macro levels. In 1964, Goldwater was pasted by LBJ in what many observers described as a sympathy vote in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. A popular mania gave us a bloody, miasmic morass in Vietnam and a morally bankrupting War on Poverty. Guns and butter profligacy would wreck our country for the next decade and a half. Then came the 1980’s and the beginning of a turnaround. 2022 could be the beginning of our turnaround, but will we seize the opportunity?
It would be lot easier if Trump stopped being so self-absorbed and divisive in the ranks of those trying to right the ship. Meanwhile, parents are taking matters into their hands by taking their kids away from the influence of Democrat client groups. I daily thank God that Trump hasn’t made any endorsements in school board races.
RogerG
Sources:
* “New Federal Data Confirms Pandemic’s Blow to K-12 Enrollment, With Drop of 1.5 Million Students; Pre-K Experiences 22 Percent Decline” at https://www.the74million.org/article/public-school-enrollment-down-3-percent-worst-century/#:~:text=A%25203%2520percent%2520decline%252C%2520measured,of%2520roughly%25201.5%2520million%2520pupils.
* “With Plunging Enrollments, A Seismic Hit to Public Schools”, New York Times, at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/us/public-schools-falling-enrollment.html
* “Census Bureau: N.Y. population loss greatest in nation”, The Daily Gazette, Dec. 23, 2021, at https://dailygazette.com/2021/12/23/census-bureau-n-y-population-loss-greatest-in-nation/.
* “Latest Polls”, FiveThrtyEight, Aug. 19, 20222, at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/.
* “Poll Finds Increase in Number of Republicans Who Support Trump over GOP”, Brittany Bernstein, National Review, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/poll-finds-increase-in-number-of-republicans-who-support-trump-over-gop/.
