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Safetyism Is a Disabling Crutch

Shira Steinbeck, the parent of an 11-year-old in Pleasant Hill, recites an anti-distance-learning poem at the Mount Diablo Unified School District board meeting on Wednesday, February 10, 2021. (Screenshot)

An article in today’s San Jose Mercury News article is about the attempted recall of five members of the Mt. Diablo Unified school board. One unintended outgrowth of the pandemic was the self-besmirching of a growing class of “experts”. These scientific and technical professionals quickly confused scholarship with activism. Others, such as elected officials skilled in the arts of public utterances and little else, seek the confirmatory esteem of a science that they scarcely understand. They bring with them an unexamined assumption which elevates a near-utopian sense of pristine safety to the exclusion of everything else. The result is a society with the wheels coming off . . . and parents irate over their shuttered multi-billion dollar schools.

Once we knew the nature of the virus, which we did within a couple of months, and had a collection of therapies, efforts should have focused on the vulnerable. Instead, universal masking, distancing, and a shuttering of lives and livelihoods proceeded apace. Schools were closed, or nearly so, and children lost a year-and-a-half of learning, something that’ll be difficult if not impossible to recapture. Of course, inequality will be magnified as those with the wherewithal continue to excel and those not so well situated languish. It’s amazing that those most concerned about “equity” are doing the most to worsen it.

The absence of a vaccine is frankly irrelevant at this stage.

The reigning safetyism is a disabling crutch. The ill-fruits are all around us. Massive academic failures for our Zoomed children, a riddled economy on the cusp of rampant inflation, the decay of personal agency in the government bribes (lavish unemployment benefits) to stay at home, and growing political and social discord are abundantly on display. Waiting in the wings are escalating interest rates and a gargantuan federal debt service for the exploding red ink that’ll eat up the federal budget.

The most stringent measures were universalized in a mammoth wet blanket that some potentates worshipping at the altar of safetyism can’t find within themselves to lift.

I say this not as a political partisan. Both parties were and are culpable. Many of the commentariat – left, right, and center – perpetuated the strangulation. Looking back on it, within a few months of the outbreak, measures should have targeted those facing the greatest harm. Concentrated measures were ignored in favor of totalitarianism.

Now it’s time for the common man and woman to find their inner Patrick Henry and right the ship. Go get ’em parents.

RogerG

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College as Farce, By Bill Maher

Bill Maher on the set of his HBO show.

How ironic for it was Karl Marx who coined this pithy phrase in reference to the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” The same applies to the current state of our colleges and universities: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

The tragedy is cramming anyone capable of breathing into another four years in a classroom. The effort has quickly become farce. It’s rapidly being turned into a burlesque of lefty fascinations as standards are simultaneously shredded. I’ll let Bill Maher tell the story; he does a better job.

Now that’s ironic, once again. I find myself often disagreeing with Maher, but even a blind man can hit the dart board after enough tries.

Check out the clip.

RogerG

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Our Totalitarian Moment

The new New Left of the Democratic Party.

Something is in the ether or water. Call it a moment of flux. The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English defines “flux” as “a situation in which things are changing a lot and you cannot be sure what will happen.” Also call it a our totalitarian moment. Do we really understand the gravity?

It happened so sudden. Race vengeance is taught in the schools under the call sign of “equity”. SecDef Austin is conducting a political cleansing of the ranks. Fortune 500 boardrooms have joined the pogrom. A virus is the catalyst for suspending the Bill of Rights and making America look more like Communist China, literally. The primary function of government to ensure public safety is forfeited in “reimagining policing” campaigns at the same time that sweeping controls on the private ownership of the means of self-protection are seriously considered. Under the banner of hyper-politicized “climate change”, government will confer upon itself the power to control nearly every aspect of our lives. To keep the revolutionary commissars in power, elections are to be rigged ala Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela. Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) or George Orwell (1984, Animal Farm) can’t compete with this emerging reality.

SecDef Austin announces campaign to politically cleanse the ranks of “extremists”.
Pres. Biden announces more gun control measures, 2021.
Radical congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey announce their Green New Deal in February 2019.
Visitors at California’s Universal Studios theme park following the state’s universal masking mandate.
Mailed ballots lying on the floor of a Paterson, NJ, apartment building during the 2020 election.

John Adams in 1775 once quipped, “Liberty once lost is lost forever”. I think that he was drawing upon the words of William Penn, the founder of the Pennsylvania Colony. In 1687, Penn ordered the printing of the Magna Carta and other English constitutional documents to remind generations of their English rights and liberties. He advised them:

“not to give up anything of liberty that at present they do enjoy, but take up the good example of our ancestors, and understand that it is easy to part with or give away great privileges [rights and liberties], but hard to be gained if lost.” *

In 1701, Penn issued the Charter of Privileges, and in 1751, in commemoration of it, the Assembly of Pennsylvania commissioned a great bell to be installed in Assembly Hall. Today, we call the building Independence Hall and the bell the Liberty Bell.

Oh, how are we quickly forgetting.

RogerG

*From “Albion’s Seed” by David Hackett Fischer, Oxford University Press.

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A Lesson For All Seasons, The Movie Clip

Here’s the relevant scene from “A Man For All Seasons” mentioned in my previous post. Substitute young Roper for the cancel-culture mobs patrolling our campuses, infecting our children’s curriculums, manning the halls of power, and swarming the newsrooms. Mob rule has the upper hand over the rule of law and decency. These, indeed, are tumultuous times. We must keep our heads on straight in this period of malevolent madness.

RogerG

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A Lesson For All Seasons

The pertinent scene from “A Man for All Seasons”.

The movie, “A Man For All Seasons”, has a pertinent exchange between Sir Thomas More and his daughter’s fiancée, William Roper. Roper proclaims his desire to steamroll any law to suppress an evil. More counters with this: “And when the last law was down – and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?” As the kids in the backseat would say, “Are we there yet?” Are our laws, like the Bill of Rights, made flat?

I don’t know, but we seem to be close. The Biden posse is coming after guns, embarking on a crusade against its political foes under the banner of the fight against the illusory “White Supremacy”, and rigging the federal election system to sustain its grip on power by making it easier to vote and easier to cheat. We are quickly becoming a banana republic with Stalinistic overtones.

Pres. Biden at recent press conference.

“A Man For All Seasons” is worth a look. It isn’t the cup if tea for those raised on films with thin dialogue and abundant eye candy, but it more than makes up for it in gripping moral lessons.

RogerG

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Have You Heard of California’s Exit Tax?

I’ve known for some time that the state’s power class has wanted to do it – i.e., tax its refugees. People are fleeing the state for its institutional cancel culture, crumbling quality of life, taxes, and regulations but Sacramento’s tenured political grifters are still trying to keep their hands in the pockets of even the escapees.

AB 2088 is the latest attempt at cross-border taxation. It would create a wealth tax that could be assessed for 10 years after a person has left the state. It rides on the back of AB 1253 which established the job-crushing wealth tax. Residents punished with the highest taxes in the nation will continue to be flogged after they flee if the influential have their way.

Read about the bill here.

The state’s Commissariat of Revenue – Franchise Tax Board – reserves to itself the omnipotent power to define a resident without any deference or recognition of any other state’s laws. To boil the issue down to simple terms, another state’s residents get the privilege of paying California taxes. That’s right, if a person meets the residency requirements of their new state, California can override that state’s laws, impose its byzantine formula for California residency, and still hold them financially hostage.

Somehow, the Constitutional provisions over interstate commerce and the right travel would seem to have some relevance here. They do! The gambit is blatantly unconstitutional.

California, you need to be reminded that you are only one state in fifty. A person can only be a “resident” of a state, but he or she is a “citizen” of the United States. My US citizenship trumps your ham-handed attempt to avoid the consequences of transforming your state into a decaying one-party nightmare.

Watch that space. I certainly will since I am one of those refugees.

RogerG

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A Woke Defense Is No Defense

Our military isn’t to be political. Our Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, is making it so. One could be excused for concluding that the Squad is running the Defense Department as it does the Democratic Party.

In a CNN interview, Austin tried to rebut claims that the military is “soft” because of its embrace of wokeness. No, he’s dangerously wrong. Secretary Austin is undermining the most important asset of a fighting unit: the willingness of its members to sacrifice for each other. Tell me how cramming down the throats of our fighting men and women racist and identity-mongering screeds will lead to combat effectiveness.

(Read about the interview here.)

Treason is defined as making war on the United States. This isn’t treason, but it has the effect of treason. It destroys the ability of the country to defend itself by dividing the troops into squabbling camps of identity groups.

The Navy came out with a reading list for the “growth and development” of sailors that included Ibram X. Kendi’s extremist tirade, “How to Be an Antiracist”. The Navy’s Second Fleet created a book club for discussing and reading Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility”. Vice admiral Andrew L. Lewis, you should be ashamed of yourself. These are extremist left-wing spiels that are being normalized in the ranks.

Vice admiral Andrew L. Lewis being interviewed by Joe Pascal.

Austin uses the left-wing jargon of “look like America” which in reality will compete with competence. Do you want an engineer “to look like America” or do you want a bridge that won’t collapse under your car? This is not only nonsense; it’s dangerous nonsense when it’s given a stamp of approval from the top.

The Army is running ads about “Heather has Two Mommies” in the ranks. What effect does all this identity obsessiveness have on morale? It produces nothing good. A constant refrain that encourages prickliness is a threat to the nation, and is not just another policy choice. For this reason alone, Austin is deserving of censure.

A scene from a recent army ad: Corporal Malonelord has Two Mommies.

He may want a military that “looks like America”, but it won’t look, or act, like an effective fighting force. See, Lloyd, looks can be deceiving.

RogerG

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What’s an Assault Rifle?

David Chipman (left) and Pres. Biden. Chipman is Biden’s nominee to run the ATF. Both want to ban “assault rifles”, “period”. But what is an “assault rifle”?

Good question. David Chipman, Biden’s nominee to run the ATF, couldn’t come up with a definition but he wants to ban them anyway. Sen. Kennedy of Louisiana pressed him for a definition. Chipman said, “There’s no way I could define an assault weapon.” Senator Cotton of Arkansas did as well. Chipman tried to redirect the question to Congress and dredged up an old memo on suspect weapons crossing the southern border. He described the memo defining an assault rifle as semi-automatic, detachable magazine, in caliber 22 on up. He just made illegal most of the rifles and pistols in the possession of good American citizens.

That’s the problem with the mythical gun: it can’t be defined in any sensible way. It’s a rhetorical mirage. Take a look at the rifles below. Which one is an “assault rifle”? Is it “A” or “B”?

A:

Remington 742 Woodsmaster, 30-06 caliber.

B:

AR-15, 5.56 caliber

You say “B”. Why not “A”? “B” looks military – it’s the notorious AR-15 – and “A” is for hunting Bambi, you might say. So it must be about the looks of “B”, right?

Looks is the only difference because both are semi-automatic, besides the fact that the hunter uses the more powerful 30-06 round as opposed to the smaller 5.56 in the other.

Will “B” assault you more effectively than “A”? If so, how so? Will the bullet out of the barrel of “B” assault you more effectively than the projectile leaving the barrel of “A”? Let me help you. The answer is “no”. Both will tear into anything that happens to be in the way. Thus, all guns with a bullet exiting the barrel “assault” whatever is in their path.

Of course, the thing just sits there as an inert piece of metal, wood, and plastic, till a human mind behind a human finger at its trigger turns it into a projectile-ejecting tool. No human, no assault. Simple.

Is the semi-automatic feature scary to you? You see “automatic” in semi-automatic. They aren’t the same. For all intents and purposes, full auto weapons aren’t available to you and I. The only thing that we can get is a gun that will fire only one round with each pull of the trigger. “A” does it just as well as “B”.

A Polish soldier behind a WLKM 50 caliber multi-barrel machine gun (automatic). You can’t buy this thing, or anything that operates as an automatic, at your local Cabela’s, or practically anywhere else this side of the Mexican cartels.

Chipman enters Alice’s Wonderland when he said that the AR-15 was issued to him as a federal agent and called it a “particularly lethal weapon”. Particularly lethal? How? All guns are lethal if you happen to be in the flight path of the bullet. Just point ’em in a dangerous direction. And another round will issue out of the hunter as quickly as the AR.

The “assault rifles” discussion is demented. If you can play word games with a legal and widely available gun in order to ban it, then any gun can be banned if you can find the right word chemistry to use against it. And there goes the 2nd Amendment.

RogerG

*Also on my Facebook page.

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Hooray for Burbank’s Tinhorn Flats Saloon! That’s the Spirit!

Anti-lockdown protesters gather outside the Tinhorn Flats Saloon in Burbank, Calif.

So, there’s a bit of the spit-in-your-eye gumption left in the Golden State. The “Battle of Tinhorn Flats” was inaugurated by the son of the owner while his dad was overseas on business, with full approval of dad. While it didn’t end well – the eatery still fell under the iron boot of Newsom’s Council of Commissars like all the others – the episode showed that the spirit 1776 has a pulse in the People’s Republic. I’m inspired.

Check out this exchange between father and son at the onset of the imbroglio:

Son, Baret Lepejian, expresses the desire to reopen in spite of Newsom’s edicts and his father says that there are 30,000 closed restaurants in LA.

The younger Lepejian recalled: “100 percent fully aware, and I said there’s going to be 29,999, and there’s going to be one motherf***er that’s going to be open, and that’s going to be us.”

It’s reminiscent of Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe’s response to a German demand for the surrender of American forces in besieged Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, December 1944. He replied, “Nuts!” He was right in the end, and rescued by Patton, and the Germans lost. Which side do you think Newsom mirrors?

Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, left, and Col. Harry W.O. Kinnard at Bastogne, December 1944.

The Leperjians fought Newsom’s Stalinesque requisition squads down to Baret’s stays in goal and $50,000 in fines. When a judge orders the cut-off of power, employees brought in generators. When doors were chained and locked, employees used saws. When agents installed a chain-link barrier around the building, they set up a food truck and grill serving “non-comply tacos” and “freedom burgers”.

Baret’s son, Lucas, before his arrest.
Police armed and ready for the assault on a place guilty for serving food.

It turns out that gumption is more scientific than the self-important decrees of the state’s Ministry of Truth. The pandemic still raged in spite of all the lockdowns. Blanketing everyone’s face behind a secular burka didn’t stem the tide. School closures treated the young-ins the same as nursing home residents in complete disregard of the science (As for the teachers, they are essential workers like doctors, nurses, and truckers). The public square was awash in hypocrisies. I could go on, and none of it worked.

Newsom is only opening up to save his own political bacon, and before the rest of the state packs up and leaves.

“Remember Tinhorn Flats” will join “Remember the Alamo” in the annals of rallying cries for freedom. Please read the article about it.

RogerG

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California Slapped Down Again

The US Supreme Court in Washington DC.

Remember the Supreme Court’s decision in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo in November of last year. It slapped down Cuomo’s near lockdown of church in his state. The Court ruled that he couldn’t have more severe restrictions on places of worship than for other organizations. Soon after, Harvest Rock Church and Ministry in California filed suit to challenge Newsom’s assault on faith. Their case reached the Court and it referred the matter back to the 9th Circuit with the stipulation to follow the decision in Brooklyn. Meaning, California was slapped down again.

Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena, Ca.

But wait, there’s more. The governor will be forced to pay the $1.35 million legal tab in a settlement on file with the 9th Circuit. But wait, there’s more. Newsom will be the first governor in history to be under a federal injunction to protect houses of worship. According to one source, “the state of California is now under a permanent injunction from imposing restrictions on churches and houses of worship that are not equally applied to other critical infrastructure or essential services.”

Read about the case here.

The Court has had enough of California’s extremist state government. But what of the state’s electorate who keeps sending these Maduro-loving clowns to Sacramento in super majorities? Recent opinion polls indicate that Newsom is set to survive the recall. Maybe it’s not surprising. The guy is buying votes by flooding the state with millions of checks. Apparently, that’s all it takes to keep the state in its current morass of blackouts, punishing taxes, rampaging wildfires, bad roads, cities that look like homeless Woodstocks, water shortages, empty prisons/rising crime, and a permanent condition of lockdown.

California voters, after all, it was always up to you.

RogerG