The metaphor is apt when applied to recent pronouncements and actions of Democrat partisans. The campaign against the winner of the 2016 presidential election most recently descended into foolish impeachment, and may have insinuated promiscuous impeachment into our national political life. Previously, calls to shake up our constitutional order were fixated on the dismantlement of the Electoral College, all this to guarantee more Democrats win the presidency. It’s shameful and grossly irresponsible, like children lighting matches to ignite a cherry bomb.
Are they cognizant of the dangers that they are foisting on us? Trent England, vice president of the Oklahoma Public Affairs Council, lays out the jeopardy to all of us in his piece, “The Dangers of the Attacks on the Electoral College” in Hillsdale College’s Imprimis (June 2019). It’s a must-read.
The effects of foolishness seldom are limited to the offender when it is performed on a political stage, and on a national one at that. Many foolhardy ideas have their origin in ignorance of the past, or a terrible misreading of it. Not well-understood is the fact that the Founders rejected a national plebiscite for choosing the president because they were fearful of domination by areas with high concentrations of population and regions with a unity of purpose. It was a check on narrow interests seizing control of the executive machinery of government.
It worked as a restraint on one of our worst tendencies: to mistakenly see the world through the lens of our immediate neighborhood and the confines of our acquaintances as the ultimate arbiter of “truth”, as in the Jim Crow South or today’s ultra-left California. Indeed, there is a historical symmetry between the Jim Crow South of yesteryear and today’s populous and heavily urbanized states like California, Illinois, and New York. The post-Civil War South accounted for an average of 10.6 % of the vote and the California of 2016 was 10.4% of it.
In the elections of 1876, 1880, and 1888, the old South – the old South of real black voter suppression, not the phony kind falsely attributed to voter ID – was prevented from imposing their partisan choices on the rest of the country. After all, this was the South of region-wide block voting for the Democratic Party, no matter what. This is a region of “yellow dog Democrats” stretching from North Carolina to Texas who “would sooner vote for a Democrat yellow dog than a Republican”. Sounds like a typical faculty lounge, big city, or Manhattan/Hollywood soiree of today.
Four of the five ladies of The View are noticeably chagrined and incredulous at having to hear the occasional disagreements of Megan McCain. The four reflect the bubble of the new “yellow dog Democrat”.
Donald Trump, Jr., in the hot seat on The View.
To deal with their frustration, our deeply blue, and occasionally purple, states have contrived a scheme to repeal the Electoral College without an amendment. It’s called the National Popular Vote (NPV) initiative. The thing would try to impose a presidential popular vote by getting enough states to pass statewide measures to require the nationwide vote total to determine their state’s electors. The scammers’ goal is to win over enough states to equal a majority of the Electoral College total, 270. Thereby, the old fuddy-duddy Electoral College will be practically repealed without having to do it the right way: by amendment. The schemers are currently ready to surpass 200.
Robert Burns’ “best laid plans of mice and men [go wrong]” is about to be confirmed again. The ploy is anti-constitutional as well as unconstitutional. First, the gimmick violates the original intent of the Founders, but, then again, when did progressives/socialists ever concern themselves with original intent. The Founders stipulated that a state’s electors were chosen by the states, not a national statistic like the national vote total. The easy-out for progressives is for all troublesome law to be interpreted out of existence. That’s anti-constitutional.
Secondly, the subterfuge violates Article 1, Section 10 of the Constitution. This troubling passage to progressives requires all interstate compacts to be approved by Congress, and this most assuredly is an interstate compact, whether they want to call it that or not. They’ll try to hide under the Constitutional power of each state to determine their method of choosing electors. But, as in all things, a limiting principle applies: a state can, if they don’t violate the Constitution in the process.
Like this latest round of impeachment, the gambit is a sham. Who in their right mind would want to live under the dictates of the lunatic cultural left? Remember, these states have some of the loosest election laws since troglodytes had to choose a tribal chief. They’ll run up the score with their usual shenanigans and the rest of us will be saddled with the result. Is this any way to run a republic?
In this Nov. 10, 2018, file photo, the Camp Fire burns along a ridge top near Big Bend, Calif. (Photo: Noah Berger / Associated Press)
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C.S. Lewis and Progressivism
C.S. Lewis
Progressivism was succinctly defined by C.S.Lewis as “state-love”. One of Lewis’s novels, That Hideous Strength, strives to plumb the depths of progressivism, its nature and likely ramifications. The story centers on the attempt to takeover Great Britain by the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (NICE). It’s an organization dedicated to science and scientific management, but the science has more devious inclinations than the acronym implies. From the novel, Lewis encapsulates the character of progressivism in the form of NICE: “The NICE was the first-fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world.”
The cause of science-based control has a darker underbelly in the form of a security force that is headed by a Miss Hardcastle.
One of the chief protagonists, Mark, has a conversation with Hardcastle on the willingness of different groups to accept NICE propaganda. Mark expresses faith in the educated classes to be resistant. Hardcastle counters,
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”
The novel and the dialogue in it foreshadow a warning about the real consequences of progressivism. A cadre of college-trained “experts” will fill the ranks of government service to more and more manage the affairs of the people. Accountability to those same citizens will be diluted because one scientific view among many will be imposed without reference to the wishes of the citizens. Their decisions have the force of law and the general public is increasingly subservient to them. Therefore, a dual threat exists in the form of a loss of sovereignty and an expansion of the state’s police powers, ergo That Hideous Strength.
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California and the Feds, Simpatico Bros
I was thinking of Lewis’s novel while reading about last year’s spate of wildfires in California. California is the epicenter of modern progressivism, a NICE writ large. Sacramento has a compulsion for all things state-love. The state’s ruling party has found few things that couldn’t be, in their estimation, improved by state intervention, especially if it is a holy war against purported oppression of fashionable victims’ groups, suppression of groups not in fashion, and the administrative deification of the environment as Gaia. One of the consequences could be an entire state literally going up in flames, among other calamitous maladies.
Gaia as depicted by Anselm Feuerbach, 1875.
Our political leaders try to avoid responsibility for the disasters by directing blame elsewhere. Both of California’s recent Sierra Club governors – Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom – lay the blame at the foot of “climate change”, recently rebranded from “global warming”. From the angle of their opponents, Trump wields his rhetorical machete at California’s governing classes for their blind subservience to environmental extremism. Trump’s jab unsurprisingly comes in the form of a tweet storm:
” The Governor of California, @GavinNewsom, has done a terrible job of forest management. I told him from the first day we met that he must “clean” his forest floors regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists, DEMAND of him. Must also do burns and cut fire stoppers…..” (Nov. 3, 2010)
In the end, Trump’s right … partially. The lefty gang in Sacramento is enthralled to an ideal of maximal environmental preservation as defined by the state’s entrenched swarm of well-heeled eco-activists. Many of the state’s public policies appear to channel the Environmental Defense Fund to such an extent that the colorful banter among the powerful in Sacramento and Coastal soirees must center on the History Channel’s “Life after People”.
Life After People, the History Channel (2008-2010). It’s a strange history: a “history” without anybody around to record it, and for whom?
The state’s ruling class is fully on-board with the Stalinist Green New Deal. Shortly after the giddy 30-year-old freshman congresswoman from New York’s 14th Congressional District (Ocasio-Cortez), flush with microphones and celebrity, announced the monstrosity, state party chieftains and power brokers like Kevin de Leon proudly gushed that the state was pro-Green New Deal before the Green New Deal, with its own eco-Gosplan, to be 100% “carbon neutral” on date certain. For an eco-extremist, extreme eco-ideas appear pale, and so they do for de Leon: “It’s not radical. By no stretch of imagination.”
But, then again, 57% of California’s designated forest lands are federally controlled, leading to Newsom’s subsequent tweet stab of hanging the wildfires around Trump’s neck in his response. Truly, almost three-fifths of the state’s forests are controlled out of DC … kinda. Yet, federal policies don’t always occur in the insular DC bubble. Some states have front row seats in the construction of federal land use policies, going back to 1970, in the form of review and comment procedures.
A little history lesson is in order. The Gordian Knot of federal environmental regulation got bigger with the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA). The mammoth law requires a period of comment for affected parties, including states, as part of the Environmental Impact Statement process. Before the US Forest Service implements land management policies, the states and everybody else in the eco-hive have to have their say. If the agency decides contra to their wishes, it’s off to the courts.
President Nixon signs the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on January 1, 1970.
Ditto for the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) and the National Forest Management Act (NFMA). Both require inclusion of state and local perspectives in federal decision-making.
Granted, the amiability between DC and a state matures into a tag team when both are riding the same Green Peace bullet train to ecotopia. Problems arise when a state wants to get off the train because it sees the conveyance careening to disaster. That’s no problem for California. It’s got an annual pass, shares bunking privileges, and enjoys the ride to ….
What I mean is that California tacks hard left on environmental policy, like much of the federal bureaucracy since the founding of the EPA. Regarding that bureaucracy, if the 2016 election is any indication, and the Clinton-Trump race is emblematic of the divide about eco government-worship (an admittedly debatable correlation), 95% of federal employee campaign contributions went to Clinton, which comports with California’s landslide vote for Clinton (by 4.2 million votes). If anything, it’s highly probable that the ideological inclinations of the federal environmental bureaucracy coincide with the state’s ruling political machine.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks during a rally in San Jose, California on May 26, 2016. (Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP)
So, Gavin Newsom’s reply to Trump relies on a completely unsupportable contention that the state’s one-party governing class is at ideological odds with the inclinations of the federal bureaucracy, particularly that part of it enchanted with the left’s ecotopia. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has the inside track to the governor’s mansion, state legislature, the state’s Democratic convention, and the state’s public workforce, as they do for a good chunk of the federal civil service. Complaints from the state’s mandarins about the emergence of matchstick federally-managed wildlands ring hollow since they did nothing – and were prone to be in agreement – as the fuel load mounted on those vast stretches of the BLM and USFS estates over the preceding decades. It’s a federal/state alliance for sins of omission and commission.
As all this was gestating, to be clear, Trump was nowhere to be found. He, among other things, was in and out of bankruptcy court, immersed in his tv show, and finagling real estate deals when the feds and California went eco-crazy.
Sorry, Gavin, you and your ideological fellow-travelers are complicit in the don’t-touch-nature movement, and the subsequent explosion of wildfires in the state. For Trump, he can’t even get many of his federal appointments approved, let alone leave an imprint on management practices on federal lands to counter the recklessness. Heck, that same bureaucracy is intent on trying to hang him à la impeachment.
It’s amazing when ideological biases infect the self-styled “experts” in the administrative state. Well maybe not amazing. Human beings are naturally prone to the favoritism of their biases regardless of place of employment and level of education.
What About That Sinister Culprit, Climate Change?
Have human beings inadvertently engineered a warmer climate? Could be – after all, 2.8 billion people in China and India are discovering the joys of air conditioning and the comforts and independence of the automobile. No more the dirt floors, rickshaws, and intestinal parasites for them.
Nantong Power Station, a coal-fired power station in Nantong, China.Traffic jam on a Delhi, India, freeway.
The amount of greenhouse gasses from the energy necessary to power the two behemoth nations out of endemic poverty has grown dramatically. No need to belabor the point.
Has it contributed to a slight and general warming of the atmosphere? Probably. Is it catastrophic? Now that’s another matter.
Back to California, though. Regardless of the dust-up over “climate change”, the state has been dealt a difficult drought hand by mother nature, aka Gaia to the well-fed middle class twenty-somethings manning the ranks of Earth First. It is already prone to extensive dry spells due to its Mediterranean weather regime: dry summers and a short rainy season. It’s the very thing that attracted the aerospace industry, motion pictures, the trendy rich and powerful, and millions escaping the wintertime tundras everywhere else in post-WWII America. And it’s the very thing that caused the population to flood into the chronically dry biomes of the coast and foothills.
The low water level reveals two chairs at the Almaden Reservoir in San Jose, Calif., on Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2014. (Photo: Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group)
Such a climate is easy to tip over into drought. If the state doesn’t get its necessary allotment of precipitation in its 3-5 month wet season, it won’t get it at all. In fact, a study of tree ring data and other natural evidence bears the habit of significant dry spells, really big dry spells – all before Michael Mann became an ideological huckster with his “hockey stick”.
“Megadroughts” have afflicted the state over the last 1,000 years. One drought lasted 50 years starting in 850 AD. After that, another one stretched 150 years. Others extended over 10 to 20 year spans. They illustrate the fact that most of the state occupies a zone on the west coast with a sensitivity to drought.
You’d think that the state’s ruling class would realize that the same thing drawing them to the Golden State was the same thing to make it difficult to keep their swimming pools filled … and cause their chaparral vistas to explode in flames. And hopefully, one would think, lead them to ameliorate the worst of the threat. Instead, they dance to the tune of an aging water delivery system, energy policies that strip the electricity grid of the resources to protect it, and allow the fuel load to pile up on the chaparral and forest floors.
California chaparral biome.
It ain’t “climate change” as the numero uno suspect for what ails the state. The offender is the same climate in existence since before the internal combustion engine, combined with the eco-foolishness that is the stock-and-trade of the state’s ruling classes. These folks are literally playing with fire.
The Tinderbox
Progressives are fond of “experts” as if the label is some kind of magical incantation. The word normally connotes a person with technical proficiency and depth of knowledge in a particular subject matter. Yet, our modern liberals can’t come to grips with the fact that these “experts” bring more than technical competence to the table. They often possess the same prejudices and biases that afflict the rest of us. If they are gung-ho for the eco-craziness of the Green New Deal and spout the same ideologically-laden tropes of much of our schools’ tendentious curriculum, they’re just as capable of bringing forth a fiasco as anyone left to flying by the seat of their pants. The designers of California’s highly combustible wildlands policies have many “experts” among their number.
And the results are disturbing. Broad expanses of dead trees have become a common fixture in the forests of the state.
Dead trees in the area of Kings Canyon National Park, Ca.
A US Forest Service aerial survey in 2018 of California’s forests on state, federal, and private land discovered an additional 18 million dead trees to bring the total number to 147 million. How does it compare with previous years? A USFS official puts the normal number of additional deceased trees per year at 1 million. Drought appears to be the main driver, but drought is a chronic condition in a Mediterranean climate. Plus, why are 147 million dead trees still standing? Dead trees in a drought-sensitive climate should come as no surprise to anyone, especially to those living there. But 147 million!
Watch the progression of slides showing the increased intensity of dead trees in the Sierra-Nevada from 2014 to 2018.
Source: US Forest Service
Reality takes a back seat to ideological jihads. Tree harvesting has been on the decline since endangered species became watchwords for ending the timber industry. In the 1990’s the debilitating reproductive habits of the spotted owl were discovered, with natural predators also reducing the species’ life spans, and an entire industry found itself locked out of many of the state’s forests. This and other campaigns have suppressed harvesting on federal lands alone to one-tenth of what it was in 1988 when Reagan was president. As a result, new tree growth outstrips harvesting. In a seven-year drought, that means lots and lots of dead trees waiting for an arsonist, a lightning storm, or a decaying electricity grid.
Here’s the kicker: the subsequent fires from neutered management practices are a greater emitter of CO2 than forests thinned of the dead stuff and therefore healthier and more capable of absorbing CO2. As one CalFire official put it, “Current flux [of CO2] may not be sustainable without forest management!”
For all the protestations for a carbon-neutral future, the state’s governing class can’t get their story straight. What do they want? Do they fancy an end to anthropogenic CO2 or more wild fires and CO2 from drought-stricken and incendiary forests and scrub land? The two go hand-in-hand in the fanciful passions of the state’s powerful eco-mandarins. Eco-passions keep getting in the way of eco-passions.
“Sustainability” and Fire
Low and behold, many of the most destructive fires originated with the policies and practices of two largest of the state-chartered energy monopolists: PG&E and Southern California Edison. There isn’t much that they do without looking over their shoulder at the frenzied eco-fancies of the ruling party in Sacramento. The state’s NICE-equivalent government, as all big governments inevitably are, has a nasty habit of leaving behind a long slime-trail of unintended consequences. One is a disintegrating infrastructure as the operators seek to patronize the lunatics running the asylum of this state’s government, the same ones who have instigated an energy-delivery infrastructure that can function as a stimulant of conflagrations.
Indeed, one could be forgiven for entertaining the thought that PG&E and Southern California Edison are less about the provision of energy and more about pyromania. 6 of the 10 most damaging wild fires in the state were ignited by electrical equipment. CNBC intoned, “PG&E’s equipment has sparked 19 major fires in 2017 and 2018.”
Vehicles and homes burn as the Camp fire tears through Paradise, Calif., on Nov. 8, 2018. (photo: Josh Edelson/AFP)
But how did the state’s energy giants get there – “there” being their grid as a fuse and lighted match? Many seeking to blame capitalism focus on the “investor-owned” aspect of the companies. For them, it’s simply a matter of corporate greed, notwithstanding the fact that the companies are just as much “state-controlled” as they are “investor-owned”. Anyone with the least knowledge of the state’s Public Utility Commission knows that “investor-owned” doesn’t in the slightest mean “investor-controlled”. If an eco-craze becomes the latest and greatest thing to sweep the commanding heights of academia and government, you can bet the utilities, already cognizant of the need to ingratiate their powerful regulatory benefactors, will hop to the tune. If “sustainability” – meaning wind and solar – is all the rage, they’ll happily dance to the music.
However, the song is a hot mess … as it applies to keeping the servers running and the lights running 24/7. When you trade something of high value for something of low value, it will be known as an economic exercise in degringolade (a sudden decline). It’s unavoidable. In energy parlance, the “high” valued energy is reliable and stable, such as a 24/ power generating facility like a dam or fossil fuel plant. The “low” valued kind is the energy from the intermittent-producing wind or solar farm. They’re not dependable since the wind isn’t so obliging at all times and solar rays aren’t so cooperative through cloud cover and low sun angles . So, the lunacy of greenie energy policy lies in the tenacious push for the undependable to replace the dependable.
The priesthood of the “sustainables” – and it more resembles a clergy of a new mystical faith than “science” – will rely on their incessant calls for more truckloads of cash to be poured into greenie energy research. Aha! Batteries, they preach, are the answer, but they aren’t now, but they proclaim that they will be the answer if only we pile more of the public purse into feverish attempts to make them so. I suppose that they’d be proven right if only we allow them to bankrupt the country in the endeavor.
Absolutely, an unlimited budget can work wonders if we forget the reality of economic tradeoffs. As you lavish money on one thing , you soon realize that it’s not available for something else. More money into “sustainables” may result in a Pentagon barely able to defend us from an invasion of the Federated States of Micronesia; or a Social Security system barely able to keep the needy elderly from freezing to death in winter; or we become accustomed to a hyperinflation that would make Wiemar Germany’s seem like a paragon of monetary probity … if we try to have it all.
The Arrogant and Dopey Politician
Assemblymember Rob Bonta announces the California Green New Deal Act alongside other lawmakers near the East steps of the Capitol in downtown Sacramento, Monday, January 6, 2019.
The fact that the vast majority of politicians are at best novices in scientific matters is a fair conclusion, since huge numbers of them spirited off to law school and not to the research labs of Dow Chemical or MIT after getting their BA’s. They have all the gullibility of the ill-informed.
After activist politician meets activist scientist, your congressional representative can become quite a zealot . Indeed, there is such a person as an activist scientist. Does Michael Mann remind you of the type? For me, he does. Like him, many are infected with the same ideological biases that circulate among our self-styled cultural betters, of which they might consider themselves a charter member.
Buttressed in their “truth”, having the support of compatriot ideological zealots in lab coats, the people with the power to make law and impose it on us can be quite conceited in their convictions. How many times have we been exposed to this or that firebrand officeholder resorting to the tendentious pronouncements of this or that supposedly disinterested agglomeration of scientific experts?
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, right, announcing the resolution on Feb. 7, 2019. (photo: Pete Marovich for The New York Times)
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a classic example of the type. The politicos mouthing the pieties of the ideological-driven group of “experts” are completely ignorant of the pitfalls, cognitive holes, foolish assumptions, loose inferences, and faulty modeling that were garnered from the routine experience of previous failed scientific explorations. The experience makes a real scientist much more humble, not so the militant politician.
Instead, we get the demand to sit down and shut up or face the state attorney general.
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey speaks at a news conference with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and other US State Attorney’s General to announce a state-based effort to combat climate change in the Manhattan borough of New York City, March 29, 2016 [File:Mike Segar/Reuters]So we leap from the most extreme assertions of “climate change” to political actions without a second thought. Logic takes a backseat. A host of second thoughts would be elicited after consideration of something called the “capacity factors” of the various sources of energy production. Capacity factor? It’s the percentage of time that a given source of energy is actually producing electricity. It’s 85-90% for coal, natural gas, and nuclear. What about the much-vaunted wind and solar? For wind it is 40% or less, and solar hovers around 30% or less.
And things get worse for wind and solar. Once the prime sites have been taken, our potentates will have to command the move into less productive locations to increase generation. As energy productivity declines from more and more solar panels and windmills in non-accommodating areas, what’s the effect on the broader society? It won’t be benign as higher costs, poorer service, interruptions, dilapidated facilities and equipment, and a widening income gap filter through the population. Skyrocketing utility bills have that effect.
And, don’t forget, the eruption of more wildfires.
Those Pesky Marginal Sites
The sun rises behind windmills at a wind farm in Palm Springs, California, February 9, 2011. ( photo: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson)
Just imagine those high voltage transmission lines stretching over long distances of chaparral scrubland from the few places places with acceptable amounts of sun and wind to cities and towns further away. The highly-prized locations aren’t likely to be near those high-rises and exurban subdivisions with their curvilinear streets and swimming pools. If the lines are poorly maintained and subject to extreme weather, expect the hills to burn bright at night.
Mojave desert solar facility in California.
To bring the generation closer to the end-users means probable placement in less productive spots, because if prime locations were near the cities , the facilities would already be there. It begs the question. Greenie energy isn’t as location-friendly as a fossil fuel plant. Conversely, you could build a coal/gas-fired plant just about anywhere, if you can get past the nimbies [not in my back yard] and celebrity sit-ins at the construction site.
The expansion of wind and solar into marginal locations exacerbates the cost problem with these sources. They are already behind the economics eight ball before you move a spade of dirt. Once we include the costs of backup plants (peaker plants to keep the power flowing when the wind and sun doesn’t cooperate), longer transmission lines, subsidies, and immense dislocations due to guaranteed market shares, wind comes in at twice as expensive as conventional sources; solar power is three times as expensive.
Back to the problem of guaranteed market shares, promising anyone a customer base – or “market share” – ensures increases in costs by stripping the efficiencies of competition and volitional refusal out of the economic equation. The wind and solar producers get a first call on the taxpayer’s and ratepayer’s dollar.
Is that any way to run a grid? It is if you want your energy industry to look like something in the third world.
Housing in Freetown, Sierra Leone. (photo by Ira Peppercorn)
I wonder about the depressing effects of escalating energy costs on the overall economy and the economy’s ability to generate the funds for maintenance. Something has to give. People and businesses leave and/or reduce their economic activity which translates into disasters-in-waiting from a dilapidated grid, like the hillsides going up in flames.
Central Planners at Heart
Nobody in their right mind would knowingly wish for such a future. The emphasis is on the word “knowingly”. Point of fact, most of the public doesn’t know and their freely-chosen representatives are equally ignorant, but that won’t stop them from foisting the hot mess on their constituents.
Imposition is absolutely essential because the discomforting consequences would become so readily apparent to those with eyes to see. Thus, people must not be allowed to freely choose or not choose the nonsense. Their self-anointed “betters” have already decided the proper course for them. Whether with the velvet glove of subsidies – aka bribes – or the stick of punishing rates, people must be made to fall in line. In the end, greenie energy leads to one place: central planning.
So California, and her like-minded sister states, gets to relive the economic performance of the Soviet Union. The only problem is the unintended consequence of shortages and blackouts … and a grid that reflects the broader economic slide. It’s Gosplan with a fiery end.
The California Public Utilities Commission headquarters in San Francisco.The building of the old Soviet State Planning Commission in Moscow.
The two photos above signify the same thing: two powerful central planning agencies, one in Sacramento and the other in Moscow. In the former, towns burn down.
The Camp fire rages through the town of Paradise, Calif., in Butte County on November 8, 2018. (photo: Neal Waters/Zuma Press/TNS)
In the latter, people queue up.
Queuing up at the state retail outlet in 1970’s Moscow.
Lewis’s NICE would be mightily impressed, and at the same time care less.
Elizabeth Warren is trying to right her sinking ship of a presidential campaign by appealing to the crazy left base of the Democratic Party with more and more outrageous utterances. Last Thursday (Jan. 30), she submitted a question in the impeachment trial by attacking the character of the Chief Justice, the presiding officer in the Senate trial. She basically accused him of being a shill for the president and Republicans. Watch the Chief Justice in a multi-second stare at the senator.
This not the way to “How to Win Friends and Influence People” (Dale Carnegie, 1936) . She would do well to get the book and read it. Under “Fundamental Techniques in Handling People”: #1, “Don’t criticize, condemn, or complain.”
Previously, she belittled the office of Secretary of Education by notifying the world that a “trans” child would make the choice if she wins the presidency. What?! Is she showing how far she will go to shamelessly humiliate herself at the altar of woke patronization. At what point is the word “despicable” appropriate in describing a politician?
Laurence Fox and Rachel Boyle in the dust-up on the BBC’s The Question.
How do people make themselves, for want of a better word, stupid? People are normally rational beings (maybe I’m too optimistic), so how do they end up … stupid? One possible answer is that they believe in fictions. Turning an untruth into truth is quite a feat, and the source of much misery when it is pronounced by people with a media bullhorn. One fount of “stupid”with a patina of academic glamour is identity politics and its conferring of “wokeness” on its adherents.
I define “identity politics” as the attempt to assign virtue and vice to people according to immutable qualities such as melanin count and genitalia. A subsidiary precept is the dualism of oppressor/oppressed for which all people must descend, as based on the aforementioned unchangeable personal characteristics – something any dyed-in-the-wool Marxist would find familiar. The result is a profusion of baloney. But woe be to those caught in the snares of the woke cadres, as Laurence Fox soon discovered.
Rachel C. Boyle
An example of a dolt on parade was broadcast to the world in the BBC’s Question Time when a supposed “academic”, Rachel Boyle, leveled the banality of “racism” at Laurence Fox for his skepticism about sending all criticism of the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, into the “racism” black hole (“black” being no attempt at cultural appropriation).
Take a look.
Boyle has all the academic credentials of wokeness, she being a lecturer and researcher in race and ethnicity at Edge Hill University in Lancashire. The amazing thing about her is the seriousness and self-confidence in her batty denunciations of Fox. She strings together pejorative epithets like a latter-day Muhammed Ali at one of his prefight weighing-ins. Or more accurately, she spouts the nonsense with all the gravity of a lab-coated functionary in the NSDAP Racial Policy Office with calipers measuring the width of noses to peg a person into the official racial hierarchy. Completely absent is any sense of humility. You know, the lack of any self-awareness that she could be wrong.
One of the ramifications for believing in the unbelievable is the potential for human slaughter. People lose their individuality as they are subsumed into artificially differentiated groups. It’s easy to condemn thousands in a single stroke.
I came across the phenomena of genocidal females – to go along with their more numerous alternatively gendered soul-mates – while reading Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s second volume of his The Red Wheel. In exile in Switzerland with Lenin were Rosalia Zemlyachka and Yevgenia Bosch, both having key posts in the Bolsheviks’ Red Terror from 1917 to 1921.
Rosalia Zemlyachka
Zemlyachka, a Marxist of longstanding, was instrumental with Bela Kun of bringing the Bolshevik butchery to the Crimea in 1920-21. Bosch similarly has blood all over her hands.
Yevgenia Bosch
She became the head of the Ministry of the Interior in the Ukraine when the Bolshevik Red Army seized control of the country. Say “Ministry of the Interior” and you may as well be saying “secret police”, “more blood of the bourgeoisie”, and “Red Terror”. Her body count came to around 400,000-600,000 murdered Cossacks, Jews, and assorted “enemies of the people”.
How can normally decent people become mass killers? It’s highly unlikely without some animating belief system overwhelming all considerations, ideas like those of our would-be totalitarian interlocutor from the woke departments of Edge Hill University, Rachel Boyle. Reducing human beings to categories of goodness and badness as based on biological traits is dangerous business, very dangerous business.
Kudos to Senators Josh Hawley (R, Mo.) and Marsha Blackburn (R, Tn.) for attempting to really drain the swamp. Their bill, S. 2672, would move “90% of the positions in 10 Cabinet-level departments out of D.C.” What a great idea: break up the place! The thought occurred to me some time ago as the Trump-collusion imbroglio was gaining steam and I was reading Geof Shepard’s “The Real Watergate Scandal” on my Kindle. Come to think of it, a real state depression in DC wouldn’t be such a bad thing for the country.
Blackburn and Hawley.
All those minions scurrying about DC have created a world all their own. The progressives of the late 19th century assured us that the halcyon days of good government would be upon us if only more power was deposited in the hands of degreed professionals who were educated to treat all of reality as a matter for “science”. In other words, people like themselves.
Ironically, they ignored the implications of the “science” of people both as individuals and in large groups. People are simultaneously self-serving and altruistic, and not in equal measure – usually to the detriment of altruism. As a collective, they create a distinct society with its own norms and expectations. It’s a world unto itself.
The skyline of Washington, D.C., including the U.S. Capitol building, Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and National Mall, is seen from the air, January 29, 2010. (Saul Loeb/AFP)
A trip into the world of the Watergate scandal sheds light on the brave new world of this administrative state. Let’s examine 3 prominent characters in the now bastardized but popular version of the story: Clark Mollenhoff, Mark Felt, and Bob Woodward.
Mollenhoff was a DC reporter and well-connected lawyer and friend of presiding judge John Sirica (Sirica is another of these networked DC folks). Not only was he well-connected, he got a position in the first year of the Nixon White House. His ambition to have direct access to Nixon and be Nixon’s premier sage was thwarted by learning that he would have to work under Haldeman and Ehrlichman. The job didn’t last much longer than a year. He becomes another of the disgruntled operatives – one among many thousands populating the District – roaming about looking for outlets for their scorn. In clearly improper, if not illegal, ex-parte meetings with Sirica, he would fill that coveted role of “sage”.
Clark Mollenhoff
Mark Felt, ex-Associate Director of the FBI, is another example of a person with stymied high aspirations. Passed over for the FBI directorate – it was handed to L. Patrick Gray – he simmered as second fiddle. He willingly became an espionage agent for Bernstein and Woodward as “Deep Throat”.
Former FBI official W. Mark Felt arrive at federal court in Washington 9/18 for the continuation of his trial on charges of approving illegal break-ins during the Nixon Administration.
Finally, what about Bob Woodward? He made his name in DC circles as an aide to Admiral Thomas Hinman Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His connections would be useful in his second career as WaPo muckraker.
Carl Bernstein, left, and Robert Woodward, who pressed the Watergate investigation, in Washington, D.C., May 7, 1973. (photo: AP)
What to make of all this? The country is governed in a bog-like slough of cliques, the excessively ambitious, and self-serving inter-relationships. If you’re an outsider from Ashtabula, beware!
Trump, does this sound familiar?
Forget all that stuff about rule by the people. Progressives bequeathed to us a government of an unaccountable nomenklatura.
That’s right, Blackburn and Hawley, we have no realistic recourse but to break it up! Break it up, and do so quickly.
Prof. Karla testifies before House Judiciary Committee, and Barron Trump (inset).
Most Americans don’t live their lives glued to talk radio and opinionated cable news channels. They’ve got kids and work to deal with. Every now and then, though, they get exposed to the deep blue bubble that would like to rule over them.
Recently, a curtain was pulled back showing the type of people inhabiting the dark blue abbeys of academia when 3 left-liberal profs traipsed before the Nadler impeachment tribunal to bellow their disgust for Trump. One of them, Pamela Karla of Stanford Law, punctuated her talk with a well-rehearsed quip dragging Trump’s 13-year-old son into her allegation of Trump’s so-called monarchical tendencies (see below).
Obnoxious, for making Trump’s young son a tag line? Yes, to anyone outside the blue bubble; not so for people who spend their lives thinking and living within one.
The gag would be cute before the captured audiences of her classroom and faculty lounges. It’s tone deaf to normal people. Once again, we get another example of the strange people who are nurtured in the narrow confines of the academic Versailles (a more accurate monarchical allusion) that dot our landscape.
Conservative political figures’ calls for “Chick-fil-a Appreciation Day” in 2012 resulted in long lines, such as this one in Wichita, Kansas. The call came on the heels of LGBTQ protests of the company. (Photo: NPR)
Has Chik-fil-A abandoned the Salvation Army and FCA? The company claims it is merely redirecting its charitable giving. The media center-left, which includes the heavies and the so-called “fact-checking” sites, have howled that the criticism of the company’s action from the right is gross hyperbole. For me, I smell a rat … in the company and among our disreputable and tendentious national media.
Snopes.com came to the defense of the company’s decision by saying that Chik-fil-A and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes were just 2 of 80 organizations losing support. Snopes quoted the company’s announcement in describing their new giving philosophy as one to “deepen its giving to a smaller number of organizations working exclusively in the areas of education, homelessness and hunger.” Hogwash! What a pile of mush.
How do you think a sellout to the cultural left occurs? “Deepen” becomes synonymous with “abandon”. The new foci are favorite hobby horses for the left’s ongoing program of social engineering. It’s certainly a way to soften the company’s image away from a Bible-based Christianity to a compromised form more compatible with transgendered bathrooms and new forms of nuptials.
Snopes and its media parasites aren’t engaging in “fact-checking” but in “claptrappery”. They mistake PR fluff for real motive. The company’s statement has all the earmarks of the ages-old campaign tactic of removing a candidate’s hard edge in order to appeal to a wider public. In this case, the company avoids the boycotts and the Antifa goons.
Until I hear of anything else, “sellout” appears to be the more accurate word.
Please watch AG Bill Barr in a speech before the Federalist Society deliver a civics lesson to the functionally illiterate mainstream press (NYT, WaPO, Mother Jones, Slate, etc.) and the entirety of the Democratic Party.
Particularly galling for them was Barr’s recognition of the Constitution’s construction of a “unitary executive”. During his confirmation hearings, he invoked the words and Democratic senators in their ignorance tried to demote the idea to a mere “theory”. It isn’t a theory. As Barr says, and he’s right, it’s a word-for-word reading of Article II. “Unitary executive” encapsulates Article II. That this has to be stated speaks volumes about the state of education and politics in modern America.
He goes further by describing the “Resistance” as, in essence, a rebellion against the Constitution. The goal of the “Resistance” is to prevent the lawful (meaning Constitutional) functioning of the executive branch. No peaceful transfer of power for them. Conducting themselves in this way, they have much in common with the Taliban and every other insurgency that we’ve faced over the past 50 years. The “Resistance” has yet to embrace terrorism, but if Trump gets a second term, Katie bar the door.
Again, take the time to watch and listen to the speech and see what the press and our textbooks are ignorant of.
Check out Chris Stewart’s (R, Utah) questioning of Marie Yovanovitch from last Friday.
Pay special attention to the start of the segment. Yovanovitch professes that she has no knowledge of bribery or any other crime committed by the president. So what, then, is this all about? Will the House Dems impeach over over a comparatively mild request (mild when compared to the Obama administration’s 2016 dirty tricks) for Ukraine to investigate the possible corruption of one of Trump’s political rivals? If so, there will be no conviction in the Senate. So why the political burlesque show? It’s about the 2020 election. The Dems have a two-track strategy of feeding red meat (impeachment) to the red-revolutionary base of the party while muddying and bloodying Trump for the general.
They tried branding Trump as an asterisk president with “Trump, the Manchurian candidate”. That didn’t work. They tried parading about the emoluments clause. That didn’t work. They’d like to get their hands on his tax returns and sift those for any dirt. But that’ll take too long. Then 2018 gave them the control of the impeachment half of Congress. Like an excited bloodhound, they have their nose in the air for the scent of anything that could be shoehorned into an impeachment charge.
So, here we are. Forget about “peaceful transfers of power” or a “honeymoon”. The Resistance was formed on Jan. 21, 2017, the day after Trump placed his hand on the Bible. It had agent provocateurs scattered throughout the bureaucratic bowels of DC. Large mainstream media was fully on-board. All elements are present for the reversal of an election that politically entrenched classes never accepted. So much for popular sovereignty.
William Taylor, left, and George Kent prepare testifying before the House Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2019, during the first public impeachment hearing. (Jim Lo Scalzo/Pool Photo via AP)
Has a mental smog descended on certain socio-political tribes in the American population? It’s a kind of groupthink, and each group with shared interests and much else in common is smothered by it. Is it present at National Review, both online and print? The editors and many of the contributing writers seems to have taken for granted that “impeachment is political”, as if it is “only” political. But is it? I think not.
Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and Ramesh Ponnuru (l) of The National Review join Judy Woodruff of PBS News Hour to discuss the week’s political news, Oct. 4, 2019
Ramesh Ponnuru, senior editor, in his piece , “Rush from Judgment” in the October 28 issue, repeats the boilerplate. If we accept impeachment as being political, I recoil in horror for its vicious consequences.
Impeachment wasn’t always considered such. It mustn’t have been since there were so few, and only 3 presidential ones in 230 years. “Political” impeachments would have to be, by necessity, partisan in nature, especially since the onset of political parties nearly at the gitgo (Federalist, Democrat-Republican). Still, the fact is, we didn’t have our first presidential impeachment till 1868 and it was under freak circumstances. The 40th Congress in the wake of the Civil War was awash in Radical Republicans waving the bloody shirt (Republican campaign tactic to remind voters of Southern and Democrat perfidy). 45 of the 53 Senators were Republican. The R’s dominated the House 143 to 45.
“The Situation”, a Harper’s Weekly editorial cartoon shows Secretary of War Stanton aiming a cannon labeled “Congress” to defeat Johnson. The rammer is “Tenure of Office Bill” and cannonballs on the floor are “Justice”.
Yeah, the episode was political in a narrow sense but even the firebrands, chomping at the bit to get Andrew Johnson, had to pay heed to statutory violations, all emanating from the recently passed Tenure of Office Act, over Johnson’s veto. Certainly, the Act was an impeachment trap, but even they couldn’t rely on Johnson’s alleged drunkenness and overall instability in office to remove what they considered to be a huge political obstacle. There’s something about impeachment that Ponnuru and company miss. Our current chattering classes omit an earlier and widespread understanding that politics wasn’t nearly enough.
It can’t be boiled down to Ford’s specious dictum: “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.” Ford was foolish, and so would we be to take it seriously.
Today, it’s become fashionable to reduce impeachment to politics, the easier for our social betters, deeply entrenched in our cultural centers and DC, to get Trump. If you think about it, the “politics” of impeachment stare at you in the face. The two political houses of the first branch get to pass judgment on the second political branch. They are political in nature, with their political parties and partisan fights, and are given the power to remove a president. The situation lends itself to political shenanigans; however, there’s more to the story.
Government cannot avoid “politics”, despite the progressives’ futile crusade to insulate as much of the state from the grubbiness of politics. As we learned recently, all they succeeded in doing is creating a political and unaccountable administrative state. Politics never disappeared; it just entered the bloodstream of the ever-expanding Leviathan.
Come to think of it, the third branch (judiciary) isn’t above the muck of the political sewer since many state and local judicial posts are elective posts and the federal judiciary all the way up to the Supreme Court is caught up in the power of legislating. Speak “government” – any part of it – and you will be bellowing “politics”.
“Politics” is not all there is to government, though. We get a hint in our professed belief that we are a nation of laws, not men. Overhanging the messiness of the politics of law-making is the principle of equity (basic impartiality), and after the the law is produced, the law’s adjudication demands more equity in the form of due process. We’re not perfect in our legislation. Samuel Johnson exclaimed that sometimes the law is an ass. Nevertheless, bounds are placed on our penchant to enlist the state in service of our demands at the detriment of others.
Similarly, bounds are placed on the act of impeachment. The actors are political but the process isn’t. The thing shadows normal jurisprudence. The charging power (impeachment) is in the House and a trial is conducted in the Senate. The Constitution outlines the statutory violations of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”. At the time of the Constitution’s writing, the new federal Congress didn’t exist and therefore it hadn’t produced a single word of statute. Thus, the list of transgressions had to be general in nature, but are still statutory nonetheless. As in a regular court hearing that it adumbrates, regular due process can’t be ignored. Congress can’t do whatever its little political heart desires.
Robert S. Bennett, a nonpartisan attorney, defended President Bill Clinton during impeachment proceedings. (NICK UT/AP 1998)
Yet, Ponnuru tries to bolster his case for “political” impeachment by dredging up the 1804 impeachment and removal of Federal District Court Judge John Pickering. Ponnuru gets the incident wrong by distilling the case against Pickering to one of “low character”.
But what of Pickering’s “low character”? The “low character” was one of observable deterioration of mental capacity, instability while performing official duties, rulings glaringly discordant with standards of jurisprudence, drunkenness behind the bench, etc. The guy was a mess and didn’t live up to his oath of office. The problem was so noticeable to staff and the other judges in the federal circuit that they acted to suspend him by moving his caseload to Circuit Judge Jeremiah Smith. Pres. Jefferson sent the evidence to impeach to Congress and it quickly became embroiled in the partisan food fight between Federalists and Democrat-Republicans. Still, if impeachment can’t be applied here, it can’t be applied anywhere, regardless of the spit and fuming of the parties.
Judge John Pickering
The “low character” of Pickering is something far more than the bumbling and coarseness of Trump; something far more than a rambling phone call to the Ukrainian president.
I suspect that a residuum of animosity exists among the editors of the magazine against the “imperial presidency” (completely understandable) alongside Trump’s 2016 attack on the magazine. If so, I’m with you, but I can’t make my indignation a selective one. Essentially, all 20th and 21st century chief executives – with the exception of the 1920’s execs – abused their powers for over a hundred years, and so deserve the adjective “imperial”. Theodore Roosevelt saw himself as ringmaster of his own political Barnum and Bailey Circus. Woodrow Wilson gave us War Socialism, which was an extension of is own vastly expanded Leviathan. After a brief interlude in the 1920’s, the electorate foisted FDR upon itself for four terms.
FDR at one of his famous fireside chats.
And, ohhhh, there’s FDR. He presents a special case of defilement of the Article II powers. Not only was he given carte blanche to destroy something that was rationalized as farm “surpluses” (march livestock to the death pits, bribe people not to be productive) in the Agricultural Adjustment Act – thus giving “adjustment” a sinister ring – and to impose socialistic cartelization on nearly the entire American economy in the quasi-fascistic National Industrial Recovery Act, he was profligate in the application of his new-found powers for his personal political benefit. He was famous for lavishing taxpayer largesse on supporters and rejecting it for opponents. No wonder the guy got four terms.
We ought not to leave this very special political specimen without mentioning his persecution of Samuel Insull. Just like the Elizabeth Warrens of today, FDR wanted scalps for the Depression in a grotesque display of unrestrained reductionism and vicious class warfare. Insull was a successful businessman with his own holding company (the industrial equivalent of a broad-market mutual fund) that was responsible, by the way, for electrifying much of the country. It collapsed in the market crash, thousands lost their investments, and FDR was elected as the avenging demon. Insull fled. Our president-as-tsar went hither and yon to hunt him down, using his executive powers for a political vendetta in a manner that would make George III cringe.
Samuel Insull jailed after his extradition from Turkey in 1934.
Well, His Majesty’s imperial guard caught up with Insull in Turkey and brought him back in irons. Insull was soon marched off to 3 separate trials and before judge and jury was promptly acquitted of all charges. Is there a moral to the story? It might be that the innocently accused will win in the end (or, then again, maybe not), but not till after personal ruination. He died penniless in a Paris subway in 1938.
Do I need to mention LBJ, Nixon, and Clinton? Clinton had a hard time keeping his fly zipped, was caught in flagrante delicto with an intern, feebly tried to intimidate witnesses, and lied before a federal grand jury. He was allowed to finish his term, but a warning to minors was issued (probably unsuccessfully as per the Epstein case).
Going further down history lane and we arrive at Obama. Is it any surprise that a community activist would give us a community activist presidency? Let’s see, we had Fast and Furious, which was an attempt at entrapment of the Second Amendment. A border agent got killed in that one. Let’s see, there was the use of the IRS as an attack dog against Tea Party opponents. Let’s see, there was Obama’s discovery of his “phone and pen” to issue imperial decrees. And, finally, let’s see, we had the recruitment of the intelligence agencies and the FBI into his Praetorian Guard in a bid to defame Trump. A full accounting has yet to be written for that sordid tale.
And then there’s lowly Trump. He’s accused of soiling the office in a feeble and rambling conversation with the president of … Ukraine, of all paces. Trump comes off as a piker when compared to his predecessors.
Expect more excursions into impeachment-based political vengeance if impeachment is distilled to mere politics. Our penchant for divided government (different parties controlling different branches) would create a conga line down impeachment lane. Every two years could produce the precursors of impeachment lynch mobs. Is that what the Framers had in mind? Is it healthy for our system of governance to be constantly on the brink of volume 11? Once we become inured to the political cannabis high of impeachment, what’s next? The meth of civil war?
Nothing good can come of “political” impeachment. It’s not only wrong. It’s dangerous.
