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The Flavor of Bigotry in the Democratic Party

Ilhan Omar (D, Mn. 5th Dist.)

What’s the difference between Ilhan Omar’s (IO) comments about the Jews and the slurs of more famous vintage?  Not much that I can tell.  As a historian, she draws from the same scurrilous anti-Jewish tropes that would reach a crescendo of hate in National Socialism.

Here she is in comments before a microphone and in tweets:

“I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

“It’s all about the Benjamins baby” – IO tweet, 2/10/2019.

“Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel. #Gaza #Palestine #Israel.” – IO tweet in 2012.

Take a look for yourself.  The Nazi posters below were typical of the disgusting genre, and are emblematic of a growing sentiment in the Democratic Party.

However, Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie would find objectionable the negative aspersions directed at the USSR in one of the posters.

Best of buds: Ocasio-Cortez and Omar.

For these rising stars in the Dem firmament, they might agree with Lincoln Steffens’s assessment in a visit to the USSR (1921?), “I have seen the future, and it works”.  The USSR is probably the “shining city on a hill” in the Bernie/AOC/Omar wing of the party.

RogerG

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Government as Parent

Case in point: Parenting Montana.

I begin with “crowding out”.  Crowding out occurs when so much money flows to one thing that other things die on the vine.  It happens in venues other than those based on mammon.  Big, really big question: Has the state become so huge that it’s sucking the blood out of civil society?  A vampire could work as a metaphor.

Nosferatu is phlebotomizing civil society.  What is the victim, civil society?  Our definitions are muddled.  The UN’s World Health Organization tries to pigeonhole civil society away from business and government.  To them, civil society is “collective action around shared interests, purposes and values”, and the third rail of life.  Sorry, that’s way too cute.  Sounds too much like something out of a snooze-inducing textbook.  Actually, much business is born of the interactions of those “shared interests, purposes and values”.  The same could be said of government, but civil society – and business, at least pre-Sanders – is voluntary.  Government isn’t about voluntary.  People in power have a quiver full of carrots and sticks to make you do something they want, and behind every carrot is a big fat hand holding that big fat stick.  Isolate government to itself while civil society since business share too much DNA.  Thus, in actuality, 2 rails exist.

Of side note, Ocasio-Cortez and her minions would like to gene-splice business and government together.  That’s the socialist thing at work.  They want 2 rails with this new hybrid Leviathan attacking the neck of a remaining and wilting civil society (in keeping with same metaphor).

This came to mind while streaming Pandora.  An ad for “Parenting Montana” appeared between the music, another one of those dot-org’s.  What the heck is that?  Smelling a rat, yep, it’s government. Go to the website and you’ll find in the fine print a scat trail to a federal block grant program to the State of Montana, CFDA 93.959.  Mind you, I find not much wrong with government helping to address the deeply troubled in our neighborhoods.  The fly in the ointment is that it is today’s government doing it.

Our present government isn’t a better one than great grandpa’s; it’s just bigger, way bigger, and beset by the ACLU, dominated by a narrow demographic, and addicted to fashionable causes.  The result is a mess.

I’m not sure what John Dewey and the rest of the Progressive leading lights of a century back, as pushers of big government, would think of today’s Leviathan.  They envisioned a government of technocratic know-it-alls guiding us to the promised land.  He probably couldn’t grasp the fact that the techs could lack wisdom and are infected with their own prejudices.  What they, the Prog’s,  produced is a government shaped around their experience of 16-plus years sitting in a classroom receiving curriculum.  Yes, curriculum.  For them, curriculum is the answer.  There’s nothing that couldn’t be cured by more curriculum.

Follow the steps, procedures, and factoids and you’re supposed to be a better person.  It is the chosen path for the representatives who made the law and the people who passed the civil service exam to get the thing up and running.  Do you get the picture?  The whole outlook is based on form (curriculum), not the substance (what’s in the curriculum).

Decamp to the website, ParentingMontana.org, and you’ll find curriculum and some referrals to nonprofits in government’s gravitational pull.  Watch videos, read the how-to links, and pay a visit to a counselor steeped in the curriculum – more people with degrees and certificates as Dewey preached.

Issues develop not with curriculum per se.  Curriculum is only a guide for what and how to teach.  The person doing the teaching most assuredly is important, but even more important is the “what”, what are they teaching?  The substance mentioned before.  Sadly, the spiritual is absent from the syllabus.  No room here for the faith.  A Bible study is replaced by your state-sponsored counseling group led by your state-approved counselor.  A referral to a church would be met by the hounds of the ACLU and years in court.  The experience produces a vanilla curriculum without God.

It competes with the kind offered by your priest or pastor, but with a distinct advantage.  Milton Friedman had it right when he said, “Nothing is more permanent than a temporary government program”.  Government draws strength from its access to everybody’s paycheck (the taxing power) and the Bureau of the Mint.  And politics is the measure of success, not bottom-line metrics, so a program has life long after it became rancid (ag subsidies anyone?).  Not exactly a level playing field here.

And government programs can be hip.  Your local priest or pastor, in contrast, will be bound to God’s word, the Bible.  Government is bound by politics, and politics is bound by money under the spell of any tight organization of commonly-oriented loud mouths.  If something gets popular traction, you bet that the authorities-that-be will take it in.  Consider gay marriage and transgender rights.  Look at the pot craze sweeping red and blue states alike (see Forbes).  The fashion-of-the-moment will find a place in government decrees on everything imaginable, including its “wisdom” on being a good mommy.

I saw the phenomena at work in a California high school.  California being so chic in thought and feeling, and personally as a teacher and department chair (Social Studies), the staff and I were frequently told of a new mandate from the state to honor one of the many “marginalized” in our lessons.  So, we went from unions to blacks to women to multiple ethnics to LGBTQ in its many variations, and back again.  Remember, the more time devoted to balkanized America, the less time for the Constitution, the Civil War, Supply/Demand, the Great Depression, etc.  “Crowding out” at work before your munchkins.  Welcome to politics flummoxing your kid’s school.

It’s no less true for “Parenting Montana”.  Scroll through the links.  Since many problems in the home can be traced to the desire for a high, a good part of the guidance will be consumed with booze and drug abuse.  Going to the links, I couldn’t find any mention of marijuana.  I found heroin, meth, alcohol, but no “mary jane”.  The words “abuse” and “reefer”, and its many equivalents, weren’t connected.  Could it be that marijuana has a constituency?  It’s fashionable whereas shooting up in a public bathroom isn’t.

But think about it: today’s THC-rich cannabis isn’t the stuff wafting through a 60’s Grateful Dead concert.  It’s jam-packed with maybe 3x’s more (though potheads hotly dispute the figure).  Hey, more bang for the buck, and with the “bang” comes all kinds of things attaching to your lungs as if you were lighting up a Marlborough (according to the American Lung Association).  Even more disturbing are the neurological and cognitive effects (see here).  It helps in germinating mental illness in the form of multiple psychoses like schizophrenia (see here).  The junk should not be given a free pass as “Parenting Montana” does.

But what are you going to do when getting high becomes “medical” … and fashionable?

I can only imagine the kinds of mischief that a hotbed of a lefty dreamscape like California can put the money to.  “Parenting” could be combined with “Heather Has Two Mommies” and how to teach your child to share a bathroom with someone of divergent genitalia.  The possibilities are endless.  If government is your mommy, you just found another way to inject politics into the family and the rest of civil society.  And then is civil society all that civil?  It certainly is more political.  Soon, we may be down to only one rail: government.  Sanders, AOC, and Marx would be smiling.

RogerG

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What’s Happening to Our News and Information?

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.  The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

Who said this? Bernie Sanders?  AOC in one of her Twitter fits?  Any of our “woke” college activists rampaging at a Charles Murray presentation?  Good guesses, but wrong.  The author is Karl Marx in his “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”.

In one sense, though, it sounds like the kind of thing they would say (maybe not AOC because that would ask too much of her facile understanding).  And it sounds like the kind of thing rattling the synapses of the vast majority of those manning our broadcast studios, newsrooms, and much of the publishing industry.  It’s a view of the world smothering the mental faculties of many in the chattering classes, whether chattering with the mouth or a word processor.

The notion has infected much of what we read, watch, and learn in our classrooms. It’s the idea that a hidden structure of oppression exists to ensnare us no matter what we do.  For Marx, the idea justified a complete revolution in the individual’s mind to the family to social relations to government.  Everything was to be managed, and that means big, really big government.  Sounds like the Green New Deal?

I’m reminded of Marx’s influence, now, almost every time I pick up my National Geographic Magazine (NGM).  The magazine reads like a series of op-eds in The Daily Worker.  A common tactic in its articles is to quote opinionated academics to buttress an opinion.  Add some stats and a few graphs, and, voilà, an opinion becomes “science”.  Marx also liked to say that his opinions were “science”.

Race is a field rich with possibilities for exploitation by those inclined to see the world as Marx did.  For instance, NGM’s April 2018 issue, “Black and White”, blathered about race as some “social construct” while veering off into Confederate statues and racial profiling.  The opinions of opinionated profs were replete in the issue’s articles.  The confusion of opinions with science has become a hallmark for the magazine, just like Marx.

Let’s examine the magazine’s treatment of racial profiling.  There’s more to the story than “racist” cops, but you wouldn’t know it from the piece.  Absent from the author’s angle on the issue is any recognition of something called “context” – context as in any other considerations.  What about the uneven distribution of chaos in the home, the uneven distribution of violent crime on the streets, the war on drugs, the debilitating effects of made-in-America welfare, other issues like the epidemic of illegal immigration to the tune of an accumulated 11 million to 21 million “undocumented” (Who knows?), and the attendant presence of the Sureños/Norteños/MS-13 and Crips/Bloods?  Circumstances exist beyond the hidden, unconscious prejudices of a police officer and the Man.

2 Sureños and 2 Norteños.

An interesting aside that’s never been adequately explained by the race hustlers: There was a time when NYC black cabbies would avoid fares from young black males. In advertising, it’s called branding.  Past experience can brand an entire demographic, even among black cabbies tired of being crime victims by the very same demographic.  I would think that something else is at work other than racism (hidden or otherwise) against blacks by black cab drivers.

Police are searching for answers after a Flash Cab driver was found shot to death inside his taxi in the Lincoln Square neighborhood. Feb. 23, 2016. (CBS Chicago)

Instead, NGM and its stable of writers traipse off into the fantasy of Marx’s world.  Evil has always resided in the souls of our species. Racism and general mayhem have always been there.  Marx’s non-stop revolution won’t change that fact.  An ever-bigger government to police human thought and conscience won’t either.  A healthy civil society – the very thing that the Left is systematically dismantling – with appropriate public sanctions is the answer.

Adopting Marx is a descent into the snake pit of totalitarian control.  Bad, very bad.

RogerG

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Hooray for Sen. Diane Feinstein … Kinda

I’m loathe to admit this, but a small dose of maturity was administered by the Senator to politicized youngins, a few older than 18 and most appear to be around 12 (watch the video below).  All mouthed lefty boilerplate in a visit to Feinstein’s office that couldn’t survive a serious high school debate.

It’s difficult to watch adults exploiting a group of tweens.  They were members of the Sunrise Movement whose purpose is to stampede the country into enacting the Green New Deal and its Soviet-style central planning by hiding behind kids.

The title’s “kinda” part has to do with appearances, which can be deceiving.  Today’s Democrats are in favor of more central planning. Yet, the presence of the Markey/Sanders/AOC Green New Deal makes the other Dems appear moderate.  The fact is, the whole party has lurched left, and to the left means in the direction of the Socialist International.  Some, like the Green New Deal sponsors, are just in a hurry to get there; others want to take a little longer and slower route to the same destination.

It’s much like the difference between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks of days of yore.  They both wanted socialism.  It’s just that the M’s were content with a more peaceful march to utopia while the B’s wanted it now, preferably with guns.  The “M” and “B” thing is playing out in the office of Sen. Diane Feinstein and Democratic Party congressional caucus.  Do you want your socialism straight (Bernie/AOC style) or diluted (Feinstein style)?

RogerG

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A Pandemic of Urban Legends

Candidate Obama in 2008 came out with this zinger of condescension about folks in the hinterlands: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”.  It’s as if the blue-collar dwellers outside the east and west coast soirees of the well-off are wallowing in falsehoods.  Really, the urban fashionistas believe this drivel.  Though, the pot-and-kettle thing keeps passing through my head.  The self-proclaimed haute couture in look and thought have their own bigoted, ignorant fictions bouncing in their craniums.  Legends abound in Appalachia and among the coastal with-it.

Pres. Obama with Spielberg and Bruce Springsteen at a 2014 fundraiser.

Widespread oppression of the “marginalized” – a special designation awarded to any group organized and loud enough – is gospel among the beautiful people.  These people haven’t left the world of the “Mississippi Burning” script. To them, the “oppressed” are abused up and down the US interstate system.  Big journalism acts as the modern Hesiod of these urban legends.  Mythology isn’t an ancient phenomenon. It’s alive and well among attendees at Dem Party fundraisers.

But wiping egg off the faces of urban America’s “better” people is developing into a habit.  Jussie Smollet is one among many rotten egg producers.  Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Maxine Waters, the functionaries at MSNBC, the networks, Hollywood, WaPo (The Washington post), NYT, et al – the list is getting too long – can’t wait to jump at the bait.  They w-a-n-t to believe the myth is true.  The only problem is that the playing field is littered with lies.

Let me count the ways.  Be prepared, the list is long.

(1) In November 2016, a Muslim woman at U. of Michigan caterwauled that a 20-something white male threatened to burn her if she didn’t remove her hijab. The WaPo was hoaxed.  Hoax #1.
(2) Taylor Volk, a bisexual student at North Park U., said she was targeted with hateful notes and emails shortly after Trump’s election victory.  Hoax #2.
(3) In, once again, Nov. 2016, Ashley Boyer of Philadelphia blamed that staple of these fibs – white/male/Trump supporter – for harassing her with a gun and getting rid of the “n’s”.  The charge went viral only to be debunked by police.  Hoax #3.
(4) An 18-year-old Muslim woman in Louisiana in Nov. 2016 (Getting the idea?) charged white men for robbing her and yelling racial slurs.  The only problem: it wasn’t true because she said so.  Hoax #4.
(5) In May of 2017, racial slurs, anti-gay insults, and Nazi references were spray painted on a church by, as it turned out, the church’s own organist.  The WaPo ended up cleaning its face of egg.  Hoax #5.
(6) An 18-year-old Muslim woman, Yasmin Seweid, of NYC in Dec. 2016 declared that she was assaulted by drunken white Trump supporters in the subway.  She confessed.  Hoax #6.
(7) Dec. 2016: David Williams of Denton, Texas, torched his own car and spray painted “n’ lovers” on his garage.  A police investigation exposed the scheme as a hoax, but not before David and his wife garnered $5,000 from a GoFundMe page.  Hoax #9.
(8) A Muslim student at Beliot College in Feb. 2017 found anti-Muslim smears on his dorm room door.  He did it according to the Beliot police chief.  Hoax #8.
(9) Synagogues and Jewish schools were the subject of bomb threats in March 2017.  Surprise, the peril was linked to Trump.  Well, a US-Israeli man was arrested.  Wait, the story gets richer.  An ex-reporter with The Intercept, Juan Thompson, kept the pot boiling with new threats to Jewish community centers.  He would be indicted shortly thereafter.  Hoax #9.
(10) In May 2017, racist, anti-black notes appeared at St. Olaf College.  The WaPo had to walk back their story after a black student was identified as responsible for the slurs.  Hoax #10.
(11) Racist messages – “Go home n***er” – were discovered at the Air Force Academy’s prep school.  Sadly for the hate-crime posse, one of the targeted black students was the author.  Hoax #11.
(12) A Kansas State University student reported to police racist graffiti on his car in November 2017.  Later he admitted to doing it himself.  Hoax #12.
(13) Racist graffiti is all the rage with hoaxers.  In Nov. 2017, racist graffiti was discovered on the mirror in a Missouri high school.  He prank was conducted by a “non-white” enrollee.  Hoax #13.
(14) A Texas waiter at an Odessa steak house Facebooked in Dec. 2018 a racist slur on a napkin, and it went viral … of course.  The only problem: The waiter admitted to faking it.  Hoax #14.
(15) The Covington Catholic High School episode of Jan. 2019 was a disgrace.  The WaPo and the Detroit Free Press were all over the story with an account of an elderly Native American being abused by prep-school white boys in MAGA hats.  The story as it ran in the media – to put it mildly – was misleading.  The Black Hebrew Israelites taunted the kids with vile insults and Nathan Philips (the Native American activist) provoked them by incessantly chanting and pounding his drum in their faces.  Hoax #15.
(16) A spate of anti-Semitic vandalism hit NYC in Nov. 2018.  It turned out that the culprit was a Democratic party activist and former City Hall intern, not a follower of Alex Jones.  Hoax #16.
(17) Donald Trump was blamed for the arson of a black church in Greenville, Miss., back in Nov. 2016.  The WaPo must have been embarrassed when a fellow black congregant was fingered as responsible.  Hoax #17.

The Greenville, Miss., episode of a false hate crime.

(Thanks to the Daily Caller for the list.)

Why the mad rush to believe the unbelievable?  The answer might be found in the need to validate a pre-recorded fable of the world.  Traditional journalistic skepticism be damned.  It’s full-speed-ahead toward a much too deeply rooted folklore in our commercial and media centers, aka big cities.  Big media has been caught in too many falsehoods.  Their credibility is shot.  If they can’t deliver reliable news and information, what can they serve up?

A void exists to be filled by the rhetorical burps of Twitter and Facebook and the retinue of “fact checkers”, and they are linked in a miasma of interrelationships.  Facebook, for instance, uses Snopes.com to filter “fake news” and hate speech.  Snopes is a mess, if court documents in the divorce of the married co-founders is any indication.  Former candidates for political office (on a “dump Bush” platform), prostitutes, vixens with a “dome” complex on pot, and no functioning standards of objectivity are rampant (reported by Forbes and The Daily Mail).  A fact-checking degree is offered at some colleges but that’s no guarantee.  Naïve and left-leaning 21-year-olds aren’t about to produce the gospel.

What we are left with is each one of us running to our corners with our personal “truth”, emotional explosions when faced with pushback, no deliberation, and a mountain of urban legends that are held in a death grip like a Bible in a foxhole.

RogerG

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An Assassination Attempt on Citizenship

Americans, a noxious notion has seeped into your kid’s school curriculum.  It’s called “world citizen”.  It’s happening to your kids, prep school to inner-city.

As a retired teacher of 30 years, I was perplexed.  Is this an attempt to erase borders or proclaim allegiance to the UN or both?  Anyway, the original concept of citizenship may go the way of plastic straws.  The modus operandi is to fiddle with the minds of the youngins and tie the project’s prospects to the fortunes of the Democratic Party.

These Democrats aren’t kidding.  They are actively trying to erase the border as they erase the distinction between citizen and non-citizen, and even legal and illegal resident.  The cultural appropriator Beto (as in Robert O’Rourke) absconded with Reagan’s old line, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”, absent the reference to Gorbachev.  12 Dem-heavy states and DC already are issuing driver’s licenses to people whose presence in the country is in violation of our laws, thus creating havoc with motor-voter laws.

Robert O’Rourke at a rally at the El Paso border.

That bastion of insanity, California, has taken the chant of “healthcare for all” literally to mean “all”, as in any of the world’s denizens who can get here.  Oh, Bernie in his 2016 concoction of the concept tried to stop migrants from receiving the benefits if they enter for that reason.  The restriction is meaningless. How could it be enforced without a mind-reading machine?  Sander’s 2017 version, the one tucked to the bosom of Dem candidates seeking to oust Trump, ended the masquerade.  “Residents” are eligible for the freebie; the adjectives “legal” and “illegal” are absent.

Gillibrand goes further than the cultural appropriator with calls to dismantle ICE and the wall.  She’s in good company with many in the Dem congressional caucus.  And once these foreign citizens get here, it’s now wrong to count them as “non-citizens”, as per Manhattan Federal District Court Judge Jessie M. Furman (Obama appointee).  Not only are we not to stop the citizens of other countries from entering but we are to be kept in the dark about how many are here.

Federal District Court Judge Jessie Furmam.

“Foreign-born” is the approved moniker for everyone born on foreign soil and taking up stakes here. If they are non-citizens – which we can’t tell thanks to Judge Jessie – they are still citizens, citizens of another country.  That makes for an interesting situation when voting rights for foreign citizens in the US gets traction among the Dem rank-and-file.  Other countries’ citizens get to help choose what happens to US citizens.  Soon, with the erasure of the border, every US election will require shipping ballots to Moscow, Mexico City, Managua, Capetown, etc., etc.  With the Dems, what’s in a border anyway?

Voting rights is making the rounds among Dem strongholds in the US.  Stacey Abrams (failed Dem candidate for Georgia governor) announced her support for the craziness in local elections.  SF, of course, and some Maryland localities have already broken the ice (not ICE).  They excuse the folderol with cries that non-citizens – legal or illegal (which we can’t tell thanks to Judge Jessie) – pay taxes.  In tax-happy cities and states, yes, they pay some exactions.  The legal ones pay but don’t have to mess around with jury duty and draft registration.  Illegals ditto, but they don’t pay Social Security taxes and the like, unless they commit document fraud – which many have since that’s the only way for them to get paid. Advantages abound for those keeping their foreign citizenship.  They avoid the flip side of rights: responsibilities.

Today’s Dem Party is clearly out to blur the line between citizen and non-citizen.  And why not?  It’s a rich vein of votes.  It works to elect Democrats.  In 50 Dem congressional districts, the foreign-born comprise more than 20% of the population (only 11 Republican districts meet the standard).  Sandy Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was elected in a 25% foreign-born locale (almost 50% Hispanic).  In-migration and out-migration combine to bend the partisan balance beam of a neighborhood.

If we take the words of the donkey party’s candidates at face value – And how could we take them otherwise? – what’s the point of being a citizen?  Simply renting on American soil is enough to get all the bennies of the nanny state, condones massive document fraud, avoids certain inconvenient responsibilities of citizenship, and is a qualification for the franchise.  For all practical purposes, naturalization is irrelevant.  Now, that’s one way to repeal Art. 1, Sec. 8, Cl. 4 (naturalization power) of the Constitution.

Say bye, bye to the border. And isn’t that the point?

RogerG

* Thanks for the contributions of Howard Husock of “City Journal” and Matthew Continetti of “National Review”.

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What Is Socialism?

Thanks to our poor K-grad school educations and ill-informed chattering classes (minions in the media and many in the punditry), “socialism”, the word, flutters about with scarcely a thought or understanding.  When the word is thrown out, particularly by those who are about to be pasted with it – Are you listening Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, Gillibrand, Sanders? – they either deny or don’t respond.  What are they denying or ignoring?  Do they even know what they’re denying or ignoring?  I kinda doubt it.

Our decrepit textbooks frequently malign our understanding with a definition like “government ownership of the means of production”, or some such.  No, it ain’t that pat.  Break it down.  “Ownership” is control and the “means of production” is property.  Thus, socialism is government (or “public”) control of property.  The control can be in the form of outright ownership or allowing people to have title but they, essentially, don’t have much say-so in the disposition of it.

Since the commercial and industrial revolutions, our notions of property – also called assets – have expanded way beyond those common in primitive barter societies.  So the control, if it is pursued, has a lot further reach.

Here’s a ringer for you: a capitalist can be a socialist. It’s simple.  A guy or gal with many assets in their possession can use them to bring about “public” control of property.  Not all capitalists support capitalism.  Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s partner, was a rather interesting case in point – one of many.

Well, how were the words “capitalism” and “capitalist” coined?  The words entered wide usage in the 19th century within the constellation of people and groups aligned with the Socialist International.  They were then popularized by Marx and Engels in their screeds.  The socialists needed a word to encapsulate the people who they hated, what Adam Smith referred to as the men of commerce.

Title page of the pamphlet announcing the Second International, a global gathering of socialists in 1889.

Think of socialism, then, on a spectrum with “free markets” at the other end.  In our modern lexicon, you are entering the “socialism” orbit when you blather about “single payer”, “free college”, a Green New Deal, confiscatory taxation, etc., etc.  All of them involve government control of other people’s property beyond the normal concerns about health and safety.  That’s where we find the Dem Party of today.

To be real, socialism comes in many shades.  We could go to the militant side where “communism” sits.  We could go to the nicer place with “democracy”, as in democratic socialism.  In fact, they would all call themselves “democratic socialists”, even Lenin. It’s just that a communist is impatient.  He or she wants it NOW!

Warren and Harris say, “Not me!”  Elizabeth Warren: “I am a capitalist.”  Kamala Harris: “I am not a democratic socialist.” Mmmmm.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D, Ca.) and would-be president.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D, Mass.) and would-be president.

So, are the denials of Warren and Harris, et al, legit?  Not quite.  If anything, they fall within the capitalists-who-support-socialism league.  Do they really understand what they claim they aren’t?  All evidence points to … “No”.

RogerG

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More Numbers: Women Up, Women Down

Mike Allen’s Axios AM this morning came out with numbers from the Institute for Policy Research showing women as slightly better educated than men and slightly less likely to be in the workforce. Once again, numbers don’t lie, conclusions do.

What do the numbers mean? Can’t tell. Numbers naturally bounce within a range. The better educated factoid may mean – emphasis on “may” – a profusion of girls willing to sit a total of 16-18 years in a school desk to get degrees in the “soft sciences” and the law. Without a deep dive, who knows what the figure means. High concentrations in the “soft sciences” – a term meant to cover a subject without much math, physical science, and classical reading – says nothing about employability and practical knowledge given their huge corruption potential. “Better educated” may mean a greater acceptance of curricular hoop-jumping, not “better informed” or any other similar synonym.

Students in a women’s studies class at Pepperdine University.

For instance, identity studies (gender, race, ethnicity, etc.) doth not make an Einstein. They make partisan activists.

Watch the drop in female workforce participation be used to press the campaign for more government spending and employer mandates. But, as before, what does the number really mean? It may mean more women choosing child-bearing and raising than a paycheck. An uptick in fertility might go a long way in explaining the statistic.

Don’t think for a moment that such women don’t contribute to the national wealth. Raising the next generation is the most fundamental act in making social capital, the basic stuff of economic growth. A unionized government worker isn’t a substitute for mom.

When we allow superficial numbers to proliferate, and put them in the hands of partisans to be massaged for political impact, we get nonsense, and worse. We get a ballooning public debt that will fall upon the heads of those very same kids. Number crunching becomes kid crunching.

RogerG

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A Stunted Bullet

California governor Gavin Newsom announces the end of the high speed rail project, Feb. 12, 2019. (AP)

Is it a coincidence that the Green New Deal is all the rage as 43 states have legalized the relocation of dime bags of pot to the aspirin isle of the pharmacy, if not the produce section of the supermarket?  Our teenage central planner’s (Ocasio-Cortez) afterbirth – The Green New Deal – disappeared without a trace as people began to realize the insanity of reshaping our society according to the musings of sophomores in pot-smoke-filled dorm rooms.

The same fate awaited the LA-to-SF bullet train because the idea probably originated in the same dorm room.

What’s left is a rump.  Were the same young and addled geniuses responsible for a bullet train from … Bakersfield to Merced?  With the fiscal probity of drunken sailors, Californians showered $5.4 billion on the $100 billion psychedelic vision.  Virginia’s governor, Ralph Northam, showed the way out of the morass: allow it to be born – Bakersfield to Merced – and then abort it.  Gavin Newsom, California’s hair-gelled governor, played the role of Kermit Gosnell.

Good riddance.

RogerG

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The Green New Deal, Prussia, and War Socialism

To be blunt, telling a person what to think is not wrong; claiming the power to make another person think that way is wrong.  The former is necessary for dialogue in a community of free association.  Before there is a voluntary dialogue of views, one must first have a view contra another’s.  The second half of the first sentence is the Green New Deal (GND), which is grounded in the rationalized Prussian state and more fully implemented in the full-mobilization governments of the warring parties of WWI – what was called War Socialism.

Let me explain.  After the humiliations of Prussia at the hands of Napoleon, the Prussian state was rationalized around the administration of academics under the Hohenzollern monarchy as the cure for what ailed the nation.  For people like the philosopher Hegel (Google him), it was the perfection of political organization.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, U. of Berlin.  Portrait made in 1831.
Prussian king William is crowned Emperor William I of Germany, Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, France, 1870.

This gave rise to his history-as-progress thing, and would flower into Obama’s silly talk of being on the right side of it – which means to agree with him.  Add a dose of “experts” rooted in opinionated “science” and you’ve just short-circuited popular sovereignty.  Oh, lip service is paid to “democracy”, but it’s only of the kind that is allowed to agree with the stale and calcified opinions of a claque of “experts”.  Thus, we have the unelected administrative state and the Green New Deal demand for a whole lot more of it.

Modern industrialized war provides the opportunity to put the grotesque plan into operation.  Since it’s all about government controls in time of war, it’s socialism, thus War Socialism.  It also explains the constant search for the “moral equivalent of war”.  Declaring a war-like situation is the go-to excuse to marshal the state, create new claques of “experts”, bust the budget, and control the lives of people.  Once again, welcome to the Green New Deal.

The parallels with that other high priest of the “laws” of history, Karl Marx, are aplenty.  He announced the need for a lot of consciousness-raising by a prescient few.  Lenin called them the “vanguard elite”. As in the Communist Manifesto, so in the Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal.  Who else but the few self-anointed gnostics, schooled in the theology of the global warming apocalypse, can be entrusted to lead us to the promised land?

 

Don’t dare, you “frontline communities”, use your democratic voice to build coal-fired power plants to sell electricity to communities stuck in the brave new world of windmills and solar farms.  If you try, the full force of the soviet will descend upon you.

Speaking of soviets, the GND has them too.  The vague references to local community councils will be nothing but warrens of left-wing activists, just like the soviets of revolutionary Russia.  The boilerplate title of “workers, soldiers, and peasants” was nothing but cover for Bolshevik militancy.

And so we are to go the way of Venezuela, Cuba, the Soviet Union, etc., etc.

Empty shelves in a Caracas supermarket.

Ocasio-Cortez, our teenage central planner, symbolizes the extreme myopia of many that are treading a well-worn path from the post-Napoleonic Prussian state to the garrison governments of the world wars and the spawning of systematize totalitarianism.  Don’t expect the realization to suddenly dawn on her and her Twitter followers.  She is to erudition what an oil slick is to water. It only floats on the surface and there ain’t much beyond that.

RogerG