Obviously, Facebook, and probably much of the techie universe for that matter, is enthralled by hair-on-fire climate alarmism. So much so that they put a “context warning” on a cartoon that was attached to one of my recent posts about the EV craziness sweeping the halls of power, a politicized professoriate, their young charges mobbing the public square, and the beautiful people in the culture. It’s crazy, just think about it. I’ll explain.
Some people are braving the hostility of today’s unofficial (and official) Inquisition who, like Galileo, just stepped forward to say, “Wait a minute!” There are voices out there other than the lefty Union of Concerned Scientists. One such voice is the Cornwall Alliance (https://cornwallalliance.org); there are others. They raise some glaring questions that few if any denizens in big media newsrooms would know enough to ask.
Right off the bat, Cornwall and most others don’t deny the existence of man-caused (anthropogenic) climate change – i.e., global warming. They assert, however, that the doom-mongering is not science. One should never say “the science says”. “Science” has no vocal cords. It’s a method that comes close to “trust but verify”, or “where’s the beef”, or simply “prove it”. Waiting for “science” to say something treats the whole endeavor as if it were a homogenized mass of one mind. May as well put up a huge picture of Mao to represent all of China, er “science”, in one fell swoop. People that wallow in “the science says” aren’t scientists and wouldn’t know which end of the telescope to use, or explain a hypothesis, or how to conduct a fitting test for one, the essence of science. Thus, it’s easy for the scientifically illiterate to jump to doom.
Such stunted science-minds would never consider, or ask, the following:
* What is the nature of the warming? Much of the available evidence indicates that the warming is concentrated in the upper latitudes and affects average daily low temperatures (mostly at night) and not the highs.
* What are the actual effects of the warming? Are they all bad? No, and on balance, they are likely to be positive. Warmer global temps in the upper latitudes extends the growing season and expands the amount of the earth’s surface for agriculture. The growing season starts earlier and ends later. Plants love CO2. Conversely, history shows that bad things happen with cooling (the Black Death, famine, for instance).
* What about droughts? They come and go, and are sensitive to localized conditions, like cold/warm water currents. El Nino is a result of warm ocean water; La Nina is born of cold. Warm water warms the air above it and warmer air has more room for more water vapor for more rain. The jet stream accommodates and sends it to one area and away from another. One place is in drought, and another can’t handle the deluge. The cycles are called “decadel” because they come and go every 7-12 years on average. Welcome to nature, and not a soccer mom’s preference for an SUV.
* Are the scare stories of an avalanche of “extreme weather” accurate? No, the evidence suggests that our current weather patterns haven’t varied from the historical record going back in time using tree rings and core samples. If anything, they prove that climate, and its short-term equivalent, weather, varies around a mean, sometimes quite dramatically, and also that climate (long term weather patterns of at least 30 years) has never been steady-state. The earth wobbles on its axis; the orbit slightly shifts; and solar radiation jumps up and down. And we have always put in and taken out stuff since we ventured out of the cave. Variation, like all of nature, is the chief characteristic of our weather and climate.
* Is the nation of Micronesia, or the Obama estate on Martha’s Vineyard, about to disappear in rising sea levels? No, because we are talking about inches in the single digits covering centuries if not thousands of centuries. It’s manageable. Talk to the Dutch who’ve been dealing with holding back the North Sea for at least a half of a millennium or more.
So, why are our science semi-literates in power so gung-ho to ruin our lives? Simple, for them, Chicken Little is a divine oracle. The apocalypse is nigh. For them, we can’t adapt our way out of the doom. For them, we must mitigate, and that means turning our lives upside down, declaring war on fossil fuels, and erecting the Soviet to oversee our wants and desires.
Actually, we can adapt, not mitigate, because their Chicken Little is essentially a witch doctor. A sea wall can handle a few inches of rise in coastal waters protecting Obama’s mansion investment on Martha’s Vineyard and Oprah’s luxurious enclaves in Montecito (Santa Barbara) and Maui. Receding ice sheets in the polar regions is more than compensated by more land open for farming and a longer growing season. Feeding more people sounds good to me. More greenery from more CO2 has a tremendous upside.
This war on fossil fuels throws common sense out the window. What do we gain (benefits) by handcuffing millions and billions of people to a crippled grid and treating the possession of an SUV as a war crime? What are the costs? The forced exchange of what works for what doesn’t will mean that more people will enter the ranks of the poor. Pencil it out. We’ll have less CO2 in the air and more filth and poverty on the ground. It’s insane.
Yep, this is our moment of insanity.
RogerG
Sources:
* Additional YouTube presentations on green matters, the other side to the debate:
1. Michael Shellenberger, “Why renewables can’t save the planet”, at https://youtu.be/N-yALPEpV4w?si=-frZCso5LEaCVNIj
2. “’What Percent Of Our Atmosphere Is CO2?’: Doug LaMalfa Stumps Entire Panel With Climate Questions”, Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Ca.), 2023, at https://youtu.be/bJfrKNR3K2k?si=9Cn0wiMwaqa8DQfe
3. Stephen Hayward, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Global Warming”, 2014, at https://youtu.be/RZlICdawHRA?si=WiZZs82W58z6D0ns
4. A balanced assessment of EV’s: The Car Guys, “THE BIG EV LIE. Why They Won’t Save the Planet & All About Dirty Electricity”, 2021, at https://youtu.be/sytWLB4-W-M?si=34ck2aFrRkRiql9n
5. Pete Buttigieg’s slick glibness. Watch him skate around the immense problems associated with an EV life. One key problem is generating the electricity to make it all work. He talks about the grid but not about the sources for an immense expansion of the necessary generation of the electricity. “’Which Uses More Electricity…A Refrigerator When It’s Running Or Electric Car When It’s Charging?’”, in questioning of Buttigieg by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky), 2023, at https://youtu.be/avi9iBC8opU?si=LoSEVadXpLZK09J1
* This is not a comprehensive list but is a sample of a robust debate that exists outside attempts in the media to quash it. Real science cannot be suppressed.
They are coming for more than your family sedan. They are going to upend, disrupt the entire system that brings everything to your home, grocery store, et al. You’re going to be hit big time in your pocketbook and in every facet of your life. Get prepared for it is coming, if not stopped.
Is Biden determined to turn me into a Trump voter? Trump, no doubt, is the ugly face of my party, but Biden and his donkey party are trying to construct a totalitarian state on a preposterous green agenda. Animating the whole venture, as is true with all totalitarian crusades, is a belief system on how best to organize and control people. To gain popular traction, it’s best for all such crusades to contain a strong apocalyptic element, one powerful enough to justify stampeding the people into acceptance of its dictates and regimentation. It’s happening before our eyes, right now! Say goodbye to the republic and hello to the Soviet.
The EPA is the chief engine of the transformation from citizen republic to rule by all-powerful commissars. Under the guise of “climate change”, we are being ordered to scrap our already immense sunk costs in affordable and reliable transportation for the mirage of something that doesn’t exist, and if it does, it’s a catastrophe as a replacement. Prepare for a calamity, one that’ll conspicuously fall more seriously upon our children and generations to come. Your kids will be the real victims.
March is turning into a deadly month for the health of our constitutional republic. The EPA earlier in the month announced its intention to follow the template of California, one of a few states famous for turning many of its residents into refugees. Like the authoritarian clown car in Sacramento, tighter emissions for “light duty” vehicles (cars, trucks, many SUV’s) will be imposed from 2027 through 2032, eventually sealing the death warrant for the production of nearly anything with an internal combustion engine (see #1 below). Say goodbye to more than the citizen republic. Say goodbye to that thing in your garage that allows you to get the kids to school, or you to work, or pay a visit to grandma for Thanksgiving, for its life will be wrung out of it by regulating and taxing it to death in escalating licensing fees and costs for upkeep, parts, and fuel. Manufacturers will be forced to eliminate their production. The comrades in power plan to leave you with no way out but into their approved and glorified golf cart. This is nothing but totalitarianism “for your own good”. And, of course, they know better about what’s good for you. Right?
On the heels of that monstrosity, the commissars proclaimed a similar rule for the fleet of big vehicles that bring everything from produce to your grocery store to all things from an Amazon distribution center, everything that fills a shelf (see #3 below). It’ll be much worse for those people who choose to live outside the controllable and tight confines of an urban area. Think about it, all that stuff that was affordably made available at your fingertips will be crammed onto battery-powered big rigs (fuel cells create their own immense problems, see #2 below) of limited capacity, range, and tremendous recharging difficulties.
The mammoth costs of so-called “innovating” our way out of these imposed problems will only short-circuit the necessary wealth to satisfy other necessities of life. These blinkered potentates have no understanding of the gargantuan trade-offs that they are inflicting on us. Either that or they don’t care.
My bet is that they don’t care. Why? They possess a religious fervor for an ideology that justifies, in their mind, taking over more and more of your life. For them, they are busy saving the planet, even if it means destroying your standard of living. You see, their religio-ideology is founded upon a robust, promethean definition of “social cost” and “externalities”. Like a canon law in the church, their “church”, the two doctrines give overriding weight to real or imagined costs for all of society for everything that you do. Where’s the limits? Practically, there aren’t any. Thus, the creeds become the supreme, open-ended excuses for the EPA, or any commissariat for that matter, to do anything that they want.
In the past, it was national socialist race justice to prevent defilement of the “race”, or the dictatorship of the proletariat to cram equality of condition on all of humanity to prevent exploitation. Today, it’s saving the climate, leaving aside the lack of any credible, peer reviewed evidence that anything that they’re doing will positively affect a global atmosphere under which billions of people are acting independently and beyond the reach of the EPA. Pardon me for concluding that this is nothing but pure stupidity.
In the end, the Biden claque and his Democratic Party are seemingly intent on destroying our way of life and replacing our citizen republic with rule by totalitarian zealots. It’s Petrograd 1917, Berlin 1933, or Beijing 1949. Keeping this crowd in power would have us see the end of much that we cherish. So, if the choice is between the abominable Trump or this gang of totalitarian fanatics, one can be forgiven for preferring boorishness to Big Brother.
RogerG
Sources:
1. In Orwellian language, the EPA announcement: “Biden-Harris Administration finalizes strongest-ever pollution standards for cars that position U.S. companies and workers to lead the clean vehicle future, protect public health, address the climate crisis, save drivers money”, March 20, 2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-pollution-standards-cars-position
2. A survey of the literature on the shortcomings of fuel cells:
* “Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Vehicles: Everything You Need to Know”, Car and Driver, 9/26/2022, at https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a41103863/hydrogen-cars-fcev/
* “A review of PEM hydrogen fuel cell contamination: Impacts, mechanisms, and mitigation”, ScienceDirect, 3/20/2007, at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378775306025304
* “Fuel Cells”, University of Illinois, at https://publish.illinois.edu/fuel-cells/benefits-and-disadvantages/
* “How Fuel Cells Work”, How Stuff Works, at https://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/alternative-fuels/fuel-cell.htm
3. The same Orwellian language for heavy-duty vehicles: “Biden-Harris Administration Finalizes Strongest Ever Greenhouse Gas Standards for Heavy-Duty Vehicles to Protect Public Health and Address the Climate Crisis While Keeping the American Economy Moving”, EPA, 3/29/2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-greenhouse-gas-standards-heavy
4. National Review articles that provide excellent overviews of the issues:
* “Biden’s Vehicle-Emissions Gaslighting”, Luther Ray Abel, 3/20/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bidens-vehicle-emissions-gaslighting/
* “Electric Vehicles: The EPA’s Fast Track to Fiasco”, Andrew Stuttaford, 3/25/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/electric-vehicles-the-epas-fast-track-to-fiasco/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=second
* “Biden Admin Imposes Strict Pollution Standards for Buses and Heavy-Duty Vehicles”, Caroline Downey, 3/29/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-admin-imposes-strict-pollution-standards-for-buses-and-heavy-duty-vehicles/
Demonstrators march down Pennsylvania Avenue during a protest against police brutality and racism on June 6, 2020 in Washington, DC. This one end of the voter spectrum. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)Trump supporters, the other end of the voter spectrum
Debt. Debt. Debt. Government at all levels is awash in it. Mountains of bonds and treasuries, unfunded mandates, and government spending galore is bankrupting the country. The numbers are in the trillions for Washington, D.C., and beyond millions and into the billions in some state and local hives. California stands out, and is leading the way to massive, harebrained fiscal imbecility, and a dismal future for anyone too young or unborn to vote.
And to think that nobody really cares. The public doesn’t, just try and do something about it. What animates the Trump crowd is rhetorical red meat, sticking it to the libs, and other acts of political theater. No talk of debt, addressing it, or facing the runaway train of our entitlements.
Donald Trump waves to the crowd at one of his rallies in Florida, 2024.
Nothing in Trump’s past or in his recent four years at the Resolute desk is promising. The guy is a real estate magnate who fumbled around in debt and bankruptcy most of his adult life. As president, he just wanted to spend and spend and spend, even chastising Senate Republicans for balking at another spewing of checks across the fruited plain to grease his reelection campaign. The only problem with his personality kink is the absence of the discipline of a bottom line in a federal government that can issue more debt and dollars at will. No state has a Federal Reserve Board. Trump is a child in a candy store, and so are his followers. Enough of this inane talk of having a businessman in the White House, especially this businessman.
The other choice on the political landscape is a band of neo-Marxist central planners who never met a tax, new bottomless social engineering gambit, and outright giveaway that they didn’t like. The central planning is bad enough, but the vacuuming of more taxpayer dollars from potentially productive endeavors in the private sector into the hands of politicians and their special pleading lackeys is a recipe to repeat 1920s Weimar Germany, or maybe 1920 Bolshevik Russia.
President Biden delivers remarks regarding student loan debt forgiveness in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in 2022. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images / Getty Images)
Where are the adults? Do we really want adults in decision-making posts? Apparently not. Adults aren’t popular. Never have we been more in need of someone who will speak truth to power, and that power means the American public who keep electing these clowns. We, the American voter, are the real “establishment”. As before, watch demagoguery short-circuit any come-to-Jesus talk.
The numbers are staggering. The national debt of $34.5 trillion is not far from the country’s total productive output, increasing $1 trillion every 100 days (see #1 and #3 below). Meaning, we are close to the land of no return. Compound the nightmare with rising interest rates adding fatter interest payments to the astronomical total and the magnitude of our fiscal immaturity resembles the black hole at the center of the galaxy. Democrats and Trump only know how to spend, with the Democrats performing a lethal injection of tax hikes into our bloodstream as we drown in the sea of debt.
If there’s one thing both sides agree on, besides the profligate spending, it is, “Don’t touch Social Security and Medicare!” As entitlements, both are on spending autopilot. The spending flies on, but the funding source is deteriorating; the revenue fuel tank of the contraption is shrinking in real time. The program is set up as pay-as-you-go, so the elderly need to stop saying that they are only getting their contributions back. Balderdash. Current retirees are receiving the contributions of current workers. That’s the truth behind the lies. When the amount of inflow stagnates or declines due to demography or deteriorating prospects for the young contributors, and the outflow prances forever upward, the fiscal tipsiness is guaranteed to add more huge infusions of red ink.
How much of an infusion? Don’t let the banality of these colossal numbers (trillions) habituate you into accepting them as tolerable. They aren’t. Euphemistically referred to as “unfunded obligations” among official bean counters, Social Security is scheduled to pour $19.8 trillion into the master “unfunded obligation” of the national debt through 2095. Medicare promises another $68.1 trillion. If we take the trend line into the great beyond, in perpetuity, as far as it can be calculated, Social Security raises the ignominy to $59.8 trillion and Medicare $163.2 trillion (see #2 below). If this was a drunk, the victim would have long ago expired from alcohol poisoning.
California is paving the way to this sordid future, but in their muddled thinking, in their clichéd mind, it’s a compliment – all the talk about “California is the future”. Well, they got this one right. California is likely to be the country’s future. They went right from a state that could conceive and build the California Water Project to inmates running the asylum. It’s a playground of the insane. There’s your future.
California governor Gavin Newsom speaks at a press conference in Beijing, China, October 25, 2023. (Tingshu Wang/Reuters)
The state’s popularly elected governor and legislature discovered, like kids coming downstairs to the Christmas tree, an eye-popping $100 billion pot of gold, or “surplus”, in the summer of 2022. Chief inmate, Governor Gavin Newsom, gushed, “No other state in American history has ever experienced a surplus as large as this.” And then he and his fellow adolescents went around showering the largesse in a splurge of incontinence. 23 million of its residents received checks worth as much as $1,050 at a price tag of $9.5 billion. It then would seem only natural for a self-proclaimed sanctuary state for immigration law violators to bankroll $5 billion for the health care of the same immigration law violators (see #4 below). Foreign nationals in our country in violation of our laws now get bennies. Got that?
In their unthinking habit of seeing bigger budgets as success in any social venture – not kids reading better or the number of homeless declining – the Sacramento clown car shoveled $20 billion into the pockets of the professionalized homeless “advocates” in their opulent NGOs, with no positive impact on public defecation, open-air drug dealing and use, crime, or the number of filthy encampments littering city streets. The state’s potentates could go a long way in curing the problem just by being a little more energetic, as they demonstrated recently in sprucing up grimy San Fransisco for the ruling thug of Red China, Xi. Instead, you’re likely to see an increase in real estate investments by those professionals in their NGOs. They don’t have an interest in curing the problem for that would only make them get a real job (see #4 below).
The state’s deficit stands at $78 billion, and rising. Add the state’s massive overspending to local wantonness and the total debt picture throughout the state approaches $1.6 trillion (see #4 below). I’m not sure if a cliff or wall is the most appropriate metaphor, but the car is more than driven by the mandarins in city hall or Sacramento. These nincompoops are popularly elected. The people of the state have their foot on the pedal. The people want fiscal insanity.
So, let’s stop blaming some abstract others for this dire situation. The people voted for it, and continue to do so. I’m reminded of Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror”.
As one stanza puts it:
“I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could’ve been any clearer
If they wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change”
Leave it to the King of Pop to issue a come-to-Jesus moment. It’s astounding to think that a deeply flawed man, who died of a deadly cocktail of drugs, made more sense than the people do in their elections. Stew on that for a while.
RogerG
Sources:
1. US Debt Clock at https://www.usdebtclock.org/. You can watch it climb in real time.
2. “The Real Federal Deficit: Social Security And Medicare”, John C. Goodman, Forbes, 2/25/2024, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/johngoodman/2023/02/25/the-real-federal-deficit-social-security-and-medicare/?sh=25189f695679
3. “The U.S. national debt is rising by $1 trillion about every 100 days”, Michelle Fox, CNBC, 3/1/2024, at https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/01/the-us-national-debt-is-rising-by-1-trillion-about-every-100-days.html
4. “California’s Deficit: Bring Your Alibis”, Will Swaim, National Review, 3/18/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/californias-deficit-bring-your-alibis/
The Feudal Future Podcast, two Chapman University professors warning of California’s slide into feudalism, or, more accurately, manorialism.
Most historians of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West would admit of centuries of misrule and foreign pressures leading to its disappearance. The Fall was incremental with most people adjusting to the slowly deteriorating conditions. Then, on the heels of persistent and growing disorder, the Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD. The evidence of decline was visible on the ground in the depopulation of many urban centers – Rome’s population in the 5th century had fallen to 50,000 – and in overgrown and decaying infrastructure. A healthy middle class faded with the weakening of commerce and the spreading lawlessness, and people began to cluster around powerful land barons. Western Europe became feudal. And so is California.
Feudal California has been a consistent theme of mine for a number of years. I’m not alone in this assessment. Two Chapman University professors (Orange, Ca.), Marshall Toplansky and Joel Kotkin, have been sounding the alarm in their “The Feudal Future” podcast at https://www.feudalfuturepodcast.com/home51396438. Check it out.
Professor Marshall Toplansky recently sat down for an interview with Siyamak Khorrami (see below) to explain what is happening to the socio-economic profile of California as it is sliding into feudalism. In sum, California is losing its middle class. A thriving middle class is a product of a vibrant commerce. Commerce is fading in the state’s broad system collapse. Sound familiar? As the middle class flees for opportunity elsewhere, the leftover population begins to take on the character of the wealthy in their walled manors and a growing mass of the poor to service their needs. How long will it be before we start calling California’s poor “peasants” or “serfs” and the state’s hyper-rich “Lord”?
This state of affairs wasn’t an accident. It is a willful consequence of elected choices. Decline and decay are popularly elected. It’s a one-party state with policy excesses never held to account. A chief target of the excess is commerce – or more simply, the economy. Doing business in California is like descending into Dante’s Inferno. A reputation for hostility is cemented; businesses leave for more welcoming states; air quality improves because the economy is systematically depressed; and the young in their peak family-formation and income years take flight. “Going green” (ev’s, solar panels, windmills, recycling galore, a war on fossil fuels, etc.) is going-going-gone for the middle class.
Please take time to watch the Toplansky interview. It should be enlightening for anyone in California or seeking to avoid its fate.
Cillian Murphy wins the Oscar for Best Actor for Oppenheimer at the 96th Academy Awards in Hollywood, Calif., March 10, 2024. (photo: Mike Blake/Reuters)
Not the history of Hollywood, but Hollywood’s version of history, a type of history which is staggeringly distilled from the lefty leanings of pop culture. Well, to no surprise, “Oppenheimer” won the Oscar for best picture. Good movie, bad history, especially if you want your history without the hackneyed left-wing bromides. It’s a history for today’s credentialed, degreed, but functional illiterates. It’s proof that today’s education is not educating, and thus Hollywood can get away with distorting history to an ill-informed public.
The film is filled with the now familiar leftist clichés. Cliché #1: Oppenheimer was persecuted. The pertinent question is, however, was he a significant security risk? A “security risk” does not require him to be a communist. As for the “risk” at America’s most top-secret war project, and one for which he is running, a simple examination of Oppenheimer’s background, activities, and associations should raise eye brows above the hair line. Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” obviously raises the subject – for it cannot be ignored, and is central to his plot – but paints the picture in gauzy hues of sympathy for him.
Oppenheimer can legitimately be an object of sympathy, like many people, but sympathy and ascertaining the danger to the country for having him at that post are different subjects. The latter is clearly more significant for us than the former. In this respect, context provides an important back story for events that would involve Robert Oppenheimer, and should have been part of Nolan’s story but are conspicuously absent.
At the time that the Manhattan Project was being organized, the U.S. Army’s Signal Intelligence Service at its operations center outside Washington, D.C., Arlington Hall, was ordered to begin collecting coded messages between Soviet operatives to their colleagues in the U.S. and superiors in Moscow. Stalin was an ally but many in our government were prudently dubious about his motives, intentions, and actions. Would he abandon us and/or undermine our efforts? After all, his connivance with Hitler in 1939 – the Nazi-Soviet Pact – helped trigger World War II. The activities of the Soviet Comintern (Communist Internationale) destabilized many countries in Europe throughout the 1920s and 30s. The Soviet takeover of the so-called Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, in tandem with Fascist support for Franco’s Nationalists, helped turn Spain into a bloodbath.
U.S. Army Signals Intelligence codebreakers, Arlington Hall, VA, 1943.
Simultaneously, the collection of the messages necessitated an intense effort to break the code which did not bear fruit till the end of the war and into the 1950s due to the complexity of the Soviet code. The program to collect and break the Soviet code was given the cover name, Venona.
Furthermore, step back to the 1930s and the preeminent trends of thought in college faculty lounges. If there was an observable sympathy in the U.S. during the 1930s, it was the warmth of our intellectual chattering classes for collectivism ranging from milder socialisms to communism, which is just an impatient socialism. For a good portion of the professoriate, the Great Depression condemned capitalism. The Soviet Union benefitted from much of that warmth and it showed in intellectual discussion groups, social affiliations and activities, which extended beyond the classrooms and laboratories. It’s into this milieu that people like Oppenheimer swam.
Many were attracted to FDR and the New Deal as only the beginning of the crusade to make the world right. Many would eventually fill FDR’s agencies and programs and brought their ideological affections with them. The extent of some of this cognitive kinship was uncovered in decrypted Soviet messages from 1946 on. The affection sometimes translated into espionage.
The effort gained new urgency in 1949 when the USSR successfully tested their first atomic bomb many years earlier than expected, which, as it turned out, was a carbon copy of our very first plutonium bomb, the one of the famous Trinity test at Los Alamos. What’s up? How’d they get it? Venona uncovered two moles at Los Alamos (Manhattan Project): nuclear physicist Klaus Fuchs and mathematician Ted Hall. Confirmation was additionally provided from Soviet archives that were thrown open in 1991. From the evidence gleaned, others at the time would be suspected, including Oppenheimer.
Clockwise from top left: Los Alamos spies Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, Oscar Seborer, and David Greenglass. In 2019, Seborer’s story was unearthed by Harvey Klehr, a retired professor from Emory University, and John Earl Haynes, former historian for the Library of Congress.
As it turned out, the espionage reached deep into FDR’s administration. Adviser Laughlin Currie, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter White, the State Department’s Alger Hiss, and a host of Justice Department and other personnel were fingered in Venona.
Around Oppenheimer personally, his wife, brother, and mistress were known to be communists. Moving about educated and influential circles at the time could have, understandably, oriented a person to the lefty side of the spectrum, leaving aside the natural social self-selection process that normally occurs. All of these factors and facts were not part of Nolan’s script, and should have been if he was truly interested in a faithful rendition of the times and the man. Instead, we got historical schlock that distorted and hid much under the rug, and an Oscar-winning movie.
Once a subject enters movie mode, it falls into the drama of protagonist/antagonist, good/bad. There’s the incessant movieland trope of creating villains who in real life may not have been. Always lurking in the background is Hollywood’s deeply embedded anti-anti-communism. The aura of McCarthy and McCarthyism overshadows their modern brain. So, they invent McCarthy-like characters.
One such maligned person was Gordon Gray, portrayed in the movie as a conniving lawyer of sinister motives. He actually was a distinguished graduate of Yale University, award-winning newspaper publisher, president of the University of North Carolina, and widely respected at the time as secretary of the army and presidential national security adviser. He headed the panel reviewing Oppenheimer’s security clearance that voted two to one to revoke it. Now, Gray will be forever reverse black-listed by Hollywood.
Gordon Gray
The rescinding of it was actually a “dah” moment. There was enough on Oppenheimer to determine that he was too great a risk to our national security, given all that we know from Venona and subsequent FBI investigations. It’s fair to conclude that the FBI’s investigation of Oppenheimer was inconclusive, but being inconclusive could be enough to keep him away from critical research, the risk being too great. He will take a downstream hit to his employability prospects but those are pale when compared to the danger to everyone else’s safety and security.
The movie doesn’t stop there in maligning people. Another object of concocted derision in the movie was Lewis Straus, but he was hardly Robert Downey Jr.’s dark and malevolent denizen of DC. An esteemed Jewish American and president of New York’s Emanu-El congregation, he rose from the bottom to the rank of Rear Admiral, headed Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, and was Eisenhower’s chief of staff and secretary of state. All this was washed away by Nolan to make Straus a demon to Oppenheimer’s saint. Let’s call it what it is: the Hollywood treatment for anybody of prominence on the right.
President Eisenhower receives a report from Lewis L. Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, on the hydrogen bomb tests (Operation Castle) in the Pacific, March 30, 1954.
Hollywood history becomes real history to people who don’t know history. There’s enough out there to know better. You just have to go from the theater to the library, or wherever honest, in-depth sources are available. They’re out there. But, best of all, be abundantly skeptical of what Hollywood is stylishly placing on the big screen. It’s nearly as much fantasy as Disney’s “Snow White”.
RogerG
Sources:
1. An excellent backgrounder on the times is Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, available on Amazon
2. Another excellent backgrounder is Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government by M. Stanton Evans, available on Amazon
3. Thanks to Neal Freeman’s piece in National Review, “Oppenheimer Provides Great Entertainment, Disfigured History”, 7/30/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/oppenheimer-provides-great-entertainment-disfigured-history/
4. Thanks to Armond White’s review of “Oppenheimer” at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/oppenheimer-the-first-nihilist-oscar-winner/
Are we off our rocker? Republicans sound like the 60s New Left and Democrats come across as Ronald Reagan (regarding Ukraine). Both Democrats and Republicans go off the cliff respectively into a crazy neo-Marxism and blind fealty in a cult of personality. I give you a few examples.
Right off the bat, Sen. J.D. Vance (R, Ohio) is clearly off his rocker. He took to the conservative American Spectator to burnish proof of his bonkers state of mind (see #1 below). In his mind, nearly everything goes down a conspiracy rat hole, particularly aid to Ukraine. The fact that the funding goes into next year is, in the twists and turns of his brain, proof of a Democrat plot to trap Donald Trump in impeachment if he should be elected this year. Here’s a shocker: it’s normal for funding to go beyond the fiscal year since it takes time to pass through the intestines of the federal Leviathan and make the stuff – in this case, munitions. It’s true for the aid to Israel in the bill which Vance incongruously, without a hint of embarrassing hypocrisy, supports (as do I).
The alleged trap assumes Trump will be elected and while in office turn the screws on Ukraine and by acts of omission assist Putin’s conquest of Russia’s “near abroad” – which, by the way, is strangely reminiscent of Lebensraum from another quarter of eight decades passed. Furthermore, it unwittingly presumes that Democrats will control the House and Senate to give us another impeachment parade, which might happen if Republicans continue to serve up candidate looniness and stage ugliness (Trump being Trump). For a good portion of the American public, who would want to check the Democrats’ neo-Marxism with the bestial and batty? Vance, without thinking and saying it, assumes that voters will prefer the neo-Marxists and thus they’ll be in position to oust Trump. Vance’s reasoning inadvertently slaps himself as he attempts to slap Ukraine.
What a strange way to quietly show affection for Putin and isolationism, albeit of the incoherent variety. What a strange way to make yourself unelectable as a party.
And in the Republican stable, more craziness awaits. Rep. Matt Rosendale (R, Montana), a stalwart of the House Republican suicide attempt in the toppling of Kevin McCarthy (R, Ca.) from the speakership, that didn’t make a lick of sense, announced that he’d like to bring the same looniness to the Senate chamber (see #3 below). Brandishing all the Trumpy jargon of the “establishment” drivel, he’s challenging Republican Tim Sheehy, who’s been running since summer last. So, the state Republican Party will be asked to place on the November ballot a man who lost to Montana Democrat Sen. John Tester in 2018 in a state Trump carried by 16 points in 2020. We’ll see if the state’s Republican voters are hungry to replicate 2022 when getable seats were lost by choosing the bestial and batty to carry the party flag. A sizeable chunk of Republican voters has proven to be the Democrats’ best allies.
Rep. Matt Rosendale (R, Montana)
In the end, ironically, after election 2024 passes from the scene, the Democrats might still be in a position to ruin the country, or make it look like the hellscapes of California and New York. Businesses and people are fleeing these bastions of insanity. When will we ever learn that lefty policy is a ticket to societal carnage? These states are governed by people who hate the Second Amendment and economic activity that isn’t directed by them. Lawbreaking, adolescent genital mutilation (“gender-affirming care” in the jargon of our time), eco-central planning, our schools as Marxist preparatory academies, the filth and crime, and the secessionist flouting of federal immigration law emanate from these metropolitan and bi-coastal enclaves. These places are a mess.
Their favorite whipping boys are people who bring us our energy and those who produce the means for us to protect ourselves from the miscreants coddled by them. Defund the police? The targets, especially the arms industry, are escaping a bevy of regulations, punishing taxation, and massive state-law sponsored lawsuits. Smith and Wesson fled Massachusetts for Tennessee. Now, Remington is abandoning New York for Georgia (see #4 below). Ilion, upstate NY, will shrink further.
Our newfound passion to make everyone whole (in legal eagle lingo) in the extreme is driving whole industries into bankruptcy, literally. The fact that a wacko used a Bushmaster to kill 20 kids and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School is the excuse to squeeze $73 million from Remington and, by extension, its employees. What of the car manufacturer of the vehicle that the killer drove? What of the gas station that the killer accessed to get him to the school? What of the fuel manufacturer? What of the maker of the shoes, clothes, and food that kept him alive and well to perform the heinous deed? What of all the hammers and steak knives that have been utilized to commit mayhem throughout history? In states like New York, we have a web of law and a jury pool, indeed a population, curated on hostility to certain industries. Remington became the target, less so the killer. Well, they are getting out. Masochism shouldn’t be expected to be a requirement for economic activity.
From the article:
“My mom worked there [Remington, Ilion]. My dad worked there. My wife works there with me now. My daughter works there with me now. My second daughter works there with me now. And my son-in-law works there,” said Brown, president of the United Mine Workers of America Local 717. “So it’s a double-hit for me and my wife: two of us out of a job.”
Do ya think?!
In statements to the press and employees, Remington cited New York’s threatening “legislative environment” and the fact that Georgia “supports and welcomes the firearms industry” (see #4 below). As a result, the State of New York is giving its residents much more than they ask for.
It’s much more than a shrinking tax base. It’s a clear field of play for criminals after non-prosecution, hostility to self-protection, and suppressed bail requirements under the puffery of “equity”. Where’s the “equity”? Right now, some people have greater rights to steal and destroy your property than you do in desiring to keep it. If the numbers don’t break down “equitably” by race, then hell is turned loose on the law-abiding, and good number of those are in so-called “protected classes” supposedly in need of “equity”. It’s laughable, if it wasn’t also so tragic.
There you have it. Current events are a chronicling of absolute lunacy. Are we off our rocker?
RogerG
Sources:
1. “The Republican Plot Against Donald Trump”, Sen. J.D. Vance, The American Spectator, 2/12/24, at https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-congress-is-pursuing-endless-war-in-ukraine-and-trying-to-stop-a-trump-election/
2. Thanks to Noah Rothman for the reportage and commentary on Vance’s claim in “J. D. Vance Thinks You’ll Believe Anything”, 2/12/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/02/j-d-vance-thinks-youll-believe-anything/
3. “Rosendale’s entry into Montana Senate primary sparks GOP furor”, Julia Mueller, The Hill, 2/11/24, at https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4459261-matt-rosendales-montana-senate-primary-donald-trump-tim-sheehy/
4. “Remington leaves the upstate New York village where it made guns for 200 years after a PE takeover and 2 bankruptcies”, Michael Hill and AP, Fortune, 2/11/24, at https://fortune.com/2024/02/11/is-remington-in-business-who-owns-leaving-new-york/
School children with masks and behind Plexi-glass in a San Diego school during the COVID-19 pandemicDestroyed, burned, and abandoned cars at music festival, Israel, October 7. Some UN aid workers were implicated in the massacre.
If the quality of our civilization can be gauged by the quality of our institutions, then we’re in serious trouble.
Domestically, our schools, FBI, CIA, a good portion of big business, the entertainment industry, federal bureaucracies, many state bureaucracies and local governments, many of them urban, much of the judiciary (federal to local, judges to juries), and the health bureaucracies (federal to local) have soiled themselves in neo-Marxist claptrap, authoritarian impulses, or rank donkey party partisanship. The rule of law is actually the rule of deeply compromised men and women. And it gets worse when we saunter on down to Turtle Bay in New York City, the United Nations.
We get daily reminders of the civilizational decay. Now, it’s another UN flight into gross immorality. The affiliated International Court of Justice (ICJ) trampled on any remaining moral authority that it may have possessed by bizarrely indicting Israel on charges of genocide. The absurdity of the pronouncement is obvious if you just think it through: the victim of genocide is guilty of responding to it. Then, the UN’s human rights conglomerate reserved for Iran the “Chair for the Human Rights Council’s one-day ‘Social Forum’” (see #1 below). Adding moral injury to moral injury, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East had people who were involved in the massacre of 1,200 mostly civilian Jews in Israel on October 7 (see #4 below). Can the “international community” get any more putrid?
The ICJ, specifically ordered Israel to stop “genocide-attacks” on Palestinian civilians in Gaza after, of course, finding evidence of “Israeli genocide” (see #3 below). Let me get this straight: the organization that runs Gaza stormed into southern Israel and slaughtered 1,200 Jews, took over 200 hostages, is not the party guilty of genocide; it’s the country who responded to the genocide. How does that compute?
Let’s rattle this around in the head a bit more. The nation that defends itself against a genocide is guilty of genocide as the original perps of the primary genocide commit another war crime by using the Gaza population as a writ-large human shield (see #2 below). Does this make any sense? Completely absent from the black robes’ decision is Hamas’s fundamental war crime – Gaza civilians as human shields – which immensely complicates the Israeli defensive response without running afoul of “genocide”. The elaborate and massive tunnel network under and into hospitals, schools, homes, large apartment buildings, orphanages, wherever civilians congregate in large numbers, the kind of civilians that are easily exploited for propaganda purposes, didn’t grace the Court’s printout. Since civilian casualties are inevitable when the human shields are used in crowd number, the Court’s opinion is tantamount to a blessing for the practice of large-scale human shields.
Maj. (res.) ‘Mem,’ a combat engineering officer, shows a tunnel that troops found inside a home in northern Gaza. The entrance was hidden underneath a bed in a children’s bedroom, November 7, 2023. (photo: Emanuel Fabian/Times of Israel)
If that isn’t crazy enough, we get to experience mullah-ruling Iran as a guardian of human rights. Isn’t that like the Grand Dragon of the Klan heading the Office of Civil Rights? Gracing the mullahs with the Chair of the UN Human Rights Council’s one-day “Social Forum” at the end of last year was too much even for the Iran-appeasing Biden administration. Biden’s Human Rights Council Ambassador Michele Taylor wrote (see #1 below), “It is unacceptable that any body associated with the promotion and protection of human rights be chaired by a representative from a nation implicated in such persistent and flagrant human rights abuses as Iran.” Exactly.
Yet, here we are, but there’s more. Speaking of the 1,200-person atrocity by Hamas on October 7, UN Works and Relief Agency workers were implicated in the barbarousness. Several had to be fired. Where’s the prosecutions (at the ICJ)? And related is the Hamas hijacking of that much-vaunted AOC-demanded “humanitarian aid” to Gazans (see #4 below). According to one source, “Hamas has their hands on UNRWA administration workers, and it manages UNRWA. . . . From the day they [Hamas] rose to power they took control of everything.” Much of the aid is dispensed by USAID. The federal organization’s Office of Inspector General (USAID OIG) “…has identified deliberate interference and efforts to divert humanitarian assistance in regions where FTO [foreign terrorist organizations, Hamas] activity is prevalent … [t]his includes systemic coercion of aid workers by FTOs…”, as reported by Jim Geraghty of National Review (see #4 below). Things at UN headquarters and in the field resemble the anti-Semitic chaos on our college campuses.
It’s getting so bad that almost anything with thousands of employees, funded by taxpayers, distant from them like D.C., the Hague and UN, and big-international in scope is a civilizational embarrassment. The little taxpaying guy and gal in the U.S., and the nation of Israel, get hosed. In this sense, bigness has become badness. I’m skeptical that anything can be done about the situation short of tearing the whole edifice down and starting over.
RogerG
Sources:
1. “Outrage as Iran regime chairs United Nations Human Rights Council body despite ‘alarming’ abuses”, Peter Aitken, Fox News, November 2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/outrage-as-iran-regime-chairs-united-nations-human-rights-council-body-despite-alarming-abuses/ar-AA1jhvrT
2. “Human Shields in International Humanitarian Law: A Guide to the Legal Framework”, Beth Van Schaack, Just Security, 12/7/2016, at https://www.justsecurity.org/35263/human-shields-ihl-legal-framework/#:~:text=Making%20the%20civilian%20population%20or%20individual%20civilians%20the,and%20Article%208%20%28e%29%20%28i%29%20%28applying%20to%20NIACs%29.
3. “ICJ ruling: Key takeaways from the court decision in Israel genocide case”, Reuters, 1/26/24, at https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/key-takeaways-world-court-decision-israei-genocide-case-2024-01-26/
4. “What about the UNRWA Humanitarian-Aid Trucks?”, Haley Stack, National Review, 1/26/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-about-the-unrwa-humanitarian-aid-trucks/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth
The term (radioactive personality) comes from the National Review editors’ op-ed on the eve of the Iowa caucuses (see below). Indeed, Trump is a radioactive personality. It bodes ill for the GOP in November.
No doubt about it, it’s true, and it’s true not because Trump drives the Left – which means the root-and-branch of the Democratic Party – nuts, but because everyone, even his friends and loyal supporters, recognize his self-absorbed boorishness and then run to a banal recitation of his accomplishments. The reprehensive demeanor is hard to avoid. This simple fact has profound repercussions. Going into this election’s primaries, Trump is the weakest rival to Biden in a general election, also, no doubt about it. If the Democrats should change their standard bearer, all bets are off for even the rosiest Trump scenario of a narrow victory in November.
How radioactive is he? His avid fans are giddy about his head-to-head slight lead (within the margin of error) in some major polls. Remember, he’s running against a guy who every day reminds the public that he belongs in a nursing home and not the oval office. In addition, look at the hash Biden’s party has made of the country and our national security. Everything from Abbey Gate (the deadly Kabul fiasco), inflation, the uncontrolled border, the assault on our standard of living in eco-totalitarianism, the neo-Marxism in DEI, the boosterism for transgenderism’s teenage genital mutilation in “gender affirming care”, the orchestrated annihilation of American education, et al, doesn’t leave much for the donkey party to run on, except the looming Trump ascendancy if he is the GOP’s avatar.
The tone for the general election is set. Biden’s speech last week in Blue Bell, Penn., made Trump the focus of evil in the world. It’s a replay of the strategy in the 2022 midterms. Did it work then? I don’t know, but the expected GOP banner year turned out to be The Great Disappointment. Apparently, it’s safe to assume that enough people fell for it. If anything, the person of Trump animates the Democrats and sends shivers down the spine of at least a sliver of Republicans. Not good for someone who’s already a close-run thing.
Biden’s “Jim Crow 2.0” speech from Sept. 2022 in the runup to the 2022 midterms
The polls tell the tale, and have been telling the same tale for quite some time. The second-place candidate in the Republican primary contest does significantly better than Trump in a face-off with Biden in the general. The crazy Trump indictments and other Democrat shenanigans have certainly contributed to a heavy sympathy vote among Republicans for Trump. While they have contributed to Trump’s political ballast among GOPers, once Trump gets out of the safe confines of the Republican primary, expect Democrats to cater to the electorate’s already deep disdain for the man from Mar-a-Largo, if only they can successfully distract the voters away from Biden’s catastrophes – a big “if”.
Follow the FiveThirtyEight aggregate of polls and follow them from 2023 on (see below for the latest). The trend is clear. At best, Trump eeks out a lead in the margin of error. The polling details vary (for instance, registered vs. likely voters) but the direction is obvious. Biden screws up, Trump improves, slightly! Yesterday (Jan. 10), the YouGov/The Economist poll registered a Biden and Trump tie at 43%. Both are stinkers with negatives in the mid to high 50s. The last time, December 2023, a general pairing of Haley or Trump versus Biden by the Wall Street Journal shows Haley smashing Biden by 17% with Trump squeaking out only a 4-point lead (see below). For the life of me, why are Republicans determined to make their election prospects so difficult? It makes me wonder if this is populist sadomasochism at work.
Nikki Haley (l)
I’ll leave the prognosis of sadomasochism to the field of psychology, but, at the very least, one must conclude that we live in crazy times. Trump is still radioactive, and Biden is a bumbler after having surrendered to his party’s neo-Marxism. Oh, America, why are we so gun-ho for mediocrities, and repulsive ones at that?
RogerG
Sources:
* “Republican Voters Can — and Should — Rethink Nominating Trump”, The Editors, National Review online, 1/10/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/republican-voters-can-and-should-rethink-nominating-trump/
* Latest FiveThirtyEight polling at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/
* “Why Nikki Haley polls better against Joe Biden than Donald Trump does”, Steven Shepard, Politico, 12/9/2023, at https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/09/haley-electability-trump-biden-polls-00130926
The Protected: John Kerry windsurfingThe Unprotected: residents of East Palestine, Ohio, waving Trump flags, Feb. 2023
Peggy Noonan’s growing “political dynamic” of our times (from 2016):
“There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it …. The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created [emphasis in the original].”
Peggy Noonan in a speech from 2017
She’s right, and it should gall anyone with half a brain.
************
I had a little time Wednesday, 1/3/24, while exercising to listen to Hugh Hewitt’s radio show. He inspired me to take a third look at Peggy Noonan’s piece from 2016, “Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected” (see below). Hewitt used the article as a launching point to discuss the fall of Claudine Gay, the disgraced president of Harvard. His point was that the vast majority of working Americans don’t care squat about the problems of a Harvard president. If anything, the episode reminds the common person of the rank favoritism of those who have placed themselves above the mire that they have made for everyone else. Good point, but it only goes so far.
Lets’ face it, Gay was not hired for her high achievements in scholarship or administrative skill. She fit the new ideologically laced identity standards of our insulated, self-anointed aristocracy: black, female, immigrant-affiliated, and predictably left-wing. She fits the superficial bill. She was placed on a fast track to a fully tenured professorship, Dean of the Arts and Sciences, and the Harvard presidency. Yet, she’s an empty suit with a checkered resumé. It should rankle the parents of any working-class kid who was booted for the same infractions committed by the appointed sovereign of Harvard College, one whose academic accomplishments are extremely thin and plagued by charges of academic fraud, plagiarism (see below).
The disgraced Claudine Gay, and protected, at a Harvard graduation
Don’t think for a moment that she’s relegated to a bread line after her resignation. She’ll still garner $900,000 a year as a Harvard professor. She’s protected no matter how bad she’s been. If that doesn’t pore salt into the open wound of the “unprotected”, nothing will.
Yet, where does the recognition of this new political battle line take us? Nowhere, and fast.
Politically, it could easily end in a disaster. Are the animated “unprotected” sufficient in number to constitute a governing electoral majority? Recent history makes that possibility very tenuous. The Trump victory of 2016 was by the skin of his teeth. With narrow majorities for both parties in Congress during his term, it teetered wildly between Reaganite measures and Trump impeachment. By 2018 and 2020, the Republican congressional footprint shrunk. The expected GOP banner year of 2022 would go down as the Great Disappointment. It is apparent that a rebellion of the bellicose “unprotected” isn’t enough. Plus, you have to factor into the political calculus what is lost in a stance catering to the shrillest in those ranks.
And that brings me to Donald Trump. As a character on our political stage, he’s both the middle finger to the “protected” and repulsive, repugnant to large swaths of the voting public open to the GOP being the antidote to the left-wing lunacy coming from our so-called “betters”( the “protected”), the supporting mass of the Democrats’ progressivism. Is the goal of a political campaign to win or simply be a stage for venting? Losing leaves only the wallowing in wild conspiratorial excuses.
Chief among the excuses is the charge that the system is rigged. It is, and the complainers (the “unprotected”) are right to be up in arms. The pandemic brought it all into the spotlight. Protests for thee but not for me. Private and open schools for thee and closed ones and distance-learning for my kids. Then, parents learned of the hard-core porn and neo-Marxist indoctrination that were being inculcated into their children. The “unprotected” experienced the loss of one to two years of learning while the “protected” raced forward in their exclusive private academies. Small and medium businesses were shuttered and jobs lost leaving a monopoly for the bigs. Cops closing down church services as rioters were free to torch the downtowns and federal courthouses from one megalopolis to the next. 2020 to 21 was a disgrace, courtesy of the “protected”.
Though, admittedly, the rigged-system charge sounds eerily like the banal Marxist complaint, the one wholly embraced by the “protected” Left. When a complaint goes “systematic”, that’s carte blanche to tear down the society, the system, a totalitarian uprising. This time from the right, Donald Trump hinted as much when he suggested that his followers should not adhere to the niceties of the Constitution. To correct the alleged fraud of his election loss, on Truth Social in late 2022, Trump called for “the termination of all rules . . . even those found in the Constitution” (see below). He quickly took a rhetorical two-step away from it. But still, root-and-branch actions to upend the “system” was broached by a figurehead on the Right. The Constitution to the woke snowflakes is a white man’s slavery compact. For Trumpers, and Trump himself, it is a compact for sinecures of the “protected” Left and election fraud. For both sides, the ends justify the means. History is not encouraging about the repercussions of that tact.
I’m not quite ready for the Hobbesian life of solitary, nasty, brutish, and short outside the rule of law. Yet, that’s a possible destination for the country for both sides.
As we head into election season 2024, the faces of both parties – Biden and Trump – appear ugly to overwhelming numbers of voters. It’s a battle of the repulsive. FiveThirtyEight’s list of current polls consistently register disgust. Media and the incendiary commentariat focus on the head-to-head matchup. Trump is up, Biden is down, but regardless, 52% to 55% consistently view both with a jaundiced eye (see below). If Biden v. Trump II was pay-for-view, the investors would face a ratings disaster.
My worry is the down-ballot. If Trump should win, it won’t be by much, and he won’t have coattails, never has. If Biden wins, ditto. If elected, I expect Trump to be immediately impeached if the Democrats ascend to the majority in the House and Senate. If roles were reversed and Biden wins, Republicans will impeach not only Biden but his entire cabinet, leaving the VP to giggle and uptalk her way through the next four years. Unitary GOP government would give us more chief executive flamboyance and impulsiveness, and Trump isolationism and protectionism. Unitary donkey party rule will be an attempt to turn the country into California. Either way, the “unprotected” will get screwed either as part-and-parcel of them getting what they want – Trump elected and proving the failure of protectionism, isolationism, and chaos in the executive once again – or being the target of command-and-control social engineering after another Trump election failure and more donkey party eco-totalitarianism.
The “unprotected”, by themselves, don’t make an electoral majority. Their middle finger to the “protected”, in the person of Donald Trump, is repugnant to the vast center of the electorate. The goal of politics in democracies is to win and the “unprotected” don’t have the numbers by themselves. Trump is a divisive figure, not a unifying one. After all, he’s a middle finger, not a statesman. Thus, by default, given the narrow appeal of the orange man, the “protected” have a good chance of remaining protected and in power to continue to make hash of our lives. We need to move beyond a mere repeat of the same contest and practice a little more election calculus. The equation ends in the unavoidable conclusion: if the “unprotected” want protection, first, win elections!
RogerG
Sources:
* “Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected”, Peggy Noonan, originally published in the Wall Street Journal, 2/25/2016, at https://peggynoonan.com/trump-and-the-rise-of-the-unprotected/
* “Is Claudine Gay a Plagiarist?”, Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet, 12/10/23, at https://christopherrufo.com/p/is-claudine-gay-a-plagiarist
* “Trump Backtracks On Calling For ‘Termination’ Of Constitution Following Backlash”, Sara Dorn, Forbes, 12/5/22, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2022/12/05/trump-backtracks-on-calling-for-termination-of-constitution-following-backlash/?sh=7118d1d74161
* FiveThirtyEight latest polls at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/
Solar panels and windmills in India. The scene is familiar in the USA, especially California.Utility bill shock thanks to “sustainable” energy
King Claudius: “O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven. It hath the primal eldest curse upon it. A brother’s murder.” — Hamlet, William Shakespeare
King Claudius in Zeffirelli’s “Hamlet” from 1990
Claudius’s lament was over the festering memory of his murder of his brother to gain the throne. Today, similarly, we have much to lament. People who should know better, but don’t, are our bane. It’s unsettling as we watch the barbarous takeover occurring before our eyes. The religio-ideology of environmentalism and genderism is poisoning us as Claudius did his brother King Hamlet.
The offenses to good order are mounting daily. In some west coast states (Washington, California for example), mental health professionals are forbidden by law to use any other approach to gender dysphoria than acceptance of a teen’s declaration of their new sexual identity. For the parents, they are straitjacketed into only assent to juvenile whims. Any other response is treated as criminal child abuse. It’s a command for fully irreversible teenage mental and genital mutilation. In some states, even famously conservative ones, voters have approved in clever wording an open license to expunge the next generation. People are tramping to the polls to give individuals the power to end human life from conception to the moment of exit from the birth canal, and maybe after as well. Don’t be fooled with the feigned “health of the mother” check since it’s been interpreted out of existence. On the eco front, climate-change is the cudgel to brow-beat people into a depreciation of their own and their children’s prosperity. Disfigured children, abortion mills, and a completely fabricated and permanent mass decline in the standard of living could be our lot if we continue down this path.
Sex change operation. Massachusetts mandates insurers cover sex-change treatments.
A mass propaganda push ensues to manufacture broad compliance with this dystopia. Search engines are in the vanguard. Try a Google or Bing search for “states who ban alternatives to gender affirming care”. You’ll get the opposite: states who ban gender affirming care, not those who banned alternatives. It’s the wrong end of the telescope. You have to come up with the partisan jargon employed by the revolutionaries against their opponents to get an inkling, albeit a distorted one, of the proper state of play. For instance, the rhetorical contrivance “conversion therapy” must be employed, which in actuality is talking therapies to help a person come to grips with their birth gender, but is now freighted with sinister connotations throughout most of the search offerings.
Likewise, the campaigns of illogic and ideological activism litter the search results on climate change. “Criticisms of climate change ideology” in Bing actually listed criticisms of the critics of climate change ideology. In third place, right behind the left-wing Guardian’s “’Word salad of nonsense’: scientists denounce Jordan Peterson’s comments on climate models” and ExxonMobil’s PR-kowtowing to the hysteria, was David Vetter’s piece in Forbes, “5 Big Lies About Climate Change [from critics], And How Researchers Trained A Machine To Spot Them” (see below). I’m amply familiar with the arguments having taught college-level Physical Geography for years.
David Vetter is an architype of the activist journalist with some exposure to science, actually an ideologically-laden version of science, not “science” as such. His LinkedIn page tells the tale. He matriculated through Cardiff University to a masters in International Journalism, and then he’s off to Oxford for a masters in Science – not anything approaching Physics, mind you, but the science of “Sustainability, Enterprise, & Environment”. It’s a little bit of science, only enough to buttress the activism, and a whole lot of ideology.
David Vetter (Forbes profile pic)
His article immediately produced the poker tell of non-science masquerading as science. In the very first sentence he gave away the store: “the science is settled”. What? The science of something as complex as our climate is “settled”, settled in the sense that we can move immediately to hammering in the coffin nails to our personal prosperity, justifying an end to cheap, reliable energy? Understanding the relationships between the many elements of our atmosphere and the natural and human injections into it is a perpetual scientific enterprise. “The science is settled” doesn’t cut it. It’s the pitch of the activist, not the scientist who wants to be respected as a scientist.
The sleight-of-hand of “the science is settled” leads to attempts to make the chicanery seem unassailable. One way is to construct a black box which will conjure condemnations of their critics. Vetter in his piece uncritically describes exactly that. Politicized scientists devised software to tar opinions that they don’t like. They’ve come up with a way to artificially make their opinions superior to those of their critics without having to scientifically prove it. It’s more sleight-of-hand to hide the initial sleight-of-hand. Garbage in, garbage out.
Target #1 for the hysterics like Vetter is the grid. Prepare yourself for vast stretches of the landscape and seascape consumed under huge blankets of solar panels and forests of mammoth windmills stretching over the horizon, and intermittency, brownouts, blackouts, and bankrupting energy bills. Target #2 is your car.
Your car must fit into this central planner’s dream. That’s no easy task. Today’s common vehicle with its internal combustion engine (ICE) was the result of decades, a century and a half, of trial-and-error and interplay of many generations of tinkerers, producers and consumers. Now, the economics of organic development are to be suddenly replaced by the central commands of politicians and their government bureaus. Out of politics – for government is politics and politics is government – come the central planners’ edicts in the form of numerical quotas on date certain. Collectivists of all stripes love blunt commands to bring everyone into line. It’s the mental fingerprint of totalitarians. Stalin loved his Five-Year Plans. The CCP loved their one-child policy and forced abortions on a grand scale. From today (2023) to 2050, the plan is for all of us to be shoehorned into their choice for us.
Extolling the virtues of central planning in the Soviet Union
Would you fly on a plane designed in a confab between technocrats of the Department of Commerce and the staff of Bernie Sanders? Count me out. The electric vehicle isn’t that much different. Oh, the cabal won’t engineer the thing from the ground up. They don’t have to. Stalin’s potentates in Gosplan (Soviet central planning agency) and the politburo didn’t. They just ordered the heavy-manufactured thing into existence like God in Genesis, but left the dirty details to less-than-benighted underlings. In America, failure is rewarded in unionization and civil service protections, something called tenure. For Stalin and the gang, failure in living up to the fancies of the junta means show trials for “wreckers”, zek-status in the Gulag Archipelago, or a mass grave in Kurapaty Forest.
Our ruling over-caffeinated simpletons are following a movie script, “Field of Dreams”. The farmer Ray in the movie hears a voice telling him, “If you build it, he will come”. It’s the activists’ voice in the heads of Gov. Gavin Newsom, his super majority of totalitarian utopians in the state legislature, everywhere the donkey party is in power, and the entire Democratic Party ensconced in DC. Translation: “Build the EV, and we’ll force the others to buy it.” But the thing ordered into mass production, and the forced scuttling of the second largest family investment, is a mass incoherency.
As a golf cart in a Florida planned-unit-development, it’s a great concept. Try selling the thing to anyone travelling a couple of hours to do their once-a-month Costco shopping, visit grandma, or road-tripping to Yellowstone. Try selling the idea to anyone responsible for distributing the tonnage from port to Amazon warehouse to your suburban doorstep waiting for thieves to take it. Not everyone lives in the tightly packed confines of our urban hellscapes. Not everyone lives within reach of California’s coastal Highway 1. The EV is designed for pampered urbanites living in mild climates, and close to the frequently vandalized charging stations – much like everything else vandalized in our cities – which are tied to a grid made unreliable by the same geniuses forcing you into the EV. Does any of this compute?
The ridiculousness of it all is intensified by the flight of the middle class from our decaying cities. It seems that people with kids don’t appreciate over-taxation, skyrocketing housing costs, a cost of living made unsustainable by those things labeled “sustainable”, the crime and broad urban dysfunction, the Soviet-style schools, and the horrible thought that once your kid is infected with the social contagion of gender confusion, they’ll fall into the clutches of those who are striving to permanently scar their minds and bodies, and you won’t be able to do anything about it. Imagine it: H.G. Wells’s “Island of Dr. Moreau” made real.
Of course, the advocates of dystopia will face declining congressional representation each new census. But, wait, the activists in and out of government have an answer for this new unintended consequence of coercing others to live the activists’ dreams. They’ll just open the immigration floodgates to the global poor. Then, these teeming hordes will be shuttled in sufficient volume to fill the vacuum left by the skedaddling middle class in time for the next census.
Still, more of the taxpaying middle class will be scattered over flyover country, in places unsuitable for the bi-coastal, urban zeitgeist of EV-love. The weather doesn’t cooperate, and the long distances can quickly turn the EV into a death trap. Oh, well, they’ll vote Republican; so, who cares? Right?
Stuck in an EV in winter waiting for a charge
The whole incongruency – in exchanging what works for what doesn’t – glares at you in the face. When it comes time to get rid of the EV, there isn’t much of a resale market for it (see below). Once used, who wants it, because who knows how those delicate batteries were treated? Not staying within the optimal charging window of 20%-80% and frequent fast-charges permanently sap it. Has anyone religiously followed the strictures in charging their cellphone, or anything for that matter run on a rechargeable battery? What makes you think that it’ll be any different with the Biden-car? You can’t order an end to quick-charging if you want to sell the thing to anyone with a life, nor will mandatory gizmos to prevent over-charging be any more effective. You’ll have to perform the mental trick of 80% becoming 100%. 300 miles of range is actually 240; but long before that, systems start shutting down to preserve power to the wheels. Playing it safe by over-charging is the norm. And do you think that people in the resale market don’t know this? If they don’t, they’ll soon discover it.
Our future?
Let’s put numbers to the absurdity. The numbskulls in central planning realize that everyone, including the unwashed masses trying to get to work and the kids to school and soccer practice, must be in an EV to create the illusion of mass acceptance of the contraption. The rich can afford anything, including Elon Musk’s latest offering, with or without a government bribe, er, subsidy, er, rebate, er, fully refundable tax credit. So, the bribes ($7,500) are concocted with income ceilings: $300,000 for married couples filing jointly, $150,000 for individuals (see below). And you won’t have to wait to file your taxes to get it.
To keep leasing within the totalitarian fold, it’s even easier to garner the bribe since the dealer and you don’t have to worry much about the red tape of the domestic content and manufacture folderol of an outright purchase.
The problem is, with leasing and rentals, they’re swelling the used-EV supply. But dealers and rental companies can’t get rid of them. They’re stuck with something quickly losing its value. EVs are the worst segment in the used car market, their value collapsing nearly 50% in five years after purchase. Rental companies are limiting their purchases and some such as Sixt SE won’t buy any more Teslas. And to think that the zealots in power want you to buy the thing where it’ll occupy half the floor space in your garage next to the thing that works, the thing for which you are holding onto in a death grip – your good ‘ol fossil-fueled sedan. Indeed, the central planners’ dream stinks to high heaven, while collecting dust among all the other junk in your garage.
To hide the disruption and devastation in the automobile industry, the euphemism “transition” will be applied and a host of subsidies, kickbacks, tax largesse, and domestic-content favoritism will be showered on Detroit. Meanwhile, as lunch-pail Joe shows solidarity with UAW strikers, his administration is bribing and coercing their employer into reducing the payroll. The planners’ forecast of growing employment in the EV’s “battery belt” to replace losses elsewhere should ring hollow to UAW members since America’s “belt” is mostly in the non-union South. Still, net jobs in the industry could very well be negative. Hints abound of things to come. Stellantis, parent of Chrysler, announced in December 2023 that they plan to cut 3,600 jobs in the unionized Midwest due to California’s increasingly draconian fuel-efficiency standards. Mandatory EV sales targets as a percentage of all sales and these blunt mpg targets encourage compliance by not necessarily increasing production of EVs, or expanding total production, but lowering production across the board. It’s a side effect of California zealotry, and, after all, Biden’s and Schumer’s DC is California, Jr.
Where California goes, the donkey party’s national potentates follow. It’s said of California that lately the only thing that it produces in abundance is refugees in an imitation of Marxism-Leninism behind the Iron Curtain. Wrong. It’s bad ideas. CARB (California Air Resources Board) has ordered into existence something that doesn’t exist: “zero-emission” locomotives (see below). First, the CARB authoritarians have ordered the train companies to squirrel away money in preparation for their 2035 deadline when all new locomotives will be, magically, “zero emission”.
Of course, if you throw enough money at any Salvador Dali-like adventure into surrealism, reality can be forcibly contorted to fit the vision, but who wants to live in the result? Who can live in the result? The things carrying the freight will likely be battery-powered with less toque and horsepower, less range, less hauling capacity. It’s the same approach in the state’s edicts for tractor/trailers, the trucking industry. The consequence is batteries, batteries everywhere, and diminishment of your well-being. Shortages, jumps in distribution costs, and mounting difficulties in getting anything for producers and consumers will translate into you living poorer. The average person will get smacked, and royally.
The reality of California’s battery-powered locomotive?
But your well-being is beside the point for utopians drunk with power. Without a doubt, this is state tyranny as obvious as slavery in the ante-bellum South. A state in the grip of lunacy shouldn’t be allowed to drag everyone else into its self-imposed quicksand, which is the current state of affairs. Clearly, ports, trucking, and trains are the stuff of interstate commerce, and the feds in the Constitution govern it (Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl. 3). Also, clearly, California is interfering with it, obstructing it. Any state action so egregiously injurious to interstate commerce should be brought to heel. Existing Supreme Court case law affirms the Constitution’s plain language in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), Wickard v. Filburn (1942), Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (1964), Katzenbach v. McClung (1964), et al.
So, the power is there; why isn’t it exercised? Our federal government is crippled by two evenly matched and irreconcilable sides. One is in the grip of neo-Marxism and the other, the antidote, is consumed in a repulsive cult of personality. Much of the blame for this sorry deadlock lies with the electorate, for they are equally befuddled by two unpalatable options, or they’re boosters of the nonsense. They won’t, and maybe can’t, give the antidote the requisite overwhelming majorities in Congress and the executive branch to right the ship. We end up muddling through with California idiocy pulling the rest of the country into a morass.
It’s all so worrisome as we inch closer to a government-engineered suppression of our personal prospects.
More could be said of California’s inspiration in the federal government’s latest assault on the ubiquitous electric motors used in all American manufacturing. It’s more of the same ilk. They want to onshore manufacturing while they pummel manufacturers with an additional cost of $20,000 per employee in new regulations. It’s like the EV and batteries, batteries everywhere. Something stinks to high heaven; or, more accurately, it’s as toxic as phosgene or chlorine gas wafting over WWI battlefields. King Claudius has nothing on these dunces.
RogerG
Sources:
* “5 Big Lies About Climate Change, And How Researchers Trained A Machine To Spot Them”, David Vetter, Forbes, 11/19/21, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2021/11/19/5-big-lies-about-climate-change-and-why-researchers-trained-a-machine-to-spot-them/?sh=9d2a24349f47
* “2023 Study Shows Electric Vehicles Are Worst for Resale Value”, Marc Wiley, MotorBiscuit, 11/14/23, at https://www.motorbiscuit.com/studies-show-electric-vehicles-worst-resale-value/
* “Top 25 Cars That Hold Their Value the Best – and the 25 Worst: Electric vehicles are the worst at holding their value, while hybrids, sports cars and trucks depreciate the least”, ISeeCars, 11/6/23, at https://www.iseecars.com/cars-that-hold-their-value-study#v=2023
* “The $7,500 tax credit for electric cars will see big changes in 2024. What to know”, Camila Domonoske, NPR, 12/28/23, at https://www.npr.org/2023/12/28/1219158071/ev-electric-vehicles-tax-credit-car-shopping-tesla-ford-vw-gm
* For a horror story with a rental EV: “Car-Rental Companies Are Ruining EVs: Good luck charging your surprise electric rental car.”, Saahil Desai, The Atlantic, 6/16/2023, at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/06/electric-vehicle-rental-cars-hertz-chargers/674429/
* “No one wants to buy used EVs and they’re piling up in weed-infested graveyards”, Monica Raymunt and Bloomberg, Fortune, 12/22/23, at https://fortune.com/2023/12/22/no-one-wants-to-buy-used-ev-piling-weed-infested-graveyards-tesla-bmw-vw/amp/
* “California Kills Auto Jobs in Toledo: Stellantis warns of layoffs in the Midwest owing to the Golden State’s electric-vehicle mandate.”, The Editorial Board, The Wall Street Journal, 12/11/23, at https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-kills-auto-jobs-in-toledo-electric-vehicle-mandate-15c44a5c?mod=hp_opin_pos_1
* “California Mandates Green Trains That Don’t Exist”, Dominic Pino, National Review, 12/28/23, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/california-mandates-green-trains-that-dont-exist/
