How is it possible that California gave the country Ronald Reagan, especially seen from this point in time? In 2016, Hillary’s victory margin over Trump in California was 4.3 million votes. Her nationwide popular vote bested him by 2.9 million. That means she lost by 1.4 million everywhere else. California is to the Democrats what Saudi Arabia is to the oil market. California’s blue is darkening to black – and “black” as in black hole of intergalactic fame, not race. And that means an intoxication with taxes. All that government with its programs and fashionable crusades is expensive.
The blueness has tailed off into self-flagellation. California voters this year had the opportunity to free itself of its 12 cents/gal gas tax increase but Prop. 6 failed spectacularly (51-45 early in the count) . People in the state like their high taxes. Oh, I suppose at least partly, they see it as absolutely essential in saving the planet, even though the scheme was billed as a way to pay for roads and bridges that couldn’t be paid by the state’s other astronomically high taxes.
But I don’t see how California’s 36 million population will have much sway in lowering the planet’s temps when compared to 2 billion Chinese and Indians (the subcontinent variety). The denizens of the rest of the world now know that living in the dirt isn’t the only option. Their elevation out of the hut isn’t going to happen by forsaking carbon and living according to the precepts of Marin County “sustainability” … and Zambians know it. Don’t expect such inescapable logic to penetrate the state’s semi-literate hipsters and coastal fashionistas in their wine soirées.
Evidence of tax inebriation didn’t have to wait for the 2018 midterms and Prop 6. No sooner had the Republican House and Senate blasted their tax cuts to the president’s desk for his signature in 2018 than the suzerains of the state’s ruling party went into hyper-drive to undermine them even before Trump’s ink was dry.
Bills began popping up in the state’s legislature to stick it to “corporations”, the nomenclature of virtue-signaling for today’s hip lefties. The Dems’ Kevin McCarty boasted, “It’s time for middle class tax justice”. What does “middle class tax justice” look like? Well, it means to shaft California businesses with a jump in the corporate tax rate from 21 to 35 percent. The “middle class” shtick is more virtue-signaling to the state’s real overburdened and shrinking middle class – overburdened by the likes of McCarty and his colleagues.
Getting beyond the boilerplate rhetoric, though, it’s just plain ol’ vengeance for losing in 2016.
Now, what to do about the tax-cut bill’s undeniable justice in refusing to continue to force low-tax states to bail out high-tax states with a complete federal write-off of exorbitant state and local taxes, the “state and local tax deduction” (SALT)? The puppy love of tax-happy states for nearly everything government is the well-spring for ingenious ways to hide some of their grossest taxes in other deductible categories. That other tax-drunk jurisdiction – NY – wants to disguise them in the payroll tax. Gov. Brown and his fellow lefty bootleggers in Sacramento – I’m not kidding you – want to turn their taxes into charitable giving. Yeah, it’s called the California Excellence Fund. But there’s a problem with the ploy: the IRS code declares that the giver can’t benefit for it to be genuine charity. Oh well, back to the drawing boards.
As of April 9, 2018, $269 billion in new taxes were wafting through the California state legislature. And to top it off, the midterms ushered into power more tax-happy Dems. I’m beginning to wonder if many of the state’s voters should be tested for alcohol poisoning before entering the voting booth. This goes way beyond the .06 limit. What’s holding them up as they punch the ballot?
RogerG
Bibliography:
“It’s Official: Clinton’s Popular Vote Win Came Entirely From California”, John Merline, Investor’s Business Daily, 12/16/2016, https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/its-official-clintons-popular-vote-win-came-entirely-from-california/
“Election results 2018: Proposition 6 gas tax repeal crashes, burns [Updated]”, Adam Brinklow, Curbed: San Francisco, 11/7/2018, https://sf.curbed.com/2018/11/7/18071282/election-night-2018-california-prop-6-gas-tax-repeal-rejected
“High-Tax States Reach For Gimmicks”, Milton Ezrati, Forbes, 2/16/2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/miltonezrati/2018/02/16/high-tax-states-reach-for-gimmicks/#6fddec4185c5
“$269 billion in new state taxes and fees proposed”, Dawn Hodson, Mountain Democrat, 4/9/2018, https://www.mtdemocrat.com/news/269-billion-in-new-state-taxes-and-fees-proposed/
“‘Time for middle class tax justice’: California corporate tax bill offsets Trump cuts”, Alexei Koseff, The Sacramento Bee, 1/18/2018, https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article195434569.html
“California Bills Acknowledge Federal Tax Changes, Don’t Conform”, Laura Mahoney, Bloomberg News, 5/4/2018, https://www.bna.com/california-bills-acknowledge-n57982092512/
This is my planned (emphasis on “planned”) final thought on the Kavanaugh fracas since Justice Kavanaugh is now safely on the Court. The Blasey-Ford story was truly the perfect false allegation. She weaved a tale without a place and time, leaving aside the complete lack of witnesses. Thus, how could it be refuted? Any statement missing these details cannot be empirically examined. A defense based on alibis is almost impossible. It’s the perfect charge for igniting the mob for a political lynching.
Blasey-Ford’s tale should be treated no different from a clearly proven false allegation, with the exception of fitting a new pair of handcuffs on the perjurer. The story can’t elicit any action by anyone with adult reasoning, and needs to be handled with discretion and not in a public forum under the glare of partisan predators and their street mob. If it were otherwise, we’re back to political vengeance meted out by the Paris mob of the French Revolution.
A Parisian mob storms the Hotel de Ville in 1789.Deja vu all over again.
Sad that the Democratic Party has become the leading advocate of mob rule.
I plan no further comments, barring the elevation of Jerry Nadler (D, NY) to the chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee. He promises impeachment-mania to satisfy the bloodlust of the lefty street mobs.
Illustration showing a woman executed by hanging, for the practice of witchcraft, 1692. Published in ‘A Pictorial History of the United States’, 1845. (Photo by Interim Archives/Getty Images)
In the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690’s, the judge admitted “spectral evidence” (dreams and visions) into court, something criticized by Cotton Mather. The boosters for the Kavanaugh accusers are demanding the return of “spectral evidence” when they demand the accusers’ stories be accepted despite the evidence, lack thereof, or counter-evidence. They circumvent simple reason with the wrong question: Why would she (the accuser) lie? The proper question is, Did she lie?
Blasey-Ford testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sept. 27, 2018.
The “why” query solely relies upon a window into the accuser’s mind – the “spectral evidence” of 1692 Salem. Rather, the latter question moves us in a fact-based direction, even though the matter still may have no quick and easy resolution.
Did Blasey-Ford lie? I don’t know. That requires some evidence of intent. Though, it must be admitted that her testimony was riddled with an absence of critical facts and the presence of probable untruths. Her role in the saga is increasingly looking like a willing participant in a smear campaign. Her story isn’t aging well.
As for the others (Ramirez, Swetnick), their’s are fictions that belong in the “lie” category. The scorecard: 2 lies and 1 highly questionable tale.
RogerG
*Thanks to Kevin D. Williamson for raising the topic.
Joseph Nye Welch, general counsel for the US Army, at the McCarthy Hearings, June 9, 1954.
I can think of no better response to the shameful display of Democrats at the Kavanaugh hearings than the one given by Joseph Nye Welch, general counsel of the US Army, to Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1954: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency? Senator.”
No, few Dems in the US Senate have any sense of decency. Following the Lenin/Alinski playbook of the ends always justifying the means, they have championed baseless charges against Kavanaugh. Their goal is to stop the nomination at all costs, even if it means destroying people’s lives.
Blasey-Ford isn’t any help. Still, she can find no one to validate her story other than her personal feelings. Others mentioned in her story deny it. That’s not validation, Christine; it’s therapy.
If anyone thinks that there is any credibility to these wild claims, that person should stay away from the Kool-Aid punch bowl being served at MSNBC. In summary, there is no corroboration for any of it. And if there is no corroboration, there’s no there there. The whole thing is reminiscent of the child sex-abuse hysteria of the 80’s and 90’s and false accusations of campus rape by Mattress Girl, and those directed at a UV fraternity and the Duke lacrosse team. All won $$$$ in settlements for false charges and slander.
The Dems are playing the more-investigation card. Cut the crap. Translation: delay the nomination … forever. Their modus operandi involves making a baseless allegation no matter how wild, call for an investigation by anyone and everyone, gin up more baseless allegations, ad infinitum, till the Republicans or the nominee withdraws the nomination.
The problem for the more-investigations crowd: there’s no limiting principle. Easily conjured and baseless charges can be cooked up at any moment. There’s no end to it, particularly if you’re a conservative and Republican.
These claims would not be the stuff of investigation by a detective division or DA for long. There’s no corroboration and plenty of counter evidence. A statement would be taken and then the person would be shown the door. End of story. And that’s how real justice works.
Make no bones about it. From the gitgo, this is an attempt to prevent the president from exercising his Article II duty. And no concession is to be made for honor and decency.
Don’t conflate the Merrick Garland case with Kavanaugh. Garland’s nomination was treated according to the Biden Rule: no SC nomination approvals during a presidential election year. Sen. Biden (D, Delaware) stated it; the Republicans were faithful to it.
The rogues gallery of the shameless and repulsive:
Sen. Kamala Harris (D, Calif.)Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D, Calif.)Sen. Corey Booker (D, New Jersey)Sen. Mazie Hirono (D, Hawaii)Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D, Conn.)Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D, New York)Sheldon Whitehouse (D, Rhode Island)Sen. Charles Schumer (D, New York)
Many more senators with a “D” after their name – that means you, Sen. Dick Durbin – could be inducted into this hall of shame. Space requires some restraint by limiting the inductees to those constantly running to the microphones and cameras to defile reputations. These suspects come readily to mind.
And, of course, we have the bewildered:
Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Sen. Charles Grassley (R, Iowa)
Judiciary Committee chairman, Sen. Charles Grassley, in probable consultation with his colleagues, agreed to a week delay of the committee vote on the nomination upon the request of a Dem committee member. Quite rightly, a person could be excused for suspecting something was up. It was. An orchestrated hell broke loose – a shameful and disgusting orchestrated hell.
The Senate Republicans always appear flat-footed when it comes to women making charges against other Republicans and conservatives. The Dems are much more agile. Look at their dexterity in defending Bill Clinton. They smeared Ken Star, created new partisan media flagships in the form of MoveOn.org, rhetorically manipulated Clinton’s perjury and perversities into Republican prurience, and vilified the women accusers of Clinton’s adult sallies into rape and less abusive forms of abuse. And got away with it! Heck, his chief enabler, his wife, Hillary, was only 43 electoral votes shy of appointing liberals to the bench and wreaking other havoc on our republic.
Of course, lefty types dominate the newsrooms which makes a headwind for Republicans but fills the sails of the Dems’ political racing yachts. The Dems have a perpetual downwind advantage. So, credible charges of rape quickly go down the memory hole as hazy teenage charges of teenage antics of ancient vintage get the full rectal examination. Go figure.
Lets’ face it. The Kavanaugh imbroglio is about one thing: keeping a conservative from joining the 8 other potentates in black robes … at all costs! It stands to reason. Progressives wouldn’t be progressives if they weren’t on a mission to remake mankind in their own image. The state, not churches, is the engine for the recreation since their image doesn’t comport with the biblical one. So they fight tooth and nail to control the levers of power. It’s who they are. It means so very much to their political identity.
On the far end of the lefty side of the political spectrum, we have Lenin, a political operator whose credo entails the ends always justifying the means. The notion has seeped into the owner’s manual of politics for Dems in their drive for perpetual reform. The connection is not surprising since lately they have been ideologically sliding ever closer to the old and still-deceased goat in his Kremlin mausoleum. He endorsed state-sponsored terror. The Dems are only slightly more humane, stopping short of the blood on the wall and floor, even though we’re getting close to that. Simple decorum and decency be damned.
Their enthusiasm to get us back on the track to the pc-plagued nirvana means ginning up the hive, using anything at hand. And they have a political mre-equivalent in the estrogen-rich swarm of women’s marches and Mee Too.
Vagina caps for participants in the Woman’s March of January 2017.Woman in vagina suit at the Woman’s March in January 2017.
Everything gets tossed into that maelstrom including Supreme Court nominations, and especially Supreme Court nominations. If the Dems can’t find anything compromising in the nominee’s adult and professional background, just extend the time frame to childhood or at least those in-between years of 15-18. In fact, the teenager phase with its hormonal hyperactivity is probably dense with potentialities for later chicanery. The Dems have hit upon a rich source of tar for their brushes.
One thing about our modern overheated politics is the huge number of willing recruits into the legions of political cannon fodder. What budding NeverTrumper and SJW, with some long-ago life intersection with Kavanaugh, or not, wouldn’t relish the opportunity to step forward to take one for the team? Brush off Andy Warhol’s 15-minutes-of-fame moniker, but replace “fame” with “shame”.
The Folly of “No Woman Lies”
People with vaginas for headgear are chomping at the bit to enter Warhol’s hall of mediocrities. They have in mind a war with the white male patriarchy in the form of Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, the guys running CBS and NBC, and any of the other suits in charge of things. But bear in mind that along with the certified brutes we have Columbia University’s mattress girl, Emma Sulkowicz. Fully reminiscent of the sexual revolution’s hookup culture in the college dorm rooms of today, she had consensual sex with fellow student Paul Nungesser. Somehow she turned it into a cause replete with agitprop. (1)
The accuser: Emma Sulkowicsz and her dorm mattress and her supporters at Columbia University.The accused: Paul Nungesser.
The University of Montana tells its incoming freshman “Almost no one lies [meaning female accusers]” in its flabby attempt to assuage the female-genitalia-headgear squads. (2) Really, no woman lies? Emma did.
She filed complaints against Nungesser with the school and New York police and both concluded that action was unwarranted. Corroboration – you know, that thing that presupposes that we are not a god with the power to make pronouncements from a heavenly throne and therefore we must backup what we say – was lacking. There was much to contradict her. And she pursued him as a sexual interest for months after the purported “assault”. She concocted a sham and turned it into a cause.
For 3 years Sulkowicsz was the poster child of the campus “rape culture” movement. The hifalutin Feminist Majority Foundation and others heaped honors upon her for her “courage”. Harassment on campus – the real kind – haunted Nungesser till graduation. Then, in 2017, Nungesser sued Columbia. In the settlement, Columbia apologized and promised “that every student — accuser and accused, including those like Paul who are found not responsible — is treated respectfully and as a full member of the Columbia community.” (1) Mea culpa, but now the cause takes on a life of its own. The genie is out of the bottle.
The Silkowicsz-Nungesser case illustrates the enthusiasm of left-wing activists to turn the Fifth Amendment into the irrelevance of the Third. Lenin would be proud. It’s a rewrite of western civilization’s legacy of enlightened jurisprudence. The rights of the accused are supplanted by the ambiguous “preponderance” of believability and the need to protect at all costs the feelings of the accuser and her allegation from being questioned. The woman-as-accuser is our new god.
The event is only a small chapter in a long tale of moral monstrosities. They include the 2006 public lynching of the Duke lacrosse team, complete with the connivance of the local DA, and the subsequent vindication of the accused and Duke’s agreement to pay the 3 male students $20 million each. Rolling Stone in 2017 had to cough up $1.65 million to the Virginia Alpha Chapter of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity for its hit piece on the group for a false claim of gang rape. Additionally, the Rolling Stone writer of the article, Sabrina Erbin Erdely, was assessed $3 million for defaming Nicole Eramo, a Virginia University administrator, as the “chief villain”. (3)
The history of our current “rape culture” hysteria is a mixed one. There are real instances of real assaults along with mutual abuse and bald-faced lies. It’s really a story of the sexual revolution’s Sherman’s March through the culture and college life. Hookup, be sexually liberated, experience this integral part of the college experience, and consequences be damned. That’s the message and the kids live it. Don’t be surprised that we lose much of our cultural integrity along the way with a few out-of-court settlements and ruined futures to boot.
Private citizens accused of high-octane falsehoods, and few things are more high-octane than a charge of rape, have recourse to a court of law. Brett Kavannaugh, as a public figure, presents the perfect target. He can be smeared without consequence by any accuser and their huckstering Dem supporters. Support her, damn him, and expunge any semblance of fairness from our deliberations is their sickening message.
We can only hope that they won’t get away with it at the ballot box come November.
The Miasma of Polygraph Tests and Repressed Memories
Miasma by Brian Mashburn.
Unbeknownst to Brett Kavanaugh as he jumps in the water of the nomination approval process is that he just became chum for a partisan shark frenzy. Thrown in as accusatory chum for Dem sharks is Christine Blasey-Ford. She purports an attempted rape by Kavanaugh of 36(?) years ago but witnesses dispute her story. She’s fuzzy on the details. But she is to be believed despite her own 4 witnesses contradicting her and no other evidence.
Oh, she has passed a polygraph test. What about that test? For her examination, Blasey-Ford was asked only 2 questions with the important one being, Is your written statement truthful? This was no deep dive into her accusations. The examiner said that this was to avoid traumatizing the accuser. The test only tells us that she has a foggy recollection, since her written accusation is so foggy, but she believes it. But is it the “truth”?
A polygraph test measures certain bodily reactions such as heart rate and blood pressure to an interviewer’s questions. If the subject remains calm, ipso facto, she must be telling the truth, or so it is assumed. No, it’s only proof that she remained calm, period. Remaining calm can be an intuitive or coached skill. The test also might indicate that the subject believes in something that isn’t true. And aren’t we really concerned about getting to the truth and not ending proceedings with a measurement of a person’s serenity?
Criminal defense attorneys, and most jurisdictions in the country, find polygraph tests highly suspect. Here’s from one law firm’s website: “… a polygraph machine does not have any reliable capacity for detecting the truth or falsity of a statement…. While these [blood pressure and heart rate] may be indicators that a person is lying, they may also simply indicate that a suspect is feeling pressurized by the interrogation even if they are telling the truth.” (4)
What are we to conclude? Blasey-Ford has a long-in-the-tooth murky allegation and she remained calm as an examiner asked her about her “written statement” and not the details of it. Is this the stuff of truth or even justice? Hardly.
But she has “repressed memories”, which can be scientifically suspect and an excellent source of fairy tales. Many adults have languished, and are languishing, in prison due to testimony of “repressed memories”. The use of “repressed memories” catapulted Florida state attorney Janet Reno to fame and a seat in Bill Clinton’s cabinet as Attorney General. Sadly for Reno and the claque of psycho-therapist fans of “repressed memories”, the convictions are being reversed. It’s a poor rack for Dem”solons” to hang their hat.
It’s not that people can’t have “repressed memories”. The problem lies in the tactics in the conjuring of them into the rudiments of testimony. Even as strong a defender of the phenomena as Jim Hopper (Teaching Associate in Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry of Harvard Medical School) acknowledges that, “There is strong evidence that people can sincerely believe they have recovered a memory or memories of abuse by a particular person, but actually be mistaken [my emphasis]”. Further he writes, “There is strong evidence that such memories have led to accusations about particular events that never happened and accusations of people who never committed such acts.” For Hopper, the potential for misuse of the theory lies with the therapist. (7) True, very true.
“Repressed memories” as false accusations turned into false convictions? Enter Harold Grant Snowden, Bobby Finje, Janet Reno, and the “Miami Method” into the unhinged child sex-abuse saga of the 1980’s and 1990’s. (6)
Harold Grant SnowdenBobby Finje, 14, at the time of his rial.
The “Method” involved a brew of “expert” testimony, multiple child witnesses, and questionable physical evidence. The physical evidence is doubtful because it might, or might not, be supportive of the charges. The tests for sexually transmitted diseases produce positive results for conditions not necessarily sexually transmitted. The tests as corroboration don’t corroborate. And, by the way, conveniently for Janet Reno, the test samples were mysteriously destroyed. Witting or unwitting destruction of evidence by the state?
What of the multiple young accusers who allegedly confirm each other’s stories? The problem with their testimony is the same as with the testimony of the child-therapist “experts”. The children were saying things on the stand that came out of the interview sessions of therapists Joseph and Laurie Braga.
The characters of Joseph and Laurie Braga as depicted with kids in the made-for-tv movie “Unspeakable Acts”, 1990.
Later courts found their techniques suggestive and coercive to the point of planting false “memories” in the kids’ heads. Young adolescents playfully interact with an interviewer when the questioner starts presenting elements of a scenario no matter how outlandish. An Easter-bunny-believing kid can come to accept the reality of the Bragas’ new artificial reality. The kids on the stand were confirming a Braga story of the suspect’s abuse of children in oral/anal sex, spaceships, dismembering babies, and Satanic rituals. The Bragas added new meaning to the word “travesty”.
Both Snowden and Finje were exonerated. Bobby Finje, 14 at the time of the accusation, was acquitted by a jury. It took Snowden 11 years to be cleared on appeal. Many of the other convictions were overturned or sentences commuted by parole boards due to “substantial doubt” about guilt. (8)
Janet Reno still became Attorney General. She refutes the Peter Principle because she kept rising despite showing incompetence at lower levels.
Caution is wise when tinkering with the “repressed memory” stuff.
Today, caution is out the window as the old child sex-abuse hysteria feeds into another hysteria, the delirium to neuter Trump and conservatives. Blasey-Ford’s hypothetical “repressed memories” of attempted rape first appeared in marital counseling in 2012. That’s a 30+-year repressed memory. Important details are missing, the named 4 witnesses/participants deny it, and her verbal and written statements contradict her therapist’s notes.
The only non-corroboration corroboration is that of people who confirm that she mentioned the matter to them not in 1980-1-2-? but in … 2012. Kavanaugh’s name wasn’t attached to the story till 2016 or 2017.
So what do we have? We have a repressed memory of an event allegedly with many people present but none can validate. What can we conclude? We can conclude that she was serene while wired to a polygraph. Anything more than that belongs in the fever swamp of The Resistance.
Auditioning for the Role of Additional Accuser
The week-long interregnum in the Kavanaugh hearing was a busy time for the left-wing/Dem hive. Its minions went fishing for candidates to fill roles in the expanded cast of their not-based-on-facts docudrama, “The Sick and Evil Brett Kavanaugh”. It didn’t take long for auditioners to show up.
The New Yorker article on the second Kavanaugh accuser, Deborah Ramirez.
The New Yorker made a splash with a second accuser, Deborah Ramirez. She claimed Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a Yale party in the early 1980s. She was drunk; there are gaps in her memory; she pieced together the story over 6 days of flogging her memory and consultations with her attorney; and the red flag in these allegations: no reliable corroboration.
The New York Times couldn’t find anyone. The paper reported,
“The Times had interviewed several dozen people over the past week in an attempt to corroborate her story, and could find no one with firsthand knowledge. Ms. Ramirez herself contacted former Yale classmates asking if they recalled the incident and told some of them that she could not be certain Mr. Kavanaugh was the one who exposed himself.” (9)
Only one person could admit to hearing something like this from someone. That attempt at validation lies somewhere between not-for-certain hearsay and hallucination.
Next, we have the tall tales of Julie Swetnick.
Julie Swetnick
Her story upped the ante from mere attempted rape and exposure to serial gang rapist. Now we’re getting close to the Satanic-rituals-in-spaceships style of accusation that was evident in the 1980’s child sex-abuse fever. She spins a tale of Kavanaugh at 10 drug-induced gang-rape parties from 1981 to 1983. Further, she was raped at one of them in ’82. What she was doing at high school parties when she was a sophomore in college is anyone’s guess. (10)
And, as in all the others, no one can corroborate. How is it that serial gang rape in a small community of high school students – with one college sophomore in attendance – can go unnoticed for 35+ years? How is it that corroboration is so difficult about something so heinous and so well attended for such an extended period? Her claims evaporates any possible meaning of credible.
There have been other stories coming down through the ether equally as bizarre. The fact is, there appears to be no shortage of auditioners. My Demdar (radar capable of detecting Dem bogies) is activated. Lawyers and other handlers within the loose network of Dem operatives have fingerprints all over much of this.
This May Not Be A Criminal Court But It Certainly Looks Like A Lynching.
One of the Dem talking points in response to their clear intent to discard the presumption of innocence is to assert that the Kavanaugh hearing isn’t a criminal trial. Yes, and neither was the above.
The Dems intentionally miss the point. The presumption of innocence and the rest of the rights of the accused go to the heart of elementary fairness, one of the great projects of western civilization. That legacy was an attempt to establish and codify the simple rules of fairness. The rules are more than a matter of guidelines for court proceedings. They touch upon how we relate to one another in the broader course of our lives. The Dems have conveniently forgotten them in their zeal to smash their opponents.
Here’s a sample of the forgotten civilized principles that the Dems would do well to remember. (1) Before the accused can defend themselves, he or she must know the accusation in order to refute it. (2) The burden of proof must rest with the accuser since it’ll be forever hard to prove a negative – the demand that a person must prove that he or she didn’t do it. (3) The charge must be stated in a falsifiable manner. That is, it must be stated in way for it to be capable of being proven or disproven. It’s simple logic (see the writings of the philosopher Karl Popper). (4) And a charge against a person can’t be allowed to stand on the say-so of one person alone. More is required.
That’s how it should be, but that’s not how it is for the Dems when the swing seat on the Supreme Court is in the balance. It’s amazing how quickly they jettisoned our inheritance for a leg-up on those who disagree with them. Disgraceful. Disgraceful.
RogerG
Footnotes and Bibliography:
A full accounting of the Emma Sulkowicsz episode is found here: “It’s High Time Columbia’s Mattress Girl Was Discredited”, Mona Charen, National Review Online, 8/4/2017, https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/08/columbia-university-mattress-girl-emmas-sulkowicz-paul-nungesser-lawsuit-rape-accusation-exonerated/
Once more, Mona Charen: “What the Left and Right Don’t Get About Campus Rape”, Mona Charen, The Federalist, 8/31/2015, http://thefederalist.com/2015/08/31/what-the-left-and-right-dont-get-about-campus-rape/
“Rolling Stone to Pay $1.65 Million to Fraternity Over Discredited Rape Story”, Sydney Ember, 6/13/2017, NYT, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/business/media/rape-uva-rolling-stone-frat.html
“Why Polygraph Tests Are Not Admissible in Court”, Broden & Mickelson: Criminal Defense Attorneys website, 10/13/2015, https://www.brodenmickelsen.com/blog/why-polygraph-tests-are-not-admissible-in-court/
An excellent introduction into the mania about child sexual abuse at daycare centers can be found here: “The Child Terror”, PBS Frontine, originally aired on 10/27/1998. A synopsis and transcripts can be seen at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/terror/.
“Harold Grant Snowden”, The National Registry of Exonerations: A Project of the University of California Irvine Newkirk Center for Science and Scoeity, University of Michigan Law School & Michigan State University School of Law, https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=3871
“Child Abuse: Recovered Memories of Sexual Abuse”, Jim Hopper, https://www.jimhopper.com/child-abuse/recovered-memories/
A recounting of the 14 significant child sexual-abuse cases can be found here: “Day-care sex-abuse hysteria”, wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria
“Christine Blasey Ford Reaches Deal to Testify at Kavanaugh Hearing”, Sheryl Stolberg and Nicholas Fandos, New York Times, 9/23/2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/23/us/politics/brett-kavanaugh-christine-blasey-ford-testify.html
“Things Fall Apart: NYT Delivers Another Kill Shot To Kavanaugh Sexual Misconduct Fiasco”, Matt Vespa, Townhall.com, 9/27/2018, https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2018/09/27/things-fall-apart-nyt-delivers-another-kill-shot-to-kavanaugh-sexual-misconduct-n2522947
Today’s environmental activist owes much to Stalin. Oh, this is not the Stalin of the secret police, gulags, and purges. No greenie would stand for that … I hope. Rather, it’s the Stalin of muscular and hypothetically rational central planning. The commissars, operating as “experts”, establish the goals that are deemed critical to national and world survival and then hector society to achieve it. In our country, the browbeating occurs without the mass arrests. Rather, the hectoring encompasses the carrots of bribes (subsidies) and the sticks of regulations and taxes to engineer the “proper” individual behaviors to reach the target. Though, the whip-hand of the state always lurks in the background. The zealots don’t give either the goal or the rationale behind it a second thought. It’s full steam ahead … until reality hits.
Not surprisingly, an unintended and unpleasant reality for the enthusiasts and the rest of us will eventually hit. In the meantime, play up an impending doom to stampede people into accepting the grand design. For today, the holy grail is “clean” and “sustainable” energy in order to avoid Earth becoming Venus.
An artist’s conception of the surface of Venus.
So the goal of 100% “clean” and “sustainable” energy by X date is popping up in deep blue states. How’s that any different from Stalin’s Gosplan (Soviet economic central planning agency) announcing X amount of steel and wheat for each of year of the 5-Year Plan?
1948 USSR propaganda poster. It reads, “Let’s carry out the five-year plan in four years”.
Corporate America, increasingly simpatico with Earth First, is all-in for the crusade, especially the tekkie companies. Watch Verizon’s latest ad now running on tv screens nationwide (https://youtu.be/Sv1OVlyUyNY).
To reach Hawaii’s centrally planned goal, the beautiful Hawaii countryside will be scarred with vast solar and wind farms. Enviros bemoan the loss of the rainforest, except when it comes to solar panels and wind turbines. Apparently, food production takes a back seat to energy utopia.
Not to be outdone by lowly Hawaii, Governor Brown and the rest of the California politburo have jumped in with SB100. It proclaims the state to be 100% carbon-free by 2045, like Hawaii – a twisting of the old and venerable 5-year plan into a 27-year one. Anyway, a central plan is a central plan.
How’s that to be actualized? Geothermal and nuclear might be accepted into the “clean”family, but they will be the red-headed stepchildren. Pride of place for today’s greenie central planners goes to wind and solar. To make it all happen, let’s not forget the plentiful taxpayer subsidies, rate increases, burgeoning regulations, higher taxes, and, oh, a little rationing thrown in for good measure.
Be prepared on your next Hawaii hike or excursion to Mammoth to run into the likes of the following:
Wind turbines dot the landscape in Mojave, Calif.The 200-acre Waianae Solar Project in West Oahu, Hawaii.
Reaching the green goal will require an expansion of the forests of 300-foot towers with 100-foot blades – and their unceasing hum – and the Levittowns of black panels. Leaving aside the technical and cost burdens of the whole scheme, the landscape will be as different as Stalin’s Russia after the construction of his collective farms and contrived industrial projects … with similar results. More likely, prior to public and private bankruptcy, these efforts will begin to look like the abandoned towns and collective farms of Soviet Russia.
The abandoned Soviet city of Chukotka, eastern Siberia.Abandoned Soviet-era collective farm.
Markets Do It Better But Don’t Tell the Central Planners
That appears to be a more than a rare outcome in these best-laid plans of mice and men (to borrow from the poet, Robert Burns). Part of the problem is the nature of the people who are commandeering society: utopia-mongering fanatics and politicized “experts”. In both cases, we have people who claim to know more than they really do. Couple this with the fact that no one person or small group can know all the details and circumstances to manage the thousands and millions (if not billions) of individuals interacting in a society. Millions end up doing without as they live among the sun-bleached bones of decaying grandiose projects.
Hayek addresses a class at the London School of Economics in 1948.
F.A. Hayek called it the “knowledge problem”. He wrote,
“The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never [my emphasis] exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed [my emphasis] bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” (9)
Boy, that’s a huge slice of humble pie for our budding central planners in Sacramento, Hawaii, and Verizon corporate headquarters. Honestly, the Verizon folks are in it for a piece of the action, thereby affixing “crony” to “capitalism”.
What? They don’t know it all? Of course not, but that won’t stop them form forging ahead because they know the important stuff, or so they believe. If there are hiccups along the way and a few people get ruined, well, be like Stalin’s head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yeszhov, when he said, “When you chop wood, chips fly”. Eh, que será, será … and stay out of the way.
Stalin and Yezhov, 1937.
The chips?
The Holodomor, the Stalin-engineered famine in the Ukraine of 1932-33, as captured in an American newspaper from the time. Massive starvation was the result of a Soviet takeover of agriculture as per the 5-Year Plan, and the use of starvation as a weapon to quell opposition.
Hey, I Can’t Afford My Electricy Bill!
And there will be hiccups. Like the Ukrainian peasants in the Holodomor (see above), those wood chips will strike the most vulnerable: those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. The rich can always afford to go green. Boutique food stores and boutique energy, with a Tesla in the garage, easily fall within the financials of the well-heeled. But a person living paycheck-to-paycheck, or residing in a South-Central LA rental, must skip some things in order to pay the state-contrived electricity bill. By all means, get air conditioning but don’t use it. Sweat.
As for that utility bill in the mail, a visit to Southern California Edison website will give new meaning to the folly of the bake-a-cake-by-committee logic. There’s no simple answer to the question, how much do you pay per kWhr? The price is a “structure” with a morass of “tiers”, “time-of-use”, “baselines”, “incentives”, “high usage charges”, etc. The thing makes King Minos’s Labyrinth appear as straightforward as a Kansas highway. (1) Go to the footnote and see if you can make sense of it.
Example of a High Usage Charge on a Southern California Edison bill from their website.
The bloody thing, though, points in one direction: Californians pay 50-60% (depending on the calculations given the word salad of California regulations) more than the national average for seeking cool air, warmth, fresh food, and clean clothes. (2) You can avoid the whipping to your pocketbook by succumbing to solar panels on your roof. What you do at the end of their 10-15 year lifespan is hard to say. Still, you’ll get a ratepayer/taxpayer provided subsidy and the utility will be hogtied into accepting your feeble production into its grid. All of which means that somebody has to foot the bill. And that somebody is, as always, you, the ratepayer and taxpayer. Going green doesn’t mean going cheap, particularly if you want to avoid Lancaster’s 110° heat.
The Peasants Are Coming And They Look Angry.
The flinging wood chips don’t end with the heart-stopping utility bills. You’ve heard of racial disparities, right? Well, now we have greenie-inspired economic disparities which have a racial tinge. The poor, and really anybody below the per capita income of Malibu, will pay more as a portion of income to keep the lights on. And you know what? The peasants are looking for their pitchforks. The scene of a torchlight mob marching on Frankenstein’s castle may have some metaphorical relevance.
Not surprisingly, somebody has come forward to sue the California commissariat for its flirtation into greenie-energy wonderland. A consortium of civic-minded community leaders – The Two Hundred – has the gumption to sue the state for its bilge of laws and regulations that push the Sierra Club’s vision at the expense of anyone who won’t reduce nature to a Disney cartoon. (3) Expect the smear campaign from the usual suspects of powerful lefty hotheads in the state legislature, the well-funded collection of politically powerful environmentalist klans, not to mention the governor, to brand those who dare to rebel as greedy, self-serving Big Real Estate, Big Oil, Big Developers, Big Polluters, Big ….
Throwing out pejorative labels is a favorite tactic, that way they don’t have to be burdened with addressing the litigants’ arguments. Brand them and wait for the sympathetic legacy media to repeatedly broadcast the slander. It’s a well-worn script.
It’s interesting to ponder the rationale behind the lawsuit. The plaintiffs point to CARB’s recent greenhouse-gas mandates on new housing as having “a disparate negative impact on minority communities and are discriminatory against minority communities and their members”. One member of The Two Hundred, John Gamboa, put it more bluntly, “They [the state’s powerful green politicos and regulators] care more about spotted owls than brown babies”.
The logic is unassailable. Piling on the regulations and mandates will have a negative effect on the cost of everything from air conditioning to a bungalow to a pound of cabbage. The costs ripple through the supply chain of everything in the consumer market. No Mensa membership is required to foresee the pernicious impacts on anyone without an inherited portfolio. Already the state with the highest poverty rate (21%) – and ballooning to 8 million when housing costs are factored – California’s enviro extremism is slamming the already-exposed to even more exposure.
Germany’s natives were exposed to the ploy at the same time as it became fashionable in West Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Manhattan, Humanities Departments, and Fortune 500 corporate soirées. The Deutsche planners declared an 80% cut in demon CO2 by 2050, began closing down nuclear power plants, and went hell-bent into the dreamland of “renewables”. A hausfrau saw her electricity bill jump 50% in 10 years and realized that she was saddled with highest-priced juice in the EU ($0.37 per kilowatt-hour). (5) The road to ecotopia is paved with unpaid electricity bills.
Ecotopia?
Ontario, Canada, and Australia jumped on the same train to the asylum with ditto results.
So, seeking to end the slide to social and economic melancholia, The Two Hundred is suing the collective pants and REI-purchased hiking shoes off California’s eco-panderers in the state nomenklatura. It seems that the plaintiffs have available a whole bunch of laws to ban “disparate impacts”of a racial cast, and the laws are at the ready to weaponize legal briefs. The state’s Fair Employment and Housing Act and US Federal Housing Act stand poised to be used. If an employer can be dragged before the EEOC for too few hires in a “protected” category, why not haul into court for the same reason the gaggle of Sierra Club diehards in CARB (Calif. Air Resources Board)? Should eco-lefties with political power be immune to the identical sanctions faced by anyone else trying to make a living?
California Air Resources Board chairwoman, Mary D. Nichols.Nichols’s inspiration? Nikolai K. Baibakov, head of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) 1955-57 and 1965-85.
Success in court isn’t likely. The courts have a long track record of protecting government desk-jockeys from the consequences of their actions. Maybe that’s how it should be. If popular sovereignty means anything, we could simply vote the bastards out, except for the bulk of civil service and union-protected lifers in the bureaucracy’s bowels – and maybe that’s how it shouldn’t be. The growth of the administrative state has made the franchise nearly mute.
The empowered eco-central planners in the Dem one-party states only muck up the works. They claim to know what needs to be done and what is best for all 300+ million Americans as well as all other earthlings. Stalin would be proud of his progeny.
RogerG
Footnotes and Bibliography:
“Time-Of-Use (TOU) Rate Plans”, Southern California Edison, https://www.sce.com/wps/portal/home/residential/rates/Time-Of-Use-Residential-Rate-Plans/!ut/p/b1/pVJNc4IwEP0tHjhiNgQl7S1tLcL4UcVW4eIEjEgHA0Ja2_76RseL06p1mtPuztuXt7sPRWiGIsnfs5SrrJA83-VRe-57Dwy7tuUNg4EDDAedvjvqkQ6zNSDUADjxGOz7MXVZ1wvAc59aNni-MwHHCTB9dNAURShKpCrVCoV1IuZJIZWQai6kAYfYgErU2UJHGc91wpWoj2pmmXO5IyqTbIHCFudtGtOlyTERpk1jbHJHpxQvktgWLRILfBB-RtmFwf1Lk-kPrKp_30-1LK5WZiaXBZr9UL1fwBHT2LE000unN7zDFlDrALhxodP1hxowGRHwyAgGAWMEoH0AnDmCFpvmRbw_aMhkTKhWVYmlqETVfKt0eaVUWd8aYMB2u22mRZHmopkUawN-a1kVtUKzYyQK9Uad0ysjKLjyROcJR3A1of8HN2evm03EtCd33vvQU_7PlOX6eU3JpxnF7XH3qyemJo8pkFaeNhrfvJkzbg!!/dl4/d5/L2dBISEvZ0FBIS9nQSEh/
“Californians are paying billions for power they don’t need”, LA Times, Feb. 5, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-capacity/
A description of “The Two Hundred” can be found from their website: http://www.ccbuilders.org/project/the-two-hundred-project/
“California Climate Policies Facing Revolt from Civil-Rights Groups”, Robert Bryce, National Review Online, Sept. 15, 2018, https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/california-climate-change-policy-hits-poor-residents-hardest/
“Germany Could Be a Model for How We’ll Get Power in the Future”, Robert Kunzig, National Geographic Magazine, November 2015, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2015/11/germany-renewable-energy-revolution/
“Why California Has the Nation’s Worst Poverty Rate”, Ryan McMaken, Mises Institute, 1/17/2018, https://mises.org/wire/why-california-has-nations-worst-poverty-rate-1
“On the relevance of Hayek: centralized economic planning is dead”, Alex Cartwright, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 6/10/2013, https://home.isi.org/relevance-hayek-centralized-economic-planning-dead
“Beyond Hayek: A Critique of Central Planning”, Tibor R. Machan, 6/1/1988, https://fee.org/articles/beyond-hayek-a-critique-of-central-planning/
“Hayek: The Knowledge Problem”, Jeffrey A. Tucker, Foundation for Economic Education, 10/28/2014, https://fee.org/articles/hayek-the-knowledge-problem/
Watch this scene of traumatized Googlers trying to make sense of the fact that a good chunk of the country doesn’t have their “values”, and it showed by putting Trump in the White House. By all means, Googlers, don’t question the universality of your peculiar beliefs; question the motives of those who disagree with you. Heck, Googlers can’t even recognize their views as “peculiar” since they aren’t likely to rub elbows with those who think different. They get their prejudices reinforced, and reinforced ….
The leftist stream of consciousness on the Google campus stage on that November day of 2016 was littered with politicized code words. Take the word “values”, as in “our values” by Sergey Brin. The word is freighted with other words like “diversity”, and it ain’t the diversity of the opinion kind. For this monocultural groupthink, all diversity is limited to race, genitalia, and sexual appetites. Mix enough hijab-wearing lesbians into the workplace and, voilà, the only meaningful kind of “diversity” is created for this diversity-is-our-strength gang. Conservatives are tolerated … so long as they lie low. The other kind of diversity – as in diversity of thought – will be a casualty. In fact, it might be excised as “hate speech”.
James Damore, ex-Google senior engineer, after his 2017 firing for publishing on the company’s “free speech” forum an essay, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”.
It’s as if Googlers found themselves rejected by the election results, and rejection is a powerful source of anxiety for those ensconced in their self-reinforced and pampered cocoons. How to make sense of it since the mind must still grapple with the reality? Well, brand your opposition as morally and intellectually deficient. The other side is said to suffer from “tribalism” and “fear”. It’s not that adversaries simply disagree, but their disagreement is a product of an unrestrained id, a libido run amok. People like our Googlers have such a high self-regard that no concession can be made to the validity of an opposing point of view. Therapy on the Google campus was reduced to fortifying the attendees’ sense of superiority and convincing them that Darwin’s missing link resides in red America.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin at the post-election confab.
There was an early light-hearted moment. A rousing cheer came from the crestfallen when Brin announced the success of pot legalization. Now that says something. Either intoxication is a preferred state of mind for Googlers, or many of them have all the seriousness of Animal House’s Bluto at a frat party. Or it could simply be a Brin joke. Anyway, it probably isn’t Joe Sixpack material.
The expected response came out of the Google inner sanctum after the video went viral. The declaration went along the lines of “we’re biased but trust us”. Here’s a good portion of it: “Nothing was said at that meeting, or any other meeting, to suggest that any political bias [we’re biased] ever influences the way we build or operate our products [trust us]. To the contrary, our products are built for everyone, and we design them with extraordinary care to be a trustworthy source of information for everyone, without regard to political viewpoint [trust us]”.
Maybe the word “monoculture” is inadequate. The Borg of Star Trek fame is gaining relevance as the more appropriate metaphor.
The Borg or Silicon Valley/blue America?Borg drones or the Google workforce?
WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 11: Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill April 11, 2018 in Washington, DC. This is the second day of testimony before Congress by Zuckerberg, 33, after it was reported that 87 million Facebook users had their personal information harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The term “monoculture” had its origins in farming with the production of a single crop. A monoculture does exist, but it isn’t a horticultural one or the type often measured by melanin counts or genitalia by hyperactive SJW’s. Socially speaking, we have a singular, smothering orientation to the world – a monoculture of the mind – chauvanistically present in the leadership and dwellers of our key social institutions: media, arts, entertainment, education, government agencies, foundations, etc., with tentacles deep into the corporate boardroom. Today’s left is obsessed over a monocultural patriarchy. Ironically, it is they, left-progressives, who have prevailed in creating an unacknowledged monoculture of the mind. In the video below, Zuckerberg admits to Silicon Valley being “an extremely left-leaning place”.
I bring this up not to parrot the crowd in the Sean Hannity zone. Heaven knows, Zuckerberg is in a difficult spot with Facebook’s problems with privacy and complaints of political censorship. Before the Senate, he looked like an exposed adulterous husband trying to keep his marriage together. Pity is only natural as he occupies the lonely seat in front of our elected publicity hounds.
Next comes the tortuous ritual of admitting the left-wing preeminence while denying any effect of it. It’s a claim of superhuman qualities once reserved for the heavenly host. Apparently, left-wing people don’t produce left-wing products. Mark me skeptical.
I just saw the full Nike ad on Thursday Night Football. It was repeated in college football broadcasts Saturday. It was a seemingly innocuous message mostly in homage to the “marginalized”, replete with a girl boxer wearing the mandatory hijab — I don’t know how that squares with the early feminist sacramental act of bra-burning. The whole kaleidoscope was emceed by a resurrected Kaepernick, the guy who soiled himself by soiling the flag. The message was never to be dissuaded from your “dreams”, an adolescent primal scream without an inkling of mature judgment if there ever was one.
Honor goes to Michael Ramirez for his capture of the ludicrous spectacle in a single image. Here it is:
Can any objective observer come away from yesterday’s Kavanaugh hearings with anything but disgust? Democrats on the committee, with a straight face, petulantly disrupted the chairman from even making his opening remarks. Then, a few spectators jumped up shouting spiteful epithets at Kavanaugh, so much so that his wife and daughters had to be escorted from the room under police protection. Has today’s hard progressivism become a synonym for mob rule?
That debacle yesterday wasn’t an accident. There was coordinated agency by the Dem caucus to make it happen. Everything from conference calls to distributing tickets to fevered activists created an unsafe atmosphere for Kavanaugh’s family while making a mockery of the “august” Senate. The decent thing for the Dems to do would be to publicly apologize. Don’t hold your breath.
As a point of comparison, look at the friendly and light-hearted treatment of Elena Kagan by Sen. Graham (R, S.C.) in 2010 alongside the fracas yesterday in the comment section below.
Sen. Lindsay Graham from 2010.
Sen. Kamala Harris and the other Dems at the recent Kavanaugh hearings.
