I have no plans to ever return to California for a visit or otherwise, absent a necessity involving a dear friend or relative. Every visit after my relocation to Montana has only reminded me of the reasons for my departure in the first place, and it’s only gotten worse.
Concerns for the state of my birth are not limited to me. Traditional Democrats of many generations, such as the Alioto family of San Francisco, are shocked by the descent of their city into lawlessness. They have yet, though, to come to grips with San Francisco being the canary in the coal mine. Large swaths of the state are sliding into the same dystopia. The problem is more than San Francisco.
For Angela Alioto, ex-member of the SF Board of Supervisors and Board president and daughter of the famous two-term mayor Joseph Alioto, she exclaimed that “It’s not my city” in a recent interview. You can watch it below. Pay close attention to her description of the near-death experience of a retired SF Fire Commissioner confronting violent homeless drug addicts on the request of his elderly mother just below her window and doorstep. He was more than assaulted. He was maimed with a crowbar and left with probable brain damage.
Not every city in the state has fallen into such despair, but they all experience the decay to some extent. Filth and mayhem, like smog, seldom respects boundary lines on a map. One thing’s for sure: no Californian can escape the state’s predilection to decriminalize various social pathologies, remove vagrancy laws off the books, tax and regulate their residents to high heaven, expunge entire criminal statutes through flagrant non-enforcement, etc., etc. When a person is more likely to face hard time for driving an unsmogged car than repeated smash-and-grabs, you know that a majority of the state’s electorate has edged closer to delusional.
Californians won’t get a better run state until a more well-balanced electorate shows up. One must face up to the fact that this state of affairs wasn’t an accident. It was voted into office. Please grab a cup of coffee and watch the interview. It might influence your decision to pay a visit to the City by the Bay.
RogerG
Watch it here:
* If you have difficulty viewing the video, that’s because it went “private”. It happened after I initially linked it on Facebook.
Screenshot of the Portland Police Bureau “LGBTQAI2S+ and Queer Policy – Introduction and Training” video. (photo from Portland Police/YouTube)
Portland’s cops were subjected to a characterization of life that is stranger than anything in George Orwell’s 1984 from 1949 (see below). The “Pronoun Training” was actually pure indoctrination in a set of highly contestable beliefs where self-delusion is to be treated as non-delusion. This episode is stranger than anything Winston and Julia were expected to believe by their interrogator O’Brien in Orwell’s story.
The “stranger than fiction” notion could be attributed to Lord Byron, or maybe it was Mark Twain when he wrote, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” I guess that Twain meant that good fiction must be believable and therefore must stick to possibilities that are limited to the imagination of the author. Real truth, by contrast, isn’t so constrained.
Of course, you’d have to believe in “real truth” which many younger generations have been schooled to assume doesn’t exist. “Real truth”, after all, is a “construct” of the systemic rule of the powerful over the weak, which is the blind faith on our college campuses, and pure Marxism. The stifling dogma leaves the campus mind-censors free to make truth into whatever they claim. Their “truth” became instantly compelling after they succeeded in their long march through the institutions and into the c-suite, government, media, schools, the NGO world, etc., and it’s everywhere.
In such a world, as in Orwell’s 1984, 2+2=5. It is indeed strange for the life of today to conform in so many unexpected ways to the world of Orwell’s 1949 depiction of his fictious Oceania. Language is deformed to make 2+2=5 the “real truth”, or in our case XY people to be treated as XX (and vice versa). Thus, we have many mini-O’Briens running around as consultants getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to convince us that 2+2=5.
By the use of a rhetorical distinction between “gender” and “sex”, the now inconsequential sex-at-birth is magically replaced by the now more compelling sex-of-the-mind, all accomplished with a little word play. And cops, and everyone else, are expected to act as if the artificial reality is actual reality. Whew, the mind reels at the multiple realities like the permutations of the multiverse coming off DC/Marvel drawing boards.
The understandable reaction when confronted with gibberish is to rebel. Believe me, in the span of the 30-year career in education, I’ve been exposed to a lot of “training” in what was absolute drivel. I have an appreciation for the cops’ critical reaction to this latest blather.
“Patronizing,” “childish,” “offensive,” “garbage,” “unnecessary”, “This training is vile”, and the like were indicative of the backlash from attending cops in anonymous feedback (see below). Rather than exercise a little prudent self-criticism and reexamination, the consultants heaped abuse on the recipients by referring to the comments as examples of “racism, ableism, or white supremacy”, and therefore more “trainings” will be necessary to convert the subjects to the approved way of thinking, and a bigger tab beyond the current $440,000 consultant’s fee on the back of Portland’s taxpayers. The paid consultant Dennis Rosenbaum, the O’Brien in this real life story, stands to get richer as he works to convince others that the unbelievable is believable.
This isn’t “training”; it’s indoctrination of the kind routinely found in totalitarian regimes. One can only hope that the indoctrination remains “nice”, but “nice” frequently morphs into “compulsory” with sanctions for not conforming to the zeitgeist. For not having the approved thoughts, which will always slip out in unanticipated ways, your life may be ruined. We’ve gone way beyond accepting 2+2=5. Indeed, modern life is stranger than old fiction.
RogerG
Read more here:
* Much thanks to Ryan Mills in his article, “Portland Cops Rip ‘Hilariously Ridiculous’ Training on How to Interact with ‘LGBTQIA2S+ and Queer Communities’”, 5/2/2023, National Review Online, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/portland-cops-rip-hilariously-ridiculous-training-on-how-to-interact-with-the-lgbtqia2s-and-queer-communities/
* The actual feedback from the “Pronoun Training” can be found at https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Equity_Training_Comments_Redacted-1.pdf
October 2020 – Scientific AmericanNature – 15 October 2020
The communist rulers in the old Soviet Union gradually came to believe that opposition to them was more than a different point of view but symptomatic of mental illness. Dissent from Karl Marx’s mental prism was tantamount to being emotionally disturbed. They developed a form of pseudo-scientific psychiatry to suppress disagreement, and the same thing is germinating in the United States: the distortion of science to pursue political ends.
In the USSR of the 1960’s-80’s, a pseudo-scientific jargon was invented to give The Science the sound of legitimacy. An entire fake science was cobbled together by a professor of Soviet psychiatry, Andrei Snezhnevsky of the impressive sounding USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. His diagnosis of “sluggish schizophrenia” and “delusion of reformism” was applied to anyone whose beliefs led them to renounce their atheism, attempt to immigrate, engage in protests, or practice a faith. If you think that it’s not happening here, think again.
Andrei Snezhnevsky of the USSR Academy of Medical SciencesLeonid Plyushch in 1976, after his release from a mental asylum where he was held for years by the Kremlin. (photo: Agence France-Presse)
Let’s be clear, “The Science” must not be confused with science. It’s an institutionalized variant of science that carries with it all the norms of organizational man/woman/whatever. People in organizations don’t behave like man/woman/whatever in their natural and private settings. A group personality coalesces around shared expectations and norms and frequently morphs into shared opinions. Once a shared attachment to collectivism takes root, for instance, the organizational politicization of science will soon follow. It’s happened, and is happening.
Our science is increasingly politicized to promote highly contentious opinions. Disagreement is persecuted as ignorance and bigotry, and maybe even attributed to a disturbed emotional comportment. Ideologically partisan journalists such as Chris Mooney in his books “The Republican War on Science” (2005) and the follow-up “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science — and Reality” come close to imitating Andrei Snezhnevsky when they hide their glaring political opinions under the cloak of “The Science”.
Chris Mooney
The tactic of branding your political opponents with dementia isn’t limited to Mooney. Express some skepticism about the extravagant and ideologically tinged claims on highly debatable issues from climate change to transgenderism to systemic racism and you’ll face a fusillade of abuse and threats to your livelihood, and maybe jail time if they can get away with it. Having these forbidden thoughts isn’t a career enhancer. You’ll be erased off the ledger of respectable humanity. The word “denier” serves the same purpose as “sluggish schizophrenia”.
Zeks (gulag prisoners) in Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” often referred to “beyond the wire” (or something like it) for the world outside the camp. In today’s politics masquerading as science, the equivalent of zeks, or “deniers”, are accused of straying “beyond the wire” of the approved mental prison – synonymous with “scientific consensus”. Straying beyond the wire is the excuse for the gatekeepers – er, mental prison guards – to put The Science at the service of a particular political party, the Democratic Party, who helps keep the fence electrified, and at the disservice of the other who questions the very existence of the camp in the first place. Political endorsements by science figureheads, organizations, and their publications have followed, and to the detriment of their reputations as they come to be viewed as just another collection of political hacks.
It hasn’t occurred to the guards that naturally non-political organizations and their participants – think professional sports: NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, etc. – alienate half, maybe more, of their clientele when they identify with one side in the country’s political divide. It’s a no-brainer: endorse Democrats, anger Republicans. At least half the public, maybe more, begins to see them as little different from a super-PAC. Buying a ticket or product of the compromised enterprise is perceived as the equivalent of a political donation. The same political self-labeling occurs when scientists step into partisan battles and the culture war.
Phil Jackson, the famous coach of the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers, doesn’t watch the NBA because it’s too political (see below). When players were allowed to festoon their jerseys with political slogans and obscuring their names, his grandkids recounted a particular play with “Justice went to the basket and Equal Opportunity knocked him down.” It’s funny if it wasn’t so tragic to the sport. And now The Science is turning off people in like manner.
The culture war, or revolution, has a clear partisan flavor to it. The high-stakes contest is one of revolution and counterrevolution with the D’s in the vanguard of the revolution and R’s trying to put the brakes on it. The journal “Nature” in 2020 jumped with both feet into the cultural and partisan war in a ringing endorsement of Joe Biden. In an editorial that could have come from Biden’s campaign staff – or Stalin’s chief prosecutor in the show trials, Andrei Vyshinsky – they branded the R’s candidate as “accelerating climate change, razing wilderness, fouling air and killing more wildlife — as well as people.” Trump may be a lot of things, but singlehandedly obliterating the planet is a bit of a stretch. This is the language of the zealot, not a lab scientist grappling with a hypothesis.
Not to be outdone, as if on cue, “Scientific American”, the sister magazine to “Nature” (same publisher, Springer Nature), issued a partisan clarion call in an October 2020 editorial titled “Scientific American Endorses Joe Biden” (see below). Their hyperbole descends into the same political septic tank: “The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science.” The hubris is astounding. They claim to own The Science and the zeks must be kept from straying “beyond the wire”.
Eight term Democrat representative Rush Holt, Jr., was chosen to lead the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the publisher of “Science” and other prominent journals. A partisan bias in The Science?
But they don’t own the science; they own a collection of political opinions. At the root of these opinions is an affection for collectivism. It’s the one thing that unites the denizens of The Science. Somehow, in their mind, collectivism became the thinking man’s (or woman’s/whatever) ideology. They were perhaps blinkered by an academic marination in it without knowing it. It was embedded in their insular classroom instruction as undergrads. Hayek’s freedom-based spontaneous order, or anything like it, was never allowed to grace their intellects.
A constrained education is woven with an endemic apocalypse-mongering which turns all issues into calls for collectivist action: it’s existential and therefore we can’t afford free markets, freedom of conscience, capitalism, or anyone practicing real science which is based on a healthy skepticism of extravagant claims. A healthy scientific intellect would raise eyebrows at hysterical calls to eliminate an entire car fleet and transportation system in the span of twenty years. A healthy scientific intellect would raise eyebrows at burdening an already overstretched grid with electric-everything and radically shifting it to low-density energy after banning high-density. This isn’t science. It’s ideology on the march.
Not unlike The Science in the Soviet Union. The gambit is the same: make the science an adjunct of the politics and then weaponize it against your political opponents. It’s a very dangerous thing to do for a country in an increasingly perilous time. It’ll ruin us. Khruschev did say, after all, “We’ll bury you.” Well, we’ll bury ourselves.
RogerG
Read here for more:
* Much thanks to the work of Christine Rosen of the American Enterprise Institute in “The Folly of Nature’s Biden Endorsement”, 3/30/2023, National Review Online, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/04/17/the-folly-of-natures-biden-endorsement/
* “NBA champion coach Phil Jackson says he doesn’t watch basketball anymore because it got too political”, Lauren Sforza, The Hill, 4/23/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/other/nba-champion-coach-phil-jackson-says-he-doesn-t-watch-basketball-anymore-because-it-got-too-political/ar-AA1aeBfW
* “Scientific American Endorses Joe Biden”, Editors, The Scientific American, 10/1/2020, at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientific-american-endorses-joe-biden1/
Teens swarm into downtown Chicago in a scene of mayhem.Three still frames of a woman getting assaulted by the vicious teens which is the subject of a short Twitter video below.
Cities from the west coast to the Midwest to the east coast are dangerous, filthy nightmares. No exaggeration. Youths in Chicago this weekend welcomed their new lefty, crime-coddling mayor, Brandon Johnson, to office with a rampage through the downtown. His honor limply criticized the behavior and then went on to say, “It is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities in their own communities.”
It is not constructive? To demonize? These kids are demonizing themselves. In fact, they’re demonizing their cities. Watch the Twitter video of a teen swarm beating a woman senseless at:
To catch the viciousness, pay close attention at the very beginning. You’ll see her go down in a maelstrom of fists and kicks. This could happen to anyone, and is happening to anyone. People are leaving these hellscapes and the dimwitted in office have no answer but excuses and more social workers.
That’s right, they promise to hire more sociology majors. It’s what you’d expect from a paid Chicago Teachers Union organizer who is fully marinated in lefty groupthink.
Anecdotes are piling of U-Hauls getting harder to find and businesses seeking safer spaces beyond the reach of the flash-mobs. Whole Foods shut its recently opened store in San Francisco. Heck, it’s getting harder to find a Walgreens or CVS in the city by the bay. REI, that caterer to white-collar trekkers, has decided to close its Portland outlet due to theft and break-ins. You name the place – LA, Minneapolis, Seattle, New York City – and they are turning John Carpenter of “Escape from New York” into a prophet.
“Democracy dies in darkness.” — From the masthead of The Washington Post.
President Joe Biden speaks about infrastructure spending, much of it greenie, at the La Crosse Municipal Transit Authority, Tuesday, June 29, 2021, in La Crosse, Wisconsin. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
Yes, democracy, and civilization also, dies in darkness – the “darkness” of ignorance and foolishness. Few things today are more foolish than the EV craze and the climate-change mania that undergirds it. Even more absurd is the renewed faith in central planning to ramrod the country into the foolishness. We are reliving the failed Bolshevik experiment.
What precipitated my reaction? I ran into a Yahoo! Finance article by Rick Newman, “Hold on tight to your gas-powered car” (see below). There’s much to recommend the piece, but much of it is still predicated on slipshod, ideologically laden “science”. The people who write about climate change and most everything related to it rely on arguments from authority. That’s the lazy man’s rationale for people who never developed an understanding of science and the scientific method. They’ve got the ideology down – man is an inveterate defiler of the environment – but depend on “experts” who are similarly corrupted by ideological biases to lend a large measure of confirmation bias to the scribbler’s contentions. It’s frilly political theater until it metastasizes into central planning – the Sovietization of life – and then becomes dangerous to the health of a civilization.
At the point of Sovietization, life will spiral downward. Remember the Soviet Union? Maybe not, for anyone who reached puberty after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Biden and his cohorts are busy resurrecting central planning on American soil. A newly announced policy issued from a DC commissariat, the EPA – much like the Bolshevik’s Gosplan (the USSR’s economic planning agency) and its Five-Year Plans – will punish owners and producers of internal combustion engines (ICE) with leaps in emissions’ standards to kill them off and herd the population into EV’s (see below). Classic central planning.
Long lines to buy shoes in 1970’s Soviet Union.Empty shelves in the government stores, 1970’s and 80’s.Waiting in line for clothes at a government clothing store.Long lines waiting to charge for electric vehicles at a California charging station, 2022.
Whether we’re talking about Stalin’s industrialization/dekulakization plans or Biden’s zero-emission schemes, they are reflections of one another and will suffocate prosperity. How? Why? Much of it has to do with Hayek’s knowledge problem: something as multitudinous and multifaceted as a society cannot be managed by a small group of centralized “experts” or “elites” (see below). No one knows and cannot know enough to do it, except God. Not surprisingly, a delusion of godliness is the companion of central planning.
When top/down controls are issued, expect the litany of unintended consequences. In prior efforts to dictate choices regarding fuel efficiency, cars became “light-weighted” and accident fatalities increased. And the gains in fuel efficiency unexpectedly led to more fuel consumption, not less – something heartily detested by the gang at the Sierra Club.
SNAFU, the refrain of WWII GI’s: situation normal all #&?%!@ up. And the prominence of snafu rises with the boldness of the plan, like forcing 330 million people in the span of a couple of decades to relinquish the second biggest investment in their adult lifetime and coerce them into an electrified and inconvenient alternative chosen by their commissars.
Biden’s EPA commissar, Michael Regan, announces new tailpipe emissions standards.
Of course, with this clique of dullards, the failures of central planning are to be met with . . . more central planning. They’ll never admit failure. Don’t underestimate the creativity of these powerful zealots to conjure more reasons to centrally plan, thus this latest round of EPA ukases. The climate-change gambit has been particularly expedient in expanding the Leviathan. A casualty of it all will be the existence of markets, if you discount the mangled kind that limply survives the administrative state’s waterboarding. Central planning and healthy markets are matter/antimatter to each other.
Markets are what happens when buyers and sellers spontaneously come together under conditions of freedom. They cannot exist without personal freedom. As with markets, freedom and central planning cannot coexist. A huge part of the sales job to accept the assault on freedom is to convince a governing chunk of the franchise that freedom is bad, even on the most mundane things. You are shamed for wanting a SUV with a v-8. You see, in repeated shouts of fevered gibberish, you’ll be browbeat into believing that buying that 5.7L Chevy Yukon will rain down on the planet extreme weather and California’s forever-drought. Hysteria works great to make people want to be controlled.
As if in a real-world experiment, watch the home base of the frenzy, California, descend into feudalism.
Biden is following California’s lead. And all for what? The political leverage afforded by politicized “science”? Physics is bastardized into the simplicity of Lego blocks or Lincoln Logs. Forget about the physics of quantum mechanics, the general theory, and energy pathways. The complex workings of nature are debauched by ignorant die-hards with a cause. In their playroom of the mind, the temperature of the multi-layered atmosphere of varying composition can be regulated like a finger pressing a touch screen on a wall thermostat. Need to lower global temperatures? Just command an x-amount reduction in fossil fuel usage for an x-amount temp decrease; it’s all so simple in the mind of a child. But both the prognosis and cure are what you’d expect from people more influenced by the unstable teenager Greta Thunberg than the lessons of real science.
The hysterical teenager Great Thunberg.
Combine the crusaders with scientists who have forsaken science for politics, and we have the makings of central planning. After all, what were the Bolsheviks, as harbingers of central planning? They were Marxists. Marxists are followers of Karl Marx as he tried to turn history into science, the “science” of his totalitarian revolution. Add a little Lenin with his “vanguard elite” to lead the revolution and direct the construction of the utopia and we’re back to central planning. And we get to relive the Soviet experience of an ossified economy of chronic food shortages and empty store shelves.
Karl Marx was right about one thing when he wrote that historical incidences occur “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. Welcome to another one of Biden’s farces, this time through his EPA commissariat.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Hold on tight to your gas-powered car”, Rick Newman, Yahoo! Finance, 4/12/2023, at https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hold-on-tight-to-your-gas-powered-car-193629839.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall
* “Biden administration proposes toughest auto emissions standards yet: The rules, which would dramatically reshape the auto industry, could cut as much as 10 billion tons of carbon emissions by 2050, the EPA projected”, Rose Horowitch, NBC News, 4/12/2023, at https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-administration-proposes-toughest-auto-emissions-standards-yet-rcna79304. —- It’s a press release that solely functions as a rah-rah statement for draconian cuts in vehicle emissions to herd the population into EV’s. You have to dig deeper to find the specific actions that drive the policy.
* “Biden-Harris Administration Proposes Strongest-Ever Pollution Standards for Cars and Trucks to Accelerate Transition to a Clean-Transportation Future”, EPA, 4/12/2023, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-proposes-strongest-ever-pollution-standards-cars-and
* For Hayek’s knowledge problem thesis: “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, F. A. Hayek, at https://fee.org/articles/the-use-of-knowledge-in-society
What was Anheuser-Busch, Inc., thinking? For that matter, what was Disney, Inc., thinking? Dylan Mulvaney as the face of Bud Light? Add the bigs at MLB, the NFL, NBA, and NHL to the socially detached. The list of corporate heavies insulting their customer bases is quite long. They aren’t even aware that they have positioned themselves at the edge of a culture war. A beer brand strongly identified with the lunch-pail crowd decides to make a boy-turned-girl the face of its product. Did it occur to anyone in the c-suite that this could be a problem? I guess not. Why? The mediocrities at the helm of our big corporations are people completely out to lunch, out of touch, or what have you.
I suspect the disconnect has much to do with something identified by Charles Murray in his book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010”. An intensifying social nepotism among people of increasingly uniform background has created an insular managerial class ignorant of the world beyond their bubble, much like the nobility at Versailles. Thus, they are caught flat-footed when an advertising strategy that is broached at a wine soiree goes awry. It only sounds compelling to those similarly closeted. Outside, for the rest of us, it’s absolute looney tunes.
This is a girl, Alissa Heinerscheid, the vice president of marketing for Anheuser-Busch, with the monotonous social resumé of her class: the same elite schooling and social entanglements and experiences. They don’t drink the stuff but are identical to the other inhabitants of corporate headquarters. They have the sensibilities of the Harvard life but lack an acquaintance with regular life. I suspect that the same happenstance applies to every institution under the management of the socially privileged and cocooned.
Alissa Heinerscheid, Anheuser-Busch ad exec.Alissa Heinerscheid as a Harvard undergrad at one of her Isis Club’s bashes.
Credentials are no protection from the bumbling mediocrities who have such great power over livelihoods. We are living through a time when “elite” and “expert” makes one cringe, like watching the face of transgenderism become the face of Bud Light.
Be my guest and watch the Sky News report on the story.
Teacher union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)Janet Protasiewicz speaks at her election night party in Milwaukee after she defeated former Justice Dan Kelly for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. (Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)
Our national decomposition shows little sign of abating. Elections in Wisconsin and Chicago indicate that there remains an appetite for decay.
Another word for decline or decomposition of a culture, civilization, or nation is degringolade. Whichever word is used, however, we are experiencing it. Nature isn’t doing it to us. We are doing it to ourselves. The precipitating factor is what is bouncing between our ears. A sizeable chunk of the electorate, without even knowing it in many cases, is sold on toxic neo-Marxism in the guise of modern progressivism. Today, progressivism and this updated Marxism are synonymous. I’m beginning to sound like a broken record since I’ve certainly mentioned it often enough but can’t get away from it. It’s constantly resurfacing in many places around the country.
This isn’t the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson. As a refresher, this current edition is a relatively modern refashioning of Karl Marx’s paradigm: the systemic oppression of the oppressed who are defined by an ever-fungible list of outgroups covering everything from XY girls to the poor to anyone with high melanin counts. To the rescue in this blinkered ideological schematic is a complete, top to bottom, inside and out, overhaul of all societal arrangements from the family to property, a thoroughgoing Marxist revolution. Sound familiar? Read BLM’s mission statement before it was scrubbed clean of too much revelatory information (see below). We’ve proven to be quite creative in defining the “oppressed”, or victim groups. For greenies, you might add the mother goddess Gaia (earth) to the list. Anyway, this latest edition fairs no better than the kind that lurked behind the Iron Curtain or Mao’s China or is lurking in North Korea and Cuba. It is a sacking of our heritage and thrusting the country into despair.
The canary passing out in the coal mine in this moment of our evisceration is urban America. Our cities are crumbling, and so are the states dominated by them. The story has been acted out before. We are historically rhyming with 4th and 5th-century AD Rome. The Roman Empire didn’t go out in a boom but a whimper. The cities became unlivable, mired in high taxes, crumbling infrastructure, a deterioration of services, lack of security, and overburdening controls. Who’d want to live there? Apparently, many didn’t by the 5th century. The population of the city nearly emptied from over a million in the 1st century AD to 30,000 by the 5th. Other similarly weakened urban places suffered. People flocked to fortified estates, monasteries, and towns with natural defenses. It’s the beginning of feudalism.
Feudalism is returning. Today, in the good ‘ol USA, people are rushing to states and places where 3-strikes laws mean something, where taxes and bureaucracies aren’t bleeding producers white, where parking your car on the street in front of your house isn’t an invitation to vandalism. In other words, where neo-Marxism/progressivism is held in disrepute.
Where boys’ and girls’ bathrooms are separated by a wall. Where nature’s chromosomal distinction hasn’t been buried by the linguistic manipulations of pronouns and “birthing person” for “woman”. It’s just the opposite in our urban neo-Marxist silos. Entirely mired in the mindset, many of our cities and urbanized states are busy advancing the revolution by eliminating other distinctions such as the one between criminal and law-abiding. Judges and local potentates treat criminals as victims and their real victims as . . . well . . . .
As if we need any more evidence, Whole Foods announced yesterday (4/10/2023) that it was “temporarily closing” its 65,000 square foot San Francisco outlet at Eighth and Market, the Trinity section, that it just opened last year. According to a company spokesman, “If we feel we can ensure the safety of our team members in the store, we will evaluate a reopening of our Trinity location.” The area has been plagued by brutal beatings, stabbings, killings, and accidents in recent weeks. Too few cops and law-unenforcement is making San Francisco look like 5th-century Rome (see below).
These arbiters of revolutionary justice in places like San Francisco have their own vocabulary to push this cultural revolution. “Decarceration” is the go-to for releasing offenders to reoffend, just call it “low-level crime”, which is another word for “inconsequential” to Soros-backed DA’s – inconsequential to everyone but the person left battered, bruised, and bleeding in the subway. Barbarian invasions aren’t doing it to us, unless barbarian refers to the urban powerful who have drunk the neo-Marxist Kool-Aid. Your progressive DA, judges, city council, mayor, governor, and state legislature are performing the role of the Visigoths and their King Alaric in laying waste to Rome in 410 AD.
Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD.Minneapolis in the 2020 summer of riots.
The only recourse for those not too fond of the mayhem is to vote with their feet. Get out! But these are democracies – surprise! The corruption is democratic. People are voting for mayhem. How’s that possible? It might have something to do with a little cost/benefit analysis on the run: the rewards of group largesse from the public treasury are greater than the costs of possibly losing your little girl in a drive-by. I know, it’s hard to believe. But, on the other hand, it could just be stupid people being stupid, something not unheard of in the annals of democracy.
Or it could be due to the overall social decomposition extending to our schools. People aren’t taught any better; they don’t know any better; and are easily led into believing nonsense. Yet, policy-nonsense still behaves, as it always has, whether popularly chosen or not, like a drunk behind the wheel. It’s a disaster careening down our thoroughfares. And like most drunks, all-too-often they don’t get sober till they hit bottom. Apparently, our urban electorates haven’t hit bottom. Or it could be that the voter pool has been reduced to the drunks, the sober having fled to safer climes (red states).
A sizeable majority – by ten points – of Wisconsin voters recently failed the field sobriety test but still grabbed the car keys. Some attribute the recent election of the Visigothic Janet Protasiewicz to the State Supreme Court to the abortion issue. Probably true, but Wisconsinites have now let the Visigoths through the gates with a new Visigothic majority on the Court and, as a result, will get much more than carte blanche abortion. Protasiewicz promised during the campaign to rewrite the state’s redistricting maps to the advantage of the neo-Marxists who promise more sacking into the foreseeable future. In addition, expect more teacher-union power to dictate your child’s education, backdoor racism in diversity-equity-inclusion, and higher taxes to finance the revolution. The whole litany of policies to promote the revolution against hypothetical systemic “oppressors” are about to be unleashed. And so will a run on exiting U-Hauls, proving once again that the only thing efficiently produced by Marxism is refugees.
Money is the mother’s milk of politics . . . and revolution. The donkey party neo-Marxists, in spite of their dismal record, are well-funded from a network of similarly intoxicated donors. The precedent was established by Lenin in 1917. The Bolsheviks were bankrolled by Imperial Germany. A revolution rides on more than fulminations.
Money and an election system reshaped to the advantage of their base put Protasiewicz in office, and gave Chicago another Alaric-style mayor, Brandon Johnson, to replace the Visigothic Lori Lightfoot. The guy is marinated in neo-Marxism, like his predecessor. San Francisco, Wisconsin, and Chicago are pointing the way to the future, the same future viewed by 5th-century Romans and early 20th-century Petrograd residents.
If not arrested, our condition will continue to deteriorate . . . until riveting calamities shock us back to our senses. Hopefully, by then, it won’t be too late. Hopefully, we won’t wake up to news of two aircraft carriers sunk in the western Pacific, and our response is crippled by an economy unable to meet the demands of the moment, or a population unwilling to fight after years of anti-western indoctrination in our media and schools. A pool of recruits rattled by gender dysphoria and accusations of white privilege can’t instill much confidence.
The signs of decay aren’t limited to the popularity of chic neo-Marxism among urban sophisticates. Another passed-out canary is plummeting birth rates and closing maternity wards. It’s hard to have a robust generational talent pool to face the threat with a population befuddled by pronouns and fungible sex-identity, all as the population shrinks. We’ve got a lot to worry about. And all the while, neo-Marxism, acting like the Visigoths, is busy hollowing out the nation and its civilization. At this late hour, the odor of national decomposition is beginning to overwhelm the olfactory glands.
RogerG
Read more here:
* BLM’s mission statement included the following:
“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.” It’s straight out of the writings of Karl Marx, nothing unusual for the self-professed Marxism of BLM’s founders of Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi.
From the Wayback Machine Archive, Black Lives Matter: “What We Believe”, at https://web.archive.org/web/20200408020723/https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/
* “Whole Foods closes San Francisco flagship store after one year, citing crime”, Jordan Valinsky, CNN, 4/11/2023, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/whole-foods-closes-san-francisco-flagship-store-after-one-year-citing-crime/ar-AA19IDPH
* If you’re interested, here’s a local San Francisco newscast about people getting out during the Covid shutdown: “On The Move: San Francisco residents on the move during the COVID-19 economic downturn” at
“It’s legally pathetic.” — Law professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University School of Law on the Trump indictment on Bret Baier’s “Special Report” program, Thursday (3/31/2023). See the Turley interview below.
Yep, Bragg pulled the trigger. Alvin Bragg’s indictment crusade against Trump is more than legally pathetic. It’s more proof that the United States is descending into a banana republic. The moral distance between us and Putin’s Russia is shrinking.
Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s KGB chief and close confidant, once said, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Putin follows the same script, and now we must add Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and the Democratic Party’s vigilante posse to the list of the maxim’s adherents. But there’s a big “if”, if what has long been reported on the case is accurate. I’m skeptical of anything new on a case that has been combed and vacuumed by the party’s hitmen in the DOJ and Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance, Jr., for at least six years. All of it came to naught . . . until Bragg ascended the throne of vigilante-in-chief in ultra-blue Manhattan.
In a nutshell, the case appears to be the brew of a legally dead accusation (vaguely worded accounting entry) hitched to another murky, hypothetical federal one (an enigmatic federal campaign finance violation) in order to conjure a felony and escape the statute of limitations. Got that? And this from a guy whose campaign pledge was to get Trump. According to ABC News,
“During the campaign, Bragg spoke openly about the DA’s investigations into Trump and cited his experience in the AG’s office as a qualification. He won the election and assumed office in January 2022, becoming the first Black Manhattan DA.”
Alvin Bragg campaigning for the office of Manhattan DA in 2021.
In an electoral cluster hot to hang Trump, Bragg was rewarded with the keys to power. Vendetta justice is chic in Manhattan. Good luck in gathering a fair-minded jury from that snake pit.
By the way, don’t let the 34 counts in the indictment fool you. In Turley’s words, it’s just “count stacking” by multiplying the same charge in each one of multiple evidentiary documents in Bragg’s possession – a favorite ploy to sell the unsaleable.
Funny thing about Bragg, he cares more about the vocabulary on an accounting ledger and federal law outside his jurisdiction than robbery with a deadly weapon within his jurisdiction. He was caught red-handed when the public learned of him issuing an office staff directive shortly after moving into his sinecure. It ordered staff to not prosecute certain crimes while ordering a downgrade of entire classes of assaults and robberies. Playing footsie with the statute books, five classes of armed robberies will be reduced to misdemeanor larceny and third-degree robbery charges – “forcibly steals property” – are to be dropped entirely. He works overtime to hang Trump on phantom charges while the city’s streets and subways become war zones. Let Christopher Herrmann, professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, paint the picture for Bragg: “. . . crime is up in New York City, and it’s up quite a bit.” And to think that Bragg is working to release the miscreants back onto the streets. Is this guy out this mind?
If anything, rather than pursue Trump, Bragg should be investigated because he is in open defiance of his oath of office and thus deserving of impeachment. He swore to the following oath upon taking office (see below): “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the State of New York, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of ……, according to the best of my ability.” Does “faithfully discharging the duties of the office” cover categorical refusals to prosecute certain categories of crimes? Bragg, with the wave of his hand, has, in effect, repealed entire sections of the New York state penal code. Sounds to me like Bragg is in open rebellion against his oath of office. Prosecutorial discretion doesn’t apply to blanket reductions in charging decisions and refusals to prosecute. Instead, that’s a DA with a Caesar complex itching for removal from office.
I can’t, with a straight face, look upon our role in monitoring the behavior of other countries as if we are a beacon of decency. Look at us: we advance racism under the guise of anti-racism; abortion up to and including infanticide is ballyhooed; our children are robbed of their innocence in curriculums littered in gay porn; child sexual mutilation is a protected activity in some of our states; much of Hollywood’s exports are a moral afront to other cultures; our elections aren’t a model to be emulated as we shotgun ballots hither and yon and have meltdowns counting them; our fiscal incontinence is putting us in the same category with Argentina; education in America for Americans is a scandal; and the world sees a form of justice that is already frighteningly familiar to them. Our moral high ground is collapsing into a sinkhole.
The foregoing indictment of our country, mostly brought to us by the neo-Marxists in our midst, is making us an embarrassment. Bragg’s indictment will in all probability add more shame to our growing ignoble reputation.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Alvin Bragg made tough-on-Trump record central to campaign for DA”, Joseph Clark, The Washington Times, 3/31/2023, at https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/mar/31/alvin-bragg-made-his-tough-trump-record-central-hi/
* “What to know about the Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg Jr., who will be prosecuting Trump”, Iban Pereira, ABC News, 3/31/2023, at https://abcnews.go.com/US/manhattan-da-alvin-bragg-jr-prosecuting-trump/story?id=97989545
* “Let’s break down exactly what Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s memo says”, Nicole Gelinas, The New York Post, 1/11/2022, at https://nypost.com/2022/01/11/lets-break-down-exactly-what-manhattan-da-alvin-braggs-memo-says/
* “New York Constitution Article XIII – Public Officers; Section 1 – Oath of office; no other test for public office”, JUSTIA US Law, at https://law.justia.com/constitution/new-york/article-xiii/section-1/
* “The Trump Indictment: Making History in the Worst Possible Way”, Jonathan Turley, Jonathan Turley: Res ipsa loquitur – The thing itself speaks, 3/31/2023, at https://jonathanturley.org/2023/03/31/the-trump-indictment-making-history-in-the-worst-possible-way/
Nashville killer in hallway of Covenant School as she hunts for more victims (from school surveillance camera).People pray during a community vigil for the victims of the Nashville Covenant School shooting spree in nearby Mount Juliet, Tenn., on March 28, 2023. (photo: Andrew Nelles, AP)
This past Monday a young woman, age 28, walked into an elementary school in Nashville and murdered three children and three adults. I was nearly brought to tears watching the police body cam footage that shows courageous police officers in a frantic rush through the rooms and finally ending the madness by killing the shooter. The tears were for the shock and horror of children having to face another murderous miscreant. Quite frankly, it was hard to watch. Prayers go out to all the families who now have a huge hole in their hearts to bear, and to the parents of the killer who now must continue their lives knowing that their child is a mass murderer. Thinking about it, the sadness must be almost unendurable.
After these events, and even more horrifying, we’ve seen people too regularly jump to their agenda in grotesque exploitation. The president, Monday, went before the press to comment on the event and opened with a standup comedy routine and then shifted to his favorite hobby horse of gun control (see below). The bodies are still at the coroner, loved ones are devastated and groping for ways to cope, and a president shames himself before cameras and microphones. The White House scene was obscene.
We don’t know much at this stage about the shooter and her motive. It’s far too easy for us to join the crowd and connect the tragedy to our personal social and political hobby horses. I will try to refrain from doing that. Yet, there are certain aspects about the shooter to come to light that may or may not be relevant. Absent evidence, though, keep in mind that the known facts of her trans-identity as a man and the killing spree should be treated as unrelated at this moment.
But it doesn’t mean that killings by a trans person suddenly prevents us from continuing our public discussion on transgenderism and the strong possibility of a social contagion. Regardless of the outcome of this investigation, this debate must proceed for the stakes are too great for our children.
The argument against a trans social contagion relies on a suspension of common sense. Peer pressure and social media contagions apply everywhere else but magically they are blocked from operating on this topic. The entire advertising industry and cancel culture rely on the triggering aspect of peer pressure. People buy Coke over Pepsi (and vice versa) and censorship on campus is justified by alleged “hurts” that transmit through the social ether of the student body. Sorry, the argument lacks merit.
And other facts clearly point to a social contagion. Where is trans-identity most prevalent? It isn’t evenly distributed. Madeleine Kearns (see below) has followed the subject for quite some time. She noticed that California has young people identifying “as trans at a nearly 38 percent higher rate than the national average”. In the very progressive California city of Davis, according to numbers provided by the Davis Unified School District, the rate is three times that of California. What is there in the California social eco-system that is causing a teen rush to transgenderism? The scale of the increase suggests something more than children are now free to expose their inner trans self.
Trans-identity certainly happens everywhere but concentrations strongly imply a contagion is at work. A bump in the numbers not only occurs by geographical location but also by sex. Just a short time ago, it was boys who mostly suffered from gender-dysphoria. Now, it’s girls by two to one. What happened? Social media happened as other influences were locked down during the pandemic. Kids were isolated in long stretches with their cellphones. The isolation and the well-known sensitivity of teenage girls about their bodies brews a perfect storm.
Consider this: any husband will rue the day he ever suggested to his wife that she is getting a bit plump.
My position on the social contagion aspect of transgenderism is unrelated to the Nashville event. Her trans-identity didn’t pull the trigger. Until proven otherwise, trans people aren’t prone to murder any more than anyone else. The willingness to take life stems from something much deeper in the cranial recesses than gender dysphoria, genitalia, or chromosomes.
That said, we need to take seriously the fact that young people are intensely more impressionable than some gratuitously let on. Drag queen story hours, anal and oral sex picture books for adolescents, the instant networking of tweens/teens on their cellphones, the pervasive online content, and parental detachment from the lives of their children make for a toxic brew. Are we weaponizing normal tween/teen insecurities into rampant dissatisfaction with their bodies? Yes, we appear to be. Its modern manifestation is transgenderism.
RogerG
Read more here:
* “Biden makes ice cream joke in first statement since Nashville shooting”, Stephen Nelson, The NY Post, 3/27/2023, at https://nypost.com/2023/03/27/bidens-bizarre-ice-cream-joke-in-nashville-shooting-remarks/
* “Trans and Teens: The Social-Contagion Factor Is Real”, Madeleine Kearns, National Review, 2/20/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/02/20/trans-and-teens-the-social-contagion-factor/
Trump and Biden at their last presidential debate in 2020.
Please watch, if you haven’t already, this recent 60 Minutes report (below) on the CCP’s PLA Navy. It’s eye-opening . . . or should be.
How did we get to this juncture of potentially losing a war against a rising hyper-power, Red China? If you look closely, an answer becomes apparent in the mediocrity that lies at all levels of our society, modern culture, and in our institutions. We are riddled with corrosive ideologies that sap our determination and abilities to respond to the threat. Mediocrities have filled the ranks of our political leadership from Obama to Biden. The predicament is frightening.
How frightening? Defense experts constantly war-game the likely outcomes of military conflict, like the emerging one between the US and Red China that culminated in a report released last December. In 18 of the 22 rounds of the war game, the US lost 500 aircraft, 20 surface ships, and two aircraft carriers. Our capabilities have stagnated as the CCP’s has grown by leaps and bounds. Everybody in the know knows it. The 5,000 sailors on the USS Nimitz should be nervous about being cooped up on a huge target beset by a swarm of anti-ship hypersonics. They should realize that military service has the potential of being a commitment that involves much more than seeing the world or the GI Bill.
The sinking of the USS Oriskany off the Florida coast in May of 2016. A harbinger of things to come?
At the same time as we allow our military capabilities to degrade, we plunge a dagger into the ranks’ morale with DEI and anti-racism crusades. These ideological jihads descending on the ranks on orders from the Pentagon dispirit them in charges that America, and all that it stands for, is a through-and-through oppressor. If you buy into it, what happens to your loyalty as your finger sets ready at the trigger of some of the most lethal weaponry in the world? If not, you might be driven to insubordination. What a way to run the nation’s defense.
Our multi-decade of mediocrities in the White House, Congress, and the Pentagon, including the present and previous occupants sitting behind the Resolute desk, have played Tiddlywinks as the Red Chinese are occupied with chess. The linkages between international actions seem to be beyond their mental capacity.
First, Trump. As the rest of the Indo-Pacific, particularly the first island chain and beyond, became abundantly aware of Red China’s encirclement of them in military and Belt-and-Road initiatives, and as they sought closer alignment with the US, Donald Trump attacked their economies with good old-fashioned American protectionism. Remember TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement? Not only did he quash it, he bragged about it (see “Read more here”).
Soon, in May 2018, Trump is pasting tariffs on imported steel from allies like Canada and Australia. The so-called shift to face Red China was blunted by efforts to make enemies of allies. The logic is straight out of the sandbox. In a tweet from May 2, 2018, he announced in a shallow display of economic reasoning,
“When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore-we win big. It’s easy!”
Trade wars are good? Did anyone attempt to remind him of Smoot-Hawley, even if it wouldn’t have had any effect? And good for whom? Certainly, appliance manufacturers, and anyone else using steel, and consumers wouldn’t be better off. Plus, it’s a charade that ignores the causes for the evolution of the Rust Belt. Bluntly put, we did it to ourselves in falling into the grip of militant unionism, the snake pit of eco-red tape, and a mounting tax burden. Business goes elsewhere once you become hostile to it. As we speak, California is learning that lesson all over again. Dah!
Donald Trump shows the executive order withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Jan. 23, 2017.
Until we clean up our own act, slapping tariffs on competitive products only puts lipstick on a pig. It’s a loser for most of the country. Consumers and steel users get shafted; allies seek solace from our enemies; and all of it just to pander to a few union bosses and a few thousand dues-payers at a cost to hundreds of thousands of other American workers. It’s a classic one step forward and six steps back. Donald Trump can’t count steps.
Then, the man from Mar-A-Lago got it in his craw that the Bushes should be slapped with “establishment” and “forever wars”. Of course, the “forever wars” rhetoric, if applied to the Cold War, a classic “forever war”, would have meant a surrender to the USSR and the world turning into a Soviet playground. Some “forever wars” are worth fighting, because “forever” can turn into collapse of an adversary ill-equipped to keep up.
But Donald Trump got his way in the sordid Doha Accords which established the predicate for a withdrawal from the Middle East, only to be additionally botched by his successor who, according to Robert Gates, has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades” (see below). Now, Trump, in his third bite at the apple, has decided to pander to the isolationistic wing of the Republican Party by favoring a weakening of our resolve on Ukraine. A bugout from Afghanistan will be followed by another one from Ukraine.
A C5a Galaxy taking off at Kabul airport as part of the Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan, August 2021.
Donald Trump and his senescent successor seem incapable of playing chess. If the grotesquerie of a Kabul bugout is condemnable for its encouragement to aggressors, what do you think an evisceration of Ukraine on the heels of Kabul would mean? And while we’re floundering in this self-defeating wrangle over isolationism, we assault our own troops with charges of racism and other bigotries. Shortly after Biden takes office, a standdown was issued throughout our national defense to expose the ranks to anti-American indoctrination predicated on American being a hateful country. Mediocrities running the country may be a greater threat than a decaying national defense.
A disaster awaits, and it will be plaid in blood, the blood of those who volunteered to defend the country. The scene of charred bodies going down with the ship and many of our injured sailors swimming in seas ablaze may be the real cost for choosing mediocrities to control the ship of state.
Will we idly wait till it happens? Will we continue to turn to mediocrities? Please watch the video.
