An accidental meeting on a forest road with a semi-Californian/Montanan – he spends his winters in California (understandable) – showcases much that has gone astray in the America of today. Our biggest threat doesn’t arise from material circumstances but from what rolls around in our heads. Occupying the synapses are an excess of unexamined assumptions and the crazes that they feed.
Let me explain. While riding our ATV’s through the forests near our property, my wife and I came upon a man on a motor-bike. Pleasantries and friendly conversation arose. It turns out that the man haled from Redding, Ca. He had few nice things to say about the winters and complained of the shrinking longevity of restaurants in the area. I mentioned that we had lost our appetite for our native state after one of many recent visits. Prohibitions, high prices, and petty annoyances – the plastic bag carousels are empty at the stores for instance – have soured us.
He complained about the plastic litter in a feeble defense of the ban. I don’t think that he, and many others, connected the dots between the propensity for prohibition and the new feudalism that is taking shape in the so-called golden state. Many off-the-cuff reactions to a hypothetical evil produce unexpected effects. Too much plastic bag litter? Ban them. Too many poor people? Tax the rich. Don’t like carbon? Command people to put solar panels on their roofs or punish them with high utility bills – or both. Don’t like suburbia? Strangle it in a maze of land-use controls. The only problem is: growth suffocates; the middle-class flees; and the cost of living inflates. The result is a new feudalism of the hyper-rich in their manorial enclaves surrounded by a growing low-wage servant class.
As for the limited restaurants in our area, our friend showed no acknowledgement of rudimentary cause-and-effect. Enterprise has been suffering in industrial and rural America for quite some time. Take away the primary industries – mining and lumbering in our case – in those places dependent on them and poverty, meth use, and social chaos erupts. Tourism is a very poor substitute.
Many of these ruminations were kept to myself. He did say that he didn’t like mining for its scarring of the land. I responded with the obvious: without it, he and I wouldn’t be on our vehicles. He dismissed the claim with a cursory, “I’ll buy it from China”.
There you have it. Don’t think of employing our own people; export our wish-fulfillment to foreign lands; and don’t give a second thought about the repercussions. As long as the consequences are invisible to us, and we remain ensconced in our comfortable illusions, all is right with the world. Right?
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” Luke 23:34
US President Donald Trump makes remarks at a roundtable meeting on sanctuary cities May 16, 2018, in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington, DC. Orange County Supervisor Michelle Steel is 3rd from left.(Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)
From 1864 to 1865, Jones County, Mississippi, and its immediate environs were in open revolt against the Confederate state of Mississippi and its governor, Charles Clark – a Democrat by the way. The so-called “Free State of Jones”. Numerous state officials were assaulted and harassed, some probably killed. Clearly, this was a pro-union constituency. Project forward to May 16, 2018 and a meeting of disgruntled California local leaders with President Trump. A parallel anyone?
Some firebrands of the left – who rule the roost in California – are as incensed about federal immigration law as the South was about abolitionism and tariffs. They have made cooperation with ICE the equivalent of assisting child porn traffickers. What’s next, an act of secession?
Well, some in the state are having none of it. They have approached the president, as surely as some in 1864 Jones County would relish a confab with Lincoln.
History seldom repeats, but it does rhyme. (Reputedly stated by Mark Twain)
RogerG
* See “Orange County, Inland Empire leaders talk immigration with Trump in White House”, Roxana Kopetman, Orange County Register, 5/17/2018, https://www.pe.com/2018/05/16/trump-meeting-today-with-leaders-from-orange-county-inland-empire/
The following is a comment to “‘We will prosecute’ employers who help immigration sweeps, California AG says”, Angela Hart, The Sacramento Bee, 1/19/2018, http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article195434409.html .
********************
State officials are not required to enforce federal immigration law. But California actions to not hold suspects of federal detainer requests, refuse to share information, and help facilitate violations of federal immigration law veer awfully close to nullification. Now, upping the ante further, the state’s attorney general threatens prosecution of any employer who adheres to the requests and instructions of federal authorities. Not participating has morphed into obstruction.
Employers in a state, first and foremost, are citizens of the U.S., but merely residents of a state. Patriotism applies to loyalty to the nation, not a state. Mr. Becerra is forcing patriotic employers of the state into obstructing federal authorities in the fulfillment of clear and unambiguous Constitutional powers – Article I, Section 8, clause 3. The state is forcing U.S. citizens within its borders into not cooperating with federal authorities.
Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun disagreed over South Carolina’s nullification of the tariff law. Asked if he had any regrets during his presidency, Jackson said, “[That] I didn’t shoot Henry Clay and I didn’t hang John C. Calhoun.”Andrew Jackson threatened to march into South Carolina and hang the state’s government in 1833 over its nullification of the tariff law. U.S. AG Jeff Sessions needs to indict and submit Mr. Becerra to a perp walk. If the rest of the brood in Sacramento continues to interfere, a criminal conspiracy is at work. Apply RICO.
The following is a reply to “Where are Americans Moving?”, 2017, https://www.northamerican.com/migration-map.
*************
The map says it all according to a report issued by North American Van Lines for 2017.
Coupling the data about moves with economic rankings for states, Hillary country in the last election is a scary place for people wishing to better themselves. Take a look at the charts in the previous article and the map in this article and a picture crystallizes of people fleeing the Dems’ poison. Long term Dem control of the state legislature is a sure signal to look elsewhere to live.
The following is a reply to “America’s top five inbound vs. top five outbound states” by Mark J. Perry of AEI, http://www.aei.org/publication/americas-top-five-inbound-vs-top-five-outbound-states-how-do-they-compare-on-a-variety-of-economic-business-conditions-and-political-measures/comment-page-1/#comment-191182.
*****************
Below is a chart showing the states in the grip of the poison and those with the antidote.
I’ve been beating this drum for quite some time, and it deserves to be beaten, and beaten, and beaten. People know poison when they see it, at least those who can load up a U-Haul. The Dems are, at this juncture, the purveyors of poison, and it shows in moving stats.
Repetition may force the message to sink in as we approach the November 2018 elections. In spite of Trump’s Twitter flatulations, the Dems aren’t a choice to register discontent with presidential behavior. Slicing off your nose to spite your face isn’t sound medical advice.
If in power as of January 2019, the Dems will take California national. It’s their beau ideal.
Whichever way the electoral winds blow, I’m still vexed by the same question. How much do people understand of this state of affairs? Do they understand that poison isn’t a health food? Or, are they so deranged by Trump that they’ll take poison by voting to imbibe the California venom?
The following is my posted response to Kevin D. Williamson’s column in National Review Online, “From Sea to Shining Sea”, 1/7/2018, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455208/conservatives-have-abandoned-coasts-cities-bad-move.
KDW,
Okay, let’s make a play for New York and California, and the rest of the blue dots on the election map. Yes, Republicans and conservatives seem to have abandoned them. But the interrogatives pinch me awake, especially how, who, what, when. The land of B1 Bob Dornan (ex-R, Santa Ana/Anaheim) is as firmly Demland as almost any of the precincts around Harvard. “Anacrime” and “Stabba Ana” are more than putdowns. They’re signs of the state-of-play in formerly conservative strongholds in a state that is more reflective of Nancy Pelosi than Ronald Reagan.
Nancy Pelosi, D, CaliforniaA Santa Ana Crime Scene Investigator takes photographs after a male was shot while riding a bicycle in the 3900 block of West 5th Street around 11:40 p.m. Tuesday night in Santa Ana. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: KEVIN WARN, CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER – 05/19/15 – A man riding a bicycle was shot to death in Santa Ana, police said today around 11:40 p.m.. The unidentified victim was riding in the 3900 block of West 5th Street when police received reports of shots fired and a victim down, Santa Ana police Sgt. Matt Hermans said. The victim was pronounced dead at a hospital, Hermans said.Homeless encampment near freeway in Anaheim, Ca.
Napoleon was allegedly famous for having said, “When you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna.” He could afford to say that. At that point in his career, he was unrivaled on the battlefield. What advantages do Republicans possess in areas currently on the verge of secession after the near-nullification of federal immigration law? Certainly, Rudy Guiliani won a couple of terms as NYC mayor, but it was after the city had cemented a reputation as an open sewer and murder capital of the world. The lesson: Take Vienna after the plague has set in.
1970s NYC street scene.1970s NYC sqeegee boys. A form of aggressive pandhanding accosting motorists.Undercover cop arrests a mugger on a NYC subway. The city’s subway system averaged 250 felonies a week during the early 80s. By 1990, annual homicides in New York peaked at 2,245.Pictured, a woman exits the subway station at Grand Central among a score of sleeping homeless individuals sometime in the 1980s.The urban decay led to the mayoral victory of Rudy Giuliani (r) over David Dinkins (l) in 1993.
The rot will have to ravage a lot more before Republicans have a real shot on the lefty coasts. Heck, the Republicans couldn’t field a candidate in California’s last Senate race. It was a brawl between two Dems: Loretta Sanchez – the big cheese of B1 Bob’s old district – and the lefty attorney general, Kemala Harris, the eventual winner … and scourge.
Poison is popular in California, as it is in the rest of blue-world. Scan the list of the recent popular initiatives. It’s become the land of the perpetual high, tax rape, greenie everything, transgender everything, and a plethora of petty annoyances like expensive eggs, pricey gas, skirting the Heller decision with clamps on ammunition, empty plastic bag carousels at the grocery store, etc., etc.
The state legislature could be confused with the staff of the Resistance, Black Lives Matter, and the LGBTQ… lobby. The governor travels around as the independent potentate of his own personal satrap. It’s not much of an exaggeration to ask if they’re channeling Nicolas Maduro and his consiglieres.
It must be said, though, that the bi-coastal insanities mirror the national map. These states are really blue along the coast and a scattering of blue dots elsewhere. But the red areas are shrinking as the sober flee the asylums. Andrew Breitbart was famous for exclaiming, “Politics is downstream from culture”. A cliché to be true, but still accurate. The culture is frightening for a church-going anyone with a spouse and a couple of kids.
County-by-county breakdown for Prop. 67, the ban on free plastic shopping bags.
So, how do we [conservatives] make a play? Take resources from Erie County where we have a shot and give them to lonely opponents of the lefty kleptocracy in California? If you’re talking about seed money to keep the movement alive, then I’m with you, KDW. If you’re talking about an abrasion-free message, call me comrade. After that, the zero-sum game presents too big of a toll.
Pray for rot. To borrow from addiction therapy, hitting bottom may work wonders.
“If a fact comes in that doesn’t fit into our frame, you’ll either not notice it, or ignore it, or ridicule it, or be puzzled by it – or attack it if it’s threatening. ” — George Lakoff, cognitive linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, as quoted in National Geographic Magazine, June 2017 issue. (1)
One of my main reasons for maintaining a National Geographic Magazine subscription is to keep tabs on the animating infatuations in that part of America politically colored “blue”. The magazine seldom fails to disappoint, perhaps unwittingly and unknowingly. The infatuations are a product of a favoritism, encoded into blue-America’s urban and academic “betters”, arising from a pervasive mix of social tastes and a grand ideo-philosophy. It operates as a kind of mental impairment for its devotees.
Susan Goldberg, Editor in Chief, National Geographic Magazine.
The above quote from page p. 50 of the magazine was meant to describe others not so enlightened according to the author of the piece from which it was taken. It could just as easily apply to the author, editors, and staff of the magazine in their Washington, D.C., bubble.
“The pot calling the kettle black”: A phrase from at least the 1600s meant to convey hypocrisy. It would be better understood if we experienced life in a medieval kitchen.
On the “affective filter”
Are the publication’s content producers immune to the presence of half-baked assumptions and prejudices that they assign to others? I think not. The affective filter concept of learning theory comes to mind. The filter functions as an emotional Polaroid lens as we consciously try to attain new knowledge. Our emotions, the theory asserts, are said to make learning difficult, and, by implication, operates to facilitate passage of those stimuli and facts that comport with our previously entrenched hunches about how the world works. If true, it is universally operable beyond the “bitter clingers” of Pres. Obama’s famous characterization.
The affective filter theory was devised to explain student second language acquisition.
The magazine’s staff could benefit from a mirror.
There is a strong emotional attachment to our deep, unquestioned, and strongly held beliefs. While we may convince ourselves that we are paragons of scientific inquiry, the reality may be quite different.
On materialism
So, what are the basal beliefs pervading the upper reaches of the status hierarchy in our urban and academic clusters? One attachment is a broad conviction for the philosophy of materialism. No, I’m not referring to materialism as a synonym for greed. Alternatively, materialism as accepted wisdom attempts to explain everything as a product of matter and material forces. Modern practitioners of science could be weaned into this line of thought by the very nature of their preoccupation. Science is focused on the physical world. The temptation is to reduce wisdom to an understanding of matter, its forces and processes.
The stage is set for a full-throated assault on anything seemingly not in tune with the current state of scientific understanding as presumed by some practitioners momentarily at the top of the science popularity pyramid.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, a popular pied-piper of science-as-wisdom.
A death sentence for tradition and rise of subjectivism
To no great surprise, nearly anything old – morals, traditions, institutions, established religion – will sooner or later fall under the crosshairs. If its antique, it can be explained away as something not worthy of our “enlightened” age. For these acolytes, it’s become like a reflex, as in the blinking of the eyes.
The old sexual morality is a victim of this popular turn of mind, a bent very popular in metropolitan and academic surroundings, and anywhere else under their sway – which means almost everywhere. Cohabitation is up; virginity is down; chaos in the home is up; and genital compatibility (heterosexuality) no longer necessary.
In fact, genital diversity (again, heterosexuality) is made irrelevant. Since an orgasm is the penultimate in this brave new world, sodomy is to be sanctified alongside the Church’s preferred option. Anything is okay if the desired end is achieved. Such is the logic of the mind unmoored from anything higher.
In these stunted minds, a belief in something higher is as expendable as a zipper that won’t zip. God? What god? Morality? Whose morality? These questions are regurgitated as readily as terns vomiting for their young.
“Nothing is written in stone.” — the quintessence of moral relativism when taken to an extreme.
The result, though, is a confusion of knowledge with wisdom. While we have the knowledge to expeditiously abort a late-term fetus, “ought” we? Even though we have the ability to euthanize the momentarily depressed, “ought” we? While we can treat people as livestock for their stem cells, “ought” we? Should we use our knowledge of genetics to manufacture custom-made human beings? Many of the most profound questions in life cannot be answered by a sole reliance on the knowledge of synapses and molecules. The reference point for such decisions must lie in something other than ourselves. Some would call it “wisdom”. A scientist may have the knowledge but be completely lacking in the wisdom.
The absence of anything higher, something outside of us, elevates each person into the the role of Creator of our own personal standards. The subjective, and relative, reigns supreme. The love of an unbounded individualism – the uninhibited self – lies here. The combination of science, materialism, and now subjectivism pushes the mind toward unlimited possibilities, a benign concept if kept abstract; a pernicious one if allowed to undermine limits.
On transgenderism, the gay agenda, and the uninhibited self
Seemingly, now even the physical limits of chromosomes can be discarded. We are in the age of transgenderism and 40 or so genders. We have come full circle when the individual as emperor of reality is liberated from science, chromosomes and all. Have we entered an epochal phase when subjectivism has put a gun to the head of science? If an idea or feeling gets locked into our head, even our physical bodies must be made to give way.
This heap of notions is so taken for granted in the confines of academia and among our self-styled cultural elites that counter-ideas are hubristically dismissed as ignorance. The 3,000 years of Judeo-Christianity and Greek philosophy must bend a knee to a new god and faith: the uninhibited self and its modern priesthood of shortsighted PhD’s and media mandarins.
The ladies of the View, 2017.
Their arrogance is astounding. They claim a monopoly ownership of science, while unintentionally dismantling it. In fact, it’s a semi-science that functions as a cover for their biases … or, more accurately, prejudices. For instance, National Geographic Magazine devoted its January 2017 issue to the “Gender Revolution” (as was covered in a previous blog post).
While reading the article, I was struck, when you cut through the excess verbiage, by the gullibility of a cluster of academics to accept a person’s claims in interviews as proof of the existence of a condition (gender dysphoria) on a par with schizophrenia and diabetes. When it involves children, the psuedo-diagnosis is very disturbing. Common adolescent confusion now can lead to permanent genital and bodily disfigurement. Efforts to less drastically treat the internal turmoil through therapy are made criminal acts in some jurisdictions.
In the same issue was a piece about female genital mutilation (FGM). The practice is resurrected in the West under the guise of “gender reassignment surgery”. Board certification and a scalpel doesn’t make the practice any less horrifying.
Is this the new wisdom?
Using their position at the commanding heights of contemporary culture, the socio-political nomenklatura seek to rub out opposing views on other subjects as well. A defense of traditional marriage – a viewpoint not very well articulated as of late – is pounded into submission by an alliance of our cultural aristocracy and the fashionable victims’ group du jour: the L-G-B-T-Q …. movement (The presence of 40 or so genders makes an acronym difficult).
One of their signature issues is gay marriage. Yet, we can only get to the idea of same-sex matrimonials if we skip over some obvious questions. Like, what is marriage? Is it simply a union of adults? Gayness, by its very nature, makes their unions only about the adults. It can be about nothing else. Last time I checked, sodomy can’t produce offspring. So, childbearing is out of the question. Yes, yes, gays can adopt, but the simple existence of those children is ipso facto proof of a heterosexual coupling. If marriage exists for the purpose of family formation, it’s incoherent to sanction as “marriage” a genus of union that can never do it (produce children).
What of the heterosexual unions who either can’t, or won’t, produce children? Are they marriages? Most emphatically … Yes! Heterosexuality is the essential condition, not the decision to have children. As for infertile couples, medical interventions are a tacit recognition of the absolute necessity of the very essence of heterosexuality: sperm meeting egg, in one way or another. Being childless doesn’t repeal the legitimacy of a marriage; and holding a ceremony and exchanging rings, by itself, can’t make one. Heterosexuality is written all over the institution.
Marriage as a mixing of the only 2 genders having any basis in chromosomes – leaving aside the unusual, but not unexpected, chromosomal abnormality – was remarkably obvious to our ancestors who lived at a time when they couldn’t be afflicted, as we are, with the hectoring of our cultural “betters”. The idea of marital bliss applying to 2 men was so outside the pale that it never came to mind to anyone coming before Justice Kennedy’s term on the Supreme Court. Marriage of the 2 genders is all that we find mentioned in the historical record. While scanning historical documents, I ran into this juicy bit from Emperor Justinian’s reforms of Roman law, Institutes, Title II, “Of The Law of Nature, the Law of Nations, and the Civil Law”:
“The law of nature is that which she has taught all animals; a law not peculiar to the human race, but shared by all living creatures, whether denizens of the air, the dry land, or the sea. Hence comes the union of male and female, which we call marriage; hence the procreation and rearing of children, for this is a law by the knowledge of which we see even the lower animals are distinguished.” (Emphasis added) (8)
Gay marriage is an inanity to logic and to our predecessors.
On Hegel, “progress”, and historicism
G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), rector and holder of the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin.
The growing acceptance of same-sex unions is a testament to the wrongheadedness of Hegel’s 19th century view of history as the unfolding of increasing rationality – i.e., “progress” (sometimes referred as “historicism”). We aren’t getting smarter, or more rational, or more contented. Instead, we’re proving that history has no arc. It’s filled with unexpected zigzags and stumbles, and chic journeys into nonsense.
In castigating historicism and any other form of determinism in the manipulation of history, the philosopher Karl Popper had it right when he said that there are no “inexorable laws of historical destiny”. (6,7) Marx/Engels (meaning the present converts of the pair), Obama, Hillary, Thomas Piketty, Robert Reich, and all self-styled Progressives please take note.
“Trend is not destiny”, Karl Popper. The old saying, “crap happens”, is the roadblock to any universal trend in history. It’s something Obama should keep in mind before he lectures us about being on the “right side of history”.
On “climate change”
For our brethren at the top of our urban and academic status pyramid, maybe the thought that they could be wrong never occurred to them. Maybe they’re blinded by their own arrogance. Well, sadly for us, their arrogance isn’t limited to the LGBTQ … wishlist. A favorite in their panoply of causes, when they aren’t yammering against homophobia, is “climate change”.
If left alone as a two-word phrase and without any of the ideological baggage that so often attends it, it’s rather innocuous and acceptable to most people. Though, our haughty “betters” couldn’t leave it alone. It’s freighted with “apocalyptic”, “catastrophic”, “solely anthropogenic”, and with sub-agenda terms like “green”, “sustainable”, etc., etc.
Al Gore as the climate change Jeremiah.
With their ever-present faith in “progress”, they’re fully on-board with upending the settled arrangements of a free people. Their confidence in politicized “experts” knows no bounds. Indubitably, government – with themselves at the helm, of course – is expected to have free reign to bring about the “green” world. The crusade has breathed new life into the disaster that is socialism. It also bequeathed to us the juiced-up social engineer.
The social engineer of the progressives’ imagination, appropriately papered with degrees and certificates, will be ensconced in administrative bureaus with sweeping and unconstitutional powers to legislate, execute, and adjudicate. It’s government by papal bull and czarist ukase. What would James Madison think?
If Madison was reanimated into today’s world, he might be struck by more than a sovereign people’s willingness to surrender their sovereignty over to Harvard’s graduating class. He’d be smacked with the glaring hypocrisy of the situation’s cheerleaders.
My blue-America barometer – National Geographic Magazine – unconsciously revels in the duplicity. Going back to the “Why We Lie” cover story (June 2017 issue), I found this gem:
“Researchers have shown that we are especially prone to accept lies that affirm our worldview. Memes that claim Obama was not born in the United States, deny climate change … and spread other ‘alternative facts’, as a Trump adviser called his Inauguration crowd claims, have thrived on the Internet and social media because of this vulnerability.”
“Deny climate change” as a lie? Is it a lie or simply a disagreement? “Lie” is used to cover a difference of opinion with our cultural suzerains. Grand prognostications in science, if its real science, should be met with a “Yes, but ….” or a “No, but ….”. Qualifiers abound in a field for which there is much unknown, and definitely so regarding those grand prognostications.
The resort to cocksure “lie” labeling is heartily exhibited by those with the least expertise in science. Al Gore is no scientist; he’s a politician/lawyer. Leonardo DiCaprio is an actor. The author of the NGM piece, Yudhijhit Bhattacharjee, is a “writer” according to the bio on his website. And since scientists, like everyone else, aren’t resistant to the surrounding cultural zeitgeist, and since politicized government largesse is widely available, today’s science can be easily hijacked by its celebrity and political non-practitioners possessing huge megaphones.
Leonardo DiCaprio as Democratic Party booster, from the 2004 campaign.
Here’s the hypocrisy: opposition to the crusade is fitted with the “liar” label while a concerted campaign in 2009 of lying was uncovered in spirited emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, Houston Control for the “climate change” enterprise. Maybe intimidation to suppress is more accurate. Still, the episode exposed the effort to misrepresent the truth. Do we dare call it “lying”? (9)
The scandal involved partisan scientists bound-and-determined to shoehorn data into a prefab outcome: climate change is apocalyptic . It included efforts at hiding data and methods from scrutiny outside a narrow, mutually reinforcing group. Further, the emails bring to light the attempts at manipulation of their models to produce their preferred results, and the frustration when they don’t. In addition to hiding and statistical messaging, intimidation and excommunication of critics from the field is plotted among the climate change clerisy’s brethren.
Putting the best face on the scandal would be to recognize the emails were taken out of context and only blunt expressions among close-knit colleagues. However, the exculpation is only limited. At a minimum, it illustrates the behavior of a highly partisan claque of scientists. It’s an example of what happens when science becomes a partisan movement and then a political industry.
Is any of this to be seriously considered – even if made aware – among the lords in their Hollywood/west Los Angeles/Manhattan/campus castles? I think that we now know the answer to that question.
Why even have a magazine issue devoted to “Why We Lie”? Why now? Why did the topic come up and demand so much of the magazine’s resources and time? I suspect a political motive. The subject of “lying” is a particular obsession in the hot nodes of lefty political activism. Blue-America’s most prominent inhabitants are busy trying to delegitimize the shocking result of the 2016 election.
I’m reminded of one of the historian Henry Adams’s witticisms from his book, The Education of Henry Adams.
“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
The organization of hatred can occur with or without a patina of science. Susan Goldberg, chief editor of National Geographic Magazine, please take note.
RogerG
Bibliography and references:
“Why We Lie”, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, National Geographic Magazine, June 2017, pp. 30-51.
“Fox Says It Won’t Interfere With National Geographic’s Editorial Content”, Andrew Beaujon, Washingtonian, 9/9/2015, https://www.washingtonian.com/2015/09/09/fox-wont-interfere-with-national-geographic-editorial-content/
“The End of Identity Liberalism”, Mark Lilla, New York Times: Sunday Review, 11/18/2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html
“Input hypothesis”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis. The affective filter concept arose from Stephen Krashen’s research into second language acquisition and is part of his broader “input hypothesis”, first published in 1977.
“Gender Revolution”, National Geographic Magazine, June 2017 issue.
A brief summary of Karl Popper’s critique of Hegel’s “historicism” can be found in wikipedia under the article “Historicism”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicism
A fuller description of Popper’s critique of historicism can be found here : “The Central Mistake of Historicism: Karl Popper on Why Trend is Not Destiny”, Farnam Street, https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2016/03/karl-popper-mistake-of-historicism/
As a pdf file: “Justinian, Institutes“, http://amesfoundation.law.harvard.edu/digital/CJCiv/JInst.pdf
An interesting op-ed about the U. of East Anglia email scandal can be found here: “Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation”, Christopher Booker, The Daily Telegraph, 11/28/2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6679082/Climate-change-this-is-the-worst-scientific-scandal-of-our-generation.html
The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter 1, Henry Brooks Adams, 1907.
Salt as sodium chloride is a necessity. SALT as the State and Local Tax deduction is a luxury, and an irritating one at that — like pouring salt into open wounds if you live anywhere that didn’t give Hillary 60% of the vote.
One need not stroll into the culture war to be smacked with evidence of our great political and social divide. The tax code is a lively arena for conflict. It is a monstrous affair, littered with baubles and beads, overlapping into almost all human activity, and encrusted with boundless perks for politically privileged courtesans. Not all tax code gimmes, though, are equal. One – the deduction for state and local taxes (SALT) – has evolved into an icon of worship in blue state jurisdictions with a penchant for taxing and spending their way to heaven. Take it away and they behave like alcoholics being forced into cold turkey treatment.
For low-tax locales, they receive little or no benefit for their reluctance to turn their state tax offices into Soviet Lubyankas. Their sole compensation is the exasperation of knowing that their self-restraint makes the subsidy more “affordable” to the public servants in hyper-taxed, Democrat-friendly environs. People outside and between the urban and bi-coastal romper rooms know it. It’s galling for them to know that the federal tax code incentivizes tax promiscuity.
SALT was born of the Civil War’s 1862 Revenue Act and the 19th century’s infatuation with sticking it to the super rich. (4) Common terms for the fat-cats that stretches across the last couple of centuries are “buccaneer capitalists” or “robber barons”. It’s easy to find antique characterizations that align with the modern left’s preconceptions.
Cyrus Field, Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Russell Sage on bags of millions, “Puck” magazine, 1883.John D. Rockefeller as “king”, 1901.
The excitement led to the passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913, which legalized the fed’s tax on income. The federal tax on income was reified into the Revenue Act of 1913, and the state and local tax deduction (SALT) tagged along.
The archaic justification for SALT was the fear of the federal government swallowing up all tax revenue, leaving little for streets and public safety. SALT was thought to preserve a slice of the cash cow for city hall. How quaint.
A more modern pretext is the avoidance of double taxation. You know, the same dollar of income being slammed by the locals and then hit by the feds. But what isn’t subjected to double/triple/quadruple taxation in our own tax Leviathan according to this logic? Think about it. For today, the excuse becomes less than a pointless gesture.
Look below at the growth of our federal tax monster by page volume. (5)
Does anyone claim that multiple taxation isn’t at work here? There are so many ways to tax income, and, when you’re done, tax the things that were purchased with that taxed dollar. We don’t even need the income to be from human beings. We extract the pound of flesh from ghosts in the form of businesses. The requirement of breathing isn’t necessary.
Let me count the ways beyond the tax on personal income.
Estate taxes, assessments on your assets after you’ve left the land of the living. Please remember, that stuff was most likely purchased with already taxed dollars.
Corporate income taxes, the tax on a business as if it were real human being. These taxes are layered on top of all the income taxes generated by all of the buying and selling involved in doing business.
Tariffs and duties, the products being taxed at point of entry. After facing this hit, these products will generate income to be taxed once again as estate, corporate, and income taxes.
Sales and excise taxes. These extractions are mostly generated from spending originating in previously taxed income.
Ditto for property taxes.
Our whole tax system is a series of overlays of double/triple/quadruple taxation. What’s the relevance of attempting to excuse state and local taxes from something that is so generic to our, or any, tax code?
If you believe the existence of “double taxation” is hyped – which some people do – the case for SALT teeters further. A good portion of tax dollars to different levels of government goes to pay for different services. Tax dollars to the feds for national defense aren’t the same dollars as those going to the state to fulfill a state’s policy of equalizing budgets among a state’s school districts. It’s only when services overlap between layers of government do we run the risk of a taxed dollar being hit again. The deduction purports to dodge something that doesn’t really happen in the first place.
Even more convoluted contentions have been summoned to keep SALT. One mind-boggling claim is the belief, absent the deduction, state and local spending would be “sub-optimal”. Wrap your head around that one. Here’s the concoction: stir into the witch’s cauldron tax incentives to pay for more or less public services and add someone’s ideological preferences, and out comes the right amount of local spending. Allegedly, SALT is the ingredient to go “optimal”.
Is it making any sense? Only if you believe in magic. The thing rides on the mystical power to glean SALT’s ability to encourage the funding of more local government services, services that might increasingly benefit non-residents. Is that “optimal”? I don’t know, though it smells fishy. Strip away “optimal” and, in reality, you are left with a simple local decision to fund a service. Nothing more. Whether it aligns with a pundit’s conception of “optimal” is meaningless. In reality, SALT is the noise in the calculation to finance a park.
If the mystical sound of “optimal” doesn’t sound convincing, a second line of trenches in defense of SALT is thrown up by blue-state advocates when they contend that they get fleeced more by the federal government and, therefore, are more deserving of a bigger break. They trot out such crude numbers as the return on federal taxes paid – i.e., residents’ taxes paid out and federal spending coming in, as in this chart appearing in a 2015 issue of The Atlantic (7):
Deep blue, Hillary/Bernie-loving sanctuaries as New York and California reside at the bottom of the chart. They get less than a $1.00 for every one sent to the feds. In contrast, redder-than-red South Carolina gets a whopping $7.87 back. (7) Are some states riding on the federal teat as they keep their tax burdens low? Are red states hypocrites? Are blue state victims and therefore deserving of SALT?
The numbers in the “return on federal investment” chart are too raw to be of much value. Local circumstances muddy the picture. Number one on the list of federal contributors is military installations. Northeast states aren’t likely to be the source of cheap real estate for sprawling tank exercises and bombing runs. A state like California ironically is (Does the Mojave Desert remind you of anything?), and so are states populated by now-posthumous “yellow dog Democrats”and represented by long since gone-to-room-temperature congressional mandarins: South/North Carolina, Texas, etc.
Marine armored vehicles at Twentynine Palms, Ca.
The presence of federal defense spending in a state has much to do with historical inertia. Those states long in the game have the advantage. It’s a mixture of red and blue states. Of the top ten receiving the lion’s share of the defense pie, 4 are solid blue states (California, Maryland, Washington, and Massachusetts); 2 are purple (Virginia and Pennsylvania); 4 are red (Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Alabama). (9) Nothing remarkable here since the federal pipeline was long established before the current progressive/left mania came to make blue states “blue”. (10)
Hampton Roads with Newport News, Norfolk, and Portsmouth. It’s the location for major military installations as the Norfolk Naval Shipyard.USS John Kennedy at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, 1983.
Looking at it from the perspective of the importance of the federal defense spending on a state’s economy (GDP), 4 of the top jurisdictions are solidly blue (Hawaii, DC, Maryland, and Maine) and the rest are purple or red (Va., Alabama, Alaska, Miss., Kentucky, Arizona). (9) Once again, a blend. Regardless of a state’s political hue, Pentagon dollars mostly go to facilities that predate ’41 Pearl Harbor. (10)
So, what do we have? We have some blue states with a large infusion of federal defense money, coexisting with a tax-spend-regulation frenzy, all the while screeching about the loss of SALT. Suddenly, the picture ain’t so clear.
Anyway, the scramble by localities for bases resembles the hustle for the next Google server farm, and should be viewed in that light – not as a “federal handout”. Defense is an industry, and like any industry, it brings paychecks to be spent in the state. It works the same as an Amazon distribution center. If it adds to the state’s coffers in the same way as a Google or Amazon facility, so what. A state can’t present itself as a victim of the federal tax monster as it shuns, or is incapable of attracting, industry – federal or private.
A growing state economy from expanding industries means a growing state tax base and a decreasing bite for each taxpaying resident … under normal mathematical rules. Hence, low tax states. High tax states punish economic activity, restrict the role of business/industry taxes to the state’s balance sheet, and create a greater reliance on personal tax extractions. Up goes their state-driven personal tax load, up goes the desire to hide the gouging through SALT, and down goes the federal dollar influx. The result is the funky calculation called the “return on taxpayer investment”.
And what about a state’s inflationary character that drives incomes and tax receipts? That’s the other side of the “return on taxpayer investment” equation: the money that flows out of the state. Yes, there is such a thing as a cost-of-living and income feedback loop. As a state’s cost of living rises, so does the income to keep up; and as incomes rise, so does the cost of living. Are state policies compelling an increase in the cost of living, and necessitating a higher income to maintain residence?
To no surprise, according to one measure, mega-blue and high tax states like California and New York nowhere appear on the list of the cheapest states to live. Pride of place goes to 9 red states (Texas, et al) and 1 purple (Michigan). (11)
On the flip side, blue states occupy near the top in the necessity for its people to shell out lots of cash to continue to live there. (13) Two of the big stimulants are housing and energy costs. Both are highly sensitive to a state’s public policies. Environmental, land use, and growth control measures wreak havoc on the cost of living. Add “prevailing wage” inflators to the mix and you have a recipe for escalating wage demands. Plug those inflated income numbers into a progressive tax code and a river of money flows to the state capital and DC.
Californios, take a look at your electricity bill for a familiar inflator. All that “green” energy is expensive, and it shows. See below. (12)
Utility rates are one of the favorite social engineering tools of the green lobby. In many blue states, the presence of an all-powerful green lobby defines what it means to be blue. Living in a 3 bedroom/2 bath house in the Central Valley of California means a $400/mo. electricity tab, unless you knuckle under to the state’s commissars and load your roof with solar panels.
The price of everything inexorably climbs. An inflated utility bill component is factored into everything you buy. No wonder a comfortable existence in these locales requires more green of the kind with presidents on them.
Democrat bastions don’t seem to be aware of the trap that they created. It begins with an infatuation for progressive tax codes. Then, greenie fascinations raise the price of existence. Lump onto the process the attempt to raise wages by ukase (minimum and prevailing wage law), add a plethora of regulations to assuage any chic cause that comes down the pike, and the pitchfork-wielding peasants end up demanding more in their paychecks. As they do so, they’ll be trapped into higher tax rates to artificially inflate the flow of cash to the feds. At this juncture, there will be no shortage of number-crunchers to produce a kind of mathematical demagoguery to justify a special perk for the victims.
What started out as an honest gesture in the dawn of income taxation is a higher mountain of contradictions today. The old pretext, along with these more modern ones, is baloney. CPA status isn’t required to figure it out. The real reason is something more simple. After 104 years, people have grown attached to SALT, whether it makes sense or not. In this sense, SALT is like today’s opioid epidemic. An addict begins with raiding the medicine cabinet, a dependency develops and grows, and the person ends up as a client of the drug cartels. Like an addiction, entire financial lives become wrapped around ages-old tax provisions. Threats to take it away lead to the political equivalent of withdrawals.
Heebie-jeebies can erupt at any time from a blue-state anybody. D’s we expect to be afflicted, but R’s aren’t immune from the spasms brought on by the threat to take away the perk. It’s simply a blue or purple state thing – aka tax-happy jurisdictions – no matter the partisan color of their advocates.
Rep.’s Peter King (R-NY) and Tom MacArthur (R-NJ) threaten opposition to tax reform that includes the elimination of SALT.
Yesterday’s absurdity has morphed into today’s “necessity”. As such, the inmates of tax-happy jurisdictions haven’t limited their defense to now-discredited claims. They’ve invented additional arguments based on prudence. Come to think of it, really, it’s the prudence of the addict.
The abolition of SALT, it is asserted, would wreak havoc on a state’s bond rating. In essence, blue-state defenders are admitting that without the sweetener of SALT their residents would seek to be residents elsewhere. Probably true. Without SALT, residents would be exposed to the full effect of their blue-state’s tax mania. The logic: out flows an alarming amount of the tax base, down goes the ability to make good on their bonds. Elementary, my dear Watson.
Understandable, probably true, but as a defense, it’s bunkum. The blue-state perk shields a state’s residents from the full effect of sky-high taxation while simultaneously making it easier for the state’s tax collectors to have a crowd to fleece. The image recurs of a vampire with a herd of human livestock to feed upon. Drugging the victims with SALT to make the experience more tolerable isn’t a valid justification for bleeding them white. If they were sober, they’d flee like hell. The argument for medicating the victims is an argument for exsanguination (sever loss of blood), without the slightest recognition about whether they should have their hemoglobin stolen in the first place.
Instead, sticking with the metaphor, wouldn’t it be wiser to start a campaign to eradicate vampires by recruiting an army of priests armed with wooden stakes? In our case, cloning an army of Arthur Laffers would do the trick. The effort would be expedited by a clear-headed confrontation with the horror among the patsies. Eliminating SALT might produce outcomes such as an exodus (and a run on U-Haul rentals), mob exterminations of blue-state Republicans, and/or the patrons of Starbucks turning into icon-smashing peasants as they march to the homes and offices of the state’s revenuers and their abettors. Maybe all three.
Number 2 on the probabilities list is a very real possibility: the extermination of blue-state Republicans. Blue-state Republicans are already an endangered species. SALT might make them go the way of Martha, the last known passenger pigeon who died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.
The fate awaiting blue-state Republicans if SALT is repealed?
Or so it is argued. That might be the short term effect. Beyond one election cycle, after the hypothetical wipeout, the residents would be accosted with more tax-crazed “public servants”, further intensifying the state’s slide. Don’t forget, your most likely choice on the ballot is between a tax lunatic (a “D”) or a now dispirited R. After multiple waves of tax bingeing, an alcoholic’s bottom would be reached. Then there’d be sobriety and a cleaning up – i.e., a return to tax sanity. A short term loss might be acceptable if it results in a long term fiscal clean-and-sober.
But try selling the logic to a soon-to-be-unemployed Republican legislator in a hostile state. Yet, is the preservation of his job a sufficient justification for keeping an iniquitous tax perk? The rationale worked to keep the antebellum South married to slavery. The South’s entire way of life , they cried, couldn’t survive the loss of their human property. The argument was as dubious then as it is today in its latest incarnation for SALT. The only difference in the 2 scenarios is the object of veneration and preservation.
While the tax perk may preserve a few “R” politicos, it continues to do violence to equity among the our sovereign states. States that prudently restrain their state Leviathans also have modest tax regimes. They receive little, if any, benefit from the perk. There’s just too little to deduct to reduce a taxpayer’s overall burden.
The calculus is reversed in most blue states. Nanny states are expensive, and so is their tax bite. The deduction is a salve to a gaping wound. Not surprisingly, it is coveted by tax hells and viewed contemptuously by places not located anywhere along Dante’s descent through tax “Inferno”.
There you have it: love of SALT is synonymous with jurisdictions defined by words such as spendthrift, irresponsible, gouging, and excessive. For those locales not so enamored by SALT, words like prudence, modest, and limited apply. Put the two sentences together. SALT enables all that should be avoided in a universe with a reasonable relationship to reality.
It is, literally and figuratively, pouring salt into the open wound between the states. It has no rationale other than to make the consequences of irresponsibility less felt. But that isn’t reasonable, is it?
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
“Congress might eliminate California state and local tax deductions. Here’s a look at the numbers”, Kurt Snibbe, Orange County Register, 10/27/2017, http://www.ocregister.com/2017/10/27/congress-might-eliminate-california-state-and-local-tax-deductions-heres-a-look-at-the-numbers/
“Which Places Benefit Most From State and Local Tax Deductions?”, Alan Coe, Tax Foundation, 4/27/2017, https://taxfoundation.org/map-state-and-local-deductions/
“The State and Local Tax Deduction: A Primer”, Jared Walczak, Tax Foundation, 3/15/2017, https://taxfoundation.org/state-and-local-tax-deduction-primer/
For a modern leftist rendition of the demographic, see: “Michael Novak’s Ethics of Buccaneer Capitalism”, Frank Cocozelli, 10/1/2007, Daily Kos, https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2007/10/1/392711/-
“Look at how many pages are in the federal tax code”, Jason Russell, Washington Examiner, 4/15/2016, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/look-at-how-many-pages-are-in-the-federal-tax-code/article/2563032
“Which States Rely the Most on Federal Aid?”, Morgan Scarboro, Tax Foundation, 1/11/17, https://taxfoundation.org/states-rely-most-federal-aid/
“Which States Are Givers and Which Are Takers?”, John Tierney, 5/5/2014, The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-states-are-givers-and-which-are-takers/361668/
This article was cited in the above piece: “2017’s Most & Least Federally Dependent States”, John S Kiernan, Senior Writer & Editor, 4/21/2017, WalletHub, https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the-federal-government/2700/ .
“MILITARY’S IMPACT ON STATE ECONOMIES”, National Conference of State Legislatures, 2/21/2017, http://www.ncsl.org/research/military-and-veterans-affairs/military-s-impact-on-state-economies.aspx
Virginia’s Hampton Roads has 20 military facilities, many date back to the Civil War and before. For one compilation refer to wikipedia, “Hampton Roads”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Roads#U.S._military
“Top 10 States With the Lowest Cost of Living”, Rick LeBlanc, The Balance, 5/16/2017, https://www.thebalance.com/states-with-lowest-cost-of-living-4137935
“Electricity Prices Rise for 30 States, But Some State Leaders Want Them Even Higher”, Heath Knakmuhs, Senior Director, Policy for the Global Energy Institute, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 4/8/2016, https://www.uschamber.com/above-the-fold/electricity-prices-rise-30-states-some-state-leaders-want-them-even-higher
“See how your state scores for living costs”, Natasha Sporn, MSN: Money, 12/22/2016, https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/see-how-your-state-scores-for-living-costs/ss-AAlEaoG#image=31
A current incarnation of the urban sophisticate is the “hipster”. If I may be excused for engaging in a loose generalization, like other versions of the breed, they are equal parts confident, media-savvy, and clueless. Prime examples of the cross-fertilization of fashion and politics, they are susceptible to pleas to prohibit almost anything presented as irritating and outside of their lifestyle experience. They are one for the constituencies for ban-o-mania.
Don’t like something? Ban it! Why ban it? Simple: it’s too jarring to the mind of your average urban and self-anointed sophisticate. That mind is riddled with the prejudices, half-baked ideas, and unexamined assumptions of a person limited to the secular equivalent of a mountaintop monastery … without the serious study of real monks (“echo chamber” keeps popping into my mind). Ban-o-mania reigns supreme as the preferred option for anyone within the materialist abbey, while adversely affecting everyone not so mentally and geographically insulated.
The locations for the secular monasteries generally matches the 2016 election map. Below is a precinct-by-precinct rendering of the 2016 election results. (1)
2016 election results by precinct. Blue is for the Democratic candidate, red for the Republican.
The blue dots on the map are outposts serving as the intersection of radical chic in culture (some might call it “lifestyle”) and politics. The journalist and essayist Tom Wolfe had a great time back in 1970 with an exposé of cosmopolitan affections for radical left politics of the time. (2)
New York Magazine cover, 1970, with Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” essay.Leonard Bernstein (seated at center), his wife Felicia Montealegre (left) and Don Cox (standing), Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party in the Bernsteins’ 13 room penthouse on Park Avenue in Manhattan, January 14, 1970
I won’t speak to the map’s much rarer blue blobs – I suspect these to be mostly concentrations of post-1965 Immigration Act ethnic and racial minorities and Indian reservations- but today’s metropolitan islands have persisted in the habit exemplified in Leonard Bernstein’s fête to the Black Panther Party.
Though, a vocabulary update to “radical chic” is in order. Yesterday’s “radical chic” is today’s “cosmocialist”, a marriage of “cosmopolitan” and “left-liberal”, typically among our tech elites but also littered throughout most of our corporate and academic boardrooms (hosannas to Reihan Salam for bringing the term to my attention [3]). The “left-liberal” side of the equation is an infatuation with imperial environmentalism, high taxes, and almost anything “anti-poverty”. “Cosmopolitan” is a reference to suspicion about regulation (except, of course, of the enviro variety, a huge contradiction), big labor (even though the teachers’ unions are 100% socially and 80% politically aligned) , and a fondness for open borders and multicultural everything.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (left) with California AG Kamala Harris in 2015. (Reuters photo: Robert Galbraith)
Oh, let’s not forget their contempt for traditional institutions. The Bible as the Word of God, Christianity as understood for millennia, marriage, and morality don’t stand a chance in these micro-universes. Currently, transgenderism has pride of place. As a matter of fact, they have conjured “equality” into behavioral license. Any coupling and self-concept among and within humans must be granted sanction by the state. Those who disagree face ostracization, loss of livelihood, and censorship. Is confinement next? Has it already started?
Now we are well on our way to ban-o-mania – the frenzy to prohibit counter-thought, and counter-things. If only Orwell was here to see it.
It’s become next to impossible to talk about these kinds of things without mentioning California, ground zero for cosmocialist social and political tinkering. Bans on things previously considered innocuous are becoming increasingly common in this political zoo. Examples are many. The state couldn’t refrain from an assault on, of all things … free plastic shopping bags. The usual suspects crafted Prop 67 – the always fashionable environmental lobby – and the always fashionable electorate, dominated by its always fashionable coast, approved it in 2016.
Grocery shopping in the not-so-golden state instantly changed from this:
to this:
Bring your own bags: filthy, torn, too small, not enough, or spill out cash to buy some more. People in the zoo will adapt, no doubt. But grocery shopping instantly became a bit more of an annoying experience.
Another example, this time from the elected “geniuses” in the state’s madhouse, called a “legislature”: marketed as an animal welfare measure, the inmates passed AB 485. It would ban the sale of dogs, cats, and rabbits if they didn’t come from shelters. In essence, due to the way the law is written and it’s probably effects, say “bye, bye” to the ritual of taking the daughter down to the pet store to buy a puppy. For Patrick O’Donnel (D-Long Beach), the bill’s author, pet militants like him can’t envision themselves doing it, so ban anyone else from doing it. Such is the auto-reflex of the ban-o-maniac. The legislation’s fate is in the lap of Gov. Jerry Brown, another cosmocialist. (4)
Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell, D-Long Beach, and rescue dogs.
For the cosmocialist, dogs are cute; Christian fundamentalists are not. The progressive fatwa against them has already begun. With dim-witted sleight of hand, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (D-San Diego) sought to impose her social opinions on the entire faith community in California. Through legislation, she tried to nullify the Supreme Court’s Hosanna-Tabor decision that buttressed a church’s religious freedom exemptions to government’s contraceptive and abortion mandates. (5) She preposterously claimed that the Court didn’t say what it said. For the Court, religious freedom reaches out to longstanding church functions beyond the sanctuary. She didn’t get the message. Fletcher’s logic is the equivalent of a child’s attempt to make a parent’s admonishment of “no” into “yes”.
If mangling the Court didn’t convince, she tried the gender equality angle. For her, the moral code in the Torah, Quran, and the Old and New Testaments must be sacrificed because a woman can show the results of a sleepover with her boyfriend. Since women get pregnant, and men can’t (there’s no place to put the fetus), scripture must now go into the garbage disposal. The minister can preach God’s law from the pulpit – I think – but, according to her, he shouldn’t be able to do anything about single moms and womanizers staffing his school (Was she trying to improve the job prospects for Bill Clinton?). And this passes for serious thought in the California legislature?
A reprieve for Baptists was granted by Gov. Brown’s veto of Fletcher’s abortion to logic. Don’t think for a moment that she and her compatriots have given up.
The Old Testament, evangelicals, pet stores, and traditional institutions are verboten to the tin-eared metro-chic. Similarly verboten is a healthy skepticism about wild-eyed climate-change apocalyptics. They won’t shrink from criminalizing, or subjecting to civil forfeiture, anyone who happens to make the mistake of conjoining a position of authority with cynicism about enviro end-times. Metroplex electorates appear to have affection for Maduro-type (of Venezuela fame) DA’s and AG’s to accomplish the desired end.
Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris in September 2015.
Not wishing to leave California out of the scrum, former AG Kamala Harris (now Senator) joined the AG’s of New York, Eric Schneiderman, and Virgin Islands, Claude Walker, and Massachusetts, Maura Healey, to form an Inquisition to ferret out “counter-revolutionaries” to Al Gore’s fashionable doctrine. It’s the latest craze sweeping the blue-dot jurisdictions: spend millions of dollars to haul into court the petroleum industry for questioning the supreme leader. (6) Ban-o-mania encompasses the campaign to silence opinions.
For everyone else without a corporate lawyer, loss of tenure, livelihood, or excommunication awaits. It’s a reincarnation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. They’re making Mao proud … if the old bloody tyrant was alive today.
Public humiliation by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).Cultural Revolution poster. Smashing the old to make way for the new.
The same is true for guns. Guns are as gauche to the chic denizens of metropolis as the climate views of anyone not in tune with the fashionable orthodoxy. Not surprisingly, respect for the 2nd Amendment fades as fewer and fewer people among the self-described “betters” in urban America have knowledge and experience with the things. This is their mental picture of gun owners, a product of too much late-night tv viewing (late-night comedians, SNL).
Yes, it’s a plain old prejudice, but it matches their ignorance. They live a life without firearms and so conclude nobody needs them. It’s easy for urban electorates to grant the state’s vast prosecutorial powers to AG’s giddy with the prospect of hanging a few gun manufacturers. The aforementioned Maura Healey of Massachusetts set her sights on Glock.
Massachusetts AG Maura Healey with Eric Schneiderman, NY AG, 2016.
Whatever their rationale, come on, it boils down to, “We don’t own them; therefore, you can’t either”. Really, lifestyle is their governing north star.
The corporate boardroom is as populated with hyper-sensitive ban-o-maniacs as deep blue state attorney general offices. The tekkie industry is particularly infected with them. “Caution” is the watchword for any true free-thinker in these occupational habitats. Just as Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla, learned in 2014. He was run out of his own company when it came to light that he contributed $1,000 to the California Prop 8 campaign to defend traditional marriage in 2008. The lefty hive in Mozilla and Silicon Valley swarmed at the knowledge.
Brendan Eich
Ideological cleansing targets anyone outside the metro groupthink. In Eich’s case, he cavorted with those who think that marriage is by nature heterosexual, and can only be homosexual if sodomy is accepted as the act of consummation. Of course, consummation could be dispensed with, but then marriage is reduced to a state-sanctioned friendship pact with the option of wide open conjugal behavior. The whole concept of “gay marriage” enters the grammatical territory of “non-sequitur”. Such thinking, though, is assigned to the Klan in the blinkered imaginations of cosmocialists.
The lefty piranha weren’t satisfied with the corpse of Brendan Eich. They will always need to feed on anyone with the temerity to express a different point of view. James Damore fell into the infected waters at Google when he sought to explain the small presence of women in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) industries in words different from the politically correct orthodoxy. (8)
James Damore and Google
He presented the proposition that women are underrepresented due to the fact that fewer girls have inclinations for STEM, not because of some overhanging pall of misogyny. (9) The snowflakes erupted and the impromptu inquisitors at Google went on a rampage. Damore found himself out of a job, fired by Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Steve Jobs juxtaposed to Google’s Sundar Pichai amid the Damore firing, by LA street artist Sabo.
The “diversity” police went into action mode to defend the sanctity of the party doctrine. Every one of the tech biggies has a Ministry of Diversity Truth. They sprang in defense of Google. At Google, its commissar is Danielle Brown. Intel has commissar Barbara Whye. Maxine Williams is installed at Facebook’s commissariat. Helping the biggies is a nomenklatura of consultants. Paradigm’s Joelle Emerson is an example. All of them are the keepers of the diversity holy grail.
Paradigm Consultancy’s Joelle Emerson
The whole diversity shtick is profoundly open to question. Yet, it is accepted as the closest thing to a self-evident truth among a class of people who have long ago rejected such truth when Thomas Jefferson in 1776 tried using the concept. Their’s is a pseudo-science meant to perform an ideological function: widely propagate the dogma while simultaneously swamping disagreement. They are the practitioners of the ban-o-mania of thought.
The tennis aficionado John McEnroe recently stepped in it when he declared what is obviously true. Men and women aren’t physical equals on the tennis court. For that, this time it was the equality police that leapt into action.
John McEnroe appearing before the press about controversial remarks.
McEnroe offhandedly stated in response to a question that Serena Williams would be ranked 700 among professional men’s tennis players. (10) Boy did that get the ant hill all abuzz. But for the equality commissariat, there was the disconcerting face-off in 1998 with a 203rd ranked men’s player, Karsten Braasch of Germany. The Williams sisters were teenagerly brash and over-confident, bragging in the ATP men’s office that they could whip any tour player ranked in the top 200.
Karsten Braasch (center) and the Williams sisters at the 1998 Australian Open.
Braasch, ranked 203 at the time, overheard the remark and took up the challenge in a lark. After playing a round of morning golf, Braasch arrived to play each sister one set. The event attracted quite a crowd. During changeovers, he smoked a cigarette and drank a beer. He bested Serena 6-1 and Venus 6-2. The Williams’ points had all the appearance of gifts. (11)
Was McEnroe all that wrong?
There is a sense of unreality in the blue-dot world. The here-and-now must be made to conform to ideological fantasies. In movies, women punch out burly men with skeletal and muscle structures that would collapse on contact if it didn’t occur before cameras and with the assistance of computer assisted graphics. We might be able to accept these illusions since, after all, it’s the movies. But the fantasies don’t dissipate after leaving the theater. There’s legions of prosecutors, politicians, consultants, and academics devoted to making the movie unreality a real life reality.
To make it happen, massive mind control and social engineering are required. All the tools of ban-o-mania are enlisted in the effort. Ostracize, prosecute, legislate, fire, and propagandize (the Bolsheviks called it “reeducation”) anyone not in conformance with the cosmocialist zeitgeist. The sad part is their push to take the campaign national. Their appetites won’t be satiated with dominance over metropolis.
Watch out red America. You’re one election away from being forced into living and thinking like a Greenwich Village hipster. You may not know it, but you have a metaphorical bulls-eye planted on your forehead.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
The 2016 precinct map was garnered from “Creating a National Precinct Map”, 4/30/2017, https://decisiondeskhq.com/data-dives/creating-a-national-precinct-map/
“Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s”, Tom Wolfe, New York Magazine, June 8, 1970, http://nymag.com/news/features/46170/
Reihan Salam is executive editor of National Review, contributing editor of National Affairs, advisor to the Energy Innovation Reform Project and Niskanen Institute. “Cosmocialist” first came to my attention in his article, “Democrats and Plutocrats”, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451463/democrats-silicon-valley-rich-entrepreneurs-changing-partys-working-class-image
“California pet stores may be required to only sell rescue animals if this bill passes”, Courtney Tompkins, The Los Angeles Daily News, 9/15/2017, http://www.dailynews.com/2017/09/15/california-pet-stores-may-be-required-to-only-sell-rescue-animals-if-this-bill-passes/
“Anti-discrimination measure or blow to religious freedom? California bill sparks debate on employer codes of conduct”, Melanie Mason, Los Angeles Times, 3/29/2017, http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essential-politics-updates-an-anti-discrimination-measure-or-blow-1490826757-htmlstory.html
“Left-Wing AGs Are Playing Politics with the Law”, Jim Copeland and Rafael A. Mangual, National Review Online, 9/29/2016, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440542/state-attorneys-general-political-abuses-power
“Mozilla CEO resignation raises free-speech issues”, USA Today, 4/4/2014, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/04/mozilla-ceo-resignation-free-speech/7328759/
“Google Episode Sends a Message: Diversity Is a Tough Sell in Silicon Valley”, Georgia Wells and Yoree Koh, WSJ, 8/10/17, https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-episode-sends-a-message-diversity-is-a-tough-sell-in-silicon-valley-1502383625; also at http://www.4-traders.com/INTEL-CORPORATION-4829/news/Google-Episode-Sends-a-Message-Diversity-Is-a-Tough-Sell-in-Silicon-Valley-24924773/.
The complete text of James Damore’s offending email can be found here: “Here’s the Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google [Updated]”, Kate Conger, Gizmodo, 8/5/2017, http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320/amp
“John McEnroe: Serena Williams world’s best female tennis player but would rank ‘like 700’ among men”, Scott Allen, The Chicago Tribune, 6/25/2017, http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/breaking/ct-john-mcenroe-serena-williams-tennis-20170625-story.html
The episode is recounted here: “Serena Williams once challenged men’s player at Australian Open”, Sandra Harwitt, USA Today, 1/21/2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/tennis/aus/2017/01/21/serena-williams-nicole-gibbs-australian-open/96876832/
Unsurprisingly and generally speaking, parents strive to grease the skids for their kids’ future success. Particularly, middle class parents will drive themselves to near bankruptcy in order to guarantee their offspring’s advancement. Yet, when they buy into a nicer neighborhood to enroll junior in a “better” school, are they really getting a “better” school? There’s good reason to doubt that proposition. Much of the corruption in our schools has deep tentacles, and is no respecter of “red” vs. “blue” states, public or private schools, inner city or suburban schools, parochial or secular, and even reaches down into home-schooling. It’s equal-opportunity corruption.
I suppose that the issue hinges on what is meant by “better”.
Sure, avoidance of gang rape in the school’s bathroom, classrooms-as-battlefields, and the accidental straying beyond the school’s chain link fence into feral environs are legitimate parental concerns. Many parents would assign “better” to any school without these traits.
Under the belief that a geographic relocation might improve things for the munchkins, many parents can’t wait to hook up the U-haul and move to a richer zip code.
A moving truck is shown at a house that was sold in Palo Alto, Calif., Tuesday, June 19, 2012. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)
However, zip codes of the affluent present their own problems, leaving aside the schools. Websites catering to the school-conscious parent have sprung up in places afflicted with a cost of living commensurate with Warren Buffett’s investment portfolio but many people possessing a net worth more in line with the denizens of 1950’s Levittown. California is a hotbed for these conversations. One site for Bay Area moms and dads, berkeleyparentsnetwork.org, is filled with advice such as “Of course, if you can afford to buy in a place with good schools then by all means buy.” (12) Though for most Californios, being able to make the rent, or mortgage, hangs overhead like the sword of Damocles.
Some have opted to jump ship and leave the state. For many, housing costs are just too big an obstacle to overcome in the quest for better family environs, including schools. From 2000 to 2009, the SF Bay Area registered a net outflow of 600,000 domestic migrants (mostly citizens, not immigrants). After a 5-year pause due to falling house prices from the Great Recession, the exodus resumed as shelter resumed its eye-popping California norm (house prices returning to 6x’s income, beyond the acceptable 3x’s). The 2016 losses for the whole state were on the order of 110,000, most of it from the heavily populated but very expensive coastal enclaves. (9)
Those “domestic migrants” – residents of one state moving to another – seem to be emerging from states with uniform ID: those with the adjective “high” before cost-of-living, taxes, crime, and regulation, and “low” for upward mobility and successful business formation. The usual suspects are California, Illinois, New York, et al.
Destinations are South and West — EXCLUDING CALIFORNIA! Look at the top and bottom of the chart below. The top is reserved for the welcoming states and the bottom for states that shed people like my dog does hair. (15)
Interestingly, the combination of escalating house prices and California’s hostility to suburban living is making for a return of feudal manorialism. A fleeing middle class, sensitive to rising prices for a family hearth, in combination with foreign immigration into the state (2.7 million “undocumented” live in the state – see 13 below), is resurrecting something resembling a lord/serf society. Two researchers characterized the situation like this: “Essentially, the model [for California] is that of a gated community, with a convenient servant base nearby.” (9)
“Convenient servant base”? Sounds much like “serf”, or maybe peasant, to me. “Gated community”? Sounds like “castle”, or chateau.
Is this a French manor from the Middle Ages or contemporary California?Gated development, Carlsbad, California.East Los Angeles neighborhood.
For many, moving for better schools and a more affordable roof most likely means leapfrogging the state entirely. But don’t delude yourself into equating a middle or upper class student body in a new state with a high quality education. Housing is cheaper but the vast majority of schools are likely, at best, to be only marginally better. The only real difference between the middle class kid and inner-city one is the poor kid’s path to mediocrity is a lot rockier. Yes, a mediocre curriculum and poor teacher training awaits all irrespective of better cars in the student parking lot or a student enrollment that’ll do the homework.
Students listening to Ernest Jenkins III in his Manhood Development class at Oakland High School. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York TimesSuburban school in school uniforms.
All schools draw from the same pool of teacher candidates and curricular resources. You’ll find the same textbooks on a home-schooler’s kitchen table as you will find in a Catholic school classroom and a suburban or inner-city public school. The vast majority of teachers are given a remarkably homogeneous college education and teacher training centering on the mind-numbing writings of John Dewey. The sameness is quite remarkable.
30 years worth of experience as a public high school and community college teacher has made me aware of the phenomenal uniformity of what is taught, how it is taught, and who is teaching it.
Two textbooks that were a staple of 20 years of high school instruction and widely adopted are displayed below.
A widely-adopted World History textbook.Ditto U.S. History text.
Over the years, textbooks have declined in narrative with a surge in graphics. Technical, thought-provoking theory has disappeared. Identity politics is amply displayed: for instance, out goes Henry Bessemer and in comes Mary Wollstonecraft. Much space is reserved for our historical sins as these crowd out the richness of debate over the nature of our federal system. Labor history is reduced to a Marxist distillation; excluded is the role of violent anarcho-socialists in some of that history. Immigration and immigrants, of course, are always saintly. The 1960’s reads as if it was cleansed through the censors of the radical left. I could go on.
For pedagogy, teacher trainees are immersed in the mind of John Dewey. Who’s John Dewey? He’s a turn-of-the-century socialist who wanted to turn the schools into factories for making socialists.
Prof. John Dewey at Columbia University.
He’s famous for such arcane mumbo-jumbo as “constructivism” and seemingly commonsensical “child-centered learning”. The “construction” in “constructivism” is simply the matter of raising (or constructing) the child’s receptivity to socialism. “Child-centered” is an assault on the established canon of western civilization. The child’s wants are the guide to instruction, not Plato, the Apostle Paul, or the Founders. The teacher as the adult in the room is to be replaced by the chaos of adolescent urges.
Howard Gardner dispensing his gospel in India.
On this foundation is built the everyone-wins-a-trophy philosophy of “multiple intelligences” via Howard Gardner. Everybody is assumed to be smart, but in reality nobody is smart … if you think about it. The whole thing is a levelling of all students. From this we get the dilution of the curricular core to include excursions into all the “intelligences” to the detriment of a traditional core. It’s conducive to “heterogeneity” and grouping in almost everything.
About that “grouping”, “cooperative learning” are watchwords. Kids are thrust together into groups of varying abilities – the “heterogeneity” thing – and responsibility is socialistically distributed. What better way to “construct” the new child for the socialist future? Keep this in mind as your kid comes home with stories of his or her classroom group.
Don’t think for a moment that AP courses are immune to these influences. AP Literature guidelines now reflect Dewey’s “child-centered” nonsense. AP US History deemphasizes a mastery of historical facts and their connections. They demand mature judgments from immature minds. Across the curriculum, we’re creating opinionated ignoramuses.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that our professional goal wasn’t Jefferson’s ideal of an educated citizenry. It’s about making good little Democrats — by Democrats, I mean the Democratic Party as part of the consortium of the world’s Social Democratic Parties. Read “socialist” for Social Democrat … mostly of the mild sort.
The kids’ minds have long been pried open to being college snowflakes and Antifa recruits. Intolerant and propagandized since shortly after becoming bipedal, many of them are now subjecting us to their partisan and ideologically-laced rhetoric. The rhetoric supplants mature thinking.
Listen to this exchange between a taxi driver and his youthful customer over a hula doll on his dashboard. Count the number of times political boilerplate and the word “offensive” is used by the female rider.
We are reaping the whirlwind as tantrums and thuggishness displace reasoned debate.
We are witnessing the results of 4-5 decades of a blinkered and tendentious instruction. It has penetrated nearly everywhere. Buying a home in a better neighborhood will buy you a preppy student body; it won’t guarantee you a education free of the bacillus. Fleeing a blue state to a red one won’t change the dynamic. A private or parochial school might only provide a safer and more accomplished route to mediocrity. Home schooling might be an option if the curriculum can be kept free of the college ed schools and government’s embrace of identity politics, an unlikely occurrence.
Education reformers are everywhere, and have been arising zombie-like throughout my career. Yet, reform seems to always originate from the same worn out premises. We’ve reached the point that real education reform may require us to ignore the reformers. Unless it happens, we had all better keep an eye on Tommy (see below).
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
Interesting and brief account of treating inner city school students: “An Inner City School Social Worker Shares Two of His Cases”, Howard Honigsfeld, Psychotherapy Networker, 7/28/2015, https://www.psychotherapynetworker.org/blog/details/607/therapy-strategies-for-working-with-underprivileged.
An account of the challenges in an Oklahoma urban school: “A look inside an inner city school struggling with multiple challenges, including ‘needing improvement’ sanctions”, Danniel Parker, The City Sentinel, 5/15/2011, http://city-sentinel.com/2011/05/a-look-inside-an-inner-city-school-struggling-with-multiple-challenges-including-%E2%80%9Cneeding-improvement%E2%80%9D-sanctions/.
Interesting advice in teaching inner city students: “4 Tips to Being a Good Teacher in the Inner-City”, The Libertarian Republic, 11/11/2014, http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/4-tips-good-teacher-inner-city/
Excellent maps showing a changing Los Angeles ethnic demography from 1940 to 2000: “Los Angeles County Ethnic/Racial Breakdown 1940-2000”, http://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=169073.0.
“White Flight Never Ended”, Alana Semuels, The Atlantic, 7/30/2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/white-flight-alive-and-well/399980/.
“Data shows how major U.S. cities are slowly re-segregating”, Kenya Downs, 3/7/2016, PBS NewsHour, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/major-u-s-cities-may-seem-integrated-but-not-for-long/.
A synopsis of John Dewey’s harmful impact on American education can be found in this critical review of Henry Edmondson’s book, John Dewey and the Decline of American Education, Dennis Attick, PhD candidate in Social Foundations of Education at Georgia State University, http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1061&context=eandc. The author is clearly supportive of the major tenets of Dewey’s education philosophy.
For an account of the most widely adopted textbooks in today’s America go here: “Widely Adopted History Textbooks”, American Textbook Council, http://historytextbooks.net/adopted.htm.
A summary of recent migration trends for California can be found here: “Leaving California? After slowing, the trend intensifies”, Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox, The Orange County Register, 4/23/2017, http://www.ocregister.com/2017/04/23/leaving-california-after-slowing-the-trend-intensifies/.
Metrics of school quality don’t vary that much for schools within the same school district is asserted here: “Do Better Neighborhoods for
MTO Families Mean Better Schools?”, Brief No. 3; Kadija S. Ferryman, Xavier de Souza Briggs, Susan J. Popkin, and María Rendón; The Urban Institute, March 2008, https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/31596/411639-Do-Better-Neighborhoods-for-MTO-Families-Mean-Better-Schools-.PDF. ** The metrics for measuring school quality were performance on state exams, the school’s poverty rate, and exposure to white classmates and students with limited English proficiency.
** “Our kids are still in early elementary school too but I think you will find the answer varies widely. Obviously… not ”everyone” can go to private school! I know some parents who have had their kids just tough it out at a not-so-great middle school, then get a scholarship for private high school. Others with more resources opt to start private school earlier on. And, even some high earning families I know chose Oakland public high schools including Skyline, Oakland Tech, and charter schools. Ultimately it’s hard to say before your child starts school, what type of high school will work for your family. That said, we chose our home based on both elementary and middle schools we liked, at least ”on paper” as you say, figuring high school was too far off to gauge.”; from “Moving for the Schools”, Berkeley Parents Network, August 2012, https://www.berkeleyparentsnetwork.org/recommend/housing/schools.
Ibid. From the segment “Moving vs. private school – how to make the decision?”.
“II. Where Do They Live?”, Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, Pew Research Center, 4/14/2009, http://www.pewhispanic.org/2009/04/14/ii-where-do-they-live/.
“5 facts about illegal immigration in the U.S.”, FactTank: News in the Numbers, Pew Research Center, 4/27/2017, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/27/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/.
“California, Illinois, and New York Keep Losing People to Other States”, Ryan McMaken, Mises Wire, 5/10/2017, Mises Institute, https://mises.org/blog/california-illinois-and-new-york-keep-losing-people-other-states
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” Luke 23:34
Unsurprisingly and generally speaking, parents strive to grease the skids for their kids’ future success. Particularly, middle class parents will drive themselves to near bankruptcy in order to guarantee their offspring’s advancement. Yet, when they buy into a nicer neighborhood to enroll junior in a “better” school, are they really getting a “better” school? There’s good reason to doubt that proposition. Much of the corruption in our schools has deep tentacles, and is no respecter of “red” vs. “blue” states, public or private schools, inner city or suburban schools, parochial or secular, and even reaches down into home-schooling. It’s equal-opportunity corruption.
