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Democracy, Schmuckocracy

(Schmuck: a foolish or contemptable person; origin in the Yiddish schmok, i.e. penis)

Is it time to ditch 'NIMBYism'? - Phillips Group
NIMBYs, schmucks

The chant “Save our democracy”, it’s flung like so many shotgun pellets at anyone viewed as an opponent.  What about the people, the people doing the flinging?  The reality is that we have more “democracy” than ever before, and the dissatisfaction with our plight has never been greater.  How does that compute: more democracy equals more discontent?  Can the collective, also known as “the people”, act in the manner of schmucks, harming themselves?  Democracy, schmuckocracy?

The level of discontent is palpable in polls.  Here’s one: Gallup’s recent survey of public confidence in major institutions ranging from the governmental to the social and economic, public and private (see #1 and #2 below).  11 of the 16 measured entities experienced declines; not one turned in a sterling performance.  Much of the public’s lackluster assessment of our institutions can be attributed to their current conduct.  Biden’s infirmity, an engineered chaos at the border, the embarrassing bugout from Kabul, the highly destructive endeavor to shut down nearly all human activity during a viral episode, inflation, the unaffordability of shelter, the unaffordability of energy, crime, nothing seems to work, boys in girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms, etc., goes a long way to heaping scorn on government, on “our democracy”, on any of our institutions that had a hand in the degeneracy.

Military Clears Crew of Plane That Took Flight as Afghans Fell to Their Deaths - The New York Times
eople running alongside a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane as it moved down a runway of the international airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, in August, in 2021. (photo: Associated Press)
Olympics 2024: Boxer Angela Carini quits after 46 seconds against Imane Khelif amid eligibility row
An alleged transgender boxer consoles Italian boxer who quit after 46 seconds in Olympic female boxing match.

It doesn’t end there.  Many private ones – “big business”, big tech, the media – get slammed, and maybe deservedly so.

The Supreme Court takes a hit as well.  That might be due to another feature of a democracy: the people’s tendency to be acclimated to bunk.  Since 1973 when the Court imperiously invented a provision in the Constitution that established a national right to take unborn life, “the people” grew accustomed to it.  A 51-year odyssey ensued to do it.  So, by today, people crave their newly minted national license to end the life of people who haven’t exited the womb.  The Court’s Dobbs decision just struck the word “national” from the license, not the license itself.  But don’t expect “the people” to understand such subtlety.

Combine this with the habit of the public to be persuaded by jargon, such as “assault rifle”, and therefore unwittingly consign the Second Amendment to the mercy of demagogues, and we have another journey down Alice’s rabbit hole.  The Constitution stands in the way of the passion of the moment so “the people” turn on it and the Court in demanding a shortcut around the cumbersome task of properly amending it.  Understanding isn’t a feature of the mob, which sadly is another trait of democracy.

We’ve injected so much unrestrained democracy into our system that our founders’ original design seems strange to anyone born after the Great Depression.  Reading the Constitution must seem like a bizarre experience for a population raised on a steady diet of democracy this and democracy that.  An example would be the abuse heaped on the Electoral College.  Once a powerful faction loses the presidency by it, but wins the popular vote, they agitate to dismantle it and make the head of the executive branch conform to the wishes of the crowds on the two coasts and every urban center with a college campus.  It’s not enough that a form of direct democracy is the operative principle of the lower house of Congress in the Constitution.  The will of the mob must be made to dominate throughout.

Lest we forget, checking democracy and its mobs was an important goal of the founders.  Here’s a sampling of their views:

“Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.” – James Madison

“It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government.  Experience has proved that no position is more false than this.  The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government.  Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.” – Alexander Hamilton

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.  There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” – John Adams

“It is one of the evils of democratical governments, that the people, not always seeing and frequently misled, must often feel before they can act.” – George Washington

There was never a more searing indictment of democracy than that of Ambrose Bierce when he wrote toward the end of the 19th century, “Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.”

“The people” aren’t cognizant of our already mammoth strides away from the founders’ restraints on the lustful will of “the people”.  Even for the House of Representatives, that bastion of the popular will in the original framing, a state’s representation became determined by single-district direct elections and not by the state legislatures by the late 19th to early 20th centuries.  That was only the beginning of the state legislatures’ attempt to neuter themselves in a mad dash away the founders’ wisdom.

The state legislatures were further taken out of the picture with the 17th Amendment: the direct election of senators.  They would no longer have any say in the selection of the state’s two senators.  Then came the initiative, referendum, and recall – “the people” make law, reject law, and reverse elections.  These ideas were championed by 19th century progressives who were more intent on removing the obstacles to their rise to power.  Smoke-filled back rooms were replaced by the big-government, neo-Marxist lunatics of the faculty lounge, the so-called “experts”, the constituency of our modern progressive gang, the people mostly responsible for our discontents when you think about it.

In the irony of all ironies, like the state legislatures, “the people” chose people who then took strides to remove “the people” from self-government, and thus enunciated the rise of the massive and unaccountable administrative state.  This new Leviathan can make law (regulations), execute their law, and adjudicate on their law without much input of an electorate.  Where’s the democracy?  It’s here: “the people” elect progressives, and continue to elect progressives particularly in the populous blue jurisdictions, who then heap more layers on the mountainous administrative state like the many bands piling upward in a mature stratovolcano.

No wonder we’re in a hell of a mess.  Pressure will build, and it’ll blow like a proverbial Vesuvius, but make sure that you’re not in the path of the political pyroclastic flow that follows.  In 2020, a cop-beating video clip went viral and progressives seized the opportunity to dismantle law enforcement, elect DAs who won’t prosecute, decriminalize criminality, riots erupted, people and property were torched, and many cities descend into the dysfunction and lawlessness where they lie today.  The only real export of LA and New York City are people as they flee the pyroclastic flow.

Seattle police at scene of riots in 2020 (photo: KOMO News, Seattle)
Antifa and anarchists co-opted an otherwise peaceful Justice for George Floyd demonstration in Seattle on Saturday, turning it into a riot. The next day, scores of employees and volunteers came together to help clean up the mess Antifa and the anarchists made. (Photo: Jason Rantz)
Seattle the day after the occupation by so-called anarchists and Antifa, 2020 (photo: KTTH 770, Seattle)

One word describes the hidden potential of the “our democracy” chant: California.  The taxes, the crime, the sordidness, the inner-city dysfunction, and the pervading sense of overall decay envelop the state and its “democracy”.  “The people” in the state chose it, and continue to choose it.  California’s “our democracy” is a Democratic one-party state.

Unfortunately, the state’s Democratic Party dominates the national Democratic Party.  The socialism of the state’s ruling Dems is the guiding philosophy of the national Dems.  The state’s Dems wreck the state’s economy and the national Dems work to imitate the wreckage everywhere else.  Quite a tag-team duo.

The state’s Dems lay waste to social life in making a mockery of nature’s male and female.  Boys rhetorically become girls and the next thing we see is that they’re in the girls’ locker rooms, bathrooms, and on their swim, track, volleyball teams, etc.  The state’s public schools are required to disseminate the gender confusion in the curriculum.  Taking his cues from California, Biden announces changes to Title IX of the Civil Rights Act to include the transgendered as a protected class thereby codifying rhetorical girls and boys into everywhere (see #3 below).

The not-so-golden state’s administrative state is imperial thanks to the ruling party’s zeal for upending an entire way of life in a senseless and manic effort to modulate the earth’s atmosphere.  That’s right, one state of 39 million people (and declining) is gung-ho about sacrificing its people’s standard of living on the altar of climate-change ideology, acting like they hold the thermostat to the global atmosphere.  They’d like to take the suicide attempt national, and Biden is accommodating.  In May of this year, the EPA issued new power plant regulations that’ll function as a death warrant to reliable, affordable electricity by mandating expensive efforts (carbon capture, etc.) to reduce emissions in fossil fuel plants (see #4-6 below).  It’s death by regulation, parroting California’s lunacy, and Europe’s.  However, Europe backed away, not so for the zealots in California and D.C.

The blackout was underway Friday as most of the state was issued Stage 3 emergency

Do “the people’s” government in America care?  Do “the people” even have enough of a pulse to care?  As for the first question, no, they don’t care a lick about your plight.  As for the second, no sé.  These activists in power are true-believers, with all the heart of a Bergen-Belsen commandant.  They are coming to get more than your sedan.  They sneer at your air conditioner, which is a lifesaver for anyone not living in Malibu (see #7 below).  This is totalitarianism pure and simple.  Like a rabid Marxist, their ultimate goal is to reengineer humanity, making the new man, woman, whatever.  You’ll be forced to live in the world that they have created for you.  And, like previous crusades for heaven on earth, it’ll be the opposite.

Watch as we relive the travel from hubris to nemesis in Greek tragedy.  The hubris hides ignorance and arrogance which leads to the disaster of nemesis.  Welcome to the base of the Democratic Party and the EPA.

We are living the nemesis that arose out of the hubristic arrogance and ignorance of a clan of firebrands, firebrands that we elected.  Don’t like Trump, voted for Biden, maybe vote for Harris in 2024?  Reality sets in: you avoid the ogre but get the greenie neo-Marxists and ruination.

Both sides decry the escalating cost of housing, the loss of the “American dream”.  The problem can’t be laid at the feet of high interest rates or inflation since it predated Biden’s spiking of the money supply in trillions of new spending.  No, speaking of supply, it’s a supply problem.  It’s been building for decades.  Look around you and you’ll hear hostility to housing construction: “The new people crowd my streets and schools”; “I’ve lost my small town”; “The new developments spoiled the scenery; they’re ugly”; “It’s destroying my property values”; “My property taxes have jumped to pay for their infrastructure and public services.”  Who’s there to speak for the young’s access to the “American dream”?  Nobody.  The only ones filling the hearing rooms and filing the lawsuits are NIMBYs galore and eco-revolutionaries.

This Northern California county tops national list for unaffordable housing

This method of governance was pioneered by California.  Growth control incubated in northern California (Petaluma, 1961).  In that instance, “the people” elected county and city officials to freeze in amber the “character” of the place.  What do you think happened to the housing supply?  Regulations and delays only added to the cost of whatever survives the local gauntlet.

In fact, the brutal gauntlet was extended.  “The people” of California gave to the world the California Coastal Commission (CCC) in approving Prop 20 in 1972, providing more avenues to block, impede, and knock out new housing, or make it so expensive that nobody in their right mind would want to pour a foundation in the “coastal zone”,  which is another one of those politically fungible concepts that prove useful to all eco-utopians and would-be social engineers statewide.

The CCC is one of many regulatory behemoths that “the people” of the state have created with their own hand in propositions or through their elected representatives to make it difficult to get the nod to nail two studs together.  Eco-obsessions reign supreme.  The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is the mother of all hoops to jump.  It empowers the California Department of Fish and Game, the various Air Quality Management Districts, anything conservation oriented, anything eco-utopian, who can only be pacified by project defeat, endless delays, and burdensome costs.  It’s a veritable goat rope.

In a microcosm of the state’s protracted assault on housing, a small 4-lot housing development in Los Osos, San Louis Obispo County, was approved as per the state and the CCC-ratified Local Coastal Program (LCP) of the county.  Later, the CCC discovered a sand dune on the property, declared it to be in an Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area (ESHA), and repealed the permits (see #8 below).  The developers are fighting back in the California Supreme Court.  I’m pessimistic because the state’s courts reflect the longstanding and overweening one-party state.

Gauntlets bedevil the entire state.  It’s so prevalent, according to the California Association of Realtor’s (C.A.R.) Housing Affordability Index, only one in five home buyers can afford a median-priced house in the state (see #9 below).  According to Zillow, of those prospective home buyers, 70% are married and 44% have children (see #10 below).  Where do the underhoused with kids go instead of just another rental in a cramped apartment complex?  Good question.  Possibly, a U-Haul barreling east on Interstate 10 might be their best option.

But do the powerful really care?  Do they understand supply and demand or possess even a rudimentary grasp of trade-offs?  Eco-purity is expensive, very expensive.  So-called saving the coastal zone or preserving the habitat of the blunt-nosed leopard lizard, the gnat catcher, kangaroo rat, mountain lion, or whatever happens to dance across the screen of the hawkers of biodiversity, comes at the price of more than a house or rent.  The price tag shows as lost opportunities for the young and generations to come.  Their “American dream” will be stillborn.  But who shows up at the hearings or has an army of “public interest” law firms ready to file suit in court?  It’s the current homeowner who already has their slice of the dream and the eco-zealot who doesn’t care about the dream and would be quite happy with a repeal of the Industrial Revolution and upward mobility.  They’d be overjoyed with the return of the Middle Ages.

All of this can be traced back to “the people”, to “our democracy”, to the four wolves deciding the fate of the lamb.  The people chose societal collapse.  It didn’t magically appear out of the ether.  And it shows in the names on the ballot.  The parties gave them to us, or, more accurately, the party bases.  The political parties are more democratic than ever before, and their choices are miserable for anyone outside the “bases”.  For that is what democracy led to: the rise of the “base”.  Think of the “base” as a mob, an assemblage animated by jive.  For the Democrats, they’re enraptured by Marx and his ideological cousins in the Frankfurt School and faculty lounges everywhere.  All of this is unstated, mostly unknown to them since their beliefs never came with source footnotes.  They deny it while implementing it.  Anybody reaching the top of their slimy pole must sacrifice their good sense at the altar of the base’s groupthink.

portrait of critical theorists frankfurt school
Prominent Marxists – “critical theorists” (CRT, being woke) – of the Frankfurt School, who would be influential in the West. From top-left; Oskar Negt, Jurgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Claus Offe

The Republicans have discovered their own inner mob, or “base”.  It’s a cult around Donald J. Trump.  People were right to admire his policy successes but they were a product of Reaganism and not anything that might be construed as Trumpism.  Social conservatives and free marketeers populated his administration giving the country border control, tax cuts, deterrence, a burgeoning economy, and a Supreme Court that acts like a court and not a legislature – the very essence of Reaganism.

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The socialist Bernie Sanders in 2020
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AOC and powerful Dems announcing their Green New Deal
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MAGA from 2023 (?)

What would a second Trump term bring?  I suspect that it’ll be more like Trump and less like Reagan.  In economic policy, he’ll pursue his own form of central planning which is called industrial policy with a flurry of tariffs and taxpayer-funded benefits to his own favorites.  Right-to-work – freedom from coerced unionization – may take a back seat in a bid for the union vote.  Trade protectionism will be combined with a new isolationism, which is nothing more than America alone.  We might even see an abandonment of Ukraine.  Would any of this be popular among the general public?  It’s hard to say, but it sells with the “base”.

How did we get saddled with an inevitable neo-Marxist and Donald Trump when both are detested?  Trump in a good week never rises above the upper 40’s in his favorability.  The popularity of the Dems’ neo-Marxism is hard to gauge since it’s never exposed as such.  People probably wouldn’t embrace the public pronouncements of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party platform if saw the line-by-line plagiarism from the writings of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School or the eugenics of Margaret Sanger.

As of today (8/3/2024), Trump’s favorability stands at 43.3% and is viewed unfavorably by a whopping 51.7% (according to FiveThirtyEight, see #10 below).  He’s a consistent stinker.  In the same poll aggregation, Kamala Harris’s standing isn’t much better with 42.4 favorable and 49.1% unfavorable.  She’s about the same in the pungency factor, even with a honeymoon of media praise, near worship, after her rise to donkey-party heir apparent.

The Dems’ neo-Marxism and its espousal by its candidates is joined by the GOP’s transformation into a personality cult.  For both parties, it’s the culmination of a century and a half of the democratization of their operations, and like the injection of direct democracy into more of our politics, dissatisfaction increases with the results.

Political extremists love the democracy rhetoric, aiming to recreate the Paris mob of the French Revolution.  Late 19th century progressives – many of whom were socialists (ex.: John Dewey) – pushed for the direct primary to replace party caucuses.  Primaries to choose delegates became routine starting in the 1970s for the Democrats and 1980s for the GOP.  It resulted in mass fealty to a person or to a groupthink among the base, thus the rise of the Dems’ Bernie Bros and the woke and the Republicans’ MAGA (see #11 below), with a corresponding rise in public disillusionment.

Democratization means rule by the base, not by the franchise.  Interparty rivalries get stamped out by a normally radical groupthink that captures the imagination of the party’s activist base.  For Dems, the groupthink is an enthusiasm for a campaign to ferret out white/heteronormative/male privilege, to expand the unacknowledged footprint of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School’s principal creed.  They’ll hide it because they have to.  The stench of the “socialist” label still pervades.

It’s so widespread that party big wheels – long-in-the-tooth politicos and big donors – had to step into the breech in 2020 to sidestep the frenzy for the Bernie Bros by resurrecting the doddering Biden, and later to swap the infirmed Biden for the younger-but-babbling Kamala Harris.  At least the Democrats have some adult guardrails which is a backhanded admission that too much democracy can get you into trouble.

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Guardrails don’t seem evident in the GOP.  Trump romped from primary to primary despite the fact that he’s the weakest candidate in a general election matchup.  Trump is popular with the base, unpopular to the those outside of it.  An infirm Biden managed to keep it close with Trump, and now the dullard Kamala Harris has drawn even with the man from Mar-a-Lago.  Ironically, with Trump in the picture, execrable socialism is still in play, thanks to mob rule in both parties and a broad apathy compounded by ignorance.

It must be hard to admit that schmucks exist in more places than among elites.  Look around you, maybe take a long hard look in the mirror.  Me too!  More direct democracy exposed the likelihood that schmucks have a broader presence than we’ve been willing to admit.  Party bases can be full of them.  The general public too.  “The people” can desire things that they ought not get.  The demands of half-witted utopians and adults who’ve already got theirs trample the prospects of the young and those yet to be born.  The adults of today confiscate the opportunities of those too young to vote and future generations.

It’s disgusting, and brought to you by . . . democracy.  Democracy, schmuckocracy.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “Historically Low Faith in U.S. Institutions Continues”, Lydia Saad, Gallup, 7/6/2024, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/508169/historically-low-faith-institutions-continues.aspx
2. “Confidence in U.S. Institutions Down; Average at New Low”, Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup, 7/5/2024, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-institutions-down-average-new-low.aspx
3. “Biden Administration: Title IX Protections Extend to Transgender Students”, Lauren Camera, US News and World Report, 6/16/2021, at https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-06-16/biden-administration-title-ix-protections-extend-to-transgender-students
4. “Greenhouse Gas Standards and Guidelines for Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants”, EPA, at https://www.epa.gov/stationary-sources-air-pollution/greenhouse-gas-standards-and-guidelines-fossil-fuel-fired-power
5. “4 Things to Know About US EPA’s New Power Plant Rules”, Dan Lashof, Lori Bird, and Jennifer Rennicks, World Resources Institute, 5/3/2024, at https://www.wri.org/insights/epa-power-plant-rules-explained
6. Much thanks to Gordon Hughes of the National Center for Energy Analytics in “The EPA’s Proposals for Power Plants Satisfy the Definition of Insanity”, National Review, 5/13/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/the-epas-proposals-for-power-plants-satisfy-the-definition-of-insanity/
7. “It’s time to rethink air conditioning”, Rebecca Leber, Vox, 8/26/2021, at https://www.vox.com/22638093/air-conditioning-worsens-climate-change-ac
8. “California Coastal Commission unlawfully blocks home construction”, Pacific Legal Foundation, describing their lawsuit against the CCC in Shear Development Co., LLC v. California Coastal Commission, at https://pacificlegal.org/case/shear-california-coastal-commission/
9. “2nd Quarter California housing affordability”, California Association of Realtors, 8/11/2023, at https://www.car.org/en/aboutus/mediacenter/newsreleases/2023-News-Releases/2qtr2023hai#:~:text=Fewer%20than%20one%20in%20five%20%2816%20percent%29%20home,according%20to%20C.A.R.%E2%80%99s%20Traditional%20Housing%20Affordability%20Index%20%28HAI%29.
10. FiveThirtyEight’s Aug. 3, 2024 poll aggregation at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/
11. “10.1 History of American Political Parties”, Open Library, at https://open.lib.umn.edu/americangovernment/chapter/10-1-history-of-american-political-parties/

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“The Science” Places Homeschoolers in the Crosshairs

What Is Homeschooling? A Guide for Parents and Students | Homeschool SuperCenter

Homeschoolers be warned that a politicized science in politicized journals like Scientific American is gunning for you.

If you believe that science hasn’t been corrupted by a political ideology, that it is value-neutral, you are naïve and grossly ill-informed.  I invite anyone to go over to the Scientific American website (www.scientificamerican.com) and peruse their links to “Pressroom” for editor bios and “The Editors” for their stories (see #1 and #2 below).  The bios read like missionaries of the progressive blob.  The editors’ stories aren’t pure science but a monotonous drumbeat for greater central government power, the poker tell of progressivism.  These are people who are impertinent enough to claim to represent science in America.  Whew, what a mess.

Managing editor Jeanne Bryner encapsulates progressivism’s pretensions in her bio which includes the line “. . . just about everything can be viewed through the lens of science.”  “Just about everything” might be the escape hatch from her half-witted flight of fancy.  It should be clear to anyone with an ounce of adult-level awareness that moral judgments frequently evade the calculus of the lab.  Science could devise an effective means to terminate unborn life, and has (for instance, the abortion pill of mifepristone and misoprostol), but it can’t say squat about whether we ought to.  These people hitch “science” to their ideological commitments, such as the charge that we have too many people, and even add numbers, but that’s just quantifying an unquantifiable belief and calling it science.

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Politicized science in Scientific American, June 2022 issue

The editors of Scientific American exude progressive conceit.  Read their backgrounds; it’s something that they’ve been imbibing since their formative years, whose lifestyle reinforces.  Degrees in fields that are hotbeds of left-wing activism are common.  Environmentalism appears to be a substitute religion.  Many have degreed specialties in journalism.  Typical of ideological zealots, no serious consideration of trade-offs plays a prominent role in their thinking.  How much of their production is real science, and how much of their “science” is curated through experiences in certain ideologically infected college disciplines, lifestyle preferences, and the prevalent proclivities of their demography (female, college, many single, urban white collar)?  Mull over that for awhile.

Editor in Chief Laura Helmuth is straight from liberal-left central casting.  Rummaging through her background discloses a propensity for hijacking “the science” for progressive, left-wing causes.  The magazine endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 in a decision that was “both unanimous and quick”, citing the sins of the Trump administration to her brand of “science”.

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Laura Helmuth, Editor in Chief

Her “science” is the science of the progressive zealot.  Her mind is as closed as a steel trap.  I doubt that the writings of researchers in design theory (evidence of a Designer in the cosmos and nature), like the work of the Discovery Institute, would ever be allowed to grace the pages of the magazine.  If you’re cool to climate-change jeremiads, don’t expect a call to be a contributor.  Under her leadership, Scientific American is in competition with Mother Jones for the same audience.  See Helmuth’s Wikipedia page.

Progressivism lies at the foundation of editorial decisions.  So, what is it?  Progressivism is a ticket to power for people like Helmuth.  Going back to the late 19th century, progressives fell in love with “experts”, people like them, people of the appropriate cultural accoutrements like years spent inside classrooms.  They worship at the altar of credentials, degrees, and what not.  And these college matriculants are said to be deserving of power to lead the population to the promised land.  Little things like the Constitution, separation of powers, federalism, the subsidiary principle (localism), rule of law, and popular sovereignty shouldn’t be allowed to spoil the march to the rule of the administrative state.

That’s where we find the editors of Scientific American in their progressive jihad against homeschooling (see #3 below).  They complain about the absence of uniform standards for such independent practitioners (parents) and their charges (their children), who are the rebels to their leadership.  Of course, the “expert’s” uniform standards will be those that emanate out of the left-infected schools of education and the vile teachers’ unions and into the commissariat of the federal Department of Education and its policies and regulations.  Once announced, they become the excuse for a power grab away from parents.

Nothing is worse for the progressive than a bunch of parents making their own choices independent of the “expert’s” set of coercible rules.  They treat the population as cattle to be herded.

For example, these “experts” in the editors’ piece lamented the “pushback” of parents in Michigan against the experts’ much-loved registry of homeschooling parents and their children.  Sounds like the registry of Jews of a bygone era.  Their contempt for the “pushback” is actually a disdain for citizen involvement, something de Tocqueville praised but upsetting to the gurus of Scientific American.  They stooped so low as to resort to child abuse to rationalize a diminishment of parental rights.  It’s disgusting. If abuse occurred in one home, it is assumed to be characteristic of all parents who teach their own children, or why else bring it up?

Holocaust Remembrance Day,: Replace Numbers With Names – The Forward
Jews in Nazi concentration camps were tattooed with serial numbers for registration.

Here we have “experts” wallowing in the logical fallacy of composition – “if something is true for the part then that is true for the whole or the group too” (see #7 below).  An abusing parent who isolates their kid is transformed into being a defining characteristic of homeschooling.  This isn’t “science”.  It’s something out of the Joseph Goebbels playbook.

The same stance of this we-know-what’s-best-for-your-kids crowd is the pretext for sidelining parents regarding “Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming” children as soon as the kids are dropped into the clutches of school employees.  California is the Valhalla of this political sect masquerading behind a mask of “science”.

A huge leap in deplatforming California parents in the upbringing of their own children was promulgated in 2017 in the California Department of Education’s notorious Administrative Regulation 5145.3 (see #5 below).  Under the guise of “Nondiscrimination/Harassment”, the young “gender-nonconforming” are accorded unique privacy rights not granted to any other student.  The policy puts the child in the parental seat.  If the child wishes it so, school employees are obligated to lie or withhold information from parents on their child’s condition.  The kid may be transitioning with the assistance of school employees and the parents are kept in the dark.  Needless to say, some locally elected school boards are resisting (Chino and Rocklin for instance) while the jackbooted California AG, Rob Bonta, responds with lawsuits to compel compliance.

Up to now, Bonta has succeeded.  He even managed to sideline a parent initiative to codify the right of parents to be informed by using his power to title and summarize the proposition as “anti-gay” (all described in a prior post).  A California judge bowed to Bonta when the parents sued.  That put a stop to signature gathering.  Parents of California, this, combined with the strangulation of other educational avenues in the state (charters, private and religious schools, homeschooling) may leave you with no other option but to leave the state to save your kids from permanent mental and physical scarring.

Charlie Evans has set-up a charity to help people in the transgender community who want to stop or reverse their decision 
Detransitioner. Charlie Evans has set-up a charity to help people in the transgender community who want to stop or reverse their decision (photo: Stuart Nicol)
Helena Kerschner, now 23, is part of a growing number of “detransitioners,” returning to the gender of their birth. She said her male transition (left) was “definitely triggered” by trans activists online.
Helena Kerschner before detransitioning and after

The only child abuse may be choosing to remain in the state.

It is heartening to know that the Supreme Court is putting a break on this stampede to the rule of the unelected “expert” – the kind of person utterly adored by the editors of Scientific American.  At the federal level, the decision of the Court majority in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo put to rest the power grab of administrative agencies in areas not supported by law.  See, such agencies can only operate within the clear parameters of an underwriting law, if one still considers the Constitution operative.  If the law is silent or vague, they can’t freewheel it.  Congress must clarify or not.  If not, regulators aren’t free to legislate.  They’re stuck, not us.

Since the 1920s, the Court has upheld parental rights under the 14th Amendment (with a muddled modification in Troxel v. Granville of 2000, see #6 below).  Loper Bright drew a bold line for federal authorities, but has little impact on states whose electorates are infatuated with regulators, even if it means making the kids the sovereigns of their own upbringing under the guidance of empowered “experts”, even if it results in a compelled recognition of your daughter as now your son.

The people running Scientific American are typical of the educated “idle hands” class (in the words of philosopher Roger Scruton).  In other words, people imprisoned in the Disneyland of their own mind.  Don’t trouble them with reality.  They have idled away their time in fantasizing about the many ways to be ludicrous.

As with children, so it is true with many of the college educated: idle hands are the devil’s playthings (Benjamin Franklin).  The devil is playing around in the “science” of Scientific American.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. The Editors of Scientific American in “Pressroom” at https://www.scientificamerican.com/pressroom/
2. Scientific American editors’ stories in “Stories of the Editors” at https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/the-editors/
3. “Children Deserve Uniform Standards in Homeschooling”, The Editors, Scientific American, 5/14/2024, at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/children-deserve-uniform-standards-in-homeschooling/
4. Thanks to James Mason of the Home School Legal Defense Association in “Why Is Scientific American Going After Homeschooling?”, National Review, 7/5/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/07/why-is-scientific-american-going-after-homeschooling/
5. California AR 5145.3, imposed on all school districts in the state, can be read at https://simivalley.granicus.com/MetaViewer.php?view_id=7&clip_id=1953&meta_id=123825. This is Simi Valley USD’s version of it. Scroll down to page 8 and the section “Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming”.
6. “The Supreme Court’s Parental Rights Doctrine”, parentalrigts.org, at https://parentalrights.org/understand_the_issue/supreme-court/
7. “Fallacy of Composition – Definition and Examples” in Logical Fallacy at https://www.logical-fallacy.com/articles/fallacy-of-composition/

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California’s Threat to Nevada and the Constitution’s Commerce Clause

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Gov. Joe Lombardo, Nevada

The federal government is supreme in regulating interstate commerce (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3).  Fact, end of story!

But California is a law unto itself, free to screw up states that have the unhappy circumstance of sharing a border with it.  In a letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday 5/14, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo stated the obvious: California policies are jacking up fuel prices for Nevadans as well as Californios (see #1 below).  You see, much of Nevada’s western fuel market is fed by refineries and pipelines from California, businesses under the thumb of that state’s multifarious politburos.

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Gov. Gavin Newsom, Ca., responds to letter from Gov. Lombardo

Newsom responded to Lombardo in the lingua franca of today’s hard-left Democratic Party by saying that Lombardo is a lackey of “Big Oil”.  As if parroting the editor of the Daily Worker (1924-1941, official newspaper of the Communist Party USA), Newsom said, “. . . [Lombardo] knows full well that oil refiners are driving up gas prices and making massive profits . . ..”  There’s not much room for the CPUSA in our national political corral since that space is increasingly monopolized by the DNC, especially their California affiliate.

Apparently, according to Newsom, refiners are only greedy bloodsuckers in California, and in a few other states acting as cheap knockoffs of the not-so-golden state.  The highest retail gas prices by state are all Democrat fiefdoms.  The prices (as of 5/16/2024) range from California’s average of $5.24/gal. to Mississippi’s $3.06.  No red state rises above Idaho’s $3.83 (see #2 below).  My Montana comes in at $3.48.

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Gas prices at Fairfax Ave. and Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, 5/17/2024

Following the Marxist template, as usual, is the Democrat supermajority in the state legislature as exemplified in the Newsom-signed state Senate Bill X1-2.  The decree would establish a new commissariat to oversee these latest “malefactors of wealth” with power to investigate and recommend penalties to the state’s uber-commissariat, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).

That’ll do the trick.  Just persecute by prosecution the people with whom you rely for your fuel.  This won’t work, unless you believe in the efficacy and efficiency of a slave economy.  Whips and chains and overseers aren’t the best way to get the most out of people.  Unlike the mid-19th century’s era of chattel slavery in the old South, no Fugitive Salve Act exists to compel a people’s acceptance of involuntary servitude to Newsom and company.  Flight is always an option, as it has been for the past few decades for the state’s middle class, families, and many businesses.  What a time to be in the moving business, one of the few growth industries left in the state.

Never do these people look in the mirror.  The state gets sanction from the federal government to exceed the Clean Air Act.  More federalism?  Not! California gets to throw around its market weight in the form of mammoth regulations, mandates, and taxes on refiners that clearly disrupts the interstate commerce in fuel.  Just think, its EV mandate alone by 2035 will force the shipment of fuel onto electric big rigs – or electric trains that don’t exist – further ballooning costs and worsening efficiencies in an already California-tortured industry.

The fuel that flows down its pipelines doesn’t fare any better.  It does so under the lash of the state’s immense panoply of eco-commissariats.  For Nevadans, what comes out the other end is bloated in cost.  Just drive on Interstate 15 up and away from California and you’ll see prices drop the more California recedes in the rear-view mirror.  Test it out for yourself.

It would be a dereliction of duty on the part of Nevada’s governor to not look out for the interests of his state.  Nevada, like all states, has a keen interest in reviving Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce, and end the unwitting delegation of that power to fanatics in Sacramento, if for no other reason than the need to avoid the collateral damage from California’s suicide attempt.

Go get ‘em Gov. Lombardo.  And Congress, dump California’s exemption.  If necessary, federal marshals should seize control of all the state’s ports and repeal the state’s interference in interstate commerce by truck, railroad, plane, ship, and pipeline.  Keep California’s malign effects limited as much as possible to its residents, who regularly vote for the mess.  No state should be forced to live under the political toxicity of another.

Remember, the U.S. Constitution guarantees to each state a republican form of government, not a California government – Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution.

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RogerG

Sources:
1. “Lombardo to Newsom: Act now before gas prices get even higher”, KTNV staff (Las Vegas, Nv.), 5/14/2024, at https://www.ktnv.com/news/lombardo-to-newsom-act-now-before-gas-prices-get-even-higher
2. “Today’s Gas Prices By State”, Kelly Anne Smith and Korrena Bailie, Forbes, 5/16/2024, at https://www.forbes.com/advisor/personal-finance/gas-prices-by-state/#:~:text=California%20has%20the%20highest%20price%20of%20gas%2C%20with,average%20of%20%243.09%20per%20gallon%20of%20regular%20gas.

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From Eco-Consciousness to Eco-Totalitarianism

Family Farms Continue to Power U.S. Agriculture | USDA
Georgia small farm

Please watch the 20-minute video of the current predicament of small agricultural producers in Oregon.  You’ll see how green ideology leads to totalitarianism, or complete micromanagement of a people.  It’s a lesson in how the tapestry of individual liberty is crushed under mass controls.  It’s happening across the country.  And you wonder why Trump remains popular in many quarters.

Trump is the middle finger to this ideologically driven straitjacket.  Trumpism, loosely referred to as “populism”, isn’t a refined set of beliefs so much as it is a temperament, an attitude, a posture toward the smothering of personal, mundane choices.

It’s a consequence of the ruling eco-left’s attempt to herd people into an officially preferred lifestyle, one that is easily concentrated and thus managed in urban locations.  The war on the internal combustion engine, and on fossil fuels, is one means to that end. It’s a war on personal mobility.  If you can’t make the EV work for you or your family, or afford it, lying below the surface, unstated, remains their ultimate selection for you: unaccommodating, grimy, and unsafe government mass transit.

The 19th-century Bronx

The impracticality of electric vehicles – their only choice left for you – will force you back into the equivalent of tenements anyway, exactly where the charging infrastructure is most efficiently provided.  The concomitant range anxiety will do much to keep you condensed into apartment life for the rest of your family’s existence.  No swing set or doll house for your daughter, the government’s park in all its seedy glory being the only remaining option for her.  That, or the streets.

Tenement Housing: 10+ Photos Show the Tragic Lives of New York City’s Immigrants in the 1800s ...
Tenement, New York City, undated

The desire for control doesn’t stop there.  The increasing grip on urban folk is extended to those who are scattered in places where the grip of the central planners is more tenuous, in the outback.  Small agriculture is targeted like the individual family in their individual car in their individual bungalow.  Climate-change hysteria is the ramrod for empowering the state.  Other hypothetical eco-disasters – groundwater use and pollution for instance – are similarly used to police the guy or gal with a few sheep, horses, cattle, chickens, or surplus vegetables.  The way is left open for greater concentration for the already highly concentrated operators, those big enough to stand toe-to-toe with big government.

USA_AG_BEEF_15_xs.jpg | Peter Menzel
Harris Ranch, Ca., feedlot for 100,000 head of cattle

Anyway, it’s an easy sell to ideologically domesticated urbanites once they accept the premise that cattle flatulence is a mortal threat to Gaia, or the choices of those rural “deplorables” must be made to fit the mold of their urban cousins.  Urbanites outvote the “deplorables”, so it is a popularly elected totalitarianism.  Somehow, the chant of “save our democracy” rings rather hollow.

Again, please watch the video of eco-consciousness turning into eco-totalitarianism.

RogerG

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The Insanity of Our Moment

Lack of action on climate change has sparked protests (Photo: Getty)
Climate extinction?

Obviously, Facebook, and probably much of the techie universe for that matter, is enthralled by hair-on-fire climate alarmism.  So much so that they put a “context warning” on a cartoon that was attached to one of my recent posts about the EV craziness sweeping the halls of power, a politicized professoriate, their young charges mobbing the public square, and the beautiful people in the culture. It’s crazy, just think about it.  I’ll explain.

Some people are braving the hostility of today’s unofficial (and official) Inquisition who, like Galileo, just stepped forward to say, “Wait a minute!”  There are voices out there other than the lefty Union of Concerned Scientists.  One such voice is the Cornwall Alliance (https://cornwallalliance.org); there are others.  They raise some glaring questions that few if any denizens in big media newsrooms would know enough to ask.

Right off the bat, Cornwall and most others don’t deny the existence of man-caused (anthropogenic) climate change – i.e., global warming.  They assert, however, that the doom-mongering is not science.  One should never say “the science says”.  “Science” has no vocal cords.  It’s a method that comes close to “trust but verify”, or “where’s the beef”, or simply “prove it”.  Waiting for “science” to say something treats the whole endeavor as if it were a homogenized mass of one mind.  May as well put up a huge picture of Mao to represent all of China, er “science”, in one fell swoop.  People that wallow in “the science says” aren’t scientists and wouldn’t know which end of the telescope to use, or explain a hypothesis, or how to conduct a fitting test for one, the essence of science.  Thus, it’s easy for the scientifically illiterate to jump to doom.

Such stunted science-minds would never consider, or ask, the following:

* What is the nature of the warming?  Much of the available evidence indicates that the warming is concentrated in the upper latitudes and affects average daily low temperatures (mostly at night) and not the highs.

* What are the actual effects of the warming?  Are they all bad?  No, and on balance, they are likely to be positive.  Warmer global temps in the upper latitudes extends the growing season and expands the amount of the earth’s surface for agriculture.  The growing season starts earlier and ends later.  Plants love CO2.  Conversely, history shows that bad things happen with cooling (the Black Death, famine, for instance).

* What about droughts?  They come and go, and are sensitive to localized conditions, like cold/warm water currents.  El Nino is a result of warm ocean water; La Nina is born of cold.  Warm water warms the air above it and warmer air has more room for more water vapor for more rain.  The jet stream accommodates and sends it to one area and away from another.  One place is in drought, and another can’t handle the deluge.  The cycles are called “decadel” because they come and go every 7-12 years on average.  Welcome to nature, and not a soccer mom’s preference for an SUV.

* Are the scare stories of an avalanche of “extreme weather” accurate?  No, the evidence suggests that our current weather patterns haven’t varied from the historical record going back in time using tree rings and core samples.  If anything, they prove that climate, and its short-term equivalent, weather, varies around a mean, sometimes quite dramatically, and also that climate (long term weather patterns of at least 30 years) has never been steady-state.  The earth wobbles on its axis; the orbit slightly shifts; and solar radiation jumps up and down.  And we have always put in and taken out stuff since we ventured out of the cave.  Variation, like all of nature, is the chief characteristic of our weather and climate.

* Is the nation of Micronesia, or the Obama estate on Martha’s Vineyard, about to disappear in rising sea levels?  No, because we are talking about inches in the single digits covering centuries if not thousands of centuries.  It’s manageable.  Talk to the Dutch who’ve been dealing with holding back the North Sea for at least a half of a millennium or more.

So, why are our science semi-literates in power so gung-ho to ruin our lives?  Simple, for them, Chicken Little is a divine oracle.  The apocalypse is nigh. For them, we can’t adapt our way out of the doom.  For them, we must mitigate, and that means turning our lives upside down, declaring war on fossil fuels, and erecting the Soviet to oversee our wants and desires.

Actually, we can adapt, not mitigate, because their Chicken Little is essentially a witch doctor.  A sea wall can handle a few inches of rise in coastal waters protecting Obama’s mansion investment on Martha’s Vineyard and Oprah’s luxurious enclaves in Montecito (Santa Barbara) and Maui.  Receding ice sheets in the polar regions is more than compensated by more land open for farming and a longer growing season.  Feeding more people sounds good to me. More greenery from more CO2 has a tremendous upside.

This war on fossil fuels throws common sense out the window.  What do we gain (benefits) by handcuffing millions and billions of people to a crippled grid and treating the possession of an SUV as a war crime?  What are the costs?  The forced exchange of what works for what doesn’t will mean that more people will enter the ranks of the poor.  Pencil it out.  We’ll have less CO2 in the air and more filth and poverty on the ground.  It’s insane.

Yep, this is our moment of insanity.

RogerG

Sources:

* Additional YouTube presentations on green matters, the other side to the debate:

1. Michael Shellenberger, “Why renewables can’t save the planet”, at https://youtu.be/N-yALPEpV4w?si=-frZCso5LEaCVNIj
2. “’What Percent Of Our Atmosphere Is CO2?’: Doug LaMalfa Stumps Entire Panel With Climate Questions”, Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Ca.), 2023, at https://youtu.be/bJfrKNR3K2k?si=9Cn0wiMwaqa8DQfe
3. Stephen Hayward, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Global Warming”, 2014, at https://youtu.be/RZlICdawHRA?si=WiZZs82W58z6D0ns
4. A balanced assessment of EV’s: The Car Guys, “THE BIG EV LIE. Why They Won’t Save the Planet & All About Dirty Electricity”, 2021, at https://youtu.be/sytWLB4-W-M?si=34ck2aFrRkRiql9n
5. Pete Buttigieg’s slick glibness.  Watch him skate around the immense problems associated with an EV life.  One key problem is generating the electricity to make it all work.  He talks about the grid but not about the sources for an immense expansion of the necessary generation of the electricity. “’Which Uses More Electricity…A Refrigerator When It’s Running Or Electric Car When It’s Charging?’”, in questioning of Buttigieg by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky), 2023, at https://youtu.be/avi9iBC8opU?si=LoSEVadXpLZK09J1

* This is not a comprehensive list but is a sample of a robust debate that exists outside attempts in the media to quash it.  Real science cannot be suppressed.

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A Green Totalitarianism Is Descending Upon Us

Online surveillance bill opens door for Big Brother | CBC News

They are coming for more than your family sedan.  They are going to upend, disrupt the entire system that brings everything to your home, grocery store, et al.  You’re going to be hit big time in your pocketbook and in every facet of your life.  Get prepared for it is coming, if not stopped.

Is Biden determined to turn me into a Trump voter?  Trump, no doubt, is the ugly face of my party, but Biden and his donkey party are trying to construct a totalitarian state on a preposterous green agenda.  Animating the whole venture, as is true with all totalitarian crusades, is a belief system on how best to organize and control people.  To gain popular traction, it’s best for all such crusades to contain a strong apocalyptic element, one powerful enough to justify stampeding the people into acceptance of its dictates and regimentation.  It’s happening before our eyes, right now!  Say goodbye to the republic and hello to the Soviet.

The EPA is the chief engine of the transformation from citizen republic to rule by all-powerful commissars.  Under the guise of “climate change”, we are being ordered to scrap our already immense sunk costs in affordable and reliable transportation for the mirage of something that doesn’t exist, and if it does, it’s a catastrophe as a replacement.  Prepare for a calamity, one that’ll conspicuously fall more seriously upon our children and generations to come.  Your kids will be the real victims.

March is turning into a deadly month for the health of our constitutional republic.  The EPA earlier in the month announced its intention to follow the template of California, one of a few states famous for turning many of its residents into refugees.  Like the authoritarian clown car in Sacramento, tighter emissions for “light duty” vehicles (cars, trucks, many SUV’s) will be imposed from 2027 through 2032, eventually sealing the death warrant for the production of nearly anything with an internal combustion engine (see #1 below).  Say goodbye to more than the citizen republic.  Say goodbye to that thing in your garage that allows you to get the kids to school, or you to work, or pay a visit to grandma for Thanksgiving, for its life will be wrung out of it by regulating and taxing it to death in escalating licensing fees and costs for upkeep, parts, and fuel.  Manufacturers will be forced to eliminate their production.  The comrades in power plan to leave you with no way out but into their approved and glorified golf cart.  This is nothing but totalitarianism “for your own good”.  And, of course, they know better about what’s good for you.  Right?

EPA Says More Diverse Advisory Committees Will Mean More Equitable Decisions - Union of ...

On the heels of that monstrosity, the commissars proclaimed a similar rule for the fleet of big vehicles that bring everything from produce to your grocery store to all things from an Amazon distribution center, everything that fills a shelf (see #3 below).  It’ll be much worse for those people who choose to live outside the controllable and tight confines of an urban area.  Think about it, all that stuff that was affordably made available at your fingertips will be crammed onto battery-powered big rigs (fuel cells create their own immense problems, see #2 below) of limited capacity, range, and tremendous recharging difficulties.

The mammoth costs of so-called “innovating” our way out of these imposed problems will only short-circuit the necessary wealth to satisfy other necessities of life.  These blinkered potentates have no understanding of the gargantuan trade-offs that they are inflicting on us.  Either that or they don’t care.

My bet is that they don’t care.  Why?  They possess a religious fervor for an ideology that justifies, in their mind, taking over more and more of your life.  For them, they are busy saving the planet, even if it means destroying your standard of living.  You see, their religio-ideology is founded upon a robust, promethean definition of “social cost” and “externalities”.  Like a canon law in the church, their “church”, the two doctrines give overriding weight to real or imagined costs for all of society for everything that you do.  Where’s the limits? Practically, there aren’t any.  Thus, the creeds become the supreme, open-ended excuses for the EPA, or any commissariat for that matter, to do anything that they want.

In the past, it was national socialist race justice to prevent defilement of the “race”, or the dictatorship of the proletariat to cram equality of condition on all of humanity to prevent exploitation.  Today, it’s saving the climate, leaving aside the lack of any credible, peer reviewed evidence that anything that they’re doing will positively affect a global atmosphere under which billions of people are acting independently and beyond the reach of the EPA.  Pardon me for concluding that this is nothing but pure stupidity.

In the end, the Biden claque and his Democratic Party are seemingly intent on destroying our way of life and replacing our citizen republic with rule by totalitarian zealots.  It’s Petrograd 1917, Berlin 1933, or Beijing 1949.  Keeping this crowd in power would have us see the end of much that we cherish.  So, if the choice is between the abominable Trump or this gang of totalitarian fanatics, one can be forgiven for preferring boorishness to Big Brother.

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May be a doodle of car and text

May be an image of car and text that says 'ELECTRICY wm HaynE LANL "Plug in to nearby taxpayer's wallet and she's ready to go!"'

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RogerG

Sources:

1. In Orwellian language, the EPA announcement: “Biden-Harris Administration finalizes strongest-ever pollution standards for cars that position U.S. companies and workers to lead the clean vehicle future, protect public health, address the climate crisis, save drivers money”, March 20, 2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-pollution-standards-cars-position
2. A survey of the literature on the shortcomings of fuel cells:
* “Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Vehicles: Everything You Need to Know”, Car and Driver, 9/26/2022, at https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a41103863/hydrogen-cars-fcev/
* “A review of PEM hydrogen fuel cell contamination: Impacts, mechanisms, and mitigation”, ScienceDirect, 3/20/2007, at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378775306025304
* “Fuel Cells”, University of Illinois, at https://publish.illinois.edu/fuel-cells/benefits-and-disadvantages/
* “How Fuel Cells Work”, How Stuff Works, at https://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/alternative-fuels/fuel-cell.htm

3. The same Orwellian language for heavy-duty vehicles: “Biden-Harris Administration Finalizes Strongest Ever Greenhouse Gas Standards for Heavy-Duty Vehicles to Protect Public Health and Address the Climate Crisis While Keeping the American Economy Moving”, EPA, 3/29/2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-greenhouse-gas-standards-heavy

4. National Review articles that provide excellent overviews of the issues:
* “Biden’s Vehicle-Emissions Gaslighting”, Luther Ray Abel, 3/20/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bidens-vehicle-emissions-gaslighting/
* “Electric Vehicles: The EPA’s Fast Track to Fiasco”, Andrew Stuttaford, 3/25/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/electric-vehicles-the-epas-fast-track-to-fiasco/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=second
* “Biden Admin Imposes Strict Pollution Standards for Buses and Heavy-Duty Vehicles”, Caroline Downey, 3/29/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-admin-imposes-strict-pollution-standards-for-buses-and-heavy-duty-vehicles/

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It’s Basic Economics. The EV Is Junk.

Watch This Severe Electric Car Fire And Explosion At A Charging Station
May 8, 2020, at a charging station in Dongguan, China, where an electric car caught fire when being plugged into a charger.

While perusing my news feed, I found a recent Fortune magazine article on the problems that electric vehicle owners are having with their cars, 80% more difficulties on average than conventional combustion vehicles (see below).  The writer tried to deflect the problems into the category of “growing pains” for the new industry.

Yes, I agree with him, but he seems unaware of the much more fundamental issue.  Problems or no, the EV is a politically driven product and, like any such good or service, has politically driven trade-offs.  Growing pains?  Growing pains or no, the whole EV industry probably would be immensely smaller but for politics.  Politicians constructing their road to utopia understand that people must be bribed, and coerced, to mass adopt something that makes their lives worse off.  The things still don’t make much economic sense compared to those efficient muscle engines.

Internal combustion engine
Gasoline direct injection engine.
Electric-car battery costs: Tesla $190 per kwh for pack, GM $145 for cells
An EV battery pack weighs on average 1,000 pounds. Your typical combustion engine and its transmission can vary from 300 (4-cylinder) to 1,000 pounds (V-8 powerhouse).

Lest we forget, politicians are camp followers, always with their fingers in the wind discerning the next fashionable thought or issue.  Those leaning to the Left already have a laundry list of ready-made issues, just add water – i.e., donors’ money.

But there’s one huge complication: Politics is a poor driver of an economy. Utility (use and practicality) occupies first place in a normally functioning economy.  Sellers invent and continue to produce the stuff that buyers find useful and enhances their lives.  If it’s not as good as the alternatives, it’s essentially junk.  It’s the economic definition of junk.  When politics enters the fray, utility disappears from the equation.  Practicality and usefulness take a back seat to powerful groups’ ideological demands.  When the movement rises in prominence due to their momentary occupation of the commanding heights of the culture, they quickly gain the reins of political power to impose their preferences, and the artificially driven esteem for junk rises.

Trade-offs and opportunity costs are tossed to the wind.  If pressed, the true believer can always interject their own wholly invented, unprovable costs into the equation.  Prominent among the hypothetical eco-costs is the existential end of the planet.  That’s always the gambit for the zealot: scare people into adopting the zealot’s choices.  The Left’s ownership of the cultural commanding heights has made it easy for already Left-leaning politicos to engage in the hyperbole.  Consequently, political power is married to an ideology’s agenda.  In the end, your family sedan is forced into oblivion.

So, as politically inspired junk is imposed on the population, what is lost, or the opportunity cost?  On the EV front, the auto producers’ resources are plowed into the less-useful and away from the more-useful.  That’s a trade-off, and it’s unavoidable.  The loss of the opportunity for producing the more useful things (opportunity costs) increases, and that’s equally unavoidable.

What to do if your electric car runs out of charge | Toyota of Orlando
An EV depleted of charge
Vandals cut cables at EV charging station on Vancouver Island - Drive Tesla
Vandals cut and removed charging handles from this charging station on Vancouver Island, B.C.

What does all this mean for you?  Your life changes, and for the worse.  It always pencils-out that way when you are forced to choose the worst alternative. How bad is that alternative?  The whole eco-agenda cascades onto you with its abundant unintended consequences.  It goes beyond the problems with charging and the batteries (some of them catch fire) in the article.  The additional resources to make the thing work as the numerous glitches of the impractical (“growing pains”) raise the costs of producing the impractical which will always translate into an increase in the cost of living.  Higher standards of living do not ride the back of higher costs of production and living.  The more that you try and do that, the worse it gets.

Save the planet by being worse off?  But you aren’t saving the planet. Do you think for a moment that India and China and the rest of Donald Trump’s “shitholes” are going to give up cheap energy?  Come on, get a grip.  China is building new coal-fired plants at the same clip as they are warships.  India, soon to be the planet’s most populous country, wants relief from the oppressive heat.  Sorry, solar panels and windmills won’t cut it.  Economies of scale in energy production, meaning a grid and power plants, is the only thing that’ll elevate people out of the sweat and filth.  Everyone, if they were honest, knows it, except AOC, John Kerry, and our culture’s eco-barkers.

Wait a minute.  That’s quite a crowd who’ve bought into the nonsense.  And nonsense it is.  The leap of faith from a period of warming temperatures to the apocalypse more resembles a religious doctrine than science.  “Follow the science” is no such thing.  It’s follow the eco-Pope.

That Genius of Lansing, Mi., Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, has decided to go California and follow the eco-Pope.  She’s hellbent on bringing blackouts and skyrocketing utility bills to the wolverine state.  She signed two bills establishing energy central planning (see below).  The state must be 100% “clean energy” by 2040, 60% by 2035.  That means a massive increase in solar and wind, 1.5 million acres more (Mackinac Center report, see below).  The costs will be humungous, and it will be taken out of the hide of Michiganders.  And out of the sovereign powers of localities.  Their power to regulate these gargantuan scars on the land in their neighborhood will be proscribed.  Expect each family in the state to shell out an additional $2,746 per year for energy (Mackinac Center report).

Declaring war on gas and petroleum and monopolizing all energy needs onto an electrical grid suffering from “intermittency” (solar and wind) is absolute folly.  Do you want to live worse off? Do you want your children to be worse off?  Don’t think for a moment that at least you’ve saved the planet, as they’ve made most people’s lives more challenging.  By the way, it won’t be true for Jeff Bezos, nor Mark Zuckerberg, nor John Kerry, who married into the Heinz fortune.

Al Gore Celebrates Earth Day By Buying Another 12,000 Square Foot Mansion | The End Times ...
Albert Gore and his mansions

The planet will be the same as before, and you’ll be less well off.  All this brought to you by people who don’t know what they’re doing.

On second thought, they do.  And it’s hooey.

Picture

RogerG

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* “Electric vehicle owners report 80% more problems than with conventional cars and trucks amid ‘growing pains’ for the industry, Consumer Reports says”, Tom Krisher of the AP, Fortune, 11/23/23, at https://fortune.com/2023/11/29/electric-vehicle-reliability-more-problems-gas-powered/

* “Michigan Gov Whitmer signs sweeping green energy bill forcing transition from fossil fuels”, Thomas Catenacci, Fox News, 11/30/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/michigan-gov-whitmer-signs-sweeping-green-energy-bill-forcing-transition-from-fossil-fuels/ar-AA1kJF4I

* “New Energy Bills Would Increase Costs and Blackouts”, Holly Wetzel, Mackinac Center, 10/27/2023, at https://www.mackinac.org/pressroom/2023/new-energy-bills-would-increase-costs-and-blackouts

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Papering Over Insanity: The Green Energy Charade, Cap-and-Trade, and the Assault on Trucking

esla unveils its new electric semi truck at a presentation in Hawthorne, Calif., in 2017. (Alexandria Sage/Reuters)

I begin with a tripartite revolution, of which the charade is a manifestation.

The sudden onset of a cultural and political revolution is bedeviling us.  It’s a three-legged revolution.  One leg is the “woke” revolution with its reverse pogrom against the vast majority of the population and the entire civilization itself.  Think of it as the reverse of the sanctioned riots – pogroms – against Jews, a small minority in imperial Russia.  Currently, a resurrected cadre of Red Guards (of Maoist infamy), defames, and defaces our cherished institutions, beliefs, customs, and commemorations, and are on the hunt to eradicate a mystical and vague “privilege” of “whiteness” or the “rich” or whoever they wish to pillory as their enemy.  The parallel with Mao’s carnage is stunning.

That’s not all.  With the assault of the “woke” comes the second leg: an intensified zealotry for the battle against “climate change” and a newfound veneration of the pagan goddess Gaia.  A suddenly intense and fanatical war on man-made carbon is the tip of the spear of the revolution.  States like California are leading the way into what will probably result in a decline much like the descent into Medieval times.  One of the chief vehicles to undermine our quality of life is the loosely-defined “green energy”, and that means a love affair with “renewables” and electric everything.  In the end, it can only produce a broad, sustained misery.

The third leg is the erection of a monster state to make it happen, for without it, the dreams of utopia will not be realized.  This turns the struggle into a war against human nature, the existence of which they have brushed aside in congeries of rhetoric in order to reimagine people as fully malleable to their designs.  It’s a calamity at the end of the day.  Think of it as a full-court, state-sponsored destruction of prosperity.

The vocabulary of “sustainable” or “renewable” is a chimera and an evisceration of our quality of life.  Solar, wind, geothermal, and small hydro is the mantra but their enfeebled productivity is the reality.  Lenin’s Bolsheviks toyed with the elimination of a financial system (money, banking, etc.), discovered that it only produced chaos, and settled on state-ownership of the economy.  In the end, that system collapsed under the weight of its own internal contradictions.  The same fate awaits this latest copy of dreams supplanting reality.

In Bolshevik Russia, a vast array of commissariats was found to be necessary to oversee the state-manipulation of ordinary life.  Human beings don’t naturally behave in ways complimentary to the official utopian template.  In California and other greenie states, and now the Biden federal government, similar government impositions are required to turn inherently deficient “renewables” into the energy backbone of a state and nation.  A flim-flam is necessary to hide the truth, much like the paper-shuffling in the Soviet Gosplan (state economic planning agency).  California has AB32 – the official, legally mandated set of commandments for greenie energy – CARB and an assisting regulatory labyrinth of support agencies.  Biden has his EPA and the entire federal Leviathan to make the incoherent appear coherent.

Open letter of apology from UCSF Professor John Balmes, MD, to the Bayview Hunters Point ...

Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Soviet politburo under Gorbachev

How incoherent is the whole scheme in California?  One need look no further than the spinoffs and unintended consequences of the greenie energy campaign.  To paper over the scant production and the fact that “sustainables” can’t meet energy needs, certificates – Renewable Energy Certificates (REC’s) and Environmental Attributes – are issued to solar, wind, and hydro producers in an elaborate carbon-credit scam who then peddle them, independent of their source, to purchase “dirty” power to make up for the abundant shortfalls.  “Dirty” instantly becomes “green” with an REC or Energy Attribute pasted over it.

The energy deficits are real because renewables are chronically untimely and deficient in their production – solar spikes at around 3-4 pm and rapidly declines after, which doesn’t coincide with actual usage; wind only contributes when there’s wind; and hydro adds only when there’s sufficient stream flow.  This certificated wallpaper is peddled by Investor Owner Utilities (IUO’s) – PG&E, Southern California Edison, etc. – and a new organizational Frankenstein called Community Choice Aggregators who are smaller energy collectives mostly composed of counties who virtue-signal their commitment to 100% pure renewables (Community Choice Energy), which isn’t, to their chagrin.  In the end, after all the gamesmanship, just as much carbon is released into the air as before, just with more bureaucracy, middle men, and paperwork to turn the simple provision of energy into a more expensive shell game.

Got it?  If not, you are not alone.  Just remember one thing: all of us would benefit from the acknowledgment of a simple facet of the real world – trade-offs.  More resources in time, resources, and capital spent on one thing means that they are not available for other things.  Greenie energy is more costly in so many ways.  How much have we unwittingly given up in new medical cures, inventions to make life easier and more productive, and greater prosperity as we spin our wheels in pursuit of a costly mirage?  This is what declining civilizations do.

Royalty Free Woman Looking At A Maze Pictures, Images and Stock Photos - iStock

So, the effort to make crippled electricity everything gave us the PR stunt of Biden tooling around in a parking lot in an electric F150 and extolling its alleged virtues.  It absolutely makes no sense.  Without the internal combustion engine, the categories of utility vehicles and freight haulers (18-wheelers) would never have come into existence in the first place.  Commerce and ranch work would revert back to the Middle Ages without it.  Imagine the food supply more dependent on local production and the return of local famines as natural disasters periodically lay waste to the nearby food supply.  The supermarket is inconceivable without the internal combustion engine.

The electric vehicle is a tony appurtenance for people who plan a life in a pampered urban cage, a life lacking in self-reliance and reveling in hedonistic indulgence.  It’s a tailor-made booster of totalitarianism, whether of the soft or hard variety, since a cooped-up population is easier to control.  It’s easier to make people greenie-compatible and keep them that way.  Say goodbye to a real functioning citizen republic.

California, of course, is leading the way to this bleak future.  The advances in fossil fuels and power efficiencies from better lubricants, tighter manufacturing tolerances, improved materials, fuel injection, solid-state ignition, and emission controls are now to be junked in an overnight leap into lithium batteries.  It’s a disaster-in-waiting.

Think about all the “don’ts” you’ll have to anticipate.  Don’t charge the ev overnight.  It degrades the battery, without which, junk the $60,000 thing in a few years.  Don’t buy one if you live in the routine path of hurricanes.  Those batteries ignite if submerged in water.  Don’t throw luggage into the trunk at the start of that long-anticipated road trip to Yellowstone.  You might have to spend the night in the car waiting to be rescued – charging stations being quite sparse outside your urban cocoon.  Don’t mindlessly grab that charging wand at some defaced public charging station.  Think of the kilovolts passing through the wires just millimeters from your fingers.  Insulation breaks down, especially when exposed to weather, vagrants, thousands of careless users jamming the things into their charging ports, and roving bands of teenage delinquents.  The utility companies constantly warn us not to touch or go near downed power lines.  What’s the difference?  At least with gasoline, you’re safe so long as you don’t play with fire while filling up.

And then there’s the weight of the thing – the battery, that is.  Weight matters a lot when getting from point A to point B, and when hauling anyone or anything.  The family sedan has a thousand-pound one; the Ford F150, 1,500 pounds; the Hummer, 5,000, the weight of a light tank.  The more weight, the less you can haul and the less distance you can haul it, making the trip through flyover country an anxiety-plagued, white-knuckled adventure as we are swallowed up in a geographical vacuum of charging stations.

14.5Kwh High Energy Electric Vehicle Battery Packs For Pick Up Truck
Batteries for an electric pickup

The asylum-by-the-coast called California is showing the world additional ways to muck things up.  Along with shoe-horning soccer moms into ev’s, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the state’s preeminent greenie commissariat, is doing the same thing to truckers.  It has declared that all new drayage trucks (the ones used around ports) are to be emission-free by 2026. By 2035, all trucks must be. So, getting freight from ship to warehouse could turn into a real comedy skit.  No practical alternative to diesel exists to do it.

Better yet, avoid California ports entirely – and while you’re at it, the entire west coast. Gulf Coast governors are waiting to welcome you in open arms. Trucking companies might very well be joining the middle class in fleeing California.

Have you seen the battery-powered 18-wheeler?  Tesla has a prototype – MAN, Scalia, Triton, Freightliner, and Volvo too. But what are we giving up as we bow to the climate-change Inquisition?  Answer: money (lots of it), reduced hauling capacity, the need for more trucks to make up for the smaller hauls, a vast increase in hauling time, the added expense of a specialized fleet of trucks impractical for anything but specialized use (drayage).

You’ll experience sticker shock at the price of that electric 18-wheeler. Try doubling the price of a new diesel one (around $185,000).  A price jump of that nature will limit the number of companies financially capable of competing in a freight hauling market now artificially skewed to the big, big capitalized boys. An already distorted market will be further mangled beyond recognition.

Guess what?  That battery powering the contraption makes an ev hauler about 5,400 lbs. heavier than the diesel version.  Given the fact that the legal total weight of truck and freight can’t be over 80,000 lbs. without crumbling the roads and bridges, the load in the trailer must be smaller.  More hauls, more trucks to do it, and jacked up prices for everything delivered by Amazon and to every brick-and-mortar store.  Expect sparser offerings on the shelves and inflation at the register.  Out the window goes Amazon Prime’s 3-day shipping and its current price tag.

Trucker collapses historic bridge, causing up to $1M damage - Bring Me The News

The whole concept of refueling takes on a new meaning.  A diesel truck takes about 15 minutes; the battery-powered behemoth takes hours.  The very people driving their trendy Nissan Leaf to Whole Foods will notice the attendant price increases and shortages.  Given their pattern of partisan proclivities, the residents have voted to turn their world upside down.  Last I checked, Manhattan, or inner-city anywhere, wasn’t famous as a verdant agricultural region or node of food packing and processing.  Everything must be trucked into the hipster lair.  I wonder how carefree is their lifestyle when scarcity turns from being more than theoretical background noise to real deprivation.  Rents may become cheaper since people no longer want to live there, and all of it as a byproduct of hours-long refueling and trucks crippled in their carrying capacity.

Photo: Empty produce shelves at Whole Foods Market, Longmont, CO, March 13, 2020; Compass Natural
Empty produce shelves at Whole Foods Market, Longmont, CO, March 13, 2020

People adjust, and in ways not foreseen by CARB central planners.  Their greenie ukases will push the population into crippled transportation and onto a crippled grid.  California will have to generate 11.5 gigawatts of more electricity from sources that are already strained to the breaking point to meet the 2026 deadlines.  Where’s that coming from?  Not from inside the state.  More limited and spasmodic energy from wind and solar won’t cut it.  I suspect more of the paper flim-flam to disguise the reliance on “dirty” sources.  It’s the truth that can’t admitted in polite company.

The state is already experiencing blackouts.  Watch produce and other perishables rot as the state scrambles to reenergize the lines.  That won’t be the end of it.  The ultimate result is a descent by baby steps into a way of life that doesn’t work as well as our grandparents’.  The green movement is a social suicide pact.

And to think that I haven’t even mentioned the monumental task of disposing of the batteries, spent solar panels (a lifespan of 10-15 years), and wind mills and their parts.  Recycling only eats up more of the grid and consumes other scarce resources.  All the toxic materials run the risk of seeping into our ground water.  Think of it: we are making such humungous efforts to move our pollution from the air and into the ground, and our way of life will get hammered as never before.  Our water supply might end up like the Salton Sea (Remember the MTBE scare? Look it up.).  Whew, what a mess.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832): “Oh what a tangled web we weave when at first we start to deceive.”

May be a graphic of text that says '219 CALIFORNIA i COMMITTEC RENEWABLE ENERG IT'S WHY WE HAVE the HIGHEST ELECTRICITY RATES CONTIGUOUS UNITED STATES. RATHER than SECURING POWER LINES, WE HAVE BLACKOUTS,L LIKE THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES. OCAC WE COMMITTING YOUR MONEY to TRANSITIONto 100% RENEWABLE ENERGY INSTEAD. OAr በርላር SOIFA WILDFIRE BREAKS OUT YOUR AREA, LEASE EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY. UNLESS YOU'RE M A BLACKOUT AREA and YOU HAVE an ELECTRIC CAR. ncAc @Ramireztoons DCAC DAC michaelpramirez.com'

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RogerG

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* For an account of California’s drayage truck mandates: “California’s latest environmental regulation may have unintended consequences for truckers”, Rachel Premack, FREIGHTWAVES, 5/25/2023, at https://www.freightwaves.com/news/californias-latest-trucking-emissions-regulation-may-have-unintended-consequences

* Thanks to Dominic Pino for his piece of 5/25/2023 in National Review Online, “Electric Trucks Are Worse than Diesel Trucks”, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/electric-trucks-are-worse-than-diesel-trucks/

* For an account of the new electric big rigs: “Semi-truck maker Freightliner has a test fleet of 40 rigs, with availability in 2022”, Mark Vaughn, Autoweek, 5/21/2021, at https://www.autoweek.com/news/green-cars/a36506185/electric-big-rig-semi-trucks/

* More on the reduced hauling capacity of electric 18-wheelers: “Electrifying trucking will mean sacrificing critical weight for heavy batteries, eating into already-slim margins”, Bianca Giacobone, Business Insider, 2/2/2023, at https://www.businessinsider.com/electric-trucks-longhaul-batteries-tesla-heavy-cargo-weight-problem-2023-2

* Here’s a little synopsis of the MTBE scare: “MTBE controversy”, Wikipedia, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTBE_controversy

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Reliving the Failed Bolshevik Experiment, Circa 2023

“Democracy dies in darkness.” — From the masthead of The Washington Post.

Methane emissions: Biden signs bill repealing Trump-era EPA rule - CNNPolitics
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.

Behind The Iron Curtain:Shortages
Long lines to buy shoes in 1970’s Soviet Union.
Behind The Iron Curtain:Shortages
Empty shelves in the government stores, 1970’s and 80’s.
Waiting in line for clothes at a government clothing store.
No photo description available.
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 unveils powerful emissions rule to power Individuals to purchase ...
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.

Female Hysteria: 7 Crazy Things People Used To Believe About The Ladies' Disease | HuffPost

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.

'How dare you?': Greta Thunberg demands change and calls out world leaders
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.

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RogerG

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* “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

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The California Housing Crisis: The Intersectionality of Hypocrisy and Central Planning

A professional basketball player in a jersey that says Golden State Warriors.
Golden State Warriors guard Steph Curry, in an April 21, 2022, game in Denver, has voiced his opposition to townhomes near his San Francisco Bay Area mansion. (David Zalubowski / Associated Press)

Have you heard this?  Steph Curry of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors doesn’t want a 1.5 acre, 16-unit “affordable” townhouse development near his $30 million mansion in the exclusive Bay Area community of Atherton (see below).  It’s too easy to expose the obvious hypocrisy given the guy’s outspoken progressive views.  Rich people of lefty inclinations seem to run away from their lefty beliefs as soon as the consequences get too close.  But Curry has legitimate concerns of safety and privacy for a celebrity like himself and his family.  The bigger issue, though, isn’t affordable housing in a state woefully deficient of it.  It’s the central planning that inherently comes with lefty/progressive thinking of the type running the show in California.

It’s borrowed from Stalin, a fellow lefty.  He abandoned his orthodox seminary as a young man and radicalized himself into an atheist revolutionary.  Off went the priestly frock and traditional beliefs and on came the drive to build the utopia on totalitarianism in league with a clique of fellow bomb throwers and statue topplers.  Sound familiar?  Portland?  Almost any urban complex or campus in the so-called golden state?  Central planning is one of the quintessential expressions of totalitarianism.

Stalin 5 Year Plan poster | Year plan, Propaganda posters, Travel posters
Soviet poster proclaiming the Five-Year Plan of industrialization.

Now in control, to Stalin, the utopia means industrialization at breakneck speed no matter the cost and turmoil to people’s lives.  Sound similar to “zero carbon”, the Green New Deal, Biden announcing the end of fossil fuels, Newson and his one-party state destroying energy production and herding the entire population of the state into ev’s?  As for Stalin, he ordered more steel from his politburo to Gosplan (state economic planning agency) who then gets the furnaces billowing at full blast to produce more of something that few can and want to use.  It piles in heaps outside the foundries.

Ditto for Governor Newsom and housing.  Not enough affordable housing?  He ordered the regional governments in the state (like SoCal Area Governments – SCAG – for instance) to create precise plans for more “affordable housing”.  Atherton, within ABAG (Assoc. of Bay Area Governments), did its part with 348 new housing units – 16 of which are to be plunked down next to the Curry estate.

Aerial Photography Atherton - Airview Online
Aerial view of Atherton, Ca.
Atherton Homes | Floor plans, Atherton, House styles
New home development in Atherton with bungalows starting from between a stripped-down $620,000 to three-quarters of a million.
Steph and Ayesha Curry are selling their Mediterranean-style estate in Walnut Creek for $3.2 million.
The $3.2 million mansion sold by Steph Curry and wife.
Il campione della Nba Stephen Curry acquista una villa da 31 milioni in California — idealista/news
Rear view of Curry’s new $31 million mansion in Atherton, Ca

That’s how central planning works.  Need something like cheaper housing? Well, just order it as Stalin did steel, while ignoring the Russian realities of the absence of a trained workforce, the infrastructure for a supply chain, whether the stuff is any good, the absence of contingent enterprises that could use it.  Equally oblivious as Newsom is, the land in question in Atherton probably goes for $8 million per acre. Do the math: $12 million for the land and sixteen “affordable” units at $250,000 each will bring in . . . wait for it . . . $4 million.  Oops, it doesn’t add up.

Watch “affordable housing” turn into “unaffordable housing”.  To cover just land costs, each unit will have to go for $750,000.  Add other incidentals like labor, engineering, materials, energy (fuel, electricity, etc.), the inevitable California delays, fees, taxes, and approvals, and you’re back to California’s housing crisis.  Stalin ended up with the world’s largest steel ingot and crappy tractors.  Newsom commands cheaper housing and ends up with fewer units and a huge subsidy bill to fund from the depleted state, county, and municipal treasuries and the state’s beleaguered taxpayers.  My bet: the units don’t get built.

Don’t worry, Steph.  The state’s buffoonish central planning and incompetence will protect you.

The housing situation won’t improve because the political eco-system for development in the state hasn’t changed.  It’s the same one that caused the problem.  Layer upon layer of bureaucracy smothers the housing industry. Powerful interest groups perch like vultures waiting to pounce.  EIR’s and EIS’s and related “public” hearings filled with NIMBY’s and the state’s militant eco-utopians make a mockery of the process.  CEQA, the Coastal Commission, the planning agencies in every jurisdiction in the state, the overlay of air quality management districts throughout the state, Cal. Fish and Game, USFWS, and their endangered species lists are poised to tear their claws into the project.

Critically Endangered Insects Make History at San Diego Zoo - Times of San Diego
The endangered Lord Howe Island stick insect (female). Photo Courtesy San Diego Zoo.

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California NIMBYs don't love their children | OC Housing News

To tell the truth, the state has a housing crisis because it wants one.  They must want it, or they’re insane.  Anyone with an ounce of common sense must know that punishing a behavior, like building more housing, will mean less of the behavior.  It’s been the reality since the eco-industrial complex discovered the Delta Smelt, the Tipton Kangaroo Rat, and the evil of humans attempting to live better.

It gets worse.  Newsom’s affordable housing imperial decree is ready to clash with a recent California court’s decree extending California Endangered Species Act protections to invertebrates – i.e., insects (see below).  Californios will quickly learn that bumble bees count more than anything affordable in the state.  Karl Marx was wrong about much, but he got one thing right: “. . . history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

Stalin’s central planning created the Holodomor and dekulakization which devastated the Ukraine, the Donbas, the Russian peasantry and agriculture, and created the stirrings of the bloody purges in the hunt for “wreckers”.  Newsom thinks that he can wave the magic wand of an imperial decree and, voilà, “affordable housing” appears.  Just announce it and it will be so.  Forget about Marx’s tragedy stage; the state quickly jumped to farce.

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RogerG

Read more here:

* “NBA’s Steph Curry joins neighbors in opposing affordable-housing plan for ritzy Atherton”, Howard Blume, LA Times, 2/3/23, at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-02-03/nba-star-steph-curry-fights-affordable-housing-atherton

* “California court ruling opens door for protection of insects as endangered species”, Liz Kimbrough, Mongabay, 6/2/22, at https://news.mongabay.com/2022/06/california-court-ruling-opens-door-for-protection-of-insects-as-endangered-species/