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Smelly Environs II: The FISA Warrant

The workings of the federal behemoth in DC would make the tangle of Amazon tributaries seem as straightforward as a lonely highway on the North American plains.  Case in point: the 2016 shenanigans of our topmost public servants in the FBI and DOJ.   After the release of the October 2016 FISA warrant Saturday (7/22/2018), though, at least some of the mystery is beginning to lift.  The pungent odor of a partisan campaign of federal officials against a candidate is wafting beyond the confines of DC.  I’ll wait for the reports of the Inspector General and Mueller before any grand conclusion.  But, as for now, the public should be getting the sense that a large mound of garbage is building nearby.

Of particular concern is the relationship of DOJ and FBI aparatchiks, the DNC, and the Hillary Clinton campaign to the Steele dossier and FISA warrant.  Further, as for the warrant itself, was hiding the connections in the application’s footnotes, and under vague pseudonyms, sometimes requiring a jurist’s conjecture – if he or she was up to it – sufficient to render the thing legitimate?  Look, the warrant’s defenders say, “All you have to do is dig a bit”. Are they serious?  Calling it proper with a straight face requires the help of an intoxicant.

A year after the warrant’s approval, it is apparent even to the NY Times that the notorious Steel dossier was a DNC and Hillary campaign piece of naked oppo research.  A NY Times article of October of 2017 laid out the connections.  The line of descent goes something like this: $12.4 million from the Hillary and DNC war chests to Perkins Coie; from Perkins Coie and its lead election lawyer, Marc Elias, to Fusion GPS (managed by Glenn Simpson); from Fusion GPS to Christopher Steele; Steele’s oppo research product to the FBI and into the warrant – making up the bulk of the “probable cause” for the warrant. (1)

How did DNC oppo research get to the FBI and move the national security machinery of the federal government to operate for the benefit of the Hillary campaign?  Two answers seems apparent: one of America’s power couples and an intense anti-Trump animus par excellence among some of the fed’s movers and shakers.  A relevant example of a fed power couple is the Obama DOJ’s  #4, Bruce Ohr, and his wife Nellie.  Nellie worked for Fusion GPS as it was conducting the Dem commissioned oppo research.  She would have access to the Steele memos that make up the “dossier”.  From her it goes to her hubby and from him to salivating administrators in the DOJ and FBI.  Sound reasonable?

Bruce Ohr, Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, and Nellie Ohr, Bruce’s wife.

Voilà, we are inundated with investigations, accusations of collusion, incessant calls for impeachment, and shouts for confrontation everywhere by Democrats in a fevered state of war.  In addition, the media’s fixation on what is, in essence, good old fashioned campaign smears – the same stuff of politics going back to Socrates – keeps the hyper-active ginned up.  Just click the remote over to the ladies of The View to get a dose of the hysteria, or stir up the wasp nests on Twitter with any kind sympathy for Trump.

Sure, Trump has done much to fuel the hysterics, though the extravagant hyperbole predates our current instigator-in-chief.  Remember the references to Reagan as an “amiable dunce”, “cowboy”, or allusions to “Bonzo”; or the chant about Bush 42: “Bush lied and people died”?  The term “truther” began life as a Bush conspiracy to foment war, akin to the second gunman on the grassy knoll.  You see, to the unhinged, the mayhem of 9/11 couldn’t have been conducted by jihadis.  The scent of meth-induced hyperventilating was much in the air.

And we have Obama ready to step into the mire.  Not content with merely using the trusty technique of smearing your opponent, he went on to bash a broad swath of the electorate.  He coolly dismissed his rural detractors by saying, “… they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”.  Claptrap replaced engagement with the voters.  Substituting the word “deplorables” for an entire opposing constituency is beginning to gestate.

Going full “deplorable”, Hillary blasted them with this comment (Sept. 9, 2016): ” … you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic — Islamophobic — you name it”.

So now we have Trump giving back – and indeed in some ways pushing the envelope – what the left has been dishing out for years.  No excuses, the whole thing is disgusting.  Well, few of us can no longer lay claim to be chaste in our slide to incivility.  The genie is out of the bottle.  The left likes to trumpet Joe McCarthy as the quintessence of evil.  Borrowing the metaphor, the left has gone full McCarthy for quite some time, and some on the right have followed suit.  Thanks Trump, Trump sycophants, the loud but minuscule alt-right, Code Pink, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Chuck Schumer, Michael Moore, the Resistance, campus social justice warriors, pc panderers (meaning the bulk of the Democratic Party base), lefty bankrollers, lefty celebrities ….

Not surprisingly, some of the frenzy penetrates conversation around the water coolers in the DC workplaces of the DOJ and FBI.  It’s a habitat for creating insular, self-reinforcing political and social prejudices that could be lessened if we had something like court-ordered busing to coerce integration in thought and experience.  Instead, de facto segregation exists and works to amplify the mania in the media and on the campaign trail.  Some in influential positions may have acted on it.

It’s starting to appear that way.  The progressive dream of a government of experts, inoculated from the mud of politics, is turning into the reality of an open septic tank.  Prejudice and ignorance are still alive and well even among our allegedly disinterested “experts”.

RogerG

Sources and footnotes:

  • “Clinton Campaign and Democratic Party Helped Pay for Russia Trump Dossier”, Kenneth P. Vogel, NY Times, Oct. 24, 2017,  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/24/us/politics/clinton-dnc-russia-dossier.html
  • “FISA warrant application supports Nunes memo”, Byron York, Washington Examiner, 7/22/2018,  https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/fisa-warrant-application-supports-nunes-memo
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Derangement as Chutzpa

Some states seem to be at war with a federal government that they do not control. These are died-in-the-wool, neo-socialist Democrat states that have had their way with the federal tax code since the birth of the 16th Amendment. Watch NY’s AG Barbara Underwood as she shows chutzpa in claiming that somehow the state and local tax deduction (SALT) is somewhere in the Constitution while announcing a lawsuit to stop Congress from exercising its tax powers.

After I stopped laughing, I began to realize that these people are serious. She asserts that New York was unfairly targeted by the cap on SALT at $10,000. Targeted? Yes, they were targeted, but with benefits … up until the new law. One could easily say that they unfairly benefited with the old law as to say that they are unfairly treated with the new one.

This is one of the reasons politics is a great spectator sport. People unknowingly say the most preposterous things with a straight face. She needs to take this act on the road.

RogerG

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President Chamberlain

Trump and Putin at press conference in Helsinki, 7/16/18.
Neville Chamberlain (center) and Hitler at Munich Conference, 1938.

Our president’s statements after his meeting with Putin were appalling. He went further than Neville Chamberlain’s famous “Peace for our time” announcement after Munich, 1938. Trump also sounded like a 60’s teenage anti-war activist blathering moral equivalence. Remember the shouts from the time – we are just as bad as Ho, comrade Brezhnev, and the Belgians in the Congo? Chamberlain, though, to his credit would have recoiled at such rubbish. Nevertheless, Trump and Chamberlain end up at the same place: appeasement.

The radical anti-war left: National council meeting of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Bloomington, Ind., 1963. Tom Hayden is at the far left.

How can a Republican president, knowingly or unknowingly, sound like the radical SDS of yore? The mind-set could be the outcome of a pinched view of life solely reliant on personal experience. Like Chamberlain, domestic matters framed the near totality of knowledge and interest for our fumbling president. Lifetime efforts to go beyond through study and thought are absent, leaving behind only interests and knowledge accrued through business and relationships within an arm’s reach. Everything outside this box is given the first-thought-that-comes-to-mind treatment. This mental reflex makes it easy to be fooled by thugs whose rise up the “greasy pole” resembled the career pathway of a mafia don.

Business and politics in a developed country is decidedly different from the rabid dog approach to power and fame in many other countries, à la Stalin. People with a business background are disarmed when dealing with people who’ll coolly instigate a “Night of the Long Knives” (Hitler’s slaughter of Ernst Röhm and the SA in 1934) or “Great Purge” (Stalin’s massacre of party and military leadership of 1936-38). The Kim sadism and Putin gangsterism are modern versions of the same phenomena. Sitting down with them isn’t quite the same as haggling with planning commissions and union bosses. If you think otherwise, you are proving that you haven’t done much in your life beyond a momentary Google search.

Stalin in 1937 during the Great Purge, 1936-38.
NKVD (Stalin’s secret police) execution.

Jonah Goldberg in his column of 7/18 makes much of the self-centeredness of Trump to explain Trump’s blarney after the Putin summit, and there’s much to the charge. But we Americans are particularly adept at choosing the naïve and ill-prepared when dealing with the key part of the president’s Constitutional job description: foreign affairs and national security. Woodrow Wilson was convinced his oratory would win over the Allies and Germany to his lofty moral internationalism; FDR thought he could charm the 500,000-corpses-per-year Stalin right up to his last breath; JFK was bitch-slapped by Khrushchev in Vienna; W was romanced by Putin’s eyes; and Obama pledged to be “flexible” if he succeeded in fooling the American electorate into giving him another 4-year lease on the White House (which he did). The pizzazz fizzled into the rise of fascism, the Iron Curtain and Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Russian military adventurism. Naivete fueled by ignorance has dark consequences.

Much of the world is a political cesspool, a far cry from having to deal with corrupt local politicos, mudslinging, and trumped up (pun not intended) oppo research. Compare that to group garroting and a bullet to the head down a lonely basement corridor — by the thousands. Vice-President Cheney had it right when asked about what he saw in Putin’s eyes. He saw a “KGB colonel”. An educated realism has been chronically missing from the résumé of many of our most recent chief executives, including this one. A sobering thought.

RogerG

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Smelly Environs

In testimony before the House Oversight and Judiciary committees on Thursday, FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok described his role in the investigations of Hillary Clinton’s email server and Russian interference in the 2016 election as acts of patriotism. | John Shinkle/POLITICO

It seems a whole lot of things are pungent these days. Peter Strzok, with the olfactory glands of a bloodhound, is hot on the scent of Trump voters as if thoughts metabolize into odors – “Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support…”. As for something that’s really beginning to take on the stink of a deer carcass in the summer sun, the FBI’s Hillary and Trump investigations are becoming quite ripe. I’ll withhold judgment till after the Mueller report but the stench is maturing beyond a whiff.

Strzok maintains that he faithfully abided the “bright line” between personal beliefs and work. Who’s he kidding? The email investigation – of which he was central – wreaked: exoneration before the target was interviewed; clear and plain evidence of the destruction of evidence; suspects in the criminal conduct are allowed to represent and collaborate with the target of the investigation; proof of violations of national security statutes messaged into the bland “extremely careless”. The fix was in, and Strzok’s fingerprints are all over it.

Fresh off that sham, Strzok jets off to London to moonlight as DNC oppo research coordinator on the FBI dime. But Trump won the election and upset the apple cart. The 2016 machinations of the DOJ/FBI lawyers at the top of the DC pile were exposed. Instead of savior, Strzok and company ended up with a diet of crow, and maybe facing a few criminal indictments to boot.

The aforementioned reference to Strzok’s uncanny ability to sniff out Trump voters shows another side of this sordid affair. The condescension for the people outside the Georgetown bistros and wine socials and upper middle-class northern Virginia suburbs was as palpable as London fog.

Borrowing Strzok’s “smell” metaphor, his texts smell like the cultural divide at the root of our politics. The Democratic Party is the party of the blue dots (dense urban cores) and the few states wholly beholden to their blue dots. The culture in the blue dots has evolved into a brew of social libertinism, dreamy multiculturalism, and fascist intolerance. Yet, they hold their snouts high in the air at the people who patronize Walmarts. Reagan said that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left him. A more up-to-date version would be, “America didn’t leave the blue dots; the blue dots left America”. The blue dots changed into something that the rest of America didn’t want any part of — thus the election of Trump.

It’s a cultural divide possibly as stark as the one in the 1840’s when a person crossed the Ohio River from free Ohio into slaveholding Kentucky. The places developed as differently as if they were on different continents. For instance, today, the blue dots are at war with traditional standards. One’s simple expectation about the occupants of a public restroom has to be revised as blue dot media mavens propagate the fantasy of 40 genders. You can’t even be certain of the chromosomal makeup of the participants in a girls’ track meet. The cultic philosophies of victimhood and shallow identity-mongering are rampant. And that’s only a start.

Trans wrestler Mack Beggs won the girls’ 110-pound category in a state wrestling tournament for the second time.
Transgender female Andraya Yearwood of Cromwell won the 110 and 200 meters at the 2017 Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference Class M track meet. (Jeff Jacobs, Hartford Courant)

The experience of a person fresh from a Baptist Sunday service and passing through West Hollywood must be akin to the Ohio resident stepping off the ferry into 1840’s Kentucky. Culture shock anyone?

It’s fascinating to wonder if Strzok and Page were caught up in one of America’s premier blue dot bubbles – DC – so much so that their muscular confirmation bias would not appear as a choked worldview but as the only true reality. Insular echo chambers work that way. In the meantime, the notion of a government of enlightened “experts” free of the prejudices of the average person is as shattered as Conan [the barbarian] throwing a 20-lb sledge hammer through an untempered glass window.

RogerG

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These are Strange Times Indeed

The following is my comment to Jonah Goldberg’s “Bonfire of the Straw Men” column in National Review Online for July 11, 2018, https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/michael-doran-strawman-response/.

Why do we have to portray our leaders as saints or devils, with those unable to accept the starkness facing excommunication or worse? Some traditionally on the right have embraced the hodge-podge that is Trump-thought as the closest thing to scripture. While on the left, many are careening off the cliff of outright socialism and boosterism for an end to the rule of law. It’s madness.

The madness is an international phenomena. Here we have a Norwegian protester screaming after comments by a government minister.

Trump is still a buffoon and the Dems have finally shed any semblance of reasonableness in the exposure of their socialist and anti-western inner selves. What we have remaining is a chaotic and impulse-driven Trump as the Dems go batty.

It’s not that I’m not thankful for a right-leaning Congress, SCOTUS, and the occasional winners coming out of a ping-pong ball presidential mind. Restrained judges, tax cuts, reigning in the administrative state, a no-nonsense use of military might, and controlling the immigration tsunami are greatly appreciated. But, please, let’s stop the sycophancy on the right and the mob-like Jacobanism on the left. In today’s politics, is there a zone of serenity and rationality somewhere between Sean Hannity and Maxine Waters?

Maxine Waters (D, Calif.) living up to her reputation.

RogerG

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A Reaction to “Judges as Legislators”

Respondent:  If we as a nation have had fair elections and that we did not disenfranchise so many throughout American history. What exactly is your point, Roger?

My response: Jon, many arbitrary discriminations could be eliminated without judges acting as activist sociology professors. Remember, we’re a nation of laws. Laws rely upon the dictates of some sense of nature and popular sovereignty. For those remaining discriminations, they are evidence of the failure to convince our fellow citizens that they are sufficiently arbitrary. Democracy is the worst system, except for all the others — to borrow a cliche’.

Respondent: Yes, Winston Churchill I believe. But the Constitution must uphold majority rule and minority rights. Just because some swath of society has passed legislation (albiet illegally with respect to disenfranchisement from 1890s to 1908 or so) doesn’t mean that that majority can trample and disregard the rights of minorities, correct? The role of the SCOTUS is to interpret the Constitution and make sure rights and laws do not violate it. We had laws (14th Amendment being the MOST important in my opinion and many others) that were not followed. Thus the Civil Rights movement, etc.

My response: Yes, and those rights can be protected without the recruitment of activist-sociology-professors in black robes. The damage to the law and respect for it is too great for judges to be allowed to fly by the seat of their pants in almost any fashion that excites their fancy. Remember those southern state governments were also activist Democrat governments … just in the pursuit of Jim Crow. Our highest law protects these basic rights and its the clear wording of the law that does so. It may take awhile, but remember that it took nearly 10 years after Brown for the enactment of the ’64 Civil Rights Act. Sometimes it takes awhile for facts on the ground to catch up to our Constitution. But such is human frailty.

Respondent: Roger, Jim Crow was already well entrenched in the South. If by activist southern state governments you mean the Bourbon Democrats sho really controlled the Democratic Party and used the terrorist organizations of the kkk, etc. yes they were activist. Albeit to suppress black voting rights which was law. I would argue that the SCOTUS is needed to balance the other branches of government and make sure that minority rights are being upheld. And you know LBJ only passed the 64 act because of mounting pressure for various civil rights groups who were advocating for the law to be followed.

My response: The Jim Crow South was an extension of the state of “expert”, “elite”, and “scientific” reasoning that arose in the early 19th century. Freshly imbued with Hegel’s philosophy of “progress”, whose dialectic was instrumental to Marx and Darwin, we have the race musings of John C. Calhoun. Race theory continued after Appomattox and supplied the justification for the denial of rights to an entire category of citizens, who were so proclaimed by the 14th Amendment. If SCOTUS was so wise, look at the jurisprudence prior to 1954. Those black-robed “wise men” embossed second-class status on blacks for an additional 4 generations, as well as forcing sterilization on “imbeciles” … in Holmes’s unillustrious phrase. Plus, the damage caused by imperial decree-making outside the law far outweighs any momentary benefit of any individual ruling. The losers in any Article I and Article II election should not have easy recourse to replace a judge’s insight for the voters. If that becomes commonplace, our constitutional republic is dead. Be careful about readily dispensing with popular sovereignty for a yearning for mommy government in a black robe.

And so it goes.

RogerG

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Judges as Legislators

Another Court pick – Brett Kavanaugh in this case – and the partisan circus is revving up. Why? Well, so much is at stake since now we have unelected commissars, appointed for life, reaching way beyond the law, sitting on the bench. What happened to the republic? Will these black-robed grand viziers practice self-restraint? Don’t know, but nominating people who will is an absolute necessity.

President Trump with Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh at the White House, July 9, 2018. (Jim Bourg/Reuters)

How did we get to this juncture of near imperial rule? Sadly, Brown v. Board of Education did much to send us in that direction. While legally mandated segregation is a blot, the Court christened “social jurisprudence” as the means to eradicate it. So, it isn’t the law anymore as the basis for many rulings. It’s a judge’s conjecture on the current state of society. As a result, judges are unhinged from the tethers of the law, whether it be the Constitution or statute.

The 1954 Court, anxious to end the practice of forced segregation, couldn’t rely upon tried-and-true “originalism” to make the desired legal rendering, since the 14th Amendment’s authors of 1868 had enshrined segregation in their own contemporaneous laws (mandates for segregation in DC public schools). To achieve the desired end, they fashioned a new role for themselves as legislators, or pontificators on our social conditions. Discontent and ambition has a powerful new avenue for satisfaction. If you don’t get your way at the ballot box, recruit a judge among the 677 District Court black robes littered throughout the country.

The late jurist, Antonin Scalia.

Avoiding the pitfalls of lifetime-tenured lawmakers as we pursue justice requires some threading of the needle. Scalia’s “textualism” may get the thread through the eye. The law’s words, not legislative history, point the way. Here’s the logic for ending segregation using textualism: 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause for blacks > incorporation (applying the Bill of Rights to the states) > due process protections in the 5th and 14th Amendments (which includes equal protection) > forced segregation violates the clear wording in the Constitution. No need to resort to the witchcraft of “social jurisprudence”.

Brett Kavanaugh could be a nice addition to the cause of self-restraint. For most of the endless list of pet causes, it would be nice if people realized that they must win legislative elections and not turn to a mommy in a black robe. Not prevailing normally means too many people disagree with you. Live with it.

RogerG

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Cross-Fertilization of Two Investigations and the Bane of Progressivism

I have long sought to keep separate the FBI’s Trump/Russia probe and their “MYI” [Mid-year Investigation] into Hillary’s server. The IG report of this past week shattered that assumption. The two are linked by the same personnel, a coterminous but muddled boundary in time, and an obvious unity in partisan bias. All of this is nestled in unbridled DOJ and FBI higher-ups in DC and its satellites. We’ve got a real mess on our hands.

The legacy media oracles responded as if they are on a mission to contradict conservatives and simple common sense. A bias in its own right. They serve to mystify and cloud what is increasingly becoming apparent: powerful organs of our government engaged in crass partisan favoritism in both official queries.

If this doesn’t dispel the progressive dream of the benign, above-the-fray rule of a clerisy of “experts”, nothing will. Progressivism has its roots in upending the understanding of our nature dating back to Genesis. It used to be accepted as axiomatic that humans are corrupted by an imperious selfishness. We were counseled by our traditions to restrain it. The late 19th-century progressives jettisoned this human nature and replaced it with a person cleansed by an expertise born of formal education (the “expert”). In other words, people like themselves.

This has profound societal consequences. The design of our Constitution is predicated on the overriding inclination of people to pursue self-interest, and thus it is true to our traditions. The founders’ structure sought to fight selfish faction with selfish faction by distributing power with separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism.

No need for that kind of thing under the progressives’ scheme of rule by a degreed priesthood of technicians. According to Churchill, though, “The French have a saying, ‘Drive Nature away, and she will return at the gallop'”. The episodes in 2016 and 2017 reveal those technicians to be riven by the same weaknesses as our sandaled and later-wigged ancestors. All that we’ve done is insulate the powerful from accountability in a massive bureaucratic pyramid.

The officials with the guns now have a political eco-system to facilitate great damage. Free of popular sovereignty, their base instincts are free to flower.

Recourse to official ombudsmen – like the IG – as a corrective is fruitless. They are too often infected by the same natural defensiveness as the rest of us. Thus we have the IG report’s equivocations, contradictions, and voluminous mind-numbing prose stretching beyond 500 pages. A glaring example from the report: on the one hand there exists coarse bias; on the other, we can’t attach the bias to any actions. What? How does that work?

There’s the rush to exonerate the favorite (Hillary) while they jump at the slightest unproven provocation to bedevil the targeted villain (Trump). It’s laid out in the report’s timeline and public record. But we’re expected to believe that what’s in the head of Strzok, Page, McCabe, and untold others is somehow unrelated to the clearly observable actions adjoining the thoughts. It’s simply Orwellian.

Trump/Russia and Hillary’s server are two investigations that share the same DNA. Questions about Mueller’s probe are similarly warranted. Like the others, Mueller is taking on a flavor akin to the previous machinations. The same or similar people are scouring for Trump people to ensnare.

Has it been happening for years? You know, the underhanded tactics to flip people, empire-building of imaginary cases, the incestuous relationships – some sexual – between big journalism and big law enforcement, the hounding of people into incriminations, and all of it unchecked. A look under the rug at the Carl Icahn-Phil Mickelsen-Chlorox-Tom Davis imbroglio, shepherded by FBI honcho David Chaves and the DA of SDNY, might be instructive.

Yes, we’ve got a mess. The sooner we discard the demigod status of government apparatchiks, the sooner we’ll make sense of it all. Only then will we be empowered to restrain our own government. Accountability need not be something necessitating a 500 page report.

RogerG

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2016 Hayseed Racists? NO!

I’ve been reading Salena Zito and Brad Todd’s The Great Revolt, an exegesis of the 2016 election. Villification of one’s opponents after the shocking loss has reached new heights, enough to obscure the reality. Tune into the halfwit but snarky late-night comedians and you’ll get a flavor of it.

The authors Brad Todd (c) and Salena Zito (r) on C-SPAN Book TV.

No, the voters opposing Hillary cannot be reduced to rural bigots left behind by “progress”. Many other things were at root to explain Trump’s winning coalition: condescension, social and political bias, and too many deaf ears in too many places of cultural authority. Those places correspond to urban and academic dots, socio-political monasteries walled off into insular echo chambers. The roiling in the backcountry therefore came as a shock to those comfortably nestled behind the walls – which means most everybody in the dots, or mentally influenced by the dots.

The book dispels these real urban myths with a grand survey of Trump voters and a series of vignettes in locales that flipped 15-30 points from solidly Democrat to Trump in the rust belt. In a nutshell, they were so fed up with the long-running disparagement that not even Trump’s boorishness would slacken their momentum to the polls.

Main Street, USA, the epicenter of the Great Revolt.

Main Street rebelled against the Acela corridor, the left coast, intense urban clusters, and the disconnected college campus. Zito and Todd make abundantly clear it was a revolt and not a Klan march. Many Obama voters became Trump voters and the rest is history.

RogerG

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A Chance Meeting and Not Connecting the Dots, 5/26/2018

An accidental meeting on a forest road with a semi-Californian/Montanan – he spends his winters in California (understandable) – showcases much that has gone astray in the America of today. Our biggest threat doesn’t arise from material circumstances but from what rolls around in our heads. Occupying the synapses are an excess of unexamined assumptions and the crazes that they feed.

Let me explain. While riding our ATV’s through the forests near our property, my wife and I came upon a man on a motor-bike. Pleasantries and friendly conversation arose. It turns out that the man haled from Redding, Ca. He had few nice things to say about the winters and complained of the shrinking longevity of restaurants in the area. I mentioned that we had lost our appetite for our native state after one of many recent visits. Prohibitions, high prices, and petty annoyances – the plastic bag carousels are empty at the stores for instance – have soured us.

He complained about the plastic litter in a feeble defense of the ban. I don’t think that he, and many others, connected the dots between the propensity for prohibition and the new feudalism that is taking shape in the so-called golden state. Many off-the-cuff reactions to a hypothetical evil produce unexpected effects. Too much plastic bag litter? Ban them. Too many poor people? Tax the rich. Don’t like carbon? Command people to put solar panels on their roofs or punish them with high utility bills – or both. Don’t like suburbia? Strangle it in a maze of land-use controls. The only problem is: growth suffocates; the middle-class flees; and the cost of living inflates. The result is a new feudalism of the hyper-rich in their manorial enclaves surrounded by a growing low-wage servant class.

As for the limited restaurants in our area, our friend showed no acknowledgement of rudimentary cause-and-effect. Enterprise has been suffering in industrial and rural America for quite some time. Take away the primary industries – mining and lumbering in our case – in those places dependent on them and poverty, meth use, and social chaos erupts. Tourism is a very poor substitute.

Many of these ruminations were kept to myself. He did say that he didn’t like mining for its scarring of the land. I responded with the obvious: without it, he and I wouldn’t be on our vehicles. He dismissed the claim with a cursory, “I’ll buy it from China”.

There you have it. Don’t think of employing our own people; export our wish-fulfillment to foreign lands; and don’t give a second thought about the repercussions. As long as the consequences are invisible to us, and we remain ensconced in our comfortable illusions, all is right with the world. Right?

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” Luke 23:34

RogerG