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The Pot Calling the Kettle Black

“If a fact comes in that doesn’t fit into our frame, you’ll either not notice it, or ignore it, or ridicule it, or be puzzled by it – or attack it if it’s threatening. ”  — George Lakoff, cognitive linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, as quoted in National Geographic Magazine, June 2017 issue. (1)

One of my main reasons for maintaining a National Geographic Magazine subscription is to keep tabs on the animating infatuations in that part of America politically colored “blue”.  The magazine seldom fails to disappoint, perhaps unwittingly and unknowingly.  The infatuations are a product of a favoritism, encoded into blue-America’s urban and academic “betters”, arising from a pervasive  mix of social tastes and a grand ideo-philosophy.   It operates as a kind of mental impairment for its devotees.

Susan Goldberg, Editor in Chief, National Geographic Magazine.

The above quote from page p. 50 of the magazine was meant to describe others not so enlightened according to the author of the piece from which it was taken.  It could just as easily apply to the author, editors, and staff of the magazine in their Washington, D.C., bubble.

“The pot calling the kettle black”: A phrase from at least the 1600s meant to convey hypocrisy. It would be better understood if we experienced life in a medieval kitchen.

On the “affective filter”

Are the publication’s content producers immune to the presence of half-baked assumptions and prejudices that they assign to others?  I think not.  The affective filter concept of learning theory comes to mind.  The filter functions as an emotional Polaroid lens as we consciously try to attain new knowledge.  Our emotions, the theory asserts, are said to make learning difficult, and, by implication, operates to facilitate passage of those stimuli and facts that comport with our previously entrenched hunches about how the world works.  If true, it is universally operable beyond the “bitter clingers” of Pres. Obama’s famous characterization.

The affective filter theory was devised to explain student second language acquisition.

The magazine’s staff could benefit from a mirror.

There is a strong emotional attachment to our deep, unquestioned, and strongly held beliefs.  While we may convince ourselves that we are paragons of scientific inquiry, the reality may be quite different.

On materialism

So, what are the basal beliefs pervading the upper reaches of the status hierarchy in our urban and academic clusters?  One attachment is a broad conviction for the philosophy of materialism.  No, I’m not referring to materialism as a synonym for greed.  Alternatively, materialism as accepted wisdom attempts to explain everything as a product of matter and material forces.  Modern practitioners of science could be weaned into this line of thought by the very nature of their preoccupation.  Science is focused on the physical world.  The temptation is to reduce wisdom to an understanding of matter, its forces and processes.

The stage is set for a full-throated assault on anything seemingly not in tune with the current state of scientific understanding as presumed by some practitioners momentarily at the top of the science popularity pyramid.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, a popular pied-piper of science-as-wisdom.

A death sentence for tradition and rise of subjectivism

To no great surprise, nearly anything old – morals, traditions, institutions, established religion – will sooner or later fall under the crosshairs.  If its antique, it can be explained away as something not worthy of our “enlightened” age.  For these acolytes, it’s become like a reflex, as in the blinking of the eyes.

The old sexual morality is a victim of this popular turn of mind, a bent very popular in metropolitan and academic surroundings, and anywhere else under their sway – which means almost everywhere.  Cohabitation is up; virginity is down; chaos in the home is up; and genital compatibility (heterosexuality) no longer necessary.

In fact, genital diversity (again, heterosexuality) is made irrelevant.  Since an orgasm is the penultimate in this brave new world, sodomy is to be sanctified alongside the Church’s preferred option.  Anything is okay if the desired end is achieved.  Such is the logic of the mind unmoored from anything higher.

In these stunted minds, a belief in something higher is as expendable as a zipper that won’t zip.  God?  What god?  Morality?  Whose morality?  These questions are regurgitated as readily as terns vomiting for their young.

“Nothing is written in stone.” — the quintessence of moral relativism when taken to an extreme.

The result, though, is a confusion of knowledge with wisdom.  While we have the knowledge to expeditiously abort a late-term fetus, “ought” we?  Even though we have the ability to euthanize the momentarily depressed, “ought” we?  While we can treat people as livestock for their stem cells, “ought” we?  Should we use our knowledge of genetics to manufacture custom-made human beings?  Many of the most profound questions in life cannot be answered by a sole reliance on the knowledge of synapses and molecules.  The reference point for such decisions must lie in something other than ourselves. Some would call it “wisdom”.  A scientist may have the knowledge but be completely lacking in the wisdom.

The absence of anything higher, something outside of us, elevates each person into the the role of Creator of our own personal standards.  The subjective, and relative, reigns supreme.  The love of an unbounded individualism – the uninhibited self –  lies here.  The combination of science, materialism, and now subjectivism pushes the mind toward unlimited possibilities, a benign concept if kept abstract; a pernicious one if allowed to undermine limits.

On transgenderism, the gay agenda, and the uninhibited self

Seemingly, now even the physical limits of chromosomes can be discarded.  We are in the age of transgenderism and 40 or so genders.  We have come full circle when the individual as emperor of reality is liberated from science, chromosomes and all.  Have we entered an epochal  phase when subjectivism has put a gun to the head of science?  If an idea or feeling gets locked into our head, even our physical bodies must be made to give way.

This heap of notions is so taken for granted in the confines of academia and among our self-styled cultural elites that counter-ideas are hubristically dismissed as ignorance.  The 3,000 years of Judeo-Christianity and Greek philosophy must bend a knee to a new god and faith: the uninhibited self and its modern priesthood of shortsighted PhD’s and media mandarins.

The ladies of the View, 2017.

Their arrogance is astounding.  They claim a monopoly ownership of science, while unintentionally dismantling it.  In fact, it’s a semi-science that functions as a cover for their biases … or, more accurately, prejudices.  For instance, National Geographic Magazine devoted its January 2017 issue to the “Gender Revolution” (as was covered in a previous blog post).

While reading the article, I was struck, when you cut through the excess verbiage, by the gullibility of a cluster of academics to accept a person’s claims in interviews as proof of the existence of a condition (gender dysphoria) on a par with schizophrenia and diabetes.  When it involves children, the psuedo-diagnosis is very disturbing.  Common adolescent confusion now can lead to permanent genital and bodily disfigurement.  Efforts  to less drastically treat the internal turmoil through therapy are made criminal acts in some jurisdictions.

In the same issue was a piece about female genital mutilation (FGM).  The practice is resurrected in the West under the guise of “gender reassignment surgery”.  Board certification and a scalpel doesn’t make the practice any less horrifying.

Is this the new wisdom?

Using their position at the commanding heights of contemporary culture, the socio-political nomenklatura seek to rub out opposing views on other subjects as well.  A defense of traditional marriage – a viewpoint not very well articulated as of late – is pounded into submission by an alliance of our cultural aristocracy and the fashionable victims’ group du jour: the L-G-B-T-Q …. movement (The presence of 40 or so genders makes an acronym difficult).

One of their signature issues is gay marriage.  Yet, we can only get to the idea of same-sex matrimonials if we skip over some obvious questions.  Like, what is marriage?  Is it simply a union of adults?  Gayness, by its very nature, makes their unions only about the adults.  It can be about nothing else.  Last time I checked, sodomy can’t produce offspring.  So, childbearing is out of the question.  Yes, yes, gays can adopt, but the simple existence of those children is ipso facto proof of a heterosexual coupling.  If marriage exists for the purpose of family formation, it’s incoherent to sanction as “marriage” a genus of union that can never do it (produce children).

What of the heterosexual unions who either can’t, or won’t, produce children?  Are they marriages?  Most emphatically … Yes!  Heterosexuality is the essential condition, not the decision to have children.  As for infertile couples, medical interventions are a tacit recognition of the absolute necessity of the very essence of heterosexuality: sperm meeting egg, in one way or another.  Being childless doesn’t repeal the legitimacy of a marriage; and holding a ceremony and exchanging rings, by itself, can’t make one.  Heterosexuality is written all over the institution.

Marriage as a mixing of the only 2 genders having any basis in chromosomes – leaving aside the unusual, but not unexpected, chromosomal abnormality – was remarkably obvious to our ancestors who lived at a time when they couldn’t be afflicted, as we are, with the hectoring of our cultural “betters”.  The idea of marital bliss applying to 2 men was so outside the pale that it never came to mind to anyone coming before Justice Kennedy’s term on the Supreme Court.  Marriage of the 2 genders is all that we find mentioned in the historical record.  While scanning historical documents, I ran into this juicy bit from Emperor Justinian’s reforms of Roman law, Institutes, Title II, “Of The Law of Nature, the Law of Nations, and the Civil Law”:

“The law of nature is that which she has taught all animals; a law not peculiar to the human race, but shared by all living creatures, whether denizens of the air, the dry land, or the sea. Hence comes the union of male and female, which we call marriage; hence the procreation and rearing of children, for this is a law by the knowledge of which we see even the lower animals are distinguished.” (Emphasis added)  (8)

Gay marriage is an inanity to logic and to our predecessors.

On Hegel, “progress”, and historicism

G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), rector and holder of the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin.

The growing acceptance of same-sex unions is a testament to the wrongheadedness of Hegel’s 19th century view of history as the unfolding of increasing rationality – i.e., “progress” (sometimes referred as “historicism”).  We aren’t getting smarter, or more rational, or more contented.  Instead, we’re proving that history has no arc.  It’s filled with unexpected zigzags and stumbles, and chic journeys into nonsense.

In castigating historicism  and any other form of determinism in the manipulation of history, the philosopher Karl Popper had it right when he said that there are no “inexorable laws of historical destiny”. (6,7)  Marx/Engels (meaning the present converts of the pair), Obama, Hillary, Thomas Piketty, Robert Reich, and all self-styled Progressives please take note.

“Trend is not destiny”, Karl Popper. The old saying, “crap happens”, is the roadblock to any universal trend in history. It’s something Obama should keep in mind before he lectures us about being on the “right side of history”.

On “climate change”

For our brethren at the top of our urban and academic status pyramid, maybe the thought that they could be wrong never occurred to them.  Maybe they’re blinded by their own arrogance.  Well, sadly for us, their arrogance isn’t limited to the LGBTQ … wishlist.  A favorite in their panoply of causes, when they aren’t yammering against homophobia, is “climate change”.

If left alone as a two-word phrase and without any of the ideological baggage that so often attends it, it’s rather innocuous and acceptable to most people.  Though, our haughty “betters” couldn’t leave it alone.  It’s freighted with “apocalyptic”, “catastrophic”, “solely anthropogenic”, and with sub-agenda terms like “green”, “sustainable”, etc., etc.

Al Gore as the climate change Jeremiah.

With their ever-present faith in “progress”, they’re fully on-board with upending the settled arrangements of a free people.  Their confidence in politicized “experts” knows no bounds.  Indubitably, government – with themselves at the helm, of course – is expected to have free reign to bring about the “green” world.  The crusade has breathed new life into the disaster that is socialism.  It also bequeathed to us the juiced-up social engineer.

The social engineer of the progressives’ imagination, appropriately papered with degrees and certificates, will be ensconced in administrative bureaus with sweeping and unconstitutional powers to legislate, execute, and adjudicate.  It’s government by papal bull and czarist ukase.  What would James Madison think?

If Madison was reanimated into today’s world, he might be struck by more than a sovereign people’s willingness to surrender their sovereignty over to Harvard’s graduating class.  He’d be smacked with the glaring hypocrisy of the situation’s cheerleaders.

My blue-America barometer – National Geographic Magazine – unconsciously revels in the duplicity.  Going back to the “Why We Lie” cover story (June 2017 issue), I found this gem:

“Researchers have shown that we are especially prone to accept lies that affirm our worldview.  Memes that claim Obama was not born in the United States, deny climate change … and spread other ‘alternative facts’, as a Trump adviser called his Inauguration crowd claims, have thrived on the Internet and social media because of this vulnerability.”

“Deny climate change” as a lie?  Is it a lie or simply a disagreement?  “Lie” is used to cover a difference of opinion with our cultural suzerains.  Grand prognostications in science, if its real science, should be met with a “Yes, but ….” or a “No, but ….”.  Qualifiers abound in a field for which there is much unknown, and definitely so regarding those grand prognostications.

The resort to cocksure “lie” labeling is heartily exhibited by those with the least expertise in science.  Al Gore is no scientist; he’s a politician/lawyer.  Leonardo DiCaprio is an actor.  The author of the NGM piece, Yudhijhit Bhattacharjee, is a “writer” according to the bio on his website.  And since scientists, like everyone else, aren’t resistant to the surrounding cultural zeitgeist, and since politicized government largesse is widely available, today’s science can be easily hijacked by its celebrity and political non-practitioners possessing huge megaphones.

Leonardo DiCaprio as Democratic Party booster, from the 2004 campaign.

Here’s the hypocrisy: opposition to the crusade is fitted with the “liar” label while a concerted campaign in 2009 of lying was uncovered in spirited emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, Houston Control for the “climate change” enterprise.  Maybe intimidation to suppress is more accurate.  Still, the episode exposed the effort to misrepresent the truth.  Do we dare call it “lying”? (9)

The scandal involved partisan scientists bound-and-determined to shoehorn data into a prefab outcome: climate change is apocalyptic .  It included efforts at hiding data and methods from scrutiny outside a narrow, mutually reinforcing group.  Further, the emails bring to light the attempts at manipulation of their models to produce their preferred results, and the frustration when they don’t.  In addition to hiding and statistical messaging, intimidation and excommunication of critics from the field is plotted among the climate change clerisy’s brethren.

Putting the best face on the scandal would be to recognize the emails were taken out of context and only blunt expressions among close-knit colleagues.  However, the exculpation is only limited.  At a minimum, it illustrates the behavior of a highly partisan claque of scientists.  It’s an example of what happens when science becomes a partisan movement and then a political industry.

Is any of this to be seriously considered – even if made aware – among the lords in their Hollywood/west Los Angeles/Manhattan/campus castles?  I think that we now know the answer to that question.

Why even have a magazine issue devoted to “Why We Lie”?  Why now?  Why did the topic come up and demand so much of the magazine’s resources and time?  I suspect a political motive.  The subject of “lying” is a particular obsession in the hot nodes of lefty political activism.  Blue-America’s most prominent inhabitants are busy trying to delegitimize the shocking result of the 2016 election.

I’m reminded of one of the historian Henry Adams’s witticisms from his book, The Education of Henry Adams.

“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”

The organization of hatred can occur with or without a patina of science.  Susan Goldberg, chief editor of National Geographic Magazine, please take note.

RogerG

Bibliography and references:

  1. “Why We Lie”, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, National Geographic Magazine, June 2017, pp. 30-51.
  2. “Fox Says It Won’t Interfere With National Geographic’s Editorial Content”, Andrew Beaujon, Washingtonian, 9/9/2015,   https://www.washingtonian.com/2015/09/09/fox-wont-interfere-with-national-geographic-editorial-content/
  3. “The End of Identity Liberalism”, Mark Lilla, New York Times: Sunday Review, 11/18/2016,   https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html
  4. “Input hypothesis”, Wikipedia,   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis.  The affective filter concept arose from Stephen Krashen’s research into second language acquisition and is part of his broader “input hypothesis”, first published in 1977.
  5. “Gender Revolution”, National Geographic Magazine, June 2017 issue.
  6. A brief summary of Karl Popper’s critique of Hegel’s “historicism” can be found in wikipedia under the article “Historicism”,   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicism
  7. A fuller description of Popper’s critique of historicism can be found here : “The Central Mistake of Historicism: Karl Popper on Why Trend is Not Destiny”,  Farnam Street, https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2016/03/karl-popper-mistake-of-historicism/
  8. As a pdf file: “Justinian, Institutes“,   http://amesfoundation.law.harvard.edu/digital/CJCiv/JInst.pdf
  9. An interesting op-ed about the U. of East Anglia email scandal can be found here: “Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation”, Christopher Booker, The Daily Telegraph, 11/28/2009,   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6679082/Climate-change-this-is-the-worst-scientific-scandal-of-our-generation.html
  10. The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter 1, Henry Brooks Adams, 1907.
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The Non-Elected Government

(Also on “Roger Graf” Facebook page)

Special counsel Robert Mueller on Capitol Hill in June of 2017.

The following is response to an article, “Who Watches the Watchmen?”, by Victor Davis Hanson, National Review Online, 11/29/2017,   http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454133/russia-investigation-robert-mueller-special-counsel-needs-oversight-prevent-abuse?fb_comment_id=1688957164469800_1689590284406488&comment_id=1689590284406488#f1fadcf5c799748

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VDH, you raise an important point. Who polices the police? In this case, who polices Robert Mueller? I would like to add one more question: Why have we become so enamored of unaccountable government agents? From Congress delegating its legislative authority to the EPA, FCC, CFPB, to “special counsels”, we have witnessed a profound erosion of popular sovereignty. We don’t control our own government.

And once unleashed, these suzerains scurry about looking into every knook and cranny for human flaws. Some might even prove to be illegal. We’ve got so many laws and regulations that its hard not to break a couple of dozen as we make our way to the morning shower.

Welcome to the reign of “experts”, progessivism’s promise. I call it a low grade nightmare.

RogerG

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People Crying Wolf about China’s Economy Surpassing the US

(Also on “Roger Graf” Facebook page)

First Lady Melania Trump, China’s President Xi Jinping, and US President Donald Trump attend a state dinner at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, 11/9/2017.

The following is a comment to an American Enterprise Institute report, “America’s inconvenient trillions”, by Derek Scissors, November 27, 2017,   http://www.aei.org/publication/americas-inconvenient-trillions/.

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We’ve become so self-critical that we flagellate ourselves over the slightest thing. It doesn’t take much. Crude numbers often send us into a tizzy. There’s few things more crude than “GDP” and the “Trade Deficit”. The “Trade Deficit” has little to do with accurately measuring what we contribute to the international economy. It’s essentially meaningless. But in the mouths of our demagogues, it’s gold for their personal political fortunes.

As for “GDP”, it excludes and ham-handedly misstates much. Plus, the thing is at the mercy of a country’s politics. In communist/totalitarian countries, all numbers are creations of the state. Those states have as their prime existential motive a secular evangelism for a socialist utopia. Everything is warped, including numbers, in service to that ultimate end. So, comparing numbers between a closed and open society is lunacy.

Honest evaluations of national wealth are more helpful. Read the article, take some time to digest it, and see if you don’t agree.

The world may not be as our visible, popular, semi-literate elites – right, center, and left – would have us believe.

RogerG

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Go USC … But Stanford Stands In the Way

(Also on “Roger Graf” Facebook page)

An intriguing match-up is in the offing for Friday, Dec. 1, the PAC-12 championship game. It’s a rematch of Sept. 9’s face-off.

Prior scores make betting odds superfluous. Check out these scores:

Sept. 9 had USC outplay Stanford 42-24. It was an early season contest before any team had time to gel. And it happened before Darnold lost his confidence, USC’s shallow bench proved troubling, and Darnold’s quick short-circuit to his athleticism has shown itself to be a weakness. Conversely, Stanford may have found a quarterback in Costello.

On Oct. 21, USC embarrassed itself before Notre Dame, 49-14. Injuries proved to be a problem due to a shallow bench, and Darnold’s high school approach to the game were key determinants of the outcome. Plus, ND is no pushover this year.

Sam Darnold, USC quarterback, fumbles versus Colorado.

Nov. 25 had Stanford convincingly beat Notre Dame, 38-20. It was 21-8 at halftime in a game that was supposed to be a nail-biter. Costello’s play was fantastic, and Stanford exhibited that hard-nosed style for which they have become famous since the glory days of Harbaugh.

Stanford TD catch versus Notre Dame.

If these scores are any indication, USC fans (of which I am one) shouldn’t be comforted by the LA media or Las Vegas bookies. Either USC’s mid-to-late-season lackluster performances were due to a lack of focus and therefore subject to change, or Stanford’s late season surge indicates the rise of a powerhouse.

I don’t know. The game has to be played. My money is on Stanford; my heart is with USC.

RogerG

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Sen. John Tester and I: An Exchange About Tax Reform

(Also on my “Roger Graf” Facebook page)

Sen. Jon Tester (D, Montana)

Recently, I had an exchange with Sen. Jon Tester’s office over the Republican tax reform effort. I’ll try to be fair to Sen. Tester in summarizing his position. What follows is my response. You might find it interesting.

Sen. Tester:
* Tax cuts must be done “in a fiscally responsible way and not increase our deficit or add to the debt”.
* Republican tax cut proposals would “add trillions to the national debt, saddling our children and grandchildren with heavy financial burdens”.

The issue of the national debt hangs heavy in his response.

My resonse:

Sen. Tester,
Thanks for the timely reply. I appreciate your willingness to communicate with your constituents.

But I’m taken aback by the use of partisan rhetoric such as “everyone pays their fair share”, “saddling our children and grandchildren with heavy financial burdens”, “tax breaks for the extremely wealthy and big corporations”, and the frequent use of the term “irresponsible”. I understand the need to be concise by using generalities, but the inclusion of the rhetoric complicates attempts at a thoughtful discussion of the issues.

First, the class warfare charge (“tax breaks for the extremely wealthy”) obfuscates the reality. No one, for all practical purposes, gets a job from a poor person. Sorry, you need rich people. Targeting rich people is self-defeating. So, now the question turns on the quest to get upper middle income and rich people to increase their business activities and create jobs. Punishing them with high tax rates and transferring wealth to DC won’t do the trick. If it did, then a robbers’ economy would be a fountain of prosperity. I refer you to Henry Hazlitt’s classic, “Economics in One Lesson”.

Next, the worry over adding to the deficit rings hollow coming from people who approach spending cuts with all the enthusiasm of nurses entering an ebola ward. The deficit is an indication of a spending problem, not a product of people refusing to be fleeced any further. The tax haul is already huge, particularly among the people who you’ll expect to produce the jobs. I’m reminded of a slave economy. For that hideous society, it is believed that increased whipping will make the people more productive. What? How does that work? The same is true with tax-the-rich schemes.

Thirdly, it’s strange to apply “cost” to a lowering of the tax burden. Our economy, and the people shouldering the burden of creating the jobs, is already excessively labored by a plethora of noncompetitive taxes. A tax cut is relief. Deficits are, ipso facto, creatures of spending excesses.

Anyway, projections of the “costs” and “benefits” are like many of the projections regarding environmental impacts, WAGS or SWAGS: “wild a** guesses” (WAG) and, adding a gloss of math, “scientific wild a** guesses” (SWAG). The federal number-crunchers can’t even get their spending WAGS correct. Look at the ’65 projections on the outyear costs of Medicare and Medicaid. What makes you think they’re any good at measuring the outyear ramifications of new tax rates?

Fourthly, if worry over adding to our children’s burdens was legit, we’d be taking a serious look at spending, especially entitlements. They are spending on cruise control. There’s no amount of “revenue raisers” that can keep up without biting into our children’s future prospects. The extractions to DC means less available for a growing the economy. An anemic economy is one that won’t make room for them.

So, get on board with the tax reform bill. I’ve already cited ways to improve it. These suggestions aren’t about the fool’s errand of Keynesian stimulus. Such foolishness is an acting out of a robbers’ economy, as mentioned earlier. “Bottom up” economics – or demand-side economics, or a “robber’s economy” – is one of the most anti-young economic approaches on the political shelf. If you’re serious about a prosperous future for the young, it won’t come out of maintaining, or increasing, the dollar flow to DC.

I think that a reconfiguration of the practical meaning of ‘irresponsible’ is in order.

Thanks again for hearing me out.

RogerG

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Pouring SALT Into Open Wounds

Salt as sodium chloride is a necessity.  SALT as the State and Local Tax deduction is a luxury, and an irritating one at that — like pouring salt into open wounds if you live anywhere that didn’t give Hillary 60% of the vote.

One need not stroll into the culture war to be smacked with evidence of our great political and social divide.  The tax code is a lively arena for conflict. It is a monstrous affair, littered with baubles and beads, overlapping into almost all human activity,  and encrusted with boundless perks for politically privileged courtesans.  Not all tax code gimmes, though, are equal.  One – the deduction for state and local taxes (SALT) – has evolved into an icon of worship in blue state jurisdictions with a penchant for taxing and spending their way to heaven.  Take it away and they behave like alcoholics being forced into cold turkey treatment.

For low-tax locales,  they receive little or no benefit for their reluctance to turn their state tax offices into Soviet Lubyankas.  Their sole compensation is the exasperation of knowing that their self-restraint makes the subsidy more “affordable” to the public servants in hyper-taxed, Democrat-friendly environs.  People outside and between the urban and bi-coastal romper rooms know it.  It’s galling for them to know that the federal tax code incentivizes tax promiscuity.

SALT was born of the Civil War’s 1862 Revenue Act and the 19th century’s infatuation with sticking it to the super rich. (4)  Common terms  for the fat-cats that stretches across the last couple of centuries are “buccaneer capitalists” or “robber barons”.  It’s easy to find antique characterizations that align with the modern left’s preconceptions.

Cyrus Field, Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Russell Sage on bags of millions, “Puck” magazine, 1883.
John D. Rockefeller as “king”, 1901.

The excitement led to the passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913, which legalized the fed’s tax on income.  The federal tax on income was reified into the Revenue Act of 1913, and the state and local tax deduction (SALT) tagged along.

The archaic justification for SALT was the fear of the federal government swallowing up all tax revenue, leaving little for streets and public safety.  SALT was thought to preserve a slice of the cash cow for city hall.  How quaint.

A more modern pretext is the avoidance of double taxation.  You know, the same dollar of income being slammed by the locals and then hit by the feds.  But what isn’t subjected to double/triple/quadruple taxation in our own tax Leviathan according to this logic?  Think about it.  For today, the excuse becomes less than a pointless gesture.

Look below at the growth of our federal tax monster by page volume.  (5)

Does anyone claim that multiple taxation isn’t at work here?  There are so many ways to tax income, and, when you’re done, tax the things that were purchased with that taxed dollar.  We don’t even need the income to be from human beings.  We extract the pound of flesh from ghosts in the form of businesses.  The requirement of breathing isn’t necessary.

Let me count the ways beyond the tax on personal income.

  • Estate taxes, assessments on your assets after you’ve left the land of the living.  Please remember, that stuff was most likely purchased with already taxed dollars.
  • Corporate income taxes, the tax on a business as if it were real human being.  These taxes are layered on top of all the income taxes generated by all of the buying and selling involved in doing business.
  • Tariffs and duties, the products being taxed at point of entry.  After facing this hit, these products will generate income to be taxed once again as estate, corporate, and income taxes.
  • Sales and excise taxes.  These extractions are mostly generated from spending originating in previously taxed income.
  • Ditto for property taxes.

Our whole tax system is a series of overlays of double/triple/quadruple taxation.  What’s the relevance of attempting to excuse state and local taxes from something that is so generic to our, or any, tax code?

If you believe the existence of “double taxation” is hyped – which some people do – the case for SALT teeters further.  A good portion of tax dollars to different levels of government goes to pay for different services.  Tax dollars to the feds for national defense aren’t the same dollars as those going to the state to fulfill a state’s policy of equalizing budgets among a state’s school districts.  It’s only when services overlap between layers of government do we run the risk of a taxed dollar being hit again.  The deduction purports to dodge something that doesn’t really happen in the first place.

Even more convoluted contentions have been summoned to keep SALT.  One mind-boggling claim is the belief, absent the deduction, state and local spending would be “sub-optimal”.  Wrap your head around that one.  Here’s the concoction: stir into the witch’s cauldron tax incentives to pay for more or less public services and add someone’s ideological preferences, and out comes the right amount of local spending.  Allegedly, SALT is the ingredient to go “optimal”.

Is it making any sense?  Only if you believe in magic.  The thing rides on the mystical power to glean SALT’s ability to encourage the funding of more local government services, services that might increasingly benefit non-residents.  Is that “optimal”?  I don’t know, though it smells fishy.  Strip away “optimal” and, in reality, you are left with a simple local decision to fund a service.  Nothing more.  Whether it aligns with a pundit’s conception of “optimal” is  meaningless.  In reality, SALT is the noise in the calculation to finance a park.

If the mystical sound of “optimal” doesn’t sound convincing, a second line of trenches in defense of SALT is thrown up by blue-state advocates when they contend that they get fleeced more by the federal government and, therefore, are more deserving of a bigger break.  They trot out such crude numbers as the return on federal taxes paid  – i.e., residents’ taxes paid out and federal spending coming in, as in this chart appearing in a 2015 issue of The Atlantic (7):

Deep blue, Hillary/Bernie-loving sanctuaries as New York and California reside at the bottom of the chart.  They get less than a $1.00 for every one sent to the feds.  In contrast, redder-than-red South Carolina gets a whopping $7.87 back. (7)  Are some states riding on the federal teat as they keep their tax burdens low?  Are red states hypocrites?  Are blue state victims and therefore deserving of SALT?

The numbers in the “return on federal investment” chart are too raw to be of much value.  Local circumstances muddy the picture.  Number one on the list of federal contributors is military installations.  Northeast states aren’t likely to be the source of cheap real estate for sprawling tank exercises and bombing runs.  A state like California ironically is (Does the Mojave Desert remind you of anything?), and so are states populated by now-posthumous “yellow dog Democrats”and represented by long since gone-to-room-temperature congressional mandarins: South/North Carolina, Texas, etc.

Marine armored vehicles at Twentynine Palms, Ca.

The presence of federal defense spending in a state has much to do with historical inertia.  Those states long in the game have the advantage.  It’s a mixture of red and blue states.  Of the top ten receiving the lion’s share of the defense pie, 4 are solid blue states (California, Maryland, Washington, and Massachusetts);  2 are purple (Virginia and Pennsylvania); 4 are red (Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Alabama).  (9)  Nothing remarkable here since the federal pipeline was long established before the current progressive/left mania came to make blue states “blue”. (10)

Hampton Roads with Newport News, Norfolk, and Portsmouth. It’s the location for major military installations as the Norfolk Naval Shipyard.
USS John Kennedy at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, 1983.

Looking at it from the perspective of the importance of the federal defense spending on a state’s economy (GDP), 4 of the top jurisdictions are solidly blue (Hawaii, DC, Maryland, and Maine) and the rest are purple or red (Va., Alabama, Alaska, Miss., Kentucky, Arizona).  (9)   Once again, a blend.  Regardless of a state’s political hue, Pentagon dollars mostly go to facilities that predate ’41 Pearl Harbor. (10)

So, what do we have?  We have some blue states with a large infusion of federal defense money, coexisting with a tax-spend-regulation frenzy, all the while screeching about the loss of SALT.  Suddenly, the picture ain’t so clear.

Anyway, the scramble by localities for bases resembles the hustle for the next Google server farm, and should be viewed in that light – not as a “federal handout”.  Defense is an industry, and like any industry, it brings paychecks to be spent in the state.    It works the same as an Amazon distribution center.  If it adds to the state’s coffers in the same way as a Google or Amazon facility, so what.  A state can’t present itself as a victim of the federal tax monster as it shuns, or is incapable of attracting, industry – federal or private.

A growing state economy from expanding industries means a growing state tax base and a decreasing bite for each taxpaying resident … under normal mathematical rules.  Hence, low tax states.  High tax states punish economic activity, restrict the role of business/industry taxes to the state’s balance sheet, and create a greater reliance on personal tax extractions.  Up goes their state-driven personal tax load, up goes the desire to hide the gouging through SALT, and down goes the federal dollar influx.  The result is the funky calculation called the “return on taxpayer investment”.

And what about a state’s inflationary character that drives incomes and tax receipts?  That’s the other side of the “return on taxpayer investment” equation: the money that flows out of the state.  Yes, there is such a thing as a cost-of-living and income feedback loop.  As a state’s cost of living rises, so does the income to keep up; and as incomes rise, so does the cost of living.  Are state policies compelling an increase in the cost of living, and necessitating a higher income to maintain residence?

To no surprise, according to one measure, mega-blue and high tax states like California and New York nowhere appear on the list of the cheapest states to live.  Pride of place goes to 9 red states (Texas, et al) and 1 purple (Michigan).  (11)

On the flip side, blue states occupy near the top in the necessity for its people to shell out lots of cash to continue to live there.  (13) Two of the big stimulants are housing and energy costs.  Both are highly sensitive to a state’s public policies.  Environmental, land use, and growth control measures wreak havoc on the cost of living.  Add “prevailing wage” inflators to the mix and you have a recipe for escalating wage demands.  Plug those inflated income numbers into a progressive tax code and a river of money flows to the state capital and DC.

Californios, take a look at your electricity bill for a familiar inflator.  All that  “green” energy is expensive, and it shows.  See below. (12)

Utility rates are one of the favorite social engineering tools of the green lobby.  In many blue states, the presence of an all-powerful green lobby defines what it means to be blue.  Living in a 3 bedroom/2 bath house in the Central Valley of California means a $400/mo. electricity tab, unless you knuckle under to the state’s commissars and load your roof with solar panels.

The price of everything inexorably climbs.  An inflated utility bill component is factored into everything you buy.  No wonder a comfortable existence in these locales requires more green of the kind with presidents on them.

Democrat bastions don’t seem to be aware of the trap that they created.  It begins with an infatuation for progressive tax codes.  Then, greenie fascinations raise the price of existence.  Lump onto the process the attempt to raise wages by ukase (minimum and prevailing wage law), add a plethora of regulations to assuage any chic cause that comes down the pike, and the pitchfork-wielding peasants end up demanding more in their paychecks.  As they do so, they’ll be trapped into higher tax rates to artificially inflate the flow of cash to the feds.  At this juncture, there will be no shortage of number-crunchers to produce a kind of mathematical demagoguery to justify a special perk for the victims.

What started out as an honest gesture in the dawn of income taxation is a higher mountain of contradictions today.  The old pretext, along with these more modern ones, is baloney.  CPA status isn’t required to figure it out.  The real reason is something more simple.  After 104 years, people have grown attached to SALT, whether it makes sense or not.  In this sense, SALT is like today’s opioid epidemic.  An addict begins with raiding the medicine cabinet, a dependency develops and grows, and the person ends up as a client of the drug cartels.  Like an addiction, entire financial lives become wrapped around ages-old tax provisions.  Threats to take it away lead to the political equivalent of withdrawals.

Heebie-jeebies can erupt at any time from a blue-state anybody.  D’s we expect to be afflicted, but R’s aren’t immune from the spasms brought on by the threat to take away the perk.  It’s simply a blue or purple state thing – aka tax-happy jurisdictions – no matter the partisan color of their advocates.

Rep.’s Peter King (R-NY) and Tom MacArthur (R-NJ) threaten opposition to tax reform that includes the elimination of SALT.

Yesterday’s absurdity has morphed into today’s “necessity”.  As such, the inmates of tax-happy jurisdictions haven’t limited their defense to now-discredited claims.  They’ve invented additional arguments based on prudence.  Come to think of it, really, it’s the prudence of the addict.

The abolition of SALT, it is asserted, would wreak havoc on a state’s bond rating.  In essence, blue-state defenders are admitting that without the sweetener of SALT their residents would seek to be residents elsewhere.  Probably true.  Without SALT, residents would be exposed to the full effect of their blue-state’s tax mania.  The logic: out flows an alarming amount of the tax base, down goes the ability to make good on their bonds.  Elementary, my dear Watson.

Understandable, probably true, but as a defense, it’s bunkum.  The blue-state perk shields a state’s residents from the full effect of sky-high taxation while simultaneously making it easier for the state’s tax collectors to have a crowd to fleece.  The image recurs of a vampire with a herd of human livestock to feed upon.  Drugging the victims with SALT to make the experience more tolerable isn’t a valid justification for bleeding them white.  If they were sober, they’d flee like hell.  The argument for medicating the victims is an argument for exsanguination (sever loss of blood), without the slightest recognition about whether they should have their hemoglobin stolen in the first place.

Instead, sticking with the metaphor, wouldn’t it be wiser to start a campaign to eradicate vampires by recruiting an army of priests armed with wooden stakes?  In our case, cloning an army of Arthur Laffers would do the trick.  The effort would be expedited by a clear-headed confrontation with the horror among the patsies.  Eliminating SALT might produce outcomes such as an exodus (and a run on U-Haul rentals), mob exterminations of blue-state Republicans, and/or the patrons of Starbucks turning into icon-smashing peasants as they march to the homes and offices of the state’s revenuers and their abettors.  Maybe all three.

Number 2 on the probabilities list is a very real possibility: the extermination of blue-state Republicans.  Blue-state Republicans are already an endangered species.  SALT might make them go the way of Martha, the last known passenger pigeon who died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.

The fate awaiting blue-state Republicans if SALT is repealed?

Or so it is argued.  That might be the short term effect.  Beyond one election cycle, after the hypothetical  wipeout, the residents would be accosted with more tax-crazed “public servants”, further intensifying the state’s slide.  Don’t forget, your most likely choice on the ballot is between a tax lunatic (a “D”)  or  a now dispirited R.  After multiple waves of tax bingeing, an alcoholic’s bottom would be reached.  Then there’d be sobriety and a cleaning up – i.e., a return to tax sanity.  A short term loss might be acceptable if it results in a long term fiscal clean-and-sober.

But try selling the logic to a soon-to-be-unemployed Republican legislator in a hostile state.  Yet, is the preservation of his job a sufficient justification for keeping an iniquitous tax perk?  The rationale worked to keep the antebellum South married to slavery.  The South’s entire way of life , they cried, couldn’t survive the loss of their human property.  The argument was as dubious then as it is today in its latest incarnation for SALT.  The only difference in the 2 scenarios is the object of veneration and preservation.

While the tax perk may preserve a few “R” politicos, it continues to do violence to equity among the our sovereign states.  States that prudently restrain their state Leviathans also have modest tax regimes.  They receive little, if any, benefit from the perk.  There’s just too little to deduct to reduce a taxpayer’s overall burden.

The calculus is reversed in most blue states.  Nanny states are expensive, and so is their tax bite.  The deduction is a salve to a gaping wound.  Not surprisingly, it is coveted by tax hells and viewed contemptuously by places not located anywhere along Dante’s descent through tax “Inferno”.

There you have it: love of SALT is synonymous with jurisdictions defined by words such as spendthrift, irresponsible, gouging, and excessive.  For those locales not so enamored by SALT, words like prudence, modest, and limited apply.  Put the two sentences together.  SALT enables all that should be avoided in a universe with a reasonable relationship to reality.

It is, literally and figuratively, pouring salt into the open wound between the states.  It has no rationale other than to make the consequences of  irresponsibility less felt.  But that isn’t reasonable, is it?

RogerG

 

Bibliography and sources:

  1. “Congress might eliminate California state and local tax deductions. Here’s a look at the numbers”, Kurt Snibbe, Orange County Register, 10/27/2017,   http://www.ocregister.com/2017/10/27/congress-might-eliminate-california-state-and-local-tax-deductions-heres-a-look-at-the-numbers/
  2. “Which Places Benefit Most From State and Local Tax Deductions?”, Alan Coe, Tax Foundation, 4/27/2017,   https://taxfoundation.org/map-state-and-local-deductions/
  3. “The State and Local Tax Deduction: A Primer”, Jared Walczak, Tax Foundation, 3/15/2017,  https://taxfoundation.org/state-and-local-tax-deduction-primer/
  4. For a modern leftist rendition of the demographic, see: “Michael Novak’s Ethics of Buccaneer Capitalism”, Frank Cocozelli, 10/1/2007, Daily Kos,  https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2007/10/1/392711/-
  5. “Look at how many pages are in the federal tax code”, Jason Russell, Washington Examiner, 4/15/2016,   http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/look-at-how-many-pages-are-in-the-federal-tax-code/article/2563032
  6. “Which States Rely the Most on Federal Aid?”, Morgan Scarboro, Tax Foundation, 1/11/17,  https://taxfoundation.org/states-rely-most-federal-aid/
  7. “Which States Are Givers and Which Are Takers?”, John Tierney, 5/5/2014, The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-states-are-givers-and-which-are-takers/361668/
  8. This article was cited in the above piece: “2017’s Most & Least Federally Dependent States”, John S Kiernan, Senior Writer & Editor, 4/21/2017, WalletHub,   https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the-federal-government/2700/  .
  9. “MILITARY’S IMPACT ON STATE ECONOMIES”, National Conference of State Legislatures, 2/21/2017,  http://www.ncsl.org/research/military-and-veterans-affairs/military-s-impact-on-state-economies.aspx
  10. Virginia’s Hampton Roads has 20 military facilities, many date back to the Civil War and before.  For one compilation refer to wikipedia, “Hampton Roads”,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampton_Roads#U.S._military
  11. “Top 10 States With the Lowest Cost of Living”, Rick LeBlanc, The Balance, 5/16/2017,  https://www.thebalance.com/states-with-lowest-cost-of-living-4137935
  12. “Electricity Prices Rise for 30 States, But Some State Leaders Want Them Even Higher”, Heath Knakmuhs, Senior Director, Policy for the Global Energy Institute, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 4/8/2016,   https://www.uschamber.com/above-the-fold/electricity-prices-rise-30-states-some-state-leaders-want-them-even-higher
  13. “See how your state scores for living costs”, Natasha Sporn, MSN: Money, 12/22/2016,  https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/see-how-your-state-scores-for-living-costs/ss-AAlEaoG#image=31
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Ban-o-mania

A current  incarnation of the urban sophisticate is the “hipster”. If I may be excused for engaging in a loose generalization, like other versions of the breed, they are equal parts confident, media-savvy, and clueless.  Prime examples of the cross-fertilization of fashion and politics, they are susceptible to pleas to prohibit almost anything presented as irritating and outside of their lifestyle experience.  They are one for the constituencies for ban-o-mania.

Don’t like something?  Ban it!  Why ban it?  Simple: it’s too jarring to the mind of your average urban and self-anointed sophisticate.   That mind is riddled with the prejudices, half-baked ideas, and unexamined assumptions of a person limited to the secular equivalent of a mountaintop monastery … without the serious study of real monks (“echo chamber” keeps popping into my mind).  Ban-o-mania reigns supreme as the preferred option for anyone within the materialist abbey, while adversely affecting everyone  not so mentally and geographically insulated.

The locations for the secular monasteries generally matches the 2016 election map.  Below is a precinct-by-precinct rendering of the 2016 election results. (1)

2016 election results by precinct. Blue is for the Democratic candidate, red for the Republican.

The blue dots on the map are outposts serving as the intersection of radical chic in culture (some might call it “lifestyle”) and politics.  The journalist and essayist Tom Wolfe had a great time back in 1970 with an exposé of cosmopolitan affections for radical left politics of the time. (2)

New York Magazine cover, 1970, with Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” essay.
Leonard Bernstein (seated at center), his wife Felicia Montealegre (left) and Don Cox (standing), Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party in the Bernsteins’ 13 room penthouse on Park Avenue in Manhattan, January 14, 1970

I won’t speak to the map’s much rarer blue blobs – I suspect these to be mostly concentrations of post-1965 Immigration Act ethnic and racial minorities and Indian reservations- but today’s metropolitan islands have persisted in the habit exemplified in Leonard Bernstein’s fête to the Black Panther Party.

Though, a vocabulary update to “radical chic” is in order.  Yesterday’s “radical chic” is today’s “cosmocialist”, a marriage of “cosmopolitan” and “left-liberal”, typically among our tech elites but also littered throughout most of our corporate and academic boardrooms (hosannas to Reihan Salam for bringing the term to my attention [3]).  The “left-liberal” side of the equation is an infatuation with imperial environmentalism, high taxes, and almost anything “anti-poverty”.  “Cosmopolitan” is a reference to suspicion about regulation (except, of course, of the enviro variety, a huge contradiction), big labor (even though the teachers’ unions are 100% socially and 80% politically aligned) , and a fondness for open borders and multicultural everything.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (left) with California AG Kamala Harris in 2015. (Reuters photo: Robert Galbraith)

Oh, let’s not forget their contempt for traditional institutions.  The Bible as the Word of God, Christianity as understood for millennia, marriage, and morality don’t stand a chance in these micro-universes.  Currently, transgenderism has pride of place.  As a matter of fact, they have conjured “equality” into behavioral license.  Any coupling and self-concept among and within humans must be granted sanction by the state.  Those who disagree face ostracization, loss of livelihood, and censorship.  Is confinement next?  Has it already started?

Now we are well on our way to ban-o-mania – the frenzy to prohibit counter-thought, and counter-things.  If only Orwell was here to see it.

It’s become next to impossible to talk about these kinds of things without mentioning California, ground zero for cosmocialist social and political tinkering.  Bans on things previously considered innocuous are becoming increasingly common in this political zoo.  Examples are many.  The state couldn’t refrain from an assault on, of all things … free plastic shopping bags.  The usual suspects crafted Prop 67 – the always fashionable environmental lobby – and the always fashionable electorate, dominated by its always fashionable coast, approved it in 2016.

Grocery shopping in the not-so-golden state instantly changed from this:

to this:

Bring your own bags: filthy, torn, too small,  not enough, or spill out cash to buy some more.  People in the zoo will adapt, no doubt.  But grocery shopping instantly became a bit more of an annoying experience.

Another example, this time from the elected “geniuses” in the state’s madhouse, called a “legislature”: marketed as an animal welfare measure, the inmates passed AB 485.  It would ban the sale of dogs, cats, and rabbits if they didn’t come from shelters.  In essence, due to the way the law is written and it’s probably effects, say “bye, bye” to the ritual of taking the daughter down to the pet store to buy a puppy.  For Patrick O’Donnel (D-Long Beach), the bill’s author, pet militants like him can’t envision themselves doing it, so ban anyone else from doing it.  Such is the auto-reflex of the ban-o-maniac.  The legislation’s fate is in the lap of Gov. Jerry Brown, another cosmocialist. (4)

Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell, D-Long Beach, and rescue dogs.

For the cosmocialist, dogs are cute; Christian fundamentalists are not.  The progressive fatwa against them has already begun.  With dim-witted sleight of hand, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (D-San Diego) sought to impose her social opinions on the entire faith community in California.  Through legislation, she tried to nullify the Supreme Court’s Hosanna-Tabor decision that buttressed a church’s religious freedom exemptions to government’s contraceptive and abortion mandates. (5)  She preposterously claimed that the Court didn’t say what it said.  For the Court, religious freedom reaches out to longstanding church functions beyond the sanctuary.  She didn’t get the message.  Fletcher’s logic is the equivalent of a child’s attempt to make a parent’s admonishment of “no” into “yes”.

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (D-San Diego)

If mangling the Court didn’t convince, she tried the gender equality angle.  For her, the moral code in the Torah, Quran, and the Old and New Testaments must be sacrificed because a woman can show the results of a sleepover with her boyfriend.  Since women get pregnant, and men can’t (there’s no place to put the fetus), scripture must now go into the garbage disposal.  The minister can preach God’s law from the pulpit – I think – but, according to her, he shouldn’t be able to do anything about single moms and womanizers staffing his school (Was she trying to improve the job prospects for Bill Clinton?).  And this passes for serious thought in the California legislature?

A reprieve for Baptists was granted by Gov. Brown’s veto of Fletcher’s abortion to logic.  Don’t think for a moment that she and her compatriots have given up.

The Old Testament, evangelicals, pet stores, and traditional institutions are verboten to the tin-eared metro-chic.  Similarly verboten is a healthy skepticism about wild-eyed climate-change apocalyptics.  They won’t shrink from criminalizing, or subjecting to civil forfeiture, anyone who happens to make the mistake of conjoining a position of authority with cynicism about enviro end-times.  Metroplex electorates appear to have affection for Maduro-type (of Venezuela fame) DA’s and AG’s to accomplish the desired end.

Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris in September 2015.

Not wishing to leave California out of the scrum, former AG Kamala Harris (now Senator) joined the AG’s of New York, Eric Schneiderman, and Virgin Islands, Claude Walker, and Massachusetts, Maura Healey, to form an Inquisition to ferret out “counter-revolutionaries” to Al Gore’s fashionable doctrine.  It’s the latest craze sweeping the blue-dot jurisdictions: spend millions of dollars to haul into court the petroleum industry for questioning the supreme leader.  (6)  Ban-o-mania encompasses the campaign to silence opinions.

For everyone else without a corporate lawyer, loss of tenure, livelihood, or excommunication awaits.  It’s a reincarnation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.  They’re making Mao proud … if the old bloody tyrant was alive today.

Public humiliation by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
Cultural Revolution poster. Smashing the old to make way for the new.

The same is true for guns.  Guns are as gauche to the chic denizens of metropolis as the climate views of anyone not in tune with the fashionable orthodoxy.  Not surprisingly, respect for the 2nd Amendment fades as fewer and fewer people among the self-described “betters” in urban America have knowledge and experience with the things.  This is their mental picture of gun owners, a product of too much late-night tv viewing (late-night comedians, SNL).

Yes, it’s a plain old prejudice, but it matches their ignorance.  They live a life without firearms and so conclude nobody needs them.  It’s easy for urban electorates to grant the state’s vast prosecutorial powers to AG’s giddy with the prospect of hanging a few gun manufacturers.  The aforementioned Maura Healey of Massachusetts set her sights on Glock.

Massachusetts AG Maura Healey with Eric Schneiderman, NY AG, 2016.

Whatever their rationale, come on, it boils down to, “We don’t own them; therefore, you can’t either”.  Really, lifestyle is their governing north star.

The corporate boardroom is as populated with hyper-sensitive ban-o-maniacs as deep blue state attorney general offices.  The tekkie industry is particularly infected with them.  “Caution” is the watchword for any true free-thinker in these occupational habitats.  Just as Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla, learned in 2014.  He was run out of his own company when it came to light that he contributed $1,000 to the California Prop 8 campaign to defend traditional marriage in 2008.  The lefty hive in Mozilla and Silicon Valley swarmed at the knowledge.

Brendan Eich

Ideological cleansing targets anyone outside the metro groupthink.  In Eich’s case, he cavorted with those who think that marriage is by nature heterosexual, and can only be homosexual if sodomy is accepted as the act of consummation.  Of course, consummation could be dispensed with, but then marriage is reduced to a state-sanctioned friendship pact with the option of wide open conjugal behavior.  The whole concept of “gay marriage” enters the grammatical territory of “non-sequitur”.  Such thinking, though, is assigned to the Klan in the blinkered imaginations of cosmocialists.

The lefty piranha weren’t satisfied with the corpse of Brendan Eich.  They will always need to feed on anyone with the temerity to express a different point of view.  James Damore fell into the infected waters at Google when he sought to explain the small presence of women in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) industries in words different from the politically correct orthodoxy. (8)

James Damore and Google

He presented the proposition that women are underrepresented due to the fact that fewer girls have inclinations for STEM, not because of some overhanging pall of misogyny. (9)   The snowflakes erupted and the impromptu inquisitors at Google went on a rampage.  Damore found himself out of a job, fired by Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Steve Jobs juxtaposed to Google’s Sundar Pichai amid the Damore firing, by LA street artist Sabo.

The “diversity” police went into action mode to defend the sanctity of the party doctrine.  Every one of the tech biggies has a Ministry of Diversity Truth.  They sprang in defense of Google.  At Google, its commissar is Danielle Brown.  Intel has commissar Barbara Whye.  Maxine Williams is installed at Facebook’s commissariat.  Helping the biggies is a nomenklatura of consultants.   Paradigm’s Joelle Emerson is an example.  All of them are the keepers of the diversity holy grail.

Paradigm Consultancy’s Joelle Emerson

The whole diversity shtick is profoundly open to question.  Yet, it is accepted as the closest thing to a self-evident truth among a class of people who have long ago rejected such truth when Thomas Jefferson in 1776 tried using the concept.  Their’s is a pseudo-science meant to perform an ideological function: widely propagate the dogma while simultaneously swamping disagreement.  They are the practitioners of the ban-o-mania of thought.

The tennis aficionado John McEnroe recently stepped in it when he declared what is obviously true.  Men and women aren’t physical equals on the tennis court.  For that, this time it was the equality police that leapt into action.

John McEnroe appearing before the press about controversial remarks.

McEnroe offhandedly stated in response to a question that Serena Williams would be ranked 700 among professional men’s tennis players. (10)  Boy did that get the ant hill all abuzz.  But for the equality commissariat, there was the disconcerting face-off in 1998 with a 203rd ranked men’s player, Karsten Braasch of Germany.  The Williams sisters were teenagerly brash and over-confident, bragging in the ATP men’s office that they could whip any tour player ranked in the top 200.

Karsten Braasch (center) and the Williams sisters at the 1998 Australian Open.

Braasch, ranked 203 at the time, overheard the remark and took up the challenge in a lark.  After playing a round of morning golf, Braasch arrived to play each sister one set.  The event attracted quite a crowd.  During changeovers, he smoked a cigarette and drank a beer.  He bested Serena 6-1 and Venus 6-2.  The Williams’ points had all the appearance of gifts. (11)

Was McEnroe all that wrong?

There is a sense of unreality in the blue-dot world.  The here-and-now must be made to conform to ideological fantasies.  In movies, women punch out burly men with skeletal and muscle structures that would collapse on contact if it didn’t occur before cameras and with the assistance of computer assisted graphics.  We might be able to accept these illusions since, after all, it’s the movies.  But the fantasies don’t dissipate after leaving the theater.  There’s legions of prosecutors, politicians, consultants, and academics devoted to making the movie unreality a real life reality.

To make it happen, massive mind control and social engineering are required.  All the tools of ban-o-mania are enlisted in the effort.  Ostracize, prosecute, legislate, fire, and propagandize (the Bolsheviks called it “reeducation”) anyone not in conformance with the cosmocialist zeitgeist.  The sad part is their push to take the campaign national.  Their appetites won’t be satiated with dominance over metropolis.

Watch out red America.  You’re one election away from being forced into living and thinking like a Greenwich Village hipster.  You may not know it, but you have a metaphorical bulls-eye planted on your forehead.

RogerG

Bibliography and sources:

  1. The 2016 precinct map was garnered from “Creating a National Precinct Map”, 4/30/2017,  https://decisiondeskhq.com/data-dives/creating-a-national-precinct-map/
  2. “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s”, Tom Wolfe, New York Magazine, June 8, 1970, http://nymag.com/news/features/46170/
  3. Reihan Salam is executive editor of National Review, contributing editor of National Affairs, advisor to the Energy Innovation Reform Project and Niskanen Institute.  “Cosmocialist” first came to my attention in his article, “Democrats and Plutocrats”, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451463/democrats-silicon-valley-rich-entrepreneurs-changing-partys-working-class-image
  4. “California pet stores may be required to only sell rescue animals if this bill passes”, Courtney Tompkins, The Los Angeles Daily News, 9/15/2017,   http://www.dailynews.com/2017/09/15/california-pet-stores-may-be-required-to-only-sell-rescue-animals-if-this-bill-passes/
  5. “Anti-discrimination measure or blow to religious freedom? California bill sparks debate on employer codes of conduct”, Melanie Mason, Los Angeles Times, 3/29/2017,   http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essential-politics-updates-an-anti-discrimination-measure-or-blow-1490826757-htmlstory.html
  6. “Left-Wing AGs Are Playing Politics with the Law”, Jim Copeland and Rafael A. Mangual, National Review Online, 9/29/2016,  http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440542/state-attorneys-general-political-abuses-power
  7. “Mozilla CEO resignation raises free-speech issues”, USA Today, 4/4/2014,  https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/04/mozilla-ceo-resignation-free-speech/7328759/
  8. “Google Episode Sends a Message: Diversity Is a Tough Sell in Silicon Valley”, Georgia Wells and Yoree Koh, WSJ, 8/10/17, https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-episode-sends-a-message-diversity-is-a-tough-sell-in-silicon-valley-1502383625; also at http://www.4-traders.com/INTEL-CORPORATION-4829/news/Google-Episode-Sends-a-Message-Diversity-Is-a-Tough-Sell-in-Silicon-Valley-24924773/.
  9. The complete text of James Damore’s offending email can be found here:  “Here’s the Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google [Updated]”, Kate Conger, Gizmodo, 8/5/2017,  http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320/amp
  10. “John McEnroe: Serena Williams world’s best female tennis player but would rank ‘like 700’ among men”, Scott Allen, The Chicago Tribune, 6/25/2017,   http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/breaking/ct-john-mcenroe-serena-williams-tennis-20170625-story.html
  11. The episode is recounted here: “Serena Williams once challenged men’s player at Australian Open”, Sandra Harwitt, USA Today, 1/21/2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/tennis/aus/2017/01/21/serena-williams-nicole-gibbs-australian-open/96876832/
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The Bluster of “We Need to Make Sure This Never Happens Again.”

A chant applied to the Las Vegas massacre, almost anything bad involving guns, almost anything bad involving kids, and almost anything that’ll agitate the news cycle for more than a day.

The mass shooting in Las Vegas around 10 pm, Sunday, 10/1/2017.

Lately, we’ve developed a nervous tic nearly every time an incident of mayhem invades our tranquility.  It won’t be long before a grandstanding politico trots out in front of a mike and cameras to announce, “We have to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”  The fact is, it will.  So what is up with the nonsense declaration?  It’s the intro to the politicization of tragedy.

It begins with the unquestioning belief in the magical healing powers of legislation.  Someone demands that we “do something”, and “do something” means “write a law”.  Encapsulate the cure in a 20,000-word statute.  What’s up with that?

Has anyone ever taken a look at the “geniuses” who’ll craft the cure?  Sorry, high-wattage thinkers don’t heavily populate the upper rungs of those who play the game of politics (i.e. acquiring power, or getting elected), especially on the lefty side of the political spectrum.  They may know the art of gaining power, but once in power we quickly learn that they really don’t know or understand much.  They’re fumbling, and sometimes dangerous, empty suits.

Nancy Pelosi, (D) San Francisco, Democrat majority leader.

They normally trot out their ready-made, off-the-shelf nostrums.  They don’t even have to be relevant to the issue at hand.  Just plug ’em in anyway.  In a recent CNN townhall after the Las Vegas shooting, Nancy Pelosi (D, San Francisco) quickly pivoted to her current favorite: background checks.  The question directed to her was about actions to prevent the Las Vegas shooting.  Her answer was nonsense.  Do we have background checks?  Yes.  Would of any of their proposed changes to them make any difference?  No.

Simply put, she didn’t answer the question.  Besides, her response wasn’t pertinent.  The killer, Stephen Paddock, passed background checks as he went about building his arsenal.  It’s not that he didn’t go through any.  The guy simply flew way under everyone’s radar, including his family’s.

On those “background checks”, all relevant records to a gun purchase are digitized with instant access for any government agent sitting time zones away from the site of the purchase.  It doesn’t take long to do a check.  States don’t vary that much in doing the look-see, only in the amount of arbitrary inconvenience for the buyer with their waiting periods.  Nothing much is accomplished with waiting periods; much is accomplished in irritation.

Still, even with the Democrats’ background enhancements, Paddock would fly under those too.

And with Pelosi and her gang’s proposals, she’d effectively put “dead” to due process in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments for gun buyers.  The Constitution is quite inconvenient for those in a hurry to win the political brass ring.

So, what’s she up to?  She’s up to politics, gaining the majority in Congress, and impatient in imposing blue America’s values on the rest of the country.

I could bore you to tears with examples of politicos and their love affair with silliness.  Here’s congresswomen Carolyn McCarthy, (D) New York, back in 2013 unable to describe a gun item (barrel shroud) mentioned in a bill that she supported.

You think that she’s the only one?  Here’s 2 New York state politicos intent on their own bans.

Incendiary bullets are “heat-seeking”?

The confusion among the left about semi-automatic and automatic guns is rampant.  The mixup extends to the progressive punditry.  CNN’s Don Lemmon steps into it.

The ignorance is pervasive.  The bulk of these people don’t own guns, haven’t really lived among them, and have SNL skits running around in their heads about rednecks and working stiffs.  Their’s is the world of gentrified neighborhoods, bistros, smartphone-saturation, and the college bubble.  Yet, they want to legislate for the rest of us.  When they get their hands on the levers of power, the result is absurdity.

From where do we get get this tic to legislate our way to nirvana?  It’s built into the progressive worldview.  Progressives are intoxicated with the idea of using state power to manufacture a new world, and new human beings to go in it.  That means legislation, laws, rules, decrees, and other such commands.  Out goes anything not familiar to them in their cloistered existence.

Maybe something can be done about “bump stocks”, but don’t expect it to change the dynamic of fevered imaginations intent on killing large numbers of people.  If the desire is there, a means will be found.  In other words, it will happen again.

Evil resides in the souls of some men and women … but, first, you have to recognize the existence of evil.  Now that’s something to scoff for your average run-of-the-mill urban sophisticate.

RogerG

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A Cause Without A Cause: The NFL Player Protests, Black Lives Matter, the “Blue” Cocoon, Trump’s SOB’s, and the 1947 Movie “Boomerang!”

Most Oakland Raiders sit during the national anthem on Sunday Night Football, 9/24/17.

The NFL player protests, Black Lives Matter, the “blue” cocoon, Trump’s SOB’s, and the 1947 movie “Boomerang!” came to mind during the sit-ins by half-million-dollar-per-year protesters Sunday,  September 24.

The first three on the list are animated by a faulty postulate: American law enforcement is riddled with racism.  It’s the “cause without a cause”.  In this case, “cause” being a premise without some relation to facts .

The slander has its biggest and loudest following in urban and academic centers, the so-called “blue” precincts.  It has spread beyond the street and campus into professional sports – who, by the way, are centered in “blue” America – and earning the ire of a huge part of the fan base in “red” America and President Trump.

As for the movie, “Boomerang!”, it reminded us that “justice” is the ultimate goal of all legal proceedings, and hopefully resistant to mobs inflamed by falsehoods (more about the movie later).  Real justice is an inconvenience for those in a hurry to hang a few cops.  Now, professional athletes are getting sucked into the sordid enterprise.

So, in the end, we have the NFL tarnishing its reputation, players heightening their profiles as political firebrands, fans registering disgust, and all because of a demonstrably false proposition.  Don’t expect justice here … but reckon a humbling decline in the once-vaunted NFL.

It’s a lesson for all high profile sports: Don’t insult your fans!

A good chunk of sports fans might have a very different take on issues like policing the streets of many of our wannabe Kabuls and Baghdads.  Your average fan sitting in font of his big screen TV on Sunday afternoon probably doesn’t see the world like your typical Sociology professor or average campus SJW (social justice warrior), and for good reason.  The alleged racism in police departments, so readily accepted in faculty lounges and by impressionable  college sophomores, isn’t supported by the facts.

First, crime, like wildfires, isn’t evenly distributed.  Local circumstances produce divergent results, without ever getting into the racism of the “man”.  Certain areas of the country have a fecundity for crime as areas of thick forests produce a fire season.  An infamous example is LA’s “death valley”, South Vermont Ave.  Read the captions. (1)

Since 2007, 61 people have been killed on a two-mile stretch on or near South Vermont Avenue between Manchester Avenue and Imperial Highway. The area is the border of the Westmont and Vermont Vista neighborhoods.
L. Christopher Caver Jr., 38, shows a scar on his stomach, a result of a 2012 shooting when he was hit seven times inside his car. He has lived in the Westmont area of South L.A. for more than a decade.
People hang out in front of a pawn shop along Vermont Avenue and 83rd Street in the Westmont area of South Los Angeles.
A woman and child walk down an alley between 93rd and 94th streets in Westmont. The 1.8-square-mile area has seen 100 homicides in the last seven years.
A German shepherd stands sentry in the front yard of a home in the Westmont area of South Los Angeles.
“I’m just fed up in this area,” said Aaron Eden, 38, about crime in his neighborhood. His house has been broken into twice, the Westmont resident said.

Some self-styled crusaders of justice cite deceiving statistics to hold up the edifice of rampant racism.  Weaknesses in their assertions abound.  For instance, their comparisons of crime to population over a broad space hide a serious problem in certain sectors.  The overall crime number in a specific locale may register no concern since the good numbers coming out of some neighborhoods depress the frightening stats emerging from others.  Examine the maps for New York City, Chicago, and Milwaukee. (2)

Source: City of New York crime map
Source: Chicago Tribune
Source: Milwaukee Police Department

The theme throughout is the same: the highest crime rates occur in the locations with the highest concentrations of poverty.  These areas correspond with the greatest assemblage of ethnic and racial minorities.  The higher the incidence of crime, the greater the opportunity for run-ins with police for people of a particular hue who predominate in these places.  We have a crime problem within certain sectors of our population, not a police problem.

Such subtleties might not course through the mind of an athlete whose life has been spent focusing on other things.  The field is  wide open for pop-culture grandees or media-savvy racialists to set the tone for the ill-informed.

Some may sound reasonable like Killer Mike above, but they still repeat a now well-worn mantra of a generalized campaign of racial injustice.  Rapper T.I. pontificates, “Police brutality is really just a tentacle to a larger problem — the racial divide and the systemic racism that goes on from the highest of highs to the lowest of the low of society in America.” (3)

And of course we have Al Sharpton, the race hustlers’ version of the legal profession’s ambulance chaser.  Here he is whipping up the congregation after the 2014 Ferguson shooting.

For many quick to have their biases confirmed, facts on the ground can be inconvenient.  As it turned out, the deceased in Ferguson was no saint (see below).  So much so, Pres. Obama’s Justice department, always on the hunt for the ghost of Bull Connor or Jim Crow, couldn’t gin up a case against the officer.  No facts, no case – to borrow a much abused cadence.

After Ferguson, a movement was born: Black Lives Matter.  Out of the garbage can, also, is resurrected the old conjoining of “cops” and “pigs”.

Like a teen girl watching the Emmies, the fashion is picked up by the impressionable tuning in.  Thus is born Colin Kaepernick  as self-anointed conscience of the NFL.

Kaepernick’s infamous socks as worn during an August 2016 practice.
Former Green Beret Nate Boyer, second from right, stands next to a kneeling Colin Kaepernick during the national anthem on Thursday Night Football, 2016. (Chris Carlson / Associated Press)

The case of Colin Kaepernick is interestingly instructive.  Having shown no prior desire to publicly pontificate as a SJW, all of a sudden he’s kneeling during the national anthem and brandishing cops-as-pigs socks.  More than a few have speculated on the influence of his fiance/girlfriend, Nessa Diab.

Nessa Diab and Colin Kaepernick on the way to the gym, September 2017.

Most recently, she spouted off on Ray Lewis’s suggestion that Kaepernick keep his opinions private as Kaepernick was being considered by owner Steve Bisciotti for a position on the roster.  She implicitly referred to Lewis as a “house negro” to Bisciotti’s slaveholder on Twitter.

Nessa’s tweet: Bisciotti/Lewis above, deCaprio/Samuel J. Jackson from “Django Unchained” below.

She’s quite the pollinating bee fluttering from the blue-dot worlds of celebrity, MTV, San Francisco, and a DJ gig at the HOT97 in New York City.  She seems to have a thing for 49er players after dating Aldon Smith.  She’s also fully immersed in the lingo of the left.  Here she is commenting on the shooting death of Alton Sterling:

Imagine the victim #AltonSterling as your brother, father, son, cousin, friend, co-worker. You didn’t have to know him personally to feel this horrific pain. This is a MAN who wrongfully got murdered!!! Don’t let this “system” now criminalize Alton Sterling to help justify these coward actions by the police. They will try and they will also try to discredit the store owner’s account of what occurred because he’s Muslim and we know Islamaphobia is at an all time high in this country.

This kind of stuff isn’t hard to find in her social media posts.

Celebrities like Nessa Diab arrive at the 2015 MTV Movie Awards held at Nokia Theatre LA Live in Los Angeles, California on April 12, 2015.

As a Muslim and familiar with Saudi Arabia, she should be aware that her chic glam would attract the attention of the Mutaween, the kingdom’s religious police, if she traipsed around in Riyadh’s nightlife in her figure-hugging and revealing sartorial beauty.

Women in Burkas, in Mina near the Saudi holy city of Mecca, Saudi Arabia in 2011.

Bringing a Bible into the country is a crime; women can’t get driver’s licenses; and the public dress code for women centers on the burka.  It’d certainly be hard for her to display her natural endowments robed like above.

You’d think that she would have greater appreciation for life in the good ol’ USA.  Instead, she treats a multiracial country of 330 million experiencing the rare  police shooting as if it is a hotbed of racial bigotry.  She ignores the nature of life in dar al-islam (lit. territory of Islam).  The lack of any sense of proportion is a hallmark of the ignorant.  But nonetheless, she appears to be an influence on poor Colin.

A little digging by Colin and Nessa would undermine their jihad.  Blacks are not shot or otherwise accosted by police in a broadly unjust fashion.  If anything, they are disproportionately represented in the incidence of crime, particularly of the violent kind.  And their victims are disproportionately black. (6)  Yes, black lives matter, and, for their lives to matter, police need to seize their assailants … who happen to be disproportionately black.  No wonder the high number of police confrontations with blacks, overwhelmingy male.

Yet, in the recent high-profile police shooting cases, few have resulted in convictions of the officers.  Some hustlers use the fact as conclusive evidence of something airily called “systemic” racism.  In other words, these pantomimes of racial justice want convictions no matter what.  If so, why bother with a trial if media buzz is enough to condemn?

Prosecutor Henry Harvey (r), played by Dana Andrews, and murder suspect John Waldron (Arthur Kennedy) in “Boomerang!” from 1947.

The matter was brought into clearer focus while watching the movie “Boomerang!”.  It’s the story of a prosecutor who refused to pursue charges against a murder suspect after being subjected to intense political pressure.  The DA couldn’t remove from his mind the legal profession’s standards of ethical conduct for prosecutors.  Put succinctly, “The duty of the prosecutor is to seek justice, not merely to convict.” (7)  Is it asking too much to demand a similar sobriety in the celebrity world and the media-incited mobs?

Pres. Trump at campaign rally for Sen. Luther Strange, September 22, 2017.

Well, into the frenzy jumps Pres. Trump.  Echoing the thoughts of many, speaking at a campaign rally for US Sen. Luther Strange, he said, “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when someone disrespects our flag to say, `Get that son of a bitch off the field right now! Out. He’s fired! He’s fired!“ (8)  Leaving aside the language, the sentiment has currency among many – if not most – veterans and a sizable swath of the country’s population, mostly in “red” America.  Undoubtedly, the comment angered some of the marginally inclined in the locker room.  So, we experienced the NFL’s own “black Sunday” on September 24.  Here’s a sample.

Buffalo Bills take a knee, September 24.
Jacksonville Jaguars take a knee, September 24.
Indianapolis Cols take a knee, September 24.
Some of the Chargers resort to the old black power salute.
Several New England Patriots players kneel during the national anthem before an NFL football game against the Houston Texans, Sunday, Sept. 24, 2017, in Foxborough, Mass. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)

It happened throughout the NFL on that day.  And it drew criticism from fans.

In a debate on MSNBC between Brian Mitchell and Hugh Hewitt, Hewitt raises the scepter of the NFL losing touch with its fan base.  As for Mitchell, he accepts the received wisdom of a pervasive racism.  Take a look.

Some like Brian Mitchell  see the players’ actions with all the integrity of The Grand Remonstrance of 1641.  In 1641, the English Parliament presented to King Charles I a list of grievances, The Grand Remonstrance, which His Highness quickly dismissed.  The result was over 40 years of civil war and social disruption.  The players’ protest could do the same by inaugurating a civil war between the league and its fans.  I don’t think the league will come out of it any better than Charles I.  He lost his head.

The execution of Charles I, 1649.

The full effect of the protests will take awhile to gestate.  The players have certainly displayed their right to free speech, and some fans are exhibiting the same right.  Free speech for everyone, including the right to express that speech in the abandonment of the NFL.  Many prescient owners and players can envision dollars whisking out of their wallets like so many autumn leaves on a windy day.

Could the NFL players’ racialized outcry have the same fallout as the 1994 baseball players’ strike on Major League Baseball?  A person could argue that Major League Baseball hasn’t fully recovered from it.  What waits in the offing for the NFL?  Much depends on the NFL’s response to players using the national anthem as a forum to present their social and political discontents.

Entire Cowboys’ team kneels before the national anthem on Monday Night Football, September 25.

Sensing the trouble, Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys knelt with the players and then everybody stood for the anthem.  A compromise, but why kneel?  What’s the reason for the kneeling?  Is it to show solidarity for a broad charge of racism for which there is no valid proof?  What’s the point?

The whole thing rests on a premise without much of a foundation.  Indeed, it’s cause without a cause.  To be clearer, it’s a political movement without much justification.  Thus, any compromise gives credence to a sham.

RogerG

Bibliography and sources:

  1. “South Vermont Avenue: L.A. County’s ‘death alley’”, Nicole Santa Cruz and Ken Schwencke, Los Angeles Times, 1/19/2014, photos by Genaro Molina, http://homicide.latimes.com/post/westmont-homicides/
  2.  “The Debate Over Crime Rates is Ignoring the Metric That Matters Most: ‘Murder Inequality’: Focusing on the neighborhood level is the best way to understand violence in America. Here are six charts that prove it.”, Daniel Kay Hertz, The Trace,  7/25/2016,  https://www.thetrace.org/2016/07/crime-rates-american-cities-murder-inequality/
  3. “T.I. speaks out on police brutality”, Deena Zuru, CNN, 8/14/2017,   http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/24/politics/ti-us-or-else-movie-police-brutality/index.html
  4. “CLASSY: Kaepernick’s Girlfriend Compares NFL Owners to Slaveholders, Ray Lewis to ‘House Negroes'”, Eliot Hamilton, The DailyWire, 8/3/2017,  http://www.dailywire.com/news/19319/classy-kaepernicks-girlfriend-compares-nfl-owners-elliott-hamilton#
  5. “COLIN KAEPERNICK: EXPLAINS PIG COP SOCKS
    … Shot At ‘Rogue Cops'”, TMZ Sports, 9/1/2016,  http://www.tmz.com/2016/09/01/colin-kaepernick-cop-pig-socks-rogue-cops/
  6. “The lies of Black Lives Matter”, Kelly Riddell, The Washington Times, 7/18/2016,  http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/18/lies-black-lives-matter/
  7. “Criminal Justice Standards; Prosecution Function, Part I, General Standards”,  https://www.americanbar.org/publications/criminal_justice_section_archive/crimjust_standards_pfunc_blk.html#1.2
  8. “Trump Calls on NFL Owners to Fire Players Who Kneel During Anthem”, Daniel Politi, Slate, 9/23/2017,   http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/09/23/trump_calls_on_nfl_owners_to_fire_players_who_kneel_during_anthem.html