“Leftists in this country claim that their violence is speech and our speech is violence.” – Daniel Horowitz
George Rebane
The Democrats and their corporatist allies are prepared to remove the First Amendment, launch a surge of prosecutions for what we have always considered free speech, and then have their lamestream assert that the First Amendment is still in force while jailing those who claim otherwise. This will be but the first step on the path to abrogate our Constitution in its entirety. When this comes to pass, anyone and everyone who resists this phase of fundamentally transforming America will be labeled a seditious insurrectionist, and treated accordingly.
It appears now that the federal government deems everyone suspect of insurrection who attended the Washington pro-Trump rally. Those who actually entered the Capitol, the people’s house, stand accused of insurrection. The vandals who led the mob into the building while destroying and stealing property, and violating private spaces, deserve to be treated like the criminals they are. However, there is no evidence that those few hundred(?) who also walked through then opened doors had any intention other than telling Congress that they were opposed to the ongoing certification of electoral votes which they firmly believed were tallied from an election abundantly laced with irregularities and fraud, the evidence of which was summarily rejected by the courts without examining the underlying substance.
Now the nationwide manhunt is on for all those who walked in and milled around the Capitol on 6 January 2021. True to Orwellian, Stalinist, and Stasi standards, fellow citizens are encouraged to report to the FBI anyone they know or think was there (DC, Mall, Capitol?) on that fateful day. History shows what kind of countries such massive snitch programs have created. And there is only one political party that wants to create a government with encompassing tentacles to effectively pursue such programs of persecution. (more here)
Federal elections integrity is promoted by congressional Republicans with their introduction of their Save Democracy Act that “aims to close loopholes that prevent secure and fair general elections by strengthening voter registration verifications, narrowing rules for when and how mail-in ballots can be accepted, and mandating observers from each party is allowed to be present during polling and vote counting.” Pew Research reports that only 5% of Trump voters and 64% of Biden voters thought the election was properly administered. That’s a heap of folks who had less favorable opinions of how everything went down last November, and more than enough reason to do something positive to restore faith in the integrity of our elections. Now let's see how far the Democrats permit this and other such measures to proceed. (more here)
C19 vaccines continue to sit on shelves as most states have trouble getting the doses distributed to their inoculation sites. Given the months of advance warning everyone received about when the vaccines would be available, most states sat on their butts instead of putting in place the needed procedures to get their residents vaccinated in a timely manner. As we continue to note here, if there is any kind of problem in the land, look first to government as the source or cause of it, and you won’t have to look much further. It turns out again that Texas leads and California lags – the correlation of performance with which party is in charge is striking, wonder why? “Texas, with a population of some 29 million, has distributed just over 2 million doses and administered just under 1.2 million, as of Jan. 15, the CDC said. California, with 39.5 million people, has distributed over 3.5 million doses and administered just under 1.1 million.” (more here)
[19jan21 update] Since it became clear that Trump’s appeals failed to overturn Biden win, the share of Americans who think the country is headed in the wrong direction jumped markedly. Today, according to the recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll (here), two out of three Americans agree with that assessment. In December 49% answered ‘wrong track’, which assessment increased to 65% this month, with 84% Republicans and 52% Democrats concurring. Of course, both sides feel that their right tracks head in the opposite directions. Yet another measure of the size of the gulf that separates us.
‘Will Covid-19 shake up capitalism?’ is a popular question today that is covered by James Macintosh of the London WSJ (here). He cites the current move leftward toward socialism that is making many people rethink capitalism, especially during the mish-mash of dubious responses that governments have initiated to fight the pandemic. As examples of crises that have resulted in major changes to political economics, Macintosh points to the Great Depression and FDR’s misguided responses that still echo through the decades. Then there was WW2’s aftermath which created the British welfare state that almost bankrupted the country. The runaway inflation of the 1970s led to some beneficial changes with the advent of Thatcherism and Reaganomics. Now there returns the great itch to undo Trump’s gains and once more pauper the country. The argument by the leftists is that ‘look, under Trump’s capitalism 17 million people lost their jobs, and 10 million are still out of work’. None of them are smart enough to figure out that it was the governments’ lockdown responses to C19 that caused the hit to the economy, not capitalism (see below).
‘It Took a Strong America to Survive 2020’ (here) is Walter Russell Mead’s more sober and accurate look at the political and economic roads we traveled last year. Contrary to the Left’s histrionics, our political system has NOT been threatened and our economy survived the pandemic remarkably well, and is now recovering at a rapid rate. However, this is not the narrative that is now being fashioned into the next Big Lie by the lamestream media which will paint Biden as the nation’s savior who arrived just in the nick o’ time. If you thought the media had reached its low point during the last four years, you ain’t seen nothing yet – seatbelts please.
[20jan21 update]
Scattershots – 27dec20 (updated 30dec20)
Suspension of judgment is always the part of wisdom in a listener, and the remission of faith to authority the part of wisdom in a speaker. Gracian #154
George Rebane
Identity politics is a totalitarian enterprise, as called out by Paul Gigot, op-ed editor-in-chief of the WSJ. About Gigot's defense of Joseph Epstein’s commentary on Jill Biden’s doctorate – ‘The Biden Team Strikes Back’ – Roger Kimball of The New Criterion writes,
The governing strategy of identity politics is not to encourage free expression but to shutter it. In essence, it is a totalitarian enterprise, deploying the shibboleths of race, gender, and radical egalitarianism to enforce a stultifying conformity. It is heartening to see Gigot affirming that, at one of our nation’s most important newspapers, “these pages aren’t going to stop publishing provocative essays merely because they offend the new administration or the political censors in the media and academe.” If, as we suspect, the preview we just witnessed was a sort of sighting shot, it suggests that Gigot is going to have his hands full dealing with ever more intolerant efforts to “turn the page” and enforce ghastly new modes of “healing” and “unity.” (and more here)
[29dec20 update] Speaking of ‘doctors in the house’ (here), we are now not surprised to hear that the pandemic is causing most leading universities to ‘pause’ their 2021 admissions to PhD programs. “More than 140 humanities and social sciences programs at top schools have suspended admitting students for fall 2021.” And also we’re not surprised to hear that STEM PhD programs are not affected by these cutbacks. During disasters, society in the large acts pretty much as humans do in the small when it comes to deciding who gets to stay in the lifeboat – utility rules. (more here)
Trust government ‘science’ when spouted by agenda-driven politicians? The short answer is ‘No’, the long answer is NFW! One of our astute readers draws our attention to “Joe Biden's decision to hold over Dr. Anthony Fauci in his administration as his chief medical advisor as a symbol of his commitment to ‘trust science’ is coming under new scrutiny following Fauci's recent admission that he altered public scientific estimates based on opinion polls.” (more here) The most vulnerable double dummies are those who believe science speaks with one infallible voice. We witness their blather nightly on the lamestream. And the Democrats (including their local lackies) still claim that theirs is the ‘party of science’. Please note the above entry on PhDs when recalling their braggadocio about all the Left’s college graduates.
Biden’s education programs promise to be on steroids in their announced path to destroy the last vestiges of the nation’s public education. From here on all curricula in union-dominated government schools will be focused through the lens of critical race theory. It is now in the open that progressives have no desire to produce students with market-valued skill sets and the ability to think critically, The overt K-12 objective from here on is to produce a generation of dumb and woke kids, indoctrinated to believe that meritocracy, personal responsibility, diligence, achievement, industry, intelligence, … are all characteristic traits of white supremacists and racists, and therefore to be eschewed in the coming socially just world of newly-minted, anti-capitalist socialism.
Anyone notice how silent the EU has been about China’s global policy of stealing commercially and militarily critical IP from any and all? The most plausible answer to that silence has been that EU countries neither develop nor protect much homegrown IP, but license it from IP producers like the US. Countries like Germany and the Netherlands incorporate licensed IP into their higher-quality manufactured products, and have been more than willing to meet aggressive thieves like China in the marketplace. In the past they haven’t cared much about China and others stealing IP as long as they can market their stuff to the pilferers. Now things are changing as China’s ability to manufacture quality products grows along with its domestic consumption for same. The EU is coming around to America’s assessment of China (thank you President Trump), and they are becoming wary of China’s global commercial and political ambitions being carried out on a very tilted playing field. (more here)
[30dec20 update] ‘California may be losing its business mojo’ was the 29dec20 Union’s lead editorial. In there Dan Walters of CalMatters presents a thoughtful summary of what has happened to our formerly golden state. The exodus is now at such a fever pitch that only the most dedicated progressives in epiphany-free Sacramento are still blind to it (of course all their local lackeys have no hope of comprehending this ongoing disaster). Nevertheless, they outnumber all the more saner ones. In recent weeks tech giants like Tesla, HP, and Oracle have headed for greener pastures (Texas of course). Why stay in a state encrusting with regulation- and tax-numbing socialism when your post-Covid workers can work from anywhere? There’s less benefit in Silicon Valley than meets the eye.
71% of America’s military age youth cannot qualify to serve. That’s the latest from the DoD. The reasons for this horrible statistic is that since the military became an all-volunteer enterprise, their standards were raised. The major disqualifiers for our young people are intellect, drugs, and bad health. Modern warfare uses a lot of high-tech combat systems that require more than a two-digit IQ to operate, with druggies and overweight people not measuring up.
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