Graffiti on Trees, High-Speed Rail to Nowhere — the Wages of Liberalism
Last week, while reading about an insolvent California’s insistence on going ahead with the first leg of a proposed high-speed rail line (total cost of the system: an estimated $100-$300 billion), I heard the following story on a local ABC news affiliate about a nearby low-Sierra lake:
Vandalism forces closure of Pine Flat campground
Monday, August 20, 2012
Amanda Perez
FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) — Acts of vandalism have forced officials to shut down a popular campsite in Fresno County. The Pine Flat Campground located below the Pine Flat Dam on Trimmer Springs Road is closed indefinitely. Nearby Winton Park remains open but things aren’t looking much better there. Vandals tagged rocks, barbeques, and even trees with graffiti. “It was horrible. It didn’t look like nature. It looked like a nightmare,” said visitor Jose Zarate of Fresno.
Unfair to the Vandals
You can read the rest of story at KFSN’s Website; additional news items detailed similar stories at other local lakes — a veritable Vandal assault on the vestiges of civilization (actually, that allusion is unfair to the Vandals): copper wire stripped out of power conduits, toilets and sinks ripped out of bathrooms, and, yes, more gang graffiti painted on trees.
I think the latter horror is what earned the local media attention. Destroying public property, assaulting other campers, closing down recreation sites are one thing — but graffiti on trees? That’s an insult that no liberal can stomach. In the grand struggle of environmental correctness versus multiculturalism, green wins every time. (Why do a few liberals oppose illegal immigration? Because of worries about environmental damage along the border.)
The Tipping Point
I have a hard time timing car trips to Los Angeles because a large section of the 99 state “freeway,” north of Kingsburg, is still (after a half-century) two lanes, potholed, and crammed with traffic. But the rub is that the traffic is of a strange sort, one characterized by an inordinate number of drivers with loose brush, tools, appliances — almost anything — not secured in flat-bed pickups or piled too high in pickups and trailers. The debris commonly flies out on the road, causes an accident, and shuts down California’s main interior north-south lateral for several hours.
What is the common theme here?
When the liberal mind cannot cope with the concrete ramifications of its own ideology, it seeks a sort of tokenism. Unable to ensure that trees are not defaced? An ancient highway is not upgraded? Presto, zoom ahead to space-age high-speed rail, as if the conditions that created sprayed trees and mattresses lying among the pot-holes will not easily migrate to high-speed rail. That is, within 10 years I have no doubt that the Fresno-Corcoran (“rail to nowhere”) link will be periodically closed due to stripped copper wire conduit, mattresses thrown over the fence onto the tracks, and the general inability of the state to service the system due to the sort of daily vandalism seen at our local campgrounds.
If one third of the nation’s welfare population resides in California, and if seven million of the last ten million Californians added to the state population are now on Medicaid, and if Californians, as it is estimated, send approximately $10 billion a year in remittances to Mexico and Latin America, then something has to give. And the remedy for that something that gives is either teaching youth not to spray paint pine trees, or hiring unemployed ex-gang-bangers to pressure wash the graffiti off pine trees — or moving to a kinder, gentler Santa Cruz or Newport, feeling good on the beach, watching the sunset each evening, and cursing those evil conservatives who want to poison the 3-inch delta smelt and keep foie gras legal in California.
The Role of the Scapegoat
When society cannot fathom that 16 youths were shot and another six killed last weekend in Chicago, it seeks symbolic relief. As I followed stories of the mayhem in the inner city of Chicago, I noted periodic news about the case of Trayvon Martin and the national outrage at George Zimmerman, who in a world of liberal jurisprudence has nonetheless mostly been tried and convicted in the court of public opinion. But because the Congressional Black Caucus cannot fathom what to do about the epidemic of black-on-black murder and even Rahm Emanuel was not successful after calling in Louis Farrakhan to keep the peace (and neither wishes to make even a rough connection between the violence and Great Society paternalism, the destruction of the black family, and a generation of youths raised without fathers on state assistance), they must seek a token — or rather, in anthropological terms, a scapegoat, some symbolic target to beat when crops fail and pestilence arrives. What is the alternative — lectures about flash-mobbing and sermons about the waste of buying $300 Lebron James signature sneakers?
The angrier we can become about Trayvon Martin, and the more our furor at George Zimmerman, the more we can square the circle of dealing with the Chicago killings (one murder occurred this week just three blocks from the Obama Chicago mansion. [I doubt Barack Obama will be returning to his home after his tenure ends in Washington]). If California has no clue what to do about its schools being reduced to near last in math and English test scores, its epidemic of uninsured drivers, its nearly 40% drop-out rates of Hispanic males in Central Valley high schools, and its 50%-plus rates of remediation of incoming freshmen in the state college system, then its needs a token solution. So it deals with the very real long-term consequences of illegal immigration by pushing for the Dream Act.
But tokenism is not the only reaction when postmodern liberal dreaming ends up in concrete premodern catastrophe. Escapism is a related response. I don’t think Dream Act supporters in Santa Monica or Atherton wish to live in, or visit much, Parlier or Orange Cove. When CSU presidents retire from Central Valley campuses, they usually frown and head to Palm Springs or Monterey. Doctrinaire liberalism is predicated on the notion of escapism, that one has the means and know-how to ensure that children do not go to the schools whose curriculum and policies follow your own utopian thinking. Or that you make sure your “wind and solar and millions of green jobs” windmills are obstructing someone else’s view. Or that the first high-speed rail link connects Fresno with Charles Manson’s prison in Corcoran rather than cutting a wide swath through Bay Area suburbs.
Medieval exemption is yet another response to liberalism. As I wrote in 2008, I watched with curiosity as tony Palo Alto neighborhoods sprouted bigger Obama campaign signs on their lawns, even though the owners were by definition one-percenter segregationists (East Palo Alto and Redwood City are a mile — and a solar system — away). The mansions of an Al Gore, John Kerry, and John Edwards are expiated by their owners’ always louder liberal outrage. No one really wishes to live in a world governed by the laws of contemporary liberalism. So the architects escape it and justify their flight by finding a suitable token, a convenient scapegoat, a secular priest like Obama to offer them penance for their sins of enjoying elite privilege.
When we talk of tokenism, escapism, or penance, we are still in world of symptoms, not the etiology of the malady. All can understand the very human desire to support a liberal crusader like Barack Obama among those who pay no income tax, belong to the near 50% who receive some sort of government aid, or are part of the one-sixth of the population on food stamps. Self-interest is an understandable motivation. It explains why the public employee and teacher naturally worry more about pay increases than the tax wherewithal to pay for them.
But for the more elite and influential progressive, affluence has allowed liberal orthodoxy to evolve to its theoretical limitations. There is a reason why 90% of professors — life-long tenure, summers off, guaranteed pay raises — are liberal and 70% of small-business people are conservative. The more removed one becomes from the elemental struggle to eat one more day — and never in the history of civilization have so many been so exempt from such existential worries — the more one enjoys the luxury of pondering more cosmic issues such as extending Social Security disability payments to youths suffering from attention deficit disorder or mandating gay history in state public schools or saving the smelt.
The problem, however, with modern redistributive liberalism is that it is predicated on a number of people not predicating their existences on just such modern liberal principles. When the natural gas fracker, the dairy owner, the cement contractor, and the software engineer either quit or move, then the Pine Flat campgrounds become, as they are now, the norm rather than the aberration.
A rich inheritance, a big law settlement, tenure, a movie deal, a state sinecure — these enablers of elite liberal thought are all predicated on the less-liberal productive classes creating wealth to shear. Behind every liberal philanthropist fortune is a huge capitalist score. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett can afford now to be liberal — an expensive indulgence — because in their early incarnations they were no-holds-barred capitalists who made lots of enemies conducting business without mercy and in search of pure profit. (In the 1980s and early 1990s Bill Gates’ Microsoft was cast as a Darth Vader enemy that had crushed the underdog, hip, and nearly insolvent Apple through piratical means.)
Put Sean Penn or George Clooney in a socialist Hollywood (one in fact, not in mere name), where the state ran the industry and the profits were divided evenly among actors, crews, and janitors (who is to say that Clooney “built” a film any more than the guy who swept the set after he got in his Mercedes and headed home?), and soon you would have a suddenly conservative Penn or Clooney, netting about $70,000 a year before taxes and without the wherewithal to jet to Caracas or hold a fund-raiser in Geneva — and furious that they were making the same as the guy who swept the set (as in most can sweep sets, but not all can be Sean Penns).
Affluence and poverty are the twins of liberalism. The former allows one to both dream and to escape that dream. The latter provides the fodder for liberal artillery.
Capitalism is based on moving up the ladder; statism is using the force of government to pull the ladder up behind you. Of course Gates and Buffett support Democrats now — they’re looking to avoid competition from the “game-changers” now…..and are acutely sensitive to such pressure because they were once “game-changers” then.
Took me forever to realize why it’s so damned hard to get into the movie industry: No one there wants anyone coming in and having the success that they themselves had. And yeah, it’s the same with just about every billionaire in this country. They want to see to it that they’re the last billionaires, so they switch to the democrat side to help shut down the whole concept of making that much money.
Hell, just look at the pro-abortionists! They don’t think “just anyone” should be allowed into this big party called Life. They want the riff-raff stopped at the door. Obama’s position on abortion can be summed up as “Now that I’ve been born, it’s OK to slaughter everyone who tries to get in under the same circumstances that brought me here.”
Yes. I’ve have always been confused about the total lack of rationality interned in what they call the liberal brain. The reality defenses of survival do not build the synapses in their brains based on well, reality.
The abortion mantra is all consuming to the left. And in due coarse as VD points out here, it esculates to the point of no return in which there are no civilized human values left in their morals and deeds. It is to the point that young children (except their own of course) are simply the ones who got away.
I’ve posted this notation from the “Lion of the Senate” before many times that I think helps understand the sheer dysfunction of the left:
“I do not believe what I see, I see what I believe.”
Which of course is the very definition of insanity.
Either Socrates or Plato spoke about the corner stone of ethics being akin to: “If something good happens to me, I immediately want it for mankind; if something bad happens to me, I certainly hope it does NOT happen to anyone else.”
The Liberal mindset is has those tenets reversed.
Socrates and Plato were intelligent beings. Liberals are mentally retarded, selfish, narcissists, without any moral values whatsoever. Liberals do not care about other people. The have no class, and they commit anarchy, vandalism, degradation, like all that are NORMAL to them.
Fully agreed. They are very much like the RNC rules committee.
Obama is quite at ease slaughtering his own grandchild, should that grandchild be conceived by one of his daughters due to “a mistake.”
Said so himself. He loves abortion.
Assuming, as rational men do, that an individual is responsible for the normal and natural effects of his actions, I believe that what unites all Leftists is the desire to destroy existing society. The history of Leftists utopias by now is too extensive for a claim of unintended consequences to be taken seriously. Besides, why do people supposedly trying to achieve economic equality always make destroying religion their first objective? Off the top of my haed, I see no connection. But religion (along with language and ethnic homogeneity) is the foundation of every society. Much more important that the economic system. The Spanish Republicans are the most pure example. Even when Franco was marching on Madrid, they still directed critical manpower to destroying churches and religious art and to executing priests and nuns. They definitely had their priorities. Come up to the present day, the Left assigns hordes of attorneys to litigate against Christians via the ACLU.
This comment shows little understanding of the dynamics of the Spanish Civil War. Yes, there was resentment of the Catholic Church, that was mostly allied with the big landowners who were not developing their vast land holdings. And many a Spanish peasant joined the Anarchists to institute their own version of land reform. Ernest Hemingway (as of the writing of his major novel on the war) was a practicing Catholic, and he had one of the great mob scenes in contemporary literature in For Whom The Bell Tolls. I wrote about that here: http://clarespark.com/2012/08/20/ernest-hemingway-carlos-baker-and-the-spanish-civil-war/. To privilege “religion” above economics is implicitly antisemitic and anti-Protestant.
Dr. Spark,
I need help with your comment. How was the comment to which you are commenting privileging religion? In addition, how is privileging religion anti-semitic?
I’m a fan of your writing/website, but find myself somewhat mystified by your comment.
Clare Spark? A fan asked you some questions. Please answer them. I’d like to hear the answers also.
Professor Hanson, are then Overlord-Loving Liberal Dronetards an eternal mystery to which there is no answer?
My father had a saying about taxes – you can shear a sheep many times (taxes, moderate in scope and amount) but you can only skin him once. Shear too close, try to get too much wool and you cut the skin, with infections and parasites getting hold. Then you don’t get nearly so much wool, and eventually the sheep dies.
The rancher’s actually doing the sheep a favor by relieving the beast of the excess wool. In return, the rancher provides care for the sheep and a safe(r) environment. The rancher makes his living off the sheep – it’s important they be taken care of.
Government makes its living off the taxpayer. But it has little to no investment in making sure, at the end of the day, that the taxpayer’s able to sustain what’s demanded in taxes. There’s always the “It’s only 1%!” increases, which ignore the fact that enough 1% increases can add up pretty fast. And there’s SO many sheep… so what if some get shorn too close?
And then they go out binge drinking (in the case of HSR, sucking down bottles of Everclear…) with the profits, leaving the sheep to fend for themselves.
Something’s got to give.
Its simple really,the fewer people with power over you the better,,,,,If alot of people have power over you the less power they have the better!
Sounds downright Aesopian, like the Goose that laid the golden egg.
Give a man a fish and you have a job for life.
Give a man dollars from Jan-June and you have a job forever!
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
to which I add
teach a man to how to make fishing gear and he’ll employ a village
…teach him to fish and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day!
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Or as Terry Pratchett said,
Build a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for one night.
Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.
Government is interested in taxpayers much the same as fleas are interested in dogs.
The IRS {theirs for short…} takes their cut of the income stream before the first penny of profit becomes available to the proprietor. At the point of a gun, and the threat of chaining closed the doors to the business. Even if you don’t make a dime of profit, the IRS has already got theirs. I know from experience. A bad cash-flow day can lead to a business being lost and shuttered forever, with no recourse. They don’t care that they are killing the geese that lay their golden eggs, they just want what they want right now. Too bad for you.
All the things VDH describes are a result of using the schools to weaken minds to create electoral sheep who can be easily manipulated. The Regionalists who thought they could create a winning means of manipulation by joining the environmentalists looking to control development and push people out of cars and end capitalism as supposedly hard on the environment with race and ethnic activists like Van Jones. They love the idea of government power destroying class or race advantages. The result is the so-called environmental justice movement that reads like: Eliminate Capitalism, Create a Line of Plenty that is good enough for all (eerily it is about $70,000 showing VDH has been reading the Global Transition reports), dictate farmland and forests must remain undeveloped without compensation as a legitimate exercise of land use power, and crowd everyone into cities a la that planning utopia, Portland, Oregon. That’s the dream/nightmare light rail is being built for, the dystopia of the Belmont Challenge and Future Earth Alliance that Obama created starting in 2009.
I wrote about the Future Earth Alliance here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/future-earth-alliance-where-education-climate-and-economic-planning-are-all-cores/ and the Belmont Challenge in the previous post. These may sound like a bad Saturday morning set of cartoon characters but they are very real. I came across references to them in the March 2012 Planet under Pressure Conference and followed the trail and found the documents and frameworks. It dovetails perfectly into the why rail at any cost and the coalition that has been built up in CA and elsewhere in the name of Ella Baker. I reject the idea that social justice can ever be achieved by keeping people ignorant but that is precisely the game the regional accreditors have foisted on all California ed institutions, public or private, K-12 or higher ed.
We are indeed playing out an endgame scenario involving the noetic system of the West and it is mostly out of sight. It won’t be in a 2nd Term as all the elements have been put in place. The ed components go seriously live at the beginning of this school year and most people still do not know and too many Republicans think ed is the part of Obama’s political vision they believe in.
Wrong and it fits perfectly with his Green Economy vision and his industrial policy vision around sustainability and . . .
“The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their common sense.” G.K. Chesterton
“The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda – a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make ‘good’ citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.” H. L. Mencken
Which goes along with the idea that the major purpose of contemporary education is to create more Democrats. And since Democrats give more to teachers, teachers have a pragmatic stake to foster liberalism, as well as an ideological one. It’s a win-win for the teachers.
Almost every educator in America owes their livelihood in one way or another to the government. Whether it be State in the form of a paycheck, or Federal indirectly through grants and guaranteed loans. It’s not surprising that they are monolithically Democrat. People vote depending on their paychecks. Teachers are no exception.
This inherent conflict of interest makes a very strong case against public education in any democratic society. We should have only private schools that are held to account for effectivenss and good value by the “vote” of parents when they choose a particular school for their children. A means tested voucher program with no strings attached is the way to help those who truly cant afford to pay.
Yeah, these damned democratic societies are so inefficient and idiotic, but when you cut yourself off from democracy, then you are into dictators of the right or the left, which has not yielded good things. Founder John Adams was a great believer in public education, but then, what did he know?
I am not trying to defend endless expansion of salaries and pensions, but going to all private schools does not seem feasible. You would have all sorts of chaos and disorder in the “bottom” 30% of society, who really do get somewhat civilized by public education from kindergarten on, because they HAVE to go to school. It is a reasonable social contract, which is not to say that we should not take a hard look at the numbers.
Because a lot of things are screwed up (as they always are) does not mean that we blow up the while thing. But then, most people know that despite the venting going on here from VDH and most of the responders. The roads I drive on are fine, the schools are at least OK, and I have a decent HMO. Are most people here irked because they CAN’T get a guvment job?
“…public education…” That’s government education D-White. For the government, by the government and of the government.
“You would have all sorts of chaos and disorder in the “bottom” 30% of society…”
Check out inner city schools. Where are they headed? And illegal immigrant world? More of the same.
“…does not mean that we blow up the while thing. But then…”
There you go again. But.
Why not allow people to choose? The deck stacked against anything private, or are you Rip Van D-White? If it took 100+ years to arrive at this present failure, how can expect moving towards allowing more choices to happen and succeed in a D-White minute?
And you’ll never hear surf music again.
The city fathers where I live and work on the East Coast have been trying to revitalize the old downtown for a decade. It began with a beautiful new government building housing a (then) state-of-the-art public library. The newest of many additions is a gorgeous river-walk park, which is scheduled to open next weekend. At the east end of it, where the long-concealed river emerges into the sun for the first time since about 1920, in a beautifully landscaped setting, you see a gleam… from the dozens of beverage cans already at the bottom of the shallow water. The protective construction fences haven’t been down for a week. QED, Dr. Hanson.
Yonkers! …and that state of the art library? Now basically a glorified homeless shelter, providing regularly scheduled Victims of Domestic Violence classes (in multiple languages), bottles of “free drinking water” during the summer for those who somehow – in the 21st century – are presumably unable to secure themselves access to this elusive new resource…and so on…QED, VDH
You’re way ahead of me ;)
is it stamford Ct you describe?
When the financial system collapses, as it might very well in the not too distant future, we shall inherit the wind. The barbarians – - the copper strippers – - so well described by VDH, incapable of supporting themselves, are not incapable of preying on those who are. It is no comfort that the insulated, narrow minded, preening wealthy Left will be as afflicted as the rest of us. But make no doubt, freedom and liberty will not be the cause of the coming gruesome chaos; it will be the wealthy egos from Hollywood, academia, media and government.
I doubt they will. They’ll divide up the land like so many feudal lords. Then they’ll turn their mansions into fortresses and payoff their protectors by allowing them indulgences unavailable to the commoner. It is why liberalism 101 means stealing the guns from the populace, by hook or by crook.
Absolutely right.
Take a look at the language justifying state CCP reciprocity and substitute “promote” for “honor” and “social justice” for “equivalent standards”. They both fit the same fascist template for the encroaching on individual liberty.
I am a regular reader of professor Hanson’s jungle diary and, while his reports sadden me, I am grateful for his humanity, tenacity, and forthright presentation. He does us all a service. But what astonishes me about the commentary here is the belief that there is any fundamental difference between the budgets of Obama and Ryan. That the voting records of Ryan and Pelosi are substantively different on TARP, NDAA, CISPA, etc., etc.. And especially that the RNC’s respect for parliamentary procedures are substantively different from those of the DPI. While the ABO neoconvicts with be frothing at the mouth in tribal outrage at such statements, no contrary evidence is available to them.
If there is a hope of a political solution to the encroaching jungle then it must start with the realization that perpetual debt is the basis of tyranny and the destroyer of liberty. Without individual responsibility for failure, a productive society cannot be realized. From there it becomes self-evident that the only difference between one corporatist sect and another is the industry of the clients of the lawyers that prescribe them. Here is Jefferson eloquently writing on just that point
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=459
My last visit to my hometown of Merced California was in 1994. My parents escaped shortly after and I vowed never to return, at least until California cleaned up its act. I never believed then that it would 18 year later and it would have only gotten worse, but over the years I’ve come to expect it.
The vandalism of copper wire and piping from public toilets reminds me of Afghanistan. It was the first time that I had to come to the realization that you can’t nation build for a people who don’t have a civilized view of life. That’s what liberalism is, essentially, it is anti-civilization. When liberals say Republicans want to take us back to the 50s, I usually respond with something like, “as opposed to the 1550s where you want to take us. Their progressivism is so regressive that describing it as Orwellian double speak is an understatement.
The problem is that it has colored my view of humanity for the worse. I no longer believe that most people want to be free. Oh they want to free once they are in shackles, but it doesn’t take long and the messiness of freedom is too much to bear. It isn’t all people, but it is enough that it seems the Tytler attributed adage “…From abundance to complacency; From complacency to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.” seems downright prophetic at this point.
In other forums there is full on internecine warfare going between the “soc-cons” and the “fis-cons”. Both groups have more animus for each other than they do for the opponents, but I think the anger is born out of frustration. Frustration that we think we in the eleventh hour, and we are fighting for our lives over an ever dwindling amount of the electorate who may see reason in returning to smaller government, rather than relying on government dependence. With every wager payer that escapes the draconian tax system, with every illegal immigrant, with every unwed mother, for fatherless ghetto born child, we take one step closer the precipice of the takers completely outnumbering the producers.
Give me one good reason to own property in the city,leave it to the children, i dont think so,let the market rise and sell it,im fixing up mine and POOF,il be gone!
When the inevitable happens, they get FEMA. Not a penny more.
“The problem, however, with modern redistributive liberalism is that it is predicated on a number of people not predicating their existences on just such modern liberal principles.”
In other words tat I have been saying for years, Liberas need Conservatives but Conservatives don’t need Liberals.
Imagine what would happen to the Liberals if we divided the country in half and forced them to actually live with all their ideas. A country run on their ideology with no conservatives to stop them would rapidly descend into Nrth Korea like tyranny.
Or, to put it more simply – feudalism. Al Gore is the perfect example.
On a more positive note, The Copper Strippers is a great name for an anarcho-collectivist metal band.
The disaster Prof. Hanson describes in CA can be rectified, simply by making the welfare recipients work, and enforcing the law (even petty laws). NYC has had Republican (if liberal/independent) mayors for 20 years now. In 1990 the population of NYC was 6.75 million, of which 1.2 million were on welfare. Today the population of NYC is 8.25 million, of which 350,000 are on welfare. All welfare recipients must work, and federal rules are strictly enforced. The police follow the “broken windows” theory of law enforcement: enforce the little laws, and people will be inhibited from breaking any laws. NYC has the lowest murder rate, relative to population, of any major city. Friday’s shooting at the Empire State Building illustrated that one nut can kill, but that NYPD response is prompt and overwhelming. In the 1970s and 1980s addicts stole copper wire (one actually put his stepladder over the commuter train tracks to get at some wire, and was promptly decapitated!) Today addicts and the “Homeless” are put into supervised housing, bothered incessantly by social workers, and subjected to mandatory drug treatment. It’s enough to make the nutcase homeless want to move to DC or LA. True, in NYC you have to ask for salt at a restaurant, the gun laws are draconian, and the taxes are horrendous. But commuter rail trains through the South Bronx now pick up commuters there, whereas in the 1980s only welfare recipients (who dared not go out for fear of being shot) lived there. Welfare reform and “broken windows” works!
“that NYPD response is prompt and overwhelming”
And directly responsible for almost all of the casualties. What is the cost of your safety? I seriously doubt that the shooting victims of the militarized NYPD view it as trivially incidental.
The vandalism at the Pine Flat Campground is what happens when a society becomes so enervated it is either unwilling or unable to defend itself. When these things happen in Singapore, for example, the punishments are harsh enough to make the infractions quite rare. I bet that the American kid that did some spray painting there a few years back and was canned for it did not repeat the same behavior, in Singapore at any rate.
When a bad decisions has no direct negative consequences to the choosers there will inevitably be a lot more bad decisions.
From the beginning Obama has had problems with working class white voters. The left has always attributed this to racism. Having begun my life among such voters in the urban North and now living among them in Appalachia I have a different take. These voters are often only one or two poor decisions away from falling off the middle class ladder. The personnel stakes are such that these people tend to be far more attuned to phonies and out right con men than the media and academic elites. Al Gore also had big problems with many of these voters.
In order to live in this cesspool of hypocrisy, we must clearly define the terms of the crumbling condition.
1)There is nothing…NOTHING…”liberal” about small c communism. Being “liberal” and being a small c communist (or one of their mindless lemming followers) are not now and never have been, remotely similar. Never the twain shall meet.
2)This is extremely important, not a distinction without a difference. If we keep assigning “liberal” motives and motivations to small c communist behavior, we will keep missing the fundamental undercurrent of all that they do…while simultaneously elevating their stature. A “do-gooder” vs. a traitor. It’s laziness and dangerous and there are no more excuses for continuing to allow either.
3)What VDH describes is a total breakdown of the societal mores, a tearing apart of the fabric of societal rules, an infiltration, and an overloading of the system in order to collapse it. That is NOT “liberal”. It is leftist, it is small c communist.
4)When you invert a system in order to collapse it, you need several things.
a)an Inversion Narrative…you must not only hide your intent, you must blame your likely opposition and paint THEM as the evildoers.
b)a complicit (not just compliant)media apparatus. That is, you cannot EVER be held accountable for any of your actions. The RAGE that Fox News, Rush, and other opposing voices generates, comes not from “liberal vs. conservative” debate, it arises from the flaming embers of hatred of being held accountable.
c)When the information stream is strangled off and truth is buried beneath distortion, propaganda and lies…small c communism can hide as “liberalism” and “do-gooderism”. Traitorism can hide in plain sight.
d)Lack of accountability is mother’s milk to small c communists. A conspiratorial media is the engine grease for the overthrow. Throwing open our society to the invasion of border crashers is a force accelerator to overloading the system. Putting as many people as possible on the public dole, taking away incentive to contribute, allowing wholesale destruction of public and private property, …we are in the midst of a “tear-down-the-system” coup.
e) Blowing apart the financial structure of entire cities, entire states, and now…finally…the federal government…is a feature, not a bug in the overthrow. But, if you can’t wrap your mind around the fact that this isn’t your daddy’s “liberal” Democratic Party…if you can’t discern the difference between Mickey Kaus and Saul Alinsky, between JFK (who would be a “hawk” by today’s standards)and Cloward-Piven…then we have lost before we have begun.
f)The other essential element is indoctrination. Conspiratorial academicians. “We will get you through your youth”. Navel-gazers create society razers. Ponderers appeal to wanderers.
g)Creating a permanent underclass is a de facto imperative. Hold black society down, and if Latino society starts to climb the ladder…throw open the borders so that statistically they “appear” to be not making it. In order to foment a upsurge, or swelling of energy for the overthrow, you first have to build a “grievance” society, then a “protest” society. There is no groundswell of “protest” without legitimate “grievance”. If you don’t have legitimate grounds for “grievance” you must create one at every opportunity.
h)Divisiveness via race, class, ethnic, age, gender is the hallmark of creating the environment for overthrow. You don’t want “solutions”…you want more “problems”. More “envy”. More animus.
i)Keeping “slavery” alive, attacking the military-industrial complex, using “ecology” to keep natural resource utilization suppressed, killing off capitalism and national defense through any means possible. Having the DOJ turn criminal and racist. Stifling voter protection. Running guns to drug cartels. Your highest Law Enforcement Department, is infiltrated and corrupt.
j)Turn your back on your long time allies. Make the country weak in the geo-political world. Create instability in hot spots around the world. Weaken our role as leader of the free world.
Never again should we confuse “liberalism” with the small c communist overthrow. It isn’t that the left is hypocritical. They are lying. The Inversion Narrative is in full force and effect. The pointing at the clear inanity of their positions vs. reality is a parlor game for them. It keeps you occupied while they continue down the path of our destruction.
These are NOT “liberals”. They are enemies of state. Wake up, countrymen. We are under siege.
cfbleachers – ditto. You wrote: “These are NOT “liberals”.” Correct: They are Leftists, or Liberal Fascists. Roger Simon has labeled them reactionaries.
I’m thinking this boat has sailed, cf. I’ve been trying to fight the “liberal” designation of leftist/progressivism, likely in vain, for years now to no avail. No, these folks are NOT liberal but like gay and marriage, apparently words mean what “they” say they mean. No more, no less.
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ ” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’ ”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master that’s all.”
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”
Malleable adjectives indeed. This is how New York became a blue state, and California. In a sane world they would be called red states. But the NYT has decreed otherwise and so we all go along. Why do we cooperate with our most vicious and deceitful enemies?
Red States are Commie States. Red is the Commie color.
Jack and Tom
My point in making this argument over and over again on these pages, is not an exercise of mine in identifying inappropriate “labels”, as you both recognize.
My intent is not a Thesaurus-based one.
We strengthen the treason and overthrow by aiding and abetting its stealth. We infuse credibility into the virus. If WE accept and advance their masquerade as true and accurate, we push it further into the bloodstream of our existence.
They are decidedly NOT “liberal”, “progressive” or “elite”. Their Propaganda and Lies Ministry is NOT “mainstream”. They are not “tolerant”, “open-minded” or “diverse”.
They are not “pro-troops”, and are definitely not “Constitutional scholars”. They are emphatically not proponents of “equal rights” OR “due process”.
They do NOT support checks and balances within our system of government.
Therefore, in what manner would they be espousing “liberal” ideals? Or “progressive” ones? They don’t. They hide behind the cloaks of these mantles in order to effectuate the “transformation” (transformation=overthrow) of our representative self-governing, free market society. In order to “redistribute” (redistribute=steal) earned and accumulated wealth to the “grievance and protest victims” that they themselves have created and expanded.
We fuel and accelerate their scheme by adopting their code words and corrupting our communications internal “hard drive” of information with them.
It is not enough to point at the terms and say that they don’t accurately portray them….and then revert to using them anyway. We must recognize why and how they are using those terms…and oppose that menace with every fibre of our being.
Hey cf – I think we’re on the same page here. I do not think I reverted to calling Leftists, liberals. Where I did use the word liberal, it was as an adjective to the word Fascists(a la Jonah Goldberg). Also, if you follow my comments here on PJM, you will see I always call them Leftists.
Sorry, Jack. I wasn’t clear in my response to you and Tom above. I know we are in agreement. That response wasn’t intended to suggest we aren’t on the same page, it was aimed at others who used words and phrases that promote, aid and abet leftist skullduggery.
I was joining your arguments to mine.
Sorry for the confusion.
cfbeachers;
You nailed it. Tnx for saving me lotsa time trying to express what you just did.
Where I come from, the original commies & Nazis used violence first to gain power and then the steps you describe to keep it. The unholy amalgam of the New-left grew patient, slick & conniving in using the sophistry of the incremental undermining of our society. The violence & terror is the last step in this case. Treason & decay from within have long term consequences. Look at the Romans; they’re gone for good. In 1620, the tiny Kingdom of Bohemia lost its freedom for 300 hundred years to the Habsburg Empire due to internal betrayal.
Navel-gazers create society razers.
Superb. Succint and to the point. Those who wish to “burn the old world to see the new,” (as seen on some protesters’ signs) will get nothing but ashes and their own extinction.
The real tragedy is that I could send this piece to my liberal friends — high achievers with high IQs, all — and it would roll off their minds like water from a duck’s back. The craziness of the contrast between liberal reality — California, Detroit — and liberal theology (smug high-mindedness uber alles) is actually making me crazy.
What it really comes down to is that some of the fundamental premises of democracy are proving weak. When the ancients warned of these fundamental weaknesses, they apparently were right. Gradually we’ve left the Founders’ vision of a democratic republic behind and are now very deep into a leftist dystopia that almost certainly will implode.
And I’ve always thought of myself as an OPTIMIST!
Okay, if Obama wins in November, will you then all start thinking about amiably dividing the country?
Does anyone have any ideas about what will happen if Obama wins? I figure that over half the adult population in the U.S. is against what Obama is doing to the country. Will we just accept his victory and say, “Well, we don’t like it, but the American people have spoken at the ballot box”? I don’t think we can.
The country is so divided and not over petty issues. America is at a crossroad and we are divided because of deep and profound foundational issues. Do we want to restore our constitutional republic, downsize the federal government, govern according to the Constitution, return morals and virtue to our society, get back to substance (reading, writing, and math) in our schools, and enforce our sovereignty along our borders? What will we be willing to do to accomplish these goals and take back our country if Obama wins?
No, it is not susceptible to amiable division; the communists of Ecotopia and the BoWash cannot do without the resources of The South and the West east of the Coast Range, so they’ll never “amiably” give them up. The useful idiots who style themselves liberal in their squishy, tolerant way will say “let our erring sisters go” just a they did in 1860, but the hard-handed men who know something about economics will say that the rebellion must be suppressed.
Unfortunately, few in the leadership cohort of the Right see the existential threat posed by Comrade Obama; they still think he’s just another liberal big city Democrat that “you can do business with.” He’s never wanted to “do business” with Republicans and he never will. If you do make a deal with him, he won’t keep it. In the event that he wins, and I think he will because of the divisions on the Right, we must find a way to drive the Left and their front groups from power in our remaining Republican/conservative controlled states and use our states as the base from which to attack the federal government. For a few more years, we’ll have something resembling an independent judiciary. We must use our power in the Congress to absolutely prevent the communists for enacting any legislation. We must use the courts to set aside every EO and regulation that exceeds statutory or Constitutional authority and we must use state law powers to, if we can’t deport them, make life a living Hell for the invaders in our Country. Other than the military, states have a lot of power, in many ways more than the federal government, but few understand those powers and most political leaders have been dissuaded from making much use of state powers, particularly since the civil rights movement days. The Constitution is still there – at least for a little while longer.
We’ve been talking about what we must do to turn this country around for decades, and nothing has happened. It just gets worse. We can continue this way until we are whittled away and become less than capable of demanding our right to live in a world of our choosing. We’re still relatively strong now and can negotiate from a position of strength. But I surely do not like what I see coming. We can just keep saying we have to try more right up until we’re permanently voiceless.
And why even try? Do we really want to keep a bunch of control-freak liberals around us? What’s the point?
As for dividing the country, I’ve proposed giving the liberals the northeast and southwest with a roughly state-wide corridor connecting the two. Then social conservatives take the southeast and libertarian conservatives the northwest. It doesn’t mean the two factions aren’t allies, it just facilitates the liberal-conservative division (keeping with current demographics) and cuts short the inevitable disputes between the social and libertarian conservatives.
I like your idea – mostly because I won’t need to move.
Honestly though, I really don’t want to live with these people anymore. I despise them on a level that’s getting unhealthy. I don’t like feeling like this about my fellow man but I also know they’d feed me to rabid dogs in a nano-second.
I’ve felt the exact same things. They’ve proven themselves more than willing to betray their own people whenever expedient. Even in he-said, she-said arguments, they become metaphysically certain the US is on the wrong side. And this sense of betrayal has to be one of the strongest emotions.
As Faulkner said, “The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.” In 1860, the Nation had a readily discernable division: slave states and non-slave states. In 1861, the Nation did divide first by the secession of the 7 Lower South states early in the year followed by the slave-holding Upper South states on Lincoln’s call for troops to “suppress the rebellion.” But in reality it was nothing like as simple as the 11 (or 13, depending on when and how you count) seceding states versus the rest of the Country. Both the Union and the Confederacy were riven with internal dissentions.
We tend today to think in terms of Red and Blue states, but it isn’t that simple. Taken down to the county level or district and precinct level you can see how internally divided both the Red and Blue states are. The Red – Blue map of the two GWB elections at the county level is most revealing. The party alignments are reversed today, but you can see the old Copperhead regions of Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania bright Red but with the cities therein an equally bright Blue. Even the very Blue states have rural areas that are predominantly Red; they’re just outnumbered by the city-dwellers. California is bright Blue west of the mountains and from the Bay Area southward, but the rest of the state is Red with Blue urban enclaves. Washington and Oregon are deep Red east of the mountains. Even very Red Alaska has deep Blue enclaves in its urban areas and in Native Western Alaska. You can see the hodge-podge of Red and Blue in Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Western North Carolina, just as these states were deeply divided in the 1860s. In the deep Red Lower South, the cities are Blue and one can still see the Blue areas which once were the heavily slave-holding areas of the Piedmont regions of the states that now are majority Black areas, and even the unionist/draft evader dominated lower Chattahoochee region on the Georgia Alabama border below Columbus Georgia remains Blue today. This after 150 years. Were a state-based division attempted, there’d be lots of “Incidents at Owl Creek Bridge.” and Pottawatamie Massacres.
We are an extremely mobile society. If anybody can manage the relocation, its us. Each year about 14% of Americans change residences, with about a third of them changing counties and states. So already you have about 5% of Americans making a significant relocation every year.
And of course this would not happen overnight. In a controlled manner, we could give it five years, ten years, whatever is necessary to make the move as tolerable as possible. Over ten years, we already have half the population making a major move as it is
My worry is that once the left sees that conservatives have lost a rough numerical equivalency, they could try to stop it from happening. Or at least only let it happen on their own terms (and you know those terms would be as unbalanced as they could leverage them; since after all, they are so morally righteous). Now rough parity makes it just too risky for them to push too hard, even if the momentum is falling (in my opinion) irrevocable toward their side.
As far as I’m concerned, if you can protect it, its yours.
Need a cook, techie, or man-at-arms, for your new fiefdom, your Lordship?
Harry, you’re in!
Sure as long as I can amiably get the hell out of New York. Please don’t leave me behind.
Don’t worry, there will be room for all. The exact lines demarcating the new countries would (presumably) be pushed or pulled depending on the population size each group ends up with.
Just draw the lines and let us know so we can vote with our feet.
Great points.
If the GOP pols had the savvy as the Dems they would start writing legislation aimed at ending all tax breaks for Hollywood and the entertainment industry. They wouldn’t necessarily have to pass it but just pull it out every time they hear some big movie guy pushing for the opposition or some liberal share-the-wealth claus. They could think of it as sort of a “mutual assured destruction” policy.
If they really want to take it to the edge submit legislation applying civil rights regulations to casting films. LOL.
If you really want to put the fear of God into them threaten the NBA with Affirmative Action legislation. They have big mouths about things that just make them look like racist a$$holes. They either shut it or they lose at least 2/3rds of their teams and they must be filled with white/asian/hispanic/etc players. To really needle them tell them they can’t height discriminate – that they must be inclusive in adding short people to their rosters.
Amusing as this would be–and it’s always worth proposing as a thought-experiment, to explain to others what’s wrong with quotas (a/k/a affirmative action)–don’t forget that the gov’t doesn’t have the hold over the NBA that they have over schools, fire & police depts, etc. NBA is a group of privately-owned teams; they’re not accepting government funding, which brings government strings attached.
Don’t forget, everyone, that the next frontier for the Leftists is to bring the affirmative-action (“disparity”) formula to science, technology, and mathematics programs at our universities. They’re going to want to equalize the numbers of students among all groups–notably male and female, borrowing the Title IX approach. We should be very afraid.
Let’s certainly hope our guys, Romney and Ryan, win; but even if they do, we will still have to be vigilant about preventing the Leftists already engrained in the bureaucracy from implementing these plans.
(In the 1980s and early 1990s Bill Gates’ Microsoft was cast as a Darth Vader enemy that had crushed the underdog, hip, and nearly insolvent Apple through piratical means.)
In the 1980s and 1990s Microsoft *was* Darth Vader. There’s a reason Microsoft paid billions in court settlements to the likes of Stac, Caldera, Sun, and (yes) Apple, among others. The case of US vs. Microsoft showed how the company abused its position in attempts to “crush” (not compete against) Digital Research (for its “better DOS than MS-DOS), Netscape for its browser, Sun for its Java. Microsoft took advantage of a poorly written contract to allow its Windows to survive legal challenge, while double-dealing even mighty IBM over OS/2.
Microsoft’s power has since been broken. Without its near-monopoly position, they’re forced to compete against other major players – Apple, Google, and open software. These days they usually lose.
Microsoft’s power has since been broken. Without its near-monopoly position, they’re forced to compete against other major players – Apple, Google, and open software.
This has zilch to do with darth vaderism and everything to do with strategic decision making re platforms e.g. google doesn’t make a unique office suite; they have essentially cloned MS office. Android on tablets is a consumption OS and the MS vision was always premised strategically on the notion that the OS ought to be able to perform work (i.e. you ought to be able to do you job with it, not combine a book reader and a web browser and call it a day.) The android tablet app universe is telling; even google refuses to release a count of tablet apps, meaning that there simply ain’t that many. The PC dev environment of android development has draconian requirements re licensing and right to collect money for the effort. That may have something to do with the dearth of apps. The only place MS isn’t the leader is in portables, but if they follow their strategy correctly with windoze 8 then perhaps the market will soon have portables that are capable WORK devices rather than tarted up book readers (i.e. media consumption devices.)
Raymond—
In discussing terms like economic power & near monopoly positioning, it is very important to distinguish market power from government power. Until very recently, MS has used only market power. Market power is not the same as government power. No one was physically forced to buy a computer or computer software from MS. No doubt, MS plays hardball with the dominate position it earned by its early success. It is also unsurprising that it was involved in many legal battles in establishing ownership rights in a new, burgeoning industry where patent law was unclear. That is the nature of the beast.
But only AFTER the government intervened in the market in favor of its opponents did MS start to be a government rent seeker. Until very late in the game, MS may have played hardball, but they did not seek nor were they granted any special government favors in winning their market share. The near universal adoption of Windows OS has been critical the digital revolution from the beginning. Overall, with the exceptions of its recent lobbying of government favors, MS should be revered, not reviled.
I dunno; MS did a REALLY good job of “persuading” government procurement people to buy Windows platform machines as every government in the Country scrambled to get wired in the ’90s. Millions of copies of Office went into government computers, almost all at full retail. If you were using a licensed copy at work, they’d give you a good deal on a licensed copy for your home machine. There was a lot of piracy out there for private use, but you can be sure that a government copy was licensed.
You’d be hard-pressed to find Apple equipment in government offices in even the grooviest places. We had a stand-alone Apple network in our office in the early ’90s. When the State government went on a serious push to wire the whole enterprise in the mid-’90s, our Apple network went to surplus and was replaced by some cheapa** Gateways and a low-level version of Office; it was a Democrat administration so you had to be a member of the nomenklatura to get PowerPoint.
Art, yes, a lot of Windows & Office copies were sold to governments.
But a lot of Windows/Office seats in government offices were pirated. Microsoft’s legal troubles only went to ELEVENTY!!!!!1!!!!!! when they started doing license checks on government agencies and found hundreds (or, in the case of the United States Navy, THOUSANDS) of pirated copies of MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows NT, and Office. Legend has it that one intelligence agency bought ONE copy each of Windows NT, NT Server, and Office in 1997, went to some East European website and downloaded “cracking software,” and proceeded to (a) populate over 2,000 seats with Windows & Office, (b) install a bunch of servers, and (c) get a nasty phone call from the NSA because their cracked wArEZ turned out to be infested with multiple variants of BackOrifice…
I mostly agree with you. But Apple did one thing that was very stupid, in terms of selling to government agencies and school systems: they refused to license their operating system to other manufacturers. This means that if you wanted a Macintosh computer, with an Apple operating system, you had to specify Apple by name — and there was no second source. Most government agencies made you jump through flaming hoops to justify buying something that doesn’t have a second source. Most times the person filling out the paperwork didn’t consider it worth the time and effort. I know: I tried, when I was an engineer working on government projects. And my wife was a buyer for a school district: she tried, too.
In my opinion, the present state of California and the entire country
can be summed up with one word: multiculturalism.
The poor illegal alien stealing copper wire from the Pine Flats men’s
room is just trying to make it in his adopted country. Once he makes
the middle class, he’ll become a model citizen.
“Once he makes the middle class, he’ll become a model citizen.”
Sure he will. Just like Al Capone became a model citizen when he made it to the middle class.
To reach the middle class in any country you would be required to speak the language and assimulate to the culture at large. As the current crop of MCs are fleeing a bloated, corrupt failed state, I think CA will crash long before any of them every see suburbia– let alone utopia.
Another dead-on commentary.
I’ve always pondered the difference between how conservative and liberal hypocrisy are viewed. Occasionaly, a consevative preacher will be caught in bed with someone other than his wife, or a politician will ask for tax funds from a program he voted against. These lapses will be publicized with great fanfare by the mostly liberal press as examples of conservatives not practicing what they preach.
On the other hand, the almost daily spectacle of liberal billionaires screaming about greedy Republicans or green phonies like Al Gore flying their private jets to and from multiple homes, here and abroad, causes nary a comment. Nothing to see here, just move along.
It reminds me of one Seinfeld episode, where Jerry berates Elaine for dating a man strictly because of his good looks. She points out that he does the same thing with women all the time, to which he replies, “I’m a man. We’re expected to be superficial.”
Perhaps liberals are just expected to be superficial.
Liberals have slowly and steadily abandoned traditional religion, especially the “Western” Judeo-Christian values that have help govern Americans collectively and individually since colonial times; and in their void replaced it with Liberal Ideology (ie Environmentalism, multiculturalism, and state-ism). It is no wonder to me that providential living and self sustenance mean little if nothing to those most influenced by liberal ideology since they no longer ‘need’ God who rewards the just and helps those who help themselves and instead look to the government to provide that heaven on earth known as Utopia. To these believers of liberalism you no longer reap what you sew on an individual level and consequently personal accountability means little to the collectivists mindset and imperfection is easily justified as someone else’s fault. On the other end of the spectrum those most well off can rest consciences knowing that they have kept the faith of liberalism and may even have made significant tithes and offerings as well as indulgences that offset in wrong doing on their part.
This appears to have more to do with the lack of jobs than much else, and sure, the lack of jobs has more to do with enviro-fantasy red tape and absurd tax structure (thanks, libs) than much else. Those talking about culture war issues are as always missing the boat. If your average hispanic kid learns that through hard work and applying himself in ridiculously expensive college he may qualify to work at a job starting at $30k and it is also apparent that at 17 yrs old he can make 3-5x this selling drugs on the street, it’s not exactly surprising what many young capitalist minds decide.
The people stripping copper are thieves, yes, but they’re capitalist thieves looking to make a buck. The problem is that the jobs that are left (after the democrat enacted laws forced everything overseas) simply don’t pay. And it all goes downhill from there.
Same problem applies to the middle class. Once upon a time college educated middle class VB programmers could make decent money. Then as tech advanced much of what they could actually do became more automated *and* be done cheaper by Ukranians, and the average pay plummeted accordingly. The guy who could command $65/hr in the 90′s is now worth $18/hr. So here you have someone whose value decreases to the point where the average high school grad truck driver or mcdonalds asst mgr can make more money.
“Capitalist thieves”? Oxymoron. A capitalist is one who attempts to make a profit through capital investment, e.g., investing in a restaurant, a tow truck, or a share of stock. A thief is one who steals other people’s property without making any capital investment. The people you refer to are not “looking to make a buck”, they are looking to steal all the bucks they can.
“Capitalist thieves”? Oxymoron.
Purposeful wording. Marxists claim capitalists are stealing resources.
When cities,states reach the bottom or near its end one questioning their future need look only as far as detroit.
Detroit is a hell hole once vibrant city housing the tigers,automobile plants and lots of commerce. Today it needs to be bulldozed with the only viable businesses huge pawn shops such as the one featured on cable tv called Hardcore pawn.
Hardcore Pawn is the story of what happens to a once great city and those who for one reason or another didn’t have the brains to leave.Irate citizens looking for an additional free ride complaining to the no-nonsense business owners that they are owed money simply because they exist.They bring token assets,some worth real money some not, some they own some they stole, and then “demand” service/money so they can pay their rent,pay their electric bill or get a quick fix.All sharing the same emergency attention they need so bad.
Its a 50k sq.ft. store that buys peoples last few assets and or loans money on them until their next welfare check,food stamps, or drug deal comes through.
It’s a pathetic show that mirrors the outrageous existence of a failed city and its the future.It’s callyfornyuh in less that ten years struggling to outlast the bulldozers.
Unchecked liberalism results in everything that the hard left now in office advocates.Sometimes you gotta wonder why.
Dr. Hanson, thank you for your column. When I read about what happened at that Pine Flat campground, it made me sick. The nature of our society in kalifornia makes me fear for our homes and lives and the really unfortunate part about all of it, in the eyes of the kalifornia legal system, we are not supposed to defend ourselves lest we end up as the criminal. The statistics for burglary in Fresno County are on the rise, isn’t that wonderful?
just dropped kids off to first day of school. Not bad, liberals, not bad. For years we’ve had a brain-drain to California. Our best and brightest could make five figures here, and six to billion figures there. We didn’t have that magical Silicon Valley Investment Corridor. We had software programmers heading west.
Anyway, every year I drop the kids off and casually find out who else is there. We had a small group of kids from Katrina. One family stayed- the one with a mom, a dad, and a family business. The rest went home to their checks. Texas is notoriously stingy on benefits. People were shocked at how little money was available to them.
We’ve had enough migration from Mexico that the assistant principal in Austin was becoming friends with the assistant principals at schools in Mexico. In every grade level, the English-speaking kids are crowded into three classrooms, and then there’s the all-spanish one. When we started, there were four regular classrooms, and then a remedial English resource room. Now? Each grade level has its own Spanish-only class. In one class, the parents decided they wanted a Spanish-only class, instead of mixed. She was the best teacher in that grade. Seriously- 22 separate educational plans (that she fulfilled!!!) for each of her 22 kids. Now? That’s for only Spanish- speaking kids. On three day weekends, they head back to Mexico City.
This year? There were families from California. White kids. With moms and dads. That’s pretty f###ing spectacular, turning California, stable, two-parent families into economic refugees. I counted lunch-bags. Kids bringing lunch from home? A good indicator of stay at home moms, and families earning an income? ( mind you, this is a majority minority school with 80% food aid?) Doubled from last year, maybe even tripled. Eleven in a class of 22 or so kids, for one teacher. There were four, three years ago when the son went through this teachers’ class. My kid, a preacher’s kid, a mom who took in sewing, and some other kid, name unknown. This year, eleven lunch-bags. And people who had just moved from California- with their moms and dads and little sisters, and baby brothers. We are hair-cutting all the people who work, and have a good future, out of California. I bet it’s even more obvious in wealthier schools.
“just dropped kids off to first day of school.”
Maybe you should stop in and learn some punctuation.
….just dropped kids off at school…. Happy now?
Ready to notice what I said? California is losing productive, stable, well-educated, socially well-adjusted men and their families to Texas. That bodes ill for this year’s budget, and on into the next few decades.
http://spectator.org/people/christopher-orlet/all
If you need complete sentences when observing the behavior of people in poor neighborhoods, try Christopher Orlet. He’s a treat.
Discursive observational style, however, is not invalid. And I don’t like the trailing three dots…I’m not trailing off, my voice isn’t fading, and I’m not gazing into the distance, nor am I sending a budget Hallmark card. Jonathan Kellerman ( award-winning fiction writer) Rick Bragg ( Pulitzer Prize winning journalist) and Lawrence Durrell ( international literary bestseller) all use sentence fragments.
To give you an idea of the difference that periods can make, versus trailing dots, versus complete sentences, I give you a classic:
(A) “Why’d you break up?”
” She invited me over to watch Sex and the City on Blu-Ray with extras.” ( said by man with sex-change operation, on an entirely too-high dose of estrogen.
(B)”Why’d you break up?”
“She invited me over to watch Sex and the City….on Blu-Ray….with extras…” This man is curled up on her welcome mat, weeping into her potted plants, wondering why she broke up with him for a fling with the mail-clerk.
(C)”Why’d you break up?”
“She invited me over to watch Sex and the City. in blu-ray. with extras.” This man took notes of all the depraved sex acts discussed on the show, inflicted them on this shoe-obsessed woman with too many cats, and then broke up with her.
( the correct answer is C)
Give ‘em hell with the grammar/punctuation lesson, Ari, but it would be a cold day in hell, ie. Texas, when I would ever move there. Here in Taxachusetts we have relatively reasonable weather, no border issues, good roads, good schools, and not many droughts or tornadoes. I have a good pension after 37 years of teaching, a big garden, good hunting, and access to lakes and the ocean when I need it for windsurfing. In other words, of you see my grandchildren enrolling in your schools, you will know that the sh*t has hit the fan, that we have given up all hope…and gone to Texas. ;-)
Ah, (but) do you have the Wasilla Dream?
Have you ever spent any time in Texas D-White? Does the Gulf count as… ocean?
I know you’ll prob’ly scream and cry
That your little world won’t let you go
I don’t need a weatherman to tell me that I don’t want to live in a place where I need air conditioning more than three months of the year. Massachusetts has it over Texas and Wasilla, hands down. Wasilla is in near darkness almost as long as Texas needs air-conditioning. Not a tough call here. Your troubadorian proclivities might make for different priorities, but I want a growing season, long temperate springs and falls, not to mention communities which will pay for good education. I’ve stopped in Texas several times, long enough to change planes for other destinations. Why would I stay longer? If I were allergic to our cold winters, rather than enjoying them, I might consider South Padre environs. Otherwise, let those who like it, or can at least stand it, bake their brains out down there. ;-)
that’s what I’m saying- the s*** has hit the fan for Cali. That’s terrible- it ought to be the giantest economy in the USA, and near the world, top to bottom. It was, for decades.
I overheard a conversation at a tech company where the HR was trying to recruit people: she said Texans worked for 25% less than New Yorkers, and 50% less than Californians. She was trying to get a company to come here. I know people who live in refurbed janitor closets, on their Texas pay. They move out of state to $80K jobs in other states. So, Texans used to move elsewhere, to make it big.
There’s a group of basically stateless, top-end, high-wage workers. They have this circuit- Seattle, San Fran to Silicon Valley, Research Triangle in N Carolina, NYCity, some place in Brazil, London, north Austin. We don’t live in that section of town. We go to church with a bunch of them, they were the core of one playgroup. Them moving hither and yon is the stuff of newspapers. I don’t care- they move here, they move there. Big deal. Nothing out of that little gated community is fundamentally changed, really. Codevilla writes about them. Everyone knows about them.
We live on the crummy, poor, southside of town. That’s the part that is so stable that the veteran teachers taught the parents, and now are on the kids, and in some cases, grandkids. The only new people show up from (1) the biggest natural disaster or (2) a failed state within a failing nation- nobody from Monterrey, Mexico- Monterrey has factories- and now (3) California. That’s really, really messed up.
That’s a long-term disaster, too. It’s the poor side of town. Texas has low benefits. The people moving here are the functional families of “Fishtown”: the blue-collar, married, with kids, stable poor people. When they move, they tend to stay moved. So, who’s left in California? Single parents, gangsters, disorganized, disorderly, dependent types? Pensioners?
When people moved out of the dust-bowl in the 30′s, it made it into novels, songs, memories, wretched PBS documentaries. They stayed there, and worked in the factories that built the state’s wealth. When poor blacks moved out of the south- they rated a chapter in textbooks, and movies and songs and what-not. Well, I think I’m seeing that same dynamic, except it’s poor families leaving Cali. Poor single guys- they don’t change history- Jamestown, and the neighborhoods. Families? Change history- Puritan New England, Utah, and so on.
Detroit was the wealthiest single city in the world in the 1950s. It was a full -spread wealth. California was the wealthiest, most dynamic state in the Union, and likely in history, ever. They both destroyed themselves, somehow.
San Francisco banking brought us Hollywood, which changes the world. Silicon Valley? The abundant fruit and vegetables of the Cali inland changed how people ate. You can’t read a diet book without some exotic fruit grown in Cali, as if it were pedestrian and normal. The gold-mining? Levis? Rand? I don’t even know what all Cali built- the war material in WW2 turned into stuff like sliding glass door factories- it sounds silly, but that abundance and imagination and glossiness and summer-ness and beauty…….
It makes me sad in ways I cannot express, b/c I’m just a bystander in a far-away, far more hard-bitten state. It’s heart-breaking. Dr Hanson’s article is like pouring wine for lost comrades, hecatombs of trees.
clarifying: we get all the central and south americans from their failed sections- guatemalans when they had a civil war, hondurans when they had a civil war, country mexican, rather than monterrey, mexican. the kids don’t even know the alphabet when they show up.
their families get it together enough to go to mexico city when they leave.
families from katrina, most of whom left. the one married couple remained.
and texas deliberately does stuff to keep wages low for tech workers. the main university is designed to flunk about 1/4 to 1/3 of the freshman class, so that there’s a slurry of ambitious, half-educated, non-degreed, really smart kids doing low-wage jobs. Coffee barista college dropouts can work as programmers for startups for low-wages and insane hours- they already do insane hours for minimum wage- so anything is a step up. College graduates cost more. And have this weird idea about 8-5 work. So it’s always people out of the city who try to get more kids to graduate in four years- it’s designed to not graduate them. So, people from out of state with degrees, are competing against startup kids with no degrees. I’ve read the position papers on this. It’s deliberate. It’s been going on since the late 60′s, on purpose, to build a tech hub.
so people leaving california in droves- the business people who have it together go to north Austin. They always have. The poor people go south, and poor people don’t move unless they absolutely have to. When the organized, married, poor people move out of Cali’s Fishtown, to reference Charles Murray- then the people remaining are what? Detroit? Too messed up to move? Optimistic? Illiterate? unmarried? poor? pensioners?
Ari, Very interesting analysis of your state, especially how so much turns on low cost, low rent workers, which I would propose is not something that either you or I would want for our families. It hardly sounds like a model for middle-class America, but it is what it is. It reminds me that we are always working with dynamic systems and that no one state provides the one answer for all of us. There will always be a tension between high-paying union jobs with good pensions and the hardscrabble, minimum (and below) wage jobs. You have the apparent wretchedness of one side and the apparent non-sustainability of the other. Most workers would like a decent wage and some security. Business owners have to make a profit, or they are no longer in business. But there are many more workers than owners, hence the deep distrust of democracy, which one often hears here. There is no solution, just cycles.
Good luck to you and yours in the new school year.
Texas is a right-to-work state. There are no, and I do mean, NO effective unions. There are two teachers unions that act more like temp agencies than unions. They sometimes help teachers. There is no automatic wage deduction. Teachers sign up for a year, if they think they’re going to have a dispute, and then drop coverage. New people trying to break into teaching have to student-teach. It’s a rough beauty pageant. It’s really hard to get hired. They have student teachers every year shadowing veteran teachers. They might hire one or two. They’re usually amazing people. It’s not a fall-back, cushy job.
I’m not sure even substitute teaching is cushy. My MIL did it, and she’d go hunt down her students, to see that they’d done their homework, or to give them help after they’d dropped out. Not money- times tables, and books.
I know one union official- actually, I know her husband. She is usually off doing some campaign work for Obama in another state. He’s a stay at home dad. Nobody respects him. He’s like a clown.
How I got to Texas? My grandfather was a shop-floor manager for GM. He expected a days work for a days pay, in Tennessee. My dad remembers him getting called out by name by the union boss, on the radio, after World War 2. When a parts warehouse opened in Dallas, GM promoted him, and moved him to Dallas. He’s a farm-boy with an 11th grade education. He sent his son to Tulane(no thanks given) and then raised his grandchildren in middle-class comfort, in a safe school district, on his pay. He earned that on his own.
His brothers and sisters who opted for union jobs? They had nice jobs, but their kids lives are really crappy. Unemployed, under-employed, no hope.
His wife is from a tenant farm in Texas. Her brother-in-law was a mill-wright. His grandson runs the company, starting from, obviously, the bottom. He raised three ( four?) (five?) kids on his own pay. No union.
My spouse’s dad came to Texas b/c his company went union in Cali. The people who stayed in Cali are, well, still on the bottom in Cali. He was able to buy a 3bed, 2 bath, multi-acre homestead, by the sweat of his brow. His son is a military officer, a college graduate, and an MBA. And has always been employed. Not one single one of those descriptions can fit any of his cousins who opted for security.
You get churn, and you get the chance to build a fortune. Everyone I know came to town with $300 to $1000 in their pocket, and ambition. No safety-net here.
No one is cheering single moms- the only ones I know have to build this elaborate safety net involving fraud, children put out to work, adult services, or developing really valuable skills. If they can’t hack it- they leave. I know one who came and flourished- her sister came, and then left back to Massachusetts. She wanted to live in a welfare hotel, rather than work and possibly get ahead in life.
The easiest way to find the money regions in Francophone countries is find the “faubourg”: the fake city. The city that got built up on the outskirts of guild ( read unionized) cities. They’re the ones that innovated, hired, grew and built everything modern and interesting.
There isn’t a balance, as far as I can tell. Do a good job. Expect the churn. My husband has a job in a tough industry b/c he’s good at what he does.
The low-wage dropouts- a house-framer- founded Electronic Arts. AT&T has a call center. Their highest paid employee delivered pizzas before this. The data-mining grad student that lives across the street paid for school delivering pizza. She’s going to walk out to six figures in May. Her husband paid for in-state architecture by building houses- concrete on up.
If you’ll go find articles on any techology hub, or aspiring tech-hub- it’s a low-wage, high-skill hot-spot. This vision of efficient, brilliant perfection- just casually- seriously, I live under a rock- I’ve seen guys building some of the most insane internet things, for fun, that never go anywhere commercial- just for them and their friends. The student clubs use machines, for fun, that the rest of the country oohs and ahhs and says ‘so advanced.’ Smarty-pants like being around smarty-pants. Not grade-grinders.
UTA a few years ago re-engineered to take the to 10% of all high-school students. On one hand, they all graduated on-time. Crime went down, class attendance went up. But- all the bookstores on the drag closed. And the really weird stuff that used to be normal- just- people doing really, really weird stuff for fun? tapered down. a lot. That’s where the innovation was- the weird stuff. The main alumni group is trying to rejigger the campus. It’s not supposed to be a mild-mannered degree factory for grade-grinders. It’s supposed to be the crazy genius factory. Bill Bennett dated Janice Joplin, and we claim ‘em both.
Nobody I know moves here to stay poor, or even middle-class. The Vietnamese guy who works nights bagging groceries- has just put two kids through school, and is sending one of them to law school. The sandwich vendor in front of the university retired when his kids graduated at the top of their grad schools. What impresses me about Massachusetts is that if you’re born poor, you tend to stay that way, and then your kids are poor, too. And your grandkids. That is seriously messed up.
It’s not a self- esteem, huggy, friendly, place. We’ve got rattlesnakes and leprous armadillos, for crying out loud. We’re the guys who trained the guy who set up OPEC- and some of the better Palestinian nationalists, and educated the arabs who actually ran the oil concessions. In the man-o-sphere- we’re the state that kicked Tucker Max’s ass. We’re the only people that ever scared him.
the lower-wage bright kids are there to innovate. They’re the wood-shavings that you throw a match on, and watch the bonfire. The kids that are just fitting into what’s already there? that’s not the future. The Cali families? Steve Jobs is from a poor Cali family. The next steve is likely in texas, not cali.
Ari: “The Cali families? Steve Jobs is from a poor Cali family. The next steve is likely in texas, not cali.”
Had good laugh over this one. Steve Jobs did not grow up poor. He was from a middle class family, raised in a modest Eichler home in a nice Mountain View neighborhood by a Machinist step father. Steve had the benefit of good schools in pre-Silicon Valley, not dumbed down Christian Fundamentalists schools. If there is a Steve Jobs in Texas, he or she is highly unlikely to stay there. There are quite a few intelligent ex-Texan’s in California. Like they say, it’s a great place to be *from*.
I’ll take the old Retread Jerry Brown. Good luck to the New Jersey wind bag. Longevity is not likely for a glutton like him. As for Ari, good luck with Perry. We’ve still got some good union jobs in California, the kind that pay for a good education in our excellent State Universities. You are welcome to stay right where you are.
It is amazing how people can take anecdotal experience and make believe it stands for facts. Apparently Ari doesn’t need to let facts get in the way of a bad story. lol
PS, Many are not excited about HSR, hopefully they won’t have a problem admitting they were wrong when Brown is proven visionary years from now.
Help me out, here. I know you’re trying to insult me, but some of them aren’t insults- they’re observations.
I think I’ve conceded that some people like high-tax, high-service states. Texas is a low-tax, low-service state. That means that at least one poor, low-skill single mom moved back to Massachusetts to live in a welfare hotel. She doesn’t like her social worker. Her sister remained here. She has to worry about food and rent, but she doesn’t have a social worker telling her how to raise her kids. And, she really does have worries- it’s not unreasonable fears she holds.
I think I’ve conceded that California has dynamic companies, high-wage jobs, and the most beautiful landscape in all of North America.
Saying we have Governor Perry isn’t an insult. He’s obviously very different than Jerry Brown. Perry is the longest-serving Governor in Texas history. We have a balanced budget every year, a rainy day fund where the argument is “how big should it be?” and a fully-funded pension system. Not a lavish pension scheme- teachers are making five figures, not six. They earn five figures, not six, as well.
Balancing the budget means we don’t get to do every cool thing that comes along. It means pay gets frozen, departments get cut, the DMV runs on a minimum number of employees. I’ve had friends in gov’t laid off from their jobs- one built the computer system that replaced her. They laid her off, instead of vertically shuffling her.
We don’t have a visionary high-speed rail. People have been arguing about one for at least 40 years. We do have, measurably, more highways and fresh concrete than just about any state in the union- City Journal writes about this. We keep the roads in good repair. The cities are building rail systems. They don’t actually have that many riders. It’s a pain waiting in 109 degree heat for a bus.
109 is not a mis-type. We usually have one month a year with the whole month over 100 degrees.
I’m trying to figure out what upsets you about the public schools: they graduate kids who can read, write and do math. The whole state is basically conservative Christian, so if you’re upset about the schools, you’ll be more unnerved by churches on just about every corner. They’re full of people, too.
So, bad weather, low- public services, low pay and low pensions in the government sector, right-to-work- which includes the right to be fired at will-poisonous snakes, leprosy-bearing wildlife, documented anthrax cases from livestock—seriously, what’s wrong with Cali that anyone would move here, from there?
I’m not being flip or sarcastic when I ask this. It ought to be incredible. It was built to be incredible. Detroit has the most beautiful public library building that I have ever seen, outside of Europe. Half the residents can’t even read, now. I’d like Texas to get durably prosperous, and no go down the tubes. Texas had an oil boom, and then bust. It’s a serious question: how do you build a durably prosperous state?
Yes. I know Detroit is in Michigan. Detroit aimed for the high-tax, high-service model, and went comprehensively into the gutter in 50 years.
California- Dr Hanson documents California’s inequities.
Massachusetts sounds like a great place to be, provided your name is Lowell, Cabot or Lodge. I’m not so sure about the rest of the place- but I don’t live there.Mr Dwight’s life sounds really good. He sounds content. I don’t understand the whole welfare-hotel, and lavish benefits notion, but I’m here, not there.
In Florida our Governor Rick Scott had the good sense to KILL the useless HIGH_SPEED RAIL project. After 30 years it had not laid a foot of track and was a useless idea.
Time to institute a wildland parking fee in the Fresno county foothills. We have had one in Southern California for some years now, and it has done a good job of keeping most of the thugs contained in their urban enclaves. One of our local trout streams used to be downright dangerous on warm days; now it is safe for regular folks.
I’m familiar with the park that was shut down, and hope the vandalism has not migrated up to the river above Pine Flat, which is a truly epic trout fishing area.
Of course, jerks are everywhere and come in all colors. Last time I camped at Cedar Grove in Kings Canyon NP, I was kept awake most of the night by a group nearby that was drinking and hollering into the wee hours. We ended up sleeping in the car. The pointlessly militarized forest rangers ignored them until morning when it was safe to approach.
VDH has nailed it again, he should be a speech consultant to Romney, the American people hunger for clarity and Dr. Hanson crystalizes the conservative arguement like few can. The Founding Fathers understood the nature of self-interest, it is the life-force in capitalsim and the death-knell in communism. Self-interest is a force of Nature, every living creature is driven by it. Some call it self-preservation, it’s the same thing. Liberalism is self-interest unrestrained, conservatism is self-interest restrained. In Genesis, Adam and Eve were living the Utopian dream, all of Nature was in balance, it was everthing the Left say they struggle for today, all of life’s wants provided for. But it wasn’t enough, Someone was whispering in another’s ear that there was more and they should have a right to it and should take it, even if it is forbidden, because the Law wasn’t fair, self-interest led to the Fall.
Welcome to the newest third world country, California. I’ve lived in third world countries and that’s exactly what they do and how they live.
Excellent essay.
What say we redistribute some risk to the professors living in their enclaves and movie stars living in their gilded cages?
Give them a little reminder of what real life is like.
and while we’re at it, maybe redistribute some risk to the millions of SEIU thugs, including the ones who coo instead of bash, and let them find out what it’s like to live like the rest of us; in other words, to be able to lose a job for incompetance or a bad economy, or to have to depend on savings rather burden the taxayers for survival in one’s golden years.
…”But for the more elite and influential progressive, affluence has allowed liberal orthodoxy to evolve to its theoretical limitations. There is a reason why 90% of professors — life-long tenure, summers off, guaranteed pay raises — are liberal and 70% of small-business people are conservative. The more removed one becomes from the elemental struggle to eat one more day — and never in the history of civilization have so many been so exempt from such existential worries — the more one enjoys the luxury of pondering more cosmic issues such as extending Social Security disability payments to youths suffering from attention deficit disorder or mandating gay history in state public schools or saving the smelt”…
I heartily agree. There is a strong correlation between affluence – and the attendant leisure time it provides – and the rise of careless tinkering with the very factors that made that affluence possible. It is instructive that the the cancer of the ’60′s began with university students and their professors, a pampered class if there ever was one, the so-called intellectuals – a term I spit at – since I firmly believe that one can become over-educated to the point of becoming stupid. Stupid as in forgetting, or ignoring, life’s elemental lessons. The biggest mistake society made was in indulging these spoiled ingrates and letting them have their way, rather than cracking some heads and throwing them out of school, so that they would need to go earn a living and re-learn some of those elemental truths, one of which is “if you don’t work, you don’t eat”.
There is no more honest or ruthless instructor than “reality.” To see the fruit that reality spawns consider:
)There would be no TeaParty were it not for profligate spending which is responsible for our debt.
)President Obama would ride to victory in November if, in fact, “all politicians are pretty much the same.” We have discovered they are not.
)There would be no ProLife movement in this country if abortion had been limited to the first trimester of pregnancy, with or without Roe V Wade. When the reality of abortion-on-demand entered our consciousness, when the issue morphed from one of choice to absolute control, one-over-another,rational persons were forced into declaring themselves either for or against it. Logic, at least, requires that we make that declaration if circumstances force it.
Reality is an uncompromising teacher.
Splitting this country should be as easy as 1-2-3.
Let each county decide which set of values they want to live by. All other sets of values in said county are disenfranchised by the majority decision. However, the disenfranchised retain the option to move to an area that fits their political views, and they will regain the franchise if they do relocate.
The locus of control will be the County, not the State, so rural counties are not overwhelmed by urban populations as is now the case.
No tax exchanges between the red and blue, they live or die by their own merits.
That will give us time to peacefully separate (which is what I think will eventually happen) and will let us live with the consequences of our decisions.
Only a civil war could make that happen.
Who would leftists have to steal from? It’s a nightmare even worse than carbon dioxide.
Dr. Hansen;
You’re writing w/ clarity & gravitas. Tnx to the hard won lessons under the blood stained Hydra of the Soviet style of ‘red-paradise’, I knew in 1989 that CA (in San Diego then) is doomed due to the leftist policies & left. It saddens me, though, what is happening not only in/to the Central Valley but to the foothills of the Sierra. Will always cherish the memories from Yosemite, Sequoia/King’s Canyon, The Minarets in the Ritter Range, Mammoth, Emerald Bay, etc. We’re luckier along the Rockies & on the Colorado Plateau, still a stronghold of the people who bitterly cling to their guns & religion. One still can leave a campsite for an all day hike & come back without anything missing or defaced.
Re-posting my earlier response to cfbleachers at the ‘bottom of the pile’:
cfbeachers;
You nailed it. Tnx for saving me lotsa time trying to express what you just did.
Where I come from, the original commies & Nazis used violence first to gain power and then the steps you describe to keep it. The unholy amalgam of the New-left grew patient, slick & conniving in using the sophistry of the incremental undermining of our society. The violence & terror is the last step in this case. Treason & decay from within have long term consequences. Look at the Romans; they’re gone for good. In 1620, the tiny Kingdom of Bohemia lost its freedom for 300 hundred years to the Habsburg Empire due to internal betrayal.
Household Income Down by 4.8 Percent Overall Since “Economic Recovery” Began – Many Groups with Larger Income Declines
http://www.sentierresearch.com/pressreleases/Sentier_PressRelease_PostRecessionaryHouseholdIncomeChange_June09toJune12_08_23_12.pdf
Can we give California back to Mexico before the elections? That way we wouldnt have to worry about its electoral votes
Be sure to build a double spaced 30 foot high electrified fence around it first.
a year or so ago I happened to forward a couple of VDH articles to a friend, a Dean of Arts and Humanities.
He went ballistic.
The next — and last — time I saw him, every other word that came out of his mouth was “vicious right-wingers.”
That sounds very par for the course.
The mindset of all of these ultra-liberals is pretty simple. The Right obstructs, the Right is hateful towards people, the Right is greedy, the Right is racist, the Right wants war for the corporations – the Right IS the problem to them. Sweep the Right away and we’ll have paradise.
Further, at least out here in this California University town, they see their own lives as how people should live. Recycle, drive a small car (or Prius), live simply (while they almost all take foreign vacations), and above all celebration of everything different from American values.
I’m 58, grew up in the California Central Valley, and I’ve tired of their self-rightousness. But I don’t think they’ll change any time soon. Only deprivation can do that, and it’s with very mixed feelings as I watch the fiscal situation in California spiral down the toilet.
Nice trashing of the ideology of collectivism, Dr. Hanson. I wish I could teach just one liberal about the guarantee of failure that is built in to this utopian claptrap. I would feel like I had saved the world, as it were. ABO2012
Dwight, thank you for wishing my kids well, this year in school.
I hope your year goes well, as well.
I remember reading a book about the decline of Britain published in the 1960′s. The town council decided to rip the seats out of the bus stop shelters and cut holes in the walls to make them uncomfortable for the punks who were defacing them with graffiti and scratching the glass. They also quoted an English Lord who stated that “if nuclear bombs detonated in the country it could change our whole way of life.”
Man o man VDH, it is so easy to see what you say. Why can’t every Californian see the hypocrisy and get rid of these so called leaders within our state?
I cannot help but conclude that liberals are modern-day Pharisees. True, all of us have “a little Pharisee” within (self-righteousness rears its ugly head from time to time) but I believe that liberals have made an art of it and, in refusing to repent of it, have earned the title of “master and mistress of Phariseeism”!
“[I doubt Barack Obama will be returning to his home after his tenure ends in Washington])”. I just heard Obama’s mother in law spilled the beans that the whole family will be moving to a big mansion in Hawaii.
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