Category Archives: Politics and government

August 26, 2025 · 4:09 pm

Coming Home

“In a liberal society that values the moral and legal equality of all persons, the undocumented are impossible subjects, persons whose presence is a social reality yet a legal impossibility.”  Mae N Ngai, “Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America” 2003

The Wave at Coyote Butte

On our recent annual Maine pilgrimage our great good fortune was to visit with our former pastor, Father Joe McKenna, now retired in Portland. Our conversations are always wide and deep about various topics ranging secular and religious. Never a disappointment to be with him.

A good storyteller, he told the tale of his Irish forebears who immigrated first from County Monaghan in Ireland to Prince Edward Island, then answered the call for jobs in the mills of Rumford, Maine. Thousands of immigrants, mostly French Canadian and Irish came in a similar way to build railroads, build textile and paper mills then run the machines in them all over New England. 

From Prince Edward Island, they often traveled via the PEI Railway to the Borden–Cape Tormentine ferry, then Canadian lines to Quebec/Maine connections. The Grand Trunk Railway/CN line into Lewiston was a gateway for the workers—locals even called the Lincoln St. depot a mini “Ellis Island.” Trains from Quebec (and Maritimes connections) dropped people steps from “Little Canada” in Lewiston. An hour or so north, they would arrive in Rumford, and the McKenna family’s new home.  Father Joe worked as a pipe fitter in the paper mill for a while before college and the seminary.

Before 1924 nothing was required to go to work in Maine mills from Canadian citizens except willingness, diligence, hard work, and a train ticket. Pack a bag or two, buy a train ticket, go to work. They came for an opportunity to work hard and flourish, for themselves and most especially for their families. No different than most that have come here for the last four centuries. Moving into company housing at first, then many would build homes, and a new life. Establish parishes, build churches with their own hands, create social clubs, dance on Saturday nights, volunteer in their communities, help their kids with their homework, have block parties.  Their kids and grandkids were birthright citizens, many of them fought and died for America in combat, worked in the mills, and many would pursue other vocations becoming the first in their families to graduate from college. Irish lawyers, doctors, college professors, legislators, and an occasional president.

The mills and the mill owners needed workers to produce the lumber, textiles, paper, and other products that American consumers wanted. The workers needed opportunity and a solid foundation on which to build a life for their families. Such a simple transactional confluence of interests built the most prosperous country in the world, perhaps in the history of the world.

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Inscribed on the bottom of the Statue of Liberty, from the poem “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus

Before 1924, U.S.–Canada land borders were comparatively loose; seasonal and circular migration for mill work was common. Most came with no identity requirements or identity checks. Many would go back and forth as the work allowed with no visa requirements. The U.S. Border Patrol was only created in 1924, and many Canadians living in the U.S. before then later “re-immigrated” formally in the 1940s to regularize status. The process for that normal and relatively painless process was established in the Registry Act of 1929.  People who entered before June 3, 1921, had a clean record, were “of good moral character,” and were not deportable, could create an official arrival record using a simple form (659 “Record of Registry”) without leaving the U.S.  Many Canadians in mill towns did this in the early 1930’s. Many wanted to be full citizens who could vote and participate in local government.  Straightforward, relatively simple, and considerate of their humanity, the registration process was common sense. America was happy to welcome the productive workers she needed to grow.

A blog post is a poor instrument to track the whole history of border law and enforcement since then.[i] Complex, inconsistent, confusing, chaotic, political, rife with conflicting ideology and rancor on all sides. This is not a suggestion that the recent history of unenforced law and virtual open borders was effective or salutary.  A nation to be a nation must have borders and rules for crossing them – who qualifies and who doesn’t. Recent efforts by the current administration to secure what was insecure were necessary and long overdue, and the resulting human drama from the long absence of such a border is heartbreaking.

But there is even more heartbreak with what has ensued since the border was shut down hard.

“(A)n irrational fear, hatred, and hostility toward immigrants has been a defining feature of our nation from the colonial era to the Trump era.” Erika Lee, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2019)

Most of us have an aversion to statistical arguments, but in this debate, they are inescapable. Compounding the difficulty is finding solid sources for the numbers; after all, “undocumented” means undocumented. What is presented here are reasonable approximations from the best sources I could find.  Here’s a few that are verifiable from usually reliable authority but with the caveat stated above. Vulnerable populations are not lining up for the census takers. or surveyors. But in the critical agricultural labor sector with a perennial shortage, about 40% of workers are undocumented and 79% of them have been here longer than ten years, 2/3 of them longer than 15 years. Across all labor sectors, most of which have an increasing shortage of experienced labor, such as construction, landscaping, and hotel service, there are significant numbers of undocumented workers. Over 66% of all undocumented workers have been here over ten years.

I worked in and around the construction industry for over forty five years and can tell many tales of these workers. Some are funny, some poignant, some personal. Some of the finest people I have ever worked with or met probably come up short with documents[ii]. What I can say from deep experience is absent the contributions of these workers, much less would be getting built in America and at a much slower pace. Much more could be written, but I only want to present a general outline for a broader view.

One more set of stats is needed for additional perspective. The major justification for the mass incarcerations and deportations has been the much publicized stories of horrific crimes committed by what the administration refers to as “illegal immigrants.” The common inference is that the preponderance of the undocumented are a danger to the rest of us. Gang members, terrorists, murderers, rapists, child traffickers, carjackers, awful people. No one would ever object to rounding those miscreants up and dropping them down a deep hole. But is that the norm for these people without papers? Actual numbers from the most comprehensive studies to date that have been done in Texas show that just under 80% have no criminal records and many of those crimes are traffic offenses, DUI’s, and misdemeanors. The real numbers of felony conviction rates from the Texas study funded by the Federal Department of Justice show that native born citizens have a felony conviction rate of 1,422 per 100,000. The comparable tally for undocumented immigrants was 782 per 100,000, which is about 55% of the native born rate.[iii]

ICE agent Photograph by Olga Fedorova_AP

Masked ICE (Immigration Control Enforcement) agents are busily scooping them up. Some are much publicized criminals and gang members. However, the big numbers come from raiding meat processing plants, farms, landscape and groundskeeping crews, then going after construction jobsites and day laborers at big warehouses and Home Depots. New ICE agents are being recruited as young as 18 years old with a $50,000 signing bonus to quickly ramp up the number of agents. There are leaked internal memos citing a 3,000 per week target or quota; a number that has since been denied by those that wrote the   memos. In the early days of the roundup the documentation for those who had been arrested showed that 50% had criminal records; by June, that had dropped to 30%. As conservative influencer and podcaster Joe Rogan protested, we expected them to take murderers off the street, but we are now arresting landscapers, construction and Home Depot workers. Reports are that 60,000, many formerly employed and paying taxes, now languish in makeshift barbed wire camps in substandard conditions called celebratory names like “Alligator Alcatraz.”[iv] What could go wrong?

“The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions.” Rene Girard “It is not an accident that the victims are always chosen from among those who are in some way different, vulnerable, or powerless, and therefore not easily able to defend themselves.” – from interviews with Gerard by Alain de Botton[v]

There is still a darker side to this: a long sad history of scapegoating in our immigration policy and politics. What is happening today is just one more dismal chapter of how to get elected by placing blame for our unhappiness and dysfunction on a convenient tackling dummy. When any human beings are downgraded to being moving pieces on a political battlefield, bad things happen. When a large group of human beings are feared, blamed, vilified, dehumanized, and degraded based solely on their immigration status, not on the individual’s record or “moral character,” we have lost our way.

Whether it was the common signs, “No Irish Need Apply,” of the mid nineteenth century or the derogative “WOPS”[vi] reference for Italian immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when new large groups of a particular ethnicity immigrate to America, the fear and loathing of the unknown soon emerges among us and is leveraged by politicians with their wet finger in the air looking for votes.

I do not advocate open borders, secure borders should be a given, but a cautionary note about how we handle millions of the people who live here now and have for a decade or longer. Do we need to round out secure borders with a system analogous to the 1940’s registry as more humane, more just, more common sense than the big roundup? Not to be described both inaccurately and mockingly as “amnesty,’ but a better way to treat those that share our neighborhoods, join us in worship, pay taxes, create families and do what immigrants have always done here: make America great[vii].

“You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”  Ronald Reagan’s last speech as President. (Transcript.  Video excerpt.)

[i] Don’t’ take my word for it. Do your own short research on comparing the various 1929-1940 registration acts and the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) for a sense of how complex and misunderstood now out of date these laws are, and none of which remotely solves the current morass. Google or ChatGPT or your favorite bot will do. It’s not hard to find.

[ii] Here’s one such personal encounter from a blog post at least a dozen years old. Selvin.

[iii] U.S. Department of Justice–supported report, “Unauthorized Immigration, Crime, and Recidivism: Evidence From Texas (2012–2018)”, provides arrest rate data across several felony categories:

Violent crime arrests (2012–2018):

U.S.-born citizens: 213 per 100,000

Undocumented immigrants: 96.2 per 100,000

Drug crime arrests:

U.S.-born: 337.2 per 100,000

Undocumented: 135 per 100,000

Property crime arrests:

U.S.-born: 165.2 per 100,000

Undocumented: 38.5 per 100,000

Homicide arrests:

U.S.-born: 4.8 per 100,000

Undocumented: 1.9 per 100,000

[iv] Judge orders much of “Alligator Alcatraz” dismantled.

[v] https://scapegoatshadows.com/alain-de-botton-rene-girard/

[vi] The common understanding is the derivation of the insulting WOPS characterization as With Out Papers is false. It came from an overheard and misunderstood enthusiastic greeting of Italians to one another.

 John Ciardi, Browser’s Dictionary:

”WOPS is a “Pejorative name for an Italian. . . . From the Italian, south-of-Rome dialect, guappo, dude. Introduced into America c. 1900, [H. L.] Mencken cited guappo as a common form of greeting among Italian immigrants. It was never that but a rather jovial exclamation when a man showed up in his flashiest Sunday best: che guappo! What a dude! . . . (The commonly offered derivation W(ith) O(ut) P(apers), with reference to immigrants at Ellis Island is nonsense.)”

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August 3, 2025 · 5:57 pm

DOGE’d

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.” C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (preface)

A friend I greatly admire recently announced to us that he had been “DOGE’d.” A retired senior twenty year military officer with deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan, he had been working in serious business at the highest level as a civilian for the Department of Defense on a war planning committee with others with three and four stars. He is smart, funny, unfailingly pleasant, and possesses the wisdom and experience necessary to be at the heart of strategic planning. But he was one of the newest members and fell on the vulnerable side of whatever line was drawn by the newly minted Elon Musk Department of Government Efficiency bureaucrats and their arbitrary algorithms.

Another young woman, who is a personal favorite of ours, is the fish and wildlife ranger who manages the national wildlife refuge where we volunteer. She works extraordinarily hard as a steward of our irreplaceable shared natural resources and helping to inculcate in the many families with kids that come her love and respect for natural ecosystems and all things wild. Friends of hers with less seniority were within the probationary year of their hiring. Recruited, vetted, hired, trained, doing important work, gone.

No notice, many had never received a performance review. They weren’t laid off in a way that acknowledged their humanity or individual contributions and talents but unceremoniously notified by a boilerplate email sent in a group memo on a Friday afternoon to clean out their desks. Fired for “performance” with no explanation or documentation or decency and with all the compassion exhibited by the big boss when he fired people on his “reality” TV series, “The Apprentice.”[i] Many were exemplary employees, the future of their agencies. No reduction of force notice was filed that would have been required by law had there been a properly administered layoff procedure. Brutal, final, and rushed harsh edicts of the worst of the technocrat bureaucratic impulse. They have since tried to rehire some after they realized the cuts were too deep and the mission was in jeopardy. Many are reluctant to submit to more abuse, and the most talented have moved on.

Her boss, a wildlife ranger with over a quarter of a century of experience took a lucrative early retirement buyout at least partially due to the fear, chaos, and uncertainty that ran rampant in Fish and Wildlife as well as with the Park Service, Forestry, and Bureau of Land Management, which received similar treatment. Collectively, they are the stewards of our most precious natural resources and irreplaceable lands. Her superior planned months of an orderly transition of leadership, passing on to her successors her experience and judgment. Her end of career hand-off, the notes that came to her mind as she reviewed what she most wanted the next generation of wildlife rangers to know and intuit while she trained her replacements, her love of it all, was cut short by the buyout deadline,  gone like a late summer leaf blown off too early.

“In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.” Hannah Arendt, On Violence

Have no doubt that the zealous DOGE young Turks with their AI tools and search algorithms imported from the mega Musk, Inc, are every bit as much bureaucrats as those found in some of the governmental departments to which they are taking a scythe. Bureaucrats marching to different orders from different managers handing out a different mission: not the usual plan to metastasize, entrench, and harden their silos as would be normal to bureaucracies, but radical deforestation. Are the right branches being whacked off? Or are only the unhealthy trees being culled? And are the skills of the cutters up to the job? Those are pertinent questions.

Stephan Covey’s perennial business best seller, “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” comes to mind. In one section he describes perfectly the difference between leadership and management that I have never forgotten. The manager given the marching orders to cut down a forest sets up productivity tracking indices, spreadsheets, daily plans and objectives, gathers sufficient tools and labor, assigns the tasks according to skills and experience, and daily monitors the progress of the project and state of his organization. Leaders climb the tallest tree, survey the land, and yell down to the managers, “Wrong forest!!”

The managers are not the primary problem, not that they are innocent of errors and clumsy implementation, but leadership barking out quotas with impatient, imprudent, and imperfect planning are clear cutting productive timberland and leaving other land choked with brambles and thorns and invasive species.

As a forty five year conservative, I am confident there is plenty of judicious pruning to be done in the Federal government, but choosing the right sections and selecting the right trees must be done with great care, wisdom, analysis, and judgment so as not to destroy the marvelous forest and drop the wrong trees.

 Democrats “are the party of government activism, the party that says government can make you richer, smarter, taller, and get the chickweed out of your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work, and then they get elected and prove it.” P.J. O’Rourke, Parliament of Whores

One of our most loved nostalgic pleasures is to ride where we once took our kids on the back roads of Maine forty years ago, stopping along the way to remember. This week we took the long loop around Rangely Lake up Phillips Road from Weld, then Route 4 to the center of Rangely before turning back south towards Dixfield on Route 17. We meandered along the west side of the lake with splendid vistas around every corner of the four hundred million year old, glacier carved valleys and northern Appalachian Mountains. Ancient things, ever new.

On the way north, we stopped at Small’s Falls, a state rest area adjacent to a four tier, fifty four foot drop on the Sandy River in Township E.  The Sandy River, lower on the river, is slower, wider and deeper with warm pools along its serpentine route from the Sandy River Ponds to the Kennebec River. The same river provided our most frequent swimming holes when we lived in Farmington forty years ago. Upstream, Small’s Falls was a geological accident along the Sandy River’s way.

The multiple drops each create deep pools surrounded by ten or fifteen or twenty foot cliffs, which we, our kids, and others visit during the few weeks of hot summer days each year. Picnic, swim, slide along some of the centuries smoothed rocks like a free Water Country slide, and gathering our resolve, jump with a quick adrenaline thrill from the highest cliff we could muster the courage to climb barefoot, leaping out to drop at thirty two feet per second per second acceleration into the shocking cold water.

While walking there this week, full of memories, we ran into fellow Rhode Islanders and struck up a conversation with a young couple in their late thirties with their first baby. He worked remotely out of his home as a virtual family psychologist. She had recently taken her generous buyout from the DOGE largesse after working for fifteen years for the Veteran’s Administration health group with the VA Hospital in Rhode Island. She left not because she no longer thought what she did was valuable and had lost her love for the work with the PTSD and disabled veterans (she hadn’t), but because she feared her job would be eliminated and leave her cut loose with no notice. She said many others were making similar decisions. Like the wildlife and park rangers, younger, newer employees were being summarily fired. Her level of experience was offered the buyout. Fear and uncertainty did the rest.[ii]

The VA had always been considered almost sacrosanct, a safe job as the nation did the best it could to honor IOUs it could never fully repay its wounded warriors. No longer. She told us the damage being done would have to be undone sooner rather than later because wait times were blowing up, veterans who desperately needed help would not get it, and an outraged public would demand quick restoration of services. The problem was that new hires would not have experienced staff to train them properly, the close to retirement folks with fewer options were getting burnt out and counting their days until retirement. Essential mid level competence that sustains any organization was being eviscerated. She thought the damage would not be an easy fix. Absolutely necessary to reconstruct, but not readily remedied. “Decades of damage,” she said.

She sighed sadly. Decades of damage.

“Bureaucracies force us to practice nonsense. And if you rehearse nonsense, you may one day find yourself the victim of it.” Laurence Gonzales, Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things

  

[i] Fake, sensationalized entertainment, an occupation for which he is much better suited.

[ii] This is a disaster being visited upon many agencies: losing their most competent core of professionals. NASA is one. “Nearly one in five NASA staff (and scientists) opt for voluntary exit.” Another decimated critical group are those predicting, tracking, and warning us about devastating storms.” Hundreds of weather forecasters and other federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration employees on probationary status were fired Thursday, lawmakers and weather experts said.”

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November 22, 2024 · 11:16 pm

perspective

Someone left the cake out in the rain

I don’t think that I can take it

‘Cause it took so long to bake it

And I’ll never have that recipe again

Oh, no…. Jimmy Webb, “MacArthur Park”

[i]We have survived the election of 2024 (so far). Some are fleeing the country and heading to more stable Perspectivesociety – like France or Somalia. Some are pledging to shun and have no contact with family, friends and neighbors who voted for the winner (which does not bode well for some marriages, block parties, and Thanksgiving dinners). Some are joining the “4B” movement[ii] of women who are shaving their heads and pledging no men, no dating, no sex, no marriage, and no children.

This seems counterproductive to long-term societal health in a nation nearly 25% below the replacement rate necessary to sustain the population and programs like Social Security and Medicare. Not to mention sustaining a trend to run out of consumers in a country that is centered on consumerism. Creating together in solidarity a joyful future full of hope. Makes sense to me.

And so it goes.

“In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed and the next place, oblige it to control itself.” James Madison, Federalist Papers

The campaigns of both parties, never a bloodless affair, were dispiritedly acrimonious. Opponents were not merely variously fascist, racist, murderous, communist, or tyrannical; they were evil instruments of the devil, irredeemable and odious. We all lived through the recent campaigns in which the Harris campaign raised and spent over a billion dollars in direct funds and around six hundred and fifty in outside PAC spending. The Trump campaign raised about three hundred and eighty million in direct campaign funds and another seven hundred and eleven million in outside PAC spending.[iii] That’s an astonishing jackpot and a lot of ads we sat through. And been polled about. And identifying which voters were likely to support the candidates, then trying to turn them out. Vitriol ruled. Accusations flew. Lies abounded. I was very happy to see the backside of that.

We hate politicians. We want principled leaders who are courageous, articulate, calm, and not noisy faultfinders. We want statesmen, but they are scarce. What we have are opportunistic candidates who tell us what we think we want to hear depending upon the audience that day. Not a recent phenomenon, but seemingly endemic in our system of governance; this sorry state is – in the end – the nature of representative democracy.

“With exceptions so rare that they are regarded as miracles and freaks of nature, successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular—not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately.” Walter Lippmann, “The Decline of Western Democracy”, Atlantic Magazine, February 1955.

election map

An alternative to despair (or elation) after the election might be to take a deep breath, look at the results and learn, maybe change course. With a cursory look, the Red Wave seems to have been decisive, a trifecta, Executive Office, Senate, and House. There is some evidence to support triumphalist gloating. In the electoral college, President Trump captured 312 out of a possible 538 and Kamala Harris a distant 226, a remarkable gain of 80 delegates since his loss in 2020 and a percentage gain of nearly fifteen percent. Tsunami scale.

However, once we look at the detail, it gets a little murky. The margin of total voters was slim, under two percent, and after the multiple third party candidates are factored in, he didn’t have a true majority over fifty percent. The Red Wave means something, but it is more a pronounced ripple. Except for four states, the left – right split is not hard to decipher. Two percent of voters make the difference; of course, there was a whole lot more than that in geography.[iv] Mostly the coastal elites v the ‘basket of deplorables’ in flyover country.

There is something else going on, and an election of a disruptive and off-putting real estate developer and game show host is not going to solve all our problems and cure all our ills.

Two thirds of the voters in the country think we are headed in the wrong direction. Our leaders seem not to recognize the struggles of those who don’t go to wine tastings in enclaves like Georgetown. Despite all reassurances of a recovered economy, most of us are aware that accumulated twenty one percent inflation since 2020 is painful. We get nervous every time we go to the grocery store. Paying the credit card bills and keeping nutritious food on the table for our kids and taking them to the doctor when they need it seems to be ever more at risk.

I won’t reiterate what people better informed and smarter than I have covered with well-reasoned insight.[v] See the footnotes below for links to some good sources with which you may not be familiar.

“What people want to be governed by a ruling class that holds it in contempt? What historical precedent is there for a lasting culture whose story-makers are embarrassed by their own ancestors? How can any culture continue into the future if it is teaching its children a deeply disturbing form of racialised self-loathing?” Paul Kingsnorth, “The Abbey of Misrule” Substack, “The Faustian Fire,” April 28, 2021

The seemingly irreconcilable divisions of polity and principles have not abated. If anything, the passions of the election have widened the chasm. For politicians, the political process, the legacy media that once served as a de facto fourth branch of government to keep legislators honest and voters informed, and in the immense Federal bureaucracy scornfully referred to as the ‘deep state,’ trust is at an all time low point. Approval ratings of the current administration were in the thirties. So, an unlikable and unlikely challenger who himself has approval ratings just better than small plastic bags full of dog excrement left on the side of a hiking trail made an historic comeback. His disapproval ratings approach ‘fear and loathing’ among his many detractors. The election has been resolved; the divide that separates us has deepened.

Seventy five plus million voters chose a problematic candidate, a blustering disruptor with baggage. Why would they do so? The obvious answer is in the previous citation that just under seventy percent of us think the country is headed in the wrong direction. We want a disruptor who promises to shake the foundations and to fix us. We’re unhappy with a paycheck to paycheck wallet and not sure we can pay for groceries if we make our car payments. We’re unhappy with a national debt that exceeds our mortgage per household[vi]. We’re unhappy with our credit card balances growing so rapidly to keep ourselves temporality afloat – currently all together at $1.17 trillion, a daunting high water mark. We’re unhappy with Federal agencies holding enormous power seemingly targeting political enemies. We’re unhappy with incessant, ideological ‘wokeism’ incoherence, which is increasingly detached from what most see as reality. We’re unhappy reading about and experiencing that agenda being forced upon the institutions of our society: our schools, our government, and even private businesses. Out of our control to deter – so much seems out of our control and beyond our power to affect. Desperate measures – we elect as savior a serial liar and (possibly) reformed exploitive womanizer who calls people ugly names. What the hell is wrong with us?

We’re unhappy with the government we’re living under, and the politicians hold their own subjects outside the Beltway in transparent contempt. That we would willingly choose such a flawed and self-absorbed candidate, one so laden with hubris and flamboyant braggadocio, insulated by surrounding himself with sycophants,  cries out that we are in trouble and see no easy path out.

But choose these people we do. We don’t trust them, and they don’t trust us.

We ask our representatives to accomplish the impossible with effortless grace while looking telegenic, then we disdain them and call them evil. Who would apply for such a job?

“The third and most significant source of pressures which discourage political courage in the conscientious Senator or Congressman… is the pressure of his constituency, the interest groups, the organized letter writers, the economic blocs and even the average voter. To cope with such pressures, to defy them or even to satisfy them is a formidable task. All of us occasionally have the urge to follow the example of Congressman John Steven McGroarty of California, who wrote a constituent in 1934: One of the countless drawbacks of being in Congress is that I am compelled to receive impertinent letters from a jackass like you in which you say I promised to have the Sierra Madre mountains reforested and I have been in Congress two months and haven’t done it. Will you please take two running jumps and go to hell.” From “Profiles in Courage” by John F Kennedy, 1955, Harper

No, something else far deeper is going on, trust is broken, the culture is broken, and one election is not going to fix it. Maybe no election can fix it. More to follow next time. The often quoted lines from Yeats’ “The Second Coming”[vii] seem more instantiated every passing year:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.”

[i] Open source image. The big rock and the photo are not retouched or Photoshopped. Turn upside down if you want a different perspective.

[ii] 4B Movement of fear, misandry, and suicidal bitterness.

[iii] Tracking political spending and sources of funds: https://www.opensecrets.org/2024-presidential-race

[iv] Election map – Associated Press

[v] From the Tangle news website: https://www.readtangle.com/final-2024-election-post-mortem/ or here from James Heaney at De Civitate: https://decivitate.substack.com/p/some-impromptu-post-election-thoughts

[vi] The average mortgage balance per household is around $146,000. The Federal debt exceeds $35 trillion and growing rapidly. Expressed as a per household debt, each household is on the hook for over $266,000. No business or home could support such a load.

[vii] Poetry Foundation. W.B. Yeats. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming

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November 7, 2021 · 6:16 pm

Well Scripted Redux

“The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

science vs politicsJournalists are not the only group wittingly or unwittingly conditioning our thinking. Nor are they the only group that believes they have a corner on virtue and where the world should be headed. A recent article in the MIT Press Reader, “Why Science Can’t Settle Political Disputes”[i] documented how politicians line up to use science as a bludgeon to convince others of the rightness of their cause. Whose science and how it should be interpreted is the issue and a valid one.

However, the article fails to develop adequately a more insidious calamity with current politics and science. In his Farewell Address,[ii] President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned in 1960 about the danger of collusion in a “military-industrial complex.” What is less well known in the same address is this warning: “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” A vast topic by itself, but for this post, ideology drives not only research priorities, but tweaking results to conform to an established orthodoxy is another example of the effects of hidden indoctrination of progressive ideology. Those results that are favored from climate change to so called gender fluidity get funded for more grants and more money for researchers along with the opportunity for career reputation and advancement. One of the consequences is the crisis of repeatability in scientific experimentation. A close second is the “good ol’ boys club” degradation of the “peer reviewed” imprimatur of scientific research.

Neither have history and the law escaped with unfettered liberty from the fishbowl in which we swim, murky from indoctrination and utilitarian ethics. The ideologue justifies any means necessary to gain victory. A leaked 1973 memo during the Roe v Wade no holds barred grudge match is illustrative. A significant amicus brief was submitted and hammered into the heads of the justices: a false narrative first put together by lawyer Cyrus Means.

The Roe team claimed that a long history exists of abortion tolerance in state’s law prior to 1850. That the reality was precisely the opposite did not discourage the attorneys from creating the propaganda and hammering it home. Attorney Roy Lucas drafted the review used to lay a major piece of the theoretical constitutional background for the decision by the lead attorney, Sarah Weddington. Lucas received a memo from one of his assistants, law student David Tunderman. He acknowledged that the historical narrative was false but thought the use of it fully justified in service of the end they all wanted. Supreme Court Justice Blackmun in the final decision cited the Means bogus narrative in support of the Roe decision.

Rarely has the cynical utilitarian ethics of the zealot been on such clear display.[iii] “David Tunderman wrote that Means’ ‘conclusions sometimes strain credulity’ but nonetheless concluded that ‘where the important thing is to win the case no matter how, however, I suppose I agree with Means’ technique: begin with a scholarly attempt at historical research; if it doesn’t work, fudge it as necessary; write a piece so long that others will read only your introduction and conclusion; then keep citing it until courts begin picking it up. This preserves the guise of impartial scholarship while advancing the proper ideological goals.’”

 So it is written, so it shall be.

“The sad truth about humanity…is that people believe what they’re told. Maybe not the first time, but by the hundredth time, the craziest of ideas just becomes a given.” Neal Shusterman, ”Unwholly”

How did this bizarre detachment befall us: the collapse of even the ideal of objective truth? The desired end is what matters; how we get there is up to the spreaders of the narrative necessary to achieve the end. Some of the answers lie in the higher education institutions over the last fifty years or so. The students then become the teachers and administrators in most of our schools, in universities certainly, and increasingly now in high schools and elementary schools with the orthodoxy enforced by the teacher’s unions.

We will look at a few examples, but we are awash in them.[iv]  What is most troubling is that administrators, politicians, and teachers’ unions are determined to keep the extent and content of the conditioning out of the reach of “meddling” parents. Much of the disputed content is contained in two general areas: race and gender, both mainstays of the progressive agenda. As former Governor Terry McAuliffe of Virginia said recently in support of teachers’ unions, which are under fire in Virginia, “Parents should not be telling schools what to teach their kids.”[v]  It is no surprise his campaign to try and retake the governor’s mansion received $25,000 in campaign contributions from the teacher’s union.

There is so much of this that it’s difficult to comprehend the damage, so this will provide some a few summary descriptions with footnoted links that you can follow until either your attention span or your spirit runs dry. There are many more with just a cursory search. The point of this blog post is general awareness of the agenda parents are facing today deciding where their children are educated. The response of the progressive ideologue, whether in the media or the education bureaucracy is to deny that these things are being taught. They are lying. As in the Roe memo, it is not the truth that holds sway, but only that the orthodoxy prevails. [vi] What we all have lost was lamented by Friedrich Nietzsche in the nineteenth century. “I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.”

“It’s gone away in yesterday

Now I find myself on the mountainside

Where the rivers change direction

Across the Great Divide.” Nancy Griffith, “Across the Great Divide”[vii]

 

Right here in Rhode Island, we have a teacher’s union suing a school committee and a parent to keep the content of the curriculum secret after she filed multiple requests to simply view what her child was being taught, especially regarding critical race theory and gender identity.[viii]

In Fairfax County and Loudon County Virginia, the battle has been well and truly joined. Attempts of parents to challenge the curriculum or to just find out what it contains have been greeted by derision and condescension. Who are parents to question what is being taught to their kids? Sample books were found in even elementary school libraries that taught among other things how to perform oral and anal sex and depicted adult/child sex in a positive light.[ix]One father whose daughter was sexually assaulted by a fourteen-year-old, skirt wearing boy professing as a girl in the school restroom cried out to the school department in protest. He was arrested, cuffed, and hauled off.[x]

The most alarming story began with the national teachers’ unions sending a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland requesting that parents who question school curricula to the school boards be investigated as domestic terrorists. He has sent the FBI around to monitor the situation. After the uproar from the parents ensued, the union rescinded its letter, but former Supreme Court nominee Garland still deploys the unfettered power of the Department of Justice to investigate parents who question what their children are exposed to.[xi]  Garland was not dissuaded by the disclosure that his son-in-law owns a company, Panorama, that conducts personally invasive student surveys and produces training programs to further the progressive race agenda and lands multimillion dollar contracts as consultants for school departments[xii]. Now the AG gets to sic the FBI on parents who may take issue with that agenda.

Honest evaluation does not shrink from the truth of our situation: the decades long first phase of the Culture Wars was lost to conservative or even middle of the road citizens. The strategic high ground was secured by the progressive front: academia, schools, journalists, and social media, even the military and the power of the state. So, what is next? What is left is a type of guerilla resistance and holding essential enclaves. Not exactly the Benedict Option, but something akin to it. And never giving up the fight.

Remember the Hilary Clinton book, “It Takes a Village?” The progressive principle is to get to the kids as young as possible. The state and its troops in the schools are better stewards than parents of the next generation. Isolate children from their parents for six or seven hours a day and prohibit the unenlightened parents who don’t buy into the progressive project from hampering the infusion of the new mindset. It is the lock and the key.

Our hope is that perhaps “woke” cuts two ways. The rising counteractions of parents who are increasingly awakened to the violation of their first responsibilities as teachers of their own kids is a drama unfolding daily. There are signs that the silent middle is rowing out of the doldrums and preparing to set sail. Terry McAuliffe lost his bid to retake the governor’s mansion last week. The decisive factor in the election was the extraordinarily high turnout of parents with kids in school.

 The stakes could not be higher.

 “Another little portion of the human heritage has been quietly taken from them before they were old enough to understand.” C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

[i] Why Science Can’t Fix Politics, MIT Press Reader

[ii] President Dwight Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the nation.

[iii] From “Wrong Then, Wrong Now: The Fake Abortion History of Roe v Wade,” Justin Dyer, Public Discourse, 9/29/21

[iv] See “Huxley Predicted the Future of Education”, John Miltimore, Intellectual Takeout, 2017. I also borrowed his illustration for the first post in this two-part series, “Well Scripted.”

[v] Terry McAuliffe tells parents to shut up and sit down; let the school department and teachers’ unions indoctrinate children to their agenda.

[vi] What educators teach and what they admit to teaching in some cases are very different.

[vii] Sadly, Nancy Griffith passed away earlier this year. Her songwriting was greatly respected by many of the more well-known names in country and folk music.  Across the Great Divide.

[viii] Teacher’s union declares that what is being taught to the kids in South Kingston, RI is not the business of the parents.

[ix] These books were pulled after they were disclosed in the meeting by a parent. That they were there in the first place is shocking.

[x] Lots of stories on this one with a quick search. Here’s one.

[xi] The Department of Justice sends its FBI attack dogs after parents seeing information on or challenging curriculum.

[xii] Merrick’s family cashes in on the curriculum agenda and “retraining” teachers and students.

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October 10, 2021 · 8:31 pm

Well Scripted

laurielipton_brave_new_world“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World[i]

Back in the mists of the early seventies for about a year I was a correspondent for a regional daily paper in Boston. I remember well the cigarettes smoldering in our ashtrays and cold coffee and typewriters at eleven at night trying to beat a deadline with coverage of a local town’s selectmen or planning committee meeting or a story about a local politician’s failings. Two fingered typing rapidly to fit in with the newsroom – men typed two fingered staccato; women reporters used all ten. They were faster.

The editor was young, male, and long haired, as was I. He wielded a good red pencil and sharpened our writing skills. He was also an ideologue who made it clear that stories favoring progressive issues would be given a pulpit; those that did not would suffer a brutal red pencil until we left out anything favoring opposing opinions. We took the message quickly to heart without it ever being clearly stated. It was not that we fabricated facts, but that we selected those facts that helped the cause and neglected those that didn’t. Since at that time I was sympathetic with the editor, I found no fault with the editing.

One of my most vivid memories of the job is a phone call I received from the wife of a planning committee member and local prominent conservative with whom I had had some run ins. Her husband was a condescending patrician with his reading glasses normally perched on top of his fashionably cut blond head and possessed of an expensive private school whiny drawl. I’d long harbored an aversion to the type. As he was a local developer, I found a conflict of interest in his decisions and comments during meetings when they jumped another builder through many hoops. The applicant was a rival of my planning board guy and was trying to get a subdivision approved that would compete with one in which the committee member was selling lots. Predictably, in my judgmental crusader persona, I savaged him in a couple of articles while my editor cheered me on.

His wife called my home, not screaming, but hurt, outraged, and in tears about the generous unpaid long hours and expertise that her husband graciously donated for the well-being of the town. And how could I do that to him and tell those lies so publicly? I didn’t understand his refined nature or his decency and goodness. Now, I didn’t share her view of him, but she did whole heartedly believe it.

I learned viscerally that while I was feeling self-righteous and clever, real people were affected and embarrassed. She was a good-natured, unpretentious woman with whom I had shared pleasantries before at an event; she thought we got along well. My ideological convictions conflicted with my feelings. But I soldiered on, nonetheless. My facts were right. The goals of my ideology overtrumped my emotions. The ends justified any necessary means. If I could short circuit the nascent political career of this man, well, all’s fair. Objective journalism was not my intent, nor my ideal. I may have been able to string together cogent sentences, but I was a bad reporter.[ii]

“It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free –to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act.” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

A Gallup poll[iii] this week chronicled the level of public trust in the media (or rather the lack thereof). It was the second lowest such poll ranking for this metric on record. Journalists compete for truth telling trustworthiness with back of the truck health supplement hawkers. Thirty six percent of the public retains a “great deal of” (a meager7%) or a “fair level of” (29%) trust that what they read in the newspapers or see in their evening news is reliable and accurate. Which, of course, means that sixty four percent do not trust what they read or see to be truthful, unbiased, and free from ideological distortion. The breakdown is more revealing: thirty one percent of independents, eleven percent of Republicans, and sixty eight percent of Democrats have confidence that what they see and hear in the mainstream media (MSM) is honest and factual. That seems to show that Democrats are dimwitted, incredibly credulous, or that their confirmation bias is operating on full wattage. I believe the last explanation to be most likely among them.

Other data show that over ninety percent of MSM reporters and editors that contribute to political campaigns contribute to Democrats and progressive causes. The seemingly obvious conclusion is that what we read and hear and see that passes for news is progressive indoctrination – we are regularly and consistently submitting to what Huxley called a “conditioned” state. No doubt this suits sixty eight percent of Democrats just fine. And sixty nine percent of independents and eighty nine percent of Republicans are not happy about it.

But the indoctrination gets worse, much worse. More to follow in the next post.

“The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass-communication, and should use this power as they tell us they must, namely, to impose necessary illusions, manipulate and deceive the stupid majority, and remove them from the public arena” Noam Chomsky

[i] [Image credit: (“DELUSION DWELLERS”, charcoal & pencil on paper, ©Laurie Lipton)]

[ii] I was not a bad reporter because I was telling lies – I was not. I was not a bad reporter because I was deterred by the hurt feelings of a subject – I was not. I was a bad reporter because I allowed my ideology to determine my subjects and the facts that I chose to include and not to include. There were plenty of other target subjects available and plenty of other facts. As the cliché goes, watching local politics is a target rich environment. But I focused that week on this planning committee member because I didn’t like his politics.

[iii] October 7 Gallup poll on the public’s trust of the media.

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August 5, 2021 · 7:59 pm

Swine, Double Speak, and Bringing Home the Bacon

“It has been the political career of this man to begin with hypocrisy, proceed with arrogance, and finish with contempt.” Thomas Paine

[i]smart_pig Recently I read an article about a bacon crisis looming in California. [ii] Sad is the plight of the owner of a small breakfast diner who survived the pandemic restaurant crisis but may be put out of business because her staple, bacon, eggs, and home fries, might soon be missing a key ingredient. A California law written in 2018 is coming into effect with regulations about the space and care required on pig farms for every resident pig to permit them to ship pork products into California. California consumes about fifteen percent of all pork products in America. A tiny portion of pig farms in Iowa, from which most of California bacon, ham, pork loins and related products come, can afford to comply. Hence, it will be eggs, home fries and yummy vegan bacon substitute soon in the diner, and the owner fears the line for Sunday brunch will be considerably shorter.

 The impetus for the new laws was a series of videos shot surreptitiously by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and others that graphically demonstrated that not unsurprisingly pigs are not treated very well on many pig farms or in slaughterhouses. [iii] Now before we change the subject of this post, let’s not get into a discussion of the horrors of pig abuse. We will stipulate that these are truly awful and need to be redressed by a humane society. The subject of the post is that undercover videos were taken. The owners and workers at the large farms who were filmed most certainly were not aware they were starring in the videos. Vice President Kamala Harris and now Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Xavier Becerra, both former Attorneys General for California, were in the forefront of legislation to protect chickens, pigs, and veal cattle from abuses.[iv] When the exposed malefactors are favored targets of the politicians, there is no squeamishness about the source of the information.

Another recent story revealed the video recordings made by an undercover journalist professing to interview Keith McCoy, a long-time lobbyist for Exxon Mobil Oil, for a job opening. [v]In it, the candidate spoke candidly about the duplicity of the big energy company paying “tribute to the virtue”[vi] of renewable energy and lowering carbon emissions to placate the climate change activists.  Another California Democrat, Rep. Ro Khanna, Chair of the Environments Subcommittee of the House Committee of Oversight and Reform,[vii] and various news outlets have no objection to undercover investigative videos when they unmask favored targets.[viii] Again, I’m not defending the possible hypocrisy of a huge international energy corporation , only demonstrating that undercover videos exposing it are perfectly acceptable with the Democrats who attack such a juicy quarry.

“Hypocrisy is not a way of getting back to the moral high ground. Pretending you’re moral, saying you’re moral is not the same as acting morally.” Alan Dershowitz

Current HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and VP Kamala Harris, when they were successive Attorneys General in California, investigated and prosecuted the Center for Medical Progress and their investigator, David Daleiden, for producing undercover videos which disclosed some appalling illegal activity of abortion clinics, primarily Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood is not a favored Democrat target, rather they are a favored partner.

Harris and her staff colluded directly with Planned Parenthood to push legislation that was originally drafted by a Planned Parenthood lawyer, then used to prosecute Daleiden for his undercover videos. She has been a major recipient of Planned Parenthood political donations for many years, as were many other Democrats. In the 2020 election cycle alone, PP donated $10,401,306 to political campaigns through their multiple PACS, all but $23,000 (or about 99.8%) of it went to the home team Democrats. [ix]

On January 20, 2021, Joe Biden was inaugurated as president. On January 28th, he announced he was issuing an executive order that the Trump ban on Planned Parenthood federal funding was ending. PP receives in a good year over $500 million in Federal dollars, much of it from Medicaid, Federal money disbursed by the states. Since 78% of their “clinics” are in or near poor minority neighborhoods, Medicaid is a major source of PP’s annual $1.3 billion in revenue.[x] Planned Parenthood benefits with a strong immediate return on investment for their ten million in PAC money to Democrats and Joe Biden.

The president of the non-profit Planned Parenthood is paid about a million dollars a year; the average salary of executives, including “clinic” directors is north of two hundred thousand; the average salary of the executives back at the mothership headquarters is over three hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.[xi] There is a lot at stake for these executives. Biden also is working very hard with his allies to eliminate the Hyde amendment from spending bills, specifically currently the funding for HHS, led by Becerra. The Hyde amendment was supported for years by Joe Biden. No more. It stipulates Federal funds cannot pay directly for abortions. Eliminating it would open new floodgates for Planned Parenthood and the abortion industry.

The rules for Becerra and Harris change according to the subject of the undercover videos. If it’s a meat producer or a multinational energy company, all’s fair. If it’s the partner of Democrat politicians, the gloves are off going after investigative journalists. Harris responded to Planned Parenthood’s concern about videotaping their clinic operators by working with PP to write legislation making such undercover videos a felony. As Attorney General, she found a friendly judge and with a subpoena directed a pre-dawn raid on David Daleiden’s home, confiscating computers, cameras, and videos. After she collected over $81,000 in campaign contributions from PP and moved on up to the Senate, her hand-picked successor, Xavier Becerra indicted Daleiden on fifteen felony counts; some were dropped, and nine are still being adjudicated.

All the legal actions against Daleiden by PP’s big cadre of lawyers are being defended against at great cost pro bono by the Thomas More Society[xii]. Another pet judge was found in San Francisco, and PP sued Center for Medical Progress and Daleiden personally. Obtaining a judgment in front of their judge in San Francisco, Planned Parenthood was awarded $2.2 million, which would bankrupt their victims. Planned Parenthood’s goal is to silence him permanently. They have injunctions against the release of more videos, which are as damaging as the early ones that made it into the public domain. Sue him back into the stone age, a scorched earth legal strategy that has him in danger of bankruptcy and/or prison. Thomas More Society and Daleiden are appealing all verdicts and fighting the judgement, which likely will persist for years in the courts and cost millions to defend. Planned Parenthood has plenty of money and lawyers ready to go.

What is it about David Daleiden that so terrifies PP and its Democrat allies? I invite you to look at the videos that were made public prior to the injunctions. Center for Medical Progress investigative videos. The first response from Planned Parenthood was to try and get the undercover videos outlawed in California, which they did. Then they unleashed their formidable public relations propaganda team to spread the rumors that the videos were fake and heavily edited. Daleiden responded by posting the full original, unedited versions including hours of edited out footage of riding in cars and eating in restaurants.

The evidence they disclose is damning. The investigative journalist Daleiden posed as a middleman broker buying fetal body parts to sell to research labs. Selling fetal body parts is illegal, so the stakes for the PP executives include felony convictions and prison. The videos show PP directors negotiating prices, describing how they can alter their abortion procedures with actual live cutting up fetuses to salvage specific baby parts. One said point blank that she wanted the additional money to fulfill her dream of owning a Lamborghini. Other videos show other PP employees promising that fifty livers should not be a problem if the price is right. As I suggested with the slaughterhouse videos, do not watch these on a full stomach. Documentation is well preserved, names are named, and faces are explicit. The cold and casual calculation of descriptions of procedures and price negotiation is chilling.

If put into general release, and they are not silenced, it would be impossible for Planned Parenthood to maintain the fiction that they are in this for the benefit of woman’s health care and “reproductive rights.” They kill and kill without remorse in a very organized fashion for big money, and there is not much they won’t do to keep that quiet.

“For some, trying to uphold such a distorted, upside-down morality is too much to bear. Frederica Mathewes-Green was a young pro-choice feminist. But after reading a physician’s account in Esquire of an abortion, her eyes were opened. “There I was, anti-war, anti–capital punishment, even vegetarian, and a firm believer that social justice cannot be won at the cost of violence,” Mathewes-Green recounted. “Well, this sure looked like violence. How had I agreed to make this hideous act the centerpiece of my feminism?”  Scott David Allen

[i] Smart pig picture is taken from an article in Modern Farmer, 2014, by Andy Wright. “Pig headed: How Smart are Swine”

[ii] Bacon May Disappear in California as Pig Rules Take Effect, Associated Press, Scott McFetridge, July 31, 2021

[iii] A short Google search will turn up many such videos investigating farms and slaughterhouses in Iowa, Nebraska, Kentucky, and other places. Here’s one from PETA. Don’t watch on a full stomach or before you head to the diner for breakfast: https://www.peta.org/videos/nebraska-pig-farm-investigation/

[iv] We are not vegan in our house, but we do buy cage free eggs, eat no veal, and buy meat from humanely raised pigs and grass-fed free-range beef. I’m not defending the people who treat animals inhumanely, only pointing out that the evidence that brought them down was collected by breaking California laws about spy videos from investigators and journalists.

[v][v] CNN exposes the Exxon Mobil videos shot by Greenpeace.

[vi] “Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.” Francois de La Rochefoucauld

[vii] Why does the name “House Committee on Oversight and Reform” sound suspiciously like an Orwellian Congressional Star Chamber?

[viii] Article on the hearing and the lobbyist.

[ix] Open Secrets, which tracks all political donations, shows this for Planned Parenthood. Over $2.9 million went to the Biden campaign or positive ads, and over $2 million went into attack ads against Donald Trump.

[x] For some information on the original eugenics’ agenda of PP, there are many resources. A start would be an old quo vadis blog post, Maggie Two.

[xi] Article with some examples: — CEO salaries at affiliates increased 22 percent in the last two years. All make over $100K.  According to former Texas clinic director and former PP national employee of the  year, Abby Johnson, they are bonused on meeting abortion quotas among other criteria. 33 make over $200,000 a year. 16 make over $300,000 a year. 6 make over $400,00 a year, and the boss makes over a million. The report said that the average Planned Parenthood CEO is “in the top five percent of all workers in the United States.” Non-profit is a fungible term.

[xii] Here is a link to the Daleiden and Center for Medical Progress cases. Thomas More Society is a non-profit group of skilled attorneys working on behalf of pro life and religious freedom cases. https://thomasmoresociety.org/client/david-daleiden/ Interestingly in case of strange bedfellows, PETA filed an amicus brief supporting Daleiden’s cause.

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March 28, 2021 · 8:56 pm

Maximum Benefit, Minimum Wage (Part Two)

“Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration.” Abraham Lincoln

rockefeller-beam-workers-lunch-construction (1)There is no substitute for what we learn in our early jobs. In 1968, minimum wage was set by the government at $1.60 per hour. The $15 an hour minimum wage proponent today claims that $22 or even $24 an hour is necessary just to remain even with inflation since then. But is that true? I did a quick projection from the $1.60 an hour in 1968, which is generally held to the be the time of the highest wage relative to inflation and most advantageous to the worker. A dollar’s worth of goods in 1968 would cost what today? The Consumer Price Index calculates that $100 in 1968 requires $771.30 in 2021 to purchase an equivalent amount of necessary goods[i]. Using that ratio would raise the minimum wage to $12.34 today. Not $24 or $22 or even $15, but $12.34. But it is $12.34, not the current $7.25, to which it was raised in 2009, a dozen years ago. That is a long time.

Without debating the free labor market and what role government should play in setting wages or prices, because that is far beyond the scope of this modest blog post, if we stipulate for discussion that there is some role government should play putting their thumb on the scales to help the working person earn fair wages, then clearly some adjustment is needed in the minimum hourly wage to which workers should be entitled for their labor.

What would the impact be of raising the minimum wage to $15? Most large companies exceed that already as a hiring wage. The labor market before the COVID recession hit was close to full employment, and to hire anyone for skilled or even semi-skilled jobs required that level of pay, at least in New England. Now things are different, and there are ten million people who were employed then that are not employed now. Market forces have pushed the full employment starter wage down a bit, but it will come back. Although perhaps not for the type of starter jobs most people rely on to enter the work force when they are young.

Small companies, the incubator for most new jobs, cannot afford to hire untrained, inexperienced workers with no known work history at $15 an hour. The high turnover and the number of misfires trying to fill those unskilled positions mitigate against starting people off at a high wage and still make the profits necessary to remain a small business and grow. Small business owners have told me they cannot afford to and will not hire inexperienced labor with no training and with a possibly deficient work ethic at that pay rate. With the cost and unproductivity of new hires with few skills, such a starting rate would put them out of business.

“Work is about more than making a living as vital as that is. It’s fundamental to human dignity, to our sense of self-worth as useful, independent, free people.”  President Bill Clinton

The Congressional Budget Office did a detailed evaluation of the economic impact of a mandated $15 minimum wage. What would that look like when implemented? The estimate from the CBO calculated that raising the minimum wage to $15 would add money to the total national payroll, but a lot of that would be offset by the loss of income to the 1.4 million people whose jobs would be lost. Rather than go into all the detail, the CBO analysis is available, and I recommend you review the whole document[ii]. It would add to the Federal budget deficit by $54 billion over the ten-year period projected in the study. Health care costs would increase. Child-care costs would rise mostly hurting the lower income brackets with two worker families who rely on these services. Childcare costs project to grow to between 30% and 50% of the income of the families needing it.

My greatest concern is that many of the job losses would occur in starter jobs where young people learn to survive and prosper in the workplace. Even the raise in 2009 to $7.25 prompted employers concerned about keeping their labor costs under control to turn to automation: from innovation in operating system software that cut down data entry jobs to kiosks in restaurants, especially fast-food restaurants, to replace counter workers. The more repetitive types of lower skill jobs in shops and factories – like making fence panels — would be quick casualties. A higher minimum wage can be offset for businesses striving to remain profitable in a competitive environment (when is it not a competitive environment?) by eliminating positions and replacing them with capital investment in robotics and software, one-time costs that are amortized over time and result in overall cost reductions.

This is what the CBO predicts will happen – the loss of 1.4 million jobs – and it will affect disproportionately the young part timer trying to get started and the educationally disadvantaged breaking into the labor market. Young workers need to improve their lives with the dignity and structure of work necessary to escape the frustration, discouragement and boredom that leads to no good place. Those who most need an entry into the workforce must be afforded the opportunity to learn the physical skills and the “life skills” so necessary throughout our lives.  A government decree does not guarantee them that nor can it justify that early formational work is worth $15 an hour to an employer. Perhaps, as my son suggested, an exception could be made for starter jobs like intern positions for students. That is an idea worth some discussion.

A shortage of starter jobs would rob the inexperienced of the chance to make some mistakes, to build their confidence and to experience the satisfaction of taking pride in their work – to build productive habits for a lifetime. Can we afford to forfeit this opportunity only available for a few short years for so many, when they are young and have so many miles to go before they sleep?

“It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one’s dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.” W. Somerset Maugham

[i] Consumer Price Index calculator.

[ii] Congressional Budget Office study on raising the minimum wage to $15:

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February 10, 2021 · 7:39 pm

Slow Loris

“I love inventing names, but I also collect unusual names, so that I can look through my notebook and choose one that suits a new character.”  — J. K. Rowling

I like the sound of words, especially names, and they make me curious. The slow loris is a genus of nocturnal, slow moving, slow reproducing mammals, mostly in Southeast Asia and the nearby islands[i]. All the identified species are listed as “vulnerable” or “endangered.” Borneo loris, Bengal loris, and Pygmy loris are some of them. We should be comforted that we are free of any known Fast loris or Giant loris species.

When we think of venomous creatures, what comes to mind are invertebrates like scorpions, Australian box jellyfish, and brown recluse spiders, or maybe vertebrates like copperheads, king cobras, Gila monsters and Mexican beaded lizards. The slow loris is the only known venomous primate (primates include chimps, silverback gorillas and Irishmen.)

This unique primate slow loris bite can cause acute allergic reactions and is a devil of a bite to heal – the toxin eats away flesh and prevents the body from mending itself properly, and sometimes their bite can be lethal to humans.  A bizarre aspect of their behavior is what precedes the thing biting you: it licks and sucks its elbow. The interaction of saliva and the venom sucked out of a hidden elbow patch is then amplified in its toxicity by the creature swishing the mix around in its mouth prior to chomping you.

If a slow loris you meet goes for its elbow, run. Fast. At least they probably will not be able to catch you.

“We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.” – Blaise Pascal

Our new presidential appointed climate change czar John Kerry was asked after the first day of the new administration how he believed the people who lost their 11,000 jobs due to the cancelling the XL pipeline in the Day One executive order could be helped. His answer was a masterwork of aloof cluelessness. Of course, he said, they should get jobs in solar plants.

Flying all over the planet in his family’s private jet that dumps hundreds of thousands of pounds of carbon into the atmosphere every year, it is easy for him to have missed what life is like for those who drive a well-maintained pickup with 165,000 miles on it to work. A pipeline welder – like the many other skilled craftspeople it has been my privilege to know over decades in construction and tree work – works long and hard for many years perfecting their craft, deeply identifies with the prestige their skilled job provides and takes great pride in employing those skills carefully to support their families. Welding pipe sections together so they last for many years without leaks or breakdown is not a trivial skill. A union pipe welder will average about $69,000 a year. Not a fortune like marrying into the Heinz family, or the six homes, multiple yachts and private jet Kerry and his wife own, but a solid, well earned income: enough, if one is prudent, to support a family, a mortgage, and maybe a modest annual vacation in a small-rented cabin or campsite for a week. The average worker in a solar plant makes around $40,000, and there are not many solar jobs in the states where the pipeline was being built. So, uproot a thousand miles and get your pay cut by 40%. Sounds reasonable. Why should they be upset?

Can’t see those betrayed folks from Kerry’s windsurfer anyway.

To a progressive elite on a grand mission, taking a 40% bite from their income and inflicting a heartbreaking blow to the dignity of some stranger whose life is incomprehensible to that visionary, and most likely just a “deplorable clinging to guns and bibles,” is a bit of the collateral damage necessary for the greater good when one is saving the planet.

The Biden executive order may run into some significant speed bumps, one of which contains some high political irony. There are legal concepts relating to reliance expectations[ii], and not to drift off too far into the underbrush, they were upheld in 2020 by the Supreme Court against the Trump administration decision to stop the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration policy. The 2012 Obama administration policy, while not providing a direct path to citizenship, eschewed deporting the so-called Dreamers who came to the United States illegally as infants or small children. Having lived for all practical purposes their whole lives in this country, been educated here, and built careers here, I think most reasonable and compassionate people would agree with some version of the policy. The Dreamers had expectations to continue their life here under DACA. The great majority of them were earning their way, raising families, paying taxes, and doing what all legal citizens do to better the society.  The Supreme Court agreed and ruled that under DACA protection, those folks should be able to rely on their reasonable expectations to not have their lives torn apart by immigration enforcement.

Well, it can be argued that union pipe welders, the Canadian oil trading providers with long-term purchasing contracts with refiners, and the multiple construction companies which geared up to fulfill signed contracts to build the XL pipeline extension have similar reason to rely on expectations to continue what they agreed to do and count on those promises without major disruption. I am not an attorney, but litigation is pending, and a court decision will probably resolve this executive action as well.

“To win the people, always cook them some savoury that pleases them.” Aristophanes, The Knights

But we sensibly ask, what of the executive action itself? Does it help our beleaguered planet to clear up its air? Plainly, many of the first day executive actions were prepared in advance to placate some of the more strident elements of President Biden’s awkwardly stitched together constituency. The XL pipeline order made a great headline in Mother Earth News. The XL pipeline had been put in place as the final connection from the Alberta oil fields to a much larger existing pipeline that runs from Nebraska to the refineries on the Gulf Coast. Long planned, construction was well underway.

For some perspective, more coal plants were shuttered under the Trump administration than any previous four-year period, and in 2020 for the first time since 1880, more electrical power was generated by renewables (wind, solar, hydro) than coal. All planned new plants in the USA to replace obsolete or closed plants are already ticketed as natural gas or renewables, with the majority renewable. However, unless all of us are willing to forgo our SUVs, pickups, and basic transportation, shut off our air conditioners and refrigerators, take cold showers, and ride horseback to visit relatives across the continent, we are going to need natural gas for electricity and fuel for our non-electric cars and jet planes for the foreseeable future. The trajectory driven by both economics and environmental concerns happily is and will continue to be to cleaner energy, but it is not going to be an instant transformation. The oil from the Alberta oil fields will be used irrespective of how it gets to the refineries.

The Biden executive action must be urgent though and will provide a safer means of transporting the crude oil the 1,179 miles from the Alberta sand oil fields to the existing pipeline head in Nebraska, right? More chance of spills with pipelines than trains or trucks, right? All the data shows pipelines, most of which are underground, are 4.5 times safer[iii] with fewer safety occurrences than those other means of transportation, and 70% of those fewer pipeline incidents have zero actual spillage or less than a cubic meter.  So, safety to those on route or to the environment is not addressed in the executive order.

Well, then, how about carbon emissions in the transportation process? This must not be just political posturing and ideological pandering, right?  Cancelling the pipeline saves the planet, right?  The pipeline would carry 830,000 barrels of oil to be processed into the fuel we need every day. Trains are better than trucks for safety and require less energy (and carbon emissions,) so we will use those best-case metrics. Trucks would be worse. The railroad industry boasts it is four times more fuel efficient than trucks.

A rail car carries 650 barrels. A barrel of oil weighs 300 pounds.  That is a lot of weight to transport. The largest allowed train is 100 cars, so it would take about twelve and three quarters full trains every day to take up the missed pipeline slack. These calculations do not consider what it takes to return the empty cars for refill, or idling cars and trucks stuck on rural railroad crossings while the long trains go by. The data to feed the calculations are readily available from various public sources, and I will not make this any longer by going through the detail on my spreadsheet, which is available, if you have interest. Trains use diesel fuel to pull their loads. The results are that moving all that oil from Alberta to Nebraska will blow about 3,340 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A day. About 1,218,514 tons of carbon dioxide a year for decades that would be saved by building the pipeline. So environmental damage is not addressed in the executive order. It is a false flag project, a green initiative in optics and headlines only.

So, if you are a green advocate, or a skilled union pipe welder, or a Dreamer, and you get to meet a president or an energy czar some fine day, that will be a memorable moment for you. But I caution you, always remember the slow loris that started this post. Unlike what the taxonomists tell us, that creature is not the only venomous and deadly primate. If that politician walking over to greet you sucks on his elbow, run for the door.

“Liars make the best promises.”  Pierce Brown, Golden Son

[i] More slow loris information for the insomniac.

[ii] American Bar Association webinar transcript on reliance expectations in the DACA case.

[iii] https://www.fraserinstitute.org/article/pipelines-are-safest-way-transport-oil-and-gas

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November 15, 2020 · 7:09 pm

The Widening Gyre

“The first principle of value that we need to rediscover is this: that all reality hinges on moral foundations. In other words, that this is a moral universe, and that there are moral laws of the universe just as abiding as the physical laws. (from “Rediscovering Lost Values”)” Dr. Martin Luther King

In 1972 my idealism, zeal, and what I came to learn was my naivete, led me to volunteer to participate in the nuts and bolts of activism within a political party rather than the demonstrations to which I previously had  been predisposed. First, we helped staff the survey phones for George McGovern. We were given a list of scripted issue questions, which carefully avoided directly asking for whom the subject planned to vote. After each call, we noted on our call sheet a ranking based on their answers from 1 to 5 with a 1 strongly supporting the other candidate and awarding a 5 if we thought they enthusiastically were on the side of the angels.

After some other tasks like signs and posters, on election day we newbies monitored voters at tables provided for party workers near the presiding officials at the polls. We carefully marked off each voter as they were announced, and late in the afternoon, delivered the marked off lists to our party coordinator. I was assured others would contact voters that favored us and offer them rides to the polls. I was living in Massachusetts, which was the only state the feckless Senator McGovern campaign carried, so I must have done a great job. We felt like insiders who worked the levers. How little did we know. I believe now we were “useful idiots,” as Vlad the First would say.

Years later, I learned through some who  are much more aware of how the world really works (as they are well established elected Democrat machine pols), that what really happened with my marked up list was likely some others more in tune with the party were sent in to vote for those who had not yet showed up. Especially targeted were the elderly and other registered voters known to be unlikely to venture out late in the day. Whether they were tallied in our surveys was irrelevant. Once when I was voting in the nineties before photo IDs were required, I personally witnessed at a polling place in Rhode Island[i] a chartered school bus parked out front in the early evening. A line of tired folks slogging through their civic duty was patiently queued up to reload the bus. One fellow near the front of the line asked another fellow checking names off a clipboard where they were headed next.

Before you grasp your head and moan that I am promulgating voter fraud myths and proposing that President Trump really won, I am not and cannot possibly know. Five hundred odd votes in Florida in Bush/Gore in 2000 are not 146,000 votes in Michigan in 2020. If I truly believed that voter fraud could be perpetrated on such a massive scale, I might despair. [ii]However, to believe that none occurs is to be as naïve as I was fifty years ago. I am a firm supporter of photo IDs, which we now have in Rhode Island, and they are not an onerous burden, as unwelcome as they are to the apparatchiks.

Then, again, tired poll workers may not have matched up signatures on millions of mailed in ballots as diligently as one would hope, and their training as graphologists may have been somewhat perfunctory. Lies and deceit on the scale needed to steal this most recent election seem inconceivable, but I have become a cynic, which is to be nothing more than an oft disappointed idealist.

“Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.” Mark Twain

Lies as morally acceptable in pursuit of desired ideological goals, the ethics of utility, relativism, and radical subjectivism should be considered in any discussion of election fraud. What is justified if our goals are considered (to us anyway) as noble and right? Does the whole democratic (small “d”) project break down when such malleable values are permissible? Are we asking the right questions?

Rita and I are more than a little wonky – no surprise, I am sure, to many of you. One night this week we streamed from a website that Rita found a ninety-minute panel discussion in 2015 between George Weigel and Yoram Hazony, well known writers and thinkers from the U.S. and Israel. A portion of the annual Advanced Institute in Jerusalem of the Tikvah Fund, the 2015 seminars covered in depth “God, Politics, and the Future of Europe.” “Tikvah hosted a conversation on “Modernity, Religion and Morality” to discuss the decline of Western Civilization and to probe some of the reasons behind it. What happens when faith in the God of the Bible deteriorates? How does that affect faith in reason and are the values of liberalism enough to sustain a society?”[iii]  See link in the notes below.

Many topics were touched on which have great relevance to that which so divides our society and whether Biblical morality has been overwhelmed by an aggressive secularization agenda, especially of the left. “Separation of Church and State,” both presenters contended means only no state intrusion into the practice of anyone’s faith (or lack of faith) and no designated state religion. Yet we seem to have decreed through an activist judiciary and press that no conscience informed by its faith has sufficient credentials to speak out on the vital moral issues of the day.  Is religion merely to be privatized, a pleasant, relatively harmless hobby for the weak, and no religiously informed conscience to be considered legitimate in public debate? The late Father Richard John Neuhaus coined a name for this public forum denuded of religion: the “naked public square,” wherein only non-religious voices should be heard. To me, these voices of objective reason informed by centuries of tradition are sorely needed, indeed critical, in a violently divided culture. What G.K. Chesterton called the “democracy of the dead” must not be silenced.

In these pages there have been previous discussions of the prerequisite of a morally sound electorate to sustain a democracy[iv]. I will not pursue those arguments again here, but I will suggest that a society deracinated of moral traditions could topple. A hundred years ago, one of my favorite poets, William Butler Yeats, wrote this (first stanza of “Second Coming”), probably his most quoted verse and the source of dozens of titles of blogs and books:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

In our own individual lives and in the life of our mutual and precarious society, has the falcon flown beyond hearing range from the Source of wisdom, prudence, mercy, and justice? Have we pulled up all the essential moorings and, adrift, look helplessly at the rocks and surf? Is our battle spiritual, not merely political and ideological?

With a sigh of relief, maybe we are liberated from four years of turmoil and tweets; we apparently sent the traveling circus train packing and revived the progressive Kool-Aid express in a national election. Or maybe we would benefit from re-reading the fable of the scorpion and the frog[v] and wondering whom we are carrying across the river now.

What we next encounter may be an uncertain future, however the same necessary voices that the progressive vision seeks to marginalize are those which murmur their prayers and talk quietly of hope, trust, kindness, and love for every person from tiny to aged. May these voices be heard, here and now, and by their Source and Benefactor.

“Look to yourselves that you do not lose what we worked for but may receive a full recompense. Anyone who is so ‘progressive’ as not to remain in the teaching of the Christ does not have God; whoever remains in the teaching has the Father and the Son.” 2 Jn 8-9

[i] We boast a more than 90% Democrat legislature here in Lil Rhody, a textbook of venal corruption.

[ii] This is not to say that concerns of the defeated should be ignored. All legal means of verification must be pursued to their end. I did some analysis by state, and margins in the closely decided states are razor thin. In Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, (easily enough to change the final results), the average margins per voting precinct are 5.7, 6.1,6.3 and 4.7 respectively. Per thousand voters, the average margins for the same states are 3.2, 2.8, 8.8 and 6.2. A switch of between three and four voters per precinct in these states would flip the outcome. The coronation by the media notwithstanding.

[iii] From the introduction text to the video. Well worth your time some evening when CGI superhero fantasies and the bread and circuses of professional sports are not your viewing pleasure. https://tikvahfund.org/posts/modernity-religion-and-morality-a-conversation-with-george-weigel-and-yoram-hazony/

[iv] https://quovadisblog.net/2020/08/09/quaker-hill/

[v] The scorpion that could not swim asked the frog to carry him on his back across the river. The frog refused because he did not want the scorpion to sting him. The scorpion pointed out that if he did that, both would drown, so the frog agreed to take him across. Halfway across the river the scorpion struck, and the dying frog cried out, “You’ve killed us both. Why did you do it?” The scorpion replied, “Because it is my nature.”

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October 12, 2020 · 3:34 pm

Consistency

“The Tudors hated to be wrong, and therefore never were.” Jeane Westin, “His Last Letter: Elizabeth I and the Earl of Leicester,” New American Library, New York, 2010

         Arguably, the two most divisive and bitter disputes in our nation’s history, not to mention the bloodiest, remain the nadir of the deep rifts in our country still. The first was dodged deliberately by the writers of the Constitution, and the second not even conceived of as a possibility. Both of these conflicting visions were rooted in a fundamental disagreement about the nature of human dignity and held positions of prominence most clearly drafted by the largest political parties: positions which were utterly opposed to one another, adamantly maintained, and the same party was in grievous error on both. And for the same reason.

The first was temporarily remedied by President Lincoln in a dubiously legal executive order designated as the “Emancipation Proclamation.” A more permanent solution enshrined in the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution was bitterly opposed by the Democrat Party. The 13th and first post-Civil war amendment ended slavery (except as a punishment for those convicted of crimes!?!).  Sending a constitutional amendment on to the states for ratification requires a two thirds majority in both branches of the Federal legislature.

The first step to ratification cleared quickly in the Senate. This remedy for the most grievous sin of the original Constitution was almost derailed by a larger minority Democrat contingent in the House. Passage in the House needed twenty Democrat votes added to all the Republican votes to attain a two thirds majority. Republican votes were secure in a party founded in anti-slavery convictions.  Only Lincoln’s arm twisting and procuring patronage jobs for soon to be unemployed lame duck Democrat representatives gained the requisite minimum Democrat votes, and the vote had to be taken before the post-election new Congress was formed. Some of the lame duck “yea” voters were menaced by other House Democrats who judged their self-serving betrayal of the party line as a capital crime. A few shots were fired, beatings inflicted, and dire threats abounded.

What immense harm and folly undoubtedly would befall the country if slavery were ended? What other ridiculous indulgences would follow? Would “n****rs” (their term) be granted full citizenship and, God forbid, the franchise to vote? Impossible. Most Southern Democrats saw this as a sure road to perdition and chaos. Democrats had owned all the slaves, and Democrats founded the Ku Klux Klan. Their Democrat political heirs wrote and enacted at the state level all the Jim Crow laws that perpetuated the degradation of the black population for another ninety years, and Democrats bitterly fought every measure of full equality.

As one result of the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties led by the heroes (and martyrs) of non-violence like Dr. King, Ralph Abernathy, John Lewis, Jesse Jackson and others, those horrendous laws and practices belittling the dignity and worth of human beings based on their color finally were put to a well-deserved end. All men and women of any color in our country can sit now in the front of the bus, eat in any restaurant, sleep in any hotel, and drink from any fountain of water to slake their thirst.[i]

“I always knew what the right path was. Without exception, I knew. But I never took it. You know why? It was too damn hard.” Colonel Frank Slade as played by the wonderful Al Pacino in “Scent of a Woman.”

 

In the latter decades of the twentieth century and persisting to this day arose the second divisive issue that assails our unity: abortion “rights” vs. “pro-life” advocates. Along with “Black Lives Matter,” not much will heat up the temperature in a room more quickly than this topic. Whether the discussion is elections, judicial appointments or endless social media diatribes, the positions seem ever more entrenched. The crux of the argument seems eerily like the first one, and just as intractable with no easy compromise possible. Is the tiny person in the womb a human being with inherent dignity and worth, and thus worthy of every protection she can be afforded? Or is she chattel, disposable, a relatively easily discarded encumbrance, and with her very life vulnerable to the decision of her mother, many times herself in desperate, lonely circumstances? Does the tragedy of the circumstances of the mother outweigh the humanity of a new victim? And if so, how are these conflicting needs to be resolved without multiplying tragedies?

The embryology, and thus the science, is undisputed: a newly conceived fetus (from the Latin meaning pregnancy, childbirth, and offspring) is forever uniquely endowed with genes from her mother and father. She begins at conception a continuum lacking only oxygen, food, and protection from harm, and without violent interruption, she is inevitably bound towards a life as a mature fully formed adult human being. The science is clear. Her fate is not.

Democrats who are not completely on board with public funding for abortion for any reason at any stage of fetal development up to birth are subject to harassment, stripped of Democrat credentials and political power or threatened with being “primaried,” which has become a coercive verb. Disavowed, disinherited, expunged from the record and party support. The money behind this comes from Midas wealthy and seemingly bottomless sources like Planned Parenthood and George Soros. They will not quit, and their pink shirted, vagina hat wearing, full throated, true believer underlings flood state houses across the land to intimidate and shout down all opposition to their program.

After the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, many lamented the passing of this brilliant long serving jurist. Agree with her judicial philosophy or not, her dedicated service as a jurist was defining. Sadly, mourning was co-opted by the abortion agenda in many places. Here in Rhode Island, an RGB shrine was set up at the State House as for a saint, ostensibly to honor the memory of Justice Ginsburg, but the hardcore subtext of this shrine was the perceived peril to unfettered abortion access, the blasphemous sacrament of the progressive movement. If any doubt exists about its primacy, zoom in on the picture of the Rhode Island statehouse shrine to RBG shown above.

Just as after many battles the dignity of the individual human person of color was declared and clarified in the civil rights struggle, will the innate humanity of tiny people worthy of love and safeguarding be similarly clarified and authenticated?  Will choices we make about who is free, who prospers and who dies continue to be utilitarian decisions, disregarding the intrinsic worth of that single life created Imago Dei? By denying the innate value of even one human person because of their race, gender, ethnicity, degree of imperfection or tiny size, we diminish the value of every life, including our own.

Those, dear friends, are questions worth pondering and the answers to them will characterize our civilization or its degradation, and inevitably form our individual hearts.[ii] Will we hasten our slide into dehumanizing the most vulnerable individual human life, or will we begin to claw back up the hill towards rediscovering and resurrecting our humanity? Quo vadis, America?

“’I hope you care to be recalled to life?’

 And the old answer.

 ‘I can’t say.’”     Charles Dickens, “Tale of Two Cities”, Chapman and Hall, London, 1859

 

[i] This is not to say that all Democrats of that era were bigots or persisted in fighting for repression of and disrespect for the dignity of black people through these heinous rules and regs. Certainly, John and Robert Kennedy along with Senator Hubert Humphrey come to mind. Ultimately after the assassination of JFK, the powers in the Democrat Party saw begrudging opportunity in the franchise for black voters, and they shifted to the cynical sanctimony many still pretend to.  When President Lyndon Johnson was speaking to his mentor and friend, Southern Democrat, Senator Richard Russell, who was leading the longest filibuster in Senate history (over 75 days) against the Civil Rights Bill (as reported by Doris Kearns Goodwin in her book” “Lyndon  Johnson and the American Dream”), Johnson said this:

“These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don’t move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there’ll be no way of stopping them, we’ll lose the filibuster and there’ll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It’ll be Reconstruction all over again.”

[ii] In relating these two issues,  I was struck also by the other egregious instances of utilitarian dehumanizing of innocent men, women and children perpetrated by the United States government: the firebombing of Bremen, Dresden, Tokyo and most other large cities in Germany and Japan near the end of WWII. As well, the only use of nuclear weapons against civilian populations in world history in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was by the U.S.

One also is reminded of the stigmatizing of Japanese Americans, many of them generations deep as American citizens by the Roosevelt administration, which sequestered them involuntarily based solely on their race in stockade internment camps during WWII, judging them as less than human and not worthy of trust, respect or dignity.

All these atrocities were presided over by Democrat presidents. First it is necessary to strip human beings of their status as human beings, and once dehumanized, almost anything is possible from lynching, mass murders and imprisonment to abortion and slavery. The common factor in these affronts to human dignity is obvious: the party of the perpetrators.

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