Living in the Age of Ultimatums

I am not sure when this age began but it must have been a long time ago.  The thing is it has become a lot more popular this century.  It used to be nations issued ultimatums, then it filtered down to parents, then celebrities, and now former celebrities.  The only problem is what does one do when their ultimatum falls on deaf ears?  Do they believe enough in their position to actually move forward with the threat?

From my chair, it appears most don’t, unless they put the ball in someone else’s hand.  For example, how many of our privileged elite threatened to move to Canada if Donald Trump were elected President?  Once elected, exactly how many fled Southern California, their Chicago/New York penthouses, or their properties in the Hamptons and the Cape?  For all the vilification and threats, I can’t recall a single famous person making the trek north to seek sanctuary from the Donald.

Fortunately for most of them, the organizations who call themselves news outlets are more interested in polling and their own ratings than actually holding people accountable for their words.  Shows like “The View” still exist, Barbara Streisand is still holed up in your palace in Southern California, and Oprah is still interviewing former princes and their mates from the comfort of her stateside estates.

We are living is a world of “Cancel Culture” but this is really just an outcome of the whole idea we get to make ultimatums and everyone must listen to us, because the progressive movement has told us we all have value, unless it is an opinion they don’t like.

This latest spat of ultimatums falls into two groups.  The first is pure silliness, the second may have greater ramifications.  Let’s deal with the silliness first.

Spotify is one of those music streaming services that has become so popular.  From what I understand it’s like those old time AM/FM radio stations, although you can choose your own music to listen to and as long as you are connected to the internet of all things you can hear them through your earbuds.  Obviously, Spotify exists to make money, just like those old time AM/FM stations did.  The question will always be, what makes them the most money?  Radio stations used to play Glenn Miller, then they moved to Rock and Roll, then Country, and then talk/news, all in the hopes of a larger audience share.  I can assume Spotify keeps track of who listens to what on their service.

So, when a 76-year-old hippy got upset with one of the talk radio shows on Spotify he did what all celebrities do these days.  He issued an ultimatum!  It is him or me! Spotify, to their credit looked at the financial implications and told the hippy, it was nice, but don’t let the door hit you on the way out. This created a fervor among other aging hippies who’ve chosen to follow their friend out the door.  Since most of them are millionaires, I don’t expect any of them will suffer real financial discomfort, but ask yourself, when was the last time you actually had to listen to Neil Young, Peter Frampton, or Joni Mitchell or your day wasn’t complete? 

Now we come to the second set of ultimatums!  The one with greater implications.

President Biden, I assume at the urgings of his son’s financial interests in the Ukraine, has told Russian President Putin, there would be serious actions if Russia was to invade the Ukraine.  To back up that ultimatum he has alerted troops to prepare to deploy, and is busy sending a lot of military equipment to the Ukraine to help them prepare for the invasion.  Of course, along the way he has said he wouldn’t be sending troops to the Ukraine, just military hardware.  The question is what will happen if this threat of action is viewed as the same empty threats Biden has made in the past, and our actions are viewed with the incompetence we showed as we bungled our way out of Afghanistan?

Now putting ourselves into the shoes of Putin, and I don’t do this lightly.  From his perspective the expansion of NATO into the former Warsaw Pact countries can certainly be viewed as a threat, especially if you consider the historical view of Russians in authoritarian regimes where anything that threatens their absolute authority is a concern. The question then is for Europe, more than the United States.  How do you expand the European Union to offer the economic and defense advantages of western Europe without threatening Russia?

For the United States, with our history of involvement in the internal affairs of other nations, how do we make a convincing argument we are not interested in the overthrow of yet another regime?  Or are we? If so, why?  At this point, do we even know what is in our national interest?

A Year in Review

I’ve not done this before, but this past Christmas season has become a time of reflection for me and as I watch the nation deal with a new crisis each day, I’ve decided to put my thoughts into some kind of synopsis.

In the beginning, the year began with the explosion of political ideologies. After a summer of violence in Democratic-run cities, a growing loss of confidence in the resolution of COVID, and the struggle for the votes of the nation we approached the transition of one administration to another.  Of course, no one was really ready to give up on the animosity of the past four years, nor was the President willing to concede he was beaten by a Democratic slate, which had done next to no live campaigning during an election that saw about 67% of all registered voters turn out[1] (compared to a historical average of 56.5% since 1980[2])).

On January 6^th, when Congress was to certify the vote of the Electoral College, the Trump campaign had scheduled a political rally in the mall to support the President, and show their dissatisfaction with the incongruity of the election and the results.  After the rally groups of the participants trooped up to the Capital to voice their disbelief in the legitimacy of the election.  In the process, they stormed into the Capital and disrupted the process of government.  Of course, this was immediately called an insurrection by the politicians and the media, and the President was accused of igniting this rebellion.  As far as actual violence the riot of January 6^th was a relatedly minor affair when compared to the outrages of the anti-police riots of the past summer and the Antifa violence of Seattle and Portland.  Yet since it actually scared the politicians who were happy to take a knee when Minneapolis was burning this became a traumatic event of such magnitude the House immediately set out to impeach the President once again and establish a select committee to determine how best to expand government to intimidate its citizens and keep such insurrections away from the house of the people.

Next, we come to January 20^th, when President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was sworn into the office of the President.  His inaugural speech covers all the main points of most inaugural speeches, but as with grand worlds, we really should see if actions support those ideals.  It was John F. Kennedy who inspired a generation with “ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”  From those words came the Peace Corp where Americans, young and old, reached out to help those in developing countries.  In his speech, President Biden sought to unify a nation clearly divided.  He talked of truth and lies but in this age of information who decides what is true and what is a lie?  As we routinely see in the public broadcasts the experts of government will condemn information they dislike as false, only to be proven later they were wrong.

President Biden spoke of coming together, of unifying a nation broken by racial injustice, extremism, lawlessness, violence.  Unfortunately for the nation, he and his party remain blind to equality of action.  It seems for this administration extremism, lawlessness, and violence is only a quality of the right, and not of the left.  The protections of the Constitution, the document he swore to defend are only relevant if the administration agrees with the politics of the political or financial views of the individual.  If its defense is useful in the continuation of “the narrative.”

The “Biden-Harris” administration has set its agenda, and it can be found at https://www.whitehouse.gov/priorities/  According to the White House containing the COVID-19 crisis is the government's number one priority.  A review of the past year suggests their plans have been far less than successful.  They were to expand testing, take science-driven steps to address community needs – especially communities of color, and launch a national vaccination program.  The media certainly did its part, condemning any option that did not originate with the CDC, or posting the approved solutions on social media anytime someone mentioned the term COVID.  But here we are at the beginning of the new year with a recent mutation and testing lags, community support lags, and the plan for a national vaccination program amounts to threats of punishment if you don’t comply with the mandates of the government dictates.  On that last point, it seems to be more akin to a fascist approach than the ideal of democracy he spoke about in his inauguration speech.  

What seems to go unaddressed is the intent of vaccination and its effectiveness.  What does fully vaccinated (now a primary dosage and a booster) actually accomplish?  Does it prevent the acquisition of the virus? Does it prevent the spread of the virus?  Does it reduce the effects of the virus and prevent the need for hospitalization?  As with all vaccines, there is no 100% correct answer to any of these questions, but the “science-driven” approach the administration has taken seems to assume there is and if you don’t do what they want you must be punished in some way.  Perhaps this is democratic.  In a true democracy, the majority in power can override the desires of the minority.  Our founders recognized this potential and tried to avoid it with the establishment of a Republic where power was shared and the Constitution specifically addressed the rights of the individual by limiting the power of government.

The administration's second priority is, of course, climate change.  Their strategy to abandon fossil fuels and create “good-paying union jobs” to build an equitable clean energy future was funded to the tune of $1.5 trillion this past year.  It will be interesting to see how much of the aging infrastructure is modernized during this administration, but we do know the free flow of dollars into the economy is having a truly negative effect on the poorest of the nation.  On December 21, 2020, the median price for a gallon of regular gasoline was $2.19 after bottoming out earlier in the year at #1.77[3]. At the close of 2021, the price was about $3.37[4], a 53% increase in one year.  While some of this can be justified by an increase in demand as the nation resumes travel, a significant portion is directly attributable to the administration’s decisions regarding supply-side control and the inflation caused by all the “free money” floating around. Again, what seems to go unchallenged by the media is who suffers the most from these price increases?  Is it the government officials who drive their official vehicles, the President who flies in a Boeing 747, or in a 20-car motorcade, the rich who take their private jets to climate change conferences, or the lower-income family struggling to make ends meet?

The list of priorities goes on, but I’m not sure where we look to see any remarkable successes in this past year.  We’ve had administration officials say the number one threat to our nation is climate change, white extremism, police brutality, systemic racism, gender discrimination, or a lack of diversity.  All threats that demand more government control over the individual, and less respect for the individual. The question that goes unanswered, at least for me, is who really gets to decide what our greatest threat to national survival is and how is that threat addressed?  Does making a trans-gender pediatrician/politician an Admiral in the public health service really address the diversity challenges?  Does looking at military members' social media posts eliminate extremism, or does it shift the focus of the DOD from a defense of the nation into an administration police force? Do more taxes, greater inflation, and greater government control actually protect this nation, or does it weaken it? 

Well, that’s enough for now.  Have a great 2022.

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[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/04/record-high-turnout-in-2020-general-election.html

[2] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/voter-turnout-in-presidential-elections

[3] https://www.gasbuddy.com/go/gas-price-report-december-21-2020

[4] https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_gas_price

When Reality Strikes Too Close to Home

As we approach Christmas, a time when Christians are supposed to remember the salvation of their souls by a merciful God who sent his Son to earth to atone for our sins it seems kind of ironic the most progressive and liberal among us are now being confronted by their own choices.

Recently, a killer broke into the home of Clarence Avant and killed his wife, Jacqueline Avant.  Ms. Avant, who at 81 was a long-time Philanthropist and supporter of liberal causes.  Also attacked were Droit Kemsley, a star from “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” and Terrance J, a host from BET were both targeted by “flash mob” robbers.  It seems crime is beginning to affect even the rich and isolated of Beverly Hills, or as Oprah Winfrey, also known as a progressive who likes to give things away, says: "it has “shaken the laws of the universe.”

Crime and violence are not supposed to directly affect those who can afford their own security, who support the release of violent felons back into their neighborhoods, or who fund causes, where felons are the good guys and cops, are the enemy.  Those "good guys and gals" are supposed to stay where they belong and prey on those who also live in those areas, leaving the rich to feel good about helping society.

As Ann Althouse^[1] points out radical leadership is concerned enough to say “They're trying to move us backward,' said Melina Abdullah, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles. 'We don't want to move backward; we want to move forward... We need to think about what kind of economic desperation actually creates property crime and how do we get people out of that state... How do we create livable wage jobs? How do we create affordable housing?'"  All great ideas until those rich liberals are actually expected to make choices that may affect their own standards of living.

The problem with all these movements is no one is really willing or able to address how dependence on the government is destroying the essential building blocks of society.  When these building blocks are gone, society will fail and we will have to start over.  The first block is a family.  Not a family unit, but a real family where there is a mother, a father, children who are taught common values by their parents and aren’t just turned into wards of the state.  The second block is a community where all the members share common values of hope (for a future better than today), respect (for the rights of others), and value for themselves and those around them.  The final building block is a trust for a standard of laws that are blind to the color of skin, gender, and the wealth or power (or lack) of the accused.

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[1] https://althouse.blogspot.com/2021/12/crews-of-burglars-publicly-smashing.html

Civility in an Age of Uncivil Society

It has become an almost nightly fixture on the news these days.  Some news channels reporting of an unruly passenger on an airline assaulting either the flight crews or other passengers.  It appears most of these events involve the millennial generation.  Passengers ranging from their twenties to early forties.  If true, it suggests to me just one more manifestation of a generation created with a sense of entitlement and self-importance that leads to outrage anytime they are forced to comply with some social norm.

These are the people who now control social media and who seem to believe being an “influencer” is actually a profit-making occupation.  I’ve been criticized by progressives for believing there is such a thing as a “slippery slope” where bad behavior, once tolerated, will lead to increasingly bad behavior. 

But I see in the Millennials a generation that has little respect for the history and culture of the nation and has been told their behavior will be tolerated.  We have legal and legislative systems around the country now committed to releasing violent individuals in the name of social justice.  We have judges who place their political beliefs before their role in the law.  In the eyes of Beryl Howell[1], an appointee by the Obama Administration, she is outraged the DOJ is allowing the January 6^th rioters plea deals that tie her hands in handing down serious prison time.  I don’t recall those same complaints with rioters in Minneapolis or New York as they protested the George Floyd death.  It seems in the eyes of liberal judges not all riots are created equally.  Those that pass their social muster are okay, those that don’t are a serious threat to democracy.

It will be interesting to see how the airlines and the government now deal with the increasing violence in the skies.  Whatever the course of action airlines will need to rethink their advertisements and perhaps even the "woke" political choices they support?  Since the "woke" tend to eat their own and if you get even a little out of step you will be condemned anyway.  

Can we really say “Fly the friendly skies” anymore?  Perhaps, “Fly with us, we are only mildly passive-aggressive” would be more accurate.  Remember, we are all in this together, unless your entitlements are more than my entitlements.

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[1] https://news.yahoo.com/federal-judge-criticizes-dojs-plea-204112591.html

Choices

We live in a remarkable time.  We now have access to all the information known to mankind.  We have so much access it is overwhelming for most of us, and we choose to live on the soundbites of information provided by our media.  These tidbits of information are sanitized, formatted, and cherry-picked to present to us the reality those pushing want us to believe in.  Of course, there is always a mirror image of that reality so that we can never be too sure that what we are seeing is really the original, or a reflection of the original changed just enough to present an alternative reality.

In 1984, Apple Inc. had a Super Bowl commercial that played on George Orwell’s novel of the same name.  In that commercial Apple^®, introduced the original Macintosh computer with the promise we would see why “1984 won’t be like 1984.”  Yet here we are almost 30-years later with the images of Orwell’s frightening vision playing out precisely because of the information age unlocked by the personal computer and the domination and control of that information by mega-corporations with global impact who can now reach into our homes and extract whatever data they desire.

We see our society fracturing now, more than our history teaches us we did in the past.  Rather than moving toward a renaissance of new ideas and thoughts, we seem to be moving to an age where the smallest voices in society dominate the conversations through the loudest megaphones.  A time where the age of reason is replaced by the age of outrage. Everywhere we look we see the condemnation of our historical values by groups who have rejected them and now demand their personal values be used as the new civil standard.  As soon as that happens a new group of outraged minorities rise up and demand those standards are obsolete and new ones must be accepted.

Meanwhile, the political and financial elite, speaking from behind their walls spur on the discontent so we won’t notice their acquisition of wealth and the creation of a two-class economy where there are only rich and poor.  The poor, of course, will live off the scraps of the rich, just as they do in other two-class societies.

We’ve seen over these past dozen years the choices made by our increasingly dominant younger generations, and it seems they are willing participants in the evolution of society to that envisioned by George Orwell.  A society where independent thought is vilified and approved behaviors are demanded.  I guess this is what happens when we create an educational industry where conformity is demanded and standards are lowered so no one is left behind.  

When You Only See One Door

I sat through a conversation this morning that has me scratching my head.  It was between two women within the community I live in; they were discussing the plight of the homeless of California.  One commented on how cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco were being overrun by the homeless and the streets were filled with filth and human waste.

The second listened and pointed out those very same problems were appearing in Seattle and there didn’t seem to be any hope to stop the rise of homelessness and the destruction of the city.

This conversation took place after they were talking about how those who are unvaccinated were creating an unacceptable risk to all those who were vaccinated and if everyone was vaccinated, we could end the pandemic, even though the vaccine has not eliminated the potential for infection and transmission.

It amazes me when educated people become so indoctrinated into a set of political beliefs, they fail to understand government policies are as likely to create a problem as they are to fix it.  

For all practical purposes, California is a one-party state, and all its major population centers are controlled by that one party, yet for all the complaints about how poorly the state is managed its citizens are just like the two women, I overheard today.  They are completely bewildered by how poorly things are going for the average person, and why those liberal policies haven’t created the promised utopia.

We have, for all practical purposes arrived at a state where critical thinking has been completely replaced by political loyalty and education by indoctrination.

If you doubt this, just listen to the people looking to be appointed to important government jobs and watch as they tap dance around previous statements where they are unwilling to actually stand behind their previous rhetoric.

“Then it doesn't matter which way you walk...-so long as I get somewhere.”

Lewis Carrol

With Friends Like This, Who Needs Enemies.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, “Does the American Government Need Enemies?”  After some consideration, a few glasses of wine, and deep soul searching about all the ne'er-do-wells who disagree with me, I think the answer is YES!

Granted, I’ve only been around for a little less than a third of our history as a constitutional republic, but as I consider our heritage it seems obvious, we are a nation built on having enemies -- both foreign and domestic.

Let’s review!

We, those of European heritage, fled to America to escape the oppression of those who viewed our forefathers (and mothers) as different and worthy of being cast out.  We could have been the rubble of society Charles Dickens was so fond of writing about, or we could have had religious beliefs that caused concern with the various churches that ruled the Continent.  But once we got here and made it through the first few winters, we vied with the natives to take control of the land we settled as if it were ours to take.

Those of us who came from African heritage clearly had enemies who captured and sold whole tribes of enslaved people who had no say in the matter and when they arrived in the colonies were sold to the highest bidders to do the manual labor necessary to open the land to the agriculture necessary to enrich those who had come from Europe.

As we grew, we English viewed the French and Spanish as our enemies, until we reached a point of domination or were able to buy the lands they claimed as their own.

Finally, even we English saw the tyranny of the English Parliament and King George as a threat to our freedom and fought to free ourselves from them.

As the Anglos moved into Texas, they saw the Spanish/Mexicans as a limiting influence, at least until they could declare their independence and become a Republic with the aspirations of joining the United States.

Along the way, we’ve fought wars, both domestically and internationally, about every 20 years or so since 1675.  We’ve been in a continuous war since 2001 and although Afghanistan has ended (kind of) we are still engaged in several places.

The thing is, each war seems to grow the government and thereby increases the power of the politicians who swear allegiance to a political party.  So, what better way to increase your political importance and financial wealth than to be a part of a government that is at war?  The Johnson Administration serves as the perfect example of this concept.  

The Kennedy administration came to office with the “Cold War” in full swing.  It had its share of diplomatic blunders which took us to the brink of a “Hot War” with Russia but managed to avoid that as Russia blinked first. Some would say one of those blunders was the introduction of U.S. forces to bolster the regime of South Vietnam, a decision that would be carried forward when Lyndon Baines Johnson assumed the office upon JFK’s assassination.

So, what did LBJ do?  He found a way to commit massive federal spending on three fronts.  He grew the military to fight an increasingly costly war in Southeast Asia while fighting the “Cold Wars” in Korea and Europe.  He then expanded a social welfare state to improve the lives of the poorest Americans in his “War on Poverty.” A lot of these efforts, if viewed objectively, succeeded in the same way the War in Vietnam succeeded.  They seemed to be great ideas that only served to enrich the few who got to make the decisions on where federal dollars should go.  Finally, in our race to prove capitalism was superior to communism we entered into the space race to the Moon.  We won and as a result of all those federal dollars so did several defense/space contractors.  Along the way, we got string cheese, Tang, and Velcro.

According to History Pieces[1] in 1962, there were roughly 5.34 million federal employees.  As the wars progressed under LBJ that number rose to 6.64 in 1968. This figure does not account for all those whose employment is dependent on Federal spending it is simply the size of our government during the decade of turbulence when the President decided war was the way to get what he wanted for the nation. 

Today the federal government has a little more than 4 million employees, thanks mostly to a reduction in the size of the military, but thanks to social media we now see far more clearly than ever before how the politicians seek to divide the nation to achieve their political success.  Having come to age in the 1960s I am firm of the belief this is a result of an education system that has transformed from one intended to create independent thinking of those most capable of it, into a system where groupthink has become the approved approach.

Because of this approach we’ve developed generations where differing political views are unacceptable, where bullies call out those who think differently and accuse them of being bullies, where racists defend their racism as anti-racism, and deviant lifestyles are glamorized and celebrated by the entertainment industry.  An industry that was once viewed as only slightly more moral than horse thieves.

With this pandemic, we see clearly how the government wages war in its effort to consolidate power to the political elite.  We also see how many are willing to sacrifice their rights to individual freedom in the hopes this government will make life risk-free.

In the end, I can only wonder, what happens when enough of us believe in a one-party political solution and the United States becomes like California?

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[1] https://historyinpieces.com/research/federal-personnel-numbers-1962