Posse Incitatus

If California is worried about carbon, why isn't it managing its forests better?

The top story this week is the urgent, immediate never-before-considered possibility that President Trump may be impeached.

Which is weird, since that's been the top story for three years.

Of more interest to me is the cold snap that plunged Michigan into deep snow very early in the season.  The usual suspect insist that this has to do with "climate change," and for once, they're right.

Because the climate is always changing.

The very spot where I sit right now was under a mile-thick sheet of ice 10,000 years ago.  Thank God for global warming!

Supporters of Climate Change Inc. will argue that carbon emissions are introducing a new and volatile element that could DESTROY THE PLANET.

That being the case, one would think the top priority of places like California would be to see that forest debris is quickly, efficiently and regularly removed to limit the impact of forest fires. 

This would involve the time-tested tools of using logging to create fire breaks and limit fuel for the fires as well as controlled burns during wet parts of the years to remove underbrush.

Strangely, none of that is happening.

Apparently the idiots who run California seem utterly unaware that when a forest catches fire, not only does it pump far more CO2 into the sky than would otherwise happen, it also destroys the "carbon sinks" that can help absorb existing CO2.

It is literally the worst possible thing to happen for people who claim to worry about carbon emissions.

Apparently the reason for this that logging and forest management is super-bad, worse even than climate change.

This lunacy is beyond parody.  Plastic straw bans accomplish nothing, and all the solar and wind arrays in the world won't do jack if they are melted or burned by rampant wildfires.

But that's California for you: the world's largest open-air insane asylum.

Demented Medicine

One of the most profound signs of our civilizational decay is the politicization of medicine.  For a century, western medical science brought a series of miracles, dramatically reducing disease and extending both the length and quality of human life.

That formidable achievement now seems to be inverting as fact-based science yields to politically correct imperatives.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of the transgender hysteria.

Even a cursory knowledge of childhood development would rule out allowing young children to make life-altering decisions.  Indeed, the age of consent exists precisely because children cannot make informed decisions.  It should be obvious that they lack the judgement and experience to do so.

Happily, nature provides parents to fulfill this role.  This brings us to the Big Lie that “trans kids” are expressing their true selves and good, responsible parents have a responsibility to cater to these self-destructive whims.

As one wag remarked, when you see a vegan cat or a trans kid, understand that neither of them are ones making that decision.

Not long ago, the medical establishment would highlight these actions as child abuse, but now a whole industry has emerged (backed of course by Big Pharma) to support it.

What’s interesting is that none of the new “treatment protocols” have any data behind them.  It’s all based on hunches, supposition and of course intense lobbying by interested parties.

The Daily Wire lays it out very clearly: the “therapeutic” drugs are being used off-label and are highly dangerous. 

Moreover, “blocking” puberty is an inherently toxic event.  Puberty unfolds differently in each individual and it is a time-sensitive process.  One can’t simply hit a “pause” button and expect it to resume if the patient has a change of heart.

The awful truth – which I have noted repeatedly on this site – is that even “successful” transitions are sterile.  They do not become the opposite sex, but instead a facsimile sustained by dangerous concoctions of hormones and chemicals.  It’s biological cosplay with real-world effects.

It is no more compassionate to help a mentally disturbed person persist in their illusion that they can change sexes than it is to buy a drink for an alcoholic or buy a hit for a drug addict.

At some point – hopefully soon – there will be a dreadful reckoning on what these twisted people have done to innocent children.

Trump ratchets up the trade war with China

This week President Trump announced yet more tariffs in his ongoing trade dispute with China.

The result will be further economic difficulty for the ChiComs and greater prosperity in the United States.

We've written about this many times, but one of the interesting aspects in Trump's approach is how he's created the mirror image of the "free trade ratchet" that seemed to only go one way.

Once NAFTA was passed and then when China became a member of the World Trade Organization, the decline of American manufacturing was taken as a given.  Powerful market forces, we were told, were the culprit, not government policies.  One may as well rage against the tide.

Ironically, many of the same people who insisted globalism was like a force of nature also claim that massive state control can change the global climate, but I digress.

Donald Trump has proven all of that false, and the stunning rebound of manufacturing jobs and the resulting prosperity are going to make it very hard for his successors to reverse his policies. 

This is clearly what the ChiComs hope for, and why the media howls incessantly about RUSSIA while ignoring massive Chinese political influence.  RUSSIA is economically weak, militarily overstretched and remains a world power solely on the basis of its nuclear weapons. 

Ask yourself a simple question: If RUSSIA is such a serious threat, why can't it fix it's only aircraft carrier?

China, on the other hand, continues to expand its blue-water fleet.  In terms of force projection, there is no comparison.

I suspect Trump knows this, which is why he's pushed harder on the economy than anything else.  The media refuses to give him much credit for the booming economy, but its effects are undeniable.  Like Ronald Reagan, he is rightfully asking the key question:  Are you better off now than four years ago?

Unless you're a fake journalist, the answer is unquestionably "yes."

The Rule of Law returns to Massachusetts

It's fascinating to see how our political parties are returning to their historical roots.

Trump's GOP is once again in favor of raising the wages of American workers and protecting American industry.  This goes back to the foundation of the party.  When Quisling Never Trumpers whine about Trump being unprecedented, they're lying.  What was unprecedented was the GOP deciding to support endless immigration and de-industrialization.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are once again embracing nullification as a response to federal laws they don't like.  The most egregious case is the Massachusetts state judge who actually smuggled a federal fugitive out of her court room to avoid his arrest by a waiting federal agent.

Naturally, the usual suspects (ACLU, other state officials) are outraged that a JUDGE is being held accountable for violating federal law.  What is the world coming to!  Judges are supposed to be part of the aristocracy and therefore immune from legal consequences for their actions.

This article has a link to the indictment, which spells out just how duplicitous the judge and her court officers were.  They even went to the extreme of shutting off the court recording camera so they could hatch their criminal conspiracy in privacy.

I've seen some deluded souls argue that helping a repeat offender escape is somehow like helping Anne Frank escape the Nazis.

Uh, no.

In the first case, they guy had already been deported twice.  For the analogy to hold, the Frank family would have had to repeatedly invade Nazi-occupied territory - the exact opposite of what is happening here.

The modern left has convinced itself that the purity of their intentions should shield them from any negative consequences of their actions.

Not only is this morally abhorrent, in practice it will destroy civilization because it breaks the crucial link between cause and effect.

Happily, there are still a few adults who understand this.  Strange that for all the venom directed at Trump, he's the most adult person in Washington.

Some transgender thought experiments

One of the Hated Instapundit's co-bloggers had a link to a formerly transgender military veteran who has decided to embrace his body as it is and this got me thinking:

What if Big Pharma developed a revolutionary new drug to treat individuals suffering from mental illness?

It's being touted as a miraculous breakthrough that will cure some of the most difficult cases. 

However, it does have some considerable side effects.

For one thing, a single dose renders the patient sterile.  The sterility is irreversible, so once you start the treatment, you can never have children. 

Another issue is the high doses that need to be administered during the first two years of treatment.  The drug is so potent at these levels that patients need to be hospitalized before taking it.  Heavy bleeding, tissue infections and debilitating pain are common during this period.  Even after these symptoms go away (and they have presented in 100 percent of the cases to date), the patient will be dependent on low doses of the drug for life.

Most alarmingly, people who complete the first intense cycle of treatment have a greatly elevated likelihood of death.  After that, the long-term health effects aren't known.  Surviving patients claim to be happier, but others are deeply unhappy and regret ever beginning the treatment.  How many feel that way isn't known, likely because Big Pharma is threatening them with lawsuits.

Here's another thought experiment:

Let us say that in the run-up to 2020, Donald Trump goes all-in on cracking down on crime by illegal immigrants.  He get so carried away that he issues an executive order requiring that any non-citizen sex offenders that come into ICE's custody will have their genitalia physically cut off before they are released.

To even write that is to laugh at it.  It's utterly absurd and not only would ICE agents refuse to obey it, the courts would immediately strike it down as being cruel and unusual punishment.

I think you can see where I'm going with this.

A century ago, people who believed themselves to be the brightest and most compassionate minds in the country decided that forced sterilization of "undesirables" was a moral imperative, and they set about their work with gusto.  We now look back on horror at eugenics, but it was once a highly-respected field.

There is no doubt in my mind that people will look back on the mutilation of these helpless mentally ill people the same way.  They needed healing and in the name of compassion they were cut apart.

 

Some optimism on a Sunny Sunday Morning

For a long time, it seems as though we've gone from one awful event to another.  The culture has been remorselessly coarsened and our politics is utterly dysfunctional.

But outside the narrow confines of the increasingly out-of-touch media bubble, there are a number of encouraging signs for our society.

The fact is that left's endless war on everything is finally wearing people out.  It's like the old joke:

Q:  How many feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A:  That's not funny!

That joke is older than I am and it's still funny because it's still true.  Happily, a lot of people are checking out of the culture wars and getting on with their lives. 

The other day I heard a song on the radio - some alternative station, I forget which - but it was a happy little tune sung by a honey-voiced woman with sparse accompaniment.  It's central theme was the once universal dream of young women to settle down with a good man and live happily ever after.

The imagery stuck with me because unlike contemporary popular music, it was so normal.

There was no call for hedonistic sex, the female vocalist didn't proclaim herself an emotional wreck or party animal out on the prowl.  Thinking it over, the basic sentiment was really just a throwback to the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't it be Nice?"

Actually, the sentiment goes back much farther because it is a universal one - an idea rooting in culture, tradition and evolution.

As I listened to the song, I was reminded of the fact that my college-town parish has put out yet another urgent call for volunteers to help manage the growing flood of converts.  This has been going on for a while, but apparently the tide is still rising.

Now if one surrendered to the defeatist views of Quisling Never Trumpers like Rod Dreher, these happy events would be dismissed as impossible or at best a local phenomenon, but in fact there is a ground swell taking place.

Far from the sexual harassment hot spots located in legacy media newsrooms, young people are deciding that maybe grandma and grandpa were on to something.  Finding a mate, raising children and having a meaningful life are hard enough without the added difficulty of trying to create an entirely new culture on the fly with nothing else to guide you than resentment at the world.

The angry left is angry because it is so miserable, and its only satisfaction is spreading that misery to others.  As the MeToo movement is showing, they are now to the point where they don't care who they destroy, so long as they destroy someone.

It is hard to imaging going through life perpetually enraged about something, waking up each day wondering whose life needs to be ruined for an innocuous remark, a clumsy attempt at a come-on, or something they did that was socially acceptable 20 years ago but now must be called out as an unforgivable sin.

A much more attractive option is to hang out with people who are comfortable with who they are and live by time-tested truths.  No wonder people are lining up to get in.

The real housewives of the deadliest catch

I spent the better part of last week roaming about, exploring this vast nation.  Between sorties, we rested and refueled in our hotel room and made a point of not watching news.  Instead, we amused ourselves by watching reality television.

There was a moment on The Real Housewives of Someplace Rich where one super-rich chick got upset about something another super-rich chick said about her and whether the subsequent apology was sufficiently sincere.  All the other super-rich chicks then picked sides and argued amongst themselves.

This, my wife informed me, was a great episode for that show.

In the course of this obviously staged catfight, one of the women announced that whatever people saw before was irrelevant because "her truth" was that she has been insulted.  She kept coming back to "her truth" and demanding that other people honor it because their failure to do so really hurt her feelings. 

And everyone else on the show took this at least somewhat seriously, even the ones who knew she was full of shit.  In fact, the producers helpfully rolled the tape of the earlier episode with the previous catfight, so we could see for ourselves just how contrived and stupid this whole affair truly was.  But no matter.  Super-rich chicks have their own individual truths and we should honor them or they will be sad and retreat inside their mansions.

There was another show on at some point that I was more familiar with:  Deadliest Catch.  It's a reality show about Alaskan fishermen.  Not "fisherpersons," fishermen.

I don't watch the show, but I remember seeing it when it was new and it was kind of fun to watch monster waves toss the boats around while the crewmen get their limbs broken and the skippers suffer heart attacks.

That is to say:  These guys get a few extra bucks to let bored viewers watch them get crippling injuries while trying to make a living.

If everything goes well and they don't get maimed or killed, they'll still be worth a fraction of what the super-rich chicks are, but at least they have Male Privilege.

That to me is where we are in terms of feminism and the culture.  Men live shorter, harder lives but some of them do very well in certain fields that convey a lot of prestige. 

Women clearly prefer social drama to actual life-taking risk, and yet they demand that they be treated the same.  I'm sure you saw that the World Champion Women's Soccer Team got destroyed by a bunch of under-15 teenage boys the other day, and yet the girls demand the same pay as the men because fairness.

My position is this:  If women should be given preference and extra bonuses to go into STEM fields, I think it only fair that some of them be consigned to work the Alaskan fishing fleet as well. 

I mean, women are terribly underrepresented there.  Fairness demands that half the crews of the crab boats swinging massive steel cages around a rolling deck be female.

Anything else is sexist.

 

The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers

One of the paradoxes of the culture war is that the overwhelming strength of the left also carries within it the seeds of its own downfall.

The fact that the left is now ascendant may dismay classical liberals and friends of freedom everywhere, but in the long view, it cannot last.

The left needs enemies.  As traditional society recedes into the shadows, the left must begin attacking itself.  It is the nature of the creature.  Like Morgoth and Sauron, the left needs the enemies to survive - without them it begins to self-destruct.

The last century has conclusively shown that one cannot create paradise on earth.  There can be no New Man, only an increasingly warped and twisted version of one God made.

Looking around us, can we not see such creatures already?

Many conservative commentators (myself included) have lamented that having subverted the Supreme Court, neutered Congress and captured the Executive, the left is now poised to begin hunting down the rest of civil society.  Persecution of those who do not full-throatedly endorse the left's talking points of the moment is already underway.

And yet, the left will ultimately fail.  They can create prisons, kill in the millions and shatter nations, but they cannot conquer the human spirit.  Grim thinking perhaps, but true nevertheless.

I don't think it will come to camps and pograms (other than virtual ones), largely because the American left is too lazy to get up from its keyboard.  Actual pograms require goons, and that 's a job that hipsters aren't really up to doing.  The only people in this country willing to actually mix it up tend to be on the right.  If the left were to try to use physical violence,  it will end poorly for them.

Indeed, the collapse of the left is already underway.  Their greatest stronghold, the citadel of their power, is academia.  They have destroyed the liberal arts and are already corrupting the "hard sciences" through their cult of Global Warming Climate Change.

The cost of college is already far more than it is worth, and the rape hysteria is only going to speed up the bursting of the Higher Education Bubble.

Consider this item from Michigan's crazy capital, Ann Arbor.  The Skunk Bears conducted a campus safety study that was designed to create false positives and conflate boorish behavior with attempted rape and forcible sexual assault.

Sexual assault is a serious crime - a felony that should be investigated by police, yet academics want this handled by bureaucrats whose only weapon is expulsion.  How this is supposed to deter non-students who have long treated the campus as a gun-free victim zone is nowhere addressed.

Even with creative accounting, U-M sex commissars failed to duplicate the bogus "One in five women will be sexually assaulted" and will no doubt use this to enforce their neo-Victorian sexual mores, but the ultimate result will be to destroy the "brand" of college altogether.

Still, all is not lost.  They did get the data that wanted:

Dramatically fewer students reported the misconduct to a university official — only 3.6 percent. And of those who disclosed to a UM official, just 60 percent said they received a response that made them feel supported — an issue that UM officials said they need to address. [Emphasis added.]

The poor things.  One wonders what the target percentage should be - and how many people's lives have to be ruined to ensure that everyone who files a complaint feels happy with the outcome?  I guess transitioning to full-on "all accusations must be true" is the only way to truly make things "safe."

U-M is courting with its own destruction here.  After all, who wants to send their daughters to a place of (self-proclaimed) rampant sexual violence?  Who wants to send their sons to a school where a single allegation can destroy their future?  Who would risk either while paying $40,000+ in tuition?

Male enrollment is already falling and as universities morph into Feminist Finishing Schools, demand for their overpriced credentials will disappear.

At the same time, state governments facing increasing health-care costs and pension pressure will see little reason to bankroll this nonsense and cut funding, in turn leading to further tuition spikes.

That is why I titled this piece with what might call the Princess Leia Paradox - the more the left gains total control, the more it will fragment and the greater the resistance to it will be come.

As they extend their totalitarian grip across the public square, they will only undermine themselves further.

Valentine's Day contradictions

One of the more curious developments of my lifetime has been the increasingly blatant celebration of sex and sexual perversion coinciding with the rebirth of a belligerent puritanism.  The trend towards increasing sexualization of just about everything was well underway by the 70s and by the 80s the taboo against homosexuality had all but vanished and was in fact replaced with a bias in favor of it by the 90s.

The advent of the internet allowed every kind of deviant to find like-minded individuals and feed their twisted manias and this also helped push the culture towards acceptance of things that were simply taboo in earlier times.

It seems quaint now to think about the stir caused by Madonna masturbating with a crucifix or feeling "like a virgin."  My kids look at that and simply shrug:  Seems pretty tame to them.

So on the one hand, we've never been more exposed to every conceivable kind of sexual practice and thanks to online mate-seeking, it has never been easier to find anonymous, constraint-free (and sanitary) sex.

At the same time, militant feminism has brought forth a 21st Century version of Orwell's Junior Anti-Sex League.  The anti-rape hysteria (and I use that word deliberately) where the accusation is tantamount to conviction can only have the outcome of driving men into dating non-college women.  The very standard of "affirmative consent" - passed into statute without any real idea of how to achieve it - is an effort to outlaw any and all sex, marital or non-marital.

This is because the legislation empowers the woman (and only the woman) to retroactively withhold consent and thereby create a crime with no physical evidence and no witnesses other than the participants.

What is more, as the case with Mattress Girl at Columbia, even if the male somehow gets exonerated, he will continued to be harassed and such stalking is considered not only legal but laudable by feminists.

The left has never been capable of thinking through the consequences of its actions and contradiction has never bothered them, but it is fascinating to look at exactly the kind of doublethink the modern feminist must now embrace as her of her credo:

1.  Women and men are completely equal in every way, yet when both get drunk, only the male is answerable for his actions.

2.  Women are mentally and emotionally strong enough to be CEOs, world leaders and combat soldiers, yet they cannot be expected to report crimes against them to law enforcement or defend themselves due to their emotional frailty.

3.  Sex is wonderful and needs to be celebrated with week-long campus events highlighting exotic practices, yet the actual performance of the act needs to have more legal documentation than a corporate merger.

Radical feminists have long tried to hijack Valentine's Day into a period of mourning, dubbing it "V-Day" to remember the victims of sexual assault or the past offenses of the Patriarchy.

Some years ago (pre-internet) I wrote a mock article about how, after the ritual naming of names and airing of grievances, the feminists concluded their ceremony with the ceremonial castration and killing of a white goat to symbolize both the guilt of all white males and the fate that they would face.

In fact, there is a certain amount of paganism going on in all of this, from invocations of one's "inner goddess" to full-throated denunciations of the Christian moral tradition and traditional ideal of strong, masculine husband and supportive, feminine wife.

Strangely, biology is now taking a side in this discussion, revealing that it is intrinsic to human nature for men and women to be different.  The roles of the two sexes must and therefore are different.  Women uniquely can bear young and their thought processes are honed to this end, making them capable of enduring great pain (essential for childbirth) and socially more adroit.

Men, by contrast, are the predatory side of the species, optimized to hunt, defend hearth and home and they obtain their mates through displays of this prowess.  It is interesting to note that despite decades of Hollywood attempting reprogram people to find Alan Alda's "Hawkeye Pierce" as the epitome of the desireable man (a weak, handsome, educated, funny, supportive coward), women continue to gravitate towards strong, masculine figures. 

Of course that isn't fair to Hawkeye, who (as I noted before) actually did display courage under fire, often sheltering the nurse he was with with his own body when under fire.  Still, there has been a concerted effort to show that women can be as strong or stronger then men.  The scene where the tiny female martial artist utterly crushes the beefy male opponent are now a staple of every movie.

(It is amusing to note that even though Hollywood keeps advocating women in close combat situations, they know better than anyone else that this does not really work for.  Remember the super-muscular female Colonial Marine Vasquez in "Aliens?"  She was the avatar of the hard-ass woman, yet the actress needed frequent breaks because the prop-equipment - which fired blanks, not real round - was simply too much for her to carry for extended periods.)

The current new thing is for people to get surgery in order to try to erase these differences, but once again all that is being created is a stitched-together construct, a Frankenstein's monster of mixed sex.  (And isn't it interesting that feminists now wonder if men who become women are not also exercising their "privilege" to become women - everything is a crime with these people.)

The awful, inescapable truth that has feminists so enraged is that the vast majority of people are happy in an arrangement where man and woman are joined as partners and lovers, husband and wife, different but together they become one flesh and from their union new life is born.

Valentine's Day is thus becoming the exclusive province of traditional married couples - or those who aspire to it.  Every effort to subvert or destroy it is doomed to failure because down through the millennia of human existence the image of a husband bringing a gift to his wife and professing his continued love has continued to stir women into renewed passion.

Despite efforts to secularize and paganize this day, this purpose endures and it is one reason why, protestations to the contrary, women who have no "valentine" are so freaking angry about everything else.

Reality strikes in Ann Arbor - Plus NCAA gets a clue

It is a rare thing for the Skunk Bear fan base to come to terms with reality before it actually smacks them in the face – even then, it doesn’t always happen. However this article takes a remarkably clear-sighted look at their upcoming season.

In the process – by dwelling on the fact that there are six road games rather than four, and they are against ranked opponents rather than sacrificial lambs – the author reinforces my argument that U-M’s prestige was inflated by an amazingly soft schedule.

It is worth noting that MSU’s schedule was much more difficult – road games at Notre Dame, Ohio State, Nebraska and Iowa last year, and at Ann Arbor, Northwestern, Iowa and Penn State the year before. In addition, MSU has had to face the Wisconsin juggernaut – a fate the Skunk Bears have managed to sidestep.

A key variable for both teams will be the quality of the Fighting Kellys. With the Irish return to form or is Brian Kelly really just an ill-tempered poseur with a resume built on harvesting the fruits of others’ labors? Kelly’s tenure has been controversial, from the death of videographer Declan Sullivan  to sideline theatrics and most recently returning quarterback Tommy Reese’s arrest .

Seems that Kelly has his back to the wall and is now in Ron Zook territory.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE SPARTANS? Congratulations to the NCAA for making an obviously correct decision and allowing DeAnthony Arnett to take the field with MSU this fall. Normally, I would regard this as somewhat of a non-issue – he would lose no eligibility and an extra year in the system would be to his benefit and help MSU as well. However, his father is in poor health and the possibility that he might pass away without seeing his son play college football was a compelling reason to let him play right away. 

Memo to the NCAA: Remember when you worried more about students and less about rules and revenue?