Who said: “The measure of a man is what he does with power”. To establish your scoring system review the antics of Governors Pritsker, Whitmer, Newsom, Murphy, Cuomo and Brown.
What President said this: “When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”
Answers at the end of the post.
Before we get to new material we should revisit the comments made in a prior post regarding the beauty of Federalism and how easily it can be abused. The states should be perceived as laboratories for experimentation in governance and policy. Blue states like New York, Illinois and California took full advantage engaging in profligate spending and high taxation leaving each on the brink of financial ruination. They have enacted insane pension plans for state employees that would make Ponzi blush. They traffic in transfer payments to an ever increasing group of voters to ensure continuing support for the incumbent politicos. They are sanctuaries for immigrants with welfare benefits and free medical care has been thrown in. An economic chamber of horrors.
Into this pending nightmare steps the Federal government and the loving ministrations of Nanny Pelosi. In her most recent effort to fill the Federal trough she has promised money to the above states to help them avoid the predictable consequences of their irresponsibility. And it is the red states that have the burden of maintaining the pumps that keep that trough filled.
Texas and Florida, our second and third largest states by population, have no state income taxes. These states have not created massive unfunded liabilities that will be burden future generations . Which is to say that they are governed by Republicans who have an understanding of basic economics. Some are beginning to notice the exodus from blue to red. Memo to Cuomo, Pritsker and Newsom…Exodus 5:1: Let my people go.
So how does the political class ensure that the people do not rise up in response to their appalling mismanagement of our Federal, state and local governments? The answer in a word is fear! Apocalyptic predictions of immediate doom unless…
At the end of the 18th century a pastor named Thomas Robert Malthus concluded that society was doomed because while the population was growing exponentially the food supply was only expanding at a linear rate. Malthus was obviously stunningly incorrect but he kicked off a cottage industry of bold and erroneous predictions.
Fast forward to 1962 and the publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. Carson, a marine biologist, was alarmed by the extensive use of pesticides and the adverse impact on ecological systems. She declared war on DDT and was successful in getting it banned. Then the law of unintended consequences reared it’s ugly head. Undiscerning environmentalists averted their collective gazes as malaria made a monstrous comeback now that mosquitoes were allowed to flourish worldwide.
The next step took place in 1968 with the publication of The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich, a 36 year old lepidopterist. He, like Malthus, predicted that the world would soon be unable to feed the fast growing population. He doubled down on the discredited Malthusian theory and was instantly embraced as a great practitioner of intellectual terror. He was, alas, every bit a wrong as Malthus. Neither was able to understand the ability of the world to adapt to change. Their worldviews were static. Ehrlich was successful in that he instilled fear in the general public and the chattering class. There was no shortage of those willing to surrender their liberty to the politicians who play upon their fears.
Ignoring the failure of every Ehrlich prediction the progressive movement mounted their unicorns and warned of the predicted global cooling. Check out the Newsweek article dated April 28, 1975 entitled The Cooling World. It was predicted that such cooling would adversely impact the world’s food supply and presto Ehrlich would be proven correct after all.
Without even a modest level of embarrassment the pessimists and fearmongers pivoted on a dime to raise the alarm about global warming. The renowned meteorologist, climatologist and Nobel Laureate Al Gore published a work of fiction entitled An Inconvenient Truth. A movie was made and Gore toured the country with his sandwich board that read: The end is nigh. In order to preserve his intellectual purity he refused to debate any living being during his dark cloud tour. His principal researcher was Chicken Little.
When warming stalled (known by the shameless climate alarmists as “the pause”) the elites changed the name of the coming cataclysm to “global climate change”. It even became for a short period “climate chaos”. But a fraud by any other name is still a fraud.
The acolytes and mindless minions of Gore the Simpleton are myriad. St. Greta of Thunberg was permanently terrorized by each new end of the world prediction. She is apparently completely unaware that no such prediction has ever proved to be accurate. Polar bears are dying! Not true. The Himalayas will lose 500 billion cubic yards of ice in a decade! Ten years later no change. The North Pole icecap will disappear! Santa’s reindeer still pull a sleigh and not a boat. The seas will rise and Manhattan will disappear! Cuomo and DiBlasio are making Manhattan disappear but it has little to do with the climate.
As a final punishment we have had to endure the pride of Boston University, a scary combination of ignorance, arrogance and blinding stupidity… Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the latest Donna Quixote. Her epitaph will be: The science is settled and I never had a clue what the science was.
So can we conclude that the people are now sufficiently softened up and Goebbels (Gurgles to Al Sharpton) would be proud? Millennials identify as one of their great fears…answering the door. Friends would call in advance so it must be a threat at the door. The bigger the hallucination the greater the demand for the government to offer up a safety net for the sheeple. The COVID so-called pandemic is the present horror we all have to endure. Never has the word science been so abused. Never has common sense been so uncommon.
What has always made America great is a fierce independence and a love of liberty. Rarely have those two pillars of our society been at such risk!
Things to think about:
Why are we not outraged by the ability of social platforms like Twitter and Facebook to censor open dialogue? Any medical professional who does not embrace and promulgate the COVID talking points will be instantly banished from the internet. There are ongoing efforts to boot our President from Twitter. This is one of the biggest threats to our liberty. This just in: Christopher Columbus Twitter account closed for suggesting the world is not flat. The science is settled!
We are always hearing about the “elitists” who oversee our well-being. You know…those Harvard and Yale graduates who are just that much smarter than the rest of us. They look more like ” deletists” as they remove our Constitutionally granted rights. Liquor stores essential, churches not so much. Abortion clinics are vital but let’s close all the schools.
Madison, Jefferson and Washington would move back to England if they heard the observation by the mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti. He suggested that we had to “earn back our freedom”. This may be the stupidest comment since the last time Joe Biden spoke. Jefferson was quite clear that our unalienable rights including liberty are endowed by our Creator. Believe it or not the word Garcetti does not show up in Genesis.
The authors of the Pop Quiz quotes are Plato and Thomas Jefferson.
Stephanie
As always, your posts are witty, well researched (though you probably did not need to crack a book) and hilarious. Thank you for saying what others refuse to allow us to say. There’s a certain segment of society who attempts to silence free speech through name calling and public shaming. It’s censorship in the most overt yet subtle way. I appreciate great minds who not only have the gift of expression, but the knowledge base upon which to grow their opinion. The wind is taken from the sails of any attack even before it’s levied.
The Observer
I just ran into a neighbor who moved to NC from NY. I sent him a link to this blog and enticed his interest with your quote about his moving from the economic chamber of horrors. Let’s see if we can get him to weigh in . Surely gems like “common sense been so uncommon” are good hooks.
On your censorship comment, guess who said the following: “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?”…..
you guessed it, Stalin.
Ron
Well said my liege.
And all this made ever increasingly easy to perpetrate by the rabid accomplices, or should I say the useful idiots…the main stream media. Since the death of journalism (circa January 20, 1993) opinion reporting and “creative” writing have replaced the time honored systemic process this profession once applied.
If I were to ask leaders at the great Journalism schools of today, “What is the value of jounalism?” they would probably reply with something like “The value flows from its purpose, to provide people with verified information they can use to make better decisions, and its practices, the most important of which is a systematic process – a discipline of verification – that journalists use to find not just the facts, but also the “truth about the facts.”
That response causes me to struggle to identify any practitioners of journalism today.
Alas, I failed again on the quiz. I had thought the first quote could be Frankl. I was a bit closer on the second one with John Adams.
admin
Well stated and you have planted some seeds for a future post.
ปั๊มไลค์
Like!! Really appreciate you sharing this blog post.Really thank you! Keep writing.
rmxtfsdwq
All We Offer is Fear Itself – When You’re Right You’re Right
[url=http://www.gc112d0a1j26dfq5yq1iop75d0l2070qs.org/]urmxtfsdwq[/url]
rmxtfsdwq http://www.gc112d0a1j26dfq5yq1iop75d0l2070qs.org/
armxtfsdwq
天天领现金
十亿现金送不停
Finley
Hello there! I just would like to give you a huge thumbs up
for your great information you have right here on this post.
I’ll be returning to your web site for more soon.
vách ngăn vệ sinh
Thanks for your personal marvelous posting! I actually enjoyed
reading it, you can be a great author.I will ensure that
I bookmark your blog and will eventually come back later in life.
I want to encourage yourself to continue your great job, have a
nice weekend!
vách ngăn vệ sinh
It’s an awesome piece of writing for all the online visitors;
they will get advantage from it I am sure.
Lakesha
Thanks very nice blog!
vách ngăn vệ sinh
Hello just wanted to give you a quick heads up. The words in your article seem
to be running off the screen in Opera. I’m not sure if
this is a format issue or something to do with internet browser compatibility but
I figured I’d post to let you know. The style and design look great though!
Hope you get the issue solved soon. Cheers
zortilo nrel
I like this web blog its a master peace ! Glad I observed this on google .