Monthly Archives: March 2015

Gaia Worship

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I found this rather odd essay linked somewhere. At first blush it looks like the typical preaching to the choir you see from the broadsheets. Gaia is unhappy and must be appeased with the blood of the deniers! Well, they are not that entertaining, but you get the point. Instead, what we have here is a rare admission that what they are up to has nothing to do with science, but is a religious cause.

ACCORDING to a recent poll, a large majority of Americans, and roughly half of Republicans, say they support governmental action to address global warming. The poll, conducted by The New York Times, Stanford and the research organization Resources for the Future, stands in stark contrast to the vast partisan gulf in political efforts to address climate change. How could it be that so many Republicans view global warming as a problem, but so few on the right are pressuring the government to take action to address it?

A paper that Matthew Feinberg, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, and I published in the journal Psychological Science in 2013 suggests one answer to this puzzle: While the number of Republicans who say global warming is a serious problem has reached high levels, there remains a very large gap in moral engagement with the issue. We found that conservatives were less likely than liberals to describe pro-environmental efforts in moral terms, or to pass moral judgment on someone who behaved in an environmentally unfriendly way, for example by not recycling. Where liberals view environmental issues as matters of right and wrong, conservatives generally do not.

It is rare to see the masked dropped like this. Usually, the Left is waving around graphs and data that they don’t understand, but are sure proves their case, because you know, science! Here we have someone saying that it’s really a moral issue.

But why does this moral gap matter if most people now believe that global warming is a real threat? Other research has shown that people are generally reluctant to undertake costly political actions, even for a cause they think will be beneficial. After all, there are so many worthy causes competing for our time, effort and resources, and we can’t contribute to every one.

People think quite differently, however, when they are morally engaged with an issue. In such cases people are more likely to eschew a sober cost-benefit analysis, opting instead to take action because it is the right thing to do. Put simply, we’re more likely to contribute to a cause when we feel ethically compelled to.

Still, why do liberals moralize environmental issues, while conservatives do not? The answer is complex, owing in part to the specific history of the American environmental movement. A quick review of that history reveals that, while the environment has been politically polarizing since the 1960s, there is nothing inevitably liberal about environmental concern. After all, it was a Republican president, Richard M. Nixon, who founded the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.

Here you see the hive mind at work. Utopians operate in a world of “us-versus-them.” After all, there’s only one destination, the promised land. Therefore, you are either heading forward to that promised land or you are an obstacle to the tides of history. Nixon was no one’s idea of a conservative. He proudly embraced liberal economics and social engineering. In many respects, he was a proto-liberal. But, he was a Republican so he is one of the undifferentiated other the Left sees as the them.

To win over more of the public, environmentalists must look beyond the arguments that they themselves have found convincing. The next wave of moral arguments for environmental reform will need to look very different from the last, if they are to be maximally effective. Such efforts to understand others’ moral perspectives might not only bring both sides in line on this important issue, but also foster the sort of sincerity and respect necessary to sustain a large-scale collective effort.

The fascinating thing about utopians is they never seem to listen to their own words. They are just incantations that make them feel better, but make little sense to a non-believer. The writer claims big majorities are in favor of his preferred acts of piety to appease Gaia. What need is there to convince the holdouts? If a majority want what he wants, surely the elected officials, who all want what the author wants, will go along with it.

That’s because it is not a rational thing. At some level, the author and his coreligionists believe that the presence of even one non-believer keeps them from reaching the promised land. Just as ISIS is focused on purifying their lands by ridding it of every last infidel, the modern liberal obsesses over the dwindling number of non-believers in the West.

The other fascinating thing is that these utopians never take yes for an answer. That’s because they can’t. What animates their faith is the struggle. The promised land is always just over the next hill or around the next bend. Today they must valiantly struggle against the infidel so that tomorrow they can live in paradise. The fact that the Left has been triumphant for close to a century in America has brought them no closer to their goal. The promised land remains just out of reach, no matter how much ground they gain in the fight.

I used to be fond of asking these sorts of people a simple question. What would have to happen for you to feel like you won? They never have an answer. Instead, you get an answer to a question you did not ask. That’s because there are no conditions in which they will be satisfied and quit. It’s the struggle, not the victory. Environmentalism will be with us in some fashion forever simply because it is a religion, not a problem to be solved.

The Show of Force

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I tend to think of “secessionist movements” as collections of harmless old weirdos with too much time on their hands. The operative word being harmless. As we see in Europe, the West is well past violent insurrection. Instead, the angry confine themselves to posts on Facebook, Twitter and the secession club meeting at the local Holiday, as long as there is a breakfast buffet. We do, however, have a cop problem.

In a deliberate “show of force,” federal and local police forces raided a political meeting in Texas, fingerprinting and photographing all attendees as well as confiscating all cell phones and personal recording devices.

Members of the Republic of Texas, a secession movement dedicated to restoring Texas as an independent constitutional republic, had gathered Feb. 14 in a Bryan, Texas, meeting hall along with public onlookers. They were debating issues of currency, international relations and celebrating the birthday of one of their oldest members. The group, which describes itself as “congenial and unimposing,” maintains a small working government, including official currency, congress and courts.

According to MySanAntonio.com: “Minutes into the meeting a man among the onlookers stood and moved to open the hall door, letting in an armed and armored force of the Bryan Police Department, the Brazos County Sheriff’s Office, the Kerr County Sheriff’s Office, agents of the Texas district attorney, the Texas Rangers and the FBI.

“In the end, at least 20 officers corralled, searched and fingerprinted all 60 meeting attendees, before seizing all cellphones and recording equipment in a Valentine’s Day 2015 raid on the Texas separatist group.”

“We had no idea what was going on,” said John Jarnecke, president of the Republic of Texas. “We knew of nothing that would warrant such an action.”Information Liberation noted, “The pretext of the raid was that two individuals from the group had reportedly sent out ‘simulated court documents’ — summonses for a judge and a banker to appear before the Republic of Texas to discuss the matter of a foreclosure. These ‘simulated documents’ were rejected and the authorities decided to react with a ‘show of force’ – 20 officers and an extremely broad search warrant.”

Even allowing for the fact this is reported in World Nut Daily, there’s simply no excuse for this behavior from government officials. They are harassing people to get their jollies. It’s why dressing up mall cops in battle gear is a very bad idea. It takes low-IQ dimwits and sociopaths and tells them they have a free pass to push people around.

In the custodial state, however, the cops function as hyper-violent helicopter parents. If a citizen is doing something the authorities think is unsafe or uncooperative, the state sends in a swat team as a “show of force” or worse. There are over 50,000 SWAT raids a year in America. Most are for things like serving a summons or collecting non-violent parolees. The argument is the cops don’t know what they are getting into so for their safety they send in Seal Team Six.

This is the logic of the managerial class. Police departments have arrived at a bizarre sense of self-awareness where they no longer see themselves as part of the community. They stand apart from those they watch, like game keepers in a preserve. While their job is to keep the animals safe, their first priority is their own safety above all else, fueled by a deep distrust of those they supervise.

It’s not just the town clowns stocked up with surplus army gear paid for by the Feds. NASA has a SWAT team. They can no longer hurl a man into orbit, but they have a SWAT team. The Department of Education has a SWAT team. Again, a lot of this is due to the unlimited access to funding for status items that are popular with the managerial class. The streets of DC are jammed with armored SUV’s toting minor officials for the same reason. No matter the reason, it is no way to run a civilized nation.

The managerial class, which the cops are a part, although at the lowest rung, must always attack and undermine the institutions of traditional social life if its power and interests are to prevail. Freedom of associations, along with its subordinate right, freedom of expression, are always under suspicion. These are the breeding grounds for resistance to the managerial class

It’s why Europe has little sympathy for the Charlie Hebdo victims. The rulers make a show of it while the issue is in the press, but they immediately go back to suppressing speech and association. The European rulers don’t fear Islam or Islamic terror. France is not going to convert to Islam. They do fear their own citizens, deciding for themselves and amongst themselves that they may prefer different arrangements. That’s a real threat. As far as the managerial elite is concerned, the shooters did them a favor.

This will not end well.

Jeb Bush’s America

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This is what’s coming.

It’s nearly 8 p.m., and inside a state office building two dozen computer experts design and troubleshoot a system that will take and process millions of unemployment claims each year.

It’s a $200 million Employment Development Department project, but with the exception of two managers, everyone inside the office is from outside of the U.S. They are employed by Deloitte, a major U.S. IT company hired by the state to create and manage its Unemployment Insurance Modernization project. The mostly Indian nationals are allowed to work here under a visa program called H-1B.

Tech companies like Microsoft, Intel, Google and Facebook say they need hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to fill jobs here because American colleges can’t crank out computer science grads fast enough. In 2013, the industry lobbied Congress on the issue to the tune of almost $14 million.

Those companies, who need workers with highly specialized knowledge like computer expertise, are awarded the visas through a lottery process. It’s allowed under the Immigration and Nationality Act and administered by the U.S. Department of Labor. The visas can be valid as long as six years.

News10 reached out to several H-1B workers over the past three months, and they all declined to comment for this story.

“The program is going unfettered, unchecked, without bounds, and it’s all in the interest of profit,” Computer Database Administrator Chris Brown said. He said was displaced by one of the special visa workers in 1996, and he has been following the issue for the past 18 years.

Hewlett Packard laid off Brown from its Roseville plant during the height of the H-1B program, when as many as 300,000 of the workers were allowed to take jobs in the U.S. The cap for H-1B visas today is 85,000 after federal audits showed there were abuses in the program. There’s an effort on Capitol Hill to raise the ceiling again to levels last seen in the mid 1990s. And, during a recent presidential trip to India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked President Obama to help loosen the restrictions on the H-1B program. India’s tech outsourcing industry makes billions of dollars every year sending programmers and engineers overseas to work for U.S. companies.

Brown is watching those new developments with interest. When he lost his job in 1996, it was just two weeks before Christmas. He says he’s afraid more Americans will be replaced by foreign-born workers.

“I’m a single income, so on that particular day, as a direct result of this program, we were unable to provide Christmas presents and I kept telling my kids that day that Santa might not show up,” Brown said.

A spokesperson for Hewlett Packard said he would not comment on layoffs that happened 18 years and three CEOs ago, but he defended the visas as a needed resource for HP and the industry as a whole.

U.S. Department of Labor data shows more than 1,100 H-1B visas were certified for workers in the Sacramento area in 2014. The largest number was for Accenture, an IT company that is currently holding state contracts totaling more than $1 billion. It has 125 H-1B visa holders in Sacramento. Deloitte has another 28, and there are four dozen of them filling positions in state offices in the Capital City.

There’s no way to say exactly how many of the visa holders are doing work directly or indirectly with the state. Hundreds of the local H-1B visa holders were awarded to third-party contractors known as “body shops.” Body shops apply for the visas and then farm them out to larger IT companies looking to hire more foreign workers.

Accenture spokesman Mark Bonacci said while the company doesn’t disclose the number of employees it has by city, state or region within the U.S., “the vast majority of our people working in the U.S. are U.S. citizens and residents.”

“Only a very small percentage of Accenture’s employees in the U.S. are H-1B visa holders,” he said.

In an email, Deloitte spokesperson Courtney Flaherty said, “Our primary focus is hiring U.S. workers, including experienced California professionals and graduates.

“Our use of U.S. work permits is entirely consistent with the intent of the Federal Government’s immigration program to complement our domestic workforce with highly-skilled professionals,” she added.

Does anyone really believe there’s a shortage of willing workers in California to do this work? We’re not talking about gene-splicing or physics. California has a 12.3% unemployment rate. They are bringing in low-skilled IT people because they are cheaper than domestic versions. In most cases, they avoid paying health insurance for these people. They also get to work them like slaves. If they complain, the service that brings them over just sends them back and brings in someone who does not complain.

But, this is just the beginning. Once Jeb is installed in the White House, it is open season on Americans.

 

Social Decay

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My pet theory about why societies decline is that their ruling classes lose the will or incentive to enforce the rules they created to govern themselves. It’s a take on the broken windows theory of law enforcement. Once you start letting the little violations go, the next level of crimes are then permitted. The rot creeps higher and higher until no rules are enforced or seen as a deterrent. Without Marius, there can be no Caesar.

It’s not linear or inevitable. New York City reformed itself. Giuliani sorted out the police force and prosecutors office, cracked down on petty crime and began a program of ethnic cleansing. The people running the city, the wealthy financial class, no longer saw any benefit to letting the lunatics run the place so they brought in a new man to address the problems. They had an incentive to do so, which was the need for safe, livable real estate for their servants.

The Romans, in contrast, never had an incentive to reform their system and return to a republic. The Senatorial class saw their interests in centralized authority and therefore went along with the drift toward empire. Given the choice between one of their own having dictatorial power and sharing power with the lower classes, they chose the former. That meant ignoring all of those rules and customs of the republic. When that was not practical, they invented clever ways around those rules and customs.

In modern America, you see much of the same at the top. The Obama administration looks at the law as a puzzle to solve so they can get around the limits. Congress routinely looks the other way as their own rules are broken. Boehner and McConnell see a benefit in letting the executive run wild. It spares them the risk of doing their job and lets them collect massive amounts of cash. There are a lot of rich men in Congress who came to Washington penniless.

The problem with rot at the top in a modern society is it tends to spread to the more mundane parts of the empire. This story from the backwaters of the America South is a good example.

The latest example of cellphone video vindicating someone from false charges is a doozy. It comes from Washington Parish, La., and WWL TV.

One of the worst days of Douglas Dendinger’s life began with him handing an envelope to a police officer.

In order to help out his family and earn a quick $50, Dendinger agreed to act as a process server, giving a brutality lawsuit filed by his nephew to Chad Cassard as the former Bogalusa police officer exited the Washington Parish Courthouse.

The handoff went smoothly, but Dendinger said the reaction from Cassard, and a group of officers and attorneys clustered around him, turned his life upside down.

“It was like sticking a stick in a bee’s nest.” Dendinger, 47, recalled. “They started cursing me. They threw the summons at me. Right at my face, but it fell short. Vulgarities. I just didn’t know what to think. I was a little shocked.”

Not knowing what to make of the blow-up, a puzzled Dendinger drove home. That’s where things went from bad to worse.

“Within about 20 minutes, there were these bright lights shining through my windows. It was like, ‘Oh my God.’ I mean I knew immediately, a police car.”

“And that’s when the nightmare started,” he said. “I was arrested.”

He was not only arrested, he was also charged with two felonies and a misdemeanor. A prior drug charge on his record meant he was potentially looking at decades in prison. Seven witnesses backed up the police account that Dendinger had assaulted Cassard.

But Dendinger had asked his wife and nephew to record him serving the papers. It was a last minute decision, but one that may have saved him his freedom.

From what can be seen on the clips, Dendinger never touches Cassard, who calmly takes the envelope and walks back into the courthouse, handing [prosecutor Leigh Anne] Wall the envelope.

“He’d still be in a world of trouble if he didn’t have that film,” said David Cressy, a friend of Dendinger who once served as a prosecutor under [former St. Tammany District Attorney Walter] Reed. “It was him against all of them. They took advantage of that and said all sorts of fictitious things happened. And it didn’t happen. It would still be going like that had they not had the film.”

Dendinger spent nearly a year waiting for trial, racking up attorney’s fees. As a disabled Army veteran on a fixed income, Dendinger said the case stretched him financially, but in his eyes, he was fighting for his life.

After nearly a year passed, his attorneys forced Reed to recuse his office. The case was referred to the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office, which promptly dropped the charges.

Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission and himself a former prosecutor, studied the videos. He did not hesitate in his assessment.

“I didn’t see a battery, certainly a battery committed that would warrant criminal charges,” Goyeneche said. “And more importantly, the attorney general’s office didn’t see a battery.”

That’s all well and good. And Dendinger has since filed a federal civil rights lawsuit. I hope he collects.

But here’s my question: Why aren’t the seven witnesses to Dendinger’s nonexistent assault on Cassard already facing felony charges? Why are all but one of the cops who filed false reports still wearing badges and collecting paychecks? Why aren’t the attorneys who filed false reports facing disbarment? Dendinger’s prosecutors both filed false reports, then prosecuted Dendinger based on the reports they knew were false. They should be looking for new careers — after they get out of jail.

If a group of regular citizens had pulled this on someone, they’d all likely be facing criminal conspiracy charges on top of the perjury and other charges. So why aren’t these cops and prosecutors?

I could be wrong, but my guess is that they’ll all be let off due to “professional courtesy” or some sort of exercise of prosecutorial discretion. And so the people who ought to be held to a higher standard than the rest of us will once again be held to a lower one.

This is something we see everywhere at the top. Jon Corzine stole billions from his clients, breaking many laws in the process. He is given a pass because he is a one of the beautiful people. The CIA gets caught spying on members of Congress and nothing happens. No one goes to jail for what used to be considered the highest crime imaginable in a republic.

This rot at the top filters down so that the local prosecutor gets away with what should result in prison time. Everyone in the ghetto, for example, knows better than to talk to a cop because cops get to lie and break the law. No good comes from dealing with the cops so no one talks to the cops. The orderly society is thrown into reverse.

Herbert Stein’s Law comes to mind, but probably does not apply. There’s no reason to think the decay of social order in America must stop or that people in charge will reform themselves. There are plenty of examples where societies went through periods of reform and renewal, but there are examples of ones that simply collapsed. The stories above suggest the rot is deep and far advanced. Reform may simply be impossible.