The Cabal That Cried Wolf and Undermined a Republic

Jussie Smollett, Crystal Magnum and Susan Smith are three names that at various times over the last 25 years have riveted America’s attention.  Smollett is a black man who lied about being attacked by two Trump supporting white racists in 2019.  Magnum is a black woman who lied about being raped by three white Duke Lacrosse players in 2006.  Smith is a white woman who killed her two boys in 1994 and blamed it on a fictional black carjacker.

While race was central to the first and incidental to the last two, as is with much news in America, the media focused on it extensively.  But race was not the issue that makes these three cases so despicable.  What makes them so heinous is that they sought to play upon the sympathies of the American public.  In the end they failed and all three ended up disgraced and Magnum and Smith ended up in jail.    

From Al Sharpton & Tawana Brawley 30 years ago to countless hate crime hoaxes across the country today, the consequence of these hoaxes is that when exposed to enough of them, people become inured to the issue such that when real crimes take place, the victim’s stories are often given little credence or are outright rejected.   

As despicable as these hoaxes are, they are simply individuals seeking to evade responsibility for their actions or attract attention, and largely don’t impact significant numbers of people beyond those targeted or involved. 

What is a much larger problem however is when such hoaxes are perpetrated by government.  And we’ve had a great deal of that.  Manmade environmental hoaxes have evolved from the Coming Ice Age to Acid Rain to Global Warming to Climate Change, with each one being manipulated to scare citizens and implement government policies and programs that never die, despite the fact that posited catastrophes never actually emerge.  Think about the “Peak oil” fears of the 70s and the ethanol programs we’re still stuck with today, despite the extraordinary increases in oil production and reserves.

Democrats have been manipulating Americans fears and goodwill for decades and today we are watching the culmination of that treachery.  It’s called Covid and it’s easily the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people. 

In reality, Covid is nothing more than a really bad case of the common cold.  Bad, certainly, but but basically the common cold nonetheless. From an epidemiology perspective that may not be completely accurate, but from a societal one it most certainly is. 

Like the flu – which kills about 36,000 people annually, Covid is largely transmitted from one person to another via airborne particles.  Over the last 18 months 42 million Americans have gotten Covid and 682,000 Americans have died from it.  The former number is likely much higher – possibly over 100 million – and the latter number is likely much lower, with many of those reported as dying of Covid in reality dying with Covid.  Keep in mind of course that that’s 682,000 people in a country of 350 million, and 95% of the dead had on average 3 or more co-morbidities and the average age was almost 75.

A little more perspective:  Heart disease annually kills 650,000 Americans while cancer kills 600,000.  We spend $350 billion a year on heart disease and $158 billion on cancer.  That works out to be $538,000 spent per person who died of heart disease and $263,000 per person who died of cancer.  Covid is a bit different.  Through March of this year the US spent $13 trillion on Covid and will likely reach $20 trillion by the end of the year.  By the end of the year the death total “from” Covid will likely hit 800,000.  That works out to be approximately $25 million per death.

Now these numbers are not exactly apples to apples in that much of the heart disease and cancer money went to research that would not benefit the people who died, while ostensibly Covid dollars went to ameliorating the virus and its associated impact on the nation.  Then of course there’s the fact that heart disease and cancer aren’t contagious while Covid is. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the survival rate from Covid is 99% or higher for men below 57 and women below 62 while the average 5 year survival rate from cancer is below 50%. 

The point here is simply that while Covid is certainly a cause of concern, it’s nothing close to an existential threat to the nation. But one wouldn’t know that from listening to the Democrats, traditional media, big tech and the healthcare industry.  For purely political and control purposes, they have conspired against the American people to hide facts about potential treatments, lied at almost every turn and sought to harness the police power of government to control virtually every aspect of American life over the last 18 months. The results have been catastrophic, from a fraudulent election to millions of failed businesses to an array of restrictions and mandates that don’t even pretend to be Constitutional.

As bad as all the obvious negative outcomes from this unprecedented destruction of freedom and staggering amount of debt will bring about, possibly the worst part of the last 18 months (besides the deaths, obviously) is that the cabal has basically wrecked what little confidence Americans had in their government.  After being manipulated, persecuted, prosecuted and insulted for the better part of 18 months, how much confidence does the average American have in their government today?  Practically none. Actually, now that a Democrat is back in the White House Democrats have embraced their inner statists and their trust has ticked up while Republicans have the lowest trust level in Government since Barack Obama’s first term – and that was back in May, which seems a lifetime ago.

And that undermining of government could very well come back to bite Americans of all stripes.  What happens when we get a real existential threat from something as deadly as Ebola and as easily transmitted as the Delta variant?  Will Americans believe that their government has suddenly become honest and responsible?  Probably not, and their skepticism grows as they see more hypocrisy and are saddled with a growing array of mandates that are demonstrably ineffective or worse, dangerous. 

The odds of a real virus borne existential threat are likely pretty low, but a visceral distrust in government is very much an existential threat to freedom and the Republic. Once before Americans were similarly distrustful of government and skeptical about its intentions and thirst for power.  The result was the Declaration of Independence.  I wonder what similar distrust in 2021 will engender... 

Thirsty Californians and unemployed New Yorkers - Sacrifices to Liberalism's Global Warming Delusion

Liberals often live in a fantasy world that ignores the real world right in front of them. They continue to pour trillions of dollars into poverty programs despite the fact that poverty persists and grows. Their go to solution for failing and failed government schools is always spend more money rather than embrace solutions that actually work such as charter schools or voucher programs. It’s no surprise then that their tired solutions rarely ever solve the problems they are ostensibly focused on.

Strangely, that dynamic exists even when the problem itself is fiction. The perfect example of this is the state of California. In an effort to address congestion on California roads (which is a real problem) and to fight man-made global warming (which is a fiction) California is planning on spending anywhere from an estimated $68 to $98 billion taxpayer dollars to build a high speed rail link from Los Angeles and San Francisco. This, despite the fact that most traffic in California is from people traveling within metro areas, not between them. Think about it, LA’s worst traffic is usually 10-15 miles on the 405 or I-10 during rush hour, not on I-5 north of the city. A high speed rail ticket between LA and San Francisco that was originally projected to cost $50 is now expected to cost more than $81. That’s a round trip cost of either $100 or $162. Today you can get a round trip plane ticket between the same two cities for $135. What’s more, the line will likely require additional hundreds of millions of taxpayer subsidies annually just to maintain operations... and it will increase carbon emissions!

So there we have it, California plans to spend what will likely be in excess of $100 billion to build a rail system to solve a problem that doesn’t exist and another that can’t be solved by such a system. This, while the state is facing a real problem that it actually can solve: a shortage of water. The state has been gripped in a drought for years, but even in non-drought years water is a problem in California. In addition to families with no water, in the San Joaquin Valley, dubbed “America’s salad bowl” vegetable farms are left idle as there is no water for irrigation. (The drought is not the only cause there…) The $100 billion that the state is wasting building the rail boondoggle could be spent instead on desalinization plants up and down the Pacific coast. Recently the nation’s largest desalinization plant opened in San Diego… but it almost didn’t as years were wasted fighting litigation by environmental groups. That $1 billion facility will produce enough drinking water for approximately 250,000 people annually. Using that metric, for the amount of money California is wasting on the rail system it could desalinate enough water for 26 million people, more than 65% of its population.

The reality is however that the state doesn’t need to build desalinization plants to support 65% of its population. It’s likely that building the capacity necessary to provide water to 20% would be more than sufficient to address most water issues, and that could be done for approximately $30 billion. But that’s not on the books. Given that California is the epicenter of liberalism in the US, that’s not a surprise.

If there is a second center of liberalism in the US, it’s undoubtedly New York, and not surprisingly, it suffers from the same problem as California. Only in New York the tool of choice for seeking to slay the faux dragon of man-made global warming is not absurdly expensive transportation subsidies, but rather absurdly expensive green energy subsidies. New York has recently agreed to spend close to $1 billion subsidizing multi billionaire Elon Musk’s money losing solar panel installation company, SolarCity. This, while the governor of a state with a 6.6% unemployment rate continues to ban the fracking for natural gas, a cleaning burning fuel that has pumped billions of dollars in to the economies of states from North Dakota to Pennsylvania while creating tens of thousands of good paying jobs. So once again, a liberal state is spending boatloads of taxpayer dollars to solve a problem that doesn’t even exist while at the same time it refuses to look at a viable solution to real problems – in this case unemployment and energy prices.

And so it goes with liberalism, using rational solutions to attack real problems takes a back seat to solving fake problems that dovetail with the left’s worldview, regardless of the consequences. California is in the midst of a water shortage that is having devastating consequences on millions of its citizens on a daily basis. New York is seeing jobs and citizens flee the state for lower taxes and better job prospects. In both states the governors have decided those very real problems are not as important as pandering to their political base by tilting at the windmill of global warming. The result is actually worse than if the state did nothing at all. If they were doing nothing the taxpayers would at least be no worse off than they are now. Unfortunately however, the taxpayers in the 4th and 1st highest tax states (respectively) are on the hook millions or billions of dollars and will be much worse off in the long run. Such is liberalism: obscure failure in the real world by selling grand designs of some future success that never quite works out as promised… then simply count on voters to forget about that failure as you dazzle them with your next quixotic mirage.

Random Observations on Government

Ronald Reagan was the most conservative president in the last 75 years. Despite interest rates of 20% when he took office, during the first 5 years of his presidency the economy grew by a total of 17.7%. Barack Obama is the most progressive president in American history. Despite interest rates close to zero throughout his terms, during the first 5 years of his presidency the economy grew by a total of 5.8%... and it's getting worse, shrinking at an annual rate of 2.9% in the first quarter of 2014!

At the very moment in time when crime in the United States is at record lows, local police departments are morphing into paramilitary armies. How many times have you heard of someone buying a brand new toy and letting it sit in the closet? Probably not that often…

Barack Obama’s never been a big fan of American Exceptionalism or hegemony, despite the fact that American leadership has ushered two generations of relative peace after two world wars in the first 40 years of the 20th century. He is however a big fan of international consensus and cooperation. The UN is a good example of just such cooperation. They are the ones who brought us a UN Human Rights Council featuring such freedom loving states as Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and Cuba. Barack Obama likes that non-US centric model so much that he has decided the United States will relinquish its management of the Internet traffic cop organization, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). So now such liberty stalwarts as China, Venezuela and Iran will have just as much to say about the freedom of the Internet as the United States does. That should work out well.

Despite mounting proof that NOAA and other organizations manipulated data to further the myth of global warming… despite record cold temperatures and ice packs in the Great Lakes, Barack Obama believes “Climate Change” (AKA “Global Warming”) is as great a threat to national security as is terrorism.

Why is it that over the last 5 years GDP has grown by 6% yet the stock market is up by over 120%. Could it have anything to do with Big Government?

There are over 3,000 counties in the United States. Why are 7 of the 10 richest located adjacent to Washington, DC? No, that couldn’t have anything to do with Big Government.

The bad news: In 2014 there are 127,000 fewer native born Americans working than there were in 2000, despite that group growing by 17 million people. The good news: Since 2000 there have been approximately 5.7 million jobs created in the United States. The worse news: According to the Center for Immigration Studies, all of that 5.7 million net job growth has gone to immigrants – legal and illegal – leaving a total of 58 million working age native born Americans without work.

After years of practically non existent border enforcement, and his administration signaling to millions of poor that if they can just get to the United States they just might be able to stay, Barack Obama blames Republicans for the tens of thousands of unaccompanied children who are flooding across America’s southern border. Constitution be damned, he’s going to use executive action to solve America’s immigration problem. Regardless of the rhetoric, the outcome of Obama’s unilateral action will likely be amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants who will soon thereafter be converted into Democrat voters.

Despite crystal clear evidence that ethanol is worse for the environment than gasoline… Despite the fact that prices for everything from beef to plastic and everything in between are rising because so much farmland is dedicated to ethanol corn production… Despite the fact that ethanol significantly raises the price of gasoline… Congress just passed another Farm Bill that will provide tens of billions of dollars to maintain the ethanol cabal.

Congress’s approval ratings are at historic lows, in the single digits, yet somehow American voters regularly return over of 90% of their Congressmen and Senators to Washington.

Despite the fantasy that progressive policies are good for the poor, in the end they are bad for everyone, except those in government and the friends of those in government. If you’re riding the Wall Street gravy train then you love big government. If you’re a big business who uses government to limit competition and pad your bottom line, you love big government. If you’re a government employee with practically lifetime employment, 50% higher salaries than your private sector counterparts and the power of life or death over businesses, you love big government.

If however you are an entrepreneur seeking to start a business and create jobs, you are oppressed by big government. If however you are an unskilled youth seeking to get your first job, your opportunities are limited by big government. If however you a simple wage earner who wonders where the rest of your check went, big government exploits you.

None of this is rocket science, nor is there anything here particularly surprising. Nonetheless, Americans continue to vote for big government progressives in both parties and wonder why things never seem to get any better. The question is not whether this unsustainable and suffocating government system will end, but when. The more important question is, will the entity we know as the United States survive intact or will it devolve into anarchy and chaos and become just another ghost of a failed state on history’s chronicle of mankind’s evolution? If people with no sense of liberty, no appreciation for small government and no allegiance to the the Constitution keep getting elected, the outlook doesn't look good.