The SCOTUS decision on the CDC's eviction-moratorium extension

 The two glaringly disturbing aspects of this are 

• the further breakdown of America's understanding of the clear Constitutional lines of demarcation between the three branches of the federal government
• the further breakdown of America's understanding of the centrality of property rights to the viability of human freedom.

Regarding the first, consider that

• Nancy Pelosi wouldn't bring it up for a vote in the House because she knew it would go down in defeat
• Joe Biden reversed himself on accepting the sunsetting of the most recent extension
• he explicitly stated that he knew it didn't fly from a constitutional standpoint

Here's an account of how that went down:

In September 2020, the Department of Health and Human Services and the CDC introduced what they insisted was only a temporary orderhalting evictions through the end of that year. The order expanded a congressional initiative protecting tenets from eviction but only those who received federal assistance or who resided in federally financed properties. The CDC’s logic was simple: Not only had the pandemic distorted the economy and put otherwise able providers at artificial financial risk, private residencies also “adhere to best practices” during a pandemic, “such as social distancing and other infection control measures.”

But as the pandemic wore on, Congress extended this temporary measure through January 31 of this year. Then, Joe Biden unilaterally extended it again via an executive order through the end of March, robbing this contingency measure of its support in law. In March, he extended it once again through June. All the while, legal challenges to this extraordinary alteration of the American social contract mounted, and the moratorium’s advocates increasingly found themselves on the wrong end of court judgments. But when the matter made its way before the Supreme Court, the judiciary elected not to strike the moratorium down on the spot. Instead, they allowed the moratorium to sunset on its own, deferring to the Biden administration’s contention that it would not be extended again.

But Joe Biden didn’t keep his word. On August 3, the CDC announced yet another extension of the federal eviction moratorium through the end of September. It represented a display of brazen contempt for the courtesy the Supreme Court had shown the executive branch, and Biden seemed to know it. Taking questions from reporters on August 4, the president was asked if this executive agency’s unilateral extension of a long-expired congressional contingency was “going to pass Supreme Court muster.” Biden replied in no uncertain terms: “The bulk of the constitutional scholarship says that it’s not likely to pass Constitutional muster,” he said. Knowing that he was skirting the bounds of constitutional propriety, he nevertheless noted that it may be “worth the effort” to test the Court—the incidental effect of which would be, at least, the temporary reimplementation of a lawless policy.

Read the sentence I've put in boldface a few times and let it sink in. Biden is saying, "What I want to see happen is more important than the Constitution."

The matter came back before the Supreme Court last week and, in a 6 to 3 vote, the Court said, "That's it. No more extending this thing."

 Justice Breyer's dissent ought to make the hair on anyone's neck stand up:

Breyer’s dissent is troubling in some of its reasoning. For example, he argues that since Congress did not specifically prohibit the CDC from exercising the power of preventing evictions, it is lawful. He wrote, “If Congress had meant to exclude these types of measures from its broad grant of authority, it likely would have said so.” Emphasis is mine. What Breyer wrote turns Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution on its head. The Constitution does not say Congress must tick off a list of what the executive branch cannot do. It says the executive does not have the authority to do A or B unless specifically given the authority to do it.

According to Breyer, if the CDC decided public transit was too much of a threat to public health and commuting by automobile prevents the spread of COVID, the CDC could decree that anyone who wanted to buy a car could do so with no credit check, no money down, 84-month terms, and 0% interest. I know my example is hyperbolic, and I did it purposely to illuminate Breyer’s apocryphal argument more clearly. The majority opinion raised the same point, asking, “Could the CDC, for example, mandate free grocery delivery to the homes of the sick or vulnerable? Require manufacturers to provide free computers to enable people to work from home? Order telecommunications companies to provide free high-speed Internet service to facilitate remote work?”

Regarding the second point, the reaction from the Left perpetuates the longstanding notion on that side of the spectrum that landlords are grubby bastards who don't see their renters as human beings. As with any demonization of a category of people, indisputable examples of some cases of this being true can be easily found. We've all seen the evening-news stories about apartment complexes in unspeakable states of deterioration. But, as is also true of such demonization, it not only obscures the fact that most landlords are not like that, but also a basic economic fact about the renting arrangement:

A landlord by definition owns the property being rented.

Put in its most simple terms, the federal government has no business meddling in the coming to an agreement between the buyer and the seller of a good or service. This is so basic, it's dismaying in the extreme that this needs to be stated emphatically at this late date. 

So we've seen a small win, for the moment at least, for Constitutionality  and basic human freedom. 

Know, however, that those who have no use for either will not be resting. 

 

 

The horrifying consequences of an unserious nation still acting under the illusion that it's qualified to lead on the world stage

 The two blasts at Hamid Karzai International Airport - one at the Abbey Gate and one at the Baron Hotel - have killed at least 13 people, including 4 US Marines. The US military is now in the final stages of its "retrograde" - that's bureaucrat-speak for turning tail and getting the hell out - from the airport.

Approximately 1,500 Americans are still in Afghanistan, with rapidly dwindling chances of getting out. That's at least as true for the thousands of Afghans (at least 250,000 at a minimum who are eligible for US visas) who helped the US in various capacities and now face dismal prospects.  T.hose who are scrambling for the Pakistan border are encountering Taliban thuggery.

US Charge d'Affaires for Afghanistan Ross Wilson told CBS News's Norah O'Donnell this morning that his office had sent warnings starting in April, each one worded with more urgency, that they needed to get out, and that some seem to have chosen not to leave and that "that's their business."

Ambassador Wilson, how does that square with what Secretary of State Antony Blinken had to say on June 21, that "the embassy's staying, our partners are staying," and that he didn't think "significant deterioration in the security situation is something [that would] happen from a Friday to a Monday"?

Or with Joe Biden's assessment on July 8 that there would be "no circumstance where you see people lifted off the roof of an embassy"?

Speaking of Biden, what's up with the address the other day in which he didn't even mention Afghanistan, but rather exhorted the nation to get COVID vaccine booster shots, or the more recent presser in which he touted domestic-policy wins for his progressive agenda for seven-plus minutes before getting around to discussing Afghanistan?

Not that the previous administration was any better. As LITD mentioned the other day, Trump came damn close to hosting a Taliban delegation at Camp David in September 2019, until the plan was squelched by a Taliban-staged car bombing in Kabul. Still, he pressed ahead with his idiotic patty-cake agenda, having Mike Pompeo work out a "peace" deal that called for all US troops to be gone  by May 2020.

Western civilization has no reliable guardian now. The institutional and cultural rot that has been underway for decades is now matched by a foreign-policy rudderlessness to which both parties have signed on. 

Still, one side wants to talk about white-privilege indoctrination and forcing the populace to switch from cheap, dense and readily available forms of energy to play-like forms that would ultimately wind up depending on the continued existence of the normal-people forms, and the other side wants to indulge in rigged-election fantasies, flirtation with industrial policy, and paranoid notions that vaccines are some threat to personal liberty.

As I've said many times over the years, I keep hoping that someday the name of this blog could be rendered obsolete by a fundamental turn toward a rule bright future. Alas, the wait for that goes on.

UPDATE: The dead-Marines figure is now 12.

Larry Elder is going to have to address specific aspects of his ex-fiancee's allegations

I've deliberated all day whether to post about this. I first ran across the Politico account on my morning news perusal. But I see it's also been covered by The Hill, The Week and The Sun. Others as well, although I cite these by name because they are not the kinds of publications that are inclined to jeopardize their journalistic standing over sketchy accusations of gun brandishing and general sybaritic behavior hurled at a California gubernatorial candidate.

There was a time when Larry Elder was an articulate spokesman for responsible living. In particular, the corrosive effect of fatherlessness, and in particular among black American households, has been a subject he's emphasized in columns, broadcast shows and tweets. He could be fearsomely effective when going toe to toe against black pundits who peddled the collective-racial-victimhood line. His views on social issues are pretty run-of-the-mill conservative, perhaps even a bit more libertarian than, say, mine. 

Like so many right-of-center figures I'd once admired and considered go-to spokespeople for foundational principles that informed my worldview - Victor Davis Hanson, Bill Bennett, Dennis Prager, to name a few - he became enamored of Donald Trump, a lapse in judgement that considerably eroded my respect. 

Still, it was a surprise today to see that the personal-life shoe has apparently dropped.

Granted, Ms. Datig has some degree of axe to grind, given the acrimonious nature of their split. But there are two levels to her story: the broad outline and the minute details. It seems to me that Elder owes the voters of California, as well as followers of his column and podcast, a thorough refutation of the broad outline, if indeed such a refutation cn be mounted. 

Regarding Elder's alleged fondness for marijuana, I can't begrudge him that per se. It doesn't seem to have interfered with his work. However, it does not seem to have had the mellowing effect on him that advocates of weed mainstreaming put forth as one of its selling points. In fact, quite the contrary. 

The Politico account provides the fullest picture of how Elder and Alexandra Datig met:

Datig described meeting the ambitious talk show host in the early 2000s at bacchanalian parties populated by Hollywood celebrities like rapper Snoop Dogg and hosted by publisher Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles. 

Elder, who has since taken to broadcasting in a robe a la Hefner in YouTube segments called “Robe Rage,” was “an A-lister’’ at the gatherings, Datig said. In one home video she provided to POLITICO, Elder brags about his relationship with Snoop Dogg, saying, “I introduced him to the evil weed… I taught him everything he knows...I’m the one who made him what he is, I can’t believe he turned his back on me, motherfucker.” 

And while she is now a conservative blogger who takes her addiction recovery quite seriously, she somehow, earlier in life, got mixed up in as tawdry a business as there is:

Datig, 51, became well known in Los Angeles in the 1990s as a leading witness and informant in the prosecution of Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss. Datig described being paid $10,000 per day and getting First Class air travel as one of the women who worked in Fleiss’s network. She has subsequently spoken out strongly against human trafficking.

Was all that behind her when she attended the bacchanalian parties, or was there some overlap?

It seems a tattoo became an issue between her and Elder:

Earlier in the relationship, Datig said, she was pressured repeatedly by Elder to get a tattoo declaring her to be “Larry’s Girl’’ — and even urged her to design one which included the Superman logo. 

She agreed to get it — after he said he would get an accompanying tattoo declaring his love for her, she said. “He never did,’’ she said.

I'm not making any politics-level prognostications here. It's not super likely, but it's entirely possible that he could replace Gavin Newsom as California governor.

My interest is on the level of integrity concerns. The question of greatest importance is whether Larry Elder is a phony. If so, the credibility that has made him the Sage of South Central goes up in a cloud of rich, pungent smoke. 

 

 

No precedent for this level of failure, humiliation and self-imperiling

 Biden telling George Stephanopoulos, "I think [the Taliban is] going through sort of an existential crisis about do they want to be recognized by the international community as being a legitimate government."

Secretary of Defense Austin's remark that the US military doesn't "have the capability to go out and collect up large numbers of people."

White House press secretary Jen Psaki announcing she's going on vacation as the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan is complete. 

German politician and probable successor to Angela Merkel as chancellor's characterization of Afghanistan's collapse as "the greatest debacle NATO has seen since its foundation."

European Union diplomatic corp leader Josep Borrell's assessment that "what has happened shows that Europe needs to develop this famous 'strategic autonomy' in order to be ready to face challenges that affect us eventually."

British Parliament member and Afghan conflict veteran Tom Tugendhat on Biden's characterization of the Afghan army: "To see their commander in chief call into question the courage of men I fought with is shameful."

Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Bob Menendez: "I am disappointed that the Biden Administration clearly did not accurately assess the implications of a rapid U.S. withdrawal."

Taliban forces using whips, guns and chemical irritants to drive away people seeking entry to Hamid Karzai International Airport. Afghan women handing off their babies to soldiers. 50,000 locals gathered at the airport gates. 

CNN reporter Clarissa Ward, who is on the ground in Kabul: "A lot of people outside that airport would like to know, if this isn't failure, what does failure look like exactly?"

The scale of what is happening - to Afghanistan, to the United States, to global security - is unprecedented. Make no mistake. The world is entering a very dark new era. 

What Afghan women can expect a return to

 Do you for a second buy that s--- about the Taliban wanting to see women participate in government and keep going to school?

Consider the fate last month of Najia:

Najia was at home with her three young sons and daughter in a small village in northern Afghanistan when Taliban fighters knocked on their door. 

Najia's daughter Manizha, 25, knew they were coming -- her mother had told her they'd done the same thing the previous three days, demanding that she cook food for up to 15 fighters.

"My mother told them, 'I am poor, how can I cook for you?'" said Manizha. "(The Taliban) started beating her. My mother collapsed and they hit her with their guns -- AK47s." 

Manizha said she yelled at the fighters to stop. They paused for a moment before throwing a grenade into the next room and fleeing as the flames spread, she said. The mother-of-four died from the beating.

The US president who was predecessor to the current one appeased these monsters and the current US president has given them carte blanche. 

We shall see if God forgives this.  

The world-stage reverberations begin

 Chinese state-run media is basically saying that, in the wake of the Afghanistan debacle, the US will not prevent the fall of Taiwan, which is being characterized as a matter of when, not if:

An editorial by the Global Times, a Chinese state-run outlet, took aim at Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party and President Tsai Ing-wen.

“From what happened in Afghanistan, [the DPP] should perceive that once a war breaks out in the Straits, the island’s defense will collapse in hours and the US military won’t come to help,” the editorial states. “As a result, the DPP authorities will quickly surrender, while some high-level officials may flee by plane.”

The editorial called on the DPP to “keep cross-Straits [of Taiwan] peace with political means, rather than acting as strategic pawns of the US and bear the bitter fruits of a war.”

Global Times editor-in-chief Hu Xijin also commented on the Afghanistan withdrawal on Twitter.

“After the fall of the Kabul regime, the Taiwan authorities must be trembling,” Hu wrote. “Don’t look forward to the US to protect them. Taipei officials need to quietly mail-order a Five-Star Red Flag from the Chinese mainland. It will be useful one day when they surrender to the PLA.”

It doesn't get much more explicit than that. 

 

 

Afghanistan

 Because this is 2021 in post-America, hard and fast takes on this are, like school-district mask mandates, whether global climate conditions necessitate urgent collective action, and whether there is anything systemic about whatever degree of racism still exists in our society, likely to outnumber more multifaceted conclusions. 

I don't say this as an excuse to equivocate. Anybody who doesn't assert that this is a foreign policy debacle of historic proportions has a woefully underbaked understanding of what is happening, in my book.

The US State Department begging the Taliban to spare our embassy in Kabul, the beheading of Afghan government troops who have surrendered, the drawing up of lists of girls and women between the ages of 15 and 45 in the conquered provinces for the purpose of forcing them to marry Taliban fighters, the influx of jihadis from the UK, Libya, Syria and Pakistan, China's indication that it is prepared to recognize a Taliban government, and the loss of intelligence capabilities add up to an absolute disaster. 

Using this to score points against the Biden administration is an exercise in sleaze, given Trump's plans to host a Taliban delegation, back when "peace" talks were underway, at Camp David on September 11 of last year, and his endless-war talk since entering the political arena in 2015. 

This is not to say that Americans haven't grown tired of US presence in Afghanistan. 20 years is a long time. But is there a widespread understanding that we've only had a relatively small military footprint there for many years?

A development like this doesn't happen in a vacuum. Following as this does on the heels of two other colossal Biden-administration foreign-policy blunders - allowing completion of the Nord Stream pipeline in Europe, and inviting a team from the UN Human Rights Council to come to the US to assess our societal health regarding race relations - it's apt to leave allies as bewildered as Trump's erratic approach did. 

This feels like the catalyst of ramifications to come. The way we were holding those ramifications at bay was far from perfect, but telling the Taliban "have at it" is going to prove grimly consequential. 

Infrastructure deal thoughts

 We finally have an infrastructure package.

Let me start on a very general level and say that I'm skeptical as a matter of principle. Even if the 2,702-page, $1.2 trillion bill were meticulously confined to matters of what until this year had been commonly agreed upon as infrastructure, it would merit skepticism. Many are the county-government meetings I've covered during which funding for road-and-bridge projects was shown to be substantially federal, and the question has always surfaced in my mind, why did this money leave our locality in the first place? There's nothing esoteric about the reason. It's been thus for nearly a century. It allows Representatives and Senators to preen about the bacon they've brought home to the district or state.

Now, to the point about how the bill, for all its non-infrastructure provisions, mainly sticks to what it's ostensibly about. 

Really?

Here are a few more examples of things in the infrastructure bill:

• $50 million for Central Utah Project Completion
• $5 billion for low/zero emissions school buses
• $2.5 billion for a carbon storage commercialization program
• $21.5 billion for clean energy demonstrations
• $75 million for the Denali commission
• $14.2 billion for the Federal Communications Commission
• $3.4 billion for the Federal Buildings Fund
• $3.5 billion for Indian Health Service

The descriptions of these payouts — I mean, grants — are ludicrous: $250 million for reducing truck emissions at ports. A $500 million grant for the Healthy Streets Program allows cities to "provide funding to deploy cool and porous pavements and expand tree cover to mitigate urban heat islands, improve air quality, and reduce flood risks.”

The bill includes $75 million for the Open Challenge and Research Proposal pilot program, which provides grants for proposals to “research needs or challenges identified or determined as important by the Secretary.” And it proposes a “federal system funding alternative advisory board” that must appoint “advocacy groups focused on equity,” among other things.

As I say, legislators love strokes, and a certain kind of legislator, even in this hyper-tribal age in which most Democrats are progressives to at least some degree and most Republicans are Neo-Trumpists who have moved far from the party's recognizable pillars, revels in wearing the "bipartisan" label, in being seen a being driven by "the interests of the country as a whole.". That is a major factor at work here:

it's important to understand the almost mystical allure of bipartisan dealmaking in Congress, especially in the Senate. In parts of official and high-status Washington, bipartisan deals are seen as a good unto themselves, almost independent of what's in them. And for a certain type of lawmaker, that allure has an even greater appeal now, in the post-Trump era, when one of the Senate's own is in the White House. Biden himself is a true believer in the power of across-the-aisle dealmaking. 

But consider the major players involved in the group that hammered this out. They are not representative of their parties as currently comprised:

. . . the makeup of the gang isn’t necessarily representative of the future of either the Democratic or Republican Party. Four of the five core GOP negotiators voted to impeach Trump this year, and Portman is retiring. On the Democratic side, Sinema and Manchin are increasingly lonely supporters of preserving the legislative filibuster.

You know what this means. This is easy fodder for the Kurt Schlichter/Marjorie Taylor Greene/Dinesh D'Souza crowd. The message writes itself: "This is what you get from effete, spineless pretend Republicans. They sell you out and acquiesce to even more dangerous levels of debt and centralized control of American life." And that point can't be dismissed. And it will ensure that most Republicans running for, and getting elected to, office in the midterms will be Neo-Trumpists. 

Democrats are now emboldened as they set their sights on the even more statist, culture-mutilating and costly budget bill they view as "tandem" legislation:

The measure would expand access to Medicare, balloon paid family and medical leave, create federal child-care programs, establish “free” universal pre-k and community college, impose green mandates on energy producers, increase subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, and impose “fees” on industries that emit carbon and methane gases.

What could have been done differently? It's fun to imagine that Romney, Cassidy, Portman - heck, let's include Sinema and Manchin - could have found it within themselves to dig in their heels and say, "Nope. Still too much irrelevant stuff in there, and still too much risk of ballooning the debt." But what-if games are not a very productive use of anybody's time. 

The reality is not pretty, but that makes it pretty characteristic of 2021 post-America. 

 

 

Friday roundup

 The title of Dorian Linskey's recent essay at UnHerd, "Why We Love To Hate 'Imagine,'" certainly grabbed my attention since I've hated that song since it came out in 1971 and have had to strive not to let it ruin my perspective on the incredible body of work John Lennon, as a co-writer with Paul McCartney, created from 1958 to 1969. Linskey's essay concludes on a generous note, borne of his own yearning for a world at least somewhat less challenging to live in than this one. Still, one senses that he understands why the song is repugnant to the non-starry-eyed. 

The most valuable part of the piece is the context he provides for the song's creation:

It is annoying that Imagine has been used to caricature a painfully complicated man as a gentle saint, so it’s essential to understand where Lennon’s head was at when he recorded the song in his home studio in Tittenhurst Park, Berkshire in May 1971. His experience of Arthur Janov’s primal scream therapy had enabled him to let go of the “father-figure trip”, he said. “Facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of heaven.” At the same time, Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono were in the throes of political radicalisation.

In 1968, he had written the Beatles’ Revolution, which told the counterculture to steady on there and drop the pictures of Mao. By the end of 1970, he was telling Rolling Stone: “I really thought that love will save us all. But now I’m wearing a Chairman Mao badge, that’s where it’s at.” Shortly after an interview with Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn for the Trotskyist magazine Red Mole in January 1971, he wrote a new song based on their conversation. Combining socialism and feminism with a Black Panther slogan, Power to the People flipped the ambivalent opening line of Revolution into a call to arms: “Say you want a revolution/ We better get on right away.” The US New Left magazine Ramparts republished the interview under the headline “The Working Class Hero Turns Red”.

Lennon saw Imagine as a different kind of revolution. The black comedian and activist Dick Gregory had given him a book of positive prayer, which Lennon explained to Playboy in 1980 like so: “If you can imagine a world at peace, with no denominations of religion — not without religion but without this my-God-is-bigger-than-your-God thing — then it can be true.” Imagine, therefore, is protest rewritten as a secular prayer. The idea chimed with Ono’s “instruction paintings”, collected in her 1964 book Grapefruit, each of which began “Imagine…” Lennon later said that Imagine should have been credited to Lennon/Ono because “it was right out of Grapefruit” and her name was finally added in 2017.

The Yoko factor turns a lot of people off. While a song like Working Class Hero draws its political power from Lennon’s distinctive flinty sarcasm, Imagine is driven by Ono’s utopian whimsicality. It’s of a piece with the couple’s subsequent billboard campaign, “War is over! If you want it.” The idea that you can simply will a better world into being can seem like impotent New Age guff but the New Left’s philosopher-in-chief Herbert Marcuse was then arguing that imagining radical change was the essential first step towards realising it. The critic Robert Christgau acutely observed that Imagine was “both a hymn for the Movement and a love song for his wife, celebrating a Yokoism and a Marcusianism simultaneously”.

David Hein, writing at The Imaginative Conservative, makes a compelling case for conferring the same status as an English-language impact maker upon the 1928 Book of Common Prayer as the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.

At Law & Liberty, Mark Pulliam offers "An Elegy for the Boy Scouts."

He invites the reader to appreciate the scope with which Scouting founder Baden-Powell was viewing the need for his movement:

Lord Baden-Powell did not write Scouting for Boys in 1908—the foundational text for the worldwide scouting movement—to increase social capital, but to improve the character of Britain’s male youth, which he found wanting.

Baden-Powell, a career military officer in imperial Britain and a hero of the Second Boer War (1899-1902), became concerned that British youth were succumbing to the vices of an industrial and urban society: passivity, sloth, smoking, drinking, poor hygiene, and a general decline in what he felt were essential masculine qualities. So, he began the scouting program to “save boys from the ills of modern life.”  A century later, Baden-Powell’s concerns are as vital as ever.

Baden-Powell felt that learning outdoor skills would make boys “strong and plucky,” and that self-reliance was essential to character building. Thus, his fascination for knot-tying, navigation, fire-building, camping, cooking, first aid, physical fitness, and surviving the wilderness—practical, quasi-military skills that are still a staple of the scouting program. All of this was in aid of improving boys’ character—making them productive citizens. Some of Baden-Powell’s concepts seem dated more than a century later, but many of them are timeless, including the motto he coined: Be prepared.

Like so many cultural institutions, the BSA felt the need to become market-driven in order to reach generations that followed in the wake of the 1960s upheaval:

The Boy Scout Law—with its embrace of religious faith (“reverence”) and heterosexuality (“morally straight”)—faced hostile headwinds in an increasingly secular and “tolerant” society. And, to be honest, in a youth culture increasingly sensitive to what is fashionable—a norm rigidly and relentlessly enforced by social media through the omnipresent smartphone—the Boy Scouts in recent decades was regarded as unacceptably “uncool.” In the 1950s and 1960s, peer pressure went in the opposite direction, reinforcing the attractiveness of scouting. Norman Rockwell’s cover illustration for the February 1965 issue of Boys’ Life depicts two parents proudly watching as their clean-cut son—standing at attention in a crisply-pressed uniform—receives his Eagle medal. Alas, times change. As the BSA’s membership began to decline, the national organization tried to remain “relevant,” adapting to America’s abrupt cultural and demographic shifts with responses that were sometimes clumsy and even counter-productive.

After decades of litigation brought by atheists and homosexuals regarding the BSA’s exclusionary membership requirements—which were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000) as the exercise of the BSA’s First Amendment rights—the BSA reversed itself by allowing gay youths full participation in 2014 and allowing openly gay adults as leaders in 2015. Instead of stemming BSA’s membership decline, the national leadership’s acquiescence to atheists and homosexuals—some believe due to pressure from major corporations whose financial patronage had become indispensable to the organization’s operation—only accelerated it.

He discusses the ill will between the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts stemming from the BSA's opening its membership to girls, as well as the BSA hiring a diversity officer.

How does the BSA come back from a decline from a 1972 peak membership of 6.5 million to  present figure of 762,000?

Jonathan Kay, writing at Quilette, says that belief that there is systemic racism in 2021 America amounts to a faith that looks in many ways like religious faith. Toward the end, he coins a great term, "plurality of the unwell," to examine how this spread has so permeated national life:

But then there is the Plurality of the Unwell. Those who are the loudest and most desperate and dangerous. Those behind the new discourse. Those who corner or lobby the people who make the decisions—the CEOs, university presidents, studio chiefs and so on—to pretend that there is a ghost in the machine. That we are being orchestrated by an unverifiable hate. That it is their role, their mandate, to overthrow the veil of false consciousness and lead us to the light. These people, one suspects, are true believers. Their faith is real, but they do not realize it is faith. They would deny vehemently that it is anything of the kind. They believe that they simply know what the old, the dumb, the wicked cannot know. That we cannot make any meaningful distinction between Jim Crow America and America right now. That all of the so-called progress of the past half-century is a distraction and a farce. That we are trapped inside a vast web of manipulations that must be decimated, loudly and with an unbelievable fervor.

At American Purpose, Frank J. DiStefano says that history can be a great guide regarding how those truly motivated could start a new political party with the viability that the Republicans and Democrats once had. 

For a read that will scare the pants off ya, check out Damon Linker's essay in The Week entitled"The Intellectual Right Contemplates an 'American Caesar.'" Actual conservatives who have succeeded in staying away from what is depicted here will get a fresh sense of the wilderness they inhabit. People with nutty, dangerous, and unConstitutional ideas have vastly more influence at the moment.

Rod Dreher is not the first observer to ask "'What Is Happening To America?'" but his contribution to the conversation is important. 

Nicole Russell at the Washington Examiner lays out just what's in the infrastructure bill:

Some of us have been reading the bill. It’s a shining example of government spending gone wrong. A friend who tweets anonymously — and who isn’t in politics or journalism but has made a habit of poring over these bills — has been raising the alarm. Turns out, the bill is chock-full of pork, “equity” oriented grants, and millions of dollars of “hard” infrastructure that seems neither necessary nor similar to infrastructure.

Here are a few more examples of things in the infrastructure bill:

• $50 million for Central Utah Project Completion
• $5 billion for low/zero emissions school buses
• $2.5 billion for a carbon storage commercialization program
• $21.5 billion for clean energy demonstrations
• $75 million for the Denali commission
• $14.2 billion for the Federal Communications Commission
• $3.4 billion for the Federal Buildings Fund
• $3.5 billion for Indian Health Service

The descriptions of these payouts — I mean, grants — are ludicrous: $250 million for reducing truck emissions at ports. A $500 million grant for the Healthy Streets Program allows cities to "provide funding to deploy cool and porous pavements and expand tree cover to mitigate urban heat islands, improve air quality, and reduce flood risks.”

The bill includes $75 million for the Open Challenge and Research Proposal pilot program, which provides grants for proposals to “research needs or challenges identified or determined as important by the Secretary.” And it proposes a “federal system funding alternative advisory board” that must appoint “advocacy groups focused on equity,” among other things.

Quinnipiac poll has some really ugly stats for Andrew Cuomo.  

 

  

 

A California restaurant-industry dilemma at the confluence of economics and culture

 It may be soon be hard to find bacon on California restaurant menus:

Thanks to a reworked menu and long hours, Jeannie Kim managed to keep her San Francisco restaurant alive during the coronavirus pandemic.

That makes it all the more frustrating that she fears her breakfast-focused diner could be ruined within months by new rules that could make one of her top menu items — bacon — hard to get in California.

“Our number one seller is bacon, eggs and hash browns,” said Kim, who for 15 years has run SAMS American Eatery on the city’s busy Market Street. “It could be devastating for us.”

In a move reminiscent of the Golden State's auto-emission rules that were different from those of the rest of the country, it has thrown a wrench in the flow of consumer products into its retail outlets:

At the beginning of next year, California will begin enforcing an animal welfare proposition approved overwhelmingly by voters in 2018 that requires more space for breeding pigs, egg-laying chickens and veal calves. National veal and egg producers are optimistic they can meet the new standards, but only 4% of hog operations now comply with the new rules. Unless the courts intervene or the state temporarily allows non-compliant meat to be sold in the state, California will lose almost all of its pork supply, much of which comes from Iowa, and pork producers will face higher costs to regain a key market.

Animal welfare organizations for years have been pushing for more humane treatment of farm animals but the California rules could be a rare case of consumers clearly paying a price for their beliefs.

With little time left to build new facilities, inseminate sows and process the offspring by January, it’s hard to see how the pork industry can adequately supply California, which consumes roughly 15% of all pork produced in the country.

“We are very concerned about the potential supply impacts and therefore cost increases,” said Matt Sutton, the public policy director for the California Restaurant Association.

California’s restaurants and groceries use about 255 million pounds of pork a month, but its farms produce only 45 million pounds, according to Rabobank, a global food and agriculture financial services company.

The response of the industry's trade association - to ask the federal government to take up the slack with taxpayer-and-debt dollars - is disheartening, of the objective is to steer things around to a free-market basis:

The National Pork Producers Council has asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture for federal aid to help pay for retrofitting hog facilities around the nation to fill the gap. Hog farmers said they haven’t complied because of the cost and because California hasn’t yet issued formal regulations on how the new standards will be administered and enforced.

Then again, havoc's going to ensue if the consequences of California's move are allowed to play out:

If half the pork supply was suddenly lost in California, bacon prices would jump 60%, meaning a $6 package would rise to about $9.60, according to a study by the Hatamiya Group, a consulting firm hired by opponents of the state proposition.

If one views an individual pig in the same manner as we do, say, dogs and cats, it does indeed seem that the argument can be made current industry practices are heartless:

At one typical hog farm in Iowa, sows are kept in open-air crates measuring 14-square-feet when they join a herd and then for a week as part of the insemination process before moving to larger, roughly 20-square foot group pens with other hogs. Both are less than the 24 square feet required by the California law to give breeding pigs enough room to turn around and to extend their limbs. Other operations keep sows in the crates nearly all of the time so also wouldn’t be in compliance.

The California Department of Food and Agriculture said that although the detailed regulations aren’t finished, the key rules about space have been known for years.

“It is important to note that the law itself cannot be changed by regulations and the law has been in place since the Farm Animal Confinement Proposition (Prop 12) passed by a wide margin in 2018,” the agency said in response to questions from the AP.

The pork industry has filed lawsuits but so far courts have supported the California law. The National Pork Producers Council and a coalition of California restaurants and business groups have asked Gov. Gavin Newsom to delay the new requirements. The council also is holding out hope that meat already in the supply chain could be sold, potentially delaying shortages.

Josh Balk, who leads farm animal protection efforts at the Humane Society of the United States, said the pork industry should accept the overwhelming view of Californians who want animals treated more humanely.

“Why are pork producers constantly trying to overturn laws relating to cruelty to animals?” Balk asked. “It says something about the pork industry when it seems its business operandi is to lose at the ballot when they try to defend the practices and then when animal cruelty laws are passed, to try to overturn them.”

But we as a society, gong back to the days when feral boars were hunted for roasting at that age-honored America custom, the barbecue,  have regarded hogs differently from the above-mentioned species we welcome as family members, and there's real cost involved in moving in a different direction:

In Iowa, which raises about one-third of the nation’s hogs, farmer Dwight Mogler estimates the changes would cost him $3 million and allow room for 250 pigs in a space that now holds 300.

To afford the expense, Mogler said, he’d need to earn an extra $20 per pig and so far, processors are offering far less.

“The question to us is, if we do these changes, what is the next change going to be in the rules two years, three years, five years ahead?” Mogler asked.

And, as in the case of the above-mentioned auto-emissions rules, things get complicated in a global economy:

The California rules also create a challenge for slaughterhouses, which now may send different cuts of a single hog to locations around the nation and to other countries. Processors will need to design new systems to track California-compliant hogs and separate those premium cuts from standard pork that can serve the rest of the country.

While Ms. Kim's establishment's concern arises because the fare she offers is good ol' all-American fare, she is cognizant that many others with her demographic classification, as well as Latin Americans, will see a dent in their ability to offer traditional fare from the Pacific rim and the southern portion of the Western hemisphere:

Kim, who is Korean-American, said she’s especially worried for small restaurants whose customers can’t afford big price increases and that specialize in Asian and Hispanic dishes that typically include pork.

“You know, I work and live with a lot of Asian and Hispanic populations in the city and their diet consists of pork. Pork is huge,” Kim said. “It’s almost like bread and butter.”

A rejoinder comes to mind that, while somewhat boneheaded, still has all too much validity in the case of the Asian cuisines in question: "Well, hell, in some of the countries you're referring to they keep dogs out behind the restaurant, and when somebody orders a dish featuring dog, they go out there, take a brick, go upside the dog's head, and bring it in and dress and butcher it."

I happen to believe, and I'm willing take the slings and arrows of a charge of chauvinism, that the special place we in the West have given to dogs and cats is one small marker of what makes our civilization  unique blessing to humankind. You just don't do that to Fido if you have any interest in attending to your humanity.

Now, no sooner do I say that than I must admit to being a sucker for cute-pig videos. When I. share them on social media, I generally do so by saying, "File under: If I ever give up a meat, it will be pork."

But I, like millions of North Americans, Latin Americans and Asians, love my bacon, sausage, chops, ribs, shoulder, ham and belly. 

I've long said that I classify the animals lower than humans three ways: those we make pets and therefore family members, those we eat, and those we view from afar with awe. In this, I take my cue from Genesis 1:26 as well as the fact that every dog or cat I've ever had has savored table scraps of steak, chicken or ribs as much as I've relished the preponderance of the offering on my plate. 

This is the well-entrenched set of assumptions that California is trying to buck. To see them do so without taking regard for the full range of consequences seems to me to be just another example of that once-great state's collective decision to decline. If only its decision didn't risk dragging down the world with it.