Another great SCOTUS ruling

 The robes - at least the majority - have been knocking it out of the park this week.

This is another one of those that, like the narrative that was ready to go upon issuance of the Dobbs ruling, that "abortion rights" were taken away, when what the Court ruled was that the Constitution does not say that abortion is a right, substantive due process fans notwithstanding, is already getting couched in certain corners as bad old fuddy-duddies standing in the way of what "needs" to happen. It's already getting framed as a setback in the "fight against climate change."  (BTW, I thought this new CNN CEO, Chris Licht, wanted to point the network in a more objective-journalism direction.)

No, what this does is go a long way toward dismantling the century-plus-old progressive vision of unelected pointy-headed bureaucratic "experts" in executive-branch positions making law:

Roberts led a 6-3 decision in West Virginia v EPAthat has significant repercussions for agency jurisdiction. The court ruled that the EPA could not use the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions without a more specific grant of that authority from Congress, although Roberts kept the decision as narrow as he could:

The Supreme Court on Thursday limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants, dealing a blow to the Biden administration’s efforts to address climate change.

The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s three liberal justices in dissent, saying that the majority had stripped the E.P.A. of “the power to respond to the most pressing environmental challenge of our time.”

The ruling appeared to curtail the agency’s ability to regulate the energy sector, limiting it to measures like emission controls at individual power plants and, unless Congress acts, ruling out more ambitious approaches like a cap-and-trade system at a time when experts are issuing increasingly dire warnings about the quickening pace of global warming.

The implications of the ruling could extend well beyond environmental policy and further signal that the court’s newly expanded conservative majority is deeply skeptical of the power of administrative agencies to address major issues facing the nation and the planet.

The New York Times notes that this draws a pretty clear line in the sand from this court about agency jurisdiction and authority. It also parallels the CDC eviction-moratoria case, they note, in which the court rebuked the CDC for overstepping its jurisdiction and authority, granted by Congress in its enabling statute. If Congress wanted to expand that authority, then Congress should have acted, Roberts ruled at that time.

Roberts writes today that not only did Congress not specifically authorize the EPA to regulate carbon emissions in the manner they planned in their Clean Power Plan, Congress explicitly rejected such proposals:

The dissent also cites our decision in American Elec. Power Co. v. Connecticut, 564 U. S. 410 (2011). Post, at 20. The question there, however, was whether Congress wanted district court judges to decide, under unwritten federal nuisance law, “whether and how to regulate carbon- dioxide emissions from power plants.” 564 U. S., at 426. We answered no, given the existence of Section 111(d). But we said nothing about the ways in which Congress intended EPA to exercise its power under that provision. And it is doubtful we had in mind that it would claim the authority to require a large shift from coal to natural gas, wind, and solar. After all, EPA had never regulated in that manner, despite having issued many prior rules governing power plants under Section 111. See, e.g., 71 Fed. Reg. 9866 (2006); 70 Fed. Reg. 28616; 44 Fed. Reg. 33580; 36 Fed. Reg. 24875 (1973).

Finally, we cannot ignore that the regulatory writ EPA newly uncovered conveniently enabled it to enact a program that, long after the dangers posed by greenhouse gas emissions “had become well known, Congress considered and rejected” multiple times. Brown & Williamson, 529 U. S., at 144; see also Alabama Assn., 594 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 2); Bunte Brothers, 312 U. S., at 352 (lack of authority not previously exercised “reinforced by [agency’s] unsuccessful attempt . . . to secure from Congress an express grant of [the challenged] authority”). At bottom, the Clean Power Plan essentially adopted a cap-and-trade scheme, or set of state cap-and-trade schemes, for carbon. See 80 Fed. Reg. 64734 (“Emissions trading is . . . an integral part of our BSER analysis.”). Congress, however, has consistently rejected proposals to amend the Clean Air Act to create such a program. See, e.g., American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, H. R. 2454, 111th Cong., 1st Sess.; Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, S. 1733, 111th Cong., 1st Sess. (2009). It has also declined to enact similar measures, such as a carbon tax. See, e.g., Climate Protection Act of 2013, S. 332, 113th Cong., 1st Sess.; Save our Climate Act of 2011, H. R. 3242, 112th Cong., 1st Sess. “The importance of the issue,” along with the fact that the same basic scheme EPA adopted “has been the subject of an earnest and profound debate across the country, . . . makes the oblique form of the claimed delegation all the more suspect.” Gonzales, 546 U. S., at 267–268 (internal quotation marks omitted).

In this case, it wasn’t just the regulation that crossed the line, but also its arbitrary nature. The EPA attempted to impose caps that didn’t have any relation to the statute nor to a rational and objective standard, Roberts wrote:

First, unlike Section 111, the Acid Rain and NAAQS programs contemplate trading systems as a means of complying with an already established emissions limit, set either directly by Congress (as with Acid Rain, see 42 U. S. C. §7651c) or by reference to the safe concentration of the pollutant in the ambient air (as with the NAAQS). In Section 111, by contrast, it is EPA’s job to come up with the cap itself: the “numerical limit on emissions” that States must apply to each source. 80 Fed. Reg. 64768. We doubt that Congress directed the Agency to set an emissions cap at the level “which reflects the degree of emission limitation achievable through the application of [a cap-and-trade] system,” §7411(a)(1), for that degree is indeterminate. It is one thing for Congress to authorize regulated sources to use trading to comply with a preset cap, or a cap that must be based on some scientific, objective criterion, such as the NAAQS. It is quite another to simply authorize EPA to set the cap itself wherever the Agency sees fit.

Finally, Roberts concludes that any such policy with the magnitudes of impacts that this scheme has needs a specific and explicit act of Congress to authorize. This is the “major question” doctrine at work:

Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible “solution to the crisis of the day.” New York v. United States, 505 U. S. 144, 187 (1992). But it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme in Section 111(d). A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is reversed, and the cases are remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

Justice Neil Gorsuch goes farther in rebuking the dissent. First, his concurrence offers a lengthy review and support for the major-questions doctrine as a means to rein in the increasingly expansive bureaucratic state, which he notes presents a threat to constitutional order and self-governance anyway. The doctrine is born of necessity to ensure that unelected officials remain responsive to both Congress and the president, and also that they do not intrude on matters that properly belong to the sovereign states.

Rexford Tugwell is surely rolling in his grave. 

Friday roundup

Excellent piece by Rev. Dr. Carolyn Moore at the Wesleyan Covenant Association's website on why she responds to the looming UMC split with relief, even as she's dismayed at the death of courage that brought the denomination to this juncture:

Without context, the headlines in the national media might seem harsh and this plan to separate may come as a surprise. But for many who have been on this journey for years, this represents a significant and hopeful step forward. Most headlines last week led with the idea that the crux of the crisis is a disagreement over our sexual ethics, teachings on marriage, and the ordination of LBTQ+ clergy. I want to emphasize that the crisis in the UM Church does not rest on just these issues. Others agree. In a recent essay accurately entitled, “The Sad, Necessary Division of the United Methodist Church” David French writes:

“The secular media will cast the divide primarily in the terms it understands—as focused on “LGBT issues” – but that’s incomplete. The true fracturing point between Mainline and Evangelical churches is over the authority and interpretation of scripture. The debate over LGBT issues is a consequence of the underlying dispute, not its primary cause… there is a strain of Protestant Christianity that views the Bible as valuable but not infallible or inerrant. Evangelical Christians, by contrast, strongly dissent from that view.”

That seems an accurate statement to me. Our divide has been forming for years over multiple issues that are very real and very deep. They strike at the fundamentals of historical Christian orthodoxy. How we interpret scripture and relate to the person and work of Jesus Christ is at the headwaters of this crisis, but it is also important to note that our inability to hold one another accountable where we disagree only exacerbates the problem. When some of our leaders are unwilling to hold us accountable to the time-honored way we make decisions at our General Conferences, the result is a kind of disorder and dysfunction that is excruciating.

The hard reality we must admit today is that while we traditionalists have won votes at General Conference, we have not really held the line of orthodoxy within the UM Church. While we are thankful for the reaffirmation of our teachings, some of our American colleagues openly resist what we have reaffirmed. With no theological or ethical accountability and no will among many bishops to establish accountability, there is no line left to hold. Most of us – from across the theological divide – recognize we can no longer go on this way.

Some would implore us to stay in the current situation and keep voting for traditional values at General Conference, as if we might eventually wear down our progressive colleagues and compel them to leave. I have zero faith in that eventuality. A colleague in my conference who serves on the board of a progressive movement within the UM Church told me without blinking an eye, “We will never leave.” And I believe her. Why would she? With accountability on these matters gone – and it is – her approach is working to a degree; it is a functional response. So, we frustrate her sincerely held views on very important matters, and in return she and colleagues in her theological camp frustrate our sincerely held beliefs. This is not a healthy dynamic for a supposedly united church.

Friends, let’s support this protocol. Let’s get ourselves out of an Egypt filled with conflict and bitterness. The protocol might not be the promised land, but once we are out of the Egypt we are living in, we traditionalists can participate with the Holy Spirit in building a vital and fruitful movement that reflects our faith and the faith of our fathers. Our ground – the ground I want to be standing on – is on the other side of separation, where we can make choices from a place of strength, and without the anarchy we live in now.

It wasn't the first piece I'd ever encountered on the subject of guys who wear shorts in the dead of winter, but I was game when I saw this Atlantic article, hoping it would offer a fresh take, or a view of the matter that would take in all ages and demographics who so attire themselves.  Alas, I should have taken my cue from the title: "Why Some Kids Wear Shorts All Winter." Having thus limited the scope, we get a range of reasons that doesn't do much to shed real insight: attention-seeking, not wanting to appear wimpy, testing the limits of authority, and such. She even quotes a therapist who recommends that parents begin a conversation with shorts-clad boys thusly:

“Start with ‘I’m really curious,’ or ‘I’m wondering,’ or ‘I’ve noticed that you don’t like wearing [long pants] in the winter. Tell me more.’ What you might find is that it’s a sensory issue, that they say, ‘I don’t like the way the fabric feels against my skin,’” she said. “You might actually be able to work with that. You could be able to find something that would keep them warm but work for them a little bit better.”

Niskanen Center president Jerry Taylor posits that all this misses the obvious, something that might have surfaced if the Atlantic piece had included adult participation in the phenomenon:

Jerry Taylor

@jerry_jtaylor

Not just boys. Also men in DC. None of these explanations resonate. Per 

@RadioFreeTom

, we've simply raised people who want to be in pajamas all day and have zero sense of social decorum. Its like we have an entire adult world in day care.  

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From the Trump-occasionally-gets-one-right file: Today he announced that the National Environmental Policy Act will be getting modernized:

The proposed rule to bring NEPA into the 21st century would modernize environmental regulations without burdening “American workers, farmers, and families” by bringing new infrastructure projects to communities nationwide in an expedited fashion.

Per the White House, the proposed rule will:

• Establish time limits of 2 years for completion of environmental impact statements and 1 year for completion of environmental assessments.
• Specify page limits, promotes information sharing through modern technology, and better defines environmental effects and other key terms.
• Reduce unnecessary burdens and delays for environmental reviews.
  Agencies would be allowed to establish procedures for adopting another agency’s determinations to increase efficiency.
• Improve collaboration with state, local, and tribal governments.

 Better savor that. Those don't come along too often.

Now, how's this for an inflated sense of his own powers?

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

U.S. Cancer Death Rate Lowest In Recorded History! A lot of good news coming out of this Administration.

10:00 AM · Jan 9, 2020·Twitter for iPhone

But why wouldn't he say this kind of stuff, given the way his sycophants drool over him?

Andrew Lawrence

@ndrew_lawrence

Lou Dobbs attacks America for not understanding we have an obligation to serve Donald Trump "It is a shame that this country which is benefitting so much from this president's leadership does not understand their obligations to this leader who is making it possible"

Mayor Pete didn't do his supposed moderate-Dem image any good by describing the shooting down (by an Iranian missile) of the Ukrainian airliner as "innocent civilians . . . caught in the middle of an unwanted and unnecessary tit for tat."


At The Imaginative Conservative, Hillsdale history professor Bradley Birzer reflects on the ancient uses of the term "The Word," or logos,  that may have informed the way St. John employs it at the beginning of his Gospel.

The only way to move from landfills to recycling is to curb human freedom and go in the red

Yesterday, I covered the monthly meeting of the board of our county's solid waste management district for the local media company I freelance report for. One item of business concerned the sole bid that the board received for the upcoming three-year contract to operate the district's two landfills and its recycling activities. The board's attorney pointed out that the bottom-line figure that the bidder quoted would exceed the district's budget, but that if one takes out recycling, it leaves a nice cushion. In other words, the landfill makes money for the district, but recycling eats that money up.

This comes up at most of the meetings. Some board members even floated the purely theoretical possibility of doing away with recycling, but then quickly said that it was not a possibility; the public would find it too politically incorrect.

So when I came across this Politico piece about San Francisco's "quest to make landfills obsolete," it grabbed my attention.

The first paragraph has to do with the impressive technology that city has employed in the task of sorting refuse, but it doesn't take long after that for the article to acknowledge that "other cities over the past several years have scaled back or even abandoned their recycling programs because they couldn't find a market for the materials." Still, San Fran presses on!

For decades, recycling and composting programs have enjoyed broad political support from San Francisco mayors, legislators and voters. “They’ve always been willing to do things other cities haven’t tried yet,” says Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for the nonprofit Californians Against Waste. “They’ve pioneered a lot of programs that either are commonplace everywhere or are going to be soon.”

As it turns out, this "willingness to do things other cities haven't tried" entails a fair degree of tyranny - excuse me, bans and regulation:

Curbside composting bins joined recycling bins in 2001, and composting and recycling became mandatory in 2009. Now, city residents and business actually compost more material than they recycle. The city has also regulated construction and demolition debris, diverting much of it from landfills through recycling and reuse. Wood goes to steam-driven power plants in North Carolina to be burned as fuel; metal goes to scrap yards, then to foundries; sheetrock is composted; crushed concrete and asphalt go into new roads and pathways. 

The city has also banned single-use plastic bags and other hard-to-recycle items. It recycles items other cities don’t: film plastic, clamshell food containers, and lower-grade plastics such as yogurt cups. San Francisco found new markets for some items after China shut the door to them last year. Its cutting-edge sorting technology produces cleaner, purer bales of recyclables, which are easier to sell. 

Residents and business owners have no choice but to take time out of their lives to fool with sorting refuse into an array of bins, and you can be sure that the nanny state is auditing your degree of compliance:

All around the city, residents and businesses don’t have just two waste bins, they have three: black for trash, blue for recycling and green for compost. From curbs outside San Francisco’s famed Victorian houses and on sidewalks outside Chinatown restaurants, Recology picks up food scraps from green compost bins the same day it picks up recycling and trash. 

Sanitation workers don’t just fling stuff into the back of their trucks. They’re auditing customers’ trash. If they see too much waste in someone’s black bin that ought to have gone into the green or blue bins, they’ll leave notes reminding the person what to recycle and compost. The notes include pictures of common items for the workers to circle — a universal means of communication in the multilingual city. It’s "very targeted communication,” Haley says, “not in a mean, police-state way, but to [say], ‘Help us clean up the recycling. Help us clean up the composting.’”

"Not in a mean, police-state way, mind you." At least not yet. Oh, and under a new law, it's up to you to pay for a sorter if you fail your audit.

B.F. Skinner would dig some of the measures the city is employing:

The city has also used behavior-modification strategies to get people to throw away less trash. It recently shrank the capacity of the black bins by half, to 16 gallons, but the monthly charge of $6.97 for each black bin is the same as for a 32-gallon recycling or composting bin. “If your recycling or your composting are so contaminated that they are trash, we can double your charge on those temporarily,” Haley says. About 500 large customers have received contamination charges, and about 100 have lost discounts for recycling and composting, he says. 

Only in the fourth and third to last paragraphs does the article glancingly deal with that pesky little matter of what all this costs:

 Supervisor Ahsha Safai, who co-sponsored the waste audit and straw ordinances, says political support for anti-waste laws is high, though businesses will always raise financial concerns. 

“That’s one of the biggest challenges we face when we’re talking about these very aspirational and wonderfully environmental policy goals,” Safai acknowledges. “How do you put it into practice without making San Francisco unaffordable for everybody?” So Safai highlights ways the laws save money: fewer supply orders for restaurants, lower garbage rates for businesses that sort.

So how to close the financial gap? More tyranny!

The next frontier may be producer responsibility laws, already adopted in Europe and parts of Canada. They fund the disposal of certain packaging and printed paper by collecting fees from companies that produce them. This month, Recology CEO Michael Sangiacomo joined with two members of the California Coastal Commission to launch a petition drive for a statewide ballot initiative. Their proposed law would tax plastic manufacturers up to 1 cent per package, ban Styrofoam food containers and require that all packaging be recyclable, reusable, or compostable by 2030.

 And if all this regulation, behavior modification, taxation and auditing doesn't do the trick, maybe the icy gaze of Saint Greta will get you to obey:

A lefty piece of legislation that should get a House-floor vote

Why would Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute want to see this bill get voted on? After all, it would return post-America to a footing of being on board with the Paris climate accord.

A sizable contingent of congressmen now have introduced H.R. 9 “to direct the President to develop a plan for the United States to meet its nationally determined contribution under the Paris Agreement, and for other purposes.”

For one thing, so we can have this discussion:

There is little trend in the number of “hot” days for the period 1895–2017; 11 of the 12 hottest years occurred before 1960. Global mean sea level has been increasing for thousands of years; it may or may not be accelerating. The Northern and Southern Hemisphere sea ice changes tell very different stories. US tornado activity shows either no trend or a downward trend since 1954. Tropical storms, hurricanes, and accumulated cyclone energy show little trend since satellite measurements began in the early 1970s. The number of US wildfires shows no trend since 1985. The Palmer Drought Severity Index shows no trend since 1895. US flooding over the past century is uncorrelated with increasing GHG concentrations. The available data do not support the ubiquitous assertions about the dire impacts of declining pH levels in the oceans.

And this discussion:

Note that the Paris agreement “requires” (again, there is no enforcement mechanism) each signatory to “update” its NDC every five years. This is an obvious acknowledgment that any given NDC might not be met; accordingly, the reasons to believe the updated promises, and the ones five years later, ad infinitum, are far from clear. What is clear is that this international UNFCCC/NDC game has little to do with GHG emissions or climate phenomena or environmental quality at all. It is instead a long-term full-employment program for the international climate bureaucracy, with endless COPs, meetings, financial support from governments and foundations, and conferences in upscale resorts and banquets at pricey restaurants. A solution to the purported problem of anthropogenic climate change is the last outcome actually preferred by this industry; only a permanent crisis can justify its existence.

It's a bit like letting Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All get a full hearing, so people can understand that it amounts to the government putting the health insurance industry out of business and that it's going to involve tax hikes like we've never seen.

Let's make the lefties talk consequences.

 

 

Barney & Clyde - Installment 3

It's here! This fortnight's installment of Barney & Clyde! Welcome back to the bar! Pull up a chair and join your favorite small-l libertarian and small-c conservative for a look at AOC’s reaction to McConnell holding a Senate vote on the Green New Deal, the San Antonio and Buffalo airports banning Chick-fil-A, and the Illinois legislature attempting to tell corporations how their boards must be composed. We also look at the evolution of the term “liberal” from the time of Bastiat to the present. It’s meant various things throughout that time, for sure.

By the way, you look thirsty. May I pour you a libation?

Avail yourself of this lively exchange here.  

"People can lose track of cost / benefit analysis if they feel virtuous"

As I've mentioned here before, one of my gigs in life is covering local government for a media company that has an array of radio stations and a news website.

One of the monthly meetings I attend is that of our solid waste management district board, and it never fails to leave me shaking my head in bemusement at the degree of preoccupation this body has with trying to figure out what to do about cardboard. It's as if it's some kind of horror that most of it winds up in our county landfill.

That board also always gets a report from the district's education director on how many people - mostly kiddies from area schools - it takes on guided tours of the recycling center.

And, speaking of kiddies, you'll recall the episode at a city council meeting I covered at which the council was waylaid by a gaggle of schoolchildren telling it that our city needed to "up its game" in addressing the dire threat of "climate change." One council member, who also sits on the solid waste board, told the kids that local government is always trying to generate more public interest in recycling.

I sat there and thought, I reserve the right to not be interested at all. I'm going to die some day, and I don't have any minutes to spare between now and then for sorting my stinking refuse.

So it was with great delight that just now I came upon Kyle Smith's latest piece at National Review, entitled "Recycling Is A Waste."

It may make sense to recycle a few items for the savings in carbon emissions — paper, cardboard, and metals such as aluminum from cans. Recycling a ton of these items saves about three tons of carbon dioxide. Glass, plastic, rubber, all the other stuff? Not really. We used to send our plastic empties to China, but China has lost interest, as The Atlantic’s Alana Semuels reports in “Is This the End of Recycling?” The subhead reads, “Now that other countries won’t take our papers and plastics, they’re ending up in the trash.” Some municipalities are directing those recycling trucks to the nearest incinerator. A transfer station in New Hampshire reports that sending rubbish to a landfill costs $68 a ton. Recycling it? That costs $125 a ton. Wasn’t recycling supposed to save us money, not cost twice as much?

And apropos my above acknowledgement of my own mortality, Smith notes this:

Note that people can lose track of cost/benefit analysis if they feel virtuous. What about all the time it takes in the household to wash and sort all this stuff? How much is it going to cost to convert all this rubbish into usable material? Los Angeles estimates that because of recycling programs, it operates twice as many trucks as it otherwise would. “Recycling,” wrote [John] Tierney in his monumental 1996 piece [for the New York Times entitled "Recycling Is Garbage], “may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.”

It appears that even pioneers of the movement can sometimes come to their senses:

If there is a Saint Paul of the recycling movement, it might be J. Winston Porter, the E.P.A. official behind an influential federal paper, The Solid Waste Dilemma: An Agenda for Action, that advised Americans in 1989 that we were running out of landfill space and that “recycling is absolutely vital.” Possibly no policy change in the last half century has proved so popular: Is there any cheaper way to purchase a sense of virtue? Tossing your Dannon container in the color-coordinated barrel is a lot more convenient than going to church, much less paying attention to the service. Yet today even Porter is questioning the recycling boom, telling Tierney that most kinds of recycling, such as composting, make no sense at all. 

Smith puts some numbers to the matter of a cost / benefit analysis:

The environmental cost of trash has been oversold. All of the trash Americans produce over the next millennium would fit on one-tenth of 1 percent of the land available for grazing, and lots of rural communities are open for business when it comes to accepting urban rubbish. There is no landfill shortage. If you’ve ever been to the U.S. Open tennis championship in Queens, you’ve seen what becomes of landfills: Arthur Ashe Stadium is built on one. Modern landfills have little environmental impact, although they do produce methane, a potent greenhouse gas. New landfills capture that methane to use it for fuel, however.

Americans who perhaps have a bit more difficulty finding ways to certify their own virtue — recycling is really popular in places such as San Francisco and Park Slope, not so much in places where people actually go to church — are going to be stubborn about giving up their recycling habits. But New York City’s recycling program is a costly disaster: It runs New Yorkers $300 more to recycle a ton of trash than it would to put it in a landfill. When the next budget crunch hits New York — and that’s due approximately ten seconds after the next stock-market crash — recycling would be an excellent program to cut. Recycling that empty bottle of Poland Spring is so expensive that it’s cheaper to simply manufacture a new one. 

No, there's only one reason to recycle, and it's the same reason for undertaking any activity "strongly encouraged" by the power-mad central planners: So that you can congratulate yourself on how much you caaaaaaaaaare.

 

An unflinching stare into the cold, dismal heart of leftism

When you have five jobs (print journalist, broadcast journalist, music performer, music instructor, university lecturer), the pace of contemporary life presses upon you. As you readers know, I am fairly diligent about posting regularly to LITD, but much that I'd like to dive into curls ephemerally upward into the ether of unrealized intentions.

I have a fairly full plate again today, but this one can't wait. It requires our immediate attention.

The Left gets uglier by the hour.

It's obvious in a number of recent national-scope developments, but for the first time in a while, I've had the grim opportunity to look directly in the face of leftism and see its full horror.

Let's start with the stack of headlines in the upper left - apropos, no? - corner of today's Drudge Report:

SUSPECT TRIES STABBING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE WITH SWITCHBLADE...
CAMPAIGN SIGN USED TO FEND OFF...
COPS: CURSED PRESIDENT BEFORE VIOLENCE...
MASS SHOOTING TWEET THREATENS TRUMP HOTEL EVENT...
Secret Service probes actress calling for assassination...
WYOMING GOP OFFICE SET ON FIRE...
Conservative Columnist Goes Into Hiding After Rape, Death Threats...
SCALISE WARNS: LEFT INCITING... 

Read each story. Unless you're a leftist yourself, your heart will break for the current state of humankind.

Let's take the D.C. McAllister story as an example. (There's a lot more to present, so in the interest of respecting your time, one of these is going to have to suffice for this portion of this post.)

She tweeted this:

At the root of #abortion hysteria is women’s unhinged desire for irresponsible sex. Sex is their god. Abortion is their sacrament. It’s abhorrent as women have flung themselves from the heights of being the world’s civilizing force to the muck and mire of dehumanizing depravity.

The Left reacted with this:

"They are threats outside of Twitter, stating they know where I live," McAllister said. "Threats of rape and strangling. I spoke to the police. I am on home watch."
"My children are very frightened," she added.

On Sunday, she went public about the threats. "I am facing legit death & rape threats because I have dared to call out women who are hysterical about abortion and to challenge them to be responsible and not to elevate sex to the point that they’re willing to kill human life to avoid their responsibilities. How sick is that?" McAllister tweeted. 

Some people responded with sympathy ... to the person making the death and rape threats!
"People don't react well to your extremism," a user named Monika D. responded.

And have you heard about the phone messages (and a letter) being left for Senator Collins, in an effort to pressure her to vote against Kavanaugh?

One caller on Friday, September 7 at 6:11 p.m., left a message saying, in part: "If you care at all about women's choice, vote 'no' on Kavanaugh. Don't be a dumb bitch. F*** you also."

In a second voice mail, the caller calls Collins "a feckless, feckless, feckless woman standing there letting Trump and his appointees steal the right to choose what women do with their bodies. And you stood by, 'Oh, I don't know. I'm so naive.' F*** you. F*** you."

And in a letter sent to her Portland, Maine office, the writer on August 9 says that "EVERY waitress who serves you is going to spit in your food, and that's if you're lucky, you f***ing c***! Think of that every meal." 

Honest, this post is not going to focus solely on abortion, but because it is such a fundamental level on which the leftist worldview plays out, we'll continue to look at its presence in the latest uptick of progressive darkness.

So let us turn to Kamala Harris's histrionics during the Kavanaugh hearings, and her remark that he wants to be on the Supreme Court so he can "punish women." Not only is that a display of infantile outlandishness, it is an appeal to the rage against nature and the architecture of the universe of the same sort that has made for the transgenderism fad. The reason feminism puts abortion front and center among its concerns is resentment at being the gender that houses people while they gestate. That anatomical fact in turn makes for all kinds of variances in life choices and resultant societal outcomes from the male sex. Of course, the other way of viewing being equipped with a uterus is to see it as a sacred charge, but that would entail recognizing God as the designer of the arrangement, something that absolutely must not enter into the discussion, as we'll examine shortly.

So, in the leftist formulation, the only alternative to "punishing women" is to use government's monopoly on the coercive use of force to make taxpayers finance the ripping of unborn people's limbs from their torsos. Oh, and classified it as "reproductive care," as Duke University law professor Jedediah Purdy does at the New York Times this morning:

Economic citizenship also has important meaning for abortion rights. All liberal justices support the freedom to choose, but it is worth much less to poor women far from services, as many are in the South and West. Decades ago a divided court ruled that Medicaid and other federal programs can refuse to fund abortion while paying for live births and other reproductive care. This is a breach of the usual principle that government may not penalize people for exercising a constitutional right. (Imagine student loans only for those who agree not to vote.) It is time to reopen this question.

Human life is utterly expendable to leftists.

The feigned pity for particular demographics that has long been a core feature of leftism has come into even sharper relief as leftism has become exponentially uglier. Consider this paragraph from Jill Filipovic's CNN piece today, one of many capitalizing on the approach of Hurricane Florence to sound the alarm about the utter fiction that it the storm is being caused by human advancement:

Like nearly everything else in America, the bad outcomes of this setup fall along racial and class lines, borne disproportionately by those who already have the fewest resources. People who are wealthy or even stable and middle class can afford to think ahead and buy insurance for their homes; those who live month to month -- a vast swath of the American population -- may not be able to afford it. Or, more likely, they may be renting a place to begin with and will find themselves homeless after a storm.

And those without reliable transportation will have a harder time fleeing; if they do manage to leave, they're less likely to be driving their own vehicle, which means leaving more of their possessions behind. Imagine what this is like.

Those with the power of education, money and time can navigate insurance bureaucracies to ensure they are made something close to whole when the waters recede. Those who don't have those privileges will inevitably lose out.

Really let that phrase I've put in boldface sink in. "Can afford to think ahead." In the leftist worldview, there is this fixed class of people called "the disadvantaged," and their situation is an inescapable cycle of needing some kind of material circumstances to be able to take charge of their lives, and never attaining those circumstances as a result. Per Filipovic, some people can't afford to think ahead and need a collectivist effort on the part of society as a whole to do their forward thinking for them.

Now, on to the level of recent personal experience.

I'd been really proud of myself for resisting the temptation to weigh in on smart-ass hard-left Facebook posts for a long time. Alas, the other day, I succumbed. Somebody had posted a video - a really lame video, by the way, shot through with flimsy arguments and attempts to compensate for with inane attempts at humor - featuring some lady "refuting" what she claims are conservatives' main objections to socialism. They aren't even the main objections. She cited shortages of goods and services and dull cultural uniformity, but those are mere outcomes of socialism's core flaw: the crushing of freedom.

By the time I joined the comment thread exchange, a lot of the predictable angles had already come up. One was the idea that America has always had public infrastructure, i.e. government involvement in citizens' lives.

Here's my first weigh-in:

Here's the thing about that "people helping each other" business. Americans have always been a very civic-minded and charitable people. DeTocqueville noticed it when he visited. Church groups, community associations, nonprofit agencies have always been involved in that kind of outreach. But government is the entity in our society with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That's why the Framers of the Constitution sought to keep its powers very limited. Any time it takes citizens' money, it's a coercive act by definition.

And that's why the business about roads doesn't hold up. Government does have some proper functions. We obviously can't have anarchy. But everybody drives on roads. That's a proper function of government. But redistribution - taking Citizen A's money to meet the specific needs or wants of Citizen B - i.e., me paying for some kid's school lunch out in Montana - is not a proper use of government resources.

Here's what that deteriorated into:

But everybody needs to eat. Why are ok paying for Road you will never drive on, yet you protest feeding a human you’ll never meet? I believe you value asphalt over life.

So I responded thusly:

The roads are for any and all of us. The kid half-way across the country needs his lunch paid for - according to somebody, anyway - because of his and his family's particular circumstances - that is, the results of the choices they've made as free individuals.

From there the deterioration accelerated:

That kid had a choice? What choices did you make when you were 7 years old in the 2nd grade about paying for lunch?

and . . .

Haha...this is so much BS Barney. You’ve just disproven your own statement about how charitable this country is! I agree. It’s not. Your arguments are the reason capitalism or any economic system doesn’t work. You have to be coerced to feed some starving kid. Like trying to shove a camel through the eye of that needle. First defund the military, it does more harm than good...no problem feeding the world napalm and torture. Just that damn hungry kid keeps inconveniencing us with his pseudo-sobs. This is where the real charity in our country is. A homeless guy would split his sandwich with that kid.

Then the rank falsehoods started entering into the proceedings:

We have never been charitable. The first thing the first Congress did was to declare that worthless continental script could be redeemed dollar for dollar. George Washington and others in politics who knew had riders mounted ready to head west to redeem that same script 100 to 1. before word got out, then return it to Washington. That was the beginning of charity in our country toward veterans who had sacrificed. How do you get more uncharitable from there? Acharitable? Non-charitable?

Redolent of Filipovic's feigned pity and assumption that being rich and poor are fixed states and that people not fortunate enough to be of the former variety need government to run their lives, one of the commenters offered this:

Barney Quick if all Americans are as uncharitable as you appear to be then we don't live in the charitable fantasy world you mention in an earlier comment. You would begrudge a child "halfway across the country" a lunch? I'm happy to pay for a kid's lunch, halfway across the country or on the other side of the planet, despite all the "bad" choices the kid's parents may have made, like for example, being born not rich. And by the way, if you had a lick of sense or civic duty you would want that kid to be well fed and mentally alert enough to do well in school so that she has a chance to learn how to think critically and inform herself and be a good citizen. But fuck all that I guess if it means me having to pay a dollar more per year in taxes. Right? Yeah, we've always been a charitable country alright.

Me again:

If I’m going to contribute to the kid’s lunch, it will be of my own volition through private sector means. It’s not right for government to force me to at gun point

The response:

Barney Quick which means the kid will starve because you think he deserves to be poor because of choices she or her parents have made. But I understand your christian perspective; it's exactly like when Jesus multiplied the loaves of bread and said, "Don't give give any to the poor! They've made bad choices!" (from the Gospel According to Ayn.)

And a reiteration of the falsehood that Americans are not charitable, couched as such a sweeping generalization that an attempt tp refute it would be like nailing Jello to the wall:

Barney Quick But it IS right for the government to do so, because you don’t send that child money or bologna or even think about him or her, just like most of the people in this country. Do you know how many kids die of hunger in America each year...ready? Hardly any, because we steal your money and feed them. Not because you and the Koch Brothers donate old cheese to them.

The thread branched out into several sub-threads. Throughout them all, as you see, I kept my participation on the level of principles

This was offered:

 My main disagreement with Barney's line of thought is that items like education, roads, fire, police, etc. are thought to be for the public good and I believe we should look at other areas that would also be for the public good. The 'every man for himself' argument is part of the reason the US is far behind other countries in health care quality, personal happiness, income equality, and ahead in medical bankruptcies.

. . . to which I responded:

Health is something experienced by individuals, not by the public.

It is morally wrong for government to take Citizen A's money - at gunpoint; remember government takes it from us by coercion - to address the particular situation of Citizen B.

The particular person with whom I was engaging here was one of the few who was likewise trying to keep things on the level of principles and ideas, and for that I respect her:

Without individuals having good health, then you don't have a healthy workforce... just one reason. I've never had anyone show up with guns demanding taxes to pay for services that I've used, whether roads, public schools, police officers or firemen.

 . . . although she was wrong, which I pointed out to her:

It is not government's concern whether the "workforce" (an awfully vague and broad term) is healthy or not - particularly at the federal level.

This comment of mine catalyzed a 106-comment sub-thread:

The thing to remember is that moves toward universal health care are predicated on the notion that health care is some kind of right. It is impossible by definition for health care to be a right. And let's not construct the false dichotomy that posits "privilege" as the alternative of what it is. Health care is just a broad category of services and products. That's all.

As I say, the "arguments" leftists trot out in these situations are utterly predictable, so it was inevitable that someone would try to claim that the Declaration's mention of the pursuit of happiness necessitated a collevisist approach to health care.

Me in response to that:

Happiness is a subjective thing. Also the right is to its pursuit, not to having it guaranteed. We all have conditions affecting how we’re able to pursue our happiness. For some it’s serious illness.

This led to a line of debate I actually relish whenever it comes up: what a right is and is not. I was accused of making up my definition of rights (actual way it was put: "You can tell by the gross inconsistencies that he's making up shit as he goes along"), to which I responded:

Actually, it’s the definition distilled from the great thinkers on the subject of human freedom: John Locke, Frederic Bastiat, Herbert Spencer, Frederic Hayek, etc.

It finally got to this level:

Barney Quick I would think that with two degrees in higher education you would know that citing your own made up fictional narratives as evidence is pretty lame shit, not to mention narcissistic.

Me:

You can tell when hard leftists have run out of gas. Out come the ad hominem attacks. Happens every time.

The response:

Barney Quick in your case it should have happened a lot sooner. You've been called out by more than one person on your innumerable instances of flawed logic and unsupported claims, and now you're name calling as if "leftists" is a magic incantation that magically and automatically shuts down your opponents' argument. Talk about running out of gas; quit projecting. Provide some real, credible evidence.

Then came the unveiling of the true nature of what these people want to impose on the world:

 I think Barney is still an 1870s cowboy who wants his individual freedom. I concur. Me too. Unfortunately there are too many damned people on the planet for that to work anymore.  I’m afraid we’re living in the past and what the millennials see is that individual rights are secondary to the rights of individuals, and they are willing to make this sacrifice for the good of the species and wo/mankind. I am too. Now we are teetering on the edge of a fascist totalitarian country led by silent oligarchs who rule with $$ and buy politicians and presidents...trump AND Hillary! So is there coercion in taxes and government and education and healthcare? Absolutely. The choice is: do you want this mess to be ruled by the likes of trump kissing oligarchs’ asses (this is where Putin and other Russian money launderers and power brokers and others come in) or do you want to trust voters and the American people to decide where the money they take right out of our pockets, yes, through coercion, is to be spent? I can only see one side of that. I sure as hell don’t want the Koch Brothers and the Eric Prince/DeVoss and the Clinton families and the owner of Amazon Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and Soros making these decisions for me. They are now. And our money is going to the rich and the war machine. This is what Bernie Sanders is trying to say. Social democracy puts these decisions in the hands of the people for good or bad and with coercion. But right now in America it’s our only choice.

And I was the one getting accused of making cartoonishly sweeping unsubstantiated generalizations!

At one point the subject turned to where rights come from. One of these leftists kept talking about legislatures creating rights, and I of course set the record straight by asserting that rights only come from God.

Here's the bone-chilling response I got to that:

Barney Quick 
Rights come from God? Which one?
What creative fiction, a/k/a "theology", do you subscribe to?

"We know, well we understand, that mighty God is a living man.
You can fool some people sometime..."

This is the 2018 Left in post-America, folks.

It is not wrong to characterize them as jackboots.

They hate freedom, God, common sense, and human dignity. They're historically and economically illiterate.

And they are fiercely determined to take this country over.

Given the opportunity, they will trample you and me into the dust.

One last note: Trumpism is not the antidote.