Monday roundup

 It's November now, and it's off to a glorious start where I live. I'm taking pictures of the trees like crazy. We haven't had this kind of splendor, certainly not this late, for several years. It's one thing that's going right in a world that is tainted in so many ways.

Several entries in today's roundup have to do with the global climate.

Stanley Young of the Heartland Institute has filed suit against the federal government for dismissing all seven members of the Clean Air Advisory Committee.

The desires of the climate alarmists notwithstanding, coal is still vital to the energy mix:

Although the COP26 virtuous don’t want you to know it, rebounding economies and the ongoing global energy crisis have vaulted much-maligned coal to the top of the energy food chain, once again.

President Biden’s energy-climate policies have apparently been more friendly to coal than those of President Trump. 

New federal data has U.S. coal-fired power generation leaping 22% in 2021 to 945 terawatt-hours - the first annual increase for coal since 2014. 

Coal will generate nearly a quarter of U.S. electricity this year, with competitor natural gas prices doubling since June to over $6.00. 

The demand boom has U.S. coal companies now offering miners six-figure salaries. 

Not too shabby for a commodity that the media has loved to leave for dead for well over a decade now. 

“Coal’s burnout,” The Washington Post declared on January 2, 2011. 

Personal politics permeating “journalism” continues to leave us energy-climate stupid. 

And with President Xi Jinping not expected to attend the upcoming COP26 climate summit, the world’s top consumer is hardly “getting off coal.

Even Europe is starting to see that its goofy skittishness about normal-people forms of energy is becoming prohibitively costly.

Good old coal is still great stuff:

Only ~20% of global coal usage is internationally traded, making coal a largely domestic resource with huge energy security advantages for consumers.  

By comparison, ~33% of gas and ~75% of oil are swapped from country to country. 

Coal is a foundational resource in all-important Asia, so demand typically grows as the population and economy expand. 

Globally, coal is still easily the main source of electricity at 37-40% of all generation. 

Coal accounts for 60-65% of the electricity generation in China and 68-73% in India – the two most significant incremental energy users that hold ~35% of humanity.

Vijay Jayaraj of the Heartland Institute takes offense at a tweet from a woman whose Twitter profile lists as her creds "trying to save the planet, got good green ideas, just need someone to help me . . . get them done," and understandably so:

n this age of green craze, the most likely response to legitimate concerns about the lack of access to energy for the world’s poor is advocacy for so-called renewable technologies such as wind turbines and solar panels.

As embarrassing as that suggestion should be to the advocate of such unreliable and impractical energy sources, there are sometimes even more cringe-worthy replies that verge on the inhumane.  A recent tweet of mine prompted one such response.

The tweet was directed to attendees of COP26, a United Nations climate conference that gets underway this month at Glasgow.  The annual conference seldom addresses third-world energy poverty, which deprives billions of people of basic needs like clean water, lights, and modern medical care.  Many of these people are subjected to indoor pollution from cooking and heating with wood and animal dung while bureaucrats and politicians preach the banning of the very fossil fuels necessary to alleviate their suffering.

When I questioned in a tweet the evident lack of empathy for poor people in developing parts of the world, a person responded that India has too many people.

“I want COP26 attendees to ask themselves a simple question,” my tweet stated.  “What are they going to do about those in the third world who still do not have access to affordable & reliable energy — both for cooking and for electricity? We need gas, oil, and coal. Do not enforce energy apartheid on us.”

The response tweet said, “India is seriously overpopulated, they need to breed less.”

Breed less?  How can an Indian like myself not be insulted by such an anti-human suggestion?  Are the 1.3 billion people of India lab rats with no right to procreate as we see fit?

Hoover Institution senior fellow and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster gives a great interview to Deseret News. A taste:

Deseret: In foreign policy, are you a realist or an idealist? 

McMaster: Those labels aren’t that useful. That polarization is rooted in what I call strategic narcissism, defining the world only in relation to us, and assuming that what we do or choose not to do is decisive in determining the outcome. On what might be called the self-loathing far left, many believe that America is the problem and therefore disengagement is good. And on the far right you have neo-isolationism, driven by a mild form of bigotry. But what they both fail to recognize is that others also have agency and authorship over the future, including our adversaries, rivals and enemies. As G.K. Chesterton observed, the best way to settle differences is to ensure they’re not settled for you.

Deseret: But should the United States be trying to export democracy and engage in nation building?

McMaster: I don’t believe we were trying to turn Afghanistan into Denmark. It just needed to be Afghanistan. That country needed a government consistent with their traditions, with their culture, with their decentralized nature. At the same time, we needed to establish a political order that was hostile to jihadist terrorists. And that’s what we had developed, and that’s what we gave up. Their society had been transformed since 2001, but not into a Jeffersonian democracy. We wasted a lot of effort based on unrealistic assumptions about Afghanistan. 

I watched Dave Chapelle's The Closer yesterday, and when I read this, I found myself resonating with its take:

Dave Chappelle is right about transgender ideology. He’s right about the disproportionate control that gender ideologues wield over pop culture and public discourse. And he’s also right that most of the people greatly upset by his jokes are white liberals who are more than happy to drop their racial consciousness at the sign of any conflict between minorities and LGBTQ activism. 

But this doesn’t, or shouldn’t, add up to conservative sympathy for him. Chappelle is not a hapless victim of a crushing ideological agenda; he’s not Barronelle Stutzman or James Eich. Chappelle is, like many before and many after him, a Robespierre of the very revolution that’s after him now. His fortune was made inside the same progressive sensibility that threatens him, and it is precisely Chappelle’s (and many other comedians) skill with which he dismissed any notion of the sacred that has taken root in the people who are walking out on his un-PC act.

Chappelle is a supremely talented comic. His timing is often sublime, and his blending of absurdism with biting observational humor is dazzling to watch. But Chappelle’s comedy, like so many others, depends critically on an “lol nothing matters” mentality. There’s an undercurrent of nihilism to his routine, a low-level hopelessness about daily life that comes through especially when he takes on those “edgy” topics like male rape or pedophilia. Chappelle has a point when he observes that nobody boycotted him for these jokes until he started saying that men are not women, but one major reason no one boycotted for those jokes was the delivery. Chappelle is a master at eliciting laughter in the face of meaninglessness.

Eric Boehm at Reason shows that Josh Hawley and his lame attempt at addressing the supply-chain dilemma is silly:

Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) has a plan to address the current supply chain issues bedeviling the American economy.

He wants to make them permanent.

In an op-ed for The New York Times published Friday, Hawley uses the temporary supply chain problems as an excuse to push for a permanent expansion of federal power over the affairs of private businesses. We must "fundamentally restructure our country's trade policy," Hawley demands, and that means injecting both the Pentagon and Commerce Department bureaucrats into companies' purchasing decisions. Under the terms of a bill that Hawley is proposing, any product determined to be "critical for our national security and essential for the protection of our industrial base" would have to have at least 50 percent of its value made in the United States.

Why is it necessary for the government to get significantly more involved in the system of global trade that's allowed Americans to enjoy unparalleled prosperity in recent years? Because "the global pandemic has exposed this system for what it is—a failure," Hawley writes.

One must assume that if the lights in his home went out due to a storm, Hawley would respond by declaring electricity to be a mistake and demanding that the government require homes to be lit with candles and gas lamps. After all, what is the electrical grid but a complicated supply chain that leaves Americans woefully dependent on production and distribution systems (power plants, substations, and lines) that they do not fully control? Better to produce your own lighting, right? If that means you have to live without television or the internet, well, those are just the trade-offs required to achieve self-sufficiency.

A storm—or a pandemic—can create temporary problems in the highly complex systems that run so much of the modern world. That's hardly a reason to abandon them. If Hawley is imagining a world in which the United States is wholly self-sufficient, then he's asking you to accept a scenario in which the United States is significantly poorer than it is today.

A piece at Spiked by Sean Collins entitled "Loudoun County and the Cruelty of Trans Ideology" asks where Scott Smith, the father of the girl raped in a school restroom by a dude wearing a girls' outfit, goes to get his reputation back. 

But then it's late in 2021 post-America and a school in Florida has taken students on a field trip to a gay bar.

 

From the I-probably-won't-vote-in-2022-or-even-2024 file: The chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party adamantly insists here in November 2021 that the Very Stable Genius won the election a year ago. 

 

 

 

 

 

Joe Biden, unmistakably Democrat

 Wednesday, January 20 - up through early afternoon, and I want stress that point - brought the nation the sigh of relief and the moment of Constitutional stability and plain decorum for which it had yearned (save for the handful of post-bitter-enders who will probably insist that November's election was stolen the rest of their mortal lives). The performances by Lady Gaga, Amanda Gorman and Garth Brooks were all appropriate to the moment. The talk of unity and turning down the temperature may have been merely obligatory, but they had a calming effect.

But after the crowd, such as it was, dispersed, President Biden, as promised, came back up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Oval Office and served notice that his was going to be an unmistakably twenty-first-century Democrat agenda, steeped in identity politics, climate alarmism and disregard for the nation's economic health. 

There was a stack of executive orders awaiting him and he dug right in.

He himself admitted that on some of the fronts, legislation will be needed to flesh out details. 

Um, yeah.

I was gratified to see Mitch McConnell address this on the Senate floor, in a speech that struck a measured balance between an attitude of willingness and a firm assurance that Republican legislators would not gloss over areas of absolute disagreement, but rather forthrightly voice opposition to such measures that Biden has put forth.

More broadly speaking, is this now a permanent fixture of the federal-government landscape? Is it going to be an entrenched tradition for a new president to sign executive orders right after being sworn in, the net effect of which is to say, "I hereby render all the measures my predecessor took by executive order null and void"? So much that ought to be codified - or rejected - in the legislative branch, a lot of it with immediate and profound impact on Americans' daily lives, becomes a ping-pong ball bounced back and forth every four or eight years. 

In any event, reversals were the order of the day.

In the immigration realm, three abrupt changes will be made to policies that, whether the Very Stable Genius truly grasped the real reason behind them or not, were about the rule of law and national sovereignty. In short, they were among the handful of policy moves the VSG got right. Biden has revoked the 2017 order that prioritized the arrest of illegal aliens. The "remain in Mexico" policy will now be reversed. Biden's administration will preserve the DACA program.

Then there's the disbanding of the 1776 Commission. No discussion of whether its scope or focus needed any reexamination,. Nope. Just pulling the plug on it. 

Again, I'm pretty sure the Very Stable Genius, the historically illiterate non-reader that he is, did not grasp the full depth of what he was setting up with this commission. The bottom line, though, is that it was a good idea, especially one to get underway in such an inflamed year as 2020. It served as a corrective to the lie-filled and America-hating 1619 Project, which, like critical race theory and Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, has insinuated itself in the curricula of school systems across the country, poisoning impressionable young minds and deeply damaging the field of history as a scholarly endeavor.

It's understandable why Biden did it. He goes all in for the idea that there is still systemic racism in American society, and a commission like that doesn't contribute to that narrative. 

No, the era now dawning is going to bring us diversity and inclusion on steroids. 

Exhibit A is another one of Wednesday's executive orders, this one saying that people who "feel" like they're the sex opposite of what the DNA in every cell of their bodies makes clear that they are have "rights" - to use the public restrooms they "feel" like using, and to join sports teams designated for the sex opposite of the one their DNA tells us that they are. 

This is another step, like the pronoun-usage laws in effect in various municipalities, toward making people indulge the delusion harbored by transgendered people, further distancing language and reality from one another. 

He's even appointed such a person to be assistant HHS secretary. The photographs of this individual  make clear that he's not fooling anybody. That's a dude with long, stringy hair.

Then there's the cancelling of the Keystone XL pipeline construction. Very stupid, on several fronts. It's a poke in the eye to our good neighbor to the north. Canada may at present have a soft-left government, but it is, as it always has been, in America's inner circle of allies. This move also throws thousands of skilled tradesmen out of work.

Democrats would rather you not think through the lack of logic in this move. Transporting oil by pipeline means you are not introducing the fossil-fuel exhaust of freight trains into the atmosphere. It's the clean way of getting it from Point A to Point B. 

I made this move the subject of an entire LITD post the other day:

Lots of Canadians are not okay with this:

Former TC Energy executive Dennis McConaghy is not surprised the project is among the first decisions by the new administration.

"I have consistently said Biden would indulge in this rescinding of the permit immediately because it's something he has to do largely to follow through for expectations of his political base and many of his donors," McConaghy told CBC's Kyle Bakx on Sunday.

The decision would likely lead to disappointment in the Canadian oilpatch, even after so many other setbacks for the project over the last decade.

"Ideally the project should have been completed and put into operation during the Trump administration," McConaghy said. "It's a very audacious thing that is being done here by the Biden administration."

Kirsten Hillman, Canada's ambassador to the U.S., said in a statement sent to The Canadian Press that the pipeline expansion fits with Canada's climate plan.

"The Government of Canada continues to support the Keystone XL project and the benefits that it will bring to both Canada and the United States," she said.

"Not only has the project itself changed significantly since it was first proposed, but Canada's oilsands production has also changed significantly. Per-barrel oilsands GHG emissions have dropped 31 per cent since 2000, and innovation will continue to drive progress."

Jazz Shaw at Hot Air gets into some of the specific fronts on this would be a wrecking-ball move: 

This move would cause significant damage to the stakeholders in the pipeline, leading to possible liabilities for the federal government. They played by the rules and jumped through all of the required hoops to obtain that permit and then began investing heavily in the work based on their belief in the good faith of the United States government. It’s not hard to imagine them going to court to recover their losses and finding judges amenable to the idea. That would leave the American taxpayers holding the bill for this fiasco.

Let’s not forget that large sections of the pipeline are already complete, including portions that cross the border. What happens to all of that pipeline? Will it just be left to rust or will the federal government attempt to force the pipeline’s owners to spend even more money to rip everything out?

As I mentioned above, there are literally tens of thousands of jobs on the line here, ranging from the workers who are directly engaged in the construction of the pipeline to all of the supporting industries that make such work possible. Joe Biden is signaling that he’s ready to come into office and evaporate a huge number of jobs “on day one.” Wasn’t he only recently complaining about the number of people who are already out of work because of the pandemic?

Somebody who holds elected office in the United States needs to speak the plain truth about energy  policy, and not just once. It needs to be driven home repeatedly.

Dense and consistently available energy forms are by definition far less expensive than diffuse and intermittent forms. The latter are not viable in the marketplace without government subsidization. And it's fine to use the former all we want. It is not putting the global climate in peril.

The above paragraph needs to be stated emphatically in debates between candidates, on the House and Senate floors, in television appearances and in columns and articles. 

The entire climate alarmism movement has been nothing but a nauseating exercise in preening and self-congratulation over how much it cares about humanity in general, the lives of actual individual human beings be damned.

Let us just hope that the pushback and court cases that arise from this shut down not the pipeline, but rather Biden's blatant assault on human advancement. 

Rejoining the Paris climate agreement is a similar type of move. No country in the world is meeting the agreement's targets. China is approving new coal plants like there is no tomorrow. Even if every signatory nation did adhere to the letter, the effect on the global average temperature in 2100 would be negligible. All it does is erode national sovereignty and interfere with energy companies' right to determine what products to bring to market (and consumers' choices regarding what energy forms to consume). 

Then there is the matter of the extermination of fetal Americans, something that it seems a self-described devout Catholic would not be cool with. Alas, it appears that the US will once again fund health organizations that are in that grisly business. 

I can't say any of this surprises me in the least. Biden was portrayed as some kind of centrist when juxtaposed against Bernie Sanders, but the entire Democrat party has largely become a leftist enterprise in recent decades. (Ironically, the lone holdouts in the Senate, truly centrist if not slightly right-leaning Democrats such as Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, may have a certain kind of power to determine how far this agenda does or does not go, given the 50-50 makeup of that body at present.)

And it becomes incumbent on actual conservatives (Trumpists are not, or ought not to be, invited to participate in this discussion) to articulate their position on each and all of these matters in the most soundly reasoned, most consistent and coherent way possible, because a great many of those who disagree with us are going to try to go for the "you-worshippers-of-the-Orange-Man-had-your-day-your-views-are-part-of-that-failed-agenda" angle.

We have to be ready to say, "No, they're not. They go way back before the Trumpism infection beset our movement and they merit a ringing defense."

 We know at the outset of the new era what the lay of the land is going to be. If Biden is devout in anything, it's being a Democrat, and he's "grown" with his party at every turn since 1972.

 

On the other hand, given the clown show shaping up on the left, the Very Stable Genius looks like the sane alternative

I'm smart enough to know that when it comes to political dynamics, one must take heed of the findings of those who make it their life's work to take deep dives into reams of wonky data. Still, my powers of intuition have served me fairly well over the years, and I have this sense that it's probable the Democrats are going to get their asses handed to them next year. Up and down the ballot (at least for federal-level offices.)

There's the economy. Even if it cools off a bit, it will still be outpacing any moment in time from the Most Equal Comrade era.

There's the illegal-alien problem. Trump actually did play his hand very well by suggesting that the illegals be sent to sanctuary states and cities. Of course, it's a move of questionable legality, but it served its purpose. Dem figures in those areas are howling and the post-American public is saying, "Why?" It's a brilliant move in the same way that Mitch McConnell's calling for a Senate vote on the Green New Deal was. Hey, Dems, your position on the issue has been very clear. Why are you so suddenly unwilling to put your money where your mouth is?

There's the passive aggressive snowflake-ism on steroids I posted about yesterday.  Lefties don't just get the vapors now, they become "physically ill" when they hear that Mike Pence is going to be the commencement speaker at the university of which they're alums. They claim that calling out Ilhan Omar's Jew-hatred endangers her life.

Even with the increasing secularization and permanent adolescence of post-America, the proliferation of "fat queer activists" and "non-binary persons of color" and the like strike most folks as a bridge too far. The basic human yearning for a sense of normalcy kicks in. Then there are the subsidiary issues, such as perv guys taking advantage of being able to use girls' restrooms, and male athletes taking home the gold medals in women's athletic events.

There's the increasingly violent way that leftist intolerance expresses itself, most recently in the melee that broke out at the University of Missouri - Kansas City during Michael Knowles's "A Man Is Not A Woman" talk.

There's the sense that the tide has turned regarding where society stands on the offing of people who aren't born yet. Gosnell and Unplanned have done well at the box office. A number of states have passed heartbeat bills.

It all adds up to a picture of a fractured society, yes, but one that, once a vote is taken, is not going to be willing to jump off the precipice into the abyss. When push comes to shove, more citizens than not are going say that that requires giving up too much that is going well, I think.

Gender obliteration winds up reinforcing gender-difference realities more forcefully than ever

Two pieces I've run across this afternoon have a point of confluence that ought to launch an important  discussion.

Susan Wright at The Resurgent quite appropriately laments the Boy Scouts of America officially changing its name - and membership policy - to Scouts BSA. (And what a lame way to try to nod to heritage. If the B doesn't stand for anything, what the hell is it doing there?) Specifically, she brings up the inevitable scenario that's going to arise:

As the group now begins adding girls to that group, ages 11 to 17, at the very time when puberty is setting in and that self-conscious sense of being sized up by the opposite sex seems to encompass every waking moment, we can only wonder how soon before some young woman fires the first shot at the organization.

In this too “woke” society, just a passing glance can be used as a punishable offense.

Put pre-pubescent and hormone-driven youth together, and at some point, something will go wrong.

Unfortunately, our current state of reality prevents us from pointing out that males and females are different, for a reason.

Then there's Christine Rosen's article about the Davos confab at Commentary, and the back and forth over - of course, they had to discuss this; it's such a weighty subject, so say the pointy-heads who assume the role of deciding what's weighty - toxic masculinity. It seems like the preponderant view was that caution about putting professionals of opposite genders - are we even allowed to couch it that way at this late date? - in such realms as the corporate world or government or NGOs is an obstacle to progress. Rosen substantively refutes this:

At this year’s recent gathering of the global business elite at the World Economic Forum in Davos, during panels exploring subjects such as the Future of Masculinity, business executives used all the right buzzwords to signal their support of women in a post-#MeToo world. As Marc Pritchard of Procter & Gamble told the New York Times, “It’s not enough to stand by when toxic masculinity is on display . . . It’s not enough to stand by and say ‘that’s not me.’ You need to be a role model for the next generation.”

Behind the scenes, however, others expressed concern about some of the unintended consequences of #MeToo. Many admitted they were now uncomfortable mentoring female colleagues for fear that their behavior would be misconstrued as sexual harassment. As the Times noted, male leaders said “they were avoiding one-on-one time with junior female colleagues because, as one man put it, the issue is ‘just too sensitive.’”

It’s a surprisingly honest admission from business leaders, who are not usually so straightforward about their feelings. (By contrast, as some business leaders confessed to a reporter, despite the many earnest public expressions of concern about the future of work, most Davos attendees are secretly super excited about robots replacing humans.)

The story drew a predictably scornful response from many in the media, however, including from people who complained that the Davos men were using claims of hypersensitivity as justification for longstanding sexist attitudes.

One GQ writer scoffed at the idea that business leaders felt confused about the new rules for office behavior and suggested that male executives “just . . . not sexually harass anyone,” arguing, “It begs the question what kind of mentoring these executives were providing that it could be so easily confused with sexual harassment.” Others were blunter. As a digital media strategist quoted in the GQ story tweeted: “It’s important to understand that a lot of rich, prominent men rarely or never interact [with] women they’re not in financial control of: Wives, or employees, or mistresses. They literally have no frame of reference for a professional woman with independent ambitions.”

By refusing to take men’s concerns seriously, however, these critics do men and women a disservice. The concerns of men about the optics of spending one-on-one time with their female colleagues might be cover for sexism for a few, but for most in the post-#MeToo business world, hypersensitivity about the appearance of misconduct has become de facto business practice for good reason.

At a time when an uncorroborated allegation of harassment (amplified by social media) can potentially derail a career (or, say, a Supreme Court nomination), it would be foolish for men not to think twice before spending time alone with a woman in their office.

It’s disingenuous for feminist-minded critics to demand that men embrace the new post-#MeToo regime of awareness and sensitivity to women’s concerns and then turn around and attack them when they try to do just that. Remember the reaction to the so-called “Pence Rule?” After it emerged during an interview that the vice president made it a practice not to dine out alone with any woman but his wife, critics acted as if he had just announced he had joined the Taliban.

We certainly see this when the envelope is pushed yet further. Trans "girls" routinely win athletic contests. They also take intents beyond relieving themselves into restrooms.

The question is how much damage is going to be done to actual human beings before there is a collective reassessment of the wisdom of going down this path.

We do not invent ourselves. There is an architecture to the universe that we inhabit that was instituted on the eternal plane, and we try to buck it at our peril.

The looney bin that is the post-American university - today's edition

The nature-distortion jackboots impose their alternate reality on the men's rooms - or some kind of rooms - at an institution of lower learning:

Brown University's student body president will be hand-delivering menstrual products to all nonresidential bathrooms on campus, including men’s rooms, with the help of 20 other students.

Viet Nguyen, President of the Undergraduate Council of Students, announced the initiative in a campus-wide email Tuesday, saying he wants to communicate the message that not all people who menstruate are women, according to Newsweek.

“There’s been a lot of conversation about why pads and tampons are a necessity, not a luxury, but not a lot of action. We wanted to take it into our own hands,” Nguyen explains in the email, observing that “low-income students struggle with having the necessary funding for food, let alone tampons.”

By putting menstrual products in women’s, men’s, and gender-inclusive bathrooms, Nguyen aims to “set a tone of trans-inclusivity, and not forget that they’re an important part of the population,” but is under no illusions that the effort will be universally popular.
“I’d be naïve to say there won’t be push back,” he preemptively concedes. “I’ve had questions about why we’re implementing this in male bathrooms as well. It’s an initial confusion, but people generally understand when we explain it.”
Nguyen told Newsweek that menstrual products will be available in approximately 30 to 40 bathrooms across campus for the 2016–2017 school year, financed exclusively by the undergraduate finance board, rather than general university funds.

Brown University today, your neighborhood junior high tomorrow.

 

The relentless march of the nature-distortion jackboots - today's edition

Not even churches can operate according to the laws of nature's God in Massachusetts:

Under a Massachusetts civil rights agency’s interpretation of new anti-discrimination law, churches can be forced to let biological males who identify as transgender women use the women’s bathroom.

Recently passed legislation amending the state’s anti-discrimination law to include protections for “gender identity” will take effect Oct. 1.

The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, which enforces the state’s anti-discrimination laws, recently published a “Gender identity guidance” that lays out what will be legally required of employers and “agents of places of public accommodation.”

The guidance was published Sept. 1 but has gone unreported by the media until now. The commission confirmed that the version of the guidance online is the “final edition.”

Beginning Oct. 1, the guidance notes, “All persons, regardless of gender identity, shall have the right to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities and privileges of any place of public accommodation.”

The guidance notes that Massachusetts law defines “public accommodation” as “any place, whether licensed or unlicensed, which is open to and accepts or solicits the patronage of the general public.” (Restaurants and hotels, for example, are generally considered public accommodations.) Violators of the law face up to one year in jail.

The guidance notes that “any place of public accommodation that lawfully separates access to a place or portion thereof based on a person’s sex, shall grant admission to that place, and the full enjoyment of that place or portion thereof, consistent with the person’s gender identity.”

“This means that a movie theater that has restrooms designated as ‘Men’s Restroom’ and ‘Women’s Restroom’ must allow its patrons to use the restroom which is consistent with their gender identity. A health club with locker rooms designated as male and female must grant all persons full enjoyment of the locker room consistent with their gender identity. A public swimming pool with changing rooms designated male and female must allow the public to use the changing room consistent with their gender identity.”

The guidance suggests that Massachusetts may force churches to comply with the new legislation.

“Even a church could be seen as a place of public accommodation if it holds a secular event, such as a spaghetti supper, that is open to the general public,” the guidance notes.

The guidance does not specify what criteria the government would use to determine whether or not church events are considered “secular.”

As with measures aimed at protecting the "climate" from "change," this is tyranny imposed in the service of an utter fiction.

Post-America is one mad place.

A square look at the most glaring manifestation of post-America's cultural rot

Per the post immediately underneath this one, the Most Equal Comrade and his junta are driven by some very mad notions (the post below has to do with their nonchalance about major post-American cities getting incinerated), but this one may top anything so far.

The federal government of post-America no longer recognizes a universe in which human beings come in two distinct genders.

President Barack Obama’s deputies will insert a rule in federal regulations on Friday to prevent federal facilities from operating single-sex bathrooms.

The rule in the “Federal Register” of regulations will open up thousands of bathrooms in federally operated buildings to employees and visitors who claim on any given day to be “transgender” members of the opposite sex.

Now, Target, being a private organization with a keen interest in making a profit, has listened to the public, which responded to this kind of wackiness with an uproar that sent its stock price into a tailspin, has decided to split the difference and "offer more options":

Target thinks it has a solution – they’re adding an extra bathroom to most of its stores.

Target(TGT)CFO Cathy Smith said Wednesday that the company has heard objections to the transgender bathroom policy from some customers, though she said other customers had voiced support. In response, Target has decided to expand its use of a third, single-toilet bathroom at all of its stores, which can be locked by users.

That bathroom can be used by any customer who needs some privacy, including parents with small children of a different gender or those who are uncomfortable with a public bathroom in which a transgender person is allowed. 

Most of Target’s stores already have this single occupancy restroom, but all will be equipped with one by 2017. The project is set to cost about $20 million.

Is an extra, supposedly private bathroom really going to appease concerned parents who are fed up with Target’s social agenda? 

All of this, of course, sweeps under the rug the basic fact that the idea of being able to determine one's own "gender identity" is a fantasy and a tragic one at that:

gatekeeping has been replaced by cheerleading. In the U.K., where records are easier to obtain, clinics are facing an explosion in demand for “gender-identity treatment.” As the Guardian reports: “Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal increases in the number of referrals to all of the UK’s 14 gender identity clinics (GICs) in recent years, with a number of clinics experiencing increases of several hundred percent.”

At one major clinic, referrals quadrupled. At another, they increased 20-fold in ten years. At still another, referrals increased a jaw-dropping 28-fold in eight years. Clinics for children were seeing staggering annual increases: “The Tavistock clinic, the only centre for children and adolescents in England, has seen referral increases of about 50% a year since 2010–11. In the past year it has had an unexpected and unprecedented increase of 100%, up from 697 to 1,398 referrals.” The Guardian — because it’s the Guardian — laments that demand for gender-identity treatment is outstripping the available supply of practitioners, noting that the resulting shortfall is “leaving vulnerable people waiting years for a specialist appointment.”

Here in the United States, the evidence is more anecdotal, but the anecdotes are disturbing. Rod Dreher’s blog at The American Conservative has become something of a clearinghouse for concerns from anguished parents, many of whom note that entire peer groups seem determined to transition together. This letter was particularly poignant: 

As a parent living the nightmare of having a teen who suddenly announces she’s transgender, I can tell you there are NO doctors who will do anything but agree. There is NO science behind this. There is NO way to medically “diagnose” her. Her therapist knows that she is not transgender but fears there’s no way we can stop her. Three of her closest friends have already had full transition, paid for by their parents, so it is difficult for her to understand why we won’t do the same. It is no different than having your child captured by a cult, only this time the cult is a societal bandwagon which wants to do permanent physical harm to her perfectly healthy female body, all in the name of “love”. 

Parents have no idea how to respond, especially when doctors permit no dissent. Here’s another letter to Dreher: 

My own daughter professes to be a boy. It is a nightmare. It came out of nowhere at age 15 — this is not a case of a girl who always wanted to be a boy, or always acted like a boy. This is a girl who was proud to be a girl until she developed physically and boys and men started treating her like a piece of meat and a second class citizen. The nightmare is that doctors and therapists are not allowed to question why she wants to be a boy. The “cult of trans” dictates that her word must be taken or they can lose their professional standing. SO they are ready to prescribe testosterone shots and a double mastectomy despite the fact that she is a minor. These physical “medical treatments” for her psychological problem are permanent and barbaric. It is against “ethics” for professionals to provide any other treatment. It is a mother’s nightmare. 

To read sites like Transgender Trend (a mainly U.K.-based site that is “concerned about the current trend to diagnose “gender non-conforming” children as transgender) or 4thWaveNow (a blog launched by a “mother of a teenage girl who suddenly announced she was a ‘trans man’ after a few weeks of total immersion in YouTube transition vlogs”) is to go through the looking-glass — where troubled teens in groups will announce their intention to transition, typically with the enthusiastic (and smug) support of school guidance counselors and other educational professionals.

4thWaveNow is launching its own survey of what it calls “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” seeking input from parents whose children “experienced sudden or rapid development of gender dysphoria beginning between the ages of 10 and 21.” 

Naturally, the Left is furious. Nothing and no one can be permitted to contradict the narrative. Indeed, some on the Left respond to the women in the videos above by claiming that they’re still actually “trans.” To accomplish this trick, they do what the Left so often does — redefine common terms. To prominent trans journalist Julia Serano, “transgender” means people who “defy societal expectations regarding gender.”

But this makes no sense. By that definition, every female but Barbie herself is transgender because no girl has a personality that conforms in all ways to classical, stereotypical femininity. By that definition, Barbie’s boyfriend Ken is thoroughly transgender. What’s “manly” about him?

As I have said before, if you indulged yourself in a time-machine fantasy and brought back some friend of yours - or maybe a parent, sibling or teacher - from, not even fifty years ago, which indeed makes for a bracing exercise, but a mere ten years ago, and show that person 2016 in all its grotesqueness, that person would think you were presenting some kind of fictional vision. You might well be regarded as utterly mad.

I can't think of a front on which the death rattle of Western civilization is more on display than that having to do with the obliteration of basic human nature.

Our universities, our corporations, our municipal governments, our nonprofit civic organizations, are all going to open their doors tomorrow morning. And the day after that.

But the day is coming when they will have been subsumed into the tangled mass of supposedly human life forms piled high, slithering and groping for basic gratifications, humping and gobbling, much like what Moses found when he came down from Mount Sinai and became so enraged that he dashed the tablets inscribed with the basic moral instructions for human living to the ground.

But there isn't likely to be any Moses, no one who will be summoned back to the mountaintop to get a second copy.

The kooks at the classroom lecterns drive our cultural madness

Heather MacDonald, writing at NRO, says that it's high time we start taking the goofballs indoctrinating our university, college and community-college students seriously.

Utterly mad developments that go unchecked until they result in totalitarian imposition of practices at odds with basic human nature start in the rarified atmosphere of conference papers and "academic" fields made up out of whole cloth.

Case in point: the "transgender" phenomenon, and the pace at which it's gathered momentum.

The most notable aspect of this latest public eruption of academic theory is how quickly the new academically driven moral consensus was formed. The current wave of non-academic transgender activism began last summer, when the New York Times ran a full-page editorial declaring that the oppression of the transgendered by the biologically obsessed heteronormative majority was our most pressing civil-rights struggle. The Times then followed up with a series of news stories documenting the alleged oppression and plight of the “trans community.” Now, less than a year later, any parent with qualms about having his twelve-year-old daughter share a locker room with a 14-year-old boy is branded as the equivalent of someone advocating a return to whites-only water fountains. An issue that didn’t even exist a year ago is now completely settled in the minds of the cultural elite; anyone who opposes the new regime is simply an atavistic, benighted bigot.

How short are the memories of the politically righteous! In the 1970s, Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg pooh-poohed as sheer demagoguery the idea that the Equal Rights Amendment would require co-ed bathrooms, her implicit assumption being that such an arrangement would of course be preposterous. In 1991, the Michigan Women’s Festival expelled a transsexual woman on the ground that she was in biological fact a male. The First International Conference on Crossdressing, Sex, and Gender at California State University, Northridge, in 1995 maintained separate bathroom facilities for males and females, causing a protest by trans activists. Gay-rights activist and historian Martin Duberman stormed out of a gender-theory presentation. Now those early advocates for gay and women’s rights would be lumped into the same category as segregationists. Wellesley and Smith have twisted themselves into knots deciding whether the “trans” category trumps the favored status of females. 

 So we can't just roll our eyes and assume these "ideas" stay isolated in la-la land:

 . . . we have learned that all academic High Theory bears watching. The conceptual roots of gender theory lie in 1970s-era deconstruction and post-structuralism, with their pretense to having obliterated the traditional categories of Western epistemology and metaphysics. From Jacques Derrida’s purported “deconstruction” of the privileging of the spoken word over the written sign, and of presence over absence, it turned out to be not so big a step to the alleged dismantling of the biological difference between male and female.

When I first started using the term cattle-masses here at LITD, I was mainly thinking in terms of the economic-dependency mindset. Of course, now it applies to a post-American human's very sense of  the essence with which God imbued him. Or her. Or now, I guess, it.

Pat McCrory's hero moment

In a world of phonies and cowards, not to mention totalitarians and deranged people, you can still find someone who has solid principles, the right principles, and consistently adheres to them.

Exhibit A: North Carolina governor Pat McCrory:

Gov. Pat McCrory addressed the controversial North Carolina bathroom law at a press conference Monday afternoon, explaining why he has decided to sue the federal government for trying to block it. 

Just five days ago, he related, the Justice Department sent letters to his office that insisted their law requiring government employees use public restrooms that correspond to their birth certificates is in conflict with federal policy and violates the Civil Rights Act. McCrory had a limited time to respond before the agency threatened to strip his state of federal funding.

“This was a substantial request and they gave us three business days to respond to this letter,” McCrory explained. 

His administration asked for additional time, but they refused unless he go on record agreeing with their interpretation of the law. He could not do that – choosing instead to file a lawsuit. 

He now wants a federal court to clarify what the law actually is.

“This is not just a North Carolina issue, this is a national issue,” he said, for it imposes a new law on every private sector in the country.

“I think it’s time for the U.S. Congress to bring clarity to our national anti-discrimination provisions under Title VII and Title IX.”

Right now, he continued, the Obama administration is “bypassing Congress” to set bathroom policies for public and private employers across the country.

It has taken lest than ten years for post-America to mainstream the tiny, tiny fraction of the population that so resents the DNA it was born with that it will carve up its crotches and stuff itself full of hormones other than the ones nature - and nature's God - set it up with.

And now we have the stinking DoJ codifying it at the point of a gun.

But God has blessed us with good people in the right places who will say, "Not here."

Wednesday roundup

How clueless is the State Department? This clueless:

Obama administration officials disclosed Tuesday that Iran has been granted access to about $3 billion in unfrozen assets in the months since the nuclear agreement was implemented, but it remains unclear to the administration if the Islamic Republic has spent any of this money to fund its global terrorism enterprise, according to top officials.

In the four months since Iran and world powers began to implement the comprehensive nuclear agreement, Iran has been able to recover around $3 billion in funds that were unfrozen as part of the deal. Iran is expected to be given access to another $50 billion to 55 billion in the coming months.

However, the Obama administration was not able to say if Iran has spent any of this money to fund terrorism campaigns.

“We don’t know” if Iran has spent this money on terror activities, State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters. “We don’t know. We don’t have a way.”

Yes, indeed, there is no reprehensible regime that the Most Equal Comrade's nomenklatura won't rush to normalize relations with:

Weeks after President Barack Obama’s historic trip to Cuba, officials from the Communist island have ramped up their attacks on the U.S.

On Monday, Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez called Obama's visit "an attack on the foundation of our history, our culture and our symbols."

"Obama came here to dazzle the non-state sector, as if he wasn't the representative of big corporations but the defender of hot dog vendors, of small businesses in the United States, which he isn't," Rodriguez said.

The foreign minister’s response came days after Cuba President Raul Castro said that the United States is "the enemy" and warned Cubans to be vigilant about the United States' efforts to undermine the Communist revolution, according to Reuters.

The remarks came at the Cuban Communist Party's twice-a-decade congress, held over the weekend, where some of Cuba's most powerful officials criticized the creaking inefficiency of its state-controlled economy, tarred its vibrant private sector as a potential source of U.S. subversion.

Guess he needs to strive harder to get them to understand that he's one of them.


That Whole Foods store in Austin that was the target of an attempted wedding-cake-with-anti-gay-slur-on-it hoax is suing the slug posing as a human being who cooked the scheme up.  For cryin' out loud, the bakery staff member he dealt with was other than hetero.

Speaking of people with abnormal sex lives, Target saw fit to make a public statement saying that transgendered people can use whatever restrooms at their stores that they mentally identify with.

Brazil's Chamber of Deputies pulls the trigger:

It's been a tough week for leftist President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil. The Chamber of Deputies voted to impeach her: 

Impeachment supporters netted 367 votes in the lower house of Congress, well above the 342 they needed.
The "no" camp took 137 votes, seven deputies abstained and two did not show for the ballot.

We move on to the Senate, or upper house, and let's see what happens there.

Post-impeachment will be uncharted waters for Brazil. In other words, Latin America does not have a history of replacing leaders by impeachment. Instead, they get overthrown by the military or escape at midnight to avoid justice.

Remember when there was so much excitement over the BRIC countries, Brazil Russia, India and China, how they were said to be a model for "developing" nations to come on board as economic powerhouses and world-stage leaders?