RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/06/how-about-a-kill-switch-to-shut-down-washington/

Kris Kristofferson said that “freedom” is “just another word for nothin’ left to lose.” To the political left, freedom is an abomination that must be defined and controlled by the ruling class elites. And what better way to do that than to crack down on automobile travel?

Cars are a favorite target of all progressives and most Democrats. No human invention has increased freedom as much as the automobile. That’s why they have chosen to go to war on cars. It’s a long-term campaign that will take decades to finish. But there are victories along the way, and one of them was won in Washington with the help of Republicans.

According to Bob Barr, a former federal prosecutor and congressman from Georgia, the infrastructure bill the president signed a little more than a year ago includes “​​​​a little-noticed ‘safety’ measure that will take effect in five years.” It “amounts to a ‘vehicle kill switch,’” Barr wrote in the Daily Caller, and every car built after 2026 has to have one.

Of course, the mandate was characterized “as a benign tool to help prevent drunk driving.” But safety is always a pretense for further government intervention and the erosion of liberty. Prime example: The COVID-19 lockdowns we just went through. 

Writing in Motorius, automotive journalist Steven Symes notes that, ​to many, a mandatory kill switch “might sound like a wonderful idea.”

“After all, we’ve seen wanted criminals who have fled from police only to crash into a car with a family inside, killing innocents as they try to avoid capture. Being able to stop the pursuit early and almost instantaneously seems like a wonderful thing, a potential lifesaver any law-abiding citizen would enthusiastically embrace.”

https://www.city-journal.org/the-quiet-right-movement

The idea of a conservative counterculture might seem like an oxymoron. The term itself has been colored by the 1960s, when left-wing intellectuals, revolutionaries, and artists captured the spirit of revolt against a supposedly homogenous, oppressive, conformist America. That old counterculture has become the dominant culture, having been absorbed into the bureaucracies of universities, schools, government, and now major corporations. The left-wing culture no longer carries a critique; it is the status quo.

This reversal has created an opening for a new counterculture that challenges the orthodoxy of the “successor ideology” and reveals the hollowness of left-wing institutional management. Though many conservatives have seen the opportunity, they have been pessimistic about its prospects. Conservative critics have long lamented the lack of right-wing pop-culture production; some have rallied to such troubled figures as Kanye West, hoping that dissident celebrities could break through the stranglehold of left-wing ideological control.

But this pessimism is misplaced. The solution to left-wing cultural dominance is neither to embrace any celebrity who casts a glance rightward nor to mimic the artistic production of the cultural Left. It is to go deeper—to rebuild the structures that provide the basis for healthy, integrated human development: families, schools, churches, neighborhoods.

Though few have noticed, this is already happening. A “Quiet Right” is patiently, and nearly invisibly, building a viable counterculture.

The main locus of this movement is in education, where conservative families have created robust alternatives to the secular and predominantly left-wing public education system. Many have turned to homeschooling, which has seen double-digit growth in recent years. Others have enrolled their children in a fast-growing network of “classical schools,” which have returned to the traditional liberal arts curriculum of logic, rhetoric, grammar, mathematics, Latin, and music. And the small but influential network of traditional, faith-based colleges, such as Hillsdale, Benedictine, Thomas Aquinas, and University of Dallas, have seen record-breaking enrollment.

https://victorhanson.com/living-in-the-land-of-lies-part-one/

In reading and listening this holiday week I encountered nothing really other than outright lies.

I was sitting on a farm buffeted before Christmas by near record cold temperatures and after Christmas by near record precipitation. Yet almost weekly we receive stories about California’s “permanent drought” of hot/dry weather and an environmental Armageddon that only precivilizational scarcity can avert.

This fated doom means we in California have been outlawing gasoline-powered yard tools and new natural gas ovens and heating systems, and must always suffer fuel prices 30-40 percent above those in the rest of the nation—due to special green blends and restrictions on refinery operations and new gas and oil leasing.

So, no matter: all of these recent stories of near-record cold and precipitation, as well as fated new cutbacks are followed by warnings of imminent global warming catastrophes. Apparently, if Californians do not use fossil fuels at all, but, as the largest state importer of electricity in the nation, buy out-of-state electricity (much of it generated by coal or natural gas) then we at least can feel better about ourselves.

But more to the point, before the recent week of intense cold storms, giving ample rain and snowfall, California was already experiencing in most places a 100 percent-plus December precipitation rate. By New Year’s Day we may well have 100 percent-plus of the season’s entire average annual precipitation. Apparently, the harder the rain falls, the colder the days become, the more Governor Newsom and the Bay Area “scientific” community insist we need to return to a premodern lifestyle of mass transit transportation, unaffordable gas and diesel, and wind and solar generated, sky-high electricity rates.

We are told yet again by President Biden, by Vice President Harris, by their Pravda megaphone, Karine Jean-Pierre, and perhaps by soon-to-be-impeached Alejandro Mayorkas that the border is “secure.” And any who object that 5-million entries since January 2021 prove that it is not, is well a Great Replacement Theory racist.

Yet, living the lie proves otherwise. Here in Central California, I’ve noticed a substantial new surge and influx of illegal aliens. On my avenue a recent sheriff’s raid surrounded a nearby house, where neighbors long suspected gang chop shops, drug dealing, and other unmentionable trafficking.

The amount of trash on the farm is greater than usual, and the paper/trash is of exclusively Spanish language matter (but, alas, carefully sifted to exclude any address or names on envelopes).

The number of parked cars in the orchard of occupants variously shooting drugs, scouting out copper wire thievery, fornicating, or engaging in illegal shooting (e.g., red-tailed hawks, great horned owls, anything that moves), and those walking cross-country, through the vineyards and orchards, who do not speak English is on the rise as well.