I’ve cited the Guru and Beatle Drummer in a few blogs. Ringo Starr said (sang) it succinctly: “It don’t come easy.” * Trust, that is. Trust.


If I’m not wrong and Ringo is right, trust is one of the building stones of relationships, including the relationship between public officials and their constituents. Citizens elect someone they trust, and then they expect their choice to be trustworthy in office because…Well, who has the time to keep checking?  And trust’s own building stones include transparency and truth.


Yesterday a story backed by a video circulated widely. Members of a Venezuelan gang now living in the US and heavily armed entered an apartment building in Aurora, Colorado, terrorizing the residents. Now, here’s the NY Post headline: “Colorado Gov. Jared Polis dismisses migrant gang takeover of apartments as ‘imagination’ — despite video, mayor confirming truth.” **


Six Matters of Trust


On what matters do we place trust in our public officials? First, truth backed by transparency. Second, security backed by action. Third, freedoms protected by the federal and state constitutions. Fourth, economic stability. Fifth, prudent use of physical and social resources, such as those provided by infrastructure and police forces. Sixth, wise, or at least prudent, use of the public treasury for the common good of citizens.


Why Do the Incompetent and Corrupt Retain Public Office?


One of the reasons that people keep untrustworthy politicians in office is that many who reelect politicians don’t feel a personal connection with bad policies. Ringo sings, “Got to pay your dues if you wanna sing the blues,” in this instance in Colorado, that translates to “suffer the consequences of an politician who betrayed the public trust in favor of ideology.” The people terrorized in the apartment building in Aurora have a reason to “sing the blues.” They have a reason not to trust their current governor. They have experienced the effects of his sanctuary policies and expenditures of tax dollars on noncitizens. Most Coloradans don’t have that personal experience.


In all probability, the majority of citizens will never experience such terror. For them, the terrorism is so remote as to be little more than the product of imagination. Similarly, the use of tax revenue, once thrown into the general fund, will never be more than a distant irrelevant thought. As I have said in numerous blogs, “That which is not personal is meaningless.” Those hundreds of billions of dollars spent on federal and state programs later found to be wasteful or subject to fraud make the point. Would you be happy if the government said that you were personally responsible to pay for the home and healthcare of a noncitizen? Yet, you seem unperturbed by the wasteful spending of your taxes.


So, we put trust blindly in those we elect, always assuming they will act in our best interests. Governor Polis (an interesting last name given its Greek meaning) will get away with dismissing an act of domestic terror because of public indifference, that is, because most of the public won’t pay such dues. Gov. Polis is telling Coloradans they don’t see what they see. Their truth substantiated in a video is imagined. He’ll probably pay no consequences for belittling the travesty suffered by those people in the apartment building and the apartment building owners. They will “sing their blues” because they have “paid their dues” while the rest of Colorado’s citizens will go on with their uninterrupted lives.


*Lyrics to “It Don’t Come Easy":
​https://www.bing.com/search?q=lyrics%20to%20it%20dont%20come%20easy&FORM=ARPSEC&PC=ARPL&PTAG=1304


**https://nypost.com/2024/08/29/us-news/colorado-gov-jared-polis-dismisses-migrant-gang-takeover-of-aurora-apartments-as-imagination/

Twitter, now X, was Donald Trump’s go-to platform during his presidency. I haven’t checked, but I would hazard that he spent almost as much time tweeting as Biden has spent sleeping on the beach and Harris has spent cackling. To what avail?


Endless Comments Passing like Ships in the Night


Any perusal of chats on social media reveals that they can run endlessly without resolution. They consist of a few rational comments and a plethora of vile diatribes protected by anonymity in many instances. They do not—as all promised venues of communication promise—result in a meeting of minds. Social media appears to be where minds clash. There’s a reality of give-and-give, not give-and-take.


The product of responding to others’ tweets lies in the futility of such exchanges. Read through almost any set of online comments to discover something akin to a stalemate game of chess played through the US Postal Service. The game lasts with no checkmate in sight. As long as a website maintains the comments, the comments go on.


Unfortunately, though presidents have an option for commenting on policy in press conferences and official press releases, they have found themselves limited by a Press that is either antagonistic—as in the Bush and Trump years—or fawning—as in the Clinton, Obama, and Biden years. The fawning Press of the twenty-first century has failed to offer true exchanges as representatives of their audiences. The antagonistic Press has failed in a different way, that is, by refusing to research information. Nothing epitomizes this more than the false stories about Russians colluding with Trump, border agents whipping migrants, and Trump putting kids in cages—this last one based on pictures taken during the Obama years.


Thus, the fawning Press used the terminology offered by the government to shape public opinion and failed to question or cover the effects of bad policies like open borders and sanctuary cities. The Press said or wrote little about the consequences of Biden’s border policy, his EV mandates, his shutting down union jobs on the Keystone Pipeline, his war on fossil fuels and energy, and his inflationary spending. Whereas the Press made much of George Bush’s playing golf, they made little mention of Obama’s 300-plus golf outings, suggesting that the former was out of touch while the latter was somehow in touch with the wars they oversaw.


Advice to Trump if He Wins the Election


Writing responses to your detractors on your smart phone is dumb. You aren’t going to convince those who hate you through endless back-and-forth social media exchanges. Silence is the best response to hateful comments. Just enact sane policies like closing the border and protecting Americans and their rights to free speech, property, and self determination without excessive government regulations.


Advice to Harris if She Wins the Election


Stop cackling and start talking in meaningful coherent sentences without platitudes and redundancies. When you do talk, do not merely mouth socialism’s utopian generalities that have never become incarnate in a functioning productive society without decimating that society.   

Maybe we should take Plato’s advice: No one should vote until he or she can demonstrate the ability to think rationally. By thinking rationally, he didn’t mean justifying on the basis of selfish reasons. Each of us can readily offer “reasons” for our perspectives. For example, some might have voted for Barack Obama because and regardless of his Caucasian heritage he was “Black.” Some might similarly vote for Kamala Harris because she is a woman or, like Obama, has a “Black” heritage, ignoring, of course, her mother’s Caucasian (Indian) heritage.


Plato also argued that no one should be a leader unless he or she is already a philosopher.


Winning the Argument but Losing the Debate


When I was in high school, I discussed a controversial topic (whether or not America should go to war to defend the islands of Quemoy and Matsu) in front of classmates. My opponent in the discussion was probably one of the smartest people in the class, a guy with both a high IQ and, though he was only in high school, a great breadth of knowledge—far greater than I held in my more parochial brain.


By the end of the discussion, my classmates indicated that I had won the argument—I argued the affirmative side of the question. I convinced them through language more tinged with emotion than with reason. My superior opponent, cool and level-headed, had argued the negative side, listing unemotionally among his arguments 1) the potential danger of escalating a war with China whose nearly one billion people could overwhelm the smaller American population 150 million people, 2) the lack of strategic importance of the two islands, and 3) the absence of demonstrable American interests like trade or resources that might have been affected by China’s possible seizure of the islands.


At the end of the discussion and after the audience left the room, he said to me, “You might have won the argument, but I won the debate.” Even in my youth I understood what he meant. I had not provided any rational antitheses. I won by emotion. And my emotional appeal had convinced the majority of the class to adopt my side: America should go to war over the two islands.


If you were to look at two philosophic approaches that represented my and my classmate’s arguments, you would put my opponent in the camp of Descartes and me in the camp of Hume. Looking back, I’m not happy with my victory in that classroom. I believed that winning the minds of the audience was more important than making an irrefutable rational argument. And yes, I say that with the full knowledge that logic—rationality itself—just like mathematical systems, as  Kurt Friedrich Gödel demonstrated, reaches a point of incompleteness. Logic rests on the illogical. The “logical” approach of my high school classmate could have been refuted had we pursued the discussions to the axioms on which he based his thoughts. But the short period of talk prevented a fuller discussion. I could have reduced his arguments to assumptions while declaring the validity of my more emotional views that were largely assumptive. 


And so it goes in the modern political arena.


Today’s Parallel


As we watch and participate as audiences, we will see candidates who derive their discussions from either the Descartes or Hume traditions, relying on either rationality or emotion. I’ll hazard a guess at this time that the Democrat candidate will fall into the Hume camp, relying more on emotion than on logic. Will there be emotional appeal on the Republican side? Possibly.


The question for us is whether or not we will fall into the camp of my classmates those many years ago and be persuaded by someone who will win the argument but lose the debate.

A long time ago in a galaxy
that we call our own,
a devastating pandemic hit humanity
with an unchecked fury.
At the same time the Emperor’s son
lost his laptop containing damning evidence of corruption.
During that time, a band of free-thinking rebels
doubted the veracity of official information published by the Empire.
But the Empire marshaled its forces of censors.
Under the command of Darth Zucker,
the censors suppressed
doubt and skepticism to ensure
there was one, and
ONLY one, official version of thinking
about both the disease and the laptop.
The censors ferreted out those rebels
who published their doubts on social media platforms
and sent them into hiding.
The Empire then sent its minions
throughout the galaxy
To quash the information rebellion.
Eventually, the censors had to admit, as the New York Post 's headline reads,
Zuck admits Biden admin pressured Facebook to censor COVID content,
says it was wrong to suppress The Post’s Hunter laptop coverage.
“In an explosive letter
to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio),
Zuckerberg wrote that “senior Biden administration officials,
including the White House, repeatedly pressured” Meta
to ‘censor’ content related to the coronavirus pandemic in 2021…
Zuckerberg assured Jordan that
Meta has put policies in place to ensure that similar censorship of stories
‘doesn’t happen again.’”
I suppose we'll have to wait to see
​whether the Empire will strike back. 

I hope you know enough not to read your daily horoscope in expectation that its predictions will become realities. Surely you realize the general nature of the predictions.


Here’s mine for today, August 26: “The Gemini quarter moon rises this morning, dearest Aries, intensifying thoughts, schedules, and workloads. Stay organized and keep to important tasks in order to rise above any stress that builds around you. Luckily, the Nodes of Fate step in to strengthen your resolve, especially when you focus on personal goals and cultivating meaningful relationships. Important conversations can also galvanize you to pursue a future with someone special. Romantic surprises continue into the evening when Venus and Uranus share a sweet connection. This energy is perfect for showing you care with sentimental gestures, no matter how simple or extravagant they may be.’


That’s the horoscope for someone labeled an Aries. But what does it say that isn’t common sense or wishful thinking? Take that last prediction about “romantic surprises.” Does it apply to a hermit monk? To Sister Mary Milk of Magnesia during the evening’s  Vesper prayers? And what of the advice to “stay organized”? Would anyone listen to advice to stay disorganized?


Horoscopes are like ten-day weather forecasts. They aren’t very often accurate. In fact, they are dependent on some generalization of weather patterns usually associated with geography and the seasons. I can predict ten days of hot weather for Phoenix-Scottsdale in summer—every summer—and be praised for my accuracy. I can predict ten days of highly variable weather for Yellowstone National Park. Both predictions are more commonsense than science; both more dependent upon experience and knowledge than on models supported by their algorithms.


Sure of the present but doubtful of the future, we humans want some specifics about what lies ahead. Knowing breeds a sense, however false, of security.


But making predictions can also be a control on thinking and behavior. And no predictions are more designed to control both than those promulgated by the IPCC. Its “climate” predictions have generated widespread changes in energy use, regulations on lifestyles, and mandated commerce, such as in pushing electric cars on a public reluctant to buy them. One product of the IPCC’s predictions is fear about the future, a fear that has a forceful influence on the least experienced among us, that is, the young.


Those who have lived through decades of IPCC predictions can weigh them against horoscope predictions that have remained unfulfilled during adult lifetimes. The IPCC is the world’s astrologer. Yearly, it makes its predictions, and yearly, it says nothing about its past predictions that did not materialize. Yet, the gullible like Congresswoman Alexandria-Cortez seem unable to question the IPCC on its past failures.


The IPCC Predictions


The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would be a great place to work. The people who work there have jobs as secure as the local TV weather forecaster. A fifty percent accuracy is all one needs to maintain the job. Make an inaccurate prediction? Nothing happens. One can always say, “Some surprisingly strong storms popped up unexpectedly as the winds shifted. Some people lost their power as trees fell on power lines northwest of the city.” Or, “The additional two inches of snow fell unexpectedly, making roads slippery.”


Who is going to lose his or her job? By the time one acknowledges the unexpected weather, the new prediction is in progress. “Yesterday, we had those unexpected storms. But the weather for today and tomorrow should be calmer.” No accountability. NO, “I failed miserably, and I am profoundly sorry.” NO “We at station xyz have decided to forego weather segments other than to say what just happened, what is happening now, and what we hypothesize will occur over the next two hours.”


And there’s no accountability in the IPCC, just as there is no accountability in government agencies and in Congress—the Congress that passed the bills requiring expenditures of billions of dollars for climate change that will do nothing quantifiable to change—or preserve—climate. Take the billions allocated for charging stations that produced fewer than 10 EV charging stations. Who’s accountable?


And all those unfulfilled predictions of the IPCC? The organization keeps making more just like like the local TV weather forecaster, unperturbed by past failures, hyperbole, assumptions, and pseudoscience that has relied on extrapolations of data from “ghost stations.”


In 2001, an IPCC “working group” released its predictions that included decreased crop production. What many climate alarmists seem to have missed in the report is a paragraph in section 4.2 “Agriculture and Food Security.” That paragraph reads:


    Confidence in specific numerical estimates of climate change impacts on production, income, and prices obtained from large, aggregated, integrated assessment models is considered to be low because there are several remaining uncertainties. The models are highly sensitive to some parameters that have been subjected to sensitivity analysis, yet sensitivity to a large number of other parameters has not been reported. Other uncertainties include the magnitude and persistence of effects of rising atmospheric CO2 on crop yield under realistic farming conditions; potential changes in crop and animal pest loses; spatial variability in crop responses to climate change; and the effects of changes in climate variability and extreme events on crops and livestock.*


In spite of those uncertainties, the IPCC made a prediction for lower crop yields. Yet, if you read through USDA reports on food production, you’ll find that many crops increased over the ensuing two decades—in spite of weather events controlled by cycles of El Niño and La Niña that bring excessive rainfall and excessive droughts during their years of influence.


Nevertheless, the alarmists have convinced the politicians to spend inordinate amounts of money that will do nothing to alter Earth’s getting warmer or cooler. Sections of continents will undergo droughts and excessive rainfall as they have undergone them through both historical and prehistorical times. Note the Central American drought that devastated the Mayan culture, the droughty decades that affected the Anasazi (Pueblo-Hopi), and the southeastern decades-long drought in the late 16th and early 17th centuries that impacted the Native Americans who met—and maybe killed— those English pioneers of Jamestown’s “Lost Colony.”


You Americans Just Spent Billions for Unbuilt Charging Stations


Horoscope writers, TV weather forecasters, IPCC “scientists,” government agents, and politicians are never held accountable for their misinformation and, in the instance of government, wasteful spending. Just as sure as you can be that tomorrow’s newspaper will have a horoscope column, that the local TV station will have a weather forecast, that no government official will apologize for mishandling taxes on incomplete projects, so you can be sure that the IPCC will have a new prediction for the next ten years. And every year after that, it will issue more predictions with no apology for past failures. You can be sure, also, that the alarmists will keep sounding the alarm that “we have just a few years left” before climate obliterates life on the planet.


*IPCC. 2001. Online at https://pdf.live/edit?url=https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/wg2ts-1.pdf&guid=c206d88d-a584-6193-182a-e14e14386811&installDate=042524&source=google-d_pdftab_crx See section 4.3.

Thanks to the birddogging efforts of John Robson, I learned that the Thomas Reuters Foundation has its feet mired in the messy pseudo science of climate-social injustice, as the foundation terms it. The foundation even has a “specialist,” Sharon Kits Kamathi, its current editor of Reuters Sustainable Switch newsletter. Robson birddogs the statements of climate alarmists and counters their assumptions and data on his CDN Youtube channel and in his newsletter. **


In his episode “Chilly Canada Day,” Robson takes to task Kamathi’s social media post in which she says, “More than 300 million people live in 20 of the world’s most populous capital cities, where they are uniquely vulnerable to rising temperatures fueled by climate change, as asphalt and buildings absorb and retain heat.” Robson points out that the urban heat island effect has always made urban areas warmer than rural areas in the same climate zones.


Three Dog Night


Just put a bunch of people in an enclosed room for awhile to see how their body temperatures alone can raise the room’s temperature. It’s the Three Dog Night effect: On a really cold night, snuggle up with your dog; colder nights might require two or three dogs for warmth.


We animals burn food to produce infrared radiation. Gather enough of us, and we can heat a building; if fact, at 2 Rue de Beaubourg in Paris an apartment building gets 35% of its heat from people in the nearby metro station. And in Sweden, where 250,000 people pass through Stockholm Central, body heat is used to warm a nearby building called Kungsbrohuset, reducing the need for traditional heating sources by 10%.*** That people can heat people was even an experiment by Hitler’s perverse doctors who had two naked women get into bed with a Jewish man they had submerged in icy water (as reported in The Third Reich). Yes, all animals, from yaks to humans can warm others by excessive body heat.


Cows and horses know this as they huddle on cold winter days. How did this escape Sharon Kits Kamathi?


So, yes, the urban heat island with not only humans crowded together, but also with asphalt and tarred roofs can, and does, raise local temperature. Asphalt has a low albedo unlike ice, for example, which reflects as much as 90% of incoming solar radiation. Ever play basketball on an urban asphalt court in summer? I have. It’s hot. Certainly, Sharon experienced low albedo environments sometime in her life.


The world is now crowded with climate alarmists who can’t separate data from belief or physical processes from ideology. That there are so many alarmists makes me think of Three Dog Night’s “Mama Told Me (Not to Come)”:


    Open up the window, let some air into this room
I think I'm almost chokin' from the smell of stale perfume
And that cigarette you're smokin' 'bout scare me half to death
Open up the window, sucker, let me catch my breath.


Cities are like rooms. The 20 most populous capital cities are like crowded rooms of partygoers pumping heat from bodies and materials into the surrounding environment.



*Sharon Kits Kamathi is the creator, curator and editor of the Reuters Sustainable Switch newsletter and the Sustainable Business vertical on Reuters.com. She joined Reuters after a stint as the Inclusive Economies Editor at the Thomson Reuters Foundation. She enjoys writing about the intersection between climate and social injustice and can be contacted via email for ESG-related queries.

**See CDN episode titled “Chilly Canada Day.”


***See BBC online. Charmaine Lee. September 2020. “The Buildings Heated by Human Warmth.”

G. K. Zipf (1902-1950), an American psychologist, proposed a Principle of Least Effort. It centers on an organism’s choices among possible actions, such as learning how to navigate a maze. Zipf suggests that, for example, a rat learning the maze will essentially “take what appears to be the easiest way” through the maze. That makes some sense. Why spend more energy than one has to to solve a problem? The principle could just as easily apply to predators on the hunt. If you spend too much energy acquiring food for energy, you won’t endure long. Calories in have to be equal to or greater than calories out. The path of least effort  makes sense.


Physicists also have a “least” principle, one based upon the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian. It’s  the principle of least action, probably best exemplified by the refraction of light passing through water and by the scenario of a lifeguard saving a drowning person down beach. Imagine which path of least energy the lifeguard should take to get to the drowning person. 1) Run perpendicularly into the water and then swim to the person or 2) Run along the beach and then enter the water farther down beach closer to the swimmer. In the principle of least action, the energy required to complete the task is the important control on the path taken. Far less energy is required in running through air along the beach and then entering the water for a short swim rather than in running to the water and then swimming the longer distance.


Kamala Harris, the Woman of Least Action and Least Effort


With regard to her stated duties as VP, which include stopping the unfettered immigration that on her watch allowed more than 10 million illegal immigrants into the country and the unaccounted for tens of thousands of minors the government can’t find, Harris has been the epitome of least action. In not going to the border’s worst sections, she has also been the epitome of least effort. She certainly has saved her energy, maybe spending it on holding up “sleepy Joe” for three years. Or, maybe she has put her energy into concocting word salads.

We need a new oxymoronic word to encapsulate what happened Tuesday night at the 2024 DNC. It was a night of condemning the wealthy for being rich and praising the wealthy for being rich. I suggest “praisedemning.”


Could there be any greater example of juxtaposition than there was at the 2024 DNC? Wealthy Obamas and “self-proclaimed” billionaire Governor JB Pritzker spoke to an adoring crowd that also heard “self-proclaimed” socialist Bernie Sanders speak? Could there have been a more telling reaction of folly than a crowd of head bobbing, elated delegates showing glee when Pritzker proudly pointed out his wealth, gesturing by pointing his finger toward himself like a fist-thumping silverback? (https://nypost.com/2024/08/21/us-news/illinois-gov-jb-pritzker-boasts-about-his-wealth-at-dnc-2024-right-after-bernie-sanders-anti-wealthy-rant/)


What’s an on-the-street Democrat supposed to think? “Do we want individuals to be extraordinarily wealthy, or do we want everyone to be hampered by crushing taxes that support never-ending giveaways?” “What is our platform?” “What are our values?”


So, the “party of the people,” the party that wants to tax the 1% into poverty, seems perfectly happy to elect a billionaire as governor. Is it because Pritzker lived the American dream of starting off poor and working his way, shovel, pick, hammer and drill, to success? Or is it because he inherited wealth from his family’s Hyatt Hotels? And Pritzker himself? Does he want his money taxed at 70% so that the poor can have what he has—less, of course, the income and luxury stuff? One would think he might, at least, help Bernie Sanders pay for a fourth home.


And Sanders? What was he thinking as Pritzker spoke about “serenity.” Sanders had just said, “Brothers and sisters, bottom line we need an economy that works for all of us not just the billionaire class…My fellow Americans, when 60% of us live paycheck to paycheck. the top 1% have never ever had it so good.”


Pritzker, the Obamas, the Biden family, Nancy Pelosi, and Bernie Sanders himself, are among those who “never had it so good.” The gleeful delegates shaking their heads in approval as Pritzker proclaimed he was “a real billionaire” need to ask themselves whose policies they really want to support.

Controversial topic, indeed! Abortion.


Is that growing organism in an inseminated woman a human being? Is it a “child,” a person of value equal to a Democrat voter? Does I† have any right other than that provided by the woman who carries I†?


Joe Biden’s religion’s official moral position is that I† does have independent rights by virtue of I†’s being a human from I†s conception. I† is an entity with identifiable DNA, so identifiable that given its maturation into an adult criminal, I†s DNA can be used in court as evidence believed by every jury save that in the OJ Simpson case. Biology, whose tenets Democrats accept only when they are convenient, tells us that DNA distinguishes each of us from the other. I’m different from my sister, you from your brother, and all your siblings from your common parents. Without such independent existence there can be no individual to fault. Do we throw the whole family in prison, the extended family, the entire species, genus, order, phylum? No, given irrefutable evidence, we imprison the individual. Generally, we don’t usually throw mothers in jail for the crimes of their children.


But rules are rules by virtue of exceptions, as in the cases of Jennifer and James Crumbley, the parents of Michigan school shooter Ethan Crumbley. Those parents were held responsible for the crimes of their child and were sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison. Ethan’s separate DNA, formed from the combination of his parents chromosomes, didn’t absolve his parents of his crimes. The conviction, however, was predicated on their behavior and not on their mutual biology.


Democrats Eliminating Home Grown Democrats


Call it a conspiracy if you will, but the Biden-Harris open border policy with its many giveaways in American treasure, seemed designed from the start to cull fresh voters from around the world, voters who would show their thanks in perpetuity by voting for Democrats.


“Come, ‘huddled masses, the ‘tired and poor’; yearn no more. We’ll give you stuff, take care of you, provide education, housing, and healthcare. In turn, we ask only for your chad, your mark on a piece of paper we will provide at drop-off boxes. If you want, we will even fill out the form for you. And your arrival and eventual vote will enable us to snuff out the meddlesome DNA growing in our women. In fact at the Democratic National Convention this year, in addition to hats, signs, and noisemakers, we’re providing a clinic for abortions and vasectomies. With that recent influx of potential voters from other lands, we don’t have to grow our own.”

Are we really capable of living in “the Middle”? Or are we sliding evermore leftward of center?


In Marx’s Words


As I read through some of Karl Marx’s writings today, I  thought of how closely they foreshadowed modern economic and social contexts for Leftist political arguments.


Marx writes in his The Poverty of Philosophy that “henceforth the good side of an economic relation is that which affirms equality….” (235)* Over the past couple of decades Americans have been hammered by the notion of equity, the Marxist version of equality that centers on the leveling of outcomes regardless of talent or effort. That’s the ideal fostered for more than a century by labor unions striving, not for just higher wages, but also for equal pay in their ranks of workers. In writing about Proletarians and Communists, Marx also says, “Communism abolishes eternal truths; it abolishes all religion and morality….” (261). * Since the nineteenth century, attacks on previously accepted “eternal truths” and morality have increased so much as to become commonplace, so that, in a recent example, the Mets honored with a game-opening  “first pitch” a young woman whose rise to fame on TikTok centered on her telling followers how she prepares for oral sex. ** It’s not that we humans have only recently discovered the Clintonian practice of “not having sex,” but since his Oval orifice escapades with Monica Lewinsky, the cat’s gotten out of the zippered pants on the most public forums available to both adults and children. The Puritan heritage, smudged by the red of Hester Prynne’s Scarlet Letter worn in shame in the eponymous Hawthorne novel, is now worn publicly and proudly by a widely followed “influencer” in front of fans both present and remote, with the history of the display forever recorded.


Furthermore, Marx writes the following four “measures” in a ten-point list, “in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable:
    
    1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents to public purposes
    2. A heavy progressive income tax
    3. Abolition of all right of inheritance
    4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants…”(262)


Pause here to consider:


    #1. New York City now houses illegal immigrants in former hotels, and other Democrat-run sanctuary cities also provide housing free of charge to both illegal immigrants and American homeless people, essentially turning private property into public facilities. Now candidate Harris says she will “build” three million housing units—a strong promise in the context of the Biden-Harris failure to build an infrastructure of charging stations. A Politico article published in December, 2023 carries the title “Congress provided $7.5B for electric vehicle chargers. Built so far: Zero.” *** So, three million new Marxist housing units? You tell me the odds of that happening. Plus, Harris promises $25,000 for first-time home buyers. Yeah. That won’t raise the price of homes just as educational subsidies haven’t raised college tuition. NOT.
    #2 “Make the rich pay their fair share,” is the mantra of modern Democrat candidates like Biden and now Harris. The idea of a progressive tax became reality during the Civil War, but was repealed in 1872. Even then it was limited at the top to 10%. And—Bernie Sanders take note—Vermont Rep. Justin Morrill wrote, “in this country we neither create nor tolerate any distinction of rank, race, or color, and should not tolerate anything else than entire equality in our taxes.” Oh! How Vermonters have changed. Then in 1913, the country ratified the 16th Amendment, and with it came the very public rise of class warfare that continues today and that has been from its inception supported by progressives on both the Right and the Left.
    #3 The Estate Tax is a tax on your right to transfer property at your death. It consists of an accounting of everything you own or have certain interests in at the date of death—and not what you paid when you acquired your stuff; rather, its current inflated value. Are you a successful entrepreneur who has weathered risks and provided jobs that support families? You know the expression, “You can’t take it with you”? Well, you can’t leave it all to your descendants under estate tax laws.
    #4 The California exit tax is a one-time tax that must be paid by businesses and individuals who relocate outside of California. Want the freedom to move? That freedom will cost you.


The Democrat Platform


Candidate VP Harris proposes:

• Tax breaks for homebuilders with the goal of building 3 million new housing units in four years
• Up to $25,000 in downpayment aid for first-time homebuyers
• Up to $6,000 for low- and middle-income families with infants (Not clear if this is a one-time gift or on ongoing yearly check. “Honey, you know that new car we wanted but was just too expensive? Well, here are the keys. Next year, we’re driving it to Disney World after the Harris check arrives. Grand Floridian, here we come”)
• Up to $3,600 per child per year in an expanded child tax credit (Will this extend to adult children living in basements of their parents’ home?
• A ban on price gouging in the food sector, singling out meat prices in particular. (Cattle drives will never be the same. But what about vegan burgers?)

And, of course, government-paid college debt that will drive the cost of college upward in a further guarantee on pay for tenured faculty as more students enroll for “free” schooling.
Legacy
If Marx could see his legacy in the impoverishment of billions of people and the deaths of millions under Communist and socialist systems, would he still hold his principles? If in selling his popular Manifesto, he became a millionaire, would he relish paying higher taxes? Would he set the price for his book or prefer a government agent who never had practical experience in writing, publishing, and distributing books, set that price?
*David McLellan. 1977. Ed. Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Oxford University Press.


**Phil Mushnick. Aug. 17, 2024. NY Post https://nypost.com/2024/08/17/sports/mets-should-be-ashamed-of-themselves-for-hawk-tuah-girl-first-pitch-on-camp-day/


***James Bikales. Politico online. 12/05/2023 05:00 AM EST