Post by Tom Krannawitter.
the state of the cruft
The Pretense of the State of the Union
There are no masters at the top who know what’s best for everyone
JANUARY 21, 2015 by JEFFREY A. TUCKER
Some people hated it. Some people loved it. Just about everyone seems to miss the real point.
The most disturbing part of the annual “State of the Union” address by the US president does not concern the specifics of the content, or the policies – as wonderful or objectionable as they may be. The core problem is the very strange presumption that one man comprehends an entire nation and its meaning, embodies something like a guiding spirit of a people, and thereby earns the right to manage the entire collective from the top down through the judicious use of power.
In a time of leviathan in which an incomprehensibly immense government aspires to master and administer every aspect of life itself, the notion that one powerful man, having processed all relevant data and related causes and effects, can stand behind a podium and sum up a national spirit and agenda, the very State of the Union, plunges us into the realm of total fantasy.
We flatter ourselves to believe that this is not an age of faith but rather an age of reason. The purpose and ethos of the State of the Union address is not reasonable.
Maybe such a presumption of knowledge wouldn’t be such a terribly offensive idea in an age of liberalism, where the government had little to no power. If the government had such limited functioning, it would be more plausible for one person to report on the activities not of the nation but of the executive branch of the government itself.
If this were President Rutherford B. Hayes or President Grover Cleveland speaking about their jobs, the State of the Union address would not be as absurd. They ruled before the federal government could tax income, manage schools, regulate consumer products, arrest and jail people for their consumption choices, unleash a police state, or start wars without congressional approval — all before government consisted of hundreds of agencies, thousands of divisions staffed with millions of permanent and unaccountable lifetime employees enforcing an accumulated cruft of 150 years of legislation.
And, as a point of fact, every president from Thomas Jefferson through the 19th century delivered his address in the form of a humble letter. It was not the “State of the Union.” It was an annual accounting by the president to the Congress. It explained what the president was doing, more in the form of an annual employment review. The president was in the hot seat and the Congress was to be his judge.
This pattern was broken by Woodrow Wilson — the imperial president who gave us the income tax, the Fed, and World War I. Wilson forged the template for the rest of history. He shocked Congress by delivering his address in person, with the beginnings of the modern ritual attendant upon the event.
Thus was born the modern cult of the presidency, built under the leadership principle. And yet, even then, his address was largely limited to matters of state: what the government was doing and why. Wilson’s imperium was over government, not the nation as a whole, so his speech didn’t address how government would manage the whole of life itself.
Then came Franklin Roosevelt and the centralized economic planning of the New Deal. Nothing was outside the purview of Washington. Once the United States entered World War II, the annual report to Congress became the State of the Union, as if the presidential mind was capable of extracting all relevant information, sea to shining sea, putting it in poetic words, presenting a vision for this gigantic collective, and embodying the whole spirit of a people. Remember that this was epoch of the dictator and every statesmen in the world, in his heart of hearts, aspired to be that guy.
It was also the beginning of the media age, so the message to Congress became a message to the entire country, attempting to somehow capture and characterize the whole of our lives. The advent of the modern State of the Union address in 1942 really amounted to a nationalization of the whole population.
FDR said in this first State of the Union speech, implausibly, in the midst of massive death by conscription and material privation of war: “I am proud to say to you that the spirit of the American people was never higher than it is today — the Union was never more closely knit together — this country was never more deeply determined to face the solemn tasks before it.”
Just look at those words. Are we really being asked to believe that the American people as a whole have a spirit, and that the president is somehow magically ordained to know its height? That he knows all previous collective spirits in American history and can know for sure, based on his omniscient measuring skills, that it has never been higher? And can a country really be “determined” in the sense that it has a unified will, no different from an individual will, and it acts in history as an aggregate?
There is nothing about this sense that embodies the idea of freedom. “The American spirit” — or the spirit of any people — is not a singular entity but a social order in which millions and billions of individuals have rights and shape their own lives in cooperation with others based on their peaceful choices.
Freedom is about an infinite diversity of changing plans, aspirations, and circumstances of time and place. It is also about a future that unfolds unpredictably in light of human choice, learning, growing, and trial and error, one life at a time. Freedom has no master at the top who knows what’s best for everyone.
There is a reason that despotism has long been associated with an all-knowing Great Leader. And of course all good things that happen under the Great Leader’s watch are due to him. Every healing, every new job, every new industry, every calming of every civil strife, every broken family that found its way, every lost soul that found salvation — all credit is due to him who rules: so knowing, so benevolent, so generous and loving. All of us live in waiting for the next miracle from the hand that feeds us, clothes us, educates us, and makes us whole.
Maybe you can say Oh this posturing doesn’t really matter. It’s just political rhetoric. And that is true, but we should not be so dismissive about it. If this type of language were coming from a pompous local pastor, or a bloviating businessperson at a Rotary luncheon, we would be free to ignore it. But it’s different when it comes from the head of state with the power to do unthinkable things whether we like it or not.
Since the time of FDR, this speech has been designed to perpetuate an all-encompassing political program, and, also, to marginalize the disgruntled, to treat dissidents like non-persons, to disregard and dismiss anyone who doesn’t fall in line with its plans. This is why these speeches can so often make your skin crawl.
There are fact checkers and commentators who oppose the specific points of the State of the Union. Of course, there are plenty of bad policy ideas pushed through this venue. And those are easy to refute. Government cannot and does not create jobs. Government cannot bring health and wealth to a country. Government cannot make people smarter. It cannot cause incomes to rise by taxing some people more and transferring the proceeds to a bureaucracy. The best thing that government can do is get out of the way so that people can begin to build their own security and prosperity.
But the specifics of the policies proposed in these addresses are not the worst part. The most objectionable aspect of the annual State of the Union is its epistemological conceit. The president has no access to the information he would need in order to know what he claims to know. He is a mere mortal who lives in real time, like the rest of us. He does not know the State of the Union.
The single hardest part of life as we know it is understanding the state of our own individual lives. Parents with teeenagers know that it is a full-time job just to keep up with what their own kids are doing. Owners of small businesses scramble every day just to know what is going on in their shops. Managers of medium-sized companies quickly discover that the only way forward is to trust others to know and manage the best they can. CEOs start their jobs with the presumption that their best hope for success is to outsource as much of their job as they can.
And yet, with the US president, we are being asked to believe that this one man can know not just the whole of the affairs of state but also the business of 316 million people: all our hopes, frustrations, and aspirations, collect them all into a big bundle and characterize them in total, and know the best possible means to get us all from here to there.
In order to convince us all of this ridiculous idea — that he knows both the here and the there and all that falls between — the speeches have become increasingly personalized, constantly referring to archetypes within the social fabric. This is not an easy trick. The speech itself is produced not by magic fairies whispering truth in the presidential ear but rather through the much more mundane task of hiring professional ghostwriters who have heavy training in the political arts.
Speechwriter Cody Keenan is the man who did it for President Obama this year. Keenan is from Chicago, grew up privileged in Connecticut, attended Northwestern University, and had a long stint as a DC fixer and wordsmith for Senator Teddy Kennedy. Now at the top of his game, his task is to bamboozle the public into believing that one man with massive power has their interests at heart and that his awesome knowledge and compassion will somehow translate into wondrous programs that will improve everyones lives.
It’s a charade. Those close to power know this. They know that the entire scene is artificial, designed to pump up power and influence for its own sake. They figure it’s dirty business, but someone has to do it.
Down deep this is cynicism and all of it is wrapped in spectacle. We are right to fear for the souls of people involved in such a hoax. A real idealist would not hope for ever-better ways of manufacturing myths through high-profile media events that disguise the true nature of government. A real idealist would hope for a world in which political leaders elicit massive public suspicion and opposition, not just when they are technically wrong on matters of policy but also because they pretend to possess knowledge and competence that no mortal can possibly have.
“If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order,” wrote F.A. Hayek in “The Pretence of Knowledge,” he will first need to recognize the “insuperable limits to his knowledge.” He will need to discover a “lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society — a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.”
But let’s say that there absolutely must be a State of the Union address. What would a moral and honest speech say?
It’s your life. I am a person just like you, with no greater insight or wisdom than you, and no magical powers to create wealth or happiness. I can only get out of your way and wish you all the best as you, in cooperation with whomever you choose, make the most of this life, come what may.
ABOUT
JEFFREY A. TUCKER
Jeffrey Tucker is a distinguished fellow at FEE, CLO of the startup Liberty.me, and editor at Laissez Faire Books. Author of five books, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events. His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World.
move on . West
The only way Islamic fundamentalism can defeat the West is by getting the West to defeat itself. But the West controls its own destiny.
People in the West may continue to learn, create, innovate, invest, advance, grow, prosper, and guiltlessly affirm their constructive way of life, by simply choosing to do so.
Barbarians and leftists try to keep the West obsessed with barbarianism and leftism by manipulating Western media to keep the focus on barbarians and leftists.
Westerners, however, may minimize propaganda exposure by making better media choices in the media market. Westerners may use market forces to reward media that upholds the West, and starve media that does not. Every time we turn on a TV or click a mouse, we make media market choices.
By not rewarding barbarians and leftists with media attention – i.e. money – they will eventually starve from lack of attention, and fade away.
You don’t defeat evil by incorporating it into your life. How much more Islamism and leftism does it take to understand these social pathologies? Neither have changed their nature. They both, always, invariably, predictably, foreseeably, lead to death and destruction.
It’s best to leave folks captivated by these cults alone. You can’t save them, and they certainly aren’t interested in saving you.
the utopia of panacea
Let 2015 be the year the Elbert County Left get over their groundless expectation that Elbert County government exists to perfect their utopian dream.
“The government having stepped into the place of Divine Providence in France, it was but natural that everyone, when in difficulties, invoked its aid. We find a vast number of petitions which, though the writers professed to be speaking on behalf of the public, were in reality intended to further their small private interests. The files in which they figure are perhaps the only places in which all the various classes of prerevolutionary France rub shoulders, so to speak. They make depressing reading. We find peasants applying for compensation for the loss of their cattle or their homes; wealthy landowners asking for financial aid for the improvement of their estates; manufacturers petitioning the Intendant for monopolies protecting them from competition. Often, too, businessmen report to the Intendant confidentially that their affairs are in a bad way and request him to approach the Controller-General for a loan to tide them over this emergency. (It would seem, in fact, that special funds were earmarked for such eventualities.) Sometimes even members of the nobility did not disdain to play the part of suppliants, the only difference being that their letters were more grandiloquently phrased than those of the common herd.
. . .
In times of dearth-and these were frequent in the eighteenth century-everyone expected the Intendant to come to the rescue as a matter of course. For the government was held responsible for all the misfortunes befalling the community; even when these were “acts of God,” such as floods or droughts, the powers·that·be were blamed for them.”
Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, 1858. Stuart Gilbert translation, 1978, pp. 70-71.
old timey thumpin’
Paul Krugman: China, Coal, Climate
Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman opines 11-13-14:
“understand the defense in depth that fossil-fuel interests and their loyal servants — nowadays including the entire Republican Party — have erected against any action to save the planet.”
False implication – Republicans want to destroy the planet.
“The first line of defense is denial”
“cabal including thousands of scientists around the world”
“witch hunts against climate scientists”
“crazy conspiracy theory”
“economic scare tactics”
Denial, cabal, witch hunt, crazy conspiracy, scare tactics – a whole string of unsupported ad hominems.
“the right’s usual faith in markets”
“we’re supposed to believe that business can transcend any problem, adapt and innovate around any limits, but would shrivel up and die if policy put a price on carbon.”
“Still, what’s bad for the Koch brothers must be bad for America, right?”
Ridicule. False implication that markets are inefficient. False implication that carbon taxes would not suppress economic activity. “Koch brothers” ad hominem fallacy.
“a “war on coal” as if this were self-evidently an attack on American values, but the reality is that the coal industry employs very few people. The real war on coal, or at least on coal miners, was waged by strip-mining and natural gas, and ended a long time ago. And environmental protection is quite popular with the nation at large.”
Multiple false redefinitions of “war on coal” – first that it’s about coal miners, second that environmental protection means using less coal.
“the last line of defense, claims that America can’t do anything about global warming, because other countries, China in particular, will just keep on spewing out greenhouse gases. “
“climate denialists controlling Congress “
Ad hominem attack against Republican majority.
“Not to mention the possibility that the next president could well be an anti-environmentalist who could reverse anything President Obama does.”
False implication that whatever Obama does helps the environment.
This language rolls off Krugman’s keyboard without a hint of hesitation or thought. It’s a practiced script of leftist memes and mantras – a liturgy that Krugman recites like a high priest. In Elbert County Krugman’s acolytes surround us, parroting their high priest, proud, cocksure owners of the liturgy, thumping their keyboards – “oh the science, the science” – like preachers at a tent revival.
Elbert County is filthy with them.
Thing is, the standard these grubers set for the right doesn’t even rise to the level of a caricature. Instead, we get windows into mean little nobel prize winning minds that would be pitiable if not for all of the malice therein.
the setup
Back when I was a Kiowa Lion, Lions did not mix politics with the philanthropic mission of the club. To this day the Lions’ bylaws contain this prohibition. The Elizabeth Lions have apparently discarded this rule. I have no idea what the Elizabeth Lions hope to gain from a collaboration with partisan publisher Jerry Bishop and other local Leftist publishers [see below], but gaming local elections through a Leftist cooperative hardly seems in the best interests of Elbert County or the charitable interests Lions ostensibly organize to serve.
I am very weary of these Leftist smear tactics [see below]. I won’t attend a setup event.
John Dorman sat with the Oil & Gas edit committee for years, a self-anointed local planning group who produced a regulatory document that would have landed Elbert County in the middle of an expensive lawsuit with the State of Colorado over “local control” – work that a majority of commissioners had the good sense to discard last summer. Those facts were documented in numerous blog postings here.
Thanks to billionaire Democrat activists and Governor Hickenlooper the issue lives on and continues to threaten property holders in Colorado.
The difference between a Leftist activist and a proponent of limited government, however, is that the latter can learn from their mistakes. The former do not.
Dorman’s an activist. A man of the Left. And I am so very weary of this all-politics all-the-time Leftism in our society. Leftism, like other religions, has a proper time and place. Activists, however, have no boundaries. They come at you like Witnesses showing wide-eyed un-listenning stares of true belief. When you see them coming you don’t answer the door. Don’t make eye contact and maybe they’ll go away.
That’s what Leftists have reduced politics to. I’ve had my fill.
The fact that their belief system gives them justification to employ tactics beneath contempt [see below] doesn’t endear them to me either. Grown men and women should know better. [Read more…]
Evan Sayet
customers eat, beneficiaries starve
Human nature is imperfect. It always was, and so long as we remain human, it always will be. The American Founders built a government system adapted to our imperfect human nature. No other system of government contains mechanisms to mitigate the harmful effects of our imperfect human nature.
The free market also resolves human imperfections. Suppliers and demanders imperfectly attempt to maximize their worth by agreeing on a price for a given exchange of goods or services. Price is the flexible point where they voluntarily meet, and price can be moved by either party to a transaction depending on how each deals with their imperfect circumstances.
The market flexibly harmonizes imperfections while providing the necessary incentives for trade to occur. Without trade, without a market, no substantial incentives exist. Without incentives, goods do not get made and trade does not occur. When trade does not exist, buyers don’t have anything to buy, and everyone stays poorer.
Humans are motivated by the opportunity to benefit themselves more than they are motivated by the opportunity to benefit others. The Left use the pejorative of greed when speaking of our human nature of self interest. But this is our nature. It is neither good nor bad. It’s just the way humans generally are.
With equal validity you could say that it’s human nature to have sex and therefore sex is bad. Oh wait a minute; a lot of people do say that. Let’s not kick that sleeping dog just now.
Which makes more sense to advocate – political and economic systems that offend our human nature, or ones that work with our human nature? The question answers itself and the overwhelming evidence affirms the answer.
Where humans have worked out their differences, their disequilibriums, their inequalities, and their variances through objective, constitutional, rule-of-law-based governments and associated free markets, they have done best.
Where humans have had their political and economic incentives removed through command economics and totalitarian governments, they have done worst.
This is the most important lesson of history, and the Left has still not learned it.
I read Jean Ziegler‘s Betting on Famine. Ziegler is a Social Democrat who worked for the UN and answers the question in his book, “Why the World Still Goes Hungry?”
He reasons that global corporate food oligarchies control food and associated supply-chain product markets to maximize profits, that these same markets inhibit subsistence farming around the world because it competes with their control of food, that sufficient food is a basic human right, that there is more than enough food produced to go around so that no one should starve, and that the free market misallocates food and causes starvation.
Aye yai yai.
Ziegler’s solution – “In parliaments, in international regulatory authorities, we can decide that there must be change; we can decide to make the right to food a priority, to remove food from the realm of market speculation, to protect subsistence agriculture in the name of national heritage and invest in improving it worldwide. The solutions exist; the plans and projects are already drafted. What is lacking is the will of governments.”
Ziegler, the Social Democrats, and the Left think we can just decide to change human nature. You might think, “But this has never been done.” And you’d be right. It’s never been done because it can’t be done. Our nature is our nature. Denying it will only result in predictably negative consequences that come from denial.
If you want to see starvation really take off and become much worse than it already is, put government in control of the food supply. Governments have already re-allocated food resources toward energy production. Governments are funding the growth of food, only to turn around and burn it up.
When governments make mistakes, they create invested constituencies who have financial incentives to resist changes to the government policy. Moreover, government programs are funded from taxpayer revenue which continues to flow regardless of the success of the program. There’s no outcome feedback loop to correct a government mistake. And there’s always the shouting constituency narrowly focused on their government benefit to drown out more sober analysis.
When markets make mistakes, they quickly self correct because no one buys the mistake and it quickly becomes unfunded and goes away.
Unsubsidized markets would have abandoned wind, solar, and food-robbing ethanol long ago. And fewer people would be starving today.
Roundup time at New Plains’ Prairie Times
Responding to Viewpoints, in the order presented in the print edition of the New Plains’ Prairie Times:
- In a Rodney King “why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along” moment, Jerrry Bishop laments our divisions, and wishes they’d all just go away. Of course he’d never go so far as to allow that Leftist societal ratchet to slip back a notch or two.
- Ric Morgan wants to bring federal and state grant money into the county, and seeks donations from water districts and agencies around the state, as well as some Elbert County revenue, to study water levels. He sees this as a political question. It would be better if it were a question the private sector wanted to take up, which apparently, currently, it is not.
- In the first of two political smears disguised as news, Susan Shick thinks commissioners spend too much on vehicles of all sorts, and she’d really like to see a reallocation of funds toward securing the water study grant.
- John Dorman uses his 1st Am. right in a letter to the editor to assert his Republican nature, dump on the local Republican elite, and frame his pro-planning, no-growth, no-oil&gas activism in the county as proof of his Republican values. Hehe. Yeah. That’s a good one John.
- In another letter, Paul Crisan hopes we haven’t lost the ability to work for the common good. But don’t forget Paul sat on the Elbert County Planning Commission for years dictating just what that common good would be. That’s the trouble with the common good, there’s always a dictator telling us what’s in it.
- Turning the page, Susan Shick lets no one forget for a moment the visceral hatred she harbors against Commissioner Schlegel. And oh yeah he won’t fund what has now become her pet water grant project. “He denies them funding.” There is no greater sin to a Democrat.
- Moving on, it’s all Leftist politics all the time as Jill Duvall focusses her rhetoric on Robert Rowland, using various Alynsky techniques designed to demean and disgrace. Two pages of that stuff, yeah that’s fun to read.
- Which brings us to the crescendo, the top card duo of Thomasson and his wonderboy Bailey each weighing in. Thomasson’s bitch is high art because after reading his complaint, you have no idea about what he wants. His abstract discontent, presumably, allows him to jump in any direction as circumstances develop. Why commit? Keep your options open Robert.
- And then Bailey, donning Roberto the Amazin’ Psycho‘s turban, darkly warns that “dubious plans are afoot.” No doubt, and the above ringleaders are in the kitchen, with the wrench.
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blunt talk – essential speech
See the most relevant 40 minutes of television ever produced. The mix of authoritative voices who refused to be intimidated by political correctness gave us a frank factual analysis that everyone must absorb. This is a defining moment for our culture. It’s a rare conversation these days that supersedes politics.
“a closed loop of the left”
Post by Brooks Imperial.
Daniel Greenfield’s world view
Post by Brooks Imperial.
Live by the sword, and die by it too.
Post by Brooks Imperial.
Last I checked, politics is not an EEOC protected category.
Democrats might begin to find it harder to get a job. After all, why should an employer hire people who believe in socialist non-merit based rewards? Employers are in business to compete in the market, make a profit, and thereby stay in business. It’s only reasonable for employers to seek employees who won’t undermine their businesses and the market system.
It’s time for conservatives to start impacting the Left where they can feel it – in their paychecks.
I know you are but what am I?
Post by Brooks Imperial.
Charles Koch’s Free Society
Post by Brooks Imperial.
the trap of revisionism
Post by Brooks Imperial.
Tools
The enviro-Left allow themselves to be led around by the nose by legal-minded activists attempting to impose their policies through clever language.
Those who’ve gone to law school know the mechanics of persuasive writing and how the English language with its vast arsenal of hyperbolic and descriptive devices, can be applied to any position about any subject whatsoever. There are no limits and few rules. The Constitution guarantees defendants receive a zealous defense, even going so far as to appoint public defenders free of charge. So lawyers train to defend the impossible in order to convince juries and get their clients off.
Environmental activists use those same techniques out of the courtroom to sway public opinion to side with the environmental belief system. Like defense lawyers, they don’t have to coordinate their arguments with objective truth. All they have to do is win because there’s huge money on the table and they aim to take a share of it.
Even if they get a policy wrong, disruptive matters will simply fall to numerous venues populated by self-anointed planning and regulatory bureaucrats to sort out – people who write book-loads of rules to tell us exactly how the great unwashed population was specifically meant to be controlled – for our health, safety and welfare of course.
Carving through these thickets of commands to open a path back to constitutional governmental limitations and our civil rights can be a daunting task, often requiring advanced educations that most voters don’t possess, just to get a word in edgewise.
I wouldn’t propose any speech limitations to change this system, for such powers would only lead to worse corruptions. But at the same time, one has to wonder whether the great majority of environmental activists, untrained to tell the difference between slick propaganda and founded language, have any clue how they get used.
Post by Brooks Imperial.
intensity X intelligence = a constant
Post by Brooks Imperial.
Eugenics and the Left
Eugenics – From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Today, eugenics is regarded by some as a brutal movement which inflicted human rights violations on millions.[29] Some practices engaged in the name of eugenics, such as attacks on reputation and violations of privacy, reproductive rights, the right to life, the right to found a family, and the right to freedom from discrimination, are today classified as violations of human rights.
The practice of negative racial aspects of eugenics, after World War II, fell within the definition of the new international crime of genocide, set out in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.[30]
The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union also proclaims “the prohibition of eugenic practices, in particular those aiming at selection of persons”.[31]
The Genocidal Duck Whisperers of the Post-Human Left
Pick up a copy of Obama’s $3.9 trillion budget and there among the TSA fee hikes, Medicare payment cuts and the $400 million for the Department of Homeland Security to fight Global Warming is a curious little item.
On Page 930 of the budget that never ends is $575 million for “family planning/reproductive health” worldwide especially in “areas where population growth threatens biodiversity or endangered species.”
The idea that the way to protect insects, fish and animals is by preventing human beings from having children is part of an approach known as Population, Health and Environment (PHE) which integrates population control into environmentalist initiatives.
PHE dates back to the 1980s and is practiced by mainstream organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund. The Smithsonian’s Woodrow Wilson Center, which is funded partly by the US government, aggressively champions PHE eugenics and USAID funds PHE programs and distributes PHE training manuals derived in part from Wilson Center materials.
PHE had been baked into Congressional bills such as the Global Sexual and Reproductive Health Act of 2013 co-sponsored by Debbie Wasserman-Shultz and Sheila Jackson-Lee which urged meeting United Nations Millennium Development Goals by using birth control as, among other things, a means of “ensuring environmental sustainability”.
Obama’s budget is more open about its PHE eugenics agenda. While PHE backers usually claim that they want to reduce population to prevent famine and promote gender equality, the PHE budget request explicitly states that its goal is to reduce human population growth for the sake of the animals, without any of the usual misleading language about feminism and clean water.
The budget is a blunt assertion of post-Human values by an administration that has become notorious for its fanatical environmentalism, sacrificing people on the altar of Green ideology.
Post by Brooks Imperial.