A California nightmare

California Governor Gavin Newsom’s diminished dream of connecting the city of Merced (population 83,964) to Bakersfield (population 390,233) has hit a snag. Several steel cables in a 636-foot-long bridge built to support construction of the project have corroded and snapped, forcing a new work stoppage on the years-long delayed project.

The Los Angeles Times‘ Ralph Vartabedian describes the ill-fated project’s latest “snafu”:

Hundreds of pages of documents obtained by The Times under a public records request show the steel supports snapped as a result of neglect, work damage, miscommunications and possible design problems.

“It is a horrible sequence of mistakes,” said Robert Bea, emeritus professor of civil engineering at UC Berkeley and co-founder of its Center for Catastrophic Risk Management....

High-strength steel strands supporting the 636-foot-long structure began to snap on Oct. 22, one after another. Ultimately, 23 of the strands, which are composed of seven individual wires each, broke unexpectedly, according to rail authority documents and officials. The order to stop work was issued Nov. 4.

A forensic engineering analysis, obtained by The Times, found that the strands corroded from rainwater that had leaked into the internal structure of the bridge and then broke. The analysis was prepared for Tutor Perini by the forensic engineering firm Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates of Northbrook, Ill.

The report focuses on the state’s multiple layers of management and its dependence on consultants to oversee the project’s bureaucracy.

Gov. Gavin Newsom told The Times in 2019 that he was “going to get rid of a lot of consultants,” but they remain integral to the project, according to engineering specialists and officials involved with bullet train planning.

“The layers on this project are onerous,” said William Ibbs, a UC Berkeley civil engineering professor who has consulted on high-speed rail projects around the world. “The levels of administration and review are very unusual. No one company is going to be wholly to blame if something goes wrong, because they can spread the blame around.”

“It isn’t getting any better,” said an executive at one firm working on the project, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. “It is such a pillage of the taxpayers.”

A “horrible series of mistakes” and a “pillage of the taxpayers” doesn’t happen by accident. Nobody wants to be held accountable for the failure of California’s zombie bullet train project, and the people who know this best want to keep it that way, including Gov. Newsom, who never followed up his April 2019 promise to fix the state’s over-reliance on the consultant-based bureaucracy it created.

Because nobody’s truly responsible for it, California’s zombie bullet train continues lumbering on from one failure to another. It’s time to permanently put the project out of its sad existence.

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Democrats Hate the Nation They Want to Rule

Why does the party want to lead if its leaders can't stand the people they're leading?

“Loving the people you lead, caring deeply about them, is the basic prerequisite of leadership. The leaders of today’s Democratic Party do not. They despise this country. They have said so. They continue to. That is shocking, but it is also disqualifying. We cannot let them run this nation because they hate it. Imagine what they would do to it.” —Fox News host Tucker Carlson, July 6, 2020

Carlson is right. Democrat Party politicos have made it clear they believe our nation is a systemically racist, xenophobic construct so irreparably flawed that only “fundamental transformation” can save it. That the endgame of such transformation would be the acquisition of unassailable power by Democrats is sold as “coincidental” by those same leftists and their corporate mouthpiece, the mainstream media.

Thus, Americans are supposed to believe the Democrats’ desire to eliminate the Electoral College, grant amnesty to 11-22 million illegal aliens, pack the Supreme Court with additional justices, and force-feed hate-America propagandist “history” to public school students is nothing more than the same political business as usual that attends every election season.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Ever since the Left’s stunning defeat in 2016, courtesy of a political novice with many flaws — but an undeniable love for America — Democrats have done everything they can think of to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency. Even before he was inaugurated, a movement was initiated to flip Electoral College electors. On Inauguration Day itself, The Washington Post ran a story with the headline, “The campaign to impeach President Trump has begun,” meaning the effort to remove him from office was preconceived.

And then came the plots. They ranged from puerile, as in the New York Times story about former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein wearing a wire as a means of amassing evidence to prove Trump was unfit for office and thus removable under the 25th Amendment, to the worst scandal in American history, as in the attempted coup that went by the name of Crossfire Hurricane, engendered by the most corrupt administration this nation has ever endured.

In between, there were three years of a wholly unjustified investigation into “Russian collusion!” followed by an attempted impeachment led by party hack Adam Schiff, who hid exculpatory evidence and blatantly lied about speaking with the Ukraine “whistleblower” prior to the hearings. Whistleblower is in quotes because, despite media denials, the Intelligence Community Inspector General ultimately released a statement admitting the office changed its forms for whistleblowers so that firsthand knowledge of the wrongdoing they were reporting was no longer required.

Then came the pandemic for which Trump was first branded a racist and xenophobe for noting it originated in China and for quickly initiating a travel ban. He subsequently became a man with “blood on his hands” for acting too slowly, even as the sclerotic bureaucracies that existed long before Trump came on the scene failed to meet even the most basic challenges of pandemic management.

As the virus gained hold, Democrats showed their true colors, precipitating draconian and wholly capricious lockdowns (churches closed, abortion clinics and liquor stores open), even as those who protested these unconstitutional maneuvers in states like Michigan were deemed dangerous, while those who obliterated history and looted and burned cities to the ground were deemed righteous and peaceful — until those demonstrations “intensified,” as our feckless media characterized their descent into blatant anarchy.

In response, Democrats aligned themselves with antifa, a conglomeration of upper-middle-class fascist thugs whose “revolutions” consist of burning down police stations and businesses (many minority-owned), assaulting police, blocking major highways, and indiscriminately destroying historical artifacts. Democrats are also aligned with Black Lives Matter, an entity run by self-admitted Marxists, whose true agenda was laid bare in Chicago this week when they held a rally for the looters who perpetrated at least $60 million in property damage and injured 13 police officers. “That is reparations,” a BLM organizer stated. “Anything they wanted to take, they can take it because these businesses have insurance.”

Has there ever been an American political party so contemptuous of its own nation that it is willing to allow its own jurisdictions to descend into complete chaos, even as it champions efforts to defund police departments? Has there ever been one willing to hold the American public hostage in the midst of an economy-crushing pandemic for nothing more than a fiscal shakedown aimed at bailing out Democrat-run cities and states, many of them illegal sanctuaries, for decades of wholesale mismanagement, wholly unrelated to the pandemic?

More important, has there ever been a party with more contempt for ordinary Americans? Last week, former Clinton adviser and CNN political commentator Paul Begala declared that President Donald Trump was “sucking up” to his “white nationalist base.” In other words, a major player in the Democrat Party automatically assumes that “white nationalist base” is a pejorative term — in a nation with a Caucasian majority that believes in American exceptionalism.

All of the above is quite revealing. Democrats are so contemptuous of our nation’s institutions and laws that they believe any election or agenda where they fail to prevail is illegitimate and should be resisted — by any means necessary.

“The American Left is different from a lot of the global illiberal lefts in that they’re the only ones that don’t like their country,” asserted Chris Bedford, senior editor of The Federalist, in an appearance on Carlson’s show. “The Cubans, the Soviets, the Chinese, they’re all fiercely patriotic. We don’t have that.”

What we have instead is a globalist agenda wholly supported by Democrats. One where the nation-state itself is an anachronism, and international labor, even slave labor, will be abided, irrespective of the devastation wreaked on American workers. One where a cadre of multinational corporate elites completely disdain patriotism and national security in favor of market share, silence dissenting opinions, and/or completely cancel their promulgators. One where surveillance and data mining are sold as beneficial, even as they ultimately evolve into totalitarian-based “social credit systems” akin to those in Communist China — the same Communist China with whom elitists in business, academia, and Hollywood still curry favor, even as millions of their fellow Americans have been devastated by China’s contemptible duplicity regarding the pandemic.

Not even elections are sacrosanct. Despite the utter fiasco revealed by mail-in voting in New York — where thousands of ballots were invalidated and results of local races remain undecided six weeks after the polls closed — the same Democrat Party that eschews voter ID as “racist” still contends voting by mail is a viable way to run a national election.

That a similar delay — or much worse — in determining who is president could undermine all faith in the integrity of the election process? Only a party that hates America would be willing to so thoroughly bastardize one of our most cherished privileges.

“Once upon a time, trying to torch a federal courthouse would earn years in prison,” states Victor Davis Hanson. “And simply taking over a large chunk of a downtown to re-create Lord of the Flies was unthinkable. Not now.”

In their quest for control, a Democrat Party that hates America is openly abetting the unthinkable. Come November, it is up to the American electorate to disabuse them of their execrable ambitions — in no uncertain terms.

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British Museum bosses remove bust of founder over his links to slavery

The British Museum has removed a bust of its founder from a pedestal and labelled him a ‘slave owner’.

The effigy of Sir Hans Sloane will now be housed in a display alongside artefacts that explain his legacy in the ‘exploitative context of the British Empire’, curators said.

Sloane, whose 71,000 artefacts became the starting point of the British Museum after he left them to the state in his will, funded his collecting through his wife’s family’s sugar plantation. Sloane Square in London is also named after him.

The bust now sits as part of a display which explains his work as a ‘collector [and] slave owner’.

The museum’s director, Hartwig Fischer, said the institution had deliberately ‘pushed him off the pedestal’. Mr Fischer added: ‘We must not hide anything. Healing is knowledge.’

The move is part of an overhaul of the museum’s collections to acknowledge its links to slavery and colonialism that will eventually involve ‘redisplaying the whole British Museum’.

Other artefacts, such as those taken by Captain James Cook on his voyages, will be labelled to show they were acquired through ‘colonial conquest and military looting’.

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No reason to taint with guilt our faith in Western culture

We all know the joke that Mahatma Gandhi supposedly made when he was asked what he thought about Western civilisation: “I think it might be a good idea.” The gag is apocryphal, in fact, first appearing two decades after his death, but very many people have taken it literally, arguing that there really is no such thing as Western civilisation, from ideologues such as Noam Chomsky to the activists of the Rhodes Must Fall movement at Oxford University who have succeeded in pulling down the statue of the benefactor of the Rhodes scholarships from Oriel College.

This belief that Western civilisation is, at heart, uniquely morally defective has recently been exemplified by The New York Times’ inane and wildly historically inaccurate 1619 Project, which essentially attempts to present the entirety of American history from Plymouth Rock to today solely through the prism of race and slavery.

“America Wasn’t a Democracy Until Black Americans Made it One”, was the headline of one essay in The New York Times Magazine launching the Project, alongside, “American Capitalism is Brutal: You Can Trace That to the Plantation” and “How Segregation Caused Your Traffic Jam”. When no fewer than 12 – in the circumstances very brave – American Civil War historians sent a letter itemising all the myriad factual errors in the Project’s founding document, The New York Times refused to print it, yet the Project plans to create and distribute school curriculums that will “re-centre” America’s memory.

None of this would amount to much if only schools and colleges in Britain, America, Australia and across the English-speaking peoples were not so keen to apologise for and deny Western civilisation, and to abolish or dumb down the teaching of important aspects of it.

The classics faculty at Oxford University, to take one example of many, has recently recommended that Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid be removed from the syllabus in ancient literature, history and philosophy, giving as its reason the difference in recent exam results between male and female undergraduates, and the difference in expertise in Latin and Greek between privately and publicly educated students. One of the supposed guardians of the discipline is therefore willing to put social experimentation before the best possible teaching of the humanities, a disgraceful position to have been adopted by Britain’s second-best university.

Yet, instead of apologising for Western civilisation, we should still believe in it and be proud of it. For all that we must of course take proper cognisance of other cultures, in terms of both its sheer quality and quantity the legacy of Western culture is unsurpassed in human history. We are deliberately underplaying the greatest contributions made to poetry, architecture, philosophy, music and art by ignoring that fact, often simply in order to try to feel less guilty about imperialism, colonialism and slavery, even though the last was a moral crime committed by only a minority of some few people’s great-great-great grandparents.

As a result, future generations cannot be certain that they will be taught about the overwhelmingly positive aspects of Western civilisation. They might not now be shown the crucial interconnection between, for example, the chapel by Giotto at Padua, which articulates the complex scholasticism of St Augustine in paint; Machiavelli’s The Prince, the first work of modern political theory; Botticelli’s Primavera, the quintessence of Renaissance humanism in a single painting; the works of Teresa of Avila and Descartes, which wrestle with the proof of discrete individual identity; Beethoven’s symphonies, arguably the most complex and profound orchestral works ever written, and Shakespeare, whose plays Harold Bloom has pointed out “remain the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually”. Even if they are taught about these things individually, they will not be connected in a context that makes it clear how important they are to Western civilisation.

What the old Western civ university courses really did was to root a people in their past and their values. The trajectory of Western culture was shown to have run from Greece via Rome to Christendom, infused by Judaic ideas and morality along the way via Jerusalem, but then detouring briefly through the Dark Ages, recovering in the Renaissance, which led to the Reformation, the Enlightenment and thus the scientific, rational and politically liberated culture of Europe and European America. “From Plato to NATO”, as the catchphrase went.

At the centre of this transference of values across time and space was democracy, of which Winston Churchill famously said: “Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

The generations who grew up knowing that truth, rather than weltering in guilt and self-doubt about “false consciousness” and so on, were the lucky ones, because they were allowed to study the glories of Western civilisation in a way that was unembarrassed, unashamed and not saddled with accusations of guilt in a centuries-old crime that had absolutely nothing to do with them. They could learn about the best of their civilisation, and how it benefited — and continues to benefit — mankind.

As Ian Jenkins, the senior curator of the Ancient Greek collection at the British Museum, put it in his book on the Elgin Marbles – somewhat politically correctly entitled The Parthenon Sculptures — “Human figures in the frieze are more than mere portraits of the Athenian people of the day. Rather they represent a timeless humanity, one which transcends the present to encompass a universal vision of an ideal society”. It was no coincidence that interest in them permeated the Western Enlightenments of the 18th century.

While the Parthenon was being built, Pericles contrasted the openness and moderation of Athenian civic life with the militaristic, secretive, dictatorial Spartans in his Funeral Speech of 430BC, and this struck a chord with the Enlightenment thinkers of 23 centuries later, just as it should continue to with us today, reminding us why Western values are indeed superior to those that actuate the leaders of modern China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea and Zimbabwe. And yes, we know that the architect Phidias employed slaves and metic foreigners in building the Parthenon, not just Athenian freemen.

“Carved around the middle of the 5th century BC,” writes Neil McGregor, former director of the British Museum, the Elgin Marbles “are the product of a creative culture that is credited with the invention of such aspects of modern Western civilisation as democracy, philosophy, history, medicine, poetry and drama.” Of course, no one is claiming that ancient Oriental, Persian and Arab civilisations did not have all of those listed — except democracy, which they did not then and most still do not today — and no one suggests that South Sea islanders, the Aztecs and Incas, Ancient Egyptians or the Khmer Empire that build Angkor Wat for the god Vishnu did not have their own worthy civilisations too.

“From the constitution drafted by the founding father of the American republic to the wartime speeches of Winston Churchill,” Jenkins writes, “many have found inspiration for their brand of human liberalism, and for a doctrine of the open society, in the Funeral Speech of Pericles.” If Pericles had lost an election or was ostracised in the annual vote of Athenians, he would have stood down from office in the same way that Boris Johnson, Angela Merkel, Scott Morrison and Emmanuel Macron would after a defeat in a free and fair election in their countries, whereas that is inconceivable in many totalitarian countries not infused by the ethics of the West.

Christianity, too, for all its intolerance and occasional obscurantism and obnoxious iconoclasm, has been overall an enormous force for good in the world. The Sermon on the Mount was, as Churchill put it, “the last word in ethics”. Christians abolished slavery in the 1830s (or three decades later in America’s case), whereas outside Christendom the practice survived for much longer, and identifiable versions of it still exist in some non-Christian and anti-Christian countries today.

The abolition of slavery did not merely happen by votes in parliament and proclamations from presidents; it was fought for by (and against) Christians with much blood spilt on both sides. That would not have happened without the Judaeo-Christian values that are so central to Western civilisation. That is ultimately why we should still believe in Western civilisation, not apologise for it; why it should be proselytised around the world, and certainly taught as a discrete discipline in our schools and universities.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 
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