Editor’s note: This is the third and final part of Bonnie Donovan’s columns on the world and adverse events.
Now to a different kind of adverse event that could be a trigger.
We are facing a faltering and decay of the established democratic social order that was nourished by the great growth and prosperity of the 20th century. In America and California.
Everywhere, serious crime is increasing, aided and abetted by the decriminalization of felonies by prosecutors and judges. This is accompanied by divisions among racial and ethnic groups, bitter strife between parents and school boards and school officials over abysmal performance by students in English and mathematics and in the indoctrination of students in “Woke racial politics,” plus LGBTQ+ practices and the secret promotion of transgenderism among vulnerable students.
There is growing fear and distrust of federal and state governments and the politicization of supposedly non-political agencies including the FBI and the Justice Department. Other federal agencies are overstepping their bounds as they increasingly become more radical in their interpretation of their charters.
Most newspapers and TV press have become propaganda mouthpieces for one political party. We are subjected to the poisonous influences and power of the ubiquitous social media platforms, along with their illegal compact with government agencies to censor free speech, if it contradicts government orthodoxy and propaganda.
There is increasing unease in the population over crime and bitter, political and social divisions. This is apparent in the growth of purchases of guns and ammunition.
All this is made far worse by the federal government and some state governments stepping into the growing secularization of America. Just as Stalin promoted communism as the new religion for Russia, so we are seeing our government agencies adopting a new God, named “Woke.” The new state religion is called “Woke-ism”.
All religions need a devil for the new religion to vanquish. This devil is known as “white privilege,” and it must be eliminated from the face of the earth, according to Woke-ism.
75.8% of the population is white. Woke-ism presumes that they all carry the evil of white privilege, which must be expunged.
There appear to be three strains of Woke-ism. One is socialism, another is racialism, and the third is sexualism. A characteristic of the followers of wok-ism is their utter intolerance to any views or arguments against their orthodoxies.
These orthodoxies appear to be those proposed by Saul Alinsky in his 1971 book “Rules For Radicals” and strategies for installing a socialist government, the radical tenets of the Black Lives Matter organization and its Marxist founders, and the political activists of the LGBTQ+ community and their objectives to normalize their practices and status.
The adoption of these orthodoxies by federal and state governments, their fostering of them through mandatory education in K-12 schools, in higher education and in government employment is causing racial divisions and political dissent among many parents in school districts across America. Even our military, whose main focus should be on unit cohesion and unit effectiveness in battle, is being subjected to divisive, woke indoctrination.
In America, calling somebody a nasty name often invokes anger. But there is now one word that invokes only fear. That word is “racist.” Whether true or not, this epithet is toxic. It can cost people their jobs, and they can be pilloried on the internet.
But if a black person calls a white woman a “Karen” (slang for a white woman who is seen as entitled and demanding), that is considered OK. The first commandment of “woke” is that only white people can be racist.
There could be a grassroots rebellion that could trigger an adverse event, against the widespread government efforts to indoctrinate a majority of the 250 million white men, women and children. Their purpose is to psychologically and physically strip them of any inherent, subconscious assumptions of white privilege and of the real-life benefits that theoretically accrued to them because of their subconscious belief.
We started this three-part series in the Did You Know? column to try to spark interest and a conversation about the adverse events and their consequences that we face as citizens.
As we end this column, we hazard a guess about which of the potential adverse events we identified, could produce a cascade of consequential failures. All bets are off if the Ukraine war becomes a war between Russia and NATO.
One adverse event likely to cause a cascade of failures is the rapid melting of ice sheets and glaciers in Antarctica, Greenland and other parts of the world. The melting of the ice has a multiplying effect on the rate of global warming that we are being warned is not accounted for adequately in plans to arrest its growth.
The other, probable, adverse event, that could be a trigger, is government overreach in forcing through extremely unpopular, expensive and freedom-killing changes on an already stressed population — changes that also fail to meet the on-demand power needs of millions of people. It seems that none of the authors of the anti-global-warming strategy commitments have calculated the extreme, adverse impacts on people’s lives, in implementing their plans to save the world.
The experts in the power generation and distribution fields are already warning California of blackouts and system failures ahead, as the state plunges headlong into closing down fossil fuel power generation and replacing it with wind and solar power.
In parallel, we are facing the potential, premature replacement of all mechanisms powered by fossil fuels, with mechanisms dependent solely on electricity, before there is enough dependable wind and solar-power energy and energy storage to meet the stratospheric increases in demand for electricity.
This is all being driven by the setting of statewide objectives that are not adequately supported by integrated project plans, critical path analyses and investments for every element of implementation, on this monumental scale. If one wants verification, just look at the California high-speed train disaster.
By comparison, that is a single-dimension project. Not at all like the super, multi-path, planning and resource implementation discipline demanded for a complete transformation to an all-new, energy creation, supply, and distribution structure that is necessary to meet all on-demand needs for energy, and to prevent a collapse of the system.
In September 2022, energy experts blamed green energy policies for Europe’s full-scale energy crisis, and they point out, it is a warning for the U.S.
The European benchmark index measuring future electricity prices rose to a record $993 per megawatt-hour. By comparison, the average price of electricity in the U.S. hit $129 per MWh. Lower-than-expected wind power generation was the major factor in sending prices higher and forcing suppliers to fall back on coal and natural gas.
Gov. Gavin Newsom should take heed of lessons already learned in Europe.
Did you know that NOAA has produced a graph of global temperatures from 1880 to 2022? It shows quite clearly that global temperatures have not increased since 2016 and have slightly reduced. This is despite the fact that, in that period, 500 billion tons of emissions occurred.
DYK does not know what this halt in temperature increases means. But it reminds us that we should be asking more questions of governments on all these factors that bring tremendous changes to our lives, and demand specific answers, as they push us down an irreversible path.
Bonnie Donovan writes the “Did You Know?” column in conjunction with a bipartisan group of local citizens. It appears Saturdays in the Voices section.
