Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does Trofim Lysensko

Lone Ranger: Hmm.... We’re surrounded by hostile Sioux Indians. Looks like we are done for, Tonto.

 Tonto:  Wadya mean, “we,” Kimosabe?

From: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, U.S. House of Representatives

To Microsoft, Google, Facebook Execs.

Dear Mr. Nadella, Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Pichai:

We are writing to you today in light of the important role that your companies play as we prepare to take comprehensive action on climate change…we were deeply disappointed to see that your companies were high-level sponsors of a conference this month in Washington D.C., known as LibertyCon, that included a session denying established science on climate change.

So, you think that a grammatical subject-matter like the rhetorical function of personal pronouns is the high end of boring and inconsequential. Well, think again, as we follow the trail of the “we” in Ms Ocasio-Cortez’s dispatch to three of the biggest Mr. Bigs in the information-tech industry.

“We are writing to you ….  as we prepare to take comprehensive action …. [and] we were deeply disappointed to see that your companies…” etc.  Note the ominous direction: from “we’re just communicating with you, to we’re about to do something very important, to we’re real disappointed because it looks like you are standing in our way by supporting a bunch of reactionaries we don’t like.” Sounds pretty threatening to me, and from someone sitting in the U.S. Congress. Just who is this “we” rapping the knuckles of a Big Enchilada like Zuckerberg? Well, it’s the latest social media sensation, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who in good Commissar fashion is wielding the “moral-we,” now one of the virtue-signaling Boss-ladies in the Capital city who knows what is best for us all. It is also an up-and-coming “we” of momentum and power, a bold “we” that takes “comprehensive action” and lets the bigshots who throw their money around know that they’ve been a big disappointment.

Obama some time back set the bar very high for the effective use of the “moral-we.” From the Obama’s 2008 campaign: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” Ignoring the disturbing pathological elements in this concoction, if you were hoping for some semblance of genuine humility in this young generation of “leaders,” and if arrogance, unbounded self-regard and immaturity put you off, these know-it-all “we’s” who seem to be running the show are just getting started. There will be many more suspects to fuel their deep disappointment, and they will make life miserable for anyone who fails to recognize their superior virtue and doesn’t snap to.  As Bob Dylan once sang: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

So, we stagger bewilderedly into increasingly muddled times where, for example, the ruling Triumvirate of the tech-media world will likely go wobbly to learn that they had “deeply disappointed” a twenty-nine year old Puerto Rican ex-waitress with a few weeks of seniority in the U.S. House of Representatives and a round of talk show appearances where she recently said she said she gives “zero fucks” about criticism she’s received from members of her own party. This is now how one is supposed to speak “truth to power.”

It’s beyond distressing to see someone like this taken seriously, and the works of Karl Marx, of all people, might be taped to provide some insight into this mess. Surveying his own tumultuous times, he wrote, history repeats itself, “the first as tragedy, then as farce.” This apothegm was from his essay, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. Tragedy reappears throughout the course of history as farce. The farce that Marx was contemplating was the French coup of 1851 by Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, a repeat of the seizure of power by his uncle, Napoléon Bonaparte in 1799 and the tragic consequences of his despotism.

Fast forward to the present, if you will, and attempt to comprehend the unfolding of the latest tragedy-as-farce in the person of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.  An instant celebrity and the darling and future of the Democrat party, it seems, she has stepped into a starring role on the political stage as the Queen of Farce. From News Week: “Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democrat from New York, called climate change “our World War II” and warned that the world will end in 12 years if we don’t address global warming on Monday [January 21, 2119]. During an interview Monday at the MLK Now event at Riverside Church in New York with writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ocasio-Cortez argued that global warming needs to be addressed immediately to avoid the end of human existence.” 

Note, of course, the predictable scolding “if we don’t address climate change...” But this is a different “we” at work than the moral-we in her memo citied above. This is a fake one overloaded with apocalyptic hyperbole, adolescent bombast and wild hallucinations. You see, she sees herself in charge now, rescuing the world, only twelve years away from oblivion, calling the shots – the Commander in “our World War II.” And the “we” in this outpouring of mental incontinence is actually “us,” those of us who she wants to salute her, take orders, bear the cost, conform to the mountains of rules, regulations and dictates that she wants to cascade down upon us, and suffer the horrific unintended consequences that follow from the whims, fantasies and dictates of an ignoramus who has suddenly found herself with lots of power and showered with attention.

Ocasio-Cortez has with much encouragement risen quickly to become our very own Trofim Lysenko, an ambitious charlatan who led the wreckage of biological science in the Soviet Union along with the ruined lives of many distinguished scientists. Lysenko was a quack agronomist whose theory of environmentally acquired inheritance was, by the man who ran the USSR, eagerly turned into the “established science” that would be career-ending, not to mention physically hazardous, for those in the biological sciences to “deny.” “He [Lyskenko] had no postgraduate  training or higher degree, no formal claim to the title of scientist, yet he aspired to the theoretical heights from which, as he told a Pravda correspondent in 1927, practical problems could be solved by a few calculations ‘on a little old scrap of paper.’” (David Jorasky, The Lysenko Affair, University of Chicago Press, 1970, 189)  

Lysenko’s astounding success was due to his skill in bending his “scientific research” into findings that greatly pleased Stalin, whose authority in all matters of importance – art, history, music, philosophy, sociology, economics and, yes, science, was supreme and unquestionable. The science of genetics that the ignorant Lysenko overturned pointed its researchers toward conclusions that were, unfortunately for the geneticists, incompatible with Stalin’s insights into how any part of the world (social or physical) actually worked. Marx had laid the theoretical groundwork for it all: Stalin fleshed out the details and perfected its applications. Pointing out flaws in any of it, shall we say, was not a prudent decision. The real scientists who noted Lysenko’s deficiencies were also casting shadows over Stalin’s jealously guarded shield of infallibility and were dispatched to the work camps. Lysenko, with Stalin’s imprimatur, shutdown scientific debate and research in much of the life sciences, including genetics, wrecked Soviet agriculture, and put biology in the Soviet Union into a thirty-year deep freeze.

Like Lysenko, Ocasio-Cortez is a science-ignoramus (more on that below) who uses her political leverage, as we see with her memo cited above, to control what scientists get to talk about and to demonize critics. Hence the label “climate change deniers” which is intended to carry the same de-legitimizing stigmatism as “Holocaust-deniers.” “Deniers” are moral-lepers who in Stalin’s reign got shot or sent to the Gulag. In the soft-totalitarianism that now envelops us, “deniers” are shut-out of the conversations and the institutions, their careers destroyed and characters assassinated. Thus, we see Ocasio-Cortez putting the “deniers” in her cross-hairs.  “[W]e were deeply disappointed to see that your companies were high-level sponsors of a conference … that included a session denying established science on climate change.” Representative Ocasio-Cortez, like Lysenko and the CPSU bosses in earlier times, thinks she should decide who the real scientists are.

It seems to me that the obvious question Messrs Nadella, Zuckerberg and Pichai, the subjects of Ocasio-Cortez’s disappointment, should be asking themselves is: does this woman have the remotest understanding of what the “established science of climate change” is? And, does “established science” ever change? And, finally, is there some good reason she should be dictating the sponsorships of science conventions in any case? The answer to the first question is not a secret. Her formal education consists of a BA degree in economics and international relations from Boston University.  From Wikipedia here is her post-college professional experience:

After college, Ocasio-Cortez worked as a bartender in Manhattan and as a waitress in a taqueria. Her mother, meanwhile, cleaned houses and drove school buses. She launched Brook Avenue Press, a publishing firm for books that portray the Bronx in a positive light. She worked as lead educational strategist at GAGEis, Inc; for the nonprofit National Hispanic Institute (NHI), and served as NHI's Educational Director of the 2017 Northeast Collegiate World Series, a five-day long program targeted at college-bound high school students from across the United States and other countries, where she participated in a panel on Latino leadership.

It is safe to say that her knowledge and theoretical expertise in the area of “climate science” would likely rival her mastery of cardiology, cartography or civil engineering.  Would anyone trust her to design a bridge, construct a map, or read an EKG?  Given what we have seen from her so far, self-promotion seems to be her singular talent, and she shouldn’t be trusted to do much of anything. Here, sadly then is Lysenkoism, twenty-first century style, featuring a blustering, know-nothing egomaniac, threatening the end of the world, like some street-corner crackpot, demanding control over the agendas of scientific gatherings and threatening business executives. This is as about a nightmarish display of arrogance married to ignorance as one can imagine. Like all ideologues, Ocasio-Cortez’s beliefs are absolute and impregnable, only confirmation is permitted. Doubt is heresy and heretics get punished. The Stalinist in Russia shot them; the Stalinists in the U.S. smear them. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez in quest of heretics is proselytizing for her religion under the guise of science. As a waitress, nobody needed to pay attention to her; as a United States Representative, with a large following, she is a very frightening woman. That she is taken seriously by so many, particularly, young people, is a signal that the bad times are getting worse. When does the farce turn into a tragedy?

Why the Left Hates Guns

                                                            

“President Obama says the biggest frustration of his tenure is the lack of new gun control laws.”

                              USA Today, July 24^th, 2015

Unlike most of the President Obama’s declarations – “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor”, for example – this one, above, was true.  You could believe him for once. Obama always hated guns and if it had been in his power he would have confiscated every firearm in the country down to the last BB gun, except for those carried by the Secret Service detail that continues to protect him and his family.

Obama is a man of the left and the left hates guns more than almost anything else they remotely associate with the despised right, more than gas guzzlers, home school families, coal companies, confederate flags or pro-life protestors. Just the mention of the NRA will trigger spasms of fury and outpourings of disgust from a leftist. The NRA for them is evil incarnate. No other organization is likely more detested.

What is it about guns that make people on the left hate them so much and harbor so much contempt for those people – not so much the criminals who use them, but the ordinary, law-abiding people who insist on owning them?

Begin with the basics:  a gun is an amazing instrument of power. A ninety pound woman physically confronted by a two hundred pound man with a BMI of 25 has little power to resist his assault or aggression.  A gun in her hand completely changes the power equation.  Sans gun by virtue of his superior size and relative strength, the man can seriously injure or even kill the woman.  It happens. With the gun she can easily kill him if he attempts to harm her. This does not happen often enough. The right person in this scenario takes the ride to the morgue. His advantage-conveying, extra 110 pounds and bigger bones and muscles are nullified by the discharge from her 25 ounce Ruger.

Guns enforce power-relations which is why police and soldiers carry them. Guns also can change power-relations which is why so many people want them both for reasons legitimate and some not so much. The left wants to take away guns (primarily those of the “bitter clingers”) so as to render them powerless.

The left would love to confiscate all the guns in this country claiming that it would end gun violence. This is idiotic on the face of it. Criminalize the possession of something in high demand and relatively easy to produce and you will see a dramatic spike in its price because of the seller’s criminal risk. High prices attract high-risk entrepreneurs (aggressive young men usually) into the marketplace who form powerful, sophisticated crime syndicates that are (a) very competitive and hence extremely violent and (b) cater successfully to vast markets for their illegal product. The massive infusion of drugs into the U.S. with the accompanying violence dramatically illustrates how the unintended consequences of firearm confiscation, if attempted, would unfold.  Government confiscation of guns would drastically increase (criminalized) gun ownership and vastly increase gun violence, not to mention the exhaustion of law enforcement resources and the complete political alienation of large numbers of American citizens. 

The loathing of the left for guns in part comes from their jealousy of power. Guns are highly-charged symbols as well as practical instruments of power, and power, they believe, belongs exclusively to them. This is not just about what guns can do.  It is about what they symbolize – individualism, independence and self-sufficiency – for the collectivist, regulation-loving, control-obsessed left, anathemas.  

The thinking on the left goes something like this: because we are compassionate, smart, right-thinking and destined by the progressive march of history to eradicate – pick your evil – racism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism, global warming, we and we alone deserve power.  If not us, who?  And, whatever we must do to get it and keep it is fine because above all else we are well-intentioned and virtuous and if we are not in charge, then it’s, well, “the other”, the corrupt and morally benighted people who oppose us  – racist, bigoted, greedy, stupid, indifferent to the plight of the poor and unfortunate.  Leftists neither practice nor believe in loyal opposition: for the opposition they have only contempt.

Gun ownership confers power and thus just the suggestion that people might legitimately arm themselves constitutes an encroachment on the left’s perceived prerogative and arouses their jealousy and outrage.  People, they groan, do not neeeeeed guns! They know what people need and don’t need and are clearly annoyed that the unenlightened rubes who live outside of the civilized regions of Manhattan, San Francisco, Washington, DC and Madison, Wisconsin cannot grasp this obvious truth.  

Self-defense, they sneeringly dismiss as a legitimate reason to own a gun – that is what the State is for.  Try not to choke on the hypocrisy.  They are protected 24x7 by armed secret service personnel (Obama and his family) or live in safe, posh suburbs with expensive, sophisticated security systems and reliable, predicable police protection. But for those “folks” for whom they have so much compassion and about whom they know so little, those folks who have to worry about the muggers, rapists, wife-batterers, drug peddlers and strung out junkies who populate their neighborhoods? Well, they are supposed to cherish how virtuous they will feel without those awful guns they don’t need and hope a cop might show up before someone in the family gets raped or murdered. We all know that there are large sections of some of the cities in the U.S. (governed by anti-gun Democrat politicians) where the police reluctantly go. The State is quite selective in the protection it provides for its citizens. The “State” for the “ruled-over” is a useless abstraction and the pervasive cynicism and skepticism now aimed at those who operate it are completely justified.  These “public servants” enjoy all of the perks of their offices that the rest of us only envy. (“Last Friday, [Hillary] Clinton flew to Bergdorf Goodman in New York, where the stylist at the salon gives $600 haircuts. The department store was locked down for her.” http://thehill.com/opinion/ab-stoddard/249734-ab-stoddard-clinton-must-be-joking) Our political class betters make onerous rules for their inferiors to live under, but not for themselves. At election time these vultures descend from their comfortable, lofty perches to perform tedious rituals of pretending to care when what they really want is just more power and the advantages and privileges that come with it.

The animosity of the left for guns is also about the special kind of snobbery they indulge that relates to the work they do and the way they live. They tend to work in the realm of ideas and at activities intended to influence the thinking and actions of others.  They teach in schools and universities, run media outlets and newspapers, manage and administer organizations, market and sell products, process paper in government offices. Some of them are “grievance specialists” at universities and other organizations, professional busybodies and scolds who operate under the rubric of “diversity”, a code word that permits them to hector and bully whomever they please. These types don’t change the oil in their own cars, fix things they own when they break down, make or grow anything they use or consume.  They pay “other people” to do things like this, and they mostly look down on them.  These “other people” tend to like guns. They live and think conservatively and work at jobs such as policemen, firemen, mechanics, truck drivers, construction workers and run small businesses. They hunt, fish, bowl, fix their own cars, go to church, take care of their grandparents, join the military and do many other things that offend the sensibilities of the left.  For the Prius-driving, inequality-obsessed Sociology professor who campaigned for Obama, the gun-toting policeman he loathes and execrates in his 101 classes could not respond quickly enough to his summons when he thinks a burglar might be near.    

The left will never relinquish their hostility toward gun owners and never abandon their efforts at gun control.  “Gun control” is a euphemism, an essential piece of the larger picture that defines the essence of the left and what they aspire to, complete control of others. Because they believe themselves to be uniquely entitled to order and manage the lives of everybody, they observe no restraints of honesty or fair play. Be assured, they will relentlessly intrude themselves into every corner of our lives so as to make the rest of us into what they think we should be, pale, inferior imitations of themselves.  Guns are a huge obstacle to this goal. Viva the cold dead fingers!

     

Al Gore, Our Trofim Lysenko

He considered that rumors of his being very dangerous to his scientific opponents and resorting habitually to police methods and denunciations were, in all likelihood, exaggerated.  
                                  Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing  
It seems to me that there is a remarkable resemblance between Al Gore and Trofim Lysensko.  Lysenkso was a quack Russian agronomist whose “acquired characteristics” approach to plant genetics so impressed his boss, Joseph Stalin, as to shutdown scientific debate, ruin Soviet agriculture, and put biology in the Soviet Union into a thirty year deep freeze.   Lysenko rose from obscurity to dominate life science and genetics in the Soviet Union for decades.   “He [Lyskenko] had no postgraduate  training or higher degree, no formal claim to the title of scientist, yet he aspired to the theoretical heights from which, as he told a Pravda correspondent in 1927, practical problems could be solved by a few calculations ‘on a little old scrap of paper.’” [David Jorasky, The Lysenko Affair, Chicago, 1970, 189]  Lysenko was, in sum, completely unqualified for the role he played, a fraud who “talked” science but acted as hard core ideologue and with his Party patrons intimidated critics and bullied the real scientists. To question the Lysenkoists was to be labeled a traitor, an enemy of the Soviet Union.

Al Gore and the resemblance to comrade Lysenko?   Gore fulminates regularly about the “global warming deniers” (hint: they are in the same category for Gore as holocaust deniers) and insists that the “science” of it all is “settled.” So what are Gore’s academic, scientific credentials?   He was a mediocre, C- graduate of Harvard with a degree in Government.  He went to Divinity school and Law school at Vanderbilt University -- didn’t finish either program.   He went on to be a newspaper reporter, then used his father's name to vault into politics. He became a congressman, Senator and Vice President with likely little contact with meteorology or climate science.   Yet at some point he became an authority on global warming.  Like Lysenko he talks science but is a science ignoramus, a pure ideologue who responds to reasonable  criticism and opposition with denunciation and vilification. Those who disagree are either neanderthals or  Nazi's. In recent years he compared global warming skeptics to people who believe the moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona.   In 2007 Robert Kennedy Jr. bested Gore in  perfect Stalinist-style by saying of global warming skeptics: “This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors.”

 

Like Mr. Gore, Mr. Kennedy is politician, not a scientist.  Treason is still a capital offense in the United States.  The fact that such an outrageous comment from a mainstream politician received so little attention and push back is a depressing indication of how Stalinist the Democrat Party has become and how no one has seemed to notice it.