When I first started writing for American Thinker, I asked Andrea, my editor, if she had ever watched the movie Idiocracy.  I remember thinking, at the time, that despite it being the stupidest bad movie ever, we were heading in the direction of validating its plot points.  If you can bear it, it's worth watching — if only to see where we're headed if we don't wake up.

Do I need to list all the stupidity currently being presented as fact?  It'd be a very long list.  It's hard even to pick out a few points to address.  I'll try to keep the list manageable:

What makes me most angry daily is "gun violence."  Living in the S.F. Bay Area, we seem to have a lot of guns causing a lot of violence.  Frankly, it reminds me of that Sorcerer's Apprentice scene in Fantasia.  Mickey Mouse puts on the sorcerer's hat and, instead of doing his chores, gets the broom to carry buckets of water to fill the cauldron.  Except he falls asleep and, when he wakes up to a flood, he can't make it stop.  That's kind of like the gun violence magic, where it's as if the gun just got up and started shooting.  It's so much easier to talk about preventing "gun violence" than addressing who is doing the shooting and what societal norms have been trampled to allow such things to fester and grow.

Image: California postcard (edited).  Public domain.

Let's stipulate that "youths" are doing much of the shooting, OK?  Even Fox News describes the perps that way.  Until we can name the problem, we have no hope of solving it.  Just acknowledge that not every "youth" pops some shots off at a random target.  Outrage is allowed only under a couple of circumstances: first, if it's a cop doing his job, who kills a fine, upstanding, drugged out, violent "youth" of indeterminate age.  Second, if it's a White cis-gender male doing the shooting.  Then it's newsworthy.

What's the solution?  How about supporting organizations that emphasize family (yeah, fathers do matter); real education as opposed to woke, entitled drivel; and, maybe even, let's be honest about both perpetrators and, importantly, victims? 

In my lib 'hood, we still have a home with the fancy signs demanding justice for a few "unjustly" killed Black "victims."  If we want to change things, we need to acknowledge that much of the violence comes from Blacks (who prey mostly on each other) and illegal aliens (any violence from them is unacceptable).  Reality, folks!  Around here, it's generally the same unhinged, gangbanger cohort doing the shooting.

We also must re-reform the no-bail laws and reinvigorate the consequences for crime.  When I was recently in Santa Fe, N.M., I watched a young pair run from a strip mall store with armloads of clothing.  Those things happen not just in big cities.  They're everywhere.  The chaotic move to lawlessness and anarchy is growing as people accept it as the norm.

California just passed a law — Governor Hair Gel signed it — making it against the law to disseminate "medical misinformation."  It's beyond belief that those in our government, almost all of whom are ignorant about basic science, think they can legislate us into their preferred groupthink.  I hope (and expect) some court challenges, pronto.  I'm no scientist, but the law does a 180 from the scientific method and is tantamount to the kind of repression we always pitied the North Koreans and Chinese for enduring.

Then there's the energy question.  When you listen to Karine Jean-Pierre talk, you realize that she has no idea that natural gas is not gasoline, much less the difference between Nord Stream and Nordstroms.  One doesn't need a high school education to know that if we go all in for everything electric, from cars to heating our homes and hot water, and we don't have adequate means of producing said electric power, things ain't gonna work no more.

California already has sky-high electric rates due to the government mismanaging our resources and the assumption that we can mandate all-electric.  (The latest is that we must give up our gas-powered utilities by 2030.)  Of course, we have no means to make it work.  Just, please, don't use power when you need it, for heating, cooling, or charging that car.  "Peak hours" and all that BS.

OK, last one: Conflating carbon with carbon dioxide is plain dumb, yet if you look at any greenie pundits, they all do it.  News flash: Carbon dioxide is a gas.  It has one carbon molecule and two oxygen molecules.  It is colorless and odorless and makes up about 0.04% of our breathable air.  It is not the black gunky stuff.  Once you start thinking about that, you'll see how the public's misaligned perceptions color reality.  Just listen to any greenie diatribe, and you'll see what I mean.