Can the Worm Turn?

New Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has floated an intriguing way to disincentivize blue cities' sanctuary policies which make the work of his immigration enforcement folk much more difficult. 

His idea: pull the immigration officials out of blue cities' international airports. The result of which would be airlines would have to quit international flights to those airports. Imagine how well this would go down with NYC, Chicago, Atlanta, or Los Angeles. These 'sanctuary cities' are "at war" with Homeland Security and he may be able to fight back. 

I'm imagining a few airports where international flights would be able to terminate and then those bound to sanctuary cities would have to take a connecting domestic flight to reach home. The resultant turmoil would be amazing, the howling unbelievable.

A series of court challenges would ensue, can cities which refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement demand immigrations services in spite of their rebellion? I know there are judges who will answer "yes." How about the Supremes?

Trump's problem is you can't fight everyone at once, although he is active on many fronts. Is this a battle he is willing to prioritize? If the idea goes nowhere, we'll know the answer is no.

Saturday Snark

Trump Farside

So true.

My spirit animal.

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Friday Snark

⬆ An infant Elon, dreaming of the stars.

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The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

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Cartoons of the Week.

Suggesting a New Path for Alzheimer’s Research

I’ve been thinking about the post below, and I’ll share those thought with you. First, what do we know? We know that older people who get flu shots are less likely to demonstrate Alzheimer’s. And we now know that those who get the stronger dosage are even less likely to get Alzheimer’s.

From this I reason as follows. What does a flu immunization do in your body? It stimulates antibodies to fight the viral influenza infection. More generally, it ‘gooses’ the immune system, wakes it up and gives it work to do. If the stronger vaccine does more of this, and if less Alzheimer’s is the result, then somehow the immune system also fights Alzheimer’s. I don’t believe we already knew this for sure.

Reasoning further, I speculate perhaps some infectious agent - at present unknown or causatively unrecognized - is involved in causing Alzheimer’s. And this “agent” - be it virus, microbe, or ?? - shares some aspects of its nature with the influenza virus such that antibodies against the one also are somewhat active against the other.

File the following speculation under “wild guess.” My hunch is that the culprit is some long-lingering virus similar to the chicken pox (varicella-zoster) virus that, in ways unsuspected, causes or accelerates Alzheimer’s years or decades after first infecting the host. It may be no coincidence that most Alzheimer’s cases manifest after the immune system becomes less active around age 65.

Weird Immunological Science

Strong relationship found between stronger flu vaccine and lower Alzheimer’s risk in seniors, SciTechDaily.com has the story. Hat tip to Instapundit for the link.

Older adults who receive a higher dose of the influenza vaccine may have a significantly lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease compared to those who receive the standard dose.

Compared to the standard-dose flu vaccine, which was associated with a 40% reduction in Alzheimer’s risk, the high-dose vaccine was linked to nearly a 55% reduction in risk among adults age 65 and older.

At this point nobody knows why this finding occurs. It could be that seniors who are still “with it” are even more likely to demand the higher dose, and that those who don’t get any flu shots are already “losing it.” 

Be clear, I don’t posit that as explaining the correlational findings. I merely point out the two things occur together and we have no explanation as to why. It is too soon to be claiming one thing causes the other, perhaps some third thing influences both.

On the other hand, if getting the stronger shot improves your chances of dodging Alzheimer’s why not do it? There is little downside.

Evolution at Work

RealClearScience brings us an interesting article with this intriguing title: “The Human Body Isn’t a Masterpiece of Design.” What follows is a the description of various bodily systems which are far from optimal but rather reflect adaptations that merely “get the job done,” more or less. Here is the key idea.

Evolution does not design structures from scratch. Rather, it modifies what already exists. As a result, many aspects of human anatomy are just “good enough” solutions – functional, but far from perfect. Some of the most familiar medical problems and ailments arise directly from these inherited constraints.

Problems so identified include the spine, the neck, our eyes, teeth and pelvis. and the adaptations continue. I am among the minority who develop no wisdom teeth. A further evolution? It amuses me to think so.

Happily Well-Adjusted

Writing for American Affairs Journal, sociologist Musa al-Gharbi does a very deep dive in the social science literature. He is looking at the persistent finding that liberals are more likely to be unhappy and less well-adjusted than conservatives. Hat tip to RealClearPolicy for the link.

He documents that this finding occurs across many nations, cultures, and eras. We conservatives think liberals have mental difficulties, and in fact they do. Liberals think we conservatives are evil, but that conclusion is a result of their latent paranoia. See his conclusion.

The general pattern is clear: conservatives report significantly higher levels of happiness, meaning, and satisfaction in their lives as compared to liberals. Meanwhile, liberals are much more likely to exhibit anxiety, depression, and other forms of psychic distress.

Iran Blinked

At nearly the last moment Trump postponed for two weeks the destruction of Iran's infrastructure - power generation and desalination plants. The deal trades two weeks of ceasefire by all parties for two weeks of unhampered open sailing through the Strait of Hormuz

Negotiations toward a permanent settlement will continue during that fortnight. What remains unclear is whether Iran's government has retained enough control over its various decentralized units to command they cease firing and be obeyed. 

Iran has established a pattern of not living up to agreements they make. We will soon learn whether the recent punishment has ended that tendency.

It is my judgment that Trump's talk of destroying their civilization, and our demonstrated ability to do exactly that, may have gotten the leadership's attention. Perhaps martyrdom is not universally sought by Iranians after all.

Later … I’ll admit to being disappointed that Trump didn’t destroy Iran’s power generation and desalination plants. I remember the embassy staff being held hostage and all the other horrid stuff they and their proxies have done. Stuff that hasn't been properly avenged.

Space Toilets

The Artemis II crew is having problems with their toilet. Apparently this is no new thing. I'm remembering the problems Big Bang Theory's Howard Wolowitz had designing one ever so long ago. You'd think they'd have those issues managed by now.

Later ... I'm not the only one making this connection. Space.com remembers the Wolowitz crapper too.

A Spectacular Rescue

Much is being written about the rescue mission to extract the second officer - a WSO* - of an F-15 shot down over Iran. The pilot had already been rescued. 

In many ways the rescuers did successfully what an earlier group failed to accomplish when our embassy staff in Iran was being held hostage some 47 years ago. The mission Carter sent failed miserably, the one Trump sent succeeded spectacularly.

Credit where credit is due, SecWar Hegseth is racking up impressive wins. The contrast with Biden’s tail-between-legs pullout of Afghanistan is night and day. For the moment at least, the US military is a weapon you don’t want pointed at your country. 

*A WSO or Weapons Systems Officer isn’t the pilot, though he or she may fly parts of the mission. WSO combines roles of navigator and bombardier plus electronics warfare. Where you’ve seen the role is the first Top Gun film where Maverick’s other crew member Goose was a Wizzo (WSO) who dies in a bailout while in training. 

Saturday Snark (two days late)

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and its Comments section.

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The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

Happy Easter

For our readers who celebrate Easter, I wish you a happy and spiritual day. I hope you are surrounded by loved ones, and share with them the traditional Easter feast. It is normally a joyous holiday.

Travel Blogging VIII

Home at last, both flights without incident, on time and efficient. TSA was again cheerful, I congratulated them on getting paid. 

Both flights today on a feeder airline - Sky West - that operates as Delta's surrogate hereabouts. The planes and gates say Delta but the personnel and planes belong to SW, headquartered in St. George. It flies nice Canadian and Brazilian narrow body commuter jets that seat 2 and 1 in first class and 2 and 2 in coach, I prefer them to Boeing 737s and the Airbus equivalents.

They provide flights to places which Delta otherwise might not bother to serve. If today was at all typical, they are carrying a lot of coach and first class pax.

A nice trip and a nice cluster of memories of traversing one of our great rivers. Our next adventure is the semi-annual relocation from one house to the other. That happens in just under 2 months. 

Seeing the Elephant

New York City is nobody’s idea of a conservative bastion. I believe we can be certain there is minimal racial bias in the NYPD’s statistics. I have for you a link to their data for 2024, the most recent available and very likely representative of recent years. 

Whites are the largest population group in NYC, followed by Hispanics followed by non-Hispanic Blacks. However whites are very underrepresented in gun crimes, including murder, shootings, etc. Ditto in sex crimes of various stripes. Blacks are over represented both as perps and as victims. Hispanics somewhat less so.

Someone who has further massaged the data claims the following:

There have been nearly 19,000 suspected shooters recorded in New York City since 2006. Only 1.5% were listed as White.

As a person who has been paying attention, I’d risk a guess you don’t find the above especially shocking. It is the elephant in the room nobody is supposed to mention or admit noticing.

Travel Blogging VII

We are tied up alongside in Clarkston, WA and have reached the end of our passage. We are at the south edge of the Palouse country of Eastern WA, and the other side of the river is Lewiston, ID. The terrain is gently rolling hills on which wheat is grown. The “coastal feeling” is gone, we’ve reached “big sky” country.

We will overnight here on the boat and fly out tomorrow morning. Some pax are taking jet boat trips to Hells Canyon but we’re just staying aboard. Tomorrow night we’ll be home in eastern Nevada, after changing planes in SLC.

We’ve already decided to take another trip with American Cruise Lines, the next one on the Tennessee rivers from Nashville to Chattanooga. It happens in mid-October. We hope to visit friends in the Knoxville area while there.

Serendipity

ICE agents had gotten an image as roughhouse goons grabbing innocent people for export. Then POTUS sent them to help TSA at the airports and … viola! … we discovered they were nice people assigned a dismal task. 

Lots of flyers learned that ICE were normal folks and not fanged monsters; it is an excellent outcome. I believe it took a lot of wind out of the ICE Out movement’s sails.

Ad Astra

Blogfather Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit) is a long-time science fiction fan, it crops up in his stuff from time to time. With a US team launched on a trip around the moon, this becomes one of those “times.”

He’s right about our return to space being long overdue. I’d hoped to see men on Mars in my lifetime, but probably won’t. He’s younger than I, maybe he’ll get lucky. I have some chance of seeing a human colony on the moon, and that will be excellent.

After being a hotshot outfit all those years ago, NASA morphed into a geriatric bunch who seemingly can’t shoot straight. Careerism in FedGov acts like a wasting disease, for which we seemingly have no cure.

Reynolds is probably right that Elon Musk will spearhead the return to space. Musk wants it in his lifetime and has the money to get what he wants. 

I’m a longtime science fiction fan too. The space frontier awaits, let’s go!

Travel Blogging VI

Greetings from Richland, WA. Sky overcast, rain today as well as late yesterday. No visit to the Northwest would be right without being rained on a couple of times. Actually, by the region’s standards we’ve have good weather, several dry days. It remains cool, not frigid.

This is a part of the northwest I’ve not spent much time in. In our RV travels we’ve driven through this area a couple of times but had no destinations hereabouts to draw us back. 

The area isn’t heavily populated and tends to be conservative. The vibe is more upper Midwest than Coastal. Parts of this region have tried to secede and join Republican Idaho, so far with no success. Counties in eastern OR have held votes on it.

I’m told we reach the Lewiston/Clarkston area tomorrow, and fly out the next day. We’ve had an excellent time, the crew spoils us to an embarrassing extent, and feed us at every opportunity. Last night was prime rib.

The Columbia River heads north at Richland, and we split off onto the Snake River and keep heading east. Ironically, the south fork of the Snake passes a 20 minute drive from our place in WY. Of course we aren’t cruising anywhere near WY, we’d have to cross southern ID to get there, and that is an all day drive.

Political Gain and Economic Self-interest

Power Line’s John Hinderaker shares some scientific findings on the issue of climate change.

We use the Epica-Vostok Ice core dataset, a single proxy dataset for temperature data sampled every century for the last 800,000 years or so and ask the question “Is a 1.1°C temperature rise in a century unusual in this dataset?”

Usually, the Earth is caught in a deep freeze. Happily, we are living in an inter-glacial warm period. In fact, the Earth has been warmer than it is today the overwhelming majority of the time since the end of the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago.

The overwhelming weight of scientific evidence refutes the global warming catastrophism that is relentlessly propagated for reasons of political gain and economic self-interest.

It would appear another Ice Age is the greater risk. Charts and citations in the original.

Travel Blogging V

Today is what on an ocean cruise is called a “sea day,” that is a day spent cruising from place to place. One not spent in tied up alongside in port. We are sailing upriver on the Columbia, and as I write this have just passed through the locks at John Day dam. We shared the lock with a pleasure craft - a cabin cruiser of maybe 30’.

Locks are a feature of river cruising, we’ll pass through eight on our way upstream to the Lewiston/Clarkston area - four each on the Columbia and Snake rivers. The most locks I’ve ever seen on one crossing is on the Rhine-Main Canal linking the Rhine and Danube rivers, we’ve passed through those on several trips from Amsterdam to Vienna.

We are having a lazy day, I slept in. The scenery continues to be excellent. Right now we are sailing beside a quite large mountain that is a mile or so north of the river. There are wind turbines atop it, as usual not turning. We will look back and marvel at how dumb those were.

I believe our next stop is near Pendleton. We see much evidence of long-ago vulcanism, outcrops of basaltic rock. This region continues to be a place where volcanoes lie hopefully dormant, but some clearly are not so quiet - Mt. St. Helens, for example. 

The weather continues with overcast skies, the norm in this region. Atypically no rain so far, I expect some and will be surprised if the cruise ends having experienced no rain. Californians drive up here in summer and marvel at how green it is, compared to CA. Many don’t realize it has to rain a lot for that to occur.