Ignoring Antecedents

Bill Scher writes a long column comparing the world view of Trump insider Stephen Miller to that of the film Starship Troopers. For all I know (or care), he might be correct about Miller. 

Scher goes on to explain how the film is a misunderstood anti-war piece. Ironically, he never mentions it is based on a 1959 science fiction novel of the same name by Robert Heinlein who, when he wrote it, wasn’t being anti-war at all. 

Heinlein was a graduate of the Naval Academy and served for several years, achieving the rank of lieutenant, the equivalent of an army captain. Medically retired, he served the Navy as a civilian employee during World War II. Along with Asimov and Clarke, Heinlein is one of the “big three” of English language science fiction.

Reason Enough

Michael Goodwin writes for the New York Post, normally I agree with him. Today he write a column entitled, “Using the military for regime change in Iran would be a gamble — don’t turn it into another Iraq.” Actually, that might not be so bad.

As presently governed Iran has been a pain in the rear for everyone in the Middle East and beyond. It has fostered and supported Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and nearly every sh*t-stirring Islamic radical group in the region.

Post-invasion Iraq, while internally a mess, has been a threat to none of its neighbors. Suppose a post-revolution Iran was similarly messy inside, but stopped fostering unrest in the balance of the region. How would that not be a huge improvement for the region?

I argue removing Iran as a regional fomenter of Islamic radicalism could be sufficient justification to act against its mullah-ridden regime. 

Wisdom of a Credit Lid ... Questioned

President  Trump has asked credit card issuers to hold interest rates down to 10% for a year, His motives are completely political. 

He wants the economy to boom long enough to get through the fall midterm elections without losing control of Congress. Let me be clear, I share his goal of a GOP-controlled Congress.

I'm not certain his chosen method will work, however. High interest rates enable credit card companies to offer credit cards to people who do not have outstanding credit ratings. Who pose a risk for default.

If firms do hold interest rates down to 10%, there is a good chance they will cancel the cards of people with a less-than-stellar credit history. Such people get driven into the hands of the payday loan sharks which are as expensive and more punitive. Not an improvement in their lives.

Lacking credit, individuals will consequently purchase less and the economy can suffer thereby. A soft economy can lead people to vote for change.

In other words, holding card balance interest rates down can be counter-productive for Trump's goal of reelecting Republican senators and representatives.

Good News

Fox News reports DHS Sec. Noem has issued a statement revoking the protected status of two thousand  plus Somalis now in the country, roughly 600 of whom live in MN. They will be required to leave by March 17.

Temporary means temporary. Country conditions in Somalia have improved to the point that it no longer meets the law’s requirement for Temporary Protected Status.

I presume most will ignore the deadline and wait to be picked up by ICE. Even better news is that DHS is looking into denaturalizing and deporting any foreign born convicted fraudsters who have gotten naturalized.

Inconsistency

Substack commenter Kevin Bass X’s the following pithy comment, echoed at Instapundit.

Democrats hate when law enforcement arrests immigrants for being here illegally.

But they loved when law enforcement arrested ordinary Americans for not wearing masks.

Let's be clear.

Democrats do not hate law enforcement or authoritarianism.

They hate ordinary Americans.

Harassing ICE Is No LARP

On Friday I noted that the woman shot by ICE in Minneapolis - Renee Good - was cosplaying a revolutionary. Meanwhile the ICE agents she encountered were operating in the dangerous real world where criminals are apprehended and separated from society.

Now Ed Driscoll at Instapundit has a long post dealing with this interpretation. In particular he notes the victim’s ‘wife’ complaining that the ICE agent “had real bullets.” What bizarro world does she live in?

Ms. Good had a real auto (i.e., weapon) even if she imagined she was acting in a LARP. More than a few people have been shot by police who saw them holding gun replicas and, in what appeared to be life-and-death situations, reacted appropriately. Her situation was similar.

Building a New World

Statecraft maven Walter Russell Mead writes for the Wall Street Journal that President Trump has captivated the globe. It is a dramatic claim which he goes on to substantiate. The column is behind a semi-paywall which makes reading it possible but tiresome.

If Mr. Trump fails, his successors will struggle to clean up the mess he leaves behind. If he succeeds, he will have built a new world. In the moment of maximum drama and uncertainty in which we now live, nobody knows what the outcome will be.

Whatever the outcome, Mead concludes, “it won’t be boring.”

Offense vs. Defense

The evolving technology of war is the seesaw battle between offense and defense, sometimes one dominates, sometimes the other.

Time was when armored knights on massive war horses dominated combat. Then, the offense technology of war evolved. Archers and, later, gunpowder-propelled bullets made suits of armor mostly obsolete. Vestiges of body armor still persist in helmets and ballistic vests.

Mechanized armor, particularly the tank, is the armored knight of today’s battlefield. Sure enough, the offensive technology of war, via drones, loitering munitions, etc., are having that same effect, defeating the defense that is mechanized armor.  

Defensive technology is scrambling now to find affordable ways to defeat cheap suicide drones and loitering munitions, without bankrupting the defender. The battlefield envisioned in the early Terminator films isn’t too far away.

Consequently, this piece on our new tank prototype feels somewhat obsolete.

Poor Prospects

Politico.eu belives things look somewhat dismal for Europe in 2026, as its three big players are ill-situated to lead or take decisive action.

France, Germany and the U.K. each entered 2026 with weak, unpopular governments besieged by the populist right and left, as well as a U.S. administration rooting for their collapse. While none face scheduled general elections, all three risk paralysis at best and destabilization at worst.

Monday's Iconic Image

Image courtesy of Power Line.

Notice the lack of hijab.

Sunday Snark

Gov. Walz and his assault tampon.

Images courtesy of Sarah Hoyt's

Mimeing Into Chaos

MN a Failed State

Power Line’s new guy, Bill Glahn writes about the political dynamics behind all the bad, awful, no-good news coming out of Minnesota.

The decision by Democrats - the party known locally as Democrat Farm Labor - was to import “new Americans” whose votes could be bought with liberal doses of taxpayer money. The result is this. 

Rather than producing a state of 5.7 million shiny, happy people, these policies result in more news than can be consumed locally.

Rather than a blissful socialist utopia, Minnesota ended up with a looted treasury and near-constant social unrest. It would have ended no other way. Minnesota is a failed state under current ownership.

It's nearly as bad as California. See this additional Glahn column which elaborates on the theme of systemic failure. 

Saturday Snark

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

Mexico 'Addicted' to Drug Money

President Trump is talking about going after the Mexican cartels which manufacture and ship illegal drugs into the US. President Sheinbaum has warned against US action on the ground within Mexico.

I have genuine questions, they are not rhetorical. Are street drugs in fact Mexico's most valuable export to the United States? I suspect they could well be just that. 

If the cartels produce a very large share of Mexico's export earnings, how can the government of Mexico not protect them? What would replace the money they bring in? How would she explain to her subordinates the absence of criminal payoff subsidies to their lifestyles? Produce employment for the cartels' newly unemployed pistoleros? Replace the retail purchases of well-paid cartel employees?

The bottom line: If we could wave a wand and stop cartel activity tomorrow, wouldn't Mexico be in recession the day after?

Friday Snark 2.0

Images courtesy of Real Clear Politics'

Cartoons of the Week.

Friday Snark 1.0

Images courtesy of Politico's

The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

Minneapolis Shooting … Further Thoughts

Several posts at today’s Instapundit elaborate on the theme that the shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis won’t create George Floyd type disturbances. The reason is she was white. 

The protests that did occur were observed to be performative - half-hearted and lacking rage. The irony of this difference is immense.

—————

Real revolutionaries risk and sometimes lose their lives. Phone video shot by Good’s wife show her to be a grinning individual cosplaying a revolutionary. Moments later the cosplay became all too real because ICE was working, not playing.

We mostly forget our everyday transportation - our auto or truck - is also a deadly weapon. Effectively every driver on the road is “open carrying;” climbing behind the wheel is like strapping on a gun belt or slinging an assault rifle. If you appear to intentionally threaten LEOs with any weapon, they have a self-defense right to respond forcefully.

Take College Classes for Both HS and College Credit

I’ll admit I haven’t been spending a lot of time lately keeping up with developments in the high school-to-college transition process. Still, I saw a mention of something on our local TV feed that seems somewhat special.

Nevada has a set of public charter schools where juniors and seniors take real college classes and get both high school graduation credit and college credit for each class successfully completed. It is called Nevada State High School, see its promo here.  It has multiple campuses, if that is the right term.

Sounds ideal for achievers in a hurry, or kids who need a looser structure than regular high school provides. I hope it works out.

Update

With the kind assistance of our visiting niece, we put away the Christmas paraphernalia yesterday. We literally have three large storage bins of indoor decorations, less than half of which were deployed. 

There is another box of outdoor lights. And yet another containing the artificial tree. Christmas trinkets and decor seems to accrue like tree rings, more "stuff" every year piled atop the old stuff. 

Likewise, it is time to pause listening to Christmas music of the serious variety. I really like the old carols that were traditional (i.e., old) when I was little, too many decades ago. Most of the recent Xmas tunes don’t hit the right note. Like the ornaments it will reappear again after Thanksgiving.

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It was raining when I awoke this a.m., obviously a very rare occurrence in the desert. I'd say it rained steadily for at least 2 hours. No downpour but more than a sprinkle. I enjoyed it, something I once would have deemed impossible.

My history with rain has been a sort of bell curve. As a kid growing up in SoCal rain was unusual and I liked it, especially in our attic where the sound on the roof was a particular favorite.

In my late 20s I moved to Oregon for grad school and spent three school years in Eugene at the south end of the Willamette Valley. I quickly got my fill of rain there. Like a kid overeating a favorite food to the point of discomfort, I OD'ed and got sick of it.

I remember more than one 14 day stretch when I never saw the sun. OR didn't rain continuously or all that hard, but it rained some everyday and when not raining it was threatening rain. I spent three years where my umbrella was seldom out of my hand when outdoors. It was literally depressing.

Since leaving Eugene, I've only visited rainy places, and have reacquired my taste for rain. The years we had a series of six RVs rain on the roof of the RV was nice, seldom heard west of the Rockies but not uncommon in the Midwest and South in summer where thunderstorms are a summer afternoon phenomenon as the rain hammers the roof and windows.

So this morning rain was once again nice.

The Winds of (Civil) War

Did MN Gov. Tim Walz just threaten to use the MN National Guard against Federal agents? I am reminded of South Carolina firing on Federal troops at Fort Sumter 165 years ago. 

Walz is emotional and impulsive but is he that stupid? One certainly hopes not. I don't see the Guard fighting and dying to keep Somalis from being deported.

ICE and other feds are enforcing our nation's laws, passed by our elected representatives before Trump was elected the first time. In a government of laws, we change laws we don't like, or if that's not possible, we obey them. That presidents Obama and Biden didn't enforce the laws didn't invalidate them.

MN's Governor and Minneapolis' mayor have made clear they don't like our immigration law. That does not give them the right to stand in the door, metaphorically, as Govs. Faubus and Wallace tried to do. Trump is every bit as likely to send the 101st Airborne as Eisenhower was. 

Hat tip to Herman Wouk for my title idea.