Pence Another Gore?

Tim O'Brien at PJ Media writes: "Looks like Mike Pence is gunning to be the next Al Gore." I freely admit I hadn't made the connection. In my defense, I am unlikely to think of either Al Gore or Mike Pence in any context.

The comparison may become one of those things that once seen, cannot be forgotten. Both men are former Vice Presidents, both are nags and stiffs. Both strike a "holier than thou" pose that is hard to stomach.

Current VP Vance is none of those things, though his place in history is yet to be revealed.

For Anglophiles

Amelia image courtesy of Ed Driscoll, posting at Instapundit,

with hat tip to Shepard Fairey.

FAFO in CO

Four of my first cousins, with whom I played as a child in CA, grew up in rural western CO. Three have lived there since childhood, and the fourth retired there. So I keep a weather eye on Colorado.

Today CO resident Stephen Green, posting at Instapundit, links to interesting economic indicators reflecting Colorado’s evolving conditions. Some key insights:

For the first time in 16 years, rents in metro Denver are actually going down. Not “slowing their increase.” Not “rising less quickly.” Going down. Metro-wide rents are down nearly 5% over the last year.

People are still fleeing the high-tax, government-failure states of California, New York and Illinois. Those refugees used to pour into Colorado. No more. They’re finding sanctuary in low-tax, low-regulation states like Florida and Texas instead.

Give our leaders one victory. They’ve stopped the mass migration of Californians to Colorado — albeit by Californicating our laws.

Now rents are falling — not because Colorado suddenly learned how to build housing efficiently — but because people stopped coming. Demand softened.

When rents fall for the first time in 16 years and population growth stalls, it’s not a mystery. It’s the market delivering feedback.

Colorado is learning the California lesson: bad governance can spoil a beautiful place. Friends in Idaho are worried they could suffer the same fate.

Another Tory Defector

A former Tory Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, recently defected from that benighted party to join Reform. Not entirely unexpected, but certainly significant. 

Comments about rats and sinking ships seem redundant at this juncture. Reform’s Nigel Farage bids fair to be the UK’s Donald Trump, an unabashed nationalist and defender of the culture.

Taken along with the Amelia movement, there are some hopeful signs of life in Blighty.

Ride or Literally Die

The latest from COTTonLINE’s current favorite foreign policy analyst - George Friedman - is out. In it he uses the current trilateral talks among the US, Ukraine, and Russia now happening in Dubai as a reason to itemize the many problems now facing Russia.

Taken together, he believes these could be sufficient to cause Russia to want to end the war in Ukraine. Sufficient, that is, if Putin can bring himself to recognize the corner into which he’s painted himself. 

My hunch is that Friedman makes too little of the threat of peace to Putin’s personal survival. Putin sought to reestablish Russia as a world power.  Accepting the status quo in Ukraine as “the best he could manage” against a much smaller adversary will be an admission of personal failure. 

Admitting failure is something autocrats seldom survive and Putin’s knows it. Guilty of war crimes and of diminishing Russia’s might, he’s realizing there is no imaginable safe dismount from the tiger’s back.

As Hitler and Mussolini demonstrated, once you lose you die, by your own hand or those of others. So you struggle on to the end.

Tuesday Snark

Image courtesy of Lucianne.com, 1/26/26.

Conspiracy Unmasked

After a lot of winning by the rioters in Minneapolis, finally some winning by those who oppose the anti-ICE movement. Power Line’s Scott Johnson has the story of a few talented hackers who penetrated the on-line anti-ICE networks. It is a quick and good read.

They revealed the identities of many of those coordinating and funding the anti-ICE demonstrators and harassers. The movement was anything but spontaneous. 

There is a strong suggestion that highly placed persons in state and local government were active in the planning and coordination. At least hints that the Lieutenant Gov. or someone using her nickname was involved.

The hacker vs. hacker ‘wars’ of today remind me of the Mad Magazine Spy vs.Spy cartoons of old. It is good to see the “white hats” win one for a change.

Geography: Unpopular but Relentless

Ten days ago I wrote Canadian PM Carney cozying up to China was unwise, noting this.

I’d think this recent action has moved the notion of a U.S. invasion of Canada from “inconceivable” to “remotely possible.”

Now comes his ill-advised speech at Davos, which could move the notion from “remotely possible” to “unlikely.” If he keeps going this way he could bait Trump into doing something we’d have believed impossible, and Canadians won’t like even a little bit. 

By contrast, Mexico’s President Sheinbaum seems to understand the inevitable logic of being located adjacent to a hegemonic power like the US. Canada once seemed to understand, now … not so much.

At some point it becomes “Geography demands we defend you so we might as well own you.” It is the same logic Trump applied to Greenland.

MN Protests Lack Support

Instapundit posts the following polling on which forms of public protests are believed okay and are which not. It seems clear much of what is happening in Minneapolis doesn't have public support.

Saturday Snark

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

Trump to WEF: FAFO

The Washington Examiner's Byron York writes that Europe's leaders would be better off today if they had listened to Trump's advice on key issues. At least a few of them sort of acknowledge it.

First, Trump told Europe: you're killing yourself with mass migration. Stop. Second, Trump told NATO: You've got to spend more on your own defense. Third, Trump told the European Union: You're hurting yourselves with draconian regulations. And fourth, Trump told German Chancellor Angela Merkel and others: don't build the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. It's a terrible idea to depend on Putin's Russia for your energy.

Trump was right about each of those things.

Meanwhile, they were mostly wrong to varying degrees. Now he rubs their noses in the bad choices they made.

Friday Snark

Images courtesy of Politico's

The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

Image courtesy of Lucianne.com.

MAGA Fun

John at Power Line posts a link to the following AI creation, and it is big fun. Check it out.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DTp892zDKER/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading

Crime Is Down?

It is widely reported that murders were down perhaps 20% last year, compared to 2024. If that few people met violent ends, it's wonderful news. I wish I was certain the statistic is believable.

Another possible explanation for the reduced number of reported murders is that Soros-funded liberal prosecutors are charging fewer perps with murder, instead choosing some lesser offense or none at all.

Many other forms of crime are also reported to have declined, which makes me suspect prosecutorial reluctance is the underlying factor in these otherwise cheerful statistics. Officials who don't wish to give violent criminals long sentences do not have this society's best interests at heart.

Not Cozy

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz speaking to the assembled WEF poobahs at Davos, about his evolving Weltanschauung.

The new world of the great powers is founded upon power, strength and when necessary, force. It is not a cozy place.

My reaction to Herr Merz? Welcome to what is sometimes referred to as "adulting." Post-war Europe has had a greatly protracted 'adolescence,' symbolically living in America's 'basement' and sponging off us. It should have ended 25 years ago, if not earlier.

No Skin in the Game

Concerning the post immediately below. Perhaps the movement to have no children actually interferes with solutions to the "birth dearth." Individual humans are ephemeral. Whatever a shrinking population will do to humankind's long-term prospects, none now living will last long enough to see those consequences.

Asking the people without children to worry about the eventual consequences thereof is like asking a fruit fly to worry about winter. Both are too far in the future to be of much concern. I fear one must have children and grandchildren and care about them to worry much about the world after one's death.

The Birth Dearth

Economist Noah Smith writes a Substack entitled Noahpinion. Today his topic is the human fertility decline, which he observes is world-wide. 

If it cannot be reversed, it will cause civilization to collapse over the next century or two. He begins with six commonly expressed coping reactions to the problem, and debunks each in turn.

1. “The only thing that matters is per capita living standards, so a shrinking population is fine”
2. “Productivity improvements will compensate for shrinking populations”
3. “Robots will make human workers unnecessary anyway"
4. “Concerns about low fertility are racist and sexist”
5. “We can just pay people to have more kids”
6. “Immigration will solve the population problem”

Smith suggests research aimed at solving the problem, which is logical, except maybe fertility isn’t the problem. I particularly liked this comment to his column, written by Professor Hollis Robbins (U. of Utah).

Call it "child rearing policy," not "fertility policy," because the real problem is the daunting task of child rearing. "Fertility" doesn't get at the actual labor. Ask any grandparent who is doing substantial child-rearing work. (My hand is raised.) Everyone I know who is not having kids will tell you: parents fear the grueling, 18+year long task of doing a good job, when the world is watching, when once you're in you can't back out.

For those of us lucky and talented enough to be successful adults, there is a substantial risk of raising children whose lives will badly disappoint us. I’d estimate half of our friends’ children have fallen far short of their parents’ accomplishments or expectations. 

Lake Wobegon is a myth, half of all children are in fact below average. After doing all the work Robbins correctly describes, being disappointed with the results is not a encouraging prospect.

----------

Plot of a science fiction short story explaining the lack of ET contact. Intelligent species tend to discover how to make reproduction elective long before they discover practical interstellar travel. As a consequence they dwindle to small, planet-bound colonies. 

Will humans be an exception? Unlikely, although Elon Musk is doing his well-financed best to evade the first and accomplish the second.

Student Self-Censorship

City Journal reports a study which finds that college students with moderate or conservative views feel the need to self-censor to fit in and avoid controversy on campus. Having the data is good, but I think we already knew it to be true.

During my 35 years as a professor with mostly conservative views, I know I self-censored in interactions with colleagues and to some minor extent in the classroom. “Minor” because politics was not central to what I was teaching. 

If my students noticed anything, it was probably that I didn’t harp on political issues peripheral to my subject matter as liberal faculty did. If they inferred from that I wasn’t liberal, I was okay with the inference. Nobody complained.

More to the point, business students aren’t often among campus radicals. My self-censorship was more in hearing faculty colleagues say flaming liberal things and not telling them how f-ing ignorant I found their comments. 

Decades ago we had a colleague whose assigned subject matter was quant analysis in business, but who spent most of his class time harping on nuclear disarmament. He was even too off-topic for my liberal colleagues, and we let him go for ignoring his subject matter. 

Trump Does Davos

President Trump spoke at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland. While there he worked out a deal whereby we locate bases on Greenland and possibly produce rare earth minerals there too, details to follow. Apparently the Danes keep ownership, and the whole thing is done under the aegis of NATO. 

The threatened tariffs are no more, and ditto the threatened invasion. Apparently they were just Trump getting Europe's attention, making them feel better about the deal they ended up with. After the fact, wise heads are describing this as classical Trump bargaining rope-a-dope.

Seemingly, everyone except Trump underestimated how absolutely crucial the US market is to exporters the world over. Faced with a threatened tariff, nation after nation has caved and given him more-or-less what he wanted.

Back to the "deal" he declares himself happy with, we already had the right to locate military bases in Greenland, almost at will. What is new is that the other key NATO nations have signed onto the need to defend the high Arctic against hostile moves by either Russia or China. 

Northern European nations already recognized the need; whether Southern Europe feels it or is just paying lip service is still unclear. Canada talks a good game but their diplomats are writing checks their half-hearted military is unable to cash.

Side note: the DrsC overnighted in Davos on a summer trip (WEF is in winter). There is a ski run but it was no Sun Valley, Vail, or Jackson Hole, in our view. I believe we bought a rare souvenir there, a bright red piggy bank with a white Swiss cross on each flank - our "Swiss bank."

Second side note: If you get the chance see video of Treasury Secretary Bessent at Davos describing CA Gov. Gavin Newsom as a cross between two fictional characters, one a serial killing sociopath (Patrick Bateman) and the other Barbie's boytoy Ken, adding that Gavin knew less about economics than Kamala Harris.

*** An Anniversary ***

One year ago today Donald John Trump was (re) inaugurated as our 47th president. It has been a whirlwind first year, and I am certain he has been having the time of his life. The adrenaline high he's on has to be amazing.

Since he was a young tycoon developing real estate in NYC, Trump has had fairly clear ideas about how this world should be run and has said as much to a variety of interviewers on-camera. He tried to operate within the system during his first term, and fell far short of his goals.

During the first year of his second term, we learned he had put the intervening 4 years to good use, planning for his return. Once back in the Oval Office, he seemingly hasn't let a single day go by without moving his agenda forward. If he doesn't work 24 hours a day, he for sure works seven days a week, regardless of where he is.

While I've not loved everything he's done this past year, nobody bats 1000. I have liked most of it a lot, and look forward to another great year of winning and libtard breakdowns.