Update

No posts yesterday. Today I write from Fallbrook, CA, which is in inland San Diego County northeast of Oceanside and not far from USMC Camp Pendleton. This terrain is a part of CA of which I, as a CA native and longtime resident, am not much familiar. 

I have had few occasions to visit the area south of greater LA, and those few trips mostly went directly to San Diego. I had an uncle who moved near San Marcos and we visited him there once, I believe. It is warm here today, high of 92 expected.

We’ve come here to attend the wedding of a protege of the other DrC, whom we both consider a ‘granddaughter.’ Her dad is a retired Marine officer. 

The nuptials happen tomorrow and we fly home to WY on Sunday. Saturday I get to see if I still remember how to tie a tie, it has been years since I last did so. Wish me luck.

Later … A big party tonight, the rehearsal dinner. As the bride’s folks are of Italian heritage the food was bellisimo, the drinks likewise. Dessert was cannolis so I was reminded of the advice from The Godfather, “Leave the gun, take the cannoli.”

On the other hand, the after dinner speechifying was long-winded. However, as the other DrC said, it’s the bride’s party, she can tell whatever tales she chooses. With my old-man hearing, nothing but murmurs came through the hearing aids anyway. 

We ate out by the pool, weather shirtsleeves perfect, flying insects at a bare minimum. So far no one has fallen in the pool. They have a hilltop location with a very nice view.  The bride’s folks live well.

An Unpopular Solution, or Two

For as long as I can remember, COTTonLINE has harped on the issue of leaving the insane and the addicted to their own devices. That is, mostly to living on the street as homeless. 

As we’ve repeatedly noted, there is plenty of blame to go around. Liberals fear infringing on people’s freedom to live however in hell they choose. Conservatives dislike spending billions warehousing the insane and addicted. And Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’ Nest didn’t help. 

As it stands, if you are insane or addicted and able to avoid arrest for a big felony, you end up living rough. If you can manage to commit an egregious felony and get caught, you may be imprisoned or be released as too addled to stand trial. Homelessness or prison, those are the choices. No long-term mental hospitals 

Today brings two excellent articles relevant to this issue. This one is particularly good, even if it does catch the otherwise-execrable Governor Newsom doing something helpful. And this one is about an example now in the news.

We need involuntary incarceration for those addled and addicted who can’t manage to live independently. We also need safeguards against abuse and misuse plus treatment for whatever their problem is. It will cost billions. 

Absent the above, there is also Canada’s indirect partial solution via MAID (medical assistance in dying), which has become quite popular. 

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Afterthought: It is worth remembering that the mentally ill quite often dislike the admittedly imperfect meds which assist in managing their behavior. They say they feel “dull” or “flat” while taking them. They prefer the oblivion or the juiced highs of street drugs. 

Many of their conditions are essentially “untreatable” in the sense of a cure, given today’s knowledge and technology. I don’t see why the incarcerated shouldn’t have access “inside” to whatever drugs make them feel good - speed, heroin, cocaine, you name it. 

If the state became their ‘dealer’ they’d not try to escape. People might commit themselves voluntarily, knowing it was a one-way street. Imagine being a “Dr. Feelgood” in one of these asylums, helping people find the mix of drugs that left them in bliss.

Seems like the plot for a noir science fiction novel or film, doesn’t it? Soylent Green had a hint of this in its MAID ending.

Update

My usual posts of memes on Friday and Saturday will either be late or not appear at all this week. I will be away from my desktop where I compile those images. Text posts may occur. 

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On a side street with little foot traffic in a small, mostly Mormon town in western Wyoming, there is a long-existing designer store front advertising "fine art." That in itself is moderately amazing. 

Even more so is this admonition: "Open by appointment. (307)886-XXXX." The other DrC, whose memory is phenomenal, is certain the store has been there for years, unstaffed most of the time. 

Is it a tax write-off? An ego project? Actually a real, money-making (or laundering) business? To quote The King and I, "'tis a puzzlement."

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In this same small rural town, roughly a thousand miles from the nearest ocean, is a combo restaurant and sea food market grandly entitled Rocky Mountain Sea Food. It has existed for 30 years that we know of, and maybe much longer. 

You order at the counter - from a menu on the wall - and they bring the food to your table. It is excellent, reasonably priced, and well-patronized by locals. The other DrC favors their coconut shrimp, and I like their clam chowder, of which I have a recent fond memory as I write this.

An Observation, Confirmed

For maybe 20 years after I retired I got the university's daily news summary via email, reporting what was news on-campus. I started paying attention to obituaries for retired faculty who had died.

What struck me about the data for our campus was that many passed away in their 80s and 90s. This was when life expectancy was in the 70s.

So I recently asked AI whether college tenure-track faculty live longer than many other professions. The answer confirmed my observation, longevity is positively associated with educational attainments. 

Most tenure-track faculty have earned a PhD or equivalent and they tend to live a long time. That the professoriate is a low-impact occupation doesn't hurt either.

I wonder if this trend will continue as enrollments shrink and tenured faculty are laid off? Possibly not, stress will certainly increase.

It's Euphemism Time

RealClearEducation runs an article reporting research into why parents switch their children from one school to another. The researchers identified both push and pull factors. 

Push factors are things disliked about the school left behind. Among these "bullying" particularly stood out, along with stress/anxiety.

Pull factors are things particularly liked about the new school. Here, less bullying was often mentioned.

Nowhere were factors of racial composition of student body mentioned, but one has to wonder if bullying isn't often a politically correct dog whistle meaning "there are too many kids of another race, who are violent and disinterested in learning."

Few people are oblivious enough to self-identify as racists. Rejecting bullying carries no such stigma, and of course intra-racial bullying occurs as well.

School switching because of bullying may often be nothing more than "white flight." As a pull factor, less bullying may equal a safer, less violent pupil demographic, one where more of the students try to excel.

What's Left?

Image courtesy of today's Politico.

Speculation

President Trump has 28 month left in office. I begin to wonder if he's decided to tough out the blockade of Iran's ports for that period, meaning Iran can export no oil, earn no foreign exchange, import no manufactured goods.

Conditions in Iran can get seriously grim if the blockade stays in place that long. Unknown is how much privation the nation's citizens will tolerate, while faced with a state willing to execute many of them.

Blockade for 2+ years means oil prices stay high and may well cost him control of Congress. That will involve him in another impeachment theater in the House. I write "theater" because it is unlikely the Senate would vote to convict, meaning Trump racks up another failed impeachment, his third if I remember correctly.

We normally think being a lame duck weakens a president, but in this case it may give him strength. He can't run again and has the option of ignoring popularity polls while focusing on his legacy.

We live in interesting times.

A Disease of the Soul

I have an excellent quotation by Argentine President Javier Milei to share with you. 

I thought being on the left was a mental problem. The empirical evidence is so overwhelming that it never worked anywhere, and they refused to accept it.

But what I discovered is that being on the left is a disease of the soul. The left is built on envy, hatred, resentment, and unequal treatment under the law. They are very violent, and since they have no way or arguments to answer, they go for physical violence.

Violence on the left indeed, between them Stalin and Mao managed to kill roughly 50 million people. Pol Pot added 2 million more to the total butcher’s bill. 

When leaders on the left discover human beings simply do not reflexively behave as the left predicts they will, wholesale slaughter ensues. Hat tip to Stephen Green, posting at Instapundit for the link.

Texas … the Next California

Continuing our series on Californication, I direct your attention to a Joel Kotkin column in the New York Post. He begins thus.

By 2050 ... Texas is now slated to pass California in population, driven both by both immigration and domestic migration. Its economy is growing far faster, and it is now the headquarters of many former Californian companies. 

And he concludes thus.

To thrive once again, California needs to refocus not just on elite industries and research, but also on nurturing blue collar and business service jobs for everyone else. Right now, we don’t do that anymore.

Texas, with its crappy weather, unspectacular scenery, and sometimes coarse culture, does.

Thus demonstrating what COTTonLINE has long maintained, a beautiful natural paradise can be so badly managed that people go elsewhere. To less attractive places (TX, FL) with good leadership and values, including lower taxes and crime rates.

'Adjunctivitis'

The Nation runs an article about universities and colleges staffing many of their classrooms with part-timers, called adjunct faculty or "adjuncts." These often have the same excellent credentials as the full-time, tenured or tenure-track faculty.

We over-produce PhDs. There are more people trained and eager to be professors than there are career vacancies, especially in the humanities and social sciences.

Adjuncts normally don't get benefits and are paid a flat fee to teach each class, something like $4k. Using adjuncts a campus can cover the same classes a full-time assistant prof would teach for perhaps 1/3 the cost, or less. 

It isn't uncommon for adjuncts to teach at 2-3 campuses in a metro area and be known as "freeway fliers." They need to live with parents, flatmates, or have a working spouse to scrape a bare living. Many qualify for food stamps.

It is known the number of college-aged Americans will decline year after year. Nobody wants to layoff tenured faculty. Adjuncts are hired (or not) each year as-needed.

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When I began teaching, university business schools sometimes had local attorneys teach business law, and secretarial school faculty teach business writing. In both cases their idea was to pick up some extra $$ in a side gig, and their benefits were normally covered elsewhere.

By the time I retired the system had begun hiring adjuncts as faculty substitutes. I'm sure it is worse now. 

I vaguely remember that if we hired an adjunct to teach 3 classes we had to give them benefits (health, sick leave), so to keep costs down the limit then was 2 per term per person. I don't know the current rules.

The Bigger, the Phonier

I normally avoid authors like Michael Tomasky and sources like The New Republic, both irretrievably left wing. Today is an exception. Tomasky has, I believe, stumbled upon something I believe can be of use to conservatives. He writes the following.

Non-college working-class voters are more skeptical than more educated voters are. (snip) It stems from the fact, more glaringly true in this country with each successive generation, that for the educated class, things like opportunity and advancement and the confidence that one’s children will live better lives are far more real than they are for working-class people.

To educated voters, big promises about government improving people’s lives sound great, or at least plausible. To non-college voters, those promises sound like just more empty talk. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that to non-college voters, the bigger the promise, the phonier it sounds.

And therein lies the useful nugget for conservatives. Hammer on the implausibility of socialists’ claims, call them “pie in the sky” and a “snake oil” con. Non-college voters have a predisposition to disbelieve anyway. 

Instead of giveaways which are normally disappointing, tout improved job opportunities in factories which pay much better than service jobs. Also emphasize keeping out floods of immigrants who undercut wages for non-college jobs. Sell blue collar prosperity, not welfare.

Reshoring our manufacturing sector is a great way to improve working class lives. So is enabling development and home building, by cutting red tape.

Saturday Snark

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

Images courtesy of Sarah Hoyt's

And Now the Memes ....

Friday Meme Fest

Images courtesy of Politico's

The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

Images courtesy of RealClearPolitics'

Cartoons of the Week.

Jason Arday, R.I.P.

I've written three times about Jason Arday, a young Black professor of the "sociology of education" at Cambridge U. who resigned after being found out as a plagiarist and serial liar about his accomplishments. I wrote first, about what was alleged, second about his resignation, and lastly in the context of a former colleague who also appears to be bent.

Sadly, I write a fourth time to report Arday has been found dead in London. The Daily News reports thus.

At this time his death is being treated as unexpected, but is not believed to be suspicious.

Natural causes deaths are relatively rare among 41 year olds with sedentary occupations. Interestingly, the word "suicide" appears nowhere in the DN's longish write-up. Are we supposed to infer it from the combination of "unexpected" and "not suspicious"?

Schadenfreude

On Monday we wrote about the WNBA's dilemma, whether to allow to play in the league men who claim to 'identify' as women. We anticipated they'd have trouble reconciling the conflict between what fans and society in general wants - no XY players in what's supposed to be an XX league - and what LGBTQ+ adherents want which is for individual's "felt identity" to prevail, regardless. 

It is not irrelevant that the league's economic self interest also favors an XX only rule. The league's owners and managers have now met and reached no firm conclusion, not exactly a shock. 

I ask to be excused for experiencing some measure of schadenfreude watching this happen.

Update

You'll remember I've indicated summers here in the high country are short. Now in early mid-August we're getting a taste of early fall. Today's predicted high is 62℉, it is gloomy and rainy. 

This iffy weather will continue for 2-3 days, and then we're back to high country summer weather for a few weeks. Locals claim it can snow in any month of the year, but we've summered here for 30+ years and never seen valley floor snow in July or August. We've seen June and September snow on rare occasions.

Have a nice summer, what's left of it.

A Pet Peeve

I just ran across an example of a thing which too often happens, and which really irritates me. RealClearPolitics links to an article they title "Why Does Europe Struggle with Free Speech?"

I went to the linked article and read it. It establishes Europe in particular is criminalizing so-called "hate speech" which we permit under our "free speech" amendment. What it particularly does not do is answer the question "why."

So I then look and discover the actual article title is "The European Free Speech Crisis," which crisis the article does describe. It frustrates me that RCP mislabels, conning me into reading it.

I already knew a crisis existed, but was curious if they would "go there" and actually dare say why. They do not. 

The "there" of course is the millions of immigrants from cultures with very different values and a propensity to go berserk when insulted. European governments appease these aliens in hopes of postponing the civil war they will eventually lose. Few will talk or write about this cowardice.

Parental Rebellion

Image courtesy of today's Lucianne.com.

This is only funny because it is true. Most DSA candidates are nepo babies who attended private schools and posh colleges. Now they're rebelling against the system that enriched their successful parents. 

We know it to be true of Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed, AOC, Hasan Piker and Graham Platner. Bernie Sanders is no billionaire but wealthy by most standards. Francesca Hong appears to be an exception.

Net Negative

Power Line's John Hinderaker writes about a female colleague of Jason Arday, the now-resigned Cambridge DEI fabulist hire with made-up credentials and accomplishments. A devout Muslim, Farah Ahmed believes western education is inimical to Muslim students, so naturally she is housed in the education department. 

You can't make up such craziness, no one would believe you. He concludes with the following pithy observation.

I think it is fair to ask whether the net contribution of “higher education” to Western countries is now negative.

A lot of it is exactly that, hence the DSA (see above).

Old Movie Review: The Great Escape

A 1963 film of imprisoned allied aviators trying to escape a Luftwaffe POW camp, The Great Escape has a big cast and they deliver the goods. Steve McQueen, James Garner, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, Richard Attenborough, David McCallum and a bunch of solid Brit actors whose names aren't so well known to Americans do a good job.

The title tells you the general story, a bunch of guys with time on their hands try to tunnel out of a prison camp, with uniforms recut into mufti, forged "papers" and maps, the idea being to fan out across Germany, heading for Switzerland or elsewhere, and cause as much confusion as possible. 

The ingenuity on display is impressive. McQueen, Garner, and Coburn play their usual on-screen personas, Charles Bronson does a credible job of portraying a claustrophobic forcing himself to dig a long tunnel in which he can barely kneel, and nearly being destroyed in the process. 

We've enjoyed this film multiple times since it was released.