Post-Californian Ideology

In a First Things column that also could be described as a professional biography of Peter Navarro, author Matthew Schmitz sees the development of "the post-Californian ideology." Hat tip to RealClearPolicy for the link.

This ideology explains Navarro's influence on Trump as his senior counselor for trade and manufacturing. 

It warns that America’s pursuit of cultural and economic openness has undermined social trust and shared prosperity. It insists that the solutions to America’s problems will sometimes come from the action of the state. It recognizes that California is not only the highest expression of America’s quest for freedom. It is also the place where that quest comes to an end.

And ICYMI, it is why Navarro has been at odds with Elon Musk. 

Dangerous Jobs

Writing at Chronicles, Sarah Wilder notes how the disastrous floods in Texas have surfaced examples of 'toxic' masculinity, about which literally no one has complained. Coast Guard petty officer and rescue swimmer Scott Ruskan being the most publicized example. In this context Wilder pens a quote I like.

Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, it turns out that there are no feminists in natural disasters.

Update

We had a small earthquake last night. The other DrC and I were in opposite ends of the house and each heard a noise that we initially thought might be the other falling, and then realized it wasn't that at all.

Since we are maybe 100 miles from the Yellowstone basin, earthquakes are to be expected, we later learned there were two but we only noticed the larger one. The plot of the epicenters were about 2k and 4k from our house.

Thinking about the earthquake, no biggie for a couple of CA natives, I remembered Mama Cass Elliot singing "California Earthquake," in particular the line "They tell me the fault line runs right through here." It sort of fits.

A few minutes ago we were digesting our lunch on the screened back porch and listening to the song of the aspens. In today's gentle breeze, our quaking aspen forest makes a susurration like a creek over a stony bed. 

The sky is azure blue, and the temperature is perfect. We've yet to run our AC this year, it's 'tough' duty that we're happy to do.

Saturday Snark

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

Dimon Disses Democrats

The CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon belittles Democrats. See what the most powerful person in the financial industry told a foreign ministry event in Ireland.

I have a lot of friends who are Democrats, and they’re idiots. I always say they have big hearts and little brains. They do not understand how the real world works. Almost every single policy rolled out has failed.

They overdid DEI. We all were devoted to reaching out to the Black community, Hispanic, the LGBT community, the disabled — we do all of that. But the extent, they got to stop it. And they got to go back to being more practical. They’re very ideological.

Democrats are immensely unrealistic, and don't notice or care when their programs fail. What is important to them is their good intentions when starting the program, in other words, "virtue signaling." 

Friday Snark

Images courtesy of Politico's 

The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

Sickos Lean Left

The always readable Michael Barone quotes primo numbers guy Nate Silver who shares his amazement at data he's seen.

I was honestly surprised by how strong the relationship is. Among voters who report poor mental health, liberals outnumber conservatives 45 to 19 percent. Among those who report excellent mental health, conservatives outnumber liberals 51-20.

Not a new finding, to be sure, but one that keeps showing up. Maybe Kurt Schlichter is right to call conservatives "normals" meaning, by implication, that liberals are "abnormals," something many liberals self-report. 

Unintended Consequences

One of life’s guilty pleasures is when people with “influence and/or money” make public plans and those plans backfire and bite them on the bum. I’m wondering if Musk’s third party ploy won’t turn out to be one of those misbegotten plans?

If  Musk’s America Party does as Ross Perot’s third party did, it would take enough votes from Republicans to ensure Democrats win. History suggests that is the best they could do. 

However quite independent of Musk’s machinations, anti-semitic, socialist Zohran Mamdani has won the Democrat nomination for New York City’s mayor, making him the likely victor. The coincidental timing is propitious. 

AOC, Bernie and their claque will do their darnedest to make Mamdani the face of the Democratic Party. What if they succeed? This will turn off many less wild-eyed people who normally vote for Democrats. 

Suppose Musk manages to take more votes from unhappy Democrats than from unhappy Republicans? I’d say the probability of this outcome is greater than zero, and could be closer to 0.5. 

For example, Musk wins 10% of D votes and only 5% of R votes. That could swing some purple states our way. I don’t predict it, but it could happen.

They Screwed Up

The Trump administration has had a remarkable first six months, with many wins and excellent beginnings. Which is not to say that they have had no failures.

The string of administration successes makes the badly bungled Epstein matter stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. Their pronouncements on this issue have been all over the map, lots of build up and promises followed by embarrassed admissions that there is nothing to see. We are told the bad man kept no client lists, did no blackmailing, and really, actually did kill himself.

The Epstein fiasco is a bad look for a group otherwise notching a lot of wins. It’s no wonder some have called for AG Pam Bondi’s resignation. I figure she survives this one, but if it happens again, she is toast. 

FBI boss Patel doesn’t come out of this looking good either. The screwup could be the result of the administrative blob back-stabbing Trump’s appointees.

A problem all Republican administrations have is their appointees have to rely on civil servants for support. Nearly all such underlings are committed Democrats whose first instinct is to be anything but helpful and whose second instinct is to attempt to co-opt the new boss.

Image courtesy of News Ammo.

Later ... Apparently all the feds have is the passenger lists from the flight log on Epstein's plane. Accepting a ride doesn't equal shagging a minor, nor is it unlawful. 

As a money manager, Epstein traveled in monied circles and offered rides to many who were wealthy potential clients. Some subset of these may have partaken of the too-young women with whom he surrounded himself. If he didn't keep records of those who indulged, except mentally, the memories died with him.

Longevity vs. Low Birth Rates

George Friedman, whose work I often cite, looks today at what is happening to populations in the developed world and notes the falling birth rates in nearly every country. This isn't news, we've noted it before.

He also notes another factor of interest that few are attending to, the fact that we are living longer than we formerly did. He believes this will force us to rethink how we deliver medical services and hints that in future people will work more years than at present.

Honestly, he is mostly noting trends and problems. He proposes darned few solutions beyond the suggestion that migrants from the third world will fill the vacancies created by less-than-replacement birth rates.

The New Zealand Accent

The DrsC have traveled in New Zealand twice - the first time in 1985 for two weeks, the second in 2001 for a month. Both times we rented a little motorhome and camped around the two main islands. It is very nice, we recommend it.

One of the things we noticed was the NZ accent, typified by a woman who ran a campground down near Invercargill at the south end of the South Island. She had a small dog and we asked its name, she replied with what sounded like the initials GC. 

That sounded odd so we asked how it was spelled and learned it was Jesse. Americans pronounce that name with the two syllables jess and ee.

Our observation was that NZ women, and teens of both genders, tended to pronounce the short e sound like a long e. Adult men, not so much.

There is a new-to-us crime drama streaming on Prime, set and filmed in EnZed, called Brokenwood Mysteries. In one of the early episodes a minor character is named Jesse. Sure enough, the series' female lead pronounced the name GC or Jeesee if you prefer. Some things don't change much.

Update

Two days ago the other DrC informed me she sees the wild asters blooming. Old WY wives' tales hold that when the asters bloom we will have another 8 weeks of summer. 

She has a photo at her website, and they are for sure in bloom. Given our altitude here (6300 ft.), 8 weeks more summer is about right. 

Technically summer is about 92 days long, or ca. 3 months. That's at sea level, we're 1.2 miles above sea level so what feels like summer is more like 2 months, but as she notes those are a wonderful two months. None finer that we know of - warm short sleeve days, cool nights for sound sleep, low humidity, and beautiful green fields and hillsides. 

Relocating twice a year from mountains to desert and back, we get a lot of that sort of weather. It is the "snow bird" life and we'll do it as long as we're able, realism suggests eventually it will be too much for us to handle. 

When that day arrives, it will be a sad milestone in long, and mostly happy lives. Alas, sad milestones become more frequent as we age.

Watching His Back

Austin Bay is a frequent writer on matters military. Today he predicts that China - which has caught the same empire rebuilding virus that affects Russia - is likely to want to invade Siberia, which it (a) covets and (b) believes for historical reasons is rightfully theirs.

If Putin goes all in on taking Ukraine he doesn't have sufficient reserve forces to protect Siberia against a bulked-up PLA. Col. Bay suggests Trump remind Putin of this vulnerability. 

Russia's inability to defeat much smaller Ukraine suggests their military is less formidable than previously thought. You can be sure Beijing has noticed this weakness.

Being "the leader who lost Siberia" isn't the historical sobriquet Putin craves for himself. I had this same insight four decades ago, as I noted in this post about a long ago game of Risk™.

Violence on the Left

Ed Driscoll posts at Instapundit a Byron York quote from the Washington Examiner, check it out.

Some Democrats are calling on their elected representatives to engage in violence against Trump’s policies. At the same time, groups that might be characterized as militant allies of the progressive Democratic movement are resorting to violence in an effort to obstruct the president’s enforcement of federal immigration law. 

Some radicals have committed politically motivated murder, for which they received support in some far-left circles. And it is all happening in the context of one of the two major political parties experiencing a sharp drop in the most basic measure of civic devotion: pride in being an American. It’s a troubling picture, and nothing on the immediate horizon suggests it will improve any time soon.

The last time this kind of lefty violence happened was in the 1960s, when the issue was Vietnam. It feels like here we go again.

Somebody wrote that the BBB authorizes 10k more border patrol agents, and that DHS will have difficulty hiring them. On the other hand, if Mamdani becomes mayor in NYC, maybe most of the NYPD will be available for hire, and they're already LEO-trained.

Maybe Not a Rhyme

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes." This quote is often attributed to Mark Twain but a web search suggests psychoanalyst Theodor Reik is the earliest exponent of the precise notion.

I was musing on the Trump phenomenon this morning and its similarities to the reign of Amenhotep IV, later known as Akhenaten, the father of Tutankhamun. He was most famous for overturning the polytheistic religion of Egypt and imposing a monotheistic religion dedicated to Aten. 

When Akhenaten's reign ended, the Egyptians scrapped his changes and went back to their polytheistic faith. They dumped his new capital Akhenaten. known today as Amarna, returning the capital to its former location of Thebes. Egyptologists view the Akhenaten pharaohic period as an anomaly in Egyptian history, an outlier or aberration. 

What I wondered was if, looking back, the Trump second term will be similarly viewed, as an attempt at a new direction that, eventually, failed to overcome institutional and cultural inertia. I can imagine the media describing the four years as a national spasm or mental breakdown, from which we subsequently recovered fortunately.

Understand, this is not my preferred outcome. I like what Trump has done so far, and what he proposes to do. But a relatively large bloc don't like it a bit, and would love nothing better than a return to the status quo ante. Let's hope they are disappointed, I believe there is a good chance.

More Tuesday Snark

Images courtesy of RealClearPolitics' Cartoons of the Week.

Another CA Screwup

This post has relevance for two themes we follow at COTTonLINE: National security and the decline of California. Writing at Townhall, Kevin McCullough reports California alone has opted out of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. He notes the JTTF is:

The primary engine for federal, state, and local cooperation in detecting and disrupting terrorism. And they did it proudly, in the name of “civil liberties.”

What makes this act more than political street theater is the very real possibility of Iranian sleeper cells. These may have infiltrated into the US in anticipation of the sort of action we just took on their nuclear weapon program. When activated, these would commit acts of terror and/or sabotage.

Expect such cells to be based in CA where the local authorities are committed to non-cooperation with federal law enforcement and counter-terrorism programs. Their refusal endangers not only Californians, it endangers us all, for it provides the moles a safe haven within which to plot their evil deeds, wherever in the country those may occur.

Tuesday Snark

Image courtesy of Politico's Wuerker.

‘Knowing’ the Unreal

Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media reminds us of a choice Ronald Reagan quote, which I share with you.

The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant, it's just that they know so much that isn't so.

That is classic Reagan, gentle humor in service of political advantage. Mamdani is but the most recent example of Reagan’s enduring truism.

Problem Solved … Conceptually

Ana Marie Cox is an old lefty, but also a decent writer, and she writes about the TX hill country where she lives. She complains about the locals’ unwillingness to invest in alarm systems, similar to air raid warnings, to notify locals about frequent, disastrous floods.

What I don’t understand is why that would be necessary. Everybody these days has a cell phone, and the tech to send alerts via the cell network is used to send out so-called “Amber alerts” about abducted children. I’ve gotten several in recent years. 

One memorable time the DrsC were sitting in a restaurant when every phone in the place harshly rang simultaneously. It was an Amber Alert. The tech works.

If I can imagine a way to pinpoint cell towers on a topo map of the region and send the alert to all phones within their broadcast radius, the tech folk can program it so the NWS can use it. The cost should not be excessive as the hardware already exists. It should be a matter of writing code.