Oh, Canada

Politico has a poll of Canadians who are angry with Trump’s America, not viewing us as a reliable ally or friend (out from behind paywall). In a sense, they are probably correct. 

Trump publicly takes a very dim view of nations he believes are “taking advantage of the US” in trade or otherwise. For example, Canada’s current military is a pale shadow of its former self. They know we have to defend them against invasion so they don’t bother. 

Prior presidents put up with Canada’s “spoiled child” behavior, Trump is disinclined to do so. Tough love is more his style. 

He seems much more likely than his predecessors to try to change things he dislikes, See for example, Venezuela and Iran. I’d be very surprised if Trump hasn’t privately considered whether taking over Canada is practical.

A Vibesession

An opinion writer with the unlikely name of Bayta Ungar-Sargon observes we are in a “vibecession” which she defines as follows.

Not a recession—that’s when the economy is bad—but a VIBE-cession: That’s when the economy is good, but the vibes just suck.

And she identifies a reason, supplied by Vox.

White-collar workers likely exert disproportionate influence over how economic conditions are perceived, since we enjoy an outsize voice in journalism and politics. Given that clout, the fact that job and wage growth has been especially weak in white-collar sectors might partly explain the darkening national mood.

To which she adds. 

The fact that white collar workers are much more likely to be Democrats, and political affiliation has become a major predictor for whether a voter thinks the economy is doing well, might explain a lot.

To which I’d add that the bad vibes are the sour feelings of voters who find their TDS exacerbated by Trump’s hyperactivity and omnipresence. I doubt there is much the GOP can do to assuage their angst. 

Friday Snark

Image courtesy of Politico.

Unclear Aims

About the military build-up in the Middle East and negotiations with Iran, Power Line's John Hinderaker opines as follows.

It appears to me that we are in a situation where we have been negotiating for something we don’t really want, a worthless undertaking by the mullahs with regard to weapons, while marshaling a great deal of military force that, however powerful in its own terms, will not prove capable of bringing about the downfall of the mullahs, the only objective we should be working toward.

That's close to my view, as well.

Perilous Parallels

We have repeatedly noted that China appears to be on an economic trajectory similar to Japan, if somewhat less far along the story arc. To see our many mentions, search this site using the key words “China like Japan.” 

Others have seen the similarities too, a recent example is by Ronny P. Sasmita, an Indonesian writing for Asia Times. He draws many parallels between what happened in Japan two decades ago and what is happening in China now.

One factor not similar between the two neighboring economies is governance. China’s is very much top-down and command-driven, Japan’s was much less so. Whether Xi can wield this power to avoid the trap into which Japan fell is unclear at this writing. 

As “the Donald” is fond of saying, “We’ll see what happens.”

No Shrinking Violet

In a column for The American Conservative, of which he is senior editor, Andrew Day decodes the actual message the Trump administration sent Europe via Sec. Rubio’s speech to the Munich conference. I particularly like Day’s description of Trump.

Look at Donald Trump. Look at the totality of his life in business and media and politics. Does he symbolize restraint to you? Are you simple? The man used to split his time between a palace in Palm Beach and the top of a skyscraper in Manhattan with his name on it, cycling through leggy supermodels and eating three Big Macs every meal, before moving into the White House—which he’s currently turning gold.

Not precisely a model of restraint, is our Trump? We’re headed back to the Moon and beyond. Ejecting millions of illegal aliens, reforming government, changing long-held policies, acting the neo-colonial hegemon, settling international disputes, and more. 

Trump is a hyperactive CEO, an over-the-top builder-developer-impresario-raconteur on steroids. He’s gotten our sluggish, no-can-do government to bestir itself, while having the time of his life. 

Trump’s motto could be “Go Big.” Not young, I hope he has the energy to keep going full-tilt until January, 2029.

Malign Influence of “The Groups”

Have you wondered why the Democratic Party keeps getting pulled to the left? To supporting policies that do not have widespread acceptance among the electorate, the losing side of the often cited 80-20 split?

The short answer is that most of their money comes via what I call “victim groups.” That is, organized groups of those who feel wronged by the path our society is now on. Most of us - the 80 - never give politicians a dime.

To access campaign money local Dem. candidates have to align themselves with those groups’ preferred policies, even when the voters of their districts don’t support said policies. It is very much a matter of “who pays the piper calls the tune.” What campaign pros call “the groups” control the purse strings.

Author Alicia Nieves has been a Democrat campaign pro and knows whereof she writes. Her column is a long, thorough treatment of how the Democratic Party keeps getting pulled to the left. It is very much “inside baseball.”

Chalk Up Another One

Writing at PJ Media, columnist Catherine Salgado reports another mass shooting by a transgender individual. This time it was at a high school hockey game in Rhode Island. 

For a vanishingly small slice of the population, trans folk are too often suicides who choose to take several others with them. Presumably they seek revenge against a society that couldn't agree to live in their fantasy world. 

The mentally ill and addicted need inpatient treatment, or failing that, custodial care apart from the rest of us. Doing so would clear the streets and parks of most of the homeless - urban renewal thrown in as a bonus.

Later … Karol Markowicz of the New York Post makes some of these same points concerning trans as an often violent mental illness.

Rubio Puts the EU on Notice

The resent Munich Security Conference, and SecState Rubio’s speech there have been much in the news as reflected in the headlines listed at RealClearPolitics and RealClearWorld. His tough love message was much like Vance’s earlier one, except with sugar coating.

George Friedman explains the “how” and “why” of it thusly.

The Europe of today isn’t what it was in 1945. Economically, the European Union’s collective gross domestic product is a bit larger than China’s. There is no economic reason that Europe cannot protect itself, especially in light of Russia’s recent setbacks.

Given this situation, the reasons for U.S. defense guarantees are no longer relevant. The European economy is revived, and the Russian threat has dramatically declined.

It’s a matter of whether Europe can do what it must do: create a European military under the control of a European state, the funds for which would come from Europe’s collective wealth.

Europe contains as many as 50 sovereign states, speaking nearly that many languages or dialects, with a long bloody history of warfare amongst them. Whether they are able to do what the current situation demands is unclear to me, to Friedman, and most importantly to the leaders of those many nations and principalities. 

These Kingston Trio lyrics, from a song ironically titled "The Merry Minuet," are relevant to the EU's problems with coalescing into a nation.

The whole world is festering with unhappy souls.
The French hate the Germans. The Germans hate the Poles.

Italians hate Yugoslavs. South Africans hate the Dutch.
And I don't like anybody very much!

Qui Bono

The Guthrie kidnapping has captured the public interest almost as much as that of the Lindberg baby. We hadn’t had a celebrity kidnapping in the US in several decades. The Frank Sinatra Jr. and Patty Hearst abductions were 50+ years ago.

Several thousand people with visibility, known wealth, and short memories - like the Guthries - have tended to forget the possibility and got careless. The current case is a wake up call.

Lawyers and economists ask the question qui bono, meaning “who benefits.” Thinking about the Guthrie kidnapping, it occurs to me the private security firms - equipment and manpower - will benefit, enormously. 

People in Los Altos, Montecito, Bel Air, Long Island, Miami Beach, and the tonier suburbs of Dallas and Houston will have taken note and in many cases become worried.

As the weeks go by and the whereabouts of the senior Mrs. Guthrie remains unknown, their worry gets worse. And business for security equipment vendors and installers gets better, as does employment in the bodyguard business. Builders of panic rooms will start getting inquiries, too. Arms vendors will sell more self-protection weaponry.

Saturday Snark

My first student assistant could have

modeled for the Big Boy.

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

Some Dim View of China

Several quotes by geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan from a speech delivered at the aPriori 2023 Manufacturing Insights Conference.

China has, at most, 10 years before it faces national dissolution. They will not be a unified industrialized nation state 10 years from now. 

Think of the three big things that have happened with Chinese demography in the last five years, officially. Number one, their population peaked. Number two, India’s population surpassed China’s. And number three, the United States, the average age of the US citizenry is now younger than that of the Chinese citizenry. 

Those all happened in the last five years. And what we’ve discovered in the last five months is no, they didn’t. Those happened 10 years ago. China’s not about to peak; China peaked years ago. And we’re only now starting to get a feel for just how bad the situation is there.

My sense from reading the entire speech is that Zeihan is given to overstatement. So ... color him an optimist, but not a blind one by any means. Hat tip to Scott Pinsker of PJ Media for the link.

Redesigning Our Selves

Someday people will travel to the planets and later to the stars. Doing so will require bodily capabilities we do not now have, and perhaps cannot imagine in their entirety.

RealClearScience has a link to the thinking of someone currently working on identifying and then solving these problems at the genetic level. Honestly it reads like science fiction ... but isn't. 

If even 10% of the promise this work seeks to undertake is successful, our grandchildren will look back and wonder how we survived the terrible risks deemed natural in our era and the recent past. Full disclosure: I wonder that about my grandparents now.

Friday Snark

Images courtesy of Politico's

The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

Images courtesy of RealClearPolitics'

Cartoons of the Week.

The Epstein Fall-out

Jeffrey Epstein was known as a successful money manager and bon vivant long before his appetite for underage girls surfaced. Even after his first conviction in Florida he was still considered to possess some combination of considerable skill and luck at money-management. That cachet attracted people to him, people now rightly or wrongly suffering damage to their reputations and careers. 

I write not to defend Epstein, or his one-time friends and acquaintances, they are well and truly screwed. The millions of pages of Epstein documents probably harbor several more career-ending revelations. 

I write instead to wonder how many people in lofty positions of power and influence are now anxious lest one of their own associates might harbor a secret vice or fetish that could similarly damage them? A case like Epstein’s could reduce interpersonal trust and comradeship for a whole generation of movers and shakers.

Perhaps that anxiety is part of the price of power and visibility.

Thursday Snark

I wonder how many Dems this meme will fool?

Image courtesy of Ed Driscoll, posting at Instapundit.

China’s Birth Dearth

An Indonesian author, writing in the Hong Kong based Asia Times, does a substantial overview of the impacts, both present and future, of China’s extremely low birth rate. A key observation: government efforts to stimulate births where tried have been shown to have quite limited impact. The conclusion:

Demography does not determine destiny, but it sets powerful constraints on what is possible. China remains a formidable state with vast resources and institutional capacity. But it is now a superpower entering old age, confronting demographic limits that policy alone cannot reverse.

COTTonLINE wonders: An autocratic state theoretically could constrain the availability of birth control drugs and devices. Would China’s citizenry rebel, or respond by further cuts in births? 

I’m guessing policy wonks in Beijing are also wondering about that precise question. Hat tip to RealClearWorld for the link.

Another Trans Shooter

The person who shot and killed nine persons in a small British Columbia town has been identified as a born-male transgender 'woman' named Jesse Van Rootselaar. He murdered his mom and stepbrother before going to the high school and killing seven more, wounding others. 

Transgender individuals are a tiny fraction of the populace, yet they've done much more than their share of mass killings. I consider that very suggestive of trans being a mental illness making sufferers susceptible to acting out in violent ways.

Later … See similar arguments made here in the New York Post and here at Power Line.

Good News

Power Line's new guy Bill Glahn posts the following quote from the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment report.

In January, federal government employment continued to decline (-34,000) as some federal employees who accepted a deferred resignation offer in 2025 came off federal payrolls. Since reaching a peak in October 2024, federal government employment is down by 327,000, or 10.9 percent.

10.9% is roughly one ninth of the federal workforce, that's not trivial. Glahn goes on to note this.

Payroll jobs were up for January (+130,000), overall, even as government employment (all levels) fell (-42,000 last month).

All the while the national unemployment rate is declining. This is good news the GOP needs, looking toward November's midterm election.

 Later .... This posted by Instapundit, making the same point graphically:

I'm liking this trend a lot, Trump gets the credit for it.

Poor States' Shining Example

For the New York Times, Nicholas Krisrtof does a long and well-reported article on why the public school children in three Southern states - Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama - are top performers in nationwide tests of child learning. Wonder of wonders, the column is not behind the NYT paywall.

The extent to which these schools are literally chasing down truants and twisting parents' arms to get kids into classrooms is amazing. If you know this part of the nation, children in public schools are predominantly non-white, mostly black. Imagine if you will not permitting students to pass out of third grade unless they can read with some proficiency - these three states are insisting, and the kids are reading and passing.

Kristof makes too little of an important contributing factor. He writes:

It was easier to undertake these reforms in states like Mississippi that lacked strong teacher unions.

No kidding, he writes only that one sentence about perhaps the major factor blocking schools in other states from emulating the success of these three "southern stars." 

These three have overcome what President Bush called "the soft bigotry of low expectations" and replaced it with this, from a superintendent in Marion County.

We no longer accept that our kids can’t compete with anybody in the world.

Kristof points out that nothing about the kids' home environment has been changed.

For many years, skeptics have offered dispiriting arguments about the prospects for educational gains: The way to improve literacy is to fix the family, fix addiction, fix the parents, for as long as the child’s environment is broken, there’s not much else that can be done.

The gains in these states suggest that that critique is wrong. Mississippi and Alabama haven’t fixed child poverty, trauma and deeply troubled communities — but they have figured out how to get kids to read by the end of third grade.

And their math scores improved a lot too.