Statehood for the U.K.?

The New York Post has a column by Sp!ked columnist Brendan O'Neill with this provocative headline.

Forget Canada, Trump should make the UK the 51st state!

The column consists of a series of Trump pronouncements while in Britain, telling PM Keir Starmer how he should be running the U.K. O'Neill takes great pleasure in Starmer's discomfort at being rebuked on his home ground. 

O'Neill really thinks Trump has the right vision for how the Brits should manage their sceptered isle. It's abundantly clear Keir Starmer has no clue and the recently defeated Torys don't either. Nigel Farage might ... or might not.

Do you suppose Trump could propose unifying the Anglosphere into single, gigantic globe-straddling country? I suspect he can think that big. What a coup if he could make it happen.

Memories ....

The current headline article at Politico has this title:

Winklevoss brothers pressed Trump to dump pick for top Wall Street regulator

I can't read the article as it is behind the Politico paywall, but I can see the nice photo of the twins. They look a lot like their father Howard Winklevoss who was a friend in grad school.

Howard, or Wink as he was known, and I were doctoral students at the University of Oregon business school at the same time. The group of b-school doctoral students was small enough we all knew each other. 

We studied different specialties but partied together on more than a few occasions in the late 1960s. As a newly-divorced Californian I would complain about the rain and the coeds' thick ankles and Wink would complain about his fiancee Carol being on the east coast. Or at least that's how I remember it from almost 50 years ago.

We had no idea he would have twins, much less that the twins would be described as "the Trump-supporting billionaire twins." Wink did well himself, he left academia and opened a successful consulting practice applying actuarial science to the management of benefit programs.

A Bullet … Dodged

California has dodged a bullet. Kamala Harris has announced she will not be a candidate for governor in 2026, when current Governor Gavin Newsom is term-limited out of office. 

Whichever doofus they end up electing will be better than Harris. The next gov may not be better than Newsom, however. The CA voters can, and likely will, do worse than he.

The last decent governor CA had was Republican Pete Wilson, and the last really good one was Democrat Edmund G. “Pat” Brown. Wilson finished his second term in 1999 and Pat Brown was defeated by Reagan in 1966.

CA has ‘coasted’ on infrastructure Brown built ever since, eventually outgrowing it. Wishing to do no harm to any living thing, however trivial, CA has been over-regulated to the point of near-gridlock ever since.

If you conclude from the above that politics in CA are a mess, you are being kind. They are something worse than a mere mess, I view them as aspirational Utopianism unguided by common sense.

Wednesday Snark

Image courtesy of Power Line.

Treating Mental Illness

An excellent long City Journal article is about the lack of inpatient beds for psychiatric patients. It was triggered by President Trump's recent EO concerning "Ending Crime and Disorder on America's Streets."

[The EO] declares that “vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks”—often a function of untreated serious mental illness—be addressed through civil commitment and humane treatment in long-term institutional settings. For this effort to succeed, the most urgent priority is expanding the number of available inpatient psychiatric beds. The U.S. currently has a significant shortage.

Why do we have this shortage? The article gives a detailed answer, explaining at length how a confluence of social and financial factors shut down government funding for psychiatric inpatient treatment.

When Medicaid was enacted in 1965, it included a provision known as the “Institutions for Mental Diseases (IMD) exclusion,” which barred federal reimbursement for care provided in psychiatric hospitals.

Today, state hospital bed capacity is down more than 97 percent from peak capacity, adjusted for population. While the IMD exclusion remains in place, simply maintaining current bed capacity is often financially unworkable for states.

As long as the IMD exclusion remains in place, states face a powerful fiscal disincentive to expand public psychiatric bed capacity. Congress must repeal the IMD exclusion and allow Medicaid to cover psychiatric hospitals as it does nearly every other medical setting. Anything less will blunt the impact of the executive order and leave the nation’s most vulnerable without the care they need.

Repeal of the IMD exclusion will require Congressional action. It has the force of law, Trump cannot change it by EO. 

Our Leverage

Axios has a quote by former US Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, echoed at msn.com.

No one fully valued how much leverage our market creates when it comes to trade negotiations until Trump.

No country besides the US has the same combination of large population and great wealth, creating a market to which exporters feel they must have access. One aspect of Trump's genius was recognizing and exploiting this leverage when others did not.

So far only the French seem to be taking umbrage at the EU trade deal. And check this out, courtesy of Instapundit.

Unexceptional Undergraduates

 RealClearScience reports recent research has found college students aren’t as smart as they once were.

The meta-analysis aggregated numerous studies measuring college students’ IQs conducted between 1939 and 2022. The results showed that undergraduates’ IQs have steadily fallen from roughly 119 to a mean of 102 today — just slightly above the population average of 100. In short, undergraduates are now no more intelligent on average than members of the general population.

Almost half of those matriculating do not graduate within 6 years, much less the theoretically possible four years. Full disclosure, it took me 4.5 years to complete my baccalaureate.

According to statistics from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, only 58% of students manage to attain their degrees within six years. What’s more, the rate of dropping out is negatively linked with IQ — the lower an undergraduate’s IQ, the more likely it is that they will leave college without a degree, potentially saddled with debt. One influential study showed that for white American undergraduates with an IQ only slightly above average, their chance of graduating is essentially 50-50.

We shouldn’t overlook that while college students aren’t smarter than average, college graduates likely are smarter. By how much isn’t clear. 

My conclusion is that too many are being encouraged to attend, and the coursework has been dumbed down to permit more to pass. When everybody goes to college, it no longer gives those who do much advantage in the job market. 

This is the labor force version of inflation, printing diplomas instead of printing money with the same end result. It decreases the purchasing power of that which is printed. 

The underlying cause of this decline was the post-World War II GI Bill. It was created to take many “demobbed” GIs out of the labor market and thus prevent post-war mass unemployment.

Billy's 3.0

We've been summering in the vicinity of Jackson, WY for over 30 years. In the early days on Sundays we would eat hamburgers at a dive called Billy's, a side enterprise of a restaurant called The Cadillac. Both were located on Cache St. on the west side of the square in downtown Jackson, facing the block square park with its iconic elkhorn arches.

Billy's was a one room enterprise with the cooks on display and a counter that formed a U around them. We sat on stools and watched our burgers get grilled, fries get deep fried, sodas get drawn, etc. The cooks were rude in a good-humored way, wore funny hats, dreamed up outrageous "house rules," and made themselves useful by handing us our meals straight from the grill and deep fryer. 

The pre-cooking prep was done in The Cadillac's kitchen and you could also order a Billy burger in their bar. The DrsC have fond memories of Billy's on the Square. Examples include meeting VP Dick Cheney's Secret Service detail at Billy's, taking a meal break. Cheney's WY place is in nearby Wilson.

We spotted the curly cords running from the earpieces down under their collars and asked. They were whining about having to run a couple more miles to burn off the calories. 

Another time we met someone we had seen on TV, sitting alongside us munching a burger. Mario Gabelli, a big-deal investor and wealthy market analyst. He is a distinctive-looking gentleman who had been a frequent guest on Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street Week program on PBS. He had a place in Jackson and would hold seminars there for his largest investors. 

Another time we'd finished our meal and were walking to our vehicle when we passed Harrison Ford on the boardwalk outside the Million Dollar Bar, carrying a six pack of bottled beer. Wikipedia says he's 6'1" but he sure looked shorter than that to me. Maybe he didn't have his heels on. He lives near here.

Anyway, The Cadillac folded and, with it, Billy's. A year or so later the owners got a new restaurant named "The Lift" on south Cache by the Snow King ski lift. We went there for burgers for several years. Then that restaurant closed, and the building was razed to put up condos. The mountains hemming in Jackson make developable land scarce and therefore super valuable.

Now Billy's has been revived again, this time co-located with The Virginian hotel-restaurant-saloon combination on west Broadway. We'll have to give it a try, Billy's is a part of old Jackson lore.

Media Defensiveness

The following quote - posted by Instapundit - has the words of New York Times Pulitzer winner Jeff Gerth.

The media isn't looking for Russiagate scoops nor will they fairly present the ones others get if they reflect poorly on their prior reporting. They're in a defensive posture & aren't inclined to report deeply on anything that helps Trump.

In other words, they work for the opposition and publish propaganda, not journalism. If Trump does his level best to discredit or destroy them, I can't blame him, can you?

Poll: Democrats Unpopular

Power Line’s Scott Johnson reports poll findings from The Wall Street Journal (behind paywall) with bad news for Democrats.

The survey finds that 63% of voters hold an unfavorable view of the Democratic Party—the highest share in Journal polls dating to 1990 and 30 points higher than the 33% who hold a favorable view. That’s a far weaker assessment than voters give to Trump or the GOP, who are viewed more unfavorably than favorably by 7 points and 11 points, respectively.

However, GOP optimism isn’t entirely warranted.

The weight of history favors Democrats, as presidents rarely escape a voter backlash in their first midterm election. McInturff, the Republican pollster, points out that five successive presidents have lost control of Congress.

Moreover, voters are continually looking for change. In nine of the last 10 presidential or midterm elections, voters have changed party control of the House, Senate or White House.

Meaning … Trump is entirely wise to get as much done as possible during the first two years of his second term in office. History suggests he will be hard pressed to keep control of the House after the 2026 mid-term election, especially given his very slim majority now.

Saturday Snark

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

Friday Snark

Images courtesy of Politico's

The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

Politics: the Gender Gap

Pew is one of the most respected polling organizations. See their findings on party affiliation by age and gender. Notice particularly the gap between men and women in party registration grows larger with each younger cohort.

About this data, David Strom of Hot Air draws the following conclusion.

Unsurprisingly, most young men aren't buying what the Democrats are selling, even if young women are. And, both sadly and ironically, the young men are feeling liberated by the move while young women feel more and more oppressed--even complaining about the dating pool. They get unhappier, and the Democrats get more of their votes.

As men move right, they become happier. As women move left, they become unhappier. Young women have rates of depression three times higher than young men, and they are blaming men.

Well of course they do, almost nobody wants to take the blame for their troubles. 

Trump Acts ... Yet Again

The New York Post reports President Trump has signed an executive order today concerning the homeless. Bravo.

President Trump signed an executive order Thursday calling on states and cities to end “endemic vagrancy” — and rehouse homeless people including drug addicts and those suffering from mental problems in “treatment centers.”

The order redirects federal funding to prioritize “shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment.”

COTTonLINE has long complained about our national failure to involuntarily house and treat the mentally ill and the addicted. Obviously, many homeless individuals are both. 

A web search shows we first wrote about this problem in 2007, four months after beginning this blog. While I have some libertarian impulses, I draw the line at letting the mentally ill live on the streets, 'treating' their conditions with street drugs and polluting the public square.

CA’s In-N-Out Moving HQ to TN

The burger chain In-N-Out started in California, is still mostly located there, and with a unique operating style, is associated with CA in the public mind. But recent news tells us it is moving its headquarters to Tennessee. Owner Lynsi Snyder, young granddaughter of the founders, says of CA.

Raising a family is not easy here. Doing business is not easy here.

Texas-based author Nicole Russell, writing for USA TODAY, interviewed Snyder and tells us what she means.

California is a bastion of liberalism that's pushed tax rates and the cost of living to ridiculous extremes even as residents' quality of life has declined.

Snyder said state policies, including draconian restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, have made it difficult for businesses to operate.

California, of course, still has extraordinary natural resources, including hundreds of miles of beautiful coastline, majestic mountains, redwood forests, and world-class farmland and vineyards.

What it doesn't have are political leaders with economic sense − or common sense. According to Chief Executive magazine's rankings for the best and worst states for business, California landed in last place. A 2021 Cato Institute study of the best and worst states for entrepreneurs found California placed 48th.

Translation: A merely nice place, well managed, is preferable to a spectacular place badly managed.  CA is the poster child for this truism. FL, TX, and TN are its beneficiaries. Hat tip to RealClearPolitics for the link.

Tuesday Snark

Image courtesy of today's Politico.

Orange Is the New Black, Redux

Two days ago I wrote it would be fun to see Obama in an orange jumpsuit. Obligingly, today President Trump (or a minion) posted a vividly-imagined-but-fake video of Obama getting arrested while meeting with Trump in the Oval Office. Go here to view it on Truth Social.

I'm not holding my breath, waiting for this to actually happen. However, it is closer today than it was when I posted my snarky wish. 

Everybody said the Democrats would someday be sorry they weaponized the legal system for political gain. That day draws ever more near.

Review: Untamed

The DrsC recently finished binge watching the mini-series Untamed streaming on Netflix. It stars Eric Bana, and Sam Neill. It is a cop show with a difference, Bana plays a criminal investigator for the National Park Service, Sam Neill plays his boss, and the series is set in Yosemite National Park. 

The story is serviceable, the acting is good, there is a scary passage in an old gold mine that is claustrophobic, another featuring rock climbers that's suspenseful as anything, and the scenery is spectacular. You could say the park itself is the star, without exaggerating.

If there is a plot hole, it is that a bunch of homeless free spirits camped out in the backcountry are implied to be there year round, when living rough off the grid in deep snow is damned unlikely. Ignore this and the series is a fun watch that made me want to revisit Yosemite's beauty in person.

Called a "mini-series," it nevertheless could get turned into a recurring series if a second season is funded. The Bana character could move to a new park each season, so many are gorgeous places.

A High Stakes Game

COTTonLINE's favorite foreign policy analyst - George Friedman - writes today about Putin's Dilemma in Ukraine. After some good analysis, he concludes:

If it turns out Trump isn’t kidding this time about massive economic actions, Putin will be in a much worse position. At this point, I don’t believe Trump can afford to renege. 

Putin gambled on the chance he could break Ukraine in one last, ruthless effort. Instead, the U.S. has pulled close to NATO and is sending weapons to Ukraine in concert with Germany, which has also deployed tanks closer to Russia’s border. The mystery is whether Putin can politically survive his ongoing miscalculations.

Something to remember, the draconian economic sanctions Trump has threatened have a historical parallel in those FDR imposed on Japan in response to Japan's depredations in China. Feeling itself in an untenable position, Japan responded with Pearl Harbor, and paid dearly. 

What we don't know is if Putin's Russia would similarly decide to "go with the nukes" in a desperate attempt to salvage an untenable situation? If at least some of their missiles got through, we could lose millions dead while obliterating Russia. I can imagine Putin thinking "I personally have nothing to lose in attacking the US. as I'm unlikely to survive a coup against me." Like other notables of recent memory, he too might be reported to have 'jumped or fallen' out a window.

Thinking About Woke

Reviewing Must al-Gharbi's new book, We Have Never Been Woke, James Hartley writes the following. 

How did our recent bout of Wokeness arise? In the first two decades of the 21st century, the number of people with a bachelor’s degree increased by 22 million. But the number of jobs requiring a college education only increased by 10 million. 

The recession arising from the financial crisis of 2008 was the breaking point. Suddenly, there was also a surge in the number of people seeking jobs in law, government, journalism, and academia, while the number of jobs in all those areas was nowhere near high enough to meet the new supply of workers. People who wanted jobs in the symbolic capitalist realm were incurring large amounts of debt with lower prospects for lucrative employment.

The opening salvo of the modern Woke Movement was Occupy Wall Street, five years before Trump was elected. Recall that the complaint was about “the top one percent” of wealth, thus conveniently lumping together someone who aspired to be at the 95th percentile and someone at the 5th percentile as being equally disadvantaged.

Hartley paraphrases al-Gharbi's view of our recent past.

What everyone perceived as Leftism run amok was really just a bunch of elite white liberals trying to amass power in cushy jobs where they can wield words and accusations to gain even more wealth and influence.

Trump's reelection was a repudiation of their failed attempt. I would add, not all of those trying to board the "symbolic capitalist" gravy train were white. Many DEI hires were BIPOC, hired as "window dressing." Hat tip to RealClearPolicy for the link.

99 of the Top 100

In a long column about the gloomy future of cable news programming, the following quote should tell you plenty about the zeitgeist, the spirit or climate of our times. Hat tip to RealClearPolitics for the link.

Fox News continues to dominate cable news ratings, maintaining its lead over NBC/MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN, with the network holding 99 of the top 100 cable news telecasts in the week of May 12, 2025.

Fox News is the only one of the majors which doesn't start from the premise that conservatives have evil motives. It dominates the right side of TV news and commentary, while the left is split among all of the others. In a mildly conservative nation, Fox has the better business model.

Update

My summer office window looks north into an aspen forest, the nearest trees being maybe six feet from the house. The berry shrubs that form part of the understory have ripened and songbirds come to feed.

I just saw a little fellow about 5" beak to tail with brown wings, a yellow breast and a reddish face. I write "he" as normally male birds are the gaudy ones. 

A quick web search suggests he was a western tanager and he brightened my day. A range map shows them to be "breeding residents" in this region, they winter in southern Mexico and Central America.

Claim: Obama Was Dirty

Wouldn't it be fun to see former President Barack Obama in an orange prison jumpsuit? It is still a dim possibility but not quite as dim as it was a few days ago. 

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has posted documents and commentary that points to Obama leading the effort to create the fake dossier claiming Russian interference in support of presidential candidate Trump. She is alleged to have called the effort and its participants treasonous.

Will anything like a trial come of it? Unlikely, imagine the entire administrative blob screaming "Raaaay-cism," ignoring the fact Col. Gabbard was born in American Samoa to mixed race parents and lists her faith as "Hindu."

Conclusion: the Obama Administration was never scandal-free, as some have claimed.

Just Saying Stuff

Writing for Politico, Dan Brooks does a deep dive into the very Trumpian phenomenon of what Brooks calls “the just-saying-stuff presidency.”

Trump’s commitment to loose talk has given him unprecedented leeway to act on his words without criticism or debate, before people have even decided whether he’s serious.

Basically, Brooks has taken Salena Zito’s pithy observation that Trump’s people take him “seriously but not literally” and analyzed its various parts. For example:

[Trump] generally knows when he is lying, joking, bluffing or riffing to see what sticks, as well as when he is speaking sincerely and when he is giving the impression of one but actually doing the other. And his awareness creates an information asymmetry that works to his advantage.

Trump is, after all, at least in part an entertainer, reading the room, and delivering what the audience either wants to hear or will find titillating. I think we can discern his core program but it is ‘juiced’ with audience-pleasing riff, shtick, and trial balloons.

A Blast from the Past

Ed Driscoll posts at Instapundit an Ann Coulter quote from late 2003, that still has resonance 22 years later, although with a few notable recent exceptions.

When they’re running for office, all Democrats claim to support tax cuts (for the middle class), to support gun rights (for hunters) and to “personally oppose” abortion. And then they get into office and vote to raise taxes, ban guns and allow abortions if a girl can’t fit into her prom dress.

The common wisdom holds that “both parties” have to appeal to the extremes during the primary and then move to the center for the general election. To the contrary, .both parties run for office as conservatives. Once they have fooled the voters and are safely in office, Republicans sometimes double-cross the voters. Democrats always do.

It’s an important difference, nevertheless. 

Saturday Snark

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

About Weather

A climate contains more natural variation than most people realize. Let me give you an example from personal experience.

When the DrsC first had a summer place here in western Wyoming 30+ years ago, it was common for the area to have afternoon thunderstorms. These were usually brief but noisy and included a few minutes of hard rain, and occasionally hail. 

Our first house here had cedar siding, stained brown, and one of those hail storms hit the front of our attached garage so hard it ended up looking like it had tan measles. Each tiny impact had broken the surface of the brown stain and showed the cedar's natural unfinished color. We had to apply more stain.

Then starting about 25 years ago the afternoon summer thundershowers stopped. Anyone who came here after that could have spent 15-20 years here thinking the summers were largely rain free.

This year they've started up again, one is happening as I write this. We've had several so far this year since we arrived in May. 

I know afternoon summer thundershowers are normal here, many who haven't summered here since the mid-1990s (as we have) will think what is happening this summer is evidence of climate change - and they'll be wrong. 

Summers with thundershowers and summers without them are both normal here, and you can get a bunch of years in a row with one or the other. When I first visited this area with my parents in 1949 on a summer camping trip we had afternoon rain more than once during our brief stay, I remember its distinctive sound on the canvas tent.

Much of what is alleged to be "climate change" is in fact normal climate variation that simply hasn't occurred for several years. Irregular occurrence is itself normal. 

Relax and go with what Mom Nature decides she's serving for weather today. Whatever arrives isn't your fault.

Friday Snark

Images courtesy of Politico's 

The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

Leftism in the Rain

The College Fix reports the University of Oregon lost a civil court battle with a Portland State U. prof who responded to a leftist rant in one of their websites with the rejoinder “all men are created equal.” He was subsequently blocked from their comments section, and sued U. of O. 

Rather than recognize that a quote from the Declaration of Independence is protected speech, U. of O. fought the suit and lost. They ended up out half a million plus in their own legal fees and having to pay nearly two hundred thousand in the winner’s fees.

I did my doctoral work at U. of O. several decades ago. It was a leftist swamp then, even in the business school, and apparently has not changed. I kept my head down, ignored most of it and survived.

During my three years there anti-Vietnam war protestors occupied the acting president’s office, and presented him with “non-negotiable” demands he had no authority to accede to. They hassled him until he committed suicide by driving his VW bug at speed head-on into a loaded logging truck - central Oregon’s version of the juggernaut. They also torched the ROTC building. Crazy times. 

Hat tip to Instapundit for the link.

Addicted to Sanctimony

Writing at PJ Media, Matt Margolis observes the problems currently troubling the Democratic Party don't involve needing to be tougher, as Obama claimed recently.

The real problem isn’t a lack of emotional fortitude; it’s a party out of touch with ordinary voters, addicted to its own sanctimony and incapable of moderating its agenda.

Analysis: true in all respects.

Thursday Snark

Images courtesy of RealClearPolitics' Cartoons of the Week.