Travel Blogging VII

We are tied up alongside in Clarkston, WA and have reached the end of our passage. We are at the south edge of the Palouse country of Eastern WA, and the other side of the river is Lewiston, ID. The terrain is gently rolling hills on which wheat is grown. The “coastal feeling” is gone, we’ve reached “big sky” country.

We will overnight here on the boat and fly out tomorrow morning. Some pax are taking jet boat trips to Hells Canyon but we’re just staying aboard. Tomorrow night we’ll be home in eastern Nevada, after changing planes in SLC.

We’ve already decided to take another trip with American Cruise Lines, the next one on the Tennessee rivers from Nashville to Chattanooga. It happens in mid-October. We hope to visit friends in the Knoxville area while there.

Serendipity

ICE agents had gotten an image as roughhouse goons grabbing innocent people for export. Then POTUS sent them to help TSA at the airports and … viola! … we discovered they were nice people assigned a dismal task. 

Lots of flyers learned that ICE were normal folks and not fanged monsters; it is an excellent outcome. I believe it took a lot of wind out of the ICE Out movement’s sails.

Ad Astra

Blogfather Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit) is a long-time science fiction fan, it crops up in his stuff from time to time. With a US team launched on a trip around the moon, this becomes one of those “times.”

He’s right about our return to space being long overdue. I’d hoped to see men on Mars in my lifetime, but probably won’t. He’s younger than I, maybe he’ll get lucky. I have some chance of seeing a human colony on the moon, and that will be excellent.

After being a hotshot outfit all those years ago, NASA morphed into a geriatric bunch who seemingly can’t shoot straight. Careerism in FedGov acts like a wasting disease, for which we seemingly have no cure.

Reynolds is probably right that Elon Musk will spearhead the return to space. Musk wants it in his lifetime and has the money to get what he wants. 

I’m a longtime science fiction fan too. The space frontier awaits, let’s go!

Travel Blogging VI

Greetings from Richland, WA. Sky overcast, rain today as well as late yesterday. No visit to the Northwest would be right without being rained on a couple of times. Actually, by the region’s standards we’ve have good weather, several dry days. It remains cool, not frigid.

This is a part of the northwest I’ve not spent much time in. In our RV travels we’ve driven through this area a couple of times but had no destinations hereabouts to draw us back. 

The area isn’t heavily populated and tends to be conservative. The vibe is more upper Midwest than Coastal. Parts of this region have tried to secede and join Republican Idaho, so far with no success. Counties in eastern OR have held votes on it.

I’m told we reach the Lewiston/Clarkston area tomorrow, and fly out the next day. We’ve had an excellent time, the crew spoils us to an embarrassing extent, and feed us at every opportunity. Last night was prime rib.

The Columbia River heads north at Richland, and we split off onto the Snake River and keep heading east. Ironically, the south fork of the Snake passes a 20 minute drive from our place in WY. Of course we aren’t cruising anywhere near WY, we’d have to cross southern ID to get there, and that is an all day drive.

Political Gain and Economic Self-interest

Power Line’s John Hinderaker shares some scientific findings on the issue of climate change.

We use the Epica-Vostok Ice core dataset, a single proxy dataset for temperature data sampled every century for the last 800,000 years or so and ask the question “Is a 1.1°C temperature rise in a century unusual in this dataset?”

Usually, the Earth is caught in a deep freeze. Happily, we are living in an inter-glacial warm period. In fact, the Earth has been warmer than it is today the overwhelming majority of the time since the end of the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago.

The overwhelming weight of scientific evidence refutes the global warming catastrophism that is relentlessly propagated for reasons of political gain and economic self-interest.

It would appear another Ice Age is the greater risk. Charts and citations in the original.

Travel Blogging V

Today is what on an ocean cruise is called a “sea day,” that is a day spent cruising from place to place. One not spent in tied up alongside in port. We are sailing upriver on the Columbia, and as I write this have just passed through the locks at John Day dam. We shared the lock with a pleasure craft - a cabin cruiser of maybe 30’.

Locks are a feature of river cruising, we’ll pass through eight on our way upstream to the Lewiston/Clarkston area - four each on the Columbia and Snake rivers. The most locks I’ve ever seen on one crossing is on the Rhine-Main Canal linking the Rhine and Danube rivers, we’ve passed through those on several trips from Amsterdam to Vienna.

We are having a lazy day, I slept in. The scenery continues to be excellent. Right now we are sailing beside a quite large mountain that is a mile or so north of the river. There are wind turbines atop it, as usual not turning. We will look back and marvel at how dumb those were.

I believe our next stop is near Pendleton. We see much evidence of long-ago vulcanism, outcrops of basaltic rock. This region continues to be a place where volcanoes lie hopefully dormant, but some clearly are not so quiet - Mt. St. Helens, for example. 

The weather continues with overcast skies, the norm in this region. Atypically no rain so far, I expect some and will be surprised if the cruise ends having experienced no rain. Californians drive up here in summer and marvel at how green it is, compared to CA. Many don’t realize it has to rain a lot for that to occur.

Research: Leaving CA Pays Off

Hot Air reports research findings that show people who leave California for elsewhere end up being better off financially - more likely to become homeowners - than those who stayed behind. This is no surprise but also no small thing.

I don’t remember sharing our personal example of moving our residence-of-record from CA to WY. We saved enough in state income and sales taxes to pay for a nice overseas trip every year.

WY has NO state income tax and the sales tax is 4-5% instead of 8-10% in CA. The big savings is not paying state income tax.

The DrsC can afford to live in CA but we are better off financially living elsewhere. Plus government policy in WY more closely aligns with our conservative values. If WY isn’t the most Republican state it is certainly among those few in contention for that honor.

Alberta to Vote on Independence?

Gambling site Polymarket has the odds of a referendum for independence in Alberta this year at 60%. Stephen Green posting at Instapundit has the story. 

Things could get spicy in the oil patch up north!

Travel Blogging IV

Greetings from The Dalles, OR. Weather overcast and cool but no rain. Town is tired and past its prime. It reminds me of a lot of towns which the Twenty-first Century has passed by, Oroville in particular. 

Both towns experienced a boom while their dam was built, and then languished when the high-wage construction workers moved on to the next site. Too many residents live in far-from-new mobile homes.

The town name means rapids which once existed on the Columbia River at this location, before dams and navigation became prevalent. The terrain hereabouts features large blocks of basalt and fairly could be called semi-harsh.

We’ve left most of the coastal conifer forest behind. Locals call this a semi-desert as it only gets a CA amount of rainfall, on the order of 14” a year.  Still, like CA at this time of year, it is green as anything and the fruit trees are blooming.

We’re eating too much and taking it easy, the crew is spoiling us rotten. The scenery on this river cruise is a lot better than on the Mississippi, not so flat. On Old Man River mostly all you see is a wall of trees on both banks and the terrain behind the trees rarely raises high enough to be visible.

Escape from LA

Yet another milestone in the ‘decline and fall’ of California, this time reported on X by long-time Los Angeles independent TV station KTLA, Channel 5. 

LEAVING LOS ANGELES: L.A. County saw the largest decline of any county in the United States in 2025, according to new census data.

It’s no record to be ‘proud’ of. Snake Plissken was unavailable for comment. 

—————

I watched the Spade Cooley and Ina Ray Hutton shows on Ch. 5 in the 1950s. It was one of only three channels we could get some 50+ miles NW of LA. 

Like much live TV of the era, in retrospect it was embarrassingly poor stuff in snowy B&W but we watched it anyway. The Ch. 5 broadcasts of the New Years Day Rose Parade were better than the networks’ offerings.

Travel Blogging III

Good morning from Kalama, Washington. It is a river-port town almost half way from Astoria ton Portland, heading upriver. Weather sunny after rain was predicted. Rain now said to arrive tonight, we’ll see.  

From here most pax will visit Mt. St. Helens volcano by bus, and will be gone most of the afternoon. From ship to buses was a long walk but we’ve old legs and found the prospect daunting so we’ll stay aboard. We often do this, and have the ship to ourselves while most pax are ashore.

The passengers (pax) of this ship are like the residents of our winter 55+ village in NV, looking at them you’d imagine nearly all oldsters are long married, at least somewhat happily. I doubt the statistics show that to be the case for the population at large. Both 55+ developments and cruises tend to be favored by the long married, quite possibly because such folk are more financially able to afford them.

You have to wonder what the older divorced and never married do for entertainment and where they choose to live in retirement. I’d guess they may not live as long - on average - as the married. Those of our friends who divorced and remarried tend to have less money to live on than those long together. Two can truly live more cheaply than one on a per capita basis, and with any luck they have two retirements coming in.

Travel Blogging II

Good morning from chilly, overcast Astoria, on the cool, damp north Pacific Coast. Something West Coast natives seldom admit: coastal skies are often overcast, or even foggy, in the morning. It often, but not always, “burns off” by noon or one pm.

When I lived in the Bay Area for several years, I would joke that every weather forecast would include the following. “Night and morning low clouds clearing locally inland in the afternoon, highs in the 50-60s, lows in the 40s.” That was the forecast something like 300 days a year.

It is a damp cold. A well-dressed gentleman in post-war San Francisco wore a topcoat over his suit and tie, and wasn’t too warm. Mark Twain joked the coldest day he ever experienced was a breezy summer (!) day in SF.

Astoria is at the mouth of the Columbia River, on the coast. Ocean-going ships sail upriver as far as Portland, which is a fair distance.

We’ve sailed down here and beginning tonight will commence sailing upstream to the juncture with the Snake River, which we will then take upstream to the neighboring cities of Lewiston ID and Clarkston WA, named for the famous explorers. We will follow their route home as far as Lewiston before disembarking and heading for our home.

Later … We took a bus tour of Astoria in the late morning, learned this area was settled by Scandinavians of all sorts, with emphasis on Finns. The guide joked who but Scandinavians would find a cloudy, cold place with million of conifers and lots of fish so entirely homelike. They looked around and said we know how to make this place work for us and stayed. Nordics predominate down this coast until nearly SF. From SF south the ethnicity of watermen switches to an Italian and Portuguese mix. 

When as a grad student I lived for 3 years in Eugene OR, I shared a house with a couple of other  B-school grad students. One of these - Olson from MN - thought the lack of snow was lovely; from CA, I hated the incessant drizzle. Same northwest weather - seen from two perspectives - reaching opposite conclusions. Life is like that.

Travel Blogging I

Greetings from Portland, Oregon. Weather here is atypically beautiful, flight here from St. George UT uneventful. TSA in St. George fully operational w/o aid of ICE, essentially zero wait time.

We overnight in an Embassy Suites and head out tomorrow a.m. early. We will begin with a visit to Multnomah Falls, followed by boarding our river boat, arriving in time for lunch. If we can post pix, they will appear at the other DrC’s blog.

Tomorrow afternoon we cruise west toward the coast, destination Astoria. That is a stretch of the Columbia I have not seen. Anticipation for an enjoyable week aboard is widely shared by pax we met at tonight’s cocktail party.

Update

We go traveling tomorrow and will be away from the desktop for over a week. Thus, the usual Friday Snark and Saturday Snark will be missing this weekend. With luck they may return next weekend. 

In the meantime - via the IPad - expect some “travel blogging” of our river cruise up the Columbia and Snake rivers. We’ve traveled with American Cruise Line before, on the Mississippi, and enjoyed that very much. We expect no less from the next week or so. We have fingers crossed about TSA delays on tomorrow’s flight to Portland.

Review: Young Sherlock

The DrsC recently semi-binge watched the first season of Young Sherlock on Amazon Prime Video streaming. Endeavoring to avoid spoilers for this fresh approach to the classic Conan Doyle character, let me say upfront we liked it and look forward to a second season.

The characters are interesting, multidimensional, and at least three hark back to the Doyle original. The Brits do this sort of historical stuff so well, it’s a joy to just take in the period costuming and scenery. In this telling, Holmes has a different sister, not Enola, but Beatrice. Both his parents have major roles in this first season. It isn’t perfect, but very nice nonetheless. 

Full disclosure: I am a lifelong Sherlockian, one of the first adult books I owned (and still have) is a well-thumbed, doorstop-sized Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle. Jeremy Brett did my favorite TV version of the famously quirky adult Holmes.

More Good News

The International Olympic Committee has banned biological males from competing in women’s events in the Olympics. The ruling is effective with the 2028 summer games in Los Angeles. Politico has the story.

Score it as another battle won in the war against woke; this one on the international level no less.

Why Homelessness

At COTTonLINE we don’t often raise the topic of homelessness, because we are fortunate to live far from where it mostly occurs - in cities. Unlike urban folk, we don’t live with the squalor and hassle day in and day out.

Writing at City Journal, Heather Mac Donald gets quite specific about who is homeless, who makes a living off of ‘helping’ them, and what false ‘facts’ our society has to believe to let it persist. If the issue is relevant to you, her column debunks current programs, clarifies where we are, and condemns it.

Preserving public safety, keeping streets clean and passable, building and maintaining transportation infrastructure, safeguarding property—those functions are embarrassingly bourgeois and repressive in the eyes of every nonconservative politician and bureaucrat. Today, progressive governance prioritizes the antisocial, the deviant, and the alienated over the law-abiding majority, which is increasingly cast in the role of a revenue source rather than a constituency to be served.

As long as the “woke” control city governments and persist in protecting the right to public insanity and addiction, your only practical option is to avoid cities as much as possible.  

I did learn one useful acronym from Mac Donald’s column, it is MICAs,  a label for Mentally Ill, Chemical Abusers. Most of the homeless are exactly that and should be receiving involuntary inpatient treatment and housing, out of the public eye.

Madam Minister

If you had asked me 20 years ago if I would live to see the day an Arab nation had a woman as Minister of State, the equivalent of our SecState, my answer would have been an unequivocal "NO." I expect most educated Westerners would have said the same. We'd have been wrong, too.

The United Arab Emirates now has a woman as Minister of State, one Lana Nusseibeh. Fox News' Bret Baier interviewed her earlier this afternoon for his Special Report, which the DrsC were fortunate to watch. Red State also has a column about her visit with Baier.

Minister Nusseibeh was beyond impressive, she is well-informed, has excellent English, and is a forceful spokeswoman who speaks with authority and abundant good sense. Fox has YouTube video of her segment here. A web search reveals she is by birth a Palestinian, educated in the U.K. 

Obama Kicked the Can ...

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has read Peter Baker’s NYT column so you don’t have to fight their paywall. He relays Baker’s reporting of an interaction between President Obama and his director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair. Morrissey quotes Baker as follows.

“When it came my turn to speak at this meeting,” Mr. Blair recalled, “I said, ‘Mr. President, you really just have one decision to make. It’s really important, but it’s only a single one. Are you going to tolerate Iran having a nuclear weapon or not?’” If no, he said, then that would prompt certain espionage and military options. If yes, then it would require ways to contain and deter a nuclear-armed Iran.

Obama hated this contribution, and chewed out Blair. He later excluded Blair from subsequent meetings, and eventually fired him. 

Spineless Obama had a third way to deal with Iran which resulted in his JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action) in which Iran agreed to delay the development of nukes. It was "kick the can down the road," stall for time and leave the by-then-much-worse problem for a later president to solve. Trump is that "later president" and now is the time.

I've seen the claim Obama was our worst president, I am inclined to think that is a bit too negative. He might be among the worst five, which would also include Carter and Biden.

Detention Required Pending Deportation

Federal judges especially in Minnesota have been granting bail to persons picked up for deportation as illegal aliens. Politico reports the Eighth Circuit court just ruled against this loophole.

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 Wednesday that the administration had properly determined that federal law doesn’t only allow — but requires — ICE to detain the vast majority of people it is seeking to deport.

This is an excellent finding, one unlikely to be overturned, or even heard, by SCOTUS. This is a win for American citizens and legal immigrants.

It is vital that we undo much of the vileness Biden open borders created. Unlike administrative decisions which can be undone by the next president, legal precedents like this one tend to be long-lived. 

Also, people in detention are much more likely to accept voluntary deportation as a “get out of jail free card.” Every illegal alien we can send home is a message to others in that country that making the trip isn’t worth it. 

PopSci Goes There

A quick web search shows I’ve been writing about the problematic future of Artificial Intelligence for at least 10 years. Instapundit links to a Popular Science article tying AI to the "Butlerian jihad." 

That is a term from Frank Herbert’s doorstop novel Dune. In that future history, at some point in our not-too-distant future we concluded that thinking machines were a threat to human existence and banned them entirely, the jihad referring to the Luddite rebellion this required.

If intelligence is what makes people special, and we develop machines with intelligence, how do they not have human rights? Does turning off the power become 'murder' or merely 'anesthesia?' And do they have a say in whether or not power can be turned off? 

We are wading out into an unexplored swamp and we have no idea if we can survive the AI experience, or even profit from it. 

Spring Has Sprung

I allowed the Spring Equinox to pass yesterday without notice, my apologies. Spring is officially here. A couple of days ago I switched the HVAC system from heat to cool, where it will remain until early November. 

Of course on the Mojave we've been in shirtsleeve weather for some weeks, while 500+ miles north at our Wyoming home it won't be really spring for another month. A lot of places have had a tough winter, our NV place is truly a haven from all that. 

Days are noticeably longer now, I can fire up the BBQ grill w/o turning on outside lights. We've seen outdoor temps in the low 90s already, very comfortable with no humidity.

Choosing “Poorly”

I am twice a graduate of San Jose State University (B.S., M.S.), both milestones passed many decades ago. I enjoyed my years there, I do not like seeing it get this kind of negative publicity. 

Apparently its current leadership has decided the risible “men in women’s athletics” issue is the hill they’ve elected to die on. In the fabled words of the ancient Templar, they “chose poorly” (classical reference) 

Sadly they won’t get the instantaneous comeuppance he witnessed in “the Valley of the Crescent Moon,” more’s the pity. I do like SecEd McMahon’s funding threat, and I will not contribute to the alumni fund.

Back to Nomadic Herding

Yesterday afternoon President Trump posted the following on X. As Ukraine discovered, power plants are in known locations and hard to defend.

If Iran doesn't FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

Iran probably has backup generators for hospitals and key government buildings, if fuel can be provided. 

Without electric power civilization disappears and society reverts to prior norms. Water and sewage don't move, refrigeration ends, heat comes from fire, or sunlight, most homes become little more than artificial caves. Gas stations can't pump fuel, traffic lights don't work, etc. Phones and tablets can't be charged.

Imagine digging a pit privy in your yard, if you have a yard. Carrying water from God-knows-where, cooking over an open fire, and scrounging for light after sunset. Apartment dwellers can't even do this much.

Interestingly, the rural poor will probably be more able to cope than more fortunate urbanites. They are accustomed to living around dung piles and have animals to kill and eat.

Mowing Iran's Grass

It is being reported in various locations that Iran launched an attack on the joint U.K./U.S. base at Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean. They fired two intermediate range ballistic missiles at the base.

One failed in flight, another was attacked by an anti-air missile fired by a US Navy ship. Neither reached the target, which is 2400 miles from Iran. It was not previously known that Iran had operational weapons of this range.

Such weapons threaten many targets in Europe, Africa, and India. Combine these missiles with the crude nuke Iran could possibly cobble together and you've got a threat to much of the world. 

This certainly makes fools of those who claimed Iran was no threat. The threat is real, and it's in a region that produces martyrdom-seeking suicide bombers. Who's to say they won't try to revenge themselves on, for example, Rome and the Vatican, in addition to Tel Aviv?

You can't build ballistic missiles in a blacksmith shop. We need to keep bombing until their industrial capacity is destroyed. Instead of a ceasefire, we may need to go back periodically and "mow the grass*," - get rid of whatever they've rebuilt until they're ready to "play nice."

*An Israeli term of art for periodic attacks to keep an enemy weak, originally applied to Gaza.

Saturday Snark

IRBM attack on Diego Garcia leaves Kent looking dumb.

Dame Diana Rigg, of fond memory.

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.

Images courtesy of RealClearPolitics'

Cartoons of the Week.

Priorities

People are fond of writing and saying "Diversity is our strength." Voices raising doubts about that assertion are not often heard. I propose to raise the issue.

In a heterogeneous society like ours, certainly diversity is a strength, in that it enables most of us to feel included. I question whether it should be our only, or even our most important strength.

I argue that if we were to pick our key strength, it should be that group of things variously labeled skill, merit, excellence, or superior ability. If most people selected for a particular job come from one subgroup, because they are best able to get it done, that is more important than diversity.

Diversity would suggest NBA teams should be roughly 60% white, 20% Hispanic, and 12% black. That isn't the case, a majority of the most able players are black and the teams reflect that. 

Hispanics are seriously underrepresented in basketball, while overrepresented in MLB. When the job is staffing the most capable team, we become color-blind and look for superior ability. Why is that wrong in other occupations?

Let's say you're a middle aged guy, slightly overweight with a sedentary occupation. You stand a good chance of needing open heart surgery sometime in the next decade or two. 

How excited are you to learn that today's medical schools are all about "diversity is our strength?" Believe it, they are. I find that a scary thought, perhaps you do as well. Wouldn't you rather med schools were ruthlessly meritocratic? I would. 

An argument can be made that diversity programs actually foster discrimination against graduates from groups known to be favored. The programs raise suspicions about their qualifications that wouldn't occur if discrimination in their favor was not government policy.

Trumpian Humor

Our President has a robust sense of humor, and a sharp tongue. The Daily Wire reports the following interaction.

A Japanese reporter asked President Trump,

Why didn't you tell us before you struck Iran?

President Trump replied,

Why didn't you tell me about Pearl Harbor?

Ouch! I'll bet that smarted.

Seeking Consequential Outcomes

I call your attention to a good column in the New York Post by Martin Gurri, a former CIA official who is not even a little anti-Trump. Gurri begins thus:

At the start of his second term, President Trump surveyed the slowly rotting swamp that was the post-Cold War landscape, and he did not like what he saw. 

He has determined to scour it clean of dangerous attachments, conditions, and — as we now know — regimes the president considers to be a legacy of past American weakness.

His ultimate objective? A world open for business that realistically reflects the preponderance of American economic and military power. 

Gurri follows with an itemization of the feckless responses of our supposed major allies. He concludes this way:

The decline of the democracies, no matter how artfully camouflaged, has brought about the opposite of peace. Cowardice and weakness are a poor place to search for rules. Entropy isn’t order.

And like it or not, for good or harm, Trump will bestride the world over the next three years seeking high-risk but consequential outcomes rather than polite fictions.

Hat tip to Sasha Stone for the link, she liked it as do I. 

Most: College No Longer Worth High Cost

Here comes a new poll by Issues & Insights. It finds that the public has soured on college education as the universal panacea for career success in our difficult environment, a role it has held since the late 1940s. They report:

The national online poll, taken Feb. 24 to Feb. 27, asked 1,456 adults: “Do you believe a four-year college degree is worth the cost for most Americans today, or not?”

The answer indicates serious erosion in how Americans view the value of higher education. Overall, of those responding, 59% selected “Not worth the cost,” while just 24% picked “Worth the cost.” Another 16% weren’t sure. The poll has a +/-3.0 percentage-point margin of error.

(By comparison, as recently as 2013, a Gallup Poll found that 70% of Americans believed college was worth the price.)

I'm thinking higher education has finally jumped the shark. It has gotten so expensive, so ideologically driven, and so impractical that its former luster is gone.

On a personal note, the DrsC were fortunate to hit the higher ed "sweet spot" of post-war growth and boom times. Also fortunate to retire before the momentum faded and the emphasis on merit was lost. 

We can take credit only for recognizing opportunity when it showed up, and jumping aboard. Most of the decline has occurred since we retired - which we did just a skosh early.

L'Affare Kent

You may have read of the resignation-in-protest of Joe Kent, an administration counter-intelligence official. He announced it was in protest of the war in Iran, he claims Iran is no threat.

Fox News' Aishah Hasnie reports:

A senior administration official tells FOX, Joe Kent was:

-a known leaker and he was cut out of POTUS intelligence briefings months ago.
-the WH told DNI Tulsi Gabbard he should be fired for suspected leaks but she never did.
-he has not been part of any Iran planning discussions or briefings at all.

"He said, she said," who knows who is right?  Both sides have reason to lie, and probably are.

----------

My view of Iran's threat: If a person (or nation) says he wants to kill you, and is seen working to attain the means to do so, believe him and act accordingly. This we and the Israelis have done. 

Iran's Death to the Great and Little Satans merits our Death to Iran, or at least to those leaders claiming to act on Iran's behalf and to the infrastructure supporting their efforts.

Iran spent 47 years threatening us. Literally scores of other nations which have made no such threats tonight sleep peacefully in their beds. The lesson Iran needs to learn is clear, as voiced by James Brown:

Don't start none, won't be none.

Breaking ... Sorry, Broken

Stephen Green just posted at Instapundit a claim the Iranian embassy in Copenhagen has taken down the current Iran flag and raised the sun and lion flag of the Shah's regime. There is video but it is unclear and could be faked.

Is it vandalism, a defection, or the start of something bigger, like regime change? As another posted at that same site, the key will be to see if it happens elsewhere and how broadly the change shows up.

This could be a hoax, could be a defection, could be vandalism by anti-regime Irani emigrants, or it could be, as the song says, "the start of something big."

Something like this happened in London and the Brit police arrested the protestor who made the switch.

As the "orange man" likes to say, "We'll see what happens."

Later ... It turns out the old flag was raised by a protestor who was arrested by Danish police. 

Aside, as I typed "Danish police" I got a mental image of a uniformed dude guarding sweet rolls in a bakery. Our language is funny that way.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

I write to wish COTTonLINE readers a happy St. Paddy's Day. Wear your green, avoid the green beer.

As I've probably mentioned before, my university decided spring break would always include St. Patrick's Day. They did this for a very good reason. 

Before this policy was instituted, with students on campus on March 17, the kids took it as a challenge to see how drunk they could get. If we had no deaths from alcohol poisoning, it wasn't from lack of trying.

Fearful of damage suits and bad publicity, the U concluded whatever students did when school wasn't in session wasn't their fault. There was going to be a weeklong spring break sometime anyway. Why not be sure that Get Drunk Day, as it became, occurred during spring break? And so it did.

My Scarpetta Review

We spent the last couple of nights binge watching the new Scarpetta on streaming. The other DrC has a good review of it on her website. 

I have a couple of things to add to what she wrote. I found the most interesting plot ‘gimmick’ was the nerd niece's dead wife brought back to life as an AI realtime onscreen voice and video presence. Her’s was by far the most charming role in the series, and very nearly its only sympathetic character. 

Everyone else was flawed enough to be off-putting, while all were competent-to-varying-degrees in their careers. I wonder if that is how Nicole Kidman experiences her off-screen life?

[Spoiler Alert] The series - nominally a whodunnit - violated one of that genre’s basic plot “rules.” It turned out the perp was someone whose only presence before the denouement was a one-line walk-on. There was no way for the viewer to have Holmes’ed it out.

I found the series shared a number of plotting flaws with Kidman’s earlier series, The Perfect Couple. My conclusion, she is a competent actress but I should avoid those of her future efforts in which she also has an off-camera role. These two examples of her notion of a good story left me irritated.

Iran's New Leader Gay?

The newly elected leader of Iran is Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the former Ayatollah recently killed in a bomb blast. It has been reported in several places that he was repeatedly treated for impotence in England.

The New York Post reports that President Trump has been briefed that although married with children, Mojtaba is gay. That was why his father preferred someone else as his successor. The White House was quite amused by this gossip. 

If this was alleged of the leader of any first world country, it would be mildly interesting. That it is alleged of the leader of a country in which homosexuality is a death penalty offense is massively ironic. NYP has some details about this supposed condition dating back to Mojtaba's childhood. 

Comments about karma are irresistible. Also ironic that in neighboring Afghanistan sex with pretty boys is very common for wealthy clan leaders. The bacha practice grossed out GI officers who had to liaise with the Afghan clans.

Huntington Smiles

Writing for the California Post, the new west coast edition of the New York Post, James Gagliano notes a disturbing pattern in recent unpleasant incidents here at home. He cites the attempted bombing of anti-Iran protests in NYC, the murder of an ROTC prof in Virginia, and the ramming/shooting attack of a synagogue in Michigan.

Note the common thread: All these attackers were either naturalized citizens or their offspring.

We steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that the terror threat within our borders is stoked from the outside, inspired by those who hate us and wish us dead.

Make no mistake — this is asymmetric warfare, and Iran is not its only driver.

The sooner we recognize that radical Islam has been at war with the West for far longer than anyone reading this has been alive, the sooner we can begin to better confront this threat.

Ah, there it is in that last sentence, the recognition of the thing most want desperately to forget. It’s the Long War - Samuel Huntington’s 1992 Clash of Civilizations. 

We in the West want to forget but they won’t let us, as 9/11 should have reminded. Intermittently hot and cold, it either began with the Crusades or continued with them.

It lives in the founding documents of Islam, and periodically flares up, as now. My mental model for it is quasi-medical. Islam treats Western culture as an irritating foreign object. 

Periodically it generates ‘antibodies’ and ‘white blood cells’ like the IRGC, ISIS, Hamas, al Qaeda, the Houthis and Hezbollah to attack and destroy the irritant (us, non-Islam). ‘Infection’ or ‘allergic reaction’ results, we then call it “war,” they’ve always been clear about that name.

Christianity and Islam are both Abrahamic schisms. That they went in different directions is no surprise, the first was founded by a preacher, the second by a soldier. We seek coexistence, they seek “Death to the Great Satan.” It’s “love thy neighbor” vs. “convert or die.”

Volunteers vs. Draftees

President Trump is discovering something President Putin has learned. Wars one fights with volunteer troops do not cause the same intense reaction at home as wars fought with drafted soldiers. There is an implicit understanding that volunteering for the military puts the volunteer in lethal harm’s way. 

Russians are not as crabby about the war in Ukraine as they were about that in Afghanistan. Seeing this Putin has gone to extreme lengths - big signing bonuses, get out of jail ‘cards’, etc. - to send only volunteers to the fight in Ukraine. Relatively few of the casualties have been people from the Moscow and St. Petersburg regions, where ethnic Russians predominate.

At this point in our history all of our military personnel are volunteers. Presidents are permitted to put them in harms way insofar as it is done judiciously, with care, and most important - successfully. 

Our losses to date in Iran do not yet equal the lives lost to violence on an average long weekend in Chicago, about which we shrug.

Detention a Win-Win

An archived article from The New Yorker discusses the Trump administration’s policy of detaining in custody those illegal immigrants who are up for deportation. As you might guess, the author doesn’t approve of this Stephen Miller-directed policy change.

The model is elegant in its simplicity. Being in the US as an illegal immigrant is preferable to life in one’s home country, but being in a US jail is likely not preferable to being sent home. That the incarceration is unpleasant is a feature, not a defect.

That simple truth encourages many so held to accept voluntary deportation as a “get out of jail free” card. The legal hassle is obviated and the desired end state is achieved thereby.

The Mixed Blessing of Hate

If the search engine is accurate, COTTonLINE has never once cited the work of New York Times columnist David French, in nearly 20 years of observing our nation’s geopolitical scene. The likely reason is that we’ve mostly disagreed with his views.

Today we remedy that shortcoming, citing this archived column (not behind NYT paywall). He writes with sadness about the degree of polarization in our political life, finding abundant hate on both sides. He correctly identifies Trump as a result of this hate, not its cause - an insight not original to French but accurate nevertheless.

He identifies the problem, sketches its magnitude and notes its uniqueness with some skill. What he does not do is map a path away from our current “hate-arama” To be fair to him, I am not at all certain such a path exists. 

One of the sometimes embarrassing aspects of human nature is the energizing aspects of hating enemies, real and imagined. In our “red in tooth and claw” history, it helped us to become the landside apex predator of this planet, a distinction very much still accurate. Carried over into politics it is obviously a mixed blessing.

We tease this trait with sports and school rivalries, and these sometimes boil over into on-field riots. Hate provides a boost in war-fighting situations, with which our history is replete. Politically, it is very likely helped by the increasingly multicultural nature of our decreasingly acculturated populace.

We have to hope the checks and balances built into our system by our prescient founders are up to the task of holding the polity together. And, as often noted, “hope” isn’t much of a plan.

Adding Kharg Island to the Shores of Tripoli

There is some talk the US may invade Iran's Kharg Island which is several miles off the coast and home to both military bases and Iran's primary oil shipment terminal. A shipborne Marine expeditionary force is en route and should be adequate to the task. 

Doing so would cripple the oil shipments which are Iran's primary source of foreign exchange. I imagine troops garrisoning the island would become targets for Iran's drone attacks. 

The plan could be to briefly imprison the island's Iranians, destroy the infrastructure, and leave after a couple of days before too many casualties accrue, while abandoning the prisoners in situ. This certainly fits within the parameters of our "no long, drawn-out wars" policy.

Schadenfreude

Here’s another quote from X, this one linked by Stephen Green posting at Instapundit. The author is Andrew Clark.

In 72 hours we went from:
Trump never expected the possibility of Hormuz closing,

To:
Trump was briefed Hormuz could close but riskily did it anyway,

To:
Trump bombed Kharg Island but it likely won’t force Iran to open the Strait.

To:
Iran opened the Strait.

Trump keeps exceeding media expectations. Imagine how frustrated they must feel, I’m loving the schadenfreude.

Someone Is Trying

Ed Driscoll, posting at Instapundit, links to a quote about the Trump foreign policy that is kinda wonderful. Exaggerated a bit? Sure, but kinda wonderful nonetheless. The author’s nom de X is Northern Barbarian, who writes:

You do get he's basically walking on water. Making every elected hack, bureaucrat and diplomat of the last 40 years or so look like dithering incompetent fools, when they weren't actively and despicably enabling said dictatorships, that is.

Could it all go wrong? Yeah. But for the first time since Ronald Reagan blew up the Soviet Union, someone's trying.

Oddly enough, Barack Obama was “trying” too, trying to turn Iran into an Islamic superpower. Fortunately, he failed because they flopped, even with his help and Valerie Jarrett's coaching. Electing as president someone who neither identified with, nor liked the US, turned out to be as dumb as it sounds when described accurately, as here. 

Saturday Snark

Iranian girls in 1974.

 Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

Images courtesy of Sarah Hoyt's

Miming While the World Burns.