Speculation

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

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

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

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

We live in interesting times.

A Disease of the Soul

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

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

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

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

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

Texas … the Next California

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

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

And he concludes thus.

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

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

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

'Adjunctivitis'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bigger, the Phonier

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday Snark

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

Images courtesy of Sarah Hoyt's

And Now the Memes ....

Friday Meme Fest

Images courtesy of Politico's

The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

Images courtesy of RealClearPolitics'

Cartoons of the Week.

Jason Arday, R.I.P.

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

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

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

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

Schadenfreude

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

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

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

Update

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

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

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

A Pet Peeve

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

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

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

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

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

Parental Rebellion

Image courtesy of today's Lucianne.com.

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

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

Net Negative

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

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

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

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

Old Movie Review: The Great Escape

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

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

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

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

Choices Made

Here's a quote I like, authored by someone using the handle "BuckCreekBreaker."

People who are downwardly mobile loathe those who made better choices in life.

So true, it's the Darwin principle in action. The non-thriving of the less fit, and the envy that engenders.

Old Movie Review: Never So Few

Last night we watched a 1959 film neither of us had seen - Never So Few - because it had a blockbuster cast: Frank Sinatra, Gina Lollobrigida, Peter Lawford, Steve McQueen, Paul Henreid, Charles Bronson, Dean Jones, and Brian Donlevy. 

Set in Burma during World War II, it was inspired by actual OSS and British officers who led Kachin tribal forces against the Japanese who had invaded Burma and threatened to invade British colonial India. Never So Few is set in the same theater of war as Bridge on the River Kwai but it’s not in the same league theatrically. 

The scriptwriters grafted an unbelievable love story onto a war movie and, as we say in horticulture, the graft “didn’t take.” The plot has holes in it you can’t overlook, supposedly crafty experienced troops fail to post sentries and get bushwhacked repeatedly.

Reviewers weren’t impressed with Sinatra but liked McQueen’s work. The film lost money, and that tells you how weak the word-of-mouth was on the film. Don’t be conned by its glossy cast list, as we were, this film isn’t their best work.

Instapundit Reaches Milestone

Professor Glenn Reynolds is celebrating the 25th anniversary of Instapundit. Congratulations, Glenn, well done. 

Speaking of which, COTTonLINE will celebrate its 20th anniversary later this year, I’ll let you know when the date rolls around a few days before Christmas. 

I just checked and so far in nearly 20 years I’ve posted 16.6k items, averaging over 800 per year. It is my hobby and it keeps my no-longer-young mind active. 

I’m fortunate I have no need to monetize COTTonLINE. Therefore I don’t pester you with ads or appeals for donations, the absence of which I'm certain you appreciate. 

B-School Exceptionalism

An interesting quote from an article looking at stereotypes about various majors on higher ed campuses. I like this one as I was a business prof.

The professors in the business school had next to nothing to do with the rest of the university. They had the nicest cars, the most up-to-date building, and the lowest level of union membership.

To what extent was that descriptive of the campus where I spent 28 of my 34 years in academia? We certainly had little to do with the rest of the university, and a quite low level of union membership. 

Our building was no better or worse than the rest of the campus. I shared an office for the first 6 years, and had a private office thereafter. 

About cars I have no overall idea, an accounting prof drove an elegant pre war Mercedes convertible coupe. At various times I drove a VW beetle, a VW Rabbit, a Thunderbird, a Buick, and a Ford Probe. Overlapping these, also a Chevy, a Dodge, and multiple Ford diesel pickups, used to pull RVs - something very few profs did.

The WNBA Dilemma

Two men with non-trivial NBA experience have decided to file for the WNBA draft, the rules of which apparently permit them to do so. Neither is overtly transsexual.

This creates a fascinating dilemma for the women’s league. Either (a) take a stand for keeping biological males out of women’s sports, or (b) a stand for transsexual rights.

Knowing nothing but the names of the two leagues, you’d suppose choice (a) would be automatic. Knowing what we know about the WNBA, many of its players are strong supporters of LGBTQ+ rights. This means their bias favors men who identify as women being able to do whatever biological women are able to do, to the greatest extent possible, including play pro basketball.

However, if the league is open to XY players, it is likely it could become dominated by taller, heavier biological males. Actual XX players will be to varying degrees marginalized or left off rosters. 

The conflict is between LGBTQ+ rights and economic self interest. It will be fascinating to see how the WNBA navigates this maze when many players simultaneously hold membership in two groups with opposing interests.

I can imagine a (admittedly unlikely) future in which most WNBA players are XY but required to cosplay XX, like classical Japanese kabuki drama in which all roles are played by XY men. It will be interesting to see this conflict of interest unfold.

History ... Rhyming

The Spanish Civil War served as a lead-in to World War II. What are the chances the Ukraine War will serve as a precursor to World War III? 

Both dragged on for years, creating many casualties. Both have served as proving grounds for new military technology. And of course, both had external allies who supported the side more closely allied to their interests.

The Spanish civil war ended on April 1, 1939. Hitler invaded Poland exactly 5 months later on September 1, 1939, beginning World War II.

Anybody want to take bets on the lag time between an end of war in Ukraine and the beginning of the as-yet-hypothetical World War III? At this point I would start with 5 months as an unbiased estimator thereof.

The Spanish war lasted roughly 3 years. Ukraine's war has already lasted ca. 4.5 years and shows no sign of ending. 

If the Ukraine war's continuation precludes the beginning of a much wider war, perhaps it is better for most of us if it does not end. For sure the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) and Poland could think so. I fear this speculation sounds a bit outré, which doesn't make it any less possible.

A Late Arrival

Images courtesy of Sarah Hoyt's

Meme, Meme Against the Dying of the Light.

Saturday Snark

IYKYK

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.