Three Leaders, No Children

Emmanuel Macron is the president-elect of France, and is childless. Lauren Collins writes in The New Yorker something absolutely stunning which will be true about the leadership of Europe's three major powers, following Macron's inauguration:

The leaders of France, Germany, and the U.K. will have zero biological children among them.

Europeans aren't having many children in the 21st century. Japan has caught the same 'disease.' Donald Trump, by contrast, has five children.

People have wondered how the French could elect Macron. He's a candidate who basically didn't talk about the repeated Islamic terrorism France has suffered.

Not having children means not having to worry about a future beyond one's own lifespan. As President de Gaulle famously said: "Apres moi, le deluge." Translation: After my death, the future is someone else's problem ... and almost certainly a disaster of epic proportions. De Gaulle was prescient.

Macron's 'Mandate'

A Brit who once lived in Paris went back to experience the presidential election, which she writes about for the Daily Mail (U.K.). See her view of "what the Macron win means."

It is an illusion to imagine 20.6 million voted for Macron. Many voted against Le Pen. Others pledged support with noses held.

Macron's biggest rivals are a right-wing woman with a solid core of 11 million ardent supporters and over 16 million people who believe in democracy but would rather not vote at all than give Macron a mandate to lead.

He says he is about unity? He has his work cut out.

Do the math. Macron won 20.6 million votes. Some 27 million people voted against him, posted blank ballots, or stayed home. Over half of France either shrugged or voted "no." The EU lives to fight another day, with nothing approaching a ringing mandate. Hat tip to Lucianne.com for the link.

The Fallen Once-Mighty

Do you remember the Washington Generals, a hapless team of basketball players whose role as foil was to be humiliated by the Harlem Globetrotters? The modern equivalent is to be the designated liberal on a Fox News panel - Juan Williams has done a lot of this, so does Bob Beckel.

George Will, as an anti-Trump conservative, will now fill the analogous role for MSNBC, according to Politico. On their liberal programming, he will be the 'tame' conservative who provides ideological balance while excoriating Trump.

The problem with this role is that, however eloquently you propound your views, your audience is people who have self-selected a channel with the opposite bias to your own. They are predisposed to ignore you, to laugh at your earnest attempts to explain your views as we once laughed as the Globetrotters made fools of the Generals.

I suppose Will needs to make a living or have a platform. There isn't a lot of demand for anti-Trump conservatives now except as a foil for liberals to put down.

It's a paycheck, but instead of preaching to the choir, it's preaching temperance to a saloon full of rowdy drunks, not very dignified or successful. He got used to it, I guess, on ABC all those pre-Fox years.

After VE Day

It may not have been obvious from reading this blog that I'm a student of World War II history. If you go beyond obvious favors-the-winner rhetoric, you discover that many, perhaps most of the Germans captured by the Soviets died in slave-labor captivity.

Less well-known is that a substantial number died in the hands of the western Allies. The Telegraph (U.K.) reviews a book by Giles MacDonogh entitled After the Reich: From the Liberation of Vienna to the Berlin Air-LIft. The title of the review is revealing:

How three million Germans died after VE Day

 Some key quotes from the review:

His best estimate is that some three million Germans died unnecessarily after the official end of hostilities. A million soldiers vanished before they could creep back to the holes that had been their homes. The majority of them died in Soviet captivity.

Many thousands perished as prisoners of the Anglo-Americans. Herded into cages along the Rhine, with no shelter and very little food, they dropped like flies.

I encountered this a decade ago when visiting the Bridge at Remagen, only the towers of which survive. The southern tower houses a museum, dedicated to the thousands of German POWs held by the Allies in an open-air prison nearby. Many of these died of exposure and malnutrition in the frigid northern European winter. Their captors had little sympathy.

The two million German civilians who died were largely the old, women and children: victims of disease, cold, hunger, suicide - and mass murder.

Perhaps the most shocking outrage recorded by MacDonogh - for the first time in English - is the slaughter of a quarter of a million Sudeten Germans by their vengeful Czech compatriots. (snip) Similar scenes were seen across Poland, Silesia and East Prussia as age-old German communities were brutally expunged.

MacDonogh concludes the only thing that stopped the vengeful killings and starvation was the rapidly emerging Cold War which saw West German former enemies magically transformed into allies against the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact puppet states.

Requiem

After unexpected upsets in elections in Colombia, the U.K., and the U.S., we wondered if Marine Le Pen might pull an upset in France. The short answer is No. The French behaved predictably.

Exit polling suggests Emmanuel Macron won roughly two-thirds of the votes in today's runoff election. Le Pen got some of the votes that went to other candidates in the prelim, but Macron got most of them, as polling had showed would happen.

It is likely France just lost its last opportunity to preserve its culture. Twenty-five or 50 years from now, the culture will be unrecognizable, although the country may still be called France. Or perhaps the Islamic Republic of France.

Further Thoughts on Single Payer

If we get to a single payer system, expect to see what exists in the U.K., two tiers. That is, private health care for those who can afford it, public health care for everyone else. We have a bit of this today, here and there, some of it hiding in plain sight.

We'll see even more care delivered by non-physicians. Nurse practitioners and physicians' assistants will handle many routine cases, leaving the more puzzling or life-threatening ones to the actual med school grads.

As a result of such triage, expect to see the number of misdiagnoses increase, and perhaps fatalities as well. There's no free lunch, however much you might wish it.

Krauthammer: Single Payer in 7 Years

I was watching the Special Report with Bret Baier on Fox News a couple of nights ago. Panelist Charles Krauthammer said something startling in response to a request to predict what will happen to the repeal/replace Obamacare movement.

"I would predict that in less than seven years, we'll be in a single-payer system," Krauthammer said, pointing out that Republicans aren't even arguing for a free market system anymore.

"They have sort of accepted the fact that the electorate sees health care as not just any commodity, like purchasing a steak or a car," Krauthammer explained. "It's something now people have a sense the government ought to guarantee."

"The terms of debate are entirely on the grounds of the liberal argument that everybody ought to have it," Krauthammer said. "Once that happens, you're going to end up with a single-payer system."

Perhaps it is worth remembering that Krauthammer is a physician, a psychiatrist in fact, as well as a conservative commentator. If what he predicts happens, it will amount to everyone having Medicare and will cost trillions.

I hope we don't end up going to VA-style clinics and hospitals ... brutal. That would be like getting your healthcare from the DMV or the Post Office.

Puerto Rico: A Way Out

Various media sources are reporting on economic troubles in the U.S. Common'wealth' of Puerto Rico; it's the second large island southeast of Cuba. The (') marks are intentional, wealth is hard to find in Puerto Rico these days. Hat tip to Drudge Report for the link.

The island government just went to federal court to attain something resembling bankruptcy protection offered by the recently passed Promesa act. Expect debt restructuring, a severe "haircut" for creditors, cuts in pensions, a curtailment of the safety net, and other economies. Closure of over a hundred schools has already been announced.

It's economic difficulties result from Congressional meddling, plus the people voting themselves government largess without raising sufficient tax revenue to pay for it. They used borrowed money to pay current operating expenses, almost always a mistake.

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As we have written before, over time the problem will solve itself. Many Puerto Ricans will move to the mainland to find work, property prices on the island will crater, and those low property prices will attract thousands of Norte Americano purchasers looking for a warm place to retire.

Eventually PR will become a Caribbean avatar of Hawaii, an American island focused on lifestyle and retirement. Those who remain will be employed by the tourist industry, plus whatever military installations the U.S. locates there. Hawaii "works" using that model, there's no particular reason PR can't do the same.

Should it become a state? Sure, when the economy achieves something like equilibrium, probably not before.

Obamacare Repeal Passes House

Multiple media outlets are reporting Speaker Ryan finally got his majority. Repeal and replace of Obamacare has passed the House of Representatives, the vote 217 to 213 in favor. All Democrats and 20 Republicans voted "No."

Now we will see what the Senate does with it. Minority Leader Chuckie Schumer has declared it dead on arrival ... he might be wrong, he's been wrong before.

Counterintuitive

The Washington Post reviews a new book by Yale Law prof James Forman, Jr. entitled Locking Up Our Own. The book reportedly indicates:

In national surveys conducted over the past 40 years, African Americans have consistently described the criminal justice system as too lenient. Even in the 2000s, after a large and sustained drop in the crime rate and hundreds of thousands of African Americans being imprisoned, almost two-thirds of African Americans maintained that courts were “not harsh enough” with criminals.

While a disproportionate number of African Americans get locked up, an even more disproportionate number of African Americans are victims of mostly black-on-black crime.

African Americans have grappled with an anguished choice. On the one hand they want to protect themselves from crime, on the other hand they know that the more active and powerful the criminal justice system grows, the more African Americans will be caught up in it, some of whom will be subjected to grossly racist treatment.

Interesting findings in the age of #BlackLivesMatter. Maybe we should view the BLM complaints as coming from a noisy minority of a minority?

U.S., Western Europe Compared

The American Interest cites interesting statistics, drawn from a Pew Research Center study of the middle class in Europe, and compares them to like data for several U.S. states. First, the summary finding:

The American middle class is smaller than Europe’s (and declining), but it nonetheless remains substantially richer than almost any other European country’s.

Pew notes:

Among the countries examined, the U.S. is the only country in which fewer than six-in-ten adults were in the middle class in 2010. Meanwhile, compared with many Western European countries, greater shares of Americans were either lower income (26%) or upper income (15%).

Then, some comparisons from the AI article:

Even the poorest U.S. states beat the poorest European countries when it comes to median household income, while only Luxembourg tops the richest states.

In 2010, for instance, the median household income in Mississippi (in 2011 inflation-adjusted dollars) was $37,838; the equivalent in Maryland was $70,976. By comparison, the average Italian household took home $35,608 that year, while a middle-income Norwegian household earned a median income of $56,960.

Put another way: average households in states like Maryland, Connecticut, or Massachusetts are richer than those in Norway, Denmark, or the Netherlands, while residents of Mississippi or West Virginia are better off than the Spaniards and Italians.

Count your blessings.

After ISIS, What?

Writing opinion at the Financial Times, David Gardner argues that the soon-to-happen defeat of ISIS will not bring stability to the troubled region. Talk about low-hanging fruit, how hard is it to predict unrest in the Middle East?

Still, he makes a good point about the reemergence of strong man rule in the region.

The strong men of Egypt and Turkey, presidents Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, are busy eliminating the political middle ground and filling the jails. Saudi Arabia, another western ally, allows only the ideology of Wahhabi Islam and never had a middle ground. Israel, for its part, has swung far to the right and continues to colonize the ground upon which a viable Palestinian state might be built.

And I begin to wonder whether, going forward, there will be much "middle ground" in the U.S. Our polarization is as extreme as it was during the Vietnam War.

Too many Americans are discovering the intoxication of hate. I believe I detect a hint of Weimar, before it fell.

Killshot

I love it when a debater delivers a riposte so devastating that, in the minds of many watchers, the debate ends there. Politico Europe has one of these (scroll down) from the Emmanuel Macron vs. Marine Le Pen debate in France. Le Pen delivers the killshot:

In every case France will be lead by a woman, either myself or Angela Merkel.

Give that line a rim shot. Le Pen found a great way to say her opponent will be Mutti Angela's obedient 'child.'  In the last century, millions of Frenchmen have died to avoid France being dominated by Germans.

Oops!

There's a firestorm because CBS's late nite Stephen Colbert said what he really thought about Donald Trump - real gutter stuff. See the story with video.

You went full George Carlin, Colbert.       Never go full Carlin.

Trouble in Paradise

Writing at City Journal, frequent co-authors Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox continue their doleful chronicle of California's death spiral.

A recent United Way study found that close to one-third of state residents can barely pay their bills, largely due to housing costs. When adjusted for these costs, California leads all states—even historically poor Mississippi—in the percentage of its people living in poverty.

California has the third-lowest percentage of people aged 25 to 34 who own their own homes—only New York and Hawaii’s are lower.

Rates of homeownership for African-American and Hispanic Californians have dropped at four times the rate of Asians and non-Hispanic whites in the last 10 years, while minority homeownership in the Golden State now lags most of the country, notably Texas and the southeast.

The people leaving California are not predominantly poor and uneducated. IRS data show that California’s outmigration between 2013 and 2014 was concentrated among middle-aged people with higher average incomes than households that stayed in California or moved there.

Regional planners and commercial chambers should indeed look to California as a model—of exactly what not to do.

How well-intentioned, misguided people can destroy a paradise - look no farther than the once-Golden State.

May Day

Today is May 1, 2017. Other parts of the world celebrate it as their Labor Day, and Communists have celebrated it since their founding. Apparently, a number of angry snowflakes will be marching in the U.S., protesting the existence of human beings, our exhalations of carbon dioxide, and other evils.

The snowflakes' underlying gripe: they aren't properly distributed to elect a president. Progressives are clustered in a dozen large metro areas where, instead of getting a mere majority, they constitute a supermajority thus wasting votes.

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My favorite association with this day was a sing-song rhyme two friends in grad school recited at this time each year. Both were from Minnesota, of Scandinavian heritage, and accustomed to frigid winters. Oregon's cool wet winters reminded them of late spring in MN. They would chorus:

Hey, hey, the first of May
Outdoor screwing starts today.

I guess you had to be from MN to fully appreciate it. To a SoCal native, it seemed old fashioned and definitely not West Coast.
Nostalgia, anyone?

The Resistance as Humor

Kurt Schlichter is developing into a conservative snarkmeister, with bells on. He blogs at Townhall and can turn a wickedly funny phrase, today about the failures of #TheResistance.

Some choice examples: He calls Hillary Clinton "Felonia von Pantsuit," describes her as "that horrible, sick old woman," supported by "the catamite media." Some quotes:

Polls show readers are less likely to trust the mainstream media than random emails from Nigerian princes.

And he describes his cynic's view of A Handmaid's Tale.

A giant Christian conspiracy to create a gay-killing theocracy where women are slaves who are forced to cover their bodies and who are occasionally genitally mutilated. Sure, that scenario sounds familiar (Radical Islam), but I just can’t place it (Radical Islam). Oh, right – it’s totally Donald Trump’s agenda (Radical Islam).

He looks forward to many more conservative judges.

Thanks to Harry Reid, who is currently back in Nevada living in a sex dungeon with his NordicTrack/dominatrix.

And he finishes with a Yoda-ism:

Pathetic you are, for win you do not, despite your media friends and your sex organ sombreros.

If laugh at stupid progressives you would, his column must you read. (Schlichter channels Yoda better than I.)

Walls Do the Job

The Daily Caller reports Hungary built a border "wall" to keep out migrants trying to enter w/o permission, mostly from Muslim lands. Although it is primarily double fencing with sensors and backup patrols, it works. Illegal immigrants to Hungary are basically zero today.

People say Trump's wall won't work, the evidence in Hungary and Israel seems to contradict that viewpoint. Their walls work just fine. See the DC article for details.

We need to get the wall built along our southern border.

Weird Psycho-Social Science

The Independent (U.K.) pulls together 13 things research has found will help parents raise successful children. The article has an explanation of each, whereas I'm sharing with you the 13 "bullet points."

1. They make their kids do chores.
2. They teach their kids social skills.
3. They have high expectations.
4. They have healthy relationships with each other.
5. They've attained higher educational levels.
6. They teach their kids math early on.
7. They develop a relationship with their kids.
8. They're less stressed.
9. They value effort over avoiding failure.
10. The mums work. (translation: moms)
11. They have a higher socioeconomic status.
12. They are "authoritative" rather than "authoritarian" or "permissive."
13. They teach "grit."

A few things in this list are more "nature" than "nurture." Education levels, healthy relationships, and socioeconomic status tend to be more genetics than they are directed effort, which is to say, things over which parents have little control. Relevant to children's success nevertheless, perhaps even more so.

Many families of my acquaintence have disappointing adult children even though the adults are successful people who remain married and have decent social skills. A psych teacher I had years ago called this "reversion toward the mean," by which he meant bright, successful people are out-of-the-ordinary and their children will often be less exceptional, more ordinary.

Hat tip to Lucianne.com for the link.

Monday Morning Snark

Friend Earl sends a Patriot Post photo of a man scratching his head, obviously puzzled. The caption is excellent:

If business owners are so greedy
And women make 30% less than men,
Why do they ever hire men at all?

Having spent some time with several medical offices recently (I'm okay, thanks for asking), you quickly see the medico-dental world has figured this out. It hires almost entirely women at the sub-professional level.

Translation: if it ain't a doctor or dentist, it is likely female, maybe 85-90%. A few male nurses, but zillions of women pushing paper, checking vitals, delivering food, passing instruments, taking notes, doing ultrasounds, taking x-rays, drawing blood samples, analyzing same, cleaning teeth, doing machine-based eye tests, fitting glasses, billing, scheduling, the list is exhaustive.

Most of these require no baccalaureate degree, maybe an A.A. or A.S. and certificate. As population ages, more work for medical staff, more jobs for women who are probably not paid especially well.
Meanwhile we sent the well-paid manufacturing jobs overseas = fewer jobs for men w/o college.

Women with jobs don't want to marry (and support) men w/o jobs so fewer marriages at the sub-college level. Result: more hook-ups, more out-of-wedlock births, more screwed-up kids, more single moms, more societal dysfunction.

It falls somewhat short of ideal, he said sarcastically.