Wyoming Trivia

I find it fascinating that 116 U.S. counties have more population than the entire state of Wyoming. WY is 10th largest state in acreage, but has the least population. The desirable result ... low population density.

WY is still the sort of place where, a couple of days ago, the other DrC was invited to watch a friend's 12 year old son do artificial insemination (AI) on a cow. It involved him shoving his gloved arm up the cow's backside. You won't see that in Beverly Hills or Palm Beach.

Note: If the map as displayed is too small to read, you can access it here.

A 45 Retrospective

Writing at American Greatness, which as the name implies is normally 110% pro-Trump, Angelo Codevilla takes a nuanced look at Donald Trump, what he stood for, what he was able to actually accomplish, and his failings which were considerable. 

Codevilla finds much to praise about Trump, much to criticize and it's likely you won't agree with everything he writes. And yet, as we think about who to support for the GOP nomination in 2024, we need to be looking for someone who supports the Trump-style program of populist nationalism, but will do a better job of actually running the government and make fewer unforced errors.

Why, for example, didn't Trump immediately fire every political appointee in government? Why didn't he spot Fauci as a four-flusher much earlier? Why did he make claims he couldn't prove about the 2020 election? But not go after Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Bezos, et al., when he still had time to make their lives miserable?

Codevilla doesn't say so but I wonder if Trump didn't view what he'd done in getting elected as being the same as a hostile takeover in business. In a hostile takeover, employees of the old firm are often willing to switch allegiance to the new firm or the "new-broom" CEO. 

Note to Trump: the policy level in government doesn't work like that. Political appointees aren't indifferent to who runs their government. Allegiances are often based in ideologies to which people have long-term emotional commitments. Leaving appointees of the prior administration in place is an unforced error.

The Shooter of Ashli B.?

A RealClearInvestigations article names the probable shooter of Ashli Babbitt - a Lieutenant Michael L. Byrd who is commander of the House Chamber section of the Capitol Police. It includes a photo of a masked man holding a gun who is alleged to be Byrd, an African-American. 

The article explains in very thorough detail why the Capitol Police are not required to release the name. It adds that normal police forces are required to reveal officers’ names in fatal shootings.

One has to wonder why the death of George Floyd at the hands of police was a big deal and the death of unarmed Ashli Babbitt under similar circumstances was not. Both were doing things they should not have been doing, in both cases the police overreacted, fatally. 

It is hard to avoid concluding White Lives Don’t Matter is the unstated-but-real policy of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, to whom the Capitol Police report.

A SciFi Idea

Here is an idea for a science fiction short story, available gratis to whoever would like to run with it. It was stimulated by the post below, the developed world's falling fertility, and the recent UFO report that didn't offer much hope for ETs visiting. 

Perhaps the reason we have not been contacted by some spacefaring intelligent species is because, as technology progresses, intelligent species get control of their fertility and eventually die out from individual unwillingness to reproduce. This happens before multi-lightyear spacefaring becomes a practical reality.

You'd think they'd invent uterine replicators and techno-creches to produce the needed replacement individuals. Perhaps that avenue is esthetically or ethically distasteful, not biologically feasible or, if bio-feasible, does not produce successful individuals.

Child-Free

Two Michigan State U. psychology profs did a survey to determine just how prevalent not wanting children might be. Their findings appear at The Conversation, an MSU publication. Hat tip to RealClearPolicy for the link.

The researchers intentionally separated those who do not want children - the child-free - from those who can't have children - the childless - and those who want children in the future, but haven't had them yet. To qualify as child-free, respondents had to answer "no" to all three of these questions.

Do you have, or have you ever had, any biological or adopted children? 

Do you plan to have any biological or adopted children in the future? 

Do you wish you had or could have biological or adopted children?

In a sample of 1000 Michigan adults, 27% answered "no" to all three questions. The researchers believe this is a larger cohort than was previously thought to exist. It could help explain why birth rates are declining throughout the developed world and beyond.

Former Cop Wins NYC Mayoral Primary

Eric Adams, a Black former NYPD captain, has won the Democrat primary, and therefore is likely to win the race for NYC mayor. What remains to be seen is whether he will take the city back to the proactive "broken windows" policing that held down crime under mayors Bloomberg and Giuliani.

Given the ranked choice system in place, he ended up winning by a narrow margin, just over 8000 votes or 1%. A Bloomberg story has this insight about Adams:

During his campaign, Adams pledged support for a modified version of stop-and-frisk -- which has disproportionately affected Black men -- and said he would restore a plainclothes police unit tasked with confiscating illegal weapons that was disbanded after complaints it used excessive force. Police reform, he said, would come through his leadership of the department and better training rather than taking away money from the police force.

Perhaps the pendulum is swinging away from "defund the police" and toward "law and order" - one can hope. As mayor, De Blasio has been a dumpster fire.

Covid Shots

I believe everyone in the U.S. who wanted it has gotten at least one Covid-19 vaccination, if not two. The shots have cost nothing beyond the effort to show up and bare your arm. As old folk the DrsC got theirs in February, before some others were eligible. Thank you, President Trump.

Choices have (or should have) consequences. Quite a number of people have chosen not to get the shots. Somehow the media asks me to care about those unvaccinated people getting sick from the Delta variant. I refuse, they made a choice and will live with (or die from) the consequences of that choice.

Who Is Radical?

Power Line's Steven Hayward has a column entitled "Liberalism's Endless Aggression Against America." If that sounds like what you're experiencing, go read it here. I recommend it.

Progressives are troubled, unhappy people insistent that we experience their unhappiness too, and determined to make it happen. I say "Rain on them, hard."

Poll: The Young Not Proud of America

This morning comes a poll asking if we are proud to be Americans, published by Issues & Insights and done by the TIPP polling organization. In a spooky coincidence, it relates to the “cohort change” post immediately below, which I filed yesterday.

TIPP sliced the data in many different groups by gender, ethnicity, age, politics, urban vs. rural, etc. In every group except one, a majority said they were either very or extremely proud to be Americans. 

The not-so-proud group was young people in the 18-24 age cohort, of whom only 36% were very or extremely proud of our nation. If the “cohorts don’t change their beliefs” hypothesis Robert Putnam propounds is correct, this bunch will be trouble going forward.

OTOH, arguing that we do change as we age is the wisdom in the trope “if you aren’t a socialist at 20 you have no heart, if you aren’t conservative at 30 you have no head.” It’s a quote variously attributed to Churchill, Disraeli, George Bernard Shaw, and others but its actual origin is unknown, lost in the mists of centuries. 

The “change with age” trope describes my own political evolution. I was raised in an FDR/Democrat household and became conservative in my late 20s and early 30s. Reading Irving Kristol’s op-ed essays in the 1970s Wall Street Journal was a definite contributing factor.

Cohort Change

Tanner Greer writes at a blog called The Scholar's Stage. His most recent topic is summarized in the phrase "culture wars are long wars." He makes several interesting points.

Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, (is) an investigation of changing social capital, social norms, and social trust in U.S. over the 20th century. Putnam isolates many different reasons for these changes, but in the chapter “Generation to Generation,” he describes most of them as effects of cohort change.

Cultures do not change when people replace old ideas with new ones; cultures change when people with new ideas replace the people with old ones.

Values must be forged. Utopias must be imagined. Ideas must be tailored for mass intellectual appeal. Paths to communicate these ideals must be cleared. The inevitable shall happen: old orthodoxies shall go stale and brittle. New crises shall discredit them in their brittleness. Then the well-placed culture warrior will have both the arguments and the networks needed to inspire the rising generation. That generation will learn how their fathers and mothers created the mess they are now in. Gradually, then suddenly, our people will turn to the light. This is a long process, but a true one. This is the proven path of the culture warrior.

I find his reasoning scary in its persuasiveness, perhaps you do as well. Hat tip to Instapundit for the link.

Independence Day

Today we celebrate our nation’s independence, and the talented and brave individuals who risked their lives and fortunes to make it so. Ironically, all they wanted were the rights to which they were accustomed as Englishmen, rights which England would not extend to them as colonials. 

While that was their grievance, they ended up accomplishing something far greater. Something so great that all these many decades later it continues to be a magnet drawing people to our shores. 

The DrsC have sailed the seven seas and visited every continent, most repeatedly. There is no nation, of the 100+ we’ve visited, we would rather call “home.”

Happy birthday to these United States of America.

An Old Truth, Restated

Glen Beaton, a retired columnist who blogs at The Aspen Beat, writes something serious about who becomes conservative. Greatly oversimplified, he argues conservatives are those for whom the current conditions “work.” On occasion, COTTonLINE has made the same argument. Beaton writes:

I’ve observed, and many studies have shown, that conservatives are happier than the leftists that we used to call “liberals.” Conservatives are more generous, more married, more religious, more fit, more humorous and more optimistic.

Unsurprisingly for a group with such traits, they have more and closer friends. They clearly love their country more. They work harder, they play harder, and they’re more likely to see meaning in life.

I don’t think conservatives are that way because they’re conservative. That’s a big load to put on a political outlook. No, I think they’re conservative because conservativism attracts people who possess those qualities.

In some ways Beaton makes an obvious point. If the current set of rewards and constraints is one in which you are comfortable and successful, why would you want it changed? You wouldn’t, which is the definition of conservativism, keeping all that is good about the current set-up. 

If the existing set of rewards and constraints chafes and is uncomfortable, you would be unhappy and seek change to something that you hope will fit you better

There is an old wisecrack: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Conservatives experience the present as “not broke” and in need of little change. They are those for whom “now” is comfortable and functional. 

Progressives experience where we are now as “broke” and uncomfortable, thus in need of change. As long as there are unhappy, maladapted people there will be progressives. 

Bad News Sells

Lucianne.com links to an American Thinker article by Jack Gleason who makes an interesting, but ultimately wrong, point. About the Covid-19 vaccines, Gleason argues that while official sites argue they are safe and effective:

But when you go to an uncensored video website like Bitchute.com or Rumble.com, you see a totally different result: scores of doctors and scientists warning about the danger from the shots, and hundreds of videos from real people who have had horrific side effects from their injections.

Understanding human behavior, that is exactly what you’d expect from an almost entirely safe vaccine. How many people (like the DrsC) who’ve had the vaccine safely bother to write up their experiences? Almost none; we had maybe a little sore arm, which sometimes happens with a flu shot, and it was done.

On the other hand, the relatively few people who had a bad experience - and they do exist - are motivated to tell you it can be horrible. Driving to the grocery store can also be horrible, if some loon t-bones your car, which also happens albeit rarely. 

Do people tell you about their safe trip to the store? Only the most boring people do that, millions of such trips are made safely every day without being reported. The same is true of vaccines. A few people have bad experiences and those you hear about. The millions who had no problems remain unreported.

I don’t know the exact numbers but I’d guess over a hundred million Covid-19 shots have been given. If one in 100,000 has a nontrivial problem, that’s still over 1000 unhappy souls with a horror story to tell.

Gleason wants to argue that if you’re young and healthy you have little to fear from Covid-19 even if you get the disease, and more to fear from the vaccine. I’m reading about too many people with lingering disease aftereffects to make that argument entirely credible.

I like your odds better with the vaccine, while admitting there is some risk either way. But at the end of the day, the choice is yours, as it is with flu shots. It is worth remembering more than a few people also die from influenza every year.

Teacher Unions

Power Line's John Hinderaker fingers the education unions - NEA and AFT - as particularly bad actors. He posts the NEA action plan showing how they plan to push the lies of critical race theory (CRT) and The 1619 Project to the nation's children and to fight parental efforts to ban same. He begins with this:

America’s teachers’ unions are the country’s single most malign influence. They do more to promote leftist extremism, and do it more effectively, than anyone else.

Hinderaker concludes as follows.

In many areas, it probably is parental malpractice to put one’s children in the hands of the extremists who now dominate public education.

If you have children or grandchildren in school, prudence suggests making certain they aren't being indoctrinated to be Red Guard clones who hate everything in our nation's past.

Rubicon Crossed

With the announcement that Rep. Liz Cheney (R?-WY) has allowed Nancy Pelosi to appoint her to the Jan. 6 witch-hunt committee, as its only nominally Republican member, one thing becomes clear. Cheney will not run for reelection in Wyoming. 

Cheney has apparently decided to become a Romney-like "tame" Republican, one of the useful fools the Democrats seem to prize and keep around. She sure as blazes won't be popular in Wyoming.

Paradise Lost

The always interesting Michael Barone writes for the Law & Liberty website detailing in one long column the political and social history of California. His title for the column: Paradise Lost.

As a CA native and long-time resident who paid attention, I didn't learn a lot that was new. OTOH, I didn't see much with which to disagree. He begins in the early 1800s with Richard Henry Dana of Two Years Before the Mast fame, and brings it right up to today.

As instant history, it is a darned good cautionary tale. See how a place that had it made, that was the cultural leader of our nation, snatched disaster from the jaws of victory starting just over 60 years ago. 

If you're less familiar with the story than I - a native and long-time resident - you may find it absorbing. I found it very sad. Hat tip to John Milton for the title.

More Good News

People in CA, based on their religious beliefs, donated to organizations supporting 2008's Proposition 8, which aimed to ban same-sex marriage. State law forced the disclosure of donor names and some donors lost jobs because the donations revealed their beliefs, which were not universally esteemed.

Today the SCOTUS ruled on that California law requiring the disclosure of names and addresses of donors to non-profit advocacy groups. It found the law violated their First Amendment rights to free speech. Politico reports:

The Supreme Court dealt a blow Thursday to efforts to rein in so-called dark money political groups, issuing a ruling striking down California’s policy of demanding donor lists from nonprofit organizations. The high court split 6-3 along ideological lines in its decision.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion for the court, ruled that California’s “blanket demand” for that information “is facially unconstitutional. When it comes to the freedom of association, the protections of the First Amendment are triggered not only by actual restrictions on an individual’s ability to join with others to further shared goals. The risk of a chilling effect on association is enough.”

As you can imagine, the "woke" don't love this ruling even a little. They aren't great supporters of the First Amendment when used by those with triggering beliefs.

Very Good News

The Supreme Court, which has been indifferently reliable of late, just handed down an excellent decision. Politico reports they decided certain state election integrity measures are constitutional.

In a pair of high-profile cases from Arizona, the justices split 6-3 along ideological lines, with the majority concluding that a disparate impact on minority groups would typically not be enough to render voting rules illegal under the act.

The decision, addressing Arizona’s bans on out-of-precinct voting and a practice critics call “ballot harvesting,” is likely to complicate legal challenges Democrats and civil rights groups are mounting to new voting restrictions Republicans are seeking to implement in states across the country.

How can we be certain this is good news? Politico quotes President Biden's reaction: 

In a span of just eight years, the Court has now done severe damage to two of the most important provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – a law that took years of struggle and strife to secure.

Analysis: In our current zero-sum environment, Biden's negative opinion makes it very good news.

Two Truths

Posting at Instapundit, Reynold's wife Helen Smith quotes Charles Murray's newest book Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America.

Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The allegations of racism in policing, college admissions, segregation in housing, and hiring and promotions in the workplace ignore the ways in which the problems that prompt the allegations of systemic racism are driven by these two realities.

Talk about assertions that will make heads explode across America, these will do nicely. Whether or not they are accurate is completely beside the point.

Loneliness

RealClearPolicy has a good article on the loneliness epidemic. Among other things, it reports polling about which subgroups in our society experience more (or less) loneliness. The article is perhaps most remarkable for what it omits.

The political differences are not stark, but they are significant: 22% of Democrats reported feeling “serious loneliness,” compared to 15% of Republicans. But ignoring politics is not the answer: Non-voters are lonelier than those who participate in elections. By age, older Americans felt less lonely than younger Americans.

It doesn’t help to be poor, either: 29% of Americans earning less than $30,000 a year experience serious loneliness. For those making six figures or higher, the percentage was less than half that. Education is also a factor: 31% of respondents who didn’t finish high school experienced serious loneliness. Among those with at least a four-year college degree did, this figure was 13%.

Reading between the lines, the groups which are likely to be, and stay, married are also the groups least likely to be lonely. Oddly, the article doesn't connect these obvious-to-me dots. It is known that the affluent, educated upper middle class are much more likely to marry, and somewhat more likely to stay married, than their poorer, less educated, fellow citizens. 

The other DrC and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary in April. In spite of being two highly educated professionals who had independent careers, we would self-describe (and be described by those who know us) as "joined at the hip." In retirement, most things we do together.