Embarrassing

The Democrats have painted themselves into a corner and don’t see a realistic way out. Dementia Joe and Shallow Kamala present a dilemma. Joe is cycling in and out of touch with reality, see excruciating video of him with visiting French President Macron. 

The process is sad enough when only people who care about you see it and are embarrassed for you, and maybe for themselves. It’s the brain fog symptoms of old age done on a national stage with TV cameras rolling. 

If Joe had a Veep anybody thought was an improvement, it would be Amendment 25 in a heartbeat.  But Harris has demonstrated that she isn’t up to the job and, more to the point, probably couldn’t win the 2024 election if she inherited the office. So Democrats carry on with the Weekend at Bernie’s charade while we all cringe and hope nothing demanding actual presidential leadership occurs.

Biden says he intends to run in 2024. Gov. Gavin Newsom of CA says he won’t challenge Biden for the 2024 nomination, which means he recognizes political reality. Both decisions can always be revisited if, for whatever reason, Biden doesn’t seek a second term. 

The Question Is Obvious, the Answer Is Not

Townhall’s Kurt Schlichter states the obvious question to pose concerning whether to be serious about a Gov. Ron DeSantis GOP presidential nomination in 2024.

Can he show that the people he loses by not being Trump are going to be outnumbered by the people he gains by not being Trump?

That is very much what our decision boils down to, isn’t it? Did the white collar suburbs go for Biden because they buy the whole woke/CRT crock-of-crap, or did they just vote against Trump? 

I’d like to believe the answer is “against Trump” but I have to admit I am unsure.  Is Florida an outlier or does it point the way to a national win?

"Great Sort" Progress Report

Writing at PJ Media, Mark Tapscott describes data from a survey done by Trafalgar Group asking likely voters whether they (a) had moved, or (b) had made plans to move, to a region with politics more resembling their own. For those who report having already moved, the numbers are these:

4.1 percent of Independents say they have moved in the last 3 years to a region that aligns more closely with their personal beliefs.
4.4 percent of Republicans say they have moved in the last 3 years to a region that aligns more closely with their personal beliefs.
1.1 percent of Democrats say they have moved in the last 3 years to a region that aligns more closely with their personal beliefs.

Those who had not yet moved but report planning to do so, the numbers are:

9.6 percent of Independents say they are planning on moving in the next year to a region that aligns more closely with their personal beliefs.
10.4 percent of Republicans say they are planning on moving in the next year to a region that aligns more closely with their personal beliefs.
2.1 percent of Democrats say they are planning on moving in the next year to a region that aligns more closely with their personal beliefs.

Meaning red states get redder, and blue states get bluer. Trafalgar doesn't use the term "independent" but calls these likely voters "no party/other."

If you are an Independent, do you move to a purple state? From the similarities, I'd judge self-identified Independents are "shy" Republicans, wouldn't you?

Afterthought: Not certain where the DrsC fit into this matrix. We recently moved our vacation home to “a region that aligns more closely with … personal beliefs” but our legal residence remains conservative Wyoming where it has been for nearly 20 years.

A First Step

Eric Adams, Mayor of New York City, has ordered the city police and fire departments to do something long needed but even longer resisted. Fox News reports as follows:

New York City Mayor Eric Adams said the NYPD, FDNY, and other city agencies will start forcing homeless people who are determined to be suffering a "mental health crisis" off the streets and out of the subway system. They will be taken to a hospital for evaluation even if they refuse to go on their own.

"It is appropriate to use this process when a person refuses voluntary assistance and it appears that they are suffering from mental illness and are a danger to themselves due to an inability to meet their basic needs," Adams said.

I presume this policy will be tested in the courts for legality, and I hope it will be found to be constitutionally acceptable. It could be a first step in the long overdue reinstitutionalization of the addicted and mentally ill. 

Ken Kesey be damned.

Weird Virological Science

Instapundit links to an Ars Technica article about the suspected role of the Epstein-Barr virus in causing multiple sclerosis in a very few of those infected by it. The virus also causes mononucleosis in adolescents who haven’t been previously infected. 

It turns out that in a group of military members who’d never been infected when they entered the service, those subsequently infected were 20-30 times more likely to develop MS than those who were not infected as adults. Since, however, most of us were infected as children and most so infected don’t develop MS, other factors are undoubtedly involved.

The Mixed Blessing

At the height of his popularity, Donald Trump was always a mixed blessing. He advocated a more popular strain of conservatism and dissed the obvious lefty losers - all of that was very positive. On the other hand, he was also a bully and a braggart, and had an ego the size of Texas - not so positive.

If he’d married a string of three supermodels, he’d also had children by them and appeared to love and be loved by those kids - more positives. On the other hand, while married he’d also had various liaisons with Playboy models and strippers that were basically one-night or weekend stands - again, not so positive.

He’d made a great deal of money in real estate development and building, and kept enough of it to be genuinely wealthy - again positive. On the other hand, he’d also started more failed businesses than successful ones, typical of entrepreneurs but not entirely positive because the start-ups that failed hurt some others along the way.

He’d been successful in show business, in what is facetiously called “reality TV,” and that was okay. He’d also been involved in professional wrestling which is definitely show business posing as athletics, not so okay.

In 2016, Trump was a mixed blessing, but a blessing on balance. He took us beyond the failed corporatist GOP of George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and John McCain - an excellent policy change and one long overdue. 

However, once elected some of his Covid policies didn’t look great in the rear view mirror, and his failure to anticipate the shenanigans associated with the 2020 election and his petulant reaction to losing that election have tipped the balance for a lot of us.

Now it is easy enough to imagine a 2024 GOP presidential candidate who espouses Trump’s populist/nationalist policies without dragging behind him- or herself all of the Trump baggage. And perhaps one who understands how to get things done in the public sector, never a Trump strength. 

It is time to sincerely thank Trump for what he accomplished, including the originalist judges nominated, and ask him to accept senior statesman status. He needs to leave the governing to younger Republicans. 

If Trump is the party’s nominee in 2024, I’ll vote for him as the lesser of two evils (2 weevils?). Sadly, doing so will not be a new experience for me.

Saturday Snark

An oldie worth repeating

Quite a haul this week; all images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures and its Comments section.

Why This Friday Is Black

Do you know why this Friday-after-Thanksgiving is known as “Black Friday?” Unlike most things with the label “black,” it has nothing to do with race and racism.

It dates back to the days when bookkeeping was done with quill pens. When a business was operating at a loss they used red ink to signal that state. When the business was earning a profit the ink used was black. 

Historically Christmas shopping begins in earnest on the day after Thanksgiving. Many retail businesses do a substantial fraction of their total year’s sales in the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Black Friday got its name because, in retailing, that was the day your store began to move from operating at a loss (in the red) into operating at a profit (in the black) for the year. 

The so-called “Christmas sales season” was and perhaps still is the key to retail profitability, and it now spills over into online sales. Retail establishments are scaled to cope with the anticipated Christmas rush. Most of the year, they are larger than their day-to-day business would require.

Asked and Answered

 Instapundit Glenn Reynolds rhetorically asks:

Why is higher education such a cesspit of hate and sexism?

Dr. Henry Kissinger has the sarcastic answer:

The reason that university politics is so vicious is because stakes are so small.

Quote of the Day

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds airing a jaundiced view:

The press is largely made up of garbage people who cheerfully operate as partisan hacks.

Back in the day, you would have been hard pressed to guess David Broder’s political party preference. He was the real deal - a journalist and no hack. I suppose we must indict Woodward and Bernstein for turning journalism into a leftist ghetto.

Accepting Human Nature

Thanksgiving, we are reminded, began with a group of religious refugees trying to make a life in what would later become the Boston area. Writing at the New York Post, John Stossel reminds us that upon arriving in 1620 the Pilgrims tried socialism, really wanted it to work, and it darned near killed them. 

After they gave up on collectivism and went over to private property, they began to make a living and actually have some things for which to be thankful. By the time one of my ancestors arrived in the area some 13 years later it was only an unpleasant memory.

Most of us, most of the time, are unwilling to view humanity as “our family” and act selflessly in the best interests thereof, regardless of our personal outcomes. Every year, while remembering the Pilgrims, we need to relearn the lesson that socialism is based on a mistaken idea of human nature and therefore doesn’t produce abundance. 

Private property and individual initiative are based on an accurate view of human nature and do produce abundance. One of the enduring mysteries is why idealists keep rejecting the realistic view of human nature, preferring one that often works in a family but rarely, and then only briefly, in a larger enterprise. 

Very Colorful

Image originally appeared in The European Conservative, and was reprinted at Power Line by Steve Hayward.

Food For Thought

Image courtesy of Power Line.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving Weekend

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day, our national harvest festival. We celebrate the various bits of good fortune we've experienced over the past year. Traditions include a pig-out meal with extended family, and pro football on TV. Tomorrow the DrsC will follow none of those traditions except for the thankfulness.

We have no nearby family, and will travel to do the large family gathering 3-4 weeks from now in the Christmas season. So tomorrow we plan to do some serious cooking, making a lot of what cookbooks call braciole. 

The other DrC's Sicilian ancestors called the dish (in English phonics as nobody wrote it down) "sausa setti." We will eat a few of these for supper and freeze most to transport to CA to share with the extended family at Xmas.

We have plenty for which to be thankful. Our health is better than it was a year ago, our new winter home is getting finishing touches with outstanding landscaping and, this afternoon, our ceiling fans will be installed. 

We've finally unpacked most of the boxes, and identified some additional stuff we should have tossed instead of moving. Finally, it is snowing today in western Wyoming so we've NV sunshine and shirtsleeves weather to be thankful for.

The DrsC wish you all a happy fall harvest festival, with good food, good company and, in the absence of abject gluttony, good digestion. 

New Yorker Plays Catch Up

Almost two weeks ago I wrote the following:

What a mess if in 2024 the nominees are Biden and Trump. Neither is the actual preference of his party but both could end up getting the nod.

Yesterday The New Yorker writes the following:

The election of 2024 might come down to exactly the same choice as the election of 2020: Biden versus Trump. The American public appears to dread a rematch between its two oldest Presidents, and both of them are viewed unfavorably by a majority of the public. In one survey this fall, just six per cent of voters wanted another Biden-Trump face-off. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. It might even be one of the likeliest scenarios.

To be clear, author Susan Glasser goes on to indicate that what looks likely at this point has every chance of not happening. After all, in 2016 the frontrunners for the Republican nomination all faded away while Trump came from behind.

My perception: Republicans have a great "bench" of other people I wouldn't mind seeing as president. I'd list Mike Pompeo, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and Tom Cotton, for starters. I can't come up with a similar list for Democrats although some might argue for Gavin Newsom.

When You’ve Lost Salena Zito….

Salena Zito writes for the Washington Examiner, her beat is the back roads of the rust belt. Today she writes of Donald Trump losing his hold on the blue collar people for whom nobody spoke, until he did.

She quotes with approval the following:

Bruce Haynes, a South Carolina native and conservative strategist, said there are 900 ways to say it. “When the concept of Trump was that he stood for the grievances of the voters, they were for him," he said. "At some point, it stopped being about the voters, and it started being about his own personal grievances. And that is when he started losing voters."

There is another piece of this that is pretty difficult for him, said Haynes. “A lot of the ethos of Trump was built around winning, but now he’s being accused by some of having a pretty substantial losing streak," he said.

“He used to say 'they,' now he says 'me,'” said Haynes, “That's where he's lost people — he stood for them, and now he's perceived as standing for himself.”

My opinion: That’s a pretty darn good insight. Hat tip to Power Line for the link.

The Birth and Death of a Non-Event

The current headline at Politico is "U.S. Lawmakers to Foreign Allies: Midterm Results Show Our Democracy Is Safe." As though the issue was ever in doubt? What nonsense.

Even if the prophesied "red wave" had actually occurred, our democracy was still safe. I know, many people, mostly Democrats, lied to you that our democracy was in danger. It wasn't, it isn't, and there is little sign it will be in the foreseeable future.

With the caveat that our governmental form is not, technically, a "democracy" but a representative republic, we'd need to see more than a pack of unarmed yahoos misbehaving at the capitol for our governmental form to be endangered. We'd also need to see more than the orderly changing of nameplates on Congressional offices. 

What truly was at risk was "rule by Democrats;" which is not the definition of "democracy" even if Democrats would ask you to believe it is. 

Weird Metabolic Science

Instapundit links to a Science Alert article about why we gain back weight lost on a diet. I will paraphrase one interesting finding.

We humans walk around in a body designed by evolution to survive in conditions of food scarcity. Our bodies are programmed to eat a lot when food is available because stored fat can help us survive the lean times, like winter and early spring before the new crops come in. 

Modern agriculture and technology mean many of us no longer experience food scarcity, but rather its obverse, food abundance. Evolution - being a slow process - hasn’t caught up with our changed circumstances and isn’t likely to do so within the lifetime of anyone now alive.

In our modern lives food is almost always present, or nearby and available. Controlling our weight in the face of food abundance means fighting our instinctual programming to eat whenever food is available. The hopeful finding, while tentative, is this.

As you lose weight, your brain reduces your metabolic rate (the rate at which your body burns calories), making you subtly more efficient. The reality is, if there are two people of identical weight, one weight stable and the other having just lost weight, the latter will have to eat less food to remain the same weight.

It turns out that a hormone secreted from fat called leptin is largely responsible for this. One of leptin's key roles is to let the brain know how much fat you are carrying. The more fat you have, the more leptin is produced. So when you lose weight, your brain senses the corresponding drop in leptin.

What is exciting is that scientists have shown that if you administer just enough leptin to fool your brain into thinking you haven't lost any weight, then many of these weight-loss-related changes are mitigated. There is no treatment based on these findings yet – but watch this space.

Imagine if you could diet down to your preferred weight and then take a daily leptin pill to keep from gaining it all back. Now that would be something fine, sez I, who have been plump essentially forever. 

A Different Slant

Writing for Politico, Seth Masket makes a point I haven't seen elsewhere explaining the atypical outcome of the recent election. He concludes:

Republicans are understandably disappointed by the election outcome this year. But one of the core reasons is they secured a huge policy win, one that they’ve advocated for nearly half a century. And despite those self-imposed headwinds, Republicans still took the House, albeit narrowly. If that’s the cost, the GOP arguably got a good deal.

The "huge policy win" he refers to is the Dobbs SCOTUS decision overturning Roe v. Wade. The red wave outcome we expected would still have left Joe Biden as President in place to veto Republican policy initiatives. From that perspective, the lesser outcome we got isn't bad. 

Saturday Snark

A good haul this week.

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures.