Indictment

Power Line’s Scott Johnson muses about the Biden documents stashed in various places, including a garage, and writes this indictment.

There is nothing funny about Joe Biden. Every day he remains in office he does incalculable damage to the country. The Biden matter is likely the least of it. He has dissolved our southern border, prioritized the climate madness, furthered the woke insanity, weakened our military, promoted a gusher of federal spending, and so on. His administration is shoddy and destructive. He is personally corrupt. Yet the vision of Biden passing judgment on himself is hilarious.

What’s “hilarious” is Biden - on camera - condemning in no uncertain terms Trump for retaining classified documents. Out of his own mouth, he insists retaining documents is indefensible. Damn, don’t you love it when a villain shoots himself in the foot?

Implicit Bias

Wilfred Reilly is a political science professor at an HBCU. He writes at Tablet the following insight.

Within my field—the academic social sciences—a 2006 survey found that about 18% of all faculty members identified as Marxists, another 24% as radicals, and 20%-21% as activists. In contrast, perhaps 5% of American soft-scientists are conservatives. In an environment this politically slanted, the odds are good that many shifts of focus attributed to new theory or empirical data—and indeed many overall social science conclusions—are largely the products of ideology.

Reilly‘s more general point is captured in the title, “How Political Bias Explains Everything.” He makes a good argument. Hat tip to RealClearPolitics for the link.

Dysfunction Junction

Writing at American Greatness, Larry Sand provides a relatively comprehensive enumeration of what could be called “California Crazy.” He describes the wretched policy choices made by the overwhelmingly Democrat government of the state. 

As Sand notes, the result is families Kurt Schlichter calls “normals” leaving the state in record numbers. The migrants move to places which, though less blessed by nature, are better governed.

Although Sand doesn’t mention it, the Covid-fueled shift to working at home has greatly facilitated such moves. Among the dozen or so households in our brand-new 55+ seniors neighborhood in Nevada are 2-4 individuals who moved there from elsewhere and continue to work from home for their employer located out of state. Nevada’s status as a no-state-income-tax haven was likely part of what influenced their choice.

The Marriage Gap

Writing for the American Enterprise Institute, Ruy Teixeira and colleagues look at the “marriage gap” in voting profiles, comparing it to the “gender gap.” They argue the two interact. 

Married men are most likely to vote Republican, followed by married women. They are followed by unmarried men who are slightly more likely to vote Republican than Democrat. On the other hand, unmarried women vote Democrat by about 2 to 1. 

What isn’t mentioned by Teixeira et al. is how the class issue interacts with this data. The upper classes are more likely to be married, but also more likely to be college grads - both of these are facts. We are told by various pundits the married are more likely to vote Republican but also told college grads are more likely to vote Democrat. 

Something doesn’t make sense here. Without the data in front of me, I can’t begin to speculate how that apparent conflict in claims can be resolved. 

It seems likely somebody has analyzed it wrong, doesn’t it? Or that the relationships between marriage and education level versus voting are less straightforward than has been claimed.

Gallup: Republicans Outnumber Democrats

The Washington Examiner reports the findings of a recent Gallup poll asking Americans their political preferences.

For the first time in decades, more people identify as Republicans than Democrats, a striking change that bolsters polls showing that the United States is a moderate-conservative nation.

In the latest massive Gallup survey of 10,000 adults, 45% identified as Republicans and 44% as Democrats. That’s a tiny edge for sure, but it’s the first time the GOP has had the lead since former President George H.W. Bush launched the Gulf War in 1991.

For several years the Ds have been too radical for most Americans, and the polling finally reflects that fact. Ds have cemented the impression their party speaks exclusively for life’s various losers. Most Americans are convinced they personally are not losers.

Plus in his public appearances poor old Joe Biden - the nominal D leader - hasn’t inspired confidence. Instead he’s left the impression he isn’t up to the admittedly tough job to which he was elected.

This information will possibly encourage retirements among D senators (and maybe House members) elected from red or purple states.

Superior Snark

Writing at National Review, Jim Geraghty looks at the performance in office of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who has recently been in the news, and quips as follows.

U.S. secretaries of transportation are a bit like brake lines, offensive lines, and power lines — you only pay much attention to them when they don’t work.

In which case Pete B’s recent publicity is correctly viewed as notoriety.  

Misdirection

Instapundit links to a Washington Free Beacon article which makes fun of Pete Buttigieg’s Transportation Department. It recently has twice dropped the ball with regard to air travel. WFB alleges that instead DOT has focused on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) matters.

No kidding. Buttigieg is a smart “out” gay who wants to be involved in national politics. If he is even slightly realistic, he understands his sexual orientation is a drag on his electoral ambitions. Put him in charge of a federal agency and then be surprised when he emphasizes DEI issues? I don’t think so. 

It didn’t take the bureaucrats at DOT 5 minutes to figure out what sort of proposals would get favorable reception in the Secretary’s office. It’s sad (but not surprising) that we don’t have a DOT Secretary who has transportation as his number one issue.

Good luck next time you fly….

Marcos Meets Xi

My foreign policy guy - George Friedman - takes a look at the map of Asia and concludes that there is a heck of an incentive for China to cut a deal with the Philippines for basing rights. The issue is continued freedom of navigation to and from China to the world. 

Of course China has such access now. The issue is whether at some point in a future conflict the U.S. might effectively blockade the Chinese coastal ports, shutting off their export market and crippling the Chinese economy. 

If China had military base rights in the Philippines, a blockade would be very difficult to achieve. This creates an enormous incentive for Philippine leadership to play off U.S. and Chinese interests against each other to see which wealthy country will deliver the larger package of “incentives” to poor Manila.

Of course, the role of the Philippines as a former U.S. colony complicates these relationships, in both positive and negative directions. A substantial number of Filipinos live happily in the U.S., probably not true of China.

Boredom Killer

I recently read a Boston Globe opinion piece which waxes rhapsodic about audiobooks. “That doesn’t sound like you” I can imagine regular COTTonLINE readers thinking - no politics, no foreign affairs.

Something I’ve mentioned here is that the DrsC live in semi-remote places throughout the year. I probably haven’t mentioned that most years it is three different semi-remote places. 

Getting from one to another SRP necessitates roughly 11 four hour drives per year, done in groups of 2 or 3 days. Plus, when you live in a SRP a couple of times a month you have to make a 1-2 hour drive to get to serious shopping, a medical specialist or an airport. 

Bottom line: we do a lot of longish drives in a year, and we find listening to music puts us to sleep - which is dangerous. Our solution, and one I’d recommend to you is audiobooks. 

As the opinion column notes, being read to is one of life’s not-guilty pleasures, one you can enjoy while doing something else. Listening and driving, or listening and walking which the other DrC likes, is both feasible and pleasant. 

If you need to talk or take a call, the book is easily paused and waits with limitless patience till you can resume listening. We like fiction, but other things are available. Give it a try.

Bipartisan Good News

Fox News reports something I believe patriots will evaluate as exceptionally good news. See what happened.

House Republicans and Democrats on Tuesday joined forces and voted overwhelmingly in favor of a new committee to examine U.S. strategic competition with China, after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy declared on the House floor that neither Republicans nor Democrats trust China anymore.

The House voted, 365-65, in favor of creating the committee, which was supported by every Republican and more than two-thirds of the House Democrat caucus.

The mission of the committee, which was proposed by McCarthy, is to "investigate and submit policy recommendations on the status of the Chinese Communist Party’s economic, technological, and security progress and its competition with the United States."

In recent years the only bipartisan things getting much support were pay raises for congress folk. I don’t suppose this will be popular in Beijing. 

I hope it signals at least a partial return to the policy that partisanship ends at the water’s edge. The world is a dangerous place; there are forces including the CCP who wish us ill and strive to bring it about.

Public School Enrollments - Rising and Falling

Another way of looking at “the Big Sort” is presented in map form at Axios. The map shows what has happened to public school enrollments in 48 of the 50 states (LA, VA not reporting) during the period 2009 - 2020. 

States in the northeast and rust belt have mostly been losers (except MD and DE), as have 4 of the 5 Pacific coast states (CA, OR, AK, HI). The big gainers have been in the mountain and prairie west (except NM and MO). The southeast is a mixed bag, all gainers except MS and AL.

The pandemic hit, and public schools were subjected to state and local guidelines. Many of them flip-flopped on virtual versus in-person learning. Widespread teacher and staff shortages exacerbated the problem. Students rapidly fell behind. That pushed frustrated parents to pull their kids out. As a result, private schools and charter schools gained students. The number of homeschooled students doubled to about 5 million.

Weird Thermal Science

Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (once known to locals as “the RadLab”) have found a new way to produce refrigeration, and possibly heating as well. They call the method “ionocaloric cooling" and it apparently produces more cooling with less electricity usage than other methods. The findings are reported in ScienceAlert. Hat tip to Instapundit for the link. The researchers write:

No one has successfully developed an alternative solution that makes stuff cold, works efficiently, is safe, and doesn't hurt the environment. We think the ionocaloric cycle has the potential to meet all those goals if realized appropriately.

As Instapundit is fond of admonishing, “faster, please.” 

Trade Sanctions Flop

Supposedly the European Union is angry with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, and has imposed trade sanctions. If you suspect sanctions have little effect, you are correct.

Power Line posts a chart by Eurostat sourced from Politico.eu which shows that 19 of the 26 EU nations for which data is available traded more with Russia in 2022 than in 2021. Malta was left off the list. For eight of the nineteen, last year’s trade with Russia was more than double the prior year trade. 

Tell me again how these “tough” trade sanctions are hurting the Russian economy, I can’t quite see it. 

A Desire Named Streetcar and A Criminal Waste

Power Line’s Steven Hayward cracking wise on the left’s love affair with public transit, which incidentally continues to experience reduced ridership and funding difficulties. Hayward quips:

Mass transit—the holy grail of urban progressivism (Quest for the Holy Rail, as I sometimes put it, or, A Desire Named Streetcar)—is struggling right now.

Concerning the heavy rains we’re experiencing in California right now, for you’ll recollect the DrsC are visiting and Hayward lives near Berkeley, he quotes the following from The Wall Street Journal (behind paywall):

California voters passed a $7.5 billion bond measure in 2012 to help build new storage facilities and make other water improvements. The state approved some of that money in 2018 to help build the Sites Reservoir, 75 miles northwest of Sacramento, which would hold enough runoff from wet years like this to meet the needs of roughly nine million people for a year. But the project has been mired in regulatory delays.

There’s that straitjacket I wrote about yesterday, “regulatory delays” imposed to please the Sierra Club. Meanwhile millions of acre feet of clean rainwater which CA could put to good use run off into the Pacific Ocean and are lost.

Families, Schools, Churches, Neighborhoods

Ed Driscoll, posting at Instapundit, links to a Christopher F. Rufo column at City Journal which argues there is significant movement by those on the right in building a “conservative counterculture.”

[The] old counterculture has become the dominant culture, having been absorbed into the bureaucracies of universities, schools, government, and now major corporations. The left-wing culture no longer carries a critique; it is the status quo.

The solution to left-wing cultural dominance is ... to rebuild the structures that provide the basis for healthy, integrated human development: families, schools, churches, neighborhoods. Though few have noticed, this is already happening. A “Quiet Right” is patiently, and nearly invisibly, building a viable counterculture.

Echoing something I wrote recently, Rufo spots a couple of “robins,” which may presage the arrival of a conservative “Spring.” It is worth noting that Gov. DeSantis (R-FL) recently appointed Rufo (and four other conservatives) to the board of governors of a Florida state college, a “robin” if ever I saw one.

Rx: Build Reservoirs

CA has plenty of dry years but with some frequency has a wet winter with plenty of rain, this CA winter is a wet one.  A website called Ars Technica runs an article entitled:

How California could save up its rain to ease future droughts

The article has a few fancy ideas but really doesn’t adequately emphasize the main one: build dams in canyons. 

CA has loads of mountains. The Sierras of course are legendary, but I grew up in the shadow of Coast Range mountains and they are no joke either. Those mountains start just north of LA and run with a few breaks all the way up the coast to Oregon. They are quite large, and hundreds of potential reservoir sites are unused along the coast and in the Sierras.

It has been years, maybe decades since CA built a new reservoir. Resistance to building reservoirs is pushed by the Sierra Club and other environmentalist organizations. 

An evil coalition of those wanting to preserve scrub-covered canyons in their current ‘pristine’ form and those who don’t want to spend money on infrastructure when it is more useful “buying votes” keeps CA from building the storage needed to stop wasting rainfall runoff into the Pacific. 

Somehow we’ve moved from having a government that could and did solve problems to a place where anybody can block almost any government initiative they oppose, which means most of them. My mental image is of a giant wearing a straitjacket, of his own construction, voluntarily donned. 

I have much nostalgia for the Gov. Pat Brown era when CA had a can-do government. It has become a beautiful place so hobbled by a can’t-do government its people are fleeing. The CA situation is bleeping pathetic.

Moves: Reds Gain, Blues Lose

Zero Hedge links to a U-Haul study which looks at the roughly 2 million one way interstate rentals they made in 2022. Each year they publish this information which is a decent indication of where people are moving to and from.

Texas is the No. 1 growth state for the second consecutive year and the fifth time since 2016. Florida, which ranks second, has been a top-three growth state seven years in a row.

South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Arizona, Georgia, Ohio and Idaho round out the top 10 growth states. Virginia and Alabama are the biggest risers, climbing 26 spots from their respective 2021 rankings. New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Illinois and California are the bottom five states for growth in 2022.

In that last sentence, read “bottom states for growth” as “negative growth” meaning losing households moving elsewhere. I believe the U-Haul index is a purer measure of Americans “voting with their feet” than the numbers released by the moving van companies like United. 

Most of those renting trucks pay for their own moves. A substantial proportion of those using a moving company have their move paid for by an employer. Van moves reflects the employer’s choice of destination more so than that of the employee.

Weird Materials Science

The MIT News journal of recent scientific findings reports that two thousand years later, materials scientists have finally figured out how the Romans made concrete that was (and still is) more durable than what we are able to make today. The Roman concrete literally “heals” cracks that form and does so automatically.

It appears the Romans added quicklime to the mixture instead of lime-mixed-with-water known as “slaked lime.” Perhaps we can do likewise and reap the benefits the ancient Romans got from their super strong concrete, some of which continues to last and be functional to this day.

You have to wonder what other technologies the ancients had that remain lost. Perhaps the “Greek fire” weapon that burst into flame upon exposure to air? How could the ancients have compounded and used that? Hat tip to Instapundit for the link.

Fighting Over Rules

Kevin McCarthy inches closer to the votes needed to become Speaker of the House. The holdouts who changed sides have gotten in return rule changes which may move “the peoples’ chamber” back toward being the deliberative body the framers intended it to be.

I would like to see the federal government adopt a balanced budget policy, with limited exceptions. We cannot keep borrowing money and living on credit indefinitely. Plus the so-called “omnibus” bills which no one has the time to read before passing are abominations.

The real question is whether McCarthy has to give away so much power to get the job that the job is no longer worth having. That was the situation which ended us up with the worthless Paul Ryan as Speaker, who did basically nothing for several years. He was tolerated because no one else wanted the job.

Later … McCarthy finally got the votes he needed to win the Speakership on the 15th ballot. A handful of the holdouts were convinced to vote “present” instead of for another candidate, thus lowering the number of votes required to win the post. (Posted at 9:45 p.m PST)

Looking Back at Jan. 6

Two years ago today a group of unarmed Trump supporters misbehaved at the U.S. capitol. Mostly it was trespass and vandalism, plus frank voyeurism. They were unhappy with the results of an election held under difficult and unprecedented conditions, and the high-handed actions of state election officials.

If you claim it was an insurrection - I do not - it was the most pathetic excuse for one imaginable. It was people venting their anger and frustration. The only shots fired were by the Capitol Police and claims of several deaths among the defenders were similar to the claims of many of the deaths blamed on Covid, coincidences politically attributed. 

One thing is clear, Democrats are never going to let it go. It has become the “bloody shirt” (classical reference) they will wave till they die. 

I note the anniversary only to add that in the annals of unrest of the period - 2020 - Jan. 6 was small potatoes. No buildings were burned, no stores looted, and some number of those involved were covert federal provocateurs and shills. Directly or indirectly, intentionally or otherwise, the then-Speaker appears to have acted in ways that made it worse.