Nikki Haley Announces Candidacy

Former Gov. Nikki Haley has announced as a candidate for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. That makes her the second officially announced candidate, Trump was first. 

The ‘we-know-better’ conventional wisdom of pundits is that she’s actually running for the Vice Presidential nomination. I’m not certain the pundits are correct, or that she’d even accept that semi-vestigial role if offered. 

My general impression is that Haley is an impressive person with a good resume who might well be a good president if she could get elected. Of course I’d say those exact words for Mike Pompeo, if he runs, and mean them just as strongly. And it would be nearly as true of Mike Pence. 

The GOP has a strong bench, maybe too strong. If all of these people plus DeSantis run in ‘24 Trump probably gets the nomination as he has a substantial reservoir of good will among GOP stalwarts - enough to make him first-among-equals in a scatter-shot race with many good candidates splitting the not-Trump vote.

Later … A knock on Haley that I believe has merit - she has not been a reliably fierce culture warrior in the way Trump, Youngkin, and DeSantis have been. Likewise, Pompeo has no demonstrated chops in the culture war arena, it’s an area in which Kristi Noem has also come up short.

About 2024

Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog raises the issue of who is acting like they're a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. Beyond Trump (announced) and DeSantis (presumptive), he sees four - Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, and Chris Sununu. 

Like a pinsetter in a bowling alley, he sets 'em up and knocks 'em down. No question any of the four would be better in office than Biden, Joe has set the bar so abysmally low. 

But could any of the four get elected? Person thinks not, check out his reasoning. Beyond those four, I worry that DeSantis isn't much fun to watch speak, whereas Trump tends to be entertaining.

Musings

I read a ton of science fiction as a young person. When I finally stopped dragging my collection of paperbacks around, I donated the 800+ volumes to a university library with a SF special collection. You might therefore conclude UFOs in our skies are triggering some strange scenarios in my imagination.

Imagine, if you will, a space-faring species shows up here and finds humans as charming as we find dogs, cats, and other pets. Perhaps they’d “adopt” some number of decorative humans and keep them around for company, perhaps breeding them selectively for docility, good humor, and conformation to shapes the aliens find attractive.

Some generations hence the resulting folk might not much resemble present day “wild” humans.  I presume human life spans might be considerably shorter than that of the aliens.  One supposes they’d neuter most “tame humans” for convenience, as we do our pets. Think of this as the “dog model.”

The alternative “cat model” would value humans as attractive predators. Not so much altered from their original state, perhaps kept in part to eradicate pests the highly evolved aliens feel squeamish about liquidating. 

Then there is the “bee keeper” model which would keep and observe reasonable-sized human colonies just for the fun of observation and perhaps some unique product we’d produce. Or the “aquarium model” where humans would inhabit an artificial habitat for decorative purposes within an alien environment in which we could not otherwise survive, one with a chlorine-based atmosphere for example.

I guess the ultimate is to view our Earth as a sort of ant colony existing for the entertainment of celestial superbeing(s).  Brrrr,  that is a chilly thought which encroaches on religion.

The Truth Is Out There

Fox News reports that the 3 items shot down subsequent to the Chinese balloon are not obviously balloons. They quote four star General Glen VerHerck, Commander of United States Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command, as follows.

We’re calling them objects for a reason. Certainly, the event off the South Carolina coast for the Chinese spy balloon, that was clearly a balloon. These are objects. I am not able to categorize how they stay aloft. It could be a gaseous type of balloon inside a structure, or it could be some type of a propulsion system. But clearly they’re able to stay aloft.

Did a four-star really say "Some type of a propulsion system?" We are in X-Files country at this point, the Mulder part of me wants to believe it's aliens. The Scully part says suspend judgment and await further input. 

I suppose the "objects" could be mini-dirigibles in odd shapes, filled with hydrogen, constructed by someone with a weird sense of humor. If the military puts it all behind a Top Secret label, a la Roswell, we'll truly be weirded out. Here is how the Fox News piece ends.

Asked by a reporter whether he has ruled out aliens VanHerck said: "I haven’t ruled out anything at this point."

Image courtesy of Ed Driscoll, posting at Instapundit.

Balloongate

We've now shot down three UAPs over North America and the Chinese claim to have downed one in their airspace. I notice that since the first Chinese balloon, folk are calling the rest of these "phenomena."

Wouldn't it be something if it turns out one or more of these are truly unknown phenomena? Maybe even the proverbial "flying saucer" with little green "men" in it? We don't want to go to war with Mars or Alpha Centauri by accident, after all.

I look forward to learning what it is that has been wandering into our airspace, and who sent it or set it free to go where the winds take it.

Later … the count of shot-down objects over North America is now up to four (4). Still no info on what or who.

Even later … now we have someone on the record saying all the stuff shot down has been balloons with payloads, albeit far smaller than the big Chinese balloon shot down off the Atlantic coast. That maybe answers the what, if not the who. Not sure how one supposed balloon was described as “octagonal.”

I’m imagining an inspired science teacher in some third world backwater with his students putting together these things on the cheap, launching them, and tracking the telemetry. The purpose: just to have fun and inspire the future engineers in the class. 

Afterthought: If shooting these down is going to be a regular weekly thing, we need to equip a few jets with gun pods. Using missiles costing tens of thousands of dollars each to knock down effing balloons is like shooting starlings with artillery.

Later … that should have read “hundreds of thousands of dollars each,” a helluva lot of do-re-mi to shoot down a balloon, however configured. 

Saturday Snark

This week's collection at Power Line was tame, only three I particularly liked.

A Killer Comparison

NY has lost a whole bunch of population which has migrated to FL. The Wall Street Journal's Editorial Board has the numbers to show exactly why. It is an amazing recommendation for FL Gov. Ron DeSantis too, here found echoed at Power Line.

Power Line's John Hinderaker adds the following from his trip to Florida.

A year ago I had the good fortune to hear Governor Ron DeSantis give a speech to a Minnesota group in Naples, Florida. DeSantis said something that I thought couldn’t possibly be correct: that Florida has more people than New York, with a state budget only half as large. Afterward, I looked it up, and it was true.

We could use the DeSantis fiscal skills in the White House, I believe.

A List of Shame

This morning I was browsing RealClearPolicy and came across a Reason article reporting free speech advocacy group FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) list of top ten most censorship-prone colleges to avoid. Sadly, the University of Oregon where many years ago I earned my doctorate, made the list of shame.

I wish I could say I was surprised, but I’m not. Oregon west of the Cascades - mostly the coast and the Willamette Valley - has been a leftist swamp since before I got there. In the late 1960s people would visit Eugene from the Berkeley and Davis UC campuses to score drugs.

In the idiom of the day, Oregon wasn’t my “scene.” I kept my head down, spent summers in CA, got my degree and “got out of Dodge.” The other DrC would tell you I have been a reluctant visitor to OR in the half century since. 

Friday Snark

This one for Mad Magazine fans.

Images courtesy of POLITICO's Cartoonists' Week in Politics.

Combatting DEI

The news aggregator msn.com has a Washington Examiner story dealing with the near-universal university obsession with DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion). It highlights the success FL Govl. Ron DeSantis has had in beginning to dismantle the expensive DEI/critical race theory bureaucracies so common in academia. 

The author believes the ideological commitment of  university folk to DEI is not strong and he cites some evidence to that effect. Perhaps he is correct; I believe there are two other factors to consider. 

First, I believe the author underrates the extent to which DEI efforts are an attempt to keep enrollments and particularly graduations up, the doors open, and state funding flowing. White and Asian kids from the middle and upper middle classes are the cohort of young people who traditionally sustained graduation levels, and kept enrollments growing. 

Birth rates for these groups have been in free fall for decades. To some degree, DEI efforts are directed at trying to "manage" the replacement of the traditional students with BIPOC kids who traditionally have not had high graduation rates. 

Nobody wants to shrink the campus footprint, fire faculty, etc. To keep faculty and administrators employed, it is crucial to sustain graduation levels with whatever students are available and therefore retain public support.

Second, DEI hiring at universities has been a sort of WPA project to create government jobs for the otherwise nearly unemployable graduates of Black Studies, Latinx Studies, Women's Studies and LGBTQ+ Studies programs. 

Not Their Job

At City Journal, James Piereson asks the question, “Is the Supreme Court Out of Step with Public Opinion?” His answer in brief is “No—it is more accurate to say that the Court is at odds with the progressive doctrines of those who make this claim.”

Actually, whether or not the Court is out of step is an irrelevancy. Being “in step” with the public is the job of the legislature and executive. Their degree of  being “in step” is tested every two years with a national election. We do not elect SCOTUS justices nor expect or require them to conform to public opinion. 

The Supreme Court’s job is deciding whether various acts are or are not constitutional. That is, legal under the basic law of the land - the Constitution as amended and subsequently interpreted by former Courts. 

Amendment processes exist by which the constitution can be made to conform to public opinion. They are intentionally cumbersome, slow, difficult and used only rarely.

More Millstone Than Lodestone

The Atlantic has a different “take” on the internal migration story we’ve been tagging “the big sort.” Here msn.com has echoed it for us outside the paywall. 

Author Jerusalem Demsas tends to view internal migration as largely driven by housing costs, whether or not a family with a median income can afford a median house or other dwelling. While she focuses on FL vs. NY, her analysis probably can be generalized to other parts of the country. She concludes:

I don’t have a lot of faith that the Republican regimes now attracting Americans will be invested in … inclusive growth. We’ve seen these states become hostile to LGBTQ rights, educational freedom, voting rights, racial equality, and more. Many Americans are being forced to choose between liberal values and financial security. Reversing that dynamic will require blue states to prioritize (housing) affordability.

Normal folk associate Demsas’ urban liberal values with homeless encampments, open drug use, street prostitution and violent criminals released to commit more crimes. Isn’t it likely that those choosing to move where “liberal values” aren’t so honored are those for whom such values have become more millstone than lodestone? 

The other factor Demsas considers is the work-from-home movement accelerated by the Covid pandemic. Downtown high rise office warrens fed workers by subway systems may be largely a thing of the past, and (personal aside) won’t that be wonderful if true? 

Full disclosure: I did the “commute on public transit downtown to work” thing for six weeks as a new college grad, hated it, and found a job in the suburbs where I could reasonably drive to work. As a CA native I have always considered an ignition key a birthright and my “wheels” a freedom machine.

SOTU

I gather public decorum was not much on display at the State Of The Union speech given last night. I did not watch the Biden speech, I am not by nature a masochist. The talking heads will be pontificating about it tonight on the news, alas. 

Speaking of which, why are we getting nightly updates on some prominent attorney who is charged with killing his wife and son? How is that a national story? That's the sort of stuff I try to avoid by not watching local news, but Bret Baier has been featuring it recently. Bummer.

Perpetrator Alleged

Writing for his Substack site, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, 85, makes a very detailed claim that the U.S. was responsible for planning and executing the sabotage of The Nord Stream II pipeline under the Baltic Sea. 

The pipeline was built to carry inexpensive Russian natural gas to Germany and perhaps a couple of other European countries. It was destroyed before it went into service.

On the other hand, the Washington Examiner reports that the White House and various intelligence and defense sources have denied Hersh's claims. The WE description of his article alleges it cites only one anonymous source. 

I would add that the U.S seems to be the only actor which has a clear and obvious motive for the sabotage. Alleging any other national actor did it requires very convoluted logic and a disguised motive, which is not in itself proof that the U.S. was responsible. 

I can imagine radical environmentalists would have liked to destroy the pipeline. It is unclear they possess the technical ability to accomplish it in 200+ feet of cold seawater.

What Maher Said

On Saturday I wrote praising Bill Maher's rant against woke culture, but complained I couldn't find the text to quote in my note. Now RealClearPolitics has a substantial portion of the Maher text, which I post here for your pleasure.

If you're part of today's woke revolution, you need to study the part of revolutions where they spin out of control because the revolutionaries get so drunk on their own purifying elixir, they imagine they can reinvent the very nature of human beings.

Yesterday, I asked ChatGPT, 'Are there any similarities between today's woke revolution and Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution of the 1960s' and it wrote back, 'How long do you have?

Because, again, in China, we saw how a revolutionary thought he could do a page-one rewrite of humans. Mao ordered his citizens to throw off the four olds - old thinking, old culture, old customs, and old habits. So, your whole life went in the garbage overnight. No biggie. And those who resisted were attacked by an army of purifiers called the Red Guard who went around the country putting dunce caps on people who didn't take to being a new kind of mortal being. A lot of pointing and shaming went on. Oh, and about a million dead. And the only way to survive was to plead insanity for the crime of being insufficiently radical and then apologize and thank the State for the chance to see what a piece of shit you are, and of course, submit to re-education, or as we call it here in America, freshman orientation.

We do have our own Red Guard here, but they do their rampaging on Twitter. Good intentions can turn into the insane arrogance of thinking your revolution is so fucking awesome and your generation is so mind-bendingly improved that you have bequeathed the world with a new kind of human, you're welcome.

With communists, that human was no longer selfish. In America today, that human is no longer born male or female. And obesity is not something that affects health. You can be healthy at any size. Really, we voted on it. A formerly serious magazine (The Atlantic) last year published with a straight face an article called 'Separating Sports By Sex Doesn't Make Sense.' Yes, it does. Because, again, we haven't reinvented homo sapiens since Crystal Pepsi came out.

I've spent 3 decades on T.V. mocking Republicans who said climate change was just a theory and now I have to deal with people who say you know what else is just a theory, biology?

No kidding. 

Big Sort Continues

Breitbart reports about the internal migration from high tax blue states to Florida and its impact on voting trends. They interview the Vice-Chair of the GOP in Florida, Christian Ziegler.

We’re trying to run up that score in voter registration,” he said, explaining that there were 250,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in Florida when DeSantis first took office in 2018.

Now, there are more than 300,000 more Republicans than Democrats in Florida.

“So we’ve had this massive swing,” he said.

Ziegler provided another stunning data point, noting that one million net new people have moved to the state and registered to vote since DeSantis first took office.

“Out of a million, about half a million have registered as Republican, and only 17,000 have registered as Democrats. So we’re just obliterating the Democrats,” he said.

Power Line's John Hinderaker seems to think it's only Republicans doing the migrating. He writes:

Americans are sorting themselves into red and blue states. To be fair, though, the sort is mostly a one-way street: millions are leaving failing blue states and flocking to Florida, Texas, Tennessee, South Carolina, South Dakota, etc.

I'm not convinced he is correct. My conservative relatives who ranch in Colorado believe a lot of Democrats have moved there, turning their once purple state blue. I'd guess a fair few Democrats have moved from CA to liberal OR, too.

Update on Italy

Power Line's John Hinderaker shares some copy from the London Times (behind paywall) which reports newish Italian PM Georgia Meloni has been doing relatively well in her first 100 days. This, in spite of predictions of trouble as she heads a Conservative party - the Brothers of Italy.

Meloni, 46, has emerged from her unexpectedly smooth first 100 days in office, completed last week, as the most popular leader in the EU.

A fairly conservative budget passed in record time in December has kept Brussels and the bond dealers sweet, while in the past week she has clinched a landmark $8 billion (£6.6 billion) deal with Libya to supply gas and been hosted by the leaders of Sweden and Germany. A trip to Kyiv is expected soon. Her authority over her far more seasoned coalition partners Silvio Berlusconi, 86, and Matteo Salvini, 49, appears unchallenged.

An EU summit starting next Thursday could see some sympathy for Meloni’s tough line on migration, while her approval rating, at 52 per cent, is far higher than that of any of the other leaders who will be seated around the table with her,

COTTonLINE wishes Meloni good fortune and wide public support.

Ryan Goes On Record

I haven't been convinced Donald Trump is our best Republican nominee to run for president in 2024, although I will vote for him if nominated. That said, a point in Trump's favor is that former Speaker Paul Ryan says he would not support Trump if nominated.

Paul Ryan was very nearly the most useless supposed GOP Speaker in living memory. It was said he didn't want the job, but took it because others didn't want it. 

Ryan's behavior certainly said he proposed to do as little as possible in office. Nancy Pelosi demonstrated the speakership can be a powerful office. Paul Ryan demonstrated, if that is the word, that the House can pretty much get along after a fashion without a Speaker.

I was so bummed by Ryan's non-performance that I would seriously consider supporting nearly anything or anyone he opposed.

Saturday Snark

All images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures.

Deepfake Is A Real Threat

I admit I'd been taking deepfakes with a grain of salt, thinking they couldn't be all that good. Then I watched this example of President Biden saying stuff I absolutely know even he wouldn't say and I am convinced I was wrong. It sounds like Biden and he appears to be doing the talking. 

Much as I'd love for him to have said it, I know it is a fake of such quality as to be indistinguishable from the real thing, except for two things. Those are the content - what they have him saying - and the deepfake Biden makes fewer goofs and gaffes. 

Because of this last difference Biden ought to hire the folks who did this deepfake and have them build out his speeches. He'd be perceived as much more with it.