Democracy in Danger? Not So Much

Democrats say Republicans in general and Trump in particular are threats to Democracy. Republicans say Democrats in general and Joe Biden in particular are threats to Democracy. 

What if they are both correct in their appraisals? Does our form of government stand any chance of surviving? 

The short answer is "Yes." The reason - both claims are only slightly true, they're mostly hyperbole.

Expect both parties to keep making exaggerated claims, even though these are largely bunkum. After all, lying comes naturally to politicians. 

It is a profession in which telling the truth is less important than telling people what they crave hearing. 

A Defense of (Gasp) Gavin?

Power Line's Lloyd Billingsley does a nice column on the intermarried Pelosi, Newsom, Brown, and Getty clans which have run California for far too long. He takes some delight at dumping on Gavin Newsom's claim, “the only reason I am governor of California, the only reason you are talking to me right now, is because of baseball.” 

To be sure, his family is wealthy but it may be true the only way he got through college was playing baseball. How, you might ask? 

Gavin has talked about being dyslexic and having trouble in school. That is normally not something people brag about. We all know some young people get a college degree because they're good athletes but indifferent-to-poor students. 

Coaches figure out where the gut courses are, the profs who "support the team," and the easy majors, often "Communication Studies" or some such. They direct the dimmer bulbs to those majors and classes and keep them eligible to play. 

Perhaps that's why Gavin attended Santa Clara instead of Stanford where boys from "connected" families like his normally go. Santa Clara is private but is not first tier.

Weird Penology Science

The Daily Wire has obtained a prepublication copy of a research study accepted for publication in the scholarly journal Aggression and Violent Behavior. The findings are interesting because they contradict the current received wisdom concerning the treatment of minorities in the criminal justice system. They found:

In recent years it has become common belief within the scholarly community as well as the general public that the criminal justice system is biased due to race and class issues. We sought to examine this with meta-analysis. Our results suggest that for most crimes, criminal adjudication in the US is not substantially biased on race or class lines.

As a meta-analysis, the study did not create a new dataset on criminal sentencing and race, but rather examined 51 studies conducted by others looking at the question since 2005. The numbers suggesting no or marginal racial bias in punishment were therefore collected by the existing studies, but those authors often claimed to have found racial bias in their writings, even when their numbers did not back it up. (emphasis added)

A prior meta-study looking for racial bias in juvenile criminal sentences, for example, also found no statistically significant evidence of racism. Yet the Northeastern University professor who was its lead author, writing in the Journal of Criminal Justice, did not make that finding the paper’s takeaway. Instead, he disputed his own evidence.

It appears scholars have been desperate to disprove the evidence of their own eyes, namely, that Hispanic and particularly Black individuals commit more crimes per capita which is why they are overrepresented in the criminal justice system.

Note: The researchers' clarification that when sample sizes are huge, virtually any difference is statistically significant, even when observed differences are of no practical significance, is absolutely correct statistically. 

Reacting to this study, Power Line's John Hinderaker writes;

Beginning in 2022, Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension began releasing data on perpetrators, organized by crime and by race. That allowed American Experiment Policy Fellow David Zimmer to prove, conclusively, that there is no anti-black bias in Minnesota’s law enforcement.

Blacks commit serious crimes ten times as often as whites, per capita, and that disproportion explains all of the “disparities” in what follows. In fact, a white criminal in Minnesota is somewhat more likely to be prosecuted than a black criminal.

Missing the Melting Pot

If you read this blog, you probably go with some frequency to RealClearPolitics, I find it indispensable. Nearly daily some opinion writer writes that the Republican-controlled House isn't doing its job and the column gets linked at RCP. Here is the latest example of this silliness. 

Honestly, how dumb do they believe us to be? We have two major political parties which don't even agree about what constitutes our major problems, much less upon answers thereto.

A Republican-controlled House will pass legislation embodying Republican values in pursuit of Republican goals. What chance has such legislation of subsequently passing a Democrat-controlled Senate? Of surviving a Democrat President's veto? 

The chance of either approximates zip, zilch, nada. So they don't bother.

Similarly, the Republican-controlled House won't bother to consider legislation embodying Democrat values in pursuit of Democrat goals which originated in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

When the public, in their collective wisdom, elect a divided legislature, gridlock is what happens. And our public votes for gridlock with some frequency, including currently.

In a representative republic, how should we interpret this voting behavior? It reflects a public in which few clear goals are widely shared. 

Plus our system is designed to enable motivated minorities to stymie majorities that are not similarly energized. Maybe it shouldn't work this way, but it sure does.

Our governmental design performed better when more Americans shared a common culture and thus had similar goals. The current emphasis on sub-group identity and multiculturalism increases the likelihood of group-specific goals not shared by other groups and enhances political gridlock.

A Minor Mystery

SecDef Lloyd Austin was secretly hospitalized for three days, in ICU, following “complications” from “an elective surgery.” No word has leaked on what the surgery was to repair or improve, meaning it was something embarrassing.

"Elective" means it wasn't essential for continued health, not life-threatening. That leaves out heart and circulatory trouble, most cancers, appendix, gall bladder, gut problems, and cataract surgery.

With absolutely zero inside knowledge, let’s speculate on what was done. Plastic surgery? Vasectomy? Weight loss abdominal surgery plus tummy tuck? Prostate? Hemorrhoids? Sex change? Tattoo removal?

I guess it could have been complications following hip or knee replacement. But why be shy about those common elective-but-not-embarrassing procedures?

Brilliant Phrase-Making

Instapundit claims “a friend” called the January 6 faux-insurrection:

“A day that will live in hyperbole.”

Hitchhiking on Roosevelt’s Dec. 7 characterization of Pearl Harbor, with bitter rhyming irony.

The Giftzwerg

The Post Millennial reports the following:

On Saturday, Jack Posobiec posted a screenshot of a now-deleted 2018 tweet from Greta Thunberg, which linked to an article predicting humans would go extinct by 2023 due to climate change.

"A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years."

The website Thunberg sourced in her original tweet, gritpost.com, has since been shut down.

We didn't stop using fossil fuels, both India and China are building new coal-fired generation plants at breakneck speed. Humanity is still very much here, and some nontrivial fraction thereof is trying, without permission, to move to the US. 

Turns out the Swedish giftzwerg was wrong once again.

Sunday Snark

Image courtesy of the Ramirez Substack page.

Saturday Snark

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

No Guns = No Insurrection

Today is the anniversary of the famous riot at the Capitol that Democrats like to call an insurrection. I heard some talking head on TV call it an attack by an "armed" group. What a joke. Were they armed with sticks? Pen knives?

In a nation with more privately owned firearms than citizens, any group with no guns is sure as blazes not an insurrection. The only shots fired that day were fired by a Capitol cop fatally shooting an unarmed woman protester with his service weapon, and he wrongly got off scot-free. 

A group demanding a ceasefire in Gaza recently became the same sort of nuisance at the Capitol in Sacramento and seemingly were allowed to go free. And unlike the group in DC, they did it without help from the FBI.

Later ... This X post about the Capitol cop mentioned above. Karma sometimes takes awhile.

Landscape Alert

The other DrC has two really pretty photos of our winter desert environment posted at her blog. Do yourself a favor and check them out. 

One thing she forgot to mention about light in the desert. A full moon can look like there are floodlights on outside.

Friday Snark

Images courtesy of Politico's Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

Barack Bobbles

In all the back and forth about the ouster of Harvard President Claudine Gay, something I failed to note in passing. Her ignominious exit was a substantial defeat for former President Barack Obama. 

Before her resignation, the legacy media made much of Obama’s support for her continuation in office. Almost no notice was taken of how little his support availed her cause. 

Obama likes to fancy himself the gray eminence behind the Biden presidency and the Democrat Party more generally. Attention needs to be paid when he fails in that role, as he did in this case. 

Obama has less clout than is widely supposed. And, his support for a proven plagiarizer draws unwanted attention to the questionable authorship of books written in his name.

From Whence Cometh Populism?

Writing at Spiked, Joel Kotkin does an overview of the economies of developed countries. He observes in passing that the percentage of Americans who can be considered middle class has dropped from 61% in the 1970s to 50% today. 

Kotkin notes the parties that once supported working class issues have now been captured by the educated and oligarchic classes. And he concludes with this summary.

Can the Democrats and other formerly left-wing parties make the changes necessary to win back working-class voters? This will be tough to pull off when these parties are financed largely by oligarchs – and when their activists are so wedded to unpopular positions, like identity politics, genderfluidity and climate apocalypticism. But if they fail to make this shift and continue to ignore the voters, then they will only have themselves to blame when the populist right eats their lunch.

Quote of the Day

Harvard grad and wealthy Wall Streeter Bill Ackman took the lead in pressing the school to fire President Claudine Gay. Now he writes more generally about DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion).

DEI is inherently a racist and illegal movement in its implementation even if it purports to work on behalf of the so-called oppressed.

The key words are "in its implementation" which tends to be revenge-flavored. 

Wednesday Snark

The satirical Babylon Bee ran these two pictures with the following headline.

Tragic: Hamas Loses Two Leaders In One Day

ABC Wins

Blessed be video recorders. The DrsC recorded both video feeds of the Rose Parade, those on ABC and NBC. Then we watched both last evening and thereby saw more of the parade, while fast-forwarding thru the ads.

Randomly we began with the NBC version and followed it with the ABC version. This provided a natural experiment. 

We agreed that ABC did the superior job. Their camera work was better, their on-air personalities were less painful, and the commercial breaks were less intrusive. 

The addition of set-piece musical and dance performances loosely tied to floats were a waste of airtime in our view. If memory serves, there were four of these high-energy, low-talent, bad-audio interruptions. 

The other DrC felt the only innovative float was the first, featuring 4-5 “boats.” She judged the rest to be non-memorable. I tended to agree but guessed the organizers’ choice of theme - music - could be blamed.

I liked those little suitcase sized Honda scooters parade officials were riding. I wonder if they are street-legal anywhere?

Two Down

Fox News reports Harvard President Claudine Gay is resigning, amid escalating scandals about plagiarism in her published work and her embarrassing testimony before Congress. That’s two gone, the president of the U. of Pennsylvania had already stepped down. 

Attention now turns to the president of MIT - Sally Kornbluth - and to the board members of the Harvard Corporation. The resignations of these have also been sought.

Gay was hired to ramrod DEI at the prestigious private university, a mistake that is the fault of the board. Even before the plagiarism revelations, her scholarship was mediocre but irrelevant in their eyes.

With DEI under a cloud and Gay departing, perhaps Harvard can get back to being a serious university with some actual standards? Maybe stop giving nearly all students A grades? Maybe expect some decorum from students?

Community Treatment a Proven Failure

For nearly as long as I’ve been writing this blog, which began in 2006, I’ve been talking about the need to institutionalize the addicted and the mentally ill, many are both. Mostly I’ve been a voice in the wilderness, not striking a lot of responsive chords in the wider public.

I am greatly heartened to read an article in today’s Politico which notes the tide is beginning to turn. Others are seeing that community treatment, supposedly the better alternative to in-patient care, doesn’t work for a variety of reasons. Begin with the fact many experiencing mental illness or addiction do not want treatment and, given the choice, will avoid it. 

Our major alternative for treatment-resistant individuals has been imprisonment when their erratic behavior becomes more than a mere nuisance for society. I conclude societies’ tolerance for large numbers living rough on the mean streets and self-medicating with feel-good street drugs may be wearing thin.

Most mental illness we cannot "cure," that is, make it go away permanently. We can treat/suppress symptoms and help sufferers cope better with the distress they are feeling. 

Support groups (AA, etc.) can help the addicted resist the pull of the substance they abuse. They wisely teach "You'll always be an addict, the only key to a decent life is abstinence."

Can we medicate many broken individuals such that they behave near-normally? Yes, certainly. Do those so medicated like the way they then feel? Do they prefer it to the high of street drugs? Often the answer is a clear no.

Perhaps one answer is inpatient warehousing with a clear choice, treatment or all the drugs you want but no Narcan. Translation, treatment or slow-motion suicide with the drugs of your choice. 

Both, however, done somewhere other than the public street or square. We've proven that leaving these sad folks free-range is not an acceptable answer. This quote spoke volumes to me.

A person diagnosed with mental illness and substance use disorder needs inpatient care for doctors to stabilize them, argued Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a gastroenterologist and top member of the two committees with power over the policy. 

“The people who were so opposed to this because they still want to do it in an outpatient [facility], you wonder if they’ve ever actually lived with somebody who is seriously psychotic,” Cassidy said.

The Politico article is wrongly titled "Mental hospitals warehoused the sick. Congress wants to let them try again." Most of the mentally ill are not "sick" in the sense that they can be healed, with today's medical technology. 

In many cases the appropriate, if politically incorrect, term would be "defective." Their brain is "miswired," probably since birth or traumatic brain injury. 

Sadly we have no current ability to put it right. And candidly, very little prospect of doing so within the lifetime of anyone now drawing breath.

More on Intelligent Architecture

Two days ago I wrote about low tech ways of keeping buildings cool in hot climates. Today the other DrC sends me a link to an article about a modern way to accomplish much of the same, albeit with technology helping out. 

The two approaches are related, but not identical. The Australian example accomplishes livability year round, dealing with both heat and cold, and expends significant energy doing so via hydronic heatings and movable louvres. The buildings I wrote about in the Middle East and Vietnam accomplish only cooling but do so passively, just by existing and require no energy inputs in the process. 

Historically, providing warmth has always been easier than providing cooling. We do it by burning something combustible, ranging from natural gas to dried camel dung. Cooling is harder, especially if no energy is expended in the effort.