Thursday Snark

Image courtesy of Lucianne.com, 5/22/2025.

A Good Trend

Ruy Teixeira keeps writing columns trying to get his Democrats to change course, these make very agreeable reading for Republicans. Some choice pickings from his latest article which looks at Catalist's demographic breakdown of the 2024 election data.

Obama carried black voters in 2012 by an amazing 93 points. Harris managed only a 71-point margin. Democratic decline: 22 points.

Obama carried Latinos by 35 points; in 2024, the Democratic margin was down to just 8 points. Democratic decline: 27 points.

Obama was the last Democratic presidential candidate to carry the working class as a whole (2-point margin). (snip) Democratic decline: 12 points.

In 2012, Obama dominated Hispanic voters under 30 by 51 points. In 2024, the Democratic margin among these voters was just 14 points. Democratic decline: 37 points.

The widening of the gender gap between 2012 and 2024 is entirely attributable to Democrats doing worse among men, not to doing better among women.

I'm loving these numbers, obviously Teixeira is not. He thinks they prove Dems should change from a DEI pitch to an economic message. Dems on the other hand think their problem is that they have no Trump-style performer-candidate. 

I think it is both. The Dems' DEI message resonates with many who've experienced university indoctrination, but they constitute a minority of voters. And Trump is a uniquely talented politician.

We Told You So

Sally Quinn is a longtime Washington DC society insider, a Washington Post columnist, and the widow of its Watergate era editor Ben Bradlee. In a recent interview she has blamed Jill Biden for Joe Biden's attempt to run for reelection, calling it "elder abuse." Quinn however refuses to accept guilt for not telling us this when it still mattered.

A quick search of COTTonLINE shows we first called pushing Joe into the limelight elder abuse in 2020. We continued to contend elder abuse was an issue here, here, here, and here. In other words, Joe's obvious inability to function has been evident for close to five years.

It is beyond disgusting that 'reporters' are writing tell-all books about his disability now, when it has been on display for all to see since he ran from the basement in 2020.

Plastics Fight Poverty

I like it when conventional wisdom turns out to be something less than wise, which I suspect to be the case much more often than is recognized. I have an example for you this morning.

Plastics have been made a villain, microplastics circulating in our bloodstreams and less micro ones clogging our oceans. A website labeled The Daily Economy runs an article describing all the ways plastics help fight poverty, prevent disease, and actually save thousands of lives once lost to malaria each year. It poses this question:

If we were to stop using plastic tomorrow, global supply chains would collapse, food wouldn’t reach the people who need it in remote areas, and millions would lose access to life-saving medical supplies. Are we willing to accept this increase in human suffering to live in a plastic-free world?

It is clear the article’s author is not willing. Hat tip to RealClearPolicy for the link.

N.B., Apparently The Graduate (1967) was given good career advice.

Irritating the Pig

I was born in Hollywood and grew up in an orange orchard; you can't get more Californian than that. And I lived there most of my life, domiciled at various times in northern, central, and southern CA. 

I spent my career as an employee of the CA state university system, and retired there. While I no longer live in CA, I know it better than most people.

California needs high speed rail about as much as fish need bicycles. The few high density cities have public transit that works sort of, some of the time. High density development is what you need to make high speed rail work, and CA neither has nor wants it for most of its citizens.

CA is a big, roomy state and it has grown based on the automobile. Suburbs, where families like to live, are based on auto transit. Commercial air traffic between the Bay Area's three major airports and the LA area's 4-5 major airports makes passenger rail redundant.

As a nation we need to stop wasting money on high speed rail. It fits Japan, Europe and maybe China. It is useful in the Acela corridor, it doesn't fit most of the US and especially CA. This is a reality urban planners refuse to grasp.

Forcing Californians into high speed rail will be like trying to teach a pig to sing. It won't work and it irritates the pig.

Weird Oncological Science

Who knew lung cancer had a racial component? UPI reports findings that I find amazing.

An estimated 57% of Asian-American women diagnosed with lung cancer have never smoked, compared to only about 15% of all other women, according to a recent University of California-San Francisco study.

A Korean researcher named Kim reports:

In Korea, more than 85% of female lung cancer patients are non-smokers. As a result, increasing attention has been given to evaluating the effectiveness of lung cancer screening, or LCS, in traditionally low-risk populations in Asia.

As to why this might be the case:

The cause of this remains unknown, but suspicion is centered on genetic mutations developed during a person's lifetime rather than inherited, such as damage to a gene that codes for a protein known as EGFR, which prevents cells from growing too quickly.

This genetic damage is believed to be caused by environmental toxins including second-hand smoke and even fumes produced by high-temperature stir-fry cooking in rooms that lack proper ventilation.

Thus: Grok the wok. 

Peace in Ukraine Unlikely

The Atlantic leans left, reliably. For all that, it is still a serious publication. Today Anne Applebaum reports on another visit she recently made to Ukraine, her column echoed at msn.com. 

Certainly the Ukraine government wanted to show her positive things, nevertheless I believe her column is worth your time. Two particular points of interest I found, here's the first.

Trump repeatedly misunderstands Putin, overrates his alleged friendship with Putin, and often attributes to Putin motives that are really his own. "Putin is tired of this whole thing," Trump said on Fox News. "He is not looking good. And he wants to look good." In reality, it is Trump who is "tired of this whole thing." Trump who is not looking good, and Trump who wants to look good.

Applebaum could well be right about this, it would be an example of the psychological process called projection where we imagine others feel as we would in their place. Here is the second.

Ukrainians believe the war will continue, and the prospect no longer scares them. (snip) Ukrainians are confident that they can continue fighting, even without the same level of American support. 

On the front line, this war has become a drone war, and Ukraine both produces drones - more than 2 million last year, probably twice that many this year - and builds software and systems to run them.

All of that helps explain the nonchalance, even the humor, with which many Ukrainians now talk about the war, as well as their assumption that they will keep fighting no matter what happens.

Skynet smiles. Bottom line, don't expect negotiations to produce much reduction in the war anytime soon. If her take on the situation is accurate and the talks stall, Trump's reaction will be interesting to observe.

That’s Twice

Over the past 30+ years I’ve been fond of saying that the DrsC have opted for spring-like conditions more-or-less year-round. Specifically that we arrive in WY in time to see the last snowfall of spring and leave after the first snowfall of autumn.

I can’t make that claim this year, this morning I saw my second late-spring snowfall here at 6300 ft. in the Rockies. There may even be more to come. 

This late in the season it is gone within hours and doesn’t accumulate at our elevation. Farther up the mountain it adds to the snowpack still there. This a.m. there was no wind and the fat flakes drifted straight down in dead silence, of course. Snowfall is notoriously stealthy.

Later ... It is now late afternoon, the skies are blue, the sun is shining, and you'd never know we awoke to leaden skies and fat flakes of snow.

Wrong-Think on Stilts

A physics prof retired from Idaho State U. has crafted a ringing condemnation of our current national state of play. Hat tip to Instapundit for the link. 

We are, these days, a nation in the thrall of lazy, dishonest, spineless, clueless, incompetent, yet endlessly entitled and arrogant academics, bureaucrats, politicians, media figures, and other “experts” who can’t seem to find their way from their heads to their asses with their hands when something important, like, say, COVID or the 25th Amendment, is in play.

But it doesn't slow them down in the slightest when they decide, despite millions of years of evolution (and a plethora of other ancillary evidence to the contrary), that men can transform into women, that merit is a manifestation of oppression, that opposing ideas are vulgar, and that disagreement is tantamount to prejudice. 

He's almost a neighbor in Pocatello, it's maybe 120 miles away from where I write this. Distances are relative in the spacious Mountain West. I've driven 230 miles to keep a doctor's appointment.

Owning the Failure

Hollywood in Toto has a Bill Maher quote on the sad state of education in this country, and on where the blame is to be placed for said sad state.

Democrats absolutely have to own education. Because that is their portfolio in the government. They wanted it. They own it. If you go to the Democratic convention half the delegates are teachers

The Democratic party is way too beholden to the Teachers Union and the Teachers Union has to answer to the fact that kids don’t know anything.

Among other things for which they should answer ... but never will. Hat tip to RealClearPolicy for the link.

Hyperawareness

The journal Science Alert weighs in with a nice long column on the various seemingly subjective methods Polynesian navigators used to sail sea-going outrigger canoes thousands of miles and reach destinations maybe not much bigger than an mile wide in the planet's most vast ocean.

The amount of remembered signs and portents and the modifiers to each were enormous, and the sensory awareness of quite subtile variations in star patterns and wave types and directions seem to almost defy belief.

All of this accomplished with zero precision instruments, and total reliance on memory retention and sensory hypersensitivity. I'm surprised the early European explorers of the region didn't attribute Polynesian navigation excellence to witchcraft or pacts with the devil. Hat tip to Instapundit for the link.

Update

We've had a gloomy day, no sunshine and this evening, as I write this, we're having a thunderstorm with hail, tap-tapping on the window. We get interesting echoes of the thunder with the shock waves bouncing off the mountains which, a mile or so east of the house, shoot up another 3000 ft. The peaks will be getting snow. 

Given the geometry - those peaks cast a big shadow - our sunrises aren't early. I'm okay with that as I'm a bit of a night owl, normally up past midnight.

Believe it or not, in our WY valley along the ID border the only restaurant we find reliably acceptable is a casual seafood place. Yep, here we are some 900 miles from the nearest ocean and we have a decent seafood restaurant. Go figure.

My usual meal there is a hollowed-out boule filled with excellent clam chowder and they aren't chintzy with the clams. The other DrC normally orders fish and chips, but today had the coconut shrimp and chips and pronounced it good.

Saturday Snark

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

He'd Lost It

Axios has obtained audio of Special Council Robert Hur interviewing President Joe Biden. I reproduce for you the first paragraph of the story they've written about his testimony, delivered in October, 2023. The article has audio for your listening 'pleasure.'

Amid long, uncomfortable pauses, Joe Biden struggled to recall when his son died, when he left office as vice president, what year Donald Trump was elected or why he had classified documents he shouldn't have had, according to audio Axios obtained of his October 2023 interviews with special counsel Robert Hur.

Later on they write:

The newly released recordings of Biden having trouble recalling such details — while occasionally slurring words and muttering — shed light on why his White House refused to release the recordings last year, as questions mounted about his mental acuity.  

The audio also appears to validate Hur's assertion that jurors in a trial likely would have viewed Biden as "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."

That foggy old codger is what we had for President for four years. The people who propped him up, covered for him, and made (or walked him through) decisions he was supposed to make should spend the rest of their lives in prison. 

Oddly enough I can't get too mad at Joe himself. To expect any career politician to turn down a term in the top job, when offered, is asking for sainthood. That's something politicians rarely achieve even briefly.

More Friday Snark

Images courtesy of RealClearPolitics'

Cartoons of the Week.

Insight

An anonymous feminist J Xs an intriguing sentence, repeated on Instapundit. It is probably too neat to be entirely true, but if nothing else, appreciate the cleverness shown in its concise ideation.

A lot of being “trans” has to do with males wishing they were the objects of sexual desire, and females wishing they weren’t.

Friday Snark

Images courtesy of Politico's

The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

Thursday Snark

Image courtesy of the 5/16/2025 Lucianne.com.

A Quiet Visitor

Good morning, friends. The other DrC just opened the blinds so we could look at the day outside and guess what? We had snowfall overnight. She is taking pix now and I will either post same here or provide links to her site.

As I’ve noted at some point in the past 30 years, locals here in western WY claim snow is possible year-round. My rejoinder then and now is that I’ve seen snow flurries in June and Sept. but never in my experience in July or August.

When we went out to run some errands mid-day yesterday, the temp was 55℉. By the time we headed home two hours later it had dropped to 38℉ and my light jacket was no longer adequate outside the car. The other DrC said 38℉ was a good temp for snowfall, to which I nodded without expecting any.

At 6300 ft., snow in mid-May is no shock. It likewise won’t stick, it will probably be gone by evening, if not sooner. So it is just fun, along with four deer in the forest out back yesterday, another part of what makes life in these mountains a treat.

Later … When I wrote the above I had yet to discover that an otherwise healthy young aspen tree of maybe 7” diameter had fallen athwart our driveway. The other DrC saw it when she was headed out for an appointment, which has now been rescheduled. 

Oddly, I know exactly what needs to be done - both immediately and eventually - but due to the vagaries of age am no longer able to perform the required tasks. Getting old isn’t for cowards but, so far, beats the alternative.

Hyperactivity

We have a hyperactive President, maybe the first although Teddy Roosevelt was a busybody too. Trump is moving so fast our sluggish bureaucracy is unable to keep up with him, even if they wanted to do so (hint: they don't).

He spent the four Biden years thinking about what he should have tried to do as Trump 1.0, but didn't get around to doing. Evidently he kept a list, maybe literally, and he hasn't let any grass grow under his feet since Jan. 20. 

Hardly a day has gone by without some new initiative or EO on things as small as shower heads and as big as the redesign of the world economy. He is fun to watch in action, schmoozing sheiks and making foreign policy on the fly. No wonder the White House press corps is exhausted.

P.S. I've not even started to get tired of the winning yet.