Soft Bigotry

Donald Trump wanted to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and by rights, should have won it. He has been instrumental in calming violence in several hot spots world wide, most recently in Gaza.

The woman who won it, Maria Corina Machado of Venezuela, is a worthy candidate and probably has more personally at risk than most. Standing up to Maduro and his thugs is no small thing.

Still, getting Israel and Hamas to agree to exchange hostages and talk about a settlement is a bigger thing and even Democrats agree Trump gets beaucoup credit for making that happen. 

The committee that picks the winner each year is leftish and most likely disapproves of Trump. After all, they gave Barack Obama the prize for being elected while black.

Obama had only been in office 8 months when the award was given. He had nothing like the accomplishments that Trump has amassed in that same time frame. 

Soft bigotry of low expectations (for POCs) seems to characterize the Nobel Peace Prize committee.

Putrid Porter

California Governor Gavin Newsom is term limited out of office in 2026, so naturally a raft of Democrats are seeking to be his successor in Sacramento. One of these is a former Congresswoman named Katie Porter.

Recently she was on camera when she reminded us of what an unpleasant shrew she is. She walked out of a CBS interview when pressed oh-so-gently to answer a question she didn't like. Plus they have her on camera yelling at a staffer about being in "her shot" - meaning being in the picture when it was supposed to feature Porter alone.

These recent events reminded Capitol Hill regulars of how unpopular Porter was and is with her staff. Indirectly she admits she is a termagant when questioned about staff turnover.

Another commentator compared her to Delores Umbridge from the Harry Potter novels, not any sort of compliment. Current opinion is that Porter has torpedoed her campaign for governor. 

Supposedly she was in the lead for that nomination, we'll see what happens. CA's governor is much in the news, let's hope she doesn't win that title.

Friday Snark

Images courtesy of Politico's 

The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

About Miller and Mamdani

Stephen Miller works for Donald Trump, and supports his program. He is often interviewed and he is smart and incisive in his critique of all matters woke.

On the other hand, he is personally one of the most repellant individuals popping up with frequency on TV, nearly as bad as Maxine Waters. He may be talented and a hard worker and loyal, but in his public appearances he is visually the anti-Trump. I find him unlikable. 

By contrast, I don't like anything Zohran Mamdani advocates, his disparagement of police, his support of socialism, his pro-Hamas stance. I think he will be a disaster for NYC.

But he has good social skills and he makes a good appearance on TV. His smile has to be worth many thousands of votes. He is likable.

If I were Trump I would keep Miller in the back office, and let JD Vance and Marco Rubio do the public stuff that Trump doesn't do himself.

Charisma, or "rizz," perhaps shouldn't matter, but it does. In my opinion, Stephen M. doesn't have it.

Soft Secession?

I just read a too-long article at a very left wing source - Mother Jones - entitled "It's Time for Soft Secession." A lot of it is lefty justification for blue states to take actions to frustrate and disempower the federal government. 

My recommendation is to skip to paragraph 16 (truly, I'm not kidding) and read the last three long paragraphs. That is where the author tells you what is proposed. 

Will something like this happen? Some of it is happening now, and I expect real efforts to go farther with such local and regional actions.

What stumbling blocks will tend to keep soft secession from happening? I don't see a real blue state recognition of how their over-regulation and over-taxation hinder the entrepreneurial aspects of the plan.

Wednesday Snark

Image courtesy of Lucianne.com, 10/8/2025.

The California Mess, Two Views

One of the stories we follow here at COTTonLINE is the California death spiral. How the nation's most blessed-with-natural-wonders state has become a place people flee from, because its politics has become so malignant. Of course the DrsC are a part of the CA diaspora.

Coincidentally, there are two current articles which focus on CA's problems. One in Forbes which describes what's happening there now as an "upstairs-downstairs" story. Upstairs being the college educated and well paid, downstairs being the poor service workers who drive their Ubers, deliver their pizzas, mow their lawns, clean their homes, and tend their children. 

As the Forbes column points out, in mid-twentieth century CA the work these service workers do now was then done by CA's middle class citizens for themselves. Truly, nobody had a cleaning lady, or a gardener, and you picked up your own pizza and watched your own kids.

The other is a further consideration of the CA decline by Joel Kotkin who, writing for Sp!ked, calls it "Newsom's dystopia." AI which is closely identified with CA high tech firms looks like it will destroy the white collar jobs of many of the "upstairs" folks and create a political disaster. Looking ahead, Kotkin writes:

Some 82 per cent of millennials believe AI will damage their careers. The displacement could soon reach 30 per cent of the workforce. (snip) As one Marxist writer put it, no power on Earth is more fearsome than ‘the swelling population of college graduates caught in a vice of low-paying jobs’.

Researcher Gregory Ferenstein, who interviewed 147 digital founders, found little interest in expanding property ownership or entrepreneurship. The preference is for redistribution sufficient for the masses to subsist while the elites luxuriate. (links in original)

Kotkin is far from optimistic.

A Newsomised America would resemble the Golden State, but only far poorer. The rise of oligarchical socialism signals the end of upward mobility for all but the super-skilled or well-connected.

It would be a society much like that portrayed in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where ‘controllers’ offer the masses pleasure, entertainment and enough propaganda to accept a new, increasingly posthuman order directed by the very few. It is a future no one should want.

Kotkin of course assumes China would let us decline that far, without waltzing in and conquering us. This I very much doubt, unless they perceive we are defeating ourselves, which they might allow to continue. The enemy gets a vote, independent of our wishes. Hat tip to Power Line for links to both columns.

Update

Here in the high country we have passed another milestone. We’ve had a couple of nights in a row where the low temperature went below freezing. 

As a kid who was born in Hollywood and raised in a SoCal orange orchard, any night below freezing seems like winter to me. I know better now, of course, and take nights like the last couple in stride as part of autumn.

Like it or not, this is the end of the growing season here. It began when nighttime lows stopped going below freezing in the spring. 

From bitter experience, local farmers know the only crops you can reliably grow hereabouts are fast-developing grasses - basically fodder for animals - and some of the grains. Most years the irrigated fields will produce two cuttings of hay or alfalfa. 

It is remarkable how the locals here and in the Swiss alps do the same agriculture. Both feed grasses to livestock. 

At a somewhat lower elevation in Idaho 50 miles west of here, most of the nation’s potatoes are grown. Being about 1000 feet lower makes the necessary difference.

My valley was once a dairying center but no longer. Now cow-calf beef operations predominate along with more than a few large remudas of horses. There is even one commercial herd of bison raised for meat.

Interestingly, we also raise elk for market here, though nobody speaks of it in those terms. Both the state and the Feds feed hay to wild elk in winter. 

The area then makes money off the hunting licenses and dudes coming in from out of state paying outfitters big money to take them on horseback into the national forests to shoot an elk. Locals hunt elk too, for meat. A bull elk will feed a family most of the winter, and the meat isn’t bad.

The electrician who wired my new house 25 years ago told me he made as much money as an outfitter as he did the other ten months of the year as an electrician. Guiding fishing and hunting is a local occupational niche, albeit not one you can do year round.

The public schools no longer have the first day of hunting season as a holiday, as the seasons have gotten too complicated with special times for bow hunters, cross bow and maybe even for smooth bore muskets. 

Roughly a week from now we head south to winter in the desert north of Las Vegas. It is mostly warm and dry and my neighbors golf all winter, cursing at the Canada geese who have also migrated south and love the water hazards and greens’ grass.

A Debunking

RealClearScience writes to answer the question, "Are Humans More Stressed Now Than Ever Before?" Many believe it to be true. 

The article concludes it is not true.

Endocrinologist Hans Selye pioneered research into stress. He even termed the "stress response" and for his work was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. 

Selye's conclusion is straightforward.

It’s not that people suffer more stress today. It’s just that they think they do.

The article also quotes a professor of Immunology who concludes this.

All we can be certain of is that the causes of stress are different now. I imagine that stress has affected people’s mental and physical health throughout history.

---------- 

A personal note - in lecture I would chide my students who claimed to be very stressed. I'd ask for a show of hands about how many had a sibling die, or a parent. Few would indicate they had. Then I'd tell them stories from my and the other DrC's families, about the tragedies our ancestors survived. Examples:

• Many women died in childbirth. My father's father buried two wives before his third wife buried him, at age 54.
• A great grandmother of the other DrC had 13 children half of whom died in one week, from one of the diseases we hardly hear of now (cholera, typhoid, diphtheria or similar). She couldn't lie down and grieve because she still had 6 kids to care for.
• We had parents who were adults during the Great Depression and it emotionally scarred them.
• One of my high school coaches and his wife both got polio and were paralyzed for life. 

Once I'd rubbed their noses in it, my thoroughly middle class students would mostly conclude they had easier, less stressful lives than earlier generations. Side note: Hardly anyone learns history anymore.

Sunday Snark

Images courtesy of According to Hoyt.

Remembering Three Strikes Laws

I am old enough to remember the "three-strikes" era - the early 1990s - when laws putting third time felony repeat offenders in prison essentially for "life" were popular. The scare quotes around life indicate a fair few were paroled in their 60s, often in poor health.

Separating career criminals from society is the only known way to reduce crime, as most serious crime is committed by a relatively small percentage of repeat offenders who reject rehabilitation. 

Roughly half the states enacted some form of this law. Later, the woke movement didn't like three strikes as it ended up imprisoning too many black criminals, without ever demonstrating those so locked up were innocent or unjustly convicted.

City Journal has a nice column which sensibly argues for locking up repeat offenders, without ever mentioning the three strikes laws. How author Jakob Dupuis manages to overlook this well-known movement to do exactly what he's advocating is puzzling. A web search reveals he was a college junior in 2021, suggesting it happened before or shortly after he was born. 

Yes, three strikes was 30+ years ago but that is no excuse. If he's going to write an article about something, he should learn its history and at least mention earlier examples. Otherwise, he gives the impression he believes he invented the idea. 

I'm reminded of Ben Rhodes' critique of young reporters, it applies here. Rhodes complained they know "literally nothing."

Catnip

Funny stuff pops up on my news feed, like this one: "Why does your cat love catnip so much?" Apparently it is some sort of aphrodisiac. IHeartCats.com has this answer:

Catnip, scientifically known as Nepeta cataria, belongs to the mint family. (snip) This aromatic herb contains a chemical compound called nepetalactone that triggers intense behavioral responses in many feline species, including domestic cats, tigers, leopards, and lynx.

When cats encounter nepetalactone, the compound reaches their nervous system and activates specific receptors that stimulate the release of sexual pheromones. This neurochemical cascade produces the characteristic euphoric behaviors cat owners frequently observe : rolling, rubbing, stretching, jumping, and sometimes drooling.

Lucky moggies. If there is a human equivalent, other than booze, I bet it's illegal.

Trouble in Blighty

Writing about the Yom Kippur murders at a synagogue in Manchester, UK, Josh Ferme notes the government's cowardice in blaming both sides for what was clearly an act of jihad by a Syrian immigrant named Jihad al-Shamie, who was out on bail awaiting trial for rape. Ferme writes.

The attack comes only a couple of weeks after a spokesman for the Islamic State, Abu Hudhaifa al-Ansari, encouraged his supporters to “Shoot, stab and ram” both Christians and Jews alike throughout America, Europe, and the rest of the world. It instructed that explosive devices, firearms, bladed weapons, and vehicles should be used as weapons against such people.

His release also urged followers to: “Break into their homes, kill them, and punish them by any means you can…Keep in mind that you are the hand of the Islamic State today, striking at the heart of the infidels, and avenging Muslims in Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and all Muslim lands.”

The UK needs to exit the European Compact on Human Rights and get serious about domestic Islamic extremism. All illegal immigrants should be deported. 

Deportation of legal immigrants who advocate violence against their non-Muslim neighbors should become government policy. Citizen advocates for this violence should be imprisoned. Perhaps Farage has the Trump-like backbone to carry out such moves. 

Saturday Snark

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

Tyler's Parents

Writing for RealClearPolitics, David DesRosiers writes with favor about Tyler Robinson's parents, and about Mormon family life more generally. He observes:

Charlie Kirk’s assassin was born and raised in southwestern Utah. Mormon territory. He was the son of a mother and father who raised kids in the Mormon way, which creates exemplary fruits that are missionaries to the world. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints – its formal name – instills family loyalty, stewardship, tolerance, sobriety, hard work, and sharing. They tithe. They contribute. They are impressive people.

The other DrC and I have owned a home in a predominantly LDS area for over 30 years. Not LDS ourselves, we nevertheless would agree with the above. The LDS families we know fit that description.

Would Luigi Mangione’s wealthy and well-connected Maryland family have done the same if they recognized his distinctive eyebrows? “Come home, son,” followed by, “You must turn yourself in to the authorities and be held accountable.” There’s no evidence they did anything of the kind. If they had, would Luigi have complied? I doubt it.

Good families occasionally produce a loser kid, the elder Robinson's have my sympathy. I know they are heartbroken. 

Friday Snark

Images courtesy of Politico's

The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

Happy Moderates

Interesting things appear at a website named Law & Liberty. Today there is a review of a book by political scientist George Hawley entitled The Moderate Majority: Real GOP Voters and the Myth of Mass Republican Radicalization (2024). 

Hawley reaches a couple of conclusions about the bulk of Republican voters.

The first is the role and importance of cultural issues in how ordinary Republicans see the world. The gap between Republicans and Democrats, Hawley shows, is wider on cultural attitudes than on views on economic policy.

A second important lesson from Hawley’s book is that Republican voters, contrary to conventional wisdom, are happier and more optimistic about their upward mobility prospects than liberal voters.

So, the conclusion is that Republicans are happy with traditional cultural values, Democrats are not. The distance between the parties on economic issues isn't as wide. Happier people tend to be okay with the status quo and unhappy people not so much. 

I'm a happy person most of the time, the status quo has worked for me and mine. I haven't been happy with what the woke have tried to enact; MAGA seems a reasonable corrective.

Echoes of Gilbert and Sullivan

I was disappointed yesterday - the first day of the fedgov shutdown - no terminations of federal employees were announced. Politico writes that could soon change.

OMB chief Russ Vought told House Republicans on a private call Wednesday that the administration will start mass reduction in force moves, or firings, of federal workers “in a day or two.”

If it turns out the promise to fire workers was a bluff, I won't be happy. There have to be many employed in woke units who, in Gilbert & Sullivan's felicitous phrase, "never would be missed." Here's hoping Trump has his "little list" ready.

Cold Civil War

Richard Fernandez does a PJ Media column called Belmont Club, and often has insights COTTonLINE has relished. Today is no exception.

September 2025 has been an interesting month.The undeclared cold civil war in the West is everywhere coming out of the closet. Both the Woke and Populist coalitions in every country have openly declared political war on one another — clashing over ideology, generational voter bases, and economic policy.

The eerie thing about it is not that the kinetic level of confrontation has increased; even the Kirk assassination followed a string of attempts on other figures. It's just that no one pretends not to see the conflict any more. Yet it is still a cold conflict in the West — for now.

Fernandez doesn't pretend to know where this is going, or how it will turn out. We continue to live in what the ancient Chinese called "interesting times," viewing same as a curse. 

The current deadlock over funding the government is but a minor skirmish therein. Woke is currently on the back foot.

Later ... I find it curious, as Fernandez notes, this same conflict is occurring in a number of countries at the same time, not all of them "Western." And it didn't particularly begin in the US.

The Hegseth Speech

The Department of War has issued an official transcript of SecWar Pete Hegseth’s speech yesterday to the GOFOs. It is long and, if we are critical, somewhat repetitious. But worth reading.

Hegseth is trying his darnedest to change a woke culture that was forced upon the military by Obama and Biden. To survive, all force leaders had to pay lip service to those civilian leaders’ woke wishes, but some became true believers. 

The committed wokesters Hegseth wishes to separate from his command. He advises them to do the honorable thing and resign or retire. Here is my favorite quote from the speech.

Today is another liberation day, the liberation of America's warriors, in name, in deed and in authorities. You kill people and break things for a living. You are not politically correct and don't necessarily belong always in polite society.

That really describes George Patton. I’d conclude with a quote, variously attributed to George Orwell and Winston Churchill, which makes Hegseth’s point.

We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us.

The profession of arms doesn’t work if those standing ready aren’t plenty rough, well-equipped and willing to "kill people and break things" at scale.