Saturday Snark

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

Sowing Suspicion

President Trump strongly hints he’s authorized CIA anti-cartel activity within Venezuela. He notes we now have the sea lanes off Venezuela pretty well locked down. 

This may be a bluff, with the hope Maduro starts a purge within his ‘government’ of anyone suspected of less-than-total loyalty. This sort of “housecleaning” normally results in less effective government as everyone wastes time on butt-covering. Supporters of those purged become less loyal in fact, if performatively more loyal.

The Darwin Award

Zohran Mamdani is a beguiling pied piper, leading New Yorkers to the same place Hamlin’s guy led the rats. Mamdani bids fair to take New York City down the road to where Detroit ended up.

A Darwin Award awaits. Like the degradation of drug addiction, Mamdani’s ‘medicine’ will be voluntarily taken, thus self-administered, and richly deserved. Let the slow motion suicide begin.

An Unfair Match

Several sources are reporting Hakeem Jeffries' riposte to Karoline Leavitt's criticism of Democrats. She said the Democrats root for "“Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens and violent criminals.”

He responded, “I’m not sure whether she’s just demented, ignorant, a stone-cold liar or all of the above." And he added more drivel that didn't help his cause.

Fair enough, each took his or her shot and caught one in return. Except the fight was rigged from the get go.

Leavitt is a beautiful, articulate, forceful advocate for Cause Trump. Jeffries is a dime-store version of Barack Obama, without BO’s Hawaiian prep school polish but with plenty of what makes New Yorkers unpleasant. Leavitt is major league, Jeffries is farm team, not a fair match at all.

Alert

Just a quick reminder that the other DrC has resumed her "Chronicles of Geezerville" series. It's at her website CruzTalking Two which can be found here. She finds much about which to be whimsical in our slightly tarnished 'golden' years.

Geezerville is her nickname for our little desert city which has maybe seven different 55+ senior developments, each with its own golf course. It bids fair to be "the Palm Springs of the Rockies," minus the latter's Hollywood riffraff and LGBTQ overlay.

A humorous side note about our life here. Having a handicapped parking permit is of little use. The reason? So many oldsters have them that the designated spaces always fill up first. Many of us have an age-related hitch in our giddy up.

Friday Snark 2.0

Images courtesy of RealClearPolitics' 

Cartoons of the Week.

Friday Snark 1.0

Images courtesy of Politico's

The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

Wokeness = Feminization?

A very interesting article at the Compact Magazine website, by author Helen Andrews. She argues that the whole “woke” movement is just the shadow cast by the increasing feminization of our society. Hat tip to RealClearPolicy for the link.

Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.

Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.

Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.

Fortunately wokeness is on the back foot at the moment. It isn’t Donald Trump’s style, nor that of his appointees - male and female. The martyrdom of Charlie Kirk seems to have driven it back further. 

This is a good article, I recommend it to you. It argues an interesting thesis in a compelling way. It provides a rationale for the sex differences in political orientation superior to any other of which I’m aware.

Let me propose an extension of Andrews’ thesis. Perhaps globalization, the EU, and the WEF phenomenon are further elaborations of feminization at the international level, with Trump’s neo-nationalism as an antidote thereto. Does that fit?

Morning Musings

Birthrates are falling in most places around the globe, in nearly all the developed nations (except Israel). And in many places not considered “developed.” Most are below replacement level which is 2.1 children per adult woman. 

One wonders. Is this what happens when an intelligent species gets control of its fertility? Separates highly incentivized reproductive behavior from its former biological consequences? Do intelligent species die out? Is it the reason we’ve not been visited (as far as we know) by a star-faring species? 

Or is this an intermediate stage in an evolving process which eventually takes reproduction mostly or entirely out of individual hands and turns it over to some technological “fix?” The crèche system of “Brave New World,” for instance? Is perhaps Huxley’s “alcohol in one’s blood surrogate,” a future birth defect risk, the future’s fetal alcohol syndrome?

In Transit

 I didn’t write anything yesterday, it was a pack-out and travel day. This morning we are in Salt Lake City, and tonight we’ll be at our winter home in eastern Nevada, in other words, today is another travel day. 

We stayed in WY later than usual this year, by at least a week or two. Plus we arrived earlier than usual, again by a week or two. So we were there about 5.5 months. 

By the time we left most of the leaves were off the aspens and our forest looked naked. It was time to skedaddle, no question.

Much later … We have arrived at our winter place, as they say, safe and sound. It appears to have survived the summer w/o injury. We are tired and turning in early.

Odd Oregon

Leaders in Oregon are saying everything in Portland is cool, there is no unrest. It is just peaceable protest against evil ICE policies. Don’t believe them.

Oregon is an odd place, it attracts odd people. I called OR home for about three years while a doctoral student at UO in Eugene, way too many years ago. When I was there the conventional wisdom was that most OR automotive fatalities were one-car accidents - many of these actually suicides.

Oregon doesn’t get a lot of snow but the coast and the Willamette Valley live under a rain cloud from late fall through late spring - about 6 months. I lived in a coat and carried an umbrella for three rainy seasons. 

I remember more than one two-week stretch when I didn’t see the sun. Gray mornings make getting up a chore, it is easy to become depressed. This is something the Lewis and Clark expedition complained about when they wintered over near the coast at Fort Clatsop.

Summers are nice, that’s when Californians on vacay come north to visit. They don’t get an accurate reading of OR. 

I did not fall in love with Oregon.

His Proudest Moment (So Far)

Image courtesy of Katie Pavlich, 

posting at X.

Image courtesy of Stephen Green

posting at Instapundit.

Columbus Day Snark

Image courtesy of Instapundit.

Update

I was going to write an Update about how a dusting of snow has fallen and it is time to “get out of Dodge.” That is, stop talking about being a snowbird and actually get on the road south. 

A quick look at the other DrC’s blog finds she has already done so, with pretty photos. So I will merely direct you there.

Afterthought ... The DrsC were both born and raised in semi-coastal CA. Snow was a novelty you drove up into the mountains to visit and play with, not something with which you coped, shoveled, scraped, and lived with day after day. We prefer it to remain a novelty, obviously.

Thank You, Columbus

Tomorrow is Columbus Day, which patriots celebrate, others hate. Personally, I am very glad he made the crossing. 

At least some of my ancestors came to North America 13 years after the Mayflower group, from England. They were being hassled for their religious beliefs which were the opposite of "high church" Anglican, they were Puritans maybe. 

With the current mess in the United Kingdom, I'm glad my ancestors left there and came here. What later became the United States has been the best place to be in the centuries since. 

Christopher Columbus was the pathfinder who got it started. Way to go, Chris. Plus thank you, Ferdinand and Isabella, for his venture capital. Spain did very well out of your investment.

Tech Bros Seek "Exit"

In a long-form article for Politico Magazine, Calder McHugh interviews Jacob Silverman, author of a new book Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. It is an interesting interview (not behind paywall), it hits a lot of tech-oriented topics, like bitcoin, AI, and indirectly utopianism.

What I didn't expect is that Silverman believes most of the leaders in tech, the top people, are firmly on the MAGA team. I'm not surprised they experience our current society as more than a little icky.

There are some practical things they are trying to do, like various attempts at charter cities and securing actual physical sovereignty over a piece of land.

These are all attempts at what’s sometimes called “exit,” a way to secure your own sovereignty by making your own currencies with crypto, to escaping the education system, to ultimately securing land and creating your own communities.

I think that their vision for the kind of escape that they want is unrealistic to a great degree, and I think it’s one of the ultimate flaws with the people my book is about. They seem to have become rather anti-social and almost xenophobic; they don’t really want to be among the rest of us.

Some of this, I argue in the book, came out of the perceived social failures and political failures of San Francisco, the city for tech, where a lot of them came from. They see the city as a failure and irredeemable to some extent, and that has also fed into this idea that “We need to get out of here. We need to build our own sovereign communities.”

Elon Musk's fascination with colonizing Mars is the most dramatic version of this escapism. Oddly, it is not noted in the interview. 

Democrats Need Help

Benjamin Ellis, a self-described liberal senior in Poly. Sci. at University of North Carolina Ashville, writes of his experiences in joining both the College Democrats and Turning Point USA. The Turning Point kids were nice, the College Democrats were ... 'interesting'. He concludes:

There are two different Democratic parties right now — people who lean left and people who need help. The latter are people who are miserable and will attempt to position you as inferior while victimizing themselves if you do not march to their tune.

I am no longer sure of my future as a Democrat. I am certain, however, that if Democrats want to ever win votes back, they need to stop romanticizing victimhood and violence and start engaging in a civil and productive manner.

Benjamin Ellis, meet Ruy Teixeira of Liberal Patriot fame, who ended up where you are, via a very different route.

The Insurrection Act

Instapundit Glenn Harlan Reynolds also writes a Substack column of longer essays and he is a law professor at UTenn. He is a busy fellow.

Today he writes at Substack about the Insurrection Act and quotes this relevant part.

§252. Use of militia and armed forces to enforce Federal authority

Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion.

To which, Reynolds provides interpretation.

So first, it’s discretionary to employ: “Whenever the President considers.” This language leaves no room for judicial review, by design; it’s up to the President to determine when the predicates for invoking the Act apply. Second, this phrase, “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings,” seems to fit perfectly with what’s going on in places like Portland or Chicago.

I am forced to conclude President Trump has been unwilling to declare the existence of a "insurrection" as liberally defined in the act. The plain wording of the act would almost require him to do so. 

One possibility is that Trump is loath to muddy his budding reputation as a peacemaker by formally accusing certain of his own cities of insurrection.

Saturday Snark

Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

The RIFs Finally Begin

Politico reports that OMB Director Russell Vought has announced the promised RIFs have begun. It felt like they'd never get around to it.

An administration official granted anonymity to discuss the layoffs said they hit agencies including: Interior, Homeland Security, Treasury, EPA, Commerce, Education, Energy, HHS and HUD.

President Trump said earlier during a Cabinet meeting.

We’re only cutting Democrat programs, I hate to tell you, but we are cutting Democrat programs. We will be cutting some very popular Democrat programs that aren’t popular with Republicans, frankly.

I believe the President is having too much fun, teasing Democrats by threatening and then actually terminating federal workers. As yet we don't have details as to the number RIFed or from which programs. 

Later ... The Hill reports on how many RIFed in each agency.

The most significant layoffs took place at the Treasury Department, with 1,446 employees receiving RIF notices Friday.

The Department of Health and Human Services also saw major cutbacks, with roughly 1,100 to 1,200 employees affected, the filing states.

Friday’s RIFs also impacted approximately 466 Education Department employees, 442 Department of Housing and Urban Development employees, 315 Commerce Department employees, 187 Energy Department employees and 176 Department of Homeland Security employees.