A Paean to Pickups, Exurbia

Writing in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson tackles the subject of Americans leaving the big cities while foreign immigrants infill behind them. Much to the despair of Eurocentric urban planners, it is the uniquely American way of life, continuing.

Urban planners and economists focused on creativity and networks have been singing the praises of the city-living since the Great Recession (or, perhaps, since forever). But local housing policy, limited family finances, and American geographical abundance—not to mention the pro-rural laws of U.S. representative government—are powerful centrifugal forces that push Americans ever-outward into suburbs with lawns, trucks, and cul de sacs.

Ford’s car sales fell 24 percent in March, while F-Series pickups rose by double digits. GM’s latest sales growth was similarly driven by crossovers and trucks, not little cars.

The pickup truck is the quintessential American motor vehicle. I have a crew-cab, long-bed, 4-wheel drive, diesel Ford F-350. Of the three vehicles the DrsC own, it is my clear favorite.

I look forward to driving it 900+ miles across a mostly empty part of North America 5 weeks from now. You'll not experience freedom like that anywhere near a big city.

Friday Snark

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, cracking wise on learning Chelsea Clinton is doing motivational speaking about how to succeed. He observes she was:

Born on third base and thinks she hit a triple.

The best advice Chelsea can give: pick successful parents ... somewhat difficult to accomplish w/o time travel.

Gutting Administrative Overkill

You can take your pick of liberal commentators who write Trump is floundering. A few of the cannier observers have noted that he's really getting a heck of a lot done, mostly below the radar. For example, Matt Lewis writes at The Daily Beast with the title:

Don't Get Fooled, Trump Is Winning.

Trump's biggest win so far, 49 year old Neil Gorsuch going to the Supreme Court for life. Gorsuch could serve for 40 years - in Trumpian terms, this is yuuge. A president can do few things which cast a 40 year shadow.

Lewis identifies just a few of the Federal regulations Trump has overturned, not to mention the simple idea that we will enforce existing immigration law, something neither Bush nor Obama would do. You'll like Lewis' conclusion:

While the media has focused on the shiny objects—the scandals and legislative failures—they have all but ignored the fact that the Trump administration has been quietly changing America. Whether by design—or by coincidence—Trump’s gains have been overshadowed by the chaotic, the urgent and the interesting.

Although this stands in sharp contrast to Trump’s action-oriented rhetoric, it doesn’t lessen the fact that, slowly but surely, he is moving the country in a more conservative direction. There’s no telling how many federal judges, never mind Supreme Court Justices, he might appoint. There’s no telling how many bureaucratic regulations he might repeal.

Most political change is incremental. The greatest trick Donald Trump ever pulled was convincing the world that his presidency was floundering.

Expect him to do quickly those things which he can control w/o the help of Congress. Things Congress must do will take many months. It moves with the alacrity of cold molasses, and it's only in session maybe half time.

Demonstrating a Willingness to Act

Many analysts argue that Trump's missile raid on a Syrian air force field actually sends a stronger message to North Korea and Iran. Their point - if this president says he's fed up with something your nation is doing, the realistic result could be fire and destruction from the skies.

We've just spent 8 years with a president who might send an armed drone or a Seal team to take out a terrorists' compound, or kill a Taliban leader. Basically all parties in Syria, Iran, North Korea, and Russia ignored him.

The new regime is different. How different? That we will learn in due course. As President Trump is fond of saying, I'll tell you about military actions after they happen. There is real advantage in others not being certain how violently you'll react.

Can Kim Jong Il be certain we won't drop a tactical nuke on Pyongyang during some public ceremony where he presides? Kim is less certain of that today than he was yesterday. Ditto, the Angry Ayatollahs in Tehran.

An ExPat's Gloomy Assessment

Jason M. Opal writes in Time magazine with the title:

America Should Never Be 'Great Again'

He argues that the U.S. has been a serial abuser of all and sundry and an ugly place, although possibly redeemable. Opal knows a lot about American history, including Andrew Jackson, but doesn't like much of what he sees. He is your classic glass-always-at-least-half-empty liberal/progressive.

Before getting serious about his arguments, you should know that Opal has moved from the U.S. to Canada where he teaches at McGill University. I daresay his America-ain't-so-hot rhetoric will be well received there.

It's not that Canadians are anti-American, they spend too much time here to hate us. It's more like envy. They get tired of being our "little brother up north, " living in our shadow, being mistaken for us overseas.

Canadians like to see us taken down a peg now and then, it's understandable. What isn't understandable is Time publishing this dreary mea culpa. It's likely Macleans turned it down.

A Failed Experiment, and an Exception

When The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan writes from her heart, few can pen more moving prose. This week she writes about the American dream, the idea that however poor your beginnings or roots, you can with perseverance and focus become someone with self-respect who achieves substantial goals, perhaps even great ones.

She poses the question: what has gone wrong with the American dream, what makes it available to fewer of us than before? In addition to the usual answers to that question, she adds:

What ails the dream is a worthy debate. I’d include this: The dream requires adults who can launch kids sturdily into Dream-land.

When kids have one or two parents who are functioning, reliable, affectionate—who will stand in line for the charter-school lottery, who will fill out the forms, who will see that the football uniform gets washed and is folded on the stairs in the morning—there’s a good chance they’ll be OK.

What I see more and more in America is damaged or absent parents. (snip) Insufficient parents used to be able to tell their kids to go out, go play in America, go play in its culture. (snip) Now we have stressed kids operating within a nihilistic popular culture that can harm them.

This is not a failure of policy but a failure of love. And it’s hard to change national policy on a problem like that.

Our dilemma: people who should be having the kids, who would do a good job with them, mostly are childless. In too many cases, people who should not be having kids, who do a poor job raising them, are the parents. Their damaged offspring bog down our struggling public schools, swell our welfare rolls, clog our courts and prisons.

The glaring exception: my Mormon neighbors, the Latter Day Saints. I know of no group that takes parenting more seriously, does more of it, or rewards it more richly. As a non-Mormon observer, I infer - from their behavior - child raising might be their number one duty to God. And it pays off big time in amazing young adults for whom the American Dream persists.

"Long Run" Misleading

Supposedly wizard prognosticator Nate Silver, writing at his FiveThirtyEight site, heads his reaction to the Gorsuch nomination Senate approval process thusly:

Nuking the Filibuster May Hurt Republicans in The Long Run

Of course Silver "may" be correct, he sometimes is. I'd remind him of John Maynard Keynes famous dictum to his fellow economists:

Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. 

Meanwhile, in the short-to-medium run, the GOP is ahead of the game, particularly if The Donald can win a second term and hold the Senate for the whole 8 years - admittedly large "ifs."

N.B., Silver predicted an easy Clinton win in 2016. Oops.

Prescience

What fun! This afternoon at 2:52 pm PDT, I posted a statement saying I concluded the best way to respond to the use of poison gas in Syria was to take out the Syrian air force.

Imagine my delight when after 6 pm I discovered that what I proposed is what Trump et al., quite independently, had decided to do, using 50+ Tomahawk cruise missiles. Time will tell if we and they made the right decision.

TV is reporting the U.S. alerted the Russians who had men at the base we chose to hit so they could get out of the way. Presumably the Russians shared the intel with the Syrians.

My concern is the Syrians flew their aircraft out of harm's way before the missiles started falling. If all we did was blow up hangars and fuel tanks, and crater runways, we didn't get much bang for $26 million in flying bombs. Aircraft are much harder to replace than ground facilities.

Eastern Europe Update

One of the most sensible authors writing on foreign affairs today is George Friedman (not Tom). In today's post at Geopolitical Futures, he looks at how eastern Europe - basically the former Baltic SSRs and the Warsaw Pact nations - now see the military threats to their region.

Friedman reports eastern Europe remains unconvinced that western Europe would come to their defense if they were attacked by Russia. Likewise, they know it would take perhaps months for really effective U.S. forces to arrive.

Interestingly, low world oil prices have damaged the Russian economy, seriously slowing Russian remilitarization. This has caused the imminence of the Russia threat to diminish somewhat in eastern European eyes.

On the other hand, they see what President Erdogan hopes to accomplish in Turkey as a growing threat. He is essentially attempting a reestablishment of the Ottoman Empire. Many in the region remember Ottoman occupations of the past, without fondness.

Friedman believes it will be several years before either Russia or Turkey is much immediate threat to the region. He implies the Czech Republic is sort of a bystander in these considerations - seemingly uninvolved - but doesn't say why. Hat tip to RealClearWorld for the link.

DMV-style Medicine

Do you know someone misguided enough to want single payer health care for all Americans? If so, you might remind them that the Veterans Administration runs a single payer system for vets.

Ask them if they'd enjoy those conditions, which are very similar to National Health Service facilities in the U.K. Some like that it seems cheap, mostly those too poor to pay income taxes. Many do not care for the quality of service.

Imagine getting your health care delivered by a Department of Motor Vehicles-style bureaucracy understaffed by bored people with don't-give-a-sh*t attitudes. Just what you want when sick and miserable anyway, right?

Too Late for Kumbaya

The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof writes a column in which he tries to sell Lib/Progs (as a friend calls 'em) on the wildly absurd idea of being nice to Trump voters. He notes we're not all racists and misogynists, very large of him, not to mention true.

Honestly, it may be too late for singing Kumbaya. We aren't much fonder of Sanders and Clinton voters than they are of us.

Neither of us likes the other group - as a group - worth a damn. We may know individuals we like in spite of their obnoxious beliefs, I know I do. If it seems we are less angry, it's because our guy won so we have less to be angry about.

Let me remind the kind reader of a brief paragraph I quoted from Gallup survey results two days ago finding Republicans are prouder of being Americans than Democrats.

Historically, Democrats' patriotism appears to have been susceptible to considerations such as which party occupies the White House and how the U.S. is faring internationally, while Republicans' patriotism has been more consistent over time.

Democrats' refusal to love this country unconditionally suggests we and they are in fact two separate populations. We have different ideas of right and wrong, different goals for the nation, different values. Example: we think making (or keeping) the U.S. great is wonderful; Democrats apparently find the whole notion embarrassing or obscene.

A Syrian Quagmire

Much talk today about how horrible it is that someone, probably the Assad regime, used Sarin nerve gas killing 70+ people including many children in Syria. Talk that the U.S. is likely to become militarily involved in regime change.

Honestly, I hope some new thing comes along to shift our focus. Do we really want to get into nation building in Syria? The U.S. is poor at nation building and Syria presents zero good choices. Nobody in Syria is halfway sane except the minority Kurds, and the Turks hate them.

I very much hope Trump can find a way to respond militarily which stops short of regime change. Remember, the Pottery Barn Rule: if you break it, you own it. If we topple Assad, we have to run Syria. We don't want to run Syria, we broke Iraq and that was bad enough. It's still a mess, arguably our mess.

I suggest using our air power and cruise missiles to destroy the Assad regime's air power, mostly I gather helicopters. That should make their use of chemical agents considerably more difficult.

Assad would still have Russian air power fighting for him. However, I doubt Russians would be willing to deliver chemical weapons - too much downside.

If going forward no nerve gas is used, we can go back to mostly ignoring Syria. Let the Iranians and Russians bog down there, they seem to care.

Hardly Nuclear

Various news sources are reporting the U.S. Senate today changed its rules so that Supreme Court justice nominees cannot be filibustered. You've been hearing this called "the nuclear option," a massive overstatement. The Senate is expected to approve the appointment of Judge Gorsuch tomorrow.

The immediate impact of this decision will be to return the Court to the political balance it had before Justice Scalia's untimely death. The Court will shortly consist of four liberals (Bryer, Sotomayor, Ginsburg, and Kagan), four conservatives (Roberts, Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch) and one swing vote - Kennedy.

For obvious reasons the Court functions better with an odd number of justices. Operating with eight justices, 4-4 deadlocks gave too much power to lower courts.

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Looking to the future, today's change in Senate rules will assure that future justices can be approved with a bare majority. Over time, probably a decade or so, the Court will become even more clearly political as whichever party controls the Senate and the White House will select people clearly representing their ideological view of the law and human rights.

I predict it will be long time before any justice will be considered, much less approved, while one party controls the Senate and the other has the White House. Expect some eight and even seven member Courts whenever split control exists, as it did for the last two Obama years. Eventually Presidents facing a Senate controlled by the other party will not bother nominating replacement justices.

We are in an era when Congress is often gridlocked but the Court decides, and in effect legislates. We have just seen the importance of a single party controlling both White House and Senate escalate dramatically. I have to wonder if the importance of the House will decline as a consequence.

Question

A man can claim he is a woman and we are required to believe him, or at least act as if we do, to be politically correct, perhaps even to be law-abiding.

If that is so, why aren't we required to believe Rachel Dolezal is a black woman if she self-identifies as such? Or that Sen. Elizabeth Warren is a Native American, because she claims to be one?

I went to high school with an odd-looking kid who lived with several minor but quite visible birth defects. He explained them by claiming good-naturedly he was from Mars. Perhaps we should have taken him seriously?

Political Consequences of a Filibuster

The politicization of the Supreme Court, though reprehensible, has been a foregone conclusion for a several years. Although Democrats taking the long view say a filibuster of Judge Gorsuch is not in Democrats' own interest, their base demands it.

Writing at The New Republic, Graham Vyse argues that Democrat Senators will pay no political penalty for doing what they can to obstruct the path of Judge Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. If "no penalty" means no one who voted for them before is likely to vote against them next time because of it, I agree.

On the other hand, will a filibuster garner for them any votes they didn't get before? Or win votes for Democrat challengers of sitting Republican Senators? I doubt both very much.

The sad state of today's Democratic Party has been widely documented and needs no recap here. They need to figure out how to win back the statehouses and House seats they've lost in the last 8 years. The filibuster isn't going to make Democrats more attractive to people who switched to Trump after staying home or voting for Obama in prior cycles.

The bottom line for Democrats: A filibuster won't make things worse. However, it also won't help in areas where they need to improve their image. Using the classic hole-digging analogy, it won't dig the hole deeper but it also won't help them climb out - their current need.

Curiouser and Curiouser

The news from Washington and beyond gets stranger by the day. These are some of the most interesting times we've seen since Watergate. Many individuals will end up bruised. Some examples:

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It's being reported today Steve Bannon has lost his seat on the National Security Council. Some are saying his supposed "shadow think tank" never existed. Those who follow closely will remember Bannon predicted he wouldn't last 6 months in the White House, and that Trump son-in-law Kushner would prove to be his nemesis. Looks like that prediction is on track so far, although we don't know Kushner's involvement for certain.

Later ... it turns out Bannon will still attend NSC meetings, but no longer serves as a Principal of the Council. In other words, he'll be a utilizer of the NSC work product without helping to produce it, like the President. We probably haven't heard the final word on his status.

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Susan Rice, who lied about Benghazi on TV to protect Obama's campaign claim of militant Islam on the run, now appears to be a key figure in the "unmasking" of Team Trump phone conversations. Not perhaps "the" key figure, but one of them, certainly. MSNBC has claimed attacks on her are examples of racism and sexism. Mental image of a large steaming pile near the aft end of a bull. There is nothing about being black or a woman that makes you lie and commit felonies, the character flaws are her own, not attributable to a group.

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People who don't understand academic standards for citation of the work of others in one's writing - something that is done all the time - have smeared Judge Gorsuch in the same way they smeared Monica Crowley when she was up for appointment to the Trump National Security Council as spokesperson. If you say the ideas come from someone else, somewhere on the page, you're legal unless you lift blocks of their exact words without quote marks - that is plagiarism.

Later ... It  turns out Gorsuch cited original sources, which someone else had previously also cited, and this was claimed to be plagiarism. I promise you, nobody documents where they find links to original source material, although good practice is to actually examine that original material and not take another's citation as verbatim. You'll note I only do "hat tips" of recognition when the original source is something I normally would not have read.

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Just when it began to look like we could get over our distaste and live with Assad as President of whatever is left of Syria, along comes a nerve gas attack. Most attribute it to the regime, but at least some conspiracy theorists think it was done by those opposed to Assad who became desperate when it looked like we had given up on getting him out. Gassed their own people to create a "Reichstag fire" incident? In that misbegotten part of the world, anything awful is not only possible but likely.

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Instructor pilots training Navy aviators are on strike, refusing to fly, because the Navy won't get serious about fixing problems with the oxygen systems in the jet trainers. Do you have any idea how serious this must be for them to risk their careers? Answer: Very. Admittedly, a shortage of pilots does give them leverage....

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Payless Shoes files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and Sears announces it really doesn't see a clear path forward to continued operation. Amazon is now worth twice what WalMart is worth, according to a Drudge headline. Retailing is in trouble, online is booming, and they're rioting in Africa ... sorry, I couldn't resist. 

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Have a nice day.

Republicans Are Proud, Democrats Not So Much

Gallup recently asked our people whether they are proud to be Americans. As you might guess, significantly more Republicans said yes (92%) than did Democrats (67%) or Independents (73%).

Looking at historical data about this question, Gallup concludes:

Historically, Democrats' patriotism appears to have been susceptible to considerations such as which party occupies the White House and how the U.S. is faring internationally, while Republicans' patriotism has been more consistent over time.

Your basic Democrat can be a sunshine patriot, your basic Republican has America's back. Hat tip to Instapundit for the link, and to Thomas Paine for the "sunshine patriot" concept.

Higher Ed Administrative Bloat

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds links to a review of a book and an academic paper on administrative bloat in higher education at the TaxProf Blog site. There Editor Paul L. Caron quotes from the paper:

The cost of higher education in the United States has risen dramatically in recent years. Numerous explanations have been provided to explain this increase. This paper focuses on one contributing factor: The dramatic growth in the size and expense of non-academic administrators and other university bureaucrats, which has outpaced the growth of expenditures on academic programs.

From the book, he quotes:

Every year, hosts of administrators and staffers are added to college and university payrolls, even as schools claim to be battling budget crises that are forging them to reduce the size of their full-time faculties. As a result, universities are filled with armies of functionaries – vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, assistant provosts, dean, deanlets, deanlings, each commanding staffers and assistants – who, more and more, direct operations of every school.

At COTTonLINE we have dealt with this issue on several occasions. The state university from which the DrsC retired certainly suffers from the above-described malady, in spades. I have my own ideas as to causes.

Empire building is one cause, the more people you supervise the more you should be paid and paid attention to. Another cause is metastasizing federal and state regulations which require elaborate compliance reports.

Don't overlook the need to figure out how to produce significant numbers of graduates from groups which historically have provided few enrollees and even fewer grads. As the population from which grads have normally sprung almost stopped having children, what's left to enroll is that part of the populace which has traditionally had little interest or success in higher ed.

Many so-called 'administrators' exist to recruit non-traditional students, hold their hands, keep them from dropping out, and provide them remediation and study skills. Failure to do so will result in the closure of scores of state campuses and the loss of thousands of higher ed jobs.

The sources cited by TaxProf emphasize the ever-increasing use of low-paid marginally qualified, part-time contract faculty. One motive for doing so is that, lacking tenure, they can be required to set low standards and help the above-mentioned non-traditional students pass courses, an obvious prerequisite to graduation. Those part-timers who won't play the game probably don't get a contract for the next term.

The eventual end result of this trend: the baccalaureate degree will be worth little more than the high school diploma. Necessary? Yes, but entirely insufficient, as is the diploma today.

Weird Bio-Chemical Science

Guest blogging at Instapundit, Stephen Green links to a CNBC article about a filter that supposedly will turn sea water to potable fresh water.

A group of scientists in the U.K. created a membrane 'sieve' capable of removing salt from seawater to make it drinkable by using graphene, a wafer-thin sheet of carbon atoms.

Reporting their findings in the Nature Nanotechnology journal, researchers from the University of Manchester have claimed that the process of desalination – filtering salt-water to produce fresh water – could lead to cheaper filtration systems in the developing world.

They explained that by controlling the size of the pores in the membranes the team was able to filter out common salts passing through the material.

If this works out in practice, as well as in the lab, I can envision one of these in every life raft, ship's boat, yacht, and perhaps even for cruise ships too. A miniature one as part of every naval aviator's life vest would be good.

It could make life practical on many atolls with no reliable fresh water source. Coastal cities in dry places like California, Israel and Chile would be customers, too.

Daily Caller Drops a Bomb

The Daily Caller moves the Susan Rice unmasking story along, with testimony by former U.S. Attorney Joe diGenova, given to their Investigative Group.

What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals.

The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with. In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.

The Daily Caller News Foundation continues:

Other official sources with direct knowledge and who requested anonymity confirmed to TheDCNF diGenova’s description of surveillance reports Rice ordered one year before the 2016 presidential election.

Michael Doran, former NSC senior director, told TheDCNF Monday that “somebody blew a hole in the wall between national security secrets and partisan politics.” This “was a stream of information that was supposed to be hermetically sealed from politics and the Obama administration found a way to blow a hole in that wall,” he said.

Looks like a lot of work for Jeff Sessions at Justice. Dare we hope for perp walks and orange jumpsuits? The Trump Derangement Syndrome would increase exponentially.