They Really Hated Him

Instapundit links to a statement by Jon Karl of ABC News, which largely echoes a Tom Friedman comment in the New York Times. First Karl's comment:

Look, some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them. 

Friedman said it first in the NYT:

One of the hardest things to accept for all of us who want Donald Trump to be a one-term president is the fact that some things are true even if Donald Trump believes them!

Talk about your grudging admissions. I've heard a stopped clock is right twice a day, too.

Memorial Day

Tomorrow we observe Memorial Day, the day our nation sets aside to honor those brave men and women who have gone to war on our behalf, and lost their lives doing so. By implication, we also honor all those who willingly risk their lives on our behalf, which includes service members, and first responders here at home. 

My father and his West Point grad brother served in World War I, two of my mother's brothers, her sister, and the sister's husband all served in World War II. Thankfully, all came home safely. 

We owe those who served much more than it is possible to say. And to the memory of those who died keeping us safe we owe even more.

Spinning the Numbers

The Hill reports the findings of a Hill-HarrisX poll asking people if relations between the police and people of color have gotten better, worse, or stayed the same during the past year. Basically, in the year since the negligent-death-during-arrest of George Floyd.

The overall findings: 45% say "worse," 43% say "same," and 12% say "better." I suppose I can't blame The Hill for reaching for the more shocking interpretation, "click-bait" is the name of today's publication game.

A plurality of voters said relations between the police and people of color have gotten worse in the past year.

An equally valid, but less 'newsworthy' interpretation is that a majority (43 + 12 = 55%) say such relations are either the same or better than before. Disaggregated by group, majorities of Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites all said police-POC relations were no worse than before.

My preferred 'shock headline' would have been "Few see improvement in police-POC relations since George Floyd Died," which is another valid way to spin these same findings.

This Won’t End Well

Instapundit links to a John Podhoretz tweet; it’s from five years ago but still relevant and worth revisiting.

Liberals spent 40 years disaggregating U.S. untl finally the largest cohort in the country chose to vote as though it were an ethnic group.

BTW, five years later the disaggregation efforts continue. 

Vaccines vs. the Darwin Award

COTTonLINE is a conservative voice, but I want to take issue with those on my side of the aisle who oppose the Covid-19 vaccine. Yes, it was created in a hurry and a vanishingly small number have had bad reactions to it. 

Most, including the DrsC, who have had the shots suffered little more than a slightly sore arm lasting about a day. Plus the shots are free, how great is that? The pandemic is winding down, and I give the vaccines much of the credit. By now we have plenty of data that they are as safe as vaccines ever are, which is to say, “mostly.”

Now various jurisdictions are going to extreme lengths to get the remaining people to take the vaccine. I oppose these efforts. If people don’t want to take free vaccine, they shouldn’t be bribed to do so.

If those who refuse then catch the disease and die, well … they won the Darwin Award, didn’t they? Evolutionarily, they took themselves out of the gene pool. I’m okay with that, we end up a smarter species as a result.

And while I agree that government shouldn’t make people be vaccinated, I oppose laws which prevent private entities from doing so. For example, cruise lines and airlines should be able to require crew and passengers to have been vaccinated. I have no problem showing my ID to vote, or my vaccine card to fly.

Feeding the Fire

The fringe conspiracy group QAnon is known, among other things, for its belief that the government is run by a bipartisan cabal of pedophiles. Now come reports that yesterday President Biden made inappropriate sexualizing comments about a pre-pubescent girl present with her family at a meeting at a military base (video here).

You would hope our President would avoid doing things which clearly add fuel to this salacious conspiracy theory, but you’d be wrong. The New York Post reminds us:

Biden has a long history of awkward encounters with girls and young women. In February, he told an Arizona nurse during a video conference that she looked “like a freshman” in college.

During his time as vice president, Biden became notorious for getting too close to women for comfort. During Ash Carter’s swearing-in ceremony as defense secretary in 2015, Biden stood behind Carter’s wife Stephanie, held her by her shoulders and occasionally whispered in her ear. Earlier that year, Biden whispered to the then-13-year-old daughter of Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and gave her a kiss on the head after swearing in his fellow First Stater.

If you voted for Biden  you share the responsibility for this, and things like it, happening. Biden’s predilection for making inappropriate approaches to women and girls were well-known before the election. 

Wisdom

Numbers guru Nate Silver, of FiveThirtyEight fame, tweets some wisdom those of us who follow current events need to remember. He writes in the context of how dramatically opinion has changed about the origin of Covid-19 snd his advice sounds like a defense of the First Amendment.

Maybe a lazy heuristic. But TBH, when the evidence is murky and there are plenty of experts lining up on both sides, but one side is excessively concerned with policing the discourse, I tend to think that side is more likely than not to be wrong.

Now apply his heuristic to the woke and their "excessive concern" with not saying certain words. "I tend to think that side is more likely than not to be wrong" pretty well defines my view of the woke and their impassioned "policing" of "the discourse."

He identifies yet another reason the First Amendment is important: "discourse" doesn't need "policing." Hat tip to Ed Driscoll posting at Instapundit for the link.

Investigation Quashed

On a procedural vote today, the U.S. Senate could not get 60 votes to override a filibuster of the proposed "Investigate Jan. 6 Capitol Riot" commission. The vote was 54 to 35. Thus no such commission will be formed. As yet, Democrat threats to ban the filibuster have remained just that.

Minority Leader McConnell opposed the measure and 34 other Republican senators voted with him. Six Republican senators - Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Rob Portman of Ohio - voted with all but one of the Democrats in favor of the commission.

I expect at least three senators who voted for the measure to face primary opponents if they run for reelection. The newly reelected Cassidy, Collins, and Sasse don't face reelection until 2026, by which time this vote will seem ancient political history, unless of course Trump wins reelection in 2024 - not an impossibility.

Later ... It turns out 10 Republicans and one Democrat chose not to vote. The Democrat no-show is someone else's problem. I suppose McConnell gave the 10 Republicans a pass as he didn't need them to block the motion, perhaps he had to work hard to get them to abstain instead of voting "yes."

I'd judge those 6+10=16 Republican Senators were uncomfortable with at least some of Trump's post-election actions. Only 6 of the 16 were willing to go on the record as feeling that way. 

The party will decide how to view the 10 "abstains" going forward. My view of them is they want to have it both ways, to remain politically viable whether or not the party eventually repudiates Trump as the Bush/Cheney/Romney wing wishes.

Paul Who?

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan spoke last night at the Reagan Library in Simi, CA. The main thrust of his remarks apparently was criticism of President Trump, or maybe that was the part CBS News chose to report.

Exactly why Ryan was invited is anybody‘s guess. He was Romney’s failed vice presidential candidate and then became without doubt the least consequential GOP Speaker in modern memory. 

Ryan took the Speaker position reluctantly when seemingly nobody wanted it, and did essentially nothing with it. Now we are asked to treasure his Romneyesque insights about a President who, despite his rough edges, got things done.

I have not missed Paul Ryan for the past two years. I see no good Republican purpose served by his untimely and unwarranted ‘resurrection’ by the Reagan Library. 

A Tangential Thought

Thinking about the post below, concerning the prevalence of meat consumption worldwide, I had a tangential thought I’ll share with you. The DrsC enjoy watching a pair of PBS-TV cooking shows - America’s Test Kitchen and Cook’s Country.

Since both have identical formats and largely identical on-air talent, it is unclear why there are two, and what I write applies to both. From time to time they will feature vegetarian main dishes, often prepared by a tall, chirpy chef named Becky Hays.

What strikes me is the lengths to which vegetarian cooks go to try to achieve a ‘meaty’ flavor without meat. You hear that soy products like soy sauce and miso have it. Also aged cheeses, tomatoes, and mushrooms have this characteristic, called “umami.” The Healthline.com site reports:

Scientifically speaking, umami refers to the taste of glutamate, inosinate, or guanylate. Glutamate — or glutamic acid — is a common amino acid in vegetable and animal proteins. Inosinate is mainly found in meats, while guanylate is more abundant in plants

What does working hard to achieve a meaty flavor without using meat tell you? Why bother? Because humans crave what is most easily found in meat. Vegetarian cooks go to somewhat extreme lengths to satisfy this craving. 

My conclusion: the primates we call “humans” evolved from herbivore to omnivore and became the “killer ape.” In our natural state, we remain just that. Most of us are comfortable with our meat-eating legacy, some are not. 

As human population growth is leveling off, I see no particular reason we need to change our diet. The world can support us as we are now, and those who choose not to eat meat are free to follow that path.

Carnivorous Musings

A couple of days ago we wrote about the intensification of meat production in our part of WY. Today comes linkage to a report by German data firm Statista concerning the prevalence of meat consumption in a variety of countries. The news isn’t good for PETA and the greenies.

On average, 86 percent of people surveyed for the Statista Global Consumer Survey in 39 countries said that their diet contained meat – highlighting that despite the trend around meat substitutes and plant-based products, eating meat remains the norm almost everywhere in the world.

In only five out of the 39 countries - Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, China and India - fewer than 80 percent of respondents said that they ate meat. The latter country had the lowest score at 43 percent meat eaters. China, which had the second-lowest result in the survey, still counted 75 percent of respondents saying they ate meat.

The article reports the following percentages of meat eaters in these countries: Japan (95%), Russia (94%), U.S. (90%), Germany (86%), China (75%), and India (43%). Translating the second paragraph quoted above, 75-79% of those in Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, and China include meat in their diets. That’s three people out of four.

India is the definite outlier of the group, Statista explains why.

India’s penchant for vegetarian fare is connected to Brahmanism or Vedic religion, a belief system connected to the caste of Brahmans, which are highly regarded in the Indian caste system, making vegetarianism equally desirable.

In other words, being vegetarian is a marker of high status in India, much like being “woke” currently has that upscale cachet in the U.S. Many insecure humans crave high status, no big surprise.

The Mayoral Dilemma

Many sites, like this one, are reporting that cities which experimented with "defund the police" in the wake of the George Floyd death are having buyer's remorse. Their police have been less active and in the newly permissive environment their criminals have been much more active.

Violent crime and especially homicide is up substantially, year over year, in many of our largest cities. This is exactly what would be expected when the police have tighter budgets and a very real fear that, should they be involved in a violent confrontation, their leadership will throw them under the bus and side with the criminals.

We know what will turn the situation around. Mayor Giuliani did it in New York City, it goes by various names including "broken windows policing" or proactive policing. It concentrates police in high crime areas and energetically enforces laws concerning property damage and carrying unlicensed weapons.

Such policing is unpopular with the people living in high crime areas as it results in many of their young men, and a fair few of their young women getting a criminal record. Proactive policing feels like harassment and, to some degree, it is exactly that. It does, however, reduce violent crime and homicide and ironically the same people who resent the police are the ones mostly victimized by violent criminals who are their neighbors. 

Big city mayors face an insoluble dilemma. They are damned if they suppress crime, and damned if they don't, often by exactly the same vocal minority community critics. 

About the Palestinians

One of the best minds in international affairs writing today - George Friedman - weighs in on the interminable Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It is a useful overview; his conclusions won't please many but seem reasonable. He writes at Geopolitical Futures:

The weakness of the Palestinians is that no great power saw them as a conventional military force, particularly because Arab countries didn’t want such a major military force in their countries. They were forced into a posture that trained them in hijackings and bombings but not in conventional warfare. What you see in Gaza today is a modern conventional military facing “soldiers” inspired by a very different culture. The aid Palestine receives from Iran today doesn’t fundamentally change this. The Palestinians can’t win, but they can inflict damage on Israel.

The Palestinians are seen by many as victims. That’s not a useful term here, but if we use it, then they were victims not only of Israel but also of Egypt, Syria and the Soviets, all of which saw use for them as small groups of covert operatives but had no desire for them to create a modern Palestinian army in a neighboring country. Additionally, there was no neighboring country that would welcome such an army. An intifada with some suicide bombers will not bring down Israel, nor will it force it to the negotiating table. And the Palestinians have no allies that will help them become such a power.

Like the Kurds, the Palestinians are a people without a country. Both groups are used by various great and would-be-great powers when their mutual aims align but ultimately both are left without a seat when the 'music' stops. Geopolitics is a tough, cynical business, especially in blood-soaked arenas like the Middle East.

Airborne Petri Dishes

Power Line's John Hinderaker writes about his impatience with vaccinated people still wearing masks, I know a lot of folks agree with him. Mostly I do too.

The one place where I might wear a mask going forward is on an airliner. Those seats are close together, left to right and back to front. What's circulating in the pressurized cabin at 30,000 feet isn't exactly fresh air. And shared restrooms aren't sanitized after every use, more like after every flight.

The other DrC and I have been to something like 120 countries, so we've done a lot of flying including the interminable trans-Pacific flights to and from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Singapore. In the best of times, it has been our experience that flying carries an increased risk of catching a communicable illness, normally respiratory or gastrointestinal.

There have been times, coming home from a cruise that ended in Sydney or Rome where we got sick on the ship and were literally a disease vector flying home, putting other passengers at risk. And if we've done it, I know others do too. If you don't feel great you want to get home.

I have a funny story about that. Coming back from Australia with a painful cough, I needed DM cough medicine in quantity. I feared security wouldn't let me bring the big bottle on board. So I grabbed the little bottles in the stateroom minibar, poured out the booze, filled them with cough syrup, and because they were small, got enough on board to get me home without coughing my head off. Feel free to borrow the idea if you find yourself in that predicament.

Bottom line: I will wear a mask whenever I fly, and I might fly with a pocketful of surgical gloves too. I think of commercial passenger planes as airborne petri dishes.

Grok the Hypocrisy

Source

Carnivorous Thoughts

While greenies say we should eat less meat, in my little corner of Wyoming's cattle country the trend is definitely in the other direction. Our area was once heavily into dairy farming, literally hundreds of Holstein cows were milked twice a day within 20 miles of where I sit writing this. 

Over the last decade, at least, the trend has been away from dairy cattle and into so-called "cow-calf" operations, featuring breeds like Angus which are raised for beef. We've noted it is particularly true this year.  

I believe few dairy farms exist in our valley today, the old cheese factory has been gone maybe a decade. A more current indicator is that the local veal operations, which relied on "freshened" dairy cattle to produce the calves, are largely gone.

Certainly, one reason for the change is the unrelenting nature of running a dairy. Milk cows must be milked twice a day, seven days a week, come rain or shine, heat wave or deep freeze. 

There is plenty of work in a beef cattle operation too, but it is more episodic, with breaks during which the cattle can more-or-less take care of themselves. With fewer farm kids coming home to run the family dairy, farming beef is less labor intensive and easier for those who do return to manage.

Twilight Time

For better or worse, Joe Biden has spent 40+ years working in government; it has been his career. It logically follows that his presidency offers fewer surprises than the Trump presidency did. For old Washington hands, this must be reassuring.

Used to the freedom of action a private entrepreneur experiences, Trump no doubt found the formal systems of government restricting. He pushed boundaries that, it turned out, were more custom than actual requirements. His public loved it, old Washington hands found their norms violated and did not.

Joe Biden is delivering basically the same presidency George W. Bush delivered, leaning a bit more to the left as would be expected. The “uniparty” is back in charge, it’s boring by design and we can all go back to sleep and ignore government. 

For the Washington establishment, this curated boredom is a feature, not a bug. It means we leave it to them to run, while we get on with our lives. 

Imagine the life of a country being like a human life with a beginning, middle and end. Donald Trump was our national mid-life crisis, our last grasp for relevance (greatness?) before sinking back into the comfortable rut leading to retirement and stagnation. Trump turned out to be a bridge too far, too disruptive, too garish.

Like most humans do, our nation settled for boring, comfortable aging. Our retirement-ready POTUS turns out to be a near-perfect metaphor for where we are as a nation ... over the hill, all our big achievements behind us, nothing much looking forward. 

Now we're on track to join Britain, France, Spain, Russia and Italy as places that were once important geopolitically. Alternatively, maybe it is not too late to opt for greatness, that will be up to the voters.

Green Talk, Not-Green Reality

The Zero Hedge website reports that, contrary to President Biden's expressed wishes, America's utilities are building new gas fired generation plants at a good clip.

While President Biden has decided to re-enter the Paris Climate Accords and vowed to take steps to place the US electric grid on the path to net zero emissions by 2030, American utilities are continuing to pursue new gas projects that would far outlast Biden's administration. Expansions have even been authorized for coal and oil plants. It's just the latest evidence that Biden's green rheortic doesn't square up with reality.

And then Zero Hedge quotes a Bloomberg article:

At least eight large utilities in the U.S. are building new gas plants right now, and another five are thinking about doing the same. That lays bare an uncomfortable truth about the sector’s commitment to fighting climate change: All those carbon-neutral pledges don’t necessarily mean quitting fossil fuels.

China and India (a) produce most of the world's human-generated atmospheric carbon dioxide, and (b) both are entirely unwilling to reduce their actual use of coal to generate electricity. Thus U.S. utilities expect to be able to keep using these new plants beyond the working lives of the executives making the decisions, if only as essential backup for unreliable renewables which depend on intermittent sun and wind. 

Pipeline Held for Ransom

I've been meaning to write about the ransomware hack of the Colonial petroleum pipeline on the East Coast. It is unclear why massive infrastructure systems like this are controlled over the eminently hackable Internet. Doing so feels like executive malfeasance to a guy who taught management for 30 years.

I understand it is initially cheaper to use a system everybody is tied into already, until some crafty nerd locks you down and demands millions or billions. Plus firms have to accept that disgruntled present and former employees are a regrettable reality of corporate life. 

There have got to be better ways to provide security for complex, interconnected systems - for example checks and balances, retinal scans, dedicated lines, an "intranet," two person interlocks, single use code pads, this stuff isn't exactly rocket science. Spend a few million up front and deal with the tedium and hassle of being careful.

Pipelines aren't the only targets, how about the electrical grid? The air traffic control system? Rail line controls? City traffic light systems? Wastewater management systems? Refineries? Big city fresh water systems? My list isn't exhaustive.

What if somebody figures out how to lock up the Internet itself, hold it hostage? I have no idea if it is designed so sabotage isn't possible, it certainly needs to be. 

Anything operating in interstate commerce can experience Federal oversight. President Biden should sic the Department of Homeland Security on this threat; it is a genuinely useful thing he could do.

As system security isn't obviously related to either climate change or racism - their apparent obsessions - I doubt the Biden claque will find it of much interest.

Comparing NY and FL

Karol Markowicz is a columnist for the New York Post, and a resident of NYC. She writes at City Journal that during the Covid-19 troubles she, her husband and 3 kids escaped to Florida for 4 months. There the kids went to school everyday, played sports, and had a normal life.

Now they're all back in NYC but you get the feeling they might decamp to FL permanently. Her column comparing the experiences they had in FL and NY is a good read. FL comes out looking very much like a winner.

I'd have one caution for Ms. Markowicz. If your family chooses to move to Florida, become Floridians; embrace the difference. That difference is the reason you left NY. Leave your NYC abrasiveness behind alongside the stuff you choose not to ship south. Relax and smile at folks, don't turn FL into a new NYC with palm trees and water bugs.