So some talking heads--talking voices, I guess, although that sounds less clever--on the radio were defending the pollsters from the 2016 election

I didn't catch the whole segment, so I don't know if they distinguished the raw data (which were, I am reliably told, within sampling error of parity, which happens to align with the popular vote numbers we saw) from the reported results of 90% or 95% or 99% in favor of Hillary, whatever it was.

But that extreme error is what they were defending.

They went on about how people being polled were reluctant to appear too in favor of such a contemptible fool as Trump, lest it turn out that the pollster was a DNC employee testing the waters for an opportunity to dox a defenseless alleged bigot--even though doxxing wasn't so widely known a thing back then--or worse yet, the people polled felt that they would come off as bigoted even though they still wanted to vote that way.

So the pollsters apparently just struggled with trying to discern how the non-responses would have broken down by party lines, and how many dishonest results they got from paranoid voters, and so on.  

Those are fair concerns, but those are the concerns that define the pollsters' job.  This wasn't some historical anomaly that just coincidentally led them all right into the blind spot that corroborated every modern electoral conspiracy theory.  That, I would have excused if they had looked at the roughly 50/50 numbers and came back with a solid lead for Hillary but Don still making a competitive showing.

Ninety-plus percent, though?  

A landslide would be putting it mildly.  How much closer to a unanimous vote would it have to have really seemed to them before they stepped back and said "You know what, we better double check our methodology."  They wouldn't even have to admit to themselves any realistic bias like "Hillary is one of the more polarizing figures of the decade and we better make sure we don't undercount the people who hate her and still turn out to the polls."  All they should do is say "raw counts make it a toss-up, final analysis shows Hillary did almost twice that well and Trump got almost nothing; isn't that a stretch?"

No, I don't think it was an honest mistake.  I think it's a "mistake" they plan to make again, if our memory is short enough to let them, and they're trying to prime us with the suggestion that they're generally responsible people who happen to completely fubar their job but can be trusted to do better this fall even though times are even more uncertain all around.

Have you noticed they tend to demand the dismantling of police forces now...

...but dreaming up a replacement, such as it might be, is only a subsequent concern?

Do they really think, or want us to think, that anarchy is a preferable alternative to some kind of gradual and measured and deliberate transition?

Or is chaos simply their goal?  Is their goal to make things bad quickly so in the collective panic that ensues, hoi polloi will accept any solution, no matter how bad?

Radio personality: "Grats to the LGBTs on the recent SCOTUS decision! If only black people could get the same rights...."

Is that nascent cracks in the alliance I'm starting to see?

Systematic racism is...personal, not institutional?

Larry Correia does some schooling on the shape of racism in the getting-paid part of the publishing biz.

Correia made a few good points in particular that I want to focus on for a minute.

For one thing, the publishing industry is heavily blue.  Most publishers' headquarters are in Manhattan, and they fit the stereotype.

So if there's racism going on, whose fault is it?  After being in the business for in some case literally centuries, there's really no one else to blame.

That's the loophole for them, though.

Like everywhere else in America, law prohibits discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, with a few exceptions for hiring practices.  So any racism literally can't be baked into the system as we are asked to believe.  The Constitution discusses slavery as a fact of life, but it was on its way out, and the fact that 1776 happened before we crossed that watershed is not germane.

So the only way that racism can persist is in the attitudes of the people who want to propagate it.

There are some back doors, of course.  Laws that affect certain demographics but seem colorblind until you note that there are well-known correlations.  But this isn't always racism.  Certain investment laws prohibit people using certain tools or strategies if they don't have enough liquid assets to back them aren't just to be mean to minorities or generally lower and middle class people, they exist to prevent amateurs from causing damage to the market with their ignorance.  But even where it might be, like with certain kinds of inner city zoning laws, if you've got people who know what's wrong getting elected...why are they still unable to set it right?  If you're a bleeding heart mayor who wants to help your city and you've been in office for thirty years, at some point the governor and state legislature stop being valid excuses.

But swap everyone in the system out for people who are equally competent but not indoctrinated, and there's no reason to expect the same things to keep happening.  Selective misanthropic unwritten policies should evaporate overnight, and bad laws that take advantage of artifacts of history will take a little longer for these unbiased replacements to weed out once they stop enforcing them.

And when a crisis like we're having these days happens, someone can always find some statistics that might be damning, or might not but can be dressed up to look that way, and so all these progress-leading Manhattanites can clutch their pearls and signal-apologize for nothing more specific than being part of the problem, and then after a few days of putting color-coded banners on their web sites and tweaking the language of their boilerplate, it's back to business as usual.

It's like they're springing the Kafkatrap of the retail clerk on themselves just so they can get out of it.  It's pretty clever, I'll give them that, but the problem with reminding yourself too much that you're clever is it gets very easy to forget that anyone else has any sense.

Like the black people you just signaled to.  Which is probably why you keep doing it and thinking that it's going to keep working.

Here's what I mean by the retail clerk Kafkatrap.  I borrowed this from somewhere but don't remember exactly where; I'll give credit or change the example if I find it or a kind reader points me in the right direction:

You're working in a store.  A black customer and a white one walk in at the same time.  Whom do you approach first to serve?  The white one because you're more comfortable?  Or the black one because you think on some level they're not to be trusted and need to be watched more closely?  Or the white one because you don't want to show that you might think that of the black person?  Or the black person to subtly contribute to elevating their social status?  The point isn't to reach an answer; the point is to think about it so In The Future You Can Do Better.

But what does "do better" in a case like this mean?  Eventually you have to stop the analysis paralysis and do your job.

But that's the Kafka trick.  When you're setting up the scenario as if to trap yourself instead of someone else, you don't have to answer.  Just framing it is the solution.  Let hoi polloi worry about what the actual right answer is; you've shown yourself to be woke enough to be above such things, and can choose to do whichever you want.  Since you're woke, it's always the right choice.

Well, not forever.  What amuses me about the explosion of obsequious fangirling is how everyone is suddenly an expert in this stuff.  In truth, they're not.  Many of 'em took good notes in their critical theory studies gen eds, but in most parts of the country there's not a lot of use, so their skills will whither; meanwhile, progress keeps moving in whatever direction is declared forward.  The wannabes are going to get left behind or consult the wrong focus group or use an obsolete phrase because even the MSM can't keep up, and eventually their virtue signal will be heard as an obsolescence signal.  And they will turn on their own.

Elaborating on lessons learned

I wanted to go into a little more detail.  That last post was long enough and dwelling on the specifics would have taken away from the overarching themes.

The two-dimensional political axis opens up a lot of understanding, but it obscures some things, too.  First off, nothing is simple, and a two dimensional space is generally better than a linear one, but even then it doesn't capture all the nuance.  Some specifics don't map neatly onto a political spectrum of any dimension because they are affiliated for historical reasons rather than logical or thematic ones.  That's why you hear about "liberals versus progressives" and conservatives and libertarians describing themselves as "classical liberals" whereas twenty years ago there were just "liberals" on the left and they were on average moderate enough for conservatives to have conversations and alliances with.

The two dimensions perhaps would be better considered as an evolution of the political landscape than as a diagnosis.  It's still common to look at conservatives and say "Hey, they want to restrict abortion, and drugs, and marriage not to mention sex itself, and liquor, and shut down businesses on Sundays, so how can they claim to be the party of liberty?" But as the arguments have developed, so have the stances on the positions, regardless of the positions themselves.  Democrats used to be the party of "keep your morality off my pursuit of happiness," but now you're more likely to see people who vote (R) saying "as long as you meet the low bar of not distressing my children in public, I'm more than happy to let you do your own thing  and to mind my own business."  The ones who vote (D)?  They're either saying "your disagreement with me is violence and it needs to be curbed whether or not you express it," or they're saying "You're perpetuating systematic if not acute violence and if promoting thought police is the best way to stop wrongthink from perpetuating white guilt, then so be it."

This has been their game for fifty-two years, but I think as their tent gets broader to include more obscure and artificial victim demographics, the tent poles of popularity won't be able to hold up all the canvas.  We're looking at pleas to accommodate people whose struggles have sunk to somewhere between "never experienced enough hardship not to take inconvenience personally" and "My coworkers oppress me with their coffee club because I prefer pop to java."  Sure, gender identity--whatever it is--is a more grave matter, but it's also something that usually is only called into question in cases of early abuse, and when it's not, is something that is usually outgrown when placed into its proper context (e.g. a girl might be a tomboy, but that doesn't make her a lesbian, nor does it make her a boy, even if it's not just a phase).

As for the boogaloo....

My first thought, wen I realized the "talks of CW2 are going mainstream" article wasn't just a report on that fact, was that it was an effort to preemptively paint it as a white nationalist movement.  Get the narrative in front of the truth, so to speak.

For one thing, white supremacists aren't ashamed of who they are.  They usually know to keep their mouths shut in mixed company but still tend to assume that everyone white still agrees with them secretly.  When they come out in force, there is little doubt.  I'll admit the Confederate flags muddy the waters a bit, but those being matched by Antifa flags, I don't think it's something one can honestly claim a difference of opinion on once the context is established (i.e. Lansing versus Minneapolis).

Secondly, for this to be white supremacists instead of Antifa, there would have to be protracted coordination between white bigots and BLM.  Do you seriously believe they would deign to do such?  Especially when the Ferguson riots and everything since have proved that urban American communities are enough of a powder keg not to need any outside help?  It supports their argument better than them planting shills and confederates to catalyze all the burning and looting and then claiming superiority.

It would also require them to be so numerous and well organized that they could spontaneously trigger riots not just in Minnesota, not just across the country, but in Europe and Asia.  Why would they even go to Korea to stage a riot?  Why do Europe and Asia care enough about a single additional case of police brutality ending in the death of a man with a rap sheet, to erupt like this?  I know our precious Wokes think they're so sensitive, but are they really so ethnocentric that they still think America is the center of the world?  Hong Kong is still getting crushed; why aren't we hearing about that from the MSM?

I mean, really--unless they're putting on white hoods, which they're not, they're not as organized as Antifa.  those confederate flags are over a hundred and fifty years old--not literally, but the movement--and these guys are pining for their erroneous dream of glory days; the MSM claims Antifa is a decentralized grassroots movement, but only sometimes, and they don't just bring flags to events, they have a de facto dress code, and a consistent M.O., and web sites where you can buy their swag.

The funniest part--not really, but you know what I mean--is all the concern some people are expressing about the lines out of the door at gun stores, where all the people are white.

Yeah, if you've only read the MSM stuff that puts white nationalism in the front of your mind, I can see the concern, but there's a glaring unasked question:

If it's the instigators of the riots who are buying guns, why did they wait until now to arm up, and if it's them, why are they falling back on bricks and molotov cocktails in the riots themselves?

I suspect a part of the answer is rioters bussed in from out of state can't get guns where they live, and don't want to risk getting caught during transport, so they fall back on the usual weapons of civilian insurrectionists.

And Antifa itself?  I don't know why people bother defending their legacy, no matter how lofty they claim their motives are.  "They're not really violent, violence just follows them." Do even they make that claim? Sure, they may not always do the provoking when real skinheads show up--usually it doesn't take much to get those guys to cross the line, no criticism there--but I submit it is not a coincidence that the two go together.  Especially when you see people in their uniform, and you see their flags, and you see them directing waiting rioters to particular storefronts and stashes of bricks, and then themselves get filmed breaking windows and starting fires.  After all that, the violence that spreads is a foregone conclusion.

Now, maybe Antifa are white supremacists in that condescending way that progressives tend to be--all compliments to minorities are backhanded, their claimed efforts and motives are patronizing and even infantilizing, and beyond the degree to which our self-proclaimed elites treat hoi polloi in general.  You know, how it's not just that white men actively held down all minorities and particularly black people but not particularly Chinese or Korean or Japanese people, but it's so ingrained and so pervasive that a victim can barely even make a healthful decision in his own life even if he's woke and unimpeded/*.  I'd certainly think so, considering they all seem to be white young men in black clothing and masks, and if I stuck to the MSM and social media I'd be told as much, but when you go to look them up...it's all suspiciously vague and oblique.

One might think they weren't really involved, if it weren't for the uniforms, and the flags, and the dearth of denying responsibility.

I learned a few things recently

And it's at least mostly my fault for not realizing them sooner.  Soon I'll post on where this is coming from and where it's going.

First, we've all heard about how socialism is slightly leftist, and communism is radically leftist (politically, anyway; I'm not sure how neatly Marx's vision maps onto the identity politics that pass for class warfare these days), and fascism and naziism radically rightist--or I guess, reactionary.

And you've heard me talk, at least if you've been snooping through my drafts, about these last two are actually wrong--that they're all leftist.

If you've read or seen Atlas Shrugged, let me remind you that of the scene where the government stooge shows up at Hank Rearden's foundry to tell him how to manage his orders.  It's still Rearden's facility, but this loss (or attempted loss) of authority to run it himself is an aspect of fascism.

The difference from socialism?  Socialism has more direct involvement; depending on the degree, industries may be nationalized and corporate management acts mainly as lieutenants to government agencies, or government agencies perform activities normally expected of the companies themselves. Roads aren't socialist, but the Eisenhower freeway system might be considered such; the FDA isn't quite fascist, but doctors and nurses who only receive federal stipends and are bound in their diagnoses and treatments by state instead of corporate actuaries would be communist.

So at fist I thought the accusations against libertarians and patriots and Republicans was just the Left projecting again, picking a random villain from recent history and speaking the name often in the hope that it sticks.  The USSR and Third Reich didn't get along well, so I wouldn't be surprised by lingering institutional animosity.

Well, it turns out that last bit is the crux of the biscuit.

I was trying to read up on Antifa the other day.  They're not much in the MSM currently, which surprised me until I stopped to thin about it.  The Wikipedia page turned out to be quite informative, though.  I knew it had started in Germany as a movement to oppose any residual Nazis or Naziism, but it turns out that is...not exactly wrong, but somewhat inaccurate, and not the whole picture by a long shot.  Well, communists being no true friends to Hitler or Stalin, they were happy to foment such action.  And what was something they did?  Categorize capitalism as fascism.

This actually makes no sense because the actual free market doesn't impose drudgery and toil on people.  Those things do happen, but it's an effect of the human condition, not a feature of capitalism.

But if you can dig up some early Cold War propaganda from that side of the Iron Curtain, you'll see all kinds of imagery about how Americans are wage slaves working in sweat shop conditions, while freedom and leisure for the soviet thanks to efficient central planning were just around the corner.

I used to work with a woman who emigrated from Ukraine after growing up there during the Cold War.  We used to laugh at how similar our attitudes as nations were toward each other--the other guys are bad, they live miserable lives, they're just going to bomb us if they decide to attack so all these infantry drills are silly, etc.  That was good time.

So okay, it makes sense on the propaganda level.  Conflate the existential opponent of communism with the historical one, then just make them sound even worse.

Thus I'm no longer frustrated when I see people compare the optics of German military culture to that of Latin American military culture, declare the latter to be an overall benign communism, and then force Germany to the other pole of a binary scheme; or even if they say "Well, there's communism versus capitalism on one axis, but then there's totalitarianism versus libertarian on another, and fascists are really free market totalitarians," which again makes no sense as such but when you live in a world where it's a question of degrees you can get away with it for a while even when you're being honest.

So that's the first thing.  The second dovetails with the first.

I was arguing with a loved one about some of the stuff that's been going on lately.  I know her personally so I can't dismiss her foggy thinking as another case of some anonymous idiot who thinks she's well informed because she consumes above average quantities of lies and propaganda.  I'm not sure I'll reach her because sometimes I have to end a conversation before I say something that would hit a little too close to home, but I have some hope in taking the indirect approach--like, if a discussion starts going sideways and she accuses me of relying on the lies of Fox News, I can remind her that none of the points I made were based on anything from Fox News.  It's also easier than getting caught up in a race to see who can send the most damning articles, and it helps me to keep an open mind if she brings up something I didn't know or actually was wrong about.

Anyway, she's been talking a lot about the patriarchy and white supremacy as if the whole country is 1950s Dixie.  I usually just ignore it and hope she'll learn I'm not interested in a discussion if she's coming out of the gate with name calling and middle school levels of nuance.  And then she sent me an article about the "boogaloo," which I'd heard of third or fourth hand as a sort of foreboding over how ripe the polarization in this country is going to get.  The article itself, of course, couched it all in terms of a white supremacy movement.  They didn't invoke the KKK or Tea Party, but when you've got the whole MSM on your side, even NBC can make the association while eliding labels and facts.

I'll write later about how the facts from that perspective don't add up; my point here is just that an epiphany I had watching the riot coverage on the they-call-themselves-news channels opened my eyes to my loved one's fears.

So for starters I don't blame her for having an objective fear of white nationalists.  Whether they're a credible threat, goodness never follows them, so I wouldn't be happy to hear about them gaining power or popularity even if it wasn't in my back yard.

But there's that "if" that made me suspicious.  Was this Screwtape scaring people into stocking up on fire extinguishers to deal with another flood?

What I noticed about the riots is that there seem to be three groups.  There's some overlap, but I think most of that is logistical or a subterfuge.  The first group is the actual protesters, people who are fed up and even strident but still in enough control to keep it from going past chanting and shouting and such.  This was a pretty mixed group.  The second group is the rioters, who as near as I could tell all were white people wearing black clothing and masks.  The third group is the looters, who partook of some recreational rioting but mostly raided stores for TVs and shoes and so on; it tragically perpetuates the stereotype so I'm not going to elaborate.

So I've been assuming, when no one was saying it, that the second group is Antifa.  Some might be the confederated grassroots types who think they're doing good and just not afraid to throw down with "actual" Nazis wherever they show up, but also the organizers who brought in pallets of bricks (check the Twitter feeds of the affected police departments; it's not just a rumor) and busted windows on the stores expected to be favored by the looters.

This is all going on and my dear loved one mentions a gun store near her home, where there was a line out the building all of white people.

She's white so I do find it a little precious for her to be so woke, but we can still talk about other things, so there's that.

My epiphany was that she made no distinction between the rioters I think are Antifa but she apparently doesn't (can't remember her ever using the word), the white supremacist boogeyman who dominates the news (I'm talking the specter of militant rednecks, not any actual people, except for Trump), and the white people she saw lined up at the store.  To her, it's all just escalation.

I'll save the rest for later.  Just wanted to point out that this really helped me understand the other side.

So I'm paying attention to the media....

I see a clip of a press conference where the governor of California says he's recruiting an "army" to start going door to door to check on people who are sheltering at home.  He says the next phase in that endeavor will be that, if someone tests positive but is living with people who test negative, the patient will be removed from his home and placed in some kind of care facility to..well I guess to ride out the disease and get what I hope to be actual treatment if necessary.

Got that?

During a pandemic of modest severity but significant (read:  self-inflicted) economic impact, a government official is recruiting civilian collaborators to round up people from their homes and stick them together somewhere.  Does this sound like anything students of history should recognize?

"Sticking people together somewhere," specifically nursing homes, is what got the governor of New York the worst infection rate in the country.  Maybe that was an honest mistake at the time, but in hindsight it was an obvious one and it needn't be repeated.

Meanwhile, next to New York we have Pennsylvania, and someone from that otherwise-fine state called in to Breitbart News to report that in her attempts to ensure treatments for the covid would be available to her mother who is in a nursing home, she was led via from facility management through the governor's office to the state department of health (whatever they call it), where they asked the mother's age and then said flat out that no treatment would be provided even if she tested positive.

To be fair, I don't know that this has been corroborated yet, but I can think of few dumber policies to enact.

Are you a post-Marxist communist who wants to get rid of some useless eaters this way?  It may well work, but if people start getting sick and not getting treatment, they will start infecting more valuable citizens, and there's your next wave of the pandemic.  You're just not going to be able to keep it under control by refusing to take certain obvious treatment steps.

But all that is not directly what my point is about.  I want to tie those things together with the other anecdotes we've heard about needless infractions on civil rights and thoughtless would-be concessions to people who want to reopen.

I'm talking people staying in cars in a parking lot and lone paddle boarders getting ticketed or arrested for violating social distancing.  I'm talking restaurants being told they can reopen but not with a seating capacity high enough to support a clientele that could provide enough custom for the restaurants to stay open.

The former is giving license to totalitarians in blue uniforms, to men who don't really want to protect and serve but just want to be able to drive fast and talk shit.  I'm sorry, I respect the institution and the badge, but there are people like that.

The latter is how how central planners failed to prevent bread lines in the Eastern Bloc (or possibly were able to deliberately effect them; I haven't looked at every case outside of Stalin and Mao).

So what I'm saying is this:

The natural goods are a lot like the moral goods that God gives us.  You can sacrifice a higher one for a more proximate one--lie to get out of jail, give up freedom for security--but statistically it will turn around to bite you in the ass.

"God will not be mocked" is not some warning that He is a bad sport who can't take a joke.  It is the insight that He cannot be without some blowback being put in motion--He's not just that vigilant; it simply can't happen.  It is the abstraction from the principle that if you burn your hand on a hot stove "I was only kidding" will not make it better.

So go ahead, criticize people who won't shut up about civil liberties if you want--again, I'll be fair, this is uncharted territory and we should all be patient with each other while we establish new precedents--but it's looking like they were right after all.

What people don't want to look at

Every so often—too often, yes—there is a mass shooting, and usually it’s a massacre. And there is a cry to ban guns. And it is pointed out that banning guns won’t make violence just stop and it won’t stop would-be criminals from utilizing other weapons or improvised weapons.

And this is admitted, but it’s pointed out that at least it would help.

And conservatives point out it wouldn’t be enough to make up for the other problems that would come from flouting the second amendment and effectively taking guns away from law abiding citizens but not other criminals or the government.

These are worthwhile things to discuss, don’t get me wrong.

But there is an opportunity here, and I think the reason it is not taken advantage of is that it doesn’t actually achieve the real, unstated goal.

You want to make even modest efforts to restrict school violence? Okay. Gun rights advocates have pointed out things they think would work better than a gun ban. So you’re not going to get a ban rammed through Congress tomorrow. So why not try to achieve the things that nobody is opposing?

Maybe it won’t be as good as your pet project, sure, but you already admitted you’d rather achieve a partial victory than none.

So how about it? Willing to put your money where your mouth is?

Or do you want to keep blaming the other side for every failure that results from your preference for ideological purity?

On crying wolf over "dog whistles"

If you’re the only one who hears them—and we know this is true because you’re the one going around telling people what they’re not hearing—maybe it’s not the accused who is racist and trying to use them to send some kind of secret signals to other metaphorical dogs.

Maybe you are.

Letting a good crisis go to waste

A year ago the secprogs were praying, after their manner, for a recession that would get Trump voted out of office in 2020. It does happen in such a circumstance; look at Carter and George H.W. Bush and Herbert Hoover.

But they can't seem to stick to one script, and in the era of social media, it's a lot harder to talk out of both sides of your mouth without the same audience hearing opposing stories from the same person. When there was a little less information and a lot more control, a lot of people will hear one bad story, and a lot of other people will hear another bad story, and most of the rest will hear both but only in small enough parts that it will seem less like a contradiction and more like a complex mass of bad news. The few who grok both prongs of the conspiracy for what they really are, were few enough not have much electoral impact.

Not anymore. Now most of us have the whole story at our fingertips. There's still more information and disinformation than we as a society are savvy enough to see all the way through yet, but the genie is out of the bottle.

So now when false rape accusations get made against high profile political appointees, we still have people picking sides based on inadequate evidence, but everybody can see how embarrassing the process of sausage making is. Faith in the old institutions is eroded, but not just in the targets that those who stooped to low tactics hoped to disparage.

And when a potential crisis arises in Hubei, the Dems poo-poo Trump for overreacting and don't let him do anything but cut off trade with China, and say "go to the Chinese New Year parade or you're racist."  When that turns out to be inadequate, they poo-poo him for not having done enough, and cite as evidence a bunch of watery out of context quotes that were intended to give people some hope and instill peace, and stay mum about having discouraged social distancing at a critical time because it may have been too early to know but racist signaling in retrospect is really not a fair counterpoint to a public health concern. When the damage that was done continues to blossom, they poo-poo him for his optimistic naïveté and start doing their Chicken Little impressions.

So now we're basically in a recession. If this all ended tomorrow, maybe it wouldn't qualify as a real recession; it's not so much that people are fiscally battening down the hatches to weather out a storm of low confidence, but everybody just putting their business on hold.  The demand is pent up, not gone, and the big companies that operate a lot on LTAs are stuck between trying to get out of them and just trying to manage them in the new situation.  But after a while people run out of the capacity to keep waiting, and businesses do board up, and workers do try to find alternative sources of income, and after a while longer the chances of the band getting back together start pointing at zero.

But even now this isn't really a recession. The stock market's behavior is just a symptom. What this is, is a crisis. And a crisis is like a war: the leaders who demonstrate the willingness and intent, in word and deed, to help America survive and thrive, are the ones who will keep or gain the reins of power until normality returns.

But the Dems have been telling us for over a decade now that, either by name or by effect, America needs to end, and we either ought to be subsumed in either some kind of global identity or anonymized under a swarm of immigrants and intersected identities that still think the brass ring known as the American dream is still here to be grasped.

Whatever the world as a whole is going through, these considerations are a luxury that Americans are decreasingly willing to indulge in. We finally have a real taste of toilet paper shortages and bread lines, and "well, at least the billionaires can't hoard any more than the rest of us" no longer sounds so comforting.

In the end, who is more likely to keep the power?  The known quantity, or the challenger who has no relevant experience (remember when that was a meaningful criticism)?  In the end, who is more likely to win the election?  The guy who stumbles along the way but at least tries to remind us that this isn't the end of the world and is actually trying to do something, or the guy who still thinks pronouns and replacing convicts in prison with socially distant paddle boarders are more pressing concerns than toilet paper and access to food?

Governor Whitmer, if you were trying to recoup your executive failure by appealing to Trump to shut down Michigan for you...

...this was not the way to do it.

See here for my original, recent post on the Michigan governor's "audition for VP" theory.

But she ran primarily on a "fix the roads" platform, which to be fair was a high priority before the pandemic.  That's kind of like Ralph Nader running on an airbags platform, except she won.  Now what, though?  This is harder than a state infrastructure crusade, isn't it?

Maybe the powers that be are thinking "ja wohl, she might be our kind of people after all," and hope that in seven or fifty-five months people will only remember the name and face when they go into the booth.

So they for three years periodically accused Trump, by dint of doing anything they didn't like, of being a dictator, as if exercising his duties in well precedented ways they didn't approve in his particular case, constituted by itself or in any degree tyranny.

But then the Wuhan virus hits and after poo-poohing him for overreacting, they "suddenly" panic and demand martial law, they demand shelter in place rules, they demand money be printed (or at least taxed) to support people who can't go to work and then divert some of it to the Kennedy Center, which lays off performers anyway.

My favorite example: the governor of Michigan begs after a fashion Trump to do the things I enumerated above, and then does them herself when she gets tired of waiting.  She should have done it herself immediately; if she has the power now, she had it when this all started too, and it was her duty to tend to Michigan more than it is his.

Like a friggin' cop who shows up and then calls 911.  Call for backup if you want, but you still have a job to do while you're waiting.

Apparently her strident posturing is to win the electoral affections of Biden, but I think it worked the other way. I'll explain in a minute.

Trump has the authority to impose martial law. He does not have the authority to violate the peaceable assembly clause. Whether groups of ten in this circumstance don't meant the peaceable criterion is debatable, but either way it's not the president's purview to regulate such things.
A governor, on the other hand, can make the state national guard enforce her will to some degree, including forcing large groups of people to disperse. It's been done before.

Ms. Governor of Michigan, the Mayor Ray Nagin Memorial Bus Depot is on line one. They'd like to interest you in some ironic optics about exercising executive power.

So it's weird how the Left seems so ready to invest more and more power in authorities and then when they have an opportunity to exercise some power, they run crying to daddy.  Even if daddy is a Republican.  Do they think they can bait and frame him with something more unpopular than their esoteric political aesthetics?  Do they still fail to understand they don't have the clout to overcome all the Constitutional checks and balances and electoral memory that would prevent them first from inventing tyrannical laws and then preventing the other side from ever getting the chance to use them?

Best I can figure is it's sort of a litmus test. Nagin failed; he did provide an opportunity to score some cheap points against Bush (but in those days that was like open mic night), but he did not show that he could step up and set an example. The governor of Michigan failed in the same way; she screamed her rhetoric but seems angry only because orangemanbad didn't do as soon as she wanted what she should have done, by her own power at any time, until she was I guess forced against her will to stand in the breach.  Lucky for her Trump's not running for governor of Michigan.

Pols who can take the reins in a crisis have a chance of a national career. Some people who never have the opportunity of such a crisis get there anyway. But pols who don't, finish their careers like varsity athletes who peaked in high school, periodically calling to the public mind what was so important about them but never accomplishing anything greater ever again. And I wonder if the DNC looks at it exactly that way.

Which is not to criticize. It's not uncommon to see people make a professional error of some magnitude and then find themselves, whether they ever realize it or not, off the career track. But it's interesting and it makes me wonder to what extent such figures are merely tolerated for what little they can contribute after all, and not "encouraged" to move on and let newer blood prove itself.

This is a little more politically hot than I usually like to get into, but...

...have you seen #filmyourownhospital?

I suppose there will always be a few hospitals that aren't as busy as the ones that we keep seeing footage of on the nightly news, but after a while it will be fair to ask "is the real crisis ever really going to happen?"

It may still be premature on my part, true, but I'm starting to smell a parallel between a couple things.

The first is three years of "the proof of Trump's collusion with Russia is imminent."

The second is "the coronavirus surge is no longer racist paranoia but imminent."

The scientist in me is interested in seeing what kind of data we'll get from this epidemiological experiment.  But the historian in me wonders how many patriotic sheriffs are out there who will refuse to support the encroachment on civil liberties that is happening because of all this.

I'm not talking about real threats to public health.  I'm talking about one guy paddle boarding by himself getting accosted by two boats and arrested.  I'm talking about 19 year old Pennsylvania girls getting $200 tickets for driving after "curfew" despite being socially distant from everyone except the cop that pulled her over in the first place.  

I'm also talking about the strange policies that sound like they're supposed to reduce human contact but in effect only make it worse.  Does a store get 100 customers during the ten hours it's open each day?  That's about ten customers an hour.  Cut that down to five hours and the hundred customers now have half the time to go shopping, and if it's an essential business like a grocery store, people on average aren't going to stop coming.  In the short run it may, since people will binge shop and then stay home, but when people come back to find empty shelves, they'll come back more often hoping for a restock, and thus we have more shopping trips than we would have seen otherwise.  So we have 100 customers coming in five hours instead of ten, and thus instead of ten customers per hour, we have twenty.  Twice as many.  Was this just stupid, or was it irrelevant to the real goal of the exercise?

The historian in me also wonders if the patriots who are staying at home for now and issuing warnings about post-Weimar Germany on social media will notice when the last chance to stand up, to draw the line in the sand, comes and passes.

I recently heard...

...that, due to the economic slowdown from corona, about 1/3 of all investment wealth (I think in the US) has been lost.

 This predominantly affects the wealthy, since they not just invest more in terms of absolute number of dollars, but tend to invest a larger proportion of their income or otherwise-liquid assets in businesses, the stock market, etc.

 Is this considered an acceptable mode of wealth redistribution?

I don't always buy the political stuff Neil deGrasse Tyson puts out... (edited)

...but when I do it seems like it's going to be one of those "the Left eats its own" cases.

I saw recently a tweet of his from late last summer trying to put into perspective the different high profile causes of death in America.  He showed how things like the flu and cancer cause tens of thousands of deaths a year but the total number of school shootings deaths is still in the hundreds.

Of course, we can't let facts get in the way of condemning guns, so someone tweeted back how we're doing so much to reduce the number of deaths to influenza and cancer but we're doing f-all about guns, and that's why people are disproportionately upset.

The hell "we" aren't.  

Hell, I'll say it again without sarcasm quotes:  the hell we aren't.

Cosmetic AR-15 bans, bump stock bans, permits to buy ammunition, magazine capacity restrictions, "gun-free zone" laws and signs where laws might not apply, increase in the presence of "resource officers" at schools around the country.

It's not that we aren't doing anything.  It's that most of the things they try aren't working.  NDT's point is that getting mad but insisting we try the same ineffective things even harder is not going to help.  We've been fighting the flu and cancer for  as long as people have been getting sick, and yes, we have made progress, but the one is a disease that looks like it will never really go away, and the other is a disease that really we barely even understand.

Really, it's a bad analogy.  Let me draw some parallels.

You’re not working to reduce medical errors by taking away scalpels.
You’re not working to stop the flu by taking away tissues.
You’re not working to stop suicides by taking away guns. Well, you are, but....
You’re not working to stop car accidents by taking away cars or roads.
But you think taking away guns will stop homicides, and are tone deaf to the UK's creeping knife restrictions.

Why don't we get more angry at people who take a dump or sneeze and don't wash their hands?  Why don't we put more social pressure on people who still smoke in public or put undertested chemicals in food or household or other personal products?  

We've done some of that and it's helped, but there's no controversy there, even though people are still getting sick and coming in to work.

There's barely any controversy about when armed security refuses to confront a shooter, even though that's the one thing they're trained and paid to do.

Historically though we haven't held the school shooters responsible, and I'm not talking about the fact that some of them were legally juveniles.

Thank God the discussion is finally starting to turn towards what makes people go postal.

Yeah..."Postal."  Remember when that's what the problem was?

And like with corporate health and safety policies, regular people wake up from the latest environmental fad and realize it was a one dimensional issue after all.

What do I mean by that?

Look back to my brief harangue about how (in particular) New York banned plastic grocery bags, demanding we buy reusable ones or revert to paper bags--but we have to pay for those, and the first time I got one, the bag ruptured twice just in the process of picking it up.

Some of you are old enough to remember when plastic got popular, on the grounds that it was easier to recycle than brown bag paper.  Maybe the technology has changed and paper really is lower impact these days.

But in their push to ride the crest of this green trend, everyone failed or declined to consider other factors that should have gone into the calculus.

Maybe there aren't enough people like me who like using the bags as bathroom trash can liners to make a difference.  I'm skeptical of that, but to be fair all my data are anecdotal.

Back when the Chinese restaurants were open, orders were often placed in plastic bags even if they were first in a paper bag, because plastic is waterproof so if my mo shu leaked I wouldn't get stains on the passenger seat in my car.  Most people don't order enough at one time to fill up a cardboard box like is sometimes used, and those are bulky enough you'd need to have a catastrophic spill to soak all the way through before getting home, but the restaurant probably wouldn't have enough boxes to go around, anyway.

Anyway, fast forward to the pandemic and everybody suddenly realized that reusable bags can accrue germs when the sit on the floor of the car, or on the ground, or soak up spills.  That's not good for the home team.  Or for the immunocompromised team.  So now plastic bags are back on the menu.

I'm just going to leave it at that.  Next time, can we at least try to anticipate some unintended consequences first?

So now Biden was accused of...things far worse than hair sniffing.

Back in the 90s, this was, and she told people at the time, so this isn't some Russian-fomented bimbo eruption.

If you like your evidence from one side of the spectrum, there's a sufficient article  here.  Another one that is in the Lifestyle section instead of Politics or...I don't even know if they have something like a police blotter section...can be found here if you want another example of the different levels at which journalistic bias can be engineered.  If you want to read something from the other side of the spectrum, look here.

The flip-flopping in social media by people who were outraged by the mass of accusations they felt added up to evidence against Brett Kavenaugh, the insistence that it doesn’t matter because Trump has more accusations (I'm not even sure that's true) just telegraphs you're not on any moral high ground, you're just doing the marketing work for your favorite team.  (h/t to Shoe0nHead for the metaphor).

If you can't even demonstrate that your side is actually better, if your best attempts to do so only make it worse, why should we be swayed by the skin suit you peeled off a moral human being and put on to parade around in front of us?  Didn't it occur to you we'd be even more off-put?

Same thing with the virus "hoax.”  Anybody who says Trump meant "the virus is a hoax" instead of "this is another political opportunity like the hoaxes that brought vaporous impeachment charges," especially since he was already trying to do something about it, wants it to mean that, don’t even want to acknowledge the perfectly neutral fact that he was in the crosshairs for years, it failed, and they’re trying to do it again with this—without even having to argue about whether it’s real.

America is so laden with propaganda...

...that white, tenured professors and journalists who barely have three credit hours each of history and economics still succeed in making generations of Americans believe that capitalism leads to a few rich billionaires and a destitute lower class, without even thinking to ask the questions "where'd the middle class come from, then?" and "why aren't we talking about the dearth of historical evidence that any alternative to capitalism has not just fewer billionaires but fewer middle class people and more poor people?"

Never mind Russia....

We need to look into China's meddling in American political affairs.  

The election isn't here yet so the disruption of legitimate political activity could still be minimized--at least, where there's nothing untoward that might be uncovered--and any collusion not uncovered would still be chilled as dishonest agents who wanted to stay below the radar, kept themselves below the radar.

Why is that when pro-choicers point to programs intended to help break the cycle of poverty as part of their efforts that have the effect of reducing abortion...

...they don't allow pro-lifers to make the same argument?

Maybe someone volunteers at soup kitchens, helps minorities in juvenile detention learn reading and other life skills, but if he goes to pray one rosary across the street from an abortion clinic or goes online, he's accused of not taking a holistic approach to honoring the dignity of human life and therefore isn't sincere at all.  Meanwhile his accusers do nothing but show up to shout at him, vote D, and then say "we pay our taxes to support these things."

Yeah, and he pays the same taxes.  Then he donates time and money willingly where he thinks it will make the biggest difference.


"Studies have shown 100% of abortions are carried out on women who don't want to be pregnant, and 0% on conservative white Christian men, so butt out."

Nice rhetoric, but you can only get that 100% figure by including women who don't want an abortion but aren't allowed to be shown alternatives, and women who want to have their babies but are dragged to clinics by their boyfriends who may use phrases like "do the responsible thing" but actually mean "avoid paternity hearings," and girls who are reluctant but undecided yet whose mothers drag them to the clinic on the grounds of "you live under my roof and I drive you around and feed you and I'm supposed to raise you, but since I failed to teach you to be 'responsible' then you must also have not learned what it takes to be a mom, so instead of showing you we're doing this," and girls who are reluctant or undecided yet whose boyfriends drag them to clinics while using phrases like "do the responsible thing" but actually mean "avoid statutory rape charges."


As for the 0%...there are atheist pro-lifers, and liberal pro-lifers, and female pro-lifers, and none of them is negligible in number, so why don't you stand your ground and defend your position, and log off or stay home for a while when you get tired of being reminded that people exist who disagree with you?