Interesting Data Point

Next year is an election year for LA County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, and he's been increasing his public profile. He says of himself,

he is the first Spanish-speaking sheriff in the county. In 2018, retired sheriff’s lieutenant Villanueva defeated incumbent Sheriff Jim McDonell, becoming the first to unseat the incumbent in over 100 years. Sheriff Villanueva also became the first Democratic Sheriff in LA County in almost 140 years.

But he isn't that kind of Democrat. As sheriff, he's elected to countywide office independently of the county supervisors, and he's frequently been at odds with them, as well as the LA City mayor and council.

When L.A. County Sheriff Alex Villanueva arrived in Venice earlier this month in a cowboy hat promising to clear its famous boardwalk of homeless people, he seemed to surprise just about everybody. After all, Venice is the LAPD’s jurisdiction.

Chief Michel Moore was among those caught off guard.

“I did not invite the sheriff into Venice Beach,” Moore told our newsroom. So he called his counterpart the day after his visit. “I asked him, ‘How can we work together? I want to talk to you as chief-to-sheriff.’”

Moore did not condemn Villanueva. After all, the sheriff has the authority to enforce laws anywhere in the county.

And in Venice, he is able to do what Moore cannot. As COVID-19 hit last year, the city council imposed a moratorium on the removal of tents housing homeless people during daytime hours. The idea was to limit the spread of the virus. That’s meant the LAPD has had a hands-off approach to encampments across the city.

. . . The sheriff says politicians have “handcuffed” the LAPD and that he had no choice but to deploy to Venice. “We’re taking action,” he said on his June 9 weekly Facebook live chat.

. . . Villanueva has taken a different approach from [the usual homeless services] groups by issuing an ultimatum: accept services, leave, or be arrested by July 4. He’s targeted people from out of state, whom he claims make up a “large” part of the population.

Indeed, Venice Beach was swept clean of the homeless, and there's now a recall move against the city councilman who opposed Villanueva's effort.

Now the sheriff has taken on the county's vaccine mandate for its employees:

The Los Angeles County Sheriff has put out a letter stating that his department will not be working with the company hired by Los Angeles County to enact a mandatory regime of COVID-19 testing and registration. That came after disturbing information arose on the background, policies, and connections of the firm hired to facilitate the program.

. . . Los Angeles County had previously mandated registration with Fulgent Genetics, citing it as part of a “vaccine passport” system applying to all public employees. As the second letter above indicates, threats of termination have followed that mandate. Yet, their own website warns that they “may store, process, and transmit personal information in locations around the world, including locations outside the country or jurisdiction where you are located.” Further, it encourages people to not register with Fulgent Genetics if they wish to avoid that happening.

All of this is a flagrant violation of federal law, the HIPAA Privacy Rule, which makes medical records confidential, especially as they relate to disclosure to an employer. Villanueva's point, though, is that firing sheriff's deputies is counterproductive no matter what, and local authorities across the country are taking this position over public safety and health care workers.

Villanueva seems to have sharp political instincts, and it appears that he's so far been successful in reflecting the actual concerns of an increasingly Republican Latin base, even thnough he's a nominal Democrat.

Why Is Dr Fauci Unhappy?

Dr Fauci had an extended interview yesterday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” where he displayed irritattion at his critics in a pattern that emerged last week when he said of Tucker Carlson and others, "I'm trying to save lives and the people who weaponize lies are killing people." Yesterday, he expanded on this:

BRENNAN: Senator Cruz told the attorney general you should be prosecuted.

FAUCI: Yeah. I have to laugh at that. I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, senator?

BRENNAN: Do you think that this is about making you a scapegoat to deflect–

DR. FAUCI: Of course-

BRENNAN: –From President Trump?

FAUCI: Of course, you have to be asleep not to figure that one out.

BRENNAN: Well, there are a lot of Republican senators taking aim at this. I mean–

FAUCI: That’s OK, I’m just going to do my job and I’m going to be saving lives and they’re going to be lying.

BRENNAN: It just, it seems, another layer of danger to play politics around matters of life and death.

FAUCI: Right, exactly. Exactly. And to me, that’s- that’s unbelievably bad because all I want to do is save people’s lives. Anybody who’s looking at this carefully realizes that there’s a distinct anti-science flavor to this. So if they get up and criticize science, nobody’s going to know what they’re talking about. But if they get up and really aim their bullets at Tony Fauci, well, people could recognize there’s a person there. There’s a face, there’s a voice you can recognize, you see him on television. So it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent science.

This is all about. . . President Trump? The elephant in the room now is that over roughly a year since Biden has been in office, with vaccines available over that entire period, there will have been about the same number of COVID deaths by January 20 as occurred under Trump. And the visible face of the COVID crisis since it began, under both presidents, has been Tony Fauci. who's been doing his job and just trying to save lives, except that his record shows he hasn't been especially good at precisely that.

But his version is that he's a scapegoat to deflect from Trump's failures, except that Biden's have been precisely the same. But criticizing Tony Fauci in any of this is criticizing science.

The problem is that hypothetical 2024 matchup polls show Trump beating Biden handily. Fauci sees sentiment against him as a surrogate for pro-Trump sentiment. He's got that right. I've seen surmise from a few poll watchers that the Delta COVID variant fed dissatisfaction with Biden's handling of the crisis.

But this means that hyping the new Omicron variant now will simply compound the problem. And scolding the plebs for not wearing masks or being unvaxxed, or worse, imposing new lockdowns, will only increase resentment and won't fix the problem.

At some point, even Biden will have to recognize that one good way to stop his slide will be to fire Fauci. He's long overstayed his 15 minutes. Even if nothing improves, it will buy Biden some time.

Remember The Scary Red Circles?

The map with the scary flashing red circles was all the rage in early 2020, and it was on the news shows along with predictions of mass graves in public parks. It was based on the Imperial College model, which was almost immediately discredited, and even the media got tired of it around the time the hospital ships in New York and LA harbors were sent back to port.

All of a sudden, it looks like the lizard people want to bring back the old panic. And a panic, or an attempted stampede, is what the Omicron variant appears to be.

What a small world we live in. The “Nu variant” scare you keep hearing about is coming from the same people and institutions that spawned the last COVID scare, and the one before that, and the one before that one, dating back all the way to the onset of COVID Mania.

. . . Just as with previous ruling class-fomented bouts of Hysteria-19, there is no statistical cause for alarm over this new strain, which is one of over 100,000 mutations of the coronavirus.

The “new strain” has hardly produced any lab confirmed cases, but a panicked narrative has already been seeded in the public. The U.K. in particular has driven the fear to new levels. The country has already added several African nations to its travel ban list, citing the new strain.

The same applies to the US:

United States' top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said on Sunday that Americans should be prepared to do "anything and everything" to fight the spread of the new COVID-19 variant Omicron.

It is "too early to say" whether we need new lockdowns or mandates, Fauci told ABC News.

"You want to be prepared to do anything and everything," he said.

But the lizard people who are whispering in President Biden's ear have overlooked a change in the political alignment -- or maybe more accurately, they're misreading it. Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins sees this, if not very clearly,

Mr. Biden, with the benefit of vaccines, has presided over more deaths now than Donald Trump, whom Candidate Biden practically labeled a murderer. He will be lucky not to see midterm ads reminding him of this. Unraveling here is a White House strategy that counted on Covid going away before the next election so it could claim its handwaving delivered us.

Two things are happening. The moral panic of 2020 was fed by the social uncertainties that put Donald Trump in the White House -- or maybe more precisely, the fear among those who profited from the post-1960s social settlement that this stability could be reversed. But the realignments are still taking place irrespective of Trump; for instance, the recognition among Latins that class identity is more important than racial identity; that the Latin working and middle classes have the same interests as the Anglo working and middle classes, and they're voting Republican like the Anglos.

Worse, Trump was never dead, and he's starting a comeback. But even there, he was only a talented amateur who took advantage of trends that had begun without him, and they'll continue no matter his individual political fate. Thus the current effort to reboot 2020 is going to be feckless.

The new Omicron attempted panic comes amid important US political developments: the January 6 commission, that was supposed to drive a final stake through Trump's heart when two impeachments couldn't, has tapered off into a joke that will end Liz Cheney's career. The jury system, with events like the Rittenhouse verdict, is refusing to knuckle under to the received narrative -- and the courts, in continuing to resist unconstitutionial COVID restrictions, are continuing to do the same.

The basic conundrum right now is that the prevailing strategies haven't worked. The graphs I showed yesterday indicate pretty clearly that no lockdowns, no mask mandates, and no vaccine mandates. work just as effectively as having them. Wearing two masks, as Dr Fauci briefly advocated, worked just as well as wearing no mask. People are catching on. Three shots will work about as well as four. Two will work about as well as three. None, it's starting to seem, works about the same as any. That which cannot continue must stop.

Color Me Skeptical

Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, we all got an emergency alert on our cell phones: "City of LA: COVID cases are spiking. Get vaccinated/tested now." My immediate thought was to ask if I'd missed something -- as far as I knew, cases in the county had been slowly declining for months. I went to my computer and pulled up the graph above. Yup, same old same old. Somebody at emergency management decided maybe they could panic half a dozen people into getting the shot that way, huh?

This is a completely irresponsible way of abusing the emergency alert system, which should be used only to notify people of wildfires, flash floods, and the like. If you cry wolf once too often, people don't take you seriouly.

So over the holiday and yesterday, the big headline at all the aggregators was WORST EVER MUTATION! VACCINE RESISTANT! STOCK MAKET DRIOPS 1000 POINTS! This is panic porn pure and simple, and I guess the world was ready for it if LA City was broadcasting stale alerts about spiking COVID the night before.

I've kept checking the COVID stats. Nobody's asking some obvious questions. Below is Florida's graph:

It could hardly be more different from LA County. Its spring-summer 2020 surge was more severe than LA, but LA had an enormouss peak in late 2020, much sharper and taller than Florida. But LA had a much smaller summer 2021 Delta surge, which has now largely faded. Florida's Delta surge was the highest yet, but it'd also largely faded.

In contrast, look at Michigan:

It had no spring-summer surge in 2020, but it had a surge late that year -- but then it had a big surge in spring 2021 that neither LA nor Florida saw, while it had no Delta peak last summer, but it now has its biggest peak yet. Why is there such wide regional disparity? Shouldn't someone be looking at this? Might there be answers here? At minimum, it's hard to avoid thinking that Florida shows doing nothing is about as effective as vaccine passports, mask mandates, social distancing, and lockdowns.

I've had my two jabs and a booster. I'm not anti-vax. I just don't think any of this is working, and I think the new variant is overhyped, just like everything else.

Looking At David French

The other day, I ran into a piece by David French on Jonah Goldberg's Dispatch newsletter, "The Moral Collapse of America's Largest Christian University". Up to now, I haven't given David French much thought. All I knew about him was that, as a writer for National Review, he briefly mulled running against Donald Trump for the Republican nomination in 2016, making him a never-Trumper. Poking around the web, I saw that he's now, like David Brooks, a contribuing writer for The Atlantic, as well as Senior Editor for Goldberg's Dispatch and a columnist for Time.

Yet Wikipedia says of him,

David Austin French (born January 24, 1969) is an American political commentator, theologically conservative traditional Christian, and former attorney who has argued high profile religious liberty cases.

The "theologically conservative traditional Christian" part puzzles me. Here's what he has to say about "Christians" in the Dispatch story at the link:

A few days ago I was eating dinner with a small group of students at a Christian university, and the subject of post-liberalism came up. A person directly asked me why I seemed to object to formally seeking Christian governance in the United States. I answered his question with a question, “Why do you think it would be better than what we have?”

I was thinking both historically and presently. Historically, one could arguably locate the apex of Protestant power in the United States as somewhere around the time of Prohibition. After all, Christians were powerful enough to pass a constitutional amendment banning alcohol, all as part of an effort to improve public morals and public health.

Yet what was the state of American righteousness at that time of apex Christian power? Lynch mobs roamed the South. The entire region was an oppressive nation-within-a-nation, largely cut off from the rule of law. Anti-Catholic Blaine Amendments proliferated across the United States. Not even religious liberty was safe when Christians ruled.

And what about the present? Its largest institutions reel from scandal. A great mass of its members have succumbed to conspiracy theories. Its “religious” anti-vaxxism is claiming lives by the thousands.

So he's essentially conflating Christianity with Protestantism and then saying "Christians" are Prohibitionists, segregationists, anti-vaxxers, and conspiracy theorists. Though he doesn't mention it here, they're probably Trumpists, too. (He also doesn't mention that Prohibition was an anti-Catholic measure aimed principally at Irish and Italian immigrants.)

But wait. I'm not aware of any movement that is "formally seeking Christian governance in the United States". This would require a repeal of the First Amendment, something I just don't see on the horizon. This sounds an awful lot like a straw-man argument to me. It sounds like some people thought he "seemed to object to" something that as far as I can tell just doesn't exist. Well, I strongly object to space aliens invading the planet to steal our oxygen. Maybe he and I can join forces.

What was that about conspiracy theories?

In reality, especially in a world where Donald Trump has expanded the possible range of activism, at least some Christians, especially Catholics, have adopoted a stance of advocacy, and indeed political alliances, on a case-by-case basis. Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, Texas recently said,

The Catholic Church should feel free to criticize the government when necessary and “shouldn’t be captive to one party or another[.]”

, , , “The Church has to have an independent voice to say we agree when we can agree, and when we can’t agree we’re going to say something,” Bishop Flores told Crux, an online Catholic news outlet.

“And that’s the way it works. I mean, the church is free to speak, and we shouldn’t be captive to one party or another,” he added.

Flores is the new head of the doctrine committee of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which is charged with assisting the bishops “in areas of faith and morals, providing expertise and guidance concerning the theological issues that confront the Church in the United States.”

This is consistent with recent statements I've noted here from Abp José Gómez, USCCB President, whose view is that there's currently a great deal about which to speak out. Does David French think this is "Christian governance"? I think it's more like the right of petition for redress of grievances, also in the First Amendment.

French isn't much of a legal mind if this is any indication. He certainly isn't much of a writer. I guess that's why he's at Time and The Atlantic.

Let Them Buy Electric Cars!

President Biden channeled Marie Antoinette yesterday:

"For the hundreds of thousands of folks who bought one of those electric cars, they’re going to save $800 to $1000 in fuel costs this year,” Biden said, referring to the $112,595 electric Hummer pickup he test drove at a General Motors factory in Detroit earlier this month.

The least expensive new electric car is the 2022 Nissan Leaf, with a starting price of $28,375. You can get a used Leaf cheaper, but they're still more expensive than comparable gas-driven cars. But not many people currently suffering from high gas prices will come out better, since trading in a gas-driven car will bring a new, higher car payment no matter what.

Another issue is vehicle range. Available models start at about 100 miles, which for many commutes is a single round trip. Recharging can take from 30 minutes to 12 hours, so you can't just swing by the corner gas station to fill up. Longer trips other than commutes are problematic. Conversion just isn't a practical option for most people given current costs and technology..

Beyond that, there are other questions like the need to upgrade the electrical grid if significantly more people are charging those electric cars. If that isn't done, the grid becomes less reliable, so that there are tradeoffs in social costs as well as family budgets. These issues can't be dismissed with a wave of the hand.

But there's a bigger question here -- what is the formal cause of President Biden's remarks? In Aristotelian terms, what's the plan behind them? Joel Kotkin has the most insightful take I've seen so far, which matches my own view that Marx had nothing to say about climate change or gender dysphoria, and he didn't think the Lumpenproletariat was a reliable working class ally:

[U]nlike the social democracy movements that followed World War Two, the New Socialism focusses not on material aspirations but on climate change, gender, and race. While the old socialism sought to represent the ordinary labourer, many on the Left today seem to have little more than contempt for old working-class base and its often less than genteel views on issues such as Critical Race Theory.

Yet perhaps the most critical difference between traditional socialism and its new form relates to growth. The New Socialism’s emphasis on climate change necessarily removes economic growth as a priority. Quite the opposite, in fact: the Green agenda looks instead towards a shrinking economy and lowered living standards, seeking to elevate favoured groups within a stagnant economy rather than generating opportunities for the general population.

. . . But there can be little doubt that the biggest change is taking place on the Left. Historically, the British and Australian Labour Parties, the French Socialist Party, America’s Democrats and Canada’s Liberals evolved from a strong working-class base. But in recent years, for both economic and cultural reasons, these parties have become dominated by professionals, academics and government workers increasingly bent on introducing paternalistic, puritan policies.

I don't think he pays enough attention to the actual political dynamic. Most "professionals, academics and government workers" are still middle class -- they're computer programmers, community college instructors (increasingly untenured), administrators, and paper pushers. They have to fill the gas tanks on their older cars like everyone else. They're faring no better than UPS drivers or construction workers, unionized or not.

There's a separate class of elites, the Dr Faucis, Speaker Pelosis, or Al Gores who fly to climate conferences on private jets and go blithely unmasked at lavish parties. (Why didn't Prince Charles ride to Glasgow on the all electric royal train, by the way? Why doesn't Biden tell the secret service to get him an electric presidential limo?)

The current de facto policy objective is actually to punish the working and middle classes by reducing their liviing standards, subjecting them to ever increasing levels of crime, and implementing pansexualist policies that, via discouraging marriage, allowing men into women's toilet facilities, and allowing men to compete in women's sports, reduce the status of women.

Kotkin concludes his piece by hoping the left can rediscover its working-class roots, but the utopia envisioned by the current elites has nothing to do with traditional leftism. The policy the elites seem to be aiming at is a new aristocracy that consumes the resources of subordinated, demoralized middle and working classes.

President Biden is fully on board with this -- this isn't a cognitive issue. His refusal to answer questions even from a generally sympathetic press is an inevitable passive-aggressive strategy forced on him by his insistence on continuing unpopular and unworkable polcies.

We Agree This Is Happening -- The Question Is Why

As an Aristotelian, I look for causes. We don't have a whole lot of insight for now into the "final" cause of Darrell Brooks Jr's crashing a very snazzy red Ford Escape into a Waukesha, WI Christmas parade on November 21. It sounds as though he may have been fleeing another crime scene, or a fight, and it's hard not to speculate that drugs may also have been involved. But that's less important for now than the "efficient" cause, for which we have some informed insight. Brooks is

the entirely predictable product of a political- and social-media driven effort to address crime by pretending that it doesn’t exist.

To present criminals — particularly black criminals — as victims. To pay no meaningful attention to actual victims — who overwhelmingly are black themselves.

. . . Brooks, however, is a depressingly familiar type.

He had been released on nominal bail Friday after being charged Nov. 5 with domestic abuse, resisting an officer, second-degree recklessly endangering safety, disorderly conduct and felony bail-jumping.

More specifically,

Just two days before the horror on Sunday, he was released from jail on $1,000 bail following an arrest for allegedly deliberately running over the mother of his child at a gas station.

As I said yesterday, this is the effect of a national campaign sponsored most visibly by George Soros to raise the felony threshold for crimes like retail theft, elect district attorneys who decline to prosecute career criminal offenses, and abolish cash bail. A recent book by John McWhorter, Woke Racism, nibbles around the edges of the problem:

"The people who are calling themselves black people saviors don't understand this, but they're hurting black people because what they're caught up in is more about virtue signaling to one another than helping people who actually need help."

At the link,

Reason's Nick Gillespie spoke with the 56-year-old McWhorter about what white people get out of cooperating with an ideological agenda that casts them as devils, what black people gain by "performing" victimhood, and what needs to change so that all Americans can get on with creating a more perfect union.

But judging from reviews, I get the impression that McWhorter, a linguistics professor, sees the issue mainly in rhetorical and linguistic terms. Rhetorical virtue signaling may be satsifying, but it isn't a perceived good that can "efficiently" cause deadly social policy, which is what we see in the Waukesha case. The virtue signaling rhetoric of wokeness is only a byproduct of the policy's "formal" cause. Elsewhere, McWhorter gets closer to the issue:

I have no doubt that Martin Luther King would have understood what I'm saying in terms of helping people who actually need help. It's not an accident that at the end of his life, he was beginning to focus more on poverty in general than on the race question.

The idea is to help people who need help. The modern idea that microaggressions and how white people feel in their heart of hearts is what we should be thinking about to me is a detour.

But what, specifically, are we detouring away from here? If virtue signaling isn't the point, what is? It looks to me as if the subtext of some of McWhorter's remarks is that the civil rights movement had effective goals and achieved partial success up to about the time of Martin Luther King's death, after which elites seized on side issues that emerged from the 1960s ghetto riots to redefine the movement's goals, placing blame on law enforcement as a means of imposing a tacit policy of resegregation and continuing to keep poor African-Americans in isolated communities sustained by destructive subsidies and misdirected social services.

This would be the "formal" cause of the Waukesha tragedy and a great deal else. McWhorter is right in saying wokeness is a distraction, but the question is the actual "formal" cause of the curent dilemma. So far, I haven't seen much insighful discussion of that.

The Lumpenproletariat And Class Consciousness

I was doing some research into the Weimar Republic (Germany 1919-1933) and ran into this passage at Britannica:

Because of the hopes aroused in 1918–19, the fact that no far-reaching plan for securing public control over industry or for breaking up the big landed estates was carried through had two consequences. First, although the German working class undoubtedly improved its political and economic status under the republic, a considerable portion of it was embittered by the failure to effect drastic reform of the social and economic systems. This disenchantment was to provide the left-wing opposition with strong working-class support, which weakened both the Social Democratic Party and the republic.

This brought to mind Whittaker Chambers's observation that as of the 1920s, German was in fact the language of international socialism, and Germany was the locus of the movement. My takeaway from the link above is that the German working class at the time had clearly articulated interests that it systematically pursued, if utterly without success.

I was looking up Weimar because I've been seeing references to a contemporary "Weimar America", but a few minutes' thought brings me to the conclusion that any parallels are superficial at best. Consider that the class interests that have been advanced most visibly since 2020 are those of the Lumpenproletariat, the urban underclass, not the working class, whose interests have been more clearly bourgeois and Republican at least since Nixon's 1972 landslide defeat of George McGovern.

But now let's look at the puzzling case of the SUV that crashed into a Waukesha, WI Christmas parade yesterday evening. The circumstances so far aren't completely clear, but the SUV driver appears to have been identified:

Darrell Brooks Jr. is the man who was taken into custody in connection with the Waukesha Christmas parade tragedy on November 21, 2021, according to police. When Brooks was detained, police found a Ford key on him, according to scanner audio obtained by Heavy.

His social media accounts and online court records show that he is an aspiring rap singer with a lengthy criminal history and two open felony cases for which he was released on $500 and $1,000 bail, the latter just days before the parade deaths.

At 39, he's had a lifetime career as a petty criminal, which places him clearly in the Marxist Lumpenproletariat. But Waukesha and Kenosha, although both in Wisconsin, aren't all that close at about 55 miles distant. It's hard to conclude that the attack, if that's what it was, had any connection with the Rittenhouse trial, in which the defendant was acquitted in charges relating to the deaths and injury of three white Lumpenproletariat:

The motive is not clear. David Begnaud of CBS News tweeted that, according to a law enforcement official, the parade suspect was “fleeing another scene – possibly a knife fight” before injuring 40 people in the parade. “Several LE sources say preliminary: Wisconsin incident appears to be vehicle fleeing a separate crime scene (stabbing) when it plowed into parade. One person in custody. Investigation ongoing but so far no initial link to terror or the recent Rittenhouse verdict w/@tom_winter,” NBC reporter Jonathan Dienst wrote on Twitter.

This strikes me as, if anything, confirmation of the Marxist theory that the Lumpenproletariat, unlike the working class, lacks class consciousness and is not a reliable ally -- Brooks, as far as we can tell so far, was fleeing his personal demons and not acting for or against anyone else's interest. That he should plow through a Christmas parade in Waukesha was unplanned, undirected, and has no similarity to, say, the 2016 Islamist truck attack on a Berlin Christmas market.

This raises the open question of why US elites have allied themsleves with the Lumpenproletariat, who are unreliable, disorganized, and not capable of returning favors even if they wanted to. It's been wealthy elites, from George Soros to Laurene Powell Jobs, who have sponsored ballot measures to raise the felony threshold for crimes like shoplifting, supported the election of district attorneys who decline to prosecute career criminal offenses, and abolish cash bail. The criminals themselves can't organize and pursue that agenda themselves.

In fact, the most organization the criminals themselves can undertake is planning mass smash-and-grab attacks, three of which occurred in the San Francisco area over the weekend. This helps only the criminals on a short term basis, but it hurts the working and middle classes when the stores they patronize close in response, and indeed it hurts the shareholders and managers of those stores as well. The only benefit is to the wealthiest, who are insulated from the effects of their policies and feel virtuous in enabling the Lumpenproletariat.

This is an odd alliance. I'm not sure if it has any historical parallel.

Allen Guelzo, Reconstruction, And The Rittenhouse Case

Last week I ran into a 2018 paper by the Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo, Reconstruction as a Pure Bourgeois Revolution, in which I found a stimulating perspective on the current political situation, which I think represents a counterrevolution by the elites allied with the Lumpenproletariat, white climate activists, and pansexualists, against "Trumpism" a populist alliance of the working and middle classes that is in fact multiracial. (These are precisely the people David Brooks sneers at, though he also finds them "terrifying".)

Guelzo's paper has also appeared on YouTube as "Reconstruction: The Last Bourgeois Revolution":

After last year's election, my attention was drawn to the US presidential election of 1876, that was disputed and resolved by an electoral commission that produced the Compromise of 1877, which awarded the election to the Republican Rutherford Hayes while effectively ending Reconstruction by withdrawing Union troops from the southern states. Guelzo has little to say about the compromise itself, but he deals with Reconstruction as a historiographical phenomenon. In doing so, he circles around to the central issue, that whatever the good or bad of Reconstruction itself, it was ended by an alliance of northern capital, northern philanthropy, and southern segregationists.

This is a view clearly reflected in Frank Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man, and it's a major part of the protagonist's dilemma. Jim Crow was an institution supported by the national Democrats and the do-gooder elites., but a revisionist historical narrative has also emerged that even as all right-thinking people disavowed it in the 1960s, actual social policy after that continues to enforce segregation and suppression of African-Americans via urban ghettos and the eugenic measure of widespread abortion.

Guelzo hiself favors a related historical "revisionist" interpretation of Reconstruction:

The great Republican goal of abolishing slavery was not seen by Republicans, as we are tempted to see it, as a crusade to right a racial injustice; abolishing slavery was not, to them, much of a racial question at all but rather an economic one. . . . The Union “represents the principles of free labor,” declared William Cullen Bryant, and only when “the victory of the Northern society of free labor over the landed monopoly of the Southern aristocracy” was complete would the war be over. . . In the most basic sense, free labor was simply shorthand for liberal economic democracy. It was the Enlightenment’s school of economics, and like the Enlightenment, it predicted that “democratic, bourgeois freedom and the supremacy of economics would one day lead to the salvation of all mankind.” (pp 56-57)

Guelzo in fact doesn't go much farther than to support what he calls this "revisionist" historiographic view of reconstruction, but it raises a number of productive questions. It's generally accepted that northern capital and philanthropy allied with southern segregationists to halt Reconstruction and establish Jim Crow. It's hard to tell at this remove how or why this was done, but it clearly had the approval of the industrial elites of the time.

Guelzo cites the hard Marxist theory that fully freeing the slaves was undesirable in that the northern capitalists wanted to avoid a full proletarian revolution, and there may be some merit to that view. But you don't have to be Marxist to think it was in northern capital's continued interest to have a supply of cheap labor, although slavery actually proved less efficient economically than at-will employment. George Washington's own plantation ran at a loss.

But if we follow the broader revisionist theory of the post-Martin Luther King civil rights movement as effectively a Democrat-led extension of the 1877 compromise, an urban re-segregation and re-formation of African-Americans as a new underclass, we get results that can provide insight into the Rittenhouse case and its outcome.

The first has been, especially since the 2020 BLM riots, a near-universal tendency to equate African-Americsn's with the Lumpenproletariat, the Marxist unreliable underclass of career petty criminals, addicts, prostitutes, and street people. George Floyd was one of these, but because he was African-American, his class identity was minimized in favor of his racial identity, but his treatment was actually an outcome of his class, not his race.

We can then move to the strange incongruities of the Rittenhouse case: Kyle Rittenohuse himself, a bourgeois aspiring college student of mixed race, naively got himself into a situation during a BLM riot where he was attacked by at least four white men (Jump Kick Man included) with criminal records, effectively members of the Lumpenproletariat, who were allied with and agitating in protest at the killing of another violent petty criminal by police, this one African-American.

So far, the Rittenohuse outcome has brought a collective sigh of relief from bourgeois supporters of law, reason, and social order, and so far, there's been no large renewal of BLM style riots from the Lumpenrpoletariat and their elite allies in the media and politics. But this case is a clear indication of the actual fault lines that have existed since Reconstuction, and to which we still await a remedy.

David Brooks On Religion

I ran into a couple of almost comical passages in the current Atlantic piece by David Brooks that I linked yesterday. He disparages

the intellectual Catholics and the Orthodox Jews who have been studying Hobbes and de Tocqueville at the various young conservative fellowship programs that stretch along Acela-land.

(It should be just "Toqueville, not "de Toqueville", by the way, unless you have "Alexis" in front of it. There. That's off my chest.) Later, he says,

Evangelical Christianity has lost many millions of believers across recent decades. Secularism is surging, and white Christianity is shrinking into a rump presence in American life. America is becoming more religiously diverse every day. Christians are in no position to impose their values—regarding same-sex marriage or anything else—on the public square. Self-aware Christians know this.

The first observation to be made here is that Brooks is at best fuzzy on Christian taxonomy and isn't up on current events. According to Christianity Today,

Evangelicals in the United States are holding steady at just under a quarter of the population, according to the latest biennial figures from the General Social Survey (GSS), one of the longest-running measures of religion in America.

According to Wikipedia, "Anywhere from 6 percent to 35 percent of the United States population is evangelical, depending on how 'evangelical' is defined." Definition is a problem, because evangelicals for instance may identify as "born again" without bothering to attend church. Nevertheless, nearly every discussion of the movement says it's either holding steady or growing. On the other hand, the consensus is that mainline Protestants are the group that's declining. According to this site,

In the 1970s, the GSS indicates that over 30% of all Americans could be classified into a mainline denomination. But that quickly changed. By the late 1980s, the share of the mainline dropped below 20%. . . . [T]here’s general agreement in these surveys - mainline Protestants have declined over time and are probably between 10-13% of the population today.

So what's puzzling is that Brooks, who is supposedly a respected commentator on contemporary culture, is oblivious to a major long-term US religious trend (which is also reflected in the decline of Reform and Conservative Judaism), the sharp decline of mainline Protestant denominations. His use of the term "Evangelical" in the passage above is simply incorrect. It also says a lot about The Atlantic that his editor didn't catch this.

So, who are the "self-aware Christians" who know they're in no position to impose their values on the public square? I assume they're the right-thinking Episcopalians, Methodists, and Lutherans whose numbers are approaching insignificance. We might assume they're in no position to impose their thinking becuase there are so few of them that they can't, and Brooks is cool with this, and presumably they are, too.

In the first passage above, he takes an indirect swipe at Catholics via the young conservative ones in fellowship programs, whatever that means. But the US Bishops themselves have become more conservative in recent decades. Abp Gómez, the President of the USCCB, recently made this point in an address to the Congress of Catholics and Public Life in Madrid:

“With the breakdown of the Judeo-Christian worldview and the rise of secularism, political belief systems based on social justice or personal identity have come to fill the space that Christian belief and practice once occupied,” Gomez said.

. . . “We recognize that often what is being canceled and corrected are perspectives rooted in Christian beliefs — about human life and the human person, about marriage, the family, and more,” he said in the address.

In other words, Abp Gómez is determined that Catholics reassert their place in the public square over precisely the issues Brooks thinks Christians are in no position to argue. It's intriguing that Brooks is irritated specifically with Catholics and Orthodox Jews, when these are the groups that pursued successful legal action that lifted government restrictions on religious service attendance as a result of last year's lockdowns.

The odd thing is that Brooks regularly disparages working and middle class people in a straw-man argument that says they want to return to the 1950s, when he himself so publicly underwent a mid-life crisis of wife dumping and pseudo-religious third wave awakening so reminiscent of the me-decade 1970s.

Revisiting David Brooks

My wife and I were late adopters of cable, and in fact we must have been among the last people ever to have a rabbit ear antenna on top of a tube TV. This meant we mostly watched PBS, The News Hour, and thus inevitably David Brooks. When we finally got cable ten years ago, we quit watching any news, and we forgot about David Brooks. The last I heard of him, he was admiring the crease of Obama's trousers, and Obama was courting him and George Will as influential conservatives whom he could coax over to his side.

Somewhere yesterday I saw a link to an essay by him in the Atlantic, "The Terrifying Future of the American Right". I went to look at it and discovered he's a contributing writer who publishes there regularly. I guess this says something about The Atlantic, the New York Times, and PBS. I guess it also says something that I'd been ignoring him all this time and don't feel like I've missed a thing.

I did read his Bobos in Paradise when it came out, and my memory of it is a troubling cognitive dissonance -- how could someone who, about the year 2000, was so respected, write such a silly book? For those who haven't read it, its premise is that after World War II, elite universities dropped their Jewish quotas, began using the SATs. adopted selective admissions, and became true meritocracies, which they continue to be today. As evidence of this, we need look no farther than Brooks himself, from a Jewish family, who made it into the University of Chicago on merit.

This is a self-congratullatory premise that also flatters its audience, the Ivy-educated book buying public. Brooks makes it plain that by bobos -- bourgeois bohemians -- he means principally suburban Jews. But this contradicts Alan Dershowitz, a much more prominent figure, who maintained in Chutzpah that Jewish quotas still exist, along with more recent quotas for Asians, that serve to limit the rise of talented and hard-working groups in favor of -- wait for it -- existing elites.

Indeed, admission of "Episcopalian Jews" into upper-crust society was a phenomenon that took place decades before the postwar period, and families like the Guggenheims worked in close colaboration with the Morgans. They were elites and had full admission to elite schools on that basis. Quotas always apply to a different group.

Last August, Brooks revisited Bobos in Paradise in The Atlantic, "How the Bobos Broke America".

“The educated class is in no danger of becoming a self-contained caste,” I wrote in 2000. “Anybody with the right degree, job, and cultural competencies can join.” That turned out to be one of the most naive sentences I have ever written.

. . . [W]e’ve come to hoard spots in the competitive meritocracy that produced us. , , , the test-score gap between high- and low-income students has grown by 40 to 50 percent. The children of well-off, well-educated meritocrats are thus perfectly situated to predominate at the elite colleges that produced their parents’ social standing in the first place. Roughly 72 percent of students at these colleges come from the richest quarter of families, whereas only 3 percent come from the poorest quarter. A 2017 study found that 38 schools—including Princeton, Yale, Penn, Dartmouth, Colgate, and Middlebury—draw more students from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 60 percent.

In other words, nothing changed, the bobos as some sort of new creative class that rose on its merits is a chimera. But Brooks clings to his theory and sees the Trump phenomenon as primarily a reflexive working-class rebellion against the bobo meritocacy:

The working class today vehemently rejects not just the creative class but the epistemic regime that it controls. In revolt, populist Trump voters sometimes create their own reality, inventing absurd conspiracy theories and alternative facts about pedophile rings among the elites who they believe disdain them.

At the start of his essay, he cites boat parades of Trump supporters as a key indicator:

During the summer and fall of 2020, a series of boat parades—Trumptillas—cruised American waters in support of Donald Trump. The participants gathered rowdily in great clusters. They festooned their boats with flags—American flags, but also message flags: don’t tread on me, no more bullshit, images of Trump as Rambo.

. . . How could people with high-end powerboats possibly think of themselves as the downtrodden?

He clearly views such people with contempt. And his essay just published in the current Atlantic expands on this:

Over the past few decades there have been various efforts to replace the Reagan Paradigm: the national-greatness conservatism of John McCain; the compassionate conservatism of George W. Bush; the Reformicon conservatism of the D.C. think tanks in the 21st century. But the Trumpian onslaught succeeded where these movements have so far fizzled because Trump understood better than they did the coalescence of the new American cultural/corporate elite and the potency of populist anger against it.

This is what Brooks finds "terrifying": the fact that Trump hasn't gone away. The specter Brooks sees is what commentators are slowly recognizing: the Biden counter-revolution against Trump has been a disaster, and Trump is still hovering in the wings. Brooks is effectively acknowledging that the new elite is the old elite, and now they're frightened.

"The Speaker Is Burning Down The House On Her Way Out The Door"

These remarks by Leader McCarthy on the occasion of the House censuring Rep Gosar for posting an anime indicate that at least some people are beginning to catch on to what's happening. The Speaker's world is effectively coming to an end. This ties in with another guiding principle I've been relying on in recent weeks, Stein's Law, That Which Cannot Continue Must Stop.

If we begin with the question of Speaker Pelosi's future, we've inevitably got to come to the question of President Biden's plans. My view continues to be that he isn't suffering from dementia, and thus he must have some understanding of his political predicament. This story gives some suggestion of what that predicament is and what must be effective cooperation with his handlers:

We reported Wednesday on the embarrassing story of how President Joe Biden’s handlers had scrapped a so-called “Three Amigos” press conference that had been scheduled to take place today between him, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador after meetings in Washington, D.C.

That traditional press conference would be scrapped in favor of allowing the reporters to shout questions that the president might or might not answer. Speculation followed a question from a Bloomberg reporter on Tuesday, ". . . you guys had to clean up not only this Olympic comment but his comment on the timing for the Fed and his Taiwan comment, is the worry that you don’t want the President taking questions?"

Unfortunately, the update to this story just makes it all so much worse. CBS News White House reporter Kathryn Watson, who has criticized the White House in the past over accessibility issues involving Biden, noted on her Twitter feed this morning that unlike Biden, Trudeau would be holding a presser later this afternoon[.]

. . . And in a report she filed, Watson noted that Biden bailing on the scheduled presser would mean he would get to avoid some potentially uncomfortable questions about the border crisis and his handling of it[.]

If Biden didn't want to go along with this, he wouldn't. And if he didn't have some clear idea of what the program was, he wouldn't be following his cues -- he'd just be wandering around the room holding disjointed conversations with whomever, visible or not. That's not the big guy, at least not so far. He functions, just not very well. This goes again to my view that he's impaired, not senile.

The question is how much longer this can go on. Has he lost the New York Times?

His crumbling public approval rating must be troubling to President Joe Biden. But can it possibly compare to learning that the liberal mainstream media is turning on him as well?

On Tuesday, the New York Times sent an email to its morning update subscribers with the headline: “Who’s to blame for inflation?”

“It is dragging down President Biden’s approval ratings and fueling discontent among Americans,” writes senior economics correspondent Neil Irwin. “How did we get here? Who is to blame?”

We fully expected the Times to make excuses for Biden. And at first, it looks as though that is what Irwin is going to do, writing that “presidents have less control over the economy than headlines might suggest.” But then he adds that “the current situation is an exception to the rule.”

. . . But the fact that any one of these “news” outlets is willing to blame Biden for the inflation spiral is a truly stunning development, given they’d spent months blasting out “fact checks” that aggressively slapped down any such claim.

I note that over the past few days, the conventional wisdom has been shifting from "Biden plans to run in 2024" to "Despite what he's said, he may not run in 2024". I think it's increasingly likely that he may not even make it to then. The problem is that he isn't senile, so the 25th Amendment probably can't be used to get him out. I would imagine that his closets are full of Agnew-style skeletons, but impeachment has been reduced to a feckless exercise, and he's a very stubborn guy who won't easily be led into a Nixon style resignation, especially if Harris can't be eased out herself.

The difficulty I continue to see is that as the border, inflation, and COVID continue as very serious problems that Biden can't solve, something worse is sure to come along. But if this happens, finding some way to put a different, competent handler behind the scenes or directly forcing both Biden and Harris out a la Nixon-Agnew would require a major change in political alignment following the 2022 midterms, still a year away. We have challenging times ahead.

Yeah, Don't Rule Out The Agnew Scenario

Via Gateway Pundit, which I don't normally trust, I nevertheless found a transcription of a Fox reporter's remarks on Bret Baier's podcast:

Just to kinda let you guys in on a little secret here. I was told, you know, about two to three weeks ago–maybe this pertains to the Supreme Court, maybe this pertains to, you know, changing the ticket before you get into 2024. You know, FDR, seemingly, he burned through a vice president almost every, every time he was up for office. But I got an email from somebody who really knows this place very well who said, “Chad, start to familiarize yourself with the confirmation process just not in the Senate but the House for a vice president.” Of course, we’ve not gone through that since, you know, President Ford picked Nelson Rockefeller. Again, as you know, Bret, I’m always playing defense and preparing for things like that, but I was very surprised to get that very cryptic email just a couple of weeks ago.

Chad Pegram's bio appears here, which suggests he's neither a conspiracy theorist, nor a fabulist, nor a flake. The only correction I would make to his account is that it's not "we’ve not gone through that since"; we simply never went through that before then, since the 25th Amendment was ratified only in 1967. Before that, there was no provision for filling a vacancy in the vice president's office.

While Kennedy's assassination was the clear impetus for adopting the amendment, when it was envisioned that a president could lie in an indefinite coma under some circumstances, Agnew's resignation has been the only non-trivial invocation of its provisions. Most vice presidents since Agnew have had enough substance that nobody's seriously contemplated edging them out before their term expires, and in fact it's hard to think any veep ever has been so without sin (possibly excepting Coolidge) that some hidden flaw couldn't be found in his record to warrant removal should this become convenient.

Indeed, had circumstances been otherwise, nobody would have bothered with Agnew's Baltimore baksheesh, and he would have stayed in office until 1977. Certainly this was Agnew's own belief, and it's hard to fault. Agnew was caught up in Nixon's dilemma, and it was simply convenient to remove him in order to facilitate removing Nixon. I can't imagine that Gerald Ford had no similar blemishes; it just wasn't convenient to go looking for them at the time.

By trhe same token, I don't think such discussion would be taking place about Harris, even on a completley unofficial, without-attribution basis, if the actual problem were not with Biden. And despite vague speculation a year ago that the 25th might be invoked against Biden, I think it's significant that the only non-trivial historical use of it was with Section 2 and the vice presidential succession, the same one being mooted now, if even not quite seriously.

As with Agnew, Vice President Harris is simply a surrogate for President Biden. I've been saying here that Biden's lack of coherence and engagement is simply not the result of a medical condition other than chronic alcoholism, and he's not the first to suffer fom it without being removed. If you ask me, Biden's problem is neither his own polls nor Harris's; the problem right now is Trump's polls. At minimum, the lizard people are figuring the 2024 ticket needs a makeover well before campaign season.

So far, this leaves aside the problem of 2022 and the bigger problem that the issues that are hurting Biden now on one hand aren't likely to go away, and on the other, aren't likely to be the worst he, and we, will need to face before the lizard people can ease him out. I have a sense that the lizard people are still working this through, but the Agnew scenario has clearly at least reached the spitball stage.

What's Happening ToThe Götterdämmerung?

There's a lot of gossip about a rift between the White House and Vice President Harris, to the extent that a trial balloon is being floated about kicking Harris over to the Supreme Court, to replace her under the 25th Amendment. Up to last weekend, of course, the 25th Amendment scenario had been intended for the big guy himself, not Kamala, who in the received scenario would replace him.

To me, this says we're edging closer to the Spiro Agnew solution, the two-shoe drop, where the non-entity veep is replaced under the 25th Amendment by someone with gravitas who can credibly succeed a Nixon once he's forced out. Nixon, recall, simply resigned. Nobody needed either impeachment or the 25th.

The only remotely perceptive commentary I've seen on the developing situation is from Chris Cillizza:

Remember that when Biden ran for president, he purposely cast himself as a sort of bridge candidate for Democrats -- holding the office until some of the party's younger stars, several of whom ran against him, were ready to take on the mantle of leadership.

"Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else," Biden said in March 2020 as he campaigned with Harris, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. "There's an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country."

When Biden picked Harris as his vice president, the message was clear: She was the future of the party.

This was the upbeat, happy talk version of the agenda. After Biden's win in November, an initial progressive laundry list was quickly added to the pre-election happy talk: statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, packing the Supreme Court, ending the filibuster. No matter this would need to be done with a four-vote Democrat margin in the House and a tied Senate, Harris as veep would break the tie. By early 2021, these all quietly disappeared, with only Harris remaining as a sort of aspirational totem. Except that her public crediblity over the course of the subsequent year has self-immolated.

What replaced that extreme Great Reset agenda was what became the BBB, although exactly what the BBB comprised has never been completely clear, and as of now, it's more uncertain than ever. As a practical matter, this was put together by an alliance of the House progressives, Sen Sanders, Speaker Pelosi, and President Biden. At this remove, it's plain that it had the opposition of Senate centrists of both parties, who put together and passed the the bipsrtisan infrastructurre bill, BIF, in the Senate.

I think this was from the start intended as an option to head off the BBB. Sen Sanders and the House progressives recognized this for what it was and intended from the start to hold the BIF hostage to the BBB. The argument in favor of the BBB was always Götterdämmerung, the Democrats would inevitably lose their majority in the 2022 midterms, the only effective strategy would be to run up the credit cards before the world ended.

Sen Manchin tacitly allied with the Republican leadership in both houses, and by November 5 with the passage of the BIF individually in the House, he was able to pry the Götterdämmerung agenda loose from Speaker Pelosi's hands, effectively turning her into a lame duck. There's been a lot of criticism of Leader McConnell and the moderate House Republicans for enabling Manchin's strategy, but I think it's proven an effective rope-a-dope, especially given the lack of other Republican options.

The other factor now in play is the effect of rhe Virginia election and subsequent polling. The idea of a Democrat loss in the 2022 midterms up to now had been mostly a vague talking point and little more than an argument in favor of the BBB and Götterdämmerung. But post-Virginia, Trump doesn't seem to be fading in the polls -- to the contrary, he's so far favored in primaries, he's beating Biden in a head-to-head 2024 matchup, and he's looking like a 2022 kingmaker as well.

Meanwhile, Biden appears to be stuck on Götterdämmerung. He's stubbornly sticking with policies deliberately intended to increase gas prices. The best he can say about inflation is it's actually good for you, suck it up. The border is still out of control. He now seems to be sending up smoke signals that he may not run in 2024, but this would basically mean three years of passive-aggressiveness, Biden stubbornly refusing to change course while saying as little as possible. This isn't how things were supposed to turn out a year ago last March.

Worse, this scenario assumes nothing else bad, or indeed worse, happens over the next three years. Biden is proving he can't handle what's come up so far. I don't want to think about how anything new will turn out. I doubt if I'm the only one who feels this way.

The problem there is that even some Democrats don't believe the world is simply going to end a year from now, and they'd like to have lives to live past that date. They haven't figured out a clear strategy yet, but if they can pull the Agnew move on Harris, they're at least a step ahead. Stay tuned.

More Unintended Consequences From COVID Social Engineering

I posted on Saturday about one unintended consequence of COVID social engineering, which is a labor shortage. It seems to me that conditions imposed by the government forbidding people to earn a living or perform other routine functions must inevitably have unintended consequences that are yet to be fully recognized. For instance, the lockdowns closed schools longer than they closed workplaces. The effects of this are only beginning to be felt.

So I saw in yesterday's Washington Examiner:

The pandemic has taken a significant toll on the desire for high school students to pursue higher education, a new study shows.

Less than 50% of high school students are interested in four-year colleges, a decrease of over 20% from the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, a new survey reported.

. . . Though 86% of students reported feeling pressured to attend university , most expressed concern about the cost. Six out of 10 respondents worried about how they would pay for college, and 65% said student loans are an important factor in their future education.

The subtext of every economics course I took in high school and college was that consumers are intelligent and able to make effective choices. But these choices aren't restricted to the price of bread. If the government says you must eat cake instead, your range of options isn't limited to what you're allowed to see on the supermarket shelf. Over the past two years, education producers modifed their product to provide largely remote learning in response to government action. How have consumers responded?

The effect of the revised higher education product was to keep students at home instead of on campus. This attentuated the product on one hand, removing in-person contact with instructors and fellow students, as well as athletics and other on-campus resources. But for this period, the price remained effectively the same. Even if the question didn't formally arise for all consumers, this must inevitably have focused their minds on the actual value of the product.

In addition, the product wasn't just attentuated, it was trivialized. Households kept paying bills in the mid five figures for one or more kids to sit home and still get college credit for courses that were reduced to webinars, Zoom meetings, and take-home exams. On the othner hand, this was a college experience that, while it lacked the depth of campus life, it actually had the advantage of coming without the parties, DUIs, date rapes, demonstrations, and drugs. Consumers appear to have factored this in as well. If the whole exercise can be replaced with webinars and take home exams, what's the point?

Thus we have the polling results given in the story above. Exactly how this will be reflected in coming years' actual enrollments remains to be seen. Nevertheless, it can't be encouraging to see what appears to be a decline in public perception of college education's value. Recognize that for the parents of the baby boom generation, the introduction of SATs and selective admissions created the impression that college education was a meritocracy and allowed the producers steadily to increase the real price of the product for well over half a century.

I can't avoid thinking this presages a major shift in social preference, which had already been promoted by the popular television figure Mike Rowe, who for some years has been stressing that people can find rewarding careers outside the college-educated bourgeoisie.

This trend comes at the expense of major administrative state clients, university faculties and administrators. But another unintended consequence of the lockdowns has been to hasten public dissatsfaction with K-12 education as well. If parents have been able to sit in on their kids' elementary school classes via the web, they get a clearer picture of what is and isn't being taught. This can only have been an important factor in the recent reassertion of parental control over local school boards, which hurts another client of the administrative state, the teachers' unions.

I'm sure we're only beginning to see the unintended consequences of COVID social engineering.

Occam's Razor And Biden's "Great Negro"

Back in August, I posted on my theory of President Biden's mental condition, based on a speech he gave at the time. A more recent speech, the Veterans' Day ceremony where he made his "great Negro at the time" gaffe, just confirms my thinking. He isn't suffering from dementia, he's just drunk all the time. It seems to me that this fits the available evidence without multiplying the entity of requiring a medical diagnosis.

A clip with the full context of his remarks about Satchel Paige is in the link above. The first thing to note about it is, as I noted last August, the slow and careful delivery to avoid slurring throughout. But when he gets to the "great Negro" part, he still can't follow the teleprompter. At about 0:37, he says, "the great Negro at the time" and immediately corrects himself, "pitcher in the Negro league", but in making that quick correction, he starts to slur. But at that point, he catches himself and returns to his slow and careful delivery. This confirms my view from a source I linked back in August on drunken speech:

The researchers also found a decrease in the subjects’ speaking rate as they become more intoxicated. There seems a specific point at which this slowing of speech occurs: men slow down the most at a blood alchohol level between 0.04 and 0.08; for women, this occurs between 0.08 and 0.12.

Finally, the researchers found that the most striking impact of alchohol on speech was an increase in ‘nonfluencies.’ That is, people stammer, stutter, and trip on their words a whole heck of a lot more when they’ve had a few too many. Just how much does this intensify? The researchers found that in the severely intoxicated, the rate of these ‘speech errors’ nearly triples.

. . . Something that isn’t mentioned in the study is what I find to be the most salient feature of ‘drunken speech:’ hypercorrection. Drunk people, aware of their intoxicated state, often overcompensate by overenunciating evvvveerrry ccconnnsonnantttt and vowel. Perhaps this relates to the higher rate of stuttering and stammering: when you put such pressure on yourself to pronounce everything perfectly, you’re bound to trip up!

This hypercorrection immediately followed by a deliberate resumption of a slower pace is exactly what we saw in the "great Negro" gaffe.

How does this relate to the big guy's overall performance as president? Well, he's drunk all the time. I think this is reflected in his limited public schedule and his need to retreat frequently from the White House environment, where his personal life is more visible to domestic staff and the secret service.

I think an additional factor is that his conscience is bothering him about a range of issues -- the baksheesh, kickbacks, and corruption that flow to him via Hunter and his other family; the way his kids turned out; no doubt other issues in his personal life; and likely more. Rather than address any of this directly, he tries to bypass it by surrounding himself with hard leftists who serve as his handlers and, like other wealthy people with troubled consciences, he endorses leftist policies that he would never remotely apply to himself.

What's hard to avoid is that this current facade is turning out to be incredibly flimsy, and I'm not sure he's confident he can maintain it. Thus his intimates are starting to float the trial balloon that he may not run in 2024.

The Great Quit

I've kept thinking about the current headline that record numbers are quitting their jobs, while lower-level openings are harder to fill. The biggest thing I noticed last year was that once the lockdowns closed the barber shops, fewer of them reopened. I asked my barber about this when I went in for a haircut yesterday.

He noted that his shop has an empty chair, and they were trying to get someone in to take it over, but so far had been unable. I asked if this was due to the lockdowns. He said yes, he thought that once barbers were prevented from earning a living, they simply had to look for other options, and they wound up liking those options better. He cited a barber who'd worked in that shop but had a sideline of selling vintage clothes. He could keep running the sideline during the lockdown, and once he focused on it exclusively, he earned enough to quit working as a barber.

A local restaurant has had a NOW HIRING COOKS sign out for months. I read that restaurant workers, another group hit by the lockdowns, are in short supply. But I've got to think the reason people are quitting, changing careers, or retiring goes beyond that. According to CNN,

Workers are quitting in search for better pay or better jobs, representing a fundamental shift in America's labor market.

"Labor now has the initiative, and the era of paying individuals less than a livable wage has ended," said Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM US. "This strongly suggests that rising wages are going to be part and parcel of the economic landscape going forward."

An additional factor that the stories don't mention is that the lockdowns prompted people to retire if they could manage it, especially if they found they didn't mind staying home and didn't relish the idea of going back to jobs they didn't like. Yet another is vaccine mandates, which appear to be forcing retirement decisions, especially among public safety and health care workers with the generous benefits that let them make that choice.

And I would imagine that not just lockdowns but work-from-home have broken the associations from habit that kept other people tied to their jobs and their networks of friends at work and changed the balance of factors that kept them from leaving.

Scott Adams has always made the point that it's never realistic to expect you'll get a major raise in your current job. If you want a realistic raise, especially one that pays the market rate for your current skills, you have to get a new job. This is another unintended consequence of the misguided social engineering behind the lockdowns and vaccine mandates. It's raised the level of dissatisfaction with the current social contract across the board. Unfortunately, it's inflationary, especially in that it's effectively raised social, not just financial, expectations.

How Did Hunter Get That Way?

When the story about Ashley Biden's diary broke last weekend, I had a feeling it wasn't going away, notwithstanding its contents, the incoherent, vaguely allusive jottings of a deeply troubled drug addict, are of no probative value for much of anything. But that the FBI would be involved in harassing Project Veritas over something or other in connection with it is effective acknowledgement of its authenticity.

In fact, I think if nothing else, it's also confirmation that the big guy is dumb as a rock -- nobody would touch the story during last fall's campaign, and if the FBI hadn't been sicced on James O'Keefe last week, the whole thing would have stayed forgotten. Now, with the matter in court, it's an ongoing narrative. Dumb as a rock.

The most-referenced passages have the author ruminating over being sexually active and hypersexualized at an early age, with one clear factor being "possibly inappropriate" showers with her father. This suggests to me that the Biden family environment was just an everyday extension of the vignettes we've seen in the news from time to time. For instance, there's the skinny-dipping:

It's the Joe Biden you didn't know — and might not want to see.

Secret Service agents dread being assigned to protect the vice president, in part because Biden's a big fan of skinny dipping, according to a new tell-all book.

. . . "Agents say that, whether at the vice president's residence or at his home in Delaware, Biden has a habit of swimming in his pool nude," Kessler writes.

"Female Secret Service agents find that offensive."

This in turn echoes reports of Hunter's behavior. This story cites a lengthy e-mail found on Hunter's famous laptop where he claims a woman, apparently his ex-wife,

has told them others [sic] I am a bad influence that I endanger their health that I've been sexually inapopropriate with [redacted] . . . and that she knows that if [redacted] were allowed to come visit me I would be "walking around naked watching porn masturbating and doing drugs in front of her." [redacted] IS NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO VISIT me if [redacted] my 25 yer [sic] old brings her she is only allowed alone with me if my father is there.

From the added perspective of Ashley's diary, it sounds as though the Biden family environment was something from which both Ashley and Hunter were exposed to and learned highly dysfunctional behavior from an early age. The report of skinny dipping both in Delaware and then in the vice president's residence suggests this was a habit of long standing in the Biden home. Indeed, it makes me wonder if the Bidens' regular weekends in Delaware now reflect a potential discomfort with having White House domestic staff and secret service observe other facets of family life.

One could speculate the apples didn't fall too far from the tree. Nor is it surprising that someone in a position to do so would order the FBI to suppress this information, however counterproductive the effort would be. As Aquinas says, sin dulls the intellect, and Biden is dumb as a rock.

"How Do You Solve A Problem Like Kamala?"

I've just had new confirmation for my view that journalists across the spectrum have the mental capability of promising eighth graders. This piece by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, which I take to be part of the never-Trump right, New Dem mission: Dump Harris?, makes this assertion:

Actually, party leadership has no real way to “engineer the removal of a vice-president,” not unless the VP wants to leave. Vice presidents are elected to their positions, so they cannot be fired. The 25th Amendment only applies to presidents, not vice-presidents, so there is no mechanism to remove a VP for incompetence or any other reason.

Except Spiro Agnew didn't want to leave, but he left. I did a find on "Agnew" in that piece, and Morrissey doesn't mention him at all, which suggests to me that he's furrowed his brow with great effort and completely forgotten about, or maybe never even knew about, the one historical case where party leadership engineered the removal of a vice-president -- in circumstances similar to those that appear to be developing half a century later. According to Wikipedia,

In 1973, Agnew was investigated by the United States Attorney for the District of Maryland on suspicion of criminal conspiracy, bribery, extortion and tax fraud. Agnew took kickbacks from contractors during his time as Baltimore County Executive and Governor of Maryland. The payments had continued into his time as vice president. . . . After months of maintaining his innocence, Agnew pleaded no contest to a single felony charge of tax evasion and resigned from office.

This was characterized at the time as "the first shoe of a two-shoe drop", a somewhat transparent effort to replace Agnew under Section 2 of the 25th Amendment of the US Constitution with a more acceptable mainstream figure who could in turn credibly replace Nixon, whose impeachment and removal or resignation seemed increasingly likely. Morrissey begins his piece, "How do you solve a problem like Kamala?", but if he were brighter than a promising eighth grader, he'd have his answer.

So the Kamala problem is actually the Biden problem, which is a tougher nut to crack. My position continues to be that Biden's public clownishness isn't the result of dementia. The big guy is dumb as a rock, has incredibly poor judgment and weak character, but he won't be removed for senility. If the lizard people want to remove him, they'll find another, easier way; I've got to figure he's got plenty of Agnew style skeletons in his closet besides Hunter. And Kamala has got to be just as easy a case -- she got her rise in the California Democrat machine by shacking up with Willie Brown, after all, and the FBI is still the political tool it's always been.

That stuff is already in somebody's desk drawer.

The development that interests me is this: 11 Dems Smack Biden With Reality Check on Rising Gas Prices

On Monday, 11 Democratic senators wrote to Biden and told him that whatever his green dreams, we needed to “ensure that Americans are able to afford to fill up their cars at the pump in the meantime.” Now that should be self-evident, but not apparently to Joe Biden.

The senators were Jack Reed (D-RI), Bob Casey (D-PA), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Ed Markey (D-MA), Tina Smith (D-MN), Chris Van Hollen (D-MA), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH).

The 11 Democrats highlighted how high the gas prices are already now, noting the “national price for a gallon of gasoline is the highest it has been since 2014, with an increase of more than $1 per gallon since this time last year.” They stated further that “in our home states, high gasoline prices have placed an undue burden on families and small businesses trying to make ends meet, and have proven especially burdensome as our constituents continue to recover from the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

A few of these senators may be lizard people themselves, but I'm sure they've all got lizard people on speed dial -- more important, the lizard people's private secretaries have those senators on speed dial, too. What the lizard people are seeing right now is polls showing Trump beating Biden in a 2024 rematch. Farting in front of royalty won't get rid of Biden, nor will pooping his pants in front of the pope, but $6 a gallon for gas will most assuredly do it in 2024, and it could do it sooner for some of those senators in 2022 as well.

As of yesterday, Biden -- or his handlers -- still wasn't listening.

Earlier on Wednesday an inflation report showed the largest annual increase in prices in three decades.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said that prices in October rose 0.9 per cent from September — and more than 6 per cent over the past year, the largest annual rise in 30 years.

. . . He said he believed the problem was temporary, and that the economy would stabilize.

'People are not going out to dinner and lunch and going to local bars because of COVID. So what are they doing? They're staying home and ordering online and they're buying product.' Biden said.

'Well with more people with money buying product and less product to buy, what happens?

'The supply chain's the reason, the answer is you guys, I'll get to that in a minute. But what happens? Prices go up.'

Glib patter and the phony false-teeth grin aren't gonna cut it. The one thing the lizard people fear is the return of Donald Trump. I suspect Kamala will be just the first shoe of the two-shoe drop.