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.

The Last Believer In Götterdämmerung

It appears that on the local, state, and congressional levels, the results of last week's elections effectively ended the fantasy that there could be a rapid enactment of a Great Reset that would make the 2022 midterms irrelevant -- or if indeed the voters did exact revenge at the ballot box, it would be something past the end of the world and also irrelevant. I've been calling this the Götterdämmerung strategy, and naturally, it isn't adult thinking, And the November 2 elections did focus the minds of many adults. According to the Washington Post,

Progressives gave up a lot of ground when they agreed to vote for the $1.2 trillion bill to improve the nation's infrastructure in exchange for a later vote on their top priorities.

Now, some of them are pretty pessimistic about the chances of getting their top priorities included in the larger, roughly $2 trillion social spending bill the leadership and moderates promised would follow. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was only able to push through the infrastructure package after Democrats took a drubbing in last week's off-year elections and President Biden personally stepped in to lobby members.

Privately, aides to some Congressional Progressive Caucus member [sic] described their members as being downcast about passing the reconciliation bill in its current form.

"We're incredibly pessimistic and it's hard to project strength and fortitude as each caucus we are all a part of individually ran us all over on Friday night," a staffer for a progressive caucus member told The Early.

What we're seeing from such reports is that people like the progressive caucus have been forced to recognize that the policy objectives of the Götterdämmerung strategy can't be achieved prior to the 2022 midterms as they had hoped.

But so far, the ones who've gotten this message have been those directly affected by short-term politics in local, state, and congressional elections. President Biden isn't up for election in 2022. I don't believe he's cognitively deficient -- at least from the specific effects of aging -- but he does appear so far to be stubbornly unaware of the potential effect of last week's elections on his own effectively Götterdämmerung agenda, now or after 2022.

For instance, he's still looking at closing another oil pipeline:

At a time when gas prices are soaring and people are demanding answers from the Administration about what they are going to do to help out the problem, the idea that they would be looking into the question of shutting down another pipeline is pure madness. As we noted, this isn’t shutting down a prospective pipeline — this would be shutting down a pipeline that provides more than half the propane used for heating in northern Michigan. Line 5 has been operating since the 1950s and is a major energy supplier to Michigan and the region. It delivers oil from western Canada across Wisconsin, the Great Lakes, and Michigan, and into Ontario.

Biden has already implemented policies that increase fuel costs, which are inflationary, as well as enacting vaccine mandates that will affect the supply chain by firing truckers, as the industry points out. He's able to enact these via executive orders and doesn't need legislative approval, which would be increasingly difficult to obtain in the current environment, especially with Sen Manchin's influence.

The problem for Biden is that the Götterdämmerung agenda is deliberately meant to reduce fossil fuel consumption without, however, replacing the fossil energy with equivalent renewable sources. Thus it simply increases energy prices overall, which increases the price of everything and lowers living standards across the board.

The electorate isn't stupid and fully recognizes this. For observers, the question is simply whether Biden is doing this because he doesn't know what he's doing, or he's doing it because he likes hurting people. Frankly, based on what we're learning about the big guy, I lean toward the latter. A factor that exacerbates this is that Biden, weak of character and even dissipated himself, is at the mercy of his unelected and ideologically driven handlers. But apparently even these are beginning to show some concern:

There must have been some sort of emergency meeting last night at the White House, because Biden administration officials have simultaneously shifted into spin overdrive as news about inflation, energy prices and supply chain issues continue to worsen.

. . . Don’t worry, according to this administration, it’s all been invented by the media (that largely helped carry Biden into office on their shoulders).

On one hand, the economic news can't help but get worse. On the other, too much evidence is continuing to build up, in my view, that Biden isn't suffering from dementia, but other determining character issues must inevitably come out, for instance in the simmering Ashley diary story.

Let's go, Brandon!