Trump Is Back

I was looking at the conservative aggregators this morning, and most reported optimistically about Trump's Florence, AZ rally last night. The surprise was this report from The Atlantic, Trump Soft-Launches His 2024 Campaign.

Tonight, deep in the Arizona desert, thousands of people chanted for Donald Trump. They had braved the wind for hours—some waited the entire day—just to get a glimpse of the defeated former president. And when he finally appeared on stage, as Lee Greenwood played from the loudspeakers, the crowd roared as though Trump were still the commander-in-chief. To many of them, he is.

“I ran twice and we won twice,” Trump told his fans. "This crowd is a massive symbol of what took place, because people are hungry for the truth. They want their country back."

. . . Trump chose Arizona for this moment for a reason. In this state, the Big Lie thrives. Trump only lost Arizona by 10,000 votes in 2020, giving him and his supporters the space, apparently, to allege that the close outcome was the result of left-wing chicanery, the result of ballot stuffing and interference by Venezuelans, among other false claims. State lawmakers who spent the past year reviewing the ballots ultimately found zero evidence of mischief. But that didn’t matter to Trump’s supporters. GOP politicians across Arizona adopted Trump’s lies anyway. Many of them were guests of honor tonight.

Now, I'm not quite sure what qualifies as a "lie" here. Let's take another well-known example:

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I “But Joe, you’re ten years dead”
“I never died” says he,
“I never died” says he.

Is this a lie? I would call it rhetorical hyperbole.

One Republican talking point, independent of Trump, has been that the circumstances of 2020 temporarily legalized ballot strategies that indeed favored Trump's opponent, and the For the People Act that died in the Senate last week was a failed attempt to make those temporary strategies permanent. There can be no disagreement that electoral reforms in states like Georgia, which President Biden has specifically and angrily denounced, were implemented to eliminate the advantage the 2020 temproary electoral changes gave Democrats.

Even if detailed reviews of ballots showed no irregularity under unique 2020 conditions, it doesn't mean that temporary loosening of ballot requirements didn't influence the election's outcome -- Biden's own objection to Georgia's electoral reforms in the wake of the election argue persuasively for that conclusion. If Trump says he "won twice", it seems to me that's allowable in this context.

In addition, Trump voters are overwhelmingly acting as though the election was legitimate, at least under the conditions at the time. There have been no armed insurrections contesting any local, state, or federal 2020 election. (Get serious, the Januatry 6 Capitol demonstration was not any such thing.) The Trump voters are beginning to organize to exercise legal and constitutionally protected redress in upcoming congressional elections. This alone is a recognition of the process's legitimacy.

The Atlantic article strikes me as disingenuous in its implication that a coup is somehow in the works:

Now that the midterm season is fully underway, Trump will be out and about more often, hosting rallies and stumping for the any Republicans desperate enough to lie about the election in exchange for his support. He will in some ways be reintroducing himself to the country: Here I am, America, back after a stolen election, ready to win by any means possible.

I asked a group of older attendees if they were excited to see Trump run again in 2024. They all were. Two of them argued about whether he could take office before 2025. "It's not possible," a retiree named Michael, who declined to give his last name, said. "I think it is!" a retiree named Susan Higgins said. "The military has to come in, and take [Biden] away."

By the end of the evening, Trump was having trouble pretending that he isn’t actively running for president. He previewed his lines of attack on Biden over Afghanistan, immigration, and inflation, recited a litany of policy changes a Republican-controlled Congress would be able to make, and promised that “in 2024, we are going to take back the White House.” Sam and Dave’s “Hold on I’m Coming,” played as he exited, and the song sounded like a promise.

Trump himself is not quoted as making any remark that implies he intends to do anything but support candidates in the midterm elections who in turn support his agenda, and it's generally recognized that he will be a kingmaker in the 2022 midterms. In 2016, his nomination came as enough of a surprise that there could be no organized effort to reform the rest of the Republican party along his lines, and that was a disadvantage that limited his effectiveness during that term.

At this point, his period out of office is beginning to look like an opportunity.

More Thoughts On Fermi's Paradox

This is a third in a series of posts on Fermi's Paradox, which started here. My thinking in recent years is driven by a remark from the then-vocation director of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, who posed this question to a discussion group of seminarians: If aliens arrive from outer space, should we offer them baptism?

I don't think he had a single right or wrong answer in mind, but I find the overall direction of his thinking compelling. It's actually in full conformity with the views of pop cosmologist Carl Sagan, the author of the Voyager Disk illustrated above, as well as the late 20th century science fiction universe exemplified by the Star Trek-Star Wars franchises -- except that I think it subverts them via a reductio ad absurdum.

Let's start with the assumption behind the Voyager Disk, which is clearly that it's intended to be found someday, even eons and light years distant, by an alien civilization that has the rational resources to decrypt it. It would pose no challenge for Hollywood to develop a script based on the idea that an alien civilization does in fact come upon the disk and then makes contact with the earthlings who produced it, via some combination of warp drive and time travel.

But the basic assumption behind the disk is that the aliens have the rational capacity to understand that the images are of a species with sexual dimorphism, situated on a planet with a particular location in the universe, with a particular rationalistic understanding of physics and chemistry. Heck, I could write a subplot in that Hollywood script that would involve Dr Asdf Qwerty, a young assistant professor in the Cosmology Department at the University of Glubdwtfug, who comes upon the disk in a discarded pile of cosmic trash, and his subsequent struggle to prove its authenticity. Key to his eventual triumph would be his ability to reverse engineer the LP phonograph technology that plays the sounds on it.

The utter complacency of Sagan's idea is in effect that the mere power of random evolutionary forces will produce alien species elsewhere in the universe with rationalistic cultures that are near-duplicates of our own Ivy League dominated human establishment, such that, once the Sagan disk is discovered, it will be a relatively trivial task to translate a rationalistic message on a piece of metal and act on it in some consequential way -- if in no other way than to place it in the Glubdwtfug Institute of Cosmology's museum. (It would not, however, be consistent with this theory to have an alien microbe species come upon the disk and simply eat it.)

This is puzzling. Before the Star Trek-Star Wars model of the universe, there was the HG Wells model in War of the Worlds, whereby the space aliens are not benign and do not have the interests of earthlings in mind. In fact, even among the earthling cosmological establishment, there have been objections to the Sagan Voyager Disk-SETI model, suggesting we may not be doing ourselves a favor by broadcasting to the universe that we're around.

But looking at Sagan's biography and list of awards on Wikipedia -- which include Ivy League advanced degrees, as well as the Klumpke-Roberts Award; NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal; Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction; Oersted Medal; Carl Sagan Award for Public Understanding of Science; and the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal -- it's plain that the Sagan view of alien beings has formed the contemporary popular understanding of how the universe is populated.

Thus, space aliens, even if there are superficial differences with earthlings, are able to undersand each other via a mutually translatable set of languages, and indeed, can communicate and persuade via classical rhetoric. It's implied that they are able to understand and manipulate the universe's elements and properties via mutually recognized rationalistic techniques. I think this is in fact an understanding of how we view space aliens that underlies Fr Sam's question to the seminarians.

If or when we encounter space aliens, it's clearly understood in this view that the aliens will not simply want to eat us. Nor will they simply want to exterminate us to steal the planet's water. The basic assumption is that the universe is benign. In fact, it's complacent enough to encompass the idea that there are probably Ivy Leaguers on other planets who are fully simpatico with those on this one.

So there are two basic assumptions here. The first is the Judeo-Christian view, expressed in the Genesis creation story, that the universe is benign. "He saw that it was good." The second is that rationalistic creatures are in effect created in God's image. Thus if there are intelligent space aliens, which of course is a big if, they are created in God's image.

In that case, I have a hard time getting around Fr Sam's question: should we offer them baptism? Carl Sagan must be spinning in his grave.

Bizarre Comedy

Biden, appearing to admit defeat on ending the filibuster & nationalizing elections, randomly starts shouting: States’ voter reform laws are “about who gets to count the votes! Count the vote! Count the vote!” pic.twitter.com/66LpGL1ckQ

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 13, 2022

For whatever reason, there's been little comment on President Biden's latest rant. At about 0:47 in the clip taken yesterday after his meeting with Senate leadership, he begins shouting "Count the vote! Count the vote!" in an incoherent break from earlier more measured remarks. This follows occasional observatioins that presidents haven't traditionally traveled to Capitol Hill to beg for votes before they're counted (or indeed, when a vote is counted and certain to go against them).

But this is the second time he's done this, and I noted in November what a bad and unpresidential strategy it was. But this week, he doubled down on it. Not for nothing did Sen McConnell call his Georgia speech Tuesday "profoundly unpresidential".

Yet again, I don't think this is a medical issue; it's a character issue. From the time he was in the Senate, he had a reputation as a "blowhard", sonmething that received too little attention in he 2020 election:

Gov. Ron DeSantis warned radio listeners on Monday that Democratic candidate Joe Biden doesn’t have the stamina to “stand up” to progressive politicians if elected.

Speaking on the conservative Mark Levin Show, DeSantis quipped that ‘progressive’ Democrats such as Vice Presidential nominee Kamala Harris, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez will be “running the show.”

“I think the thing about Biden is he’s a career politician, kind of a blowhard Senator,” DeSantis told show host Mark Levin. “He’s malleable but he is not strong enough to stand up to the left. He will fold every single time.”

I think there are a couple of related issues here. One is that he's been in the habit of writing checks he can't honor througout his career. His answer to the problem keeps being to tell them to redeposit the check. He got away with it as senator because the amounts were much smaller, but as president, he's kept the old habit.

In addition, he's very similar to speaker Pelosi in his tendency to detour into incoherence in challenging situations:

Both Biden and the speaker retreat into shouting, non sequiturs, or impenetrable jargon like Pelosi's "bird bath oir privilege scrub" when the going gets difficult -- and in retrospect, the speaker in that situation was fully aware that her strategy for forcing the BBB through via reconciliation was doomed to failure. But if nobody understands what either is saying, neither can be held accountable for it. This isn't a medical issue.

The other factor is that both have had lifetimes to develop these habits. Nobody questions the speaker's bizarre annual facelifts. Nobody questioned Biden's hair sniffing, groping, or skinny dipping until, during a presidential campaign, they became too obvious to ignore. Nobody yet takes seriously the utterly unpresidential gaffes, insults, shouting, and incoherence.

In both cases, the problem is a lifetime of bad habits, fostered by entitlement and indulgence. My guess is that there will need to be behind-the-scenes interventions of one sort or another in both cases. The lizard people have their work cut out.

Yeah, It's A Quiet Constitutional Crisis

I think there are numerous signs now that the lizard people are scrambling for a Plan B:

• Hillary Clinton 2024 Gains Steam
• Biden-Cheney 2024?
• VP Harris Dodges on if There Will Be Same 2024 Democrat Ticket
• Nancy Pelosi's Eyebrows Are A Thing -- No, Really
• Nancy Pelosi makes millions off tech stocks

It's becoming harder and harder to finesse the failure of the Biden-Pelosi agenda, and one sign of it is, as I pointed out yesterday, that the elevation of the speaker's eyebrows is an annual event that up to now has caused little comment. Today, it's a thing.

One did not, up to now, disrespect the speaker. Indeed, the direct comparison to Michael Jackson raises the even less mentionable circumstance, that Speaker Pelosi's public persona is basically that of a drag queen. The media at this point, now that her signature issue is lost, has no reason to cover for her.

It's also significant that Hillary Clinton is reemerging as a potential cure to the problem:

In the last few weeks, Hillary Clinton has been all over the media, sounding warning bells about the midterm elections and the dangers of President Trump returning to the White House in 2024. Many commentators wondered if she was positioning herself to run for president again.

. . . The rumor mill cranking was crazy enough. Now two long-time Clintonites are advocating for it. Douglas Schoen and Andrew Stein opined for 17 paragraphs on the case for the Empress of Chappaqua to run in 2024. Their reasoning is pretty astounding. First, they note Joe Biden’s age; he will be 82 at reelection time. They also note Vice President Kamala Harris’s unpopularity, which surprised no one who watched the Democratic primary. She was the first to drop out, and black voters never flocked to her. She did not even lead in her home state of California.

Unfortunately, as Schoen and Stein note, there is not another leading Democrat burning up the national stage ahead of 2024. The attempts to make Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg a thing fizzled. The other prominent members of the administration have approval ratings hovering around 30%. Former stars have also lost their shine. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo resigned in disgrace. California Gov. Gavin Newsom faced a recall and has radical COVID policies that are unpopular nationally. Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s tin pot dictator, faces reelection in 2022, and it is not clear she will be successful.

All of this while President Brandon, still with days remaining in his first year in office and, unable to secure unanimous votes for his program in his own party, is effectively denouncing fellow Democrats as domestic terrorists. And the lizard people are out of Democrat options, while the entire line of presidential succession is hemorrhaging credibility. In 1974, the lizard people were able to resolve a constitutional crisis (effectively of their own making) quite smoothly.

This constitutional crisis, while it's certainly the result of electoral consequences that were of the lizard people's making, has spiraled into something beyond their control. They don't have ready replacements for Agnew and Nixon the way they did in 1974. The best outcome we can hope for is a year, or maybe three, of this bizarre comedy.

Updating The Götterdämmerung Strategy

Last summer, I posted on

what in early 2021 seemed to be a consensus "Götterdämmerung strategy" among the elites, whereby Speaker Pelosi, possibly expected to retire after the 2022 election, would use slim congressional majorities, plus control of the White House, to enact a massive Great Reset agenda and ignore the post-2022 consequences because, well, she'd be retired by then. I likened this to someone who, assuming the world would end on December 21, decided to run up a huge credit card bill that would never need to be repaid.

I was always skeptical that this would work, but there have been only a few voices of sanity over the past year who raised the point that Pelosi had only a single-digit majority in the House, with the Senate evenly tied. Throughout the fall and winter, it became more clear that there weren't enough votes among Senate Democrats even to reach a tie on the Götterdämmerung agenda. Beyond that, House Republican leader McCarthy is announcing plans to nationalize the 2022 midterms by directly opposing any Götterdämmerung grand reset.

The reaction among Democrat leadership so far appears to be denial. Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, who would presumably be among those who would benefit most by the reset, distanced herself from its most prominent advocate by missing President Biden's speech endorsing ending the filibuster:

Failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams declined to attend the event in what was seen as a snub of the Biden administration. However, her team claimed her absence was the result of a scheduling conflict. However, some have speculated that Abrams is hesitant about appearing on a stage with President Biden given his sagging approval ratings.

MSNBC media activist Joe Scarborough on Tuesday pointed out that this would have been “an event custom-made for Abrams” and that “she obviously doesn’t want to be on the same stage as Joe Biden.”

Meanwhile, Speaker Pelosi is the subject of renewed speculation about plastic surgery. A web search suggests that questions about her eyebrows have come up in recent years on an annual basis, and yesterday's comments are nothing new. The photo below is from 2019:

The annual re-raising of the eyebrow level suggests Speaker Pelosi is so far still reluctant to acknowledge the passage of time. Although the headlines are that she's "expected" to retire, there's been no announcement.

If you think about it, believing the world will end on December 21 is at least a consistent set of beliefs, and in that case, it could well be reasonable to calculate that you could run your credit cards up to the limit by November 30, enjoy the last few weeks on your new yacht, and never have to repay the card when the bills come in over the next month.

But that does require minimal attention to the calendar and your credit limit, even leaving aside the possibility that the Götterdämmerung doesn't happen on schedule. The current leadership doesn't seem capable of even this.

Let's hope that this provides only amusement over the next year.

COVID Narrative Collapsing

On Friday, President Biden gave a typically incoherent statement on COVID:

President Joe Biden said on Friday he did not believe the coronavirus will be a permanent affliction for Americans.

"No, I don't think COVID is here to stay," Biden told reporters after remarks on the U.S. economy. "The new normal is not going to be what it is now, it's going to be better."

But all of a sudden, for reasons that aren't clear to me at all, the emphasis has shifted from shots to tests.

Nearly 50 House and Senate Democrats are calling on the Biden administration to substantially increase the nation's supply of rapid COVID-19 tests.

In a letter led by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), along with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the lawmakers acknowledged efforts already underway, like acquiring 500 million additional tests and setting up federal testing sites, but said the administration needs to do more to boost supplies.

"But as the Omicron variant spreads and we enter an ominous and unprecedented next phase of this pandemic, it is critical that we ensure these efforts meet the severity of the moment," the lawmakers wrote.

So the next phase is "ominous and unprecedented". The increase in positive cases is exponential and off the charts. But instead of new demands that the unvaxxed get vaxxed, we now need to have -- more rapid test kits?

The lawmakers had a list of specific policy asks, including manufacturing enough tests that every American could take at least one rapid test per week, and ensuring that Americans without internet access can order free COVID-19 rapid tests delivered to their home.

So the new new normal is going to be better than the old new normal, and that will include everyone getting the jabs, as well as everyone taking at least one rapid test per week? Doesn't sound better to me. Nevertheless,

We’re seeing a massive shift from the Biden team and the Democrats.

. . . “Everyone thought the vaccines were going to solve everything, which meant the administration took its eye off the ball when it came to testing,” [Dr Zeke] Emanuel had said earlier last week.

Emanuel noted that they finally had gotten a reasonable testing process in place [under Trump] but then that got dismantled under Biden after the vaccine when they then came to rely upon that.

The Biden team fully focused on vaccines and masking, to the detriment of testing and treatment. So that explains why Biden ran on testing, promised Americans tests, and then didn’t come through with them? And now you have all kinds of restrictions and mandates that are conditioned on tests?

On one hand, yes, if you take seriously the vax mandates that say more or less that you can keep your job without the jabs if you get tested once a week, but I have no idea how that gets enforced. But with the federal vax mandates on shaky legal ground, why does everyone need a weekly test otherwise?

And if everyone gets tested, what do they do if they get a positive? Emergency rooms were flooded last year when people got positive tests and, though without symptoms, thought they needed to do something about it. More recently, the CDC has issued confusing guidelines:

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidance on the recommended Covid-19 isolation period Tuesday, telling people that if they have access to a Covid-19 test and want to take it, the best approach is to use a rapid test toward the end of their five-day isolation period.

The agency has faced pressure over the past week from outside medical experts to include a testing component in its new shortened isolation period. The updated recommendations do not advise a test for isolated people, but they offer guidance on how those people should respond to a test result if they choose to take one. If the test is positive, isolated people are advised to continue their isolation until 10 days after their symptoms started. If the test is negative, isolated people can end their isolation but are advised to wear a mask around other people until day 10.

As far as I can tell, this is for people without COVID symptoms who for whatever reason are moved to take one of those free rapid COVID tests and, without symptoms, turn out to test positive. If they have no symptoms, as far as I can understand this, they can take another test at the end of the five-day isolation period if they want to. If they do and they test positive, they isolate for five more days. If it's negative, well, OK, but wear a mask for five more days.

If they want to. Or do I have this wrong? Just a month ago, President Brandon was predicting "a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated -- for themselves, their families and the hospitals they'll soon overwhelm." But if everyone gets their rapid COVID test and follows the new isolation protocols, well then, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

Forecast: More Angry Joe

According to Politico yesterday,

Fresh off a high-profile speech in which he warned that a dagger had been placed at the throat of American democracy, President Joe Biden will travel to the state that White House officials view as “ground zero” for Republican-led election suppression efforts.

Biden will speak in Georgia on Tuesday. In his remarks, he is expected to not only echo the themes of his address on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection but to expand on his endorsement of a filibuster carveout to pass voting rights legislation in the Senate.

. . . “We are doubling down, kicking it into another gear, we are going right to the belly of the beast, or ground zero, for voter suppression, voter subversion and obstruction,” said Cedric Richmond, White House senior adviser and director of the Office of Public Engagement.

Politico makes the point that the real issue isn't Georgia, it's Sen Manchin, though Manchin himself isn't named:

“It's really about the fact that there's a vote coming up,” said Richmond. “The Senate leader has voiced his plan. We supported his plan, and we're going to use the White House to try to galvanize the votes.”

Despite the renewed push by the White House, major hurdles remain in the form of Senate Democrats not yet willing to make changes to the filibuster rules. Richmond said that Biden continues to talk to lawmakers one-on-one and with the group of senators spearheading talk of how to get the voting and elections reform bills passed. “He’s been working the phones on voting rights,” he added.

Here's what's puzzling. Manchin has been sending the message, as of last weekend at least twice, that scolding him in public is counterproductive. Apparently Biden's staff is continuing to reassure him that instead, it will bring Manchin around if he just does it more. As I noted yesterday, the staff appears to be leaking stuff to the press that negotiations are under way, while Manchin keeps saying no such thing is happening. The last paragraph above seems to be a variation on this theme.

Last week I linked to stories that also suggested the angry tone of Biden's January 6 address came from Biden himself, not just his staff. We may assume that any continued angry tone in Atlanta will come from Biden himself as well. This will mostly just galvanize the Trump base and poison the atmosphere going into the midterms.

This also effectively plays into House Republican leader McCarthy's strategy for the election:

“Any time you have an election that has contrast, clear contrast—like, if Republicans were trusted with the majority, what would you do?” McCarthy said. “We’ll come out with a Commitment to America. What we’ve been doing for the last year is all the members are on task forces. We’ve been working on policy.”

Some specific policy items he previewed that will be in it include the GOP’s “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” plans to secure the border and for holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable for the coronavirus pandemic, Republicans’ public safety vision to contrast with Democrat pushes to defund police, energy policies, and perhaps most importantly economic policies to stop inflation.

One thing that stumps me is that, in the wake of the Christmas Eve Let's go Brandon troll on national TV, Biden didn't immediately shift to endorsing, but redefining, Let's go Brandon himself. In his public statements earlier last fall, Brandon Brown expressed the idea that the chant was more of a positive message about America than a specific denunciation of Biden, and the announcement of his aborted NASCAR sponsorship made the same point. Biden himself missed an opportunity at Christmas to use his gaffe to co-opt the chant and even insist that it reflected his own positive agenda.

Instead, his message is angry and scolding. I'm more and more convinced that it doesn't come from his handlers, it comes from the big guy himself. Some of his handlers may even know better, but that's how they keep their jobs.