The Real Political Alignment

Few photos from the past weekend's news illustrate more clearly the current real US political alignment. With even legacy media beginning to ask whether President Brandon needs to change direction following a disastrous first year, let's parse out the current situation. My first observation is that the current Democrat coalition is anything but Marxist, pace Mark Levin. My second is that President Brandon has no choice but to do everything he can to appease that coalition as it exists.

The contradiction in the news photos of the looted container trains in Los Angeles over the weekend is the distant view of the alabaster city framed by stately palms contrasted with the third-world conditions on the rail right of way in the foreground. This is one key nexus of the current coalition, which the rail shippers fully recognize:

Photos and videos showing piles of empty boxes littered alongside rail tracks in Los Angeles County, California have gone viral as shipping companies say they've seen a dramatic spike in railroad theft. Some of the boxes are packages from companies like UPS, Amazon and FedEx.

Union Pacific, one of the country's largest railroad companies, says it may avoid operating in Los Angeles County following the spike in thefts, which it blames on lax prosecution of crimes. The containers and trains are locked, but can be broken into.

This reflects the alliance between wealthy elites and the Lumpenproletariat, Marx's criminal class, which is fostered by a new crop of prosecutors who won't prosecute violent crime, as well as bail reformers who oppose cash bail. On one hand, to Marx, the Lumpenproletariat are not reliable allies for the working class. On the other, petty criminals in the ghetto and barrio prey almost entirely on their own communities with drugs, shootings, robbery, and prostitution.

The most recent tendency for organized smash-and-grab retail theft and more wholesale looting of trains victimizes the poor and working class, where the retail stores close in their neighborhoods due to such losses, while the supply chain for consumer goods is interrupted, prices rise to compensate for the looting, and jobs disappear in the stores and shipping hubs. But so far, the demagogic politicians -- the Squad and others -- who claim to be acting on behalf of their consituents prevent attempts to remedy the problem and insist on defunding law enforcement. Regarding the lootings,

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has not appeared to take any action or issue a formal reaction to reports of looting from cargo trains near Los Angeles, even though he has taken credit for incremental progress on the supply chain crisis.

President Brandon and his allies in the Democrat establishment can't afford to alienate the Squad, and in any case, Secretary Buttigieg is not there to fix any real transportation issues. Meanwhile, the jobs of the elites don't depend on local retail and distribution, while they're protected from porch pirates in security buildings, well-policed enclaves, and gated communities.

A second factor emerged in the weekend's news, the reemergence of Islamist terrorism in the US, which had been largely inactive since the San Bernardino shootings of December 2015 and the Orlando nightclub attack of June 2016. It's especially significant that the FBI, a Democrat deep state ally, was forced to backtrack on its initial statement that the Coffeyville, TX synagogue hostage crisis was not "specifically related to the Jewish community." Clearly this is a sensitive issue to the Democrat coalition.

Antisemitism and the larger, related issue of "decolonization" are also a key issue for the Squad and its allies in the coalition. Again, the current extremely narrow majorities the Democrats hold in congress mean President Brandon can't afford to alienate even the most extreme adherents of these views. "Decolonization", the view that reason, responsive government, meritocracy, and economic choice are oppressive measures of European domination over people of color, has an associated anti-Christian component, as we saw in the post yesterday in which advocates attempted to restore the Aztec religion to remedy such grievances.

It's worth pointing out that Marxism is philosophically atheist and materialist, although Marx himself was of Jewish ancestry, and the early generations of Soviet and international communists were also of heavily Jewish ancestry. It would never have been part of Marxist doctrine to advocate revival of Islam or Aztec religion, and Marxism was far less specifically antisemitic than National Socialism, which which early Islamism was closely allied,.

Another part of the coalition is, broadly speaking, pansexualists, now including transgenderists. The goal here is increasingly strange, with the most prominent current public figure now Lia Thomas, an Ivy League biological male who competes as a female swimmer. Of all things, the Ivy League as a body has endorsed this:

The Ivy League is, and always has been, of, by, and for the wealthy established elites. It has consistently followed, and continues to follow, discriminatory admissions policies. Just as it endorses transgender athletes, it also now moots dropping standardized admissions tests, once thought to be a meritocratic innovation. Marx never had anything to say about gender dysphoria, although in his personal life he appears to have been well beyond a mere traditionalist in his view of the dominant male role. These people are not Marxists by any stretch.

The public is incresingly aware of the current alignment and is making decisions accordingly. Gallup has found "a dramatic shift over the course of 2021, from a nine-percentage-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter to a rare five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter." Although Gallup themselves mention that the opinion shift is a remarkable reversal of the polls immediately following the 2020 election, they don't mention an inevitable takeaway from this, that the electorate is collectively reviewing that election and determining that it made a mistake.

The Democrat problem is that it can't change course in any meaningful way, since its current legislative majority is so thin that it can't afford to offend any of its allies.

In additioni, COVID and the associated moral panic were a major factor in the 2020 outcome. We're still coming to terms with what happened.

Fun With The Establishment Clause

The Establishment Clause in the First Amendment to the US Constitution says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . ." I ran into an interesting recent case that illustrates yet again how useful it is.

The state of California has agreed to remove an “Aztec chant” from its ethnic studies curriculum following a legal settlement with several plaintiffs

The new curriculum would have had students praying to the Aztec dieties Tezkatlipoka, Quetzalcoatl, Huizilopochtli and Xipe Totec.

Part of the chant read “Xipe Totek, Xipe Totek, transformation, liberation, education, emancipation. imagination revitalization, liberation, transformation, decolonization, liberation, education, emancipation, changin’ our situation in this human transformation.”

The co-chair of the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, Tolteka Cuauhtin, had said the chants were to “regenerate indigenous spiritual traditions” as Christians had committed “theocide” to “oppress marginalized groups.”

It occurred to me that pretty much the whole theme of Judeo-Christian scripture, as well as the history of the Church, is theocide, whereby false gods are often quite ruthlessly exterminated. It's just as well the state isn't involved in choosing sides, because at this point, it's almost guaranteed to come down on the wrong side. The story continues,

The Thomas More Society filed a lawsuit in September challenging the chants on behalf of Californians for Equal Rights Foundation and three parents. Special Counsel Paul Jonna said “The Aztecs regularly performed gruesome and horrific acts for the sole purpose of pacifying and appeasing the very beings that the prayers from the curriculum invoke.”

The Thomas More Society site explains further:

“The curriculum’s unequivocal promotion of five Aztec gods or deities through repetitive chanting and affirmation of their symbolic principles constitutes an unlawful government preference toward a particular religious practice,” added Frank Xu, President of Californians for Equal Rights Foundation. “This public endorsement of the Aztec religion fundamentally erodes equal education rights and irresponsibly glorifies anthropomorphic, male deities whose religious rituals involved gruesome human sacrifice and human dismemberment.”

The complaint submitted to the court details the California State Board of Education’s approved Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, which includes a section of “Affirmation, Chants, and Energizers.” Among these is the “In Lak Ech Affirmation,” which invokes five Aztec deities. Although labeled as an “affirmation,” it addresses the deities both by name and by their traditional titles, recognizes them as sources of power and knowledge, invokes their assistance, and gives thanks to them. In short, states the complaint, it is a prayer.

. . . Attorneys sent a demand letter to Tony Thurmond, the California Department of Education’s State Superintendent and former California State Assemblyman, on August 26, 2021, asking for removal of the Aztec prayer from the curriculum. A response was requested by September 2, 2021. When none was received, the lawsuit was filed.

The Thomas More Society was among the public interest law firms that were instrumental in securing a ruling from the US Supreme Court that prevented health departments from declaring religious services non-essential.

Hillary 2024?

I think we can safely say that Hillary Clinton is eyeing a run for the presidency in 2024. Dick Morris, a sometime Clinton intimate, is making the case:

Morris said Sunday that if Democrats lose control of Congress in the 2022 midterm elections, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will be toast — paving the way for a second Hillary bid, with husband Bill playing an architect to her strategy.

“There’s a good chance of it,” said Morris, referring to a Hillary-Trump rematch, to John Catsimatidis on the radio host’s WABC show.

“Hillary has set up a brilliant strategy that nobody else is able to do,” Morris added. “Knowing the people around her, I believe there is only one person capable of that level of thinking — and that’s her husband, Bill.

. . . ​”She has set up a zero-sum game where the worse [Biden] does, the better she does, because she’s positioned herself as the Democratic alternative to Biden. Not just to Biden, but to the extreme left in the Democratic Party,” Morris said.

I think Morris is in something of an alternate universe here. As far as anyone can tell, both the Clintons now appear to be old beyond their septuagenarian years, and they're both sick. What on earth did Bill do to contract sepsis from a urinary tract infection? My bet is that Bill was just being Bill and paid the price -- over my working life, I knew lots of guys who came back from Vegas with UTIs. And by 2024, on her current pace, Hillary will look like a cross between Angela Merkel and Golda Meir.

I've already speculated here that Hillary's best chance is to be the candidate to replace Kamala Harris as vice president under the 25th Amendment if Harris resigns. Then she can either step in for Biden before 2024 if Biden resigns or is incapacitated, or she can try for the nomination then if Biden is still in office.

The problem with that is that the Democrats have moved to the left even since 2016, but beyond that, Hillary isn't really credible as a moderate alternative to Biden or Trump. Biden, after all, was supposed to be the Clinton-style modrate himself, but the story of his presidency so far is that he's caved consistently to Pelosi and the Squad. How would Hillary be different? And to move in as vice president under the 25th Amendment, she would need a majority in both houses of congress.

Up to November of this year, this means she'd need the approval of the Squad. After November, it's likely one or both houses would be under Republican control, and Republican majorities likely wouldn't approve a candidate who'd use the post to campaign in 2024. They'd probably want a non-controversial figure, possibly even a moderate Republican, who wouldn't be a serious 2024 contender. A difficulty there is that many potential names, like Colin Powell, are no longer available.

A Trump-style Republican who runs in 2024, Trump himself or someone like DeSantis, would probably use a "fool us once" strategy against any Democrat who claims to be a moderate, which Hillary is not in any case. They'd simply say you voted for Biden thinking he wasn't what he turned out to be. How can you trust anyone else who needs the support of the far-left Democrat base?

I don't see it. Actually, I thought Dick Morris was smarter.

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.