No organized party
Will Rogers famously quipped that because he belonged to the Democratic Party, he didn't belong to an "organized party".
The entire staff of the Democratic Party in Nevada resigned. All of them.
That's because the state organization in Nevada is the mirror image of the Republican GOP organization in Wyoming, if you recall that mirror images are right/left reversed. That is, "Progressive" Democrats, and indeed candidates backed by the Democratic Socialist of America, took over the party.
Which is why, in spite of what we've been noting about the mess in the GOP, the Democrats will ultimately fail and are now well on their way to doing so.
The Democratic Party tends to creep up on liberal positions and then, as soon as it has its toes in the water, it dives fully into the deep side of the pool, and drowns.
The American public really isn't liberal, or as the press and liberals now like to term it, "progressive". It's really pretty conservative. Indeed, something that the Democrats don't get, and the press very much doesn't get, is that a lot of the concerns that Trump gave voice to really do reflect the concerns of common Americans, and not in the way that the press imagines.
The press has repeatedly suggested since January 6 that Trump supporters are "racists". Some probably are, and frankly the Democrats have some pretty racist members as well, with their racism just directed in a different direction. But most aren't. And they resent having their concerns framed in that fashion, which is actually hardening their opposition to the Democrats.
It isn't racist to be worried about the massive immigration rate into the country and to be concerned that its out of control. Worrying about what seems to be an assault on traditional culture and even basic human nature in favor of newly defined and hyper evolving woke definitions doesn't make a person a bigot either. A concern over traditional values and even traditional activities isn't an improper concern.
The left wing of the Democratic Party, looking at Donald Trump's loss in the last election, and the disarray in the party right now, is drawing the wrong conclusion. The country hasn't leapt to the left. Indeed, the overall vote would suggest its crept a bit to the right. People just didn't like Donald Trump, who in more than one way seemed to be an assault on democracy and even an example of the personal opposite of what conservatives and populist stand for. Lots of principled conservatives and populists have left the GOP. . . for now, but that doesn't mean that they're digging out their posters of Trotsky and Lenin. Far from it.
But the Democrats will think so. By 2024 they'll be running a Kamala Harris that they've pushed even further to the left of her natural left, which is pretty far left, and flame out.
Indeed, lots of people, myself included, have wondered how the Republicans are going to get their act together following the late stage disaster of the 2020 election. The Democrats are providing the answer.
The Democrats just passed, but only barely, a massive COVID relief bill. More money will not be spent, in real terms on relief for the pandemic than was spent on the New Deal. Indeed, twice as much money is being flooded into the economy through the pandemic bills than was spent on the entire New Deal. There's absolutely no way on earth that this isn't going to be damaging to the economy, none. For retirees and near retirees, this may be the death knell of their retirements because if it isn't inflationary it will be simply stunning. And if it turns out to be inflationary, the fact that the GOP had abandoned fiscal responsibility under Trump will be rapidly, and deservedly, for gotten.
Moreover, the Democrats have already flooded the legislative machinery with bills that leap to the left. New gun control bills are being introduced and while the press routinely claims that the populace is for them, the voting populace never seems to be. Democrats are dragging out the Equal Rights Amendment, a vestige from the 1970s that now would have little meaning, in part because the 1970s were the golden era of Democratic liberalism and the failure to pass the ERA was a failure. They're also advancing bills regarding gender issues when the American public only recently came to accommodating itself to the Supreme Court's actions in the era, and if state legislatures are any clue, the legislative tide may be flowing in the opposite direction at the local level.
All of this is going to anger conservative and middle of the road voters. If the GOP can get Donald Trump out of the way, and the simple operation of time may accomplish that, they're going to come roaring back and the Democrats will have themselves largely to blame.
A sane Democratic Party would concentrate on a few issues that have wide backing, and there are some, and push them through now, while, as Pentangli would have it, they have the muscle.
They won't.
Well, Reagan ran
Matthew McConaughey is considering running for Governor of Texas. He is a Texan. It's not clear what party his a member of.
The Texas gubernatorial race, like Wyoming's, is up next year. He'd be running against the incumbent, Greg Abbott.
And why the heck not? Abbott and McConaughey are both native Texans. Abbott is a lawyer, and nobody like lawyers, and McConaughey is an actor who exudes authenticity. Who knows if he's authentic or not, after all he's an actor, but the same could have been said about Reagan when he started off in politics.
And McConaughey is a good decade younger than Abbott, and therefore out of the Baby Boom generation. He's married, moreover, to a hot Brazilian model who is a Latina Catholic, where as McConaughey is an Evangelical Christian, and they have three children, so he probably fits the rank and file younger Texan profile somewhat.
Grasping Statistics
Regarding races, and this one the Wyoming House Race, a letter in the editor last weekend demonstrated a grasp of statistics beyond that commonly understood which those reporting on the alleged discontent with Liz Cheney should consider.
Indeed, as I've already noted, letters to the editor seems to show that more people support Cheney, by a huge margin, than oppose her. What the letter writer noted is that around 40% of Republicans are reported being really miffed at Cheney for her vote to impeach Donald Trump. That might be right, but the letter writer also noted that only about 1/3d of eligible voters casted votes.
I thought that must be wrong, but in actuality, it's worse than that. About 50% of those eligible to vote registered to do so, and of those, only 1/3s showed up to vote. That's horrifically bad. But what that also means is that the cry that "Wyomingites" are mad at Cheney is probably pretty far off the mark. That "40%" actually reflects less than 1/6th of the state's eligible voters. When other factors are considered, Cheney probably has lost next to none of her support.
What that also means is this. The hard right of the GOP is incredibly vulnerable to being turned out if average Republicans show up at the polls in 2022. No wonder that the current party is trying to restrict voting. The more people that actually vote, the less chance that the hard right keeps on keeping on.
It also means that the Democrats in the state have a lot more in the way of opportunity than the common evidence might suggest. Wyoming is a "Republican state", but only half of Wyomingites are registering to vote which actually means that, as far as we can tell, less than half of Wyomingites are actually declared Republicans. That disinterested and disaffected remaining 50% is almost certainly outside of the diehard GOP camp. They're not all Democrats, but probably a lot of them would have Democratic sympathies.
Finally, if the electorate gets really owly or just motivated, Cheney could swamp the hard right candidates next year. It just depends on people showing up.
Shopify and CO2
Shopify has contracted with Carbon Engineering in Canada to contract for the latter's direct CO2 from the air removal process.
I've long wondered about this and strongly suspected it will become a viable technology. Lots of places have been working on it and I've long thought it a viable technological pursuit. Carbon Engineering is running a plant in Canada that does this right now, and Spotify may be pointing the way to the future on this. But entering into a contract with Carbon Engineering, what Spotify is doing is contracting to remove its carbon footprint through directly removing the equivalency of what they re putting into the atmosphere.
As this technology develops, it will become more viable. And at some point that's going to work its way into public policy as well as private effort. Indeed, that day seems to have arrived.
This is, by the way, one of those industries Wyoming should look at. So far the state's solutions to the rapid decline of the coal industry and the feared decline of the petroleum industry has been to try to require the operators of coal fired refineries to keep them in operation no matter what, and to invest in clean coal technology that has so far failed to yield results. This technology is yielding results. It'd make more sense to invest in this to offset the state's carbon footprint than to try to keep power plants generation that their operators wish to close.
Why not nuclear?
I have a separate post I'm doing on this, but with the Wyoming legislature working on bills to force coal fired plants to keep on keeping on, why isn't any thought given to the state building nuclear power plants?
I know, this will be "socialism", but it isn't exactly free market to force power companies to keep power plants into operation that they'd otherwise retire.
Wyoming once had a really viable uranium mining industry. There are three still in operation. There could be more.
Again, more on that coming up.
The House Judiciary Committee and Pop Tarts
Donny Osmond. . . um Matt Gaetz. Superficial Gadfly.
Two Republican House Judiciary Affairs Committee members, Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordon, want the committee to hold hearings on Brittney Spears conservatorship.
Jim Jordon, right before he lost his sports coat, or started trying to look like the coach in The White Shadow. . . it isn't clear.
Wyomingites will recall Gaetz as the Donny Osmond second who came to the state to protest against Liz Cheney. Cheney's record was actually more pro Trump that Floridian gadfly Gaetz up until she voted to impeach Trump for the January 6 insurrection. Jim Jordon was the former coach who appeared consistently in hearings sans jacket, as if he was on the floor of an overheated basketball court.
This is really stupid. It's been pointed out by Spears' father that she can file a motion to remove him as conservator or to terminate the conservatorship, but hasn't. And no matter what the virtues of Spears may be, the fact of the matter that the national legislature wasting time on a state issue of this type is really absurd.
Supporters of Gaetz and Jordon, and they do have them, really ought to consider this. When Wyoming gets Gaetz flying in here to lambast Cheney, and then he next goes back to D.C. and declares that the former teen chanteuse's conservatorship is a matter of national importance, the state ought to brand him with the mark of superficiality.
How did Florida elect that guy?
Time Travelers
A group of U.S. Senators, a bipartisan group no less, has introduced a bill to make daylight savings time permanent.
Here's an idea. . . why not just ban daylight savings time and go back to the idea that time is connected to nature?
Superficiality tour de force
Æthelstan, King of the Anglo Saxons from 924 to 927, and King of the English from 927 to 939, the first English monarch to claim that broad of sovereignty and is widely regarded as the first King of England. He never married and he had no children. He's probably displeased over the current silliness in his kingdom.
There appears to be a serious flap involving the British Royal Family that stems from Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan's interview with Oprah.
If nothing else reveals the complete superficiality of the English speaking world at the moment, this certainly does.
I wonder to what degree that absurd fascination with the British Royal Family is an American deal. I know that it happens in the UK too, but the American fascination is freakin' bizarre. They aren't our Royal Family and they haven't been since we gave the King the middle finger salute in 1776. Indeed, when we put the government together a few years later, we turned our back on all monarchs, a trend that we seemingly don't get much credit for launching as we didn't do what the French did and cut the head off of our former monarch. But then, he was right there for the French. King George III was a long ways away.
Cutting off your king's head is a line of demarcation that, even if you bring kings back later, your society never gets over, so by and large the French don't get all atwitter wondering what the Bourbons are up to, and they're still around. Some Bourbons would like the French to be fascinated with them but the French pretty much yawn and ignore them. Probably more Reddit Rubes who are Americans or other English speakers care what is going on with the Bourbons than the French do. Indeed, of all the English speaking peoples we seem to have the greatest fascination with the English monarchy. You don't see Canadians or Australians lining up to interview Prince Harry.
Apparently we sure care what the Windsor's are up to for some reason, although I have no idea what it is.
We also care what Oprah has to say even though she's a superficial pop tartian. Just having an opinion on everything and being able to write about it doesn't mean that your opinion is worth listening to or it has value. Nonetheless, Oprah has come to virtually define the American Civil Religion in some ways. You know. . all religions are valid . . you can get money just by thinking about it, and that sort of stuff.
I didn't listen to interview of the Harry and Meghan so I'm ill equipped to comment on it. I was amused, however, by the recent entry on James Proclaims, linked in on the right as a blog we follow, as he didn't either but still commented. Apparently the ex pat royals have accused the Royal Family of being racist and went after the English press.
The English press is nasty, but it has been for some time. That's nothing new. Being a Royal puts you in the crosshairs of the British press. That's just the way that is. Indeed, even before the English press was that, the English themselves delighted on dissing the Royals, who have traditionally given people plenty of stuff to diss them on. Prince Harry surely knew that all along. If Duchess Meghan didn't, well she should have.
On racism and the Royal Family, I don't know if individual members of the family harbor racist ideas but would note that the King and Prince Consort are crowding 100 years old. People will instantly say "that shouldn't matter" but frankly when somebody is approaching the centennial mark you have to cut them some slack if for no other reasons you can't expect people on death's door to be changing whatever attitude they've held for 10% of a millennium. Both the Queen and the Prince Consort were born into an era when people still pretended that the British Empire mattered, even though it was fading. Fading thought it was, however, all sorts of people all over the globe still took the view that the English had the right to rule all sorts of other people as they were English. And at that time, and indeed up until fairly recently, nobility took all the rules pertaining to marriage, or should we say intermarriage, very seriously, which would also be bound to give you an odd view of the world. People who were expected to marry only their cousins, the prime consideration in their marital choices, and one of the primary reasons for the social and physical ills that they suffer, on the basis that their interrelated blood lines were "special", can't be expected to shed themselves of some retained concept of that now that it isn't, particularly as the fact that it now isn't demonstrates how weird monarchy really is in the first place.
That's all faded but, if anything, the European Royals have all proven themselves to be amazingly adaptable. Frequently the titular heads of state churches, they switch religions quickly for marital convenience and have long intermarried in spite of national allegiance. If anything, the oddity of the most recently Royal marriages is that they're tending to go British, with Markle being an exception. The Prince Consort, Prince Phillip, is from the deposed Greek royal family and grew up in the Greek Orthodox Church before becoming an Anglican for marital purposes, something that would make very little sense for anyone who took Orthodoxy seriously. One of the Queen's great grandfathers was an Austrian. This all fits into the common pattern of royals in which a Lutheran princess ends up the Russian Orthodox Czarina. You get the picture. For a class of people that Monarchist hold stand for the traditions of their countries, Royals really don't.. They just adopt them. In recent years that's meant adopting the concept that average folks can be royals too, and that's been the pattern everywhere from England to Japan, but that's a fairly recent concept. Earlier, they could abandon countries and faiths, but abandoning the royal bloodlines was an anathema. Now it isn't.
That's actually return to monarchical origin, in which the King was kin and just head of the family, but expecting that to be picked up overnight by centenarians is asking for a lot, particularly when at least the Queen is next to uneducated.
And the whiny approach of Harry is really a bit much. Harry has always been a whiner, seemingly, although he seemed to have found a home in the British Army. Meghan, however, made him a whiner again and he gave up at least one of his more many pursuits, although its one engaged in by women as well, that being hunting. That sort of behavior used to be defined by a crude term I'd hear a lot when younger which was something not admired at all when men were still allowed to be that in common culture but which is now something of an anathema itself.
Biological Attack
USS Connecticut
The USS Connecticut, an American submarine, has a bed bug infestation.
That's gross.
It's also a serious problem. Bug infestations have always been a problem that submariners have tried to guard against. Once you got one rolling, it'd be hard to address it.
A more serious infestation problem was recently gamed by the Navy.
The U.S. Navy recently ran a war game in which the US is the subject of a surprise Chinese military biological strike on Naval and air installations. In the game, the U.S. rapidly lost and the Red Chinese invaded Taiwan.
The American public may not be paying that much attention to it, but the Department of the Navy is seriously concerned that the U.S. is going to get attacked by China. Indeed, in historical terms, the Navy is essentially where it was at in the 1920s and 1930s when it was studying an oncoming war with Japan that it was convinced was coming.
In that case it was right, and there's real reason to be concerned that its right again.
China isn't analogous so much to Imperial Japan of the 1930s as it is to Imperial Germany of the 1890s-1910s, or even the 1930s-1940s, and that's the problem. Its a massive country with resources and its occupying other cultures against their will. It's flexing its muscles and in the same way that Germans in the first half of the 20th Century dreamed of an Anschluss of the German speaking peoples, and in particular Austria, China dreams of the same with all the Chinese speaking peoples. It's pretty much crushed the special status that Hong Kong once had and it seems to be seriously aiming to drag Taiwan back into Peking governance. It's been building a navy.
Our Navy is gaming the future war. The Marine Corps under President Trump determined to adopt a plan to re invent itself, the same way it did after World War One with Japan in mind, with China now in mind, and that's an extremely serious development. The Army doesn't seem focused on it, but it would have no real reason to be until that time came. The Air Force has quietly been building some forces with China as an anticipated enemy.
Something to be concerned about.
