J. D. Vance's Roadtrip.
This past week we've seen the United States meddle in a foreign election.
Now, this is likely happened before, but not in this fashion. Chances are the CIA has funded various sides back during the Cold War. If we could go so far as to topple the Iranian government, which we helped do in the late 40s as it was socialist (the horror!), we could certainly meddle in elections in some fashion.
But that's not what I refer to.
Rather, Vice President J.D. Vance, the highest legitimate figure in the U.S. Government, was in Hungary stumping for Viktor Orbán, the long serving Prime Minister of the country who looks like he's going to go down in defeat tomorrow.
Now, this probably provokes a yawn from a lot of Americans in a day and age in which we have a demented hotelier starting wars and saying stupid stuff non stop. But it is really extraordinary. The US has been willing to use economics and clandestine efforts in some circumstances, but outright campaigning?
Nope.
Oh King Donny got involved in it too, with his limited world view:
In actuality the economy of Hungary under Orbán is in pretty bad shape.
What's going on here?
Frankly, a lot of the news analysis of this hasn't been very good.
Orbán represents something that Trump actually doesn't, although Trump probably doesn't realize that. Orbán is not only an authoritarian from the far right, and corrupt, he's a illiberal democrat that National Conservatives adore.
Vance probably does get that, as he's a National Conservatives.
Unlike Trump and his Protestant Christian Nationalist, Orbán's party stands for a different sort of quasi authoritarianism. Once that's still scary, but which is much more intellectual than anything Trump could grasp. Trump's MAGA is massively crude in comparison.
Fans of Orbán imagine every Western democracy working the way that Hungary does, and its very notable that Hungary's primary opponent in this election is also from the far right. This election is a contest between two National Conservatives with Péter Magyar, whose very last name means Hungarian basically, likely to come out on top.
Magyar formed a new party to run against Orbán's old party, which he came up in. Tisza, the new party, has moved back towards Europe, however, and therefore is headed in the direction of being more of a true conservative party.
To put this in context, if this were an American election, it would basically be between Conservative Republicans and the Heritage Foundation, which is downright scary.
And that should tell you J. D. Vance's weltanschauung.
At least, however, that should tell you that if Vance is elected in 2028, which there's little chance he will be, Paula White and Franklin Graham will be sent packing.
Vance is now in Pakistan, having been assigned the task of negotiating the end of the war by King Donny. Donny, who has no filter, has already noted that with J. D. at the helm, if it doesn't get done, well that's not Trump's fault.
Vance is a curious choice for this. Either Trump really has faith in him, perhaps because he opposed the war, or he's just tossing him to the wolves. Trump has no problem at all, as we've seen, axing those who were once his most loyal supporters. This could really boost Vance in some ways, which may be what he's trying to do, or it could wreck him.
The Pope is Catholic.
In something that's vaguely sort of related to this, the news this week was filled in some quarters with the story that the Catholic Church may, or may not have, been threatened, or not, by the Trump administration.
The story was broken by a blogger that we link into on this site. Supposedly some Administration officials were upset by some statements of Pope Leo's and told a Vatican official that the Church better get in line with Trump, and then reminded the figure of the Avignon Papacy.
Right away, some conservative Catholic bloggers were dubious about that, in part because we're all surprised that any American knowns anything about the Avignon Papacy. What was additionally surprising, however, for historically minded American Catholics is to realize how many American Catholics don't realize that the U.S. is a deeply Protestant country with a strong history of rampant anti Catholicism. Indeed, while Kennedy's betrayal of his faith got us all in the door of the culture, to our detriment, that's never really gone away. Bishop Barron, when he appears with Trump's faith leaders, may be standing on a floor with members of other denominations, but you can be relatively assured that some of the Protestant clergy appearing with him don't think he, and the Orthodox cleric who appears, are even Christians, in spite of the fact that they represent the actual original Christianity.
Anyhow, the Administration denied the story and now the Vatican has as well. The overall lesson however, probably should be that figures like Vance and Marco Rubio aside, the Evangelical arm of MAGA is a lot stronger than the National Conservative end, and they don't really view Catholics favorably in spite of what naive Catholics may think. Walking arm in arm with the Trump administration, which some have done, is going to come back to haunt American Catholics.
Pope Leo XIV, I'd note, is already getting accused of being a flaming liberal, including by some American Catholic clerics. What he seems to be is, well, a flaming Catholic. I.e., really, really, Catholic. American Catholics who are upset with him ought to reconsider what's upsetting them.
Melania on the tube
Melania Trump, the forth wife of King Donald, came on the tube to proclaim that she never served Epstein. She rarely speaks in public, and listening to her heavy accent really shows why.
People have said horrible things about her which she doesn't deserve, but it's easy in a way to see why. Her husband is a horrible person with a horrible history with women and they were friends with Epstein. This administration has sought to keep Epstein material from the public and to bury the topic, which is a big part of the reason that Pam Bondi was canned.
People have been wondering why Melania is choosing to speak now. It is an interesting question. It's also interesting that she demanded what her husband has been opposing, a real Congressional investigation.
I've often noted here that people inevitably revert to their original, and true, personalities. We might just be seeing that. She came up as a model and famously appeared in at least one photo that should be regarded as pornography. Modeling paid off as it turned into a career that caused her to be married to a rich man, if we regard being married to Donald Trump as a payoff. Frankly, it probably isn't. Maybe now she's returning to being the Slovenian woman that she originally likely was.
Men abusing women
Fairly distressing news in some quarters.
I'll be frank that even though I sympathize with unions in the current age, while conceding that they also had a negative impact on labor in the 70s-90s, and while I sympathize with migrant farm workers, something about Chavez always left me a bit uneasy. That might simply be because I first heard about him in the 70s, at which time I was a lot more conservative than I am now on a lot of things, as odd as that may seem.
But I don't think so.
Something just made me feel odd about him.
Which is a really easy thing to say retrospectively, isn't it?
Chavez was huge figure in the farm labor movement, which is to say the Hispanic farm labor movement as symbolized by his organization, the United Farm Workers. The flag used by the UFW is also used by the Hispanic movement, which was strong in the 70s and 80s.
I tend to associate it in my mind with La Raza, which apparently no longer calls itself that.
Well, so what?
So what indeed. I think in part that I just have a youthful recollection of how radical everything was getting in the 1970s, and associate LaRaza and UFW with that. Things have certainly moved along since then, and indeed the entire American Hispanic Immigrant situation has. Indeed, today the Hispanic population of the United States has really come into its own and is its own force in a way that it was not in the 1970s and 80s. And as that, as I long predicted, it's very conservative, but also sui generis. Not MAGA, although Trump briefly thought it was.
What's that have to do with Chavez, probably not much.
One of the things about the farm labor movement and Hispanic movements in general is that they reflected back on things in Central and South America in away, including the efforts of the Catholic Church, of which of course I'm part, to aid Hispanic people. Because Chavez was a practicing Catholic, he was lauded in some quarters by the Church, and not without reason. Now his reputation is ruined, as it should be.
He seems to be one of those guys who just couldn't keep his hands off of girls.
Regarding somebody who couldn't keep his hands of of women, even it it meant drugging them:
Bill Cosby found guilty: What the $59.25M verdict means for sexual assault survivors
The whole Bill Cosby story is just bizarre. It's hard to know what to make of it, other than it seems to be a massive example of the Jimmy Akin Rule that sin makes you stupid. It's also, however, an example of accommodation to sin brings on worse sins. Cosby was in Hugh Hefner's orbit. In some ways, therefore, it figures.
Hefner was a pioneer in what one Leonid Radvinsky exploited in the electronic age, the prostitution of the image of women. He was a billionaire.
OnlyFans owner Leonid Radvinsky dies of cancer at 43
He's now take the same trip that Hefner took, and in both instances, even knowing that death was approaching, they did not reform.
Americans apparently spent $2.64B on Only Fans last year, which is a lot, but actually in context not as much as it might seem. The girls whose lives are being wrecked by it didn't get much of that $2.64B from the men whose lives it is also wrecking.
And hence, once again, why the young are returning to real conservatism and the Faith.
I thought a drop in teen pregnancy was a good thing?
While a return to what is real and authentic is to be lauded, just like Paula White's bee dance, the groping for it brings about some really weird results.
The CDC announced last week that teen pregnancies were at an all time low.
When I was a kid and teenager society was hugely concerned about the teen birth rate. It was actually lower in the 1970s and 80s than it had been in the 50s, but people didn't seem to take that into account and there was a general fear, it seemed, that 100% of teenage girls were going to be pregnant in any give year.
Well that figure is really in the basement now. Added to that, there's lots of new stories that teenagers and young adults really aren't having much sex, which is also a good thing, assuming they aren't married.
Now, all of a sudden, some quarters of the far right are really freaked out about this. Consider:
The problem is teens and young adults. From ages 15-19 the fertility rate is down 7% and it's down 70% over the last two decades, meaning we're telling people that are young not to have babies.
Dr. Marc Siegel, Fox News.
Problem? What's going on here?
I'm not sure what they're aiming at, but it's interesting to note that the book "The Third Reich. A New History" includes a Nazi era German cartoon lamenting the decline in German birth rates down to age 14. It seems to be a far right populist thing.
Indeed, in some conservative quarters there's a real push to emphasize that young people need to get married, young, and have lots of babies.
I'm not saying that there isn't something to this, but it can really go to far. This is going too far.
In the category of going too far.
I don't believe in recovered memories.
I do believe that you can basically forget something and then remember it later, usually when somebody or something prompts the memory. While there are some very rare people with perfect recall, who can remember all the details of their lives with crystal clear accuracy, those people are few. Most people, however, have piles of information stored in their mental databanks that they have no particular reason to recall, but can if there's a prompt.
Recovered memories of trauma are another thing, however, and in my view, mostly complete bullshit People don't have some horrific memory of the time they were, fill in blank here, and have it capable of being restored. People remember when they were exposed to really significant trauma. About hit only "recovered" memory of trauma that's likely real is when somebody didn't regard something as traumatic, but later on somebody convinced them that it was. They never really forgot it however. They just didn't regard it as significant.
For this reason I'll note that this past week there's been news of a dramatic lawsuit being filed where the supposed victim of a trauma had it recovered after decades passing since it supposedly occurred.
Human memory is really peculiar. We don't really know how memory works that well, but we do know that some people have highly accurate memories. I fall into that camp. I can remember certain things back to age 3 or so, and I remember them. They don't vary or change, I can see them, in my minds eye, if I choose to, although I frankly will admit that I don't remember as much as I used to, and that concerns me greatly.
Other people have very malleable memories. The details of what they think they remember change over time. Some people recall nearly nothing at all and no prompting is going to recall their memories.
All of this is significant as in my view "recovered" memories are basically suggested. They aren't real.
Having worked in lawsuits involving recovered memories this is pretty clear to me. People will work with a subject until the subject has a memory. The memory is completely fictional, but they have it.
In the most recent instance of this, I happen to know one of the accused, or rather I should say I happened to have known the accused, although not personally and not well. The accused is deceased. I don't believe the accusations against him at all. What I do believe, however, is that the person had a peculiar personality and had, as a sort of cause, a certain then demised demographic. The demographic has become a cause celebre since then, which has caused the expressed public view to shift on the demographic, Frankly, that has completely suppressed any ability to look into the cause and origin of the condition, and up until a Supreme Court opinion last week, even caused states to basically ban looking into it. What was once regarded as hopelessly weird and disgusting is to now be celebrated. The person I knew backed the demographic when it was regarded as weird and disgusting, which is inevitably going to cause members of the general public to suppose that you are part of it, if they have any ability to do so.
Indeed, a lot of people still find the demographic weird and disgusting. So it still comes up in that fashion in back room discussions. That keeps some people who fairly reliably are rumored to be members of it to closet themselves. Truth be known, as the condition is fairly openly accepted now, if the people who have it simply admitted it, probably nobody would care, save for one instance I can think of where a decade long public personality would have been shown to be a lie.
Accusing people of things is really easy. Accusing the dead of things is easier yet. American law, based on English common law, holds that the accused are assumed innocent until proven guilty, but that's not how the public acts. If somebody is accused of certain things, people believe it instantly. For that reason, those things are libelous per se if untrue, save for lawsuits, which are subject to an accusatory privilege.
Anyhow, I'm really tired of accusations that come decades after a supposed event. It'll sound harsh, but there really ought to be a put up or shut up policy for adults. Forty years later? Too freakin' bad, you are too late.
Rampaging ageism
I posted earlier this week about Chris Christie taking a shot at the Baby Boomers.
Good for him.
I'm noting this as this past week, after that post, brought up too boomer related items. One is the matter immediately above, brought by a boomer lawyer. Another is dealing with an upset boomer.
The last instance of this was affirmatively an example of somebody upset because younger people are trying to move on. I won't detail it, but I got a direct personal comment about it from the upset person. They've been in a prolonged fight with a Gen Xer, who has gotten over the fight, and the Boomer now fears that people are moving on, and around, the Boomer. The Boomer is correct.
Work, for most people, isn't a hobby. For some elderly people it actually is, as pathetic as that is. It doesn't matter if you have the sort of work that doesn't put you in the way of others, which very few people do. People who work by themselves, for themselves, basically have that position. Even then, if they work in an area of public trust, there comes a time when they need to stop.
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