When governing (effectively)................

 

Focusing on basics, and on developing a sense of community, is far more effective than emphasizing partisan politics.

-Joel Kotkin, from this substack effort

Hiding behind a polarizing man...........

 

There are at least two, each complicated, layers to this story. The first is about decades of misguided bipartisan policy on research into dangerous viruses. The second is about how the U.S. government and academia have communicated the relationship between this strategy and the origin of the virus from 2020 onward. The first may have had disastrous consequences for global health security; the second has contributed to eroding trust in American democracy.

-as culled from this The FreePress issue

1936.....................

   

     The kind of campaign Huey envisioned would require tremendous amounts of money.  Be he believed that he would have ample resources to conduct it, for in addition to his own Louisiana revenues, he had been promised help from an unexpected quarter.  Representatives of some of the biggest corporation and banks in the country came to him secretly and pledged huge contributions, up to two million dollars or even more if he would remove Roosevelt from the White House.  He was astonished at the depth of their hatred for the President and reminded one man that he was more radical than Roosevelt.  "We're not for you either," the man spat out.  "Just give me the money," Huey said amiably, probably reflecting that these conservatives were no smarter than the ones in Louisiana.

     The threat of Huey's third party alarmed the Roosevelt high command.  Jim Farley caused a secret poll to be taken of Huey's national strength.  The result was disquieting.

-T. Harry Williams, Huey Long

differences......................

 

     more memes here

politics......................

The Democratic Party no longer has a knack for its business, which supposedly is politics. In America, this means cobbling together majority coalitions from a politically and culturally diverse continental nation. The second proposition is that the nation cannot have just one healthy party. When one welcomes contamination by the extremism and stupidity on its side of the spectrum, the other, relishing the collapse of standards, does likewise.

-George Will, as excerpted here

ought to be adjusted.................

 

Throughout, however, Burke demonstrates his ability to combine specific details with Olympian generalization.  Thus a discussion of imports from Jamica and the malign effects of the Stamp Act yields the timeless Burkean insight that 'politics ought to be adjusted, not to human reasonings, but to human nature; of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part.'

-Jesse Norman, Edmund Burke: The First Conservative

unraveling.................

 

     Our unraveling continues, even accelerates.  Political institutions and geopolitical norms are fracturing.  Far-right and nationalist movements are ascendant.  Democracies around the world look vulnerable; the sturdy-seeming institutional bulwarks that loomed solemnly around them now sag under pressure like rotten wood.  There is no more staggering an indicator of the profound misoperation of American society that its decision in 2024 to return Donald Trump to the office of the presidency.  It is madness to have put him there, and is our madness that keeps us from perceiving—collectively—the absurdity and destructiveness of our choice.   But the world as a whole is sheathed in confusion.  In all likelihood, the postwar era of liberal hegemony is ending, and it is honestly difficult to say why.  In America and around the world, we look at each other bewildered, unable to comprehend the reality that others perceive or to fathom their motivations.

-Ryan Avent, In Good Faith: How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies

Somewhere on my journeys through the Intertunnel I found a recommendation for this book, so I bought it.  Enjoyed the first three pages, then came to the above paragraph.  All I can say is that Avent needs to get out more.   A few stray thoughts:  first, one of the problems with our elections is that the choice is binary.  Donald Trump or Kamala Harris was our choice in 2024.  Reasonable people may disagree, but it was certainly not madness, or far-right, to prefer Trump over Harris.  A majority of the country made that choice.  Second, Avent finds it difficult to understand why the "postwar era of liberal hegemony is ending".  Maybe, in good faith, he should take a closer look at the quality and character of those people passing as "elites" in government, media, and in our world-at-large these days.  Open your eyes, Ryan.  Anyway, if the quality of thinking does not improve, I will not be finishing this book.

Good luck with that.................

 

If Mamdani wants his affordability agenda to be more than a redistribution of this shrinking pie, he will need to recharge the private-sector engines of upward mobility. He can do that by confronting the occupational licensing and business regulations, land-use restrictions, and cost drivers that have made middle-class life in New York so hard to sustain.

-Michael Dresdale, from this essay

Almost seventy years ago.................

 

To create today is to create dangerously.   Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.  Hence the question is not to find out if this is or is not prejudicial to art.  The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies (how many churches, what solitude!), the strange liberty of creation is possible.

-Albert Camus, from this 1957 lecture

Meanwhile, in Great Britain in 1781.....

     Reckoned by talent alone, Burke should have had a Cabinet position himself.  Yet he lost out.  He was a commoner, indeed and Irish novus homo, at a time when Cabinets were small and almost invariably drawn from the peerage; and there may have been some taint from the well-known financial speculations of Will Burke and Richard Burke.  But there wer perhaps two other important reasons in the background.  Burke's relationship with Rockingham had faded somewhat, and the long years of often futile opposition had taken a toll on his public character.  He was not merely passionate and outspoken but becoming tougher, somewhat embittered, and prone to rant.  Over time he would acquire the nickname of 'the Dinner Bell', able to clear the Commons benches when he rose to speak.  Colleagues who had admired him increasingly saw him as a bore . . . uncollegial . . . unsteady . . . too independent-minded . . . not someone to have round the Cabinet table.  It cannot have helped either side that he was so often right.

-Jesse Norman,  Edmund Burke: The First Conservative

Not sure whether to laugh or cry.......

 

In the meantime, Warsh, as official chairman, could try to speed Powell’s departure by making his life at the Fed uncomfortable: maybe take away his parking space and staff plus put his office in the basement.  But the decision to leave would still be Powell’s until January 2028.   

Based on Powell’s statements about trying to protect Fed “independence” from politics, preventing Trump from getting a board majority may be an ulterior motive for Powell to stay, which means the policy shifts supported by Warsh could be on the back burner for some time to come.

-Brian Wesbury, from here

soccer does matter.............

 

Successes allow leaders to strut and pontificate, to make grand speeches about the symbolic ramifications of victory.  Soccer has, at least if claims made in the moment of glory are to be believed, put Uruguay on the map, reintegrated postwar West Germany into the global community, and ended racism in France.  That's almost entirely nonsense, of course, but it doesn't mean that the assertions are not revealing.  And soccer does matter, does offer insights, often unconscious, into the desires and doubts of a culture, never more so than in the quadrennial snapshot offered by the World Cup.

-Jonathan Wilson, The Power and The Glory:  The History of the World Cup

He seems a bit testy....................

 

............about how things are going in California:

As the descent accelerates, the promises of more free shit accelerate. Eventually we’ll all be living in a muddy hole in the ground, and the political debates for state office will be about eating daily free lobster and filet mignon from the government. “Buddy, I’ll fill that muddy hole in the ground where you live with the biggest free diamonds you’re ever seen.” They’re out of money, they’re out of sanity, they’re out of logic, and they’re out of honesty. Why, boys, out in Californee, they go lakes full of hot stew, and the rivers flow with the finest whiskey.

The combination of getting less and being promised more seems to be inevitable, making politics an exercise in filling psychological holes. You’ll go to bed hungry, but debates will be a buffet. Hobos dream big.

a prisoner of words..............

 

Subject to these reservations, we must hope for a common rallying.  But first our Leftist intellectuals, who have swallowed so many insults and may well have to begin doing so again, would have to undertake a critique of the reasonings and ideologies to which they have hitherto subscribed, which have wreaked the havoc they have seen in our most recent history.  That will be the hardest thing.  We must admit that today conformity is on the Left.  To be sure, the Right is not brilliant.  But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with the truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws.  The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty.  Until such an effort at re-examination is well underway, any rallying will be useless and even harmful.

-Albert Camus, from his 1957 essay, "Socialism of the Gallows", found in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

Staying awake at night..........................

 

............................with Jared Dillion:

There is a chart that gets passed around from time to time which is a chart of the S&P 500 going up annotated with all the reasons why it might go down over the last 40 years or whatever, the most recent example being the Iran War. The price of oil goes up 50%? Fuck you, stocks are going up anyway. That has been our experience, pretty much, for most of the last 20 years. Every worry, every pullback has been a buying opportunity.

Now, it doesn’t take a galaxy brain to figure out that this dynamic might not continue indefinitely. 

-------------------------

We just elected large-C Communist mayors in Seattle and New York. The Democrats are moving to the far left faster than you can say Hegelian dialectic. It seems as though the stakes are higher for each successive election, and it says something when Gavin Newsom is probably your most centrist candidate. Newsom would have been far to the left of Carter in the 1970s. But here we are, and the polarization is a freight train coming through your living room. 

Checking in with Martin Gurri...............

 Already, the global chessboard looks unrecognizable.

And if the winners in this great reshuffling are not yet known, it’s easy to identify the losers.

That would be the national and transnational grandees who had pictured themselves as pillars of a “rules-based world order.”

These are elite types who worship at the altar of process: Every crisis must be papered over with consultations, negotiations and proclamations, until the public’s attention wanders and the trouble is decently shoved offstage.

Trump’s rage for change, for an actual outcome, feels to them threatening and immoral — a trampling on the proprieties.

In the rules-based world order, the point isn’t to defuse lethal situations like a hostile fanatical regime acquiring nuclear bombs — it’s to play-act at doing so, while adroitly turning present difficulties into someone else’s nightmare in the future.

-as culled from this effort

The best possible way to.............................

 

......................................argue about politics.

perceptions awry................

 

Captured by a blend of multiculturalism and white guilt that has infected so many at the highest levels, their leaders never perceived that importing large numbers of military-age single men from nations that regard women as chattel and freedom of expression as a joke might not be a wise plan, especially over the long-term.

-Michael Wade, from this substack

On Europe and ..........................

 

.................................the U. S. of A:

You do not spend 276 years obsessing over something you merely dislike. That is the behaviour of someone working through a deeper anxiety.

Every once in a while............

 

...........................only Martin Gurri will do:

Social relations as they actually exist, and democratic politics as they are actually practiced, are repudiated. Everyone is against, but few can say what they stand for. The radical Left, which wields substantial influence within major institutions, loathes nearly every aspect of Western civilization—its history, its economic system, its racial and sexual norms—and would happily demolish the entire edifice. The populist Right is eager to smash whatever regions or organizations that the Left controls, with little regard for the consequences. And the institutional elites, who might be expected to defend the status quo, now feel compelled to strike insurgent poses and denounce the very structures that they oversee.

----------------------

Populism is a political by-product of the post-truth condition. Once presidents and TikTokers stand on the same plane of plausibility, with only the unruly public to choose between them, the temple of establishment authority is destined to tumble like the walls of Jericho. Sensing this, elites have succumbed to a reactionary panic—they want their twentieth century back. The first article of faith in “our democracy” is that the public must be pushed out of the commanding heights of the information sphere and that the power to construct a single, universal reality should return to those deemed properly trained for the task: the expert, the scientist, the politician, the journalist, the bureaucrat.