The New People

“Some party hack decreed that the people
had lost the government's confidence
and could only regain it with redoubled effort.
If that is the case, would it not be be simpler,
If the government simply dissolved the people
And elected another?”

― Bertolt Brecht

There is a similar quote by Kafka, I think, to the effect that the government had lost confidence in the people and decided to convene a new one. 

Anyway, I think something along these lines is going on with the border. Our ruling class has decided that the American people just don't cut it anymore and so are in the process of trying to replace them through immigration. They have already succeeded in California and seek to export their success there to the rest of the country. The question is, are we going to let them? 

I disagree with conservatives who call the Biden administration 'incompetent'. They are succeeding quite nicely in their goal of replacing the American people with a people more dependent and pliable, less jealous of their rights and more docile. 

Be Like Europe

Be like Europe, Practice Federalism!

If you want to see what America would be like if you devolve more power to the states, look no further than Europe. 

Both America and Europe have roughly similar populations and most European countries are closer in size to the states than the United States as a whole. Even the most populous country in Europe, Germany, is only 83 million which, though quite large, is still closer to the population of our largest state, California at 39 million, than it is to our country as a whole, 330 million. 

The countries that we are most often asked to model ourselves after are even smaller. 

The proper way to make comparisons with Europe is as a whole. America as a whole should be compared to Europe as a whole. America has 50 states, Europe has 43 (I took Russia out in light of recent event). United States' states are generally smaller but comparable in size. If our largest state, California, were in Europe it would be the 6th largest in Europe, roughly the size of Poland. If our smallest state, Wyoming at 600 thousand, were in Europe it would be 8th from the bottom, larger than Malta but smaller than Luxembourg. 

Pfizer vaccines not shown to be safe

One thing the story highlights is that the 'independent' safety evaluators were not so independent. Why don't we do what the Ancient Greeks did when faced with a politically contentious process--let foreigners do it for us? The ancient Greek city states often contracted out the work of designing a constitutions to non-citizens. Why don't we do the same with drug safety decisions? 

We could just use the recommendations of foreign countries like Germany, Japan, or Israel. They can't be more corrupt than our bureaucracies. And we would save a lot of money. All these massive domestic bureaucracies produce is a list of things approved and not approved. The list is available publicly. Just use their list. It's free. 

What do we gain from having it done domestically? We can haul them before Congress and threaten to cut their funding, which (the cutting) never ends up happening. By doing away with the domestic bureaucracies we could fire our bureaucrats and save billions of dollars along with thousands of lives. 

 The old man and the mountain

This is a fable in Chinese where an old man, annoyed by having to walk round a mountain to get to his fields, resolves to remove the mountain. A old wise man (whom I recall being portrayed as a confusion scholar, though I cannot find confirmation of it now) tells him he is foolish. The old man reposts that the wise man in foolish, because he will have sons who will in turn have sons who will continue his work, while the mountain has no way to get bigger. And so, victory over the mountain is only a matter of time. 

It is kind of like Pascal's wager applied to generational projects. Any probability of God existing multiplied by the infinite good of eternal life is a proper bargain. So any project, multiplied by the infinite power of generational effort, is doable. 

Sometimes you read Western foreign policy experts say that we look 5 years out while the Chinese have a time horizon of 10 or 20 years. They are clueless.  

 The Colorado shooter turns out to be non-binary, using "they-them" pronouns. Isn't that a bit like if a shooting were attributed white supremacist hatred of black people, and then finding out the shooter was black? Isn't this news? 

 There is someone blowing their horn. They are picking someone up. They are sitting in their car outside the house of the person they are going to pick up and blowing their horn. I have never experienced this in Ohio. Maybe a teenager will give a quick toot, I have seen it in movies and may have experienced it in real life but cannot recall now, but it was certainly not habitual. Here, in Chicago, it is the customary method of picking someone up. It is just how one does it. It is 7:30 in the morning and it has been going on 20 minutes and it happens quite frequently. 

This is not an American custom. It is a foreign custom. Our elites who have decided that it is our duty to let all of these foreigners in don't have to live with them. The immigrants and their, at times, noxious customs, don't settle in the neighborhoods where the people who make the decisions live. They make the decision, we bear the costs. It makes me angry. And the worst thing is that if I complain about it these complaints will be met with the retort, "shut up, racist." I don't mind being called a curmudgeon or a grouchy old man. But I do not like being called a racist. 

You ask me how I can vote for Trump. It is because someone is blowing their horn at 7:30 in the morning. 

 The ten books from political science that non-political scientist should read: a personal list

Reinhard Benedict, Imaginary Communities

James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

Jay, Hamilton, and Madison, The Federalist Papers

Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 1

George Washington Plunkett and William L. Roidon, Plunkett of Tammy Hall

Charles S. Murray, On Democracy

George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950 

EE Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People

 The thing about this January 6th, election deniers, controversy is that it all takes place without discussion of policy proposals. Most of the time when we have a controversy it is what to do about a problem. This is a controversy about a belief. That makes the controversy arid and problematic. 

The reals question about election integrity is what to do about it, and it is here that the arguments of the left and the democrats fall down because all that these terrible election deniers propose to do is have voting in person, with a photo id, and with a paper trail. Those may be good or bad proposals but it is hard to see how they make elections more insecure.