Month: July 2021

When I was growing up, the MSM—effectively, the owners and operators of a handful of newspapers, TV networks, periodicals, and movie studios—decided what was and wasn’t worthy of public discussion, and what was and wasn’t respectable opinion. It was censorship of a sort, but it gave everyone a reasonable degree of choice, and it wasn’t enforced by the government. It kept a diverse nation from flying apart, but it wasn’t oppressive. In short, it worked.

Today’s landscape is very different. The MSM have given way to the lawless internet. Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want the job, partly because it costs him money, and partly because he doubts his legitimacy as an unelected national censor. Lots of other people doubt it, too.

This situation is unsustainable. It will not last. The government is going to step in sooner or later; in fact, it is already happening in red states with ambitious governors. Unfortunately, that means the stakes in elections are going to get even higher, and the culture war is going to get even more vicious.

Elizabeth I barely survived a bout with smallpox in 1562. Based purely on genealogical principles, Mary Stuart would have been her successor. Would the Queen of Scots ever taken the English throne?

There are arguments both ways. Mary was viewed as a politique in 1562, she had a kingdom behind her, there was no single obvious Protestant candidate, and the Council would have been divided. The Mary Tudor precedent would have given her additional hope. On the other hand, unlike Mary Tudor, the Queen of Scots was a foreigner, and the leading English nobles would have been in no mood to repeat their experience with a Catholic Queen. They probably would have reached an agreement on a male Protestant candidate fairly quickly.

In the end, it probably would have come down to Mary’s willingness to provide guarantees that would have satisfied the Protestants. It would have been an unstable situation at best, and in the long run, as in Protestant Scotland, it could not have worked.

The numbers are clear and overwhelming: millions of deaths caused by the virus; none by vaccines. Nevertheless, about a hundred million Americans continue to refuse the vaccine, for reasons ranging from the spiteful and malicious to the merely stupid. So what do we do now?

In a nutshell, there are three choices:

1. Stick with the current program, which isn’t working. That results in countless new deaths. Almost all of these, at first, are unvaccinated people, but sooner or later, our inability to reach herd immunity leads to a new variant that infects vaccinated people, as well.
2. Make the incentive program even more attractive to the unvaccinated, and impose mask mandates on the entire population, which primarily means the vaccinated, as the unvaccinated will probably refuse to wear masks. This amounts to punishing the vaccinated to appease the unvaccinated; worse, there is no guarantee it would work, so the new regime would have to go on indefinitely—probably for years.
3. Permit state governments and employers to impose vaccine mandates. Strip anyone who refuses the vaccine of all government benefits. In other words, impose sanctions on people who are putting our lives and freedoms at risk.

Is this really a hard choice?

That’s Greatest of Today! It’s plenty good for me. You GOTO, girl!

If you are an English patriot, this is the nightmare scenario: Mary Tudor dies shortly after giving birth to a healthy son. The ensuing government is dominated by Philip and the Spaniards. A Protestant rebellion is crushed by Spanish troops. The Inquisition comes to England. The Dutch revolt is overcome with English assistance. England is now effectively a Spanish colony, and the Counter-Reformation is triumphant all over Europe.

It could have happened. What appears inevitable today is largely the product of luck.

As viewers of “The Crown” know, life amongst the royals involves a trade off—comfort, wealth, and status in exchange for the loss of freedom to live as you see fit. Inevitably, members of the family rebel and demand freedom, while attempting to retain the benefits of the deal. At that point, things get messy. Just ask Prince Harry.

The Simone Biles episode has some of the same characteristics. Biles could have relieved her stress by skipping the Olympic Trials, giving up all of her endorsement money, and declining the interviews in which she was repeatedly (and without objection from her) described as the GOAT. She didn’t do that. Instead, she took the money and then left her team and her country holding the bag.

Biles is trying to portray herself as another Naomi Osaka, but the circumstances are very different. Osaka was competing as an individual, not part of a national team that was relying on her. She had the right to back out. Biles did not.

I was complaining bitterly about the Biles hype machine days before the team final. Now the whole thing just makes me want to throw up.

In this scenario, Edward VI lives to a ripe old age and has a male heir. Mary and Elizabeth never reign; in fact, it is possible that Mary is executed at some point. The king pursues a more aggressively Protestant foreign policy than Elizabeth did. Relations with Parliament are somewhat less fraught, as there are no issues with the succession or religion. Catholicism withers, but does not die.

The real question with this counterfactual is whether Edward marries the Queen of Scots after the death of her French husband. The timing suggests not; Edward probably would have been married before that opportunity presented itself. England and Scotland would ultimately have been united, but in a different way.

You can see what they were thinking. With Bolt and Phelps gone, NBC needed a new face to promote the Olympics—and what better figure could there be than an apparently invincible black woman? It was PC America at its most cynical and relentless. Biles bought into it, too; she fully embraced the notion that she was the GOAT, and made millions promoting herself. The hype machine was in overdrive. It overwhelmed Biles, and the rest is history.

The worst is yet to come. Racists will go bonkers on social media. Woke people will argue, on the other hand, that she is a victim of an oppressive system that used her and spat her out. It will turn into a culture war issue.

The truth is that Biles is an accomplice to the crime, not a victim. The primary responsibility, however, rests with the people who created and ran the hype machine.

That’s the Anti-Vaxxer Party, of course. The answer is simple: the Reactionaries have become the predominant faction in the party, and they are faux libertarians, opposed to mandates from a government that doesn’t embrace their values. Refusing the vaccine is just the latest, and most egregious, of a series of actions they have taken that are against their material interests in order to stick it to the man.

The GOP needs their votes, so they will not condemn this kind of stupid and reckless behavior. As with the riot, however, acquiescing to the extreme right carries its own dangers. Those of us who took the vaccine are getting fed up, and we vote, too.

If Henry and Catherine of Aragon had succeeded in producing a healthy male heir, there obviously would have been no government-driven Reformation of any kind. As with the Arthur scenario, the key questions are whether the Protestants would have gained much of a foothold in the face of fierce official disapproval, and whether England would have assisted the Dutch rebels against Spain with a Catholic on the throne. In my opinion, the answer to the first question is clearly no, although it is unlikely that Protestantism would have been eliminated altogether. As to the second question, my best guess is also in the negative; aiding Calvinist rebels against a Catholic king would have been a bridge too far. England would have remained neutral, and the Dutch rebellion might have failed, with consequences we would still feel today.

Biden has an audacious plan to rebuild the American middle class through a combination of spending programs and tax increases on the wealthy. The idea is to revive the economy by increasing demand. But what happens if he can’t get his big taxing and spending bills through Congress? What does that mean for 2024?

He’s in better position than you think. While the revolution has failed, investors are happy, and inflation is not an issue. The Covid bill has provided significant benefits to workers which are now under threat from the GOP. The Republican nominee, whoever it is, offers nothing but benefit cuts, lower taxes for business, bathroom bills, and support for the January 6 rioters. That’s a winning hand for the Democrats.

By all accounts, Prince Arthur was very different than his boisterous, self-indulgent, charismatic younger brother Henry. How would English history have been different if he had not died prematurely?

There would have been no issue about the consummation of his marriage, to be sure. There would have been no government-driven Reformation, and fewer frivolous French wars. It is fair to assume that he would not have had a son with Catherine. This would have been less of an issue, however, because Henry would have been married to a French princess; their union probably would have produced male heirs. The Tudor line would consequently have continued uninterrupted after Arthur’s death in the 1540s.

England would have remained a completely independent Catholic country, with a foreign policy based on the maintenance of the balance of power. Wolsey would have been a much smaller figure, and no one would have heard of Cromwell. An institutional battle with Parliament was still on the horizon.

In short, the specifics would have been quite different, but the overall direction of English history would have been fairly similar.

It’s 1803. The American negotiators are in the White House, relaying Napoleon’s offer to sell Louisiana to President Trump. What will the great man say? He speaks;

I have to say—I admire this Napoleon guy. He may be short, but he gets things done. If he wants something, he just goes out and takes it. He reminds me of myself. He’s a man I can do business with.

But this is a terrible deal. Terrible. Louisiana is a s+—hole country. It’s full of Indians and buffalo and God knows what else. There’s no place for a decent golf course or a hotel. I know more about real estate than anyone alive, and I’m telling you, there’s no way I’m putting money in this deal.

Go back and tell the little guy that I have a different idea. I’m willing to license him to use the Trump brand for a million a year. He can go develop the property under my name. With his connections and my genius, we would be unstoppable!

And you thought the GOP always supported tax cuts! In yesterday’s NYT, Michael Strain of the AEI argued that tax cuts for low and middle income families should be avoided, because they would increase demand and cause inflation. This, as opposed to virtuous tax cuts for the wealthy, who always use the money to invest in new businesses and create jobs.

In reality, regressive tax cuts are just used by the wealthy to drive up asset prices, buy government securities, and build dollar stores, because we no longer have a middle class to purchase goods and services.

This is class warfare openly declared by the affluent—nothing more or less.

From the perspective of the Democrats, there are two reasons to have a comprehensive investigation of the riot: first, to identify the reasons for the lapses in security, and to fix them; and second, to develop facts that will cause the public to view large portions of the GOP as being complicit. The GOP leadership naturally opposes the latter; hence, their refusal to cooperate in the process.

But they cannot avoid it. If the Republicans boycott the proceedings and go on Fox every night to complain about how the system is rigged against them, they will only prove to everyone outside the base that they are, in fact, Trump’s accomplices, and a continuing danger to American liberal democracy.

That is exactly what I expect them to do. It will come back to bite them in some of the swing House districts next year.