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I noticed a new word the other day while browsing though the internet. Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Memo has devised a short hand for the term throwing someone under the bus, Marshall now writes underbus. I have to admit I like it. I knew immediately what he was referring to and it abbreviates the phrase into a new verb that can be conjugated effortlessly. Four stars for underbus.

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There is a growing number of people, generally Conservative, who are worried about a population bust. Here is the latest example from Noah Smith. Why won’t people have more babies? The earth, at some point in the distant future, won’t have enough people to keep the human species alive. They have tried giving money to potential parents to encourage them to populate. It doesn’t seem to have an effect. Greater support for the parents. Socialized countries with a wide array of parental support have some of the lowest birth rates in the world. It seems that women, when given the choice, will opt for fewer to none children. Why?Why? Why? How can this be happening?

  1. It is really difficult to get people to believe there is a crisis when I drive in bumper to bumper traffic, shop in crowded grocery stores, and can never find a parking spaces. My life experience would be a whole lot better with fewer people — everywhere I go and you are telling me we need more people. I find it difficult to believe there is a problem despite the scientific evidence that suggests otherwise (see global warming and extremely cold winters).
  2. Children are an 18 year and longer project. Child rearing is time consuming, expensive and, for some stretches of the little human’s life, thankless. Once you are committed to the project, you just can’t back out. I think it is to our credit that people are now looking at child rearing with the idea is this right for me. Or not.
  3. That many people are opting out suggests there is a problem with the role. If you can’t see yourself changing diapers, going to grade school Christmas shows, teaching your kid how to tie his shoes are how to drive, witnessing tantrums and adolescence, and, oh yes, paying $100,000 plus for a college education then you absolutely should opt out. Isn’t that what people have been saying for years – don’t have kids if you don’t want to take care of them. You can’t very well complain when people are looking at the role and saying, you know I just don’t think that is for me. Parenting isn’t for everyone.
  4. The old historical model of women having lots and lots of babies is based in a different time. There wasn’t reliable birth control. Women were restricted in their options. Realistically most men had equally restricted options. Farm labor was the “choice” far large swaths of the human race for most of our species existence. This doesn’t mean people liked these options, they just didn’t have another choice. In the modern world, people have many more choices. Isn’t that the way we want things to be?
  5. Right now there are 8 billion people on earth. I think more people might step up to reproduce if they actually believed the future of the human race depended upon it. Right now, for most of us, it doesn’t appear to be that way. I find it difficult to believe that a much smaller group of humans, thousands of years back, were able to grow a species to this number but if we drop below a billion people, the human race is doomed to extinction. Computer models are all well in good but the truth is they are often wrong.

I don’t know what the solution to this “problem” is but I fear that it might involve forcing women to have babies they don’t want to have and don’t want to raise. All for the sake of keeping the human race going. I know this is disappointing, but maybe the human race has run its course. If people don’t want to reproduce anymore then maybe the jig is up. It says a lot about a species when people no longer want to participate in one of the basic biological function that keeps the species running. All good things must come to an end.

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The worst part of Donald Trump’s march through history is that he has gotten exactly what he wanted from us. He talks and we pay attention to him. He can call a press conference and it will be packed with reporters. The whole world is hanging on his every word.

He doesn’t care if people hate him. He doesn’t care if people point out his lies. The point is people are talking about him. HIM. Donald J. Trump. He is impossible to ignore. I tried. Honestly, I did but he is the fucking president of the United States. How do you ignore him? Particularly someone so adroit at enraging people.

The best thing we could have done would have been to ignore him. But no, we paid attention and now we are stuck talking about him. When people talk about this point in history, they will be talking about Donald Trump, the reaction to Trump, and the damage Trump did to global relations. Exactly what he wanted.

Hate him, impeach him, arrest him. It doesn’t matter that he has low poll ratings because we are talking about him. The press will ask him to respond to anything that happens because he knows how to sell papers. The press will relay any of his thoughts no matter how ludicrous and his opponents will respond and on and on we go.

This man with such meager talents won the most powerful position in the world. Voted in by his fellow citizens. Then he managed to use this lofty position, despite all of his stupidity and malice, to force people to pay attention to him. What more could a megalomaniac want? And we fell into his trap — hook, line and sinker.

Now we are stuck talking about him for the rest of history.

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I have reached the age where I realize that my body just isn’t going to get any better. As someone who has been exercising regularly since I was in my early 20’s, it has come as bit of a shock. My idea for exercising was eventually I would get it right — the perfect body. And, at some point, I whipped it into pretty good if imperfect shape. But not any more.

For the past 20 years, I have resigned myself to maintenance. Just keep the old boy presentable. But,in the past few years, it has dawned on me that even maintenance is no longer possible. The hairline keeps receding, what is left is grey. The stomach which I kept comfortably around a 34 inch waist simply won’t return. I’ve tried. I stopped running because when you run, you fall occasionally, the falls just took it out of me and I worried that the next fall would cause broken bones instead of scrapped knees.

More distressing is I have had to watch what I eat. For most of my life, I have been on the skinny side. Indeed, when I was an adolescent I could stuff myself to the point of sickness and not gain a pound. No more. Just a casual glance at a chocolate chip cookie can drive my weight higher.

I surrender. I donated all the 34 inch waist pants to the more in shape out there. I will try to maintain the 36 inch waist as long as possible but once the amount of work and diet I have to put into keeping a 36 inch waist exceeds the pleasure I have in living, well, the 36 inch waist trousers are gone as well.

It is both sad and liberating to feel this way. Sad that my body has seen its best days. Liberating in that I can focus on enjoying my life without guilt because no matter what I do to make my body better looking it is never going to make me better looking than the average 20 year old after gorging on pizza and beer. So I might as well enjoy the pizza and beer.

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I saw the following post from Stephen Green on Instapundit, a Conservative/Libertarian Blog. A man asking why do women who write disparaging headlines about conservatives “always” look like this (see woman in circle). When you are reduced to commenting about somebody’s looks, it says an awful lot about your argument. You don’t have one. Scott Adams did make racist’s comments and lost most of the distribution for his highly successful cartoon. Disgraced seems like the appropriate word here. But then Green wasn’t saying there was anything wrong with the headline he was going after the woman’s looks.

Or was he? Green is just coy enough in his words to be able to shrug his shoulders and say you were the one assuming I was making a negative comment about the woman’s looks. I didn’t say there was anything wrong with the woman’s looks. I was just saying why do they always look like this and posting her picture for you to see. What an asshole.

I would prefer to link directly to the post but Instapundit doesn’t give me the ability to this. You will find this on the Instapundit blog for January 13 posts made after 2:40PM.

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I googled the percentage of voters in 2024 that thought they were voting for the lesser of two evils. I was astounded to learn that 47% of voters felt this way. This information should raise red flags for both parties but, since I vote Democratic, it should particularly alarm Democrats because, given this bad choice between a corrupt babbling idiot and a rather tame party hack, a lot of people choose the idiot.

More people distrust the Democratic Party than Trump. There is this assumption among liberals that Trump is somehow tricking good people into voting for him. I purpose an alternate vision that people know Trump is corrupt, a liar and an idiot but they are voting for him anyway because the Democrats scare them more. This means the problem isn’t Trump but the Democratic Party. The question, then, should be why are people choosing Trump as the lesser evil?

This is also why attacking the Trump voters is counterproductive. Notice I said Trump voter not Trump. The avid Trump voter is a lost cause but the lesser-of-two-evil Trump voter is not. When you call Trump voters racists, you are also potentially ceding the lesser-of-two-evil Trump voter. Yes some Trump voters are racists but some are not. if you are trying to change minds — calling someone names really is a lousy way to do it.

It reduces the Democrats strategy to making the Republican candidate so fucking unpopular that lesser-of-two-evil voters chose the Democrats as the lesser evil. This is hardly a ringing endorsement of a future Democratic Administration. It also explains why the Byzantine political processes that govern American processes so easily thwarts change. Nobody is exactly sold on the change. Paralysis is a better option than initiating drastic change that will take the country who knows where. People unhappily vote Democratic while also understanding that the filibuster will prevent any big changes from happening.

The Democrats need to win voters in a variety of states other than New York and California. Whenever I talk to Bernie Sanders fans I catch this disconnect with the rest of the country. If you say that words like Socialism don’t translate well in the American heartland, their answer is this isn’t a problem when they listen to Bernie and hear what he actually is saying, they will change their minds.

Well, Bernie ran for Democratic Party nomination twice among the most liberal voters in America. If he can’t win the nomination of the more liberal party what makes people think he can win with more conservative voters in November. This is the whole point of primary elections — testing for the strongest candidates for your party. Sanders has failed this test twice.

I wish people like Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez all the luck in the world. I truly want them to succeed but the idea that they are the answer for the Democrats has yet to be proven outside of New York City and, let’s face it, the typical New Yorker hardly represents middle America. Let’s do some more testing before we place our markers on the wrong bet.

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Greenland, not too long ago, was a hunk of ice that few people cared about. But then Greenland started to melt making it more feasible to exploit its natural resources and making the waterways surrounding the country more navigable. So now Trump wants it.

So even though Trump doesn’t believe in Global Warming, he wants to take advantage of the destruction Global Warming is causing. On one hand, nothing needs to be done to slow Global Warming because it isn’t happening and, even if it was, it has nothing to do with human activity. On the other hand, this vast hunk of ice that covers Greenland is disappearing, I guess for no particular reasoning, and Trump wants in on the action.

The contradictions here are mind boggling.

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The city of San Diego has moved from free trash service to paid trash service. This wording is a bit of a mystery as trash service was never free — it was included in our taxes. But never mind. Semantics.

Part of this process was to replace the old black trash bins with the new grey ones. This is necessary, or so we are told, in order to know how to bill customers. Environmental Services will pick up the chipped grey bins and have stopped collecting trash in the old black bins. So the thousands of black bins are no trash and being, I suppose, tossed into a trash land fill. This sounds both environmentally and economically wasteful. Perfectly good bins are now trash because the city wants to track who should have their trash picked up via the new user charge. Instead of the much more efficient system of picking up all the black trash bins on the street because everyone is a tax payer.

In order to put this new process into action, the city is confiscating the old black bins and replacing them with the new grey bins. Except we didn’t get the new grey ones, our old black ones, however, were confiscated. This leaves the question of where are we suppose to dispose of our trash.

The city, ever willing to help, has a customer support number for just such a problem. A quick call and all will be resolved. Right. This would work, I suppose, if there was anyone answering the phone. Bob tried one afternoon and after a hour plus of waiting gave up. He did manage to get in after about 40 minutes wait the next day.

So the customer service agent resolved the issue and new grey bins were delivered to our home. In your dreams. The customer service agent told Bob that their records showed that the grey bins were delivered to our home. Bob reminded the agent that he has spent a couple of hours waiting to talk to someone because there were no grey bins delivered and we have no place to dispose of our trash. She helpfully noted that Bob could go up and down the block checking the serial numbers on our neighbor’s trash bins to see who made off with our bins. That is right. We are supposed to go looking at our neighbors trash cans, find ours, and claim it. All hopefully without a confrontation with the neighbors.

Bob, of course, refused this choice and escalated the problem to a supervisor who he is hoping will return his call and get our grey bins delivered so we can dispose of our trash. Fingers crossed.

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I saw the following posts on Glen Reynolds Instapundit site where I learned that the capture of Maduro is not only a victory for the Trump Administration but also White men. Yes, White men are the only one’s capable of pulling off such competence needed for such a special military operation. No people of color or women involved at all so the only reason it came off without hitch was because White men were in charge of the project and White men performed all of the tasks.

This isn’t the least bit racist either because he is just pointing out the facts. There were only White men involved and the result was military success.

What a crock. There have been lots of successful military operations in the past 6,000 years. Some of them surely involved people of color.

And just in the spirit of balance, I would like to point out the many historical disasters initiated by White men — trench warfare and Viet Nam will suffice as gentle reminders that depending on White men sometimes leads to disaster.

This is, given the divisive nature of the Trump administration and criticism regarding their racial politics, oddly counter productive to what I would think is the goal of such an operation. This was a necessary action conducted for the nation and benefit all Americans. We are all in this together.

But if you are going out of your way to gloat about the performance of just White men than, yeah, great, go White men. The Venezuela Operation is all about White men.

On the other hand, if anything goes wrong later, and surely an undertaking of this size, something will go wrong. We can assign the blame for these mistakes on White men.

Sorry for the photographs. I couldn’t link to the post so I took pictures. If you want to go to Instapundit site and find these posts of January 4 around 5PM.

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I was talking with my brother about the Hitler/Trump comparison and I always end up in the same place. Trump just isn’t Hitler. Not even close. It is an impossible measurement. Hitler is one of the all time champion dictatorial monsters. Valid comparisons to Hitler are Stalin and Mao but Trump falls short in this competition. Way way short.

This doesn’t mean Trump isn’t dangerous, he just fails to match Hitler.

I think the Hitler comparison comes about because Hitler’s rule was so disastrous for the entire world. A lot of people died directly and indirectly during his rampage through history. He is the worst case scenario. Hitler is meant to scare people. But because Trump isn’t nearly as bad as Hitler the comparison fails to accomplish this task and might even be counter productive.

The danger of this comparison is that people will judge the comparison as faulty and dismiss the argument.

The real problem, as my brother pointed out, is that Trump is crossing lines that are intolerable in democracy. He is arresting people and taking over countries with very thin pretexts. He is condemning people to death without trial. He thinks the president can do anything he wants. He is no longer playing by the rules of American democracy so when is it all right for people who disagree with him to stop playing by those rules.

This is a much more difficult proposition and one we need to be very careful about. Political violence is terrible because once it starts, all bets are off. Once the bodies pile up, things get pretty bloody awfully fast. I, personally, would like to avoid that if at all possible. I may be wrong but I still think we aren’t at a point to stop playing by the rules.