In the Daily Mail Morgan Phillips quotes James Carville as hammering home a couple of points I have been making for some time. While Democrats are running primarily on abortion, that’s not a strategy that’s likely to work. Here’s the telling quote:

Democratic strategist and Clinton advisor James Carville is warning his party against laser-focus on abortion in the run-up to the November midterm elections.

‘A lot of these consultants think if all we do is run abortion spots that will win for us. I don’t think so,’ the famed strategist told the Associated Press. ‘It’s a good issue. But if you just sit there and they’re pummeling you on crime and pummeling you on the cost of living, you’ve got to be more aggressive than just yelling abortion every other word.’

IMO Democratic strategists are gravely overestimating the number of voters whom the issue will get to the polls. We’re not the only ones who think so. So does Bernie Sanders:

In my view, while the abortion issue must remain on the front burner, it would be political malpractice for Democrats to ignore the state of the economy and allow Republican lies and distortions to go unanswered.

What I’m seeing here in Illinois is 20 Democratic political spots in which abortion is the focus to each spot in which something else is the focus. That’s true regardless of the office for which the candidate is running: legislators, states attorneys, judges, anything.

Hearkening back to a point I made earlier, I wonder if they realize that strategy increases their vulnerability to events. If inflation gets significantly worse, if crime gets worse, if the price of gas goes back up, they will look woefully out of touch.

At The Daily Sceptic Will Jones asks an interesting question, “Why Did the Coronavirus Suddenly Cause Thousands of Deaths in Spring 2020 When it Had Been Hanging Around Quietly All Winter?”. For those who find the piece too long to read, he basically makes a two points. SARS-CoV-2 had been circulating since no later than October 2019:

So the evidence all points to a picture of SARS-CoV-2 being widespread in the winter of 2019-20 but not being the dominant virus, circulating at a low level, before exploding into a large outbreak – and getting into the care homes – in the spring. It was thus this explosion in spread that primarily caused the explosion in deaths (though some were caused by poor treatment protocols of course, and a sizeable number of care home deaths were due to mistreatment of residents). The deadliness of the virus didn’t change a great deal; the IFR didn’t suddenly leap up; it’s just that suddenly many more people were catching it and spreading it, and it was getting into many more care homes. (Discharging hundreds of infectious hospital patients into care homes to free up beds won’t have helped with this of course.)

but it took quite a while for the number of deaths to ramp up.

I think he substantiates his first point pretty will but I don’t find his second point particularly convincing. I suspect that’s an illusion caused by exponential growth.

As far as I can tell there’s one conclusion that should be drawn from that—the policy responses aimed at containing the spread of the disease couldn’t have worked by the time they were put in place and with how porous they were. They would need to have been put in place almost six months earlier than they were and, for various reasons, that information was just not available then. File that under “lessons learned”.

Angela Lansbury has died. From Variety:

Actress Angela Lansbury, whose 75-year career encompassed triumphs on the big screen, in musical theater and on television, died at her Los Angeles home on Tuesday, her family announced in a statement obtained by Variety. She was 96 — five days shy of her 97th birthday.

Nominated for three Oscars, she won seven Tony Awards and holds the record for Emmy actress nods with 12 for her role on “Murder, She Wrote.”

For those of you who only know of Angela Lansbury from Murder She Wrote or as a singing teapot, she was a Hollywood star since her first movie appearance at age 19. That was in 1944 in Gaslight. In it she played the “bad girl”, one of a series of femmes fatales she portrayed in her early days in movies.

Take a gander at her in 1946’s The Harvey Girls. She’s playing a dancehall girl and she was quite beautiful. It’s a shame they didn’t let her sing—she had a pretty fair singing voice as she demonstrated in years on Broadway. Among her memorable roles there were the title role in Mame and Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd.

The last role I’ll mention was as Laurence Harvey’s mother in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), despite being just a few years older than Harvey. It wasn’t that she had aged but that she had the presence, the poise to carry the role off. She carried it off well enough that her performance garnerd an Academy Award nomination (she’d already won one Academy Award for Gaslight).

I mourn her passing but celebrate her many contributions. She was one of the last surviving bona fide stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood. It’s a shame her performance as Mame wasn’t captured on film (Lucille Ball championed making the movie—clearly, she wanted the role).

Is it just me or are the opinion pages incredibly arid these days? Practically everything is a partisan tract, far removed from reality, little more than slogans strung together.

Today would have been my dad’s 110^th birthday. He lived less than half that long. What he might have accomplished with a few additional years!

I’ve written quite a bit about him over the years. Here’s something I don’t think I’ve written. I mentioned that after he graduated from law school jobs were scarce so, instead of looking for a job, he went to Europe for a year. How he afforded it is a story in itself.

As he traveled he collected his thoughts in a journal. I had known about the last journal of his trip since I was a youngster but it wasn’t until my mom died and I was going through the contents of the family home and cataloguing them that I learned that all of the journals were there. When he filled each journal he mailed it to his mom and, after his mom died (I was just a baby then), he dumped the journals into a box and, ultimately, the box made its way to the rafters of our garage where it sat untouched over a period of 40 years.

Now I have all of the journals here. They’re in horrible condition but I have them. I really need to go through them, read them, and figure out a way of preserving them.

There must be as many predictions of the outcome of the 2022 midterm elections as there are predictors. Some think the Democrats will retain control of both houses of Congress, some think that the Republicans will take control of both houses, some think the Democrats will hold the Senate but lose the House, and every other imaginable permutation. Although it’s just about four weeks until the election, I think it’s too early to tell and the reason it’s too early should make everyone feel uneasy.

I think the outcome is all but completely dependent on events, events over which no political party or candidate have much influence at this point. Inflation. Crime. The prices of oil. The war in Ukraine. The situation in the Middle East. The situation in the Far East. A litany of countries including all of those mentioned in my earlier post.

And those are just the known unknowns. There are also the unknown unknowns. All of these events are influential in any election but I think events will shape this one more than any other of my recollection.

The only thing I can say for sure is that I won’t vote for any Illinois legislator or official who supports the SAFE-T Act. With 100 of 102 county states attorneys opposed to it, it’s obvious that regardless of what you may think of cash bail, the law is seriously flawed. Onw the things that bugs me about it is that it’s so racist. It will almost certainly increase violent crime in black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Illinois pols should do the courageous thing and fix it before the election rather than waiting until they’re safely re-elected. My previous state representative voted against it; my present state senator voted for it which leads me to the conclusion that he’s an idiot. His campaign spots provide supporting evidence.

As the latest entry in the Predator what we’re now calling “franchise”, Prey is mildly entertaining. It does have some twists that set it apart.

It is a prequel and takes place in 1719, probably in what will become Wyoming primarily among the Comanche people. Like practically all film treatments of Native American life, it is highly romanticized. For me that was actually the most entertaining part of the movie—the detailed, close-up, reverent look at late Neolithic culture.

It was also what was most distracting to me. I don’t believe there were any actual Comanche in the cast. To my eye they appeared to be heavily Europeanized people from the Southwest or the Northeast. Couldn’t the director have gone to Oklahoma where, to the best of my knowledge, most Comanche can be found today for casting? In for a penny in for a pound it seems to me. I don’t see a great deal of difference between the cast they used and casting Italians, Greeks, and Jews as they did in the 40s and 50s. Note to Hollywood: Native American peoples look as different from one another as Swedes to from Greeks. Saying “Native American” is like saying “European”.

Among the Native Americans of the plains, the young woman who played the lead was old enough to have been married and had a couple of kids rather than being off hunting. Willing suspension of disbelief I guess.

One last point. I believe that by 1719 the horse had become an important part of the Comanche way of life. You would not have known it from this picture. Maybe it’s supposed to be a mythologized version of how the Comanche got horses. Again to the best of my knowledge the Comanche were the foremost horse breeders and handlers among Native American peoples.

I recommend seeing it. It’s predictable but pretty good fun.

We presently face multiple threats. Consider:

From Russian President Vladimir Putin’s remarks on September 30:

We will defend our land with all the forces and resources we have, and we will do everything we can to ensure the safety of our people.

and from President Joe Biden’s remarks on October 7:

“First time since the Cuban missile crisis, we have a direct threat of the use (of a) nuclear weapon if in fact things continue down the path they are going,” Biden warned during remarks at a Democratic fundraiser in New York where he was introduced by James Murdoch, the youngest son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, according to the pool report.

He added: “I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily (use) a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon.”

What presently presents the greatest threat of nuclear war?

1. Russia’s use of tactical nuclear weapons in its war against Ukraine
2. Kim Jong Un attacking South Korea
3. Iran attacking Israel
4. A preemptive strike by Israel against Iran
5. China attacking Taiwan
6. India attacking Pakistan or vice versa (update)

My own view is that there is presently a substantial threat of Russia, the U. S., or both backing themselves into a nuclear conflict.

On Tuesday we boarded the dogs. On Wednesday we flew to California on urgent personal business. On Thursday we discharged our personal obligations. Yesterday I flew back to Chicago. Today I picked up the dogs from the kennel and have been tending them. They were quite glad to see me.

In case you’ve been wondering where I have been. Normal programming should resume tomorrow.