Following up on my last post, I was reminded of an engineering meeting I participated in at a client’s site. The client was a large, Fortune 500 company and the meeting was a status meeting about a new product they were introducing. The product had been installed in a number of beta sites and, frankly, the results had been pretty disastrous. With various modifications and many sleepless nights we had remedied all of the problems as they arose but it was a grueling process.

The Director of Engineering summed up the situation like this: “What worries me is that these are the easy cases. Will the next installations be harder?”

Over the last century and a half or so, the U. S. has had several waves of immigrants. Prior to the American Civil War the wave was composed of the Irish and Germans, particularly Germans from the West Rhine and Westphalia. After the Civil War the wave was composed of more Germans and Scandinavians. Around the turn of the last century the wave of immigrants was composed of Eastern and Southern Europeans.

Our most recent wave of immigrants has mostly been composed of Mexicans, with some people from Central America and the Caribbean.

What I think should trouble us is the likelihood that the people who’ve come here over the last 150 years have been the easy cases—those who would fit in the best, who would be happiest here, who would accept the United States and be assimilated to it and us.

Unlike some I don’t think we should ban immigration or even immigration by Muslims or people from the Middle East or North Africa. I think there are plenty of likely candidates among those groups but we should limit ourselves to accepting the candidates most likely to prosper here. That would mean people with educations, people who are literate, people who speak English, and, especially, people who’ve helped us in the past.

Something to think about is that so far in the investigations of the Boston Marathon bombing something like 10% to 20% of the Chechen refugees who’ve settled here have been implicated in it in one way or another. They either perpetrated, participated in, or were accessories to it before or after the fact. That’s something that should really make us think.

I disagree with one particular in Heather Mac Donald’s polemic in City Journal on the pundit reactions to the mass murder in Manchester last week. Here’s the passage in question:

No, the terrorists will have failed if they can no longer slaughter children. They don’t care if a terror attack is met with candlelight vigils; they care if border restrictions and law enforcement make it impossible to destroy lives.

I believe that reflects a grave misconception about these acts of terrorist violence, a misconception held by conservatives, libertarians, and progressives alike.

We are not the audience for whatever the perpetrators are trying to accomplish with these atrocities. We and the actual victims are merely set pieces. The audience they’re trying to reach is other Muslims, particularly other Muslim extremists. The audience they’re trying to reach is their own tortured consciences. The audience they’re trying to reach is their God.

What we do, how we react, what we believe doesn’t make a whit of difference to them.

At Heterodox Academy Jonathan Haidt enunciates an important rule:

Do not assume that being politically progressive will protect you (as Weinstein and the Christakises found out). Whatever your politics, you are eventually going to say or do something that will be interpreted incorrectly and ungenerously. Your intentions don’t matter (as Dean Spellman found out at CMC.) This is especially true if your university offers students training in the detection of microaggressions.

And the rules will change too rapidly for you to keep up. There is no such thing as sensitive enough.

What is the goal, the end game, of all of this? Stay tuned.

I agree with John Kass’s assessment in his Chicago Tribune column. Removing Trump from office will not result in a “return to normalcy”. Things will only get worse:

True, Clinton received about 3 million more votes than Trump. But almost 63 million people voted for the president. And forcing them to their knees in capitulation is not a prescription for unification but a prospect for disaster.

Trump voters didn’t create the divided nation. The elites divided it over time, through economic dislocation and abandonment of the working class, and a mad push for endless wars in which soldiers returned to find no jobs or economic future.

Now America is reaping what the elites have sown.

Months and months before the presidential election, I began thinking of Trump not as a cause of American disruption but a symptom of it. And as much as I don’t like quoting myself, here is something from March 2016:

“It’s obvious the American political system is breaking down. It’s been crumbling for some time now, and the establishment elite know it and they’re properly frightened. Donald Trump, the vulgarian at their gates, is a symptom, not a cause. Hillary Clinton and husband Bill are both cause and effect.”

The establishment pushed the wars and free trade and their partners in the corporate-government matrix agreed to the sending off of capital (and jobs) to foreign lands.

For all the talk of partisanship, Democrats and Republicans were the two horns on the head of the goat.

There is no national consensus on the way forward but profound disagreement, particularly between those have power and those who don’t. Removing Trump as president even if it were to prove necessary or possible wouldn’t resolve that.

I don’t know that anything will.

In her Washington Post column Katrina vanden Heuvel, reacting to the highly publicized failures to win congressional districts in Montana, Kansas, and Georgia, points out where progressives have made gains:

In the 9th state assembly district of Long Island, Christine Pellegrino — a schoolteacher, union activist, Bernie Sanders delegate and Working Families Party Democrat — dispatched her Republican opponent by a stunning 58 percent to 42 percent. As Newsday reported, this is usually a district where Democrats hardly compete. Trump swamped Hillary Clinton here by 23 percentage points. The veteran Republican state legislator who held the seat was reelected by a 37-point margin over a Democratic challenger. But when he stepped down, Pellegrino — a first-time candidate — swept to victory.

In New Hampshire, Edith DesMarais pulled a similar upset in a state legislative race. “Republicans should absolutely be concerned,” William F.B. O’Reilly, a Republican partner in the November Team, a political consulting firm, told the New York Times. “Two Republican canaries died in the coal mine yesterday.”

Progressive candidates are rising in Democratic primaries in Democratic areas as well. In the primary for Philadelphia district attorney, civil rights attorney Larry Krasner, who has defended Occupy Philadelphia and Black Lives Matter protesters, won on a platform calling for an end to mass incarceration, police reform and more. Supported by Sanders and a range of progressive groups, his candidacy was also bolstered by the money of George Soros. “This changes the game across the country,” William Cobb of the American Civil Liberties Union told Philadelphia Magazine.

In the Democratic primary for mayor in Jackson, Miss., victory went to Chokwe Antar Lumumba, running on a bold program calling for a “people’s administration” that would feature police reform and a locally grounded, cooperative strategy for economic development. Lumumba marched in solidarity with black auto-plant workers at the March on Mississippi with Sanders and the UAW and helped to found the Mississippi Human Rights Collective that led efforts to remove the Confederate insignia from the state’s flag. His victory was one of many for progressives in Democratic primaries.

These examples illustrate exactly what I wrote about back in November. In deep Blue States and/or in deep Blue areas of Red States, erstwhile Sanders supporters are duking it out DNC-type Democrats for control of the Democratic Party. IMO this is cheerful:

These candidates are not your standard Democrats. Like Sanders, they are campaigning for bold change. They pledge an end to corruption. They support aggressive public action for working people — $15 minimum wage, investment in infrastructure, renewal of public education and making public college tuition free. This is now increasingly reflected at the national level as well, with Democratic legislators coming out for a $15 minimum wage, a major infrastructure jobs agenda and progressive tax reform.

but grossly premature. As I’ve been pointing out for some time, the challenge for Democrats is to win more seats and governors’ mansions, not to unseat incumbent Democrats. That’s just a continuation of the trend we’ve seen over the last several decades—the increased polarization of elected officials in Red States vs. those in Blue States.

Will these newcomers retain their energy and idealism through multiple terms, re-elected time after time to safe seats? Or, like the incumbents they replace, will they inevitably see themselves as entitled to their offices by virtue of their magnificent hearts and mysteriously become wealthy in office while the ideals they espoused languish? Time will tell.

You might want to read Andrew O’Hehir’s message to progressives at Salon:

For many people in, let’s say, the left-center quadrant of the American political spectrum — especially those who are not all that eager to confront the fractured and tormented state of the current Democratic Party — Montana and Georgia and 2018 seem(ed) to represent the opening chapters of a comeback narrative, the beginning of a happy ending. If what happened in 2016 was a nonsensical aberration, then maybe there’s a fix right around the corner, and normal, institutional politics can provide it.

First you chip away at Republican triumphalism, and the House majority, with a couple of special-election victories. Then it’s about organizing, recruiting the right candidates for the right seats, registering voters and ringing doorbells, right? Democrats picked up 31 seats in the George W. Bush midterms of 2006 — and will need 24 or so this time — so, hey, it could happen. For that matter, Republicans gained an astounding 63 seats in the Tea Party election of 2010, and many observers have speculated that Trump-revulsion might create that kind of cohesion on the left. So we sweep away Paul Ryan and his sneering goons, give Nancy Pelosi back her speaker’s gavel after eight long years, introduce the articles of impeachment and begin to set America back on the upward-trending path of political normalcy and niceness.

I suspect it’s pointless to list all the things that are wrong with that scenario, because either you agree with me that it’s a delusional fantasy built on seven different varieties of magical thinking or you don’t, and in the latter case I am not likely to convince you.

Maybe just maybe Americans are voting for brutes like Trump and Gianforte despite disliking them and what they do but because they disagree with what the Democrats are offering or can no longer believe them.

A good start might be to reconsider where “center-left” actually is.

I wonder if the facts about the behavior of Millennials will change the minds of those who’ve been busily making predictions about them, as noted by Mark Mills at RealClearEnergy:

Over the past couple of years, the data show travel on America’s roads has been growing at a record pace. By year-end 2016 road travel had hit an all-time high, north of 3.2 trillion vehicle-miles. Gasoline demand has followed apace, also hitting new highs. So much for peak driving.

It’s true that because of the Great Recession driving in the U.S. declined by some by 50 billion vehicle-miles in 2009, and stayed flat for half-dozen years. It was the biggest drop and longest stagnation in road travel in automobile history. But the peak theorists confused the effects of economic deprivation with structural changes in behavior. It turns out that Millennial behavior during the recession—living in the basement rather than driving to work, and biking and sharing rides elsewhere—did not reflect a preferred lifestyle so much as an accommodation to the longest recession and slowest recovery in modern U.S. history.

And Millennials aren’t just driving more now, they’ve started buying cars too. Sales data and surveys show that Millennials exhibit more of a preference for new versus used cars compared to the gen Xers that immediately preceded them, and prefer SUVs and luxury cars rather than econo-boxes and electric vehicles. So much for peak oil demand.

and the same thing is being shown in home-buying and other economic behaviors. Maybe Millennials are just as acquisitive and materialistic as the rest of us after all.

I think there’s one introspective question that Bernard Goldberg fails to ask in his criticism of media elites at RealClearPolitics:

I stumbled across an interesting essay by Washington journalist Robert W. Merry in which he says, “When a man as uncouth and reckless as Trump becomes president by running against the nation’s elites, it’s a strong signal that the elites are the problem.”

Memo to America’s elites: Millions of Americans think you’re the ones who are deplorable. They don’t want to be called bigots because they worry about the effects of illegal immigration on America’s schools and hospitals and more broadly on the nation’s sovereignty and culture.

They don’t want to be seen as heartless because they believe that not everybody getting food stamps deserves them.

They don’t want to be viewed as Muslim-hating bigots because they, like the president, believe that a temporary ban on travel from a few countries — countries that harbor terrorism — is a good idea.

And they’re sick of being portrayed as unsophisticated dolts because they don’t abide by the politically correct ideas that are so popular among the elites at our most prestigious universities.

The question is why do they think that they hold mainstream views? They’re professional, trained observers whose job it is to gather information from outside their own narrow circle. It’s more than simple parochialism or confirmation bias. They’re either lying, stupid, or nuts.

I don’t know that there’s a better example of the problems I noted in my earlier post today than the World Health Organization, as noted by Alex Berezow at the American Council on Science and Health:

According to the Washington Post, the WHO spends $200 million every year on travel and accommodations. Of course, WHO officials aren’t flying Ryanair and staying at the Motel 6. Instead, they are booking “business-class airplane tickets and rooms in five-star hotels.”

To put that figure into perspective, WaPo writes:

Last year, WHO spent about $71 million on AIDS and hepatitis. On malaria, it spent $61 million. And to slow tuberculosis, WHO invested $59 million. Still, some health programs do get exceptional funding — the agency spends about $450 million trying to wipe out polio every year.

In other words, WHO spent more on travel than on fighting AIDS, hepatitis, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. To make matters worse, back in 2011, WHO cut 300 jobs because of budget constraints. Assuming that WHO spent roughly the same amount on travel then as it does now, by eliminating its travel budget, it could not only have saved those 300 jobs, but could have paid each of those people a salary of $666,667.

Thinking of that as waste or corruption is to miss the point. It is more an instantiation of Pournelle’s Law.

Over time the purpose of the organization has transmogrified into a mechanism for continuing the out-sized lifestyles of its bureaucrats. who no longer know any other way of functioning. That’s much more basic than ordinary waste or corruption.