Veep

Tim Walz is simply Gavin Newsom without the Gordon Gekko/American Psycho affect.

Same policies and both are driving their states into the ground. 

Kamala and Tim's history of working together probably helped in the selection.  As someone else has already pointed out, back in 2020 Tim let minority areas of Minneapolis burn to the ground while Kamala raised funds to bail out the perpetrators.

I am surprised by the choice.  Minnesota is not a swing state; Pennsylvania is.  And I've seen enough of Gov. Shapiro to know that while his policies are progressive, his rhetoric is very unthreatening to non-progressives, while Walz is proudly an insane and vocal leftist. The selection is revealing in two ways.

1. Since Biden dropped out, Kamala has been desperately running away from her radical left positions, but Walz is a signal to the radicals who run the party that, whatever Kamala is now saying, don't worry, because after the election it will be business as usual.  Her positions in this campaign are merely to fool the rubes. 

2.  I had figured that after Kamala, the next Democratic nominee would be from the Hamas wing of the party, but things have moved faster than anticipated.  As mentioned, Shapiro is from a swing state, can sound like a normie to those not carefully following politics, but differed from the radicals in refusing to denounce Israel.  This tells you who wields the power in the Democratic Party of 2024.

Sadly, it's no surprise.  The top domestic priority of the Biden Administration is promoting the conspiracy theory that whites and Jews have plotted to manipulate the language and structures of our society to attain and maintain White Supremacy and this system must be dismantled.  The administration's two DEI Executive Orders and its appointments show its commitment to implementing race essentialism into every aspect of the Federal government.  The rejection of Shapiro and the embrace of Walz are the logical outcomes of the dominant Democratic Party ideology as my post from last October pointed out.

One of my favorite Democratic commentators, Reuben Rodriguez, notes of the Walz selection:

Harris & Walz have records that make Rs lose their minds.

Issue for Rs is 90% of the country is against this stuff but "b/c everyone hates it, no one BELIEVES it's real".

So Rs come off as crazy describing something that did in fact happen.

Water Song

From Hot Tuna, the Jorma Kaukonen (guitar) - Jack Casady (bass) collaboration.  Former bandmates in Jefferson Airplane, they are still playing together.  Listen to the guitar/bass interaction throughout this instrumental.

The Way Things Work, Or Don't

Burn After Reading, the very funny Coen Brothers movie, provides a users guide to how things really work in a bureaucracy.  Two scenes, featuring the great JK Simmons as a CIA executive, and David Rasche (1), as his beleaguered deputy who just wants to make it through the day, as they sort through a baffling mess which they don't understand and just want to make go away.

Or, as cultural observer Joseph Fidler Walsh tells us in words featured on THC's masthead columns; 

You know, there's a philosopher who says, "As you live your life, it appears to be anarchy and chaos, and random events, smashing into each other and causing this situation or that situation, and then, this happens, and it's overwhelming, and it just looks like what in the world is going on. And later, when you look back at it, it looks like a finely crafted novel. But at the time, it don't".

At the other end of the spectrum from the random events theory are reductionist theories which increasingly dominate the political arena; one idea which explains everything.  On the left it is critical race theory and its spawn, DEI, which are simply sociology for stupid people.  On the right we now often see it claimed the reason for any mishap, miscalculation, or fiasco in the public or private sector is DEI and dismissing any other potential factor(s). 

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(1) Rasche is one of those guys who you realize has been in a lot of stuff you've seen, but you can't place him.  According to his wikipedia page, since the late 70s he's been in 49 movies, 313 TV episodes and a dozen TV movies, along with 22 on and off-Broadway plays.

The Vessel

Reuben Rodriquez, the pseudonym for a Florida Democrat political observer, has some astute observations on Donald Trump.  I've been reading Reuben on Twitter since 2020 and find he has remained true to his political beliefs, while avoiding the stampede to insanity of mainline Democrats.

Trump exists as a flawed, powerful & impotent, VESSEL for a cornucopia of grievance. He is a revolt against a global economy, cloying feminism & a subconscious revolt against the victory of post-material liberalism. That he can not even comprehend this ADDs to the appeal.

Say it weekly: Trump being fully unable to articulate his value prop allows HUGE swaths of the pop to project on him their *own* amorphous grievances Grievances they can’t even say aloud. Trump is an inadvertent masterpiece of channeling desperate groups & desires.

I don't think this completely captures Trump or his appeal but does account for a certain amount of it.

His observations were prompted by tweets from Matt Stoller (a leftist and no relation to THC), including this scathing and accurate assessment.

There's this belief that JD Vance was 'radicalized' by something, as if it's weird to lose faith in institutional leaders, academics and journalists who are clearly inept and totally full of shit all the time.

Andrew Sullivan, who will not be voting for Trump, provides another perspective on the man and his political resurrection, while pondering the collapse of the liberal establishment.

What makes this narrative feel like something deeper than a mere looming electoral college landslide is that, simultaneously, the entire liberal establishment seems to be imploding. The Democrats’ Biden formula — impose radical social, economic, and cultural change by fronting it with a moderate, easy-to-bully old man — has unraveled as obviously as Biden’s health. One reason is that the president is simply incapable of catching the attention of the country — except in universal cringe — and has singularly failed to construct a compelling narrative of his own.

Another is the incoherence of the Resistance. If you want to protest potential abuse of the justice system by a future president Trump, don’t bring an obviously flimsy, political case in New York City that merely helped Trump sweep back to dominance in the GOP. If you want a saner GOP, don’t demonize every other possibility, from DeSantis to Vance. If you emphasize the danger of political violence, don’t turn a blind eye as BLM burns America’s cities to the ground, or ignore Antifa. If you want to accuse Fox News of propaganda, don’t push out equal and opposite propaganda on toxic MSNBC. If you think democracy dies in darkness, why try to get Trump legally excluded from some state ballots, and prevent any real primary among Democrats?

More saliently, if one of your main lines of attack on Trump is his mendacity, it was probably not a great idea to tell the entire country that Biden was, in Joe Scarborough’s words, “far beyond cogent. In fact, I think he’s better than he’s ever been — intellectually, analytically…”

The lies the Democrats have been telling us these past few years are legion: inflation won’t happen/is temporary/is good for you; the Southern border is secure; “equity” is “fairness”; biological sex is a “spectrum”; Ukraine is about to win the war; Russia’s economy can be sanctioned to death; political violence is entirely on the far right; children can meaningfully consent to sex changes; the only thing holding black Americans back is white bigotry; the mainstream media is fair; and women have penises. Yes, Trump is a shameless liar. But the left’s propaganda has muddied the waters. When NBC’s higher-ups took Morning Joe off the air this week, it was a real moment. Even the muckety-mucks couldn’t take the lucrative propaganda anymore.

I will never vote for Trump — because he is so psychologically disturbed and so contemptuous of the rule of law that he remains a danger to us and the world. But I can see the logic of Trumpism. Those who feel left behind — culturally, economically — need at least one party to represent them and their values. As Biden has proven, protectionism is not all bad, especially when related to supply chains and national security. Mass immigration is out of control, and only one party gets it. Support for those who have lost the most from globalization seems to me a defensible conservative position, after migrant winners like me have had such a good run of it. And the madness of the neocon war machine demands a president able to spurn it.

Neither Rodriguez or Sullivan focus on the authoritarian turn of the Democrats, for whom a danger to democracy is anyone who does not vote for Democrats and, as a party, are doing all they can to ensure that the opposition never attains power again.  The radical social, economic, and cultural change referenced by Sullivan can only occur if accompanied by the repression needed to impose and maintain that change.

As for THC, he remains committed to leaving the presidential line on the ballot blank in 2024. 

Friends

With the passing of Bob Newhart at 94, he joins his wife Ginnie, and Don and Barbara Rickles, their best friends.  Judd Apatow produced this piece, devoted to their long friendship, prior to Bob's death.

Remnants

But it’s weird to be a Jew in Prague. While there is a remnant of Jews still living there, you can't help but be struck by the museum-like nature of the Jewish presence in the city.

You should read this Substack article by Russ Roberts on his recent trip to Prague.

Jewish life may not be vibrant but tourism for Jews and about Jews is quite healthy. The Jewish part of town is thronged with visitors eager to see those old synagogues, the Holocaust memorial, and the Jewish cemetery.

And yes, some Jews still live in Europe 80 years after the Holocaust. But the Jewishness of Prague and Vienna and similar capitals is in the past rather than the present. There is something macabre about savoring the Jewishness of Prague’s past knowing how the story ended.  

I knew this of course before I went to Prague, at least in some abstract sense. Visiting in person makes vivid what has been lost.

We visited Prague in 2014.  Lovely city.  We also visited the Jewish sites, including the memorial with the names of the tens of thousands transported to their death by the Nazis. 

I had an experience similar to Roberts' more than thirty years ago while visiting Worms, Germany in the early 90s.  I had a business trip to Europe which was to start with a meeting at our plant in Worms on a Monday and I decided to fly over early to help with the time adjustment, arriving on Saturday morning.

It was January when the daylight was already very limited and a gray mass hung low over the city during those nominal daylight hours creating a penetrating gloom on my walks.  The Nibelungen Hotel was my residence, decorated in a palate of grays, browns, and blacks, very appropriate to Worms and the time of year.  I visited the cemetery, the oldest surviving Jewish cemetery in Europe with its origins in the 11th century.  The Nazis destroyed all of the other Jewish cemeteries in Germany but were persuaded to keep the one in Worms for historical purposes.  It resembles the photo of the Prague cemetery (below) except that the trees are much older, thicker, taller, and more twisted.

Though the Jewish community was wiped out during the time of the Third Reich, there is a Jewish museum in Worms which I also visited.  It was a strange experience, leaving me feeling like a spectral figure peering into a lost past, the member of a lost tribe.  Perhaps it would be like an American Indian descendant from one of the New England tribes that exist today only in memory.

Roberts goes on to note another absence in Prague.

But one night in Prague, I realized that the lost Jewishness of Prague has a very strange bedfellow. I was sitting in St. Clement’s Cathedral listening to an hour-long concert of classical music’s greatest hits—Mozart, Bach, Pachelbel, Schubert, Vivaldi, and others. I realized that Judaism is not the only religion that is a shell of its former self in the sense of its role in the daily life and culture of a great city. The same would be true of Christianity. 

The Christian impulse that built such magnificent cathedrals and inspired some of the finest music human beings have ever composed, plays no role in the current culture of Prague any more than Judaism does.

 It was a strange moment for me, this realization of kinship between the two sister religions. It does make a difference that Christians were not herded into railroad cars and murdered as the Jews were. But both religions are essentially being kept alive by a remnant, a remnant that is not embedded in a serious way in the life of the city other than as a tourist attraction. I don't remember who made the observation but it is a deep one, that some of the greatest creations of human beings--the cathedrals in particular, but you could also include the music--were inspired by something very few Europeans believe in any longer—Christianity. 

As a Jew thinking about Christianity in Europe, what comes to mind is the Inquisition, the blood libels, the pogroms, and the church-driven expulsions from country after country. It’s harder to remember that Christianity was a revolution in how we human beings see ourselves. The post-Christian attempts to inspire a new way of seeing ourselves, communism and fascism, dwarf Christianity in their cruelty to the Jews and to humankind generally. 

Though not as dramatic as in Europe, we are also seeing an ebbing in Christian belief in the United States.  But people always need to believe in something.  Something will fill, and may already be filling, that need.

It's part of the new world that is emerging.  The Cold War ended in 1991 in a way that no one, other than Ronald Reagan, would have predicted a decade earlier.  Since then a new world has been struggling to emerge, an emergence accelerated, in retrospect, by the 2008 financial crisis, and which has been accelerating even more rapidly in recent years.  What the shape of that world will ultimately be is unpredictable.