Gorsuch Confirmed, So What?

Neil Gorsuch was just confirmed to be Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court by a vote of 54-45. So that's all right.

We know why the Democrats have to fight these Supreme Court nominations to the knife. It's because their pet issues -- abortion, gay marriage -- have been decided by the Supreme Court, and not by a bipartisan majority in Congress. So the composition of the Supreme Court is of vital importance to secular-believing liberals.

It all seemed so sensible and advanced a century ago when the Progressive movement came up with the idea of the "living constitution." Of course, that was then, when total government spending was less than 10% of GDP, whereas now it is 35% of GDP and very likely more.

The truth is that we are somewhere near the high-water mark of the great progressive tide and sooner or later it will start to recede. We can't really deal with more government spending, because it chokes off the natural workings of the economy. Yet we can't cut anything, from Social Security to government employee pensions, because nothing gets people to the polls like someone cutting their benefits.

So liberals are going to be on defense, protecting their privileges, and it will get worse before it gets better. That's because all the people displaying the "In This House We Believe" in the Liberal Commandments signs from Karen Joiner do not understand that what they are doing. They do not understand that all the Liberal Commandments amount to the legislation of liberal morality. They do not understand that their secular commandments are a violation of the separation of church and state. They do not understand that government is a very blunt instrument to use in enforcing morality.

They do not understand that the reason for limited government is to reduce the number of issues over which people can fight, so that we can avoid civil war.

Look at the top item on the list: Black Lives Matter. Just what is the government supposed to do about that? Stop police brutality? Or stop gangbangers killing other blacks? And what are we going to do about the fact that most black children don't have fathers, not in a practical sense of having a mother and a father in the house? And what are we going to do about the fact that government education serves the upper-middle class best and the poor worst?

And anyway, what are we going to do about the travails of the white working class, suffering elevated deaths from drugs, drink and suicide for 30 years while nobody noticed?

Our liberal friends do not understand that the bill for a century of progressive politics is coming due, and it ain't gonna be pretty.

The problem is that just about everything liberals have done over the last century is evil, as in identity politics; stupid, as in big government entitlements; or wrong, as in all the regulation and administrative ukase that benefits special interests.

The usual way of solving such problems is through the collapse of the current civilization.

Tell me it ain't so, Justice Gorsuch.

Democrats Ride the Tiger of Progressive Rage

Today the Senate Republicans voted to change Senate rules to end the Senate filibuster for US Supreme Court nominations. This was done after the Senate voted not to end debate on the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the court.

On the Drudge Report there is a mushroom cloud, as in "nuclear option."

It is not elected Democrats that are pushing the filibuster; it is progressive activists.

Apparently in progressive circles there is a strong belief that Republicans will pay for this vote to end the filibuster. But, as Jim Geraghty writes, maybe not. The progressives predicted doom and gloom for Republicans when they refused to bring Merrick Garland's nomination to a vote in 2016. And nothing happened. Actually less than nothing happened because Hillary Clinton's campaign barely mentioned the Garland nomination, the Republicans kept control of Congress and the American people elected Donald Trump.

Apparently, the Democratic rage at and consistent "Borking" of conservative Republican nominations to the Supreme Court is all about one thing and one thing only.

Abortion.

That's what Kristan Hawkins writes.

I suppose that is true. But it seems crazy.

The thing is that if the Supreme Court were to vacate the Roe v. Wade ruling it would not make much difference, because Roe v. Wade was a preemption of state laws. If liberals want abortion they can have it, in New York, in California, and wherever Democrats and liberals are gathered together and wear pussy hats.

So the progressives are getting all excited about nothing.

Meanwhile, we ought to get back to legislating changes in the law in the legislatures and untangling legal problems in the courts, rather than using the courts as a way for the elite to short-circuit the legislative process and implement its moral vision without consulting and persuading the broad American people.

But that brings us back to the Democrats. They are riding the tiger of progressive rage and hoping that they don't get thrown off and eaten by the electoral process.

Because ordinary Americans that don't listen to NPR and don't read the New York Times live in a different world from the religious cult we call "progressivism" with its sacraments of activism and peaceful protest, and I suspect that Democrats will continue to lose at the ballot box. That's because ordinary people don't like street action and heightened political strife.

I doubt if ordinary people understand that it is they that pay the price when politics transforms itself into street violence and ultimately civil war. But they know that they don't like the sound of political war drums.

Always in the back of my mind is Peter Turchin's Ages of Discord in which he notes that the "political stress index" in the US is soaring just like it did in the years before the Civil War broke out in 1861.

Today's elimination of the Supreme Court filibuster is just one more flashing red light telling us that all is not well in the United States, that both sides of the partisan divide are cruisin' for a bruisin'.

According to Turchin the present divide started with the election of Ronald Reagan, so you could say that it started when people like me decided that they couldn't take the progressive bullshit any more.

You can see that the progressive pushback ever since has been based on the Deplorables argument so thoughtfully advanced by Hillary Clinton in 2016.

How dare those Deplorables dare to oppose our glorious progressive vision!

Well, I would only tell my progressive friends that politics is a very blunt instrument, and that the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years that has brought the world's poor from age-old starvation to an astonishing competence has occurred in the face of non-stop leftist prophecy that the End is Near, the poor would suffer, and that only the political hegemony of the educated, evolved, compassionate people could stop it.

In other words, the progressives get it wrong. Politics is not the answer. Period.

And until progressives finally understand that -- and don't hold your breath -- the poor will suffer.

The Trouble with Moving Comics and Movies Left

Last week Marvel Comics admitted that their new lefty-approved superheroes aren't going down well. Comic readers just don't want diversity. One of my readers commented that he'd been reading the comics for decades, but "a couple of years ago, the sjw comics showed up and I quit."

You see this sort of thing everywhere. Last week I went to the live-action Beauty and the Beast, and of course Beauty had to be a right-on liberal girl that couldn't wait to get away from her sleepy bigoted village. And she was the daughter of an artist, not the daughter of a merchant, as in the 19th century version, or a princess as in the ancient version.

Then yesterday on a flight from Florida I saw the latest Star Wars franchise movie, Rogue One, and the heroine (who is hero and heroine in one) is risking her life in death-defying action that no girl or woman ever did or will do.

And as for the diversity, it was notable that the diverse characters were all in supporting roles. In Beauty they were villagers and courtiers. In Rogue they ran the gamut, including blacks, east Asians, Middle Easterners, and they were all wise and brave. But they were all in supporting roles. The main flawed characters were white.

You can understand why blacks are getting shirty about no black Oscars. How come they are always playing second fiddle when liberal Hollywood puts out a blockbuster? Well, Hollywood? What's the excuse?

But of course it goes deeper than that. The heroes and heroines are all upper-class. Beauty is a voracious reader. The Star Wars heroine is the daughter of a major scientist. And what about La La Land, which I also saw on the plane. These are white college kids confronting the hard choices of life as an artist. Blacks and other races need not apply except as scenery.

The point about the old Marvel superheroes is that they started out ordinary. Superman was from Smallville. Spiderman's family was very ordinary. So the point of the Marvel comics was to cater to boys from working-class backgrounds that were dreaming of the possibilities of a life of action and adventure rather than just working at the factory. This is the boy version of the Broadway musical, which is about young women daring to marry out.

The new SJW-converged characters are middle-class kids wondering whether they can be creative artists.

Obviously today's left is only interested in the cultural situation of people like them. It's not just that they have fallen out of love with the white working class; they are just not interested in any life questions that don't apply to the educated, creative life.

This all makes sense with my reductive Three Peoples theory. The comic superheroes are about the sons of the People of the Subordinate Self trying out as People of the Responsible Self, as in the advice to Spiderman that with great power comes great responsibility. But the SJW heroes and heroines are all about the creative life of the People of the Creative Self. In La La Land the whole movie turns on a scene where the hero and heroine choose creativity and artistic career over relationship. The improbable heroines of Beauty and Rogue One are trying out as feminist heroines that can be everything that a man can be.

I think that the SJW turn is a blind alley. The minority supporting characters are racist insults, Uncle Toms, keeping Asians as inscrutable martial-arts experts and other non-whites as repositories of wise tribal tradition. As as for the heroines? Well, in my view you can't get away from the fact that men are fighters and women are lovers. So when you put a heroine up and make her into a fighter you are lying. Women do fight, but they fight in verbal whispering and in their culture of compliant. And a woman's life all comes down to caring.

The problem with the SJW-converged arts is that it completely leaves the ordinary person in the dust. I've spent a week interacting with immigrants that are doing "the jobs that Americans won't do" like looking after little old ladies in retirement communities. They are living in another world from the liberal SJW world. Yet liberals pose as their advocates and representatives.

It won't end well, any more than the liberal love for the white working class ended well. The People of the Subordinate Self need to learn the ways of the middle class, the "program" for succeeding as a responsible adult in the market order. When liberals block the road to the middle class they are committing vile injustice.

I've been reading a book about David Bohm and his "implicate order." It's all good, except that it marginalizes people that want to live according to a "program." David Bohm and his interlocutors don't understandthat before you can spread your wings in creative discovery you must first master the responsible life, and for many people that means a "program" of rules and roles?

Pity the Media Won't Keep Their Side Honest

One thing you can say about the mainstream media. They are in like Flint on any political shenanigans by Republicans. The result is that Republicans are really careful about governing by the rules. At least after the lesson of Richard Nixon.

But the mainstream media gives their Democratic buddies a pass. And now that failing may be coming to bite them in the Obamagate/Susan Rice affair.

There seems to be an attitude in liberal circles that, hey, the IRS harassment of Tea Party groups was no big deal, and anyway they are all teabaggers. There seems to be an attitude out in mainstream medialand now that, well, National Security Advisor Susan Rice's "unmasking" of Trump transition people was legal, and therefore not a problem.

And don't get me started on sanctuary cities and drivers licenses for illegal immigrants.

In other words, it's OK for Democratic politicians and administrators to flout letter of the law and the spirit of the law, because they are on the right side of history. And it's OK for liberal activists to break the law with violence on the street or burn down a few businesses in Baltimore, MD. But don't you racists and sexists and teabaggers try that, or we will have your guts for garters.

In a way, it is good news for Republicans and conservatives that Democrats are breaking the rules. It shows that they are in trouble. That is usually how financial fraud starts. Financier Bob gets into a hole with a bad bet and then tries to paper over the hole with a bit of sharp practice.

Of course the story on the ObamaGate surveillance seems to be a bit different. The Obamis figured that Hillary Clinton would win the election and so a bit of illegal surveillance of the politicians and operatives on the Trump team would be no big deal. It just made sense to keep an eye on the Trumpsters, just in case. No surprises, please!

But then Trump won the election and the liberal base lost its mind. So now the Obamis switched into interference mode, trying to wrong-foot the Trump transition and maybe trap its officials into improprieties or illegalities.

On Powerline blog, they call Susan Rice a fool and a knave. I presume they mean that not only is Rice operating above her level of competence, but that when she gets into trouble she cheats, just like a financier in trouble.

Isn't that really the story of the Obama administration, from Obama on down? President Obama, as they say, was "wafted aloft" by liberals doing their bit for affirmative action. For the rest of America, electing Barack Obama to the presidency was to be a ticket out of race shame, so that America could get on with being America and stop the penance for African slavery.

But a chap that was "wafted aloft" has not really shown his mettle, and sooner or later he will be in over his head.

When you are in over your head you revert to your training. That is what military basic training is all about, and that is what flying training is all about. When things go wrong you automatically go with your training. I remember in my soaring days that a couple of times it looked like I would have to "land out" in a field. My training clicked in and I started a descent into a sensibly selected field. But both times I hit a thermal on the way down and so was able to circle in the thermal and climb out of trouble.

President Obama's training has been in left-wing activism, which I would call an inappropriate preparation for high office. It is training for rich kids to protest and agitate, but it is not a training for governance.

So President Obama has given away the Democratic dominance of elected offices by pushing the liberal activist agenda without regard for people that might not agree with liberalism. And his affirmative action appointments, from Attorney Generals Eric Holder to Loretta Lynch, have not seemed to imagine that they represent the nation rather than the liberal agenda.

What these liberals do not seem to understand is that the whole apparatus of laws and following the rules is not there to be the servant of political power, but is designed to make the opposition feel that they are protected from the arbitrary power of the rulers, and hold on the the dream of getting back into power at the next election.

Our liberal friends think that law is a question of enforcing rights, rather than limiting government power. In fact, according to my understanding, law developed mostly outside government to deal with questions of commerce and inheritance. It was so successful that government picked it up to exploit the law's reputation for justice. So with "rights." These started as the rights of Englishmen to be free of government power; they have now migrated to be rights that are enforced upon ordinary people to favor the favorites of the ruling class.

Liberals don't get this. They think they are doing God's work by advocating for traditionally marginalized people and by legislating social programs to help "working families." And it means nothing to them how they get there. Because social justice. Indeed, the normal way to "get there" is through "activism" and "peaceful protest."

The problem is that "activism" and "peaceful protest" are in fact rehearsals for civil war. Both methods amount to shows of force, or, in left-wing jargon, "escalation." That is why the left used to talk about "demonstrations" and in French they still talk about "manifestations." And that is why the left gets all worked up when groups on the right use the method of the street, as the Tea Party did a decade ago. When the other guys do it to you, you understand completely what is going down.

So the liberal love of "activism" and "peaceful protest" is a rehearsal for civil war and so also is the Obami appetite for weaponizing the government against the Republicans.

Hopefully, the end of the current leftward lurch will be a repeat of the 1970s when ordinary Americans reacted viscerally against the New Left and the students and the "kids." And hopefully Marx's apothegm will also apply that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce.

Hopefully we won't lurch, step by step, towards civil war.

Because, quite apart from the illegality, I just get the feeling that the Obamis are the gang that couldn't shoot straight.

And they aren't going to learn until the media makes them play by the rules.

Trump is the Bonfire of All Our Vanities

Is it the best of times, with President Trump upsetting the administrative state apple cart, even if he isn’t draining the swamp? Or is it the worst of times, with the amateur Trump getting taken for a ride by the Deep State?

It depends on whether you read Breitbart or Jonah Goldberg.

Did Trump and the Russians steal the election, or were the Obamis surveilling the Russians so that they could spy on Trump.

It depends on whether you listen to DNC chair Tom Perez or Obama factotum Evelyn Farkas.

I’d say that the simple answer is: we don’t know. And the simplest reason is that when there is a great battle raging, nobody knows who will win, because it ain’t over till it’s over. See Battle of Waterloo, Duke of Wellington, winner: “The nearest run thing you ever saw.”

Waterloo ended the Second Hundred Years War in Britain’s favor and relegated France to second tier. But what if that nearest run thing had gone the other way? What if the Prussians hadn't arrived in the nick of time?

I think that disappointed Never-Trump conservatives are chiefly concerned that Trump will lead conservatives into the weeds, betraying conservative principle in one of two outcomes: either confirming big government by failing to curb entitlements or by surrendering the United States back to Obama-style Democrats and smashing the Republican Party to pieces.

And Democrats? They have raised up a generation of secular religious bigots, according to Jonathan Haidt, that have turned the university campus into

a holy space—where white privilege has replaced original sin, the transgressions of class and race and gender are confessed not to priests but to “the community,” victim groups are worshiped like gods, and the sinned-against are supplicated with “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.”

Victor Davis Hanson has more on that.

If you are an old-fashioned liberal -- and I assume there still are some -- your comfortable certainties are ruined. Why has this happened? Because the old-fashioned liberals surrendered their party to the leftist cultural Marxists that believe in bending the arc of history towards justice by any means necessary.

If you are an old-fashioned conservative the rise of Trump means that your comfortable certainties about reining in big government are ruined. As I wrote last summer, the gentlemanly conservatism of my adult life is over, because it failed to produce a majority at the polls. Call it GOPe or RINO or neocon or whatever. It’s over.

Conservatism failed because it failed to persuade the American people to abandon what we regard as the false promise of the big-government administrative state that lives by buying the voters with promises of free stuff.

Maybe the whole conservative agenda is a mirage. Maybe the basic socialization of humans is that we want some powerful lord or imperial president to rule over as as a neo-feudal baron with his grand promise that he will make us safe, paid for by the “rich” or the “one percent” or “evil corporations.”

But think how the world looks to liberals today on April Fools Day as I write this. We have the humiliating situation of FDR’s New Dealers voting for a billionaire. For thirty years, it now appears, the white working class has been dying of despair, and the evolved and educated liberals had no idea! What happened to the science? What happened to the people who cared about people? How could the white working class be flushing itself down the toilet and their wise rulers had no idea?

Now think on the bright side.

For conservatives we now have the white working class voting Republican. With the workers now on our team we can start to persuade them, and over time they will listen to our story. Why? Because we humans all look with a kindly eye on the agenda of our friends. Maybe, as time goes by, the white working class will agree to little tweaks to Social Security to allow the camel’s nose of private savings into the tent. Maybe they will allow tweaks to Medicare so that market prices can bring reality to the fantasy of third-party payments.

And then there are the immigrants of whom you’ve heard tell. I’m in Florida at a retirement community this week, bumping into immigrants working insane hours to get ahead. One is working as an aide because her dry-cleaning business failed. But already she is developing a website to sell women’s gym clothing. There’s the security guard working two jobs and sleeping three hours a night and going to school one day a week to get nursing credentials. Somebody forgot to tell them that the American Dream is a nightmare. People like that are going to be a huge disappointment to the Democrats in the years ahead.

Everyone wants the comfort of believing that the other guys are cheating: that’s what the Russia flap is all about, on both sides. Everyone wants the stop the other party from legislating their agenda: Democrats are enraged that the Republicans obstructed Obama; Republicans are enraged at today’s Democratic shenanigans.

The truth is that all our political vanities are burning up in flames, and nobody knows what the bonfire will burn up before it is done.

How the Lefties Retell "Beauty and the Beast"

Whenever I visit my grandchildren and get to see the latest Dis-e-ney [sic, as children pronounce it] production I am struck by the way that the fairy tales are warped to conform to leftist politically correct stereotypes.

So I expected more of the same from the latest Diseney Beauty and the Beast. I'd heard about the gay theme, so was ready for that.

But let's compare the movie with the official fairy-tale version from La Wik and Infogalactic.

Traditional: Beauty is the only good daughter of a rich merchant that loses all his money. Her brothers and sisters are selfish spoiled brats and gang up on her.

Diseney: Beauty is the only daughter of an artist that leaves Paris to live in a rural village. The village thinks that he and she are odd, and eventually gang up on them as witches.

Traditional: Beauty is a good virtuous daughter that loves her father.

Diseney: Beauty is a liberated daughter that is oppressed by the narrow-minded village and wants to break out of its stuffy traditionalism.

Traditional: The Beast sends the father home, laden with riches for his family, on the condition that he should return. But Beauty insists on returning in his stead.

Diseney: Beauty rides to Beast's castle looking for her father, and manages to substitute herself.

Traditional: Using a magic mirror, Beauty discovers that Beast is dying of despair without her.

Diseney: Using a magic mirror, Beauty discovers that Beast is being besieged in his castle by the villain Gaston and the villagers while she and her father are imprisoned as witches.

Of course there is the problem of race in our multicultural society. It is dealt with by having lots of non-white people in the cast, but keeping Beauty and Beast as white, northwest European. Also, the music and the songs are good old traditional mid-20th-century golden-age-of-musicals genre. None of your Sondheim or rap for the kids.

Imagine the story retold with Beauty and her father as Bible-believing Christians in a secular US university and reviled for their godly virtues by the Resisters and the special snowflakes. Imagine Beast recast as a secular libertine that slowly comes to virtue under the influence of the Christian love of Beauty. Yeah. Imagine.

I understand Beauty and the Beast as an ancient affirmation of the faith that woman's love can transform the world. And that is how the Diseneyfied movie ends. But a modern "woke" movie cannot say that, because we are to be carefully taught that gender is culturally determined and that women can and are just as adventurous and risk-accepting and action-oriented as men.

I don't know how long this leftist fantasy ideology is going to continue. I recall how they used to be upfront about this with cartoon "fractured fairy tales." Now they just warp the fairy tales without telling us.

On the good side, even the current PCed Diseneyfied Beauty and the Beast cannot really escape from the central message of the fairy tale. There really is nothing in this world to compare with the love of a good woman.

Hey, but all in all, a good movie.

The White Working Class Again

The decline of the white working class has shown up again this week. 

Naughty conservative Matt Stoller showcased the commenters to a piece at the Huffington Post on the white working class. He selected the comments that most callously declared that the white working class were a bunch of deplorables that had it coming.

And then Steve Sailer featured the death-by-despair statistics, cohort by cohort, of the white working class since World War II. He features a chart that shows the increasing deaths of each cohort as it ages from causes like suicide and drug and alcohol overdose, and things are getting worse, year by year, cohort by cohort. Much worse.

Reacting to Mark Stoller's piece, I am not that outraged by the hatred and the classism of the young liberals and lefties that read Huffington Post. They have been taught to hate, and contra South Pacific, written in a time when liberals confidently expected to inherit the world and rule it benevolently ever after, you don't "have to be carefully taught / To hate and to fear." It's the easiest thing in the world. Hey, even a government teacher can do that. All those commenters are doing is just repeating the lessons taught them at their government schools and colleges. They were taught, by good teachers and by indifferent teachers, to be the shock troops of the progressive movement and they show that their progressive boot camp was effective.

But on Steve Sailer's piece I was drawn to the units of death-by-despair on the chart. It was in deaths per 100,000, and in recent years, for recent cohorts of white Americans that did not graduate college, it is hitting 100 deaths per 100,000 per year.

What's the big deal? Well, it's because social scientists use the same unit of measure, deaths per 100,000 per year, to report murders and violent death. In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker tells the story. Back in the good old days of the hunter-gatherers, violent death was about 500 per 100,000 per year. Back in the high Middle Ages, it was about 50 per 100,000 per year. And now, in the United States, violent death is about 5 per 100,000 per year.

The death-by-despair for the cohort of white working class Americans that were born in 1945, right at the end of World War II, is peaking at about 20 deaths per 100,000 per year. But the folks born since 1960 are all dying at rates over 100 per 100,000 per year. That is five times the rate for the cohort born right after World War II.

What is the lesson here? No really: why stop at one? Let us count the lessons.

First of all the lesson to the white working class, articulated by a black Republican politician from Louisiana. He warns all and sundry that politicians do not care about you; they only care about your vote. For about a hundred years, politicians on the left just loooved the working class, and wrote legislation to shower the white working class with benefits and privileges. Great: who doesn't want to win the lottery? But the downside is that those benefits and privileges slowed down the embourgeoisification of the white working class; it allowed them to maintain the tribal, subordinate culture of the peasant, and to delay putting on the armor of light, the culture of the urban middle class. So when the day came in the 1960s when the left started pitching for the votes of minorities and women the white working class was left by the side of the road like the soldiers of a defeated army. I go into this in detail in my pieces on the "little darlings" of the ruling class.

This is not the first time that people have died of despair. What do you think that cartoonist William Hogarth and his pieces on "Beer Street and Gin Lane" of 1750 were all about? Not to mention Alfred P. Doolittle, father of a poor Covent Garden flower girl, saved in the nick of time from death-by-despair by the horror of "middle-class morality." And, of course, there is the question raised by Gregory Clark in Farewell to Alms. His study of parish records in England showed that, prior to the Industrial Revolution, England was a downward mobility society. The second sons of the landed nobility moved down into the upper middle class, living as soldiers and clergymen as fictionalized in Jane Austen novels. The less able in the middle class were downshifted to be farmers, as fictionalized in Thomas Hardy novels, and those made landless could end up as vagabonds and highwaymen. But then came the Industrial Revolution and upward mobility. Until now.

Then the lesson to the sneering progressives of the Huffington Post. Right now, you chaps are the little darlings of the ruling class, which enjoys using you as their cats' paws against the racist sexist homophobe Republicans. Have you ever thought about what comes after? When the ruling class no longer needs your services? Or if President Trump succeeds in restarting the economy and moderate voters rally to a winner?

Finally the lesson to the proud liberal ruling class. Do you care what happens to the little darlings of your political projects? I notice, according to Larry Elder, that back in 2013 Sen. Harry Reid was talking about how Obamacare would lead to "single-payer." On "Nevada Week in Review" he said that the country needs to work its way past insurance-based health care.

What we've done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we are far from having something that is going to work forever.

 Er, no, Senator. An administrative program of health care, modeled on Medicare, is not going to "work forever." It's the science, Senator. It is already a century since Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote that socialism could not work because it could not compute prices. It was left to others to fill in the details and realize that any government program is doomed to failure because every government program is an attempt to stop the world and order the tide to stop coming in. In real life things change every moment and everyone has to adapt to it, and the more people you exempt from this universal truth the harder it becomes to deal with change. When you pass a bill to make health care "work forever" as a government administrative program you are just fooling the voters and fooling yourself. You are just buying votes, living high on the hog for today and letting the future take care of itself. Settled science, pal.

I notice, Senator, that on climate, you liberals insist that immediate action is needed to head off gthe global disaster predicted by complicated climate models that have failed to predict the future. But on Social Security, which is known to be heading for disaster, you chaps are doing nothing, indeed the excellent Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and other Democrats are proposing an increase in benefits rather than a sensible attempt to match future revenues with benefits. And Medicare is the same, only worse.

We know, not just from the science but from the historical record, that no government program is "forever." Unfortunately, the way that government programs end is not by sensibly adapting every day to reality, or through the temporary pain of bankruptcy as individuals and corporations must enndure. They end in the hurricane of national debt default and the blizzard of inflation. And the horror of defeat in war.

As for me, I wish that the working class had not submitted to the seduction of those 19th century rich kids and abandoned the rugged wisdom of their labor union and friendly society mutual-aid philosophy. But what working girl can withstand the smooth talk of the well-spoken rich kid when he's taking her out to dinner and dancing at swank places and telling her how pretty she is? Yes, we all deplore the vile young Sir Felix Carbury seducing the village maiden Ruby Ruggles who thinks she is too good for the local yokel. But who is out there "peacefully protesting" the vile seduction of honest working folks by ambitious well-born Ivy League graduates and their bribed apologists.

Why is that?