Chinese Flu: Too Much or Too Little?

The central question disturbing us right now is whether the Chinese Flu -- known to the wokerati as COVID-19 -- is a global pandemic that will result in millions of deaths or an overblown nothing-burger that is panicking us into stopping the economy dead in its tracks.

A question that is burning in all hearts is whether President Trump acted too soon or too late, too little or too much.

Before we answer the question we must understand that President Trump is a politician, and politics is the art of the possible.

So, let us ask ourselves whether it was possible in mid-January for President Trump to stop flights from China. The answer is obvious: No. He would have been accused of trying to interfere with the serious and troubling issues that were being addressed in the House impeachment and Senate trial on Russia, Russia, Russia.

But at the end of January he halted flights from China, and in his State of the Union speech, just before Speaker Pelosi tore it up, he promised a vigorous response to the virus. So I would say that Trump has been on the leading edge of responsiveness, but not on the bleeding edge.

Let us now ask whether the President is doing too little or too much. Should he have locked the Nation down two weeks ago? Or should he have refused to panic and said that, hey, this looks like a normal flu-type bug, not much different that a regular winter flu?

Again, the answer lies in the fact that politics is the art of the possible. Could President Trump have shut the nation down on March 1? I doubt it. It would have been universally laughed and sneered at as a ridiculous overreaction. But suppose he had waited until today, Friday March 20? Then, I think, he would have been laughed and sneered at as waiting too long.

The truth is that leadership of any kind depends on getting in front of the herd, but not too much. YOu must be seen to be protecting the People, but not treating them like cattle. And the fact is that President Trump is quite an experienced leader, much more so than 97 percent of the poiticians in Washington DC.

Why is that? It is because the skills and qualifications of the average politician are all about running for elective office. That is what they do. But actually leading and sucking it in and making tough decisions, knowing that 33 percent of them will be the wrong decision? Not so much.

President Trump, on the other hand, has lived a life of decision-making in his various businesses. You can say that he has truly experienced life on the edge. And he has experienced his share of failure.

Trump is unlike our average crop of Harvard-Yale educated and evolved elite that live in a pretty safe-space world where the system looks after them, provided they pay their dues and don't step out of line. And that, I think, explains why the president always seems to be half a block ahead of them.

There has been a bit of criticism that Trump's White House is chaotic and he runs through chiefs of staff like toilet paper. But I think that misses the point. The White House staff system is intended to enable the President to escape from the chaos of daily events, and preside like a god over the nation. I think that setup exists partly because your average president -- I am thinking of you, Barack -- can't handle the stress and chaos of leadership. And so he needs a staff to make the world look like it is manageable.

In reality, the world is not manageable. It is chaotic, and you never know when and where the Dragon of Chaos is going to show up next. If you manage your interface with the world to make sure the Dragon is kept out of sight, well, then maybe you are not going to be ready when it is time to act.

Probably the next big decision that President Trump will have to make, after the masks are flowing freely and the Chloroquine is available all across the fruited plain, is to say OK, now it's time to start getting back to normal.

Based on his performance so far he will make the decision a little after he should have done, based on facts and reason, but still a little too soon for the Good Little Girls in the media worried about their hair and the racism of calling the COVID-19 virus the Wu Flu.

And then it will be on to the election, and who knows how that will turn out?

Only I would say this. To have set up Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee for 2020 is getting close to another proof of God's existence.

Great Reaction: The Left's Neo-Knight Errantry

I argue that the left represents a Great Reaction, a religious and cultural and political attempt to return to the past. My Maxim is:

Socialism is a return to slavery; the welfare state is a return to feudalism; identity politics is neo-tribalism; reparations is neo-vengeance; activism a return to revolution, rioting for the ruling class, part medieval knight-errantry, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a school play for their parents; helpless victims are a return to sacrifice, social justice is good old loot and plunder.

What's not to like! But I wondered a bit about the medieval knight-errantry bit. Was that really true, or was I over-determining a bit?

Well, I spent a few days reading some medieval romances in a college textbook collection, including the story of "Perceval," the Grail Knight, from Chrétien de Troyes, "Tristan and Isolt" from Gottfried von Strassburg, and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" by Anonymous.

Chrétien de Troyes, according to La Wik, flourished from 1160-1191. Gottfried con Strassburg, according to La Wik died in 1210. And, of course, for Brits there is "La Morte d'Arthur" a reworking of the tales by Sir Thomas Malory who lived 1415-1471 according to La Wik.

All of the narratives are highly colored. The court of the king is incredibly lush and rich, cloaked in costly fabrics, inlaid with gold, and banners are flying, and the queens are astonishingly beautiful and attended by beauteous maidens. And the feasts! The meat! And fine wines! They go on for days! But not to worry, all these chaps are deeply religious, observing all the Christian festivals and getting shriven and making confession before they ever go off on their palfreys into the wilds.

Well, if you were entertaining the rough tough medieval barons in the long winter evenings how would you do it? Exactly. You would concoct stories to flatter your hosts. Here is a piece that I particularly liked, as Sir Gawain arrives at the moat of the castle of the Green Knight in the middle of nowhere.

The wall ran down into the water wonderfully deep, and towered up to a huge height above it, wrought of hard hewn stone right up to the cornices, and with bantels of the best under the battlements. There were fair turrets fashioned between, with many loopholes designed to shut fast.

Yeah. I imagine that every second-tier baron of those days wanted a castle like that. In his dreams.

We know a bit about what those barons and bishops and knights were really like. They were rascals. Here is the Frankish drive to the east under Clovis, in 500 AD from The Barbarian Conversion by Richard Fletcher.

It was the obvious direction for Frankish kings to turn when the annual campaigning season came around: let us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.

Golly. It seems really similar to modern progressive government that depends upon "regular, successful, predatory" taxation to reward the regime's supporters and maintain political power.

In our day we have similar "romances" to tell the glorious story of the progressive intellectuals and reformers. One of the most durable is the idea that Fidel Castro in Cuba may have been a tyrant, but at least he did literacy and provided universal health care. And our Sixties Kidz all went around with a copy of Mao's Little Red Book. And there is the iconography we saw in the Soviet Union of Marx to Engels to Lenin to Stalin.

In progressive narrative riots and rebellions are represented as "demonstrations" a polite way of saying "show of force." But then "demonstration" was further softened into "peaceful protest." And thus a "mostly peaceful protest" is the modern term for a violent riot.

Thus rebel is transformed into "revolutionary" rather than "agitator" and now into "activist."

And street riots are turned into the street theater of Extinction Rebellion that provides opportunities for well-born maidens to dress up and do their hair.

The point is that politics and kingship in the Middle Ages was a pretty thuggish affair. You had to be rough and tough and rougher and tougher than the baron next door. And when castles came in in the 9th and 10th centuries having the biggest and bestest castle became the name of the game, because until guns appeared, a castle made you the master of all you surveyed. And of course you wanted to dress it up into something glorious and fashionable, with banners flying and queens beautiful and damsels dimpled.

Likewise, our modern progressive government is a pretty thuggish affair, spending money on its supporters that it has forcibly taken from ordinary wage-earners and businesses. Its devotees are instinctively eager to dress it up in noble robes, a knightly quest to succour the victims and protect them from oppression.

But whatever they do and say, government is still force, taking money from one person and giving it to another.

That was the point of Don Quixote, to laugh and sneer at the whole medieval romance genre, and imagine a guy that actually tried to make the medieval fantasy a reality.

We await our Miguel de Cervantes to write the novel that will satirize the whole progressive conceit into embarrassment.

Because I say that the whole point of the Great Reaction is a last desperate attempt to make politics relevant and pretty before we go forward into a post political era where politics has become a minor irritant while most people just get on with their business, and their wiving and thriving, having got past the notion that force and compulsion should be front and center in human life.

For are we not, at heart, social animals that have learned how to minimize the resort to expensive and deadly force?

Time to Kill The Racism Virus

By now everybody knows that the MSM has jumped on board the Xi train and accused President Trump and others of "racism" for calling the COVID-19 virus the China virus.

Oh yeah! You should always go with the experts at the WHO. And the propagandists in the totalitarian regimes.

Never mind that the US media -- hello New York Times -- has been carrying water for the Commies since the 1950s, what with NYT reporter Herbert Matthews hailing Cuba's murderous dictator Fidel Castro. Not to mention the 1930s when NYT reporter Walter Duranty wrote of the Ukrainian famine: What famine?

And never mind that the Chi-Coms are batting on a bit of a sticky wicket now that facts on the ground are telling us that we need to be a lot less dependent on the global supply chain. I mean, the Chic-Coms, that apparently produce 95 percent of our antibiotics, have been threatening us with a cutoff. If we don't stop the racism! See, they are looking at a real economic depression if the US and Europe decide to lower their dependence on manufacturing in totalitarian countries. So of course they are trying to intimidate us and change the subject.

You would think that any journalist worth her byline would be extremely skeptical of government memes out of China right now. Even if she was emotionally consumed with writing her next article about her hair.

But hey! If you are a mindless liberal journalist "racism"-in-the-air is like blood-in-the-water for sharks. You can't help yourself.

Now if I were the editor, or the publisher, or the owner of The New York Times I would have put the race-baiting journalists on Social Distancing without pay for 30 days or until the arc of the China Virus epidemic curve started to bend towards justice. That's what I would do. But I dare say that NYT owner Carlos Slim rather enjoys watching the gringos in a cat-fight.

I say, never mind about them. Whatabout us?

And I say that it is 30 years past the time when there was any moral warrant to name, shame, and shun "racists." Because hey, racial discrimination is illegal. And the only real racists are loser white crackers parading around with tiki-torches. If there is still racial discrimination in America then pull the FBIs off Michael Flynn and put them to work on investigating acts of racial discrimination and sending the results to the local Soros-funded prosecutor.

I mean. There is a difference, dontcha think, between some guy making a racist tweet and some innocent POC being denied a job or a place in university because of racial discrimination. One of the two is not like the other. One of them is an act of racial discrimination, and the other is just some jerk mouthing off.

So I say that this China Virus racist flap is the ideal moment to declare that we deplorables are not going to cringe in fear any time someone call us racists. Not any more. It is time to stop apologising.

Indeed it is time to hit back, using the eternal male Culture of Insult that is connected back into the male culture of honor, which is courage. We males are expendable, anyway, as the millions of men that died in the armies of the rulers of the world down the ages have proved.

Here are a few insults for you to try out when next you are accused of being a racist.

"Wait a minute! I thought you cupcakes said that race didn't exist!

"That's an insult to all the African-Americans that died under slavery down the ages!"

"So's your father, buttercup!"

"It takes one to know one!" 

"Know what racists and anti-racists have in common? A vile obession with race."

"Yeah, call me racist-sexist-homophobe, snowflake. I don't care!" 

"Know what really gets me? The hate that educated whites have poured on poor white trash down the centuries." 

"Wow! You really are a hater. I had no idea!"

Notice that you should add the patronizing "cupcake" "buttercup" or "snowflake" according to taste and opportunity.

Now, if you are lunching with a liberal woman friend the rules are different. Because with women we cannot use the male Culture of Insult. Instead we are acting out the female Culture of Complaint and are always talking about a third person who has said or done something that should be named, shamed, and shunned.

So when some third person is branded a racist, as in "I can't believe she would say something so racist," you say:

"But, like, Susie in my book club who is, like, a Gender Studies professor says that race doesn't exist." 

"So, like, I always worry about which are the worse haters, the racists or the activists." 

"I worry that making that a racism thing makes it, like, harder to deal with real racism."

I leave the "like"s and "I can't believe"s and "uptalk" to you. You know best how to emotionally manipulate your women friends.

We can't finish this without reminding ourselves of the words of the noble Democratic sage, Rahm Emanuel, who said:

"You never let a serious crisis go to waste."

And two can play at that game. Cupcake.

Really? We Can't Make Art Beautiful Because Ugliness?

I only found out about Alma Deutscher a couple of days ago. Because reasons. And I don't know whether she is a musical genius or just another musical prodigy. The Wall Street Journal says of her "A Girl Makes Music Without Irony or Ugliness."

What? No irony? No ugliness? What's her problem? As she says told the audience in Carnegie Hall last December:

But some people have told me that nowadays, melodies and beautiful harmonies are no longer acceptable in serious classical music, because, in the 21st century, music must reflect the ugliness of the modern world.

Really? I admit I never thought of it that directly. But, as Rush Limbaugh says: she just nailed it.

So the modern artists think the world is an ugly place and art ought to reflect that.

Really? More ugly than Vienna at the turn of the 19th century when chaps like Beethoven were perpetually sick as dogs from the urban pathogens -- and lack of personal hygiene -- and Beethoven couldn't get it on with his aristocratic girl students because class barriers, darling.

Actually, I think the problem is that too many artists and composers get sinecures from universities and so don't have to develop a popular style to earn their Benjamins.

Anyway, Deutscher wrote a waltz about sirens:

In the piece, “Siren Sounds Waltz,” the music moves from the dissonant sounds of Vienna’s city center, with its noise and ambulance sirens, to a buoyant big-hearted waltz in which the “sirens” are made to sound like Homer’s rather than Vienna’s.

What? Deutscher knows about those pesky sirens that bothered our pal Odysseus on his way home to Penelope in Ithaca? How did she ever get to do that in this world of "woke" education? Oh, I see...

“I don’t go to school,” she says. “I’m home-schooled. I read lots and lots of books about almost everything—history, geography, fiction, science, whatever. As long as they’re interesting.” 

But, but, but! How in the world does she have the time for a classical education when she is a concert level violinist and pianist and has composed a violin concerto, a piano concerto, and two operas?

But she does echo the pyschologists who say that the unconscious mind is the ruler of all.

She has spoken elsewhere of melodies coming to her from an early age, so I ask if they get in the way of her study. “Very often,” she says. “Sometimes when I’m talking to someone or trying to concentrate on something, a melody will come. It never comes when you want it to come.” But, she points out, “composition is not like inspiration that just comes out of the head and onto the page. It’s work. I have studied many scores. The greatest teachers are the old masters. I’ve studied the scores of Richard Strauss,  of Beethoven,  of Mozart and many others.”

Deutscher raises an interesting question for me. How do we recover a tradition of beauty in art? From the people that insist that we live in an ugly world, riven by exploitation, oppression, hegemony, and all the rest. And that irony is the only thing?

Not that our Betters in the Gentry ever exploited, oppressed anyone. Oh no. Because they are the good guys.

You know. I would say that our modern problem is not that we are too ugly but that we are too bland. If anything, the appetite for ugly among the cognoscenti represents an effort to get away from bland and experience something real, something original.

And, of course, the easiest way to be original is to be ugly, or break something. Being beautiful is a lot harder. And imagining beautiful without getting into kitsch is harder still.

It's interesting, innit. Right now we are experiencing a number of teenage-girl phenoms, from St. Greta Thunberg of Climate to her German opposite Naomi Seibt. And now Alma Deutscher.

What I experience in Naomi Seibt and Alma Deutscher is a complete absence of postmodern cant. They almost sound like they actually read a book rather than recited teacher's lesson.

Considering my prejudice about Good Little Girls that hate and fear from day to day as they are carefully taught, it is a welcome dose of reality.

All I can say is God bless the good ship Alma Deutscher and all that sail in her.

Uncertainty Doesn't Go Away

In the middle of the current Coronavirus panic Martin van Creveld, the strategist, reviews the scene to remind us that things are not tied down.

He remarks on a new book about how we are soon going to transform ourselves from Homo Sapiens into Homo Deus, where we will be able "to look into the future and control our fate" much better than before.

But will we really? We thought we had it all tied down back in the Age of Reason with mechanical theories from the likes of "Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, and others."

Many nineteenth century scientists in particular believed not just that the world is deterministic but that, such being the case, they would one day be able to predict whatever was about to take place in it.

This was considered to be a great improvement on the old days when the only way to get a handle on things was with divine help from gods and spirits and seers. Even after the revolution in physics with relativity and quantum theory scientists, even including Stephen Hawking, were still spinning the idea that "there only remained a few minor gaps to be closed."

But Creveld is having none of it. Responding to young students who wondered how they could ever learn what he knew, he drew a little square on the blackboard, and a slightly bigger one next to it. The little square was the students' knowledge. The slightly bigger one was his, Creveld's, knowledge. The blackboard was the scope of all available knowledge.

That is my understanding of the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything." We still don't know nothin'.

And it's remarkable. On the one hand we have evolved as animals that have wived and thrived on this earth to a remarkable extent. On the other, the whole of the world of life except us operates without our fabulous human reason. How does that work?

Used to be that we sneered at our forefathers for their ignorance and superstition. But what exactly should we do about the current Coronavirus scare? There are all kinds of possibilities, from Do Nothing and let the virus work its way through the population and pick everything up after it's all over, to Stop the World and quarantine everyone until the virus gives up. So, which one does our science recommend? And which one does our human social instinct, which, scientists say, is the key to our survival thus far?

You tell me.

In other words, we are just as hopeless at forecasting the future as we ever were. And no sooner do we figure that we have it all figured out than life comes along and reminds us that we don't have a clue.

You will notice that there are several strategies for life and survival. There is the small organism and thousands of eggs approach, favored by the insect world. There is the large organism and succor of the young approach that mammals and humans prefer. There is the non-social plan of solitary species like the orangutan and the incredibly social organization of termites. And every combination in between.

What does it all mean? And what if it doesn't mean anything?

The fact is that life and the world were a mystery when humans thought of the sun god riding his chariot through the heavens. And it is all still a mystery when we reckon the universe as unimaginably big, and we can't decide whether there is a universe or multiverses.

To use the current fashion of talking about "scale," it seems that the the world we live in is a mystery, at whatever scale you choose to experience it.

And what does that mean?

Are Democrats Getting Desperate?

One of the basic tent-pegs holding up my world view is the notion developed by Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution. The idea is that there comes a time in every revolution where the revolutionaries get desperate. Despite the glorious prophecy, the New Age has not dawned.

Why? It's got to be the reactionaries, the kulaks, the saboteurs and wreckers. In our day, of course, it's the racist-sexist-homophobes. Did you know that it is xenophobic to refer to the Chinese Flu instead of the WHO approved COVID-19?

What to do? The answer is always the same: pedal to the metal. Push the movement's agenda to the utmost. Stop compromising with the other side. Push them out of the way.

In the French Revolution it was the Reign of Terror and Virtue. In the Bolshevik Revolution it was Death to the Kulaks. In Maoist China it was the Great Leap Forward followed by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Now I believe that in the United States we are seeing the failure of the progressive agenda. I think we are seeing that the big government adminisrative state doesn't work. I think we are seeing that the Sexual Revolution doesn't work. I think we are seeing that the regulatory state doesn't work. I think we are seeing that "I am woman, hear me roar" doesn't work.

That is why the left is accusing everyone of being a racist-sexist-homophobe.

And so our wokerati friends are overreaching. In California they are trying to kill the "gig" economy -- meaning especially Uber and Lyft -- with the so-called AB5 act -- and are demolishing the arts, including writers and musicians. In Oregon they are so determined to save the climate that they are steamrollering a cap-and-trade policy past a desperate GOP opposition and the Democratic governor is now implementing the policy by executive action. Here in Washington State the Democrats are pushing a cap-and-trade bill. What is cap and trade?

a system for controlling carbon emissions and other forms of atmospheric pollution by which an upper limit is set on the amount a given business or other organization may produce but which allows further capacity to be bought from other organizations that have not used their full allowance

See? Another "system," beloved of bureaucrats and ideologists.

Because there is no time to be lost! The climate deniers, funded by eevil oil and gas interests, are going to kill us. Unless we act now.

And the Democrats in Washington have been running a three-year campaign to hinder and humiliate President Trump in every way possible. Including a special prosecutor investigation and an impeachment effort. Now, according to reports, House Democrats are trying to put abortion policy into emergency legislation to help deal with the Hunan Virus Epidemic.

Yeah, you might say. What is wrong with these people? What happened to bipartisan compromise and both sides working together?

What is wrong is that the world promised by the prophets is not working out for them. All the things their prophets told their supporters are turning out false. And so they are getting desperate; they are turning up the volume.

Well, here's my Prophecy. It's all going to collapse, the whole lefty world view. Because? Because the progressive agenda is a conceit of the educated Gentry that does nothing for ordinary Commoners. It is an excuse for the educated Gentry to puff itself up with Important Issues and activisme and peaceful protests and Goals and Timetables. But it does nothing for ordinary people.

And, I would argue, it devastates the Clients, the Subordinates, the grateful serfs that suck on the tit of the admninstrative state and its entitlement programs. But that is another story.

So our lefty friends are desperately lunging for the finish line. One last WWI-style Big Push. One last ideological purge to clear the world of deplorables and haters.

The argument of Anatomy of Revolution is that the Reign of Terror is followed by a Thermidorean Reaction that ends up as Napoleon.

The Thermidorian Reaction was a liberal-conservative counter-revolution that followed the toppling of Maximilien Robespierre in July 1794. It wound back the Reign of Terror, purged the government of Jacobin influence and attempted to restore some of the political, social and economic values of 1789.

Brinton argued that the ideological frenzy of revolution cannot be sustained. Eventually, people demand to return to ordinary life.

In our day, if you like, the Sixties Kids were followed by the Nixon Reaction of the Silent Majority and the Reagan era.

And the "fundamental transformation" of Barack Obama was followed by the Trump Reaction of the bitter clingers and deplorables.

Notice the common denominator of the Nixon and the Trump Reaction? Both Reactions were really revolts of the Commoners. Or, as Nietzsche might have said if he were writing today, revolts against the hoity-toity Gentry secular "priests" that were teaching us to hate ourselves.

But maybe I am wrong. Maybe this time really is the Millennium of the Wokerati. Maybe.

What's that? You are looking for a bridge to buy?

Keeping a Proper Distance: A Strategy for Foreign Policy

About four years ago this crazy orange-haired businessman ran for President of the United States on a platform of putting America First. As Conservative Tree House puts it, this whacky guy proposed:

1. The U.S. needed to have control over our borders, and a greater ability to control who was migrating to the United States.  A shift toward stopping ‘illegal’ migration.
2. The U.S. needed to stop the manufacture of goods overseas and return critical manufacturing back to the United States.  A return to economic independence.
3. The U.S. needed to decouple from an over-reliance on Chinese industrial and consumer products.  China viewed as a geopolitical and economic risk.

Well I Never! Whaddya think of that, here in the US and A on March 12, 2020?

What I want to know is: who is the brains trust behind President Trump? Is it really Trump himself? Or his son-in-law Jared Kushner? Or who or what?

Because today it looks almost like divine intervention, the old saw about God taking care of children, drunks, and the good old US of A.

The alternative is to accept that Donald Trump has an astonishing strategic mind. And that is impossible, right, geniuses?

The point is that Trump has been pretty cagey about a lot of things. We were all taught to believe that his 2016 campaign was a complete amateur hour. Then, after the election, Brad Parscale appeared on FoxNews and talked about their social-media campaign and how they targeted this and that, and so on.

What! I thought that Trump was supposed to be totally winging it. And yet managed to target exactly the states that put him over the top -- with the help of Parscale who was creating websites at the Trump Organization back in the day.

Now, with the "foreign virus" -- yeah! Call me a xenophobe! -- he is looking like a genius. What! You mean to say that nearly all our antibiotics are made in China? Who knew? We oughta do something about that!

When you look at the three principles listed by CTS above, you see that Trump is arguing for a certain distance between the US and other nations.

But the question is: how distant? I have an idea.

Take President Putin's latest announcement, that allows him two more terms as president of Russia. I'd say that the US needs to keep a distance from nations that have presidents-for-life. Nothing personal, you understand.

So that would also mean we keep a distance from China, with President-for-life Xi.

Nothing personal, you understand. Nothing xenophobic. Heavens no. It's just that any guy that signs himself up to be president for life is missing the point. In fact he is dumb as a post, and dangerous for that reason.

You see, politics is a blunt instrument, basically designed to defend the border from the baddies. It doesn't take a genius to do that. But the dirty secret about border defense is that the defenders expect to be paid for their trouble: loot and plunder. So the longer the current leader gets to run the border-defense racket the deeper will be the corruption of his regime.

And since politics is usually a succession of one stupidity after another, it can't hurt to change one idiot for another.

Plus, we democratic societies have found, after about a decade of one chap in power, the voters start to feel it is Time for a Change.

So we Yanks should keep regimes at arm's length that go in for president for life or for mullahs for life. Just not our kind, darling.

Here's something to think about. How about the European Union, that seems to be a bureaucracy for life? Yeah. Good point, senator. Maybe we should keep a certain distance from those chaps too. Not as much as the presidents-for-life, of course, but still...

Here is my thought on politics. In chimpanzee society it makes sense to defend the border to the death, because the whole troop depends on the food -- and baby-chimp -- growing capacity of the troop's territory. That is according to Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn. But as soon as you get humans on the job the absolute necessity for enough food on the land becomes less important, because humans trade, and human trade seems to go back about 200,000 years before even the Dawn of Agriculture.

Still, right through the agricultural era, the basis of wealth and security was food-growing land with a bit of trading on the side. So humans put a high priority on defense of the homeland.

But now, food is something you put on grain ships in the harbor of Vancouver, BC, and send across the world.

But do you see? The less that the food-growing capacity of our sacred land equals survival the less we need warriors on the border and charismatic leaders to lead them.

Put it in a different way: the less important food-growing becomes to our well-being, the less we need brave warriors and a warrior elite to protect us.

Thus, to say that a President Putin is so essential that he must stay as president into his 80s is baloney. Russia doesn't need to be led by a charismatic leader. Same with China. Just get on with producing stuff and selling it. And never mind being the charismatic leader.

But whatabout the danger of Donald Trump, the charismatic leader?

Good point. But see, here in these United States we have a Constitutional Amendment restricting presidents to two terms. And we also have a cultural and political elite that would take poison rather than allow Trump a third term.

So, no worries. And anyway, I dare say that Trump will have a recession in his second term, and everyone will agree that we need the Democrats in office again.

And in 2021 Trump will leave office and everyone will live happily ever after.