Civil Society

New Year’s in San Salvador

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This was an amazing thing to see. Salvadorans seem happy and optimistic. A few years ago it was like: Don’t go to this place; don’t go to that place; you can go to this tourist place, it’s safe. Everything was either off-limits or a walled garden. Someone I know was robbed at gunpoint of her cellphone while sitting in her car with the window down and having a conversation. Everyone says she was lucky.

Now it’s a different country. There is still crime but you can go almost anywhere. The murder rate, once sky-high, is low by US standards. The downtown was dilapidated and dangerous. Now it’s being renovated, bustling, a nice place to walk around.

It’s all because, almost by chance, Salvadorans elected a president who was serious about stopping the gangs that were responsible for most of the crime, and politically skilled and lucky enough (very) to pull it off.

National turnarounds can happen. El Salvador, maybe Argentina, maybe the USA. Europe looks in a bad way, reminiscent of the late 1970s before Reagan and Thatcher. Of course this time is different, it’s worse this time, etc. But this time is always different, and thus rarely different at all: trends, including bad trends, don’t go on forever. Here’s hoping.

The Lie At the Heart

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There was a time when most of us neither knew nor cared about matters to do with transgender, save in the nature of not quite being able to look away from the blessedly infrequent spectacle of someone in the public eye deciding to medically readjust their body to the appearance of the opposite sex and to change their name to conform. Christine Jorgenson was, as I recall as a teenager, seen as a freakish anomaly – an entertaining one, to be sure, but pretty much a one-off. Travel writer Jan Morris (formerly James) and musician Wendy (formerly Walter) Carlos came along a decade or two later. Their transition to a sex other than the one they had been born with at a point where both were mature adults was viewed as kind of a private eccentricity, not affecting much beyond their families and personal circle. Curious, but … whatever floats your boat. I also suspect that there was a scattering of other individuals who made such a transition, and chose to live quietly and modestly in their new identity; happy enough to live and be accepted in the identity that they felt was truly a reflection of who they were. Constantly blaring out the specifics of their previous life and their new one was most definitely not a means to achieving privacy.

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Reaching for the Alien Shore

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So, about those drones. Treating the current social contagion as a subset of the ongoing “UAP” fad, how are we to evaluate the obsession with extraterrestrial aliens? Lest my output appear misleadingly prodigious, I wrote most of what follows in late summer 2023 and have modestly updated it for our situation as of (very) late autumn 2024. The organization of this post is an attempt at a hierarchy from most immediate/local to greatest space/time extent.

NOTICE! In compliance with the Manifoldian Transparency Pledge of 2024, which I just thought up:

  • this thing runs > 8k words, reading time potentially exceeds 30 minutes, and that doesn’t account for
  • lots of math and possible inducement to wander off down various rabbit trails invoked thereby (besides the homework/syllabus assignments), which you may or may not regard as part of the fun; and
  • not to overlook the obvious, I will address the concomitant obsession with foreign infiltration, and OCD contamination phobia in general, in at least one separate post.

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The Inconvenient Man

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Anybody here remember the name Nicholas Roske?

Probably not.

If you don’t that’s okay because there are a lot of people, especially right now, who wish you didn’t.

However, you do know the name of the killer of Brian Thompson.

I am not going to use that murdering sc*mbag’s name here. You can find it easily enough. There are millions of people treating him as a modern-day Robin Hood or (if they weren’t so ignorant of their cultural patrimony) an avenging angel. I shouldn’t say that about ignorance because you can actually purchase merchandise depicting the man as a saint. Just in time for Christmas…. or the Holidays…. or WinterFest or whatever they are calling it this year

Well, for now, regarding the merchandise because it seems Etsy is pulling this stuff down off their site as fast as it goes up. The other day there were multiple pages of stuff there for sale so maybe there is still hope for decency. Then again, there is always the possibility of our friends at places like Target stepping up — they haven’t forsaken the high holies of DEI yet, and open enrollment does run through Jan. 15.

So back to Nicholas Roske.

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2024 Election Plus/Delta

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Pluses: admittedly much the shorter list, but we did resolve a few things.

  1. Thanks mainly to vote shifts in California and New York, the popular vote outcome was not at variance with the Electoral College vote, and it wasn’t particularly close (over 4-1/2 million votes).
  2. Largely as a result, the losing side, and VP Harris herself, have indicated cooperation with formal certification and transition processes.
  3. Harris is gone. She’ll get a chunk of money for a book and retire to the lecture circuit.
  4. Walz, same, and given the likelihood that he would have been a 21st-century version of Henry Wallace, with Chinese instead of Soviet agents in his inner circle, that might be more important than getting rid of Harris.
  5. Taking a somewhat longer view, Trump is gone too (perhaps not a much longer view; see the final Delta item below).
  6. By extension, there is some chance that ’28 will not have the electorate choosing between a crook and an idiot for President.
  7. Whatever one may think of prediction markets, and there are arguments on both sides regarding their functionality, the biggest prediction market of all, the US stock market, was forecasting a Trump victory all year (not coincidentally, the same thing happened in 2016).
  8. By the way, the media will actually report negative economic news now.
  9. I could have put this in either category, but I’ll leave it here: your Cluebat of the Day is a reminder that Trump is as old as Biden was in ’20, and notwithstanding some of my more apprehensive items below, to expect anything much of him is a waste of time.
  10. Likely continuation of relatively good space-industry policy across Administrations, which should be the only thing that matters several decades from now.

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