BNN is the Answer to the Current Epidemic of Despair

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The Baby News Network (BNN) is a comedy channel on YouTube that features as its centerpiece Baby Trump.  And as far as I can tell it is the solution to the plague of depression that has engulfed our times.  It’s just absurdity piled on absurdity but the smile it produces is certainly real.

I noticed this about Trump back during his first campaign.  His bluster and exaggeration are hilarious and actually endear him to the voters.  I mean, it’s obvious he’s talking trash and employing P. T. Barnum tactics in almost every circumstance imaginable.  But the fact that he is doing it against the people who hate us and, in our defense, makes it enjoyable.  And the fact that we don’t hold his trash talk against him drives his opponents crazy.  I once had a leftist get exasperated when she pointed out he was exaggerating some accomplishment and I started laughing about the story.  I told her that the exaggeration was what made it fun.  She just walked away shaking her head.

And this kind of humor always appealed to me.  In fact, back during his first term I used to do some Trump humor.  But the funny thing is the reality is usually funnier than the stuff I’d make up.  So, I watch some of the BNN whenever I see something that strikes my funny bone.  Of course, it doesn’t solve any of the real problems we have fighting against the Left day in and day out.  But laughter is valuable.  Enjoying something witty is helpful.  So, I’m linking these videos to help lift the mood of the people who come here to find something interesting and hopeful.

I hope someone enjoys at least one of these.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reading the SCOTUS Tea Leaves

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Well, I believe this is the last week of the Supreme Court session.  And most of the big decisions have been handed down.  But the 600-pound gorilla in the court, birthright citizenship, is still hanging out there.  And so, I’ve been trying to decide whether leaving it for the last means it’s more likely to be overturned or confirmed.

It’s a real puzzle.  Rejecting Trump’s challenge to the birthright citizenship interpretation of the 14th amendment is the conventional reading and if the court was unwilling to buck convention, then would they leave it to the end to minimize the amount of abuse they would inevitably receive from Donald Trump?  Or does leaving it to the end signal that they are going to go out with a bang this year and save the biggest decision for last?

The pessimist in me says they’re going to deny Trump.  After all you have the three commies who will surely vote against Trump and you also have John Roberts who is a squish and almost certainly would be afraid of taking such a stance even if he were completely convinced of the logic.  So that’s 4/5 without any other waverers.  How sure am I that the other five will be unanimous for Trump’s argument?  Well, not very.

But I’ve decided to force myself to take an optimistic stance on this highly important ruling.  I’m throwing my weight behind a Trump victory.  Whenever the last day of the term is, I predict that the Supreme Court of the United States of America will vote by a 5/4 margin that children born in the United States, to non-citizens are not automatically citizens of this country.

And that decision along with the recent decision allowing Trump to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for roughly 350,000 Haitians (and about 6,000 Syrians) will allow him to accelerate his immigration policies.

TPS is a humanitarian program that allows nationals from countries facing ongoing crises (e.g., natural disasters, violence, or instability) to live and work legally in the U.S. without facing deportation while conditions in their home country remain unsafe.  And that means they never leave.

So, I’m using this earlier decision as a rationale for my mindless optimism.  The thought is, if the justices were wise enough to see the logic that allows one president to declare something an emergency and another to declare the emergency over, then they can see the logic that would make the 14th amendment a stopgap to enfranchise the children of freed slaves but not want to utilize it to allow illegal aliens to steal American citizenship for their children.

Alright, have I convinced myself?  Have I convinced you?

SURE!!!

Well, stay tuned.  The decision is in the next few days and it will tell us quite a bit about our current Supreme Court.  Who knows, maybe Hakeem Jeffries is right.  Maybe we need to increase the court to thirteen justices and flood it with wild-eyed conservatives who will do my bidding.  Or maybe we’re just entering the silly season and I need a vacation.

The Wavelet

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Getting old makes everything, if not worse, then definitely harder.  I had the two younger grandsons over and one of them wanted to have a baseball catch.  And that is one of my favorite grandson activities.  But what I didn’t reckon with was the fact that he was now entering high school and had become much stronger.  So that meant we were standing about twice as far apart as we used to and that if he threw the ball a little too far or too far left or right, I would have to break into a full run to catch the ball on the fly.  And at first this was exhilarating and made me feel like a kid again.  But it was 85 degrees out and after about twenty minutes I was sweating and puffing like an old man (which I am!).  But it was great.  I think that was the most fun we ever had together.  And I was so proud to see how athletic he’d become.  His fast ball was a rocket.  It stung my hand through the glove!

But right now, work stinks.  I’ve got all these extra hours and it’s ruining the summer.  I want to hand the job over to someone else but no one else is stupid enough to accept it.  So, it’s me.  End of job rant.

As anyone who’s been paying attention knows the communists are making major inroads against “moderate” Democrats in the urban centers.  This reflects the voting pattern of millennial and zoomer radicals and includes their embrace of the whole Gaza “genocide” claim.  And this is causing a noticeable collision between Jewish Democrat politicians and their constituencies.  We saw this with the New York City congressional races but it’s happening elsewhere and it doesn’t spare Jewish candidates just because they’re “diverse.”

Here’s Scott Weiner, a Jewish San Francisco LGBTQ hero, who is running for Nancy Pelosi’s congressional seat, being hounded out of a trans-parade because he won’t call Gaza a genocide.

The unhinged behavior of the three gatekeepers chasing him off the parade ground is indicative of the primacy of the Gaza genocide plank of the communist movement.  Regardless of what other causes you can point to on your political grievance bingo card if the Zionist spot isn’t covered you lose and no election win for you!  Now this is going to cause some problems for these people when we get to the general election.  First off, they’re going to have trouble raising money for their campaigns.  A lot of the big donors are Jewish and they’re most probably not loving all of this.  And they’ll be expressing their unhappiness by closing their check books.  And in some cities like San Francisco, the older voting population has a much more nuanced position than Gaza = Israeli genocide.  So, if, for instance, Scott Weiner wins Pelosi’s seat I wonder just how friendly he’s going to be with the Mamdani mafia that will be installed next year.

Now, maybe I’m wrong about how this schism on the Left will affect the 2026 midterms but I’ll be surprised if we see a blue wave.  I think it’ll be a much less impressive wavelet than promised.

Technical Innovation 2030 – Part 2

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Alright, so I got the no-brainer out of the way.  I identified a critical technology that’s been allowed to languish for sixty years.  Now let me look at actual innovation.

Probably the most powerful new technology is the current ability we have to modify the living genome.  This is the CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technology.  With this set of tools or techniques we can replace genes inside of living organisms and even produce gene lines that include or exclude traits that biology identifies for these changes.  This kind of control over the machinery of life is unprecedented.  Currently it is being used to create treatments for everything from genetic diseases to cancer.  In the future once the risks have been measured it may be used to edit the genes of human embryos to eliminate disease.  And obviously, as much as the idea is currently denounced by medical ethicists, in the future it will be used eugenically.  In some future time, in the same way as we currently inoculate our children against measles and chicken pox, we will modify our children’s genes against cancer and other diseases.  And after that we will alter their genetic code to make them more intelligent and longer lived.  And finally, after that we’ll use this technology for trivial purposes like making them taller and better looking.

And these things will happen because they can happen and because some of them will make human life better and happier.  Of course, sometime far in the future we may regret tampering with our DNA.  But the same can be said for all of the changes that man’s ascent out of the jungle have created.  These will be just the most premeditated.

And this CRISPR technology can also be used to modify all the other plants, animals and microbes that share the planet with us.  Imagine designing an insect whose only reason for existing is eating ticks so that they won’t have a chance to bite humans and spread disease.  Or how about a robber fly that is designed to eat specific mosquitoes that transmit malaria or even just live in my backyard in Dunwich?  Or how about a caterpillar whose favorite food is poison ivy?  And these are just parlor tricks.  The plant side is where the real benefits accrue.  Currently we have to plant grain every year.  This is expensive and fraught with problems.  What if corn and wheat and rice weren’t annuals but perennials.  What if we could chop the tops off of these plants and leave the root and the stem to grow again next year?  What if all plants could fix nitrogen from the air and thus reduce their need for fertilizers?  What if we could come up with microorganisms that attack the pathogens that cause tree blights like the ones that have decimated chestnut, elm and ash trees?  We can build living things that do a lot of the things we currently use chemistry to do.  And they’ll be a lot better at it.  Pesticides and herbicides can be biological.  We can even design creatures that excrete octane (well, maybe something a little less volatile).  Now that’s a trick I’d like to see come to fruition.

Anyway, you get the idea.  Biology is the next frontier.  But what will the third post in this series be about?