"Ending The Blue State Urban Veto"

 This is another one I shamelessly clipped while I was on the cruise, I got it from Michael Smith SubStack.  He makes a lot of good points that the urban areas can pull a state. Oregon has that problem as does Washington.  Both have very blue cities surrounding by red rural areas, but they swing the states partially by the lax voting rules they have by the political machines that run the state(Democrat).   I have commented many times that voting is a safety valve for our society, but it it is made redundant by the gerrymandering and other slight of hands tricks  used by the party in charge to totally wipe out any influence of the opposition party, people will eventually lose the will to participate, and the institutions of the country take a hit.  When people no longer care to participate in the body politic and fade away, the safety valve is gone, eventually a spark will set off a fight. and it will go kinetic. Do I want to see "Spicy Times", no I don't, but eventually I see it coming when the tyranny of the minority will force the issue.

Virginia’s election of alleged “moderate” Democrat, Abigail Spanberger, proves a couple of things. First, given her immediate actions—what Meghan McCain described as an effort to “turn Virginia into Minneapolis”—it confirms there are no such things as “moderate” Democrats anymore. CIAbigail has already moved to unwind many of the reforms of former governor Youngkin, including ending hand-counting ballot safeguards and reinstating discriminatory DEI policies. Second, her victory once again illustrates how concentrated urban populations rule over rural counties in statewide elections, regardless of how divergent their values, needs, or ways of life may be.

In dense urban and suburban environments, daily life is mediated by public systems so thoroughly that their presence becomes invisible. Garbage disappears on schedule, utilities are reliable, grocery stores are minutes away, and commercial centers appear as if by market magic—though many are in fact the result of tax abatements, subsidies, zoning favoritism, and government-directed incentives. When most necessities are delivered through a mix of public provision and state-assisted development, and the most effort required is dragging a wheelie bin to the curb, it is hardly surprising that residents come to see larger government as natural, benevolent, and even indispensable. By contrast, someone living a hundred miles from a major airport or a full-service hospital experiences government very differently and understandably struggles to see why taxes must rise to support services that feel distant, unnecessary, or irrelevant to daily survival.

This divide maps cleanly onto modern electoral geography. As population density increases, so does support for liberal, government-centered policies, a pattern visible in virtually every election heat map. The closer one lives to a dense urban core, the more likely one is to support expansive government programs; the farther away, the more skepticism tends to grow. When people spend their entire lives in environments where government quietly handles problems they never have to think about, independence and private enterprise begin to appear risky, even threatening. They assume that without government, those services might disappear and that they would, for the first time, must pay for them directly, manage them personally, or go without.

The rural counties and the urban areas, meanwhile, have profoundly different philosophies, ideologies, and views of religion—and yet they are regulated, taxed, and governed as if they were interchangeable with the urban cores that dominate statewide elections. This tension is no longer abstract or theoretical. We see it in counties openly discussing secession, state realignment, or outright political separation as a means of escaping governance they no longer recognize as legitimate.

I’ve written before about how Congress actively assisted West Virginia’s break from Virginia over slavery in 1861 and awarded it statehood in 1863. Setting aside how legally questionable and non-reproducible that episode would be today, the fact that people are even contemplating similar ideas tells you something is broken. The current arrangement does not feel particularly fair and it certainly does not feel representative.

The U.S. Constitution reflects a uniquely American insight: democracy without geography becomes domination. The Founders never believed that raw headcounts alone produced legitimacy. They believed legitimacy came from distributed consent across real, distinct communities. That is why they created the Electoral College to elect presidents, split Congress into two chambers, apportioned House seats by population, and granted each state equal representation in the Senate. These were not accidents or compromises born of ignorance; they were deliberate structural restraints on the tyranny of concentrated majorities. Modern states abandoned that insight—not because it was wrong, but because it was inconvenient.

I’ve been thinking about this problem for nearly twenty years. Every presidential cycle, when a handful of urban counties like Fulton County in Georgia or the swamp-infested counties of Northern Virginia, effectively determine who sits behind the Resolute Desk, I revisit it, then drop it again. Since the disastrous election of 2020, however, I’ve been more deliberate, jotting down possible alternatives to the permanent domination of rural counties by cities—domination that exists solely because cities have more headcount. I keep arriving at the same conclusion: the problem is not democracy itself, but the absence of federalism inside the states.

Out of roughly ten mechanisms I examined, three stand out as serious possibilities, all would require amendments to state constitutions. I proposed several frameworks to ChatGPT and Grok, told them to use Virginia as a crash-test dummy, and then compared, synthesized the outputs and ranked by legal survivability.

The most legally durable option would be a dual-majority requirement for statewide offices. Under such a system, a candidate would need to win both the statewide popular vote and a majority of counties or regions. This does not dilute urban votes or give rural areas veto power. It simply requires geographic legitimacy in addition to numerical superiority. Cities could still decide elections—but only if their preferences were shared, at least in part, beyond their own boundaries. Courts have historically been more comfortable with outcome-qualification rules than with systems that directly weight votes, making this approach especially resilient.

A closely related option would replace counties with regions. Virginia is already functionally divided into recognizable geographic blocs—Northern Virginia, Hampton Roads, Central Virginia, the Shenandoah Valley, Southwest Virginia. Requiring a candidate to win the statewide vote and carry a minimum number of regions would prevent a single metro area from imposing its will on the rest of the Commonwealth, while avoiding the legal vulnerability of treating tiny rural counties as coequal to Fairfax or Loudoun. It forces candidates to assemble geographically broad coalitions rather than relying on one dense population center.

The most philosophically honest, though legally ambitious, solution would be a state-level electoral college. Counties or regions would function as political units, each receiving a combination of population-based electors and a small fixed allotment recognizing territorial status. Statewide offices would be decided by electoral votes rather than raw totals. This mirrors the logic of the federal system and acknowledges that states are composed of communities, not just aggregates of individuals. Properly designed, with population remaining the dominant factor, such a system could survive judicial scrutiny, though it would require careful drafting and political courage.

While I personally prefer the last option, none of these reforms would guarantee conservative victories, nor are they meant to. Their purpose is not partisan advantage but political relevance—rural Virginians would not be asking to rule cities; they are asking not to be ruled by them. Federalism was never about efficiency. It was about legitimacy. When fundamentally different ways of life are governed as if they are interchangeable, resentment becomes inevitable and consent erodes.

We see the same dynamic play out at the county level elsewhere. I lived in Park City, Utah, in Summit County, which is still (despite the sprawl) majority farm and ranch land. Yet the county is effectively ruled by Park City rather than the county seat of Coalville. Scale changes, but the problem remains the same.

Virginia is beginning to experience that reality firsthand. The real question is not whether these mechanisms are sufficiently democratic. It is whether a system that permanently subordinates one culture, one economy, and one way of life to another can plausibly claim to be representative at all.

If geography no longer matters, then consent soon won’t either.

"How To Cower Elite Wussies" at Davos

 

Another Snagged off Farcebook while I was on the cruise thingie.

It’s been hilarious watching Trump’s masterclass in “How to Cower Elite Wussies” at Davos.

The WEF elites mistake spreadsheets for courage and panel discussions for strength. Their effete, limp-wristed males wear tailored suits but have the posture and presence of substitute teachers. Their vinegar-faced females clutch lattes and explain - through trembling smiles - why YOU must accept less so that THEY can feel virtuous about “the transition.”

For years, these pompous windbags strutted around like philosopher kings and queens.

So sure of themselves. So brave when speaking to captive audiences and a compliant press. So bold when announcing that other people would need to eat bugs, tighten belts, lower expectations, surrender ownership, abandon tradition, and “adapt.” All delivered in that soft, bloodless Davos tone - condescension masquerading as compassion.

But then Trump, like Gandalf on the Bridge of Khazad-Dum, strides onto the stage and thunders “you shall not pass!”

And suddenly the Davos elites’ courage vanishes.

These feckless wusses are just wannabe tyrants. Real tyrants have nerve. They’re wannabe revolutionaries. Real revolutionaries risk something. The WEF class is managerial to the bone - precious career climbers, pretentious credential collectors, middle aged prefects who rose by never offending anyone stronger than themselves. Their authority exists only in rooms where disagreement is disallowed and consequences are theoretical.

That’s why the shift is so revealing.

The same crowd that wagged its finger at entire nations now speaks in careful hedges. The same mouths that confidently declared the future “inevitable” suddenly sound unsure. The same people who mocked dissent as ignorance are now desperately trying to sound reasonable, moderate, listening. Watch them physically shrink - voices softening, language watering down, principles melting into mush.

Because at heart, they are terrified of conflict they can’t referee.

They are brave when power is abstract; fearless when no one can say no; and ruthless when the costs are paid by strangers.

But faced with force, resolve, or a challenge that doesn’t care about their credentials? They fold. They always have. The Davos elite aren’t evil geniuses. They’re puffed up, evil mediocrities with delusions of adequacy.

Their brittle authority is propped up by prestige and fear of social disapproval. But once that fear dissolves, there’s nothing underneath. No backbone. No conviction. No willingness to stand behind what they so smugly demanded of everyone else.

Trump has exposed them for the feckless, ineffectual, self-congratulatory apparatchiks that they’ve always been.

"Has Donald Trump Ever..."

 

I clipped this off Farcebook during the cruise..

Has Donald Trump ever opened extermination camps for entire groups of people?

No.

Has he used the U.S. military to deliberately target innocent civilians?

No.

Has he targeted hostile forces like ISIS and the IRGC?

Yes.

Has he promoted racial hatred?

No.

Did he call for unity—under one flag, regardless of race or religion—at his 2025 inauguration?

Yes.

Has he repeatedly challenged media manipulation and outright falsehoods?

Yes.

Did he help broker peace deals and ceasefires between long-standing adversaries during his time in office?

Yes.

So why the hatred?

Because it was never about what he did.

They hated him from day one.

Every misrepresentation, every exaggeration, every manufactured scandal is recycled and sold as “truth.” Racist. Misogynist. Rapist. Anything will do—as long as it justifies the hatred. The labels matter less than the outcome.

Why do they hate him?

Because without that hatred, they would be forced to confront something far more uncomfortable: themselves.

The truth is this—many are deeply invested in a system that no longer works. A system he challenged, disrupted, and exposed. And people who have built their identities around a broken system will defend it with everything they have. History is full of those who defended their masters while calling themselves virtuous.

To admit that Trump is a disruptor rather than a tyrant would require them to unravel the beliefs, credentials, and moral hierarchies they’ve spent their lives protecting. That kind of reckoning is unbearable. So denial becomes survival.

They don’t hate him for who he is or what he’s done. That’s just the story they tell themselves. They hate him because their egos recognize him as a threat—to their status, their worldview, and the system that validates them.

He holds up a mirror they refuse to look into.

That mirror reflects an unsettling possibility: that the system they trusted is false, that the narratives they defended were hollow, and that the world they were promised was never real.

And when a system collapses, so do the identities built inside it.

Will they ever understand this?

No. The ego doesn’t work that way.

It sneers instead. Not out of strength—but out of fear.

Because it’s always easier to hate the one holding up the mirror than to face the reflection staring back.

Monday er Tuesday Music "Mr Jaws" by Dickie Goodman

 

I am continuing my soundtrack "Monday Tuesday Music".  I happen to catch this on my 70's on 7 on my Sirius/XM and I totally forgot this song until I heard it and I was chuckling to myself.  So I decided to make it my "Monday Music" song.  I heard it for the first time in 1975 while we were living in Frankfurt Germany and I heard the song on the "Wolfman Jack" show on AFN where I thought he was an AFN DJ, what can I say, I was 10 years old then.


"Mr. Jaws" is a novelty song by Dickie Goodman released on Cash Records in 1975.
This record is a parody of the 1975 summer blockbuster film Jaws, with Goodman interviewing the shark (whom he calls "Mr. Jaws"), as well as the film's main characters, Brody, Hooper, and Quint. Goodman makes full use of his practice of "break-in" music sampling, in which all of the interview answers are lyrics from popular songs from that year.
The single peaked at #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October 1975. On the Cash Box Top 100 it fared even better, reaching #1.

Goodman would later make more parodies of Hollywood films, along with his political satire records. The B-side of this single was "Irv's Theme".
The name of the song's label, Cash Records, was another idea from Goodman after he was asked whom the record company should make the check out to.
The recording took place at Sear Sound in New York engineered by Russ Hamm. Originally the songs were sampled, however when the record became a hit, the songs were replaced by sound-alike recordings.

"Empathy as a weapon "

 Still on the cruise and shamelessly "nicked" another one off farcebook.  We will see if weather will make our return problematic or not

Gad Saad is one of my favorites. His book The Parasitic Mind was excellent, and I pre-ordered his new one, Suicidal Empathy, a while back. Saad has developed compelling theories about why we’re seeing empathy weaponized—and why Western civilization seems willing to let its enemies use that weapon to undermine institutions that have stood for centuries. Watching today’s protests and media performances, I see anger and disgust, along with a striking lack of concern for consequences. But I also see something else in those faces: fear. Not rational fear—the kind you’d expect in war or when facing a wild animal—but fear of imagined conditions, abstract threats, and constructed enemies.

I’m just a layman when it comes to evolutionary psychology, but like any proper amateur pundit, I have a theory nd I do my homework. My theory is far less sophisticated than Professor Saad’s (and you should probably listen to him, not me), but here it is: much of this is sadistic, malevolent manipulation by political sociopaths in pursuit of power. That manipulation works because there are millions of people who have undergone arrested adulthood, and many more who, despite being chronologically adult, lack the ability to recognize or regulate their emotions well enough to engage in reasoned conversation. They retain adolescent emotional reactivity while being granted adult moral authority. This isn’t merely cultural, there is a neurological basis for it.

I think that is why this excess empathy is especially rampant in Hollywood and the desperate housewife segment populated by AWFULs (Affluent White Female Urban Liberals). They spend their waking hours wanting to be someone else, so emotional displacement is already at work.

Modern political persuasion increasingly bypasses deliberation by targeting the emotional circuitry of the brain directly. The strategy is simple: trigger empathic distress first, then insert policy while judgment is impaired. To understand how this works, we have to distinguish between empathy and compassion. They are not the same psychological state, and they do not activate the same neural systems. Empathy is emotional mirroring—internally reproducing another person’s pain. When it’s triggered, stress hormones rise, attention narrows, and executive control drops. The prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for proportional reasoning and long-term planning—loses influence. In plain terms, the nervous system enters threat-response mode.

Compassion is different. Compassion recognizes suffering while maintaining psychological distance. Instead of activating distress circuits, it engages regulatory systems in the brain. The result is calm focus, preserved judgment, and sustained motivation to help. Empathy floods. Compassion steadies. Modern political messaging overwhelmingly aims for empathy, not compassion, because empathy creates urgency while compassion preserves clarity.

This explains why political narratives are almost always personalized. Complex policy questions, immigration, policing, healthcare, war, are converted into emotionally vivid individual stories: a crying child, a grieving parent, a viral clip. Humans respond far more strongly to one visible person than to statistics involving millions. Our moral intuitions evolved for small tribal groups. They are not designed for civilization-scale problems. One face will always outweigh a spreadsheet.

Once emotional identification occurs, attention shifts away from systems and toward symbolic individuals. Structural analysis gives way to protective instinct. Messaging then collapses emotional boundaries. The language moves from “they are suffering” to “imagine if this were your child.” The listener is no longer observing suffering; they are invited to inhabit it. Healthy empathy requires self–other separation. Political rhetoric deliberately removes that separation, producing emotional flooding.

Flooded minds don’t ask about incentives, second-order effects, or long-term consequences. They ask a single question: how do we stop this feeling right now? That’s when urgency and moral absolutism enter. Action must be immediate. Hesitation becomes cruelty, nuance becomes complicity and deliberation is replaced by moral pressure

Disagreement is reframed as a character defect: if you don’t agree, you lack empathy .

Here’s the critical point: empathy is inherently biased. It favors the visible over the invisible, the similar over the distant, and the immediate over the proportional. It feels virtuous, but when elevated to a governing principle it reliably produces distorted priorities, impulsive decisions, and punitive moralism. Empathy evolved to guide interpersonal care. It did not evolve to manage large societies. That’s why emotionally driven policy so often results in symbolic legislation and cascading unintended consequences. Emotional logic doesn’t scale. Policy does. What begins as a response to one compelling story becomes permanent structural change—usually without recalculating costs or downstream effects.

This is where arrested adulthood becomes politically useful. People who never fully developed emotional regulation respond to distress the way children do: urgently, absolutely, and without proportional reasoning. Their feelings become their facts. When entire movements rest on this foundation, politics becomes emotional theater rather than governance.

Compassion would lead somewhere else. Compassion preserves boundaries. It asks not merely who is suffering, but what actually helps. It allows concern without surrendering judgment. Empathy collapses self and other; compassion maintains separation. Only compassion supports rational action.

The political consequences are profound. A society trained to maximize empathy becomes reactive, manipulable, morally theatrical, and cognitively exhausted. Emotional escalation becomes the currency of public discourse. Every issue is framed as an emergency. Every disagreement becomes a referendum on virtue. Modern politics favors this because emotionally flooded populations are easier to mobilize, easier to shame, and easier to steer.

This isn’t about kindness. It is about control. It is always about control.

Philosophically, the imbalance is clear. A lack of empathy reflects emotional underdevelopment. Excess empathy reflects emotional dysregulation. Civilization depends on something rarer than either: disciplined concern under reason.

Empathy without regulation becomes hysteria and regulation without concern becomes cruelty. The narrow edge between them is where functional societies live. Modern political systems increasingly push people off that edge and toward emotional flooding while claiming moral superiority for doing so.

That is the mechanism. It is cruel but it works. That is why they will keep using it.