FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Hard to pick a favorite Nilsson song but this one has been giving me chills for 43 years.

•  I've been telling you guys that the longer Trump hangs in there, the greater the dilemma he presents for mainstream conservatives -- they have to disown him because he presents such an ugly picture of their real beliefs, but they also can't disown those beliefs. This is breeding some fascinating fleurs du mal. Attend Peggy Noonan today at the Wall Street Journal, who has gone further faster in that direction than even I would have expected. Noonan is a master of lipsticking the pig and silk-pursing the sow's ear, and here she goes all-out:

What a year of wonders. For a good portion of it there were three Republican presidential candidates who, if you added up their polling numbers, had the support of more than half the voters—and they had never, not one of them, won a political office in their lives.

You and I see Carson, Fiorina and Trump as malevolent clowns merrily stomping the reputation of the Party into the mud with their elongated shoes, but Noonan sees them as sunny populists. And she's not sweating a Trump nomination -- she thinks it could be great. She fantasizes a future headline: "Trump Expands the Base—Trump Grows the Party!” (I'm so sorry she wasn't around to tell us about the miracle of Wendell Willkie.) And if "Mr. and Mrs. Longtime Republican in the suburbs" don't like it, says Noonan, then "they’d better get ready to press the viable non-Trump candidates to stay, and all others to leave." Sound advice! Will eeny-meeny-miney-moe work? Oh, and get this:

Jeb Bush, by stepping down, could become what he wanted to be this year -- a hero, a history changer, a man who enhanced his own and his family’s legacy.

In the Hall of Bushes, Jeb!'s statute will be inscribed, "I don’t want to be elected president to sit around and see gridlock just become so dominant that people literally are in decline in their lives... I've got a lot of really cool things I could do other than sit around, being miserable, listening to people demonize me..." Then Noonan tells us, gosh, Democrats aren't like they used to be, i.e. losing:

This is not like the Democratic Party! It was once a big brass band marching through the streets—loud, dissonant, there. “I’m not a member of any organized party,” Will Rogers famously said. “I’m a Democrat.” For generations Democrats repeated that line as a brag. They knew disorganized meant vital, creative, spontaneous, passionate—alive. 

Now that party acts like this tidy, lifeless, fightless thing, a big, gray, dead-hearted, soul-killing blob. “I have the demographics,” it blobbily bellows, “I have the millennials.” Maybe it doesn’t have as much as it thinks. It is no honor to the Democratic Party that it is not fighting things through with a stage full of contenders this epochal year. 

The Republicans are all chaos and incoherence, it’s true. But at least they’re alive. At least they’re fighting as if it matters.

In 1984, when the Democratic primaries were contentious, the New York Post ran a front page with a picture of Jesse Jackson, Gary Hart, and Walter Mondale under the headline BEST OF ENEMIES. Parties love it when the opposition is in disarray. But in the last ditch, Noonan tells us the Democrats should be so lucky to be fractured and led by an unstable demagogue! She's got them right where she wants them!

•   A cautionary tale:

The self-driving car, that cutting-edge creation that’s supposed to lead to a world without accidents, is achieving the exact opposite right now: The vehicles have racked up a crash rate double that of those with human drivers. 

The glitch? 

They obey the law all the time, as in, without exception. This may sound like the right way to program a robot to drive a car, but good luck trying to merge onto a chaotic, jam-packed highway with traffic flying along well above the speed limit. It tends not to work out well. As the accidents have piled up -- all minor scrape-ups for now -- the arguments among programmers at places like Google Inc. and Carnegie Mellon University are heating up: Should they teach the cars how to commit infractions from time to time to stay out of trouble?

If you made it up it would be too on-the-nose, eh? And I don't mean about driverless cars. I have long believed, with Bob Dobbs, that we Americans suffer from a lack of slack. I say this not only out of personal preference (or, as some might say, laziness), but out of longtime observation of what happens to humans who are deprived of it. We see the endless and pernicious efforts to take up and tighten slack at every level of society, from the illegalization of the homeless to the prosecution not only of legal behavior but of legislation itself -- it's as if we all have to be on guard all the time, lest society collapse. (Nothing typifies this better than the professionalization of just looking for a goddamn job, which gets more absurd all the time.)  Now we have these driverless cars which, at first blush, would seem to be a slack-enabling devices that would leave us free to chill in the car like we would at the bar. But because they are not gifts from a beneficent society, but part of the usual slack-averse bullshit, they have created this problem -- the automatons can't behave like humans -- they can't draw outside the lines -- they have no slack in the nature. And now the scientists are trying to find way to emulate it, presumably with an algorithm. You know what comes next, right?



What life could be if we were just allowed to be human.

•   Speaking of automatons, at National Review Stephen L. Miller bitches about SJWs and that Star Wars thing the kids are all talking about. Apparently people on the internet are speculating on the sexuality of that little ball robot, talking about the black guy in the white whatchamacallit suit, etc. Killer finds this intolerable, and imagines other people find it intolerable too. Key passages include, "We can surely expect our celebrity president to weigh in as well," and "the scourge of Social Justice Media tempts us to give in to our anger and aims to tear us apart." "Can Star Wars survive such an onslaught launched from the Social Justice Media’s veritable Sarlacc Pit — more commonly referred to as Twitter?" Miller asks. Yes, but can your underoos survive this wedgie?