Give Shenna Bellows points for originality. Just not points in the polls. Bellows, Maine's secretary of state, was one of the eight candidates selected to participate in two separate debates Thursday night in the battle to decide who replaces disgraced oysterman/Nazi tattoo aficionado/accused rapist Graham Platner atop the Democratic ticket...

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UK/Europe The Golden Oriole Rule The explanations must be out there, even if we cannot find them. There have been fewer golden orioles in my garden in France this year: or perhaps, more accurately, I should say that I have heard fewer of them. Their single, slightly melancholy or plaintive whistling cry (one could hardly call it a song) has been much less evident than last year above the chirping chorus of the cicadas. It is difficult to see golden orioles, despite the brilliant yellow plumage of the males, for they are shy birds, and are much more manifest by sound than by sight. It is possible that it had been too hot for them this year to expend their energy on making a noise, though whether orioles are affected in this way by unusual excessive heat I do not know. The golden oriole is very rare in the British Isles, where it used to breed; but Britain has become one of the most impoverished countries in the world from the point of view of wildlife (except of the human variety). It is curious in a way: Deindustrialization has not been accompanied by the extension of natural habitat, the population having grown and requiring ever more shopping centres, distribution warehouses, car parks, airports and amusement theme-parks, to say nothing of windfarms and solar panelling.    Elsewhere in Europe, there is no shortage of orioles, though in France it is forbidden even to possess a dead one. In what used to be called the Levant, the oriole is regarded as something of a pest, being so numerous as to imperil fruit crops—though the depredations of orioles probably do not rate at present rate very highly on that region’s litany of woes. The life cycle of the oriole is extraordinary. In the northern spring, it migrates from southern sub-Saharan Africa to Europe and Eurasia; in autumn, it makes the return journey. This return journey is always via the Eastern Mediterranean. It spends between two and three months a year in its migrations, thus rather more time in the air than the average long-haul airline pilot. Of course, they are not subject to quite the same administrative oversight, though organizations dedicated to the welfare of animals no doubt would like to limit the hours that they were permitted to fly, if they could. What I puzzle over is how such a pattern of behaviour could have evolved. I am afraid my concept of evolution is very crude, deriving as it does from school biology about 60 years ago.  For example, there was the moth in the North of England that lived on the bark of trees, which started out light-coloured but became darker and darker as the industrial revolution covered the locality, including the trunks of trees, with soot. This made perfect evolutionary sense, or perfect enough that I could grasp it. It is obvious that a lighter-colored moth on a soot-covered tree trunk would be more visible to a predator than a darker-colored one; a chance mutation could thus easily result in darker-coloured offspring who would be at survival advantage by comparison with their lighter coloured brethren. Before long, all the moths of that species would be darker.  But this facile and easily comprehensible story seems not to cover the case of the golden oriole. The idea of a gradual change in conduct of the ancestors of the present generation of orioles is not quite as plausible (even supposing that the complex conduct of a species were genetically as easily changeable as the colour of a moth’s wing).         The explanation of the oriole’s migration is that climate change in some sense encouraged behavioural experimentation in an overcrowded field, where every species, or every member of every species, or every gene of every member of every species, struggled for survival, or immortality. When Europe became more habitable after the end of the Ice Age, certain creatures, among them Oriolus oriolus, discovered that there were now rich pickings to be had in the newly-fertile Europe between the months of May and August, and therefore that it made sense to make the journey. Of course, evolutionists don’t like expressions as “discovered,” “struggled,” or “made sense,” for they impose upon the process of evolution a vocabulary of direction or guiding intelligence, though in fact what they are describing is a purely mechanical process.  The problem is this: If the proto-oriole went only a little bit north, rather than the whole hog, he or she would find him- or herself in very inhospitable regions indeed, the Sahel and the Sahara. If it were argued that in those days, the Sahel and the Sahara were not so inhospitable to orioles as they are now, the question then becomes why they should have continued northwards. Bear in mind that the migratory conduct of orioles (and not only orioles, of course), is not a matter of conscious or rational reflection, but of hardwiring into their nervous systems. No oriole ever said to itself, “The Sahara’s a bit arid, let’s try it a little further north”—as sub-Saharan Africans do nowadays.             This is not a diatribe against evolutionary theory. I have nothing better to offer to explain why the golden oriole flies back and forth between Africa and Europe; and all theories that propose an overall purpose, a design, to this extraordinary phenomenon, even if the role of the oriole in it that overall purpose is only very minor, a fly-on part in the drama as it were, seem to me open to at least equal objection.  But where explanation is concerned, Man dislikes a vacuum; he is an explanation-seeking animal. Where one is not immediately available, he invents one. That is one of the reasons that conspiracy theories are so popular and comforting: They give the illusion of understanding. Where there is understanding, there is also the possibility of mastery and control, especially by being nasty to someone, which for a good proportion of people is a pleasure, even a duty or a necessity. The situation is complicated by the fact that conspiracies do exist, and it is a moot question whether it is more dangerous to see them where they don’t exist, or not to see them where they do.  At any rate, I have no explanation of why there are fewer orioles this year, or why they come in the first place. On the other hand, it might be that the smaller number of orioles explains the larger, indeed very much larger, number of swallow-tailed butterflies this year, more of their caterpillars (a favorite food of orioles) having survived into the chrysalis and imago stages. There is, no doubt, an explanation of everything, but I do not have it.  The post The Golden Oriole Rule appeared first on The American Conservative.

UK Special Coverage Burnham’s Disproportionate Misrepresentation The prospective prime minister aims to “reform” Britain’s democracy—into a disguised permanent dictatorship. UK Special Coverage Proportional representation is an extremely boring thing. Which is precisely why, if you want to destroy British democracy, it is such a very useful tool.  The mind-numbingly tedious voting system is even known by the initialism “PR,” which is ideal for a structure whose main public appeal really is a matter of pure public relations. Marching into Parliament wielding machine-guns is far too obvious a way to stage a coup. Instead, you could more effectively enlist polling companies like YouGov to go out and ask the general public a harmless-sounding, but very carefully phrased, question like the following: Some people support a change in the British voting system to proportional representation (PR), where the number of MPs a party wins more closely reflects the share of the vote they receive. Other people support retaining our present voting system, first past the post (FPP), which is more likely to give one party an overall majority in the House of Commons and avoid a hung Parliament. Which system would you prefer? Well, when it’s put like that, how can you possibly say no to PR? YouGov may as well have asked voters whether they would prefer the fair system, where voters get what they vote for, or the unfair system, where they don’t? All PR means is that, if a party gets, say, 36 percent of the vote, they will end up with precisely 36 percent of the nation’s MPs. At first glance, this does indeed sound fair. Examined more closely, it resembles a recipe for oppression. Significantly, figures show an outright majority of voters for the UK’s main left-wing parties, Labour, Lib Dem, and Green, want PR, whilst only a plurality of Reform UK and a minority of the Conservatives, do. This is because, whilst superficially more democratic in principle, in truth PR would most likely help deliver a permanent majority for a multiparty left-wing coalition government. All these parties want only slight variations of the exact same open borders, DEI, LGBTQ, Net Zero, tax-and-spend agenda—thus PR would transform the UK into an electoral left dictatorship.    There are 650 MPs in the UK Parliament, and, under the current FPP system, the one with most votes in each individual constituency becomes that constituency’s local MP, even if only by a single ballot. If a party gets the magic number of 326 MPs, just one over the halfway mark, they can form a national government.  Generally, however, if you collate the sum total of votes gained by all the other opposition parties put together, it will represent far more votes than the actual new government got; under FPP a winning 30 percent share of national votes may equate to 60 percent of MPs. So, letting that same “winning” government with a 30 percent minority share of the ballot govern is in fact highly undemocratic, and it would be far fairer to let all the 70 percent of losers gang up into one big coalition and rule in their stead, right?  That certainly appears to be the opinion of the UK’s incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham—who, even more undemocratically, wasn’t really elected by 99.99 percent of the general public into his current role himself. In the run-up to his takeover, the left-wing Labour Party leader has spoken of the alleged need for “a different type of politics,” one based “less [upon] point-scoring, more [upon] problem-solving,” a more consensual, less oppositional way of doing things: less oppositional because, in practice, under PR there will be no meaningful non-leftist opposition remaining to stop him anymore, just to shout impotently from the sidelines. In the past, Burnham has explicitly called for PR to be implemented, speaking of how alternative voting systems help build “collaboration, partnership and consensus-building”. But what he means by that is the building of an artificial consensus, one which does not in fact exist anywhere outside of the left-wing Westminster Uniparty bubble within which Andy blindly lives. PR will lead to a more “consensual politics” only in the sense that the politicians forming all future governments will fundamentally agree with one another on the core key issues beforehand, and undoing their legislation will be made impossible. Burnham has called for as many UK parties as possible to fight the next general election upon a commitment to introduce PR for all future plebiscites. Then, he can claim he has a democratic mandate for it, when he knows most ordinary people won’t read said parties’ manifestos, or be aware the PR promise is even being made in them, just as many people were not aware of Labour’s manifesto promise to extend voting rights to 16-year-olds at the last general election—including the majority of 16-year-olds. There is currently a left-wing cross-party agreement to bring in PR. Why? The ex-Green Party leader Caroline Lucas rather gave the game away:  Andy’s right that PR is a vital way of changing the wider political culture as well as better reflecting the wishes of the electorate [or one particular portion of it, anyway]. And, crucially, it’s also our best way of protecting our political system from a far-right government elected on barely a quarter of the national vote. By this, Lucas actually means it is a better way of “better reflecting the wishes” of uniparty blobs like herself, forever. On issues like mass immigration, a large majority of the British public want less of it: but uniparty hydra-head offshoots like Labour, the Lib Dems, and Greens all want more of it, so under PR that is what they will get “democratically.” The only plausible party in existence at present who will try and change any of this is Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK—or a “far-right government” who could be “elected on barely a quarter of the national vote,” as Lucas would prefer to call them.   Reform has been leading national polls for the last year or more, generally with 25–30 percent of the vote; under FPP, they could plausibly form a government, or at least team up with the “right-lite” Conservative Party as a governing coalition. Under PR, this would be far less thinkable. The latest polls at time of writing give Reform 26 percent of the vote, equating to 169 PR MPs, and the Conservatives 19 percent, or 124 MPs, for 293 in total, 33 short of a majority. But add up the combined PR votes for the left-wing cabal of Labour, Lib Dem, Green and the SNP Scottish Nationalists, and you get precisely the magic number of 326 MPs, enough to form a coalition majority government. Throw in a few Muslim independents and Plaid Cymru Welsh nationalists for extra “stability” ,and you have a picture of the likely perma-junta of Britain’s PR-based future.  At first, this seems like a partial loss for Burnham. Being the mere head of a multi-party alliance, not a one-party Labour regime, should give him less power. But being voted out of office altogether will give him no power at all, an all-too plausible prospect under FPP. If he can only manage to persuade the electorate to vote for him this one final time come the next general election, giving him a “mandate” to impose PR, then he or one of his Labour Party avatars could be in office until Doomsday—towards which such a government would assuredly lead Britain. Thus, uniquely, the consequences of the next general election scheduled for 2029 will probably not be able to be subsequently democratically undone. How is that “democratic”?  Under FPP, a severe change of political course gained with about 30 percent of the vote is always at least theoretically possible. Under PR, contrariwise, a party like Reform would need to gain at least 50.1 percent of the vote to form a government, which is impossible in today’s fragmented political landscape—the last time that happened was 1931. Of the 22 general elections held in the UK since 1945, there was only a single one where the left-wing parties combined would have got under 50 percent of the vote. So, no FPP, no Thatcher or (postwar) Churchill—and certainly no Farage, ever. Under Burnham’s auspices, the main left-wing parties all recently came together in a “cross-party council” for the progressive majority, explicitly to plot how best to keep Nigel out of office: evidently, their answer was “use PR”.  All across Europe, PR is already in place, expertly preventing “unacceptable” and allegedly “Nazi” politicians like Holland’s anti-Islam and anti-immigration Geert Wilders from becoming leaders of their nations, even when, under FPP terms, they win general elections outright. Only the UK, post-Brexit, and with FPP still in place, can become potentially free from prevailing European-style liberal tyranny—Burnham’s “electoral reforms” are designed to cut off this last final path to liberty forever in the UK too. Upon his success, the only possible way any change to the uniparty regime can thenceforward be affected by a huge, disenfranchised portion of the population will be by violence. How very “consensual” Andy will have made everything become then.     Although largely forgotten, Britain did once have a referendum on changing the FPP system, back in 2011. It was lost, decisively, when voters decided they preferred the current way of doing things, as this would lead to fewer hegemonic coalition multi-party governments of the precise kind favored by the Burnhamite left today—but, as the Brexit vote was later to prove, when the public give the “wrong” choice in referendums, they can always easily be overruled.  To win public votes, those left-wingers campaigning for a change in 2011 planned to erect giant blow-up plastic buttocks of people like Andy Burnham all over the country, advertising how scrapping FPP would supposedly be the best way to “Kick [your] MP up the behind!” Under any future PR regime, that word “Kick” will turn out to have been a misprint for “Kiss.” The post Burnham’s Disproportionate Misrepresentation appeared first on The American Conservative.