Lawyers tell the joke about a person on trial for mariticide – killing one’s spouse. The defendant testified, “I didn’t do it and, if I did, it was in self-defense.”

The point for lawyers is that you can plead inconsistent legal theories, but not inconsistent facts.

Which brings me to Portland, Seattle and the Democrats. On the one hand, while their cities are looted and burned the Dems maintain that in fact the looters and burners are “perfectly peaceful.”

The Dems’ lackeys in the media spin the same tale. While buildings burn in the background, television so-called news reporters contend with a straight face that the riots are “mostly peaceful.”

Challenged, the Dems and their media allies would say, I suppose, that “mostly peaceful” merely means over 50%. Under that rationale, you could say that Chicago is “mostly peaceful” on any given night because more than half of the inhabitants don’t get shot. World War II was “mostly peaceful” because most of the soldiers survived.

In Seattle, rioters took over an entire neighborhood for weeks and destroyed the police precinct building. They looted, burned, extorted and killed.

In a clinical case of psycho-denial, the lefty Seattle mayor declared it a “Summer of Love.”

Until they came for her, anyway. The rioters went to her house after a city council member even more radical than the mayor apparently gave them her address. They were armed with the usual collection of bricks, bats, guns, bottles and bombs. From the street outside her house, they called her vile names and threatened her.

Did she really think the mob would settle for one police station? Why would they, when even the mayor offers to surrender?

That’s the one hand – the Dems denying the existence of the violence that we can see for ourselves on our television screens. Who you going to believe, the Dems or your lying eyes?

On the other hand, even as the Dem politicians deny the existence of any violence, they contend that this violence which they deny exists is the fault of the police which they plan to abolish. And, of course, the fault of Trump.

Like the person accused of murdering their spouse, the Dems say the violence didn’t happen and, if it did, then it was in self-defense. They contend that the looters, vandals, rioters and murderers didn’t loot, vandalize, riot and murder but, if they did, it was to protect themselves from the police.

The United States Attorney General, Bill Barr, asked plaintively at this week’s hearing before Congress, “Is that OK now?” He challenged the Democrats at the hearing to condemn such violence, or even to simply disapprove of it. In response, the Dems went mute for the first time that day.

The Democrats are unwilling to disapprove of the violent overthrow of the United States government, and they watch silently as their radical base attempts precisely that. The Dems are accomplices to looting, vandalism, rioting and murder – almost in a legal sense, not just a moral one.

Oddly, these Dem politicians still seem to have some support from the people who elected them in Portland and Seattle. The hard left of those cities feel good about themselves by imagining that the filthy vagrants, violent anarchists and sick sociopaths they encourage to roam their cities picking fights to overthrow the government are social justice warriors.

My theory regarding this flight from reality in Portland and Seattle (where I lived for a couple of years) is that those cities have long suffered from an inferiority complex vis-a-vis San Francisco. The big city to the south makes Portland and Seattle feel like a timber mill and a fishing harbor.

Every policy decision is consequently animated with the unspoken sentiment, “What would San Fran do? Let’s outdo that!”

Congratulations, Portland and Seattle, you’ve managed to outdo even San Francisco in violence, vagrancy and anarchy. Now you can live in the festering filth and feces of sociopaths who have nothing but cynical contempt for your self-indulgent self-righteousness. But at least you feel really good about yourselves.

Let’s pull the feds out of Portland and Seattle.  Give the people there the feel-good they crave and vote for, good and hard. Let’s see how they like it when the thugs come for them.

In an environment of limited resources – which is to say an environment in the real world – those resources get allocated. Not everyone can start and build Microsoft and not everyone can conceive of the General Theory of Relativity.

So how does society decide which people do?

The answer is that society doesn’t decide. Instead it happens as a result of merit. The most meritorious aren’t allocated those titles, wealth, inventiveness, prestige and accolades. They earn them.

The founder and builder of Microsoft is an extraordinarily talented, hard-working and risk-taking individual named Bill Gates. The guy who thought up the General Theory of Relativity is an obscure and un-trumpeted (at the time) but brilliantly creative man who is now synonymous with “genius” named Albert Einstein.

Others could have done what they did. But others didn’t. They lacked sufficient merit.

If this sounds like social Darwinism, that’s because it is. Continue reading →

Law school is a notorious scam.

In the course of three years, young victims pay for courses in property law but don’t learn how to buy a house. They take courses in contract law but are never taught how to write one. They take courses in litigation procedures but in a courtroom they literally don’t know when to stand up and when to sit down. In fact, it’s common for students to graduate without having seen the inside of a courtroom.

Never entrust a recent law school graduate with any legal matters.

If we trained doctors the way we train lawyers, surgeons would graduate medical school without knowing how to wash their hands or which end of a scalpel is for holding and which end is for cutting. Continue reading →

American science is making terrific progress on a COVID vaccine. This is great news for America, which of course makes it bad news for Democrats.

First, the great news. A company named Moderna has released data on further clinical trials of its promising vaccine. The results were published after peer review in the most prestigious medical journal in the history of the world, the New England Journal of Medicine.

There were 45 test volunteers. Every single one of the 45 developed a “robust” antibody response. There were “no serious adverse events” in any of the 45 patients.

That’s not to say there were no adverse effects at all. A significant number of patients developed side effects. But “side effects” were defined broadly to include such things as “pain at the site of the injection.”

The vaccine is entering Phase 3 clinical trials this month where it will be tested on up to 30,000 volunteers. If everything stays on track, it will be approved for widespread use this fall. Meanwhile, over 200 other vaccines are under consideration and at least 19 are in clinical testing.

Big Pharma is awful, isn’t it, except when you need a medicine to save the world.

Which brings us to the media and other Democrats. They have bigger fish to fry than saving the world, namely regaining the presidency. Continue reading →

As for baseball, let’s be honest. It’s boring to watch and it’s even boring to play. Ordinary people who aren’t being paid to play baseball cannot endure it except by playing it co-ed with beer, which makes practically anything endurable including watching paint dry.

About 90% of baseball consists of the players standing around while touching their privates whenever the TV camera is pointed at them or sitting around the dugout pretending to watch the other team while touching their privates. They often spit.

Why do people pay to see millionaires lolling about in a park and hiding in a little concrete bomb shelter while spitting and touching their privates? I can get that from the vagrants who live in the park and under the viaduct. For free.

If you’re a baseball fan, your life is very small. There’s a reason this game hasn’t caught on in the rest of the world (except in Japan, a country that practically defines boredom).

By the way, this has nothing to do with the fact that I was cut from the 9th Grade baseball team in an unfair, cruel and incompetent decision from which I’ve fully recovered and about which I have no hard feelings. Continue reading →

My father flunked the 6^th grade twice. He was probably dyslexic, among other things, back in the days when dyslexia was called “stupidity.”

He wasn’t a high school dropout, because he never made it to high school. He dropped out of the 8^th grade to support his widowed mother in the Great Depression. He ultimately died early of liver cirrhosis.

He sometimes predicted that I would wind up in prison if I didn’t first get sent to the state mental hospital.

But he was always around and had a good job. He helped raise four children who earned a total of nine college degrees including a Ph.D. in Physics and a J.D. in Law. His presence was the main reason that I defied his prediction, despite my worst efforts.

The illegitimacy rate among blacks in America is 77%. Continue reading →

Once upon a time, there was a shining castle on a hill. It was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that under the law all men are created equal.

Texts from the founders of the castle promised the people they could speak their mind, practice their religion and defend themselves and their belongings. The founders were revered for their wisdom, and in the castle were many monuments and statues to honor them.

The good people thrived, and more good people came. Like all people, they were flawed. But they were always striving for a more perfect union for themselves and their castle.

To fulfill their promise of equality under the law, over half a million castle dwellers died in a great civil war among themselves. Twice they sailed across the seas to save the world – once from fascists and once from socialists. They put men on the moon.

This castle was revered everywhere.

But the world descended into darkness, lies, confusion and evil. Fascists calling themselves anti-fascists looted and burned. Continue reading →

Karl Marx was a shallow-thinking loser who understood economics poorly and human nature worse.

But give the left credit. Some of Marx’s pragmatic successors such as Lenin, Stalin and Mao were amazingly successful for a while. They and their henchmen succeeded in killing 100 million people and fought a Cold War for the future of humanity that they almost won. Almost.

By the way, imagine the conundrum at the New York Times and such places. They’re tempted to blame Ronald Reagan for defeating communism, but they’re afraid that their few un-woke readers (they probably still have a few that are un-woke) would construe that as a compliment to Reagan.

In point of fact, Reagan deserves lots of credit but the person deserving nearly as much is Pope John Paul II. The former cardinal in Soviet-occupied Poland stood for the Judeo-Christian proposition that truth exists. That truth, he preached, would set you free. Continue reading →

The virus apparently produces insanity, even in people who don’t catch it.

Here in Aspen, iron-fisted totalitarians that we used to call “petty government bureaucrats” sometimes but not always post signs commanding us to keep six feet apart when hiking through the forest.

On the other hand, patrons in Aspen restaurants are now permitted to eat without masks, even when seated together, which is good because it’s been hard to squeeze food through those little pores in the mask. On the other, other hand, a restaurant was cited for permitting patrons to walk to their table without a mask.

There are other arbitrary exceptions to the mask rules. Consider a trustafarian Aspen city council boy named Skippy (yes, that’s his real name). For a guy who’s never had a real job, Skippy is very busy. He’s organizing the protest thing in Aspen. Continue reading →

Urban trekking around Denver the other day, I happened across a protest march of maybe a thousand people. Here’s what I observed.

The marchers were almost all white. I saw fewer than a dozen black people and no Hispanics.

Most were young women looking vaguely guilt-ridden. They were well-dressed, well-groomed and well-fed. I’m not passing judgment, mind you, but just reporting the facts.

Some were in small groups of similar young women. Some were with boyfriends, who were neither well-groomed nor well-fed. They were scrawny and scruffy, if you ask me, with thin beards.

Not that there’s anything wrong with a guy with a body and beard that are thin and a girlfriend who’s not. Again, I’m just reporting the facts.

Most wore COVID masks. In virtue signaling, their march and their masks made the day a twofer.

Many carried signs displaying slogans like “Black Lives Matter” and “Justice for George.”

I agreed with those signs, at least the literal words of them. George deserves justice just as everyone does, and black lives matter just as all lives do.

The marchers surely aren’t worried that we onlookers reading those innocuous signs will don our MAGA hats, pull our 9 mm and shout: “No! Black lives do not matter! And no justice for George!”

So why were the marchers there? Continue reading →