Glenn K. Beaton is a writer and columnist living in Colorado. He has been a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, RealClearPolitics, Powerline, Instapundit, Citizen Free Press, American Thinker, Fox News, The Federalist, and numerous other print, radio and television outlets. His most recent book is "High Attitude — How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen"
DJT: WELCOME EVERYBODY TO MY BIG BEAUTIFUL TURKEY DAY WHERE WE ALL GIVE THANKS TO THE HOST!!!
Joe Biden: I want ice cream.
DJT: QUIET, PIGGY!
Barack Obama: What we now call Thanksgiving presented an existential threat to native Americans, both foul and fowl. But if you like your turkey, you can keep it.
Al Gore: Lockbox. Gotta put the turkeys in a lockbox. Solar powered. Tax deductible.
DJT: AL, THAT’S SO 1996! TODAY IT’S BITCOIN BITCOIN BITCOIN!!! HERE, I HAVE A FEW YOU CAN BUY!
Bill Clinton: What’s that I feel on my leg? Is there someone under the table?
George W. Bush: This party needs more strategery. Who wants to dance? Laura, let’s dance!
Joe: Now Dancer now Prancer now Dancer now Dancer now Dancer . . . Medicare . . . I used to be a turkey . . .
DJT: I DON’T KNOW WHAT HE SAID. I DON’T THINK HE KNOWS, EITHER.
Bill: . . . moan . . . moan . . . moanica . . .
Dick Cheney: . . . . . . . . .
JD Vance: Barack, the problem with the Indians is they weren’t Christians. Indians that refuse to convert to Christianity deserve to be divor– . . . er, I mean genocide’d.
DJT: I DIDN’T WANT THEIR STUPID LITTLE PRIZE ANYWAY. DO YOU KNOW HOW COLD IT IS IN NORWAY THIS TIME OF YEAR?
Bill: Puh-leeze pass the mashed potatoooOOOO!
Elon Musk: I sense a commercial opportunity here. Turkeys are flightless birds, right? We give ‘em the gift of flight by putting a flock of ‘em on SpaceX, take ‘em up 120,000 feet, dump ‘em out the back. They’ll rain down at about 1800 mph and the air friction will roast them to perfection – and pluck them to boot. We charge money for the space-roasted turkeys and money to view the event and money for shares in the corporation that manages it all. If Tesla is worth a trillion dollars, this scheme is worth 200 billion, easy. Think of the mark-up. That’s about $1,000,000,000 per turkey, or $50,000,000 per pound. [Gives a Heil Hitler salute]
Al: Solar powered?
Elon: What?
Al: Solar powered? Which part is solar powered?
Elon: None of it is solar powered, you moron.
Al: Hard to make money without the solar power angle – that’s what gets you the tax deduction.
Barack: It’s time to end these existential threats to flightless fowl.
DLJ: QUIET PIGGY!
Joe: Let’s sing Turkey carols!
DLJ: QUIET PIGGY!
Bill, whispering:Excuse me, I’m going under the table.
Hillary: QUIET PIGGY!
Mitt Romney: . . . . . . . . .
Hillary: Not you, Mitt. In fact, you should be less quiet. Say something, Mitt!
Mitt: Well . . .
Hillary: OK, that’s enough.
Michelle Obama: QUIET PIGGY!
Hillary: Are you talkin’ to me, bitch?!?!
Michelle: Ho yo’ callin’ bitch, ho?
Hillary: QUIET PIGGY!
George: Talk about weapons of mass destruction . . .
Bill:: OH MY GAWD OH MY GAWD OH MY GAWD !!! It was Barack all along! It was Barack under the table! Feeling my leg. And . . . then . . . OH MY GAWD!!!
Hillary and Michelle: What about my leg?
Barack and Bill: QUIET PIGGY!
Melania: . . . . . . . . .
DLJ: SO, I TOLD THEM TO JUST GIVE THEIR STUPID LITTLE PRIZE TO THAT GIRL IN VENEZUELA. SHE’S KINDA HOT.
Bill [already recovered]: Yeah, she is.
Al: You need to put solar panels on the rocket, Elon. Or just something that looks like solar panels so you can get the tax break. Maybe card tables.
Elon: You’re a moron, Al.
Cha[u]ncey Billups: Did someone say “cards”?
DJT: I TOLD BLONDI BONDI TO SUE ‘EM BEFORE DINNER’S OVER – IN FLORIDA. HA!
Gavin Newsom [coming in the door]: Hair I am!
DJT: YOUR HAIR’S NOT THAT GREAT.
Hillary: I’m surrounded by deplorables.
DJT: REVERSE DISCRIMINATION. SUING THEM FOR REVERSE DISCRIMINATION.
Kamala [coming in behind Newsom]: Hey everyone, long no see time! With you here indeed that I was in the ‘hood the timing was appropitious.
Everyone: QUIET PIGGY!
Melania [muttering to herself]: Slovenia is looking pretty good. In 759 days, I’m outahere.
As a three-time Trump voter with no regrets, I don’t like this message any more than most of you. So don’t shoot me, I’m just the messenger.
The message is the Republicans in next fall’s midterm elections will lose the House, bigly, and probably the Senate.
If politics is indeed “war by other means,” expect the political war next fall to be bloody. Think Battle of the Little Bighorn. Think Stalingrad. Think Pickett’s Charge. Think the Battle of Midway. Think Waterloo. It will be one-sided.
Oh, I know the President has done some terrific things – at great personal risk to himself, by the way – even if they were sometimes done unartfully.
Stopping illegal immigration is near the top of the list. His crude methods were probably by design but might have been by fortuitous accident. Either way, he sent a message that transcended language barriers: The United States of America doesn’t welcome illegal immigrants anymore, and illegals who come anyway may find themselves on a one-way flight to West Africa. Due process? Mayyyybe . . . .
As a result, illegal immigration is at the lowest point in decades. The southern border in particular is more like, well, a nation’s border. All this has produced some human pain. Fixing big problems that politicians tolerated and sometimes encouraged often has that effect.
In the Middle East, the President let the Israelis beat and batter the barbarians of Hamas and then brokered a quasi-peace between the two. Even better, he prevented a nuclear Iran/Israel war by handing the Persians their biggest defeat since the Battle of Marathon two and a half millennia ago.
On tariffs, however, the President got out of his depth. His tariffs were defensible as an economic matter, maybe, but not as a legal matter. He will lose when the Supreme Court issues its decision next Spring – perhaps in a 9-0 decision – and the Court signaled as much in oral arguments a couple of weeks ago. At best, the decision will be 7-2 against the President.
The unravelling of those tariffs, which will have been in effect illegally for as much as a year, will be messy and embarrassing for the administration.
Intangibles are the most notable things on the score card for this administration. On the plus side, the President has made “woke” a four-letter word. That’s more than a stylistic change. Wokeness and all that it entails – abolition of merit, obsession with skin color and sexual preferences, the euphemizing of language, ubiquitous victimization – was highly destructive to America and the world.
On the minus side, the President has shown a tendency to say or tweet what he thinks in a way that often and needlessly offends. The most recent example was when a reporter persisted in asking yet another follow-up question during a press conference. Most reporters are loathsome creatures, but they paid to ask – nay, shout – questions in that manner.
The President could have ignored the reporter, or rebuked her with something like “let’s move on.”
Instead, he barked “Quiet, piggy!”
That may not bother you but it does bother millions of Americans, particularly women. Such people vote.
Right now, approval surveys suggest that many of them are sufficiently turned off by these sorts of crude insults that their vote will be against the GOP next fall. The outcome of the special elections around the country a few weeks ago supports that conclusion.
Forget about peace in the Middle East, the solving of the immigration debacle, and the mixed outcome on tariffs. Because the people will forget about those things.
What many of them will remember is that they dislike the President on a personal level. People vote against people they dislike. Right now, a large and growing number of people dislike the President.
That’s a fundamental flaw in representative democracy, but it’s an unavoidable aspect of human nature. We’ll see the results next fall.
Now, before you bark “Quiet, piggy!” at me, remember: I’m just the messenger and just doing my job. (And in case you think it’s relevant, I’m 6’ tall and weigh 160 pounds.)
“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule” -Thomas Jefferson
The other Founders were similarly scornful of pure democracies. John Adams proclaimed:
“Democracy… while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy.
James Madison said:
“Pure democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention.”
Alexander Hamilton warned:
“Pure democracy is as much a fallacy as the idea of eternal vows and permanent alliances.”
Ah, you might say, but what about the democracy of ancient Athens?
I’m glad you brought that up. Athens was indeed a pure democracy in the sense that the people voted directly on matters of governance. But not all the people.
There was no vote for slaves, women, foreigners (meaning foreign to Athens), or people who had even one parent who was a foreigner. After all the winnowing down, only about 10-20% of adult Athenians had the right to vote.
Even that limited democracy of Athens was problematic. No less than Plato complained that “Democracy . . . is continually subject to the influence of demagogues and the passions of the multitude.”
Rome was more pragmatic in governance, as in everything else, and more successful. While Athens was never more than a city-state that faded in a couple hundred years, Rome expanded its empire to embrace about 60 million people – about a third of the population of the entire ancient world – and lasted nearly a thousand years.
It’s no coincidence that Rome was never a pure democracy, but was initially a quasi-republic. The people did not vote directly on matters of governance, but instead voted (sometimes) for representatives who made those decisions.
Rome eventually morphed from a republic into an empire ruled by an emperor, a transition precipitated by Julius Caesar. After conquering Gaul, he led his army east and then south, crossing the Rubicon River to invade Italy from the north – in defiance of the Senate – and journeying on to Rome to declare himself dictator. In Rome, there was enough popular adulation for the conquering hero that he got away with his coup for a while. His great nephew Augustus cemented the role of emperor, and Rome became greater than ever.
Eventually, nearly all of Europe became Roman, and also a good part of northern Africa and England. We still see the remnants of their incredible buildings and culture. Latin is the world’s biggest unspoken language and is the root of French, Spanish, Italian and a good part of English.
Fast forward a few empires, to the American one. Benjamin Franklin was asked in the course of the Constitutional Convention what kind of government they were establishing. He famously answered, “A democracy, of course!”
Just kidding. His real answer was, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
They would be appalled by Americans today who pride themselves on tossing that republic into the ash bin of history. The people brag of being exactly what the founders feared – a “democracy.”
The Founders consciously sought to avoid that outcome by incorporating several basic buffers from the mob.
For one, the American mob doesn’t generally decide matters of governance. Rather, as in a republic, they vote for representatives who make those decisions. The thinking of the Founders was that informed gentlemen are more apt to make good decisions than passionate, uniformed mobs.
The Electoral College is another example of a buffer from the mob. Today, the Electoral College is a mere formality. In each state, they all vote for the presidential candidate that won the most votes in that state. But originally, the Electoral College was free to vote contrary to the majority of the state they represented, and they sometimes did. Again, the intent was to put a layer of sanity between the hoi polloi and the decisions of government.
Another buffer between informed decision-making and uninformed mob rule took the form of voting restrictions. As in Athens, women and slaves were not permitted to vote in early America. In the pre-Civil War south, that literally excluded a majority of the adults.
The Civil War of course abolished slavery and finally enfranchised former slaves and their descendants. But in the Jim Crow South, literacy tests were used to bar many Blacks from voting on the rationale that illiterate people lacked the necessary sophistication to vote.
In many states in early America, voting was prohibited unless the voter owned real property, the thinking being, again, that persons without property lacked the sophistication necessary to choose good representatives. Those prohibitions continued for about half a century.
Women were not enfranchised until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920.
I personally am glad that we now allow voting by women, minorities and renters, though I’m not fond of renters.
But we’ve gone well beyond that. The Founders would be mortified to see the current trend toward what we champion as “democracy” and what those Founders would decry as mob rule.
For example, people are allowed to vote without presenting simple proof that they’re who they say they are.
They’re allowed to vote in many states even though they’re not citizens.
They’re often allowed to vote even though they’re dead.
They can vote multiple times – one time from their main residence, another time from their vacation home in a different state, and another time by mail.
They’re allowed to fill out ballots for their elderly grandmother, sign her name to it, and drop it off or mail it in. They can do that for as many grandmothers as ballots they can get their hands on.
This loosening of voting requirements coincides with a dumbing down of the voters. People are allowed to vote even though they graduated from public high schools in Democrat-controlled cities where they didn’t learn anything. In fact, they’re allowed to vote even though they graduated from no high school at all.
And even the ones who graduated from high school lack a basic education. A recent survey at the University of California at San Diego (ranked one of the leading universities in America) found that 25% of incoming freshmen cannot solve for X in the equation:
7 + 2 = X + 6
I wonder if they could solve for X in the equation:
7 + 2 = X + 2
Or the equation:
7 + 2 = X
Or the equation:
7 = X
These freshmen have no idea how many students make up 25% of the incoming class of 4,000. But I suspect they do know to label me a misogynist for using the term “freshmen.”
We can and should re-establish literacy tests for voting. They were outlawed generations ago on the grounds that they discriminated against illiterate Blacks, but today that objection is gone – we’re all illiterates now!
Is it any wonder that the state of the union is bad? We have a polarized government of mean girls (most of whom have penises) who don’t even try to solve problems. They just play to the mob that elects and reelects them.
And so, the minority party shuts down the government unless they get to act like they’re the majority party. They don’t really expect that to happen, but it’s great theater for a while for the mob in the nickel seats.
And there’s Epstein 24/7, as if anyone really needs to see the emails to know that Donald Trump’s relationship with a creep who exploited teenage girls might have been worth a whole chapter in The Art of the Deal.
And there’s a kooky Jew-hater who’s never had a job getting elected in a place that a kooky Black man once dubbed “Hymie-town” on a platform of arresting the Prime Minister of Israel and giving everyone free stuff paid for by the Jewish billionaires he’ll fleece on their way out of town.
And there’s a governor in California running for President on the platform “OMG, get a look at my hair!”
And 70% of the younger generation approve of socialism, while 45% disapprove and 17% aren’t listening to the survey question and 81% pick the New England Patriots by 7.
What’s the fate of our once-great republic now that it’s descended into mob rule?
History offers some lessons. Witness the mob of the French Revolution and the mob of the Weimar Republic. The path out of mob rule typically goes through despotism, and a lot of people get hurt.
The fascist who gave fascism its name came to an ugly end. Benito Mussolini was impaled on a meat hook and hung upside-down from a lamppost. Fascists don’t tolerate failure.
Democrat leader Charles Schumer is someone I don’t like, and I felt a certain schadenfreude when his Democrat “friends” blamed him for their caving on what has come to be called the “Schumer Shutdown” or, more accurately, the “Schumer Sh*tshow.”
But there’s something disquieting about the barrage of criticism from the left.
The gist of the criticism is that Schumer failed to keep all the Democrat Senators “in line.” In other words, he failed to coerce every Democrat to vote the way he told them to, despite his best efforts at coercion. At coercion, he failed.
Criticizing Schumer for failing at coercion says a lot about the criticizers. It says that they think other Democrats are Schumer’s subordinates, and he is supposed to be able to control their votes.
That sounds vaguely dictatorial to me.
It would come as news to the people of New Hampshire, Ohio, Virginia, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Illinois who elected these particular Democrats that the Senators they elected are required to vote not their conscience, and vote not for the interests of the people who elected them, but vote the way an old guy in New York tells them to.
It seems the left wing of the Democrat Party believes that the only acceptable vote for the rank and file is a vote for insanity and radicalism. When the Democrat leader tells his “subordinates” to vote for insanity and radicalism, then, by golly, that’s what they’re required to do, their conscience and their constituents be damned.
The predicament of the Democrat leader is even more precarious. It’s not enough for him to vote insanely and radically. He’s also supposed to succeed in coercing every other Dem into voting insanely and radically. Any failures in his coercion earn him a meat hook and a hanging.
Regardless of what it says on paper, regardless of Senate rules, regardless of the will of the people, the leftists in the Democrat Party have a tyrannical and bloodthirsty grip on the party.
We went to bed on Sunday and there was vague talk of a shutdown workaround. We wake up on Monday, and the Democrats have caved.
Analogies, anyone? If this were a boxing match, the Democrats didn’t come out of their corner for the 8th round. If it were a softball game, the ten-run rule got applied. If it were a war, they flew the white flag and laid down their arms. If it were wrestling, they tapped out.
If it were poker, they folded, though the time to fold ‘em was a month ago. They didn’t know when to walk away, and so now they have to run.
Feel free to add your own analogies. That’s what the comment section is for!
This all transpired because Democrats are the minority party in Congress at the moment. They consequently got outvoted on the tax bill last winter. Getting outvoted often happens to the minority party.
The Democrats’ solution to being outvoted as the minority party was to demand to be treated like the majority party, else they would shut down the government. They demanded a re-do of the tax bill, specifically the part that let expire the Obamacare insurance subsidies enacted as a temporary measure during COVID.
The Republicans’ reaction was, “Huh? Do you think that Democrats get to act like the majority party when they are, and also get to act like the majority party when they aren’t?”
It wasn’t hard for the Republicans to call that bluff.
After the biblical 40 days and 40 nights, give or take, and over a dozen votes blocked by the Democrats, eight of the 43 Democrat Senators finally broke ranks Sunday evening and voted to re-open the government.
The stock market cheered. Food stamp recipients rejoiced. Federal workers felt relieved. Holiday travelers were glad.
Democrats fumed.
Now there’s a civil war in the Democratic party. By the media reports, it sounds like the biggest one since Democrats quit America a century and a half ago to continue holding in chains some of the men God created equal.
In the resolution to both civil wars, the Democrats got hardly anything in the bargain.
At least this time, Atlanta didn’t get torched.
But Chuck Schumer did. Imagine Schumer stark naked with only a fig leaf, surrounded by ravenous dog-like Democrats looking for someone to blame. Now take away the fig leaf and let loose the dogs.
That’s the Democrat Party right now. It ain’t pretty.
Remember the virtue-signaling yard signs a few years ago? In rainbow colors, they shouted self-congratulatory platitudes like:
“HATE DOESN’T LIVE HERE”
Except that the residents of the house hated anyone who disagreed with them.
“NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL”
As if the phrase “illegal immigrant” is synonymous with the phrase “illegal human.”
“BLACK LIVES MATTER”
In view of the colossal rip-offs committed by the organization of that name, this one didn’t age well.
“WATER IS LIFE”
Except it’s not; water is a simple molecule of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. Saying “water is life” is like saying “aluminum is an airplane.”
“SCIENCE IS REAL”
I’ll leave aside the irony of someone blathering something scientifically incorrect like “water is life” and in the next breath preaching “science is real.” It’s this last platitude that I want to focus on.
I have no objection to the phrase “science is real,” per se. “Science” is a methodology of observing, collecting data, developing theories to explain the data, testing the theories, and adopting the theories that pan out – while discarding or modifying the ones that don’t. That method is indeed real.
The problem with “science is real” as a slogan, as opposed to science as a methodology, is that the sloganeers don’t understand the methodology. Rather, they believe – very strongly, as believers are wont to do – that “science” is not a method but an authority. When people disagree with them, they cudgel them with “science” to shut down the debate.
Real scientists don’t do that. Real scientists instead talk about the theories that the methodology of science has developed. You would never hear a real scientist say “Science says . . .”
Real scientists don’t have nonsensical yard signs shouting “SCIENCE IS REAL.”
Over thousands of years, the methodology of science has led to immense knowledge and enrichment for humanity. From that methodology, we’ve learned that the earth travels around the sun, that many diseases are caused by living pathogens that we can control, that water is a molecule of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom (none of which are alive), that we can split other atoms to release tremendous energy that may someday supply endless electricity to run artificial intelligence machines that will enable us to forget everything we learned in those thousands of years.
But along the way, we’ve gone down many dead ends.
For millennia, scientists including Aristotle thought that life was created spontaneously in suitable settings. It was supposed that tadpoles were created by mudpuddles.
Scientists believed that the earth was a static place, and resisted the concept of continental drift and plate tectonics long into the last half of the 20th century, well after the proof became overwhelming.
Scientists thought that all the great problems of physics had been solved by the end of the 1800s, until an obscure dabbler in the Swiss Patent Office unveiled theories that changed everything. Albert Einstein had a brilliant and creative mind unimpeded by the rigors of running a laboratory or raising NIH grants. In fact, he had no laboratory and did no experiments.
Einstein’s successors in physics never disproved his theories, but their theories of quantum mechanics in the infinitesimal stand awkwardly alongside Einstein’s theories of the universe at large.
His successors accepted Einstein better than Einstein accepted them. He dismissed quantum mechanics theories of uncertainty with “God does not play dice with the universe.” Late in life, Einstein was one of the continental drift deniers.
But the continents do drift, and God does seem to play dice.
In geology, scientists thought the age of the earth was maybe a few million years. Not until the middle of the last century did they theorize correctly (we currently think) that it’s more like 4,500 million years – or 4.5 billion.
At the time scientists came up with the 4.5 billion figure for the age of the earth, that figure was older than the widely accepted age of the universe. It was as if you were determined to be older than your mother. Talk about awkward.
The “science is real” crowd of non-scientists have even more reckoning ahead. Here’s a brief punch list of what the methodology of science has still left unanswered:
We don’t know why things fall. We have a name for it – gravity – and we can predict how things react to this gravity stuff (though our predictions get squirrely when we take them to a large scale and start moving things fast) but we don’t know what it is. It behaves like a force by drawing things toward one another, but we cannot isolate or identify that force. We’re left with the unsatisfying conclusion that it’s just an artifact of the shape of the universe. Hmm.
About 90% of the universe is unaccounted for. We call it “Dark Matter,” which is not to be confused with Darth Vader. Our observations say it has to be there, but we can’t find it or even describe it. Given that it’s 90% of the universe, it’s not like looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s more like looking for hay in a haystack. Here we are, deep in the haystack, and we can’t find the hay.
The universe began with a bang, says our best theory. Before this big bang, there was nothing – no time, no things, not even empty space. Then everything came out of nothing. We don’t know why and we don’t know how.
Back to quantum mechanics. Scientists have experimentally proven that there can be “action at a distance.” If two protons (or other objects) are “entangled,” then a change to one simultaneously effectuates a change to the other even if it’s a million miles away.
This simultaneous action-at-a-distance would seem to violate Einstein’s settled conclusion that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light – including information. But physicists have ideas as to why it doesn’t violate Einstein. They call those ideas “theories.” Those theories will be tested, validated, invalidated, modified, remodified and, if appropriate, discarded.
I suspect that some of the great unanswered questions will never be answered because the applicable theories cannot be tested. How everything – the universe – came into existence from nothing, is one of those unanswerable questions. The nothingness before the big bang was empty of both time and events, and so it left no tracks. All we know and ever will know about the time before time and the nothing before everything, is nothing.
Which brings us back to that dice player.
The best we can say is this. Creation was created and, perforce, it was by a creator, the nature of which or whom is a question best left to philosophers and theologians.
Next time someone tries to win an argument by invoking “science,” have a little fun with them. Start with “Do you think water is life?” and go on from there.
Democrats have gone full Islam. On the surface, that’s a bit peculiar. When you dig deeper, it’s downright weird. But as always, there’s a cause for this particular effect.
Let’s start with the peculiar part. Islamists tend to be religious, much as Christians, Buddhists and Hindus (and, for that matter, atheists, who often disbelieve with a blind religious fervor).
In contrast, Democrats tend not to be religious. They’re simple vanilla agnostics. Go down to Starbucks. Ask one whether he believes in God. His response would be along the lines of, “Umm, I’m kinda in-between . . . it all depends . . . what I do know is I don’t believe in America . . .” And then he’d drift back to his double latte sprinkled with fresh pumpkin seeds.
Now, try to imagine that wishy-washy but unwashed and wish-less agnosticating procrastinating prognosticator with the man-bun sipping a double latte sprinkled with pumpkin seeds . . . embracing Islam.
Well, not exactly embracing Islam, with which there’s not necessarily anything wrong, but embracing Islamists, with whom there is.
You see, I distinguish between Islam and Islamists. About Islam, I know very little. I do know that, like most religions, it was invented by barbarians and so there’s undoubtedly some rough spots in its scriptures. I’m sure there’s eye-for-an-eye stuff, animal sacrifice rituals, and cruel tests of torment.
In most religions, the barbaric stuff got watered down over time. As people advanced, the believers shifted their focus toward the kinder, gentler aspects of their religion. They shifted toward loving thy neighbor, and away from goat sacrifices.
That could have been the path of Islam, if only we’d had different Islamists. The Islamists we do have seem stuck in the 9th century – which was not a particularly enlightened time.
That brings us to the weird part. The beliefs of these Islamists stuck in the 9th century are, by today’s mostly-civilized standards, downright weird.
They believe shoplifters should have their hands cut off. They believe adulterous women should be stoned to death. They believe gays should be thrown off rooftops. They believe infidels (meaning non-Muslims) should be beheaded, raped, tortured, burned alive, murdered and taken hostage to use as currency to free terrorists.
They believe it is right, joyful and heroic to fly airplanes into tall buildings.
I know Democrats have fallen far in the last generation but they still didn’t have those things in their party platform, even in 2024 when they ran a half-baked, half-assed, half-wit.
That’s why it’s downright weird that the Democrats have embraced not Islam, about which they know nothing, but Islamists, about which they know quite a lot – and none of it is good.
But it all makes sense. Despite the peculiarity and weirdness of this outcome, it all makes sense in a perverted sort of way.
Democrats perceive, correctly, that Islamists see America as their enemy. Indeed, Islamists see all of Western culture as their enemy.
And so do Democrats.
If America is the enemy of Islamists, and is also the enemy of Democrats, that makes Islamists the friends of Democrats – or at least the allies.
Of course, Islamists and Democrats hate America for entirely different reasons. Islamists hate America because it’s not an Islamist theocracy, while Democrats hate America because it’s not a communist dictatorship.
But that’s just a detail, say the Democrats. They’ll figure out how to share the spoils of this war against America once they win it.
That’s the part where Democrats might not have thought things through. Islamists will be in no mood for sharing.
AI knows, or will soon know, practically everything. The most knowledgeable people in the world readily admit that AI knows more than they do – about their own specialties.
How could it be otherwise? AI has access to all the information on the internet. In today’s world, that’s tantamount to saying it has access to all information, period, with the possible exception of personal information like what you ate for breakfast this morning and classified information like the underwater location of America’s nuclear submarines at any given instant.
Apart from those narrow exceptions, AI already knows – or will soon know – more about quantum mechanics than the leading physicists. More about tax law than the best tax lawyers. More about biology than the brightest biologists.
It’s not just me saying this. Business technology thinkers like Elon Musk and Sam Altman, who know a lot more about AI and a lot more about business than I do, say the same. (Interestingly, most of those deep thinkers are conservative/libertarian in their politics.)
Here are the implications. We are fast approaching the day when people with knowledge will not be able to command a premium for their services. Employers needing knowledge will not pay someone for it; they’ll simply ask AI for it. The knowledge they get from AI will not only be less expensive, but also more accurate.
Granted, we aren’t at that point yet – today’s AI makes too many mistakes – but we soon will be.
This phenomenon is likely to accelerate. AI will acquire more human knowledge and will also start to interpret that knowledge to produce knowledge that humans themselves don’t have.
In some cases, AI will produce knowledge that humans cannot even comprehend. When AI figures out how the universe began, don’t expect to understand its explanation.
That’s the fate of knowledge. Factual knowledge will be the province of machines, not humans.
Now let’s look at another quality that employers currently pay for: Hard work.
In the past, hard workers were paid more, just as knowledgeable ones were. That’s because hard workers produced more for the company. Other things being equal, someone who put in 46-hour weeks got paid more than someone who put in 29-hour weeks.
Take an analytical problem that is difficult but susceptible to resolution. Imagine that a team of humans would require, say, 1000 manhours to solve it. The employee working 46-hour weeks will contribute much more to that solution than the one working 29-hour weeks.
In the future, however, the hard work of the AI machine will dwarf both those workers. AI could solve that 1000-hour problem in seconds – and without the drama, sex harassment lawsuits, maternity leaves, labor strikes, water cooler gossip about the boss and expensive office space associated with the team of humans.
To the accuracy of a tiny rounding error, those two workers – the 46-hour worker and the 29-hour worker – become equally valuable or, more accurately, equally valueless.
Human hard work will thus go the way of human knowledge. Just as backbreaking work in the mines and the fields became obsolete with the advent of tunnel digging machines and farm equipment, hard work of other kinds including office work will become obsolete with the advent of AI machines.
This presents a dilemma. If employees are not differentiated by their knowledge or their hard work, then how will they be differentiated in their salaries? How will the market decide to pay Jane a million a year, and pay Charlie only a few hundred thousand? (Yes, workers’ compensation will increase dramatically due to the incredible efficiencies that AI brings to bear.)
We already see this problem in schools. How do you differentiate students when they’re all using AI to take the test for them and all the answers are right?
Stated another way, if AI can answer questions and perform work assignments unimaginably fast, what can AI not do? What’s left for us humans?
Here’s what. AI cannot weigh human values.
A character in an Oscar Wilde play complained about people who “know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” That character might have been anticipating AI by a century and a half.
Oh sure, AI is fully capable of determining value in a cost-per-pound or other quantifiable way. But it is incapable of possessing or assigning “values” in a human sense. It is consequently incapable of weighing those human values in its analysis.
Here’s an example, back to Elon Musk. He has about a million children at last count (actually, the figure is ten, officially, according to AI) born to sundry mothers. And he has something like a half-trillion dollars.
AI can figure out how to distribute his billions to his children over time in a way that minimizes the tax consequences. (Don’t worry, the taxes will still be astronomical.)
But here’s a question that AI is incapable of figuring out. Is it a “good” thing for Musk’s kids to receive a multi-billion-dollar inheritance? More specifically, will such a windfall enhance the values that we humans call “happiness” and “fulfilment”? Relatedly, are such inheritances “good” for society?
My human instinct is that the answer depends on lots of circumstances, including especially the nature of each kid. For some kids, such an inheritance would be a “good” thing for them, and perhaps for humanity, too, though there might also be some bad aspects to it. For other kids, maybe not.
To answer this question, you need to understand human nature, you need to understand kids, and you need to understand that people change as they grow up, sometimes in unpredictable ways.
AI will always have a poor grasp of such things. Such things are and will remain the province of humans. They entail something AI will never have, no matter how fast or knowledgeable it becomes. They entail wisdom.
Will society find a way to compensate people for wisdom after AI renders human knowledge and hard work obsolete? I don’t know, and neither does AI. Maybe the compensation for wisdom is just the joy and the pain of having it.
U.S. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY)
The Senate filibuster is an odd rule. It says 60 votes out of the 100 Senators are necessary to end debate on a piece of proposed legislation.
Absent those 60 votes, the legislation never gets put to a vote. The effect is that it takes not just a majority of the Senate – 51 votes out of 100 – to pass legislation. It takes a supra-majority of 60.
The filibuster rule is not in the Constitution. In fact, it’s not even in a statute. It’s simply a rule dreamed up by the Senate. In various forms, it goes back to the 19th century, and has been tweaked many times since then.
The original idea behind the filibuster was this: If Senators want to keep debating some proposed legislation, then – politicians being politicians – they should. Talk is not just cheap, but good, and so more talk is better.
But – politicians being politicians again – they soon abused their right to talk. Filibusters became not a way to keep talking about legislation, but a way to kill it. Legislation supported by 59 Senators, which typically meant Senators from both parties, could be killed by just 41 senators opposing it.
The result has been the occasional paralysis of the Senate. Controversial legislation cannot get passed unless it falls within one of the limited exceptions to the filibuster rule.
This outcome frustrated Democrats a few years ago, because it enabled the Republicans to stop the confirmation of a few of the controversial federal judges nominated by Barack Obama. Republicans didn’t stop all confirmations, mind you, but only the ones they especially disliked. Obama still got the great majority of his judges confirmed, and we still see them in action.
This filibustering of judicial nominations did not start with the Republicans, of course. Democrats were at least as adept at the practice and, arguably, were the ones to start the practice.
For example, a brilliant and highly qualified nominee by George W. Bush name Miguel Estrada was filibuster by the Democrats. And then again. And again, and again. And again, and again. and again.
Seven times, the Democrats filibustered Miguel Estrada.
When the Republicans repaid the filibustering favor, it didn’t sit well with the Democrats. The Democrat Senate leader was a sleazy old battle ax named Harry Reid who served in, or at least enjoyed, the Senate for 30 years and mysteriously amassed a fortune doing so. He threatened to, and did, abolish the filibuster for ordinary judicial nominations. From that time forward, it took only 51 Senators to break a filibuster on ordinary judicial nominations.
You might reasonably ask how he got the 60 votes to abolish the filibuster rule requiring 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.
Here’s where it gets curious. It takes 60 Senators to overcome a filibuster on proposed legislation, but it takes only 51 to change the Senate rules allowing for filibusters. And so, with a simple majority, Senator Reid jammed through his change to the rule requiring a supra-majority to confirm a judicial nominee, to require only a simple majority.
The Republicans warned Senator Reid and his Democrat colleagues that they would regret abolishing the filibuster. They warned that someday the tables would be turned, and it would be the Republicans who would take advantage of the power to confirm judicial nominations with a bare majority of 51 Senators, rather than the traditional 60 Senators.
That’s what happened, in spades. Senator Reid abolished the filibuster for judicial nominations with the exception of Supreme Court nominations. In 2017, the Republicans saw his bid and raised him.
President Trump had the opportunity to nominate three Supreme Court Justices in his first term to replace conservative and liberal Justices who died in office, and a moderate Justice who retired.
Unsurprisingly, President Trump nominated three conservatives. Unsurprisingly, the Democrats went ballistic and promised to filibuster. Unsurprisingly, the Republicans took the natural step of abolishing the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations, just as the Democrats had for lower court nominations. Unsurprisingly, all three were confirmed by Republican Senate majorities (even though the Democrats shamelessly defamed Justice Kavanaugh).
Unsurprisingly, the Supreme Court is now 6-3 conservative, and will remain conservative for the foreseeable future.
This 6-3 conservative Supreme Court has been a key component to President Trump’s power. On political cases, the outcome is generally (not always) five or six conservatives to four or three liberals.
Which brings us to the government “shutdown.” Of course, the government is not shut down, but the word “shutdown” generates clicks for click-baiting whores that comprise today’s media, and so that’s the term they use – together with the suggestion that it’s all the fault of the Republicans because they refuse to un-do the tax bill that was passed last spring.
But that’s just an excuse. The real reason for the “shutdown” is that the Democrat leader, Now York’s Charles Schumer, is panicking that a loony Democrat woman with initials for a name will challenge him in a primary and defeat his ambition to stay in the Senate well into his 80s. He’s in need of loony lib cred in a state that prizes such stuff. (See, e.g. Zohran Mamdani.)
And so, the Democrats have filibustered the legislation to keep the government open a dozen times.
In ordinary times, the rank-and-file Democrats would go along with Schumer’s selfish shutdown scheme, for about as long as they can say those four words fast.
But in today’s political climate, even rank-and-file Democrats oppose practically everything Trump proposes, just because it’s Trump who proposes it. When the leftist base of the Democrats demand brave “resistance” to Trump, the rest of the Democrats willing grovel in compliance to show their bravery.
The Republicans could thwart the Democrats and end the shutdown in hours by taking a simple majority vote, a la Harry Reid, to suspend the filibuster. They wouldn’t even have to abolish it. They could do a one-time suspension of it. With 53 of the 100 Senators being Republican, that one-time suspension should pass.
By the way, if the Republicans were to abolish the filibuster for everything, not just as a one-time exercise, then they could run roughshod over the Democrats for at least the next year until the 2026 mid-term elections.
I like the idea of running roughshod over Democrats who are “bravely” groveling to their crazy leftist base.
Ah, you say, but then the Democrats would turn the tables against the Republicans next time the Democrats have a majority of the Senate.
Yes, they will.
But they will do that whether the Republicans suspend the filibuster now or not. These are Democrats, by golly. Do you expect them to abide by the filibuster later just because the Republicans do now? Do you expect them to play fair?
Back when Sleepy Joe Biden was “President” and someone with a Tourette’s laugh named KAMala or KaMALa or something, was his trustless assistant, we had a fashion fest.
You know, sort of like hula hoops, or streaking, or socialism, or The Twist.
First it was COVID, the disease that was not leaked from a Chinese bioweapons lab, except that it was. The Chinese and their allies in the teachers’ unions successfully produced a generation of illiterate Americans. (But those Americans would have been illiterate anyway because, after all, their teachers are in the teachers’ unions.)
Then came Russian collusion – the fact that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians, somehow, to get himself elected back in the Dark Ages of Trump 1. That fact was not factual but it was still a good fad. Call it a fadt.
Hot on the heels of that came the false fact that Sleepy Joe’s drug-addicted, deadbeat, foreign-favors-receiving criminal son left his incriminating laptop at a repair shop. That false fact, however, turned out to be a true fact, but it was fashionable to sneer that it wasn’t – that it was just something planted by the Russians. (Those Russians were everywhere!)
Believe you me, it was a crazy time.
But the craziest craziness was when attention-starved boys decided to pretend to be girls.
It worked. They got lots of attention and even cheers – from parents, classmates, teachers (in the teachers’ unions, naturally), and women’s athletic teams who didn’t like the little pervs in the women’s locker room, which not only garnered attention for them but also made them victims.
Being a victim at the center of attention was about the highest achievement in the land. And if you were a pervert to boot, well, that’s god-like (lower case “g” for this crowd).
Here’s where we need to be careful about our terminology. There are transvestites and there are transexuals. Transvestites are men who like to dress up as women.
Disclosure: I confess that in college I once dressed up like a woman on a Halloween about three hundred years ago. We all thought it was funny, but I can’t say I particularly enjoyed my costume.
Some men do enjoy that costume. They really enjoy that costume, if you know what I mean. Scientists say that men who enjoy dressing up as women, not just on Halloween and not just every three hundred years, are “transvestites.”
Importantly, a transvestite man doesn’t think he’s a woman, and has no desire to become one. He’s simply (if I can use the word “simply” here) a man who for sexual pleasure likes to dress up as a woman.
Transvestites in history are not unheard-of, but they’re usually unheard from. They get their jollies in a private sort of way. They’ve generally been pretty harmless.
Rumor is that J. Edgar Hoover was a transvestite. That rumor has been mostly debunked, and historians now say he was merely gay, with a close aid as his long-time lover.
Interestingly, as Director of the FBI, Hoover liked to keep files on the sexploits of politicians, with a special emphasis on possible homosexuality for the purpose of blackmailing them if necessary, and, perhaps, because he just liked gathering and keeping those files.
Transsexualism is something different. A man who is transexual wants to be a woman. Some have surgeons surgically remove their genitals and carve a vagina into the bottom of their torso. Such a man wants not just female clothing but also female parts and female pronouns. He wants to be a she.
Unlike transvestites who typically do their thing in private, transexuals seem to crave the limelight. It’s not enough to pretend to be a woman, it’s not enough to dress like a woman, and it’s not even enough to surgically mutilate themselves to look like a woman when they’re naked.
They want you to know they are transexuals. They want you to know that they’re men who “have become” women. And they want you to acknowledge that they actually are women.
That last thing – demanding that you acknowledge that a man pretending to be a woman actually is one – is their sure-fire attention-getter. Demanding that you sign onto something that is patently untrue is sure to get your attention.
Transexuals are very rare. Scientist estimate that far fewer that 1% of men are transexuals. It’s safe to say that evolution has not favored men who go around pretending to be women, mutilating their genitals, and demanding that you admit that they really are women.
But in the fashion-fest of a few years ago, young people were signing up to be transexuals like crazy. The numbers reached something like 5-7%.
Ah, but fads fade, and this one did too. In the latest surveys, the number is something like half that, and dropping fast.
Odd, that, since we were told that transexuals were “born that way.” These folks “born that way” seem to be about half in number that they were a year ago.
Maybe the fade in this fashion has something to do with the association between transsexualism and cold-blooded murder. And maybe not, since cold-blooded murder seems rather fashionable too these days.
More likely, it’s just a fad that ran its course. Fads are that way.
I can imagine a fashion-conscious tranny today. “Now where do I go to get my penis back?”
the Aspen beat 