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These four women destroyed the Democratic Party with race

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Four young Congresswomen – not even Senators – accomplished something that eluded years of Democratic Presidents and their woes.

Jimmy Carter in his malaise, Bill with Monica and his cigar, Lyndon Johnson and his Vietnam War – none of that was able to accomplish what these four young Congresswomen accomplished.

They destroyed the Democratic Party.

It was a perfect storm that began around the year 2020. China leaked a bioengineered virus from its biowarfare lab – probably accidentally – to produce worldwide mass hysteria and lockdowns of billions of people.

It gathered steam when a thug died in the hands of a white cop. Protests and riots ensued, weirdly exempted from the lockdowns.

At the time, the country was already weary of Donald Trump and his often productive but typically provocative antics.

These four Congresswomen seized the moment. Never great fans of America, they seized that time of weakness to destroy her, or at least act out their anger at her.

The death of the thug became emblematic of white police brutality. Never mind that this particular thug probably died of drugs, not a chokehold. Never mind that more Blacks die at the hands of Black police officers than at the hands of white ones. Never mind that the leading cause of death among young Black men is other young Black men. Never mind that the murder rate among Blacks is seven-times that of whites, and nearly all Black murders are at the hands of other Blacks.

Led by these Congresswomen, the Left decided that sticking to those inconvenient facts was . . .

RACIST!

The narrative was more important than any dumb facts. To disagree with their false narrative or their false charge of racism served only to prove you’re a . . .

RACIST!

Your only salvation was confession, and then they might let you off easy with just a few hundred hours of DEI training.

Oh yes, DEI. The Left’s long-standing reverse discrimination called “Affirmative Action” had failed, and their effort to sustain their failed discrimination was also failing.

So, the Left did what they do when their policies fail: They rebranded it. (See, e.g., communism rebranded as socialism, rebranded as liberalism, rebranded as wokeism, rebranded as progressivism.)

The new brand for “Affirmative Action” was “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” This new brand was the same as the old brand, except, this time, it was coupled with brainwashing.

You had to not only engage in reverse discrimination; you had to believe in it. You had to believe that the company (or college or whatever) was stronger if the guy down the hall had dark skin.

Painting the skin of employees a la Justin Trudeau blackface was not Kosher, but almost. You could hire into a company or admit into a college a privileged Black kid (or ¾ Black kid like Barack Obama’s daughters admitted to Harvard) and get full DEI credit.

The problem was that DEI, like Affirmative Action, tended to conflict with a meritocracy. But the DEI supremacists had a solution to that problem: Do away with merit. Merit became a code word for . . .

RACIST!

The only content of your character that mattered was the pigmentation of your skin. If that meant Boeing planes fall out of the sky because 2 + 2 = 4 regardless of the skin color of engineers who would like to say otherwise, well, that’s . . .

RACIST!

The planes are just . . .

RACIST!

While we’re at it, they thought, let’s do away with sex. A nominee for the Supreme Court announced rather proudly that she could not define “woman.”

That proved to be a slippery slope. Next thing we knew, people that everyone else defines as not women – you know, people with a Y chromosome, high testosterone levels, a penis and testicles – were calling themselves “women” and competing in women’s sports like swimming and even boxing. Unsurprisingly, in view of their testosterone levels and male musculature, they usually won. By a pool length or a knockout.

At which time they joined the women in the showers. If you complained, you were the sex equivalent of . . .

RACIST!

You were alphabet-people-phobic. For that, you get another few hundred hours of DEI training, and then you get cancelled. No soup for you, and no career either.

Two more things. Bear with me.

They spent taxpayer money like drunken sailor-ettes. The Orwellian-titled Inflation Reduction Act threw a trillion dollars in borrowed fuel onto an inflation inferno. That was after previous boondoggle bills literally paid people not to work.

So . . . you pay people not to work at producing goods, and then you wonder why demand seems to be outpacing supply to produce price inflation.

Ah, they knew that would be the effect. But it was worth a little inflation to get money out of the hands of people who earned it and into the hands of people who voted for them.

Speaking of people who vote for them, they opened the southern border. A gazillion people came. All were illegal, many were criminals, some were murderers.

But almost all had darkish skin. So, if you don’t like them illegally entering our country, and some of them committing criminal acts here, and many sponging off our welfare state, well, then you’re a . . .

RACIST!

It all worked for a little while. But reality has a way of intervening. Systems that disregard merit tend to become unmeritorious. They get reputations for that, and there are consequences. People get turned off by planes falling from the sky, applicants being evaluated on the basis of their skin, illegal immigrants whom we can’t call illegal, prices going through the roof, lockdowns keeping the kids in the damn house all day, teachers who won’t teach, and all the rest.

In the end, the Squad’s passion to destroy America failed because America is, even now, very powerful and basically sensible.

But they did destroy the Democratic Party. The people voted the bums out. Not the Squad – most of them are in safe Democrat districts – but their Democrat colleagues. Especially their senile President and his smiley, witless, joyless VP.

So far, the judgment of the people has been without regrets. My sense is that if the election were held today, the Democrats would lose even more resoundingly.

It won’t be easy for the Democrats to recover. In theory, they can change their policies, but it’s hard to abandon a position when you’ve already announced that to do so is . . .

RACIST!

It’s one thing to argue that your position is the better one on the merits. That argument allows for negotiation and compromise. It’s another thing to climb down from a moralistic perch where you shout that your opponent’s focus on merit simply proves he’s a . . .

RACIST!

We’ve never seen a political climate quite like the current one. The Democrats went way out on a race limb, sawed it off, and are now surprised that they and their limb – not the tree – have fallen.

Like everything else, the debate over alcohol is turning into a bar fight

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Jesus turned water into wine. Modern-day abolitionists want to turn that wine into poison, and modern-day drinkers want to chase them out of town. We’re come a long way baby.

Not.

Let’s start with some facts:

As a long-time drinker, I can say with some authority that alcohol is a toxin. Half a quart of hard liquor in half an hour will probably leave you unconscious. More than that can kill you.

However, people rarely drink that much, that fast. Those who do are probably engaging in many other reckless behaviors, too, that will kill them long before the alcohol does.

The big question is, what about the millions of people who do not drink themselves into oblivion, but just into a mild buzz? And what about people who don’t drink for the buzz at all, but despite it – they’re drinking because they simply like the taste of a beverage, especially with dinner, that happens to contain a small amount of a nuisance toxin?

Most wine drinkers fall into this category, myself included.

As you might expect, the matter has been studied. Most recent studies suggest a strong link between heavy drinking and many different diseases – no surprise – but also a tenuous link between even moderate drinking and some cancers and vascular disease.

(Please don’t rebut these studies with a story about your long-living great aunt who drank every day.)

This link between alcohol and illness is, however, difficult to get a real fix on, because it is confounded by many variables. For example, people who drink moderately tend to be moderate in many of their other habits as well. And moderation is usually a healthy thing.

As for people who don’t drink at all, they tend to be moderate in all things including moderation. That’s why their alcohol consumption is not moderate, but is highly immoderate – it’s zero. These immoderate individuals very often engage in immoderate activities like ultra-marathons and are immoderately ultra-fit.

Comparing the health of a teetotaling ultra-marathoner with a moderate-drinking three-times-a-week treadmill exerciser will produce skewed and misleading results tending to show better health in the former that appears to be, but is not, a result of his teetotalling. Correlation very often does not equal causation.

Here’s another example of a confounding factor. Heavy drinkers tend to die young. People who die young are never included in studies of populations that are not young. Therefore, studies of not-young people will tend to show that drinkers are healthier than they really are, since the unhealthiest drinkers are dead and unincluded in the study.

The Surgeon General last week re-ignited this controversy-for-the-millennia by suggested that warning labels be put on alcohol, much as we’ve done on cigarettes for many years and as we already do on alcohol as it pertains to pregnant women.

As a sign of our times, the reaction was along party lines, but not in the way you might have expected. Strait-laced conservatives were outraged that anyone would dare warn them of the health hazards of getting intoxicated (even if the warning is only a warning and not a ban) while libertine liberals applauded the suggestion.

In reading the commentary, you might think the SG’s suggestion drove conservatives to drink, while it sent liberals onto their wagons.

That partisan reaction seems odd until you realize that the SG is a Democrat. In today’s charged political climate, that means many Democrats will reflexively like whatever he says, while many Republicans will dislike it.

In the mostly-conservative Wall Street Journal, for example, a member of the Editorial Board (with a BA in American Studies – owwwhh!!!) wrote an editorial unburdened by any supporting data announcing that the Surgeon General (a graduate of Yale Medical School) was simply wrong.

Other conservative commentators with similar “qualifications” weighed in with similar sentiments. The common theme was that the SG’s suggestion was yet another example of governmental overreach. It was Democrats trying yet again to control your life by warning you about things that might hurt you.

Well, maybe. But it seems to me that a fine-print warning that alcohol can be unhealthy is not exactly in the same category of, say, a warning that coffee can burn you or water can drown you. This is particularly true in view of widely published studies some years ago suggesting that moderate alcohol consumption is actually good for you – studies that were later debunked as having been confounded by the sort of lifestyle factors mentioned above.

And even if alcohol warnings are indeed in the same category as coffee-can-burn-you warnings and water-can-drown-you warnings, what’s the harm? It seems the protesters doth protest too much. A wee bit defensive, are we?

But that’s the current political world we live in. Messages are judged not by their content or other objective standards, but by the identity of the messenger. In my lifetime, America has never been so tribal. That’s bad.

By the way, I wonder about the position of our current tribal chief, for whom I’ve voted thrice now and whose performance as de facto president is great. (I especially like the idea of annexing Greenland, where we’ve had an early warning Air Force base for many years.) He is a known and admitted teetotaler. (Thank goodness – can you imagine Donald Trump intoxicated?) Wouldn’t the world be turned upside down if he were to side with the Democrat SG?

Along the same lines, I wonder how politically conservative, teetotaling Mormons reacted to the liberal SG’s suggestion.

As for me, from time to time I consider reducing my alcohol consumption, and maybe even ending it. It’s probably not the healthiest of my habits, nor the least expensive. But I hope I’m already knowledgeable enough that a silly new warning label won’t persuade me to stop, and I hope I’m mature enough that it won’t persuade me not to. 

Jimmy Carter playing God paved the road for radical Islamists playing Satan

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Jimmy Carter informed us back in 1976 that he had “looked on many women with lust” and “committed adultery many times in my heart.”

The fact that a man’s heart or other organs have lusted after many women is not exactly news. The reason men don’t go around broadcasting their lust is because it’s obvious. It would be like saying, I get horny on days that end in a “y.”

But Carter did tell us about his lust – in a formal interview with Playboy, perhaps fittingly. He evidently thought that a man’s lust was newsworthy, if the man was him.

It reminds me of the devil’s temptation of Christ, a story told in three of the four Gospels. The devil failed in his temptation of Christ, but the fact that it happened was Good News-worthy two millennia ago.

Carter was a born-again Christian. (Full disclosure: I am too.) In fact, Carter was a Sunday School teacher. In teaching the temptation of Christ on Sundays and advertising “the temptation of Carter” on Saturdays, he was aware of the parallel he was drawing.

Mind you, I don’t judge a person’s brand of Christianity. That’s beyond my paygrade.

But I do judge their politics. Carter seemed to believe that a New Testament approach could work in international affairs – as in forgiveness and love thy enemy – with the likes of Leonid Brezhnev and the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Ah, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

When Carter was elected in 1976, the country of Iran was run by a Shah – roughly the equivalent to a Western monarch. The Shah was hostile to communism and generally friendly to the West. Many Iranian students went to Western universities. Women’s rights and human rights steadily improved over the decades of rule by the Shah and his predecessor father.

Carter’s limited experience as the former governor of Georgia and his black and white view of good and evil left him unprepared for the nuances of international geopolitics. In his simplistic syllogism, democracy was good; monarchs were anti-democratic; the Shah was a monarch; and, therefore, the Shah was bad.

In contrast to pragmatists such as Henry Kissinger (whom he despised), Carter was uncomfortable with the notion of the lesser of evils.

And so, when the Shah was threatened, Carter did little to save him. The resulting revolution led to a bloody theocratic state called The Islamic Republic of Iran. Like the Shah’s regime, it was a monarchy except in name, and this time it was led by a monarch – the Ayatollah – who claimed a hotline to Allah (and actually had one to Brezhnev) together with a divine right to rule.  

The Islamic theocrats naturally hated America. They taunted us by holding 53 hostages in the American Embassy in Tehran for 444 days until the day of the inauguration of the man who defeated Carter’s bid for a second term, Ronald Reagan. (Funny, that coincidence.)

Carter’s sanctimonious forgiveness and love failed to free any hostages. (To his credit, he did attempt a rescue, but it never got off the ground.)

Since the time of the Iranian hostage crisis, Iran has shuffled along in their seventh-century oxcart. They throw gay men off tall buildings, they chop off the hands of shoplifters, and they stone prostitutes to death. They threaten to annihilate Israel, and they are just weeks away from having a nuclear bomb with which to do so.

In this odd world of ours, I sometimes see a bumper sticker reading “What would Jesus do?” I’ve always assumed that the owners of the cars to which those stickers are stuck have no interest in Jesus. They’re instead just trolling Christians. They’re trying to contrast the typically conservative political leanings of Christians with what they regard (unburdened by any actual knowledge) as the liberal leanings of Jesus.

But some Christians are actually guided in their geopolitics by that bumper sticker question – What would Jesus do? Never mind that Jesus spent his entire life in a place without iPhones which could be walked in the long direction in a few weeks and the short direction in a day. These particular Christians believe that Christ taught not just the tools for a relationship with God, but also for a relationship with Taylor Swift, John Maynard Keynes, and the Ayatollahs.

The teachings of Christ are probably harmless in dealing with Taylor Swift. (I know nothing of Swift’s beliefs, and I don’t mean to pick on her.)

However, the teachings of Christ are probably less helpful in dealing with John Maynard Keynes. Can we honestly suppose that Christ had insights into economic questions like how to obtain the greatest good for the greatest number, and what the capital gains tax should be, and that those insights are revealed if only we read between the lines of, say, Corinthians?

As for the Ayatollahs, the teachings of Christ are wholly unhelpful in dealing with them. Or in dealing with their jihadi foot soldiers who seek to conquer, enslave, rape, take hostage, behead and eliminate people they regard as infidels by means of suicide bomb vests, airplanes in skyscrapers, and pickup trucks on sidewalks.

The what-would-Jesus-do Christians seem unaware that we already know the answer to their bumper sticker question, “What would Jesus do?”

What Jesus would do is what he did do. He taught love, forgiveness and pacifism. He surrendered and sacrificed himself. He was excruciatingly tortured – naked and humiliated on the cross – that he might rise again to show us The Way.

The madmen of Islam would very much like us, now, to try doing with them what Jesus did with his enemies two thousand years ago. The last Western leader to try that was Jimmy Carter. And here we are.

Increase legal immigration

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Guess what these people have in common:

  • Albert Einstein
  • Enrico Fermi
  • John Audubon
  • John Muir
  • Elon Musk
  • Nikola Tesla
  • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • Irving Berlin
  • Arnold Schwarzenegger
  • Levi Strauss
  • Dikembe Mutombo
  • Liz Claiborne
  • Mariano Rivera
  • Melania Trump
  • Andrew Carnegie
  • Audrey Hepburn
  • Yo-Yo Ma
  • Ayn Rand
  • Elie Weisel
  • Sergey Brin
  • Bob Marley
  • Sammy Sosa
  • Carlos Santana
  • Henry Kissinger
  • Rupert Murdoch
  • Alexander Hamilton

You’ve probably guessed it – each was born outside the United States, and immigrated here. Most became full, legal American citizens after undergoing the citizenship process, including passing history, civics and English language tests that most American college graduates would flunk.

The list could go on for thousands of pages, but you probably get the drift.

And by the way, you can add to the list a full quarter of the American winners of scientific Nobel Prizes. American technological prowess owes a lot to immigration.

Legal immigration is a strength of America, and always has been. America has been the most attractive place on earth for immigrants for a long time – due in part to the role of immigrants in making it so.

Do build the wall. Do secure the Mexican border. Do deport at least the illegal aliens who are criminals. Do require businesses to check the immigration status of employees, and do impose substantial fines on those who hire illegal ones.

Illegal immigration over the last generation became a tool of the anti-American left. Leftists intent on destroying Western Civilization used it to import the tools of destruction. Only slightly less bad are Democrats who used it to recruit a Democrat constituency.

The rest of America has finally seen the destruction wrought. And ironically, the leftists misread the political sentiments of the only immigrants who can vote legally – the legal ones. Those immigrants who worked tirelessly to come here legally – and vote legally – tend not to sympathize with illegal ones who want to cut the line, and tend not to vote for leftists or Democrats who want to help them do so.

One of the most racist assumptions of the Democrats was that legal Hispanics favor illegal immigration simply because many of the illegal immigrants have brown skin.

OK, the Democrats overplayed their hand. But let’s not overplay ours. We would be foolish to turn away the brave, the entrepreneurial, the smart, the industrious, the legal.

I miss the TV dads – and my own too

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You know them. They were in your living room and part of your family conversations every night, especially during those 60-second breaks. 

Before America was siloed into warring tribes by ratings-hungry cable TV and, later, by click-hungry internet sites, these men defined fatherhood for two generations. They were uncool before uncool was cool.

I’m aware this isn’t Fathers Day, other than in a specific religious sense. But Christmas always brings back family memories for me, particularly of my dad, which gets me thinking about the role of dads everywhere.

You’ll have your own favorite dads, but here are mine, in no particular order. Feel free to add and subtract.

Ben Cartwright, of Bonanza

Ben came west, and founded the Ponderosa Ranch. He married and buried three women who gave him three sons. He was a strong and kind man back in the days when we thought that was a good thing.

Each episode of the show was a morality play, as much of television was back in the days when we had morality. A recurrent theme was the need for men to man-up. Ben taught that lesson many times, usually by example. And sometimes it meant something different than viewers initially assumed.

Frasier Crane, in Frasier

I suppose experts in comedy would say that a fussy, pretentious, good-hearted psychiatrist is easy material (Bob Newhart, anyone?) but Kelsey Grammer is so darned good as an over-actor (and also as a just-right actor on the Shakesperean stage) that he pulls it off. Best. TV Comedy. Ever.

Andy Taylor, of The Andy Griffith Show

I always wanted to dislike Sheriff Taylor (played by Andy Griffith) because the show was just so hokey. But Griffith was an accomplished actor, the writing was pretty good, and so I mostly failed.

I succeeded much better with Barney Fife. Bumbling incompetence with handguns does not amuse me.

Ward Cleaver, of Leave it to Beaver

Not really. Just seeing if you’re paying attention. I couldn’t – and still can’t – get past the fact that this dude calls his young son “The Beaver.” What’s up with that?

Tony Soprano, of The Sopranos

This show was pretty edgy. Tony led a life of crime, but, out of love, he desperately wanted to guide his family into something legitimate. He ever got a therapist!

If only Joe Biden had been watching. 

Jed Clampett, of The Beverly Hillbillies

The hat. This one is all about the hat. I wanted the hat. Well, the hat and the jalopy. Well, the hat, the jalopy and Elly May.

Ricki Ricardo, in I Love Lucy

I never liked Lucille Ball, but to this day it’s remarkable that her husband Ricki was presented as a charismatic Latin immigrant bandleader married to red-headed Lucille.

You couldn’t do that today, because Ricki was the bad kind of immigrant – legal, Cuban and probably Republican.   

Jim Anderson, in Father Knows Best

This is another one that could not be presented today. Maybe you could get away with “Birthing Parent Has a Truth That Works For Them.”

Atticus Finch, in To Kill a Mockingbird

OK, this was a movie, not a TV show. And, OK, I offer it up mainly to show off my movie chops. But Atticus Finch (played by Gregory Peck in his finest role) sets the standard for strength and courage in explaining and exemplifying the nuances of both to his young daughter. Ben Cartwright would be proud. The writing isn’t bad either.

That’s my list from the past. Today, I look for the next generation of fathers in the entertainment media. Two come to mind.

One is Joe Biden, who is not an entertainer strictly speaking but that’s about all he’s good for anymore.

Joe does not make my list of fathers I admire most.

Another is Deion Sanders. I don’t know Prime, and don’t pretend to understand him or relate to him. But one thing is clear: He holds his sons to very high standards of professional (yes, professional) achievement.

But where’s Ben Cartwright, for God’s sake? Where’s Sheriff Taylor? We can’t even get our hands on a good-father mobster like Tony Soprano.

When I was young, I had a father who was quirky (OK, that’s an understatement) but full of decency. Sure, there were things he simply was not capable of. But maybe that had something to do with his own father dying in the depths of the Great Depression when Dad was five. Maybe it had to do with flunking the 6th grade twice due to dyslexia (which went under the medical term “stupidity” at the time). Maybe it had to do with dropping out of school in the 8th grade to support his widowed mother, the turmoil of joining the army underaged, earning his GED, and somehow working his way into the middle class to support a family of six in an 800 square foot house.

I never heard the man say “I love you” to anyone, including my mother. But I was certain this unusual person did love me, just as Sheriff Taylor loved lovable Opie and Ben loved unlovable Adam. That’s how dads were. Television said so.

In today’s world, there isn’t enough of that certainty. The more our world of global information fragments, the less our moral compasses point in the same direction. 

AI “thinks” hospital gowns make sense

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Marc Andreessen is a very successful Silicon Valley venture capitalist. In picking and investing in early-stage tech companies such as Twitter and Facebook years ago, you could say he swims with the sharks, and swims very well. His firm has over $45 billion under management. He was recently the subject of a wide-ranging interview by Bari Weise, the intrepid founder of The Free Press.

The hottest thing in Silicon Valley these days is AI – the acronym for Artificial Intelligence. In its true definition, AI is much more than the next generation of powerful computers. If you ask Google Assistant or Apple Siri a question, it will search the internet for data pertaining to your question, aggregate that data, synthesize an answer, and write it up in understandable language.

It has what computer scientists call a heuristic ability. It learns. If it were playing chess with you, it would quickly learn your tendencies – and thoroughly kick your ass.

Andreessen remarked among other things that AI has been “a censorship machine . . . right from the very beginning.” That statement made in passing made headlines as an indictment of AI.

But that’s not exactly how Andreessen intended it. He actually thinks AI is a good thing and will make for a better world, and I tend to agree. But there’s a danger.

The danger is the oldest danger in computing: it’s GIGO, or “Garbage In Garbage Out.” AI is not in contact with the real world. What it knows about the real world is what it gathers on the internet. Its answers are only as good as you yourself could get on the internet if you took the time to do so. And it does not have the rich context of a human’s lifetime of experience in interpreting casual language, particular circumstances and unreliable sources.

AI has infinite knowledge and zero judgment.

I saw this recently when I was in the hospital for some minor open-heart surgery. As hospitals do, they insisted that I wear one of those “gown” contraptions that are open in the back so that your buns hang out.

I find this piece of apparel quite annoying and embarrassing, and I know you do too. I’m guessing the hospital employees do as well, since an average hospital patient is not someone whose buns you would want to ogle.

So, I asked Google Assistant why hospital gowns tie in the back – where they cannot be tied at all. Here’s the answer I got back:

Hospital gowns tie in back for a variety of reasons:

Translation: There’s no good reason, but there’s a “variety” of them. Google Assistant listed them:

*Easy access: The open back design allows medical technicians to quickly and easily access any part of the patient’s body for examinations, treatments, or procedures without the need to fully undress the patient.

It allows easy access alright. But there’s a big but. The big but is that it allows access to only the patient’s big butt. In my personal experience, that part of the patient is not the focus of many medical procedures. And, contrary to what Google implies, the patient in a gown is completely undressed apart from the gown.

There’s more.

* Patient Comfort: The loose fit and open back design can help prevent overheating and discomfort, especially for bedridden patients.

Patient comfort? So, will patient gowns catch on outside hospitals? Will they be the next big thing in fashion, replacing jeans and hoodies? Because they’re just . . . so, darned, comfortable?

And overheating? I find hospitals to be cold, if anything. I cannot remember a time when my buns were so hot – in any sense of the word – that I wanted to whip them out.

* Modesty: While the open back design might seem counterintuitive, it can actually provide a sense of modesty. The ties can be adjusted to ensure the gown stays securely in place, covering the patient’s back and providing a sense of privacy.

That’s not just “counterintuitive.” It’s a bald-faced, butt-on lie. The ties are not long enough to extend around to the front in order to cover the patient’s back, as AI admits in its very next bullet point:

* Efficiency: Tying the gown in the back is a quick and simple process, saving time for both the patient and the medical staff.

How on earth is tying a string behind your back “quick and efficient”? Try it sometime, Google Assistant.

Overall, the design of hospital gowns is a balance between practicality, comfort, and modesty. The open back with ties is a design that has been found to be effective in meeting the needs of both patients and healthcare providers.

That’s all a big fat lie. But don’t blame AI. AI thinks it’s true because . . . Garbage In, Garbage Out.

This is a trivial example to prove Marc Andreessen’s point. AI is only as good – and is just as bad – as the information it receives. AI thinks hospital gowns are efficient, convenient and modest because the internet says so. If I were to say something contrary to that, AI would say I’m wrong.

This extends to everything – global warming, Jan. 6, Russian collusion, the Kennedy assassination, election rigging, and drones over Jersey.

That’s the sort of censorship we’re looking at. It’s a pervasive, insidious thing. We cannot put AI back in the genie bottle, nor should we. But we should carefully monitor and dispute the information it relies on for its pronouncements, and take those pronouncements with a large grain of salt. That won’t be easy.

Trump’s powerful America will produce a safer world

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Henry Kissinger argued that geopolitical negotiations are successful only if they are backed by an implicit or explicit threat of force. In that argument, he echoed Teddy
Roosevelt’s quip a century earlier that America should “speak softly and carry a big stick.”

The contention that adversarial negotiations are successful only if you have some leverage to exert is an obvious truism. But American leaders need to re-learn this truism every so often. They naively – and sometimes malevolently – come to believe that the way to get along with the bad guys is to kowtow to them.

Our latest example began with Barack Obama. He was asked whether he believed in American exceptionalism – a basic American tenet which goes back to Thomas Jefferson’s empire of liberty, Abraham Lincoln’s almost-chosen people, and Ronald Reagan’s shining city on a hill. Obama answered,

“Yes, there’s American exceptionalism, but I suspect the Brits also believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

In other words, Americans are exceptional in the same way that everybody else is – which is to say they are not exceptional at all. Moreover, implicit in his answer is that the only true exceptionalism in American is their conceit in believing in it.

Poisoned by his distaste for American civilization, Obama went about his stated task of “fundamentally transforming” it. His first act in this transforming was to go around the world apologizing for American misdeeds of the preceding two centuries.

Forget about America winning the Cold War; helping to win two World Wars; delivering billions in gifts to countries around the world; taking the world’s tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free; rebuilding Japan and Germany from totalitarian ashes; putting a man on the moon; spending a trillion dollars to create a well-intentioned but failed Great Society to pull up its underclass; and inventing Silicon Valley.

Forget all that. It is time, Obama preached, for America to apologize to the world.

And so, he did. For eight years, he did what he could – and that was a lot – to reduce American power and prestige in the world. He thought a smaller, weaker, apologetic America would result in world peace.

Barack Obama is nothing if not insincere. I suspect his peace-through-weakness approach was not designed so much to achieve peace, but to achieve his fundamental transformation of America. His vision had less to do with Liberty Gleaming, and more to do with Workers Uniting.

Obama’s reign of pusillanimity – his war on America – continued for eight years before briefly yielding to a four-year interruption. But the interruption was too brief, too chaotic and too sabotaged. Obama then returned in the form of his hand-picked puppet and eff-up in chief, Joe Biden.

Joe was too shallow to grasp Obama’s scheme of fundamental transformation, but he certainly knew what side his bread was buttered on, and he knew who knew about the skeletons in his closet.

Joe did what he was told, willingly and even eagerly. By golly, the man from Scranton was determined to outdo his teacher. With that eagerness, combined with a degree of plain incompetence that bordered on its own kind of exceptionalism, Joe took another step toward the fundamental transformation of America.

And the world. From Afghanistan to Ukraine to Gaza to the Mexican border and to everywhere else, Joe succeeded in projecting American pusillanimity and incompetence to produce worldwide chaos, violence and death.

Joe was the anti-Midas; everything he touched turned to shit. Sometimes, as in the border, it was on purpose.

Now there’s a new boss in town who’s not the same as the old boss. He was elected a month ago, and won’t assume office for another month, but already he’s making waves, and not the pusillanimous kind.

In response to his threat to impose steep tariffs that would decimate their economies, Mexico and Canada have already promised to clamp down on illegal immigration from their borders into the United States.

In response to his candid support of Israel and his no-nonsense threats against barbaric terrorists, a fragile truce has emerged in that forever conflict. Jefferson, who forcibly subdued the Barbary pirates, would nod.

Nearby, in response to his tough stance against Russian imperialism, rebels in Syria were emboldened to reclaim their country from years of a Russian-sponsored dictatorship.

In response to his muscular defense posture but unwillingness to write blank checks forever in an unwinnable war of attrition, Ukraine and Russia are quietly negotiating peace. Kissinger would approve.

In response to his indefatigable populism, the people of France are once again inspired by the people of America. Those people yearning to be free are demanding a government that represents . . .  wait for it . . . people yearning to be free.

Those people of France begged him to attend the re-opening of their Lady of Paris – the Notre Dame – while Joe Biden mumbles and stumbles around in the swamps of Brazil.

His enemies in America say this guy who supports the Jewish nation of Israel is just like Hitler. Other enemies say he’s too volatile to be in charge. Still others say he has surrounded himself with stupid yes-men (like Elon Musk?). But his American enemies mostly disbelieve their own rhetoric – they’re just bad sports and sore losers.

In the rest of the world, his enemies are lying low like rats in the basement. They’ll stay there – but only for so long as they see America as an unabashed empire of liberty, a strong and chosen people, a shining city on a hill.

Donald Trump and his progeny have an opportunity unseen in two generations. They’re off to a good start.

“Transgender Miners at the Supreme Court . . .”

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. . . Is how a headline reads in today’s Wall Street Journal. To which my reaction was, what next?

First, the trannies were in the closet. Then they came out, apparently just to go to the bathroom. The one for girls.

Then they were in the Cabinet of the future former President and current organized crime boss who both commits and pardons family criminal acts. (One stop shopping, is he.)

The next thing we knew, they were competing in athletic contests against real women – or, as much of the media dubs them, “birthing persons” or “menstruating persons” or “persons with a bonus hole” or (my personal favorite) “non-transgender women.”

Now, no less than the Wall Street Journal informs us that we have transgender miners. Yep, they’re in the mines. Those would be the mines on federal land, no doubt.

“Glory Hole” takes on a whole new meaning.

Not only that, but these transgender miners have a case today before the Supreme Court – a Court that is not especially sympathetic to identity politics (though they did rule a few years ago – centuries ago in terms of the cultural climate – that businesses cannot discriminate against tranny employees).

Given the composition of the Supreme Court, one might expect a miner of all people to know that the first thing to do when you’re stuck in a ditch is to stop digging.

What’s that you say? The WSJ headline refers to “minors” and not “miners”? And the Supreme Court case is about transgender children, not transgender miners?

Nehva mind . . .

In that case, let me put on my legal hat.

The claim being heard by the Supreme Court is that state laws prohibiting hormone manipulation and gender mutilation (er, “affirmation”) of children having some growing pains are a violation of the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution.

The gist of the argument is: If a boy who thinks he’s a boy can get certain hormones to affirm his boyhood, then why can’t a boy who thinks he’s a girl get other hormones to affirm his girliness? If the second boy can’t get his hormones, then you’ve discriminated against him on the basis of sex. The boy got the hormones, and the boy who thinks he’s a girl was refused them.

The argument has a circular quality to it. The boy thinks he’s a girl, and so he’s entitled to receive hormones to make him one. To refuse him those hormones is to discriminate against a boy who thinks he is a girl but is not  because he hasn’t received the hormones, and so it’s sex discrimination.

If you can follow that, you should be a lawyer.

There’s another, more basic flaw to the argument that boys who think they’re girls have a Constitutional right to receive hormones to make them girls (sorta). Recent studies in Europe have shown that gender “affirmation” treatment generally has a poor outcome. To be sure, a boy who becomes a “girl” has his genitals mutilated. But also – as if the genital mutilation is not a bad enough outcome – gets nowhere in his psychological well-being. He’s just a prone to suicide, for example – an act that is tragically common among trannies.

Moreover, many “transitioned” children later regret their transition, and seek to “de-transition.” If you thought the transition surgery was dicey, imagine the de-transition surgery.

Countries in Europe have now stepped back from gender “affirmation” treatment for children, and several have outlawed it – just as many states here have.

So, the Supreme Court can dodge the Constitutional Equal Protection issue that even lawyers have a hard time articulating, and decide the case in a more basic way that even you and I can understand.

They can say: This treatment is controversial and unproven. The states can, in the exercise of the plenary powers reserved to them, make a reasonable judgment that it should not be performed on children.

This is anything but unprecedented. Note that most states prohibit children from getting tattoos. But now there’s supposed to be a Constitutional right for them to mutilate their genitals in the interest of a faddish identity group that is recruiting them?

This was predicted by me – at least twice

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The news tonight is that Worst President Ever (hereinafter “WPE”) has pardoned his son.

You know the one – the crack-smoking, drug-addicted, whore-mongering, influence-peddling, gun-toting, tax-evading, lie-teller.

After stating time and again – but that was in the past, so it doesn’t count – that he wouldn’t, WPE proved himself to be as big a liar as the miscreant son.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I explicitly warned that WPE would do this, but for obvious reasons he would wait till after the election.

I also proposed that the pardon would seal the judgment of historians on WPE – that he is indeed the WPE.

So there we are. WPE has been officially crowned . . . Worst . . . President . . . Ever.

May the whole decrepit family rot in hell. 

The Denver mayor is an illegal unrepentant insurrectionist

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Denver mayor Mike Johnston, as I imagine him in his insurrectionist get-up

Resistance 2.0 is upon us, and it’s getting ugly.

The latest is from the formerly-mediocre and now-failed city of Denver, of which I am an embarrassed alum. The mayor promises to forcibly thwart the United States government’s enforcement of the United States immigration laws. He says he’ll send Denver police and 50,000 moms to head the feds off at the pass.

This valiantly woke mayor even promises to personally break laws and go to prison if necessary.

Here’s the back story:

Denver declared itself a “sanctuary city” back when liberals could make such feel-good declarations without any adverse consequences. But over time, the adverse consequences came good and hard, as did the illegal immigrants.

Armed with the knowledge that in Denver they would receive a hearty Mile Hile welcome and armed with the knowledge that they would not be deported (and, in many cases, armed with drugs and guns, too), the illegal immigrants came by the thousands.

Over 40,000. Denver now hosts the highest illegal immigration population per-capita of any city. Denver might not be a great city, or a great place to live anymore, but, as the host with the most, it’s a great haven for illegal immigrants.

Providing services for these illegals has strained the city budget to the point that the city has cut back on police and other emergency protection as well as basic services like street repair and snow plowing.

In a splendid exercise in irony and hypocrisy, Denver has tried to foist some of its illegals onto neighboring towns and cities. The libs of Denver thus pat themselves on the back for “welcoming” illegals into the city while simultaneously re-shipping them to cities that don’t.

The mayor declares that the city should continue to welcome illegal immigrants because it puts the city on “the right side of history.” As if history proves that illegal acts by illegal immigrants typically produce good and legal outcomes, so long as you express that conclusion in a flowery cliché. 

I have a question for these “right side of history” Democrats. Now that history has recorded that Republicans have won control of the Presidency, the Senate, the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, a majority of state governorships and a majority of state legislatures, how’s that “right side of history” argument working out for you?

Back to Denver. The mayor’s latest rhetoric goes a step beyond the “sanctuary city” status that is common in our Blue cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and so on – you know, the toilet towns. Those so-called sanctuary cities had merely announced that they welcomed illegal immigrants, and would not help the feds enforce the federal immigration laws against them.

The Denver mayor now goes a step further than that. He promises war. He says he will send armed local Denver police to intercept the federal law enforcement personnel at the town limits, and will recruit moms from local Denver neighborhoods to help. He promises to personally go to jail if that’s necessary to stop the United States government from enforcing the United States immigration laws.

He boasted that his rebellion would be like Tiananmen Square where anti-communists were run over by tanks.

But wait! Democrats like communism – Karl Marx, Mao, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, the whole gang. The Democrats aren’t anti-communists, they’re anti-anti-communists. If the Democrats had been at Tiananmen Square, they would have been in the tanks, not under them.

And double but-wait! Didn’t the rebels lose in Tiananmen Square?

Ponder all this. The mayor of Denver says he personally will commit crimes for the purpose of preventing the United States government from enforcing United States laws; promised to enlist tens of thousands of armed local policemen and a citizens’ militia of 50,000 moms to join his rebellion; and promised to lose.

I wonder, will the mayor wear a buffalo horn hat?

I also wonder, won’t the mayor’s criminal interference with the United States government’s enforcement of the United States immigration laws within the United States (1) cause Denver’s the illegal immigrant problem to continue unabated and (2) worsen it by drawing even more illegal immigrants to Denver from other cities and towns?

The mayor later walked back his comparison to Tiananmen Square, perhaps because it dawned on him that the Democrats are on the side of the tank-riding communists, not the tank-crushed anti-communists. But he didn’t walk back his threat of secession or rebellion or insurrection.

Democrats, are you OK with this?