Category Archives: Uncategorized

Paul Krugman is angry at farmers

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Former Enron advisor and current New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is angry at farmers. What’s earned his wrath is that they vote for Donald Trump. He says they vote for Trump because they’re afflicted with “white rural rage.”

Let’s examine the components of Krugman’s catchy phrase “white rural rage.”

As for rural, it is certainly true that Trump does better in rural areas than in, say, downtown Chicago or Baltimore. Then again, everybody does better – wherever they are – than they would in the toilets of downtown Chicago or Baltimore.

It’s not obvious that the politics of these rural folk are dictated by their Green Acres. Plenty of suburbanites vote for Trump too. After all, farmers comprise fewer than six million people in the U.S., while Trump won over 74 million votes last time. If every single farmer voted for Trump, that would still leave him more than 68 million short of the votes he actually received.

So, are the suburbanites and urbanites angry too? Maybe.

As for white, it’s true that Trump does better with white people than with BLack people. But there’s a couple hundred million white people in America, and Trump got only those aforementioned 74 million votes.

OK, maybe more, but let’s not go there today. In any event, Trump clearly isn’t getting all the white vote.

Compared to most Republicans, Trump is doing quite well with racial minorities. Millions of the people who voted for him are Black or Hispanic or Asian. His supporters are – dare I say it? – diverse. Is this entire multicolored constituency full of rage?

Maybe.

Which brings us to the last of Krugman’s angry accusations about Trump voters – that they’re full of rage. That, he says, is because they’re losers in a changing economy and changing world. They’re deplorable. They’re bitterly clinging.

Indeed, many Trump voters are angry, but not for the reasons that Krugman suggests. They’re angry that their country’s borders are left undefended; they’re angry that the military is well woke but can’t even lose a war gracefully, much less win one; they’re angry that Biden runs up trillion dollar deficits and double-digit inflation to pay for “free” stuff for his favored constituencies; they’re angry that the whole Biden family sells political influence to foreign governments for millions; they’re angry that Biden wants to throw the Israelis into the oven in order to bribe a few terrorist sympathizers in Michigan to vote for him; they’re angry that Joe himself is obviously non compos mentis while his caretakers gaslight us with preposterous stories that he’s sharp as a tack as soon as the cameras are turned off.

Yes, it’s fair to say that many Trump voters are angry.

But note this, Mr. Krugman. You’ve probably never met a farmer, but they deal with their anger straight up. If they’re angry, they’ll express that anger by voting against Biden and for Trump.

What they won’t do is invent pop psychology to demonize those who disagree with them. None of these voters you diagnose as afflicted with “white rural rage” will diagnose you as being afflicted with “Jewish urban anger.”

They’re smart and decent enough to know that your religion, your place of residence, and your emotional state are not particularly relevant to their political disagreement with you. To them this is not a cafeteria food fight and not a jihad.

You could learn something about manners, Mr. Krugman, from these farmers you look down upon. Keep Manhattan, just give us this countryside.

Biden’s pandering to a few terrorist sympathizers drives away millions of other voters

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In 2020, about five and a half million people voted in Michigan. Biden won by about 155,000 votes.

Of those five and a half million who voted in Michigan, about 145,000 were Muslim. About 100,000 of them voted for Biden.

Those 100,000 Michigan Muslims are now making a stink. They’re unhappy that Biden is permitting Israel to finish the war that Palestinian terrorists started on October 7. They demand that Biden pressure Israel into a cease fire that would leave the terrorists free to murder, rape, behead, burn alive, and terrorize another day – and another year and another decade.

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BlaCKs* do poorly on the bar exam, so, naturally, progs want to abolish it

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Anna (Shelley Long):
“That is such a dumb idea. Sometimes it amazes me you ever passed the bar.”

Walter (Tom Hanks):
“I’m not surprised. You’ve never passed a bar in your life.”

The Money Pit

Washington State is planning to join Oregon in banning the bar exam. That’s the two-day or three-day test taken by recent law school graduates (and, in the case of the Kennedys, not-so-recent law school graduates) to prove they’re fit to hold a state license to practice law. It tests the student’s knowledge of the rules of law as learned in law school (or, more likely, in studying for the bar exam, since hardly anything useful is learned in law school) and their skill at applying that knowledge to hypothetical scenarios.

The bar-banners are candid about the reasons for their ban. It’s because BLacks* disproportionately fail to pass the exam as compared to whites and even as compared to other minorities (including minorities from homes where the language spoken at home was not English).

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Is capitalizing “Black” the ultimate condescension?

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I capitalize the word “Black” when referring to Black people. Many of my tribe object to that, since I don’t capitalize “white.” Those objections were expressed by readers most recently in reaction to my latest column.

Here are my reasons for using “Black” to refer to Blacks, in reverse order of importance.

First, the AP Style Manual calls for “Black” to be capitalized. That Manual is not the Bible, but it’s a highly recognized authority in what used to be called journalism.

Relax. As I stated, my reasons are presented here in reverse order of importance. The AP Style Manual is the least important one.

Second, of a little more importance, is that many Blacks want the big “B.” I tend to defer to people’s preferences when it comes to their name, their nationality, their religion and their race. (Not so much their sex.)

If a person named Javier wants a hard pronunciation of the “J” as in “Java” then I’ll give him one even if I think it’s a linguistic butchering. I’ll also give him Gavier and pronounce it Javier if that’s what he prefers.

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Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson says some foolish things

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The Justices of the Supreme Court make their living with words. They read them, they write them, they speak them, they listen to them, and they rule with them. We currently have a Justice who uses words very poorly.

At her confirmation hearing before the Senate, Justice Jackson was asked to give a definition of “woman.” That’s a legitimate question, since many legal matters depend on whether a given person is a woman or a man.

Her answer was:

“I can’t. Not in this context. I’m not a biologist.”

Jackson was of course dodging the question. Fine, that’s what you do when you’re being cross examined by a hostile questioner. But the unartfulness of her dodge was striking. A person trained and working with the tool of words should have been able to craft an answer along the lines of:

We all know that words can mean different things in different settings. In the case of the word “woman,” there is of course a traditional definition in genetics which is ‘a person with two X chromosomes.’ We also know that there are people in the world without two X chromosomes who view themselves as women. I respect their views of themselves, just as I respect the views of geneticists. I can’t say without the particular facts of a case in front of me how those views should be weighed, if at all, in a court of law.”

Blah, blah, blah, right? Yes, but that’s the point of an artful dodge – don’t give the questioner a sound bite. Jackson didn’t seem to recognize that she’d handed her questioner – and her present and future critics – a sound bite that will live forever.

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Will we use reverse discrimination to “correct” the gender gap the way we disastrously “corrected” the racial gap?

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A persistent myth is that, for the same job, women in America are paid only 84 cents for every dollar that men are paid.

I explain below, first, why that myth is false and, second, why it’s dangerous.

There are the several reasons why it’s false. The figures use a category of “full time work” for their comparisons. That’s defined as any work over 35 hours per week. That means a man working 55 hours a week is compared to a woman working 36. So, a man making, say, $30/hour for those 55 hours for a total of $1650/week is deemed to be making $210 more for a “full time” job than a woman making $40/hour for 36 hours for a total of $1440/week for a “full time” job – even though in point of fact, the woman is making $5/hour more.

It’s not like this all balances out in the end because women and men overall work the same number of hours. They don’t. The high-hour work is mainly by men.

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An AI-generated speech shouted at the teleprompter by an angry old man on amphetamines

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This week was the ridiculous annual spectacle where the president is supposed to tell us the state of our so-called union, as if we don’t already know. That’s a particularly appropriate topic for the current president who was elected on the promise that he would be a “uniter, not divider” who would bring normalcy and decency back to the office.

A few seconds into it, this “uniter, not divider” was implying that the people who currently disfavor his re-election, a cohort comprising over half the country – and especially his “predecessor” whose name must not be spoken – were in league with Vladimir Putin.

It almost made me miss the good old pre-1989 Democrats who liked Russia.

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The Democrats believe Trump is a witch

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When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything.

Émile Cammaerts

I suppose technically speaking, he would be a warlock. Unless he has undergone that “gender affirmation” mutilation that the Democrats promote for other people’s children.

Which I doubt.

The ancient notion of witchcraft was an understandable aspect of the pre-Enlightenment inability to understand the connections between natural causes and effects, together with the absence of a scientific method of data-gathering and experimentation to discover those connections.

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The Colorado Secretary of State says she now trusts the people to make the decision she didn’t trust them to make four months ago

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The cabal that calls itself the Democratic Party of Colorado nearly pulled a coup last fall. Unburdened by any inconvenient process that might have been due, a Democrat state judge decided that Donald Trump was an insurrectionist. Therefore, under a clause of the 14th Amendment designed to prevent former Confederates from running for federal office, Trump was ineligible to run for president.

Never mind that Trump had never been convicted or even charged with the crime of insurrection.

On appeal, four of the seven Democrat-appointed justices on the Colorado Supreme Court agreed. The other three in their strident dissent all but wondered out loud what kind of Colorado-legal weed the majority was smoking.

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My apology to President Trump

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I voted for Donald Trump twice. But I’ve never used the words “altruistic” or “generous” to describe him. In fact, whenever my support for Trump came up, I always hastened to add, a little sanctimoniously, that I don’t like the man personally.

I might be changing my mind. Here’s why.

Trump didn’t need to go into politics. He’s a billionaire. He had everything a man could want, including a gorgeous ex-model for a wife. (Money is a more potent aphrodisiac than power. Sorry, Henry Kissinger – you’d have known that if only you’d had money.)

Trump went into politics anyway. Sure, there was an ego factor. I hope it doesn’t surprise you that successful men have egos. So do successful women.

But Trump could have exercised that healthy ego in many other ways involving less risk and less cost. He could have bought a cruise ship, or a gold-plated 747, or donated a billion dollars to get a medical center named after him, or started a charitable foundation – a real one, not like the Clinton Foundation.

He instead chose to run for president back in 2016. That doesn’t make him Mother Teresa, but it makes him a lot closer to Mother Teresa than to Joe Biden – the guy who has spent a lifetime in politics because he’s been a failure at every other thing in life, including parenting, and whose lifetime in politics has been primarily for the purpose of lining the greasy, grafty and grifty pockets of himself and his cheesy, sleazy family.

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