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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Fani for Vice President!

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The sun is setting on Fani’s career as a lawyer, and she’ll be seeking other career opportunities.

First, let’s recap why her law career is ending.  

Fani’s case against Donald Trump includes a preposterous RICO charge for violating the racketeering laws. Fani has no expertise in that arcane law, so she hired her boyfriend and paid him three-quarters of a million taxpayer dollars for his expertise. Never mind that he, too, has no such expertise, having never tried a RICO case.

The scheme worked well for Fani and the boyfriend, for a while. The boyfriend took Fani on expensive vacations to exotic places, paid for by the taxpayer money he received from Fani’s office. Fani says she always paid him back for her half, but the payback was in untraceable cash that she kept around the house. There’s no bank record of her withdrawing that cash, and no bank record of him depositing that cash.

To casual observers, and, more importantly, to the judge, this all looked a little crafty and grafty.

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How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen – the Quiet Years

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My book about the decline of Aspen was published last year, entitled “High Attitude — How Woke Liberals Ruined Aspen.” It debuted at Number 6 on Amazon in its category of political books. That put the book in rarified air with the likes of Tucker Carlson and Jesse Watters (who helped me promote it when I appeared on his show).

Although I’m no longer in the stratosphere with Tucker and Jesse, sales are still climbing and, more importantly, so are royalties. You can get the book at Amazon or Barnes and Noble for $18 or $8 for the e-version.

Meanwhile, here’s a teaser. It’s Chapter Two, about the odd period between the silver boom and the post-WWII boom, entitled “Cows, Potatoes and Ghosts — the Quiet Years.”

high-attitude-ch-2Download