Tag Archives: politics

Democrats crying “affordability” is like an arsonist calling the fire department

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The party of compassion and intellectualism, according to them, is selling two things this election season. One, they hate Trump, and they want you to.

Forget that Trump stopped illegal immigration and deported millions of Biden’s illegals.

Forget that Trump emasculated Iran and re-masculated America’s would-be trannies.

Forget that Trump called out overpriced woke colleges for their hiring, admissions, grading and testing on the basis of skin color.

Forget all that. Just remember that Trump’s hair, adjectives and vanity make you feel . . . well, deranged. Your derangement is his fault.

Remember only that. And to vote early and often.

The second thing the Democrats are selling is “affordability.” If you vote for them, they tell you, they’ll make stuff more affordable.

The Democrats are light on the details here, for good reason.

For example, the Democrats could, but don’t, say that they’ll lower the price of gasoline.

The Democrats don’t say that because, for two generations now, they’ve argued that the price of gas in the U.S. is already too low (and indeed it’s still lower than anywhere else in the developed world). If gasoline cost more, they argue, we’d use less of it and – voila! – the climate would be Goldilocks. Never too hot, never too cold.

Forget that the Democratic Republic of California enjoys extremely high gasoline prices, and we nonetheless have cold winters and hot summers the way we always have. Maybe the climate Giai hasn’t gotten the memo. And neither have carbon-spewing China or India.

Forget, too, that the average price of gasoline during the Trump administration is less than the average price of gasoline during the Biden administration. As for Jimmy Carter’s administration, let’s not even go there.

In talking about this “affordability” issue, Democrats could also say, but don’t, that they’ll lower the cost of housing.

The Democrats don’t say that because for many years, they’ve enacted rules and regulations to do the opposite. They favor unionized contractors, even – or especially – when the housing is government-subsidized “affordable” housing. They favor burdensome building codes that display omnipotence more than making buildings safe.

The Democrats also don’t say that because they don’t like the outcome of their own experiment. They know that the cost of building a house in their stronghold of California with its crushing land-use regulations and unionized workforce is almost triple the cost of building the same house in free-market – and Republican – Texas.

In California, it seems that a construction worker is required to be either a member of a union or a citizen of somewhere in Latin America.

How about the affordability of college? Under Democrat administrations, the tuition at the nation’s universities has skyrocketed, due largely to the availability of government student loans which the Democrats turn into gifts.

These universities are mostly controlled by a bunch of group-think Democrats who seem to delight in free-speech inquiry if, and only if, they agree with it, and delight in free market economics if, and only if, it benefits them. 

Maybe the Democrats would address the unaffordability of college in the same way they always have. They’d make more student loans-cum-gifts. The outcome of that approach would be the same as always. Their collaborative Democrats at the universities would be grateful, because they could thereby raise tuition some more.

Except they’d still give in-state tuition to illegal immigrants.

Many Democrats think socialism leads to affordability. The elders of Eastern Europe would beg to differ. What socialism leads to is not affordability, but scarcity. Meat in Soviet-occupied Poland cost pennies a pound, but you literally had to wait in line for hours to get it. Talk to a person who lived through socialism in Poland (which, significantly, is now booming under a free market economy).

How about the cost of electricity? Democrats have long proposed to make electricity cheap by simply mandating that.

But price controls don’t work because they destroy incentives for production. What they could do instead is increase the production of electricity by means of nuclear energy. But “nuclear” is still a dirty word in much of Democrat-land. Better to put windmills in the DC mall and solar panels on the Washington Monument.

The only energy source the Democrats like is the scarce kind, which serves their plan to return us to the utopia of the Stone Age.

With no real plan to lower costs in order to increase affordability, Democrats advocate what they’ve always advocated – higher wages. They propose to double the federal minimum wage, for example.

Why not triple it? Why not increase it to $100,000 an hour? If the Democrats seriously think that higher wage costs can be imposed without producing higher prices, then let’s go whole hog!

Why not hand out free money, the way they did in Covid times?

Ah, the organizations that used to be called the “news media” tell us to forget all that and forget the consequences of all that. Let’s not be too specific. Let’s not be specific at all – what is this, a racist merit-based test or something?

Instead, remember only the bad hair, bad adjectives and bad vanity of the guy – that guy! – who is not on the ballot.

Why did Democrats open the border?

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Until President(ish) Joe Biden assumed office, the Democrat Presidential policy on illegal immigration was the same as the policy of all earlier Presidents of the United States. Their policy as leaders of the Executive Branch was to enforce the law. The law was to prevent people from entering the country illegally.

This non-partisan national policy was founded on the idea that what we have in America is special, and we don’t intend to just give it away to anyone willing to swim illegally across the Rio Grande. Or the Volga, Rhine, Congo or Danube.

Moreover, allowing immigration that was illegal, as opposed to legal, would give us the worst of the pool of immigrants – the ones willing to violate the sanctity of our laws, often because they’d already violated the sanctity of the laws of the place they came from. Lawbreakers break the law.

In other words, illegal immigration by definition is mass immigration by criminals. Despite what the liberal media tells you, it’s a crime to enter the country illegally. (It’s not a crime to overstay a visa but illegal immigrants are not usually mere visa-overstayers.)

We knew that if criminal immigration reached the millions, it would disrupt our social fabric by burdening schools, emergency rooms, highways and welfare systems.

And if the criminal immigration were by criminals unable (or unwilling) to speak our language, we risked becoming a different society altogether. There’s a reason that immigrants who achieve the privileged status of U.S. citizens are required to pass a test – in English. It’s not racist to believe America should be an English-speaking country of non-criminals where everyone can speak with everyone, preferably without pressing “2” for Spanish or talking through the translation app on your phone.

This was the policy of even the most-recent Democrats to precede Biden, namely Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. They stated that people cannot enter the country illegally or stay in the country illegally, and their policies mostly were in accord with those statements.

So, what happened under Biden? Why did he fling the border wide open, even as he denied doing so?

In fairness to Biden, he knew not what he’d done. He was a very old man with very metastasized cancer. Even in his younger days, he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, and in his later days he was nothing but a tooth-capped scalp-plugged cutout taking instructions from others.  

The shots were being called by whoever was the boldest shot-caller. All of them in the Biden White House were very hard-left, including – or perhaps particularly – his wife, “doctor” Jill.

The question remains, why did somebody or somebodies who were calling the shots under the Biden administration open the border, and why did the other Democrats allow it? There must be a strong reason, because it arguably cost them the 2024 election.

This is an interesting question because the answer tells a lot about the modern Democratic Party.

The most generous reason is that they wanted to do the humanitarian thing. People in Haiti and Guatemala and even Mexico have suffered horribly. Enough is enough. I have some sympathy for that sentiment.

But that sympathy goes only so far. Are we supposed to allow all of Haiti and Guatemala and Mexico to immigrate to the United States?

Moreover, such a sentiment disregards our system of government. If we want to allow more immigration from troubled parts of the world, then the way to achieve it is to pass legislation to allow it and regulate it, not to wantonly violate the legislation that is already on the books.

The Biden administration didn’t pass new legislation. They didn’t even try very hard (at that or anything else). Instead, they said in effect, “We don’t like the law, so we’ll simply violate it.”

That’s anarchy. Or, to use the phrase du jour, it’s a threat to democracy. In the context of the Executive Branch collaborating with an illegal invasion of our country by millions of criminals, it’s arguably a high crime or misdemeanor.

The Democrats indeed seem not to like the laws of our country, at least when it comes to immigration, but I’m afraid it goes deeper than that. They don’t like the country itself.

This is factual. Polls consistently show that Democrats are much less likely than Republicans to express a love for America. They’re a bit embarrassed by America. They want a very different America, one that is more socialistic. Merit is bad, because the people who have it tend not to be the “right” people.

“Fundamentally transforming America” is the phrase Obama repeatedly used as a euphemism for correcting this perceived defect. Obama may indeed have enforced the immigration laws, as I mentioned, but he was hell-bent on making the nation different in values and composition. Maybe he didn’t intend to make America into Haiti (and maybe he did) but “fundamentally transforming America” became a cool thing to advocate.

Obama’s followers in the Democratic Party took that phrase and ran with it. And they ran by any means necessary, including willful evasion of the immigration laws.

That leads to yet a deeper question. What’s so bad about America? This country has given the most prosperity to the most people in the history of the world. Our poor people are rich by the standards of nearly all of history. Our foreign aid to other countries far surpasses anyone else in history.

I laugh at youngsters who display their ignorance by complaining that the price of their iPhone is too high. I grew up in a family of six in a 1200-square-foot house. We had no air conditioning, no color TV, no microwave, and no second car until my father bought an old junker for $110. I started working when I was 15, and washed pots and pans through college. And we were considered upper middle class.

I’ll reserve for another column this question as to why young Americans seem not to love this country that loves them. But here’s a hint. It’s not despite America’s prosperity, but because of it. It’s not because things are too hard, but because things are too easy.

The next President will be a white male Democrat

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This isn’t real

Conventional wisdom is that J.D. Vance will be elected President in 2028. I think not.

Vance has a lot going for him – he’s smart, accomplished, well-educated, in the public eye, and will be heir to MAGA.

That last point, however, is two-edged. Yes, he will be associated with Trump. But yes, he will be associated with Trump. There’s a lot of Trump fatigue out there even among people who voted for him three times, as I did. 

The last time a sitting Vice President was elected to the Presidency was when we elected George H.W. Bush. But that was when Ronald Reagan was a very successful and popular President. When it comes to popularity, Mr. Vance, your boss is no Ronald Reagan.

Vance seems unwilling or unable to apply any balm to soothe this Trump fatigue, much less the strong topical anesthesia that is indicated. He always seems angry and a little xenophobic. I won’t go so far as to say he’s racist – after all, he’s married to an Indian (whom he publicly says he wants to convert to Christianity) – but . . .   

Speaking of xenophobia, what’s with the beard? My phone tells me at a glance which century it is. You’d think Vance could get a Russian oligarch to buy him a phone.

Vance will get some competition from my favorite, Marco Rubio, but Rubio will bow out well before the Republican convention.

The reason Rubio will lose is that he’s Hispanic. On the Republican side, sadly, there are enough voters who simply will not vote for a non-white candidate, even if he’s a dedicated anti-communist, anti-Castro, Republican son of legal Cuban immigrants.

The media won’t help Rubio, even though – or perhaps because – he’s Hispanic. The media will acknowledge that he’s Hispanic, but not a “real” Hispanic since he’s Cuban and since he’s a Republican. They’ll paint him as a betrayer of his race, since in their racist view all minorities are required to be Democrats rather than independent thinkers. They will see him much the way they see Justice Clarence Thomas – as an Uncle Tom.

Ironically, Rubio’s odds would be much better as a Democrat because then he wouldn’t be painted as an Uncle Tom. But then, of course, he’d have to be a Democrat and that’s much worse.

Vance will also get a little competition from Nikki Haley, another candidate I like. But hop in your pickup and drive the backroads of Texas to see how enthusiastic they are about electing a woman as President whose parents are Ajit Singh Randhawa and Raj Kaur Randhaw from Punjab, India.

Or just take it from me: they aren’t.

So, Vance will be the Republican nominee. Who will be the Democrat nominee?

It won’t be Kamala. Even though she seems to be leading in the Democrat polls, a good part of her lead is her name recognition. She did run for President last time and received some 75 million votes. She is also the only credible Black(-ish) candidate, which ensures a few million votes.

But she’s a two-time loser. And both times, she ran a poor campaign. Her support is probably about as high as it will ever be, and that’s not very high.

Moreover, there’s an element of Kamala fatigue – by Kamala. I think she doesn’t want the job badly enough to put in the work that’s necessary to be hired.

That leaves some Democrat white guys. It won’t be Buttigieg. Even the Democrats aren’t ready for a gay man. Besides, being gay is no longer fashionable. To the average American, it’s a little like being trans – it’s sooo 2024.

That leaves the governors. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro is disqualified because he doesn’t hate Jews enough. In fact, he is one!!! (Do the Democrats know?)

The women governors are pretty much all women, and the Democrats have already done that twice. Can they really say with their self-congratulatory zeal, “Third woman Presidential candidate! This is another first – the first time that there’s been a third!”

There’s the governor in Illinois who has lost 80 pounds by taking the new fat pills. That’s nice, but does he still have an appetite for the job?

The only one left is Gavin Newsom, complete with his cursed hair issues and cursed State of California. He’s reasonably bright, good-looking, and well-known.

Newsom says he’s dyslexic, which is a good excuse for any gaffes and might even get him some sympathy votes. It’s only right that we elect a President with disabilities. We already had one who was comatose. (Someday we’ll signal our virtue by electing one who is autistic.)

Think how edgy the Dems will feel in nominating a sentient white guy. They haven’t done that in over 20 years. And Dems are nothing if not edgy.

And so, the race will be Vance vs. Newsom or, if you prefer, J.D. vs. Gavin (sounds like an election for frat president).

I’ll be voting for Vance, but the winner will be Newsom. For Vance, the MAGA baggage is a lift too heavy and a bridge too far. It worked for Trump, but Trump is sui generis. I’m glad. 

Liberals rage at Sidney Sweeney for debasing sports intended for trannies

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Sidney Sweeney, best I can figure it, is an heir to Paris Hilton, Brooke Shields and the Kardashian Klan. She has a new ad out. She “dresses” in sports balls, like footballs, basketballs, baseballs, and so on. Nothing comes between Sidney and her balls. My favorite is the golf balls, and I don’t even golf.

Liberals hate the ad because, well, you know why. It’s because they don’t like young attractive women acting like young attractive women. Liberal women think women should be as old and fat as they are.

As for liberal men, they think women should have a penis. After all, someone has to.

Sidney’s ad revealed enough for me to conclude that she is not old, she is not fat, and she does not have a penis. (I watched the ad 16 times to confirm that. Investigative journalism lives!)

But of course, the liberals aren’t honest about their reasons for hating Sidney’s new ad. They instead have a rationale. They say it debases women athletes because it implies that they’re really hot.

Why doesn’t anyone debase me that way? That former Patriots quarterback with the model girlfriend, he gets debased. He gets debased right and left. He gets debased all the time.

But me? Noooooooo. Nevahhh. It’s not fair.

The debasement thing is a problem in women’s sports, according to liberals. The God-given destiny of woman’s sports is to be the domain of . . . (you know what’s coming) . . . men.

It’s not just any men, mind you. It’s the men who act like women, which is approximately 100% of liberal men. And so, Sidney’s debasement of women’s sports is wrong, wrong, wrong because it debases liberal men.

It might even be unconstitutional, according to the new 13-Justice Supreme Court we’ll soon enjoy.

Sorry Sid. Let me know if you need a shoulder to cry on, or if you want to debase me. I’m here for you.

Gas prices are the least of our problems

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It’s fashionable this election season to complain that gas prices are high.

Cry me a river.

I can remember when we had to wait in line for 20-30 minutes – or even for hours – for 5 gallons of gas. The price of gas was about what it is now, in inflation-adjusted dollars, but the mileage of ordinary American vehicles was only one-third of today’s mileage. The result was that the effective price of driving your car was triple what it is now – if you could stay in line long enough to get gas for it.

And then, this car unsafe at any speed could kill you or kill itself, but that’s a different story.

The gas crunch of the 1970s produced two dramatic effects. One, people started shopping for smaller cars that got better gas mileage. Two, people started driving less.

Today, I see evidence of neither. I’ll start to worry about gas prices when Joe Sixpack trades in his People Rammer 450, or whatever they’re called.

Meanwhile, maybe it will help you to know we have bigger problems than gas prices. Here’s an incomplete listing:

Iran might get The Bomb. In our obsession to get gas prices down, we might choose to end the Iran task prematurely. That may well get the price of gas down from $4.46 a gallon to $3.89 a gallon – Halleluiah! – but at the cost of nuking Atlanta, NYC, DC, San Francisco, Jerusalem, Paris and London.  

AI is getting too smart. While ignorant fad-meisters complain that data centers in the middle of nowhere might produce a noise nobody is there to hear, we continue at breakneck, break-civilization speed to advance an intelligence that we’ve dubbed “artificial.” If only this artificial intelligence had an artificial heart and an artificial conscience, too.

It doesn’t.

So, let’s hope that people who are real smart are in charge.

They’re not.

The solution, of course, is not to abandon AI technology. If we don’t adopt this technology, then someone else will – who will use it to own us, like the Chinese. The solution instead is to somehow, in some way, do it right. But we have a bleak history lately of doing things right.

While AI is getting too smart, our children are getting too stupid. Objective data in the form of test scores show they never recovered from Covid. In our zeal to protect them from a disease to which they were nearly immune, we destroyed the educational system.

Our solution to these declining test scores, comically, is to make the tests easier.

But the teachers’ unions did fine and the woke professors did fine. Maybe it was a success, after all!

Our $40 trillion deficit. It’s easy to think deficits are a way of life for America. They’re not. As recently as the turn of the century, Bill Clinton was running a federal surplus and we were on our way to eliminating the federal deficit.

It didn’t happen. And it evidently won’t, until it’s too late.

Socialism. Our increasing population of stupid people with declining test scores are again finding the opiate of stupid masses – socialism. The totalitarian economic policies of Lenin, Chavez, Mao and Pol Pot are once again all the rage. Maybe those policies will be tossed on the ash heap of fashion (again) before they murder a hundred million people (again). Or maybe this time it will require a full billion.

We are not reproducing. Given that one of my earlier compaints was that our children are too stupid, this sounds like the old complaint about a restaurant: “The food was terrible and the portions were too small.” But yes, given the millions or billions that will die of socialism, we should be having more children. We aren’t. Globally, our rate of reproduction is barely at replacement level. In our most advanced cultures, it’s far below that.

At this rate, Europe, Asia and America north of the Rio Grande will become near-extinct in a time frame when your descendants will still know who you were (not that they will care). Long before that, your vaunted Western Civilization will be a dot in the rear-view mirror of your descendants’ horse and buggy.

Yet, here we are with elections approaching and our number one worry is that the price of gas went up a buck a gallon.

I have only one conclusion: We deserve what we get.

Trump offers to pay the taxpayers with money from the taxpayers

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The unique “Midterm Convention” by the Republicans in Dallas this week featured the faithful filling an arena (mostly, but there were quite a few empty seats) to hear the faith (mostly, but a Democrat Senator, too, spoke by video).

I’ve voted Republican since Ronald Reagan, including three times for Donald Trump. I didn’t think I would learn anything by watching the spectacle, and I didn’t think it would be amusing entertainment, so I didn’t watch.

But I did hear that President Trump promised to pay each adult citizen $5,000 if the Republicans hold both houses of Congress in November. I have two thoughts on this.

First, the odds that he’ll ever pay the $5,000 are approximately zero. The Republicans are sure to lose the House, and stand a good chance of losing the Senate as well. Even on the slim chance that they hold both, the $5,000 payments would require an act of Congress. The odds that Congress would go along are approximately, well, zero.

The odds that the Republicans will hold both houses of Congress, and Congress will go along with the $5,000 payments, are, if my math still serves, approximately zero times approximately zero, which is well nigh . . . zero.

So, don’t spend the money yet.

My second thought is that this money amounting to something over $1,000,000,000 has to come from somewhere. Oh, you say, it just gets printed.

But didn’t we learn for the umpteenth time during the Biden administration that money that “just gets printed” still comes from somewhere? Didn’t we learn that it comes from us, through inflated prices?

If that were not the case, then why make the payments only $5,000? Couldn’t we all be rich by letting the government simply print and mail to each of us $5,000,000?

Heck, why stop there? Let’s all be as rich as Elon Musk by having the government print and mail to each of us, say, a trillion dollars.

Okay, I said I have two thoughts on the matter, but actually I have three. Trump thinks we’re stupid.

Why do Democrat Jews vote for Democrat Jew-haters?

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It’s a puzzle. It’s a conundrum. To use Winston Churchill’s quote about the WWII Soviets, it’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Why do Jews vote for Democrats?

Okay, I can understand why they vote against certain Republicans. For example, notwithstanding his defense of Israel, Donald Trump sometimes comes across as . . . well, let’s just say he does not come across as Albert Einstein.

A culture such as the Jews might find Trump’s social media postings and his in-person “weave” a bit off-putting. This off-putting is apparently not offset in their minds by his support for Israel.

But Trump is not the only Republican rejected by the Jews. The Jews as a group have never voted for any Republican Presidential candidate.

Never.

Was Eisenhower too dumb? This was the general in charge of Allied Forces in Europe, the bold genius who helped mastermind D-Day, and the good soldier who opened the concentration camps.

What about Richard Nixon? A man is not called “tricky” because he’s stupid. Nixon was clearly smarter than LBJ or Harry Truman.

How about Ronald Reagan? All he did was win the Cold War.

Reagan’s vice president who succeeded him, George H.W. Bush, was one of the most accomplished men in DC at that time.

The son of Bush senior, namely George W, was at least as smart as the men he ran against, Al Gore and John Kerry.

Was Mitt Romney who made zillions on Wall Street dumb? I should be so dumb.

Even Donald Trump was clearly smarter than his opponent the last two times.

The Jews voted against all of them, and every other Republican Presidential candidate. Why?

I have a theory.

Jews coming to America were much different than the ones here today. Jewish immigrants were more like the Irish or the Italian immigrants. They suffered discrimination for their ethnicity and religion (Catholicism in the case of the Italians and most of the Irish). All had heavy foreign accents that served to identify them, and the first language of the Italians and Jews was not even English.

They naturally voted for the political party that held itself out as just like them – working-class folk. The Democrats were the party that did not control the country clubs that refused to admit them.

The Irish and Italian immigrants assimilated within two generations, as most immigrants do. For example, I say I’m Scottish but the truth is that I have just one grandparent from Scotland. The rest came from here and there. Likewise, most of the Irish and Italian immigrants married outside their ethnicity and even their faith.

Today, there is no Irish vote or Italian vote, because there’s no longer a discrete Irish culture or Italian culture in America. Getting drunk on St Patrick’s Day doesn’t count, and Columbus Day has been cancelled.

But there’s still a Jewish vote, because there’s still a discrete Jewish culture. That culture is the reason that the Jews survived for thousands of years as a minority ethnic group with a distinctive non-Christian religion despite enormous pressures.

The Jews’ survival skills were forged in the furnace of Europe and, before that, the Middle East. There, they learned not to blend in because they weren’t allowed to.  They learned not to marry outside their faith because nobody outside their faith would marry them.

The Jews made a virtue of this terrible discrimination and periodic pogroms. Being ostracized from mainstream culture drove them into an observance and even obsession over their own distinctive culture, religion and traditions.

You have your Christmas, they said, but we have our Hannukah.  You have your New Year, but we have our Rosh Hashanah. You have your Easter, but we have our Passover.

And you have your Republicans, but we have our Democrats. In short, Jews vote for Democrats because it’s tradition.

Most traditions are good. There’s a Darwinian aspect to them; bad habits die out and never rise to the level of a tradition. In the context of Jewish culture and religion, tradition has been a very good thing, a sine qua non of these extraordinary and vulnerable people who comprise only 0.2% of the world’s population.

But I submit that the Jewish tradition of voting for Democrats is now unhealthy for them and us.

The Torah is full of traditions that may have been right for their time but are not right for the present. No longer is it appropriate for Jews to push goats off cliffs, decapitate calves, or light bonfires on mountain peaks.

Or vote blindly for barbarians who seek to destroy them. Even Tevye compromised tradition to save his people.

Many Jews seem conflicted about Jewry

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The Ashkenazi Jews are a remnant of the Jewish diaspora. A couple thousand years ago, they fled from Judea to Europe, and then were driven east. They did not assimilate, but deliberately kept to themselves to practice a religion and engage in a culture that was persecuted through the ages.

Just in case they had aspirations for integrating into the local population, the locals ensured that they did not. Marrying a Jew was a good way for a gentile to get disowned and disinherited, and vice versa.

DNA analysis suggests that at one point the Ashkenazim dropped to a population of as few as 350 people spread over the European continent. They were very nearly extinguished.

But in some ways, what didn’t kill them made them stronger. They have an inbred vulnerability to certain diseases but a near immunity to others.

Ashkenazim often score high on standardized IQ tests and they’ve succeeded inordinately in science, law, literature and business. In analyzing the reasons for this success, it’s difficult to tease apart the role of their admirable minds from the role of their admirable culture.

It’s a culture that values education, achievement, wealth, power, and – not least – family.

I’ve wailed at the Western Wall, both literally and metaphorically, though I’m not Jewish. Then again, maybe now we’re all Jewish. In a way, everyone with a claim on Western Civilization is Jewish. I claim a heritage from Moses, Jesus, Paul, Freud, Einstein, Spielberg, Oppenheimer, Kasparov, Ben-Gurion, Kissinger, Bellow, Salk, Kafka, Chagall and Dylan – all Jews.

Thus, I’m saddened to see some of today’s prominent Jews equivocate in their defense of the Jewish state of Israel.

No less that the Senator Charles Schumer – the first Jewish Senate Minority Leader – is willing to throw Israel under the bus if necessary to save his job. No less than Rahm Emmanuel, Chief of Staff in the Obama White House and an advisor to Bill Clinton before that, is willing to put Israel back in the Jewish ghetto if it puts him back in the White House.

The Middle East has always been a complicated place. If only all of it were like Israel – largely an arid land with few natural riches. Instead, vast areas are cursed by black gold. The energy dependency of the world requires us to pay attention to this place. To mollify, cajole, bully and beg the barbarians.

It’s easy and habit-forming to blame things on the Jews and to see their oil-rich adversaries as the victims, notwithstanding the appalling atrocities committed in the name of those “victims.”

But as a matter of history, it was the Jews who were the victims. Their persecution for thousands of years culminated with the systematic murder of a third of their population. After the event that put an upper case “H” on the word Holocaust, the Jews swore that they would be victims never again.

In short, the Jews refuse to be exterminated. Should they be blamed for that?

For those who see the Jews as the source of the problem in the Middle East, I have a question: What would you have them do differently?

Are the Jews supposed to give up their ancient homeland, to give up Israel? Are they supposed to go back to the lands of their persecution and victimhood – to Europe, to America, to Russia? Because that’s what the Palestinians demand.

Look at a map. “From the river to the sea” refers to the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. That’s all of Israel. The slogan chosen by the Palestinians candidly calls for the abolition of Israel. 

The Ashkenazim of Europe were persecuted for a thousand years, but against all odds they maintained their identity, their culture and their religion. In their faith and unanimity, they did well and they did good. If only their American successors could be so united and so brave.

The decline in violent crime correlates to a decline in testosterone levels

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The Trump administration has heralded a decline in violent crime in the past few years. America is a safer place.

We’re told that this should be credited to Republican policies for greater law enforcement and more vigorous criminal prosecution. That may be so. I’m certainly in favor of both those policies. But maybe there’s also another factor at work.

The graph* above shows a clear correlation between declining violent crime and declining testosterone levels. To be sure, there’s an exception around the year 2020 where violent crime spiked but testosterone levels did not. It’s safe to say the spike in violent crime at that point was due to something other than a spike in testosterone levels.

Gee, what could be the reason for the spike in violent crime around 2020? Oh yeah. There was a worldwide pandemic where the Biden administration and many Democrat-controlled cities shut down law enforcement.

Apart from this Covid pandemic crime spree, the correlation is clear.

Now, of course, correlation does not equal causation. Just because a decline in violent crime correlates with a decline in testosterone does not mean that the decline in testosterone caused the decline in violent crime. Logically speaking, it could just as well be the reverse – that the violent crime reduction caused the testosterone reduction. (Are they still castrating criminals?) Or it could be that both were caused by some other factor (but I can’t imagine what) or that each was caused by different factors.

But nonetheless, we’re left with the correlation.

In this particular case, there are reasons to think that correlation does equal causation. Testosterone is the male hormone that is responsible for dense muscle mass, risk-taking and road rage.

Testosterone is the main reason that males are far more likely than females to engage in mountaineering, car racing, entrepreneurialism, Seal Team 6-ing, boxing, exploration – and violent crime.

The males most likely to engage in violent crime are the young ones, in whom testosterone levels are the highest. And among young men, young Blacks are far more likely to engage in violent crime than young whites. Is it any surprise that young Black men tend to have higher testosterone levels – and incarceration levels – than young white men?

That said, let me also say that I’m a fan of testosterone, despite (or maybe because of) its mucho-macho side. In fact, the phrase “testosterone poisoning” makes me want to punch someone. But I have to admit, there are benefits to having less of the stuff. And detriments.

*The graph was generated at my request by AI using data from the FBI on violent crime and from the NIH on testosterone levels. I should mention that AI does not buy my theory because . . . sociology. In any event, cursory research finds that no one has noted this correlation. The contrarian in me says that proves it’s right. If you disagree, let’s settle it outside.

Cambridge has blood on their hands

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By now, you know the story. A man named Jason Arday was hired by Cambridge to be its “youngest Black* professor.”

Cambridge hired Arday in the wake of the George Floyd death, a tragic death that had as much impact on Great Britain as on Minnesota. What we learned from the George Floyd episode was not that we should treat or incarcerate mentally disturbed, substance-abusing criminals. No, that lesson was too much for those Days of Wokeness.

What we learned instead was that anytime a person dies in police custody, the police must have murdered him – if he was Black.

Just as rebels holler “To the barricades,” the DEI advocates hollered, “To the reparations!”

The reparations were not to take the form of putting the likes of George Floyd into in an expensive institution for treatment, rehabilitation and, if necessary, punishment. The reparations were instead to take the form of putting a person who the DEI advocates view as someone just like George Floyd (to the DEI advocates, they all look the same) into a professorship at Cambridge. Call it the George Floyd Chair.

It didn’t matter whether the Black person was ever a victim of slavery or if his ancestors ever were. What mattered was that the person was Black.

And so, it was no problem that the George Floyd Chair was filled with Jason Arday, even though his parents immigrated to London from Ghana and there is no evidence that he or any ancestor suffered slavery (if they did, it was the Black-on-Black kind).

Arday was a piece of work. Outside the classroom, he bragged that he once ran 600 miles in 6 days. As if that was not enough, he once ran 30 marathons – a 26-mile race – in 33 days. In his spare time, he said, he raised $6 million dollars for charity in the span of a few weeks.

He said he barely spoke until he was 11. He suffered two brain tumors.

Inside the classroom, he was touted as brilliant. Any claims to the contrary were dismissed as “racist.”

Yes, there was much ado about the phenom named Jason Arday. It turned out to be much ado about nothing. I was all lies.

There were no brain tumors. He spoke at the usual age. He apparently ran no marathons, much less 30 in 33 days. The $6 million he single-handedly raised for charity in a short time was actually raised over a long period of time by a charity group he was loosely affiliated with.

The thing that did him in, however, was not his superhuman fabulism. It was his academic fraud. It was discovered that his PhD thesis contained over 100 instances of plagiarism. Some of the plagiarism was page upon page of exact copying.

The initial reaction by Cambridge was of course, “More racism! By racist critics!” Arday himself literally called the police when journalists sent him emails asking for his comment. (The police belatedly dismissed his complaint.)

Despite the stonewalling by both Cambridge and Arday, his plagiarism was too stark to be ignored. Whole pages were cut and pasted, including the grammatical errors. Cambridge finally announced that it was undertaking an investigation.

Arday resigned from his prestigious and tenured position later that day. Cambridge must find another Black man for the George Floyd Chair.

Yesterday, this story went from amusing to bemusing. Arday was found dead in London. Police say there is no evidence of foul play. That’s police talk for suicide. Although I condemn Arday’s fraud and his attacks on critics who sought to point it out, part of me feels bad for him and his family.

Here’s who I don’t feel bad for: Cambridge.  

It is often observed that affirmative action may feel good to the advocates, but it does no favors to the beneficiaries. The beneficiary is put into a position they’re not ready for, a position where they are bound to fail. Indeed, the failure rate for affirmative action Black students is significantly higher than for ordinary white students.

Lies are compounded by more lies. Soon, a little resume exaggeration balloons into “I ran 30 marathons in 33 days!” Soon, the Black person is no longer a person, he’s just Black. 

Cambridge is not full of dummies. The fabulism claimed by Arday was a red flag, and the plagiarism must have been an open secret. Cambridge didn’t care, for they had their Black.

Cambridge’s charges of “racism!” against accomplished academics who raised good faith questions was a coverup, and one that potentially damaged those academics.

All this was for Cambridge to feel good about itself, to fill the George Floyd Chair.

Cambridge, you have blood on your hands.

*Most Black people want an upper case “B” and so that’s what I give them. It costs me nothing. Most white people want a lower case “w” and so that’s what I give them. That, too, costs me nothing. As for the whole ridiculous controversy, I have bigger fish to fry.