Tag Archives: politics

Ready-Fire-Aim! Virginia Democrats shoot themselves in the foot

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The latest battle in the gerrymandering wars took place in Virginia. The Democrats in Virginia had all the guns – they control the governorship, the legislature and a majority of the voters. In a classic example of “Ready-Fire-Aim,” the Democrats promptly used those guns to shoot themselves in the foot.   

It all started a few years ago, back when Virginia was a purplish state. Voters approved an amendment to the state constitution to establish a non-partisan procedure for drawing Congressional Districts. That procedure produced Districts that resulted in a Democrat-Republican split in the elected Representatives of 5-4, which is approximately the same as the split in Virginia voters. So far, so good.

Then Virginia gradually shifted blue. Last fall, Virginia Democrats joined the gerrymandering wars. As is often the case with wars, it started with the political equivalent of stirring songs, glitzy parades, and predictions of victory in a month.

The Democrats figured that with a little creativity and an utter absence of shame – the absence of which has never been in short supply among politicians – they could gerrymander the Districts to shift the 5-4 split in their Congressional delegation to a 10-1 split.

They would be heroes! (And maybe some of them would fill those five new Democrat Congressional seats!)

Sure, it would take another amendment to the state constitution in order to nullify the one from a few years ago that established the non-partisan procedure for drawing Districts. But, as the Democrats reminded themselves, they controlled the three bodies that approve such amendments – the legislature, the governorship and the voters.

Constitutions contain procedures for amending them. The Virginia constitution stated that the legislature is supposed to approve the amendment twice. In between those two approvals, there’s supposed to be an election of the legislature. Only after those two legislative approvals and that intervening election, can the matter be put to the voters in a referendum.

There’s method behind this redundant madness. The thought is that, after the legislature approves the amendment the first time, the voters should get a chance to dis-elect the legislature that approved the amendment. And then the new legislature has to re-approve the amendment.

A constitution is a sacred thing, you see, even if it’s just a state one. Amendments to it are not to be taken lightly.

This is where the Democrats misfired. They got the requisite approval accomplished in the state legislature which they controlled, but the approval came after early voting had already begun on the requisite election of the legislature. In fact, about 40% of the votes had already been cast for that election.

After the election, they got the requisite second approval from the new legislature, and then they narrowly got the approval of voters in a referendum.

The matter went to the Virginia Supreme Court. This week, that Court held that the first approval by the legislature did not occur before the election of legislature, because at the time of that approval the election was already underway and 40% of the voters had already cast their ballots.

In effect, therefore, there was no “election day,” but rather an “election period.” The Democrats mistakenly failed to accomplish the requisite legislative approval for the amendment prior to the commencement of that election period. The result was that 40% of the voters were denied the opportunity to consider that approval in weighing their votes in what was supposed to be a subsequent election.

The matter cannot be reviewed further by the U.S. Supreme Court, because it is purely a matter of state law. The Virginia Supreme Court is the final authority on the subject. The Democrats could start again from square one in Virginia, but it’s too late for the upcoming mid-term election.

There’s a certain poetic justice in this. Democrats like loosey-goosey election procedures such as early and absentee voting for any and all. This time, it shot them in the foot and blew up in their faces. They will use this experience to advocate for gun control, no doubt.

Racial discrimination is a lousy way to overcome racism

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There’s a rule of law that Americans of all races have long asked for, and thought they had. That rule is the one that outlaws racial discrimination.

First, consider where we are now as we approach two centuries since the Civil War and three generations since the first Civil Rights Act. We’ve elected a Black President and a Black Vice President, we currently have a stellar Hispanic Secretary of State, we’ve had 14 Black Senators and 183 Black members of the House (including many from states that were part of the Confederacy), and oddsmakers say a Black man is likely to be the next Speaker of the House.  

America has plenty of flaws that need fixing, but, given these facts, it’s hard to make a case that one of those flaws is systemic racism. Are there a few racist people in America? Of course, everywhere has that, and most places have a lot more of them than America does.

But is America a systemically racist society? No. America is probably the least-racist place on earth.

America’s world-leading progress wasn’t enough for an alliance of well-intentioned social engineers seeking to improve us and ill-intentioned fascists seeking to end us.

They decided that our color-blind society has too little color – too few Black people – in prestige universities, company board rooms, and status professions like law and medicine, because Black presence in those fields was less than their 13% presence in the population at large.  Consistent with the pre-conceived goal of improving us (or ending us), these do-gooders (and do-baders) attributed that shortfall to our racism.

They conveniently ignored the abundance of Blacks and the paucity of whites in lucrative sports such as basketball and football in our purportedly racist nation. When facts don’t fit the narrative, these people ignore the facts.

To “remedy” the perceived “problem” that America had racially discriminated against Blacks, the social engineers and fascists schemed to discriminate in favor of them. They embarked on a campaign to correct racial discrimination by . . . racially discriminating.  

They didn’t call it racial discrimination, of course. They used euphemisms like “affirmative action.” When “affirmative action” came to be recognized as racial discrimination, they rebranded it “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Now that “diversity, equity and inclusion” has likewise been recognized as racial discrimination, they are re-branding yet again.

Whatever their name, these programs were all based on the notion that Blacks should be favored in non-athletic competition that is ordinarily based on merit, in order to achieve a number of Blacks that is proportionate to their representation in society.

The degree of discrimination necessary to produce this outcome has been extreme, as shown by objective measures. The average test scores of people admitted to prestige colleges or to medical school are wildly different depending on the race of the applicant. As a matter of pure statistics, it is a simple and undeniable fact that the average Black physician would never have been admitted to med school if he’d been white.

This racial discrimination for the purpose of achieving proportionate representation was extended to every nook and cranny of American society (with that notable exception of sports). Businesses, clubs, fraternities, company board rooms, hospitals, law firms, colleges and every other group of people were pressured, coerced and often sued. They were forced to compromise merit in favor of proportionate racial representation.

Our elected leaders chose not to stand up to this. Democrats instead egged it on, because they benefited politically. Republicans just watched silently, because they were too damned cowardly to risk, ironically, being name-called “racist” for standing against racial discrimination.  

We now teeter over a racial abyss where people are judged not by the content of their character but by the color of their skin. As a society, we’ve almost succeeded in snatching a racist defeat from the jaws of a colorblind victory.

But a rescue is coming from the Supreme Court. Beginning a few years ago, the Court has re-affirmed the rules against racial discrimination in hiring, contracting and college admissions.

A case issued last week (though it was apparently decided many months ago – more about that later) built on this start. The topic was the drawing of Congressional Districts by race. I’ll discuss it in my next post.

Ending racial gerrymandering ends a failed scheme where legal rights were allocated by race

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Imagine a system where arrests, convictions and sentencing for the crime of murder had to be in proportion to the racial composition of the population.

Since Asians are about 7% of the population, the murder arrests, convictions and sentences for Asians in such a scheme would have to be 7% of the total.  Likewise, since Blacks, Latinos and whites make up about 13%, 19% and 62% of the population, respectively, they’d have to account for 13%, 19% and 62% of the murder arrests, convictions and sentencing.

At first glance, that sounds reasonable. But of course, it is not.

The reason is because those four races commit murder at dramatically different rates. FBI data show that whites (if you include Latinos/Hispanics as whites) comprise 82% of the population but commit only 46% of murders. Asians comprise 7% but commit only 1% of murders. (Latinos/Hispanics apart from whites comprise 19% and commit 20% of murders.)

So, who is committing all the murders that whites, Asians and Latinos are not?

Blacks are. Blacks comprise 13% of the population, but commit 51% of murders in the country. If you do the math, the statistical likelihood of a Black person being a murderer is quadruple the likelihood of a white person being a murderer, and roughly 22 times the likelihood of an Asian being a murderer.

A few tangential points are worth your attention. One, this high Black murder rate accounts for a large part (but not all) of the high overall murder rate in America as compared to Europe.

Two, the victims of these Black murderers are also mostly Black themselves. Black-on-Black violent crime in America is, tragically, extremely high.

Three, a few people would contend that Blacks don’t really commit murder at a high rate (though they cannot dispute that they die of murder at a high rate since, after all, there’s a Black body to prove it).

Those people would say that these statistics to the contrary are instead proof that the justice system racially discriminates against Blacks in arresting them, convicting them and sentencing them for crimes they did not commit (but, interestingly, does not discriminate against Latinos or Asians). Nobody really believes that contention – even the people saying it – so I won’t address it.

And four, an interesting tidbit is that the number of men we arrest, convict and sentence for murder is several times the number of women, even though the two sexes are about 50/50 in the population. Does anyone seriously contend that men are victims of sex discrimination in the field of murder arrests?

Back to our hypothetical. A scheme where people must be arrested, convicted and sentenced for murder in proportion to their racial representation in the population, even though murders are not committed in that same proportion, is undeniably unjust and probably criminal.

We would have to arrest many more whites and a lot of Asians for murders they didn’t commit. And we would have to leave un-arrested a lot of Blacks for murders they did commit, all to achieve our fantasy of racially proportionate representation in the law of murder.

This superficially appealing but fundamentally unfair concept of racially proportionate representation in the law brings us to another area of law – the way we elect Congress.

The country is divided into Congressional Districts of equal population – about 762,000 people each. Each district gets one representative. That amounts to the 435 members of the House of Representatives.

Each district typically elects a House member of the party that controls the district. Only 10-15% of the districts are actually competitive. (That’s why members of Congress are seldom voted out of office.)

Because populations shift, the districts must be redrawn periodically. That’s done by state legislatures. In doing so, the legislatures often “gerrymander” the districts. That is, they draw weird-shaped districts in order to distribute the population such that each district has a slight majority of the party doing the drawing. In a state with a 55/45 split between the two parties, the party in power can easily achieve an 80-20 split in the House members elected from that state. There’s more about gerrymandering HERE.

Gerrymandering has been going on for a long time, overtly or covertly. It’s unseemly and might be unfair, but it’s part of our system of representative government. The Supreme Court allows it, because there’s nothing in the Constitution to prohibit it.

But when the gerrymandering is done for the purpose of racial discrimination, there are special rules that have evolved and changed. For a while back in the Jim Crow days, the Democrats who controlled the South racially gerrymandered the districts in a way to prevent the election of Black representatives.

That wasn’t difficult. Even in Louisiana which is about 30% Black, they simply drew the districts such that no district had anywhere close to a majority of Black voters. Divide and conquer was the strategy. The result for many years was that there were none or very few Black members of Congress.

That changed in the last half of the 20th century with the passage of the Voting Rights Act and numerous legal challenges to districting. In fits and starts, judges gradually concluded that the VRA together with the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment required that a state’s Congressional delegation be Black in proportion to the Black population of the state. In Louisiana, that meant that two of their six representatives should be Black since about 30% of the state population was Black.

That was achieved with gerrymandering. They drew two “majority minority” districts that concentrated the 30% Black population. The resulting districts had a weird shape, but there was some assurance that two Blacks would get elected in those two mostly-Black districts.

It was something like affirmative action. When the number of Blacks qualifying for prestige colleges and jobs was not “enough,” society put its thumb on the qualifications scale. Similarly, when the number of Blacks getting elected to Congress was not “enough,” society put its thumb on the election scale. For a while, Lady Justice peeked to check which race she was judging.  

There’s an expression in law that hard facts make bad law. Imagine a case where a child is run over and crippled after darting into a passing car. The law says the driver was not at fault but our emotions want to help that child, and so we bend the law to obtain a result that’s emotionally satisfying but legally bad.

In racial gerrymandering, the hard fact was that not many Blacks were being elected to Congress despite a significant sentiment that Congress should have more. The bad law that resulted was divvying up Congressional districts by race.

Allocating representation in Congress by skin color is almost as bad as allocating arrests, convictions and sentencing in murder cases by skin color. It denies our individuality. It assumes that Blacks will and should vote only for Blacks while whites will and should vote only for whites. To the extent those assumptions are unfortunately accurate, the effect is to further drive people apart racially. It is all founded on a destructive us/them view of race.

Moreover, this racial divisiveness is self-perpetuating. Politicians become motivated to reinforce their constituents’ destructive beliefs that they can only be represented by a member of their own race, not “the other” race.

In short, racial gerrymandering is founded in racism, and it promotes more racism.

In my upcoming final installment of this series, I’ll discuss the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling last week abolishing racial gerrymandering. It’s the most boldly correct and politically consequential decision in years. And I’ll discuss the media’s disgraceful reporting on it.

Trump is winning the Iran negotiations

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A few weeks ago, Iran had lost every battle but was winning the war. The regime had survived, even though its putative leader and probably his son and many others had not.

That’s because the Iranian regime was still raking in billions in the oil market, Moreover, they were disrupting the oil market for the rest of the world.

That disruption benefited the regime doubly. It garnered a higher price for their oil, and it incentivized the world to push for America to back off. Dependably venal and dependably short-term in its outlook and dependably anti-American, the world did as instructed.

Sure, a few thousand of Iran’s people had been killed by bombs, but the regime couldn’t care less about a few thousand of its people. After all, this is an outfit that killed ten times that many people in the streets last fall when they dared to protest the regime.

But as radicals often do – this is one reason they’re called “radicals” – the regime overplayed its hand.

They shut down the Strait of Hormuz to everyone except Iranian-approved vessels. As for the ones they approved, they conditioned their approval on payment of a multimillion-dollar toll. This is for an international waterway, mind you.

Their little pirate scheme was calculated to raise even more money for the regime. On top of revenue from selling oil at artificially high prices, they would collect tolls from their customers buying that oil.

“Free shipping,” it wasn’t. After paying through the nose for the oil, the customers paid again through the nose to pick it up.

It’s as if Amazon told you there was no free shipping on what you bought. In fact, there was no shipping at all. You had to pick up the merchandise from half way around the world – and you had to pay a hefty pick-up charge.

In response to all this, Trump did something I have to confess was brilliant, even though I hadn’t thought of it. He upped the Hormuz ante. He said in effect, “If you want to selectively close the Strait, fine. We’ll close it altogether.”

That eliminated most of Iran’s oil sales. Since oil is by far their biggest source of revenue, the move closed their ATM.

It gets worse for Iran. With nowhere to send its oil, Iran is forced to shut down its wells. Oil wells cannot be simply shut-down indefinitely. If the oil isn’t pumped, the well becomes inoperative and then dysfunctional within weeks.

Iran is thus facing a severe money crunch, which will become increasingly difficult to pull out of. They are denied their main source of revenue, and each day increasingly renders that denial permanent.

Now Iran is doing what losers do in negotiations. They’re trying to gracefully cave in. Two weeks ago, they scornfully refused negotiations unless America pre-conceded important points. It was if a seller on eBay told you, “If you pre-agree to pay full price, then I’ll discuss whether or not I’ll agree to sell this to you.”

That changed at the end of this week. Iran now says it will negotiate without those pre-concessions.

Here’s where I have to admit Trump is truly showing some art in the deal – or at least an instinct for the jugular. He told the Iranians, no thanks.

Trump seems to recognize an important negotiating point that it took me many years to learn in practicing law. It’s this: When you gain an advantage, and the other side realizes it, your advantage is probably bigger than you think.

Unless there’s a reason to let your opponent save face (sometimes there is), this is the time to annihilate them. Wait till they beg. Then let them grovel. Then go in for the kill.

I confess to a love-hate relationship with Trump. But this is yet another instance when I’m oh-so-glad Trump is President rather than any of the alternatives that were offered. I can’t quite imagine Sleepy Joe or Kam-A-La going in for the kill.

A primer on gerrymandering and race discrimination

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The 435 members of the House of Representatives represent the people of specific geographic areas. Those areas are drawn up to include equal populations.

The population of a Congressional District is currently about 762,000 people. The intent is for each citizen and 762,000 of his close friends to have a voice in Congress.

This necessarily means that Congressional Districts have vastly different geographic sizes and shapes reflecting different population concentrations. Alaska has only one Congressional District covering the entire sparsely populated state, while one of the 26 Congressional Districts in New York State is just a few square miles of densely populated Manhattan.

Because populations change and shift, Congressional Districts must be redrawn periodically. (It’s different for the Senate where each state gets two Senators regardless of population, and the boundaries of states don’t change.)

The natural question is, who draws up these ever-changing Congressional Districts?

A computer program could do it in milliseconds. Give it a few factors to consider such as natural geographic boundaries, and then ask it to draw up random equal-population globs on the map.

Ah, but simplicity and logic in government are usually subordinated to the political needs, incompetence and corruption of politicians.

In the case of drawing up Congressional Districts, those politicians are among the worst of their kind – state legislators. You know, those brilliant statemen who take a few months off from their ordinary jobs as rocket scientists and brain surgeons in order to inflict on the population of their state whatever legislation best meets the needs of their donors.

The needs of their donors can be summed up with: “Maximize my power by maximizing my political party.”

The legislators thus draw up districts that favor their party. A seventh grader from yesteryear, or a PhD from today, can see how this is easily done. You simply draw the districts so that the majority party has a majority not just in the state as a whole, but in each district.  

Say a state has a population of 7.62 million, with a total number of Congressional Districts of 10 (because 7.62 million people divided by 762,000 people per district equals about 10 districts). Say further that about 3.16 million are Republicans and the other 4.46 million are Democrats (or at least tend to vote that way) for a party split of about 60/40 between Democrats and Republicans.

In an ideal world, the districts might be drawn such that the party split between Democrat and Republican Representatives is about the same as the party split between Democrat and Republican voters – about 60/40 – and so there would be 6 Democrat Representatives and 4 Republican ones.

In the real world, however, here’s where it gets mischievous. In my example, the state legislature is probably controlled by the Democrats, since 60% of the voters are Democrats.

That Democrat legislature will be motivated to “gerrymander” the Congressional Districts to maximize the number of Democrat Representatives and minimize the number of Republican ones.

They achieve this by drawing the Congressional Districts in such a way that Democrats have at least a small majority in every Congressional District. If a map shows a Republican majority in a district, then they shift the geographic boundary of that district to borrow from an adjoining district where the Democrat/Republican split is more favorable. The outcome can be weirdly-shaped districts, such as shown on the above map of Louisiana.

Gerrymandering is always possible, because a statewide political split won’t be reflected in every county and every precinct. Rural counties tend to lean Republican, while urban counties tend to lean Democrat. If the legislature needs a few more Democrats in order to have a majority in a rural district, just shift the district boundary to borrow some from the nearby city.

In my example, that could mean the ten districts in the state wind up with Democrat/Republican splits of something like 55/45, 60/40, 57/43, 62/38, and so on. With their 60/40 overall advantage, the Democrats have plenty of votes to spread around in order to have a majority in each of the ten districts.

This result is odd, and arguably not intended by the Founders. In a state where Republicans have 40% of the voters, they wind up with zero Congressional Representatives. And, of course, they wind up with zero Senators as well, since Senators are elected statewide in this state that is 60% Democrat. Millions of Republicans in a Blue state can be left with no representation in Congress.

In my example above, Democrats are the gerrymanderers. But a recent example of gerrymandering was by Texas Republicans who, spurred on by President Trump, gerrymandered their state to shift about 5 House seats from Democrat to Republican. Democrats are poised to return the favor in Virginia and California, while Republicans are poised to re-return the favor in Florida. We have full-on gerrymandering wars.

Gerrymandering is a volatile issue. It seems at odds with representative government because it allows the majority party to not just out-vote the minority party, but to lock them out of government altogether, at least in a given state’s Congressional delegation.

In the preceding paragraph, I used “minority” in the numerical sense, as in the “minority party” as distinct from the “majority party.” When “minority” is used in gerrymandering in the racial sense, the matter becomes not just volatile, but explosive. That’s the subject of a long-overdue Supreme Court decision this week, which I’ll discuss in my next column.

On men rebranding into women and Democrats re-branding into Independents

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It’s not easy being a Democrat. It began a century and a half ago when they got caught on the wrong side of history.

Democrats supported the enslavement of human beings. Many of them actually owned enslaved human beings. They fought the bloodiest war in U.S. history to retain their right to enslave human beings.

Suffice to say that this right to enslave human beings was not one of the God-given ones mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration does not speak solemnly of the right to “life, liberty, happiness and enslaving humans.”

History sided with the Declaration and against the Democrats, for a while.  

But, alas, history these days is written not by the winners but by the Democrats – specifically the Democrats who rule the Humanities Departments at major U.S. universities. These Democrat humanist historians saw that slavery was bad for the Democrat brand. So, they buried it.

As a result, most people today – especially young people – think it was the Republicans who were the Southern slave owners and they think (I’m not making this up) that Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat.

Blame this on the Democrats in higher education, but blame it also on the Democrats in lower education. Teachers tend to be Democrats. When it comes to teaching the role of Democrats in slavery and the Civil War, they don’t.

Their past safely buried, the Democrats succeeded in rebranding themselves as civil libertarians who wanted equal civil rights for everyone. In short, they rebranded themselves as Republicans.

But they kept the name “Democrat,” mostly.

But not entirely. Many Democrats decided to candidly call themselves “socialists.” I give them credit for being honest enough to call themselves what they were, but I give them discredit for being what they were. Socialism is a proven failure.

As time went on, people came to recognize the failure of socialism. It sounded great in those university humanities departments, but invariably failed every time it was tried in the real world – from the Soviet Union to China to Eastern Europe to Latin America to Cuba to everywhere else. It succeeded in exactly zero places.

And so, the growing socialist wing of the Democratic party re-branded itself. They became “liberals.”

It was a shameless theft of the word “liberal,” which had always meant small-government and individual rights. In fact, in Great Britain, the word liberal still retains its old meaning. If you want to start a fight, introduce a GB liberal to an American one. (Don’t worry, they won’t break anything.)

That worked for a while for the Democrats. But the people eventually caught on. They came to recognize that “liberal” did not mean liberal in the classic sense. It instead meant something roughly the opposite – it meant socialism. And so “liberal” became a bad brand.

The Democrats wondered, what do we do now? Starting another civil war seemed imprudent, given that they didn’t have many guns.

They decided to simply re-brand again. It worked before, sort of, so it would work again. They started calling themselves “woke.” As if non-Democrats are all busy sleeping.

You know what happened to “woke.” It became a four-letter word. The reason is that people began to associate woke with – you know what’s coming – socialism (and worse).  

And then came “progressive.” As if anyone not a Democrat is regressive. This progressive moniker ironically harkens back over a century to the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson who was an avowed white supremacist until a stroke involuntarily relieved him of his power in favor of his wife who was an avowed white supremacist and eugenicist.

As for the success of the current “progressive” brand . . . meh.

The problem is that Democrats are simply too burdened by the brand “Democrat.” They can call themselves whatever, but people still know that Democrats are the people who wanted to replace merit with skin color, who wanted boys in the girls’ locker rooms, who have been predicting the incineration of the world for two generations, and who wanted – and did – abolish the nation’s borders.  

And so, in the most brazen re-branding yet, the Democrats have taken to calling themselves non-Democrats. Specifically, they are starting to call themselves “Independents.”

Yep, in a number of upcoming races, lifelong hard-left Democrats are calling themselves “Independents” in an apparent bid to distance themselves from any accountability for their Party’s craziness – a craziness that they endorsed up until, oh, about yesterday.

It reminds me of one particular craziness by the Democrats. For years, they maintained that a man could change into a woman by announcing that he had simply changed his mind about his man/woman thing.

I submit that Democrats are likely to be about as successful in “changing” into Independents as men are successful in “changing” into women. But we’ll see.

Shrinking America: the population will soon decline by 50%

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Mothers and fathers die. For the population to remain constant, the two of them need to produce about 2.1 children on average in order to replace themselves. (The extra 0.1 is necessary to offset the deaths of children who never reach reproductive age.) This figure is called the “fertility rate.”

Recent data shows that the fertility rate in the United States is nowhere near that 2.1 figure. It has instead dropped to an all-time low of about 1.6. American woman on average give birth to only 1.6 children.

This raises a question: How fast will our population decline due to our low fertility rate of 1.6 compared to the replacement rate of 2.1?

The answer is, pretty fast. At our current fertility rate of 1.6, the U.S. population will decline by 50% in 77 years.

Granted, that calculation doesn’t account for immigration into the country. But are we willing to accept an enormous number of immigrants – something like 200,000,000 – over the course of three-quarters of a century?

That would constitute the biggest immigration wave in the history of the world. It would be much bigger, on both an absolute basis and percentage basis, than the massive waves of the Irish to America in the 1800s, Italians in the 1900s, and even Latinos in the 2000s. Immigration on that scale is inconsistent with the current political sentiment and, arguably, inconsistent with maintaining our American culture.

If it makes you feel better, know that the fertility rate in most of Europe is even lower. In Italy, it’s about 1.2. At that fertility rate, the population of Italy will decline by about 75% while the population of America declines by “only” 50% over those 77 years.

Extend that out further. At a fertility rate of 1.2 over 800 years, the population of Italy will decline to approximately 20 people. At least there won’t be any complaints about a housing shortage.

(BTW, consider the fact that this ridiculously low fertility rate in Italy is in a country that is nearly universally Catholic, and that the Catholic Church prohibits abortion and contraception. Along with art and food, the rhythm method has apparently been perfected in Italy.)

Back to America. The bottom line is America is apt to shrink. I see some good and some bad in that.

First the good. As a matter of personal aesthetics, I think we have enough people here already. The roads seem sufficiently crowded. Even hiking in the remote mountains of Colorado, it’s rare that I wish there were more people on the trail.

It’s true that our cities are hollowed out, but that’s due to crime, corruption and mismanagement, not a lack of people.

Now the bad. Our economy, like most modern economies, hinges on growth. Imagine an economy where the gross domestic product is flat forever. Imagine an economy where the stock market doesn’t go up and everyone’s 401K stagnates.

Worst of all, imagine an economy where the number of young workers paying Social Security taxes drops dramatically due to low birth rates while the number of retirees collecting benefits rises dramatically due to longer life spans.

This touches on a basic issue. Our Social Security system is a big pyramid scheme. Old people like me tell ourselves that we’re simply collecting the money we paid in over a lifetime of work, but, in point of fact, the average retiree collects far more than he paid in. That’s possible only because the number of payors continues to grow faster than the number of payees.

At our current fertility rate, expect a collapse sometime in the next few decades. We’ll lack the workers to fill the bottom of the pyramid.

Finally, there are some aspects of our de-population explosion that are philosophical, metaphysical and even religious.

God told the Abrahamic religions to “be fruitful and multiply.” We obeyed. Did we ever.

This advice to “be fruitful and multiply” was given twice. The first time was at Creation when the human population was two people. The second time was after the Flood when the population was eight people.

We haven’t heard that advice for a long time. During that long time, we’ve multiplied and fruitified to a population of eight billion people. If the advice is still applicable, then when will it expire? When we’re eight trillion? Eight quadrillion? Do we just keep multiplying and fruitifying until there’s no place to stand?

In the philosophical realm, there’s this. We seem to be the only form of life in the universe that is capable of asking questions like “How many of us are enough?” And, from the evidence found so far, we inhabit the only home of all life. As a philosophical, moral and ethical matter, what is our obligation to propagate? To what extent? How many? Where?

These questions are not easy, but it’s worth talking about them. We might be the only creatures anywhere at any time to have that talk.

Note to readers: In case you’re wondering, I fathered at least two children, and one of them gave birth to my grandchild a few months ago. Two of the three pay Social Security taxes.

The market is irrationally exuberant today

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Everyone loves a party. Especially when the party makes you money. Forget that the money you’re making now is the same money you lost last month. It’s still fun.

And so, the stock market is having fun today.

And why not? America and Iran are not exactly kissin’ cousins now, but at least nobody’s civilization will end. Not today, anyway.

The stocks of the boomers are booming, oil is crashing, monster pickup sales to monster drivers will certainly become monstrous again, the Pope (who is “God’s representative on Earth,” a reader informs me) will take credit for a few days, and we’ll probably get a docu-fiction war movie courtesy of War Secretary Hegseth, starring War Secretary Hegseth.

Still, I’m skeptical. I’m not selling into this market uptick, mind you, just as I was not buying into the preceding market dip. Er, market correction. Er, market crash.

You see, I’m a buy-and-hold sort of guy. I don’t pretend to know more about market values than, say, Goldman Sachs and their mega-massive-computing computers and their MBAs who learned at Harvard how to extract insider information from public company Chief Financial Officers. (I won’t give away their secrets, but have you heard the name Jeffrey Epstein?)

So long as you don’t bet against Goldman Sachs, a diverse stock portfolio has proven to be a good investment over a period of decades, and it will probably continue to be, and so that’s where I keep most of my meager money.

I’m just sayin’, as they say, that the people who try to time the stock market are probably getting this one wrong in their buying spree this morning.

Because this cease fire is flawed seven ways to Sunday. To name a few:

Even now after the cease fire has been announced, it still has not taken effect. Iran is still lobbing missiles and drones at its neighbors. I always thought the sine qua non of a cease fire was that everyone ceases firing, but I’m old school.

If Iran finally observes the cease fire by ceasing its firing, rest assured that it will then violate the cease fire by ceasing its cease fire.

It’s who they are: Missile and drone lobbers. That, and terror financiers.

We are told that the big condition to the cease fire is the re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz – that waterway that Iran has closed to the great angst of civilized people everywhere, and also those monsters in the monster pickups.

So how exactly is that supposed to happen? Who will police it? What happens when a rogue or not-so-rogue Revolutionary Guard lobs an ad hoc drone on a frolic of his own?

Um, details to follow. Uh huh.

This war is not over. But the cease fire is – before it even started.

Do Blue states produce stupidity, or does stupidity produce Blue states?

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Blue states have more problems than Red states. On average, the people in Blue states are less law-abiding and less law educated.

The dysfunctional big cities are mostly in Blue states – Chicago, L.A., New York, Baltimore, Seattle, Portland, Detroit, East St Louis, Minneapolis, and – I’ll admit it – my own former city, Denver.

Blue states have the worse budget woes. California, Illinois, Washington, New York and now Colorado are facing severe shortfalls. Their remedy is of course to raise taxes, not to cut spending. You see, the official color of Blue-sters is green.

In Colorado, there’s the TABOR Amendment to the state constitution which requires voter approval for these tax shakedowns. Naturally, the Democrat politicians are scheming to dodge the Amendment, even though the people of the state have already foiled them in their dodges three separate times. Ah, but this time the Democrats have 100% Democrat appointees on the Colorado Supreme Court.

That’s right, even the Blue-ish people of Blue Colorado (isn’t it a cruel irony that “Colorado” means “color red”?) refuse to allow their elected Blue-sters to raise taxes beyond the rate of inflation. But the Blue-ster politicians may still find a way to do it.

In all Blue states, there’s a psychological denial of the fact that if you raise taxes too much, people will move away. In California, they’re proposing a “one-time” 5% tax on the wealth of billionaires, as assessed by government assessors (how convenient that they do the assessing).

Apart from the fact that this tax is almost certainly unconstitutional, and vague to the point of being unenforceable, it ignores the fact that billionaires are typically smart enough to dodge it by . . . [wait for it] . . . moving out.

Duh.

One might think that even a Democrat state legislator in California would know that typical billionaires are smart enough to figure that out. But no, Democrat state legislators in California are not smart enough to figure out that the billionaires will figure that out.

We’re talking world class stupidity here.

This Blue state stupidity has gotten too obvious to ignore. The country used to mock the people of Mississippi. But recent data shows that Mississippi students are now doing better on standardized tests than California students.

People used to mock the kissin’ cousins of Appalachia. But we now have a deep Red Vice President who went to Yale Law School after growing up poor and barefoot in deep Red Appalachia, while the new mayor of deep Blue New York is an unredeemed Marxist with nary a clue about how to balance a budget, manage people, avoid Jew-baiting, or tie his shoes. And he was voted into office by a million deep Blue voters who don’t know Karl Marx from Groucho, and don’t care that they don’t.

So, I have a question along the lines of, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?”

In Blue states, did the stupidity of the people make the states Blue? Or did the Blue states make the people there stupid?

I think it’s mostly the latter. The people who flocked to California a generation or two ago weren’t stupid.  Heck, they launched Hollywood, they invented Silicon Valley, they made surfing cool (and that’s no easy feat). Fifty years ago, I wished everybody could be California girls.

But after the people got there, something weird happened. Maybe it was in the water or the drugs or the collective fashion-consciousness.

Whatever it was, it became cool to be leftish, to be druggy, to be counter to whatever is the culture. The more extreme, the more cool – all the way up to, and stopping just short of, Charles Manson.  

Yep, there was general agreement even in California that Manson was a step beyond cool. You could say that, in California, Charles Manson was literally too cool.

Of course, in the rest of the world, Manson was a murderous psychopath. California probably would not say that; too judgmental.

Once this mass hysteria took root in California, it spread like crabgrass. Fashion is like that. Hula hoops, bell bottoms, long hair and moustaches, streaking, gender mutilation, electric vehicles, dumbing down the school curriculum, you name it.

One day you’ve never heard of it, the next day you can’t live without it, and the following day you wouldn’t be caught dead in it.

And so, Leftism was the fashion of the day. Except it lasted for a generation. A generation lost in space.

In that time, they really messed things up. They tried to abolish merit, and almost succeeded, substituting a hodge-podge of skin color, sex habits, and political leanings. They ridiculed 2,000-year-old religions, and hated 3,000-year-old ones. They canceled and sought to outlaw anyone who disagreed with that agenda.

The fashion-conscious people went along with it for a long time. To be on the wrong side of fashion in a fashion-conscious world (and all worlds are) is to be without a friend. Better blue than uncool.

In short, my conclusion is that the Blue states produced stupidity, not the other way around.

But finally – or maybe this is not final – the tide turned, the fashion changed, the chickens came home to roost, the Kool-Aid ran out, and the people awakened from their wokeness.

They’re discovering, one hopes, that they aren’t actually stupid, but were just mistaken. We will see what comes next.

This isn’t Suez in 1956 and it isn’t Vietnam in 1966; it’s Iran and it’s 2026

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This war with Iran is one that had to be fought, and so we were right to fight it on our terms at a time before it became harder to win. The way Iran has lashed out at civilians everywhere, including with indiscriminate killing machines it denied having, has confirmed that.

But I recognize that there are arguments and counterarguments. Some of those are just the lame “Orange Man Bad!” or “Orange Man Good!” type, but others are more principled.

Here are two arguments – one against the war and one for it – that sound principled, even scholarly, but at the core are just sophistry.

First is the one that is against the war. It says, “Another Vietnam catastrophe!” (Yes, the argument is typically presented replete with the exclamation point, which should give you a clue that you’re about to receive more heat than light.)

But Vietnam was not really a catastrophe. It was indeed poorly conducted, but it achieved for a time its main objective: to stop the Communist advance through Southeast Asia.

The Communists eventually did get South Vietnam (and ironically have turned it into a haven of export enterprise) but we delayed that by at least 15 years.

And the Communists never did get Indonesia, Malaysia, or the Philippines, to say nothing of Australia and New Zealand. Was that worth 50-some thousand Americans? History’s jury is still out.

The point here is that Vietnam was not the debacle that kids today are taught in “schools” where they are indoctrinated by the teachers’ union arm of the Democratic National Committee – an organization sworn to pacifism except when their opponent is America.

When comparing Iran to Vietnam, here’s the bigger point. Vietnam was 60 years ago. Vietnam was literally much closer in time to World War One in the year 1918 (that’s One, not Two) than to today in the year 2026.

It should not need to be said that weapons, battlefield tactics, global economies and world alliances are vastly different now compared to 60 years ago.

We saw that in the first hours of the Iran war when the U.S. and Israel eliminated the Iranian leader and many of his subordinates. That’s the first time that’s ever happened in a modern war.

On the other side, we see the Iranians responding with inexpensive but sometimes effective missile and drone attacks throughout the Middle East, and a dramatic show of their capability of launching a missile as far as London or Berlin. (The accuracy of those missiles, and how long before their stock is depleted, are separate questions.) We also see them blocking the flow of 20% of the world’s oil supply.

In short, this is not Vietnam. This is not your dad’s war.

On the other side, supporters of the war sometimes compare it to the Suez Crisis in 1956. That’s when Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, ousting the U.K. and French interests that had controlled it. The U.K. and France tried to reclaim it, but backed down in the face of international pressure. The U.S. through President Dwight Eisenhower sided against the U.K. and France.  

Since then, the U.K. and France have never held much sway in the Middle East. According to supporters of the Iran war, the lesson to be learned is “never back down in the Middle East.” Or “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”

But this “lesson” forgets the broader context. The U.K. and France don’t hold much sway anywhere, not just in the Middle East. Their economies and militaries were never completely rebuilt after being ravaged in WWII.

Even more ravaged were their national psyches. The cultural collapse we’re seeing today in the U.K. and France was not triggered by Suez. Rather, Suez was triggered by their already-emerging cultural collapse.

An equally valid – or invalid – lesson might be learned from the Camp David Accords in 1979 when Jimmy Carter in probably the best feat of his Presidency (I know that’s not saying much) moderated a lasting peace between Egypt and Israel. In that peace deal, both sides compromised – both sides backed down.

Of course, the Camp David Accords don’t teach us much about the Iran war, either.

The most that can be gleaned from the events of history is usually allegorical. Platitudes about history are of little use in another time under different circumstances. They are no substitute for hard analysis. In analyzing Iran, they’re about as useful as Aesop Fables.

The crux of the hard, real analysis on Iran is the point I made at the outset. Whether Donald Trump is a genius or a fool, war was inevitable. We were smart – it was the product of hard analysis – to choose the time and circumstances.

So, when should the war end? Again, it will take more than history to answer that question. Again, it will take hard analysis – of the costs, benefits, risks and rewards. Let’s have the patience and courage to undertake that analysis. Damn the Midterms.