Tag Archives: writing

Cigar-smoking attention-seeking hedonists, it’s who we are

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When one of my daughters was 12, it was time to teach her the facts of life. I took her out on the front porch to teach her how to smoke a cigar.

I didn’t intend to teach the girl any other facts of life, of course. As a dad, that wasn’t my job.

Like all cigar smokers, and especially the occasional kind, I treasured this big ritual. You light the cigar in a certain way, which isn’t as hard as they pretend – the thing is designed to burn, you know. Then you keep it lit, which isn’t hard, either – it’s not like keeping smoked salmon lit. Then you puff on it, which is harder than it sounds – it’s not natural to put smoke in your mouth, and it’s even less natural to pretend you enjoy it.

Like other rituals, cigar smoking is best if you have an audience. It’s something like a preacher in front of his congregation or a professor in front of his class. It’s not as much fun all alone.

In my case, it was a dad in front of his daughter. A middle-aged blow-hard in front of a captive audience with the pretense of educating and the goal of impressing. Sort of like that preacher and that professor.

In the ritual of cigar smoking, the highest achievement is the miracle of blowing smoke rings. They look difficult, and they are.  

A half hour into our dad/daughter porch lesson on cigar smoking, I started blowing smoke rings. Big beautiful ones. I wasn’t able to make shapes other than rings – no pirate ships or dragons – but the rings were pretty good ones. The daughter was duly impressed.

Ah, but smoke rings pit two of cigar-smoking rules against one another. The first rule is, smoke rings are cool. The second rule is, don’t inhale. (Bill Clinton’s smoking rituals come to mind, but that’s another column.)

You see, a smoke ring requires a fair quantity of smoke, sometimes more than a mouthful. But if you inhale cigar smoke into your lungs, well, bad things can happen.

And they did. After 20 minutes of impressive smoke rings on the porch, I went down to the lawn and puked my guts out. To this day, my daughter credits me with an ingenious lesson to teach her the perils of smoking.

If only I’d been that ingenious, rather than that stupid. But I’ll take the credit. To this day, the daughter doesn’t smoke, anything.

And so, here we are in America circa 2026, blowing smoke rings. We don’t call them that, of course. Just as “smoke rings” is a euphemism for inhaling into your lungs the hot ash of burning vegetable compost in order to make a show of a small and arbitrary talent, we’ve invented euphemisms.  

There’s the euphemism of “Balancing Work with Life.” This euphemism is more tempting than breathing burning vegetable compost, because it treats work as a vice and laziness as a virtue.

But this nice-sounding euphemism (who can object to balance?) is designed to obscure a basic human weakness: laziness. A corollary could be “The Road to Happiness is Paved with Pleasure.”  

But it’s not so. Ironically, but predictably, people seduced by this notion that pleasure is the road to happiness are invariably quite unhappy. Doubly ironic is that they blame their unhappiness on their meager work, and so they double down on their goal (to the extend they have goals) of doing less of it.

They get a lot of emotional support in that quest. Many people who “work” eight months a year, to whom we entrust much of our children’s daytime lives, teach and profess this notion that work is unhealthy or even evil for the purpose of validating their own unhappy choices.   

And then there’s the euphemism of “women’s liberation.” Invented by men, this one pretends that free sex for men somehow liberates women.

Yeah, it “liberates” women from men who help raise children, it “liberates” women from men who hang around after the pregnancy occurs, and it “liberates” women from men who are still in bed with them the next morning.  

It would be inequitable for us to forget “equity.” That’s the euphemism that says it’s unfair when the consequences to a person correlate with his efforts and achievements.

And the euphemism of “gender affirmation” as if unhappy men can be transformed into happy women by lopping off their genitals.

And the euphemism of “DEI” as if racial discrimination is right, not wrong, so long as the chosen races are the right ones, not the wrong ones.

All this euphemistic pleasure-seeking and virtue-signaling has replaced values that humanity held dear for millennia – work, responsibility, dedication, duty, love, commitment, and, yes, truth, justice and beauty.

It makes me want to run out to the lawn to puke my guts out.

On Colorado highways, it’s now illegal to obey the speed limit and illegal not to

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In Colorado, the highest posted speed limit is 75 mph. I can live with that, even though I think 85 mph might be better and perhaps just as safe.

This speed limit of 75 means that it’s against the law to go faster than that. Trust me on this, I used to be a lawyer.

But now, Colorado has announced that if you go the 75-mph speed limit in the left lane, or even if you violate the speed limit by going 85 mph, and people stack up behind you who want to go 95, then you’re violating the law by impeding traffic. And you’ll be ticketed for it.

I suppose they have a point here. Going slower than people who want to speed does indeed get in the way of those people.

So, now we have two contradictory laws. The first sets the speed limit. The second requires you to violate the first.

The underlying premise to these contradictory laws is the one I mentioned at the outset: It’s generally believed that the speed limit should be something higher than the current 75 mph.

OK, there’s a solution to this. Rather than mandating that people violate a speed limit that is generally recognized to be too low, simply raise it.

Instead, they have instituted a system where it’s literally impossible to drive lawfully in the left lane. If you go 75 mph, you can be ticketed for going too slow. If you go 95 mph, you can be ticketed for going too fast.

Here’s where it gets really crazy. If you go, say, 83 mph, you could literally be ticketed both for going too fast because you’re going faster than the speed limit, and for going too slow because you’re in the way of the people who want to go 95 mph.

Isn’t it great how the left has breathed new life into Franz Kafka and George Orwell? And Joseph Stalin’s henchman who bragged “Show me the person, and I’ll show you the crime — and if he’s in the left lane, I’ll show you two.”

What do you call a government that employs this damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t methodology for ruling the masses? Fascist, that’s what.

What do you call the masses who tolerate such a government? Slaves, that’s what.

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.

Are the Dems rooting for Iran because Iran is America’s enemy, or because the new Supreme Leader is gay?

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Given Iran’s half century of cruel barbarism in the Middle East, it’s hard to understand why the Democrats seem to be rooting for them in the current war. I have two theories.

One is the obvious one. The Dems are not so much rooting for Iran, as rooting against Iran’s enemy. Bad as Iran is, its enemy is even worse in the eyes of the Dems.

Iran’s enemy, you see – or at least the Dems see – has a history of its own cruel barbarism going back to at least 1619. Iran’s enemy has engaged in genocide against native people. Iran’s enemy has wrongly oppressed workers of the world who sought freedom in the workers’ paradises of the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, Red China and Eastern Europe.

Dems believe that Iran’s enemy has raped the earth, ruined the climate, undermined the sacraments of diversity, equity and inclusion, elected a man with bad orange hair to the Presidency, increased the wealth of everyone but at the cost of especially increasing the wealth of the wealthy, made “woke” a four-letter word, and is rapidly driving Starbucks out of business.

Iran’s enemy is of course America, which happens to be the Dems’ primary enemy as well. So, in a textbook example of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend,” the Dems see Iran as their friend.

That’s all that matters to the Dems. Forget about Iran’s atrocities. Forget about the hostage-taking, the baby-beheadings, the rapes, the murders, the incinerations. Forget about the imprisonment of people for political beliefs, the torture of dissidents for dissenting, the belligerent development of a nuclear bomb for use on Israel, and the throwing of gays off tall buildings for being gay.

(Correction: A reader has informed me that Iran does not throw gays off tall buildings; they pay ISIS to do that. Homer nods.)

Which brings me to my second theory. It has been reported that Iran’s new Supreme Leader who assumed the supremacy after the supreme demise of his supreme father is . . .

. . . gay.

President Trump, a supporter of gay rights, was reportedly pleased by the news. He laughed.

Gayness is not a sin, in my view. It’s barely worthy of mockery. For cheap mockery material, it’s on the order of baldness.

But under these circumstances it’s notable. The new Gay-atollah could be a second reason why the Dems are rooting for Iran.

It would be a DEI “resistance” exercise by the Dems, now that ordinary DEI has been outlawed or at least discredited. As in “I want the gay guy to win!” Or “I want the gay guy to beat Trump!” Or just “I want the gay guy!” (“But the bushy beard? Eww!”)

As for that newly-supreme-and-outed gay man serving as the putative Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran while cowering in a corner somewhere, he has yet another thing to watch out for. He has to watch out for not just bombs in the sky, but himself in the sky. Stay away from tall buildings, my friend.

Gavin Newsom to Blacks: Vote for me because I’m stupid like you (but not really)

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In his quest for the Presidency, Gavin Newsom has a few things to overcome.

First, he’s burdened with all that great hair.

Second, he’s the Governor of the State of California, which used to be a great-state-to-go-to, but is now a-great-state-to-be-from.

Third, he’s a victim of white privilege. I know, I know, white privilege is a privilege, not a liability. The problem, however, is that in order to run for President, he first has to win the Democrat nomination (notwithstanding the Joe Biden 2024 rule). Many of the people who vote in Democrat primaries see whiteness as a liability.

There’s not much he can do now about the first two problems, but he’s keenly focused on the third. He gave an interview to a Black interviewer in front of a Black audience the other day. He wanted to bond with the Black audience:

“I’m not trying to impress you. I’m just trying to impress upon you [that] I’m like you. I’m no better than you. You know, I’m a 960 SAT guy. And you know, I’m not trying to offend anyone, you know, trying to act all there if you got 940, but literally, a 960 SAT guy. You’ve never seen me read a speech because I cannot read a speech. Maybe the wrong business to be in.”

I have two questions. One, do we really want a President who scored below average on the SAT? It’s fine to have a President with a common touch – Reagan, Ford and Truman come to mind, and even Clinton depending on how you define “common touch” – but they were all pretty smart.

For me, the answer is no.

Two, what makes Newsom think that he can bond with his Black audience by bragging about his lousy SAT score? The answer to that question is apparently that he thinks his audience have lousy SAT scores, and so they want a President with a similarly lousy SAT score.

I think that sells his audience short. Contrary to Newsom’s belief, Blacks do not all have lousy SAT scores. As for the ones who do, they are not likely to want a President with a similarly lousy SAT score.

I’m lousy at driving an 18-wheeler, but that doesn’t mean I want the world’s 18-wheeler drivers to be similarly lousy.

Newsom later explained that he’s not legitimately a 960 SAT scorer. He scored 960 only because he’s dyslexic. (When the press politely asked his office whether there was any historical evidence of his alleged disability, they answered “Fuck off.”)

Well, Governor, then what’s your point in bringing up your lousy SAT score? On the one hand, you offer it as proof of your common touch, and on the other hand you quickly claim that it’s not really proof of your common touch at all. Rather, it’s proof of your disability.

OK, my sympathies about your disability, which you assure us is not evidence of your stupidity even though you offered it as such to Black people because you thought they would see it as such and thereby identify with it and – of course, it all comes down to this eventually – thereby vote for you.

But now I have yet another question. I sympathize with persons having disabilities, including dyslexia. But do we want a dyslexic President who by his own admission has trouble reading and cannot read a speech? Reading memos and giving speeches are part of the job, you know.

And if we do, do we want one that also thinks Black people are stupid and that he can persuade them to vote for him by dishonestly passing off his dyslexia as comparable stupidity?

If I always please and pleasure you, then you should drop me

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A reader emailed me recently to say he disagreed with my position on an issue. That’s fine, I get such emails all the time, and I typically respond to them. I’ve had some good discussions that way.

The funny thing about this one, however, is that the reader never walked me through the substance of his counterargument. Instead, he told me he usually liked my stuff because it is pretty logical, but in his judgment this particular piece was not. He didn’t say what was illogical about it

He implied that he would stop reading my work if I persisted in these unspecified illogicalities. I think he intended that as a threat.

Then he implied that my position was not only illogical for unspecified reasons, but was aligned with the other tribe. The thrust was that the other tribe is always wrong, and so if I happen to agree with them on a given issue, that makes me wrong as well. In addition to being traitorous.

I think he intended that, too, as a threat. As in, “If you persist in being a traitor, I’ll stop reading you.”

I got to thinking. This reader is exactly the sort of person who should read me. By reading me, he occasionally gets exposed to a position outside his comfort zone, expressed by someone he has enough regard for to take the time to read regularly.

However, he evidently is not interested in being taken outside his comfort zone. He likes his comfort zone just fine. It’s comfortable, in fact. What he wants is validation of his comfortable comfort zone.

He’s not alone. In today’s political polarization, he’s the rule, not the exception.

Bloggers like me – and even many legacy news sources – have learned to pander to these millions of polarized partisans. They publish what they know the partisans want to hear. They seldom stray off the reservation, lest they lose a reader, and a click, and a dollar.

As for me, I don’t need readers or clicks or dollars. I’m not in this for money (thank goodness). There are no stakeholders or shareholders in my operation. Unlike the Washington Post, there’s no chance I’ll lay off a third of my staff tomorrow. When you have no staff, you have no staff to lose.

I truly do this because I’m a political junkie, because I enjoy writing, and because I like to interact with my readers. If you don’t like what I say, or even if you do, please free to let me know in an email or, preferably, a public comment.

I’m happy to interact in a substantive and sometimes personal way. I’ve made friends in my writing, though in some cases we still haven’t met. (You know who you are.) And I’m talking about real friends – the kind where we can disagree without being disagreeable.  

On the other hand, if reading something with which you disagree is intolerable to you – if you insist that everything you read be tribal orthodoxy – there are plenty of other blogger-whores out there happy to pander to you.

They’ll say what you want to hear, every single time. They’ll please and pleasure you, orgasmically, and even pretend to have a simultaneous one with you – so long as you keep clicking.

Why on earth did Pretti bring a gun to a protest?

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Alex Pretti did something foolish and illegal at the protest in Minneapolis. He interfered with law enforcement agents. There will be debates for days if not years about whether his illegal interference with the cops, the discovery of his gun, and his violent resistance justified them shooting him.

In considering that issue, I urge readers to consider it not from the warm comfort of their recliner while watching slow-motion videotapes interspersed with football highlights, but from the perspective of cops who are being taunted, spat upon, name-called, and threatened with being run over by organized protesters in the bitter cold, who suddenly discover in a scuffle that one of those protesters has a gun hidden in his pants.

(I’m glad to report that speculation that the gun was planted on Pretti by the cops appears to be disproven.)

But let’s put to one side the issue of whether the shooting was justified. Even now, we still don’t have enough facts to make that determination.

Let’s instead consider a threshold issue: Why did Pretti bring a gun?

Note that it’s not illegal in America for ordinary citizens to own a gun. And it’s not illegal to protest non-violently.

It’s not even illegal to bring a gun to a protest (despite claims to the contrary by a Trump Administration official).

In short, whatever illegalities Alex Pretti committed at the protest, he did nothing illegal in putting a gun in his pants and going there.

But why did he? Why did he hide a loaded gun in his pants?

Ordinary people carry guns routinely for lots of reasons. Most of those reasons are poor ones, in my judgment, but not illegal ones. Some ordinary people carry guns simply because it makes them feel secure or even masculine. Some ordinary people carry guns because it plays into boyish fantasies.

And a few ordinary people carry guns because they have legitimate reasons to think they may need them for lawful self-defense and they have the expert skill and excellent judgment to use them properly in that mode.

Pretti seems not to be in the latter category. Rather, he brought a gun to the protest because it made him feel secure or masculine or fulfilled boyish fantasies. Sadly, those feelings and fantasies cost him his life.

Before leaving this incident, there’s a tribal juxtaposition here that is worth noting. Conservatives typically defend and even celebrate owning and carrying a gun, while liberals typically decry the same. Conversely, liberals typically defend and even celebrate protests of law enforcement, while conservatives typically decry the same.

So, conservative and liberal tribalists are left in a quandary when somebody brings a gun to a protest of the immigration laws. Conservatives wonder, do we defend the gun-toter even if he’s protesting? Liberals wonder, do we defend the protester even if he totes a gun?

I like the fact that this quandary forces the tribes to think past tribal identities. Conservatives are forced to acknowledge that owning and carrying a gun may be lawful but there are circumstances where it isn’t smart or right. Liberals are forced to acknowledge that protesting may be lawful but there are circumstances where that, too, isn’t smart or right.

In short, judging an act often requires thought beyond merely identifying the tribe of the person performing that act.  A bit more thought and a bit less tribalism would be helpful these days.

Two foolish women taunted an overwrought cop, and now one is dead

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David Brooks holds himself out as a moderate Republican. I suspect, however, that the last Republican he voted for was George H.W. Bush – the senior Bush who was elected 38 years ago.

Disgracefully but predictably, PBS pairs Brooks with Jonathan Capehart in a point-counterpoint format. PBS pretends that this little tête-à-tête constitutes balance – an avowed far-left gay Black man versus a faux Republican moderate who, in reality, hasn’t voted for a Republican in decades.

But Brooks made a good point in a recent piece on the shooting in Minneapolis. First, Capehart performed his predictable over-the-top song and dance about murder-murder-MURDER!!!

Then Brooks quietly observed that, in a better day, principled people would believe what they see on videotape. Today, however, it’s the opposite. Rather than believing what they see, people are seeing what they believe.

People watching exactly the same videotape believe they watched a murder, or believe they watched a cop shoot someone in self-defense, based on their pre-existing political persuasion.

Today’s political partisans are like sports fans. When two people are watching the same game but rooting for opposite teams, they typically both believe their team is getting cheated by the refs.

Of course, that can’t be true. On balance, the refs are either fair, or biased one way, or biased the other way. But people’s emotions cloud their judgment. It’s especially pernicious that they’re unaware of this phenomenon. That’s bad enough in sports; it’s tragic and often unjust in law enforcement.

Of course, after making this good point, Brooks went on to bash President Trump. There’s a reason, after all, that Brooks has a forum at PBS and The New York Times.

As of today, a few more facts have come it. I don’t know what Brooks is thinking right now, but I’ll tell you what I’m thinking.  

First, a couple of background facts. Context matters.

The cop (I’ll call him a “cop” for convenience, though I know he’s not a policeman, and I do so without derogation) was the victim of another car incident last year. His arm got tangled up inside the car of a person he was apprehending as the person drove off. The cop was dragged 300 feet down the paved road by the accelerating car. He was lucky to survive.

Does that matter? Maybe not in a legal sense. After all, it was a completely different incident that occurred many months ago. But it suggests that the man was probably sensitive to the danger in such a circumstance. I sure would be.

Here’s another background fact. The left has made a studied show of resistance to enforcement of the immigration laws. They’ve flung names at ICE cops such as Nazis, fascists and worse. They’ve physically obstructed them, and occasionally physically attacked them with rocks and bottles. That’s criminal behavior, even though it does not justify a lethal response.

They’ve also used their cars to obstruct the cops and, as I’ve just reported above, on at least one occasion they dragged a cop 300 feet with their car.

Their objective has been to provoke the cops into victimizing them. Lefty influencers have explicitly urged protesters to put their bodies on the line.

If they can provoke the cops into violence in their enforcement of the immigration laws, goes the thinking on the left, people will come to believe that the laws being enforced are bad.

It’s a very old strategy. It often works, especially when the news media is sympathetic to the cause.

A final background fact. The Administration has taken a confrontational approach to immigration enforcement. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and it may be warranted in view of the lackadaisical approach taken for many years. But confrontational approaches do have a tendency to produce, well, confrontations.

Whatever approach is utilized, it might be useful to combine it with an employee card-check system where employers are required to check the immigration status of their employees. Substantial fines could be imposed on companies who hire illegals. Such a system has been talked about for years and partially utilized, but politicians too often bow to business lobbies who want to hire illegals for cheap labor.  

On to the incident itself. At least two videotapes are available. One was taken by a bystander, and the other is the body cam that was being worn by the cop who fired the shots.

The bystander’s video is taken from a stationary position. It shows a cop approaching the car, putting his hand on the driver’s door handle, and ordering her:

“Get the fuck out of the car.”

The car moves backward a few inches. The front wheels turn hard right and it juts forward. Only then, you can see another cop at the left front of the car. He shoots three times. We later learn that his shots leave one bullet hole through the windshield. At least one shot went in through the driver’s open side window as the car moved past him.

The shot through the driver’s side window suggests that, whatever danger the cop was in at the time he shot through the windshield, the cop by then had gotten out of the way, for he was then alongside the car.

The video taken by the cop’s body cam provides more context as the cop circles the car. The woman’s wife was at the scene and had gotten out of the car. Smirking, the wife taunted the cop repeatedly:

“Come at us! You want to come at us?”

A refection of the cop is visible in the shiny finish of the car, and he appears to be a sizable man. The wife taunts him again:

“Go get yourself some lunch, big boy!”

As the cop circles to the front of the car, the shots come quite suddenly. The situation was tense but exploded unexpectedly, to me as the viewer anyway, with (1) the wife starting to open the passenger side door and shouting “drive, baby, drive,” (2) the car lurching forward, and (3) three shots ringing out quickly.

I cannot tell whether the cop legitimately feared for his life when he fired the first shot. I can say, however, that he was very ready to pull his gun and shoot, because he did so very fast. As for the second and third shots, see my discussion above.

It’s still early, and not all the facts are in. Maybe they never will be.

But here’s my tentative assessment. Two lefty troublemakers went looking for trouble. They used their car to block armed cops on an icy street from doing their jobs, and they taunted the cops with personal insults. One cop reacted with a profanity. Another cop – who’d been dragged 300 feet by a car in such a situation – reacted with his gun when the car lurched toward him as he was circling it and he heard “Drive, baby, drive!”

Is this tragic? Yes. Was it preventable? Yes. Is it murder? No.

Maybe we should pay bad parents money to be sterilized

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A good part of a person’s success in the game of life is a product of nature and nurture – his genes and the parenting he received. People who were unlucky enough to receive bad genes, or bad parenting, or both, tend to be unsuccessful.

Tragically for America, these people who are unsuccessful at life are the very people who are disproportionately successful at having babies. Those babies tend to inherit their parents’ bad genes and learn their bad parenting.

When those babies grow up (or, often, just partially grow up) they, like their parents, are unsuccessful at life but disproportionately successful at having babies. Those babies, in turn, wind up short-changed by both nature and nurturing.

What I’ve just described already takes us through three generations. In the end, there’s no end. We’ve set up a vicious and expanding cascade of poverty and failure.

The effect is a policy of survival – and propagation – of the un-fittest. Charles Darwin would predict adverse consequences for our species.

Before you take offense, I hasten to add that general rules often are riddled with exceptions. I grew up in in a family of six with modest means. We all turned out OK. But the fact that it sometimes rains in the desert doesn’t disprove the general rule that deserts are dry.

The welfare state makes it all the worse. This was recognized as early as 1965 by intellectuals such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the future Democrat Senator from New York back when the Democratic Party sometimes produced rigorous thinking rather than identity politics. Moynihan’s work focused on poor Black families but it’s not a Black issue per se; it’s a poverty issue.

Moynihan criticized social welfare policies where we pay unsuccessful people to have unsuccessful babies to propagate their failure at life, thereby amplifying this vicious cascade of poverty.

The more babies they have, the more money we pay them. Then their babies have babies, and we’re off to the races.

Perhaps our policy should be exactly the opposite. Perhaps we should discourage unsuccessful people from having unsuccessful babies.

A smart start to getting out of this hole would be to stop digging. We should stop paying unsuccessful people to propagate. To that end, eliminate the $3,000 child tax credit.

Then go a step further. Pay people not to have babies. A simple way to accomplish that would be to pay them to undergo sterilization.

That sounds cruel, but is it really? If “my body my choice” justifies people aborting unborn babies because they’re inconvenient, then surely it justifies people accepting money to prevent the babies’ conception. For gosh sakes, the manufacturers of condoms accept money to prevent the conception of babies.

Moreover, many if not most of the babies these people have are utterly unplanned. If it’s cruel to prevent unwanted pregnancies, then why haven’t we outlawed those condoms – along with birth control pills, the rhythm method, premature withdrawal, abstinence and chastity?

I recognize that courts are wary of government measures that produce sterilization. Courts might view a system where the government pays people taxpayer money conditioned on them being sterilized as tantamount to the government sterilizing them involuntarily.

So don’t do it through the government. Let foundations and philanthropists administer the system with private funds. A foundation or a rich guy (Elon, do you hear me?) could say, “Here’s $3,000 for anyone under 50 who wants to get sterilized. And we’ll pay the medical bills, too.”

The people that we want not to have babies would find that offer tempting, because $3,000 is a lot of money to those people. But the people we want to have babies would not find that offer tempting, because that’s not a lot of money to them.

Over time, we just might reduce the population of undesirables (not to be confused with deplorables).

You might ask, what about America’s fertility crisis? Yes, it’s a fact that American (and European) birthrates are less than what’s required to maintain the current populations. And so, the argument goes, we should provide incentives for people to procreate.

That argument is premised on the notion that when it comes to people, the more the better. I question that notion, especially when I’m forced to endure crowded freeways, crowded hiking trails, and crowded crowds.

We have eight billion of us. Is that not enough? I don’t know about you, but I rarely think, “Gee, I wish there were more people here.”

From a pure financial perspective, it’s true that an ever-increasing population is necessary to continue our Ponzi scheme called Social Security, where we need more and more workers to support more and more retirees who live longer and longer (though the effects of rationed medical care – which seems inevitable and already encroaching upon us – will partially solve that problem).

I submit that the way to fix the Ponzi scheme of Social Security is not to produce infinitely expanded pools of young suckers to support it, but to phase out the scheme. Like all Ponzi schemes, it’s unsustainable. We cannot increase our population forever to produce an ever-increasing pool of hard-working suckers to support an ever-increasing number of long-lived retirees. At some point, we run out of space, resources and suckers.

Even if the number of suckers we breed to support the burgeoning population of retirees is sufficient in quantity, they are apt to be insufficient in quality. How many generations of bad nature and nurture can a society withstand?

Trans was transient and now “they” are all gone

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Back when Sleepy Joe Biden was “President” and someone with a Tourette’s laugh named KAMala or KaMALa or something, was his trustless assistant, we had a fashion fest.

You know, sort of like hula hoops, or streaking, or socialism, or The Twist.

First it was COVID, the disease that was not leaked from a Chinese bioweapons lab, except that it was. The Chinese and their allies in the teachers’ unions successfully produced a generation of illiterate Americans. (But those Americans would have been illiterate anyway because, after all, their teachers are in the teachers’ unions.)

Then came Russian collusion – the fact that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians, somehow, to get himself elected back in the Dark Ages of Trump 1. That fact was not factual but it was still a good fad. Call it a fadt.

Hot on the heels of that came the false fact that Sleepy Joe’s drug-addicted, deadbeat, foreign-favors-receiving criminal son left his incriminating laptop at a repair shop. That false fact, however, turned out to be a true fact, but it was fashionable to sneer that it wasn’t – that it was just something planted by the Russians. (Those Russians were everywhere!)

Believe you me, it was a crazy time.

But the craziest craziness was when attention-starved boys decided to pretend to be girls.

It worked. They got lots of attention and even cheers – from parents, classmates, teachers (in the teachers’ unions, naturally), and women’s athletic teams who didn’t like the little pervs in the women’s locker room, which not only garnered attention for them but also made them victims.

Being a victim at the center of attention was about the highest achievement in the land. And if you were a pervert to boot, well, that’s god-like (lower case “g” for this crowd).

Here’s where we need to be careful about our terminology. There are transvestites and there are transexuals. Transvestites are men who like to dress up as women.

Disclosure: I confess that in college I once dressed up like a woman on a Halloween about three hundred years ago. We all thought it was funny, but I can’t say I particularly enjoyed my costume.

Some men do enjoy that costume. They really enjoy that costume, if you know what I mean. Scientists say that men who enjoy dressing up as women, not just on Halloween and not just every three hundred years, are “transvestites.”

Importantly, a transvestite man doesn’t think he’s a woman, and has no desire to become one. He’s simply (if I can use the word “simply” here) a man who for sexual pleasure likes to dress up as a woman.

Transvestites in history are not unheard-of, but they’re usually unheard from. They get their jollies in a private sort of way. They’ve generally been pretty harmless.

Rumor is that J. Edgar Hoover was a transvestite. That rumor has been mostly debunked, and historians now say he was merely gay, with a close aid as his long-time lover.

Interestingly, as Director of the FBI, Hoover liked to keep files on the sexploits of politicians, with a special emphasis on possible homosexuality for the purpose of blackmailing them if necessary, and, perhaps, because he just liked gathering and keeping those files.

Transsexualism is something different. A man who is transexual wants to be a woman. Some have surgeons surgically remove their genitals and carve a vagina into the bottom of their torso. Such a man wants not just female clothing but also female parts and female pronouns. He wants to be a she.

Unlike transvestites who typically do their thing in private, transexuals seem to crave the limelight. It’s not enough to pretend to be a woman, it’s not enough to dress like a woman, and it’s not even enough to surgically mutilate themselves to look like a woman when they’re naked.

They want you to know they are transexuals. They want you to know that they’re men who “have become” women. And they want you to acknowledge that they actually are women.

That last thing – demanding that you acknowledge that a man pretending to be a woman actually is one – is their sure-fire attention-getter. Demanding that you sign onto something that is patently untrue is sure to get your attention.

Transexuals are very rare. Scientist estimate that far fewer that 1% of men are transexuals. It’s safe to say that evolution has not favored men who go around pretending to be women, mutilating their genitals, and demanding that you admit that they really are women.

But in the fashion-fest of a few years ago, young people were signing up to be transexuals like crazy. The numbers reached something like 5-7%.

Ah, but fads fade, and this one did too. In the latest surveys, the number is something like half that, and dropping fast.

Odd, that, since we were told that transexuals were “born that way.” These folks “born that way” seem to be about half in number that they were a year ago.

Maybe the fade in this fashion has something to do with the association between transsexualism and cold-blooded murder. And maybe not, since cold-blooded murder seems rather fashionable too these days.

More likely, it’s just a fad that ran its course. Fads are that way.

I can imagine a fashion-conscious tranny today. “Now where do I go to get my penis back?”