Saturday Miscellany

First, correct me if I am wrong, but when you want to find out what manliness is, you do not ask superflack Jen Psaki.

And yet, the failure of the Harris campaign to reach male voters impelled Psaki to declare that Doug Emhoff, husband to Kamala, was redefining manliness.

In the time that it took to digest that one, we discovered, via the tabloid press, that Doug had knocked up his nanny, had helped induce a miscarriage, and had slapped around a woman in Cannes. 

Maureen Callahan reported in the Daily Mail:

Had Psaki and the rest of the left-leaning media actually investigated this story, they might have learned that the nanny has a much more disturbing claim about Emhoff and what happened to her baby — because loose-lipped Doug reportedly told the woman he allegedly hit all about that.

Yes, Doug allegedly described how he paid the nanny $80,000 to go away, made her sign an NDA and dismissed her claims about how her reported miscarriage came about.

But hey — strength through joy, people!

For the record, Emhoff has denied it all. The press accounts have multiple sources.

Second, as you have been told, and I assume you believe everything you have been told, Hurricane Helene, and many other natural catastrophes, have been caused by climate change. Joe Biden said so, and, is there really a higher authority?

Steve Milloy tried to set the record straight.

Alarmists assert storms are “made more likely by climate change. I have no idea what they're talking about,” Milloy told me. “Storms have always happened. They always will happen. The ocean water … has warmed recently. But once again, the atmosphere cannot warm the ocean.” Rather, “the primary warmer of the ocean is the sun, and the other is [that] water can be warmed from beneath. That's probably how El Nino has developed. So both of these things are natural, have nothing to do with humans.”

And also,

It has been repeatedly illustrated that “the climate models don't work. That's been proven again this past year,” Milloy concluded. “No climate alarmist prediction has ever come true. They can't demonstrate that emissions are really having any effects on anything other than maybe they're helping the planet get greener, which means there's more life.” Obviously, “we need plant growth, because that's where we get our food from.”

Of course, if you are truly convinced that carbon dioxide is ruining the planet, you can make your own small contribution, by not exhaling.

Third, Bret Stephens wrote what I consider an important article about how American Jews have recently awakened to a pervasive anti-Semitism.

Naturally, Stephens tries to be fair and balanced about it all, and includes anti-Semites on the left and the right. And yet, when we break it down, anti-Semites on the left are out persecuting and harassing Jews while right wing anti-Semites are saying stupid things. To me this does not feel commensurate:

The home of an impeccably progressive Jewish director of a prominent art museum was vandalized with red spray paint and a sign accusing her of being a “white supremacist Zionist.” A storied literary magazine endured mass resignations from its staff members for the sin of publishing the work of a left-wing Israeli. A Jewish journalist scrolled through Instagram and recognized an old friend from Northwestern gleefully tearing down posters of Hamas’s hostages while saying “calba” — dog in Arabic — to the pictures of kidnapped infants and elderly people. 

A leading progressive congresswoman was asked during a TV interview about Hamas’s rapes of Israeli women and called them an unfortunate fact of war before quickly returning to the subject of Israel’s alleged perfidy. An 89-year-old Holocaust survivor petitioned the Berkeley City Council to pass a Holocaust Remembrance Day proclamation in light of the resurgence of antisemitism and was heckled by demonstrators. An on-campus caricature depicted an affable Jewish law school dean holding a knife and fork drenched in blood. A Columbia University undergraduate posted on Instagram: “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” Tucker Carlson platformed a Hitler apologist. Trump warned Jews that he is prepared to blame them should he lose the election.

With some chagrin Stephens notes that American Jews have long since championed progressive causes. When push came to massacre, their supposed progressive allies were AWOL, if they were not throwing rocks at Jews.

A proud history, but whatever we poured of ourselves into the pain and struggle of others was not returned in our days of grief. Nor should we expect much understanding: In an era that stresses sensitivity to every microaggression against nearly any minority, macroaggressions against Jews who happen to believe that Israel has a right to exist are not only permitted but demanded.

These gross manifestations of anti-Semitism, beginning with activities on college campuses, continue to exist because the authorities allow them to persist.

Whether it is local law enforcement or weak kneed administrators, the left wing leaders of these places are allowing anti-Semitism to fester.

Fourth, we recall the trash talk about the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. As I have reported, Tommy Friedman of the New York Times has been hard at work blaming him for the recent events in the Middle East. Better to blame BiBi than to blame Joe.

Economic historian Niall Ferguson marks the ascendance of Netanyahu, by comparing him to the Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck:

At home, the left sees him as cynical, conniving and corrupt; while the right sees him as tired, weak and unambitious. Abroad, he is almost universally loathed and distrusted. And yet no one can deny his Machiavellian mastery of the dirty game of politics, domestic and international.

Modern history has produced only two figures who fit this description. The first is Germany’s Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. The second is Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. For Bibi – his nickname and the title of his recent autobiography – read Bibismarck.

How did Netanyahu recover after the debacle that was October 7?

And no wonder. Hamas has largely been vanquished in Gaza, its remaining fighters confined to tunnels under a heap of rubble. More impressively, Israel has conducted arguably the most successful clandestine operation of the 21st century, maiming around 3,000 Hezbollah operatives with explosive pagers. And it is waging a war in all but name in Lebanon, attacking more than 5,000 targets in the past month and eliminating 16 of Hezbollah’s most senior operatives.

Fifth, on the mass migration front, Sweden is showing us the way-- to national oblivion.

The number of people who are illiterate in Sweden is expected to exceed 800,000 in winter of this year, with researchers expecting the number to soon reach 1 million, in large part due to mass immigration.

Evidently, this causes significant immediate damage in schools.

Sixth, speaking of standardizing testing, Twitter offers this fact:

Results from standardized math testing of California 8th graders showed Asians performing about six grade levels above blacks and Hispanics. That's right — six grade levels.

Make of it what you will.

Seventh, in the world of women’s volleyball San Jose State has been playing a transgender woman, aka, a man. Once other teams found out they began forfeiting their matches- because they remember Payton McNabb. The schools that refused to compete were Boise State, Southern Utah University, the University of Wyoming and Utah State University.

Naturally, this has caused something of a kerfuffle, and some lawsuits. But, truth be told, it’s the least the girls could have done. Good for them.

Please subscribe to my Substack.

Who Is Ta-Nehisi Coates?

I have never read a word of Ta-Nihisi Coates. I consider myself a better person for as much. Coates trafficks in anti-white prejudice, and has made a career out of accusing everyone of racism. He has won many awards and has sold many books. Regrettably, he has given race-baiting a good name. 

Now Coates has written a new book and Coleman Hughes offers a clear and succinct review in The Free Press. 

His new essay collection, The Message, is a masterpiece of warped arguments and moral confusion. But it is important to take it seriously, not because Coates’s arguments are serious, but because so many treat them as if they are. 

Coates is not a deep thinker. He is not really a thinker at all. He lays an extensive guilt trip on people of pallor, the better to sell books and to present himself a paragon of moral virtue:

And the specter haunting this book, and indeed all of his work, is the crudest version of identity politics in which everything—wealth disparity, American history, our education system, and the long-standing conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors—are reduced to a childlike story in which the “victims” can do no wrong (and have no agency) and the “villains” can do no right (and are all-powerful). 

For the simple minded everything is simple. For Coates racism explains everything, beginning with wealth disparities between Northern and Southern hemispheres. He blames it on colonialism:

The essay relies, for emotional weight, on Coates’s assumption that Western nations are rich, and African nations are poor, because of colonialism. This framework makes the West morally responsible for the poverty of countries like Senegal. 

But economists have long exposed the problems with this theory. For starters, five-hundred years ago, the whole world was poor. 

Hughes has a more cogent and far more intelligent explanation:

Wealth was created only when certain nations began to adopt a set of key institutions: property rights, honest government, markets, rule of law, and political stability. These institutions rewarded productivity and, in particular, innovation. Every nation that has adopted these institutions has grown exponentially as a result. Every nation that hasn’t has remained in the default state of poverty. 

Insofar as African nations would like to have “growth miracles” of their own, they will need to import the political institutions that reliably create wealth. Most of those institutions are “Western” in origin. Thus, it does no one any good to nurse in Africans a hatred of the West and its institutions—except perhaps Western liberals, many of whom derive a perverse pleasure from castigating themselves, their countries, and their ancestors. 

But, Coates does not just demonize the United States. Apparently, his nemesis in this book is Israeli Jews. He learned it from his anti-Semitic father:

In other words, Coates inherited an anti-Israel bias—based on crude, inaccurate analogies to American racial politics—on father’s knee. (His father ran an unsuccessful publishing house called Black Classic Press, which “took food off our table,” as Coates writes in The Beautiful Struggle, but was “another tool Dad enlisted to make us into the living manifestations of all that he believed and get us through.” Coates’s father recently republished The Jewish Onslaught, an antisemitic screed about Jews and the transatlantic slave trade.) 

Coates warps the history of Israel in order to make it fit his anti-racism narrative:

In The Message, Israeli policies are (inaccurately) parsed over, while the fact that Mahmoud Abbas still pays the families of suicide bombers who kill Jewish civilians through his so-called “Martyrs Fund” is not mentioned. Nor is the Hamas Charter, which calls for genocide against the Jewish people: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews. 

When the Jew will hide behind stones and trees, the stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslims, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ ” Why discuss the mainstream policies and mission statements of the most important Palestinian organizations when you can caricature Israeli policy and cherry-pick quotes from early Zionists?  

You might ask what this can accomplish. In truth, it accomplishes nothing, beyond fomenting anti-Semitism:

Still, no serious historian doubts the big picture: Jews had successive kingdoms in the land of Israel, and maintained a continuous presence there even after the Roman Empire destroyed Jerusalem in the first century, and renamed the region Palestine in order to punish the Jews who had rebelled against colonial rule.

It’s a sad story, but it is indicative of what happens when the intelligentsia wraps its mind around a dimwit who makes them feel guilty for being racist. Once they anoint him, people take what he says seriously, to their detriment.

Please subscribe to my Substack.

Why Not Victory?

The Biden administration chastizes Israel for not showing proper restraint. It keeps mewling about a unilateral cease fire. It recommends proportionality, as though that has even been a tactic in warfare. 

Yet, it never talks about winning. It never suggests that Israel should be allowed or encouraged to win its war against Iran and its proxies.

Eli Lake explains the failure of Biden administration policy.

So Biden arms the Jewish state and professes his support for Israel’s right to defend itself, but there is always a “but.” Israel has a right to self-defense, but it must do more to protect the Palestinian civilians Hamas uses as human shields. Israel has a right to self-defense, but it should not escalate its war against Hezbollah—even as the terror group fires rockets and missiles over Lebanon’s southern border. Israel has a right to self-defense, but it must participate in ceasefire talks that Hamas has boycotted. Israel has a right to self-defense, but there is no way it can enter its enemy’s last stronghold in Gaza without unacceptable casualties. Put another way, Israel has a right to fight its enemies to a tie.

And he adds an important point, via the Financial Times, namely that after October 7 Israel was ready to attack the head of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrollah, but that the Biden administration insisted that Israel not do so.

The flaw in the reasoning behind the Biden administration policy is quite simple. Roger Simon identified it in a recent article. Simply put, Biden has been willing to sacrifice everything in order to resurrect Barack Obama’s Iran Nuclear Deal. That this was a horribly bad deal, never crosses their minds. It makes you think that Obama is pulling the strings in the Biden administration.

And yet, while pretending that Israel has the right to defend itself, Biden insists that the Iranian nuclear facilities are out of bounds. 

Simon explains:

Notably, other than the mullahs themselves and their Republican Guard, the man most responsible for what happened Tuesday was Barack Obama.  Our 44th president was the one who lifted sanctions, opening the economic spigot for Iran to become the world biggest state sponsor of terrorism and finance violence across the Middle East and the globe. 

Why he did this, when Iran’s client Hezbollah had already exploded the truck bomb at the Buenos Aires Jewish community center that killed 85 and injured hundreds more, not to mention perpetrated fatal attacks on a U.S. Embassy and a Marine barracks that killed hundreds of our citizens, is a question with an answer few in the Democrat Party are willing to confront or even think about.

Nevertheless,  President Donald Trump wisely shut the spigot down until President Joe Biden, Obama’s slavish lieutenant, opened it again and we are where we are, demanding ceasefires at every turn almost by reflex, thereby guaranteeing the preservation of our evil adversaries.

Of course, Tommy Friedman at the New York Times has been leading the march toward surrender. He blames the Israeli Prime Minister and proposes a two state solution, the type that no one else wants. 

More importantly, Times columnists Bret Stephens wrote yesterday that it is time to help Israel win the conflict.

As for the case against Iran, Stephens explains it:

Iran presents an utterly intolerable threat not only to Israel but also to the United States and whatever remains of the liberal international order we’re supposed to lead. It is waging a war on unarmed commercial ships through its Houthi proxies in Yemen. It has used other proxies to attack and kill American troops stationed in allied countries. It encouraged or ordered Hezbollah to fire nearly 9,000 munitions into Israel, supposedly in solidarity with Hamas, before Israel finally began retaliating with full force last month. And it appears to be seeking Donald Trump’s assassination, according to reporting by The Times — a direct assault on American democracy, no matter how anyone feels about the former president.

What does Stephens propose?

Iran currently produces many of its missiles at the Isfahan missile complex. At a minimum, Biden should order it destroyed, as a direct and proportionate response to its aggressions. There is a uranium enrichment site near Isfahan, too.

Elsewhere, Iran’s economy relies overwhelmingly on a vast and vulnerable network of pipelines, refineries and oil terminals, particularly on Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf. The administration can put the regime on notice that the only way it will save this infrastructure from immediate destruction is by ordering Hezbollah and the Houthis to stand down and to pressure Hamas to release its Israeli hostages. We can’t simply go on trying to thwart Iran by defensive means only — fighting not to win but merely not to lose.

I trust you noticed the flaw in this reasoning. Rather than suggest that the Israelis attack Iranian facilities, Stephens recommends that Biden do so. The problem is, there is effectively no chance that the Biden administration will grow enough courage to do as much.

The Wall Street Journal editorializes about the Biden fecklessness:

Even before he talks with Mr. Netanyahu, the President engages in public lobbying aimed at blocking a sovereign state and American ally from deciding on its own what is the best response to a direct military attack on its territory. Iran attacked Israel for the second time in six months, but Mr. Biden tells Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that the U.S. will help the regime protect its most prized and threatening military asset.

This is the thinking that has led to the collapse of U.S. deterrence on Mr. Biden’s watch. Enemies rely on him to come to their defense by restraining allies from responding to aggression. Mr. Biden didn’t even wait to keep Iran guessing.

What happened to the “severe consequences” for Iran the Administration promised Tuesday? On Wednesday Mr. Biden mentioned new sanctions, but he won’t even enforce the oil sanctions already on the books.

Obviously, there are no limits to Biden administration incompetence or cowardice.

Please subscribe to my Substack.

Wednesday Potpourri

First, we have seen the whining and whimpering of Tommy Friedman in the New York Times. We have heard Joe Biden continue to promote Israeli surrender via a cease fire. And we have witnessed an Israeli Prime Minister showing exemplary courage in ignoring the plaintive wails of his supposed Western allies.

For some perspective, we turn to Gerard Baker in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. His is a more muscular defense of the Jewish state.

… Israel has in 12 months done nothing less than redraw the balance of global security, not just in the region, but in the wider world.

It has eliminated thousands of the terrorists whose commitment to a savage theocratic ideology has claimed so many lives across the region and the world for decades. It has, with extraordinary tactical accuracy, dispatched some of the masterminds of the worst evil on the planet, including most recently Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader in Lebanon. It has repelled and then reversed the previously inexorably advancing power of one of the world’s most terrifying autocracies, the Islamic Republic of Iran. It has demonstrated to all the West’s foes, including Iran’s allies in Moscow and Beijing, that our system of free markets and free people, and the voluntary alliance network we have constructed to defend it, generates resources and capabilities of vast technical superiority. Above all, it has provided an unexpected but crucial reminder to our enemies that there are at least some willing and able to pursue and defeat them whatever the risk to our own lives and resources.

As for our own government, the story is a sad one indeed. Baker continues:

Before Israel had even buried its dead last October and as Hamas was busy murdering its hostages, there were calls for Israel to cease fire. For a year we have heard our leaders’ “balanced” condemnations of Hamas and its terror masters on the one hand and the Jewish state on the other, a false equivalence that says more about the moral disorder in our own politics than about Israel’s motives and actions.

Baker adds this:

First, the strategic tactical, intelligence and technological genius Israel has demonstrated over the past year might have done so much damage to Iran’s proxy armies and their military and political leaders that they will be ill-prepared and equipped for the bigger struggle to come, and Israel—and, let’s hope, reliable allies—better placed to defeat its enemies. Second, having observed this Israeli superiority over that time and eagerness not to bring the destruction on itself a wide war would surely bring, perhaps Iran will be deterred.

Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few, Winston Churchill said of the men of the Royal Air Force after they had repelled Hitler’s Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain. 

We should echo those words today as we watch in awe what a country smaller in area than New Jersey, with a population less than North Carolina’s and an economy smaller than that of Washington state, has done for all of us.

As Israelis solemnly mark a year since Oct. 7, we should not only redouble our expressions of sympathy and solidarity. We should show them our gratitude, and if we are willing to be really honest, acknowledge a little of our own shame.

Second, as for Kamala Harris, the Daily Mail has discovered that when she was appointed to the California Medical Assistance Commission, she often missed meetings.

Kamala Harris was frequently absent for California Medical Assistance Commission meetings, even though she was appointed to the position by her boyfriend at the time and then-Assembly Speaker Willie Brown.

Harris and Brown dated for about a year when she was a 29 year old lawyer for the Alameda District Attorney's office and he was the powerful speaker who ran for mayor of San Francisco at the age of 60. 

Brown appointed Harris to the CMAC position in 1994, drawing some criticism for impropriety despite Brown’s willingness to publicly flaunt accusations of political patronage. 

As you might imagine, Harris has been rather defensive about the advantages she gained by being the mistress of an important male.

The Daily Mail quotes a memorable line:

‘Whether you agree or disagree with the system, I did the work,’ she told SF Weekly magazine in a 2003 profile of her career.

‘Well, I worked,’ Harris said to journalist Joan Walsh when asked about her positions in 2003 for San Francisco City Journal magazine. 

'I’ve worked my ass off for everything I have,' she said. 

That’s the first time I have ever heard it called that.

Third, on the home front, news from college classrooms. Johnny and Janey cannot write. They are barely literate.

Going Godward reports on Twitter:

Was talking to a college professor recently who remarked that the students in her science class could not complete written assignments that made sense or were without serious grammatical and structure errors. I’ve been hearing this kind of feedback from the collegiate level for about five years. You do not know how bad the literacy crisis is. The next two generations, at least, are probably going to be the most incompetent we’ve ever seen in this county. I’m not even being hyperbolic.

Fourth, it will not come as a surprise, but today’s college students have mostly never read a book. It sounds bizarre, but apparently it is true. 

From the Atlantic:

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

Fifth, the New York Times has an article out naming the horrors inflicted on the nation by Donald Trump. To which Katie Pavlich counters with a list of what the Biden administration has given us. 

From her Twitter:

Just today we have: 

-A dock strike not seen in 40+ years that could cripple the economy 

-Katrina level devastation in a number of southern U.S. states 

-War raging and a stalemate between Russia/Ukraine 

-Hundreds of missile launches from Iran

This is what happens when the adults are in charge.

Sixth, from Philip Klein a comment about Iran’s ballistic missile attack on Israel:

Reminder that Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal — supported by Biden and Harris — allowed Iran to develop ballistic missiles that are now targeting 10 million Israelis.

Seventh, yes, we have all noticed that dock workers have managed to shut down Eastern ports. They want more income, as it is reported, and yet, we should understand that they are terrified about the advent of more automation.

My best sources tell me, for example, that ports in places like Shanghai and Singapore are five times more efficient than the port of Los Angeles- Long beach. 

The reason, these foreign ports are entirely automated. The cost of having dockworkers is built-in inefficiency. And yet, dock workers want job security. Apparently, they are trying to forestall the inevitable. The rest of us are paying for it.

Eighth, the federal response to hurricane Helene seems to be woefully inadequate. Picking up the slack is the governor of Florida. Ron DeSantis is sending personnel and equipment to North Carolina and Georgia to help out with disaster relief.

He wrote this on Twitter:

We have dispatched a convoy of @MyFDOT staff and heavy equipment, including 7,500 feet of temporary bridges, to North Carolina to help with damage assessments and roadway repairs.

Please subscribe to my Substack.

Affirmative Action Fails

I don’t know why it comes as news, but a recent City Journal article announced that affirmative action in college admissions does not work. It chose the example of MIT, where administrators have recently discovered that students admitted to produce diversity are far more likely to flunk out during Freshman year.

And yet, we will ask whether MIT is an outlier. As we have pointed out here, one Robert Weisberg, a political science professor at Cornell and Illinois-Urbana found that affirmative action students tended to plagiarize their reports. Who knew? And he explained that the dean told him to give the students good grades anyway, lest someone think he is racist.

Weisberg explained that a certain coterie of students was being given credentials they did not earn, by professors who feared being branded a bigot. 

Of course, other schools have found other means to hand out credentials  to students who could not do the work. They set up courses that handed out good grades to whomever and even set up departments that could give all students As. 

One recalls that when he became president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers called in the heads of the African-American studies to ask them why all of their students were receiving A grades. And one recalls that this produced an uproar and an outcry, as though there was nothing abnormal at seeing all students in a specific program getting As.

Of course, affirmative action programs were academic darlings, even though everyone knew that they were corrupting the academic enterprise. If certain students did not earn their credentials how would anyone know the value of any credentials offered by said institutions.

Evidently, a school that maintains standards will eventually fail to meet diversity quotas. Such is the case with MIT, where they feel compelled to have real standards.

Now, the City Journal suggests that the problem begins well before college. It points out that academic disparities are built into high school curricula. So they suggest that we allocate more money to improving the pre-college preparatory programs.

Racial preferences increase the number of black and Hispanic students at America’s top colleges and universities, but this policy does nothing to alleviate the disparities that made it relevant in the first place. If university officials genuinely want to help underprivileged students of all racial and ethnic backgrounds get on a path to greater success, as they claim, then they should refocus their efforts on reducing disparities in elementary and secondary education. If, on the other hand, university officials care only about diversity for aesthetic purposes and virtue signaling, then they can continue to evade SFFA—and get sued.

Now, how can they reduce such disparities? Consider that certain charter schools, like New York’s Success academies with a student population that is largely poor and minority, consistently produce graduates who excel at math and science.

It is not just a question of providing advanced placement courses in calculus and physics. It depends on how these courses are taught, whether students have learned the discipline and focus needed to take them on.

And, of course, the biggest obstacle to this program is the teachers’ unions, who violently oppose anything resembling charter schools. 

And, to be clear, the pedagogical methods practiced in Success Academies are far more rigorous and disciplined than are standard elementary and high school. These academics have far more latitude disciplining students than do public schools. They make an effort to engage parents in the process.

It is nice to think that we can just put every child in a Success Academy and that the result will be, they will all qualify for MIT. Unfortunately, it takes more than a good school. Upbringing matters. Even IQ matters.

As Dana Suskind once discovered, wealthy parents speak more to their toddler offspring than do poor parents. Some children hear more spoken words than do others. And the surplus of spoken language facilitates cognitive development. Sad to say, some of the problem cannot be remedied by having more advanced placement calculus courses.

Please subscribe to my Substack.