Wednesday Potpourri

First, the wit and wisdom of the first son. That would be one Hunter Biden. Currently on trial for lying on a gun ownership form, Hunter still provokes great fatherly love from the president, his father. 

For the most part, we have not heard the dulcet words of said Hunter. So, we are shocked to read his comments on his step-mother, one Jill Biden.

Hunter Biden, President Biden's scandal-ridden son, branded his stepmother Jill Biden a "vindictive moron" and "entitled c---" in text messages from 2018 that have recently come to light, according to a report by The Sun.

The 54-year-old troubled son of Joe Biden allegedly launched the venomous tirade against his stepmother after she encouraged him to seek help for his well-documented substance abuse problems.

In a particular exchange with his late brother Beau's widow, Hallie Biden, who was in a controversial romantic relationship with Hunter at the time, Hunter does not mince words about the now-incumbent First Lady.

"F--- my stepmother for always being as much of a selfish silly entitled ct as you," he vented to Hallie amidst the breakup of their brief relationship.

And also:

Further probing text exchanges with his uncle revealed Hunter bragging that he was intellectually superior to his stepmother.

"And you do know the drunkest I've ever been is still smarter than you could ever even comprehend and you're a shut grammar teacher that wouldn't survive one class in a Ivy graduate program," he wrote.

"So go f--- yourself Jill let's all agree I don't like you anymore than you like me."

But, there were no hard feelings. Dr. Jill Biden has shown up at Hunter’s trial. 

Second, the Daily Mail reports on a phenomenon that had already been covered by the New York Times, and by yours truly.

The topic is sexual strangulation. Apparently it is all the rage among young people today.

Choking, medically known as sexual strangulation, during intimate moments has been experienced by a staggering 58 percent of female college students, according to a recent study. 

How dangerous is it? Glad you asked:

Research has shown that women who had been choked four times over the previous 30 days experienced changes in their brain structures that affected their abilities to perform working memory tasks. 

Nothing quite like a little brain damage to go along with that wondrous orgasm.

Restricted blood flow to the brain can cause it to stop operating at normal capacity immediately and can suffer necrosis, or tissue death, as soon as five minutes due to a lack of oxygen and glucose supply. 

The risks of the sex act lie in the harms of depriving the brain of oxygen.

Even if this is only for a short periods of time, such as 10 seconds, it can cause someone to pass out. Minutes without oxygen can lead to permanent brain damage. 

Third, on a lighter and more therapeutic note, scientists have just rediscovered something that they discovered long ago. It’s about how to cure depression, not by taking pills, but through exercise.

This comes to us from the Epoch Times:

Research suggests exercise may be more effective for treating depression than antidepressant drugs, with dancing far surpassing all other activities and pharmacological treatments—and intense exercise close behind.

And also,

They found that walking or jogging, yoga, strength training, and dancing were the most effective exercise modalities when used alone without medical treatment, and that certain exercises affected men and women differently. Notably, walking and jogging were effective for both men and women, while strength training and cycling were more effective for women and younger people. Yoga and qigong were more effective for men and older adults, while aerobic exercise positively impacted men more than women when used with psychotherapy.

Across all modalities, more intense exercise such as running, interval training, strength training, and mixed aerobic exercise yielded greater benefits, although even light physical activity such as walking or hatha yoga still provided “clinically meaningful effects.” The benefits of exercise were equally effective at different weekly doses for those with other medical conditions and baseline levels of depression.

Overall, dance outperformed all other exercises and established treatments for depression, including selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and cognitive behavioral therapy.

Fourth, I have often opined that the current wave of pro-Hamas demonstrations was going to have a net negative effect on the career prospects of the participants.

I have also suggested that firms need to be careful, lest they be sued for prejudice when they refuse to hire certain people.

Consider the case of one Jinan Chehade, a young woman who recently lost a job offer at the law firm Foley & Lardner. Naturally, she is suing:

The Washington Post explains:

Jinan Chehade was hired at Foley & Lardner in July but was told the night before her first day in October that the firm was revoking the job offer over statements she made on social media and during a speech at Chicago’s City Hall, her lawsuit says.

Unfortunately for Chehade, the only thing worse than supporting Hamas is being litigious. Her future looks considerably darker now.

Fifth, leaving aside the damage to institutional reputation, suffered by Ivy League schools, and leaving aside the problems that certain graduates are going to have finding work in the future, we remark that an anonymous Columbia University alumnus just bypassed his alma mater and offered a gift of some $250,000,000 to Bar Ilan university in Israel.

Money talks.

Sixth, when you cannot get them to do what you want, you can always resort to lies. Such was the case when President Biden announced something that he pretended was an Israeli peace plan for Gaza.

William Jacobson has the story, via Legal Insurrection:

Per Biden, Israel had proposed what amounted to a permanent ceasefire not even subject to all hostages (alive and dead) being returned and subject to indefinite negotiations.

This has all the appearances of Team Biden trying to box Israel into something it did not propose and does not agree to – and dropping it just before the Sabbath so we can't get a full Israeli response for 24 hrs as Biden continues to build pressure.

Biden is hard at work pressuring Israel, the better to save Hamas. As it happened, Jacobson reports that it was really an Obama proposal, because Obama is pulling the Biden strings behind the scenes.

The misrepresentation by Biden that this was an Israeli proposal immediately began to fall apart when Obama tweeted that it was Biden’s proposal. (Obviously Obama is calling the shots because his foreign policy team is Biden’s team – how curious he had this tweet ready to go.)

The Israeli government rejected the Biden/Obama proposal.

The Times of Israel reports:

Israeli officials pushed back on Monday on elements of the hostage deal proposal presented by US President Joe Biden over the weekend as an Israeli offer, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that there were gaps between that proposal and Israel’s stance.

“The claim that we agreed to a ceasefire without our conditions being met is incorrect,” the prime minister reportedly told lawmakers.

Netanyahu said in a Knesset meeting that Israel will not end the war in Gaza until it achieves its three war aims, an Israeli official told The Times of Israel: destroying Hamas’s military and civil governance capabilities, securing the release of all hostages, and ensuring that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel.

“The proposal that Biden presented is incomplete,” the premier told MKs at a closed-door meeting of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, according to media reports.

He also reportedly said that there are “gaps” between the Israeli version and Biden’s recounting of it.

“The war will stop in order to bring hostages back, and afterward we will hold discussions. There are other details that the US president did not present to the public,” Netanyahu was quoted as saying.

What is the deeper meaning here? Jacobson is surely correct to say that the Biden team is trying to overthrow the elected government of Israel. So much for democracy.

This is not just Biden and his team being untrustworthy. It’s part of the Biden administration attempt to topple the Netanyahu government. The Netanyahu-Deranged Israeli left immediately took to the streets after Biden’s statement to demand Israel accept it.

In the end this is causing the war to continue because it is persuading Hamas that it need not make concessions for peace. If you think that this foreign policy team is simply inept, you can feel consoled. If  you do not believe in ineptitude, you will understand that while the Biden administration is publicly declaring its support for Israel, privately, and now not-so-privately, it is working to overthrow the Israeli government.

Lazar Berman tweeted this:

Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar is in no hurry to end the war, says the @WSJ. He thinks that while Israel is turning into a pariah, the Palestinian cause is being revived, according to messages he has sent to Arab mediators.

With friends like Joe Biden, you don’t need enemies.

Finally, I current have some free consulting hours in my coaching practice. If you are interested email me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com

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Enough with the Girl Talk

Julie Burchill has had it with women. She has had it with girl talk and with whiny expressions of deep emotions. She prefers the company of men. You know, toxic men, the variety we are all supposed to be rejecting, like one Donald Trump or our supposed autocratic enemies.

Dare we mention that more and more schools across America are teaching boys that there is something radically wrong with them for being boys.

Manliness has gotten a bad name. True enough, Jerry Seinfeld misses the old fashioned manliness, but the new model for a good relationship does not involve anything manly. It feels a lot closer to what occurs among girls. None dare call it a coven.

After all, in the new therapeutically correct description of a good relationship, we find a surfeit of girl talk and deep feelings. Our culture is being girlified at a rapid clip, so it feels right to quote Burchill, to the effect that relationships between women leave a great deal to be desired. I yield to her expertise in the field.

And they do so even for a woman like Burchill, who has considerable feminist sympathies. 

She writes:

I’m an utter rad-fem and completely accept that men do most of the damage in this world. I’ve made my own living since I was 17 and never sought a man to support me.

Yet I’ve been married – three times – since I was 18; I’m 64 now and I’ve never been single. As a child, I never dreamt of being a bride or a wife – rather, of being a divorcee – so I can only conclude that I have the marrying habit for the simple reason that it means I always have a male best mate on tap.

What does she like about men? Glad you asked:

What is it about the company of men I prefer? I like the way they have reserved friendships, so far from the exhaustingly emotional ones women go in for. I once said to my third husband: “If Sam had a drink with Alex and they didn’t invite you, would you be hurt?” He looked at me as if I was insane!

And you recall the current mania requires us to preface any discussion of women with the phrase, strong, empowered. It is obviously a vapid piece of nonsense, but still women do it. And they think it is meaningful. Some feminists even think that it makes them stronger and more empowered:

Men don’t give each other mindless pep talks; over the past two decades too many broads have strode around announcing that they are “strong women”, automatically winning a round of applause and shouts of “You go, girl!” from their friends.

If a man announced that he was a “strong man”, his mates would want to see him prove it by pulling a tractor along with his teeth.

Men are less inclined to see all of their relationships in terms of therapy. They do not psycho analyze their everyday interactions, measuring the emotional valence. They do not tell you to get in touch with your feelings or to pour them out all over the kitchen table:

Any man who went around obsessing over the minutiae of daily interaction with his peer group, the way some women do, would immediately be identified by his mates as a raving nutter and exiled forthwith. When a man wants to relax, he will slob out. Or he will pursue a hobby – anything from building models to watching sport.

When men get together they form teams. They put on uniforms, follow rules and compete. Women who get together to form groups with other women rarely have the same purposeful connection:

I don’t mind women from a distance, or one on one (having said that, my least satisfactory romantic relationship was with a woman – all those feelings!) but there’s something about most women in groups (unless they’re high-spirited hen parties, which are appealingly loud and “male”) that give me the “ick”, as the Love Islanders say.

When I first heard about the phenomenon of “menstrual synchrony”, I felt something like revulsion.

Lest you jump to the wrong conclusion, Burchill strongly opposes the presence of men in the women’s locker room. She opposes allowing male beings to compete in women’s sports.

Despite this, I’m a great supporter of single-sex spaces. I fully believe that women have a right to gather together without men shoving their way in, be it in book clubs or on lesbian dating sites. Just don’t invite me, that’s all.

Now if only female athletes would begin to boycott events where they are being forced to compete against males, they would really be strong and empowered. As for the presence of males in female locker rooms, why not film the males and put the pictures up on Pornhub.

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Always Someone Else's Fault

It is a very good day, indeed, when someone cuts through the thicket of confusion surrounding a hot-button issue and summarizes it in what Hollywood calls a “high concept.”

Extracting a high concept means boiling the problem down to a single sentence. The sentence should explain the problem, be easy to grasp and should serve to direct debate.

Such is the value I will attribute to a high concept introduced by one Mike Cote, in National Review. His concept involves what we are supposed to call the Palestinian problem. He asserts, with good evidence, that the Palestinian people have been misled by leaders who have failed to take responsibility for their condition and have consistently blamed someone else, the Israelis, first among equals.

If someone else is always to blame, then the sad consequence is that you are declaring yourself to be basically impotent to do anything yourself. Time to stock up on the Prozac.

If someone else is always at fault, if someone else is the only obstacle standing between you and success, you are reduced to extorting favors from other people.

Of course, other countries in the Middle East are not democracies. They are not prospering. They have a per capita GDP that is something like a tenth that of Israel. So, anyone who imagines that the Palestinian people are one free election away from prosperity are seriously deluded.

So, Cote argues that the Palestinian problem is ethical. They believe that when they fail, it is always someone else’s fault. 

If you have a friend who is always blaming others for his misfortune, you will think he is a moral eunuch. You understand that he has no moral character. You will certainly not sympathize with his condition.

The obvious example is that the people of Gaza have received hundreds of millions of dollars in aid. They have not used it to improve living conditions in Gaza. They have done nothing to build a prosperous and functioning society. They have used the money to build terror tunnels and rockets. That is, to kill Jews.

Cote begins with what Palestinians call the nakba, the calamity that was the advent of the state of Israel:

In their telling, the disaster of 1948 simply befell the Palestinian people, with the Jews forcibly evicting them from their land, making them into refugees, and committing war crimes against them. Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” speaks to this lack of control. It presents the events of 1948 as fully externally driven, without Palestinian involvement.

As for what really happened, Cote explains it clearly:

The U.N. Partition Plan, which would have created a Jewish state alongside an Arab one in British Mandatory Palestine, was accepted by the Jewish population, even though it would result in a smaller state than initially promised. The Palestinian Arabs, however, refused the partition and launched a war of extermination against the nascent State of Israel. Seven Arab armies invaded alongside local Palestinian Arab forces, seeking to deny any homeland for Jews in the Levant.

Palestinian Arab leaders were so confident in their eventual success that they pushed for Arab inhabitants of the area to leave their homes to simplify the military operation. Many did so. To give their people motivation to evacuate, the leadership exaggerated battles like Deir Yassin into so-called massacres and demonized the Jewish people. A glorious Arab triumph would soon allow them to return to their homes. Yet many of those who left would later come to regret it, as the Jewish forces emerged victorious. Originally, the term nakba was used to lament this defeat — it described the Arabs’ own ignominious military failure — but it morphed into its current meaning in the 1990s as part of the denial-of-agency strategy. 

As for the notion that Palestinians are perpetual refugees, Cote easily dismisses it:

The families that left during 1948 were made into refugees by the war. This was not at all uncommon for the period, with large-scale population transfers occurring in East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Eastern Europe — as well as the mass ethnic cleansing of Jews across the Middle East. None of those peoples were turned into permanent refugees, but the Palestinians claimed special status, seeking a bogus “right of return” to the homes they fled. This unique status earns the Palestinians a large number of extraordinary benefits. The U.N. has a special agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), to provide these forever refugees with significant benefits meant to entrench the idea that the Palestinians are not the authors of their own fate.

Palestinians have settled around the Arab world, where they have no real rights, not to vote, not to speak freely:

For the past 75 years, Palestinians have lived in segregated ghettos around the Arab world. In Jordan, Lebanon, and elsewhere, they are not citizens and have no political rights, even after decades of residence. This clearly seems suboptimal, so why would Palestinian leaders choose this fate for their charges? The answer is simple: It allows them to garner undue international sympathy and blame Israel for the predicament they put themselves in.

Why do these people insist on being considered the world’s charity case? And why does so much of the world comply?

The Palestinian people, en masse, have embraced a near-religious devotion to the idea that they will be able to recapture the status quo ante bellum of 1948, returning to their homes and undoing the State of Israel. One would think that living in long-term refugee camps would be a miserable plight, but these are not the tent cities that the term conjures up in the mind’s eye. They are large-scale, concrete apartment blocks that look no different from any other residential neighborhoods of the region. And they’re paid for by international relief dollars. That enormous flow of funds through the United Nations and its NGO partners enriches the Palestinian leadership through corruption, provides jobs for large swaths of Palestinian society, and funds the terrorism meant to destroy Israel. It pays the families of terrorists, provides construction dollars for the building of tunnel networks, and funds salaries for Hamas cadres. 

Obviously, the world that Palestinians abandoned in 1948 no longer exists. They certainly have no right to occupy or to confiscate the world that Israelis built.

Finally, as to the blockade of Gaza that supposedly was the casus belli of the October 7 massacre, Cote notes:

The pre-war blockade of Gaza is presented as a cause of the conflict and is ascribed entirely to uncontrollable outside powers: imposed by Israel for no reason having to do with Palestinians’ own actions, an arbitrary and capricious exercise of oppressive power against a helpless people. In reality, the limitation of supplies into the Hamas enclave was imposed because of chronic terrorist rocket barrages and the importation of weapons and military components from Iran and other malign actors. And it must be remembered that Egypt, which also shares a border with Gaza, imposed its own blockade in 2013 — a cordon sanitaire intended to reduce weapons smuggling and prevent Hamas-linked terror attacks in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

He concludes:

Blaming everything on external forces outside of their control has created a version of learned helplessness among the Palestinian population, one that speaks poorly of their ability to run a successful nation-state. Combining that victimhood mentality and repudiation of control with the widespread approval of terrorist violence is hardly a recipe for peaceful self-determination.

This applies, nicely, to a multitude of life situations. If you think that whenever something goes wrong, it is always someone else’s fault, you are declaring yourself to be incompetent and are consigning yourself to permanent failure. If you have a friend or a neighbor who thinks such thoughts you do best to marginalize him.

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Joe Biden's World

If you had just alighted on our planet from a distant galaxy and you were witnessing the witless reaction to the Trump verdict, you would be forgiven if you concluded that Trump haters rationalize their anti-Trump bigotry by imagining how much better life has become under Joe Biden. Not just for Americans, but for people around the world.

If you spend a few more seconds reflecting on the celebrity reactions to the Trump verdict you will notice that these people are mostly idiot high-school dropouts. Those who wet themselves, as one Joy Behar proudly declared, when they heard the verdict are sorely lacking in little gray cells. 

And yet, were things really that much worse when Donald Trump was president? Has Joe Biden’s skillfully adroit management of foreign policy produced a world where justice and peace reign? 

And let’s not ignore the Biden effort to produce more inflation through poor fiscal policy. The nation knows that the Biden presidency has not been all love and roses. Celebrities do not care. They wet themselves thinking that Donald Trump might go to prison.

So, it is worth our trouble to check in with one Athena Thorne. Her PJ Media column on “a world of fail” lays out the multiple calamities that the Biden management of foreign policy has brought the world. 

None of it should be new. All of it should be recalled.

Thorne’s thesis is simple. The Biden ineptitude, the administration weakness and incompetence on the world chess board, has produced calamities, wars, massacres and other assorted horrors.

Thorne opens with a wistful recollection of the Trump years, when the Trumpian Beast ruled:

Was it only less than four years ago that President Trump oversaw the historic Abraham Accords? That Israel signed recognition and normalization agreements with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in an unprecedented swing towards peace in the modern Middle East?

Now, under Biden, we have massacres, wars and other humanitarian horrors. All of which, if you read people like Tommy Friedman, are the fault of someone other than Joe Biden.

Thorne sums it up nicely:

Now, war rages as Israel hunts down the Hamas barbarians that attacked civilians last fall. The Biden administration is worse than leaderless; it's actively taking positions that will prolong the conflict. For Israel's sake, thank God that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu still knows how to win a war: by crushing the enemy. It's not pretty, but in this situation, it's the best chance at re-establishing longer-lasting peace and stability.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration busies itself by lending support to Hamas — by giving aid to Gaza that will go directly to the terrorists — and looking foolish in the process. The pier that the U.S. military hurriedly built (to the tune of $320 million) has been destroyed by heavy seas less than two weeks after it opened.

If that is your track record, you will naturally be led to shift the blame to the Israeli prime minister.

Of course, it is not just the people of the Middle East who have suffered under the Biden regency. You do not need to have a very long memory to recall a time when there was no war in Eastern Europe. Whether this was because of Donald Trump’s ineptitude or because the Russians did not want to see whether he was crazy, the truth remains: with Biden we have gotten involved in a war in Ukraine, a war which, incidentally, we are not going to win.

Thorne sums up the horror:

The inept Biden administration, along with its NATO allies, is also prolonging the tragic war in Ukraine by continuing to provide just enough equipment and support to keep the invaded country in the fight. The truth is that much larger Russia is slowly but surely grinding Ukraine down, holding onto its gains, and beginning to advance again. Not only that, but Russia itself is doing quite well, thank you very much. Despite Biden's much-ballyhooed sanctions, Russia's economy is set to outpace the United States and all other "advanced economies" this year, according to an IMF projection.

Russia is now holding out offers of peace negotiations, demanding it gets to keep all the territory it now holds in Ukraine. Ukraine has heretofore refused to settle for less than the return of all Russian-occupied land including Crimea, though the invaded country doesn't have much to bargain with at this point. Biden's failure to lead and produce a resolution to this bloody war is inexcusable and has cost half a million lives at this point.

One does not want to make claims for prescience or even to declare oneself a seasoned foreign policy analyst, but, truth be told, one saw the futility of this operation from the onset. And one also saw that fighting via sanctions was not going to work and was not going to damage the Russian autocracy. It was designed to make us feel like tough guys.

For the moment things are reasonably calm in the Pacific, though we are still on edge awaiting the possible Chinese attack on Taiwan. One suspects that China does not want to war over Taiwan, but that does not mean that it has given up on causing mischief.

As for the rest of the world, things do not look too good for us in Africa. One recalls the words of Larry Summers to the effect that when the Chinese come to a third world country, they build a factory; when the Americans come, they deliver a lecture.

In Africa, political leaders are rejecting American aid and presence, and who can blame them? In a disgusting trend begun under Obama and continued by the Biden regime, that aid comes with demoralization requirements that completely disregard local customs and beliefs. They are exactly what you'd expect: abortions, alphabet-people supremacy, and prosperity-killing climate worship.

Yes indeed. We love the environment. We are going to save the planet. We expect that people around the world will worship us for our benevolence. We believe fervently in the dogmas of climate change. We are perfectly happy to tank our and their economies in order to save the world. 

For third world people, people who need to industrialize and to produce more wealth and prosperity, climate change hysteria is a frivolous indulgence, worthy of adolescents, unworthy of adults.

In Africa, political leaders are rejecting American aid and presence, and who can blame them? In a disgusting trend begun under Obama and continued by the Biden regime, that aid comes with demoralization requirements that completely disregard local customs and beliefs. They are exactly what you'd expect: abortions, alphabet-people supremacy, and prosperity-killing climate worship.

Thorne arrives at this conclusion:

As the West falls further into socialism and immorality, its influence is less appreciated around the world. America in particular has proven itself an unreliable and undesirable ally under Biden and is no longer taken seriously. Bad actors are taking advantage of the opportunity, spreading crime, war, violence, and corruption.

At least you now know why so many celebrities are dancing around celebrating the possible demise of one Donald Trump. You might not agree with Trump’s policies and you might not like his deportment, but still, if you compare his track record with that of Joe Biden, you will be obliged to conclude that senile demented Joe has made a colossal mess of the world.

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Saturday Miscellany

First, before the verdict, Naomi Wolf, no member of the vast right wing conspiracy she, said this on Twitter:

As a former Democratic political consultant, it’s deeply embarrassing to me that the party’s best idea now for winning is to imprison the opposition leader.

Second, from Daniel Greenfield:

1,000 New Yorkers Were Murdered While Prosecutors Went After Trump While New Yorkers were being killed, robbed and raped, New York prosecutors spent their time chasing Trump to find him guilty on 34 counts of being a Republican

Or else, there’s a Daily Mail headline that speaks volumes:

Progressive DA Alvin Bragg downgraded staggering 60% of felony cases to lesser charges last year-- amid fury over criminals being repeatedly released to roam the streets of the Big Apple.

Third, from Elie Honig, who does commentary for CNN, via New York Magazine--

The jury did its job, and this case was an ill-conceived, unjustified mess. Sure, victory is the great deodorant, but a guilty verdict doesn’t make it all pure and right. Plenty of prosecutors have won plenty of convictions in cases that shouldn’t have been brought in the first place. “But they won” is no defense to a strained, convoluted reach unless the goal is to “win,” now, by any means necessary and worry about the credibility of the case and the fallout later.

As for the indictment, Honig says this:

The charges against Trump are obscure, and nearly entirely unprecedented. In fact, no state prosecutor — in New York, or Wyoming, or anywhere — has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime, against anyone, for anything. None. Ever. Even putting aside the specifics of election law, the Manhattan DA itself almost never brings any case in which falsification of business records is the only charge.

In these key respects, the charges against Trump aren’t just unusual. They’re bespoke, seemingly crafted individually for the former president and nobody else.

The Manhattan DA’s employees reportedly have called this the “Zombie Case” because of various legal infirmities, including its bizarre charging mechanism. But it’s better characterized as the Frankenstein Case, cobbled together with ill-fitting parts into an ugly, awkward, but more-or-less functioning contraption that just might ultimately turn on its creator.

Here, prosecutors got their man, for now at least — but they also contorted the law in an unprecedented manner in their quest to snare their prey.

The district attorney was either corrupt or stupid. In no sense can we say that he was doing his job.

Fourth, from Ben Shapiro on the concept of a two-tiered justice system:

Trump is the threat to democracy? Are you serious? Biden has:  

Activated party apparatchiks in NY to convict Trump on spurious charges, thus leading to the possible jailing of his chief political rival;

Activated his DOJ to target Trump in 3 separate jurisdictions while avoiding criminal culpability for himself and his son; - 

Tried to use OSHA to force 80 million Americans to take the vaxx; 

Defied the Supreme Court by illegally waiving student loan debt;  

Falsely claimed that any election he uses will have been decided by racist Republican voter suppression; 

Attacked the Supreme Court directly; 

Used governmental agencies to threaten social media companies;  Attacked states for attempting to enforce border law... 

The list continues. That's just the short version.

Fifth, Stephen Kruiser offers this mixed metaphor:

The pathetic toddlers on the American Left didn't get their way in 2016 and have been throwing the longest diaper-filling, snot-bubbling tantrum on record ever since. 

Sixth, Alan Dershowitz considered it a sad day for American justice:

This is still the weakest case I’ve ever seen in 60 years. The fact that the jury convicted based on false instructions, wrong instructions, based on the jurors having been between 85 and 90 percent picked from a veneer that hates Trump and doesn’t want him to be president, the fact that the jury convicted doesn’t make this case any stronger or any better,” Dershowitz said.

 “I was recently just 15 minutes ago on with The Times of London and they were saying, ‘Well, doesn’t the fact that the jury convicted prove it was a strong case?’ No, no! It proves that it was of a case that was brought in a jurisdiction where a conviction was almost assuredly guaranteed.”

Seventh, from Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame:

I was in Europe for the beginning of this case during the Stormy Daniels testimony, when she was testifying, talking to sovereign wealth funds. We've done a lot of damage to the American brand here. A lot of damage. Trump and Biden are going to be gone in four years but the damage done here to the office of the executive, the 200-year-old brand, the reason we can go overseas and bring billions of dollars back to the United States is they trust our system.

This has rocked the bedrock of that belief. She [Stormy Daniels] was testifying about condom brands and sex. They were asking me "What is this?" "Wasn't this the President of the United States?" I think what we should do and think about it as a country, forget about whatever this is that's really going on here. What is it doing to the brand of the United States of America? 

Because in just a few months, these guys are gone, but the executive -- when a president leaves the office of the White House, the President of the United States, you better murder somebody if you are going to be brought into trial. You don't do condom brand, porno stars -- this is hurting what every entrepreneur does in America.

For me, we dragged our brand through the toilet with this one. I hope everybody understands it. Anytime you want to talk about this case, it has to be so partisan. Forget about that. Think about America, the mother egg that we want to protect. Is this what we want to do to former presidents? Forget about Trump, any former president. We have to raise the bar in bringing these cases because we drag them -- and porn stars? I've never understood. What does she have to do with campaign law? 

Nobody understood that overseas in London. Where's the condom brand and the law on campaign financing. I didn't get it either. I said, look, it is an unusual time, let's talk about my deal instead. They said, "No, let's talk about the porn star. We're trying to understand how this is working." Really not great for me trying to bring back money for data centers. Really bad.

Eighth, to change the subject, students in Edinburgh have been caught up in the meme about Israel being an apartheid regime.

To which, a professor named Denis MacEoin replied:

… there is not and has never been a system of apartheid in Israel. That is not my opinion, that is fact that can be tested against reality by any Edinburgh student, should he or she choose to visit Israel to see for themselves. Let me spell this out, since I have the impression that those members of EUSA who voted for this motion are absolutely clueless in matters concerning Israel, and that they are, in all likelihood, the victims of extremely biased propaganda coming from the anti-Israel lobby. 

I'm speaking of a hatred that permits itself no boundaries in the lies and myths it pours out. Thus, Israel is repeatedly referred to as a "Nazi" state. In what sense is this true, even as a metaphor? Where are the Israeli concentration camps? The einzatsgruppen? The SS? The Nuremberg Laws? The Final Solution? None of these things nor anything remotely resembling them exists in Israel , precisely because the Jews, more than anyone on earth, understand what Nazism stood for. It is claimed that there has been an Israeli Holocaust in Gaza (or elsewhere). Where? When? No honest historian would treat that claim with anything but the contempt it deserves. 

But calling Jews Nazis and saying they have committed a Holocaust is as basic a way to subvert historical fact as anything I can think of. Likewise apartheid. For apartheid to exist, there would have to be a situation that closely resembled how things were in South Africa under the apartheid regime. Unfortunately for those who believe this, a weekend in any part of Israel would be enough to show how ridiculous the claim is. That a body of university students actually fell for this and voted on it is a sad comment on the state of modern education. The most obvious focus for apartheid would be the country's 20% Arab population. 

Under Israeli law, Arab Israelis have exactly the same rights as Jews or anyone else; Muslims have the same rights as Jews or Christians; Baha'is, severely persecuted in Iran, flourish in Israel, where they have their world center; Ahmadi Muslims, severely persecuted in Pakistan and elsewhere, are kept safe by Israel; the holy places of all religions are protected under a specific Israeli law. Arabs form 20% of the university population (an exact echo of their percentage in the general population). 

In Iran , the Bahai's (the largest religious minority) are forbidden to study in any university or to run their own universities: why aren't your members boycotting Iran ? Arabs in Israel can go anywhere they want, unlike blacks in apartheid South Africa . They use public transport, they eat in restaurants, they go to swimming pools, they use libraries, they go to cinemas alongside Jews - something no blacks were able to do in South Africa . 

Israeli hospitals not only treat Jews and Arabs, they also treat Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank. On the same wards, in the same operating theatres. In Israel , women have the same rights as men: there is no gender apartheid. Gay men and women face no restrictions, and Palestinian gays often escape into Israel, knowing they may be killed at home. It seems bizarre to me that LGBT groups call for a boycott of Israel and say nothing about countries like Iran , where gay men are hanged or stoned to death. That illustrates a mindset that beggars belief. Intelligent students thinking it's better to be silent about regimes that kill gay people, but good to condemn the only country in the Middle East that rescues and protects gay people. Is that supposed to be a sick joke? 

University is supposed to be about learning to use your brain, to think rationally, to examine evidence, to reach conclusions based on solid evidence, to compare sources, to weigh up one view against one or more others. 

Yet Edinburgh students mount no demonstrations and call for no boycotts against Libya , Bahrain , Saudi Arabia , Yemen , and Iran . They prefer to make false accusations against one of the world's freest countries, the only country in the Middle East that has taken in Darfur refugees, the only country in the Middle East that gives refuge to gay men and women, the only country in the Middle East that protects the Bahai's.... Need I go on? 

They are not at university to be propagandized. And they are certainly not there to be tricked into anti-Semitism by punishing one country among all the countries of the world, which happens to be the only Jewish state. If there had been a single Jewish state in the 1930's (which, sadly, there was not), don't you think Adolf Hitler would have decided to boycott it? Your generation has a duty to ensure that the perennial racism of anti-Semitism never sets down roots among you. Today, however, there are clear signs that it has done so and is putting down more. 

Ninth, in an important development on the transmania front, a court in North Carolina has allowed someone who was tricked into transitioning to sue the doctors who signed on to the procedure. This is just the beginning. The attack on doctors who promote child mutilation will continue for decades.

The Dominion Report has the story:

A North Carolina judge has ruled that detransitioner Prisha Mosley will be allowed to sue the “gender affirming” doctors who “treated” her, marking the first such suit known to proceed before the courts.

Tenth, as a sidelight on the current fracas in the Middle East, we report a small detail that certainly matters. In Saudi Arabia, student textbooks no longer refer to the Palestinian cause.

This comes from Zero Hedge:

Saudi textbooks have removed the name “Palestine” from most maps where it previously appeared, a study by an Israeli think-tank said. The study, conducted by the NGO Impact-se, tracks changes in Saudi school textbooks over the past five years, as reflected in the 2023-24 academic year. 

It reviews 371 textbooks published between 2019 and 2024, and highlights content removed, altered or that which remained unchanged. A social studies textbook for grade 12 defining Zionism as a racist movement was no longer taught from 2023, while another textbook still taught has removed the chapter about the Palestinian cause, the study revealed.

Eleventh, last Wednesday I offered some commentary about a television show called: Summer House. I suggested that it showed us young women wrecking their marriages and their relationships. 

Now, Nicholas Kristof has opined about the topic in the New York Times. He is especially concerned that marriage has become outmoded. Whatever the reasons, the least we can say, as I suggested, is that women are rejecting wifehood.

Kristof received many letters from young women who believed that marriage was a patriarchal plot designed to enslave them. Thus, their behavior conforms to their ideology, which is not the same as saying that it conforms to some preternatural need.

Anyway, Kristof wrote this in a more recent column:

Many women readers in particular dismissed heterosexual marriage as an outdated institution that pampers men while turning women into unpaid servants.

“Marriage is generally GREAT for men,” declared a woman reader from North Carolina whose comment on the column was the single most liked, with more than 2,000 people recommending it. Wives get stuck with the caregiving, she added, and “the sex that receives the care is gonna be happier than the sex that doesn’t receive the care.”

The second most recommended reader comment came from a woman who said that when she and her women friends get together, “We all say, ‘Never again.’ Men require a lot of care. They can be such babies.”

Fair enough, being alone, unmarried and childless is an option, one that is becoming more and more attractive to more and more women.

And yet, if a woman makes this choice, she should not blame men and should not complain about being alone. 

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