the divine spark

Only human beings, it seems to me, have mathematical-logical ability to any significant degree. Only human beings, for example, can hold perfect geometric forms in their minds' eye. Does any other species have this ability? Why do we?

I call this the divine spark. It is this ability that is the basis of science and technology and our beginning exploration of the cosmos. It is this ability that has created our fabulous standard of living. It's not that we walk upright and have jointed thumbs that makes us so different and special; it's this mysterious ability to understand and manipulate physical reality. Why do we alone have this? What is our responsibility in using it?

mathematical/logical ability is more important than sexual prowess

Mathematical/logical ability is more important than sexual prowess.

a tipping point

This whole affair with Jeffrey Epstein has really changed my thinking on a rather touchy subject: antisemitism. I have concluded that Epstein, and his girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell—and her father, Robert Maxwell, for that matter—that these people really did believe that the Goyim are inferior beings placed on Earth to be manipulated and exploited for their own pleasure and profit.

I didn’t used to think this. By an accident of fate and real estate patterns, I went to elementary school with a lot of Jewish kids. I never thought much about it. In fact, the big distinction in the suburb of Milwaukee I grew up in was between Catholic kids and the rest of us, because some of the Catholic kids went to a totally separate school. To the extent that I thought about it at all—which wasn’t much—I probably thought of Judaism as just a somewhat unusual form of Protestantism.

This attitude pretty much took me through high school and college, where I also knew a lot of Jewish kids. It was only after that that I started occasionally running into people whose dismissiveness I found unusual. But even then, my attitude was simply quizzical: ‘What’s up with that?’ The Epstein business seems to have brought these occasional experiences into a certain focus. Perhaps these people behaved the way they did because they genuinely assumed their superiority to others.

I think a small fraction of Jews are like this, probably not even a tenth, although the percentage may be higher in Israel. I would place Benjamin Netanyahu and his disgusting wife in this category, for example. I once saw Mike Huckabee, that fine Christian gentleman, interviewing Netanyahu. As Huckabee threw softball after softball question at him, I could just see the wheels turning in Netanyahu’s head: ‘Man, I’ve got a live one here.  This guy’ll swallow anything I say!’ He had that same knowing smirk that one sees in some photos of Epstein.

The tipoff for me is the rudeness, the gratuitous rudeness. When someone behaves this way toward total strangers, he probably also feels entitled to lie to and cheat them as well. After all, that’s why they’re there, right? So now when I get this kind of attitude, I push back: ‘Are you this rude to everybody? Why are you so rude? What’s your problem?’ People like this need to be challenged right from the get-go, so that’s what I do now. And I can thank Jeffrey Epstein for helping bring this into focus.

RIH jeffrey epstein

I'm so sorry that Jeffrey Epstein is gone. I was so looking forward to suspending the constitutional prohibition on 'cruel and unusual punishment' so that Mr. Epstein could be put to death in a most cruel and unusual way. First of all, he should have been publicly executed, preferably in Yankee Stadium or someplace, to the taunts and cheers of thousands of blood-lusting revenge seekers.

As to method, my personal choice would be garroting, which I believe was a specialty of the Spanish Inquisition. The executor comes up behind the executee, puts a length of piano wire around his neck, and proceeds to squeeze the life out him. In Epstein's case, this should have been done very slowly and painfully, prolonging the agony as long as possible.

But now all that won't happen because Epstein (assuming he did actually kill himself) didn't have the guts to confront the young women whose lives he destroyed for his own personal pleasure. It is for that reason-- and that reason alone-- that I'm sorry he's gone.

franken-mayer: the opening salvo

The timing of Jane Mayer's attempt to exonerate Al Franken of sexual harassment charges couldn't be more suspect. This is clearly the opening salvo of an attempt to get Franken back in his Senate seat in 2020.

Governor Mark Dayton appointed then-Lieutenant Governor Tina Smith to fill Franken's seat until a special election, which she won, to fill out his term. But that means that in 2020 she'll have to run for a full term. Smith was a bit of a statehouse insider who was not well known in the state and had never run for office independently. The New York political/media elite may now figure that she would be fairly easy to knock off and reinstall 'their guy' to his rightful position.

I don't think it'll work. For one thing, the carpetbagger issue may prove more important in this election than it was originally, because Smith is a born-and-bred Minnesotan, and the incumbent. Franken was born in New York City. His family moved here when he was a small child but moved back to New York when he was around ten, where he lived until he decided to run for the Senate in Minnesota and established residency here. He's not a Minnesotan, he's a New Yorker, and the fact that his reentry into Minnesota politics is being orchestrated from the pages of The New Yorker is highly suspect.

high-end parasites

This Jeffrey Epstein nonsense brings up a nagging question about our socioeconomic 'system': Why is it so common that disgusting subhumans like this are often among the most richly materially rewarded people in our society? We really need to ask ourselves that question.

For one thing, nobody seems to know just where this guy got his money. That in itself seems a little odd, given that he has so much of it. People like him aren't wealth creators; they're wealth extractors, skimming it off the top of the productive economy much as the Mafia skimmed it off the top of the Las Vegas casinos. We all know about the low-end welfare/petty criminal parasites, but most of those people simply can't help themselves. These high-end parasites know better, though. And so should we.

ben shapiro

I've never thought much of Ben Shapiro, and his recent interview on the BBC only confirmed those feelings. Shapiro showed himself to be an emotional adolescent, at one point saying to his interviewer, 'I'm more popular than you are!' More than that, though, he showed himself unwilling or unable to defend his own positions when challenged by an adult.

Shapiro's whole shtick is that he's so flat-out brilliant that his tongue can barely keep up with his lightning mind. He has used this motormouth delivery in 'debating' kids on college campuses. If he were to slow his delivery down to a normal pace, most of what he says would be recognized for the shopworn right-wing talking points they are. For flyoverlanders, he epitomizes the fast-talking, flim-flamming city slicker of whom we have been traditionally and rightly suspicious.

He's clearly not somebody who's particularly interested in the truth. Trained as a lawyer, he's more interested in 'winning the case,' at any cost. He's not a reflective person and probably hasn't entertained the notion that he might be wrong about anything since he was, oh, about twelve. If he were a practicing lawyer, he'd be a shyster. It brings to mind Thomas Jefferson's characterization of the law as 'a dubious and talkative profession.'

i'm torn

I'm torn. On the one hand, I could never vote for Donald Trump. Did not vote for him, will never vote for him, could never vote for him, for two main reasons.

1. The guy is totally out to lunch on climate change. Willfully oblivious. Dangerously oblivious. He claims his 'gut is better than most people's brains.' Not on this issue, baby.

2. His full-throated embrace of the military-industrial complex. Increasing the defense budget, upgrading our nuclear weapons, trying to create this new 'space force,' etc. We simply can never spend too much on 'defense.' (Of course, the establishment Democrats are totally on board with all this as well.)

ON THE OTHER HAND, there are a couple things I agree with him about. The main one is immigration. Broadly speaking, we need to know and control who is coming into this country. Who can disagree with that? Above all, we need to control who can become citizens. That means ending this 'birthright citizenship' nonsense. The 14th Amendment had to do with the rights of ex-slaves and their children, because in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War Southern states were trying to deny these people the full rights of citizenship. It had nothing to do with illegal aliens; the term didn't even exist then. Very few nations have birthright citizenship today, particularly developed nations. As for the vaunted wall, why not give the Border Patrol what it wants, where it wants it? Do you want to secure the border, or don't you? These are the people tasked with doing this on the ground. Give them what they want-- and in a lot of places, what they want is a wall.

The other thing is something the media really doesn't want to talk about: Trump actually seems to want to withdraw from some of our perpetual military engagements around the world. When he indicated he'll pull our troops out of Syria, the Democrat/Media complex went apoplectic. How dare he? Does anybody even know why we're in Syria, or what the hell we're doing there? And just what are we still doing in Afghanistan after 17 bleepin' years? Does anybody know, does anybody care?

So I'm torn about all this. Not torn enough to ever consider voting for Trump, mind you. But I don't understand why so many people seem incapable of forming independent judgments on each of these issues, rather than just buying the whole ideological smorgasbord of either the right or the left.

my problem with the 'green new deal' is my problem with the whole climate change 'debate'

There's one thing I like about the 'Green New Deal' unveiled by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement: It's dramatic enough to deal with the scale of the climate change problem. There's one thing I don't like about it, though, and I think it's enough to make it sink like a stone politically: Why is it tied in with this big social-justice agenda (guaranteed jobs, basic income, racial 'equity,' etc.)? What's that got to do with climate change?

I've never really understood why climate change has become this big right-vs-left issue. To me, it's just science. The thing is, the Republicans used to agree with this, back in the 1990s and early 2000s. They were just looking for a market based approach to the issue-- and they came up with one: cap and trade, which came out of the American Enterprise Institute. But then sometime toward the end of that decade the word seems to have gone out that, no, climate change was to be seen as some kind of leftist plot to Take Away Your Freedoms and install a UN One World Government. My guess is that the fossil fuel interests let the GOP bigwigs know that they were not amused.

But now the Democrats are just doubling down on this approach. You may or may not be in favor of Medicare for All, but what on Earth does it have to do with climate change? Nothing, that's what! I just wish the Democrats would deal with this issue alone, on its merits. I think there's plenty there to attract voters turned off by Trump's willful ignorance on the subject. But trying to tie it to this whole left-wing social-justice agenda seems like a really bad, self-defeating idea.