Consider this. In the psycho world people are treated as individuals, as independent and even as autonomous. When psycho professionals define the goal of treatment, and even of adult life, they see people moving toward less dependence, less concern for the wishes of others, less willingness to follow the rules that society lays down, and more creative, individually.

Now, consider this, from Aristotle, quoted by one Chris Arnade in a Free Press essay:

“Anyone who cannot form a community with others, or who does not need to because he is self-sufficient, is no part of a city-state; he is either a beast or a god.”

Arnade continues:

…there is no such thing as a human without a community, and all cities are a reflection of that.

People are human because they belong to communities. They follow the rules that make them members in good standing. They know that some people also belong to their community, while others belong to other communities.

Arnade theorizes that human despair come about when people feel that they have been separated from their communities:

Human despair is no longer primarily a result of economic destitution; rather, it is due to a lack of functional and healthy communities, and the current challenge for most of the world’s political class is understanding that.

If standard forms of community no longer function people join other forms:

When traditional forms of community erode—family, faith, place, and yes, bowling leagues—people will gravitate toward drug traps, bars, and gangs, like water running to the lowest point.

My theory, which I’ve been suggesting since the lockdowns began, is that the spike in crime, protests, and other antisocial behavior in the months and years immediately following was a manifestation of the despair that comes when humans are wrenched apart; a national and sometimes global display of the pent-up, simmering anger that comes with isolation.

As it happens, psycho theorizing sees human development in terms of love and aggression. People seek to become one with each other through romantic love. And they aggress others who interfere with their self-contained self-sufficiency.

As for the other important point, therapy insists that your truth is the worst, whether it is the worst you have ever imagined or the worst someone has ever done to you.

If we return to Aristotle we discover that he saw the most important ethical relationship as-- friendship. You can find this in his Nicomachean Ethics.

Friendship is a social tie. In principle, it does not contain lust or aggression. Better yet, as Aristotle put it, friends see the best in friends. They do not look to uncover the worst.

If true love is not the meaning of life, then marriage is not merely an expression of love. Marriage is based on roles, rules and routines.

It, like other community institutions, is based on the ability to follow one set of rules. If you cannot follow the rules, then true love is not going to bail you out.

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More than a few people, on both sides of the aisle, found this explanation unsatisfactory.

Among them, Alan Dershowitz, who said this:

I know for a fact [Epstein] documents are being suppressed and they're being suppressed to protect individuals. I know the names of the individuals, I know why they're being suppressed. I know who's suppressing them, but I'm bound by confidentiality from a judge and cases, and I can't disclose what I know. But, hand to God, I know the names of people whose files are being suppressed in order to protect them, and that's wrong.

So, who do you believe? I tend to think that Dershowitz is being truthful here and that the Justice Department is protecting someone.

Second, remember Lena Dunham. She produced and starred in a television show called Girls. Then she moved to London and has produced a new show.

About Dunham the highly estimable Julie Burchill has this to say:

To be fair, anything Dunham makes would irritate me. I feel that I have something like an allergy to her. There’s the bovine quality of her face – so at odds with the razor-sharp intelligence her fans claim she has. And there’s the way she appears to have allowed random passers-by to graffiti on her body (if you’re that rich and don’t bother with a decent tattooist, you’re either pathologically stingy or pathetically self-loathing). These combine to make up a most unappealing visual. I can’t talk – I’m a toothless, grey-haired hag. But then, I stopped stripping off in public when I was 18. Dunham spent quite a lot of time doing so throughout her most famous years, during what seemed like an endless series of Girls.

Nothing like a little girl fight to brighten your day.

Third, on the good news front, the Justice Department is cracking down on hospitals and clinics that mutilate children for a living. Dare I say that it is well past time that those who practice such abominations were doing hard time.

The New York Post has the story:

The Trump Department of Justice subpoenaed more than 20 doctors and medical clinics nationwide that perform transgender medical procedures on children, the federal agency announced Wednesday.

“Medical professionals and organizations that mutilated children in the service of a warped ideology will be held accountable by this Department of Justice,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement….

Federal authorities also demanded access to protected patient data to determine whether any laws were violated and to spark policy discussions with providers regarding gender-affirming treatment, sources familiar with the probe told the New York Times.

Fourth, from The Free Press, its TGIF column. Always worth a read:

As floods ravaged Texas, drowning hundreds, some people celebrated. It’s true.

Here’s a Houston-based pediatrician, Dr. Christina B. Propst: “Kerr County MAGA voted to gut FEMA. They deny climate change. May they get what they voted for. Bless their hearts.” And I apologize for how vile this is, but here is a former Houston mayoral appointee, Sade Perkins, after posting that the camp was “white-only”: “Maybe it was gods will to wash them lil cu#t$ away.” Perkins had been appointed by the former mayor to Houston’s Food Insecurity Board in 2023, which should make everyone feel very insecure.

Fifth, and then there is the Argentinian economic miracle, thanks to the nation’s new president, Javier Milei. I have often made note of what is happening down under in Argentina. Now the story has made its way to TGIF:

Anyway, Javier is presiding over an economy that’s expanding at an astounding rate, growing 7.7 percent in April compared with the same month last year. And in May, Argentina’s rate of inflation went below 2 percent for the first time in five years.

They emphasize the simple fact that a vast number of credentialed economists warned against Milei’s reform agenda. Now how do they react when they see that they were wrong?

Back in 2023, more than 100 economists signed a letter saying Milei’s policies would be a disaster. The signatories included Thomas Piketty, who you might remember as the author of a book called Capital in the Twenty-First Century that liberals didn’t read but did have on their bookshelves a decade ago. Another is Jayati Ghosh, a UMass Amherst professor who recently signed another open letter saying Zohran Mamdani’s whackadoodle economic plans will be great for New York City.

So are Milei’s critics conceding that he had a point? Of course not. Instead, they’re finding Argentines (Argentinians? Argentiners?) who are still poor. And of course they’re also finding economists who say the statistics don’t matter, that they don’t really tell the full story, which is always “capitalism bad.” “[E]conomists warn that the figure fails to capture the reality of ordinary people struggling to cope with the most radical austerity program in Argentina’s recent history,” reports the increasingly ideological Associated Press.

The numbers may be better in Argentina, technically. But the vibes are not better. The American press would never allow it. Repeat after me: Venezuela is a success, and Argentina is a failure.

Sixth, as you must have noticed, the Democratic Party is having an identity crisis. Is it the party of centrists like Bill Clinton or is it the party of progressive maniacs and socialists like Zohran Mamdani? Tis a puzzlement.

Now, the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee has announced that the Democratic Party retains a place for anti-Semitic scum like Mamdani.

From the New York Post:

Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin brushed off concerns from Jewish Democrats on Wednesday about New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani’s refusal to condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada.”

Martin, elected to lead the DNC in February, suggested that his party welcomes users of the chant associated with violent uprisings against Israel, in an interview with PBS.

“You know, there’s no candidate in this party that I agree 100% of the time with, to be honest with you,” Martin said, when asked by “PBS NewsHour” host Amna Nawaz about Mamdani’s repeated defense of the rallying cry for anti-Israel protesters.

Seventh, if he has been politically engaged I am not aware of it. I am speaking of Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase bank.

After explaining that Zohran Mamdani would be a catastrophe for New York City, Dimon went after Democrats:

“I have a lot of friends who are Democrats, and they’re idiots,” he said.

“I always say they have big hearts and little brains. They do not understand how the real world works. Almost every single policy rolled out failed.”

Does that settle the issue?

Penn and Stein are dismayed to see so many young people supporting Hamas over Israel.

Put all this together, and it's little wonder that about half of 18- to 24-year-olds tell pollsters they support Hamas over Israel. By and large these young adults aren't hard-core ideologues; they're merely ignorant. About half of young Hamas supporters say they don't want to wipe out Israel and prefer a two-state solution. Call them the Useful Idiot generation, mouthing slogans and causes they don't understand and from which they would recoil if they did.

Dare we say that this is charitable. Penn and Stein believe that we should forgive these useful idiots because they do not know what they are doing. They are supporting a free Palestine without noting that Jordan is a Palestinian state, except that it is a monarchy, not a liberal democracy. They militate for queers in Palestine without understanding that under Sharia Law gays are executed because their sexuality is a capital crime.

Supporting Hamas means supporting massacres of the innocent, gang rapes of women, murder of children, even babies. Do today’s useful idiots know this? Of course not, they are too stupid to bother with reality.

Speaking of stupid, one of America’s two major political parties nominated an idiot for the role of president of the United States. Of course, she was not even remotely qualified to do the job. But, the bien pensant elites of this nation rallied to support her.

As they did for the moron that Joe Biden placed on the Supreme Court.

Historically, the term “useful idiot” was coined by Lenin to describe Westerners who were unwitting allies of the Communist movement. And yet, all things considered, the Revolution that the radical left promised was tried in the twentieth century… and failed miserably.

All things considered yesterday’s useful idiots are today’s useless idiots. After all, how stupid do you need to be to understand that Communism failed?

Take the case of Zohran Mamdani, candidate for mayor of New York City. Young people thrill to his program of reconstituted Communism. Tyler Cowen addresses the Mamdani platform and shows that the least reflection could easily led intelligent people to reject it as patent and rank absurdity:

I understand why such proposals might thrill some New Yorkers—especially struggling young people. But as an economist I know there is long-standing research showing, for example, that rent freezes lead to apartment shortages and also to quality collapses and deteriorating neighborhoods. Ultimately, it hurts the working class. I also know that the government does not have the flexibility or the profit incentives to do a good job running our grocery stores. They probably would lose money trying, forcing taxpayers to make up the difference. And even the Soviet Union did not wish to experiment with completely free bus rides. Usually service quality is higher when the users have to pay something, thereby boosting the incentives to take their desires seriously.

Writing on the Free Press Tyler Cowen points out the rank stupidity of one Hasan Piker, a newfound hero to the radical left:

… dismantling the guardrails of civilized conversation, has now become normal behavior among many socialist influencers. One of the most prominent is Hasan Piker. To choose just one of countless examples, the Twitch star spoke about an American war hero in this way: “What the fuck is wrong with this dude? Didn’t he go to war and like, literally lose his eye because some mujahideen, a brave fucking soldier, fucked his eye hole with their dick?” He suggested that the brave soldier “deserved” his fate. And he stated, on several occasions, that America deserved 9/11.

Finally, Cowen makes an intriguing and salient point. How much of the generalized hatred of the country derives from what he calls bad events. When you lose wars people are less likely to feel patriotic:

Perhaps bad events are to blame for the initial uptick in negative feelings. In 2001, hijackers flew planes into the Twin Towers—a previously unimaginable event for most Americans. The United States was taken down a peg. The second Iraq War then failed. The Great Recession came in 2008, followed by a slow labor market bounce-back. Covid and its aftermath were the next nightmare. Should it be such a huge surprise if the negative feelings have dug in and stuck?

So, reality has caught up to the American university system. Students are taught to be woke. They are told to ignore the wisdom of the past. They learn to be self-indulgent narcissists, drowning in their sorrow over how oppressed they are.

They might not all be out on the streets fighting against the Gestapo, that is, against government law enforcement agents. But many of them are. And those who are not certainly sympathize with those who do.

In the meantime, the word is out. Today’s young people are simply not worth the trouble. They expect to be coddled and swaddled. They have no work ethic. They complain and whine about whatever. They are quick to take offense. They feel entitled and do not respond to feedback. That is, they cannot tolerate being told that they can improve.

As the old saying goes, they are thin skinned. It counts as a form of depression.

More importantly, this generation as a whole never learned to work. They were granted awards and prizes simply for showing up. They did not learn that hard work is required to excel at competition. They are so thoroughly involved with their own self-interest that they ignore the best interest of their companies. Many companies have decided that they are not worth the trouble.

It is a sad state of affairs. If you ask yourself why so many young people are drawn to the madness of Antifa and are more than happy to go out on the street to cause trouble, the answer is easy. It is all they know how to do.

They have been taught to live for the psychodrama, not for the hard work and achievement.

If they did not learn adult behavior in school and even at home, they will go out in the world to act like overgrown children. In some ways it must be worse in elite institutions, like the Ivy League. These schools have long since abandoned their mission to educate in favor of an effort to indoctrinate in woke ideology.

Worse yet, diversity quotas have helped fill classes with students who could not do the work. As noted some time ago, when affirmative action became the order of the day many students who could not do the work often resorted to plagiarism. When professors saw what was going on they were told by their deans that it was best to give everyone an A, regardless of the plagiarism. Otherwise, they would be threatened with a charge of racism.

So, why would you work to get a good grade, or to hand your assignments in on time, when you know that certain members of your class were plagiarizing their work and getting excellent grades.

Thanks to DEI college became an exercise in what you could get away with. Merit was tossed aside, with the exception given for STEM subjects, most of whose students were from outside the country.

Since students are taught that hard work does not matter, they end up believing in socialism. That is, they believe that the government and businesses should take care of them. If someone is going to provide for your needs, regardless of the work you put into any activity, you are going to vote for socialists. You are going to disdain the free market and its competitive ethos.

Some argued that it was the fault of the most recent Big, Beautiful Bill that Trump had just signed. Others blamed it on climate change.

For people who believe that everything is Trump’s fault, the flood was not just Biblical. It was a gift from Heaven, that is, God’s judgment.

One is not going to rehearse all of the arguments, but Chris Martz offers some cogent analysis:

Okay. Let’s talk some facts. The Camp Mystic flood disaster in Texas is very unfortunate, and I hope that all of the missing girls are found. The usual suspects are exploiting this tragedy to score political brownie points.

Some left-wing activists are blaming this flood on “climate change,” others are blaming the deaths and missing persons on inadequate warning caused by low staffing at the National Weather Service (NWS) caused by Trump administration federal RIFs.

First of all, staffing cuts played no part in this tragedy. The NWS issued a flood watch for Kerr County more than 12 hours ahead of the flood. They also issued a flash flood warning for Hunt and Ingraham THREE HOURS before the Guadalupe River began to climb. There was plenty of lead time with respect to the forecast and issuance of warnings.

The flood was caused by the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry becoming embedded into a broad mid-level trough over central Texas. These remnant lows are typically slow-moving and drop heavy rain over a large geographical area where the troposphere destabilizes.

This particular one stayed quasi- (fairly) stationary, and caused massive flooding along the Guadalupe River, something that has happened many times before. In 1987, a flash flood on the same river killed 10 teenage campers from the Pot O Gold Christian Camp, with another 33 swept away who survived.

Camp Mystic is built on a floodplain. It is on sediment that has been deposited by hundreds, if not thousands of floods over the last millennium. The event has nothing to do with climate change.

And, the tragedy had nothing to do with DOGE cuts. If you are someone who has exploited this catastrophe because you just don’t like Trump, you need to take a serious look in the mirror.

As for staffing, the National Weather Service had extra staff on duty at the time.

Second, as noted before, Zohran Mamdani, candidate for New York’s Mayor, is a gift that keeps on giving.

As does his father.

Zohran Mamdani's father believes:

The Allies and Nazis had the same goal

Abraham Lincoln was Hitler's inspiration

White people are the oppressors, America is the root of all evil

BLM is the resistance Blah blah blah. Another wealthy leftist who hates America. Now we know who Zohran gets it from.

Not just a wealthy leftist. A Columbia University professor, too.

Third, on the Mamdani front, the candidate’s association with notable anti-Semites is certainly troubling:

Socialist New York City mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani visited a controversial Brooklyn mosque to pray while on the campaign trail — just months after the imam had called for the destruction of Israel.

Mamdani posted a picture of himself speaking at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, alongside firebrand cleric Sheikh Muhammad Al-Barr, on his social media in January.

Fourth, and then there is this, the image of Mamdani ridiculing the Jewish holiday of Chanukkah. Via Newsmax:

A Jewish advocacy group harshly criticized democratic socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani over the weekend for posting a "sick" video mocking Hanukkah and "cosplaying Jews," the New York Post reported.

Mamdani shared a video on his X account last year from the Geeta Brothers Duet Group, which showed two men wearing wigs dancing behind a menorah, spinning dreidels, and celebrating with Punjabi-style music.

The pro-Jewish group Stop Antisemitism group wrote on X that "Zohran Mamdani posts Indian men cosplaying Jews, spinning dreidels and lighting the menorah." The post continued that "our holidays and traditions are sacred and not for your comedic pleasure @ZohranKMamdani — this is sick."

Fifth, the New York Post reports that some senior Palestinian officials are now interested in joining the Abraham Accords:

A group of five top Palestinian officials in the West Bank’s Hebron district said they are willing to leave the Palestinian Authority and join the Abraham Accords, recognizing the state of Israel.

The sheikhs penned a letter to Israeli Economy Minister Nir Barkat, expressing their desire to transform The West Bank’s largest district into an emirate that “recognize[s] the State of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

Sheikh Wadee’ al-Jaabari — one of the most influential leaders in Hebron, the West Bank’s largest region — urged Israel and President Trump, who oversaw the Abraham Accords in his first term, to back the plan for self-governance.

Sixth, meanwhile, back in Germany, migrant crime advances exponentially. Via Zero Hedge.

In the last 10 years, we’ve welcomed a lot of ill-behaved and criminal young men into our country for no discernible reason, and along the way we’ve had the dubious privilege of discovering whole new categories of crime. There is the hostile-immigrant-drives-his-car-into-a-crowd-of-unsuspecting-innocents crime, there is the hostile-immigrant-stabs-a-bunch-of-random-people crime, there is the immigrant-gang-collectively-rape-underage-girl-in-park crime, and there is the immigrants-at-swimming-pool-molest-or-assault-various-children crime.

The latter has been stealing the headlines since the latest (allegedly carbon dioxide-induced) ‘heatwave’ in Germany. Recent stories include this one about a 25 year-old man of undisclosed background (who is almost certainly a migrant, otherwise authorities would not be so secretive about his origins) exposing himself to a bunch of underage teenagers at a pool in Asperg (Baden-Württemberg). Or this one, about a 21 year-old Syrian at a pool in Schweinfurt (Bavaria) caught exposing himself to four boys. Or this one, about men of “dark complexion” who severely beat an 18 year-old and threw him down some stairs. Or this disturbing one, about two Syrians who groped and assaulted a 12 year-old girl at a pool in Hof (Bavaria), forcing her beneath the water repeatedly and leaving her with a bloody nose.

Stories like this often come in groups, and what set off the present cascade was a particularly grim incident from June 22nd in Gelnhausen (Hessen), in which a group of Syrian migrants aged 18 to 28 molested eight or nine underage girls at the local pool. When the girls first complained about what was happening, pool personnel sent them back into the water. After this incident became a nationwide story, the Mayor of Gelnhausen, Christian Litzinger (CDU) gave an interview in which he appeared to ascribe the crime to “high temperatures”, which can cause “tempers to flare up”.

Seventh, what would we do without experts? Consider the case of Argentina and the administration of their new libertarian president, Javier Milei:

Javier Milei has lowered Argentina’s monthly inflation rate from 26% to just 1.5% The economy grew 7.6% in Q2 YoY Never forget… the media and professional class labeled him a dangerous “far-right” lunatic because he wanted to cut spending.

Eighth, on the therapy front, there’s relatively recent therapy that seems to be producing good results.

Consider the case of one Miley Cyrus. She claims that EMDR cured her stage fright:

Miley Cyrus has performed for some of the world’s biggest audiences — but for years, she quietly battled stage fright behind the scenes.

In a recent interview, the pop icon revealed that a therapy called EMDR was instrumental in curbing her anxiety.

“Love it. Saved my life,” she told The New York Times in May. “I’ve never had stage fright again. Ever.”

In another recent interview with Vogue, Cyrus said that EMDR felt like watching a movie in her mind — vivid and emotional, but grounding.

What is EMDR?

EMDR — or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing — is an alternative therapy designed to help people process unresolved trauma and emotional pain….

“EMDR uses bilateral stimulation, often through eye movements, tapping or sound, to help the brain reprocess those upsetting memories,” added Campbell, who leads a team of EMDR professionals.

She elaborated, “On a neurological level, EMDR helps shift the memory from being stored in the emotional part of the brain (the amygdala) to the more logical, rational part (the prefrontal cortex).”

I have no personal experience with EMDR, but I have it on good authority that you can produce a similar effect by fly fishing. I think that the same would apply to golf.

Netanyahu, for his part, explained that "After October 7th, people said the Palestinians have a state, a Hamas state in Gaza and look what they did with it. They didn't build it up. They built down into bunkers, into terror tunnels after which they massacred our people, raped our women, beheaded our men, invaded our cities and our towns, our kibbutzim and did horrendous massacres, the kind of which we didn't see since World War II and the Nazis, the Holocaust. So people aren't likely to say, 'Let's just give them another state.' It'll be a platform to destroy Israel."

Netanyahu seems to be saying it's 'either us or them' in terms of who is fated for destruction. His brutal policies in Gaza also speak loudest.

"We will work out a peace with our Palestinian neighbors, those who don't want to destroy us and we will work out a peace in which our security, the sovereign power of security, always remains in our hands," Netanyahu continued.

We no longer exchange ideas. We no longer debate propositions or policies. We fixate on our ideas, the ones we feel most deeply, and reject everyone else for having failed to have done enough therapy. They have not dealt with their issues and thus they are not just wrong, but not worth debating or even respecting.

The issue is complex. If therapists want you to get in touch with your feelings they are assuming that your feelings will show you something relevant about your reality. This involves introspection but it does not involve analyzing real world situations. It does not tell you what to do to solve problems. It limits itself to your subjective state.

As Professor George puts it:

That is because most people today do not believe that their personal values and convictions, though the products of feeling, are subjective or relative. They believe, or are at least prepared to act on the belief, that those convictions are, in some sense, objectively true. And not only that, in practice many people treat their beliefs as infallibly true and thus treat their feelings as if they are infallible sources of truth.

It gets more complicated. In Freudian psychoanalysis the issue is not how you feel but what you want. They ought not to be confused. Freud’s theory begins with wish fulfillment, not with emotional lability.

Worse yet, the situation becomes more complicated when analysts decide that they want to figure out what other people want from you. It becomes less about what you really really want and more about how you are reacting to what other people want from you.

And that does not really answer the question of what truth is. After all, does your truth lie in your desire or your feelings? Or is there a truth that is impersonal, that is true regardless of whether or not you feel it.

What about scientific truth or even philosophical truths?

By definition, scientific truths are objective. They are not subjective. Evidently, those who make a fetish of feeling have little use for objective truths. The case of transmania makes that clear.

But then, what about tradition? What about policies that have been shown to have worked in the past? Ought we to respect tradition? Or ought we to reject tradition because it is not subjective?

Take the case of language. However much you are in love with your feelings, you are still obliged to use a language that other people understand. That means, a language that has evolved over centuries. You might want to impart your style to your sentences, but you cannot speak your own private language. As Wittgenstein famously said, there is no such thing as a private language.

In principle, the search for your true feelings is promoted as a way to improve your relationships with other people. And yet, if two people are not speaking a common language, and using words as they ought to be used, they are unlikely to connect.

At a time when New York City has an idiot candidate for mayor who drones on about equality it does not feel like a bad idea to ask what equality is, whether it is desirable, and whether it is achievable.

In the most obvious and everyday sense of the term, equality is an ideal that never becomes realized. (except perhaps in mathematics) Perhaps that is why serious thinkers are contorting their minds in order to pretend that we can achieve it.

We will agree, without any disagreement, that we are not equal. We are not equal in height, weight, intelligence, ability, character, wealth, strength and even maturity. The notion that we are equal collapses once we ask the most obvious questions.

You might think that when Thomas Jefferson was intoning that all men are created equal he was not talking about these types of equality. He was suggesting that all human beings have the same and equal rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It is a universalist theory, one that presumably will lead to the advent of a universal state, a Heavenly City, in which everyone will be equal to everyone else.

Otherwise, you will easily note that all citizens of our republic have rights that are not granted to non-citizens, like the right to vote. Nationhood and the identity that comes with it exist in relation to other nations. You might belong to one but you do not belong to all of them.

And yet, cultures are not all created equal. Some are better; some worse. Some produce wealth and prosperity for their members while others avoid production in favor of more decadent pursuits. Richer or poorer, smarter or dumber, more or less peaceful… different cultures excel in different ways.

Besides, if no one was better than anyone else at badminton, what motivation would you have to improve your game?

Without inequality there would be no competition. There would be no pride in being successful at competition. And, let us not forget the words of New York Mayor Eric Adams-- there is no dignity in receiving a handout.

The principle of competition says that you can earn what you have. As for the notion that we should provide basic goods for everyone, thus redistributing income, it has been tried and it has failed. When you remove the motivation to work harder, people tend to work less.

A London Review of Books blog post about the book makes the point:

It is hard to shake the feeling that the centrality of these particular kinds of stigma in the book’s conversation stems more from their consequentiality for what is viewed as the left’s central political project of redistribution rather than a more general engagement with inequalities of recognition and respect. What about stigmatised groups who do not decide the outcome of elections, and their claims to equality?

Of course, this is traditional Western idealism. The Enlightenment philosophers thought that they had dispensed with religion, but, as Carl Becker famously argued, they were mining the tradition of the Heavenly City. They were doing secular eschatology, straight out of the book of Revelation.

For those who care about intellectual history, this idealism also comes from Plato’s Republic and Augustine’s City of God. The notion of a state that provides equally for everyone suggests a basic matriarchy, named a Mutterrecht by Swiss sociologist J. J. Bachofen in the mid-nineteenth century.

Thinking that human society is best organized as a matriarchy suggests that it is like a mother who cares for her children equally. Obviously, this infantilizes people and makes them all dependent on the state. It has never ended well.

With a warm welcome to new subscribers. And, a special thank-you to paid subscribers.

Today is Sunday, so we take the day off from opining in order to request donations. They are the fuel that keeps this work going. It allows you to show that you want me to continue. Dare I say, requesting donations is preferable to tithing.

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When he was a high school senior applying to college Mamdani lied on his application to Columbia. He claimed to be Black, the better to game the DEI world. After all, if Elizabeth Warren could get away with it, why not try.

Also, Mamdani’s father was a professor of Columbia.

Put them together and the young man could not get into Columbia. He must have been astonishingly stupid.

Second, you remember the Boulder, Colorado fire bomber, by name of Mohamed Sabry Soliman. And you know that one of the victims of his terrorism has now died.

You might not be familiar with the fact that our federal government has chosen to deport Soliman’s family. That is, to deport his wife and children, apparently to Egypt.

Now, in the latest news, the family has lost its appeal and a judge has allowed the deportation to proceed.

Third, it turns out that the Democratic Party has fully embraced anti-Semitism. But, you knew that already.

The news comes from Harry Enten, crack pollster at CNN:

“What are we talking about here? All right, who do Democrats sympathize more with: Israelis or Palestinians? In 2017, the Democratic Party was a pro-Israeli party,” Enten explained. “Look at this. They sympathized with the Israelis by 13 points—more with the Israelis than the Palestinians. But look at this sea change. Now, Democrats sympathize more with the Palestinians by 43 points.”

“Oh my God! That is a change in the margin of 56 points over the course of just eight years. So all of a sudden, it’s the pro-Palestinian position that actually reigns supreme in Democratic politics, not the Israeli position,” he continued. “And that is part of the reason why Mamdani was able to do so well in this primary, because those attacks over Israel, simply put, did not ring true for Democrats. They’re now on the side of the Palestinians, not the Israelis.”

Put that in your hookah and puff on it. Mamdani’s anti-Semitism resonates with today’s Democratic Party. He is a lot less of an outlier than Democrats would have you believe.

If you had not been alarmed before, it’s time to do so.

Fourth, it’s an astonishing divide. In America, 92% of Republicans and 24% of Democrats are proud to be Americans.

Just in case you were wondering why liberals have such poor mental health. If you feel no pride, in your nation or your community, you are more likely to be depressed.

Some people imagine, not without reason, that the cure for despair is hope. The truth is, the cure is pride, especially pride in achievement.

Didn’t a Navy admiral once recommend to a group of college graduates that they begin their day by making their beds. That is, by accomplishing something.

Try it; it works.

Fifth, once upon a time feminists declared “wife” to be a four-letter word. Women across America adopted the aberration and broke the American family. Large numbers of children are now being brought up without fathers. Many women who would want to be married find their prospects diminishing.

At the least, it made feminists feel empowered, and that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?

As for putting the toothpaste back in the tube or putting the genie back in the bottle, recent cultural phenomena show women bucking the feminist current. Nowadays it is becoming more acceptable for women to want to be what are called trad wives, traditional wives who are homemakers and who do not spend half their time harassing their husbands over who is going to do the dishes.

And now we have the advent of the princess treatment, of who are not just tradwives but who want to be treated with a decent amount of courtesy when out on the town.

According to the New York Post, a TikTok post on the subject has garnered millions of hits.

The author is named Courtney Palmer. The Post reports:

“If I am at a restaurant with my husband, I do not talk to the hostess, I do not open any doors, and I do not order my own food,” she said. She also addressed minutiae, like what to do at the coat check, at the valet, and at the host stand when your husband is checking on the reservation.

Amazingly, at a time when Democrats are whining about why men no longer support their candidates, the post suggests that the princess treatment works because it allows a man to be more manly. Who would have thought it?

“You’re just letting your husband lead and be masculine,” she declared.

“He made the reservation, he’s taking you out — let him do the logistics. You’re just being a princess, you’re not being hoity-toity; you’re just letting him take care of it,” she explained.

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When asked by NBC’s Kristen Welker to denounce the phrase, Mamdani hemmed and hawed, mumbling something about free speech, and ended up refusing to eat his own words.

But then, how many of us really know what the intifada was? How many of us understand that it was a campaign of systematic terrorism against Israeli civilians, beginning in 2002. And, of course, it was globalized in terroristic attacks against Israelis and Jews in other parts of the Western world.

Yesterday morning New York Times columnist Bret Stephens recalled what it was like living and working in Israel during the intifada.

The notion that a politician in New York City cannot denounce this is beyond belief.

I had just moved into an apartment in the Rehavia neighborhood when in March 2002 my local coffee shop, Café Moment, was the target of a suicide bombing.

… Eleven people were murdered and 54 were wounded that night. Multiple perpetrators, members of Hamas, were arrested and then released nine years later, in an exchange for the Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit….

Two weeks later, I was at the Passover Seder of a friend in central Israel when the news filtered in that there had been a bombing of a Seder at a hotel in Netanya. Thirty civilians were murdered there and 140 were injured.

This is straight-up terrorism, directed at civilians, to redress a grievance that was not really a grievance.

Life in Jerusalem was punctuated over the following months by suicide bombings that occurred with almost metronomic regularity. Among those I’ll never forget: The Hebrew University campus bombing, which left nine murdered and 85 injured, and the bombing of Café Hillel, another neighborhood favorite of mine. Seven people were murdered there, including David Applebaum, an emergency-room doctor who had treated scores of terrorism victims, and his 20-year-old daughter Nava. She was going to be married the next day.

And then, in 2004:

The ground was covered in glass; every window of the bus had been blasted. Inside the wreckage, I could see three very still corpses and one body that rocked back and forth convulsively. Outside the bus, another three corpses were strewn on the ground, one face-up, two face-down. There was a large piece of torso ripped from its body, which I guessed was the suicide bomber’s. Elsewhere on the ground, more chunks of human flesh: a leg, an arm, smaller bits, pools of blood.

As for what it means to globalize the intifada, Stephens offers some examples:

But the intifada also was globalized. One woman murdered and five others injured at the Jewish Federation office in Seattle in 2006 by an assailant who told eyewitnesses he was “angry at Israel.” Six Jews murdered by terrorists at the Chabad House in Mumbai, India, in 2008. Four Jews murdered in a kosher market in Paris in 2015. A young couple murdered in May after leaving a reception at May after leaving a reception at Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum by a killer yelling “Free Palestine.” An elderly American woman, Karen Diamond, who died of burn wounds last week after being the victim, with at least 12 others, of a firebombing attack in Boulder, Colo., by another assailant also yelling “Free Palestine.”

Stephens finds the Mamdani attitude unacceptable. I find him to be a bit wishy-washy here:

But a major political candidate who plainly refuses to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” isn’t participating in legitimate democratic debate; he is giving moral comfort to people who deliberately murder innocent Jews.

The obsession with the Palestinian cause involves making the weak feel strong, making the impotent feel powerless, and making the cowardly feel courageous. Worse yet, it makes a free people feel oppressed. Keep in mind, there have been no Israelis in Gaza for nearly two decades now.

And yet, the Palestinians, rather than build a nation, never stop whining and complaining… and blaming someone else.

The Palestinian cause is the ultimate in lost causes. Its adherents will never forgive Israel for succeeding where the Palestinians have failed. And, given their moral degeneracy, promoters of the Palestinian cause are always blaming someone else for their failings and their failures.

As a coda, I will add a point that Times columnist Tommy Friedman made recently. The Palestinian Gazas are monumentally stupid people. So, their cause is to make idiots feel smart:

Among Palestinians in Gaza, the question will be asked of their defeated Hamas leaders:

“What in the world were you thinking on Oct. 7, 2023? You started a war with Israel, a vastly superior military foe, with no end game other than destruction, which only got the Jews to retaliate with no end game other than destruction. You sacrificed tens of thousands of homes and lives to win the sympathies of the next generation of global youth on TikTok, but now there is no Gaza.”

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry explains:

Objectively speaking every single major policy/collective choice by Germany in my adult life has been astonishingly stupid: -

Giving their manufacturing technology to China -

Destroying Eurozone growth -

The Energiewende -

Letting in millions of Middle Eastern migrants -

Allowing themselves to become dependent on Russian gas -

Not investing in their own defense

Literally every single one of those choices was obviously retarded at the time it was being made and almost every intelligent person said so at the time and each time the Germans smugly and autistically refused to listen.

Second, New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is a gift that keeps on giving. As journalists scour his record they discover horrors.

Among the discoveries, from Elisha Baker:

This is insane. 13 days after Hamas killed, raped, and kidnapped thousands of innocent Israelis, @ZohranKMamdani led a protest accusing Israel of “genocide” and demanding a ceasefire.

Third, if you are no longer very young, you might want to pass some of your time making fun of Gen Z workers. The products of an educational system that has become infested with therapy, they are unsuited and unfit for work.

John Sexton reports, sharing this from the San Francisco Standard via Maggie’s Farm:

They want to be promoted after only a few months, treat the office like their bedroom, show up in sweats or skimpy office-siren fits, FaceTime friends from their desks, and ghost their managers.

This is the gist of employer complaints about Gen Z workers, who seem to be having a uniquely hard time getting along in the office — much worse, managers say, than the generations before them. In a December 2024 survey of 1,000 employers by Intelligent.com, 12.5% said a Gen Z candidate had brought Mom or Dad to a job interview. The bosses are fed up…

Rosalinda Randall, a Marin-based etiquette coach, said inquiries have risen 50% over the last two months…

She tailors her presentations toward clients’ biggest complaints. One Bay Area tech firm asked her to address personal hygiene, because two new hires did not shower or change their shirts for weeks. “They didn’t want to deal with it, so they hired me,” said Randall. She made her presentation to all new hires and added slides to hammer home the hygiene point.

Business Insider reports:

They are chronically disgruntled. I work hard to be fair, compassionate, and supportive while also maintaining the high standard of performance common to our company. But members of this group always seem to be grumbling about how they are treated unfairly. I have been accused of “humiliating” someone by asking a routine follow-up question to a report they gave to a meeting. They have a group chat where they complain about myself and my higher-ups being cruel and inhumane because we ask them to arrive at the office by 8 a.m. (a standard expectation in our field), correct their mistakes, and suggest that they take on new challenges. I’m “mean” because I ask them to redo work that is below par. They talk constantly of quitting.

Sometimes they complain to management, but more often they complain to each other, and the venting turns into an echo chamber of toxicity that drags morale. We are paid very well for our industry, but they frequently complain they aren’t being paid enough. Because I have no power to give them money, I often ask what else I can do to make their jobs more fulfilling and help them to do their jobs well. They don’t know.

If you are on the outside looking in, you will find this amusing. If you are tasked with managing an office full of Gen Zers you will not.

Fourth, I have rarely said very much about tariff policy, because I do not understand tariff policy. I am fully aware of the fact that most serious economists have asserted with complete self-confidence that Trump has been wrong on tariffs. Could all of those economists have been wrong?

The New York Post reports on one economist who has changed his mind. It is worth noting:

A prominent Wall Street economist who had slammed President Trump’s tariffs earlier this year now says that the president may have “outsmarted all of us” with his controversial trade policies.

Torsten Sløk, chief economist at investment giant Apollo Global Management, said that while the uncertainty surrounding trade policy has already started to weigh on the economy, Trump could lower tariffs on most of the US trading partners while using the levies to boost federal revenue.

Sløk suggested in a recently posted analysis that the administration’s approach may be more strategic than previously thought.

The optimistic outlook stands in stark contrast to his earlier position.

In April, Sløk warned that Trump’s tariffs could trigger a recession by summer, particularly harming American small businesses and potentially halting the flow of goods from China to the US, leading to layoffs and a broader economic slowdown.

Fifth, the Mamdani candidacy is setting off action in the New York real estate market. Keep in mind, if you live in New York City for less than six months in a year, you are exempted from local taxes.

As everyone knows, if you tax the rich, the rich pick up and leave.

Newsweek has the story:

Zohran Mamdani's surprise victory at New York City's Democratic mayoral primary last week has stunned the metropolis's wealthy buyers, and some are now looking to buy properties in other, more favorable locations—especially in Florida.

"Within a day of the primary results, we had serious inquiries from buyers in Manhattan and Connecticut," Isaac Toledano, CEO & Co-founder of BH Group, one of South Florida's most active luxury developers, told Newsweek. "One asked about the Ritz-Carlton Residences in West Palm Beach, the other about the West Pompano Beach Hotel & Residences," he said.

For many wealthy buyers looking into relocating from New York City to Florida, the idea of leaving the Big Apple is more than a Plan B in case Mamdani wins the mayoral election later this year. It is a strategic investment they are doing right now.

"A few weeks ago, we sold two penthouses at the Ritz-Carlton Residences in Hammock Dunes near St. Augustine for a combined $20 million, which set records for Palm Coast and all of Flagler County," Toledano said.

Mamdani says that he will pay for it all by taxing the rich. He is either delusional or stupid-- take your pick.

At the Glastonbury musical festival in England this weekend Bobby Vylan – a British-born rapper of African heritage – led the crowd in a chant of “Death, death, to the IDF”. It was a potent reminder of a dispiriting trend: the growing hostility among those of African heritage in the United States towards Israel and even to Judaism itself. One notable development seen during the bitter battle over Gaza and the recent strike on Iran has been broad embrace by African-American celebrities of anti-Israel and sometimes openly anti-Semitic memes.

Sixth, people are going to find it hard to believe, but black Americans have become virulent foes of Israel-- that is, they have become anti-Semites. Considering that Jewish Americans fought alongside blacks for civil rights, this counts as a monumental betrayal.

Dare we mention that embracing Jeremiah Wright’s protege, making him president of this nation, legitimizes anti-Semitism.

Joel Kotkin makes the case:

At the Glastonbury musical festival in England this weekend Bobby Vylan – a British-born rapper of African heritage – led the crowd in a chant of “Death, death, to the IDF”. It was a potent reminder of a dispiriting trend: the growing hostility among those of African heritage in the United States towards Israel and even to Judaism itself. One notable development seen during the bitter battle over Gaza and the recent strike on Iran has been broad embrace by African-American celebrities of anti-Israel and sometimes openly anti-Semitic memes.

He provides the analysis:

Blacks are arguably – along with extreme leftists, Muslims, and the usual far right racists – the most anti-Israel constituency in the country. A New York Times Sienna poll found that a third of all blacks favored the Palestinians in the current conflict, roughly twice the level for whites. In October, the predominately minority Richmond City Council passed a controversial resolution that recognized the suffering of Palestinians and accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing” and “apartheid.” Oakland’s resolution for an immediate ceasefire passed with no mention of Hamas’ atrocities, which some advocates argued was a plot by the Israel Defense forces.

And also,

Like the tragic children of Gaza, minority children are being groomed to hate Israel – as well as the people who predominate there. In Oakland a teacher held an unauthorized teach-in, reports the New York Times, including a coloring book for elementary students with a Palestinian character who says, “A group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people.”

It’s straight-up very bad news:

For now the black anti-Semites have the wind to their backs. Many young blacks deny the Holocaust and some even favor eliminating Israel and giving it to Hamas. Jewish authors, and Israelis, are being banned from literary events, much as occurred in the early days of Nazi Germany, even as the intelligentsia applaud Ta-Nehisi Coates – who is so anti-Israel that he even wonders if he would have participated in the October 7th pogrom. Even worse, a National Book Award was recently bestowed on W. Paul Coates, a publisher of rabidly anti-Semitic texts like The Jewish Onslaught.

The consequence: bad therapy results. And that merely counts those men who submit to the process. By now, enough men know that it is a waste of time, so they just do not go.

In more data-driven terms, men are 49% of the population, but 80% of the suicides. So said John MacGhlionn and he was surely correct to point this out. I have been writing about how therapy fails men for years now, so I am happy to discover that I have company.

The American Psychological Association succumbed to bias against men. MacGhlionn explained:

Unfortunately, not long after, the “sex is a construct” narrative started gaining traction, and the APA began denying that differences between the sexes actually exist.

Soon after, the APA decided to label qualities associated with traditional masculinity as “psychologically harmful.”

Having effectively turned its back on men, is it any wonder that the current system is so ill-equipped to help the men of America?

As for the difference between men and women, difference that escapes the ken of the APA, the answer lies in the fact that depressed men are looking for a way to function within the world. Women want to have their feelings validated.

In simpler terms, the relevant question for a man who is depressed because he is stymied by a problem is: What can we do about this? The relevant question for a woman is: how does this make you feel?

Perhaps this feels familiar. New York Times editorialist Michelle Cottle explained it well. This dates from my blog, on 7-22-23.

While women can maintain ties through conversation-heavy engagements, the experts say, men are better served by side-by-side bonding. That is, they participate in activities together, during which community and camaraderie are established. On occasion, between rounds of bocce or even rounds at the sports bar, the men may bring up how much they hate their boss or the results of their latest stress test. Behold! Male bonding in action.

Among the other problems in therapy world is the simple fact that therapy has become a pink ghetto. As MacGhlionn explains:

Sadly, there just aren’t enough male therapists to choose from.

Almost two-thirds of psychologists in the United States are female.

Eighty percent of clinical psychologists are female.

Some 75% of psychology graduate students are female.

This is one reason why therapy is failing men.

Female therapists do not understand men. They want men to feel loved and connected, but they leave men feeling loved and powerless, ineffectual.

Happily, these pages have not missed the story. Recall that Kenny Xu reported that in Silicon Valley some three-fifths of the tech workers are Chinese. As Xu adds, that does not mean Chinese-American. It means Chinese Chinese.

Whatever we think of the fact that students from outside of the country are taking up space in America’s best universities, we should see it as a challenge, not as an invasion. At the very least, it suggests that American students cannot compete.

If we want to make America great again, we cannot rely on students who were brought up in foreign countries. Surely, it is a good thing that foreign companies are investing so heavily in America. And yet, are we confident that we have the human capital to work in those factories?

John Mac Ghlionn explains it in the New York Post.

The numbers tell a stark story. According to a new report by the Economic Innovation Group, foreign-born workers who arrived on student visas out-earn their American peers by nearly $30,000 annually. They’re twice as likely to work in research and development.

But this isn’t a zero-sum game where one group’s success diminishes another’s potential. Instead, it’s a mirror reflecting what America could achieve if it stopped settling for mediocrity and started demanding excellence from its own educational system.

True enough, he is not the first person to note it-- I even wrote about it myself-- but we ought to see the reality of our failed educational system:

Walk across any American university campus today, and the contrast becomes painfully clear. While international students pack engineering labs and computer science departments, too many American students have drifted toward paths of least resistance — degrees in Critical Race Studies, Queer Theory and Gender Analysis.

He continues that American students are deconstructing the past, and learning to complain while foreign students are building the future.

One group is building the future; the other is deconstructing the past. These fields offer little beyond debt and limited career prospects. Yet they proliferate while hard sciences struggle for enrollment.

The real revelation isn’t that international students are outperforming Americans. It’s that they’re succeeding within systems America built, but has allowed them to decay. They’re mastering curricula Americans designed, conducting research in labs Americans constructed, and launching careers from universities Americans funded. The infrastructure for greatness already exists. America has simply forgotten how to use it.

Where to start? Surely, we can begin by shutting down ethnic studies programs. We also begin hiring faculty for their merit, not for their ideological groupthink.

You will be thinking that this is easier said than done. The leftist faculty that has infested American universities has tenure. Getting rid of them will be no easy task.

Mac Ghlionn explains his idea, which is to encourage American school children and university students to learn to compete with their foreign-born counterparts:

The key is understanding that competition drives excellence. International students aren’t just filling seats. They’re setting benchmarks. Their success should inspire their American counterparts to rise up and meet them, not retreat into easier alternatives.

When classrooms contain students from around the world, all working at the highest level, everyone benefits from the elevated — and more, yes, diverse — standards.

Surely, we believe in competition. And yet, as he argues persuasively, foreign students are studying subjects that American students are avoiding. And American students have stuck themselves in idiot courses in which they will learn nothing resembling a useful skill.

Happily, these pages have not missed the story. Recall that Kenny Xu reported that in Silicon Valley some three-fifths of the tech workers are Chinese. As Xu adds, that does not mean Chinese-American. It means Chinese Chinese.

Whatever we think of the fact that students from outside of the country are taking up space in America’s best universities, we should see it as a challenge, not as an invasion. At the very least, it suggests that American students cannot compete.

If we want to make America great again, we cannot rely on students who were brought up in foreign countries. Surely, it is a good thing that foreign companies are investing so heavily in America. And yet, are we confident that we have the human capital to work in those factories?

John Mac Ghlionn explains it in the New York Post.

The numbers tell a stark story. According to a new report by the Economic Innovation Group, foreign-born workers who arrived on student visas out-earn their American peers by nearly $30,000 annually. They’re twice as likely to work in research and development.

But this isn’t a zero-sum game where one group’s success diminishes another’s potential. Instead, it’s a mirror reflecting what America could achieve if it stopped settling for mediocrity and started demanding excellence from its own educational system.

True enough, he is not the first person to note it-- I even wrote about it myself-- but we ought to see the reality of our failed educational system:

Walk across any American university campus today, and the contrast becomes painfully clear. While international students pack engineering labs and computer science departments, too many American students have drifted toward paths of least resistance — degrees in Critical Race Studies, Queer Theory and Gender Analysis.

He continues that American students are deconstructing the past, and learning to complain while foreign students are building the future.

One group is building the future; the other is deconstructing the past. These fields offer little beyond debt and limited career prospects. Yet they proliferate while hard sciences struggle for enrollment.

The real revelation isn’t that international students are outperforming Americans. It’s that they’re succeeding within systems America built, but has allowed them to decay. They’re mastering curricula Americans designed, conducting research in labs Americans constructed, and launching careers from universities Americans funded. The infrastructure for greatness already exists. America has simply forgotten how to use it.

Where to start? Surely, we can begin by shutting down ethnic studies programs. We also begin hiring faculty for their merit, not for their ideological groupthink.

You will be thinking that this is easier said than done. The leftist faculty that has infested American universities has tenure. Getting rid of them will be no easy task.

Mac Ghlionn explains his idea, which is to encourage American school children and university students to learn to compete with their foreign-born counterparts:

The key is understanding that competition drives excellence. International students aren’t just filling seats. They’re setting benchmarks. Their success should inspire their American counterparts to rise up and meet them, not retreat into easier alternatives.

When classrooms contain students from around the world, all working at the highest level, everyone benefits from the elevated — and more, yes, diverse — standards.

Surely, we believe in competition. And yet, as he argues persuasively, foreign students are studying subjects that American students are avoiding. And American students have stuck themselves in idiot courses in which they will learn nothing resembling a useful skill.

With a warm welcome to new subscribers. And, a special thank-you to paid subscribers.

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New Yorkers stand poised to elect a socialist crackpot from the third world who's only been a citizen for 6 years and wants to nationalize grocery stores and appropriate money from taxpayers to spend on castration drugs for children. The voters have a death wish. They want their communities to be destroyed. And they will get what they ask for. So be it.

Second, Lawrence Summers points out that Mamdani is a gift for certain Southern states. Bloomberg reports:

Former US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers says if Zohran Mamdani is the next mayor of New York City, it will be a great gift for the economies of Florida and Texas. He says the democratic socialist's policies would hurt the city and there would be "massive outmigration."

Third, Iran was being attacked by Israel. So, naturally it turned to its sometime ally, China. Apparently, the alliance was not as sturdy as they imagined.

China Tells New Israeli Ambassador It Wants to Boost Cooperation.

If Iran had had the idea that it could punish the world by closing the Straits of Hormuz, it must have learned, fairly quickly, that China would never tolerate such an action.

Fourth, Brandon Smith takes up one of my favorite topics: the mess that feminism has made of relations between the sexes. He refers to a New York Times article that argues the following: women have been trashing men and have been rejecting traditional female roles… and then, the feminists among them are whining and complaining that men do not want them. Duh.

Listen men, your lack of participation is starting to stress out the ladies. Just admit you can’t handle intimacy. Just admit you can’t handle these “powerful” women and their vast intellects and emotional genius. You need to be taught how to behave, that’s all. Just crawl back to them and they’re ready to tolerate you again.

Isn’t that nice? They’re giving you a second chance…

At no point does the author ask WHY men are exhausted? At no point does she ask any actual men what they think or feel before writing her nonsensical screed. Obscured by insufferable and flowery prose, she still blames men while asking them to come back. And that should tell you everything you need to know about feminism in general.

I would ask feminists the million dollar question that they have avoided for so long: Have you considered the possibility that men ghost you and will not commit to you because YOU are the problem? The answer is no, obviously.

To be fair, in these pages I have often remarked that feminists are the problem. So I do not believe that I missed this one.

I’ll tell you the biggest open secret that modern women still don’t understand – They claim that men are afraid of approaching them. They say that men today are “weak” and that they can’t handle the new era of the “boss babe”. They argue that men need to abandon their traditional masculine roles and act more feminine; this will make it easier for everyone to get along.

These are common jabs at the male ego designed to make men feel ashamed for distancing themselves from feminists. In reality, men value one thing above all else: Peace. If you can’t offer peace, then no man with any sense of self worth has a use for you. Feminists offer the opposite of peace, and so they have no value.

I suspect that men want more than peace, but peace is a good place to start.

Fifth, meanwhile over at the New York Times, David Brooks does a bit of a mea culpa regarding his inane hostility toward Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. He has not been as bad as his colleague, Tommy Friedman, who took the occasion of Israel’s involvement in a war to talk trash about the nation’s leader, but at least Brooks admits that he was wrong.

Here goes:

And yet those of us in the Bibi critics’ club do have to confront an uncomfortable fact: Especially over the past 10 months, Netanyahu has impressively followed through on his aim to remake the face of the Middle East. He’s degraded Hamas and Hezbollah, two of the vilest terror regimes on the planet. He has made the Iranian theocracy look pathetic and decrepit. Israel has demonstrated its vast military and intelligence supremacy over its enemies, establishing total freedom of the skies over much of Iran. It has shown that its agents can penetrate enemy organizations and find and kill their militant leaders. Netanyahu’s actions have contributed to the toppling of the Assad regime in Syria and have helped the legitimate Lebanese government regain control of its own territory. The Axis of Terror is in shambles.

Sixth, the French have found out how much it costs to welcome illegal migrants into their midst. And this is an addition to the simple fact that French women no longer feel safe walking the streets of their nation… thanks to migrants.

Zero Hedge blog tallies up the cost:

Rather than boosting growth, the think tank claims immigration is costing France the equivalent of 3.4 per cent of its GDP due to a significant mismatch between the taxes immigrants contribute and the services they consume.

Le Figaro reports that, according to OID, taxes collected from immigrants cover only 86 per cent of their fiscal cost, creating what it calls a “budget deficit.” This imbalance is largely due to low employment rates among immigrants: only 62.4 per cent of working-age immigrants in France are employed—one of the lowest rates in the European Union, just ahead of Belgium. The French native population, by comparison, has a 69.5 per cent employment rate.

The OID argues that if immigrants were employed at the same rate as native-born citizens, French GDP would be 3.4 per cent higher, and taxable income would rise by 1.5 percentage points.

The next time some talking head waxes poetic about how much migrants are contributing to the economy, recall this study from France.

So, at a time when President Trump has joined with Israel, in all senses of the word, in their war against Iran, Democrats in New York City have nominated Zohran Mamdani for New York City’s mayor.

Keep in mind, Mamdani wants to globalize the intifada, which means killing Jews. And he promises to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu if ever he steps foot in New York City.

As you know, the reliably leftist New York Times recommended that its readers reject Mamdani. And lifelong Democrat Lawrence Summers expressed his own alarm:

I am profoundly alarmed about the future of the @DNC and the country by yesterday’s NYC anointment of a candidate who failed to disavow a "globalize the intifada" slogan and advocated Trotskyite economic policies. I fear it is evidence that our party is following the most problematic aspects of Britain's Labor Party. It didn’t work there, and it won’t work here. @Harvard and other universities' moral weakness after Oct 7 in condoning hateful, anti-Israeli, and even antisemitic, rhetoric and activity opened the Overton window in ways that contributed to yesterday’s outcome.

I hope candidate @ZohranKMamdani , who showed great ability to learn and adapt during his campaign, will continue to evolve in ways that provide much needed reassurance to people committed to a free from prejudice, market economy as an American ideal. An important task for Mamdani now is to provide reassurance that his moral energy and formidable political skills can be productively directed for the City of New York at this difficult moment.

The silliness about evolving simply means that if he makes a few noises against anti-Semitism Democrats are willing to overlook his bigoted history.

Another point is worth underscoring. The campus demonstrations in favor of Hamas and the intifada were instrumental in giving rise to a candidate like Mamdani. In fairness, Summers opposed campus anti-Semitism strongly.

And yet, let us not forget that these demonstrations broke out in full force under the Biden presidency. If anti-Semitism has become acceptable, to the point where Jew-hatred is protected free speech, at a time when pro-Hamas students are defended by the political left, it should surprise no one that an anti-Semitic piece of scum should be leading the pack in New York City’s mayoral race.

The New York Times offers this analysis:

Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the city with the largest Jewish population in the world offered the starkest evidence yet that outspoken opposition to Israel and its government — and even questioning its existence as a Jewish state — is increasingly acceptable to broader swaths of the party, even in areas where pro-Israel Jews have long been a bedrock part of the Democratic coalition.

Some surveys showed Mr. Mamdani winning as many as one in five Jewish Democrats, with supporters including Brad Lander, the city’s comptroller, who also ran for mayor and encouraged his supporters to back Mr. Mamdani through a cross-endorsement.

And on Wednesday, Representative Jerrold Nadler, one of the city’s most prominent Jewish leaders, endorsed Mr. Mamdani, saying they would work together “to fight against all bigotry and hate.”

But for other Jews around the country who were already struggling with their place in the progressive movement, Mr. Mamdani’s stunning victory confirmed their worst fears about the direction of the American left, fueling a sense that urgent concerns about the community’s safety are being dismissed in a movement and a city that Jews helped build.

Naturally, the candidate has been eating his words about Israel and Palestine. And yet, when he attended Bowdoin College, he belonged to the virulently anti-Semitic student group, Students for Justice in Palestine.

Jewish Insider has this to say:

In the closing days of the campaign, Mamdani, who began his activism journey as a Students for Justice in Palestine leader at Bowdoin College, defended the term “globalize the intifada” as an expression of Palestinian rights. Mamdani’s defense of the phrase was strongly criticized by Jewish groups across the ideological spectrum, who view the phrase as a call to violence. While Mamdani has pledged to keep Jewish New Yorkers safe, he has not acknowledged their concerns about his invocation of a phrase tied to a violent, yearslong Palestinian uprising.

The Times of Israel reports similarly:

Zohran Mamdani’s upset victory in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary has set off shock waves among a Jewish communal establishment that has usually been able to count on the mayor to be in their corner on Israel and related issues.

At the same time, two of the city’s most veteran Jewish pro-Israel Democratic politicians — including the highest-ranking Jewish member of Congress — issued endorsements of Mamdani, a supporter of the boycott Israel movement.

Because Mamdani has broken the pro-Israel mold of past mayors — with his staunch condemnations of Israel and his embrace of much of the rhetoric of the pro-Palestinian left — his victory over a strongly pro-Israel rival like former New York governor Andrew Cuomo has tied the Jewish political and communal establishment in knots.

And let’s not ignore parentage. Mamdani’s mother, famed film director Mira Nair is similarly anti-Semitic.

Roy Abrams notes:

I’m still digesting the fact that Zohran Mamdani’s mother, the successful film director, Mira Nair, tried to get Gal Gadot banned from attending the Oscars because she’s Israeli. It is so grotesque, so hate-filled and un-American.

It does not really need mention but the American left is fighting the good fight against Trump-Hitler. So it is willing to ignore the anti-Semitism in its own ranks.

As I have said, it has become the stupid party.

Such is the case of contemporary feminists. Having declared war on polite and genteel behavior-- of men toward women-- they are distressed to see that men no longer give up their seats to women on the bus. Men have become rude and disrespectful toward women.

Since women considered courtesy to be insulting and demeaning, they should now be thrilled to have won this small victory.

A New York Post article suggests that it all means one thing: that chivalry is over.

If we wanted to be pedantic, we would point out that chivalry is a martial ethos, invented during the Middle Ages. It seems to have morphed into something else of late, but it did not begin as a form of courtesy.

Similarly, chivalry is not the same as courtly love, the origin of what we call courtship. Courtly love was invented during the same Middle Ages, as a seduction ritual whereby the ladies of the manor, women whose husbands had gone to crusade in the Holy Land, worked to seduce the boys who remained at home. Those boys would obviously have been too young to fight wars as fully fledged knights.

Call it chivalry if you like, but it is really gentility. It involves codes of good conduct that exist for men and women. They are not universal and they are not therapeutically correct.

Mary Madigan explains her experience in the New York Post:

Is Chivalry dead? After a grown man practically trampled me to get on the bus recently, I’d be inclined to say yes.

He was in a suit and fun socks (boring finance bros tend to think quirky socks make them look fun), and he was on the verge of elbowing me to get a seat.

I was unnerved by his rugby scrum approach to public transport, it was a bit much for 8 a.m. and buses come every 10 minutes – but I wasn’t shocked

It wasn’t very chivalrous, but is that even a thing anymore? Is men letting women go first on public transport a dead concept?

Evidently, feminists rejected such behaviors. They argued that a man who was deferential toward a woman was demeaning her, and was saying that she was weak.

Strong women could open doors for themselves. They pay their own way in restaurants and they did not mind standing on buses or subways. According to feminism, a man who defers to a woman is simply treating her like a weak and ineffectual being.

Anyway, the important point, from my perspective, is that gentility-- to call it by its right name-- is a code of social conduct. It comprises roles and rules, from gentleman and lady to deferential and respectful gestures.

And yet, in a culture that is defined by therapy people are not encouraged to follow old rules. They are not even inclined to follow new rules. They are told to follow their bliss, to express their feelings. We are induced into thinking that we are unique and autonomous individuals. As such we should do what pleases us, regardless of the consequences. If the woman is standing in your way, push her aside.

Evidently, the rules of gentility are not designed to make you function like a self-involved human monad. They have been established to promote social harmony and to allow people to get along.

When you follow rules of decorum and gentility you are showing yourself to be a member of the group, to belong. If you fail to perform the most elementary gestures of courtesy you are showing yourself to be an outlier, an outsider, someone who is not contributing to group harmony.

Recently, I pointed out that the basis for social cohesion is trust. It’s a bit vague and limited as a concept, but it was the best we had. Now we can add that social cohesion develops when people follow one set of rules, follow them automatically and show respect and courtesy to other people.

If you fail to do so, you are showing yourself to be a boor, not to belong, and unworthy of trust.