Another year has passed. Let us shove it off the cliff and watch its brains get bashed to paste on the rocks as it falls. Let seagulls peck at its flesh on the wet, cold sand until the year’s ravaged corpse rolls into the sea foam, only to be ripped beyond recognition by bloodthirsty marine predators.

The world is no better than it was this time last year. In fact, it seems far worse. The very ability to speak is being squashed at every turn, but rather than rebelling, most people are choosing to live in silence. We may have to go through a thousand-year Dark Age merely to get back to how bad things were a mere five years ago.

As always, I hope I’m wrong.

I’ve compiled these “Most Annoying” compendiums for 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2016, with the stark and inexplicable exception of 2015. For the first time since its inception, women outnumber men on the list, 11 to 7. Although women are never slackers when it comes to being annoying, they took it to the hoop this year by exploiting the idea that everyone was keen on raping them.

This is not meant to be definitive or scientific or comprehensive. These are nothing more and nothing less than the people who annoyed me the most while I covered the news this past year. I’m not gauging who annoyed everyone the most, who caused the most damage, who is more truly dangerous, or, most importantly, who annoyed you the most. Therefore, there is to be no carping from the peanut gallery. If you don’t like the cut of this list’s jib, write your own gosh-darned article.

18. DAVID BUCKEL
David Buckel was a tiny little gay lawyer from Brooklyn who polluted the air while committing suicide to protest air pollution. One bright April morning in a Brooklyn park, he doused himself in evil fossil fuels and set his self-righteous body ablaze to protest fossil fuels. He was polite enough to apologize for causing the mess, but not polite enough to refrain from causing the mess in the first place. His note read, in part:

I am David Buckel and I just killed myself by fire as a protest suicide. I apologize to you for the mess.

Pollution ravages our planet, oozing uninhabitability via air, soil, water and weather. Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result — my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves. A lifetime of service may best be preserved by giving a life….Honorable purpose in life invites honorable purchase in death…I hope it is an honorable death that might serve others.

The world is now less polluted to the tune of one David Buckel.

17. NIKKI YOVINO
If the world should ever decide to lurch toward sanity one day in the wee distant future, 2018 will be remembered as The Year That Women Never Shut Up About Rape. It didn’t matter whether or not they were being raped—it rarely does. At any given moment, a certain quotient of women seems to feel the need to imagine that they are so irresistible, many men can’t help themselves from whipping it out and taking a stab.

Nineteen-year-old Nikki Yovino’s innovation to the art of Rape Lying was to falsely accuse someone of raping her, then to lie and claim she’d never even lodged the accusation. The crafty Connecticut teen lied to police about a 2016 alleged incident where two college football players raped her. Then, two years later when officials asked her about it in court, she denied ever accusing them.

If she winds up denying the denial, we suggest she run for public office.

16. EVAN CURTIS HUDSON
Despite all the laugh tracks you hear whenever the subject is mentioned, it must be humiliating to be raped in jail. One’s manhood and dignity—and sphincter—are ripped straight from one’s body, leaving what once was a man a pathetic bloody heap and a sexually confused trauma case.

For some reason, 22-year-old Evan Curtis Hudson of Davidson, TN, felt that “male rape victim” was a life goal. He falsely accused his cellmate of raping him. But even more humiliating than being raped in jail is not being found attractive enough to be raped. I doubt Evan Curtis Hudson will ever emerge from the sad mental grave he dug for himself.

15. CLAAS RELOTIUS
Why, it seems as if I covered this story only last week—in fact, I did.

After being selected as CNN’s Journalist of the Year for 2014, Relotius proceeded to fabricate elements of at least 14 of his articles, most notably a profile of a rural Minnesota town that was almost entirely fraudulent. It depicted Trump supporters as the sort of blood-drinking, hate-chewing, Mexi-bashing Cro-Magnons that most coastal media luminaries wish beyond hoping that most Trump supporters were. I am glad that he has endured the journalistic equivalent of defrocking. He can now go serve Venti Americanos to Somalian immigrants at a Starbucks somewhere in Stuttgart.

14. DON LEMON
Don Lemon is gay and black, which in many circles would be two strikes already. But he is one of those gay black media puppets whose smugness is so thick, you couldn’t even begin to hack at it with a machete. Since he toils in major media, he has all the “right” opinions—meaning that whatever comes out of his mouth is wrong. He recently said that the “facts prove” that white men are the nation’s biggest terrorist threat.

But even the facts he cited proved that Muslims are a bigger terrorist threat. Don, we might be able to forgive you for being black and gay and dumb, but not for lying.

13. SUZANNA DANUTA WALTERS
In olden times, ugly women toiled as midwives and librarians and charwomen. They didn’t tell us about their sex lives, and we didn’t want to know. We understood in a deep instinctual way that if they hated men, it’s because men never loved them. But along comes Northwestern University professor Suzanna Danuta Walters, who in the name of “social justice” or some other such shapeshifting indefinable, said that women have a right to hate men.

We won’t dispute your “right” to hate men. We’ll just point out it’s because you are incurably ugly. Now fix us a sandwich, you mutt.

12. ASIA ARGENTO
Along with the Savagely Mental actress Rose McGowan, this slimy Italian snake was one of the loudest megaphone-mouths of the #MeToo movement, which validated the female lust to get men in trouble onto a global scale. Argento feigned grief when her ex-junkie douchebag chef boyfriend Anthony Bourdain killed himself over the summer, only for it to emerge that his suicide was likely spurred in part by her public infidelity. And then a longtime family friend accused her of sexually assaulting him when he was underage. At first she claimed it never happened, but then she blamed him and said “the horny kid jumped me.”

It may seem unkind to wish that her uterus…and then the rest of her body…would fall out of her vagina, but that’s how I’m feeling right now.

11. LILY ALLEN
Like Asia Argento, Allen is another insanely spoiled woman who spends her public life pretending she’s had it bad. Earlier this year when confronted about the undeniable specter of Muslim grooming gangs raping English children with near-impunity, she shrugged and said, “there’s a strong possibility they would have been raped or abused by somebody else at some point.” Then she tried pushing the counterfactual narrative that 100% of the “nasty” raping in England was being done by white males.

It would be a shame if she were to be raped by 20 Pakistanis. We wouldn’t wish that on anyone. And she might even enjoy it.

10. HANNAH GADSBY
If ugly women are going to become comedians, it should only be to make fun of their own looks. Phyllis Diller made a career of it. The LAST thing that ugly women should do is become comedians without telling a single joke and while bashing males nonstop.

Infected with irreversible late-stage feminism, Gadsby recently gave a speech at some ladies’ convocation stating that even the “good” men who claim to be feminist allies are bad, because no man is good and no man will ever be good until they bow to the will of some sour-pussed Aussie lesbo who won’t be happy until everyone is as unhappy as she is.

I really hope she isn’t pecked to death by a flock of lesbian seagulls. I mean that.

9. JUDY MUNRO-LEIGHTON
Amid the sick, estrus-fueled mania of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing, the newly minted Supreme Court Justice was called a rapist by one woman after the other. The only consistent thing about all their claims was a complete lack of evidence.

At the height of the hearings, Judy Munro-Leighton sent an email claiming to be the Jane Doe that Kavanaugh had raped. Later, after Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Leighton confirmed that she’d made up the entire story.

Believe women? Only when they’re telling the truth—which seems rarer and rarer these days.

8. MIRJAM HEINE
Gay-rights opponents have faced scorn for years by insisting that once homosexuality becomes normalized, pedophilia will be the next frontier.

The gay-rights folks was right.

At a TEDx Talk in Germany, Ms. Heine gave a speech titled “Pedophilia is a natural sexual orientation” that contained the following passages:

According to current research pedophilia is an unchangeable sexual orientation just like, for example, heterosexuality….We shouldn’t increase the sufferings of pedophiles by excluding them, by blaming and mocking them. By doing that, WE increase their isolation and WE increase the chance of child sexual abuse.

Please never let this woman have children.

7. BARACK OBAMA
In between being pegged by his alpha wife and attending gay bathhouses with Rahm Emanuel, Our First and Last Black President gave a speech where he sold out his entire gender:

Women in particular…I want you to get more involved. Because men have been getting on my nerves lately….I mean, every day I read the newspaper and I just think like, ‘Brothers, what’s wrong with you guys? What’s wrong with us?’ I mean, we’re violent, we’re bullying. You know, just not handling our business. So I think empowering more women on the continent — that right away is going to lead to some better policies.

Go away and stay away this time, half-breed. You’re getting on my nerves.

6. VEIT LINDNER
Can you believe that the nation that once produced Otto von Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm now produces scrawny male bloggers who pine for the day when there are no Germans left in Germany?

Say “Guten Tag” to pinch-faced zeta male Veit Lindner, who penned a blog entry that fairly begs for indigenous Germans to either exile him or make a screaming example of him:

If the stinking, bloated thoughts of the New Right should now be the ‘German people’ again, it would actually be best to simply exchange it…Blacks, browns, yellows, whites, Asians and Arabs, Africans, you people from America, from India, people of all faiths – come to our aid! Flock up and replace us…this would be….genocide from its most beautiful side.

Mr. Lindner, you are lucky that Hitler has waited so long to rise from the dead. Very, very lucky.

5. RANDA JARRAR
Randa Jarrar is an extremely fat “Arab American Muslim American Woman,” which makes her twice as American as everyone else simply because she used the word “American” twice. She seems to hate everything that’s American, though, as she’s always bashing “the white hetero patriarchy” and publicly wondered why no one has yet burned Richard Spencer’s house to the ground. When Barbara Bush died, she tweeted that she was “glad the witch is dead.”

In that spirit, I will be glad when Randa Jarrar dies of a heart attack over the next five years.

4. SARAH JEONG
The new lead technology writer at The New York Times is a thirty-year-old Korean woman who has a habit of saying that “white people are bullshit” and that she can’t wait until white people go extinct. When called on these comments, she scolds people for not being able to take a joke and then doubles down on unironically calling for the extinction of white people.

We never should have tried to save South Korea.

3. LANA HOCH
For all that women complain about being raped—which is often a covert way of complaining about not being raped enough—Lana Hoch takes home the Sickness Prize this year by penning an essay called “I Cheated on My Boyfriend with My Rapist.” She claimed that she was merely scratching an itch, but she did far more than that—she made the world smell her fingers.

2. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ
What can be said about this horse-teethed economic retard that hasn’t been said beyond underlining the fact that she claims to have come from poverty but instead grew up in a plush ’hood that was 81% white and whose residents enjoyed a per-capita income twice the national average? Nothing, and I’m so sick of her already that I refuse to say anything else.

1. ROB TIBBETTS
Political beliefs are all well and good so long as you don’t smack others in the face with them. But there’s a special sewer tank in Haiti reserved for parents who use their child’s freshly murdered corpses to make a political point. Mollie Tibbetts was a white Iowa girl who once wrote “I hate white people” on Twitter. After her dead body was found in a cornfield this August, the life beaten out of her by an illegal immigration from Mexico, her father Bob penned a nauseating OpEd that placed Mexicans above white Iowans:

Today, we need to turn the page. We’re at the end of a long ordeal. But we need to turn toward life — Mollie’s life — because Mollie’s nobody’s victim. Mollie’s my hero….The Hispanic community are Iowans. They have the same values as Iowans….As far as I’m concerned, they’re Iowans with better food.

Mr. Tibbetts, I wouldn’t feel bad if one day those “Iowans with better food” were to feast on your carcass.

The Week’s Stinkiest, Kinkiest, and Dinkiest Headlines

LEBRON JAMES APOLOGIZES TO JEWS FOR FALSELY SUGGESTING THEY HAVE A LOT OF MONEY
Superstar basketballer and Rhodes Scholar high-school graduate LeBron James is multilingual, as evidenced by the fact that his first name refers to an obscure French phrase meaning “The Bron.”

He now finds himself in trouble with a small and perennially oppressed group who have horrible luck and always find themselves being maligned, persecuted, oppressed, bullied, harried, disempowered, and given noogies.

While tooling around in a vehicle that cost more than the Gross Domestic Product of several African nation, King James posted something on Instagram that quoted the following lyric from a young fella who goes by the name of “21 Savage” and is apparently a rising star in the “hippety-hop” community:

We been getting that Jewish money, Everything is kosher.

Sigh. After two World Wars, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, angel dust, Quaaludes, “don’t ask, don’t tell,” Stonewall, “Who Shot JR?” and the election of our first lesbian Native American politician from Kansas to Congress, are you telling us that there still exists the sinister myth that Jewish people have a lot of money? What was all the fighting for, anyway?

James’s net worth is $440 million, but we don’t hear anyone calling him Jewish, do we? But his wealth is mere circus peanuts compared to that of hippety-hop impresario Jay-Z, whose estimated value hovers around $900 million. In 2017, Mr. Z faced public ridicule for featuring the following horrifying couplet in one of his so-called “songs”:

You wanna know what’s more important than throwin’ away money at a strip club? Credit/
You ever wonder why Jewish people own all the property in America? This how they did it.

Within a matter of only moments, we find ourselves shaking our damn heads again—or, if you’d like to ape the urban patois, our damn haids again. For the record, Orthodox American Jews do NOT enjoy a per-capita income roughly tthree times that of the average American household. OK, actually they do, but apparently you’re not supposed to mention it.

LeBron, who at 6’8” and 250 pounds could likely manhandle an entire squadron of rabbis, apologized nonetheless. He said he hadn’t realized that it’s a sin to say that Jewish people have a lot of money, even though they do technically.

Curiously, Mista James also recently committed blood libel against old white men:

In the NFL they got a bunch of old white men on teams, and they’ve got that slave mentality.

James did not apologize for this comment, and it appears that no one demanded he say he was sorry, either. As we all know, white men, and only white men, controlled the transatlantic slave trade.

INTERNET TROLL FORCED TO TAKE “ANTI-HATE TRAINING,” RENOUNCES HIS SKIN
In olden days, a “troll” was a hideous creature who lived under bridges and raped goats.

These days, the only difference is that a troll lives in his mother’s house and plays a lot of video games. Either way, they still rape goats.

Scientists long ago determined that everything that has ever gone wrong in human history is due to a mystery virus known as “hate,” which is easily identified but, to be fair, has yet to be quarantined and identified nor even proved to exist in the phenomenal world.

Regardless, in order to prevent anything bad from ever happening again, we must remain so vigilant in fighting “hate” that we may appear insane to casual observers.

In College Park, Maryland—which, through a miraculous confluence of random events has a college, a park, and also happens to be located in Maryland—a strong, vibrant, empowered and sassy young black woman with exceptionally smooth skin named Taylor Dumpson has won a lawsuit against a hateful, bigoted, and quite likely acne-scarred young racist white man named Evan James McCarty.

While Ms. Dumpson was exalting and luxuriating in the honor of becoming American University’s first black female student government president, some complete jerkasaurus named Andrew Anglin from some totally immature website named The Daily Stormer allegedly encouraged his readers to harass her. It was then that Mr. McCarty, thinking it was “funny” and “hilarious,” tweeted an image at Dumpson featuring bananas and the phrase “OOGA BOOGA.”

In olden times this wouldn’t be a crime, but as you know, we’ve made progress. After pleading guilty to harassment, McCarty now faces a fate that to us sounds worse than any prison:

He…agreed to attend at least one year of anti-hate training sessions with a licensed therapist or a qualified counselor, and to complete at least four academic courses on race and gender issues. In addition, McCarty must complete at least 200 hours of community service promoting “racial justice and civil rights” and publicly advocate against hate.

There is one bright spot, if you could call it that: Despite the inane mantra you hear about how “children have to be taught to hate,” this case disproves that. They are born “hating,” if that’s what you mean by being born favoring your own kind. With all this brainwashing and guilt-tripping and all these struggle sessions, it’s clear that the powers that be feel that children have to be taught NOT to “hate,” or else why are they being bludgeoned with all this constant propaganda?

NEUTERING THE LANGUAGE IN BRUSSELS
Our friends in the European Union know what’s best for us, even if it runs directly counter to everything that our God-given senses tell us is good for us. Unlike us, they realize that Europe will only be great again once it is irreversibly non-European, that men will only be free again until they are all convinced they’re women, and that the only healthy sex is the kind that causes fatal diseases and never produces babies.

Since the idea that humanity is ruled by a hateful fiction called “sexual dimorphism” that violently splits us all into arbitrary categories called “male and “female” is insane, oppressive, and forms the building blocks of fascism and contentment, EU staffers in Brussels are encouraging all the men and women under their employ to stop referring to themselves as men and women.

A new guidebook called Gender Neutral Language In The European Parliament counsels staffers to pretend that between everyone’s legs is a smooth field of polished glass rather than genitals.

In other words, don’t call him a chairman, call him a chairperson. Better yet, just call him a chair.

It’s not manmade, it’s artificial.

He’s not a fisherman, he’s a fisher.

And they’re not politicians, they’re lunatics.

SUNSET ON CHRISTIANS IN THE LAND WHERE CHRIST WAS BORN
The 20th century was one of relentless atrocities, yet some seem to receive far more attention than others. For example, were you aware that the Soviets are estimated to have killed 12-20 million Christians? That’s not exactly chump change, my friend.

As we end the holiday season, we must pause to consider that in the Middle East—where Christ was born—Christians are on the verge of extinction. Not only are they surrounded on 800 miles in every direction by Muslims, but the Jewish population that started streaming into Israel from Europe after World War II don’t seem very sympathetic to the Christians’ plight.

From Syria to Egypt to Lebanon to the northern plains of Iraq, Christians face conditions which under any other circumstances would be considered deliberate genocide.

But for the most part, the Western press remains silent, focused instead of the plight of the non-Westerners whose lives they apparently value more than those of their own kinfolk.

Enjoy the rest of your holidays and prepare for the troubles ahead.

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Every Monday, Jim Goad reads the previous day’s “Week That Perished” on his podcast.

For reasons too convoluted for swift explanation, I looked into the annual Scottish figures for homicide recently. Last year they were down 5 percent and were the second-lowest recorded since 1976. The homicide rate has declined from its peak rate of 2.2 to 1.1 homicides per hundred thousand inhabitants (in the USA in 2016, the rate was 5.3), and the absolute numbers of the recent decrease were so small that, unless they are the start of a trend, they may not have been of any great significance.

So far, this might appear like good news in a world in need of cheering up. But then I noticed something truly dreadful about these figures: their horribly sexist nature.

Of the 59 victims of homicide in Scotland, 45 were male and only fourteen were women. Does this not show how deeply sexist Scottish murderers are? Imitation may be the highest form of flattery, but murder is surely the highest form of compliment to the importance of the person murdered. After all, you wouldn’t kill someone unless he were very important to you. Are not women important enough to Scottish men to be worthy to be killed?

The disproportion in those accused by the police of killing is even more startling. Only four women were accused, compared with 77 men. (More people were accused than killed because—one presumes—some killings were carried out by more than one killer.) Could any figures better illustrate the strong and persistent prejudice of the Scottish police and criminal justice system against men?

What can be done to redress the sex balance of victim and accused alike? There are obviously different possible approaches.

One could, for example, try to reduce the number of men killed. However, this approach is unlikely to work because the numbers are already quite small and resources are limited. One could nevertheless try an advertising campaign to encourage murderers to balance the statistics, for example with slogans such as the following:

MURDERERS!
SO ANGRY WITH SOMEONE THAT YOU COULD KILL HIM?
KILL HIS MOTHER OR SISTER INSTEAD.

Preventive public health campaigns, however, are often ineffective, especially those that require people to control themselves. It would probably be easier to increase the number of women than decrease the number of men murdered. Encouragement in this case would probably work, and incentives—lower prison sentences, for example—given.

No doubt it will be objected that this would lead to an increase in the total number of homicides, and so it would. But the important thing to fix one’s mind on is the sex equality produced thereby, surely worth a relative hand’s worth of extra deaths. Equality, after all, is a good in itself. And it might have some collateral benefits; for example, the elimination of those women in restaurants who have extremely penetrating, though not necessarily very loud, voices.

What can be done about the gross disparity in the numbers of men and women accused of homicide, to redress the balance? Surely this should be easy enough? Simply accuse more women. If it were objected that most of these accusations would be false, and that those wrongly accused would suffer as a result, I would argue that such suffering would surely be compensated for by the reduction in the public prejudice—very strong and difficult to alter—that men were more inclined to violence than women. What is important here is not the reality, but the perception of reality; for, of course, perceptions are often self-fulfilling. For example, if girls are thought to play with dolls rather than with guns and toy tractors, they will do so; similarly, if men are thought to be more violent than women, they will be so.

Thus, the public impression that men kill more often than women is the cause of the fact that they do.

Here the media can do their part in bringing about sex equality by (for example) suppressing reports of murders by men and maximizing the publicity given to murders by women. It will take time to overturn ancient prejudices, but history shows that it can be done.

With a little rewriting, plays such as Macbeth that reinforce sex stereotypes of violence could help to destroy them. It would involve reversing the roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, so that Lady Macbeth returns from the wars to her househusband Macbeth, who encourages her to seek power. The three witches would become three wizards, and on meeting them Lady Macbeth would exclaim, “How now, you secret, white, and midday lads!” instead of “How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags!” Lady Macbeth would tell Macbeth (who by now would have had a uterus transplant) to bring forth girl children only, instead of Macbeth telling Lady Macbeth to bring forth men children only. It would be easy to work out the rest of the details of the necessary changes. Children in school, particularly in Scotland, could be obliged to learn the new version.

Another sign of how deeply entrenched in Scotland are sex stereotypes is the way in which the homicide statistics are presented. Whoever compiled them assumed that the sex of both victims and perpetrators was binary, that is to say that they were either male or female. It is true that the majority of the perpetrators identified, or were identified, as men, and that no transgender persons were either victims or perpetrators; but that is no excuse for presenting the statistics in this old-fashioned, prejudicial way.

Even worse were the little icons used to represent men and women in the statistics. The women were schematic figures who wore skirts, while the equally schematic men wore trousers. The best that could be said of these stereotypical figures is that at least they were of equal height, thus helping to overcome the entrenched prejudice that men, on the whole, are taller than women.

With a little effort and imagination, Scotland could become the first country in the Western world where as many women as men commit homicide, and where there are as many female victims as male. Would that not be something to be proud of?

In her December 21 column in The New York Times, “None of Us Deserve Citizenship,” Michelle Alexander provides an example of the dangerously utopian thinking that characterizes many leftist arguments on immigration:

A radically more humane immigration system is not pie-in-the-sky, utopian dreaming. But it does require a certain measure of humility on the part of those of us who have benefited from birthright citizenship. Rather than viewing immigrants as seeking something that we, Americans, have a moral right to withhold from them, we ought to begin by acknowledging that none of us who were born here did anything to deserve our citizenship, and yet all of us—no matter where we were born—deserve compassion and basic human rights.

Throughout her column, Alexander repeats the accurate observation that “none of us who were born here did anything to deserve our citizenship,” and she seems confident that this constitutes a strong objection to people like me who take a hard line against illegal immigration. On the contrary, it does not. There is also a lesson here concerning the need to recognize natural human limits.

Of course, nobody who was born in America or any other nation ever did anything to deserve citizenship, because one must be alive in the first place to have done (A) to deserve (B). Nobody ever did anything to deserve to be born, either, so by Alexander’s lights, it’s a fair question whether life itself, like citizenship, isn’t intrinsically suspect in a moral sense. Alexander might respond, with her characteristic vagueness, that everyone has an inalienable right to life, but we need a lot more than that to determine who gets to be a citizen where.

As with citizenship and life itself, so with any number of things. I myself, for instance, don’t deserve to be 6 foot 3 with a high IQ, and yet I’ve undoubtedly benefited from these things in countless ways. Are those benefits moral evils in relation to those persons who aren’t as fortunate as I am? What about those who were born with what I lack? How can all these inequalities, or “privileges,” be put right?

As America continues to move leftward, it’s important to understand that Alexander’s reasoning is exceedingly dangerous. “On what moral grounds,” she asks, “can we deny others rights, privileges and opportunities that we did not earn ourselves?” But she doesn’t realize that, taken to its logical conclusion, this leads to tyranny. For so various are human beings that the only “solution” to the “problem” of undeserved goods must be absolute sameness of outcome. Even if, per impossible, everyone began “the race of life” the same, owing to their respective choices and the environmental contingencies they experience, people would still turn out differently from one another. Constant intervention would be necessary to “correct” those differences, and short of ensuring absolute sameness by life lived in test tubes, it’s difficult to see what could stop people from making the anxious value judgments that are always possible so long as they differ in any way whatsoever.

Instead of Alexander’s utopianism, I advocate a Burkean conception of citizenship. “Society is indeed a contract,” said Edmund Burke. “It is a partnership…. [And] as the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” An analogy to the nature of inheritance may help to illustrate the truth of this conception. Your children didn’t work to deserve that which you leave them (money, property, or whatever it may be), but they’re nonetheless the objects of your inheritance. You earned the goods which compose that inheritance, and having earned them, you deserve to leave them to your children, if you see fit.

It is similar with life and citizenship. These are goods—or gifts or blessings, if you like—that, though unearned, are granted at the discretion of the giver. Thus parents give to their children life and citizenship—carrying on “a partnership,” so to speak—somewhat as they bequeath a house or a collection of baseball cards. In these situations, to be sure, it is the giver, not the state, nor one’s neighbors, who is sovereign over the goods. For only he has earned (or rightfully inherited) them, or undertaken to bestow them, and the receiver’s legitimacy consists in the fact that she is the giver’s beneficiary. In a sense, citizenship, like life itself, is an inheritance, and needless to say, this doesn’t apply if one has entered a nation illegally, just as I cannot rightfully give to someone that which I stole from another.

Of course, this analogy goes only so far. There is such a thing as legitimate asylum, and there is something to be said for naturalization, too. (For example, I quite like David Goldman’s idea: We should recruit the most talented Chinese students in STEM and, once they’ve graduated and become citizens, use that talent to maintain a competitive edge over China.)

Writers like Alexander—well-meaning but superficial—never seem to reconcile their aversion to borders (or, in other words, to nations per se) with obvious practical problems. “All of us—no matter where we were born—deserve compassion and basic human rights,” writes Alexander in her moralistic vein. But how do we square this lofty belief with the reality that adding more low-skilled labor to a nation whose working class is already struggling is likely to keep wages down, and perhaps also lower them further? Indeed, as I have often remarked in my columns, the immigration issue is fundamentally tragic, but tragedy is something people in our time are too weak to face. They prefer sentimental rhetoric like the following, which is as easy as it is useless:

The founders of our nation did not merely wax poetic about the virtues of liberty; our nation was birthed by a Declaration of Independence, a document that insists that “all men are created equal” with “certain inalienable rights” including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” After centuries of struggle, including a Civil War, we now claim to understand that all people—not just propertied white men—are created equal with basic, inalienable human rights. If this is true, on what moral grounds can we greet immigrants with tear gas and lock them in for-profit detention camps, or build walls against the huddled masses yearning to breathe free?

The anthropologist Margaret Mead famously said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Today a relatively small group of courageous noncitizens—people like…the Dreamers and the thousands who joined the caravan—are challenging us to see immigrants not only as fully human, created equal, with certain inalienable rights but also morally entitled to far greater care, compassion and concern than we have managed to muster to date.

Here, as elsewhere, Alexander shows no sense of natural human limits. No matter about resources and economics and cultural compatibility; the state is to be as accommodating of immigrants as the moralist desires. Hence the Founders’ negative conception of rights (that is, “freedom from”) becomes a positive entitlement to universal citizenship and “to far greater care, compassion and concern than we have managed to muster to date.” An apt example, this, of what Alexander Hamilton called “artificial reasoning to vary the nature and obvious sense of words.” Yesterday’s prudence gives way to today’s delusion.

Wary of intellectuals, the shrewd Hamilton saw in them a tendency to follow “the treacherous phantoms of an ever craving and never to be satisfied spirit of innovation.” Their goal is progress, and yet often disaster is the result. For while the man of genius gets his nuanced views from acute perceptions of complex phenomena, the ordinary intellectual lives in a shallow world of empty word games. He is a chatterer, not a thinker. His opinions come from the books he’s read and from what he’s picked up, pell-mell, in his dealings with others in his milieu. And if anybody gains from those opinions, it’s generally he himself and those in his milieu, although others, and in particular the future, may suffer for it.

DALLAS—What if the country shut down and nobody gave a flip?

Entering day 6 of “The United States Is Closed,” I’m not seeing much evidence of panic or, for that matter, interest.

The most likely citizens to get their panties in a bunch—literally—are families who picked this week to go to Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon, only to find out that (a) the roads are open, but (b) the restrooms are closed. There are just so many times Dad can say, “Just go in the bushes” in subfreezing temperatures before the other occupants in the car start clamoring for the nearest Holiday Inn, which, in some cases, might be 150 miles away.

I haven’t been following that closely, but from what I understand, we need $5 billion to loan to Mexico so they can pay for The Wall, but I’m not quite sure who’s supposed to be ponying up and why we can’t come up with such a measly amount.

Okay, here’s an idea. We’ve ordered 2,663 F-35 fighter planes from Lockheed Martin at $90 million each. How many fighter planes do we really need? You know the last time there was an actual dogfight in the skies? Twenty years ago, when the Yugoslav Air Force made the mistake of sending up five MiG-29s. Score: NATO 5, Yugoslavia 0.

My point is that I think we can figure out how to fight China and Russia with 55 fewer fighters, bring that number down to 2,608 aircraft, and voilà!—draw up the papers, call up President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, give him a 2.25 interest rate over 30 years, put a clause in there that says if he falls behind on payments we can send the Navy down to Yucatán to claim the Cantarell Oil Field in the Gulf. And that’s his collateral.

No boots on the ground.

The Mexican Navy has three boats, we’ve got destroyers equipped with Tomahawk Missiles.

Game over.

Pump the oil till we get our 5 billion repaid, throw a party in Cancún to give the oil field back.

Not that anybody is clamoring for the government to reopen. In fact, I’m starting to think having the government open for business is a vastly overrated state of affairs.

Unfortunately, doing it this way—shutting down the government once or twice a year to see who says “ouch” first—does have its dangers. I know everybody says, “No big deal, whenever they reopen everybody gets paid, doors reopen, everybody handles the backlog, yadda yadda yadda.”

Yeah, but in the meantime we’ve got 800,000 people being told, “Don’t worry, you’ll eventually get paid”—at Christmastime.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m guessing that doesn’t go over that well in lower-pay-grade government households while the Yule log is burning.

So what we’re not taking into account is the Pissed-Off Bureaucrat Factor.

For example, nobody working for the TSA is getting paid right now. These people have X-ray machines and body wands. Do you really want the person who suspects your anus of contraband coming to work with an attitude?

I think not.

Or air traffic controllers! Let’s say the guy was up all night with his crying newborn baby and he’s barely making enough money for the formula and some pilot is requesting permission to avoid turbulence by ascending from 28,000 feet to 32,000 feet and the controller sees a Lufthansa 747 vectoring in at a weird angle at precisely 32,500 feet and so he decides to say, “Yeah, you can probably do that. I could give you more precise information if I got paid this week.”

Do we really want FBI agents, who go to the gun range twice a month to stay in practice, walking around with no cash in their pockets?

Doctors and nurses in federal hospitals? Really? They have surgical implements and access to lethal drugs. Sure, there’s that whole Hippocratic-oath thing, but need I remind you of…

Doctor Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs.

Doctor Herbert West (okay, med student) in Re-Animator.

Doctor Seth Brundle in The Fly.

Doctor Christian Szell in Marathon Man.

Doctor Moreau in The Island of Dr. Moreau.

Doctor Jed Hill in Malice.

And, of course, the all-time screen champion, Doctor Jekyll.

These are all dudes who were being paid. Let’s not encourage surreptitious experimentation down at the clinic, especially since they’re probably already pissed off to be working at the government hospital instead of the private one.

Half of the Pentagon is “furloughed,” which is the fancy word we use when we tell them either “Don’t come to work” or “You’re required to come to work but you won’t get diddly-squat at the end of the week.”

The Department of State is closed. No problem if your passport is thrown into the back of a dresser drawer somewhere, but not a good thing if you just got arrested in Turkey.

The Department of Justice is closed. (Take that, Robert Mueller!) Not so terrible if your extortion trial starts Monday. Less desirable if you’re under 24-hour guard because you’re entering the Witness Protection Program after your testimony next week.

Meanwhile, members of Congress get paid.

Of course they do.

And there’s one cause for optimism: The Internal Revenue Service is mostly laid off.

They’ll still take your money, but they probably won’t hunt you down.

Forget refunds, but they probably won’t be showing up to padlock your office safe.

But is all this really necessary? After all, it’s Mexico that’s paying for the wall. I’m telling you, just seize some assets down in Juárez—it’s a one-day invasion—and we’re set.

What am I missing?

Well, I know what I’m missing. These are mere employees we’re dealing with here. Kitchen help. Janitors. Park rangers. Clerks. People who took government jobs so they could have security instead of making a lot of money. People who were told, “You’re a patriot for doing this repetitive work and so we’ll make sure you never have to wonder where your next paycheck is coming from.”

Whoops.

The day after Christmas, President Trump issued his official Kwanzaa greetings from the White House:

This annual celebration of African heritage, unity and culture is a special opportunity for many to reflect on their shared ancestry and values. At this time, our nation joins in honoring the important contributions of African-Americans to the strength and success of the United States.

We have to assume this was Jared’s idea.

Other great Jared ideas:

1) Fire James Comey — the Democrats will love it!

2) Hire Anthony Scaramucci — we need to bring professionalism to the communications department!

3) Back Luther Strange in the Alabama Senate primary and diss Mo Brooks, the MAGA candidate — don’t worry, this won’t lead, like night into day, to a primary victory by Roy Moore and a Democratic pickup in the most conservative state in the union.

4) Hire more Goldman Sachs bankers than George W. Bush and Barack Obama combined — that’s just what your industrial Midwest base wants!

5) Back Obama’s Paris climate accord — this won’t result in mass protests when fuel prices soar in the countries that signed it! (Like France.)

6) Defend bone saw-killer Mohammed bin Salman to the hilt — I’m sure he’s not manipulating me at all!

Kwanzaa, celebrated exclusively by white liberals, is a fake holiday invented in 1966 by black radical/FBI stooge Ron Karenga — aka Dr. Maulana Karenga, founder of United Slaves, the violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers. Liberals have become so mesmerized by multicultural gibberish that they have forgotten the real history of Kwanzaa and Karenga’s United Slaves.

In what was ultimately a foolish gambit, during the madness of the ’60s, the FBI encouraged the most extreme black nationalist organizations in order to discredit and split the left. The more preposterous the group, the better. (It’s the same function MSNBC and CNN serve today.)

By that criterion, Karenga’s United Slaves was perfect.

Despite modern perceptions that blend all the black activists of the ’60s, the Black Panthers did not hate whites. Although some of their most high-profile leaders were drug dealers and murderers, they did not seek armed revolution.

Those were the precepts of Karenga’s United Slaves. The United Slaves were proto-fascists, walking around in dashikis, gunning down Black Panthers and adopting invented “African” names. (I will not be shooting any Black Panthers this week because I am Kwanzaa-reform, and we are not that observant.)

It’s as if David Duke invented a holiday called “Anglika,” which he based on the philosophy of “Mein Kampf” — and clueless public school teachers began celebrating the made-up, racist holiday.

In the category of the-gentleman-doth-protest-too-much, back in the ’70s, Karenga was quick to criticize Nigerian newspapers that claimed that certain American black radicals were CIA operatives. Karenga publicly denounced the idea, saying, “Africans must stop generalizing about the loyalties and motives of Afro-Americans, including the widespread suspicion of black Americans being CIA agents.”

In a 1995 interview with Ethnic NewsWatch, Karenga matter-of-factly explained that the forces out to get O.J. Simpson for the “framed” murder of two whites included: “the FBI, the CIA, the State Department, Interpol” and so on. Karenga should know about FBI infiltration. (He further noted that the evidence against O.J. did not “eliminate unreasonable doubt” — an interesting standard of proof.)

Now we know the truth: The FBI fueled the bloody rivalry between the Panthers and United Slaves. In the annals of the American ’60s, Karenga was the Father Gapon, stooge of the czarist police. Whether Karenga was a willing FBI dupe, or just a dupe, remains unclear.

In one barbarous outburst, Karenga’s United Slaves shot two Black Panthers to death on the UCLA campus: Al “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins. Karenga himself served time, a useful stepping-stone for his current position as the chair of the Africana Studies Department at California State University at Long Beach.

(Speaking of which, Rep. Paul Ryan certainly is right about what a fantastic job his mentor Jack Kemp did reaching out to all those “socially conservative” minorities. Look at how California has swung decisively to the right since Kemp started all that outreach stuff. Good luck winning California now, Democrats!)

Back to the esteemed Cal State professor: Karenga’s invented holiday is a nutty blend of schmaltzy ’60s rhetoric, black racism and Marxism. The seven principles of Kwanzaa are the very same seven principles of the Symbionese Liberation Army, another invention of The Worst Generation.

In 1974, Patty Hearst, kidnap victim-cum-SLA revolutionary, famously posed next to the banner of her alleged captors, a seven-headed cobra. Each snakehead stood for one of the SLA’s revolutionary principles: Umoja, Kujichagulia, Ujima, Ujamaa, Nia, Kuumba and Imani. These are the exact same seven “principles” of Kwanzaa. (And here’s something interesting: Kawaida, Kwanzaa and Kuumba are also the only three Kardashian sisters not to have their own shows on the E! network.)

Kwanzaa praises collectivism in every possible area of life. It takes a village to raise a police snitch. When Karenga was asked to distinguish Kawaida, the philosophy underlying Kwanzaa, from “classical Marxism,” he essentially said that, under Kawaida, we also hate whites.

While taking the “best of early Chinese and Cuban socialism” (is that the mass murder, the imprisonment of homosexuals or the forced labor?), Karenga said Kawaida practitioners believe one’s racial identity “determines life conditions, life chances and self-understanding.”

There’s an inclusive philosophy for you!

Kwanzaa was the result of a ’60s psychosis grafted onto the black community by the founder of a murderous black nationalist cult with the FBI’s seal of approval.

Kwanzaa emerged not from Africa, but from the FBI’s COINTELPRO.

Sing to “Jingle Bells”:
Kwanzaa bells, dashikis sell
Whitey has to pay;
Burning, shooting, oh what fun
On this made-up holiday!

Only white liberals take Kwanzaa seriously. American blacks celebrate Christmas.

Merry Christmas, fellow Christians!

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a prodigious intellectual who has managed to build a significant following with his books on investing and “tail risk,” such as The Black Swan and Skin in the Game. Yet he’s never quite gotten Watsoned out of polite society for his variegated crimethinking. All this despite a cantankerous personality, especially since he has taken up weightlifting and the testosterone has really gotten flowing.

Born in Lebanon to a ruling-class Christian family that was hurt by the horrific civil war of 1975–1990, Taleb, constantly worrying about what could possibly go disastrously wrong, is by nature a man of the right.

In contrast, Taleb’s intellectual archrival, rock-star Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, an optimist who believes that every day in every way the world is getting better and better, would appear to be innately a man of the left.

But things are more complicated than that. Pinker, for example, is an outspoken advocate of the politically incorrect science of IQ and heredity. For instance, Pinker tweeted earlier this year:

The Blank Slate is cracking: With polygenic scores corroborating twin & adoption studies in showing IQ is in good part heritable, even schools & left-leaning mags are walking back the tabula rasa.

How does Pinker avoid getting in trouble like DNA researcher James D. Watson or Pinker’s friend Larry Summers, former president of Harvard until he gave a Pinkerian talk on sex differences in IQ? I’m not sure, exactly. Perhaps it’s that the lithe, long-haired, soft-spoken Pinker seems like the archetype of the liberal college professor.

Or perhaps would-be SJW deplatformers intuit that they’d come out of a collision with the extraordinarily smart Pinker as badly as Malcolm Gladwell did in 2009 when the New Yorker writer tried to taint Pinker with guilt by association with me and my impolitic views on IQ and race. Gladwell’s career has never fully recovered from the drubbing the seemingly mild-mannered Pinker gave him.

In contrast to Pinker, the brawny, bald, and obstreperous Taleb advocates largely PC views on the most career-endangering questions of race and IQ. It would certainly be prudent to not risk a career that has gained considerable momentum over the past decade, making Taleb one of the highest-paid highbrow authors in the world.

But perhaps Taleb has more intellectual reasons. He broke through to best-sellerdom in 2007 with The Black Swan. The title is Taleb’s rather strained and confusing metaphor for rare but important events. (A more straightforward title would have been the one Gladwell later used for his 2008 best-seller Outliers.)

Taleb argued that bell-curve-based forecasts often fail because outliers—“black swans”—can have more dramatic impact than expected under a normal probability distribution.

Taleb drew a helpful distinction between “Mediocristan,” situations where data points tend to be distributed according to bell curves (e.g., height, weight, IQ, or car accidents), and “Extremistan,” where rare items greatly affect the average (e.g., wealth or book sales per author).

After the financial crash, The Black Swan was acclaimed for its insight. But wasn’t the mortgage meltdown that triggered the Great Recession a classic instance of Mediocristan? It wasn’t set off by, say, Trump Tower defaulting, but by a huge number of moderate-size defaults in the exurbs of heavily Hispanic states, following a Bush Administration campaign to boost nonwhite homeownership by 5.5 million by easing down-payment requirements. The big losses weren’t in, say, Extremistan Malibu but in Mediocristan Inland Empire.

Attacking bell curves has been popular since the 1994 publication of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s IQ book. But, of course, they named their book The Bell Curve precisely because IQ is firmly lodged in Mediocristan.

Yet this didn’t stop Taleb over the weekend from launching a Twitter war on all things related to The Bell Curve: IQ, race, and genetics. Taleb began, curiously enough, by pooh-poohing the importance of tails:

1- What people don’t get about “race” ≠ or “heritability” of traits: even it these were true & not fabrications, they wd be dominated by IDIOSYNCRATIC differences. If pple from Mars had an “IQ” lower than earth by 5%, w/variance you wouldn’t see it in ANY 2-paired individuals.

Taleb added:

“IQ” is an arbitrary metric (say like length of the index finger), overoptimized, predictive of school grades, success as bureaucrat but not in the wild/entrepreneurship.

Taleb has made a lot more money than I have, so I’d listen to his views on entrepreneurs. On the other hand, a guy who worked for me in 1986 got a much better job the next year at Microsoft. He became a close acquaintance of Bill Gates when the entrepreneur wanted his girlfriend to go skydiving with him and she said she’d only do it if he found another woman to jump out of the plane with her. Gates looked over the roster for somebody ambitious and married and settled upon my old friend, much to the distress of his poor terrified wife.

My pal testified that Gates was intensely smart.

But the irony is those focused on the IQ of “races” (“bell curve”) seem to have a lower IQ scores themselves!

I wouldn’t say that Professor Taleb is right in the case of Pinker or Murray (who called Taleb’s tweet storm “willfully stupid”), but no, my IQ isn’t as high as his. I’m not as smart as Taleb, so the only way I can out-argue him is to use better facts and logic. (Here’s my 2007 frequently asked question list on IQ.)

In response to Taleb, I pointed out some obvious examples of racial gaps in real-world performance. For example, all 72 finalists in the men’s 100-meter dash in the past nine Olympics, going back through 1984, have been at least half black by ancestry.

Implies moderate race difference in sprinting speed piles up to huge race gaps in @nntaleb’s beloved tails.

Similarly, all starting cornerbacks in the NFL have been black since Jason Sehorn retired after the 2003 season. That’s two cornerbacks times 15 seasons times 32 teams, or 960 out of 960 data points.

That probably didn’t happen by luck.

Initially, Taleb tried rejecting any and all examples from sports.

Ludic. It has no impact when someone is crossing the street. Noise dominates outside of extremes. Try another example. Something nonludic.

But I stood my ground:

It’s silly to dismiss out of hand learning from sports statistics on grounds that they are “ludic.” E.g., the men’s 100m dash in the Olympics is an extremely global event with 100+ countries trying to get in….

Taleb eventually conceded that sports were a reasonable data source:

I accept that sports matter and draw a lot of people. And that heredity matters for some functions. But the tail is well…the tail. 90% and 99.9% of life lie by definition outside of the near and far tail respectively.

But of course sports success is Extremistan. Sprint king Usain Bolt makes $31 million per year and barely has to work out. When a journalist asked how fast Bolt could run a mile, his agent responded, “Usain has never run a mile.” In turn, what happens in Extremistan affects Mediocristan. I responded:

Sorry, @nntaleb, but race differences turn out to be highly relevant in real world because society is interested in extremes. E.g., all regular NFL cornerbacks after 2003 have been black: 960/960 data points. If your son is white, tell him to play safety, LB, receiver, not CB.

One interesting question is, how big is the racial gap in sprinting speed at the Mediocristan playground level? Unfortunately, I’m not aware of any studies of children’s running ability by race. The French had a project to time as many 15-year-olds as possible at running 50 meters, but they don’t record ethnic data. (Interestingly, the fastest white 100-meter man of all time, Christophe Lemaitre, was discovered by this national undertaking, which suggests that there may be a few other world-class white sprinters undiscerned by the usual methods.)

Taleb assumes the gap in sprinting speed between the average black and white child is trivial, but in my experience at playgrounds, it’s noticeably large. That has not insignificant real-world influences. I responded:

Sorry, but the extraordinary race gap in Olympic 100 meter dash results (all finalists since 1984 have been black) correlates with lots of mundane realities like: Who bullies whom in playground, and who takes up street crime: those most likely to outrun their pursuers.

It’s often lamented that black youths overinvest in the slim hope of becoming a professional athlete. But on the upside, it can make sense for a black child with above-average IQ and above-average foot speed to work hard on sports because the racial gap is large enough that a scholarship to a good private high school is hardly implausible.

For example, the one African-American in my Catholic high school class of 1976 was there on scholarship because as a senior he would run a 9.5 second 100-yard dash, the second-fastest in Southern California that year. He was recruited by UCLA’s track team, and today is an architect.

Nowadays, Catholic high schools recruit quite a few black athletes for each class.

And college scholarships are a possibility. A high school friend of my son’s got a free ride to Harvard because he is a giant black basketball player. He actually didn’t like sports all that much; he just worked extremely hard at his game after he grew tall so that he would be recruited by a top college, such as Harvard.

In contrast to sprinting speed, where we have ample data about the racial gap at the high end but not at the playground level, we know all about the IQ white-black gap in Mediocristan, but less so in Extremistan.

The notorious IQ gap is usually estimated at about one standard deviation or 15 points. The typical white would, by definition, score at the 50th percentile of the white distribution, while the typical black would score at about the 16th percentile of the white distribution.

But please note, this means that about one-sixth of blacks are smarter than the average white. Perhaps there are 7 million African-Americans with IQs above the white mean. So in IQ Mediocristan, the race gap, while sizable, is not immense.

On the other hand, in IQ Extremistan, there aren’t many blacks, although how few there are tends to be kept a secret. America is obsessed with pushing blacks to achieve high in many fields, but the numbers are in short supply.

For example, Penn law professor Amy Wax caused a huge brouhaha earlier this year by pointing out that blacks “rarely” finish in the top half of their class. The dean shot back that, in fact, “Black students have graduated in the top of the class at Penn Law.” But no data were forthcoming.

Amusingly, when Barack Obama showed up at Harvard Law School in 1988 and demonstrated that he could hang intellectually with the white kids, he was, within weeks, talked up as a possible first black president of the United States.

Taleb then shifted gears from race to IQ:

2- It takes a certain type of person to waste intelligent concentration on classroom/academic problems. These are lifeless bureaucrats who can muster sterile motivation. Some people can only focus on problems that are REAL, not fictional textbook ones.

I replied:

Actually, the military relies on heavily g-loaded cognitive tests such as the AFQT to determine who is allowed to enlist. By law, nobody below 10th percentile is allowed to enlist, and often Army/Marines take nobody below 30th %ile, & AF/Navy only recruit IQs of 100 or higher.

The military’s AFQT enlistment test isn’t precisely an IQ test, it’s more like the SAT/ACT college admissions tests, but it correlates closely enough with IQ that The Bell Curve used it as its main indicator of IQ.

I spent a couple of hours on the phone in 2004 with a college professor who had previously long been head of psychometrics for one of the main branches of the military and who had supplied the Pentagon’s test data that made up much of The Bell Curve. His only objection to the book was that Herrnstein and Murray hadn’t gone far enough.

During the Vietnam War, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara tried to get around the law banning enlisting soldiers from the bottom 10 percent of the intelligence bell curve. The book on what ensued is entitled McNamara’s Folly.

Taleb went on:

If many millionaires have IQs around100, & 58 y.o. back office clercs at Goldman Sachs or elsewhere an IQ of 155 (true example), clearly the measurement is less informative than claimed.

I said:

This is kind of like saying: if there are 6-footers starting in the NBA and 7-footers on the bench, clearly height is less informative than claimed. That’s true … to some extent, but it doesn’t disprove that height is a sizable advantage in the NBA.

Remember, there are lot more 6 footers than 7 footers, just like 100 IQs vs. 155 IQs. When I attended Rice and UCLA, there were a total of four 7 footers on campuses, all on the school basketball teams, and 2 played in the NBA, one (Mark Eaton) in NBA all star game.

It’s almost as if the IQ glass is somehow both half empty and half full at the same time…

This doesn’t mean that IQ is a perfect measure above criticism, just that in an imperfect world, it’s proved itself over the past 113 years as one of the social sciences’ enduring accomplishments.

Because Taleb has a much higher IQ than I have, the only way I can win an argument with him is by being right.

Christmas is supposed to be a holiday for Christians, but this year Santa’s bringing a very special present for America’s Jews: the gift of seeing Ruth Bader Ginsburg the way we wish she looked. Opening in theaters December 25th, On the Basis of Sex tells the story of a plucky young RBG as she risks everything in a quest to become a nationally known feminist hero.

Does she succeed? I’ve purposely avoided the trailer, as I’m fearful it might give away the ending.

The actress portraying the young Ginsburg is Birmingham-born Felicity Jones, a Brit who is most definitely not Jewish, unlike the brittle SCOTUS scarecrow she’s portraying. In fact, Jones could not look less Jewish if she tried. This girl is so Aryan, she could give Himmler’s corpse a boner. And yet she’s portraying a woman who—hmm, how to put this gently?—is the reason Jewish men often date outside the flock. Not since Warren Beatty decided to portray Dick Tracy without facial prosthetics has there been a greater physical disconnect between actor and subject.

Felicity Jones’ nose is what Jewish women are shown in the plastic surgeon’s office as an enticement to plunk down ten grand on rhinoplasty.

“I can totally give you that nose, Hadassah. And for a 10 percent cash discount, such a deal!”

“I’ll do it, Dr. Lifkinbloom, I’ll do it!”

Yet the casting of shiksa Jones in the role of a leftist Jewish icon has not caused very much outrage among U.S. Jews. Compare that with our other favorite colicky victim group: blacks. If a light-“skinded” black actress is cast to portray a dark chocolate black celebrity, all hell is guaranteed to break loose. The casting of caramel Caribbean beauty Zoe Saldana as dark-skinned jazz legend Nina Simone in a 2016 biopic completely sank that film before anyone even had the chance to actually see what a piece of crap it was. And just a few months ago, megastar Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was pummeled in the black press for daring to portray a live-action version of the popular folkloric American hero John Henry. “Big John” may never have actually existed, and even if he did, no one knows what he looked like, but he’s traditionally been portrayed in artistic depictions as dark-skinned, so blacks shit a bunch of rail spikes over the casting of the biracial Johnson.

To be clear, this black outrage is not about accuracy. There’s never an outcry when a dark-skinned actor is cast in the role of a light-skinned real-life figure. The casting of “no question she black” Taraji P. Henson in the role of “so light she could’ve fooled David Duke” Katherine Johnson in last year’s unfortunate hit Hidden Figures provoked no anger. Darkening is fine, just don’t dare lighten. This can be viewed as “racially healthy” (cue alt-right blogger: “Good fer them bein’ comfortable with their color! We should all be so willin’ to take pride in our race!”) or dishonest (cue opposing alt-right blogger: “Blacks worship the light-skinned among ’em, but they get bullied by their overbearing dark-skinned wimmin into pretendin’ that ‘black is beautiful’”).

The actual answer is probably a healthy mix of column A and column B, but that’s not the focus of this piece. What I’m interested in is how little outrage the goyification of Ginsburg has provoked. Indeed, as the most influential racial/ethnic group in Hollywood, Jews don’t just tolerate goyifying, they’re the ones doing it. Let’s look at that most sacred of Jewish cinematic genres: the Holocaust film. The movie that launched it all—NBC’s 1978 miniseries Holocaust—starred as the doomed family of Jews a parade of gentiles, including James Woods (not Jewish), Fritz Weaver (very not Jewish), and Meryl Streep (a descendant of William Penn…very very not Jewish). The hit 1988 ABC miniseries War and Remembrance saw the most-assuredly-not-Jewish John Gielgud portray a heroic Hebrew gassed by Nazis. 1989’s Triumph of the Spirit featured Willem Dafoe, Costas Mandylor, and Robert Loggia (a goy, a Greek, and a guinea) as spirit-triumphant Auschwitz Jews. 1990’s Max and Helen saw South African Alice Krige and Treat Williams, a descendant of the strikingly not Jewish U.S. Founding Father Robert Treat Paine, as lovelorn death-camp Jews. Jakob the Liar? Robin Williams the goy. In Escape From Sobibor, Aryan übermensch Rutger Hauer portrayed Jewish Holocaust hero Sasha Pechersky despite looking more like one of the SS men who would’ve shot Pechersky on sight.

The list goes on. The lead actress on the award-winning Amazon hit The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, a series about a Jewish housewife who decides to become a stand-up comedian, is a mick named Rachel Brosnahan.

Placed in this context, the casting of Felicity Jones as Ginsburg seems practically expected.

So why do we see such a markedly different reaction from Jews as compared with blacks when it comes to being racially/ethnically altered for the screen? Well, there are several reasons. The first is something I’ve written about before—the remarkable Jewish ability to be either white or “ethnic” depending on the needs of the moment. Jews don’t mind being seen as white; we just don’t want to be seen as white when it disadvantages us. Portraying Holocaust victims as strapping Aryans is to our benefit. It makes the Huns who Holocausted us feel perhaps a little bit more guilty, because now they see their own likeness in the faces of Hitler’s victims. “Look what you did, you monsters…you just gassed Frodo Baggins” (Elijah Wood, extraordinarily not Jewish, killed in a death camp by Gary Sinise in 1992’s The Witness).

Of course, try parroting the line favored by nutcases like “Calypso Gene” Farrakhan that the Holocaust was nothing more than white-on-white crime, and you’ll find that, magically, we’re now no longer white. Indeed, how dare you see us as white. Just because we cast white actors to play us doesn’t mean you should see us as the people we cast to play us in the movies we produce about us.

Another factor in cinema goyification is self-esteem. We Jews can be very self-conscious about our looks. Sure, so can everyone. But we’ve made an art form of it, milking it for comedy and pathos, as well as keeping the garages of Beverly Hills plastic surgeons well-stocked with luxury cars. Jewish women want to look like Felicity Jones. And most Jewish women aren’t more than a deviated septum away from actually being able to achieve that goal. In other words, fantasyland Ruth Ginsburg is not an unattainable goal for the average Jewish gal. To that extent, there’s something affirming about seeing a better-looking reflection of ourselves on the screen. It’s not just how we want to look, it’s also how we can look, if we’re willing to spend a few bucks. A dark-skinned black person, on the other hand, ain’t ever gonna be white. You can Michael Jackson the hell out of yourself, but the best you can hope for is monstrous freak. Dark-skinned blacks have little choice but to embrace the reality of who they are and how they look, because there’s really no changing it. There are a thousand online essays, on sites like The Root, Ebony, Salon, Mic, etc., in which dark-skinned black girls write of the struggle to come to terms with their looks. Their skin tone, their nose, their lips. Because coming to terms is their only realistic option, since altering isn’t much of a possibility. But Jews understand that Melanie Mayron 1978 can become Melanie Mayron 1988 with just a four-hour outpatient procedure.

So we don’t mind the idealized images, because in a way they give us comfort. We don’t see what we can never become, but what we can.

Then, of course, there’s the political motivation. Ginsburg is pushing an agenda that is near and dear to many (most?) American Jews. So, just as in the case of Holocaust films, there’s probably a perception that whites will more easily accept that agenda if they think it’s coming from one of their own. A spoonful of shiksa helps the bad medicine go down.

And finally there’s Ginsburg herself, who has been slammed, even by her fellow leftists, for her propensity for crass self-promotion and self-aggrandizement. She’s probably as pumped as everyone else to see her ethnically cleansed onscreen depiction.

Well, actually, not everyone’s pumped. It took some searching, but I finally found a roaring dissent in the sea of silence regarding the Ginsburg/Jones ethnic switcheroo. Marissa Korbel is a self-described “bleeding heart lawyer” and “award-winning essayist” who writes for Harper’s Bazaar, Guernica, and Bitch magazine. Last week, she penned a piece for the online literary journal The Rumpus that I’d wager is the single most honest piece of writing on the ’net regarding Jews and the Aryanization of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Korbel begins by recounting her insecurities as a self-conscious Jewish seventh grader:

I sat in my mother’s passenger seat—a beige pleather upholstered bench—and stared at my reflection in the flip-down mirror, flattening my nasal septum with my finger. I was sitting in the car…imagining how much better I would look if I had a nose job. It wasn’t even a full nose job that I wanted; it was a tiny stitch, maybe two, that would flatten my septum and improve my whole face. I watched as my nose went from vaguely Semitic to American-as-apple-pie white girl with the tiniest pressure. I imagined a stitch, like the kind you got for injuries, an outpatient surgery. It was such a small thing, one I obsessed over all year.

Which leads to her problem with the Ginsburg film’s casting choice:

Ruth Bader Ginsburg has a real face, a strong and lovely face. We can see in photographs what she looked like as a younger woman, and it’s not like Felicity Jones…. Underneath the gentile-fication of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is this larger problem. What is driving this need to make her look less Jewish? To erase her Judaism, minimize her nose, and reimagine her as a movie star hottie instead of as a brilliant, tenacious mind?

From there Korbel launches into a tirade about “white supremacy” and Black Lives Matter, and at that point the vulnerable seventh grader vanishes and the rigid ideologue appears in her place. It’s a shame, because it was a raw and authentic piece before it fell to clichés. All the same, good on Korbel for expressing publicly what I guarantee most Jewish viewers, reviewers, and pundits thought privately about Jones’ casting. Someone had to say it aloud.

But don’t expect Korbel’s essay to be picked up by national Jewish news and opinion sites. Even its concluding and comforting descent into leftist banality can’t make up for the disquieting honesty of the rest of it. We Jews are generally an introspective lot, but every now and then we encounter an abyss into which even we prefer not to gaze, lest we find Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Semitic mug gazing back at us.

Imagine if an award-winning American journalist had spent three weeks in Eastern Germany and written a feature article about secret bunkers where neo-Nazis were training to usher in a Fourth Reich.

I think most Americans would believe it, and even if the story turned out to be entirely fabricated, I doubt that the writer would have been terminated and thoroughly disgraced. Most Americans have been awash in so much WWII propaganda by the victor, they probably wouldn’t care whether the article was true or not, because it makes them feel good.

A recent scandal suggests that the German media is more honest than its American counterpart. Award-winning German alleged reporter Claas Relotius—he was named CNN’s Journalist of the Year in 2014—has just been unmasked as a rank fabulist after it was revealed that he fabricated large sections of at least 14 articles since 2011—most significantly, a 2017 piece about Trump voters in rural Minnesota that turns out to have been a largely fact-free hit piece designed to appeal to the confirmation bias of media elites who regard rural white Americans as hateful, toothless retardates.

The article appeared in Der Spiegel—one of Europe’s highest-circulation and most respected publications. With a fact-checking staff of 70, this saga is being depicted as Europe’s biggest media scandal since 1983’s “Hitler Diaries” debacle.

Relotius, 33, was first unmasked by coworker Juan Moreno, who smelled something fishy when he started double-checking many of the assertions in Relotius’s 60 published articles for Der Spiegel. When Moreno brought his evidence to higher-ups, they initially accused him of lying, and Relotius was almost successful in having him fired. But faced with mounting evidence that Relotius lies as easily as he breathes, he finally caved last Monday and admitted that he was essentially a fiction writer appealing to the progressive mindset.

The Hillbilly Trumper article, “Where they pray for Trump on Sundays,” aimed its gun barrel at the town of Fergus Falls, Minnesota, where a self-described liberal couple did a bang-up job fact-checking the article’s seemingly endless mistakes and fabrications. In a shimmering example of independent journalism called “Der Spiegel Journalist Messed With the Wrong Town,” Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn say they are “wary about the anthropological gaze on rural America in the wake of the 2016 elections…when before we really didn’t matter to mass media at all.”

They write:

There are only two things those writers seem to have concluded or are able to pitch to their editors — we are either backwards, living in the past and have our heads up our asses, or we’re like dumb, endearing animals that just need a little attention in order to keep us from eating the rest of the world alive….Not only did Relotius’s “exposé” on Fergus Falls make unrecognizable movie-like characters out of the people in my town that I interact with on a daily basis, but its very basic lack of truth and its bizarrely bleak portrayal of the place I love left a very sick, unsettled feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Regarding the article’s truth-to-fiction ratio, they claim that:

In 7,300 words he really only got our town’s population and average annual temperature correct, and a few other basic things, like the names of businesses and public figures, things that a child could figure out in a Google search.

Among the article’s innumerable mistruths:

• Citing the city’s 2016 electoral support for Trump at 70.4%, when it was actually 62.6%.

• Claiming that a sign or signs at the town’s entrance said “Welcome to Fergus Falls, home of damn good folks” and “Mexicans Keep Out.” In the real world, the greeting sign merely says, “Welcome to Fergus Falls.”

• Alleging that City Adminstrator Andrew Bremseth had never seen the ocean, and “was never together with a woman,” Anderson and Krohn present a picture of Bremseth and his live-in girlfriend of many years posing for a selfie in front of the ocean. After interviewing Bremseth, he claims he never said that Trump would “kick ass” and was neither a fan of the New England Patriots nor 18th century French philosophers as the article had alleged.

• Claiming that the Clint Eastwood patriot-fest American Sniper had been playing nonstop in Fergus Falls for two years. A simple email to the local cinema’s owner confirmed that the film had played only a little over a month in 2015.

• Stating that a woman named Maria Rodriguez was a local restaurant owner who “saw Trump as a savior” despite the fact that her high-school aged son Israel was bullied for being Mexican by locals. The son in question, who posed for a picture and was identified as Israel Rodriguez in a photo caption under the article, is actually a college student named Pablo. He says Roletius never interviewed him and had merely asked him to pose for a snapshot. And Pablo said that students in high school never bullied him for being Mexican.

• Claiming that anyone who wishes to enter the local high school “must pass through a security line, through three armored glass doors, and a weapon scanner.” In the real world, there is no weapon scanner and only two doors—neither of which can be properly described as “armored”—and only because two doors are needed to keep the blistering Minnesota winters at bay.

• Averring that the town hosts a “Western Evening” where everyone, even the token local Mexican female, dance in “old-fashioned clothes” and wear “hats and cowboy boots.” No such event exists.

• Stating that students from the local high school took a trip to New York City, where they shunned an outing to Liberty Island and headed straight for Trump Tower. But the students had never taken a class trip to New York City.

Sadly, in the end, the couple reveal their own biases by stating that the majority of their “friends, family and neighbors voted against their own interests in 2016.” It seems as if they couldn’t resist the impulse—one they apparently share with Claas Relotius—to depict their town’s inhabitants as cretinous Cro-Magnons.

But I’ll take whatever journalistic victories we can get these days. A pair of non-journalists from Podunk, USA did far better journalism than CNN’s 2014 Journalist of the Year.

I’ve often wondered why the egregious silencing of any media figure who doesn’t think like Claas Relotious ever since Trump was elected hasn’t become the biggest media news story of the past two years. After all, in previous generations, I would think that muting around half of the nation’s citizens would be a Watergate-level scandal. It was only recently that an online commenter explained the reason: It’s because independent journalists are the mainstream media’s competition, which is why they remain silent on all this silencing.

Sometime during the 1920s, at an exclusive party at Count Boni de Castelanne’s, a great French lady felt herself beginning to die at the dinner table. “Quick, bring the dessert,” she whispered to the waiter.

She was not overcome by greed. She simply wished to hurry dinner along so as not to drop dead before the party rose from the table. In other words, she did not wish to cause discomfort to those present. Needless to say, the lady had impeccable manners.

Now, please don’t get me wrong. I do not expect anyone nowadays to avoid leaving a room when feeling unwell in order to not cause discomfort for the rest. I simply brought up a true story to illustrate how far our mores and manners have fallen these past 100 years. Back then, a grand lady dropping dead would have caused somewhat of a scandal. The hostess of the dinner would have become associated with the death forevermore. Such were the joys of a closed society. Especially in Catholic France, where the old guard tried its best for years to resist the Napoleonic nouveaux, with their extraordinary titles granted to them by the Emperor for having served him well on the battlefield. (Boni de Castellane’s family was titled long before the great Corsican came along, and his pink palace on Avenue Foch I remember well when I was young and lived nearby. Sadly, it is no longer there, torn down and replaced by apartment houses mostly inhabited by rich Arabs.)

Perhaps it sounds stuffy, but I am nostalgic for the good old days when manners were exquisite. You might think that this is a bit much, but not really. Things are so bad at present that even returning to the time of strict etiquette, I find, would be a blessing. Manners, you see, are as important as morals, and have very little to do with a man’s outer attributes—birth, rank, or education—but rather involve his inner qualities of character and behavior. At present, people take phony offense at anything and everything, yet rudeness is de rigueur and boorishness a virtue. It is hip to be discourteous, trendy to act primitive, and “in” to be coarse.

Those who form our culture nowadays—magazine editors, TV writers and producers, and of course the Hollywood elite who put out the absolute dirt emanating from the West Coast—bombard us with stories and shows of coarse people using the coarsest language possible but always shown in a favorable light. Gentle folk speaking without using the f-word are always depicted as bigots. No ifs or buts about it.

In language, of course, is to be found one of the most crucial lines of demarcation between the vulgar and gracious people. I will deal with those responsible for the coarseness of our culture later, because in order to tackle vulgarity we need to stop celebrating it, but for now let’s establish what good manners are: Natural good manners are putting other people before yourself without thinking about it. Actually, Christianity is good manners. The men who queued in an orderly fashion for lifeboats on the Titanic, or allowed others to go first, died in a very Christian manner. Compare that with a recent British survey of 20,000 people, where 91 percent of those asked admitted to no longer saying thank you. Perhaps that is why I don’t actually believe in surveys. It seems impossible that 91 percent of those we extend some small service never thank us. Maybe this is so in downtown Los Angeles or in San Juan, but not in Britain.

Never mind. There are still American and European gentlemen who walk on the outside of the pavement and stand up when a woman enters the room. Some men still give up their seats to women in public transport, although the ghastly #MeToo movement will soon put a stop to it. The irony of it all is that the men I just mentioned are mostly working stiffs and white. Self-reliance plays a large role among the working classes, thus a woman’s vulnerability is paramount to them.

Edmund Burke insisted that manners are more important than laws, but I wonder how many of today’s television producers eager to push the boundaries, and other promoters of “edgy” art, have ever heard of the great man. If they had, perhaps they would not have contributed as much as they have to the incivility corroding our society today. These talentless ruffians like to claim that they espouse a counter-courtesy in the shape of political correctness. But PC is nothing but political manipulation, communism in disguise, a central control of people’s lives, the imposition of a political agenda by a minority on the majority. One day not far off, good manners will be deemed politically incorrect, just as they were in Orwell’s chilling 1984.

Good manners are not a superficial activity. They serve a moral purpose. They are the outward signs of an inner unselfishness, a readiness to put others first. They are the direct opposite of the me, me, me mentality, what W.B. Yeats defined as the essence of civilization. Manners are the opposite of brute force. The duel, once a benchmark of settling differences between gentlemen, had a mannered code, and was a downside better than a knife in the back or a street brawl.

How did we get to live in such a mannerless world? How did we breach the period when that grand lady asked the waiter to hurry up with the dessert to today’s world of nonstop four-letter expletives? I suppose when triumphant ignorance took over responsible positions in the media and entertainment and publishing industries. Better yet, when these above-mentioned industries related popular culture with obscenity, boorishness, and a constant diet of puerile filth. Anyone resisting these affronts to good taste and civilized living is seen as a reactionary, which brings me to the vile and coarse texting that goes on with the internet. (Personally I do not text and do not tweet and do not allow comments on my website that use vulgarity.) There is no doubt that the boundaries of taste and decency are being pushed ever further back in the name of connecting with one another through such useless and horrible inventions as Facebook. (Sadists regularly troll grieving families who have lost children, desecrating their memories. Zuckerberg and his gang of billionaires call it freedom of expression.)

And another thing: Lack of talent breeds four-letter words. Show me a writer of a TV series with great talent and his show will have the minimum of four-letter words. In fact, people with talent do not need to use them. Lack of talent, however, guarantees nonstop filth. Expletives are also part of the culture of triumphant ignorance—the belief that to behave like a slob or a gangster is an indication of manly virility. To a certain sort of half-wit, obscenities are testosterone turned into the spoken word. I fear that it is a sign of the times.

The fact is, obscenities have become smart—the symbol of a generation that disregards majority opinion, but thinks it clever. Yet not so long ago, I remember going to Yankee Stadium as a teenager and not hearing a single swear word in the crowded bleachers, and certainly none by the players. (Today no pro athlete is worth his salt unless he uses the f-word as an adverb, adjective, and verb.) Ditto for celebrities. They consider themselves cutting-edge when being boorish and using profanity. Yet no one from the mainstream media or those ghastly late-night-show hosts has had the courage to point out that those who use profanity nonstop display a woeful lack of imagination. F—ing this and f—ing that and using F as a verb and noun in the same sentence is the equivalent of a caveman’s grunt, nothing else. But you’ll never see a New York Times editorial denouncing such vulgarity because it emanates from the street, a street that is mostly black and brown, and it would be politically incorrect to criticize anything blacks or Latinos do or say.

The people in the academy and the media who turn a blind eye to this outrage are mainly victims of cultural deprivation—the idea that to shock is the same as succeeding while letting all our emotions hang out without any inhibitions. We can thank the ’60s for this, and our hippy friends. Civilization took a beating during the ’60s as the young demonstrated against the war in Vietnam. But after the war was over, we forgot that civilization depends on considering the susceptibilities of others. The elegance of Shakespeare’s language was lost when four-letter words became de rigueur. Hollywood, needless to say, jumped at its newfound freedom. For much too long, the Sammy Glicks who run the place felt that they were pandering to the forces of convention by not showing extreme violence and nudity and obscenity. Their time had come.

As some of you may remember, Central European Jews created Hollywood a century ago. People like Goldwyn, Mayer, and Warner—not their real names, but Americanized—showed an America of white picket fences, polite and helpful neighbors, and churchgoing citizens who never swore and thought Andy Hardy was a tad too naughty. Mind you, it was reel life, but it was based on what those foreign Jews had seen in America. Wonderful movies like The Best Years of Our Lives and All About Eve showed poverty, conflict, and unbridled ambition without a single swear word muttered by anyone. Yet they reflected a real and true American scene. (President Nixon went to see Sam Goldwyn on his deathbed and Sam showed off his proudest possession, “my Toujours Lautrec.”)

After them came the deluge. Young American-born Jews looked elsewhere to show their America. And that was mostly in the gutter. They were out to make money like their predecessors, I’ll grant you, and they found that their chief audiences were and are the young. The fall of the studios took place during the mid-’60s. Bleeding hearts eager to accommodate angry blacks salivated at ghetto language. Movies, music, and books follow trends; they do not set them. So what we got was the lowering of standards, with the general population given a visual diet of smut and soft porn, the effects of which have turned us into a nation of foulmouthed, tongue-tied morons.

This trend has continued on a downward spiral ever since. I was recently watching something called The Affair on television. A well-known writer is introduced to a Princeton University writing class by a fellow writer. “My God, you’re f—ing Noah Solloway, that’s f—ing amazing,” says a student to the visiting writer. The visitor smiles and feels proud to be recognized. Now that’s simply gratuitous swearing injected by the know-nothing director or writer to exhibit hipdom. Back in my time at the University of Virginia, one f-word would have had me thrown out of my fraternity and expelled if used in class, especially while addressing a visiting writer.

Hollywood etiquette is all about reminding others that you are more important than they are. And Hollywood does educate large parts of America. Certainly television does, and TV is just as bad, probably worse on cable, as Tinseltown. The printed word is not much better. Glossy magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair now promote only minorities and the LGBT community. In fact, under the egregious Anna Wintour, a Condé Nast Vogue for children ran a long article on how to test which sex gives you more pleasure. This was for the children’s benefit. My proudest achievement has been once managing to drive the ghastly Wintour to tears of frustration. The argument was over politics, and I managed to show what a phony she is while praising her for her successful social climb posing as an English member of the upper crust. She is nothing of the sort.

Never mind. Glossies now have curse words in their editor’s letters, using expletives to enliven their covers and such. And there are enough suckers around who will pay to read such rubbish. Cover cursing is now in vogue. The so-called elite in the media, the Times, the networks, the nerds of Silicon Valley, all believe that bad language and adult material once viewed in Times Square by raincoat-wearing weirdos are a valid part of life, that only puritans are bothered about it. The fact that large majorities everywhere are appalled by the filth that appears on our screens is given little weight by the self-proclaimed left-wing leaders. And when it comes to LGBT, there is more coverage of that group than there is of the majority-straight population. In a recent book review of a gay photographer of The New York Times, the reviewer, one Dwight Garner, correctly admired the memoirs of Bill Cunningham, an acquaintance of mine and a very nice man, but also wrote, “In what is this book’s worst sentence, he notes that ‘generations of good breeding’ are among the things necessary to carry off high fashion, you can’t slipcover a pig and expect it not to grunt.”

See what I mean about an agenda being handed down by the bosses of the Times that absolutely no sentence might contain anything favorable to good breeding and old families? I thought it the truest sentence in the memoir; the rest was interesting only to New York fashionistas. So, generations of good breeding are now to be avoided at all costs. And why not? When one Safaree Samuels, a black rapper, is paid a seven-figure sum to create a sex toy molded from his member, and it’s reported as hard news in the social pages of newspapers, you know the battle is lost. I suppose the war was lost when God died—according to Time magazine, that is, sometime back in the early ’70s. People who don’t go to church and don’t believe in a Christian God are far more likely to fall into the quicksand of porn, drugs, and violence. Black kids without fathers are far more likely to be recruited into crime, and also be celebrated by the media and aped by those who should know better. Once upon a time, newly rich people used to ape their social betters. Now the opposite is true. Media types talk like ghetto thugs trying to impress.

Personally, I have always seen myself as special and apart. Many of my friends believe in privilege and tradition and refuse to apologize for their good luck. We put up with the horrors of modern life, the brutishness, the hideous buildings, the deleterious effect on civilized life of egalitarianism, and the misuse of language. The best way to resist the brutality of modern life is to remonstrate with those friends who use foul language and to refuse as much as possible to rub elbows with slobs.

Last but not least, do not believe a word the so-called experts tell you. For example: Social scientists never quoted by mainstream media insist that racially diverse communities are more suspicious, withdrawn, ungenerous, fractured, and fractious. But in 2007, such an incendiary refutation of the well-known truth that diversity is strength was refuted by the people who had done the research under pressure. Publication of the facts was delayed, and eventually they were not published.

So what else is new?

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