My partner has come out, too, as a femme homosexual transgender man

In my previous blog post, I described that I have come out as the butch lesbian transgender woman that I am. When I finally worked up the courage to inform my partner, Nancy, of this, she said that she, too, had some news for me.

Because she has a vagina, the sex that was assigned to her at birth, against her consent, was female. But, over the years she has come to realize that she self-identifies her gender as male, that she is a homosexual male, preferring sex with other men, that she likes to dress and wear her hair in an effeminate way (as many other drag queens do), and that she prefers the pronouns "she/hers/her." In sum, she, too, is not a heterosexual female, but a femme homosexual transgender man.

What a relief for both of us, after all these years, to be able to truly acknowledge our inner selves to each other.

I am not guy, but a butch lesbian transgender woman

In an earlier blog post, I came out as guy, or heterosexual male. After recently reading Ryan T. Anderson's book When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, I have realized that my sexual identity is quite a bit more nuanced than that and I will attempt to explain it here.

As a preface, let me refer to California's recently enacted Senate Bill 826, which mandates that publicly-held corporations put females on their boards. This bill defines the term "female" as follows:

“Female” means an individual who self-identifies her gender as a woman, without regard to the individual’s designated sex at birth.

Because I have a penis, my sex was designated at birth (without my consent, I might add) as male. Over the years, however, I have come to realize that I self-identify my gender as a woman. That is, I am a transgender woman. More precisely, I have come to realize that I self-identify as a lesbian transgender woman, that is, I am a woman who has a sexual preference for other women. And, as is the case with many lesbians, I prefer to express my gender by wearing butch clothing and cutting my hair short. Being butch, I also prefer to be referred to with the pronouns "he/him/his" and to use men's restrooms. In sum, I have realized that I am not guy (that is, heterosexual male), after all. Rather I am a butch lesbian transgender woman. I should also note that, as a butch lesbian transgender woman, I do not wish to have my penis and testicles removed through gender affirmation surgery because I prefer to use my original equipment instead of being forced to use a dildo strap, as my non-transgender butch lesbian sisters are forced to do. Finally, let me clarify that I use the term "transgender woman" as an aid to the reader only. In reality, I find the term "transgender woman" demeaning since it implies that I am not fully woman, which I am.

In sum, although previously I mistakenly thought of myself as a man, I have now realized I am a butch lesbian transgender woman (a BLTW). As a BLTW with over 30 years experience in the software industry, I hereby declare myself qualified and available to serve on the boards of directors of California high-tech companies.

Partisan attorneys general demand impartiality

All 18 of the state attorneys general who signed a letter to Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker demanding that he recuse himself from any role in overseeing the Mueller investigation are Democrats. Their letter solemnly intones:

Because a reasonable person could question your impartiality in the matter, your recusal is necessary to maintain public trust in the integrity of the investigation and to protect the essential and longstanding independence of the Department you have been chosen to lead, on an acting basis.

So, these attorneys general have the audacity to call into question the impartiality of Whitaker at the same time that the fact that all 18 of them are Democrats clearly indicates that their letter is nothing more than just another example of rank Democratic partisanship.

The Democrats' attempts to weaponize the American judicial system, now, the offices of 18 state attorneys general, against the Trump administration are only intensifying.

The frisson of revulsion and the palimpsest of nature

These days we see more and more ads, television shows, and movies that portray homosexuals embracing, kissing, and engaging in other acts of intimacy. I am a heterosexual and, every time I see one of these portrayals, a shudder of disgust -- I think of it as a frisson of revulsion -- passes through my body. I am sure that most people would classify this frisson as homophobia, a response that in this day and age is almost universally condemned as morally repugnant and evil.

These reflections prompted me to ask the following question: Is this sense of revulsion a part of my nature or has it simply been inculcated in me by the cultural environment in which I was raised. This is, of course, the age-old question of: Nature vs. Nurture. If my feelings of revulsion are not part of my nature, but have merely been inculcated in me by the way in which I was nurtured (i.e., raised), then it should be possible, by changing the way I am nurtured, to correct them. Perhaps if I were to submit myself conscientiously and in good faith to the reeducation camps of modern progressive liberalism, I could be purged of all such feelings and my thinking "corrected." The blank slate in my soul on which my upbringing wrote all the bad instructions that cause my frisson could be wiped clean and I would be restored to pristine goodness, rehabilitated as a kind of non-homophobic noble savage.

If these feelings are, in fact, simply culturally determined, I am even willing to consider the possibility that I have become so inveterately habituated by my environment to responding in this morally repugnant and evil way that it is effectively impossible to change me and that the only way the world will become a better place is when I and the cohort of people like me perish from the face of the earth. Sentiments of this kind often take something like the form: "The world will be a better place when all those old, white, heterosexuals die off." In fact, if one follows this train of thought to its logical conclusion, one might be inclined to argue that it is actually better for society to take preemptive action to cleanse itself of people like me in the public interest (kind of the way liberals fantasize about improving the world by killing off all the "deplorables"). If the reeducation camp doesn't work, the extermination camp will. Either way, if my frisson is culturally determined, that would seem to imply that it will be possible someday and somehow to reeducate or exterminate our way to a brave new world in which no heterosexual will ever feel a frisson of revulsion when he or she encounters homosexuality. The dawning of this brave new world will be one more example of "liberal progress" and another degree on Obama's inevitable moral arc of history.

But these considerations prompted several further questions in my mind: Isn't my frisson of revulsion at homosexuality simply a somewhat extreme manifestation of my preference for heterosexuality. Or, expressed conversely, isn't my sexual preference for heterosexuality simply a mild, attenuated form of my frisson of revulsion at homosexuality? And: if my frisson of revulsion and my preference for heterosexuality are essentially two manifestations of the same thing and my frisson is morally repugnant and evil, then, isn't my sexual preference for heterosexuality morally repugnant and evil, too? And, finally: if it is true that my frisson of revulsion at homosexuality is culturally determined, then, why would it not also be the case that the sexual preference I feel is a mere cultural construct, too, and in no way an unalterable part of my nature, something merely inculcated in me by my cultural environment, but in no way an unchangeable feature of my being? If that were the case, then, hypothetically, sexual preferences could likewise be effaced, and our brave new world might eventually consist of humans who not only feel no frissons of revulsion at homosexuality but also do not have any sexual preferences whatsoever and are perfectly indifferent to whether they engage in homosexual or heterosexual couplings. In fact, the categories "homosexual" and "heterosexual" would disappear, mere cultural constructs erased by correct ratiocination.

The absurdity of this hypothesis, however, (there are those who actually believe it is true) suggested to me that perhaps my frisson of revulsion is not a cultural construct after all. Rather, my weak mind is forced to conclude, the most likely explanation is that my frisson is somehow connected to my sexual preference, both of which are part of my human nature, which is itself determined primarily by the bi-modal distribution of the biological sexes in humans. But, if my frisson is simply a part of my human nature, I find it difficult to understand how it can be morally repugnant and evil. I happen to be guy (that is, a representative of the one mode), and that's all there is to it. But, if that is the case, then it will never be possible to create the brave new world free of frissons of revulsion because any attempt to purge these morally repugnant and evil frissons will simply be an attempt to deny human nature. Seen in this light, the closest analogy to the reeducation camps of modern progressive liberalism (and the extermination camps they logically entail) are the reeducation camps of China's Cultural Revolution or the tribunals of Jacobin France.

Whenever I consider issues like these I am reminded of the metaphor of the palimpsest. A palimpsest is a page from a medieval manuscript from which the old text has been scraped or washed off so that new text can be written on it. Perhaps my soul (or personality, if you prefer) is like a medieval manuscript that needs to be scraped clean. That is, if my frisson of revulsion is merely a cultural construct, then, it should be possible to scrape or wash off this construct from my soul and replace it with a text of new moral instructions that cause me to respond "correctly" to homosexuality. But, what if it is the finger of nature that has written these things, indelibly, on the page of my soul and humans are vainly attempting to expunge and write over them? In that case, the underlying text written by nature will always continue to seep back through to the surface (as often happens with real palimpsests) and reappear.

Is it possible to expunge the texts written by nature?

Update:

In his article Biological Limits of Gender Construction, the late sociologist J. Richard Udry, stated:

If [societies] depart too far from the underlying sex-dimorphism of biological predispositions, they will generate social malaise and social pressures to drift back toward closer alignment with biology. A social engineering program to degender society would require a Maoist approach: continuous renewal of revolutionary resolve and tolerance for conflict. [emphasis added]

I note that Udry's remark that societies will "drift back toward closer alignment with biology" is the equivalent of my metaphor of the palimpsest in which "the underlying text written by nature will always continue to seep back through to the surface" and that Udry's characterization of the program required to degender society as "Maoist" is the equivalent of my observation that "the closest analogy to the reeducation camps of modern progressive liberalism (and the extermination camps they logically entail) are the reeducation camps of China's Cultural Revolution or the tribunals of Jacobin France." I do not claim, of course, that Udry's article supports the views expressed in this blog post, only that it is interesting to note that the same metaphors occurred to both of us.

Pipe bomb update

In related news, Michael Avenatti announced today that Julie Swetnick saw Brett Kavanaugh and a gang of his friends make bombs by the punchbowl at parties when they were both young.

The pipe bombs are the work of Democratic agents provocateurs

Were the pipe bombs sent out by Fusion GPS, with payment coming from the DNC and funneled through Perkins, Coie?

And is Corey "Spartacus" Booker pissed off because he didn't get one, since it would have ratified his membership in good standing as a member of the "Resistance?"

Seriously, take a look at this photo and ask yourself if this is the work of someone with a serious intent to harm a political figure. Rather, these bombs have all the earmarks of the work of agents provocateurs.

Timothy McVeigh rescued a floundering Bill Clinton by bombing the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

I'm betting that now some crazy member of Antifa is trying to create a "McVeigh effect" right before the mid-term elections to boost flagging Democratic polling numbers.

Muori, Donaldo damnato!

Nancy and I saw Puccini's Tosca at SF Opera tonight. I enjoyed it tremendously. My admiration for Puccini grows and grows. Verdi is God, but, with Tosca, Puccini approaches Verdi. And Puccini does it in such a different way. Puccini is so much more modern than Verdi. With Tosca, the music and the drama are inextricably intertwined in a way they never are in Verdi. As you listen to the music of Tosca, mirroring the dramatic action and accentuating the moods of the characters (so unlike the arias in Verdi, those complex and highly structured exercises in musical-beauty-existing-for-its-own-sake), you understand why every great movie has a great soundtrack.

And then, there is the thoroughly modern flavor of the role of Scarpia, the Chief of Police in Tosca, whose greatest pleasures in life are torture, rape, and endless, shameless, perfidious chicanery and manipulation. Scarpia is the prototype of every fascist, SS officer, and secret policeman of the 20th century. The entire opera can be viewed as an extended musical reflection on fascism and "The Resistance" to it. I don't think any other music has ever been written that captures as effectively as the End of Act II the desperate resolve to which a person can be driven when cornered by fascism. Tosca has agreed to surrender to Scarpia's lust in exchange for Scarpia freeing Tosca's lover, Cavaradossi. But, then the music grows dark, sad, and tortured as Tosca sees a knife lying on the table and realizes she has made a compact she can never keep. She conceals the knife in her clothing, and, as Scarpia triumphantly approaches to deflower her, plunges it into him, and then stands over him and exclaims "Questo è il bacio di Tosca! Ti suffoca il sangue? Muori, damnato! Muori! Muori! Muori!" ("There's Tosca's kiss for you! Are you choking on your blood? Die, damn you! Die! Die! Die!").

The only downside to the evening was the thoroughly predictable Director's Note in the program, which attempted in veiled terms to draw a comparison between Scarpia and Trump. One gets the impression that San Francisco views this year's production of Tosca as its own contribution to the Trump-as-Tyrant-being-assassinated genre. You could almost hear the audience members hissing to themselves "Muori, Donaldo damnato!" Even so, a thoroughly enjoyable evening with Puccini.

Females and Indians on corporate boards

Jeff Harding has written an excellent blog post on California's recently enacted Senate Bill 826, which mandates that publicly-held corporations put females on their boards.

One thing Jeff does not discuss is how the term "female" is defined in the bill:

“Female” means an individual who self-identifies her gender as a woman, without regard to the individual’s designated sex at birth.

Does that mean that I, who, last time I looked, have all the "earmarks" of a male, can count as one of the women on a board if I simply choose to self-identify as a woman? But, if the only logical qualification for being defined as a "female" is that I self-identify as such, then isn't the entire purpose of the bill, which is to add to boards the different perspectives and management approaches of females, vitiated?

Here is a related question: If California should ever mandate that other groups, such as "blacks" or "latinos," be represented on corporate boards, then, would it be enough for me to self-identify as black or a latino to qualify? Alternatively, how much "black or latino dna" (if there is such a thing) would I need to have in order to qualify? For example, if the California legislature required American Indians to be represented on boards, would Elizabeth Warren, whose DNA shows evidence of Native American DNA from six to 10 generations ago, qualify as an American Indian?

These are examples of the ludicrous questions that this kind of identity politics leads us to.

As an aside, there was one sentence from Jeff's blog post that struck me in particular, a quote from an abstract of an article by Alice Eagly, a professor of psychology at Northwestern:

Rather than ignoring or furthering distortions of scientific knowledge to fit advocacy goals, scientists should serve as honest brokers who communicate consensus scientific findings to advocates and policy makers in an effort to encourage exploration of evidence‐based policy options.

Amen! If only we all would adopt this sentence as a foundational principle, the world would be a much better place. Of course, a second foundational principle would need to be that advocates and policy makers should follow and be guided by "consensus scientific findings."

Affirmative consent in Victorian times

This evening I was reflecting on the concept of affirmative consent and on how much energy is being spent these days on devising mechanisms whereby partners can signal their affirmative consent to a sexual liaison. I found it interesting to learn that there are even suggestions that sex education classes include instruction on how partners may obtain affirmative consent from each other.

Suddenly, the following proposal for a foolproof 3-step mechanism for obtaining affirmative consent sprang into my mind:

1. the young man seeks the hand of the young woman from her father (this step is perhaps optional);
2. if the father approves, the young man proposes to the young woman;
3. if the young woman accepts, the young man and young woman engage in a public ceremony, presided over and sanctioned by a respected member of the community, whereby they officially signal to the general public that they consent to engage in exclusive sexual relations with each other.

Oh wait! Silly me! This mechanism for obtaining affirmative consent is called "marriage" and it's just how things used to work in the old days before we all became sexually enlightened and liberated.

The only reason why we need to devise mechanisms for signaling affirmative consent and to teach them in sex education classes is because we have discarded the traditional mechanisms that used to work so well.

Perhaps those Victorians weren't so benighted after all.

UPDATE:

Heather Mac Donald has assessed the situation correctly. In a recent interview in WSJ with Jillian Jay Melchior, Mac Donald discussed the topic of affirmative consent:

She similarly thinks conservatives miss the point when they focus on the due-process infirmities of campus sexual-misconduct tribunals. She doesn’t believe there’s a campus “rape epidemic,” only a lot of messy, regrettable and mutually degrading hookups. “To say the solution to all of this is simply more lawyering up is ridiculous because this is really, fundamentally, about sexual norms.”

Society once assumed “no” was women’s default response to sexual propositions. “That put power in the hands of females,” Ms. Mac Donald says. “You didn’t have to bargain every time you didn’t want to have sex. The male had to bargain you into yes. But you could say no, and you didn’t have to exhaust yourself.” Sexual liberationists claimed men and women were alike, and chivalry and feminine modesty were oppressive. “Now, the default for premarital sex is yes,” Ms. Mac Donald says. “That gives enormous power to the male libido” at the expense of women.

The #MeToo movement is one reflection of this reality, but so is the growing realization that consensual sex isn’t always healthy sex. To get back to the “no” default, students are “inviting adults back into the bedroom to write rules that read like a mortgage contract,” Ms. Mac Donald says. Young women, meanwhile, are learning “to redefine their experience as a result of the patriarchy, whereas, in fact, it’s a result of sexual liberation.” [emphasis added]

Burke recognized the same destructive forces at work in the French Revolution as have been at work in our sexual revolution:

All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion ... When antient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us; nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer.

The traditional prohibitions against casual, pre-marital, promiscuous sex -- prohibitions that constituted the decent drapery of life, furnished from the wardrobe of the moral imagination -- were exploded by the sexual revolution as so much ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. But, once these prohibitions had been eliminated and a new age of "sexual liberation and enlightenment" had dawned, men and women found that they no longer had any moral compass to guide them and women were left exposed, naked and shivering and without defense, in the face of the enormous power of the male libido. Unsurprisingly -- almost necessarily -- what has ensued are the messy, regrettable and mutually degrading hookups that are the defining characteristic of life on our campuses today. To remedy this situation, we now have calls for the new rules of affirmative consent to be re-introduced, which conceptualize sex not as a romantic and erotic act, but as a business contract. But, these contractual rules would never have been needed if the traditional prohibitions and the practice of such cultural norms as modesty, chivalry, and shame had not been jettisoned.

Ms Ford's second front door

FEINSTEIN: “I see. And do you have that second front door?”

FORD: “Yes.”

FEINSTEIN: “It…”

FORD: “It — it now is a place to host Google interns. Because we live near Google, so we get to have — other students can live there.”

I love the fact that she uses the terms "hosting" and "living there," when what she is really referring to is "renters." In other words, the real reason why Ms Ford and her husband added the second front door was to create an addition to their house that they rent to Google interns or Stanford students.

I have two sons, one a grad student at Stanford living in Mountain View, and one in Berkeley who just finished his Masters degree at UC. They are both currently being "hosted" in apartments, to the tune of over $2000 a month each.

Falsa in uno, falsa in omnibus

So we now learn from Christine Blasey Ford's longtime old boyfriend two new facts:

1. He personally witnessed Ms Ford coaching a friend on polygraph examinations. This, after Ms Ford in her testimony before the Judiciary Committee had explicitly denied ever having given anyone tips or advice on how to pass a polygraph examination.
2. She had deceived that boyfriend and fraudulently charged his credit card.

Applying the standard falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal insisted should be applied to all of Mr Kavanaugh's testimony, we are now justified in ignoring all of Ms Ford's testimony as false since she obviously told a bold-faced lie in one statement.

A row of threes

My wife Nancy and I just returned from a marvelous 18 day vacation in Ireland. Nancy is of Irish extraction on her deceased father's side and we raised many an Irish whiskey to him while we were there.

One of the distinctive things about the Irish accent is that they pronounce "th" as a hard "t" sound.

When she was a girl, Nancy attended a Catholic grammar school. One day in first grade, the students were practicing writing their numbers. The old Irish nun stood over them and commanded "OK, class, now I want you to write a row of threes." While all the other students were busily writing down rows of the numeral, Nancy dutifully followed Sister's instructions and drew a row of trees.

I love my wife.

Benjamin Wittes' unfair and naive attack on Brett Kavanaugh

Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institute has written a a grossly unfair attack on Brett Kavanaugh disguised as the reluctant condemnation of a dear friend. Democrats are laughing up their sleeves. Wittes writes:

His opening statement was an unprecedentedly partisan outburst of emotion from a would-be justice. I do not begrudge him the emotion, even the anger. He has been through a kind of hell that would leave any person gasping for air. But I cannot condone the partisanship -- which was raw, undisguised, naked, and conspiratorial -- from someone who asks for public faith as a dispassionate and impartial judicial actor. ... Can anyone seriously entertain the notion that a reasonable pro-choice woman would feel like her position could get a fair shake before a Justice Kavanaugh? Can anyone seriously entertain the notion that a reasonable Democrat, or a reasonable liberal of any kind, would after that performance consider him a fair arbiter in, say, a case about partisan gerrymandering, voter identification, or anything else with a strong partisan valence? Quite apart from the merits of Ford’s allegations against him, Kavanaugh’s display on Thursday -- if I were a senator voting on confirmation -- would preclude my support.

I am astonished that Mr Wittes so completely misunderstood Judge Kavanaugh's opening remarks. My response to Mr Wittes is: yes, I do feel that a reasonable party to litigation could be confident that a Justice Kavanaugh would be a fair arbiter. This is because Mr Kavanaugh's opening statement was anything but partisan. Rather, it was a passionate rejection of partisan prejudice and closed-mindedness; for example, of the prejudgement of a Democratic senator who labeled him as "evil" before the hearings even started and of the ludicrous hyperbole of a former head of the National Democratic Committee who claimed that Kavanaugh "would threaten the lives of millions of Americans for decades to come." His opening statement was likewise a passionate defense of the principle that due process must be accorded to all and that the accused should be convicted only by the force of factual evidence, the testimony of witnesses, and rational argumentation rather than because of blind faith in the uncorroborated accusations of an accuser. So, yes, if a party to litigation were to present factual evidence and testimony and logical argumentation to a Justice Kavanaugh (rather than bald assertions), I am fully confident that he would listen with an open mind, not prejudge the case, and give that party a fair hearing.

After all, many parties to litigation have received a fair hearing before Judge Kavanaugh over many years, as was testified to by the ABA, which assigned to Judge Kavanaugh the rating of "well-qualified." As the ABA states in its backgrounder to its Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary:

In evaluating “judicial temperament” the Committee considers the nominee’s compassion, decisiveness, open-mindedness, courtesy, patience, freedom from bias and commitment to equal justice under the law. ... To merit the Committee’s rating of “Well Qualified,” a Supreme Court nominee must be a preeminent member of the legal profession, have outstanding legal ability and exceptional breadth of experience, and meet the very highest standards of integrity, professional competence and judicial temperament. The rating of “Well Qualified” is reserved for those found to merit the Committee’s strongest affirmative endorsement." [emphasis added]

For Mr Wittes to question Judge Kavanaugh's fairness and impugn his judicial temperament because of one occasion on which he expressed righteous and fully justified anger at a smear campaign directed against him after his fairness and judicial temperament had been judged by the ABA to have been unimpeachable over a period of many years is simply grossly unfair. Keep in mind that the temperament and fairness of Judge Kavanaugh had never been called into question before the vicious attacks on him started to accumulate during his confirmation hearings. As I wrote the other day:

[A]fter doing everything in her power to antagonize the man, our noble California Senator, Dianne Feinstein, now has the temerity to complain that he has become antagonistic. It is as if she had beaten a dog with a stick repeatedly and then, when it snarled at her in its anguish, she said “You see? You see how vicious and rabid it is? That's why we must put it down.”

Wittes continues:

I fear the evidence is not ... quite in equipoise, even if one believes that a senator should confirm a justice on the basis that the presumption of innocence should break the tie between two equally compelling testimonies. At least as I read it, though it pains me to say so, the evidence before us leans toward Ford.

The experienced sex crimes prosecutor, Rachel Mitchell, on the other hand, has indicated that Ms Ford's allegations do not even meet the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard used in civil lawsuits:

In the legal context, here is my bottom line: A “he said, she said” case is incredibly difficult to prove. But this case is even weaker than that. Dr. Ford identified other witnesses to the event, and those witnesses either refuted her allegations or failed to corroborate them. For the reasons discussed below, I do not think that a reasonable prosecutor would bring this case based on the evidence before the Committee. Nor do I believe that this evidence is sufficient to satisfy the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard

It is presumptuous, to say the least, for Mr Wittes to consider his ability to assess Ms Ford's testimony superior to that of a seasoned sex crimes investigator with many years of experience.

Wittes goes on:

Kavanaugh’s testimony, whatever one makes of his impassioned claims of innocence on the specific charge, is not credible on the more general issue of his drinking habits. ... His apparent lack of candor on the culture of drinking at Georgetown Prep and later is a problem of its own, quite apart from what it may indicate about the truth of Ford’s story. ... I don’t believe in white lies from anyone else either in sworn congressional testimony

Regarding Mr Kavanaugh's drinking habits in high school and college, the Democrats and their allies in the media are applying a standard to Judge Kavanaugh that they have never applied to Democrats. For example, the drinking habits of Teddy Kennedy were never considered to be disqualifying. Even now, Beto O'Rourke, the current Democratic senatorial candidate from Texas, has himself admitted to being so drunk while driving as a young man that he crashed his car; police records indicate that he tried to flee the scene of the accident; and yet, none of this is judged by either his fellow Democrats or the media as even remotely disqualifying (after all, he's so cool he skateboards). Likewise, Barack Obama himself admitted to using marijuana and even cocaine in the period "before he entered politics" (a convenient phrase, which conceals exactly when he stopped using) and it was never considered disqualifying for him. As I wrote the other day:

[W]here were all these critics of substance abuse when Barack Obama admitted to smoking marijuana and snorting cocaine when he was a young man? Back in 2006, the NYT reported:
Obama had written in his first book, "Dreams From My Father" (1995), before entering politics, that he had used marijuana and cocaine ("maybe a little blow"). He said he had not tried heroin because he did not like the pusher who was trying to sell it to him. ... "It was reflective of the struggles and confusion of a teenage boy," he said. "Teenage boys are frequently confused."

Ah, I see: Barry's cocaine use was the confusion of a teenage boy, but Brett's drinking is an unforgivable crime. And "maybe a little blow?" This is the very definition of a white lie. There is no "maybe" about it, Barack: either you did or you did not snort cocaine. And, if you did, you know exactly how much you did. In other words, Obama was never entirely truthful in his characterization of his embarrassing youthful drug habits, but this was never seen as disqualifying for him. (For a lot more on Barry's pot smoking habits with the "Choom Gang" in Hawaii, see here.)

It is simply unfair for Mr Wittes to apply one standard to those who are the darlings of the Democrats and the media and another, far more priggish, standard to those who are not.

So come on, Ben, get off your high horse and realize that your delicate moral sense is being manipulated by a bunch of shameless Dems and their media lackeys who afterwards are simply going to laugh at how completely they hoodwinked you. Do not allow the Democrats to add the verb "kavanaugh" to the verb "bork."

Expel Feinstein from the Senate

In her testimony, Ms Ford said:

Sexual assault victims should be able to decide for themselves when and whether their private experience is made public.

A noble sounding platitude. But, there was also a responsibility to make the accused aware of Ms Ford's accusation. That is, there was also an obligation to make Mr Kavanaugh aware of the fact that Ms Ford had gone so far as to send a letter to her United States Senator alleging that he had assaulted her. To neglect this obligation was grossly unfair to Mr Kavanaugh and reveals clearly how this episode was handled without any regard whatsoever to Mr Kavanaugh's right to due process.

Ms Ford had sent a letter to her official representative alleging that Mr Kavanaugh had committed a very serious crime, maintaining that she felt it was her "civic duty" to do so; but, at the same time she insisted that letter be kept confidential, essentially denying the accused the right even to know that he had been accused and the ability to confront his accuser and defend himself.

Senator Feinstein, the senior Democratic member on the Judiciary Committee, should have appreciated the gross injustice such a secret agreement constituted and informed Ms Ford that, if she was going to press this charge, she needed to press it publicly. That Senator Feinstein did not do this, thereby depriving Mr Kavanaugh of his right to due process, was a gross dereliction of her duties, an action for which Senator Feinstein, whether she acted out of malice or only because she has become a doddering old fool, should be expelled from the Senate.

Brett = angry drunk; Barack = confused youth

As Fox reports, the attempt to smear Brett Kavanaugh because he drank in college and allegedly lied about it is now officially in full swing:

In a statement released Sunday, a Yale classmate of Kavanaugh’s said he is “deeply troubled by what has been a blatant mischaracterization by Brett himself of his drinking at Yale.” Charles “Chad” Ludington, who now teaches at North Carolina State University, said he was friend of Kavanaugh’s at Yale and that Kavanaugh was “a frequent drinker, and a heavy drinker.”

“On many occasions I heard Brett slur his words and saw him staggering from alcohol consumption, not all of which was beer. When Brett got drunk, he was often belligerent and aggressive,” Ludington said. While saying that youthful drinking should not condemn a person for life, Ludington said he was concerned about Kavanaugh’s statements under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Note Ludington's careful effort to frame the issue not as a question of whether Kavanaugh was guilty of excessive youthful drinking, perhaps a pardonable indiscretion, but as a question of whether Kavanaugh lied to the Judiciary Committee, presumably a disqualifying offense. This has become a favorite tactic of investigators, including Robert Mueller: attack the victim not because of the seriousness of the crime he allegedly committed (if there even was a crime committed), but because he lied about it to the investigator. For example, as I have pointed out elsewhere, Mueller charged Mike Flynn not because he had spoken with the Russian ambassador (presumably part of his duties), but because he had lied about it to the FBI.

In other words, Ludington's statement has all the earmarks of a document that has been carefully formulated by lawyers so that it has the maximum potential to damage Kavanaugh, which is to say that this fucking prig, Mr Charles Ludington, is just another Democratic partisan working together with Democratic lawyers to defeat the confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice with whose judicial philosophy they all disagree.

And where were all these critics of substance abuse when Barack Obama admitted to smoking marijuana and snorting cocaine when he was a young man? Back in 2006, the NYT reported:

Obama had written in his first book, "Dreams From My Father" (1995), before entering politics, that he had used marijuana and cocaine ("maybe a little blow"). He said he had not tried heroin because he did not like the pusher who was trying to sell it to him. ... "It was reflective of the struggles and confusion of a teenage boy," he said. "Teenage boys are frequently confused."

Ah, I see: Barry's cocaine use was the confusion of a teenage boy, but Brett's drinking is an unforgivable crime. And "maybe a little blow?" This is the very definition of fudging. There is no "maybe" about it, Barack: either you did or you did not snort cocaine. And, if you did, you know exactly how much you did. In other words, Obama was never entirely truthful in his characterization of his drug habits, but this was never seen as disqualifying for him. (For a lot more on Barry's pot smoking habits with the "Choom Gang" in Hawaii, see here.)

In sum, the only reason why NYT did not go crazy about Barry's drug use was because they liked his politics. NYT and the Dems don't like Kavanaugh's judicial philosophy or the politics of the President who appointed him, so now, they are suddenly shocked, yes shocked, that Kavanaugh drank in college.

Who drove Ford home?

Ford's selective memory is also highly suspect. She says that the fact that it was Brett Kavanaugh who sexually assaulted her is indelibly imprinted on her hippocampus. And yet, her memories of other details of the event, for example, where and when it occurred and how she got home afterwards (did someone drive her? did she walk?) have vanished.

Ask yourself: Where were you and what were you doing when John Kennedy was shot or 9/11 occurred? Surely, your memories of these traumatic events contain an abundant store of details. Mine do. I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing for much of 9/11/2001 (I was at a W3C Conference in San Jose). Is it possible that Ford could remember some, but not all, of the details of an event that she insists was so traumatic that it has had a psychological impact on her for 35 years?

When John Kennedy was shot, I was in 5th grade (about 10 years old) at St Leo's Grammar School in San Jose. I had asked my teacher, Mrs. Pereira, if I could go to the restroom. When I returned from the restroom, I found the class standing, praying for John Kennedy. When I asked one of my classmates what was going on, I was told that Kennedy had been shot. I remember thinking to myself "Hmmm. It must have been a hunting accident. I didn't know that Kennedy was a hunter." I realized later on that the reason I assumed it was a hunting accident was because my father was a deer hunter and I associated shooting with deer hunting.

How is it possible for me to have such vivid memories from over 50 years ago (I am 64 now), but for Ford not to remember how she got home on that traumatic evening in her life? It would be one thing if she said that someone had driven her, but she could not remember who (as I cannot remember which of my classmates told me that Kennedy had been shot). It is quite another for her to say that she cannot remember at all how she got home, in particular, when she remembers the subsequent fact that she did not tell her parents about the event because she was afraid they would be angered that she was at a party where drinking was going on.

How did she get home? Did someone drive her? Did she say anything to the driver or others in the car about the alleged event? How convenient for Ford to have indelible memories about who her attacker was, but not to recall who she drove home with, people who presumably could provide additional testimony about that night.

Who leaked Ford's letter

There were only a limited number of people who knew about Ford's letter: Ford herself, Anna Eshoo, Dianne Feinstein, their staffs, and any legal counsel Ford had retained.

If Eshoo, Feinstein, or anyone on their staffs leaked the contents of the letter, then, they behaved in a manner utterly inappropriate for elected officials, sharing the contents of the letter with the media, but not with their Republican colleagues on the Judiciary Committee.

On the other hand, Feinstein maintains that Ford's charges were not leaked by her or her staff, but by Ford herself:

It’s my understanding that her story was leaked before the letter became public. She testified that she had spoken to her friends about it and it’s most likely that that’s how the story leaked and that she had been asked by press. But it did not leak from us, I assure you of that.

But, if Ford herself was openly discussing the letter with friends, then, Feinsteins's entire justification for withholding the letter from her Republican colleagues, namely, her sacred obligation to honor Ford's request to keep the letter absolutely confidential, evaporates. What need was there for Feinstein to maintain strict confidentiality about the letter if Ford herself was openly discussing the matter with her friends?

If Feinstein's explanation of the sequence of events is accurate, then what likely happened is: when the existence of the letter was not having the desired effect of derailing Judge Kavanaugh's confirmation (presumably because of the total lack of corroborating evidence), Ford's circle leaked the contents of the letter to the press in order to bring the smear out into the open so that it could be pushed by sympathetic media outlets.

In other words, if Feinstein's explanation is correct, then Ford lied about her absolute requirement for confidentiality, just as she lied about her fear of flying.

A father's final letter to his two sons

Because you support the Democratic Party, I hold you responsible for the travesty of justice that is unfolding right now in the United States Senate. Various women have accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting them. He has denied their allegations. I will not go into the details either of their charges or of his defense of himself. In my judgment, the determinative fact is this: there is no independent contemporaneous physical evidence or testimony from witnesses that corroborates the charges; in the absence of such corroborating evidence (and no matter how sympathetic the accuser may be or credible her charges may seem), the presumption of innocence, one of the bedrock principles of the American system of justice, should prevail; and that should be the end of the matter. But rather than accept this basic functioning of due process of law, the Democrats and their enablers in the media have waged a vile campaign of character assassination to demonize Judge Kavanaugh and derail his confirmation, and this they have done not out of any genuine concern for female victims of sexual assault (ask the women who accused Bill Clinton of raping them whether the Democrats “believed” them when they came forward), but rather in order to make sure that Judge Kavanaugh does not vote to overturn the deeply flawed Supreme Court decisions like Roe v Wade and Obergefell, whose substantive due process deficiencies you are too uneducated to appreciate.

I ask you to consider the following. You and I both went to an all-boys Jesuit high school. I will not presume to speak for you, but, as for me, I can say that I did many things that I truly regret: I drank too much; I smoked too much pot; what I regret most is wasting my time there and not taking advantage of the rich resources that were placed at my disposal so that I could learn more and be a better student, the kind of student Brett Kavanaugh so obviously was. On the other hand, I never sexually assaulted any girl and neither I nor any other Bellarmine student I knew (let alone the top student in his class, for heaven’s sake!) ever spiked the drinks of girls from Presentation so that we could gang rape them (at one party after another, no less, to which the girls came back willingly again and again, apparently). The ludicrous grotesquerie of this caricature should offend your experience deeply and reveal to you the utter shamelessness and complete moral bankruptcy of the Democrats who have painted it. It probably does not.

Even worse, now that Judge Kavanaugh has angrily defended himself against the outrageous charge that he was “a drunk and serial gang rapist,” the Democrats are claiming that his righteous anger is additional evidence that he “does not have the proper temperament” to be a Supreme Court Justice. In other words, after doing everything in her power to antagonize the man, our noble California Senator, Dianne Feinstein, now has the temerity to complain that he has become antagonistic. It is as if she had beaten a dog with a stick repeatedly and then, when it snarled at her in its anguish, she said “You see? You see how vicious and rabid it is? That's why we must put it down.” But, instead of being appalled by such behavior, you undoubtedly applaud it and will dutifully vote for Senator Feinstein in November, or, if not for her, then for her opponent because his agenda is even more extreme.

The Obama administration and then the Clinton campaign did everything in their power to weaponize the agencies of government against conservative groups and then Trump. Conservatives were branded as knuckle-dragging “deplorables” simply because we disagreed. When the inept and feckless Clinton lost anyway (and, btw, I did not vote for Trump; I wrote in Paul Ryan instead), the Democrats simply could not accept her defeat as a normal (if somewhat unusual) outcome of the American electoral system (the Electoral College must be done away with, they cried) and instead launched a campaign to overthrow the Trump administration, now using slanderous innuendoes from psychiatrists about Trump’s mental instability to justify recourse to the 25th Amendment, now using a Special Prosecutor to press the ridiculous charge that Trump colluded with the Russians to influence the election (when, in fact, the only thing we know so far is that it was the slick Democrats who paid for dirt to be dredged up from Russian sources and handed over to the FISA court to facilitate their spying on the Trump campaign). They declared it a “moral imperative” to “resist” Trump (when Democrats are about to break the law, they always appeal to higher moral imperatives, which, of course, they feel they, in their superior wisdom, are entitled to define). And now they have taken the next step to overthrow the government, poisoning yet another judicial confirmation process, just as they did before with Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. But this is by no means the end of it. If the Democrats take back the House and Senate in the upcoming midterm elections, they will surely institute impeachment proceedings against Trump (and now even against Kavanaugh, apparently, if he is confirmed) on trumped up charges or seek, like that first great demagogue FDR, to pack the Supreme Court with compliant lackeys who will debauch the rule of law even further. And these Democrats have been and will be abetted by a completely biased and compliant media, purveyors, yes, of false news, whose most powerful organs (for example, the Washington Post) are being snapped up by the very tech moguls who fire their employees, like James Damore, when they dare to express a different point of view and who filter out conservative views, like those of my friend Victor Hanson, from their social media platforms. What we are witnessing is essentially a slow motion coup d'état. And yet, you both probably applaud its progress, blithely unaware that soon the revolution will come for you, white males that you are and thus irredeemably infected, in the opinion of the very people you stupidly applaud, with systemic, institutional, and unconscious racism, sexism, and bias.

I cannot stand by and acquiesce in your complicity in these developments any longer. I disown you, you Antifa fascists who are destroying our culture and dismantling the checks and balances of lawful, constitutional government that so many generations of our forebears worked so hard to set in place. I don’t want to have anything to do with you any more. Do not bother sending replies; I will not read them since there is no reason to continue this discussion. I will not persuade you, nor you me. I tried my best to raise sons with a proper moral compass. Obviously, I failed. I am tired of making excuses for you, of defending you; your morals and your politics are indefensible. What good does it do anymore to be a decent (if admittedly human) father and husband when the shameless smearing of the reputation of a decent father and husband like Brett Kavanaugh can be so easily countenanced?

Your heretofore father

More 20th century beauty.

More 20th century beauty. The way in which the trumpet sinuously intertwines with Frank's voice in the first half of the song (I think the trumpeter is Billy May) is the closest thing I have ever heard to a musician making love to a singer through sound.

This recording is also famous as the soundtrack for the final scene of the movie When Harry Met Sally, the great romantic comedy, set in Manhattan with Manhattan music, and one of my favorite movies of all time.

Unfortunately, the original soundtrack was never released and there is only a disappointing rendition of the songs by Harry Connick Jr. Luckily, Frank's version of "It Had To Be You" is available through many links online. I love the way, when he sings "With all your faults, I love you still" (at 2:15), you can hear a little emotional quaver in his voice.

Snowflakes experiencing Trump Anxiety Disorder

In October of 2017, I wrote about an overwrought article by Andrew Sullivan about Donald Trump:

I would love to be a fly on the wall of the offices of psychiatrists in New York, San Francisco, and Washington these days to find out exactly how many Never Trumpers, even a year later, still cannot bring themselves to accept the reality that the Donald defeated Hillary and are reporting grievous psychological distress to their Duty to Warn shrinks as a result of it. "Doc, I feel like I've fallen into an abyss."

All I can say to the author is what I said to David Remnick of The New Yorker last year right after the election: Andrew, it's probably best just to end it all right now.

Now, CBS News reports:

What's been called "Trump Anxiety Disorder" has been on the rise in the months following the election, according to mental-health professionals from across the country who report unusually high levels of politics-related stress in their practices. ... Though not an official diagnosis, the symptoms include feeling a loss of control and helplessness, and fretting about what's happening in the country and spending excessive time on social media, she said.

During Obama's autocratic reign with pen and phone, the Liberals and Progressives were blithely unconcerned. But, now that Trump is using the very tools that Obama honed for him, the world is coming to an end.

Gee, I wonder why Trump's Interior Secretary wants to drain San Francisco's Hetch Hetchy Reservoir

WSJ reports:

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is interested in restoring the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park to its natural state after more than 100 years of providing water to the people of San Francisco and some suburbs. ... While San Francisco officials weren’t immediately available for comment, they have steadfastly opposed the proposal in the past. City residents in 2012 voted down a measure to study the idea, with 77% voting against it.

This is the perfect issue to allow the Trump administration to illustrate the hypocrisy of Left Coast environmentalists: they are willing to inconvenience the rest of the world to save the environment, but they will fight to the death any effort to drain the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and restore the valley to it pristine state. In so doing, these so-called environmentalists defend one of the greatest environmental crimes of all time, about which John Muir himself, the patron saint of the environmental movement, wrote:

In these ravaging money-mad days monopolizing San Francisco capitalists are now doing their best to destroy the Yosemite Park, the most wonderful of all our great mountain national parks. Beginning on the Tuolumne side, they are trying with a lot of sinful ingenuity to get the Government's permission to dam and destroy the Hetch-Hetchy Valley for a reservoir, simply that comparatively private gain may be made out of universal public loss ...

The opportunity to help all those San Francisco Democrats perish of thirst, especially in the name of John Muir and environmentalism, is just too good to pass up.

New favorite adjective of the Left

Feckless.

Stare decisis and Obergefell

Countless times in the coming weeks, we are going to hear our Democratic colleagues appeal to stare decisis, the legal principle that the Supreme Court should not overturn existing precedents, but should instead "stand by its previous decisions." Trump's Supreme Court nominee must be resisted, our liberal and Democratic brothers and sisters will tell us, because s/he may violate the principle of stare decisis by joining other members of the Court in voting to overturn previous decisions like Roe v. Wade, which invented a right to abortion in the Constitution, or Obergefell v. Hodges, which invented a right to gay marriage in the Constitution. These decisions, we will be told, are "established precedent" and "settled law," fixed guideposts in our legal system that simply must not be disturbed.

If our liberal, Democratic friends had been truly devoted to the principle of abiding by established tradition and precedent, perhaps they should never have sought to overturn a societal, cultural, religious, and legal precedent that had existed for millennia across the entire face of the earth, namely, the precedent that marriage is to be defined as an institution between a man and a woman.

If such hoary and universal precedents, which have stood the test of time, persisting unquestioned for thousands of years, can be cavalierly tossed aside in a spasm of abstract moral reasoning by the Left in their endless march forward into the Brave New World, then, surely there is nothing sacred about a two-year old opinion like Obergefell and it can be overturned, too.

As Democrats become more extreme, Trump's approval ratings tick up

I'm curious:

Democrats do not want illegally immigrating children separated from their illegally immigrating parents at the border. The Flores settlement requires that illegally immigrating children be released into the United States after 20 days. Does this mean that Democrats want the illegally immigrating parents to be released along with them? If so, doesn't this effectively make the border open for any illegally immigrating adult who crosses the border with a child? Are open borders what Democrats want?

Maxine Waters has encouraged people to hound and harass any member of the Trump administration that they find in a public place. Does Ms. Waters believe that opponents of the Republican administration ought to enter baseball fields with guns and shoot Congressmen playing in charity softball games?

Of course, neither the position that America should have open borders nor the position that Congressmen should be shot would be popular with a majority of the American voting public. But, one wonders exactly where Democratic sentiment falls short of these positions.

As Democrats adopt more and more extreme positions, Trump's approval ratings simply tick up.

Separating children from law-breaking illegal aliens

Below is a copy of a letter I sent to all my senators and congressman. I encourage everyone to express their thoughts on this matter.

Dear Representative,

I agree with President Trump that adult immigrants illegally entering the United States with children should be incarcerated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and that the children traveling with these law-breaking adults should be separated from them, retained in HHS custody for the 20 days mandated by the Flores decree, and then entrusted by the HHS to the care of a sponsor. Otherwise, every adult immigrant who wants to enter the United States illegally has an incentive to cross the border with a child so that they both can be released together into the United States after the 20-day Flores holding period.

Furthermore, I think that comparisons between President Trump and Nazis, such as are being made by various Democratic politicians, are completely inappropriate. The separation of a child from a parent who is a law-breaking illegal immigrant is no different from the separation of a child from any other parent breaking the law in any other way, for example, by robbing a bank, so that, in my humble opinion, President Trump, the Justice Department, and the HHS are separating children from law-breakers in precisely the manner they should. Comparisons of President Trump to Hitler, on the other hand, strike me as hateful attempts by Democratic politicians to arouse hysteria among American citizens for crass political purposes. These hateful comparisons are ginning up a level of stasis, faction, and incivility in the American political environment that may never have been seen before in the history of the United States. As your constituent, I ask that you please refrain from making these false comparisons and instead support the President in his efforts to staunch the flood of illegal immigrants into our country.

New predictor for Trump's approval rating

The chattering classes do not seem to realize that there is a large group of voters for whom the use of language like "Fuck Trump!" or "Feckless cunt!" is simply unacceptable. Every time someone uses a phrase like this, Trump's approval rating ticks up.

Liberal prejudice against Asian-Americans and Indian-Americans finally being called out

Since 2011, I have expressed concerns about the attitudes of some liberal Americans towards Asian-American and Indian-American immigrants to the United States. Among the topics I have discussed are:

1. the prejudice harbored by many Democrats, liberals, and progressives against Asian-Americans and Indian-Americans;
2. Democratic support for affirmative action quotas in our schools, universities, and places of work that advantage blacks and Hispanics while disadvantaging Asian-Americans and Indian-Americans;
3. given items 1 and 2 above, the possibility that the Republican Party may be the more natural home for Asian-Americans and Indian-Americans than the Democratic Party.

Two events in the news lately have made it all too clear that my concerns were well-founded:

• New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio's introduction of racial quotas into New York's elite public schools to boost the enrollment of blacks and Hispanics while suppressing the enrollment of Asians and whites
• the lawsuit brought against Harvard’s admissions policy, charging that it seeks to limit the number of Asian students.

In this post, I have decided simply to provide interested readers with a list of the links to my relevant blog posts in roughly chronological order so they can read the posts for themselves to see how I have expressed concern about these issues for many years now. Don't say I didn't tell you so! Here they are:

• To CNN, "Asian diversity" isn't real diversity
• Court Asian and Eastern European immigrants, not Latinos
• I have to wonder about Rebecca Solnit (see towards end of post; San Francisco liberal sees influx of Asian and Indian hi-tech workers into San Francisco not as a blessing, but as a blight)
• Opposition to affirmative action shows, once again, that Chinese and Indians are natural constituents of the Republican Party
• Jesse has landed (How Jesse Jackson attempted to strong arm Silicon Valley high-tech companies into establishing racial quotas that advantage blacks and Hispanics while disadvantaging Asian-Americans and Indian-Americans)
• John Ying: Asian American core values align with GOP (Prominent international investment banker encourages Republican Party to reach out to Asian-Americans)
• Techno-coolies or brilliant competitors (Joel Kotkin expressing ugly stereotypes about Asian-Americans and Indian-Americans)
• Silicon Valley must say no to Democrats who pushed for SCA-5 and are now pushing for racial quotas in high-tech companies (Democrats' support for racial quotas in California universities and Silicon Valley high-tech companies; California constitutional amendment SCA-5 was predecessor to DeBlasio's quotas for New York elite public schools)
• Open letter to my friend Victor Hanson (Letter to my friend Victor Hanson about real racial diversity in Silicon Valley)
• Once again, naked discrimination by liberals against Asians and Indians (The early stages of DeBlasio's efforts to institute racial quotas in New York elite public schools)
• Prominent Hindu Indian-American declares support for Republican Party
• It is liberals, not conservatives, who use Asian Americans as "tools"

It is gratifying to me to see Asian-Americans and Indian-Americans stand up against the prejudice that Democrats, liberals, and progressives harbor against Asian-Americans and Indian-Americans and against racial quotas that disadvantage them unfairly.

Dwight Clark RIP

Dwight Clark passed away today at 61 from ALS.

Dwight was a wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers when, in the 1981 NFC Championship Game, he made "The Catch," the football play that defeated the Dallas Cowboys and put the 49ers into their first Super Bowl. You can watch the final Niner drive starting at 2:00:00 here.

It is pure football ballet: undersized, but agile guards John Ayers and Randy Cross (typical products of O-line coach Bobb McKittrick) lead the journeyman running back Lenvil Elliott (the antithesis of the Cowboys' star Tony Dorsett) through traps up the middle and on devastating sweeps to the left and right; Joe Montana hits receivers Freddie Solomon and Earl Cooper with passes downfield and threads the needle to Dwight on the sideline, who toe-taps to stay in bounds; Freddie dashes around the end on the reverse; Bill Walsh calmly orchestrates the whole drive on one side of the field as Tom Landry in his trademark fedora, his team totally discombobulated by the variety, flow, rhythm, and force of the 49er offensive attack, stalks back and forth on the other, not realizing that the Cowboy dynasty (the first one, at any rate) is over; the lyrical Vin Scully (along with the meathead Hank Stram) calls the whole drive.

And then, finally, Montana rolls to his right, back-pedals and double clutches to avoid the unimaginably tall Ed "Too-Tall" Jones leaping right in front of him, and releases a dying quail into the twilight; for what seems like an eternity, the football flutters through the air, looking like it is going to fall, futilely, as so often before, out of the back of the end-zone; but suddenly, as if out of nowhere, Dwight Clark launches himself to a height never achieved before or since in 49er football lore and, with the very tips of his fingers, plucks the ball from the air. The Catch!

Listen to the roar that goes up from the old school, blue-collar, Candlestick Park fans (who drove Chevies to the game instead of Teslas) when Clark comes down with the ball. It is the sound of decades of futility against the Cowboys being washed away from the Bay Area in a single play. It was the football equivalent of the Giants and Warriors finally breaking through after decades of baseball and basketball mediocrity.

(Be sure to watch Dallas' last drive afterward; if not for Eric Wright's horse collar of Drew Pearson and Lawrence Pillar's sack and Jim Stuckey's fumble recovery, San Francisco football history might have been very different.)

Dwight, you lifted us all up that day. The memory of you is undying. RIP.

David Reich geneticist, Part II

Chief Justice John Roberts famously wrote: "[T]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." One can generalize this to: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of any characteristic (e.g., race, sex, sexual preference, religion, etc.) is to stop discriminating on the basis of that characteristic." I have always held that general statement to be true. But, given David Reich's work, I think I have to modify that statement now: "We should stop discriminating -- except when it is rational to do so." For example, it is rational in the NBA to use height as one discriminating factor, although other discriminating factors can outweigh a low score in height. See Isaiah Thomas.

David Reich geneticist

In a recent article, David Reich, the Harvard geneticist writes:

How do we accommodate the biological differences between men and women? I think the answer is obvious: We should both recognize that genetic differences between males and females exist and we should accord each sex the same freedoms and opportunities regardless of those differences.

I have a question for Professor Reich: If the same freedoms and opportunities should be accorded to each sex regardless of their differences, does that mean that the same outcomes should be assigned to the sexes, too? If not, it appears that Professor Reich's argument undermines the doctrine of disparate impact, one of Liberalism's preferred tools for obtaining similar outcomes and a bedrock of the Obama/Holder Justice Department. For example, it seems that Professor Reich is saying that, yes, all women need to be given the opportunity to be software engineers, but we shouldn't be surprised if more software engineers end up being men. Conversely, we shouldn't be surprised if individual female software engineers exist who are better than some (or even all) male software engineers. This is quite different from the disparate impact approach, which holds that the percentage of female software engineers must be the same as the percentage of females in the general population (equality of outcomes, not of opportunity).

I would also like to hear Professor Reich address the following question: If Group A and Group B are genetically different in such a way that members of Group A require more medical care in aggregate than those of Group B, should members of both groups pay the same for health insurance? If not, who should pay the difference in cost? The individuals, the insurance company, the government, who? Is it ever ok for an insurance company to deny members of Group A health insurance? It would seem that denying them health insurance is denying them an "opportunity or freedom." But, if the insurance companies are forced to cover them at the same cost, would not the insurance company rapidly go broke?

Here is a similar question: if Group A and Group B are genetically different in such a way that members of Group A are less creditworthy in aggregate than those of Group B, should members of both groups receive credit at the same rate and cost? Is it ever ok for a bank to deny the members of Group A credit? But, once again, if banks are forced to lend to the non-creditworthy, won't they rapidly go broke?

Note that the question about creditworthiness assumes there can be a correlation between genetics and creditworthiness. I am not aware of any evidence that such a correlation exists. (I suspect Professor Reich would label this an unwarranted prejudice.) But, It seems these questions about insurance and credit and the like can be generalized: If Group A and Group B are genetically different in such a way that selection of members of Group A for some purpose costs the selector more in aggregate than selection of members of Group B, then is it justified for the selector to select only from Group B and to avoid selecting from Group A (all else being equal)?

But, if this is the correct general form of the question, then, it seems that this question can be asked about software engineers, too: If women and men are genetically different in such a way that the selection of women to be software engineers costs the software company more in aggregate (say, because of the lower aggregate performance of women; shades of Lawrence Summers!) than selecting men, is the software company justified in selecting only men and avoiding women (all else being equal). Remember: we are stipulating that we have genetic findings that demonstrate that there is a correlation between being male and having a greater aptitude for software engineering.

I think perhaps the correct approach is hinted at in the phrase "(all else being equal)" and is shown by the following example: Let's say that A and B are seeking health insurance. A has a gene that makes those who have it more susceptible in aggregate to heart attacks. As a condition of offering health insurance, both A and B are required to take a battery of tests of their coronary health and performance. Both A and B score equally well on all these tests with very high marks. Is the health insurance company justified in charging A more? Perhaps the test for the gene is just another test that should be considered in the total battery of tests, so that if A tests positive for the gene, then his overall score is, in fact, less than B's score (by the significance of the gene test) and the insurance company would be justified in charging him more for insurance because of the additional single risk factor. In addition, the costs of insuring A and B may be far less than the cost of insuring others who have scored much lower on the other tests.

The extraordinary thing is that such an approach would seem to suggest that there are times when protected characteristics like gender can and should be taken into consideration in selection processes to accentuate different aggregate outcomes, rather than ignored so as to create equal aggregate outcomes. It should be noted that such an approach would likely give us our original outcome with software engineers: more would be men, but there would be very many good women, too.

I do not claim to speak for Professor Reich in any of this. I am aware that the statements I have made above may be entirely sophistical. If so, I would take pleasure in hearing him refute them; the gain in knowledge would be mine. Professor Reich seems to be the kind of person who follows the facts and science wherever it leads him, even if they end up leading him to reject the assertions of political correctness or to refute unwarranted bigotry. I have pre-ordered his new book and look forward to reading it when it is released.

Facebook, Google, and OAuth

Another thing that is troubling to me is how hypocritical users are about their use of "Facebook login" to log in to apps. When you use "Facebook login" to log in to an app, the login screen clearly states that you are granting the app permission to access whatever parts of your Facebook profile the app lists (for example, access to your email address or to your "likes"). Thus, when users used "Facebook login" to log in to Aleksandr Kogan's "This is Your Digital Life" app, they granted him access to whatever parts of their Facebook profiles the login screen listed. See here for the documentation. Google offers similar functionality. The protocol that Facebook and Google (and many other platforms) use to enable this functionality is OAuth. For people to use this self-documenting login and then to claim that their data ended up where they didn't want it to be seems similar to the way in which people signed subprime mortgages with clearly stated terms and then later claimed they were deceived. I am a believer in personal accountability. If you agreed to be bound by the terms of a contract (whether in a subprime mortgage or on a login screen), you are bound by the terms of a contract. You had better make sure you understand those terms before you sign or click.

The end result of the "2008 Financial Crisis" was the elevation of Elizabeth Warren as a new demagogue on the Left and her creation of the leviathan CFPB. I wonder what new demagogue on the Left will be elevated as a result of the so-called "2016 Cambridge Analytica Data Breach" and what new leviathan agency will be created to "protect the consumer."

A world of difference

In quivering, almost apoplectic rage, Adam Serwer writes in Atlantic:

That Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf has been demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt.

Adam, cool down, bud! Don't burst a vein. There is a world of difference between the claim that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf and the claim that Trump colluded with Russia to improperly influence the 2016 election. The second claim remains unproven. The first claim should surprise no one: Russia attempts to influence outcomes in American politics on a daily basis; just as America attempts to influence outcomes in the politics of other nations on a daily basis. Anyone who needed the massive efforts of a Special Prosecutor's investigation and a year of national trauma to realize that Russia engages in cyber activities to destabilize the United States is naive in the extreme. What's more, the charge that Russia attempted to help Trump is no worse than the charge that Russia attempted to help Bernie Sanders, this second charge also being contained in Mueller's indictments. Neither man is tainted in any way by such charges.

With each new set of indictments by the Mueller investigation, the case against Trump grows weaker. The first set of indictments simply pointed out that Michael Flynn lied to the FBI (as did Christopher Steele, obviously, and Steele has yet to be indicted) and that Paul Manafort is a crook. But no collusion. This second set of indictments proves that Russians engage in cyber attacks against the US. But, again, no collusion. And, in the meantime, we have discovered that a paid operative of the Clinton campaign cobbled together rumors from Russian sources into a "dossier", peddled it to Obama's FBI and Justice Department, which then used it to obtain from the FISA Court a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. Thus, the case against Trump grows progressively weaker, while the case against Clinton and Obama grows progressively stronger.

But the mainstream media believe that, if they respond with white hot rage and resistance to every new revelation of the Mueller investigation, they will persuade the American people that Trump is the ogre that they sincerely hope he is, even when the revelations do not incriminate Trump in the least. This is a losing strategy. With each new "nothing-burger" revelation from Mueller, and the ensuing "hair on fire" response from the media, Trump's poll numbers just rise. It was looking for a while like 2018 might be a very good year for Democrats. The chances of that happening seem now to be diminishing.