That’s politics. It’s how Henry Clay got to be Secretary of State during John Quincy Adams’ presidency, and it’s why Abraham Lincoln’s advisors promised cabinet positions to politicians from Indiana and Pennsylvania in order that he would receive the 1860 Republican presidential nomination.

But in little more than eighteen months RFK, Jr. has gone from unintentionally amusing weirdo to dangerously incompetent fool — and it’s time for him leave office, whether through resignation or dismissal.

Kennedy’s record as a flake was well-established before he arrived in Washington. Examples are many. There was the dead bear cub that he hid in his car’s trunk, then secretly deposited in Central Park. And there was the 2012 court deposition in which he revealed that a doctor had told him a worm had lodged itself in his brain and eaten a portion of it, causing him to suffer from memory loss and mental fog.

Robert Kennedy, Jr. speaking at a conference in Spain in 2017.

This was not to say that he was harmless. A reformed drug abuser who pleaded guilty to possession of heroin after he was caught trying to bring it along with him on a plane in 1984, he also has a demonstrated record as a world-class philanderer and all-purpose low-life. That goes back to his adolescence when he was thrown out of two boarding schools. Kennedy is also generally believed to be the addict who turned his brother David on to heroin, the drug that caused his sibling’s fatal overdose from the drug.

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Kennedy’s treatment of his second wife, Mary Richardson, appears to have been particularly reprehensible. Not only did he repeatedly cheat on her, but he left his diary out where she could find it. This meant that she wound up reading his accounts of his many infidelities. In addition, he texted nude pictures of his various lovers to friends, and he attempted to seduce the couple’s 23-year old babysitter. It should not surprise anyone to learn that Richardson committed suicide. After this happened, he sued her sisters so that he could determine her place of burial, disinterring her remains in the process.

More recently, Kennedy was exposed for his adulterous affair with journalist Olivia Nuzzi. His own cousin, Caroline Kennedy, has publicly identified him as a “predator.”

However, none of this made him a problem for the nation as a whole, and some of his initial speeches and statements upon receiving his cabinet post were thoughtful and reasonable. Americans do eat too much processed food, and we do need to exercise more. He was right to say these things.

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That’s politics. It’s how Henry Clay got to be Secretary of State during John Quincy Adams’ presidency, and it’s why Abraham Lincoln’s advisors promised cabinet positions to politicians from Indiana and Pennsylvania in order that he would receive the 1860 Republican presidential nomination.

But in little more than eighteen months RFK, Jr. has gone from unintentionally amusing weirdo to dangerously incompetent fool — and it’s time for him leave office, whether through resignation or dismissal.

Kennedy’s record as a flake was well-established before he arrived in Washington. Examples are many. There was the dead bear cub that he hid in his car’s trunk, then secretly deposited in Central Park. And there was the 2012 court deposition in which he revealed that a doctor had told him a worm had lodged itself in his brain and eaten a portion of it, causing him to suffer from memory loss and mental fog.

Robert Kennedy, Jr. speaking at a conference in Spain in 2017.

This was not to say that he was harmless. A reformed drug abuser who pleaded guilty to possession of heroin after he was caught trying to bring it along with him on a plane in 1984, he also has a demonstrated record as a world-class philanderer and all-purpose low-life. That goes back to his adolescence when he was thrown out of two boarding schools. Kennedy is also generally believed to be the addict who turned his brother David on to heroin, the drug that caused his sibling’s fatal overdose from the drug.

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Kennedy’s treatment of his second wife, Mary Richardson, appears to have been particularly reprehensible. Not only did he repeatedly cheat on her, but he left his diary out where she could find it. This meant that she wound up reading his accounts of his many infidelities. In addition, he texted nude pictures of his various lovers to friends, and he attempted to seduce the couple’s 23-year old babysitter. It should not surprise anyone to learn that Richardson committed suicide. After this happened, he sued her sisters so that he could determine her place of burial, disinterring her remains in the process.

More recently, Kennedy was exposed for his adulterous affair with journalist Olivia Nuzzi. His own cousin, Caroline Kennedy, has publicly identified him as a “predator.”

However, none of this made him a problem for the nation as a whole, and some of his initial speeches and statements upon receiving his cabinet post were thoughtful and reasonable. Americans do eat too much processed food, and we do need to exercise more. He was right to say these things.

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It’s possible to be underrated though employed by the New Yorker. Peter de Vries was. Another sufferer from this affliction was a cartoonist for whom de Vries wrote more than a few captions: Charles Addams (1912-1988). Both men committed the not-always-extenuated crime of being terrifically funny.

One wonders: Whence is this transgression? Why is the most tediously “serious” person invariably elevated above the most accomplished clown? How is it that a ham like Richard Burton was judged a better actor than Peter Sellers, and a stiff like Paul Robeson is more consistently venerated than Eddie Murphy? Those gifted with the power to make people laugh seeking respect and awards would do well to follow the example of Woody Allen. I do not mean that they should wed their step-daughters; no, the trick is never to be in any degree amusing when you are interviewed about your work.

The artist as a shadowy figure: Charles Addams in 1947.

This was not Charles Addams’s practice. If he was happy to pose for photographs wearing medieval suits of armor, he never garbed himself in the heavy breastplate of the artist. Even as he created an oeuvre of more than 1,300 published cartoons (including the memorable characters we know today as the Addams Family), he was always a model of amiability and winking affection. Contrary to myth, he was at no time committed to an asylum. Nor was he known for moodiness or depression.

Moreover, even though his drawings were regularly published in bound volumes, and he sold well through prestigious galleries, he refused to produce lithographs of his compositions, and insisted on describing himself only as a “cartoonist.”

This persistent impulse towards modesty was inherited through an impressive patrimony of well-mannered and successful WASPs. Patrilineally a distant cousin of Jane Addams, he was also, through his mother, a descendant of John Adams and that original Adams Family. But this was not something he would mention, and the range of his friends extended from fellow bar patrons in out-of-the-way taverns to such notorious misanthropes as Alfred Hitchcock and John O’Hara.

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If Addams’s wit is sardonic, there is also something warm and inclusive about it. This is a reflection (as it must be for all artists) of who he was. The much-indulged only child of a housewife and a prominent naval architect, Addams followed his father in his early avocation for the art of drawing and his mother in displaying an offbeat sense of humor and fascination with haunted houses and graveyards, something which continued throughout his life.

Addams took these interests from the small New Jersey town in which he grew up to the University of Pennsylvania, then to work as a re-toucher at a publication specializing in gruesome crime scene photographs, and finally to the magazine with which he is most associated.

At each of these places—and during his subsequent wartime service in the Army and his many years living in the Hamptons on weekends and in a townhouse he owned in New York during the work week—he displayed the classic artist’s preoccupation with beautiful women. Of these there were many in his life, including three wives and such famous lovers as Jacqueline Kennedy and Joan Fontaine. (Addams and the former first lady became a couple in the year after her husband’s assassination, and, though she ultimately spurned him, telling him pointedly that he was not rich enough for her, it was he who introduced her to Greta Garbo, another of his former girlfriends, at a dinner for three.)

In spite of this overactive libido, he had hardly any enemies. This may have been partly because he was, by his own acknowledgment, somewhat childlike. Though he did not want to have children himself, the progeny of his paramours consistently adored him, finding in him a kindred spirit. This was not only a consequence of his impishness, but of a certain naïve wonderment with which he looked at things. Like many intelligent tykes, Addams would spend hours staring at objects or the sides of buildings, trying to more fully appreciate their designs, gazing fixedly and with something akin to rapture.

This concern for detail—along with a habit of going to antique stores to study period furniture and purchase curiosities like crossbows and halberds—vitally assisted him in his work, since much of the brilliance of Addams’s drawings derives from their specificity. His haunted Victorian piles have minutely rendered mansard roofs and finely drawn gables and shutters. The shadows formed by his drainpipes are elegantly executed using delicate washes. A cash register in a remote store is of a recognizable make and model.

Though Addams’s faces and hands are rounded and smoothed off in the manner common to caricatures, there is no question but that he was a superb draftsman in a way that other acclaimed modern comic artists—Charles M. Schulz or Garry Trudeau, for example—are not. This was integral to his work. Just as Peter Sellers’s Inspector Clouseau was not merely a bumbling idiot, but one who aggressively insisted upon his own dignity and importance, Charles Addams’s characters determinedly labor to deny the perversity of what is in front of them.

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A few points ought to be made with reference to this. First, the United States killed 20,000 French civilians during our invasion of Normandy in World War II.

You may wonder why and how we killed so many ordinary Frenchmen. The answer is that widespread bombing — however discriminate — leads to the deaths of large numbers of people. Most of those we killed were Nazi soldiers. Some were Americans. But 20,000 of the dead were non-soldiers: French men, women and children.

Were we committing genocide against the French? No, as you likely know, we stepped in to protect both them and ourselves from psychopaths who were ruling them on behalf of a crazed ideology.

Israel’s situation is similar. The Gaza Strip has been ruled by psychopaths who act on behalf of a crazed ideology. Hamas members have regularly killed other Palestinians for the better part of two decades. The savagery dates back to before they first gained power in 2007. Once they assumed control over Gaza, they rounded up and shot their Palestinian rivals. In a single week of 2007, during what’s known as the Battle of Gaza, more than 160 Palestinians were murdered by Hamas. Thereafter, no attempt was ever made to conduct elections in Gaza. Instead, Hamas ruled the Gaza Strip through terror and coercion.

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Eight years later Amnesty International issued a report on Hamas’ “brutal campaign of abductions, torture and unlawful killings against Palestinians.” That occurred even as billions of dollars in aid were being given to create a liveable Gaza. Most of this money was either stolen by Hamas leaders or spent on building tunnels and acquiring weapons.

Finally, on October 7, 2023, Hamas gunmen invaded Israel. 1200 Israelis were murdered on that day. A proportionate number for the U.S. population would be more than 40,000 Americans. Other Israelis were raped, kidnapped and tortured — as Hamas had previously engaged in atrocities against their fellow Palestinians.

Hamas’s leaders hoped that Israel’s response to their attacks would lead to tens of thousands of Palestinians losing their lives. In fact, their leader Yahya Sinwar gleefully spoke of 100,000 Palestinian deaths as an acceptable number. Sinwar’s thinking was that Israelis would grow sick of killing and that this would permit Palestinians to further their attacks and expand the conflict.

Yahya Sinwar: As a Hamas leader, he spoke of the glory that would come with tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths.

The Nazi Holocaust perpetrated against the Jews was not the only case of genocide in the last hundred and fifty years. During the First World War, the Turks engaged in campaigns of mass murder against Armenians while Pol Pot slaughtered his countrymen in vast numbers when he ruled Cambodia. Each led to the death of between one and two million people. Let us hope that we are all familiar as well with Stalin’s Holodomor, the deadly forced famine that took place in Ukraine in 1935, and with the Hutus’ slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. Each one of these was a systemic campaign whose express purpose was the annihilation of another people. The least of these involved the murder of 800,000 people. This is not what has happened in Gaza following Hamas’ invasion of Israel. Israel did not kill hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, and did not seek to annihilate and destroy the Palestinian population.

The Geneva Convention serves to deter actual acts of genocide. The Convention provides clear and detailed rules about what armies can and cannot do. So, if Israel was engaged in a genocidal campaign in response to Hamas’ invasion of Israel, as antisemites around the world have claimed, why do they never make reference to the Geneva Convention? Surely, Israel must have engaged in wholesale violations of the Geneva Convention?

Isn’t that so?

The reason it is never mentioned is simple. The Geneva Convention has little relevance to what took place. Why? In order to answer that question, we need some background.

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Last week demonstrated that in striking fashion.

The biggest story ran in the business sections but not on the front pages. It came in an announcement by the pioneering mRNA company Moderna, and it’s probably more important than the Moon Landing or the Vietnam War.

On Wednesday, Moderna announced the results of a study it undertook on its personalized melanoma treatments. The study found that skin cancer patients given its new mRNA vaccines along with the immunotherapy drug Keytruda (pembrolizumab) were 49% less likely to have a recurrence of their cancer over a 5-year period than patients given Keytruda alone. That’s an amazing result.

Here’s how Reuters reported the story:

Unlike chemotherapy, which kills both healthy and cancerous cells, or immunotherapy, which revs up ‌the immune system, personalized cancer vaccines train the immune system to specifically target mutations found only on a person’s tumor…[T]heir vaccine helped prevent the return and spread of disease in a large trial involving more than 1,000 melanoma patients. They had localized tumors that were removed surgically, but had a high risk of recurrence. Moderna expects that thousands of melanoma patients could benefit within the first few years of approval.

In other words, this new method can help people beat cancer without undergoing the standard cancer treatments, which are brutal and often ineffective. The new approach takes a patient’s surgically removed tumor, identifies its particular characteristics, and then uses that information to design a cancer vaccine especially for the patient.

Although Moderna’s experiment was on skin cancers, the technology can be applied to other cancers. In fact, the company is already testing the technology for lung cancers, bladder cancers and kidney cancers. Equally importantly, it can be refined. This is just the beginning. It can and will become far more effective as it comes into common use.

One of the few people to understand the significance of this was Elon Musk. Displaying his loyalty to President Trump, Musk criticized the use of mRNA Covid vaccines like the one that Moderna produced during the pandemic. But he then said, “Artificial RNA essentially makes curing diseases a software problem.”

That’s going too far. But it really is true that the cancer death rate among otherwise healthy young people could fall by 70-80% in the next ten to fifteen years. What scientists have been aiming to do for decades is moving past the trial stage. These individualized mRNA cancer treatments will be much more effective than chemotherapy, and they will eventually replace it for the greater number of patients.

This is especially notable as the number of cancer deaths in the U.S. is starting to approach the number of deaths from heart disease. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, there were 683,491 heart disease deaths in 2024 as against 619,876 cancer deaths. The main reason that cancer is catching up with heart disease as a killer is that heart surgeons have improved their treatments (e.g. stents, angioplasty, bypass surgery, etc.), and people are living longer. That means people who would once have died of heart attacks now live long enough to get cancer.

The new mRNA cancer treatments won’t prolong your life indefinitely. Old people with weakened immune systems will still get fatal cancers that will be hard to treat. It’s revolutionary, nonetheless.

And it should be pointed out that AI is helping to improve cancer diagnosis. That means that we’ll be able to catch and treat cancers at earlier stages — before the cancers have spread and become inoperable.

Moderna was not started so that it could develop Covid vaccines. It was set up with the hope that it could accomplish what it’s doing now: using mRNA technology to produce vaccines that would be designed to treat cancer on a person-by-person basis. Founded in September 2010 as a private company, Moderna went public in 2018. It’s taken it almost sixteen years years to prove that its ideas work. In years to come, it will hone the technology, making it more and more precise. It will do this working alongside Merck, its pharmaceutical industry partner. In the meantime, other companies will begin to compete.

We’ll all be the beneficiaries. (Full disclosure: I own approximately $15,000 in Moderna stock…)

Meanwhile, Russia’s central bank reported that net withdrawals from the Russian banking system were over $7 billion (USD) last month. While that many not sound like much, bear in mind that the total M2 Russian money supply is only $1.734 trillion. In other words, money is being pulled from the banking system at an annual net rate of about 5% of the country’s total money supply. The equivalent in the U.S. would be net withdrawals of roughly $100 billion per month. Since Russia has detailed controls on the flow of money out of the country, this suggests that Russians — especially rich Russians — are taking money out and holding it as cash, fearful that a desperate Vladimir Putin might try to confiscate it.

That trouble compounds another problem: The Kremlin has forced the banks to make loans to financially shaky military contractors, and many of the banks are already close to insolvency. (Hat tip to John McCormack.)…

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A little over a month ago, my wife and I went to the ballet. We have been going together for many years, and I have been attending performances on my own for three decades. My preference is for traditional story ballet. So I’ve been to American Ballet Theater (ABT) more than any other company. But I’ve also seen New York City Ballet, Alvin Ailey, Paul Taylor, Ballet Nacional de Cuba, the Paris Opera Ballet, the Mariinsky and many others.

I did not see Rudolf Nureyev or Mikhail Baryshnikov dance, but I have seen all of the best male American dancers of recent years and a lot of the most exciting stars from overseas, including Carlos Acosta and Roberto Bolle.

I bring this up because I strongly believe that 24-year old Jake Roxander, who won’t even officially be an ABT principal until the 1st of September, is the best American danseur to appear since David Hallberg joined the ABT company a quarter century ago.

In the production we saw of John Cranko’s “Eugene Onegin,” Roxander played the sensitive and doomed poet, Lensky. He brought great intelligence to his performance. But what really stood out was the warmth of his dancing and his tremendous technique.

A native of Oregon, Roxander grew up with the art as his parents were both professional dancers, and they run a ballet school in Medford, a medium-sized city in the southwest corner of the state. Roxander also has an older brother who is dancing with the Philadelphia Ballet, which is where he first attracted serious notice.

The critical establishment has not failed to pay attention. To The New York Times’ credit, it ran a laudatory profile and interview of Roxander in July.

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Like many Americans, I have a lot of affection for Canada. My stepmother was a Canadian, and she embodied a lot of what makes Americans fond of our northern neighbors. She was polite, intelligent, cultured, and conscientious.

But these days something is not right up there. How do I know this?

All you have to do is look at some simple statistics. Last year, roughly 150,000 Americans chose to leave the United States. Canada has more exact statistics on emigration. It says that 120,640 Canadians left Canada. The numbers aren't so different. But the United States has eight-and-a-half times as many people. So, if the United States had the same rate of emigration, we would be losing close to 1.3 million people each year. That's more than live in Boston and Miami combined.

Protesting Canadian truckers in Ottawa.

To read the rest of the article, go to: https://freebeacon.com/politics/whats-wrong-in-canada/

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On Sunday, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, Iran’s state-controlled media corporation, said that Army Commander-in-Chief Amir Hatami has announced that Iran will pay $30,000 for the capture or killing of any American soldier or sailor.

In addition, Hatami made the further promise that, “The weapon of any person who succeeds in killing an American aggressor will be purchased at double the price and will receive a new weapon. The individual's weapon will also be kept in a planned museum." The statements were made in the midst of peace negotiations between the U.S. and Iran.

On December 7, the country will celebrate its annual national holiday, formally known as Student Day, in honor of its hostage-taking of the Americans serving in the U.S. embassy compound in Tehran in 1979…

The Institute For Family Studies released a report on women’s happiness. It showed that contrary to most Hollywood depictions stay-at-home moms tend to be more content, less inclined to use pills and alcohol and less likely to be on prescription psychiatric medications than comparable-age women working outside the home.

The results come from a study of 150,000 women between the ages of 18 and 49. These findings parallel those of Betty Friedan’s research in the 1960s, which showed higher rates of unhappiness among unmarried women and working women than among stay-at-home mothers, although Friedan did not highlight that finding in her book The Feminine Mystique…

The chart below shows the largest foreign sources of American college and university funding over the last forty years.

Another group that’s heavily dependent on outside funding is the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. This official organization of leading Catholic clergy relies on funding from the U.S. government. In fact, as this balance sheet shows, government contracts and grants have composed 80% of the unrestricted funds in their budgets in recent years. The greatest share of this goes to providing for immigrant resettlement programs. Does this partially explains their support for less restrictive immigration policies? It would certainly seem so.

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It turns out that my book The Primate Myth: Why the Latest Science Leads Us to a New Theory of Human Nature turned a profit. It’s also gotten a series of rave reviews from critics and readers.

UCLA professor Jared Diamond: He expresses his views in books but won’t defend them in public.

Its idea is simple. The book does not dispute the evidence that humans are descended from apes. But it points to a mountain of new research from fields like biochemistry, genetics and neuroscience that show humans aren’t all that closely related to chimps and gorillas.

In particular, it turns out that we’re not 98.6% genetically alike to chimps as has been frequently claimed. In fact, as a definitive study published in Nature magazine last April proved, we’re at least 13.5% different — and the genetic transformation especially turns up in things like the genes that determine how our brain functions.

My book explains why this is and why we are so different. In order to survive humans evolved to be highly cooperative animals who use speech and are domesticated. In doing so, we have taken on many of the traits of other large-brained animals with many of these same attributes. These creatures — like dolphins and elephants — are pack or herd animals, and they think and behave very differently from apes.

One subject the book pays particular attention to is human sexuality. It points out that the fossil record indicates that we and our ancestors were designed to be relatively monogamous, and this has been so for roughly three hundred thousand years. In addition to that, I show that there is no record of a polygamous human society ever becoming highly functional. The chapter of the book that discusses this was adapted for a National Review cover story that ran this past February.

I have repeatedly reached out both to those who promoted the ideas that humans are simply very clever chimps and to those who think that polyamory and polygamy can work in human societies, and I’ve asked them to debate.

Well, guess what?

Last week I found out again what I’d discovered previously. I have not been able to find even one prominent person who holds these views who will debate me.

• Richard Dawkins is a noted chimp enthusiast and self-proclaimed expert on human evolution. But, when I reached out to him, his booking agent claimed that he was overscheduled and couldn’t debate me.

• Jared Diamond emailed me to say that he hadn’t written about chimps in thirty years and therefore couldn’t debate me — even if I flew out to Los Angeles to debate him on his home turf. Yet Diamond’s reputation was founded on his book The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, which claims humans aren’t much more than a souped-up chimp sub-species.

• Christopher Ryan, author of the pro-polygamy bestseller Sex At Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, won’t respond to my messages.

• Nor will University of New Mexico psychology professor and polyamory promoter Diana Santos Fleischman.

• Bondage and polyamory enthusiast Elisabeth Scheff actually wrote back to me, seemingly open to the possibility of a debate. Yet when I asked her where and when we could debate, she stopped answering my messages.

Nothing has changed. Just as human nature is a relative constant, those who believe that humans are naturally ape-like and polygamous won’t defend their ideas.

However, if you want to know the truth, you can buy my book. Readers have consistently said that it’s not only informative but a fun read. So here’s a link: https://www.amazon.com/Primate-Myth-Latest-Science-Theory/dp/B0F27ZZ9ZN

Formed in 2012, the New IRA is composed of militants who reject the old IRA and all established political parties, including Sinn Féin. The group’s activities are said to be centered in Ulster, especially in County Tyrone and in the city of Belfast. They claim to have 250 to 300 members who identify themselves as fighters, along with assorted “advocates” and supporters. Ironically, although the New IRA is anti-immigrant it is also known to have ties to the government of Iran and to Hezbollah…

If you’re among the number of people who have been falsely convinced that Americans are getting poorer, consider this fact reported by The Wall Street Journal: In 1990, only 5% of Americans had a valid passport.

Of course, in 1990 Americans could still travel to Canada and Mexico without a valid passport…

Great Britain’s K3 naval scout drones are equipped with Chinese-made optical equipment. Last week the Telegraph newspaper revealed that the optical devices are actually functioning as spy cameras that send messages back to an IP address in China…

Nathan Lasker, who writes a controversial Substack under the pseudonym Crémieux Recueil, published a chart yesterday on “intergenerational transmission of divorce.” The data is taken from a Swedish study previously published in an academic journal. The study found that the probability that adopted children would go through a divorce tied to the likelihood that their biological parents had been through a divorce, not their adoptive parents. Here is Lasker’s chart of the study’s findings:

This researches matches to a number of previous studies of the IQ of adopted children. Among the most famous is one known as the Texas Adoption Project. That found significantly stronger correlations between the IQ of adopted children with the IQ of their biological parents than those of their adoptive parents…

Compact magazine, quoting recent Stanford graduate and author Theo Baker, reports that students at Stanford’s fraternities have been required to recite a land acknowledgement statement saying that they were on stolen land before they are allowed to attend college fraternity parties…

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Formed in 2012, the New IRA is composed of militants who reject the old IRA and all established political parties, including Sinn Féin. The group’s activities are said to be centered in Ulster, especially in County Tyrone and in the city of Belfast. They claim to have 250 to 300 members who identify themselves as fighters, along with assorted “advocates” and supporters. Ironically, although the New IRA is anti-immigrant it is also known to have ties to the government of Iran and to Hezbollah…

If you’re among the number of people who have been falsely convinced that Americans are getting poorer, consider this fact reported by The Wall Street Journal: In 1990, only 5% of Americans had a valid passport.

Of course, in 1990 Americans could still travel to Canada and Mexico without a valid passport…

Great Britain’s K3 naval scout drones are equipped with Chinese-made optical equipment. Last week the Telegraph newspaper revealed that the optical devices are actually functioning as spy cameras that send messages back to an IP address in China…

Nathan Lasker, who writes a controversial Substack under the pseudonym Crémieux Recueil, published a chart yesterday on “intergenerational transmission of divorce.” The data is taken from a Swedish study previously published in an academic journal. The study found that the probability that adopted children would go through a divorce tied to the likelihood that their biological parents had been through a divorce, not their adoptive parents. Here is Lasker’s chart of the study’s findings:

This researches matches to a number of previous studies of the IQ of adopted children. Among the most famous is one known as the Texas Adoption Project. That found significantly stronger correlations between the IQ of adopted children with the IQ of their biological parents than those of their adoptive parents…

Compact magazine, quoting recent Stanford graduate and author Theo Baker, reports that students at Stanford’s fraternities have been required to recite a land acknowledgement statement saying that they were on stolen land before they are allowed to attend college fraternity parties…

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As an alternative, it will allow law school graduates to present a portfolio of activities they have engaged in related to the law, one that demonstrates that they have done 675 hours of supervised legal work. They can then become fully fledged lawyers without ever passing the two-day test that had been traditionally required of them.

New Mexico: The vastness, beauty and emptiness within the “State of Enchantment.”

New Mexico is following the lead of six other states that have already adopted this practice: Oregon, Washington, Arizona, South Dakota, Utah and Nevada. New Mexico’s Bar Association argues that this change will make it easier for people living in remote parts of the state to find an attorney to represent them.

But the state is ignoring a far better option that’s still practiced in four states.

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As an alternative, it will allow law school graduates to present a portfolio of activities they have engaged in related to the law, one that demonstrates that they have done 675 hours of supervised legal work. They can then become fully fledged lawyers without ever passing the two-day test that had been traditionally required of them.

New Mexico: The vastness, beauty and emptiness within the “State of Enchantment.”

New Mexico is following the lead of six other states that have already adopted this practice: Oregon, Washington, Arizona, South Dakota, Utah and Nevada. New Mexico’s Bar Association argues that this change will make it easier for people living in remote parts of the state to find an attorney to represent them.

But the state is ignoring a far better option that’s still practiced in four states.

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It’s this: Hitler was actually partially Jewish. The claim appeals to antisemites as it allows them to suggest that the Holocaust may have been in some measure the fault of the Jews. A Jew ordered the death of six million Jews.

The source for the old story is that the ancestry of Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler, is obscure. Hitler’s father was born with the name Alois Schicklgruber. Hitler and his father derived their eventual surname from Hitler’s father’s stepfather, Johann Georg Hiedler. (The name seems to have been misprinted by a local official during the process in which Hitler’s father was adopted and took on his stepfather’s last name. Thus, Hiedler became Hitler.) Since Hitler’s father was illegitimate, there has always been uncertainty about who his father’s biological father — his paternal grandfather — was.

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One reason is that all too often our legislators are trying to respond to the interests of the various constituencies that helped get them into office, and their focus is on almost everything but keeping the cost of government down.

Few things show this better than the scandalous way that Congress has arranged for provisioning the Artemis space program. Artemis is a NASA space mission program inaugurated by President Trump in 2017. Its dual purpose is to arrange for a renewal of manned NASA flights to the moon and to create a permanent U.S. colony on the lunar surface.

So far there have been two Artemis rocket missions. Both orbited the moon. The plan is to blast off a manned flight that will touch down on the lunar surface in 2028. That will be an extension and continuation of the storied Apollo flights, which were suspended in December 1972.

The current program’s enormous cost is to a very great degree a function of the Artemis program’s RS-25 rocket engines. These cost upwards of $145 million each, and they cannot be re-used…

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Anthony Fauci swearing an oath to give honest testimony as he appeared at the U.S. Capitol last week. He then repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment in refusing to answer questions.

Take Health and Human Services Director Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his recent remarks following the release of Fauci’s diaries. Kennedy was right in pointing out that Fauci was treated in June 2021 for a pulmonary infarction, and that Fauci concealed this. Kennedy is also correct in saying that this is dubious in itself as pulmonary infarction can be caused by Covid vaccines, and for Fauci to cover this up when he was promoting the vaccines — and for years afterwards — surely leaves him open to reproach.

But Kennedy also said that Fauci had a myocardial infarction. In laymen’s terms, that’s a heart attack. But it was Fauci’s lungs, not his heart, that were affected. Moreover, while some vaccines did induce pulmonary embolisms and some pulmonary embolisms cause tissue death, which is what an infarction is, this was typical of non-RNA vaccines. Pulmonary infarction does not appear to be associated with the Moderna vaccine, which is an m-RNA vaccine, and that is what Fauci was given. In addition, Fauci’s infarction appeared five months after he received his Covid shot, and that’s not consistent with the claim that the injection prompted his infarction.

In other words, Kennedy was half-right. Fauci’s behavior was questionable, but the facts don’t quite align with what Kennedy alleged.

That brings us back to where we started. Nearly everyone commenting on Fauci is partisan, and we need to be absolutely specific about the facts in order to assess his record.

With that in mind, here is a review of some of Fauci’s key decisions, especially including those that have been most criticized:

Fauci was in charge of the United States government agency that provided funds for the gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory. That’s where it’s now generally agreed that Covid was accidentally spawned. So Fauci bears at least some responsibility for the pandemic.

Nonetheless, he repeatedly testified under oath before Congress that the NAID never funded "gain-of-function" research—modifying viruses to make them more transmissible or lethal—at the Wuhan lab. Whether Fauci recognized the extent of the gain-of-function research that took place there and knew that what he was saying was false is unclear. At a minimum he appears to have been shading the truth. This may have been based upon the belief that what he was asserting was defensible since the NAID funds first passed through a New York-based non-profit called EcoHealth Alliance, and they were not made directly to the Wuhan Institute.

Still more troublingly, even after Covid made its appearance and it was revealed that EcoHealth Alliance had delayed in telling the U.S. government that the viruses Wuhan was studying were more lethal than had been expected, Fauci did not cut off their funding.

Fauci was also slow in favoring a ban on travel from China. On January 24, 2020, Fauci told a group of senators that this was unwise. However, he reversed himself a week later, possibly under pressure from President Trump, expressing his support for a ban. As he later noted, the ban may have prevented “seeding” of the virus, giving the country more time to prepare for its emergence here.

Fauci has often been blamed for the extended school closures of 2020-2021…

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Zohran Mamdani holding up green bananas. The color seems apt for his level of knowledge of economics.

But, like Mamdani’s claim that as mayor he would arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when Bibi came to New York for United Nations sessions, this turns out to be hogwash.

How do we know that New York can’t offer fruits and vegetables more cheaply than local bodegas and national supermarket chains without losing large sums of taxpayer money?

Well, the Mayor just told us that yesterday.

However, in his typically shifty fashion he did not say this directly. Instead, Mamdani and his aides released a plan which said that the planned city-owned stores would limit customer purchases and require buyers to demonstrate that they were New York City residents. Of course, if the items were being sold profitably, there would be no need to ration or to cut down the number of buyers. Quite the opposite: with more sales and more customers, city profits would go up.

This strategy only makes any sense if the stores are being set up with the understanding that they will lose money on each sale. In that case, this becomes a means by which to keep a line on the losses. Those will be substantial as even the optimistic projections of city officials call for a cost of $14 million to set up each store, but you can buy an existing New York City supermarket for $5 million!

The plan also points to various other absurdities of the Mayor’s political program. Perhaps the most obvious is that he favors open borders/sanctuary city policies for illegal immigrants, but he is opposed to folks from Long Island, Westchester County and New Jersey coming into town and lining up to buy tomatoes in the city stores. Similarly, he is arguing that proof of citizenship should not be required for voting, but proof of residence is needed for purchasing cauliflowers.

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The piece offered readers a pointed demonstration that there are still stories that are well worth reading in the self-appointed “newspaper of record.” At the same time, the article was written in an odd way that suggests that it was intended to avoid providing the reader with a clear understanding of pertinent and highly relevant facts connected to it.

Why had this happened? As with so much in The Times, the problem seems to be one of the paper’s not wishing to stand up against its own ideological preconceptions.

New York Times Science writer Gina Kolata.

Before considering this, let’s back up a moment. Some context is necessary. While the story does not say it, the median age of diagnosis for ovarian cancer is 63. This means that it mainly strikes women who are well past their child-bearing years. Curiously, the article also does not say what the ovarian cancer five-year survival rate is, merely telling readers that the disease is exceedingly deadly. (As it happens, it’s barely above fifty percent — though you wouldn’t know that from the article.) It does, however, provide valuable information for readers on how prevalent ovarian cancer is.

As Times science writer, Gina Kolata notes:

Women have, on average, a 1.1 percent risk of being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, among the most deadly of all cancers. Screening to find it early does not work (death rates do not budge). Ultrasound, blood tests and advanced imaging have all failed. And most of the 20,000 women a year who receive a diagnosis of ovarian cancer have no known risk factors. By the time they find out why they have vague symptoms like bloating and abdominal pain, the cancer has spread throughout their bodies. Surgery and chemotherapy — the standard treatments — are unlikely to cure them.

In addition, the story offers its readers with a historical account of how oncologists came to a critical recent discovery about ovarian cancer. It turns out that four-fifths of ovarian cancers actually start in the fallopian tubes, and these are the cases that are the hardest to treat.

Most ovarian cancers begin in the fallopian tubes and then spread into the ovaries.

Granted that, it’s possible to prevent the overwhelming majority of fatal cases of ovarian cancer through the relatively uncomplicated and inexpensive expedient of removing a women’s fallopian tubes. The difficulty that the article goes to considerable lengths to avoid addressing properly is that this leads to infertility.

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The piece offered readers a pointed demonstration that there are still stories that are well worth reading in the self-appointed “newspaper of record.” At the same time, the article was written in an odd way that suggests that it was intended to avoid providing the reader with a clear understanding of pertinent and highly relevant facts connected to it.

Why had this happened? As with so much in The Times, the problem seems to be one of the paper’s not wishing to stand up against its own ideological preconceptions.

New York Times Science writer Gina Kolata.

Before considering this, let’s back up a moment. Some context is necessary. While the story does not say it, the median age of diagnosis for ovarian cancer is 63. This means that it mainly strikes women who are well past their child-bearing years. Curiously, the article also does not say what the ovarian cancer five-year survival rate is, merely telling readers that the disease is exceedingly deadly. (As it happens, it’s barely above fifty percent — though you wouldn’t know that from the article.) It does, however, provide valuable information for readers on how prevalent ovarian cancer is.

As Times science writer, Gina Kolata notes:

Women have, on average, a 1.1 percent risk of being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, among the most deadly of all cancers. Screening to find it early does not work (death rates do not budge). Ultrasound, blood tests and advanced imaging have all failed. And most of the 20,000 women a year who receive a diagnosis of ovarian cancer have no known risk factors. By the time they find out why they have vague symptoms like bloating and abdominal pain, the cancer has spread throughout their bodies. Surgery and chemotherapy — the standard treatments — are unlikely to cure them.

In addition, the story offers its readers with a historical account of how oncologists came to a critical recent discovery about ovarian cancer. It turns out that four-fifths of ovarian cancers actually start in the fallopian tubes, and these are the cases that are the hardest to treat.

Most ovarian cancers begin in the fallopian tubes and then spread into the ovaries.

Granted that, it’s possible to prevent the overwhelming majority of fatal cases of ovarian cancer through the relatively uncomplicated and inexpensive expedient of removing a women’s fallopian tubes. The difficulty that the article goes to considerable lengths to avoid addressing properly is that this leads to infertility.

Read more

A contributing factor to this is the huge growth in the money supply within the People’s Republic. China’s government is flooding the country’s banking sector with cash. The banks in turn loan this to property developers. What’s resulted from this is an unresolved real estate crisis that’s many times more serious than what the U.S. experienced in 2008.

M2 money supply measures the total amount of cash in circulation, money in checking accounts and money in savings accounts and certificates of deposit. This is a chart showing the growth in this broad measure of money supply.

…Placed below is some old data that I came across. One big question among the ranks of American Christians is why the mainline Protestant sects have lost so many parishioners and why their ministers are so consistently sympathetic to amnesty claims made by foreign nationals of other faiths. This chart may offer some clues. It also raises questions about what young Catholic priests are being taught in their theology classes…

Within the last year London has lost 400,000 people — between 4 and 5% of its whole population. London is a bigger city than New York. In 2025, it had 9.1 million people. That’s more than 13% of the United Kingdom’s 69.9 million people. That’s a higher percentage of the country’s population than California makes up of the United States.

Buoyed by its role in finance and its place as the country’s center of governance, London has grown to gigantic proportions. Birmingham is the only other British city with one million people, and it only barely reaches that marker (1.1 million.) But, in the aftermath of Brexit and with all its issues of crime and terroristic violence, London finally — and rapidly — is losing people as city residents relocate to other parts of Britain…

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