It’s Monday, November 5th, 2018…but before we begin, in honor of the great Thomas Sowell, we humbly offer a couple random thoughts on the passing scene.

First consider this photo from a campaign urging women to Grab Them by the Ballot:

 “…A Jewish transgender woman, who goes by the initial Z, took part in the shoot to point out how the transgender community suffered under the rule of Republicans. “Donald Trump’s administration is aggressively trying to define transgender, intersex, and gender non-conforming people out of existence,” she told the Daily Mail…”

Inquiring minds want to know how…precisely how…has the transgendered community SUFFERED under the rule of Republicans, not to mention how The Donald is aggressively defining these deviants “out of existence”?!?  By requiring them to use bathrooms designed for their particular plumbing at birth?!?

Meanwhile, we have to confess our confusion: is a transgender woman a man who relates as a woman…or woman who relates as a man?  And why, if her possession of a penis or vagina can be ignored due to Z’s feelings on a given day, should her status as a Jew bear any meaning on her identity?  Could she not tomorrow, or the next day, be a Pakistani Muslim or Native American transgender woman?!?

In a related item highlighting the idiocy inherent with Progressivism’s promotion of feelings over facts…

Paraplegic athlete drags himself through terminal, claims airport ‘humiliated’ him after airline forgets wheelchair

“A man paralyzed from the waist down is suing London’s Luton airport after his custom-made self-propelling wheelchair was left behind on a flight, causing him to drag himself through the airport terminal.“

“Causing him”?!?

Sorry, but the facts tell a different story:

The incident took place when paraplegic athlete Justin Levene, 29, arrived at the airport August 2017 and learned his wheelchair was not there to meet him. Though airport staff offered to push him through the terminal in a traditional high-backed wheelchair, Levene declined, calling the suggestion degrading and dangerous if he were strapped down. “I’ve worked very hard for a number of years to try and maintain all of my independence,” Levene said to BBC. “And to be in one of the chairs they were offering would make me feel humiliated and degraded.”

After denying the airport’s wheelchair, Levene felt dragging himself through the airport was his only option – and for that he is suing the airport, claiming the staff had no “empathy for what was happening.” Leven was filmed sliding himself through the airport terminal and lifting himself onto a baggage cart, which he used to push himself to a taxi out front.

The airport has defended itself in a statement to the BBC, saying its staff reacted properly given the circumstances. “While we apologize if Mr. Levene was dissatisfied with the service he received, we are satisfied that our agents and staff did all they could in difficult circumstances,” the airport said…”

Here’s the juice: from where we sit, Justin Levene has a bone to pick against the world, and the authorities at London’s Luton Airport merely served as a convenient target of opportunity for his ire.  Everything about this story fairly screams…

So we’d suggest Justin suck it up and accept reasonable man-made solutions to life’s unanticipated inconveniences…as that’s what EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD has to do…including the people who had to step around him while he slid across the floor of Luton Airport.

Since we’re on the subject of self-centered a*sclowns, it’s worth noting the individual…

…who recently suggested (see our Quote of the Day at the top of the page) White male Conservatives pose the greatest threat to peace on the planet also seriously wondered whether Malaysian Airways Flight 370 might have fallen victim to supernatural forces or been lost in a black hole.  Thus Don Lemon deserves the same respect accorded former Congressman Hank Johnson after, while questioning Admiral Bob Willard about a proposed increase in troop levels on Guam, he asked…

Which is absolutely zero.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

We lead off the last edition before Decision Day 2018 with Holman Jenkins’s latest at the WSJ, as he accurately observes, when humans are considered as a group…

We Are a Homicidal Species

Better than engaging in political cheap shots would be figuring out how to use technology to protect us.

“Homicide is known to have been a top cause of death in prehistoric societies, as well as in hunter-gatherer cultures that survived into modern times. This is what we learn from archaeology and ethnology. Human beings are a murdering species. I’m not here to proselytize for a particular religion or philosophy, but if you haven’t taken on board this ugly reality of human nature, please do so. If you are a pundit not conversant with the existence of evil, it’s hard to see how you can be much use to an audience.

…An unconscious assumption of people who populate Sunday-morning talk shows goes like this: The arc of history is pointing to human perfection. We’ll get there when we have freed ourselves from corrupting ideologies and beliefs (i.e., Judeo-Christian-Conservative morals and values!), much like the specimens on Sunday-morning talk shows have already done.

Why this fantasy persists in the face of daily experience and human history is a mystery for another time. Maybe one day an edited version of human nature will be loaded into machines and sent on journeys of millions of miles to spread ’cross the galaxy a version of ourselves without our mad, vicious, hateful, homicidal tendencies. That’s the dream of certain Silicon Valley technologists and visionaries. It doesn’t sound like the worst outcome. But neither would it be us.

Robert Bowers and Cesar Sayoc, the alleged Pittsburgh killer and antiliberal letter bomber, are very different cases. That said, it’s worth noting that both freely broadcast their hateful attitudes to the pubic using social media. Mr. Bowers is reported to have acquired 21 guns and ammunition. By the estimate of IBM , 2.5 quintillion bytes of data about us are created every day—90% of all the data in history has been created in the last two years. Using this data to understand who bears watching, who might benefit from social intervention, could in theory be done in a nonoppressive way. We should try. Even so, don’t lose sight of another fact: For reasons not fully clear, the murder rate is at a 53-year low; after a slight uptick in 2015 and 2016, violent crime fell again in 2017. We are not in a “state of emergency,” as CNN’s Bill Carter, in a spasm of cable one-upmanship, intoned on Sunday.

Like any journalist, I keep in memory a list of every ill-advised, off-color thing President Trump has said. As this column pointed out after Charlottesville, it would pay him to play the media’s game sometimes by saying the expected thing, in the expected way. The reasons are partly ignoble: In a country of 330 million people who have implements of mayhem within easy reach, bad things are going to happen. Sticking to the media script is how politicians minimize their risk in the blame game that frequently follows.

But his saner fans, as well as reporters who cover him at the White House, also get something the cable commentators don’t—he’s mugging. He’s putting on a show. For all the purple fits he supposedly throws in private, in public he’s consistently good-natured if pungent. The tweets he rattles off at random denouncing a Dodgers pitching change, mocking the ratings of cable shows, etc., ought to dissipate any tendency to take any particular thing he says very seriously.

Plus his statements are but a teensy fraction of the political hysteria flowing daily from the media. Let us phrase this delicately: Who contributes to ginning up the political stakes in the minds of the overly credulous and outright deranged is a question that doesn’t lend itself to an easy assumption that the culprit is always and only Donald Trump. If hyperbolic political speech were outlawed, there’d be silence in America. We are better off—all of us—focusing the blame on people who commit sick acts rather than trying to shift blame around for political advantage…”

It’s worth remembering, with the possible exception of Genghis Khan, no humans in history have proved as homicidal as those promising liberté…

…égalité and…

fraternité!

Which should come as no surprise given the world received ample warning…

…of what inevitably…

…follows such promises.  At least for those less equal than others!

Next up, writing at NRO, Andy McCarthy offers an historically-accurate perspective on the legality/constitutionality of anchor babies:

The 14th Amendment Does Not Mandate Birthright Citizenship

It was about removing vestiges of slavery, not regulating aliens.

“…Rarely noticed in our era of the Beltway Behemoth is how sparse the Constitution is on the matter of central-government power over aliens. The naturalization clause is the beginning and the end of it. Congress was given the power to prescribe what aliens needed to do to become Americans. But there is not a word in the Constitution about law enforcement, nothing about which aliens would be allowed into the country, or on what conditions they would be permitted to stay.

Why is that? Because such matters were understood to be state responsibilities. The Constitution prescribes a federalist arrangement in which the states retain sovereignty. The states had control over their internal affairs. From the founding through most of the 19th century, that was understood to include deciding which non-Americans would be permitted in their territories.

America was vast, unsettled, and expanding ever westward. People were needed to fill it. And in the 1800s, aliens came to do just that, first in dribs and drabs and then, beginning in the 1840s, in droves. But, as University of Massachusetts immigration scholar Vincent J. Cannato recounted in a comprehensive 2012 National Affairs essay, it was not until 1891 — at the dawn of the progressive era, after years of urging by the federal courts and some statutory fits and starts — that Congress finally asserted federal control over immigration regulation and enforcement. Indeed, Ellis Island opened in 1892, essentially as a station charged with carrying out the 1891 Immigration Act.

This is a rich transitional history. I’ve described it only briefly here to make the point that the 14th Amendment was utterly unrelated to the challenge and complexities of immigration-law enforcement.

Again, the 14th Amendment was enacted in 1868, nearly a quarter-century before the federal government seized control of immigration regulation from the states. The driving objective of the 14th Amendment was to shore up deficiencies of the 13th Amendment. Though it had formally abolished slavery upon its 1865 adoption, the 13th Amendment failed to prevent the states from denying black former slaves the privileges and immunities of citizenship.

As University of Texas Law School professor Lino Graglia has explained, Congress attempted to address this shameful situation by enacting the Civil Rights Act of 1866. President Andrew Johnson’s veto of the measure was overridden, but it heightened uncertainty about Congress’s authority to act. The purpose of the 14th Amendment was to remove all doubt.

That is the main point: The 14th Amendment was meant to ensure that the necessary relief for former slaves could not be undone by subsequent Congresses or court decisions. As we shall come to, the Supreme Court later resorted to the 14th Amendment in order to address an injustice done to an adult child of immigrants under the noxious Chinese Exclusion Act. The Court, however, was wrong to do so — certainly, to the extent that its ruling can be read (and has been read) to usurp Congress’s constitutional power to prescribe citizenship qualifications for children born in the United States of aliens who are not legally here. The 14th Amendment was about black people enslaved in America for generations. It was not about aliens transiting America illegally…”

We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: is it any wonder why Progressives prefer their pawns utterly ignorant of history?!?

Which brings us to The Lighter Side:

Finally, going full circle, we’ll call it a day with the Misplaced Priorities segment, and this just in from the subcontinent:

Man-eating tiger who is believed to have killed 13 people is shot dead in India after major hunt

“A tigress in India who is suspected of having killed at least 13 people over two years was shot and killed in India after a hunt Friday night, officials said.

The tigress, who was believed to be six years old, was also known as T-1. Rangers were called to a place near Borati village after residents spotted the man-eating tiger, the BBC reported. The plan was to shoot the tiger with a tranquilizer by a patrol team but the tigress charged. The tigress was killed by a single shot.

Residents who lived in the area were said to be overjoyed after learning of the tiger’s death, The New York Times reported. However, wildlife activists did not feel the same. “This is a coldblooded murder,” Jerryl Banait, an advocate for animal rights, said…”

As the Atimanarj News noted without a hint of irony…

“In this case, there weren’t too many arguments about whether or not Avni was responsible for the human killings but there were a lot about whether humans had any business being where they were. Animal rights activists saw them as encroachers, and argued that she couldn’t be called a man-eater because she hadn’t entered human habitations to kill people. The forest department, the local government, even the Supreme Court saw it otherwise…”

In other words, the protestations of Dr. Jerryl Banait and his fellow animal rights advocates well beyond the reach of Avni’s paws notwithstanding…

…those tasked with preserving the rights and lives of the tigress’s preferred food source…

…fortunately felt otherwise.

Which just goes to prove, Liberalism is a debilitative mental disease which transcends race, religion, color, creed and national origin.

Magoo