THIS & THAT XXVII

 

         I didn’t hear “Baby It’s Cold Outside” once this season.  For the past few years, it has been discussed and argued about, but there were always a few rebels who would play it on the radio.  Now I think it has been quietly banned because it’s so unsafe and rape-y.

 

*

 

         There is a distinct odor of the 1930’s in the air.

 

         It’s impossible to see the celebrations of the October 7 massacres without thinking of the ships full of Jewish refugees turned away in New York by Roosevelt and sent back to Europe, to their deaths.

 

         When I see the quarantine camps and the COVID lockdowns, and the demonization of healthy citizens who have done nothing wrong, my mind wanders back to the Japanese-American citizens rounded up for internment camps.

 

         And when confused children are seduced into the transgender industry to be sexually mutilated through drugs or surgery, often with the enthusiastic participation of their parents, how can we not be reminded of the eugenics movement sterilizing tens of thousands of “inferior” people?

 

*

 

         Southwest Airlines has announced its new “person of size” policy, which gives free seats to people who need more space because their butt can’t fit in the one seat they purchased.  One way they can take advantage of the policy is to purchase two adjoining seats, fly to wherever, and then demand a refund of half their fare.

 

         Here’s my question.  What if I merely identify as a “person of size” but weigh 160 pounds?  Can I too pay for one seat and get two?  What if I am fat only in my mind?  What if I’m a fathead?

 

*

 

         COVID trivia: though the virus is not nearly as dangerous as it once was, there are still elderly people with serious illnesses for whom COVID can be life-threatening.  Some doctors prescribe nicotine pills for these patients.

 

         COVID enters the body through “receptors,” which are present on human cells.  The virus can bind with certain receptors and thus infect the person.  One type of receptor that the COVID virus typically uses is the ACE2 receptor, but there are others.

 

         For tobacco users, the ACLR receptor is how nicotine gets into the body.  These receptors can also accept COVID virus, but not at the same time.  This is why smokers tend to get fewer COVID infections and have fewer serious or deadly outcomes.  The advantage for smokers was apparent from the beginning of the COVID outbreak.

 

         This is also why nicotine pills are being used (experimentally) as a treatment for COVID in at-risk patients.  The nicotine occupies the ACLR receptors, leaving fewer opportunities for COVID to enter the body.

 

*

 

         A few months ago, I blogged my theories on the Democratic race for the presidential nomination in 2024.  To save you the trouble of reading it, my prediction was that Michelle Obama would be presented as the new figurehead President so that Barack could continue in his role as the national political leader.  He would continue to govern as he has under Biden’s four years, though with Michelle as the front man.  The pretense that someone other than Barack was president could thus be abandoned.  While there are people now who believe Biden is a real president who makes policy, nobody would believe Michelle was anything other than a stand-in.  Michelle in the Oval Office would simplify matters.

 

         There is still no question Biden will be replaced.  He’s like that 1993 Toyota that you love, that is full of memories, but is now beyond fixing.  Are you really going to put a third carburetor in the damn thing.  No.  You’re going to ditch that Tercel.

 

         And I’m not backing off my original prediction since Michelle remains the ideal choice for the Obama machine that rules America.  But Kamala also has a possible path to the top job.

 

         Nobody (or almost nobody) wants her there, and nobody likes her very much, but they chose her as VP partly to get Joe past the finish line, and now they are stuck with her.  She’s young and healthy, and they can’t just kick her out of national politics without some serious howling from the DEI crowd.  I mean, did she somehow STOP being a little bit black and a little bit Asian?  And doesn’t she still own a vagina?

 

         So if they can’t easily dump her, the question becomes how to use her.  Would she accept a secondary role and take orders from Barack?  She might.  Gavin Newsom would not---if he were made president, he would insist on being the boss---but Kamala might take the deal.  Kamala might realize the ONLY way for her to become president is to accept the state-dinner/ice-cream-cone role that Biden now enjoys.  It could work, and it would free Michelle Obama to continue hanging out with her girlfriends on Ibiza and Martha’s Vineyard.

 

*

 

         I understand it is typical for geezers like me to rail against today’s ignorant and misbegotten young folks.  In my defense I can only say that I don’t believe I have ever done that.

 

         Until now.

 

         When I see polls indicating that HALF of Americans aged 18-34 believe the massacres of Israelis on October 7 were justified, or blame the Jews for the killings, I am worried.  When I see tens of thousands of youthful Jew-haters filling the streets around the world violently demonstrating and chanting for the annihilation of Jews, I dread what the future may bring.  

 

         I knew that no real history was being taught to high school and college students, and I knew the group-identity-based indoctrination was taking place, but I had no idea how successful it was, or how many young people were affected, or how thoroughly the Left had purged any consideration of good and evil from the minds of the young. 

 

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki  

DEI, Free Speech, and the Jews

 

         With the rapid spread of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) industry on campus, free speech principles have taken yet another hit in America.  Up until now, it has been little appreciated just how incompatible DEI rules are with the First Amendment, but events on campuses relating to the recent Israel-Hamas war have shined a light on the issue.

 

         The values embedded in the Bill of Rights of our Constitution begin with a presumption of equality.  EVERYBODY gets to say whatever they wish, everybody is protected from unreasonable searches, everybody gets to have a gun and defend himself, everybody gets to go to whichever church they desire, etc.  Further down the line, exceptions begin to appear: maybe felons don’t get to have guns, maybe pictures of children being sexually assaulted are not “free speech,” maybe the religion that practices ritual sacrifice of virgins doesn’t get the same deference as, say, Baptists.  But equality is where we start.

 

         DEI, however, starts not with equality, but with a hierarchy based on group victimhood. Muslims are at or near the top, then gays and transsexuals and blacks and people of color, and women and Hispanics and third-worlders, and so on.  At the bottom are white people and Jews (who are sort-of white and sort-of “colonizers”), and Asians who study hard and get perfect SAT scores.  The good people at the top of the scale can say or do whatever they want and it’s OK because they have been oppressed.  The whites and Jews and Asians can be silenced and ignored and beaten and have no right to even complain about it.  All rights flow from the accepted hierarchy of oppression.

 

         The reaction on American campuses to the October massacre of Israeli innocents is entirely derived from the DEI hierarchy, which is widely accepted at the most prestigious schools (e.g., Ivy League), in America.  Muslims, at the top of the list, are justified in doing ANYTHING to Jews because Jews are oppressors and scum and colonizers and sort-of white.  And that belief among the DEI-addled students would be just fine with the administrators and professors who run these places if the kids would just keep quiet about it.

 

But they can’t.  Not only do the leftists loudly blame Israelis for being massacred, they try to beat up Jewish students who object to it and they tear down posters of Israeli hostages the Jewish kids put up on campus.  If there were any respect for free speech and the First Amendment, Jewish students would at least be allowed to express their disapproval of the beheadings and torture, but any respect for the First Amendment is based in equality, and in the idea that anybody can speak, even Jews.  That idea is intolerable to anyone who has been indoctrinated with the tenets of DEI.

 

One problem that has arisen is that a lot of people who give a lot of money to these universities are Jewish, and they are now saying they don’t want to give any more money.  Presidents of universities have to answer to their boards and the board members want to know if the school is still going to get $100 million donations from this Jewish guy or that one.

 

The response to this from university presidents has been (almost) humorous.  They will NOT embrace equality and free speech because that would be incompatible with the DEI business.  They cannot conceive of Jews and white people having the same right to speak as Muslims and gays and others at the top of the pyramid.  Instead, their plan is to ban more speech, specifically antisemitic speech.  This is the scheme of Liz Magill, President of the University of Pennsylvania, which is currently experiencing a revolt by its most generous alumni.

 

I close with the letter I sent to the Philadelphia Inquirer about the problems at UPenn.

 

*

 

To the Editor:

 

    Penn will never get past its speech problems until it accepts its obligations under the First Amendment.

 

    The Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has put Penn on its list of America's 10 worst colleges for free speech.  Its national survey of students puts Penn second worst in the country (behind only Harvard), for suppression of student speech.  Yet President Liz Magill’s solution to Penn’s donor revolt is simply to add Jew-hatred to the list of things that cannot be expressed at Penn.

    The real solution is not complicated.  Allow people to say or chant whatever they want, no matter how loathsome or “threatening” it may be to the more delicate sensibilities on campus.  At the same time, anyone committing vandalism, real violence, or silencing of other speakers or speech should be expelled immediately and turned over to the cops. 

 

         *

 

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki

NEVER AGAIN

The Harvard/Harris poll of October 18 asked a representative sample of your fellow Americans this question:

 

“Do you think the Hamas killing of civilians in Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified?”

 

It was widely reported that a large majority said the killings were NOT justified.  What was not so widely reported was disturbing, however.  The youngest respondents were evenly split on the question.  Half of young Americans from ages 18 to 34 believe that the grievances of Gazans justified burning Israelis alive, shooting entire families, killing babies, mowing down hundreds of concertgoers, raping and torturing and killing young women, and dragging hundreds of civilians away as hostages.

 

Think about the 18-34-year-olds you know.  What do they think and how did they get that way?  Half of them in America believe the savagery and the massacres of Israeli civilians can’t be condemned, that it was to be expected.  Some of them think it was worth celebrating.  Who the hell are these kids?

 

Here’s my theory on who they are.

 

They are not your 24-year-old haircutter at the Haircuttery.  They are not the carpenter’s assistant building your shed.  They are not the 30-year-old produce clerk putting oranges in the bin at your supermarket.  They are not the young woman with two kids who just got her GED and is trying to get a job as a cop.

 

They are the barrista with the gender-studies degree who just frapped you a frappuccino.  They are the Bernie Sanders fan who just graduated from Cornell and is trying to get into law school.  They are the Ed-School student who thinks 14-year-old carjackers just need a little understanding.  They are the recent BA in sociology who works as an intern in a diversity office.  They are the young women who think it’s great that trans-women beat actual girls in swimming.  They are the young man with $35K in student debt who delivers Uber food and has a BLM sign in his apartment window.

 

In other words, the young people who think it’s OK sometimes to cut babies heads off (if they’re Jewish babies), were taught that in school.  There’s no way normal young people think that unless they had it drilled into them in high school and college.

 

This indoctrination has been going on for decades, behind closed doors, disguised as “compassion” and “anti-colonialism” and “acknowledging white privilege” and “social justice” and “fairness.”  And now it has emerged, in 50% of our gen-whatevers, as tolerance for pure evil and a belief that there is some political grievance that can excuse the gleeful slaughter of innocents.

 

Who is to blame for what has been done to these young people, to turn them into moral monsters?  There is no lack of villains here, beginning with the leftist academics who erased any understanding of right and wrong in these children and replaced it with tribalism and identity politics and Jew-hatred.   But what of the rest of us who didn’t see it coming, or perhaps did sense there was a problem but didn’t understand it posed a threat to Western civilization?  Yes, I feel responsibility for this, a sense I could have done more, a sense I should have seen what was happening.

 

One group that must be called out as having dropped the ball is American Jews.  Sorry.  I know you’ve had a bad October, but a lot of this is on you.  “Never Again,” we were told over the years.  That was the slogan and the rallying cry.  Never again would endemic Jew-hatred be allowed to metastasize into another Holocaust.  “Never Again” meant “we got this.”  Jews accepted the duty to tell the world (and especially the children) about the evils of identitarianism and genocide, as well as the story of five thousand years in their homeland, from Judea to modern Israel.

 

And they failed.  They got distracted.  They were too busy.  And the result is that millions of young people in America know nothing about the horrors of genocide or the history of the Middle East.  In fact, they share the absurd belief the Israelis are colonizers in the land where Abraham and Moses walked.

 

There is really no excuse for this.  American Jews are well-represented in academia, and there were always political, cultural, and financial resources available to tell the story.  Yet they handed these ignorant young people over to the Herbert Marcuses and Angela Davises and Noam Chomskys of the world, and now look what we have.

 

For some reason, the focus of Jewish political attention in America has always been on the five hundred guys who live in shacks in Kentucky and Montana, who wear swastikas on their shirts on the weekends while they drink beer, shoot rats, and wonder why they don’t have girlfriends.  These idiots don’t run movie studios or television stations, and they don’t lecture at universities.  Occasionally they put up a sticker with a Star of David on a picture of a pig.  Once every five years, they march to celebrate a statue of a Confederate General everybody else had forgotten about.

 

 Nobody pays the slightest bit of attention to what these skinheads say, yet they have been the sole focus of the Abe-Foxman/anti-discrimination industry for decades.  Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Jewish Voice for Peace members show up to demonstrate for Hamas and Gazans and “Palestinians.”

 

With their own children marching in support of the slaughter of Israelis, will this finally be the moment when American Jews stop supporting, with money and votes, the people who hate them?  Is it finally time to abandon liberal Democrats, leftist academia, and the “progressive” agenda?

 

Bill and Hillary Clinton routinely referred to Jews as hebes and kikes, and yet both took 70% of the Jewish vote when they ran for president.  Barack Obama not only hates Jews, he hired people as top advisors who had long histories of Jew-hatred, and he personally treated the Israeli Prime Minister with contempt, but he somehow was rewarded with three-fourths of the Jewish vote in both of his elections.  Joe Biden cannot stop throwing billions of dollars at Iran, which uses it to fund Islamic terrorism on a number of fronts.  Eleven days after the slaughter of Israeli civilians, Biden sent $100 million in supplies to Gaza where the goods are  currently being diverted by Hamas for their own purposes.  If Biden is on the ballot again in 2024, will 77% of Jewish voters choose him, as they did in 2020?

 

This is now serious.  This is now a threat to our existence.  An America that cannot distinguish between good and evil will not survive.  All of us must help, but Jews in America bear a large responsibility to teach the world ethics and morality.  It’s a job that was originally given to them by God.   We forget sometimes, but it’s why they were “chosen.”    

 

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki

THE AISPURO AFFAIR

          On September 15, 2023, shortly before a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign event was about to begin, a man attempted to enter the Wilshire Ebell Theater in Los Angeles through a non-public entrance.  Dressed as a U.S. Marshal, in tactical clothing with a fake Marshal badge and other fake ID, Adrian Paul Aispuro had a .45 ACP pistol in a shoulder holster and was carrying a 9mm semi-automatic in a gym bag along with multiple loaded magazines for the two weapons.

 

         (Fun fact: the Wilshire Ebell Theater is about two miles from the site of the now-demolished Ambassador Hotel, Where Robert F. Kennedy was murdered on June 6, 1968.)

 

         When approached by Kennedy’s private security team, Aispuro said, “Take me to Kennedy immediately.  I have to see him right now.”  Upon questioning, he insisted he was “with the Marshals” and had been sent to see Kennedy.  When his story fell apart, he was arrested.

 

         Later that day, Aispuro was charged with one felony weapons charge and bail was set at $35,000.  A warrant to search Aisporo’s home was also issued, and other weapons were found---a shotgun, an AR-15 and two other sniper-type rifles with high-end scopes and plenty of ammunition.

 

         Three days later, defense counsel expressed doubts about his client’s mental competence and criminal proceedings were suspended pending a psychological evaluation of Aispuro.

 

         Then, on September 21, the lone charge against him was reduced to a misdemeanor and bail was reduced to $10,000.  The next day, one week following his attempt to approach Kennedy at the theater, Aispuro was released on bail.  There are no conditions to his release, and there is no GPS monitoring of his whereabouts.  Also, this happened before any psychological evaluation took place.  To my knowledge, he still has not had a meeting with a psychiatrist or other professional.

 

         Though his firearms were taken by the police, he has no criminal or mental health record (and is not even being charged with a felony), so there is nothing to stop him from legally replenishing his arsenal.

 

         Aispuro could easily be charged with impersonating a federal agent as well as carrying loaded weapons without a concealed carry permit, (and probably twenty other charges).  But all criminal proceedings are being handled by the L.A. District Attorney’s office, which has taken a more laid-back approach.  Also, the FBI has never shown any interest in the case.

 

         In 1968, the same day Bobby Kennedy was shot, LBJ extended Secret Service protection to all substantial presidential candidates.  Every president since then has continued this tradition, which has now been in place for more than fifty years.  The lone exception is the current administration, which has refused to provide protection for RFK, Jr. even though he has asked for it. 

 

         It is sometimes said that candidates are entitled to protection 120 days before an election, but there seems to be no legal basis for that.  Certainly, many candidates get federal protection well before that.  Barack Obama, because of perceived dangers, got Secret Service protection almost two years before his election.

 

         Just imagine how many death threats RFK Jr. gets as a presidential candidate.  In fact, he got them regularly even before he announced his candidacy.

 

         And speaking of Obama, I will close with my own theory about this.

 

         I have written that Biden is our figurehead president while Obama is the real one, and I think that is the reason RFK Jr. is getting no federal protection.  It seems unlikely Joe Biden is even aware of the September attempt on Kennedy’s life, and the denial of federal protection doesn’t strike me as the sort of nastiness he would revel in.  However, it is exactly the sort of snarky vindictiveness Obama was famous for.  Denying routine federal protection to a presidential candidate Obama dislikes, whose father was murdered when he was a presidential candidate, is just the sort of inside joke that Barack, the smartest-kid-in-the-back-of-the-classroom, would find amusing.

(NOTE: Thanks and a hat tip to "Courageous Discourse,” a blog run by John Leake, where most of this information comes from.) 

 

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki   

 

 

         

THIS & THAT XXVI

         Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has announced his candidacy as an “Independent” rather than as a Democrat.  This is a political mistake and will only serve to further marginalize him and the issues he has been talking about.

 

         RFK Jr. was always going to be a sideshow.  He has been a crank for years, a climate-change maniac, an anti-vaxxer before it was cool to be an anti-vaxxer, a death-penalty-for-the-Koch-Brothers enthusiast, and the only person on earth who believes the 2004 election was stolen from John Kerry.  Then he was absolutely correct, from the first moment, about everything concerning the COVID madness and the deadly mRNA vaccines.  (That’s why I like him.)

 

         The problem is that NOBODY wants to talk about the COVID security state or the vaccines or the masks or the mandates or the lockdowns or the school closings.  The Left doesn’t want to discuss that stuff at all, and only a small percentage of conservatives want the architects of it held responsible in any way.  There are just too many people on both sides of the aisle who never objected to shutting down churches, forcing an experimental drug into hundreds of millions of arms, silencing dissenters, and destroying the lives of anybody who objected. 

 

         This is why he has been largely ignored by the government-run media to the extent possible.  As the only real Democrat officially running against Biden, and because of his famous name, he can’t be ignored completely.  People ladmire Kennedys, or they are fascinated by Kennedys, or something.  So his campaign gets some news coverage.  He is just not allowed to talk about politics, or his views. 

 

         But as long as he was a Democrat, his name would be on the ballots in Democratic primaries and he would get a certain number of votes and those results would be reported.  And IF he happened to get a significant percentage of the votes somewhere, speculation would arise over Biden’s popularity, and how enthusiastic Democrats were about the ancient drooling fool, and maybe something interesting would happen.  Maybe Democrats would dump old Joe.  Maybe somebody else on the Left would run.  Maybe RFK Jr. would get some opportunity to speak to the electorate.

 

         But removing himself from the Democratic “field” and declaring himself an Independent will make it possible to ignore him completely.  And that’s what the Leftist media will do.   He may wind up getting one or two or three percent in the general election, like dozens of other irrelevant candidates have done, but his views will never break through.  The COVID crimes of Fauci and Biden and Trump and Newsom and Cuomo and a thousand others will never be discussed.

 

*

 

         In an interview a couple weeks ago, Maryan Zablotsky of the Ukrainian Parliament was asked about the state of the world and the problems he faces, and he described the enemy of mankind as an “Axis of Assholes.”  The phrase stuck with me.  Bush’s “Axis of Evil” always made me feel like we were giving the monsters too much credit.

 

         You know who they are without me telling you.  There’s Putin, of course, and Xi Jinping, and Kim Jung-un, and the ayatollahs and a dozen other excrescences, and they don’t all work together on evil plots and they probably don’t agree on much and they don’t often plan things together, but they will cooperate if they can get away with it because death and destruction and genocide and prison camps and pain anywhere in the world is not only good for business, it’s something that seems to make them feel good inside.  And since they have nothing that normal people would call morals, there’s only a limited number of ways you can deal with them.  You can scare the crap out of them or you can kill them.  Of course, that doesn’t stop idiots in our government or other governments from trying to negotiate with them or appease them or buy them off. 

 

         And now there’s Hamas and Hezbollah and a bunch of others.  There’s room in the Axis for them too.  There’s always plenty of room. We forgot about them for a while because they were quiet for so long, but now they’re not quiet anymore.

 

         And why should they be?  Putin does what he does and we stop drilling for oil so he will even get rich from doing it.   Absolutely no one cares about the Uyghurs in the Chinese prison camps.  Kidnap people’s kids in Ukraine?  In Israel?  Why not?  Exactly nobody is worried we will show up and make them stop.  Ever. 

 

 I wonder what it feels like to live in Taiwan these days. 

 

*

 

Dr. Peter McCullough is an internist, cardiologist, epidemiologist, and a professor of medicine at Texas A&M College of Medicine in Dallas. He also has a master's degree in public health.  He is one of the most-published medical researchers in the United States and is the editor of two medical journals.

 

He has been a consistent critic of COVID vaccines, particularly the mRNA vaccines.

 

Because he is so often asked to summarize the evidence regarding mRNA vaccines, he posted the following statement of facts on a website he often contributes to.

 

 

 

Note of Concern to Colleagues

As of August 25, 2023, the CDC has recorded 18,015 deaths reported to them in VAERS by healthcare professionals or pharmaceutical companies who believe the vaccine is related to the death.   Approximately ~1100 deaths have occurred on the same day of vaccination.  The largest autopsy study published to date indicates 73.9% of deaths after vaccination are a direct cause or significantly contributed to by COVID-19 vaccination.   There are >3400 peer reviewed manuscripts in the medical literature concerning fatal and nonfatal COVID-19 vaccine injuries including those recognized by regulatory agencies around the world such as myocarditis, neurologic injury, thrombosis, and immunologic syndromes.  The World Council for Health, June 11, 2022, has produced a pharmacovigilance report which is factual, scientifically grounded, and consensus driven calling for global market withdrawal of COVID-19 vaccines based on lack of safety.  Dr. Peter McCullough, a widely regarded expert on COVID-19 and vaccine safety, on December 7, 2022, in the US Senate, and on September 13, 2023, in the European Parliament, has called for, with expert panels, removal of all COVID-19 vaccines from the US and EU markets for excess risk of death.  On March 21, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons issued a factual, scientifically grounded, and consensus driven statement calling for all COVID-19 vaccines to be removed from the market based on lack of safety and efficacy.  The National Citizens Inquiry, a Canadian citizen-led and citizen-funded organization chartered to investigate governments’ COVID-19 policies, on September 14, 2023, called for market removal of all COVID-19 vaccines.  These observations and sources of evidence indicate the COVID-19 vaccines are not safe for human use.  No large-scale, conclusive, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials have demonstrated reduction in infection transmission, hospitalization, or death as primary endpoints.  Thus, the COVID-19 vaccines are not proven to be effective in reducing important clinical outcomes.

Please consider these developments if you have taken or supported COVID-19 vaccination.

* 

     “Everybody is basically the same.” “People are fundamentally good.”    “Everybody wants pretty much the same things.”

     How often have you heard people say these things?

     They are simply not true.  There is evil in the world and there are people who do not think the way you and I do.  It is easy to forget that, but it is dangerous to forget it.  Our safety and our well-being and even our lives can depend on seeing the reality of the world, though it can be very unpleasant to do so.

     About ten years ago, a book came out (followed by a movie), called “Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer.”  It concerned Kermit Gosnell, an abortionist is West Philly who, for more than twenty years, performed hundreds of late-term abortions under squalid and dreadful conditions.  Some women died.  Late-term babies were routinely born alive and then murdered with a blade to the spinal cord. State authorities intentionally overlooked Gosnell’s activities because they did not want to provide political ammunition to anti-abortion groups.

     It was not fun to read that book, or to see the movie, but I forced myself to do it.  It had nothing to do with the nuances of pro-choice or pro-life politics (which frankly do not much interest me).   I did it because we must occasionally remind ourselves that people like Kermit Gosnell exist, that things normal people regard with horror are not regarded with horror by everybody, and that, yes, evil exists in the world and it will win if good people do nothing. 

     Go find the images of the Hamas attacks in Israel beginning on October 7.  Look at the broken bodies, the slashed bodies, the bodies lying in the streets, the bodies burned beyond recognition.  Look at them.  The pictures are still available on the internet though they are being scrubbed by Hamas itself or by others who initially took pleasure in seeing and celebrating them.

     At this moment, the “Politics of the Middle East” is not the point.  There will be plenty of time for “The Politics of the Middle East.” What matters is the horror, the pain, the lust to exterminate a group of humans, the glee in administering that death and mutilation and destruction.  What matters is the evil.

     See it.  Know it.  

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki     

MY CAREER IN THE UNDERWORLD

         In the 1980s, the Boulevard Social and Athletic Club, at Bustleton Avenue and the Roosevelt Boulevard in Philadelphia, was the hottest poolroom in Philadelphia and probably the hottest on the East Coast.  All the biggest names showed up there---Efren Reyes, Mike Sigel, Spanish Mike, Jimmy Fusco, Pittsburgh Johnny, Trenton Marty, Stevie Wonder, Petey Fusco.  (There were plenty of other cool names as well---Pooh, Peter Rabbit, Muscle John.  It was a lot like the waterfront---you could know a guy for years and never learn his real name.)

 

 The big players showed up for the big money games, which typically began around 2 AM.  I was a very bad pool player at the time but I loved the ambiance.

 

Among the grifters and degenerates I met there was a sports bookie who I will call Joe Decker (many names in this story have been changed).  Aside from an occasional $5 wager with friends on a big football game, I was not a sports bettor and had never dealt with a bookmaker before.  I had never even met a bookmaker before.

 

Decker was about 5’6”, 120 pounds---a ratty little man who never had a beard or mustache but who never seemed to have shaved recently either.  He worked in circulation for the Philadelphia Inquirer and spent a lot of time driving around the city.  He knew a lot of people and was always meeting more of them, so there were always potential new customers.

 

At the time, I was young, had a decent job, and normally had some money to throw around.  It was inevitable I would start betting on sports with Decker, and I did.  I was not a huge player, but I was reliable so he liked me.  If I lost, I paid him.  If I won, he paid me.  Friday at the Boulevard was our day to settle up.

 

One night he asked me if I wanted to get more involved in the game, as his silent partner.   He would do all the work and take all the phone calls, but he would call me every day with the action, and I would be responsible for half of it.  I said yes.

 

And thus began my life of crime.

 

For Joe, this arrangement had many advantages.  He was a small-time guy with small-time players and no real bankroll, so my partnership allowed him to take on more action.  He had always had the option of “laying off” bets with a mob-connected bookmaker in South Philly.  For example, if he had a thousand dollars bet on the Eagles and didn’t want to carry that risk, he could always bet some of it in South Philly to reduce his exposure.  The problem was that if he lost bets to South Philly, they had to be paid, and on time.  If Joe’s dirtball clients were slow in paying him, he could wind up being squeezed.  Then he would have to tap a loan shark for the money to pay South Philly.  With me in the picture, Joe had a bit more flexibility.  For example, if Joe needed an extra week to pay me, I might bitch about it, but I wasn’t going to send some guy to alter his kneecaps. 

 

Immediately, I went from having a hundred or two at stake to having five or ten thousand a week on the line.  Now I really cared about sports, including sports I had previously paid no attention to, like hockey.   I was obsessed.  Every evening, from 7:30 until the last games finished on the West Coast, I was tracking scores, and on weekends, I followed the ebb and flow from noon to midnight.  Of course, I had to conceal my frenzy because what I was doing was illegal.  If my law firm had found out, I would certainly have been fired, and I might have lost my license.  The adrenaline rush was constant and addictive, and it kept me going, but becoming Decker’s partner was not the very smartest thing I ever did with my life.

 

In addition to sweating the scores, I also had to sweat the ordeal of getting paid.  There were times the business ran smoothly, and the times when Joe would shove an envelope full of twenties in my pocket were delightful, but most of the time, the money was late, or a little short, and I would have to listen to his stories about why the money was a little late or a little short, and he was such a bullshitter under normal circumstances that I would always wonder what the real story might be.  I knew I was way down on the list of guys to get paid---that was our deal.  He had to pay winners and he had to pay South Philly, and then there were deadbeats who would drop five hundred and then disappear.  That was reality, and I had to cut him some slack.  Nobody wants to be played for a sucker, however, and I had no way to verify Joe’s stories, which changed frequently.

 

But of course, I was making money, and it was cash, and since I couldn’t put it in the bank or do something useful with it, it paid for meals in nice restaurants and bar tabs and presents, and that was wonderful. Today, in 2023, I wonder about the totalitarians in our government and elsewhere who want to eliminate cash and replace it with “digital dollars.”  I hate them, of course---the freedom-haters are dangerous people.  But I also pity them because they never had the experience (or have forgotten it), of being on the loose in a city with a few bucks in your pocket and nothing but fun on your mind.

 

My arrangement with Joe lasted for about three years, and while we both benefitted from it, we never became friends, and we eventually broke up the partnership because we just got sick of it.  I remember our relationship mostly as a constant stream of arguments about money, about whether he should cut a customer off because he was more trouble than he was worth, and so on.  Also, Sandy never could stand him, and would make sure she was never around when he would show up at the house.  Tex had come into being as well, and I didn’t want Decker around because he kept using the word “nigger” no matter how often I told him not to.  “It’s just a word,” Decker would say.  “Yeah, Joe,” I tried to explain, “but I don’t want my kid hearing it until he’s old enough to understand what it means.”

 

The one souvenir of my life as a bookie is a very nice pool cue made by Richard Helmstetter, a craftsman of fine cuesticks.  It was taken as collateral on some losing bets made by Johnny Falcon, once the best pool player in Philly, and I agreed to accept it in lieu of $400 I was owed.  I don’t play pool much anymore but I do take it out of its tooled leather case occasionally, screw it together and admire it.  It’s a beautiful item, and a perfect artifact of my ridiculous career as a bookie.  Plus, as Damon Runyon would say, “There’s a story that goes with it.”

 

Copyright2023Michael Kubacki

 

TOAST AT THE FUNERAL LUNCH FOR VINCE GRIECO----Philadelphia Cricket Club, August 7, 2023

         Ladies and gentlemen, there have been many stories told about our dear friend Vince today, some humorous and some touching, but I want to go in a slightly different direction and tell you something about Vince that very few people are aware of---his spiritual side.

 

I heard that!  I heard that chuckling.  You’re thinking “spiritual side?”  Vince?  VINCE??  Well lend me your ears, maties, and listen up good.

 

I first became aware of it during a casual conversation, one of thousands we had over the years, when I happened to mention an angel I had just been reading about in the book of Genesis.  Vince listened politely and then started talking about eight or ten other angels, their names, what their powers were and what their jobs were.  He was not showing off.  He might have been discussing the starting lineup for the 1968 Phillies.  He just happened to be intimately familiar with the world of angels and he was just chatting, one guy to another.  I did find myself wondering, however, where the heck a guy like him came by such knowledge.

 

The next time this happened, I had been reading up on the argument that’s been going on for about a thousand years, mostly between Catholics and Protestants, about whether you could get to heaven by faith alone or whether you also needed to perform good works in life.  I briefly explained the issue to Vince, who gently corrected me on a point and suggested I read more about it.  So I did, and I realized eventually that what I had said was completely wrong.  When I went back and told him, he started telling me about the Counsel of Trent, which happened from 1545 to 1563 in Trento, Italy, and where all the big Catholics of the day discussed the doctrine of justification and argued about the veneration of saints.  It almost sounded like he had been there.

 

It was then I asked him if he had ever read the Bible, and he said, “Yeah, a few times.”  And he didn’t mean he had dipped into it here and there, he meant he had read the thing from cover to cover.

 

But that’s not what I came here to tell you about.

 

What I want to tell you is that Vince was excommunicated.  Do you know anybody who has ever been excommunicated?  Well, for me personally, here’s the list:  Martin Luther, Henry VIII and Vince.

 

Around 1960, Vince drifted away from his Catholic upbringing and joined a Calvinist church.  I will not attempt to summarize all the beliefs of Calvinists, but generally speaking, their bottom line is that every person is hopelessly enmeshed in sin and spiritually unable to choose goodness.  God, in His mercy, will save some, but people really have no say in the matter and cannot save themselves no matter what they do.

 

Somewhere around 1963, Vince and the elders of the church he had joined disagreed about something, and he was presented with an indictment, or a bill of particulars, or whatever they called it, and a trial for his excommunication was scheduled.

 

Think about that, if you would.  Imagine you got that letter in the mail.  Not all of us would take it the same way.  Some of us, maybe me included, upon being presented with a Writ of Excommunication, would respond with something along the lines of: “Well, blank ‘em if they can’t take a joke.  I ain’t showing up for your damn trial!”

 

But not Vince.  He appeared, listened to the evidence and the arguments against him, and made his case.  And he lost.  A while later, he received a formal proclamation of his apostacy and excommunication.

 

As I look out on this crowd today, I see a number of older gentlemen who will let you know (halfway into their second bourbon), that though today they are solid citizens, there was a time in their youth when they were badasses.  To these gentlemen, I say: “Fine.  Maybe you were in a bar fight once, maybe you got a little rowdy on your 21^st birthday, BUT DID YOU EVER GET YOURSELF EXCOMMUNICATED??”

 

For me, in other words, Vince raised the bar.  So you got taken down to the precinct once in 1966?  Fine.  You got drunk and egged somebody’s car?  Great.  You’re a rebel all right.  BUT DID YOU EVER GET YOUR ASS EXCOMMUNICATED?  No?  Then you’re no Vince Grieco, buddy.

 

So here’s to Vince, a man who went all the way, a man who lived life to the fullest, and a man who made sure he always got his money’s worth.

 

God bless him.

 

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki     

THOUGHTS ON THE 2024 ELECTION—The Democrats

          There are not many places in the world that have a chief executive analogous to the American President, a single person who is both the head of state and the political leader of the nation.  Most places have something similar to the UK, with a monarch or other figurehead who holds little political power along with a Prime Minister who runs the government and is responsible for policymaking.

 

         In this country, what we tend to have is somebody who is supposed to fill both roles but who is much better at one than the other.  LBJ, for example, is generally regarded as a political genius but an extremely crude man who was an embarrassment as a president.  Bill Clinton was much the same---a politician who always thought three steps ahead, but a rapist and apparent sociopath in his private life.  Jimmy Carter was the opposite, a kindly and soft-spoken religious sort who had no clue how to deal with the economy, foreign countries, etc.  Occasionally, you get a guy who can handle both roles.  Reagan was courtly and charming but knew how to get things done.  Obama also was very effective in the dirty world of politics but was generally admired as a gentleman and a family man.

 

         And what is Biden?  Well, he’s not exactly a President, is he?

 

Biden is the head of state.  He doesn’t seem to work much, except in public events where he will have a few words to recite from a teleprompter.  Photographs are taken.  He shakes hands with the Israeli foreign minister.  He has lunch with an important diplomat from somewhere.  Then he is taken to Rehoboth, Delaware for a long weekend where he is photographed eating an ice-cream cone.  Always, no questions may be asked unless it is a brief, planted question for which Joe has been prepared with an answer.

 

Joe Biden does not make policy or craft legislative plans or strategize around a political agenda.  He is not capable of doing those things anymore.  Twenty years ago, he might have functioned as a real president, but of course, nobody wanted him to be president twenty years ago.  It was only when he reached his dotage that he became useful for the Democrats as a figurehead.  He is told what to do and what to say, he is rehearsed for his public appearances, and then he is taken back to his rooms for a nap.

 

This is the third term of Barack Obama.  About 75% of the staff in the West Wing, and everyone of significance, previously worked for Obama.  Susan Rice, who recently left the White House position as domestic policy advisor, was Obama’s national security advisor and UN ambassador.  Among other things, she oversaw passing Biden’s trillion-dollar infrastructure spending bill and supervised immigration policy on the Mexican border.  She has been, in effect, Obama’s chief of staff throughout the Biden “presidency.”

 

And for the Democrats, this clandestine version of the UK’s bifurcated executive has worked well.  The biggest benefit is that Biden automatically becomes the fall-guy for the disasters wrought by Obama and the Democratic politburo during this administration.  The bizarre departure from Afghanistan, leaving thousands of Americans behind enemy lines and bequeathing tens of billions of dollars’ worth of state-of-the-art military equipment to a regime rooted in 8^th-century values---that little booboo belongs to Joe.  And so does the human trafficking now rampant along our open southern border.

 

But now there is a problem.  The Democrats were able to drag Joe across the finish line in 2020 for several reasons.  First, there was an unprecedented enthusiasm among Trump-haters and a widespread willingness to use any method to defeat him.  Then, when authentication-free, mail-in voting became legal in many states, new methods of cheating were available for the first time.  But now the many policy failures of the administration, and Joe’s increasingly obvious age and senility, mean that he will have to be replaced.

 

This must be done gently, but the process has begun.  For more than two years, the corruption of the Biden family and the millions in bribes accepted from foreign powers has been suppressed by the media and censored by tech companies, but now bits and pieces of this story are being allowed to appear in outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post.  In addition, one tiny story about Joe’s health was published about three weeks ago---he is now using a CPAP machine to help him sleep.  This is especially significant because absolutely NOTHING at all negative about Biden’s health or mental capacity has been permitted in the state-controlled media since he was nominated in 2020, and there was no necessity to report this CPAP story at all.  It would seem the only reason to release it is to begin laying the groundwork for a “Joe-is-getting-a-little-too-old-to-be-president” explanation for why he must step aside.

 

But how to replace him, and by whom?  Joe Biden was the perfect figurehead in part because he was not capable of being a real president.  But how do you get Gavin Newsom, at age 55, to stand in front of the cameras and eat ice-cream?  You can’t.  If Biden steps aside and Newsom wins, he will be glad to take Obama’s phone calls, but he will insist on his own aides, his own West Wing, and his own policies.  There will be no fourth term for Barack Obama.

 

The Democrats have been very successful in forging a united front for electoral purposes.  In 2020, Bernie Sanders was persuaded to drop out and fade away, Buttigieg and Kamala Harris were bought off with high-level positions, and the decks were cleared for the third Obama administration.  This time, however, the attempt to replace Biden with another figurehead will likely lead to a schism.  Democrats like Newsom will stand aside if Joe runs as an incumbent president, but if Biden is dropped there will a challenge to the Obama reign and the new Obama avatar.

 

When that happens, Obama will have to drop the pretense.  If, for example, Obama chooses Kamala Harris as his fake president, it won’t work because Newsom (or other Democrats), would crush her in the primaries.  The only way Biden was nominated in 2020 was that all the other legitimate candidates were forced to buy into the scam, but Newsom and other candidates would have no reason to do that this time.

 

In 2024, in other words, the figurehead must be someone everyone knows will be a figurehead.  That’s why the 2024 Democratic nominee will probably be Michelle Obama, and everyone will know up front that she will be spending most of her presidency on Martha’s Vineyard or Ibiza while her hubby is doing the actual president stuff.

 

The objection I always hear to this theory is that Michelle won’t do anything involving actual work, and that all she is willing to do is vacation and shop and hang with girlfriends.  All that is true, and the negotiations in the Obama household regarding her presidential role from 2025 to 2029 would make for fascinating eavesdropping, but there can be little doubt she will fall into line.  In their minds, you see, it’s never a power-grab or a coup d’etat, it’s what needs to be done “for the good of the country.”  She won’t want to do it, but she will.

 

January 20, 2025: President Michelle Obama.  Get used to the idea.

 

***

 

I suppose I would be remiss in this review of the 2024 Democratic candidates if I failed to mention Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an announced contender for the nomination.  Early polls had him taking 20% of the Democratic vote for the nomination (a number that has now dropped to about 10%).

 

On the plus side, he certainly has name recognition across the country, and from the first moment, he was right about every aspect of the COVID lunacy that swept the country for the past 3 ½ years.  Unfortunately, he is a sideshow in the political world, and he will simply be disappeared by the state-controlled media and tech companies as the campaign becomes more serious.

 

The biggest problem for him is that NO ONE in a position of power wants to discuss what happened during “the pandemic.”  Whether they are elected officials at the state or federal level, bureaucrats, part of the medical and healthcare establishment, media companies, technology businesses, pharma, or the judiciary, and whether they are Republicans or Democrats, virtually everyone has a lot to hide and nothing to be proud of.  Holding our officialdom and elites in some way accountable for the lies, the deaths, and the economic meltdown they engineered will not be permitted so long as those same people are in charge.  This is why the lies continue to this day and why someone like RFK Jr. is pilloried as a conspiracy theorist and a loonie.  He was right about COVID and everything he said has now been proven correct.  But that doesn’t matter.

 

The other problem for RFK Jr. is that he is a conspiracy theorist and a loonie.  OK, that may be a bit harsh.  However, in addition to his views on COVID, he is known for his beliefs that 5G causes cancer, fluoridated water makes children stupid, the 2004 election was stolen from John Kerry, and childhood vaccines cause autism.

 

These are all areas where serious inquiries may be made, of course, since that is what rational people are supposed to do, but RFK seems to have come to conclusions on these topics that cannot really be justified by existing knowledge.  It is wrong, and ignorant, to dismiss the theory linking vaccines and increased levels of autism, or to laugh at the people who propose such a link.  However, RFK doesn’t just propose it or theorize about it.  He is convinced the issue is settled and that vaccines cause autism.  The evidence supporting that conclusion does not exist.

 

But by far the most troubling aspect of Kennedy’s advocacy has been his maniacal support for worldwide efforts to fight climate change or global warming.  In this area, he has been a true believer for decades, once demanding the “death penalty” for Exxon and Koch Industries because they sponsored “climate lies.” 

 

Very recently, there is some evidence he is beginning to see that the climate totalitarians are the same people (the WEF, Gates, Schwab, leftist green groups), using the same methods (inciting panic, throttling free markets and economic growth, redistributing wealth worldwide, reducing population, imposing non-democratic “emergency” government), to achieve the same ends that the COVID fascists have sought for the past 3 ½ years.  But for thirty years, Kennedy swallowed the entire package---the hockey stick, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Siberian tree rings, electric cars, “hiding the decline,” insect-eating, etc.  For someone who claims to be devoted to human liberty, democratic principles, and scientific truth, how could he possibly miss the totalitarian agenda of the Green New Deal, the Great Reset, and the “global crisis” of climate change?

 

It would be wonderful for America, and even for the world, if Kennedy were permitted a national TV platform with other candidates.  I agree with him that the most important issue in this election should be holding accountable those who tried to use COVID to eliminate our fundamental human rights and destroy our system of government.  It’s just not going to happen.

 

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki