THOUGHTS ON THE 2024 ELECTION—The Republicans

 

         I have questions about who will win.  In particular, I do not buy the story being told by Trump and his various boosters and flacks that the race is over.

 

         As for the non-entities (Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Tim Scott, Ryan Binkley, Doug Burgum, Chris Christie, Larry Elder, Will Hurd, Asa Hutchinson, Perry Johnson, Vivek Ramaswamy, Francis Suarez), little needs to be said.  Many of them are nice people and might even be good presidents in a different universe, but the idea that one of them will emerge from the pack and win the Republican nomination is just silly.  It will either be Trump or DiSantis.

 

         In the race between the two, the polls indicate Trump is ahead by a lot, but I love the campaign DiSantis is running.  He knows the race does not end today, or tomorrow, and he knows that the steady drip of criminal indictments will take its toll.  Yes, the charges against Trump are fueled solely by Trump Derangement Syndrome and are largely bogus, but they are not going away.  In fact, there will be more of them, and their effect is to diminish Trump’s chances of victory in a general election.  There are still plenty of Trumpsters who would take a bullet for the guy, but there are also Trumpsters who are losing faith in his ability to win.

 

         In this bizarre political environment, the DiSantis campaign strategy has been perfect, and brilliant.  He does not engage in the mud-wrestling, though he will occasionally respond politely to Trump’s constant efforts to make the campaign personal.  He presents himself as the conservative (which he is), presses the anti-woke politics that made him so successful in Florida, and waits for the electorate to turn his way.  Time is his friend, and Trump’s enemy.  Though he may not win, I admire DiSantis for his consistency in formulating a strategy early on and sticking with it.

 

         Also, the polls that Trump touts relentlessly are not as uniformly pro-Trump as Donald (and the leftists who are pushing him for the Republican nomination) would have you imagine.  In head-to-head Trump-DiSantis polls, Trump wins handily, it is true.  However, in a number of swing states, Biden beats Trump but loses to DiSantis.  These largely unpublicized polls are being noticed by Republicans who want to win in 2024.  There is a growing body of evidence for what we all suspect---that Trump can never get 50% of the vote in a general election.  But DiSantis may.

 

*

 

         But while it is fun to speculate on the Republican primary race, the fact remains that the Democrats will win in 2024.  In fact, there is no reason to think there will ever be another free and fair presidential election in the United States.  In many states, voting laws were changed in 2020 to allow mail-in voting with virtually no authentication of voters.  Many millions of Democratic voters are not voters at all.  They are “ballots.”

 

         It will probably be illegal soon to state the 2020 election was stolen, but it’s not yet punishable as a crime so I might as well say it.  The 2020 election was stolen.  The result is just so implausible that no fair-minded individual who has reviewed the facts can conclude it was kosher.

 

         Let’s recap, starting with some numbers that have already been dropped down the memory hole.  Here are the popular vote totals in the last four presidential elections:

 

         Biden 2020:         81 million

         Trump 2020:        74.2 million

         Obama 2008:        69.5 million

         Obama 2012:        65.9 million

         Clinton 2016         65.9 million

         Trump 2016:         63 million

         Romney 2012:      60.9 million

         McCain 2008:       59.9 million

 

         First, please note that the top three totals are the most ever recorded in a US presidential election.  Obama’s 69.5 million in 2008 was a record at the time. Trump beat that number in 2020 by almost 5 million, yet somehow Biden, a man who generated no enthusiasm as a candidate and who regularly attracted fifty or a hundred people to his rallies, crushed them both.  As most of us can recall, the energy and excitement for Obama in 2008 was off the charts, yet his old war-horse of a VP somehow attracted 11.5 million more “votes” (an increase of 16%) than Barack had garnered at the peak of his popularity.

 

         In US presidential elections in which an incumbent is seeking re-election, our history is that the contest becomes a referendum on the incumbent.  If he receives fewer popular votes the second time, he loses (only exception: Obama in 2012).  If he gets more votes the second time, he wins.  Trump, in 2020, got 11.2 million more votes in 2020 than he had in 2016, yet he lost.  Nothing remotely close to this has ever happened before in our history.  No incumbent president has ever gotten more votes in his second election than he did in his first, yet lost.

 

         Other voting anomalies abound, and rather than get too deep into the weeds, I recommend you look at the analysis of data from the 2020 census versus voting totals.  Also look at results in the bellwether counties across the US.  There were 19 such counties which had voted for the presidential winner in every race since 1980.  This time, 18 of the 19 went for Trump, yet he lost.  None of these anomalies is definitive in itself, but as you review the evidence, you too will come to see just how implausible it is to believe Biden won the 2020 election.

 

         For me, the most suggestive lies in the sheer number of votes.  In 2016, Trump and Clinton pulled a total of 128.9 million votes.  Four years later, there were 155.2 million cast, an increase of over 20%.

 

         Turnout across the land, we are told, was around 75%, the largest since the election of 1900.

 

         Recall that the election occurred in November of 2020, when the country was in a state of panic.  There were mask mandates in most of the nation and social-distancing stickers on the floor of supermarkets and sanitizer stations at the door of every business.  A hundred thousand businesses had closed. COVID death tolls were trumpeted on TV and in newspapers every day, and the vaccines (that were totally fer sure going to save everybody), were unavailable, not yet approved.  I knew plenty of people who, in November 2020, would not leave the house for any reason.  They had all their food and other supplies delivered.

 

         And yet, in 2020, 26.3 million more people voted than had done so in 2016.  Where did they all come from?  They didn’t all go to the trouble of figuring out how to vote by mail, did they?

 

         The fraudulent votes in 2020 came primarily from three sources, some of which were traditional and some of which were brand-new.  Since Republicans have done virtually nothing to stop the cheating, the number of fraudulent votes will only continue to grow.

 

         Traditional Cheating in Big Democratic Cities

 

         I am familiar with this variety because I live in Philly and it has been going on my entire life, in every election.  Democrats even do it in primary elections; in other words, they cheat each other.

 

         The Democratic machine has run Philadelphia, and Philadelphia elections, since I was born.  What this means is that the vast majority of polling places in the city are run by minor Democratic officials (committeemen and such), who live in the neighborhood.  Typically, there are noRepublicans present at the table to oversee what happens.  These local Democrats serve for decades and come to know everyone in the community.  They know who died.  They know who moved to Florida in 2008.  All these departed voters are on the rolls because there is never any effort to remove non-voters from the list, and if there is an attempt to mount such an effort, it is viciously resisted as anti-democratic or racist or whatever.  YOU WANT TO DISENFRANCHISE VOTERS????  Nice try, you Republican fascists, but we’re having none of it.

 

         For many years in Philly, there were more votes cast than there were registered voters.  Nobody seemed to care much, but they don’t do it that way anymore.  Nowadays, the turnout is large, but not impossible.

 

         Of course, the local Democrats running the precinct cast votes for the people who moved on to Clearwater or Salt Lake or heaven ten years before.  I’m sure they think that those folks would have wanted it that way.

 

         And they do another thing as well.  On election day in Philly, no union member in any of the building trades works.  It’s the law or it’s in their contracts or something, and that’s the way it has been since the Big Bang.  What they do is drive around the city and bring people into polling places so they can vote.  These voters live in group homes and do not understand what “vote” means, or they are drug addicts who live on the street, but they are brought to polling places by the van-load and they are allowed to vote.  The guys who drive them to the polling venue go into the voting booth with them.  You know.  To help.

 

         I have personally witnessed this.  Probably every conscientious voter in South Philly, where I saw it, has witnessed it.

 

         Non-Citizen Voters

 

         With the open border to our South, there are an increasing number of these voters.  A recent study by Just Facts indicates that between ½ million and 5 ½ million (let’s call it 3 million), non-citizens voted in the 2020 presidential election.  Eliminating these illegal votes would have been more than enough to move several swing states into the Trump column and give him the necessary electoral votes for the win.

 

         All fifty states require that registered voters be citizens.  Also, federal law forbids non-citizens from voting.  As a rule, however, no documentary evidence is required, and when some states tried to demand proof of citizenship, court rulings obtained by the Obama Administration prevented states from doing so.  In effect, there is no enforcement of the rule that voters must be citizens, no one tries to catch them, and there is no punishment if they should be caught.

 

         At the state level, some states ask for a social security number but most request only a bank statement or utility bill.  Even a request for an SS number is not very effective since most illegals have them.  The traffic in fake SS numbers is large.

 

         The Just Facts study was not some sort of extrapolation, it was actually based on a series of surveys of non-citizens that began in 2008.  At that time 15% of illegals said they had registered and 8% said they had actually voted.  These numbers have grown in subsequent elections so that based on these surveys, the number of non-citizens who voted in 2020 was (best conservative estimate), around 3.5 million.  Any errors on these self-reported votes would tend to understate the actual numbers, of course, since there would be voters who would not want to admit they had done something illegal.

 

         Invented People

 

         In the past, the problem with inventing people and casting votes for them was that on election day, you had to produce some person at the polling place who would walk in, sign the book, enter the booth, and vote.  Among people who want to cheat in elections, this was not a moral issue, but it was a practical one.  Where are we going to find somebody who will walk in and pretend to be somebody we made up?

 

         This problem was solved for the cheaters by the widespread passage of vote-by-mail legislation in 2020.  There are places where authentication of ballots was preserved in the vote-by-mail process (e.g., Florida).  But in most states, the new vote-by-mail laws were a way of eliminating the requirement that people identify themselves before being permitted to vote.  I am most familiar with Pennsylvania, and that is what happened here.  Previously, a registered voter had to appear in person, sign the book, and have their signature checked against a prior signature.  Then mail-in ballots arrived, there was no authentication, yet the ballots were counted.  Dates didn’t matter, signatures didn’t matter, and there was suddenly no interest in determining that the ballot came from a living, human, resident of the state.  “Ballots” gave Biden the win in Pennsylvania, not voters.  And this occurred across the land.

 

         There is nothing surprising about the fact that when you give people a reason to invent human beings, they will do so.  If it will further their political goals, or put money in their pockets, OF COURSE they will invent people.

 

         On October 22, 1986, President Reagan signed the Tax Reform Act of 1986.  One of its provisions was that any child five years or older claimed as a dependent  had to have a Social Security number.  The following year, seven million dependent children disappeared from the tax rolls.

 

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki

 

REPEATING THE PAST

 

          From the beginning, the most disturbing aspect of the COVIDian dystopia was the ease with which citizens in free countries accepted the edicts and mandates of government bureaucrats and public health officials.  Public gathering in theaters and arenas ended overnight, restaurants and bars were closed, schools emptied, churches were locked, millions of businesses got shut down, many of which would never reopen.  Here and there, a few rebels appeared---a gym in New Jersey that defied the government, a pastor in California who wouldn’t shut his church, a few restaurants that tried to stay open, under the radar.  Almost all were crushed by the authorities.

          And as we now know, there was never much justification for any of the mandates or the crushing of our traditional civil liberties.  When Anthony Fauci decided, in April 2020, that we all had to wear masks, there was zero scientific basis for believing that mask-wearing could prevent the spread of respiratory viruses.  Later, a number of pharma-funded and government-funded studies (none of which were peer-reviewed), were published in order to support the mask mandates, but there was never a time when the weight of the evidence could be read to support masking.

          Social distancing?  Well, it’s true that if you are far enough away from a sick person (a mile?), you won’t catch their cooties.  But “six feet” was purely arbitrary.  In other countries, it was one meter, or two meters, or 1.5 meters.

          Then, of course, there were the vaccines, and the vaccine mandates.  Here, “effectiveness” was the mask behind which all the lies and half-truths were told.  We all thought “effectiveness” meant that if you got the shot, you wouldn’t get the disease, or even if you did, you couldn’t pass it on to somebody else.  We were told that repeatedly on TV, on the internet, in newspapers---everywhere.  We are still being told that.  Rachel Walensky, CDC boss, told both these lies to Congress one week ago, on June 13.  But she knew in November 2020 that the vax would not stop anybody from getting COVID or transmitting it because that’s what Pfizer told the CDC.  Those pre-vaccine Pfizer documents are public now, released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, but Walensky saw those documents before the first shots were authorized.

          Still, you were forced to get the shot.  People were fired from their jobs for not getting the shot.  Soldiers (all volunteers, remember, who chose to serve their country), were kicked out of the service.  The unvaxxed were ostracized, demonized, scorned by their friends and family, and scolded by the president and other government officials.  “It’s YOUR fault,” they said.  (And that’s just here in the U.S.; in other countries, the unvaxxed were treated much worse.)      

          Finally, there was “asymptomatic spread,” which made all the restrictions on perfectly healthy individuals necessary.  Fauci was undoubtedly correct when he said in February 2020 that asymptomatic spread was so unlikely it was not worth worrying about.  But two months later, after several apocryphal anecdotes were circulated (remember the woman who unknowingly carried the virus on a flight from Seoul to Frankfurt?), it became the basis for all the mandates.  Healthy people were dangerous!  Stay in your bubble, goddammit!!

 

*

 

          Some people are primarily remembered for a single quotation.  That is the case with George Santayana and his famous gag: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

          And that is what we have done with the public health establishment and the public health rationale.  We have failed to remember.  The history of “public health” over the past century is primarily a story of abuse, the abolition of liberty, mutilation, and mass murder.  And yet, we all did what we were told to do when COVID came along, and we did it without question.

          The public health rationale has always been a popular tool for tyrants since it can be used to justify virtually any suppression of fundamental human rights.  In the Soviet Union, political dissenters were put in mental hospitals on the theory that their sick ideas about freedom might infect other people’s minds and undermine the communist state.  In other words, this was a public health policy.

          For the Third Reich, the Jews represented a public health crisis because of the possibility their “blood” might mix with the blood of white Aryans and pollute the superior racial purity of the German people.  Again, the extermination of the Jews was an explicit public health campaign.        

          Ah, but we’re not like Stalin and Hitler, are we?  Sure there might be occasional excesses or mistakes in America, but we’re not monsters, right?

          But much of the intellectual underpinning for the extermination of the Jews came from the American eugenics movement of the 1919s, 20s, and 30s, which championed the forced sterilization of the “feeble minded” and of “moral defectives.”  The movement, also called Scientific Racism, was based at Harvard where its most enthusiastic proponent was the highly-respected Charles William Eliot, president emeritus of the college.  Other prominent names were Stanford President David Starr Jordan, Yale economist Irving Fischer, and Margaret Sanger, who later founded Planned Parenthood and was primarily concerned with finding ways to prevent black people from reproducing so much.  There was little dissent in academia to the basic concept of eugenics, which was that we must prevent our DNA from being polluted by idiots and people of undesirable racial and ethnic ancestry.

          The fruit of this poisoned tree was the forced sterilization of about 70,000 Americans in the 20^th Century.  The practice was even approved by our Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell, a case decided in 1927, where Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”  Twenty years later, Nazi defendants in the Nuremberg trials cited Buck v. Bell in defense of their actions.

          Is any of this so different from what we did to “slow the spread?”  Or what the Chinese did as part of their “no-COVID” approach, when doors of apartment houses were bolted so people were trapped and no one could violate lockdown orders?  In Australia, which was not previously thought of as a totalitarian state, citizens were plucked off the street by police for being unmasked or unvaxxed and stuck in “quarantine camps” for weeks, with no legal process.

          The allure of the public health rationale is irresistible for those who know what’s best for us and are extremely irritated by our traditional freedom to ignore their scolding. This is at least partly the reason for the intrusion of governments into the medical/hospital business over the last sixty years.  Public health used to be concerned primarily with trying to control the spread of deadly infectious diseases.  But now that we are all, to some extent, paying each other’s medical bills, the argument is that I’m on the hook if you eat too many potato chips, so I can use the law to make you stop.

          This is why buckling your seatbelt is now a “public health problem,” as is whether you are depressed, whether you have guns in the house (a question I am asked every time I go to the doctor), how much you drink, what sort of recreational drugs you take, whether you wear a helmet when you ride your bike or motorcycle, how much red meat you consume, whether you belong to a gym, whether you smoke, and how much you watch TV.  All these things used to be your business, remember?

          And don’t forget: have you had your COVID shots?  And your booster?  And your second booster? And your fifth?

          (I hear an objection in the back row---that vaccines are a traditional role of public health, and not some modern attempt to expand the definition.  However, that was when vaccines were designed to prevent you from getting a disease.  Now that we have COVID vaccines that don’t protect you from getting COVID and don’t stop you from transmitting it once you catch it, it’s not obvious what their purpose is, but it sure ain’t “public health.”)

          We are already being warned by the really, really smart guys at Davos, as well as our more-local totalitarians, that the next pandemic is coming and we have to be ready for it, or that climate change is going to create crises that will require new sacrifices from all of us.  They are counting on us to forget the recent past.

          And I worry that we will forget.  Fear will be used, again, to make us forget and secure our acquiescence.  Fear works.  It usually does.  The problem is, as my friend Yoda put it, “Fear is the path to the dark side.”

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki           

         

         

         

           

MICHAEL GRIECO—A Story for Memorial Day

       Now that Mike is somewhat advanced in years, a new career, or hobby, or something, has found him.  He’s a popular guy these days.  He is a WWII veteran, and there aren’t that many of them left.

          The calls started a couple years ago, from war museums, patriot groups, and the like.  Would Mike be willing to attend a banquet and a ceremony at our museum?  Would Mike like to join other veterans at a July 4^th celebration?  He agreed to do a couple of them, enjoyed himself, and now he gets called regularly. On his latest trip, a veterans’ organization brought him to Arlington National Cemetery to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

          I think one reason he has become a sort-of star of these events is that he doesn’t need a wheelchair, he doesn’t have to drag a care-giver along with him, and when he speaks, he makes about as much sense as he ever did. Mike is easy.  Give him a nice ride, a room at a 5-star hotel, three squares, and some recognition from grateful patriots, and he will come to your party.  As a bonus, he also gets to meet other ancient warriors and swap stories with them.  It’s not a bad deal.  He does have his limits, though.  A while ago, a group wanted to fly him to France for a WWII event and he turned them down.  He said he would have felt silly doing it because he spent his war in the Pacific.

          Mike joined the Marines in 1943 (with parental permission since he was only 17), and was promptly shipped to the Pacific theater.  He was a grunt in the 2^nd (and later the 4^th), Marine divisions, and his military career was “distinguished” primarily by the fact that he somehow survived it.  But though the armies of the Pacific were unable to kill Mike, or even seriously injure him, it was not for lack of trying.  He was involved in three horrific battles of the Pacific War, all of which killed and injured thousands of American soldiers.

          First was Saipan, an amphibious assault by 8,000 Marines on June 15, 1944 that was later called the D-Day of the Pacific.  The battle ended three weeks later with 3,100 Americans dead.  But not Mike.

          One week after Saipan was secured, on July 24, American forces moved on to the neighboring island of Tinian.  The two are so close that artillery on Saipan was fired across the strait between the islands to soften Japanese resistance.  Though the battle took only one week, the invasion involved 41,000 Marines, 368 of whom were killed along with 2000 other casualties.  But Mike survived.

          Mike’s third nightmare was Okinawa, which was the largest amphibious assault of the war.  (Fun fact: Mike couldn’t swim.  He still can’t.)   Beginning on April 1, 1945 and lasting almost three months, Okinawa took the lives of 12,000 Americans, including 7,500 Marines.  It is believed Japan lost over 100,000 soldiers and 100,000 civilians.

          Even then, Mike was not done.  American forces remained in the Pacific preparing for the invasion of Japan itself, which some have estimated would have cost another half million American lives.  It was only after the Japanese surrender following the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that most of the Americans, including Mike, went home.

          After the war, Mike apprenticed and became a men’s tailor, and he was good at it, so that became his career until he retired in the 1990s.  Since then, he has spent much of his time pursuing his two hobbies, cycling and skiing, and his good health allowed him to do both until just a couple of years ago.  (There are no downhill competitions at his age, but I can state with no fear of contradiction that he was the best 95-year-old skier in America.) He has lived for many years in the Mayfair section of Philly, which used to be called a “working-class neighborhood.”  Maybe it still is. 

          Billionaires and neuro-surgeons tend to get a lot more ink, but Mike is what you need to keep a place like America going.  And you need a lot of them---guys who will do what has to be done when it has to be done, and not do a lot of bitching about it.  Then they move on with their lives and their families and their grandchildren.

          Mike was born in Philadelphia on May 26, 1926, so he is 97 years old today.

          Long may he wave.

 

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki

PHILLY MAYOR’S RACE---2023

 

          This Tuesday, May 16, Philadelphia will elect its next mayor.  It is actually a primary election, so the result will not be final until the general election in November, but with Philly’s 7-1 edge for Democrats in registration, the winner of the Democratic primary almost can’t lose.  The last time there was a Republican mayor was 1952, and Republicans long ago gave up the ghost on mounting some sort of opposition to Democratic rule.

          For most of my life, ethnicity and skin color was the primary concern of voters in Philadelphia.  Italians voted for Italians, Irish voted for Irish, and blacks voted for blacks.  In the 1970s, Judge William Marutani was elected to the Court of Common Pleas twice, pulling close to 100% of voters with Italian ancestry.  He was actually of Japanese descent, but he NEVER let his photograph be taken.

          Around 1990, the city became majority non-white, and it was assumed that Ed Rendell (1992-2000) would be the last white mayor Philly would ever have.  And in fact, for the next sixteen years, John Street and Michael Nutter, two black men who knew how to play the game, held the office.

          Then in 2016, an interesting thing happened.  Jim Kenney, a white leftist with a familiar ethnic name and experience in city government, rolled to victory.  At the time, there were plenty of crusty old wise guys in Philly politics who said Kenney could never be elected, but as often happens, the wise guys are often the last people to see that the old paradigm has crumbled and been replaced with something new.

          While identity politics is very much alive in Philadelphia, old-fashioned race hustling went out of style while nobody was watching.  John Street (2000-2008), was probably the last pure practitioner of it.  He had been a rabble-rouser in North Philly and had worked his way into the establishment as a City Councilman, but he was a product of the streets.  His successor, Michael Nutter, was also black, and he knew how to play the card, but he had been educated at prep schools and was something of a nerd.  Then came Kenney, the white radical.

          In its simplest terms, young black voters became ideological.  Increasing numbers of young black people went to college, and inhaled the leftist indoctrination that takes place there.  Also, the race politics of the past were embodied by men like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who were now geezers and increasingly viewed as an embarrassment.  It was no longer necessary to vote for someone with your skin color or ethnicity.  You could now vote for the most leftwing candidate no matter who he was.

          Which brings us to the election three days from now.

          Of the nine candidates, four of them are throwaways with 2% of the vote or less.  The other five, in a poll two weeks ago, were in a five-way tie.  The winner (and nobody knows that will be), will probably get 20% of the vote.  Nobody will get 25%.

          Of the five, three are white---two businessmen and a woman with experience in city government.  One is a woman of Asian descent.  And one is a middle-aged black woman, the “establishment” candidate, who has been involved in politics since she was a teenager and has held a number of elected offices.

          Twenty years ago, this would have been a no-brainer---the one black candidate (Cherelle Parker), would win since she would get a few white votes and ALL the black ones. That does not, however, appear to be what is going to happen.

          My prediction is that Philly will elect the most radical leftist who has at least some experience in government or elected office.  That is Helen Gym.  Bernie Sanders and AOC are coming to a rally for her tomorrow, and thousands of lefties from all over the country are knocking on doors for her this weekend.  For several years, under Mayor Kenney, Philly has been sliding into crime and drugs and homelessness.  Police get arrested for doing their jobs, so they don’t do their jobs as much as they used to, and many of them have retired.  All that will continue at an accelerated pace if Gym is elected.

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki    

NOTES ON JURIES

 

          In the 1980s, I would occasionally drop into Room 236 in City Hall, where my father plied his trade as a criminal court judge.  He was assigned all the “Career Criminal” cases in Philadelphia.  This was Pennsylvania’s variation on 3-strike laws, which require enhanced sentences for repeat violent offenders.

          There were not a lot of laughs in Room 236.  The victim and his family were often there, along with the defendant’s mother and any other relations.  The defendant himself was thinking about spending the rest of his life in prison.  Sherriff deputies stood at attention, watching everyone, waiting for a rumble to start.

          And sometimes it did.  Judge Kubacki had to seek cover more than once.  The one incident that stuck with him was a melee where a young woman with babe in arms waded into the fray and tried to use her infant as a bludgeon.  He told that story more than once.  I think he disapproved of her behavior.

          But this is about juries, and that is because most of the trials in Room 236 were jury trials.  Judge Kubacki, for about twenty years, presided over more jury trials than any other judge in the city.  Juries made up of random citizens from the voting rolls inject an element of chance into a contest, and the only hope for most defendants was to get lucky, so they all demanded juries.

          For the judge and his staff, jury trials are a LOT more work than non-jury trials.  Jurors must be separated from the participants at all times.  You don’t ever want a juror in the same elevator or restroom as the defendant’s sister, so you take steps to prevent that sort of random encounter.  It took work, constant attention to detail, and always knowing the location of everyone interested in the trial.

          Also, juries and jurors are mysterious and unpredictable.  The lawyers and the judge asked a few questions, and would typically find out what neighborhood the person lived in, what they did for a living and maybe where they went to school.  Then, just from looking at them, you get male/female, white/black, old/young---and that’s about it.  There are consultants who claim to be experts who will help lawyers pick jurors, but I always wondered whether they really know anything at all.

          Because of this, and because of all the jury trials in Room 236, my father and his staff developed a fascination with juries and jurors.  They all had theories on how to read jurors and the factors that might sway them.  They were convinced, for example, that a nasty-looking weapon in evidence (that the jury could look at and touch), would tend to lead to a conviction.  It doesn’t make any real sense, of course, since the only important question should be whether the defendant used the nasty looking weapon, but the court staff swore by it.  Prosecutors generally believe this as well.  Maybe it’s because a long sharp knife or a cold, gray semi-automatic are real.  Even the most uncynical jurors realize quickly that people lie at trial.  Witnesses lie, cops lie, the defendant lies---but a chain or a gun or an ax does not.

          Another topic they wondered about was the effect of a large contingent of supporters and family for the victim or the defendant.  I don’t remember what they concluded, but I know that a crowded courtroom full of on-edge, emotional people put everybody on a state of alert.

          All of them had their individual roles.  The Court Crier was Helen Wolf, a tiny, no-nonsense woman who worked in City Hall for forty years.  She was in charge of wrangling juries and moving them from place to place, but she never catered to them or let them dawdle.  They had a job to do.  She had several jury-deliberation rooms at her disposal, and if it were July and she felt a particular jury was taking too long to reach a verdict, she might move them to the room where the AC didn’t work so well.  There was also a drafty room where the radiator rattled constantly and didn’t kick out much heat in December, and Helen would move the jury in there in the colder months if she felt they needed a kick in the ass.

          Jack Woods, the Tipstaff (the judge’s general factotum and body-security man), had the job of taking lunch orders for the jury.  He saved them, correlated them against the verdict eventually rendered in the case, and theorized about them.  He was convinced that meat-eaters generally favored conviction, and that an order for twelve roast beef sandwiches basically guaranteed a guilty verdict.  Salads and tunafish were wild cards.  Three or four of them in a lunch order meant anything could happen---a hung jury, a wrongful acquittal, or screaming arguments in the jury room.

          Because of the expense, juries are rarely sequestered in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court, but it does happen.  My father told me he would do it occasionally once the testimony was over and the case had been given to the jury to decide.  If it had been a lengthy trial, or the case had gotten a lot of press attention, he might put them in a hotel to keep them under the court’s control and maybe protect them from any outside influences.

          In one case, he told me, the jury had started deliberating that morning but it was getting late in the afternoon, so he decided to sequester them, and he had the staff start calling their homes to tell the families not to expect the juror home that night.

          On one of these calls, Jack Woods reached the husband of a juror and said, “Hello, Mr. Smith.  I’m from Judge Kubacki’s courtroom where your wife is on the jury, and I’m calling to tell you the jury is deliberating now and the judge has decided to put them up in a hotel overnight.  So you shouldn’t expect Mrs. Smith home tonight.”

          There was a pause, then the response:  “Tonight?  TONIGHT?  And exactly where the hell has she been for the last two weeks?”

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki   

THIS & THAT XXV

 

          Dummheit is one of my new favorite German words.  It is usually translated simply as “stupidity,” and that is probably its most common meaning.  But it also can mean collective stupidity or stupidity that affects an entire society.  In this sense it is not a matter of intelligence.  I have seen it used this way to refer to the German people in the era of the Third Reich from 1933 to 1943, a time when a large number of people succumbed to fear and political pressure and propaganda, and abandoned any ability to think critically or make decisions for themselves.

          It can also be applied to the three years of COVID madness, from March 2020 to the present, when most sensible people were so terrified by their governments that they accepted the most absurd and lethal policies without objection.

*

 

          I have never heard the word “abolishment” until a month or two ago.  Now, for some reason, wherever the word “abolition” would be used, “abolishment” is used instead.  I don’t get this one.  A lot of word changes these days are about wokeness or political correctness, but I don’t see that angle here.

*

 

          When I see people wearing masks these days, I think of those Japanese soldiers they found on isolated Pacific islands in the 1960s, the ones who thought WWII was still on and who were waiting further instructions from the Emperor.

*

 

          You’re not allowed to use the word “retard” anymore, because we are told it is offensive to those people with Down Syndrome.  It was a very useful word, though, and I miss it.  The ban doesn’t really make much sense because I never use “retard” to refer to people with Down Syndrome.  In fact, the people who used “retard” to refer to people with Down Syndrome all died about fifty years ago.  I use it exclusively to refer to people like Kamala (”Assigned Retard at Birth”) Harris.

          According to Stanford University, “retard” is a slur against those who have a cognitive disability.  The correct term, according to “The Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative,” is “neurodivergent,” but if you look up “neurodivergent,” it doesn’t mean the same thing.  Neurodivergent covers a wide range of brain variations, including OCD, autism, Asperger’s, Tourette’s, bi-polar disorder, dyslexia, ADHD, and Down Syndrome.  And that’s fine in the sense that we probably need a collective term for all the different types of brain weirdness out there, but neurodivergent is not what I mean when I say “retard.”

          There is, however, a possible loophole.  The document recognizes that some of the offensive words may actually be preferred by the people they refer to, and that’s OK.  Presumably, this is to exempt the phenomenon whereby black people routinely call each other nigger and it’s not offensive at all.  Stanford recognizes this exception as a general rule regarding offensive speech.

          In other words, if you are yourself a retard, you are allowed to call other people retards as well.  That will be my excuse from now on.

*

 

          Name tag on a young lady cashier at the supermarket: Asma.

*

 

          For a while now, my attitude about the 2024 presidential election has been that while I would prefer Ron DiSantis, I would reluctantly vote for Trump if he were to become the nominee.  As we roll on towards the primaries and the election, however, it is becoming more and more difficult to see anything in Trump I can support.

          If there were some sense in America that the COVID fascism of the past three years was a madness that must now be faced and condemned, and its architects jailed or shamed or at least sent packing from the public sphere, I might feel more sanguine about the prospects for “moving on” from COVID.  If that were to happen, I could perhaps forgive other aspects of Trump and vote for him.

           But there is little attempt, by anyone, to address what happened.  Trump himself not only won’t admit what happened, but in fact has doubled down on what he did during COVID.  He recently said the vaccinations “saved millions of lives,” though any research supporting such a statement is riddled with flawed assumptions and outright propaganda.

          And he is largely responsible for the nightmare we endured, with its mask mandates and forced mRNA vaccinations and shuttered churches and economic destruction and empty schools.  He was, after all, the president.  I guess I should not be surprised that he still has to support Operation Warp Speed and the Emergency Use Authorizations and the lockdowns and the pointless mandates.  Admitting one’s mistakes is not something any politician does well, but I don’t see how America can ever regain its footing as a free country and a representative republic unless ALL OF US face the truth, or are forced to.

          As for the question of how many people there are like me, I have no idea, but the 2024 election may turn on the answer to that question.  How many are there who would never vote for one of the totalitarians the Democrats will put forward, but can’t quite bring themselves to vote for Trump either?

*

 

          It’s a common problem.  Older men pee more often than they used to, and often don’t zip up afterwards.  You don’t leave the house as often as you once did, and you’re probably going to pee again in a half hour or so, so what difference does it make if you walk around with your fly down?  It’s not even a conscious decision.  It just happens.

          The problem arises when you remember you have to stop at the bank, so you do leave the house, and it’s only as you are walking into the lobby at Wells Fargo that you realize the barn door is open.  Then you have to surreptitiously reach down and zip up, or try to.  It’s embarrassing.  It’s undignified. 

          And the solution?  “The Fly-Catcher!”

          There’s a sensor at waist level on the door you typically use to leave the house, and there’s a tiny chip you attach to your zipper.  As you walk out the door, there is a discreet “beep-beep” if you need to return your tray table to its upright and locked position.  If all is well, nothing happens and you proceed on your way with all your dignity intact.

 

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki    

                      

WRONG WAY ZEYNEP---A PROUD TRADITION CONTINUES

           It has been 85 years, and a lot of us have forgotten Wrong Way Corrigan, the pilot who, in 1938, took off from Brooklyn for a flight to Long Beach, California and landed in Dublin 38 hours later.  When he got back from Ireland, he became famous as America’s favorite goofball, and he pretty much retained that title for the rest of his life. It was a silly story, and nobody really got hurt.  Not even Corrigan.

          But being a goofball is not as cute as it used to be.  Today, it seems, there are lots of people who have committed dreadful errors but, for political reasons, will never pay a price.  One of my favorites is a superstar D.C. lawyer named Jamie Gorelick.

          Important note.  There are lots of people in America who have committed horrible crimes but who, for political reasons, will never pay a price for them.  You know their names---Bill and Hillary, Fauci, Obama, the Bidens, etc. I’m not talking about them.  I don’t view Jamie Gorelick as a criminal though you may be able to find “crimes” in the U.S. Code that she has committed.  (We all commit two or three a day without even noticing.)  But I’m not charging Jamie with being a criminal.  She’s just an idiot who managed to remain an EXTREMELY important player in Washington no matter what she did.  For thirty years.

          Gorelick graduated from Harvard Law (of course!) in 1975, and then disappears from public view until 1994 when Bill Clinton appoints her Deputy US Attorney General.  She immediately flies into action by initiating procedures for the investigation of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.  These included drafting the famous memo setting up a “wall” between criminal investigators and counterintelligence authorities.  According to Attorney General John Ashcroft (and many others), Gorelick’s memo is the reason the feds were never able to put the pieces together to stop the 9-11 attacks.  The 9-11 Commission itself, to which Gorelick had somehow managed to get herself appointed, never mentioned the “wall” memo in its report.

          In 1997, after her stint at the DOJ, Gorelick was appointed Vice Chairman of Fannie Mae, where she served until 2003 and collected $26.5 million in salary and bonuses.  In a 2002 interview, Gorelick assured Business Week that Fannie Mae was managed safely and that it was “among a handful of top-quality institutions.”  Shortly thereafter, the Fannie Mae accounting scandal erupted as regulators caught the company hiding $9 billion in unrecorded losses.

          Back in private practice in 2008, Gorelick represented Duke University in the infamous Duke lacrosse case, where the university and a prosecutor were found to have railroaded dozens of innocent athletes in order to support local activists and race-hustlers in a hoax accusing the white lacrosse players of crude and obscene behavior.

          You would think these incidents might be enough to tarnish Gorelick’s reputation, but no.  In Washington, if you are a leftist in good standing, no act of idiocy is sufficient to get you kicked off the gravy train.  Hey, man, she went to Harvard!  Sure, “mistakes were made,” but how can you blame Jamie?

          In March of 2022, Gorelick was appointed by Joe Biden as Chair of the Homeland Security Advisory Council.  What could go wrong?

          But Jamie Gorelick is 72 years old.  There’s probably not much more damage she can do.  It seems unlikely she will ever have the pull she did in the 1990s when she single-handedly prevented us from seeing 9-11 was coming.

          That’s why we need Zeynep Tufekci.

          It’s a Turkish name, and she was born in Istanbul, but she is now a sociology professor at Columbia University whose work, and op-eds, often appear in the New York Times.  Let us note at the outset that she has no training in medicine or epidemiology or viruses.

          Until April 3, 2020, Anthony Fauci, the CDC, the WHO, and Surgeon General Jerome Adams all advised against wearing masks as protection against a respiratory virus like COVID.  On that day, Fauci, the CDC, and Jerome Adams all changed their stories and demanded that we all start wearing the damn things.  There was no new “science” and no new medical study suggesting such a thing.  One of the great mysteries of the masking madness was how it got started in the first place.

          The reason was Tufekci.  She had actually accepted the decades of research indicating no benefit to masking and had said so in an article on February 27, 2020.  Then, in a March 17, 2020 op-ed in the New York Times, she told the world that masks were essential to prevent infection.  Supposedly, this was the only conclusion to be drawn from recent events in the Czech Republic where masking had prevented a COVID outbreak.  This was never true, but the tall tale about the Czech Republic became the rallying cry for the #Masks4All movement.  Less than three weeks later, the public health establishment in the U.S. did its about-face and universal masking became the norm.

          And now she’s at it again.

          On January 30, 2023, The Cochrane Review published its summary of 78 random control trial studies involving mask-wearing and its effect on the transmission of respiratory viruses, concluding that masking was worthless and probably harmful.  (Random control trials are often called the “gold standard” of medical research.)  This was basically the end of any rational basis for masking or mask mandates, though most of the support for masking was never rooted in science anyway.

          Tufekci, however, is not ready to let us take our masks off.  Armed with an ambiguous statement she had secured from Karla Soares-Weiser, Editor of the Cochrane Report, she wrote an op-ed for the NYT (3-10-23), entitled “Here’s Why the Science is Clear That Masks Work.”  And, at least in terms of how all the really, really smart people think, that was the end of the Cochrane Review and its 78 random control trial studies proving that mask-wearing is useless.  Tufekci forgot to mention in her op-ed that she was the person who put us on the path to universal masking in the first place, but I suppose that’s a minor point.

          It is mystifying, to me at least, how people like Jamie Gorelick and Zeynep Tufekci can be so catastrophically wrong and yet continue to be promoted, listened to, and even lauded by otherwise sensible people.  If there was one American official responsible for 9-11, it was Gorelick, and yet she is now at the pinnacle of D.C. power-brokers and influencers---nobody even checks her driver’s license anymore before putting her in charge of some critical government agency.  As for Tufekci, she wasn’t always a full professor at Columbia.  A few years ago, she was an assistant prof at North Carolina in the School of Library Science.  Then she wrote an article in Wired in support of censorship on social media (you know---all that “misinformation”), and now look at her.  She is the reason you had to tie that diaper to your face for two years, and there is no sign she is ever going away.

 

Copyright2023MichaelKubacki

 

(Note: Much of the factual information herein about Zeynep Tufekci comes from a 3-26-23 article entitled “How Zeynep Tufekci and Jeremy Hoard Masked America,” by investigative reporter Michael Senger.  I am grateful for his work.)