Ending racial gerrymandering ends a failed scheme where legal rights were allocated by race

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Imagine a system where arrests, convictions and sentencing for the crime of murder had to be in proportion to the racial composition of the population.

Since Asians are about 7% of the population, the murder arrests, convictions and sentences for Asians in such a scheme would have to be 7% of the total.  Likewise, since Blacks, Latinos and whites make up about 13%, 19% and 62% of the population, respectively, they’d have to account for 13%, 19% and 62% of the murder arrests, convictions and sentencing.

At first glance, that sounds reasonable. But of course, it is not.

The reason is because those four races commit murder at dramatically different rates. FBI data show that whites comprise 62% of the population but commit only 46% of murders. Asians comprise 7% but commit only 1% of murders. Latinos comprise 19% and commit 20% of murders.

So, who is committing all the murders that whites, Asians and Latinos are not?

Blacks are. Blacks comprise 13% of the population, but commit 51% of murders in the country. If you do the math, the statistical likelihood of a Black person being a murderer is quadruple the likelihood of a white person being a murderer, and roughly 22 times the likelihood of an Asian being a murderer.

A few tangential points are worth your attention. One, this high Black murder rate accounts for a large part (but not all) of the high overall murder rate in America as compared to Europe.

Two, the victims of these Black murderers are also mostly Black themselves. Black-on-Black violent crime in America is, tragically, extremely high.

Three, a few people would contend that Blacks don’t really commit murder at a high rate (though they cannot dispute that they die of murder at a high rate since, after all, there’s a Black body to prove it).

Those people would say that these statistics to the contrary are instead proof that the justice system racially discriminates against Blacks in arresting them, convicting them and sentencing them for crimes they did not commit (but, interestingly, does not discriminate against Latinos or Asians). Nobody really believes that contention – even the people saying it – so I won’t address it.

And four, an interesting tidbit is that the number of men we arrest, convict and sentence for murder is several times the number of women, even though the two sexes are about 50/50 in the population. Does anyone seriously contend that men are victims of sex discrimination in the field of murder arrests?

Back to our hypothetical. A scheme where people must be arrested, convicted and sentenced for murder in proportion to their racial representation in the population, even though murders are not committed in that same proportion, is undeniably unjust and probably criminal.

We would have to arrest many more whites and a lot of Asians for murders they didn’t commit. And we would have to leave un-arrested a lot of Blacks for murders they did commit, all to achieve our fantasy of racially proportionate representation in the law of murder.

This superficially appealing but fundamentally unfair concept of racially proportionate representation in the law brings us to another area of law – the way we elect Congress.

The country is divided into Congressional Districts of equal population – about 762,000 people each. Each district gets one representative. That amounts to the 435 members of the House of Representatives.

Each district typically elects a House member of the party that controls the district. Only 10-15% of the districts are actually competitive. (That’s why members of Congress are seldom voted out of office.)

Because populations shift, the districts must be redrawn periodically. That’s done by state legislatures. In doing so, the legislatures often “gerrymander” the districts. That is, they draw weird-shaped districts in order to distribute the population such that each district has a slight majority of the party doing the drawing. In a state with a 55/45 split between the two parties, the party in power can easily achieve an 80-20 split in the House members elected from that state. There’s more about gerrymandering HERE.

Gerrymandering has been going on for a long time, overtly or covertly. It’s unseemly and might be unfair, but it’s part of our system of representative government. The Supreme Court allows it, because there’s nothing in the Constitution to prohibit it.

But when the gerrymandering is done for the purpose of racial discrimination, there are special rules that have evolved and changed. For a while back in the Jim Crow days, the Democrats who controlled the South racially gerrymandered the districts in a way to prevent the election of Black representatives.

That wasn’t difficult. Even in Louisiana which is about 30% Black, they simply drew the districts such that no district had anywhere close to a majority of Black voters. Divide and conquer was the strategy. The result for many years was that there were none or very few Black members of Congress.

That changed in the last half of the 20th century with the passage of the Voting Rights Act and numerous legal challenges to districting. In fits and starts, judges gradually concluded that the VRA together with the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment required that a state’s Congressional delegation be Black in proportion to the Black population of the state. In Louisiana, that meant that two of their six representatives should be Black since about 30% of the state population was Black.

That was achieved with gerrymandering. They drew two “majority minority” districts that concentrated the 30% Black population. The resulting districts had a weird shape, but there was some assurance that two Blacks would get elected in those two mostly-Black districts.

It was something like affirmative action. When the number of Blacks qualifying for prestige colleges and jobs was not “enough,” society put its thumb on the qualifications scale. Similarly, when the number of Blacks getting elected to Congress was not “enough,” society put its thumb on the election scale. For a while, Lady Justice peeked to check which race she was judging.  

There’s an expression in law that hard facts make bad law. Imagine a case where a child is run over and crippled after darting into a passing car. The law says the driver was not at fault but our emotions want to help that child, and so we bend the law to obtain a result that’s emotionally satisfying but legally bad.

In racial gerrymandering, the hard fact was that not many Blacks were being elected to Congress despite a significant sentiment that Congress should have more. The bad law that resulted was divvying up Congressional districts by race.

Allocating representation in Congress by skin color is almost as bad as allocating arrests, convictions and sentencing in murder cases by skin color. It denies our individuality. It assumes that Blacks will and should vote only for Blacks while whites will and should vote only for whites. To the extend those assumptions are unfortunately accurate, the effect is to further drive people apart racially. It is all founded on a destructive us/them view of race.

Moreover, this racial divisiveness is self-perpetuating. Politicians become motivated to reinforce their constituents’ destructive beliefs that they can only be represented by a member of their own race, not “the other” race.

In short, racial gerrymandering is founded in racism, and it promotes more racism.

In my upcoming final installment of this series, I’ll discuss the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling last week abolishing racial gerrymandering. It’s the most boldly correct and politically consequential decision in years. And I’ll discuss the media’s disgraceful reporting on it.

Trump is winning the Iran negotiations

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A few weeks ago, Iran had lost every battle but was winning the war. The regime had survived, even though its putative leader and probably his son and many others had not.

That’s because the Iranian regime was still raking in billions in the oil market, Moreover, they were disrupting the oil market for the rest of the world.

That disruption benefited the regime doubly. It garnered a higher price for their oil, and it incentivized the world to push for America to back off. Dependably venal and dependably short-term in its outlook and dependably anti-American, the world did as instructed.

Sure, a few thousand of Iran’s people had been killed by bombs, but the regime couldn’t care less about a few thousand of its people. After all, this is an outfit that killed ten times that many people in the streets last fall when they dared to protest the regime.

But as radicals often do – this is one reason they’re called “radicals” – the regime overplayed its hand.

They shut down the Strait of Hormuz to everyone except Iranian-approved vessels. As for the ones they approved, they conditioned their approval on payment of a multimillion-dollar toll. This is for an international waterway, mind you.

Their little pirate scheme was calculated to raise even more money for the regime. On top of revenue from selling oil at artificially high prices, they would collect tolls from their customers buying that oil.

“Free shipping,” it wasn’t. After paying through the nose for the oil, the customers paid again through the nose to pick it up.

It’s as if Amazon told you there was no free shipping on what you bought. In fact, there was no shipping at all. You had to pick up the merchandise from half way around the world – and you had to pay a hefty pick-up charge.

In response to all this, Trump did something I have to confess was brilliant, even though I hadn’t thought of it. He upped the Hormuz ante. He said in effect, “If you want to selectively close the Strait, fine. We’ll close it altogether.”

That eliminated most of Iran’s oil sales. Since oil is by far their biggest source of revenue, the move closed their ATM.

It gets worse for Iran. With nowhere to send its oil, Iran is forced to shut down its wells. Oil wells cannot be simply shut-down indefinitely. If the oil isn’t pumped, the well becomes inoperative and then dysfunctional within weeks.

Iran is thus facing a severe money crunch, which will become increasingly difficult to pull out of. They are denied their main source of revenue, and each day increasingly renders that denial permanent.

Now Iran is doing what losers do in negotiations. They’re trying to gracefully cave in. Two weeks ago, they scornfully refused negotiations unless America pre-conceded important points. It was if a seller on eBay told you, “If you pre-agree to pay full price, then I’ll discuss whether or not I’ll agree to sell this to you.”

That changed at the end of this week. Iran now says it will negotiate without those pre-concessions.

Here’s where I have to admit Trump is truly showing some art in the deal – or at least an instinct for the jugular. He told the Iranians, no thanks.

Trump seems to recognize an important negotiating point that it took me many years to learn in practicing law. It’s this: When you gain an advantage, and the other side realizes it, your advantage is probably bigger than you think.

Unless there’s a reason to let your opponent save face (sometimes there is), this is the time to annihilate them. Wait till they beg. Then let them grovel. Then go in for the kill.

I confess to a love-hate relationship with Trump. But this is yet another instance when I’m oh-so-glad Trump is President rather than any of the alternatives that were offered. I can’t quite imagine Sleepy Joe or Kam-A-La going in for the kill.

A primer on gerrymandering and race discrimination

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The 435 members of the House of Representatives represent the people of specific geographic areas. Those areas are drawn up to include equal populations.

The population of a Congressional District is currently about 762,000 people. The intent is for each citizen and 762,000 of his close friends to have a voice in Congress.

This necessarily means that Congressional Districts have vastly different geographic sizes and shapes reflecting different population concentrations. Alaska has only one Congressional District covering the entire sparsely populated state, while one of the 26 Congressional Districts in New York State is just a few square miles of densely populated Manhattan.

Because populations change and shift, Congressional Districts must be redrawn periodically. (It’s different for the Senate where each state gets two Senators regardless of population, and the boundaries of states don’t change.)

The natural question is, who draws up these ever-changing Congressional Districts?

A computer program could do it in milliseconds. Give it a few factors to consider such as natural geographic boundaries, and then ask it to draw up random equal-population globs on the map.

Ah, but simplicity and logic in government are usually subordinated to the political needs, incompetence and corruption of politicians.

In the case of drawing up Congressional Districts, those politicians are among the worst of their kind – state legislators. You know, those brilliant statemen who take a few months off from their ordinary jobs as rocket scientists and brain surgeons in order to inflict on the population of their state whatever legislation best meets the needs of their donors.

The needs of their donors can be summed up with: “Maximize my power by maximizing my political party.”

The legislators thus draw up districts that favor their party. A seventh grader from yesteryear, or a PhD from today, can see how this is easily done. You simply draw the districts so that the majority party has a majority not just in the state as a whole, but in each district.  

Say a state has a population of 7.62 million, with a total number of Congressional Districts of 10 (because 7.62 million people divided by 762,000 people per district equals about 10 districts). Say further that about 3.16 million are Republicans and the other 4.46 million are Democrats (or at least tend to vote that way) for a party split of about 60/40 between Democrats and Republicans.

In an ideal world, the districts might be drawn such that the party split between Democrat and Republican Representatives is about the same as the party split between Democrat and Republican voters – about 60/40 – and so there would be 6 Democrat Representatives and 4 Republican ones.

In the real world, however, here’s where it gets mischievous. In my example, the state legislature is probably controlled by the Democrats, since 60% of the voters are Democrats.

That Democrat legislature will be motivated to “gerrymander” the Congressional Districts to maximize the number of Democrat Representatives and minimize the number of Republican ones.

They achieve this by drawing the Congressional Districts in such a way that Democrats have at least a small majority in every Congressional District. If a map shows a Republican majority in a district, then they shift the geographic boundary of that district to borrow from an adjoining district where the Democrat/Republican split is more favorable. The outcome can be weirdly-shaped districts, such as shown on the above map of Louisiana.

Gerrymandering is always possible, because a statewide political split won’t be reflected in every county and every precinct. Rural counties tend to lean Republican, while urban counties tend to lean Democrat. If the legislature needs a few more Democrats in order to have a majority in a rural district, just shift the district boundary to borrow some from the nearby city.

In my example, that could mean the ten districts in the state wind up with Democrat/Republican splits of something like 55/45, 60/40, 57/43, 62/38, and so on. With their 60/40 overall advantage, the Democrats have plenty of votes to spread around in order to have a majority in each of the ten districts.

This result is odd, and arguably not intended by the Founders. In a state where Republicans have 40% of the voters, they wind up with zero Congressional Representatives. And, of course, they wind up with zero Senators as well, since Senators are elected statewide in this state that is 60% Democrat. Millions of Republicans in a Blue state can be left with no representation in Congress.

In my example above, Democrats are the gerrymanderers. But a recent example of gerrymandering was by Texas Republicans who, spurred on by President Trump, gerrymandered their state to shift about 5 House seats from Democrat to Republican. Democrats are poised to return the favor in Virginia and California, while Republicans are poised to re-return the favor in Florida. We have full-on gerrymandering wars.

Gerrymandering is a volatile issue. It seems at odds with representative government because it allows the majority party to not just out-vote the minority party, but to lock them out of government altogether, at least in a given state’s Congressional delegation.

In the preceding paragraph, I used “minority” in the numerical sense, as in the “minority party” as distinct from the “majority party.” When “minority” is used in gerrymandering in the racial sense, the matter becomes not just volatile, but explosive. That’s the subject of a long-overdue Supreme Court decision this week, which I’ll discuss in my next column.

On men rebranding into women and Democrats re-branding into Independents

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It’s not easy being a Democrat. It began a century and a half ago when they got caught on the wrong side of history.

Democrats supported the enslavement of human beings. Many of them actually owned enslaved human beings. They fought the bloodiest war in U.S. history to retain their right to enslave human beings.

Suffice to say that this right to enslave human beings was not one of the God-given ones mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration does not speak solemnly of the right to “life, liberty, happiness and enslaving humans.”

History sided with the Declaration and against the Democrats, for a while.  

But, alas, history these days is written not by the winners but by the Democrats – specifically the Democrats who rule the Humanities Departments at major U.S. universities. These Democrat humanist historians saw that slavery was bad for the Democrat brand. So, they buried it.

As a result, most people today – especially young people – think it was the Republicans who were the Southern slave owners and they think (I’m not making this up) that Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat.

Blame this on the Democrats in higher education, but blame it also on the Democrats in lower education. Teachers tend to be Democrats. When it comes to teaching the role of Democrats in slavery and the Civil War, they don’t.

Their past safely buried, the Democrats succeeded in rebranding themselves as civil libertarians who wanted equal civil rights for everyone. In short, they rebranded themselves as Republicans.

But they kept the name “Democrat,” mostly.

But not entirely. Many Democrats decided to candidly call themselves “socialists.” I give them credit for being honest enough to call themselves what they were, but I give them discredit for being what they were. Socialism is a proven failure.

As time went on, people came to recognize the failure of socialism. It sounded great in those university humanities departments, but invariably failed every time it was tried in the real world – from the Soviet Union to China to Eastern Europe to Latin America to Cuba to everywhere else. It succeeded in exactly zero places.

And so, the growing socialist wing of the Democratic party re-branded itself. They became “liberals.”

It was a shameless theft of the word “liberal,” which had always meant small-government and individual rights. In fact, in Great Britain, the word liberal still retains its old meaning. If you want to start a fight, introduce a GB liberal to an American one. (Don’t worry, they won’t break anything.)

That worked for a while for the Democrats. But the people eventually caught on. They came to recognize that “liberal” did not mean liberal in the classic sense. It instead meant something roughly the opposite – it meant socialism. And so “liberal” became a bad brand.

The Democrats wondered, what do we do now? Starting another civil war seemed imprudent, given that they didn’t have many guns.

They decided to simply re-brand again. It worked before, sort of, so it would work again. They started calling themselves “woke.” As if non-Democrats are all busy sleeping.

You know what happened to “woke.” It became a four-letter word. The reason is that people began to associate woke with – you know what’s coming – socialism (and worse).  

And then came “progressive.” As if anyone not a Democrat is regressive. This progressive moniker ironically harkens back over a century to the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson who was an avowed white supremacist until a stroke involuntarily relieved him of his power in favor of his wife who was an avowed white supremacist and eugenicist.

As for the success of the current “progressive” brand . . . meh.

The problem is that Democrats are simply too burdened by the brand “Democrat.” They can call themselves whatever, but people still know that Democrats are the people who wanted to replace merit with skin color, who wanted boys in the girls’ locker rooms, who have been predicting the incineration of the world for two generations, and who wanted – and did – abolish the nation’s borders.  

And so, in the most brazen re-branding yet, the Democrats have taken to calling themselves non-Democrats. Specifically, they are starting to call themselves “Independents.”

Yep, in a number of upcoming races, lifelong hard-left Democrats are calling themselves “Independents” in an apparent bid to distance themselves from any accountability for their Party’s craziness – a craziness that they endorsed up until, oh, about yesterday.

It reminds me of one particular craziness by the Democrats. For years, they maintained that a man could change into a woman by announcing that he had simply changed his mind about his man/woman thing.

I submit that Democrats are likely to be about as successful in “changing” into Independents as men are successful in “changing” into women. But we’ll see.

Cigar-smoking attention-seeking hedonists, it’s who we are

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When one of my daughters was 12, it was time to teach her the facts of life. I took her out on the front porch to teach her how to smoke a cigar.

I didn’t intend to teach the girl any other facts of life, of course. As a dad, that wasn’t my job.

Like all cigar smokers, and especially the occasional kind, I treasured this big ritual. You light the cigar in a certain way, which isn’t as hard as they pretend – the thing is designed to burn, you know. Then you keep it lit, which isn’t hard, either – it’s not like keeping smoked salmon lit. Then you puff on it, which is harder than it sounds – it’s not natural to put smoke in your mouth, and it’s even less natural to pretend you enjoy it.

Like other rituals, cigar smoking is best if you have an audience. It’s something like a preacher in front of his congregation or a professor in front of his class. It’s not as much fun all alone.

In my case, it was a dad in front of his daughter. A middle-aged blow-hard in front of a captive audience with the pretense of educating and the goal of impressing. Sort of like that preacher and that professor.

In the ritual of cigar smoking, the highest achievement is the miracle of blowing smoke rings. They look difficult, and they are.  

A half hour into our dad/daughter porch lesson on cigar smoking, I started blowing smoke rings. Big beautiful ones. I wasn’t able to make shapes other than rings – no pirate ships or dragons – but the rings were pretty good ones. The daughter was duly impressed.

Ah, but smoke rings pit two of cigar-smoking rules against one another. The first rule is, smoke rings are cool. The second rule is, don’t inhale. (Bill Clinton’s smoking rituals come to mind, but that’s another column.)

You see, a smoke ring requires a fair quantity of smoke, sometimes more than a mouthful. But if you inhale cigar smoke into your lungs, well, bad things can happen.

And they did. After 20 minutes of impressive smoke rings on the porch, I went down to the lawn and puked my guts out. To this day, my daughter credits me with an ingenious lesson to teach her the perils of smoking.

If only I’d been that ingenious, rather than that stupid. But I’ll take the credit. To this day, the daughter doesn’t smoke, anything.

And so, here we are in America circa 2026, blowing smoke rings. We don’t call them that, of course. Just as “smoke rings” is a euphemism for inhaling into your lungs the hot ash of burning vegetable compost in order to make a show of a small and arbitrary talent, we’ve invented euphemisms.  

There’s the euphemism of “Balancing Work with Life.” This euphemism is more tempting than breathing burning vegetable compost, because it treats work as a vice and laziness as a virtue.

But this nice-sounding euphemism (who can object to balance?) is designed to obscure a basic human weakness: laziness. A corollary could be “The Road to Happiness is Paved with Pleasure.”  

But it’s not so. Ironically, but predictably, people seduced by this notion that pleasure is the road to happiness are invariably quite unhappy. Doubly ironic is that they blame their unhappiness on their meager work, and so they double down on their goal (to the extend they have goals) of doing less of it.

They get a lot of emotional support in that quest. Many people who “work” eight months a year, to whom we entrust much of our children’s daytime lives, teach and profess this notion that work is unhealthy or even evil for the purpose of validating their own unhappy choices.   

And then there’s the euphemism of “women’s liberation.” Invented by men, this one pretends that free sex for men somehow liberates women.

Yeah, it “liberates” women from men who help raise children, it “liberates” women from men who hang around after the pregnancy occurs, and it “liberates” women from men who are still in bed with them the next morning.  

It would be inequitable for us to forget “equity.” That’s the euphemism that says it’s unfair when the consequences to a person correlate with his efforts and achievements.

And the euphemism of “gender affirmation” as if unhappy men can be transformed into happy women by lopping off their genitals.

And the euphemism of “DEI” as if racial discrimination is right, not wrong, so long as the chosen races are the right ones, not the wrong ones.

All this euphemistic pleasure-seeking and virtue-signaling has replaced values that humanity held dear for millennia – work, responsibility, dedication, duty, love, commitment, and, yes, truth, justice and beauty.

It makes me want to run out to the lawn to puke my guts out.

On Colorado highways, it’s now illegal to obey the speed limit and illegal not to

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In Colorado, the highest posted speed limit is 75 mph. I can live with that, even though I think 85 mph might be better and perhaps just as safe.

This speed limit of 75 means that it’s against the law to go faster than that. Trust me on this, I used to be a lawyer.

But now, Colorado has announced that if you go the 75-mph speed limit in the left lane, or even if you violate the speed limit by going 85 mph, and people stack up behind you who want to go 95, then you’re violating the law by impeding traffic. And you’ll be ticketed for it.

I suppose they have a point here. Going slower than people who want to speed does indeed get in the way of those people.

So, now we have two contradictory laws. The first sets the speed limit. The second requires you to violate the first.

The underlying premise to these contradictory laws is the one I mentioned at the outset: It’s generally believed that the speed limit should be something higher than the current 75 mph.

OK, there’s a solution to this. Rather than mandating that people violate a speed limit that is generally recognized to be too low, simply raise it.

Instead, they have instituted a system where it’s literally impossible to drive lawfully in the left lane. If you go 75 mph, you can be ticketed for going too slow. If you go 95 mph, you can be ticketed for going too fast.

Here’s where it gets really crazy. If you go, say, 83 mph, you could literally be ticketed both for going too fast because you’re going faster than the speed limit, and for going too slow because you’re in the way of the people who want to go 95 mph.

Isn’t it great how the left has breathed new life into Franz Kafka and George Orwell? And Joseph Stalin’s henchman who bragged “Show me the person, and I’ll show you the crime — and if he’s in the left lane, I’ll show you two.”

What do you call a government that employs this damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t methodology for ruling the masses? Fascist, that’s what.

What do you call the masses who tolerate such a government? Slaves, that’s what.

Shrinking America: the population will soon decline by 50%

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Mothers and fathers die. For the population to remain constant, the two of them need to produce about 2.1 children on average in order to replace themselves. (The extra 0.1 is necessary to offset the deaths of children who never reach reproductive age.) This figure is called the “fertility rate.”

Recent data shows that the fertility rate in the United States is nowhere near that 2.1 figure. It has instead dropped to an all-time low of about 1.6. American woman on average give birth to only 1.6 children.

This raises a question: How fast will our population decline due to our low fertility rate of 1.6 compared to the replacement rate of 2.1?

The answer is, pretty fast. At our current fertility rate of 1.6, the U.S. population will decline by 50% in 77 years.

Granted, that calculation doesn’t account for immigration into the country. But are we willing to accept an enormous number of immigrants – something like 200,000,000 – over the course of three-quarters of a century?

That would constitute the biggest immigration wave in the history of the world. It would be much bigger, on both an absolute basis and percentage basis, than the massive waves of the Irish to America in the 1800s, Italians in the 1900s, and even Latinos in the 2000s. Immigration on that scale is inconsistent with the current political sentiment and, arguably, inconsistent with maintaining our American culture.

If it makes you feel better, know that the fertility rate in most of Europe is even lower. In Italy, it’s about 1.2. At that fertility rate, the population of Italy will decline by about 75% while the population of America declines by “only” 50% over those 77 years.

Extend that out further. At a fertility rate of 1.2 over 800 years, the population of Italy will decline to approximately 20 people. At least there won’t be any complaints about a housing shortage.

(BTW, consider the fact that this ridiculously low fertility rate in Italy is in a country that is nearly universally Catholic, and that the Catholic Church prohibits abortion and contraception. Along with art and food, the rhythm method has apparently been perfected in Italy.)

Back to America. The bottom line is America is apt to shrink. I see some good and some bad in that.

First the good. As a matter of personal aesthetics, I think we have enough people here already. The roads seem sufficiently crowded. Even hiking in the remote mountains of Colorado, it’s rare that I wish there were more people on the trail.

It’s true that our cities are hollowed out, but that’s due to crime, corruption and mismanagement, not a lack of people.

Now the bad. Our economy, like most modern economies, hinges on growth. Imagine an economy where the gross domestic product is flat forever. Imagine an economy where the stock market doesn’t go up and everyone’s 401K stagnates.

Worst of all, imagine an economy where the number of young workers paying Social Security taxes drops dramatically due to low birth rates while the number of retirees collecting benefits rises dramatically due to longer life spans.

This touches on a basic issue. Our Social Security system is a big pyramid scheme. Old people like me tell ourselves that we’re simply collecting the money we paid in over a lifetime of work, but, in point of fact, the average retiree collects far more than he paid in. That’s possible only because the number of payors continues to grow faster than the number of payees.

At our current fertility rate, expect a collapse sometime in the next few decades. We’ll lack the workers to fill the bottom of the pyramid.

Finally, there are some aspects of our de-population explosion that are philosophical, metaphysical and even religious.

God told the Abrahamic religions to “be fruitful and multiply.” We obeyed. Did we ever.

This advice to “be fruitful and multiply” was given twice. The first time was at Creation when the human population was two people. The second time was after the Flood when the population was eight people.

We haven’t heard that advice for a long time. During that long time, we’ve multiplied and fruitified to a population of eight billion people. If the advice is still applicable, then when will it expire? When we’re eight trillion? Eight quadrillion? Do we just keep multiplying and fruitifying until there’s no place to stand?

In the philosophical realm, there’s this. We seem to be the only form of life in the universe that is capable of asking questions like “How many of us are enough?” And, from the evidence found so far, we inhabit the only home of all life. As a philosophical, moral and ethical matter, what is our obligation to propagate? To what extent? How many? Where?

These questions are not easy, but it’s worth talking about them. We might be the only creatures anywhere at any time to have that talk.

Note to readers: In case you’re wondering, I fathered at least two children, and one of them gave birth to my grandchild a few months ago. Two of the three pay Social Security taxes.

The market is irrationally exuberant today

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Everyone loves a party. Especially when the party makes you money. Forget that the money you’re making now is the same money you lost last month. It’s still fun.

And so, the stock market is having fun today.

And why not? America and Iran are not exactly kissin’ cousins now, but at least nobody’s civilization will end. Not today, anyway.

The stocks of the boomers are booming, oil is crashing, monster pickup sales to monster drivers will certainly become monstrous again, the Pope (who is “God’s representative on Earth,” a reader informs me) will take credit for a few days, and we’ll probably get a docu-fiction war movie courtesy of War Secretary Hegseth, starring War Secretary Hegseth.

Still, I’m skeptical. I’m not selling into this market uptick, mind you, just as I was not buying into the preceding market dip. Er, market correction. Er, market crash.

You see, I’m a buy-and-hold sort of guy. I don’t pretend to know more about market values than, say, Goldman Sachs and their mega-massive-computing computers and their MBAs who learned at Harvard how to extract insider information from public company Chief Financial Officers. (I won’t give away their secrets, but have you heard the name Jeffrey Epstein?)

So long as you don’t bet against Goldman Sachs, a diverse stock portfolio has proven to be a good investment over a period of decades, and it will probably continue to be, and so that’s where I keep most of my meager money.

I’m just sayin’, as they say, that the people who try to time the stock market are probably getting this one wrong in their buying spree this morning.

Because this cease fire is flawed seven ways to Sunday. To name a few:

Even now after the cease fire has been announced, it still has not taken effect. Iran is still lobbing missiles and drones at its neighbors. I always thought the sine qua non of a cease fire was that everyone ceases firing, but I’m old school.

If Iran finally observes the cease fire by ceasing its firing, rest assured that it will then violate the cease fire by ceasing its cease fire.

It’s who they are: Missile and drone lobbers. That, and terror financiers.

We are told that the big condition to the cease fire is the re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz – that waterway that Iran has closed to the great angst of civilized people everywhere, and also those monsters in the monster pickups.

So how exactly is that supposed to happen? Who will police it? What happens when a rogue or not-so-rogue Revolutionary Guard lobs an ad hoc drone on a frolic of his own?

Um, details to follow. Uh huh.

This war is not over. But the cease fire is – before it even started.

Take out one Iranian power plant per day

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Power plants are legitimate targets in war. They’re “dual purpose” infrastructure in that they serve a civilian purpose but also a military one. (The same was true of the large bridge in Tehran that we took out last week.)

That’s one reason that terrorists like Hamas position their military commands in hospitals, not power plants. It is recognized that hospitals are not legitimate targets (unless a military use is made of them) while power plants are.

America is therefore justified in disabling Iran’s power plants, as President Trump has threatened to do. It will be much tougher for Iran to launch drones and missiles without electric power.

But let me offer a fine point on this strategy. Once you carry out a threat, then you can no longer threaten it. A threat that has been carried out has no further utility in negotiations.

And so, don’t disable all the power plants at once. Let’s instead disable, say, one power plant per day. Call it the One-A-Day treatment. AI tells me that Iran as a country of 90-some million people has a few hundred power plants. At one a day, we have a year’s worth of targets.

By proceeding this way, the mullahs will experience ever-increasing pain and ever-decreasing lights, air conditioning and electricity. Moreover, the mullahs themselves will endure this, not just their people.

Let’s make good on our threat, while still keeping the threat alive.

Bill Maher’s Magical Mystery Tour

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I once saw an unidentified flying object, or “UFO.” I was a passenger on a commercial airliner on an overnight flight. I awoke in the middle of the night, looked out the window, and saw a lighted object flying near the airplane. I couldn’t identify it.

The object kept perfect pace with the airplane, as if it was shadowing us. Once in a while, it blinked, as if it was signaling us. Maybe the blinks were an extraterrestrial form of Morse Code?

In my half-awake stupor, it thrilled me to realize that we are not alone.

But after a few minutes of gradually waking up, I realized that what I was looking at was the light on the end of the airplane wing. It was an object and it was flying and for a few minutes it was unidentified, at least by me, and so it was a UFO.

Mind you, I was not an 11-year-old boy at the time. I was in my 20s and was an aerospace engineer for Boeing.

The point of my little story is that my eyes and my mind played a trick on me.

I’m not alone, even if we are. Thousands of people have reported UFOs. Such things have now been re-branded “unidentified aerial phenomena” or “UAPs,” apparently because these things are typically not objects at all, but instead lights or reflections in the air.

Personally, I like the old term, “UFOs,” because there’s a well-earned stigma associated with that term. Let’s not rebrand “UFOs” into “UAPs” the way the Democrats keep rebranding socialism into “liberalism,” “woke-ism” and “progressivism.” Some things deserve the stigma they earn.

Notwithstanding the stigma, many people believe in UFOs with a fervor normally associated with sports events and Revival Meetings, These people believe UFOs are close encounters of some kind with “flying saucers” which is a layman’s term for . . . [drum roll] . . . aliens.

And I don’t mean the kind from Guatemala who clean toilets unburdened by any immigration documents. I mean the tall, pale kind with big heads and long fingers driving a spaceship from across the galaxy. The kind that kidnap you, take you to that spaceship, and perform – shudder! – secret experiments. On your body. 

Then they let you go home. To tell everyone about them and their secret experiments that they performed. On your body.

UFO reports have been reviewed and re-reviewed ad nauseum. Most of the “sightings” are perfectly explainable, as in the manner of my own “sighting” of the airplane wing light.

Some UFOs are not explainable, but are extremely unlikely to be aliens. After all, we see lots of things on this planet that are not explainable, such as people with a taste for brussels sprouts, men who pretend they’re women, and dogs that chase frisbees. Just because something is inexplicable doesn’t mean it’s extraterrestrial.

Think about it for a millisecond. If we were being visited by extraterrestrials who’ve flown across the galaxy (Lord knows why), then they would either (1) want us to know about them, or (2) want us not to. If the former, wouldn’t they just hold a press conference? If the latter, wouldn’t creatures smart enough to fly across the galaxy faster than the speed of light in a flying saucer be smart enough to conceal themselves from us?

Speaking of creatures that want us to know about them, there’s the attention-getting, influence-peddling, pod-casting, You-tubing Bill Maher. Until now, Maher has made a name for himself by being a Democrat who says Republican-ish things occasionally.  

That strategy is a proven click-generator. Republicans and Democrats love it when they hear Republican-ish and Democrat-ish things from a Democrat or Republican, respectively. (To map this out for you, I’m saying that Republicans love to hear a Democrat endorse Republican positions, and Democrats love to hear a Republican endorse Democrat positions.)

When that happens, it seems to show that “the other side” has suffered a defection. No one loves a traitor, except the side to which he trades himself, and they love him a lot. Clicks follow a traitor like flies follow dung.

The problem with this marketing strategy is that it’s self-limiting. If a Democrat like Maher endorses enough Republican positions, Republicans stop loving him as a traitorous Democrat because he’s become just another Republican.

So, Maher has a new click generating scheme. He has gone FULL UFO. He’s announced that UFOs are indeed alien spacecraft.

Like the fake traitor scheme, this new scheme is a proven click generator. Say something crazy, and people will tune in, for a few minutes anyway. On the right, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have this down pat in their Jew-baiting conspiracy schticks. Before that, on the left, were the Russian collusion schticks.

The scheme originated in the entertainment business. Remember magic acts? A “magician” would stand on stage and “do magic” by making things disappear and re-appear, or by pretending to saw a woman in a box in half, or by pulling rodents out of a hat.

Of course, nobody actually thought this was “real” magic. After all, by definition there’s no such thing as real magic. But people were willing to pay to see the show.

Welcome to Bill Maher’s magic show. Let him entertain you. Pay him a nickel or a click. But don’t take him seriously.