The British government has matched the American Biden administration in identifying flag-waving patriots as the greatest danger to the nation. That is, Britain and America are endangered by people who wave the flags of those two countries. In contrast, waving the flags of the global south and terrorist groups is “progressive”.

Today, the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has continued its process of dismantling the basic guardrails of a nation. Previously, they decided that there is no fixed deadline for receiving ballots for an election, which one blogger called “cheat-by-mail”. Today, SCOTUS announced that invading armies could birth children in America, giving rise to automatic citizens. They claimed to have found this right in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. It is not there.

The legal details are as follows. The 14th Amendment was intended to ensure that after America’s Civil War, the freed slaves would be considered as citizens, and could not be denied their rights. Here is the text.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

It was not intended that citizenship be granted to the newborn children of ambassadors, or invading armies, or a hostile state, or terrorists. The people in question must be subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, not citizens of a foreign country. A majority of the world’s countries reject birthright citizenship.

Could America benefit from open borders? We can answer that question by looking at western Europe, in which the population has terrorized into submission by rape and murder committed by migrants. (On this topic, readers may want to watch the recent film "Citizen Vigilante". It is extremely brutal, but so is life these days in the West.)

We can also examine data from my study of the Freedom Development Index 2024. I broke down the relation of this number to the fraction of population associated with five large belief systems. (The unaffiliated include not only atheists, agnostics, and “spiritual but not religious”, but also fully religious people who are not affiliated with a religious institution.)

On average, the unaffiliated and Christians improve quality of life; Buddhists and Hindus leave it mostly unchanged; while Islam decreases the quality of life.

The next image displays average IQ by world region. Here Tiger stands for Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore; ASEAN is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

A Western society that wants to endure and thrive should bar entry to communists, fascists, jihadists, socialists, and anyone with an IQ under 85 at a minimum. This is not racist. People of any race can qualify for entry under these criteria.

EDIT: The Census Bureau reports that the share of foreign-born Americans is currently around 14.9%, close to the all-time record high. Immigration should be paused until the share of foreign-born Americans is below 10%, to allow for cultural assimilation.

Unfortunately, President Trump has relied too much on executive orders, in this term as in his previous one. Laws passed through Congress are stronger, and constitutional amendments are the strongest. The Constitution should be amended to ban birthright citizenship. It should state explicitly that only the child of a citizen is eligible for citizenship.

On the subject of citizenship, this amendment should clarify the definition of “natural-born”, which is a requirement for the presidency. This phrase should be defined as being born on sovereign American territory, and being born to two biological parents who themselves are citizens at the time of the child’s birth. Not only should the president be natural-born; the same should apply to the vice-president, cabinet, judiciary, Congress, and all federal employees.

No society’s founding document should be read as a suicide pact.

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Many make explicit reference to our nation’s sesquibicentennial.

Other homes “proudly” fly the “pride” flag.

I have not seen any houses flying both the national flag and the “pride” flag. Perhaps surprisingly, polling reveals that the type of people who tend to fly the “pride” flag do not actually feel pride about being American. Then again, this would explain why the two flags are never seen together.

It is remarkable how much correlation there is among social-cultural issues. The same people tend to loathe America, Western civilization, Christianity, Christians, Judaism, Jews, whites, men, heterosexuals, capitalism, neatness, punctuality, diligence, accomplishment, politeness, responsibility, and so on. They tend to admire the most dysfunctional people: thieves, rapists, terrorists, murderers.

Initially, I wanted to align these dimensions with a worship of entropy (disorder). I realized this was not quite accurate. Instead, the left requires an external source of order because they are not able or willing to regulate themselves.

About 12 years ago, I was talking with one of my colleagues, a fellow professor, at the end of his class. He had just collected old-fashioned homework submitted on notebook paper. Some of these sheets had been torn from spiral-bound notebooks. The paper carried a margin by which it had been bound to the notebook, with many small holes for the wire. This narrow margin had a perforated edge which the students could have torn off, but many did not do so.

In order to make the stack of papers a bit neater, the professor was engaged in carefully tearing off the perforated edge, and throwing the slivers of discarded paper onto the room’s carpet, to be laboriously vacuumed later by a janitor. There was a trash can within easy reach, but the professor chose to dump his trash on the ground. This incident was memorable, as you can see.

People who cannot or will not govern themselves require a totalitarian government to supply the basic standards of society. Perhaps this explains the cultural left’s infatuation with the world of jihad and shari’a. The romance is not mutual, however.

One of the Founding Fathers asserted that the recently composed Constitution of the United States was only suitable for a moral people, none other. I cannot say confidently that we still are a moral people.

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The New Zionist Times

JD Vance Should Thank Israel Instead of Trash Talking the Jewish State

JD Vance is worried that Israel is isolated…

Read more

18 days ago · 25 likes · 6 comments · Bob Goldberg

Bob’s column is the rational response, the point-by-point refutation. Danny Zaken, writing in Israel Hayom, sees a bigger picture, in a column entitled “You could have been the greatest president of all, but you failed”.

There is so much wrong with this MOU (memorandum of understanding), which is less than a treaty (and even the latter is subject to hudna, as I discussed earlier). I am interested, however, in the implications for the direction of our politics and our culture, as well as America’s international reputation.

Let’s be brutally honest. America has abandoned allies for decades. Foreigners whose ideals are shaped by the Bible, US Declaration of Independence, and US Constitution imagine that American society functions in accordance with those ideals. “A man’s word is his bond”, and all that.

What happens to Trump’s reputation in the Middle East, a society shaped by ancient concepts of honor and loyalty? Countries like the United Arab Emirates would be foolish to trust Trump promises when his family’s business development enterprises are at stake. All countries will need to hedge their bets with America under its mercurial leadership. Xi and Putin must be gloating.

JD Vance is willing to tell lies about Israel, using dog-whistles to the kook right. This is combined with open hostility and violence from most of the left. In both parties, the silence of the moderates is deafening. I did not vote for a Tucker Carlson - Nick Fuentes - Candace Owens puppet, but it looks like that is what I got.

Trump is crazy to be led astray by the caterwauling of the kook right, whose noise makes up for their small numbers. He has had the steadfast support of mainstream conservatives throughout this war, until he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. The leader of the free world could not stomach more than 3 months of gasoline above $4 per gallon.

The comment sections on the blogs and on X are hijacked by Chinese bots trying, successfully, to disrupt American unity. They do so posing as “America first”, even lecturing me how Israel needs to get along with its “neighbours”. America first - really? Our British cousins may know that we Americans altered the spelling of words like color, favor, flavor, honor, labor, neighbor, and so on, so I do not worry about “America first” people scolding me about my “neighbours”.

Trump backed down. Yes, he chickened out. He cancelled some military operations, because of the risk of casualties. In contrast to the Carlson-Fuentes-Jones-Owens-Peters-Vance lies, it was actually Israel that took on military risks to protect American lives and interests; it was Israel that avenged the Hezbollah killings of American soldiers, not America itself.

This is a long war, one that will drag out for centuries. This war is not just against the Jews. It is against all non-Muslims.

If Vance’s isolationist coup is successful, many mainstream Republicans may well sit out the 2026 and 2028 elections. If Vance is the 2028 Republican presidential nominee, I am certain that I will never vote for him, no matter who his opponent may be. The resulting Republican losses will then be blamed on the Jews.

But God will not be deceived; God has made the rules clear in Genesis 12:3 and elsewhere throughout the Bible. Persecute the Jews at your own risk. Just ask the Roman Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Nazis, and the Soviet Union.

I am holding out hope for the true MAGA executive, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, as the Republican presidential nominee in 2028. That year is also an opportunity for the Democrats to win a landslide if they nominated their only sane politician, Senator John Fetterman.

If both major parties nominate their wingnuts (Vance and Harris presumably), there might be hope for a DeSantis-Fetterman independent ticket. Senator Joe Lieberman was able to win election as an independent, so why not at the presidential level as well?

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Folklore has it that 10 thousand steps per day is required for good health. But it turns out that that number was only chosen because it was a nice round number, to help promote an early pedometer.

Recall that on average, there are about 2 thousand steps in a mile, and average brisk walking speed is about 3 miles an hour. Do we all need to walk 5 miles each day?

The Lancet journal published a meta-analysis of studies connecting the number of daily steps to various health outcomes. The results are enlightening.

I focus on all-cause mortality as the primary outcome of interest. As with statins, hormones, cholesterol, and various other biomarkers, it doesn’t make sense to reduce the mortality risk for one disease only to increase it for another.

The researchers calculated the risk of dying for any reason associated with people who take a certain number of steps each day. They chose 2 thousand steps daily as a convenient reference point, the number of steps one would take walking around the house on a slow day, with no exercise. The risk of dying was then converted into a hazard ratio. Here are the results.

Someone who takes 3 thousand steps per day has already reduced the risk of dying by 23%.

Moving from 3 thousand to 4 thousand steps per day reduces the risk of dying an additional 13%, which is about 17% in relative terms: still a significant improvement.

Going from 4 thousand to 5 thousand steps per day reduces the risk of dying an additional 7%, which is about 11% in relative terms: still beneficial.

As you can see, not only the absolute reduction, but even the relative reduction in mortality risk, rapidly loses benefits. After 6 thousand steps per day, one does not encounter any meaningful benefits until going to 11 thousand steps.

Please note, the study found enormous benefits in increased walking for three very important outcomes: cardiovascular mortality, cancer mortality, and dementia.

So take care of your bones and feet. Taking a calcium supplement is not enough; you need to get that calcium into your bones. Vitamin K2, specifically, encourages the deposition of calcium from our blood into our bones, when accompanied by walking and weight-bearing exercise.

My daily routine includes brief stretching and yoga in the morning, two of these capsules, a daily brisk walk outdoors in the afternoon, jumping on a rebounder (trampoline), a little work on the Total Gym, lifting some free weights, a few minutes on a vibration plate, more brief yoga in the evening, taiji (tai chi) and qigong (chi kung). A recent diagnosis of osteoporosis has gotten my attention.

Remember that I am not a healthcare professional; my reporting is for educational purposes only. Consult with your healthcare practitioner with any questions.

To your health!

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“What has it been, like a few months already?! Why can’t we just move on to the next shiny thing, because our attention span is wavering, and my goodness, the price of gasoline is just unbearable! It is $4.17 per gallon in the USA. How can anyone be expected to live like this?!”

Today’s poor dears aren’t fit to shine the shoes of the Greatest Generation, who had the fortitude to engage in four years of war and sacrifice over 400 thousand Americans to defeat the Axis in World War 2.

“But, but, Trump promised no new wars! No forever wars!”

Is President Trump allowed to defend America? Is he allowed to fight, and maybe even win, an existing war?

I don’t mean only the openly declared 47 year old war of the Islamic Republic of Iran against America. That is a mere facet of a much broader war, one that is a forever war. That war started no later than the Christian year 632, arguably earlier, and is driven by verse 9:5 of the Qur’an. This verse states that every non-Muslim has three choices: convert; submit as a second-class dhimmi; or be killed. The enterprise of enforcing Qur’an 9:5 upon the entire world is called jihad. It is religiously commanded, and thus represents a forever war.

These concepts are explored in greater detail in my earlier post.

There is no compromise with jihad. Someone has to lose. Any ceasefire is a hudna, temporary by definition, until the jihadists can resume the war. Anyone on the political left or on the political right who calls for ignoring this phenomenon is a traitor in an openly declared war.

Does that mean the West has no choice but to fight a war of attrition forever, or risk going down to defeat? Of course the left-wing leadership of Australia, Canada, and Europe have chosen to throw open the gates to the enemy, acting more savagely against their own people than against the murdering invaders.

It is said that the best defense is a good offense. Take the initiative, defeat the enemy! Let’s see what that would take. The principal Axis powers, Germany and Japan, surrendered after about 8% and 4% respectively of their populations were killed.

The Muslim world comprises roughly 2 billion people. 4-8% of that total is 80-160 million people. There are about 97 million people combined in Afghanistan, Gaza, Somalia, and Yemen. I don’t think anyone would miss those countries and territories if they were gone. They are near or at the absolute bottom of my Freedom Development Index.

What are the grounds for launching pre-emptive nuclear strikes against these countries? None today, although perhaps on September 12, 2001.

The only things that can be done today are to:

1. seal our borders tight as a drum;

2. expel all illegal aliens;

3. expel all legal aliens who have committed any crimes or adhere to subversive ideologies (international socialism = communism, national socialism = fascism, Islam, amending the First Amendment itself);

4. denaturalize any naturalized citizens who have committed any crimes or adhere to subversive ideologies (international socialism = communism, national socialism = fascism, Islam, amending the First Amendment itself);

5. end immigration of any individuals who adhere to subversive ideologies (international socialism = communism, national socialism = fascism, Islam, amending the First Amendment itself);

6. respond disproportionately to attacks. This requires abandoning the Geneva Conventions, which our enemies already violate.

The ruling parties of Australia, Canada, and Europe will not accept these prescriptions of course, since they are already subservient to the enemies of the West. The Democrat party wants to steer America off the road as well. Their defeat is the task of every patriot.

The war will not end in our lifetime. However, some Muslim societies have shown true maturity and tolerance. It is not unreasonable to hope that centuries of stinging defeats will bring reality to some of the other Muslim societies. When Islam finally adopts the Golden Rule because the alternative has brought them unbearable destruction, then there may be peace.

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According to a 2025 paper linked in my earlier article, all-cause mortality (death for any reason) is minimized for Caucasians when total cholesterol is 250, LDL is 175, and HDL is 60.

As it turns out, President Trump just underwent a physical exam. He was given a clean bill of health, although he is significantly overweight.

The markers on his bill of health, and their interpretation, do not sit well with me. You can read the whole letter at this link.

Here is Trump’s lipid panel:

• total cholesterol 143, down from a healthier 223 in 2018

• triglycerides 104

• HDL 70

• LDL 53

Trump’s triglycerides-to-HDL ratio is 1.49, even better than mine; anything less than 2 (but larger than 0.5) is good. From what I have read, this ratio is the most informative predictor of cardiovascular disease based on the basic lipid panel (without accounting for ApoB, LpA, particle count and size, and so on).

What concerns me is the extremely low LDL level, achieved through taking ezetimibe and rosuvastatin (which is a statin, of course). Using the chart published in my earlier article, you can see that Trump’s doctors have chosen to lower his cardiovascular mortality risk slightly, at the price of substantially increasing his cancer mortality risk, and this increases his overall mortality risk. The graphic in the earlier article shows that cholesterol is preventive against cancer.

Trump’s LDL is dangerously low, in my opinion. I would rather see him drop the statin (which has its own side effects), change his diet, and exercise more (training with Bobby and Pete). His diet should no longer include junk food or beverages, sweets or refined starches. He should focus on water and a low-glycemic, anti-inflammatory diet, with plenty of protein, fat, and fiber, like Dr. Mark Hyman's pegan diet. Hopefully his LDL will increase to at least 100.

We have gotten well beyond the point of trusting the medical establishment. President Trump, take care of your health. The world needs you.

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Two important primary elections took place in the past eight days. In Kentucky’s 4th congressional district’s Republican primary election, incumbent Thomas Massie (RINO) lost to Ed Gallrein, 55-45%. In Texas’s 35th congressional district’s Democrat runoff primary election, Maureen Galindo lost to Johnny Garcia, 64-36%.

Massie, a consistent rebel against President Trump’s agenda, was endorsed by prominent Democrats like Ro Khanna. Massie stated falsely that a rabbi in his district, Rabbi Shlomo Litvin, was an AIPAC representative, but the rabbi is not a member of AIPAC. Massie stated falsely that he could not reach Gallrein after the election because the latter was in Tel Aviv.

AIPAC has been demonized in recent years, unfairly so, as a foreign influence operation, donating foreign money to American political candidates. This is false in two ways. First, foreign donations to political campaigns are already illegal. Second, AIPAC is not a foreign group; it is 100% American. However much Massie, Green, Carlson, Owens, Peters, and others rage, Americans are permitted to support Israel - and they do.

Galindo threatened to intern all American Zionists in concentration camps, to castrate them and to execute them. She should have been prosecuted for making terrorist threats. She would face a serious challenge attempting to intern a majority of Americans, a majority of Christians, and God Almighty, the original Zionist.

The MAHA movement has been going down the sewer steadily since October 2023. Other than the decent Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., many of their leading personalities became outraged when Israel tried to rescue their captive hostages. In this, MAHA shows its similarity to a thoroughly leftist movement: refusing to condemn rape, mutilation, torture, and murder, but loudly condemning the force of order trying to rescue the innocent. Doctors and Substacks I used to admire since the pandemic have gone insanely, perversely nazi. I have severed my ties with all of them.

President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu are working on a plan to phase out American foreign aid to Israel (which ends up being spent in America anyway!). This controversial assistance is illustrated in the graphic below, to show how much Americans suffer due to foreign aid to Israel.

(I tried to render the preceding graphic as a pie chart, but the Israel wedge of the pie was literally invisible.)

American aid to Israel constitutes 0.012% of the American economy, $12 out of every $100,000. If that is too much for you, I understand. Once American foreign aid to Israel ends, Israel plans to develop its own defense industry further, and then it will compete against American manufacturers. Does that make you happier?

If you don’t like Jews living in your country, and you don’t like Jews living in Israel, where do you propose that they should live (not that it’s your decision)? The following graphic illustrates the cruel Jewish occupation of Muslim land.

Israel’s area is 0.076% the combined area of the Muslim-majority countries. Is that still too big?

Let the heathen rage. Genesis 12:3 is still in force. The day that any country turns Israel into an enemy is the day God will curse that country.

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Vitamin D is an unusual vitamin. It has been claimed to be both a hormone and a steroid. Apparently, there are more receptors throughout our bodies for vitamin D than for any other molecule. On a related note, the most prevalent micronutrient deficiency is for vitamin D. Vitamin D is synthesized in our skin in response to the sun’s ultra-violet radiation. So if you live in a cold climate, or for cultural or religious reasons cover up your limbs year-round, your only source of vitamin D would be food or supplements.

The most bioavailable form of vitamin D is vitamin D3, cholecalciferol. How much D3 do you need per day? The US government recommends a daily value of 20 mcg (micrograms), which is equivalent to 800 IU (international units). The conversion ratio is 1 mcg = 40 IU.

How did they come to this conclusion? Researchers from the US Institute of Medicine studied two sets of data. The first set of data addresses what levels of vitamin D we need in our blood in order to prevent various diseases. The amount of vitamin D we need to prevent rickets is nowhere near enough to guarantee other forms of health.

While the official reference range for 25-hydroxy-D is 30-100 ng/mL, better informed practitioners understand that 50 should be the true minimum, and others claim optimal health begins closer to 80. One should not go too far over 100, as this fat-soluble vitamin will begin to affect the liver adversely.

The next data set considered by the US IOM was that connecting patients’ intake of vitamin D (from food and supplement sources) with their corresponding blood levels. They were able to fit a reasonably good model to the data: such and such intake of vitamin D tends to be associated with such and such blood levels of vitamin D. The process of fitting of a theoretical model to observed data looks like this.

So far, so good. However, as you can see, in real life, most observations do not lie exactly on the line predicted by the model. This is where interval estimation comes in. Interval estimation constructs an interval where, for example, you might expect to find 95% of observations in real life. We never attempt to attain 100% certainty, because there are always outliers, unpredictability, and unknown factors in any situation.

The US IOM researchers thought it would be helpful to calculate what amount of vitamin D3 intake would be required to get at least 97.5% of patients over the minimum recommended blood level for vitamin D3 (50). The current guidelines are based on a 95% confidence interval. This interval excludes the 2.5% of people at the bottom and the 2.5% of people at the top. Presumably the people at the top are getting enough vitamin D, so the use of the 95% interval actually gets 97.5% of the population high enough.

There is just one little problem. The researchers used a confidence interval, which estimates the location of population means, rather than what they should have used, a prediction interval, which estimates the location of individual observations. This graph shows the difference.

The observed data are little circles. The best-fit linear model is the solid line. The blue confidence band shows where population means are expected to lie: very close to the line. However, individual observations can be expected to vary considerably more than the population means, so the prediction band is the much wider space between the dashed lines.

Suppose your goal is to get hours, the quantity on the vertical axis, to be over 300. If you were lucky enough to have all points be exactly on the line, then you could just drop down to the horizontal axis, and announce that the size must be at least 70.

In real life, not all points are on the line. Since they might be below the line, if we want to be 95% certain of getting hours over 300, we could drop down to the lower edge of the blue band, and trace up to the right a bit. Maybe with size over 80, we could get hours over 300.

However, that would only get the population mean over 300 with 95% certainty. If your goal were to ensure that 95% of all individual observations were over 300 hours, you would need to move down further to the lower dashed line. Now we see that to get it over 300 hours, we must move even farther to the right, with size over 100.

This is just what happened with the vitamin D3 calculation. The current guidelines are designed to get the population average blood level over a desired goal (50) with 95% certainty. But to help 95% of all people get to that same goal, you need a much higher dose of vitamin D3.

You can read the details in two articles: 1) one published in 2014; and 2) one published in 2017. The articles never questioned the original data; they just did the correct statistical analysis that should have been done from the beginning.

The bottom line is that the Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) of vitamin D3 was way too low at 600 IU; it should have been 8895 IU!

I have recently increased from 5000 IU to 6000 IU, with my blood level of 25-hydroxy-D now at 79. I like to be in the approximately 80-100 range, so this is a good result.

Vitamin D3 cannot be taken on its own. It needs cofactors to make sure you don’t calcify your tissues. 100 mcg of vitamin K2 is often joined with D3 at any dosage (the relationship is not proportional). This K2 will send calcium from your bloodstream to your bones.

The other important cofactor is magnesium, a very helpful mineral present in many green leafy vegetables. I supplement with it as well in the common citrate form, where it aids sleep.

Sunshine on your face and bare limbs (for a limited time each day) helps too!

I have read and enjoyed Jeff T. Bowles’s two books on vitamin D3. He is a self-educated amateur who can rattle off hundreds of studies at the drop of a hat.

Dr. Eric Berg offers some high-quality supplements and almost 6000 videos on his YouTube channel. The star supplement and most popular video topic are both vitamin D3.

What works for you? Let me know.

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Of course these numbers are driven by the volatile energy sector. Once the Iran conflict winds down, energy prices are likely to retreat.

The food sector is likely to see uncomfortably high prices for an extended period, thanks to the low supplies of fertilizer (sourced in Iran) combining with drought in some areas of America.

The largest sector of consumer spending is on housing. I tried to find an alternative measure to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) housing price index. I have chosen to graph the ratio of the Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI) to the average weekly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees (private sector). This is the number of weeks it takes the average worker to buy the average house (single-family, condominium, or co-op). It is shown in blue below. The green curve is the mortgage rate (multiplied by 60 to put it in the same range).

In 2000, and again in 2011-2013, an average worker could buy an average home with 5 years of earnings. In 2006 and 2022, it took more than 7 years. This implies that homes became 40% more expensive relative to wages. There is your affordability crisis!

Today, the ratio is still almost 7 years. Republicans should celebrate the deportation of millions of illegal aliens, who are draining the housing stock. They should finish the job by enacting national E-Verify to ensure illegal aliens are not employed.

Republicans should also stop the rapid purchase of American housing stock by foreign interests (such as Chinese around American military bases) and by investment firms. These steps should increase the housing stock and decrease housing costs.

Off-topic, I have put in a 25% trailing stop loss on my MU (Micron) position. Volatility should be expected, but one analyst wrote that the forward P/E ratio for MU is a low 8.

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The relatively new research was discussed in detail in this article. The authors summarized studies that took place in Britain and in China, involving hundreds of thousands of participants. They were prospective studies, which are higher quality. This means the participants are observed from the beginning of the study, as opposed to a retrospective study, in which survivors are asked about their habits. All participants were late middle-aged to early seniors, and none took cholesterol-lowering medication (like statins).

The participants were followed up with after about 10 years. The authors were most interested in death from coronary heart disease (CHD); death from cancer; and death from any cause (all-cause mortality). The authors were most curious about the association of these three outcomes with four proposed predictors: total cholesterol; HDL; LDL; and non-HDL cholesterol.

What do you think the results were? We have been taught that cholesterol is a killer. My mother was so proud of her total cholesterol level of 125 - right before she died from cancer. You will understand why when you see the charts below.

Figure 1 summarizes the most important results of the paper. I will break it down in detail.

The twelve graphs show every possible combination of every proposed predictor (subdivisions of cholesterol) with every outcome of interest (mortality from various causes). Within each graph, the red curve and band represent the Chinese patients; the blue curve and band represent the British patients.

The most important graph is the one in the upper left: all-cause mortality as a function of total cholesterol. Understanding it is key to the remaining graphs.

The horizontal axis represents the level of total cholesterol. The vertical axis represents the hazard ratio (HR). This is the risk of observing a specified event (in this case, death from any cause) as a multiple of the risk at a certain specified control point. In this case, the specified control point for total cholesterol (TC) was 200, because we have been taught that levels above 200 are dangerous.

Based on the dominant narrative around cholesterol, one might expect to see graphs with curves sloping up to the right. This would imply that higher cholesterol is riskier (more deaths), and lower cholesterol is safer (fewer deaths).

What do we actually see? The red Chinese and blue British graphs are both U-shaped. You can also see that characteristic shape throughout most of the other components of figure 1.

The U-shape implies that high cholesterol is indeed risky, but so is low cholesterol. To minimize the risk of dying, you would prefer to be at the lowest point on the curve. For the Chinese cohort, that is where TC = 200. For the British, that is where TC = 250, much higher than the 200 they tell you to achieve.

Regarding HDL, both cohorts minimized all-cause mortality at HDL = 60. Regarding LDL, the Chinese optimal level was 130 and for the British, it was 175. That 175 is significantly higher than the 100 the statin manufacturers doctors want you to achieve.

You can imagine how shocked my cardiologist was to see these numbers. She tried again to convince me to take a low dose statin because my LDL was too high, in her opinion (it is in the 110s). She said that statins are safe (I did not argue that point with her, even though I did not agree). She hoped to reduce my risk of cardiovascular mortality - at the price of increasing my risk of cancer mortality far more!

I would like to bring my HDL up to the 50s, and my LDL to the low 200s. I am edging towards going more paleo-pegan, reducing sweets and starches substantially. I am happy to be living near a traditional culture rural area, with several organic farms and robust people.

We are already doing well with vegetables and fruits, I think. According to my research, the most healthful foods in the plant kingdom are avocadoes and cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower). More walking in the sun could only help.

L’chayim (to life)!

DISCLAIMER: I am not a physician giving medical advice. I am sharing what I have learned for educational purposes. Consult a healthcare practitioner with questions.

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I got information about market caps from the informative website 8MarketCap, where the 8 stands in for the symbol for infinity. Data is correct as of May 6, 2026. 8MarketCap tracks the capitalization of 10742 companies, 8287 cryptocurrencies, 2273 ETFs, and 4 precious metals. The companies had a combined market capitalization of $146.889 trillion. (For the record, the world’s gold is worth over $32 trillion, far more than any individual company.)

I copied the capitalization of the world’s 25 largest companies into a spreadsheet, and displayed their market cap, along with the remaining 10717 companies, in the following chart. (We can even see our friend MU (Micron) from the earlier article. The largest bank, JPM (JP Morgan Chase), stands at number 15, and once-mighty industry XOM (Exxon-Mobil) stands at number 20.)

The top thirteen stocks are each worth more than $1 trillion, seven of which are high-tech (including all of the top four). The 13 top stocks are: Nvidia, Alphabet (Google), Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Taiwan Semiconductor, Broadcom, Saudi Aramco, Meta (Facebook), Tesla, Samsung, Walmart (the world’s largest private employer), and Berkshire Hathaway. No other company is worth more than $900 billion today.

Their combined value is nearly 22% of the combined market cap of all 10742 companies. The top five alone constitute over 13.5% of the world stock market. Using a somewhat arbitrary mathematical formula, this type of asset distribution would make more sense to me if there were only 863 publicly traded companies in the world, rather than over 10 thousand.

What are the implications? More and more growth is being squeezed out of fewer and fewer companies. Maybe the US Justice Department’s Antitrust Division will get busy again. In any case, stay awake and aware!

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In that previous article, I mentioned a metric I have been using: Sharpe ratio divided by PEG ratio. This prioritizes several desirable traits: steady price growth without too much volatility; and healthy earnings growth combined with affordable valuations.

After I sent out the previous article, I realized I could apply the same principles to individual stocks as well as ETFs. On that basis, I bought MU (Micron Technologies) as well as ARGT (Argentine stock index fund). ARGT is almost unchanged, unfortunately, year to date. MU, in contrast, is up about 83% year to date.

I planned to repeat the analysis at the end of each quarter. However, my metric involves earnings, so I decided to wait one month into the next quarter to get all the information from “earnings season”. I also decided to include a third dimension emphasizing consistently respectable returns across 13-week, 1-year, 3-year, 5-year, and 10-year time frames (using the geometric mean of returns).

Running the new screen, MU remains the best performing stock, so I am happy to hold onto it. Among ETFs, things have changed. ARGT has slid in the rankings, and I will sell it.

The top four ETFs in the new ranking are all gold miner ETFs, and the leader of the pack is RING, offered by iShares. I am buying this with some hesitation. It is a potentially volatile offering. In February 2012, it opened close to $50 per share, falling gradually over the next few years to close to $10 per share, down about 80%. It did not recover its original price until August 2025, thirteen and a half years later. RING got close to $100 in January and February of this year, falling to about $75 per share. Thus it must be watched very closely.

There is a sobering reason for optimism about commodities, especially gold, and that is the explosion of US government debt, now at $39 trillion and counting. There is no willpower in the White House or Congress to bring that under control. This makes an argument for gold as the ultimate store of value.

I don’t know if it is appropriate to compare stocks with ETFs, but for the record, MU has the better value for my investment metric. You could have made 545% returns if you bought MU exactly one year ago. Well, better late than never!

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Then again, Iran’s leaders are not pragmatic one bit. They would be quite happy to bring on an apocalypse in order to hasten the coming of the twelfth imam (their version of the messiah). That, of course, is precisely the reason they must not be allowed to have weapons of mass destruction: because mutual assured destruction fails with them.

There is another more sinister issue which has gotten my attention, however. That is that Iran’s abundant natural gas supplies are the world’s leading raw ingredient for fertilizer, the fertilizer that enables us to eat abundant food. This happens through the Haber-Bosch process that roughly tripled wheat crop yields a century ago and helped to feed cattle. You may enjoy this video.

America and much of the developed world has outsourced its chemical supply chain, out of understandable environmental concerns. Thus, many chemicals that we need for our daily lives - not for luxuries, but enough to remain alive - are under the control of China, Russia, Iran, and their allies.

The current concern seems to be that the worldwide supply of fertilizer is going down during spring planting season here in the northern hemisphere. Wheat futures prices are increasing - not yet at record levels, but higher than the past two years.

I ask my readers to return to an unpleasant time - the 2020-21 pandemic period - and put yourself once again in prep mode. Make sure you have all the medicine you need, and plenty of shelf-stable food staples. Gasoline prices are the least of what we need to worry about. Combined with the ongoing drought in some parts of the United States, food prices can be expected to increase this year, and you should not count on availability.

It is also time to have a national discussion about repatriating our chemical supply chain. In this case, the environmental arguments are legitimate, but we cannot be held hostage to hostile nations.

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By the West, I understand essentially the countries of the EU, NATO, and the “Five Eyes” portion of the Anglosphere:

• all of Europe west of the former Soviet Union, together with the Baltic states

• the United States of America

• Canada

• Australia

• New Zealand

Other countries are closely allied to this grouping, but the countries listed above are traditionally Christian, and founded by Europeans. We will examine other groupings later in this article.

The news events prompting me to this conclusion are primarily connected with the Iran war. Parts of NATO have joined previous American military expeditions regularly for decades.

This time was different, however. A collision of two facts made NATO support of America not viable this time. One fact is the great replacement of the Western population, chronicled by Renaud Camus (most of you will need to translate the page into English).

The second fact is that the American war effort took place in complete coordination with Israel, the nation most hated by the West’s new population. Even allegedly “conservative” governments in the West, who might have sulked and given lukewarm support to America alone, refused to fight alongside Israel.

I used to be a die-hard supporter of NATO. Now I wonder what the alliance stands for. In my last column, I explained my repeated question in dozens or hundreds of reposts: “Why do the [people of Western country X] choose this?” Each such post displays criminal activity, violent, depraved, contemptuous, by unruly guests welcomed enthusiastically into the West. Crimes include assault, rape, and murder, and Westerners never seem to get tired of this. The perpetrators are quite reliably from certain communities of migrants.

Historian Bill Federer was interviewed regarding the ongoing Islamification of Europe. He claimed that there would be a Muslim majority in Europe by 2030, which I am virtually certain is not accurate. There may be a Muslim majority by mid-century, but that is irrelevant. What matters more is the steadily increasing numbers of Muslims in the West, the Muslim confidence in the success of their hijrah (migration), their confidence in asserting their religion, and the obsequious deference shown by Westerners, who efface their own culture so as not to offend the migrants’ sensibilities. Shari’a law is already replacing Christian, European common law in some areas.

Europe has the fortune of being adjacent to not only the Middle East, but also Africa, and it is not too far from South Asia. This led me to revisit my Freedom Development Index, adding a sixth dimension, IQ, to the previous five. The map changed only slightly, and the updated version appears below.

I put most of the 164 countries pictured above into several baskets, to see the average score within each group. (Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Israel, Mongolia, Russia, and Ukraine did not fit into any obvious groupings. There was not enough data for Afghanistan, Cuba, North Korea, South Sudan, Turkmenistan, or Uzbekistan.) Here are the results.

• The West is defined near the top of this column.

• The Tiger countries are Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. While these countries are not majority Christian or founded by Europeans, they generally work well with Western countries.

• Latin-Caribbean is the western hemisphere outside of Canada, Greenland, and the United States.

• ASEAN is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

• The other categories are self-explanatory.

It would appear that great caution is called for in importing population from the lowest-ranking groups on the Freedom Development Index. With multiple countries having average IQ less than 60, one must ask how such people would support themselves in a technologically advanced society.

It should be understood that all immigration standards should be applied to individuals, not to nationalities. I think it is fair to deny residence to immigrants with IQ less than 85.

Returning to Europe, I have read recently of many exciting developments.

• Spain is granting amnesty to 500-800 thousand illegal aliens, who will then be able to travel throughout the EU. We Americans should expect the Democrats to do the same thing when they return to power, and in our case, we have about 30 million illegal aliens, enough to guarantee permanent one-party control.

• The Pope has ordered the construction of a Muslim prayer room in the Vatican library. The popes who oversaw Crusades are turning in their graves.

• The United Kingdom has made it a de facto, not yet de jure, crime to fly the flag of the United Kingdom, and also to object to women being raped. The British government is also in the process of eliminating the right to trial by jury. King John must be wondering why he gave in so easily and signed the Magna Carta.

Returning to our original subject, the collapse of NATO, the question bears pondering: what exactly is it that we are defending? Moreover, who is “we”?

Charles Murray, in his Human Accomplishment, identified the highest achievers from around the world, in the humanities, science, and technology. The most brilliant era of accomplishment was roughly from the Renaissance through the 20th century, and at its head were primarily England, France, Germany, Italy, and their neighbors to a smaller extent, with America becoming prominent later in this period.

Western civilization underwent a destructive process, starting slowly in 1914 with World War 1, and then accelerating after World War 2. The post-war Pax Americana masked a loss of confidence in Europe, which grappled with the Holocaust which was perpetrated on its territory. Finally Europeans decided to assuage their guilt for the lost Nobel Prize winners by admitting tens of millions of rapists and jihadists, eager for revenge for the Crusades.

This column should not be construed as gloating over the demise of Europe, but rather a warning to America. Democrats are eager to destroy America, by turning its control over to violent people who cannot support themselves. The next combination of a Democrat president and Democrat congress may well doom America, the last, best hope of the West. I wish I had a simple solution to this problem.

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In each case, the perpetrators come from countries with a very low quality of life. They are fortunate to have been admitted to live in a country with a very high quality of life. Rather than displaying their gratitude, the perpetrators seek to replicate the same failed society among their new hosts. This begins with maiming or killing their new hosts.

As I noted in that earlier article, the most desirable countries are the ones listed in the first paragraph, and the least desirable countries are either majority Muslim, or in Africa, or are communist. In the case of Islam and communism, there is a religious command to conquer the rest of the world. Africa has the highest fertility.

The video posts usually feature extremely violent assaults. Each time I see these video posts on X, I repost them together with a caption: “Why do American-Australian-British-Canadian-Dutch-French-German-Italian-Portuguese-Spanish-Swedish [as the case may be] voters choose this?” In other words, experiencing such violence is completely up to the choices of society. Why do people want to live like this?

The good conspiracy theorist will answer darkly that the elections are rigged; that in fact most voters favor secure borders and repatriation, but the powers that be (choose your favorite scapegoat) have decided to control the population against their will.

This is nonsense. Look at this video posted yesterday:

I think this took place in Florida. The crazy people interviewed asserted “Allahu akbar” in admitted solidarity with “radical Islamists”, but refused to assert “Make America great again”, presumably because Donald Trump’s skin is orange.

Such people define themselves by their antagonisms. They know they hate successful heterosexual white male conservative Christians, people who are very productive and happy. They are unproductive and unhappy by choice, so they promote anything that is the opposite of what they hate, usually the most dysfunctional people around. Unfortunately, that includes perpetrators of violence, and the more demographic variables that distinguish them from the hated group, the better.

We should not criminalize mental illness any more than we should criminalize political differences, but we have to be honest about its harmful influence in our society. “Allahu akbar” is a call to destroy Western civilization. Tolerance cannot include civilizational suicide.

In the last month, we have seen Spain commit to national suicide. The voters want that. Which other polities have chosen suicide? So far, Australia, Britain, and Canada are well down the road. Muslim assailants are not arrested, but people who defend themselves or criticize jihad or fly the national flag are arrested. Reform, Nigel Farage’s party in the UK, avoids the topic of remigration. Here in America, Republicans are being advised to stop talking about mass deportation.

There is a meme on X that captures the dynamic. It is a cartoon drawing of two men standing facing each other in the park. One man with a long dark beard is wearing the headdress and flowing robes of the Middle East. The other is a white European. The first man is plunging a knife into the second man while saying, “Allahu akbar.” The second man is saying, “At least I am not racist.”

Is this how Western civilization ends? Not with a bang, but with a whimper?

No, the Second Amendment and your rifle or shotgun are not going to save the country, not even your household. Of course, if we had secession, then we could isolate the crazy people in little islands.

We have to get the nominally conservative parties serious about completely defunding academia, one of the epicenters of cultural rot. Secure borders (wall), secure elections (voter ID for citizens only), and E-Verify would go a long way towards a winning platform to save us from invaders. Thus we could secure the external and internal threats.

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A fascinating article just appeared in the Daily Mail with the following title: “CIA faces furious backlash after hidden document with potential cure for cancer is declassified after 60 years”.

It turns out that in 1951, the CIA became aware of research going on in the Soviet Union regarding a potential relationship between parasites and cancer. It seems that Soviet researchers knew about similarities between the two diseases, such as thriving on glucose and in an anaerobic environment. This would suggest that cancer could be weakened, and maybe even cured, by drastically cutting or eliminating sugars in the diet (including supposedly healthful fruit juices) and other high-glycemic foods like starches (most baked goods, pasta, and rice), together with hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

The CIA chose to keep this document classified until 2014. They have not explained why it was originally classified or why it was declassified. Moreover, the news has not come to light for the last 12 years.

My mother was diagnosed with cancer in 2014. Recovering from cancer surgery, hospital staff gave her a sugary beverage, which satisfied her enormous sweet tooth. Two years later, she was gone. How might this discovery have changed millions of lives?

How many family members’ lives are you prepared to sacrifice in order to be perceived as obedient to authority? Obedience to the Blob was one of the top values in the leftist family in which I grew up.

Science is not decided by a majority vote, and each generation corrects mistakes made by earlier generations. I am not a medical doctor, and am not giving medical advice. I am asking you to do your own research, to think for yourselves, not blindly to trust authorities, and to take responsibility for your own lives.

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• we need permanent daylight saving time;

• we need permanent standard time;

• we should continue to change our clocks by one hour twice per year.

I am in the third group, and I will explain why.

Only at the equator does the sun rise and set at the same time every day throughout the year, with 12 daylight hours and 12 nighttime hours. The farther you get from the equator, the more variation there is in the duration of daylight. The extreme situation happens at the Arctic Circle and at the Antarctic Circle, beyond which there are 24 hours of day half the year, and 24 hours of night half the year.

Does the actual time of sunrise and sunset matter in “modern” civilization? Yes, it surely does. Our bodies’ DNA have not been informed that times are “modern” and that we may disregard the environment.

The time of sunrise greatly influences my day. Our bedroom has heavy Venetian blinds, as well as a thick double-layered curtain on top. At nighttime it gets quite dark, but come sunrise, a few rays manage to sneak their way into the bedroom, waking me up a bit earlier than intended.

I prepared this map to show the maximum range of the time of sunrise throughout the year in each of the 50 American states.

You may be aware that Arizona observes standard time throughout the year. That is a reasonable choice for them, as well as other states situated at the same latitude or farther south. Hawaii has only 1.8 hours of sunrise variation, Florida 2.0 hours, and so on. Daylight savings has little effect on their life style.

However, our northern tier states experience substantial sunrise variation. We can set aside Alaska as an outlier, given that part of that state lies north of the Arctic circle. But Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota experience about 4.0 hours of sunrise variation throughout the year. If they did not change their clocks, they would experience one of the following:

• on permanent standard time, the sun would rise in the summer at about 4:00 AM, which is too early for most of us;

• on permanent daylight saving time, the sun would rise in the winter at 9:00 AM, sending children to school at night.

The problems are almost as extreme even in the mid-latitudes. Thus each state needs to determine what is best for it, with an incentive to “spring ahead and fall back” for northern and mid-latitude states; and permanent standard time being acceptable for southern states.

That said, there are ways to improve our current practice. Most urgently, I propose that clocks be changed on Friday nights, not Saturday nights. That would give people two days to get ready for the new workweek instead of just one day.

For the benefit of readers outside the United States, I created a graph showing the number of hours between earliest sunrise and latest sunrise as a function of your latitude.

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The number of attacks seems to be decreasing. An account on X provided numbers of attacks by ballistic missiles and drone swarms by Iran in the first 5 days of the war. Here is my graph of that data.

There is a very strong exponential decay in the missile attacks, and a somewhat strong decay in the drone swarms. The numbers could be expected to diminish fairly rapidly. Either the launchers are being destroyed, or Iran is using up its weapons, or both.

I am puzzled by the attacks by Iran against nearly all of its neighbors, most of whom are staying out of the American-Israeli led fight. I have read another analysis of the number of attacks Iran conducted against regional countries. It turns out that not only did Iran attack Muslim countries collectively more than they attacked Israel, alienating every potential ally; apparently one single country, the United Arab Emirates, received more Iranian attacks than Israel.

Why? The UAE has tried to remain relatively neutral, and even joined the BRICS club. But the UAE has things going for it that embarrass Iran. The UAE is relatively religiously tolerant, compared with most of its regional neighbors. It is not stridently jihadist. It sanctions the Muslim Brotherhood more strongly than does the United States!

Take a look at the geography of the eastern portion of the Persian Gulf. This is a screenshot from Google Maps. Iran is in the upper portion of the map. The landmass to the south is the Arabian peninsula. The UAE occupies most of the southeastern gulf coast. The country on the eastern side (and the very tip of the Musandam Peninsula sticking up into the Strait of Hormuz) is Oman.

I have wondered for several years why the UAE does not build a canal across the Musandam peninsula to bypass the Strait of Hormuz, say between Dubai (on the west side) and Fujairah (on the east side). That way, ships would not have to traverse the Strait of Hormuz. Every time I see a post on X by a friendly person in the UAE, I suggest this idea, but I have not received a response.

I asked AI recently if there had ever been any proposals to build a canal in this region. Apparently, it has been considered too expensive and difficult, because of the mountain range running up the peninsula. There is an existing pipeline running between Abu Dhabi and Fujairah, but it does not have as much capacity as the ships.

Guess where Iran has chosen to target? The Fujairah terminal. China is very unhappy at seeing its supplies severely cut. It is too bad, but they chose to ally themselves with a suicidal religious cult.

It seems that the UAE has chosen to be optimistic about a regime change in Iran, leading to a friendly government, so that the canal will not need to be built. That would be too bad, because it is the type of grand project they enjoy building.

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• Muslim countries supporting America include Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates;

• Muslim countries supporting Iran include France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Ouch!

Is it true? Are western European politicians trying to placate their increasing Muslim population?

Europe’s overall population is about 745 million, including European Russia. In 2020, according to Pew Research, there were about 46 million Muslims, around 6% of the total population. Without a doubt, that number has climbed each year since then. The Muslim population is very unevenly distributed.

Here are some recent estimates of the Muslim population as a percentage of the population of each European country, from the Pew Research Center. Darker shades of green indicate a higher Muslim share of the population.

I found historical estimates of the Muslim population by country in Europe, each decade from 1950 to 2020. The data set is not perfect by a long shot, but it is a start.

My goal was to produce a forecast of the expected Muslim population share in 2030. Due to uncertainty in the data, the following forecast is subject to uncertainty as to the exact magnitude. But if the numbers are anywhere close to the truth, they are shocking.

Sweden could be about 34% Muslim four years from now; Germany and the Netherlands about 28%; Switzerland about 21%; France and Belgium about 20%; Austria about 19%; Spain about 17%; and so on.

Tom Kratman wrote a dystopia called Caliphate about a future Muslim Europe. In his novel, Islam conquered Europe after a nationalist American president dropped nuclear bombs on the existing Muslim countries in the Middle East (which in turn was retaliation against a jihadist terrorist attack celebrated by the Ummah).

The irony is that we are discovering that Iran's population is increasingly rejecting Islam. When Operation Epic Fury is finished, we may see Islam more popular in some parts of western Europe than it is in Iran!

I want to clarify that I am not calling for a Crusade. Last time that happened, Jews were massacred. I am happy to live alongside anyone with tolerant beliefs and behavior.

But I have also noticed numerous videos of Muslim preachers telling their followers that it is their job to subject the West to Islam. To these preachers and followers I would say, if you are uncomfortable with Western civilization, there are 48 countries with a Muslim majority. They do not take kindly to immigrants seeking to convert their countries to Judaism or Christianity, so I ask them to return the favor and respect our culture the way it is.

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Self-destructive sectarianism among Jews is as old as the Hebrew Bible, continuing through the period chronicled by Christian scripture, and onward to this very day. There is nothing wrong with different opinions, and friendly arguments for the sake of Heaven (in the words of the Talmud). Such disputes have become violent, however, not only in ancient times but in modern times, and occasionally, such violence has even included murder.

The Chareidim in Israel have a good life. They are supported on welfare and are exempt from the military draft, as long as they are full-time “Torah students”. They get to go to school, argue the live-long day, while their wives try to balance earning a living, keeping a home, and raising their children.

One would expect such pious divinity students to act with great humility, in view of the gifts given them. Regrettably, as in so many other religions, only the formalities matter, not kindness or sincerity of the heart. A week ago, two female IDF soldiers entered a Chareidi neighborhood, supposedly doing a welfare check. They were unescorted by a man! (Shades of the Taliban?) The outraged Chareidi mob raged down the street, chasing down the soldiers, who had to be rescued by police. I can only guess what the soldiers’ fate would have been had the police not been there.

Later, on news media, I saw Chareidi commenters criticizing the alleged “provocation”, and celebrating their perceived victory. Some victory. I have decided to end my donations to charities subsidizing the Chareidim. I now support removing all financial subsidies from this sector, for the same reason that I support removing governmental subsidies from the academic sector that employs me.

For the record, this incident was definitely not an isolated incident. The violence in the Chareidi sector grows, just as leftist secular insurrectionist violence has grown in Israel (just like America). Life is too easy for some demanding people.

I have also stopped reciting a phrase in the morning prayer, from Mishnah Peah 1:1, whose translation is “the study of Torah is equal to them all” (meaning all the other commandments). The yeshivah students are masters of study, but not of practice.

Our Jewish educational system prioritizes the study of Gemara as soon as age 15 (based on Mishnah Avoth 5:21, or 5:25 in alternate numbering). Gemara is commentary and argument concerning Mishnah, the fundamental level of Oral Law (which in turn explains how to implement the Torah’s Written Law); Mishnah + Gemara = Talmud.

Many students spend years engrossed in Gemara without learning Halakhah (the ultimate conclusions about the law, once the arguments are settled), or the very important areas of Derekh Eretz (conduct), Musar (discipline), and Machashavah (philosophy).

I propose to change the order of priorities in Jewish education. It should begin, as it already has, with Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) with its major commentaries (like Onkelos and Rashi on Torah), and continue with Mishnah (foundation of the Oral Law). But before attempting Gemara, students should master Derekh Eretz, Musar, and Machashavah.

The only reason for any of the holy scriptures is to improve our character. Before Jesus taught the Golden Rule, Rabbi Hillel taught the essence of Torah was this (from Babylonian Talmud tractate Shabath page 31a): whatever you hate, do not do that to your fellow. Within a couple of centuries, Rabbi Akiva taught that the foundation of Torah is the commandment in Leviticus 19:18: “Love your fellow as yourself.”

These are the common threads of the world’s great religions. Anyone who does not act according to these maxims is not authentically religious.

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