UPDATED (6/5): NEW: Jared Packs Unicorns and Rainbows For Mideast Trip

America, Donald Trump, Gender, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Middle East, Populism

NEW COLUMN IS “Jared Packs Unicorns and Rainbows For Mideast Trip.” It’s now on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

An abridged version, “Bibi’s Cautious Conservatism May Clash With Jared’s New Peace Plan,” is on Townhall.com.

An excerpt:

JARED KUSHNER couldn’t stare down an uncompromising foe if his wife, Ivanka Trump, held his soft, lily-white hand throughout the ordeal.

Yet ridiculously, a May 22, McClatchy article claimed Mr. Kushner was fixing to “stare down uncompromising foes in fights over immigration and Middle East peace.”

Let us begin with our debutant’s Middle East peace plan, the thing his father-in-law calls “the deal of the century.”

The notion of Jared solving the Israeli-Palestinian vexation is laughable, perhaps the dumbest thing ever. You just know this is a vain Ivanka move to brand the region and add it to her CV. (Ivanka, to those who don’t know, is intent on riding to the presidency herself on her father’s coattails.)

The Arabs slated to partake in the Kushner summit, Bahraini, Saudi and Emirati participants, are likely laughing the hardest.

For one, the Arabs know that Ivanka is calling the shots—and that the president’s fashion-focused daughter is behind the branding of the sexually androgynous, intellectually inchoate production that is Jared Kushner. If you think that’s something Arabs respect, you don’t know Shiite from Shinola.

Wily Arabs are hip to White House dynamics. They know who’s running the West Wing and who to flatter. Some in the region have even given Donald Trump a dubious honorific, Abu Ivanka al-Amriki. Being known as “father of Ivanka the American” is, of course, no honor in the muscular, manly Middle East.

The timing of the Kushner peace plan is especially asinine. For all the upheaval in the region, the Palestinian Problem has nevertheless dropped off the geopolitical radar as an urgent matter to resolve. …

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “Jared Packs Unicorns and Rainbows For Mideast Trip,” is now on WND.COM and the Unz Review.

READ an abridged version, “Bibi’s Cautious Conservatism May Clash With Jared’s New Peace Plan,” on Townhall.com.

UPDATE (6/5): Jared definitely has those girl-like broad hips. His is not a man’s shape. The contrast is stark when he’s seen striding alongside these two military figures who have narrow hips and broad shoulders.

So You Know: Democrat Jerry Nadler Cares DEEPLY About The LAW

Democrats, Donald Trump, Ethics, IMMIGRATION, Law

“No one, not even the President of the United States, is above the law,” roared House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY).

Wrong. Just one example: In the U.S., illegal immigrates are sainted outlaws.

“Although Department of Justice policy prevented the Special Counsel from bringing criminal charges against the President, the Special Counsel has clearly demonstrated that President Trump is lying about the Special Counsel’s findings, lying about the testimony of key witnesses in the Special Counsel’s report, and is lying in saying that the Special Counsel found no obstruction and no collusion. Given that Special Counsel Mueller was unable to pursue criminal charges against the President, it falls to Congress to respond to the crimes, lies and other wrongdoing of President Trump – and we will do so. No one, not even the President of the United States, is above the law.”

* Image courtesy “Kisspng.”

Ashkenazi Jews’ IQ: Judaism Itself, The Study Of Talmud, In Particular, Is a High-IQ Activity

History, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Judaism & Jews, Logic, Reason

This article reduces the reason for Ashkenazi Jews’ aggregate, genetically based, high IQ to Jewish exclusion and suffering: “selection events”:

… the frequent pogroms to which Jews were subject in Eastern Europe would have been “selection events” which would have selected for correlates of IQ such as future-orientation, social skill, planning and simply the wealth needed to escape. Thus, Lynn argued that, even though Jewish IQ was high before the Holocaust, it was probably even higher afterwards.

There are other reasons for the high IQ in Ashkenazi Jews predating the pogroms and the Holocaust. These have to do with the substantive nature of Judaism itself, not least the premium put on the study and analysis of scripture and certainly the study of Talmud. (I would argue that even the study of our Tanach, which Rabbi Ben Shapiro has mistakenly called Torah, does the brain good.)

At the secular, Israeli secondary school I attended, not enough Talmud was taught, unfortunately. Still, the process of reasoning, called pilpul, captivated me; it’s marvelous—magic, really.

There is the Socratic Method and there is pilpul—“a dialectical method of Talmudic study, consisting of examining all the arguments pro and con in order to find a logical argument for the application of the Law and at the same time to sharpen the wits of the student.”

The Talmud is calisthenics for the mind, for sure, but also sagacious.

Whittling down Jewish thinking and achievement over thousands of years to oppression-generated genetic mutations during the Middle Ages has its flaws. The article, “Are Jews Smarter?”, in the New York Magazine, puts paid to such reductionism:

“To say that the Jews have a history of emphasizing scholarship is not just the fantasy of ethnic chauvinists and Woody Allen fans. To look at a single page of the Talmud is to understand this, with its main text at the center, its generations of rabbis arguing around the rim. The dialectic and critical reasoning are at its core.”

Remember, too, that the young scholar who did mental gymnastics the best got the prettiest girl …