REALIZING THE DREAM:

Young Black Americans Embrace the Stock Market (Oyin Adedoyin and Sanaa Rowser, Jan. 15, 2024, WSJ)

Young Black Americans are among the fastest-growing segments of stock-market investors.

Nearly 40% of Black Americans owned stocks in 2022, up from just under a third in 2016, according to the most recent Federal Reserve data. During that same period the share of white households with stocks grew to nearly two-thirds, up from 61%. This was all before the stock market’s 2023 rally.

This growth seems to be driven in part by younger investors, surveys suggest. They embraced the market in a retail-investing boom fueled by mobile apps, commission-free trading, participation in 401(k)s, crypto, meme stocks and social media, researchers said. Nearly 70% of Black respondents under 40 years old were investing, compared with roughly 60% of white investors in the same age group in 2022, according to a survey by Ariel Investments and Charles Schwab.

“You’re seeing topics of money and investing coming up at the dinner table slightly more among Black families than they had ever before,” said Arielle Patrick, Ariel Investments’ chief communications officer. She also runs thought leadership at the company.

Funded investment accounts would be the proper form of reparations.

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

DESPITE CONFLATION OF ISRAEL WITH JUDAISM, ANTI-ZIONISM IS MORE KOSHER THAN YOU THINK (SETH SANDERS, JANUARY 14, 2024, Religion Dispatches)

[E]ven among many Jews absolutely committed to the continuing relevance of the Bible the idea of humans starting a state in Israel was long considered destructive—even blasphemous. Israel Prize winner and Hebrew University Jewish Thought Professor Aviezer Ravitzky begins his widely respected Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism with a startling fact: the first Hebrew appearance he can find of “The State of Israel” (Medinat Yisrael) is in the writings of the Polish Rabbi Elyakum Shapira of Grodno in the year 1900. Shapira, outraged by secular Zionist plans for a humanly created Jewish state rather than, as Jewish law requires, a Davidic kingdom led by a divinely chosen Messiah, wrote: “How can I bear that something be called ‘The State of Israel’ without the Torah and the commandments (heaven forbid)?”

And the greatest Jewish philosopher of the Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn, wrote in 1770 that “The Talmud forbids us to even think of a return to Palestine by force. Without the miracles and signs mentioned in the Scripture, we must not take the smallest step in the direction of forcing a return and a restoration of our nation.”

It turns out that opposition to a Jewish state isn’t an isolated theological quirk but a central conviction among Jews for most of the history of Rabbinic thought. It’s contained in the Talmud itself, expounded by Rashi (the most important Jewish Bible interpreter, whose interpretation every Jewish Day School student learns first), and detailed by Maimonides, arguably Jewish tradition’s single most influential thinker.

Indeed, according to Ravitzky, Shapira’s response and that of the many Ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionists today reflects “fundamental tendencies and patterns of thought anchored in a long-standing tradition. In fact, they faithfully reflect the Messianic view prevalent among Jewish believers for many generations.”

This Messianic view is anchored in the Talmud, which says that the Jewish people must swear to keep faith in God’s plan for the world. The messianic end, when God will redeem all of reality, is a goal so desirable as to be like a bride in waiting for marriage. Thus it is in a mystical commentary on the Song of Songs that Israel is first commanded to swear three oaths: not to “ascend the wall” to where the Messiah (the Bride) waits, not to “rebel against the nations of the world,” and not to “force the End [times].”¹

The statement is enshrined in the Babylonian Talmud, the richest source of Jewish law and theology. Rashi and later authoritative commentators make clear that they understand this to mean that it is forbidden to use political or military power to establish a Jewish kingdom. In keeping with these admonitions, Maimonides does not include any command to settle Israel among the 613 commandments Jews are divinely obliged to keep, and authorities from the medieval Ashkenazic Pietists (who transmitted much of the earliest known mystical literature) through 15th century Spanish Kabbalists held to it.

Theological resistance to the early Zionist movement was thus based in the mainstream of Jewish tradition. This resistance spanned the theological spectrum from Orthodox to Reform Judaism which, through the early 20th century,² officially opposed a state of Israel. A principle adopted at its 1869 conference in Philadelphia could scarcely have been more clear:

“The Messianic aim of Israel is not the restoration of the old Jewish state under a descendant of David, involving a second separation from the nations of the earth, but the union of all the children of God in the confession of the unity of God.”

A principle adopted a few years later at the 1885 Pittsburgh conference only reinforced this view:

“[w]e consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”

On the other end of the spectrum, one of the founders of the populist Chabad movement, the Lubavitcher Rebbe (Sholom DovBaer Schneersohn) who was most influential in bringing Hasidism to the masses, describes political Zionism as an out-and-out denial of central tenets of Judaism; namely that, because it’s the prerogative of God alone to bring a messiah, and because human activity merely usurps his role, placing the state in the role of God indicates that “the Zionists must give nationalism precedence over the Torah.”

GET WOKE:

The lessons of Martin Luther King’s life should give us hope today (Janice Ellis, JANUARY 15, 2024, NH Bulletin)

If we, like King, truly believe that the words of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are meant for all Americans, then zealously embrace them and put them into practice by letting them govern and guide our actions in both our public and private lives.

That fundamental belief inspired and motivated King and lit the path he chose to fix policies and practices to make life in America as it was intended to be.

This was made abundantly clear in his “I Have a Dream” speech during the historic march on Washington in the summer of 1963: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, Black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

King did not ignore, nor seek to discredit or dismantle, the basic tenets of our democratic republic. He embraced them instead.

Republican liberty denies Identitarianism.

THE W-SHAPED HOLE:

What Conservatives Can Learn from MLK’s Economic Views: His support for left-wing views didn’t arise in a vacuum—and it was highly controversial among black pioneers, too. (Rachel Ferguson, Jan 15, 2024J, The Dispatch)

The conservative temperament is not naturally activist, which lends itself to too much lethargy about injustice—even when that injustice goes directly against one’s principled advocacy for private property and free exchange (as Jim Crow, red-lining, and urban renewal certainly did). They might also remind theological conservatives to turn inward and ask where one’s commitment to orthodoxy has veered into a gnostic, out-of-balance spiritualization of the Christian life.

More broadly, they should convince today’s conservatives to pause and take a breath between condemnations of the left to wonder why it has been able to suck all the air out of the room on racial questions. If you are not willing to step into the arena and offer your own solution, you can hardly complain that you lost the match.

YUP, THAT’S ANTI-WOKE IN A NUTSHELL:

Scientist cited in push to oust Harvard’s Claudine Gay has links to eugenicists: Christopher Rufo, credited with helping oust school’s first Black president, touted critic associated with ‘scientific racists’ (Jason Wilson, 14 Jan 2024, The Guardian)

The 2019 paper is entitled Polygenic Scores Mediate the Jewish Phenotypic Advantage in Educational Attainment and Cognitive Ability Compared With Catholics and Lutherans. It argues that the high cognitive abilities of Ashkenazi Jews are “significantly mediated by group differences in the polygenic score” – that is, genetically caused. They speculate that “culture-gene coevolution” may influence “Jewish group-level characteristics” like high cognitive abilities.

The basis of the paper was an interpretation of publicly available data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, one of the longest-running population surveys in the US.

Pallesen’s co-authors were Emil Kirkegaard, Michael Woodley and Curtis S Dunkel.

The paper was demolished in a direct response from academics from universities including Stanford, Georgetown and the University of Wisconsin, who wrote that “researchers have been warning against using polygenic scores for comparisons across race/ethnic groups for some time now, and a closer look at the data results [in Pallesen paper] provides another illustration of why”.

The lead author of the paper criticizing Pallesen’s paper is Jeremy Freese, a professor of sociology at Stanford. Freese was also part of a team that integrated genetic data into the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study – the same data the original paper draws on.

In a telephone conversation, Freese said that “we were moved to write something because the paper seemed to mistake correlation for causation in a question that obviously deserved more care”.

Freese added: “The problem we pointed out didn’t take a detailed interrogation to notice.”

Aaron Panofsky is the director of, and a professor in, UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics, and one of the authors of the paper How White Nationalists Mobilize Genetics, which includes the Pallesen-co-authored paper in its survey of the misuse of genetic data by scientific racists.

On the paper’s claims about Jews’ innately high intelligence, Panofsky said that this was a persistent trope among white supremacists that “fits into a larger narrative about Jewish conspiracies and the idea that Jews are controlling the problems of the world from behind the scenes”.

The paper Pallesen co-authored repeatedly cites Kevin MacDonald, a retired psychology academic whose antisemitic publications argue that Jews engage in a “group evolutionary strategy” that explains their financial and cultural successes, and that antisemitism is an understandable reaction to this phenomenon.

THE TEXT IS A STUBBORN TASKMASTER:

Is Donald Trump Disqualified from the Presidency? (Matthew J. Franck, 1/11/24, Public Discourse)

I doubt that any academic article on the law has moved so rapidly from its circulation among scholars to the adjudication of the merits of its argument as “The Sweep and Force of Section Three,” by William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen. Initially posted to the Social Science Research Network in mid-August 2023—with publication still forthcoming in the pages of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review—Baude and Paulsen’s 126-page case for Donald Trump’s disqualification from the presidency has been downloaded more than 100,000 times and figures prominently in the reasoning of the Colorado supreme court’s decision of December 19 that Trump’s name cannot appear on the state’s primary election ballot. (It is not cited in the December 28 ruling by Maine’s secretary of state to the same effect, but one might say that Baude and Paulsen’s fingerprints are visible.) Other scholars reached the same conclusion both before and since their article’s appearance—and still others vehemently disagree with their conclusion. Some states have considered the question and permitted Trump to remain on primary ballots. The question is now headed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The “Section Three” of Baude and Paulsen’s title is the third section of the Fourteenth Amendment, crafted by the Thirty-ninth Congress after the Civil War and ratified in 1868:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

The case against Trump, then, is that, having sworn the oath of office as president on January 20, 2017, he then on January 6, 2021 “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the constitutional order that was the subject of that oath. Thus, he is now ineligible for any office, state or federal, in the United States, or for service in Congress or any state legislature or as a presidential elector.

ILLIBERALISM DOESN’T WORK:

China’s Long March Back to Stagnation (DEBIN MA, 1/12/24, Project Syndicate)

As the world grapples with the implications of ominous shifts within China, MIT economist Yasheng Huang, an astute long-term observer of the Chinese economy, has produced a well-timed book. In The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline, he combines a close examination of contemporary China with an ambitious (sometimes overly so) assessment of the country’s recent and distant past.

Like Huang’s other writings, The Rise and Fall of the EAST has a crisp, punchy, and occasionally satirical tone. Unflinching in his criticism of the current Chinese regime’s failings, Huang champions China’s great reformers, including politically fallen ones.

Given the current political climate in China, it is a courageous book. Huang shows, with great conviction, that China owes its economic miracle to its embrace of market forces and the private sector, which formed the core of the “reform and opening-up” that began four decades ago, following the death of Mao Zedong. By retreating from those earlier policies and commitments, Chinese leaders created the conditions for the setbacks and stagnation that we are seeing today.

It’s remarkable how much damage a regime can do by rejecting the End of History.

PLAYING FOOTSIE WITH THE iDENTITARIANS:

How Justin Trudeau lost his grip: The prime minister’s bleak reality: Canadians don’t like him anymore. (ZI-ANN LUM, 01/10/2024, Politico)

Trudeau, a bilingual Ottawa and Montreal native, tripped over old divisions between English and French-speaking Canada during the 2021 election — another disconnect with voter anger.

Internal Liberal polling suggested Trudeau was on his way back to majority status until the all-party English leaders’ debate during the home stretch of the contest. Trudeau’s tepid response to a question about whether language-protection laws in Quebec amounted to racism derailed Liberal momentum and cost Liberals the 10 seats they needed.

“You deny that Quebec has problems with racism,” moderator Shachi Kurl said to separatist Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet during the televised debate. “Yet you defend legislation such as Bills 96 and 21, which marginalize religious minorities, anglophones and allophones.”

The laws introduce protectionist rules for the French language in the province and ban public servants from wearing religious symbols such as kippahs, turbans and hijabs at work.

While Blanchet unleashed fury at the moderator, Trudeau seemed merely uncomfortable.

FOGGY, WITH A CHANCE OF DISINFORMATION:

Report: Israel Police unable to find victims, witnesses of alleged Hamas sex crimes (MEMO, January 5, 2024)

Israel Police are struggling to locate the victims or witnesses of alleged sexual assaults that are said to have occurred during Hamas’ infiltration of Israel on 7 October, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported.

The paper said: “In the few cases where police have already amassed testimony about the sexual assaults Hamas committed during its massacre in southern Israel, they haven’t yet been able to identify the specific victims of the acts to which witnesses have testified.”

According to Haaretz, most of the testimonies covered by the Israeli and foreign media, including a New York Times report about the alleged sexual assaults, are based on the testimony of a young Israeli woman identified only as S.. An edited video clip of her testimony was shown at the United Nations.

Amid war and urgent need to ID bodies, evidence of Hamas’s October 7 rapes slips away (Carrie Keller-Lynn, 9 November 2023, Times of Israel)

[I]n the wake of the unprecedentedly large mass-casualty event, physical evidence of sexual assault was not collected from corpses by Israel’s overtaxed morgue facilities amid their ongoing scramble to identify the people killed, many of whose bodies were mutilated and burned. More than a month after Hamas rampaged through border communities near the Gaza Strip and a massive outdoor music festival, Israel is still identifying the dead through disaster victim identification protocols.

The decision — made under war footing and a pressing need to identify the dead — to not use time-consuming crime scene investigation protocols to document rape cases has, however, fueled international skepticism over Hamas’s sexual abuse of victims while it held control over parts of southern Israel on October 7.

ALL BEES ARE cREATED EQUAL:

Can the centre hold? From Mandeville’s bees to artificial intelligence (David Howell, 1/03/24, The Article)

Not many people nowadays read Bernard de Mandeville’s allegorical Fable of the Bees, first published in 1705. This described to a shocked world at the time how a large and successful beehive colony stayed bound together and prospered, so long as the bees all pursued their own interests within the law and their relationships one to another, as both individual and essentially social creatures, even if untidily, and with some backsliders. Each creature, by going about its reciprocal business, contributed, even if unintentionally, to the cement of society.

But once they stopped working for themselves and their individual and mutual needs, focussing instead on higher and more perfect state design for general welfare and behaviour, their precious equilibrium was rapidly lost. The framework of society, which no one had planned but in which not only bees but humankind too had always existed, fell apart. Without that glue, a cohesive society, which all the millions of their individual actions had created, crumbled and their relatively stable and balanced society disintegrated into chaos, division, grievance and immiseration.

So things would also turn out, went Mandeville’s thinly disguised message, where in human affairs states spent too much time and effort trying to iron out social blemishes, intervening to insist on virtuous conformity to blueprints of perfection and putting the interests of an increasingly separate and distanced state ahead of people’s daily lives and needs. It would all end badly, if ever it ended at all. […]

Coming from the global to the national level, the societal divisions, like deep flesh wounds, must be held with plaster strips and stitched together, not salted with more tired ideology from a past age and a partisan spectrum of beliefs and aims that now barely connect with the real issues before us. The heart of the matter is not race or gender or class, but reaching with new determination towards a capitalist system that shares, that is democratic, that is fair and spreads dignity and security to millions of households and financial literacy to an entire population, starting in the schools. This was the old dream of the Conservatives. The digital revolution brings a dream of genuinely widened ownership and financial justice to the edge of reality.