Thursday, October 30, 2025
AOC Tells Mom Giving Birth To Get A Real Job
BRONX, NY — According to witnesses at the scene, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez burst into a birthing suite at local Montefiore Hospital to tell off a woman in labor that she should get a real job.
"All you do is lay around," Ocasio-Cortez reportedly said, admonishing a woman actively in labor. "I would like to challenge you to get a real job and contribute to society."
Doctors described the scene as odd. "This angry Latina came in and started making all sorts of demands of the patient. I'm not even sure they knew each other," Dr. Debra Goldenberg said. "It wasn't until later we realized she was from Congress. Which, honestly, explains a lot."
At the time, the patient, whose name has been held back by request, was so busy giving birth she barely acknowledged AOC's presence. The patient just screamed, prompting AOC to retort, "Maybe if you channeled all this anger into a job, you could accomplish something worthwhile with your life."
According to sources, when security arrived to escort "the angry lady" out of the room, the Congresswoman put her hands behind her back as if handcuffed, although no one touched her.
At publishing time, AOC posted on X, formerly Twitter, that Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans had her arrested for visiting a pregnant woman.
Diversity
Nothing so epitomizes the politically correct gullibility of our times as the magic word "diversity." The wonders of diversity are proclaimed from the media, extolled in the academy and confirmed in the august chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States. But have you ever seen one speck of hard evidence to support the lofty claims?
Although diversity has become one of the leading buzzwords of our time, it has a history that goes back several generations. In the early twentieth century, the principle of geographic diversity was used to conceal bias against Jews in the admission of students to Harvard and other leading academic institutions.
Because the Jewish population was concentrated in New York and other east coast communities at that time, quota limits on how many Jewish students would be admitted were concealed by saying that Harvard wanted a diverse student body, consisting of students from around the country.
Therefore some highly qualified Jewish applicants could be passed over, in favor of less qualified applicants from the midwest or other regions of the country.
My own first encounter with the idea of geographic diversity occurred more than half a century ago, when I was an undergraduate at Harvard, and worked as a photographer for the university news office, in order to help pay the bills.
The instructions I was given were to concentrate on taking photos of students from other parts of the country, rather than from the east coast, from which Harvard already received more than enough applicants. The idea was to encourage applications from places that would produce a geographically diverse student body.
It struck me as an odd idea at the time, but I was being paid to take pictures, not make university policy. Moreover, I had no idea how such a policy had originated and, by the 1950s, it might have been continued from inertia, for all I know. Meanwhile, I could enjoy seeing publicity photos I took appearing in newspapers in Chicago and elsewhere beyond the east coast.
Fast forward to today. It is common, at colleges and universities across the country, for the test scores of Asian American students who have been admitted to a given college to be higher than the test scores of whites or of blacks or Hispanics.
That may not seem strange, since that is true of test scores in general. But, at any given institution, applying the same standards to all, the test scores of students at a particular institution would tend to be similar. More Asian Americans would be admitted to higher ranked colleges and universities, however, if the same standards were applied to all.
In short, something very much like the quota limits that were applied to Jews in the past are now being applied to Asian Americans — and, once again, are being justified by diversity.
But what justifies diversity? Nothing but unsupported assertions, repeated endlessly, piously and loudly.
Today, as in the past, diversity is essentially a fancy word for group quotas. It is one of a number of wholly subjective criteria — such as "leadership" — used to admit students to colleges and universities according to their group membership, rather than according to their individual qualifications.
This is not something new. Nor is it something confined to the United States. Very similar patterns were found more than a decade ago, when doing research for my book "Affirmative Action Around the World."
In India, the courts' attempts to rein in some academic quotas were met by a proliferation of new, and wholly subjective, admissions criteria. Individuals from groups that were not as qualified by objective criteria were simply ranked higher on subjective criteria and admitted.
In the United States, the Supreme Court itself has long been part of such game-playing when it comes to affirmative action. Back in 1978, an opinion by Justice Lewis F. Powell banned racial quotas with one hand and created "diversity" as a criterion with the other. In other words, colleges were told in effect that they can have racial quotas, but they just can't call them racial quotas.
According to the Constitution, "We the People" are supposed to decide what laws and policies we live under. But not if we can be so easily fooled by courts using slippery words like "diversity."
Wednesday, October 29, 2025
Is Human Nature Good??
A certain well meaning rabbi wrote that human nature is good.
This is one of the most foolish and dangerous ideas of the secular world. No Abrahamic religion — not Judaism, not להבדיל Christianity, and not להבדיל Islam — asserts that people are basically good. This notion is a product of the secular age and a major reason for the moral confusion that characterizes our era.
With regard to Judaism, the Torah completely rejects the notion that man is basically good. God Himself states that "the will of man's heart is evil from his youth" (Genesis 8:21) and that "every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time" (Genesis 6:5).
For a rabbi to assert that man is basically good is to assert that God was wrong. I am used to secular people saying that, not Orthodox rabbis.
In addition, the Torah — and the rest of the Bible — repeatedly warns us not to follow our hearts. In fact, Orthodox Jews cite this admonition from the Torah three times every day: "Do not follow your hearts and your eyes after which you prostitute yourselves" (Numbers 15:39).
If the human heart is basically good, why does the Bible repeatedly warn us not to follow it?
The rabbi never cites any of these verses. For good reason: They would simply invalidate his argument. This secular belief in the inherent goodness of man is not only not Jewish; as noted, it is foolish and dangerous.
How foolish? It is not possible to be aware of human history and to rationally maintain that people are basically good. For a Jew to believe such nonsense after the Holocaust is simply breathtaking. Apparently, basically good people murdered six million Jews.
But we don't need references to the Holocaust to make our case.
In the 20th century alone, more than a hundred million people — civilians, not soldiers — were murdered by vile regimes and their vile followers. These include the approximately 20 million killed in the Gulag Archipelago; the slaughter of the Tutsis in Rwanda; the genocidal murder of Armenians; the deliberate starvation of about 60 million Chinese; the Japanese mass rape of Korean "comfort women" and hideous medical experiments on Chinese civilians; and the torture and murder of approximately one out of four Cambodians.
And that is only a partial list.
Virtually every serious thinker in history knew people were not basically good. They knew about the universality of slavery and the tortures and rapes that accompanied slavery. They knew how men behaved in wartime.
Were all the people who engaged in these evils aberrations? In fact, most were quite normal. The aberrations in history have been the truly good individuals. To cite the Holocaust, the Germans, French, Poles, Hungarians, Lithuanians and others who aided the Holocaust, let alone those who did nothing, were normal people. The handful who aided Jews were the aberrations.
And what about childhood bullying? Are fat, or slow, or unattractive boys and girls generally treated with kindness and empathy? The question is rhetorical.
And what about child sexual abuse? The WHO in 2002 estimated that 73 million boys and 150 million girls under the age of 18 years had experienced various forms of sexual violence. Quite remarkable for a world of basically good people.
So much for the foolishness of the belief that people are basically good. Now let's deal with why it is dangerous.
One reason is that the most important, and most difficult, task of parents and of society is to raise good human beings. Yet, those who believe we are born good will not concentrate on making good people. Why bother if we're already good?
A second reason the belief is dangerous is that those who believe it blame the evil that people do on outside forces, not on the individual who committed the evil. Belief in the basic goodness of human nature is the major reason people claim that poverty, or guns, or racism causes crime. Anything except the perpetrator.
The rabbi cites a Yale study that purports to show that babies are not only moral agents but are actually moral beings. Such studies are one reason so many Americans have come to hold universities in increasing contempt. The idea that babies know right and wrong is preposterous. The idea that babies are moral is even more preposterous. Babies are neither moral nor immoral since they have no more free will than your family dog.
Babies are selfish — as they have to be to survive. And babies are innocent. But innocent is not the same as good. The rabbi conflates "innocent" with "good."
He also conflates "in God's image" with "good." He writes: "the Torah stating that human beings are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27) (is) a statement that underscored humanity's inherent goodness."
Not so. Created "in God's image" has never meant man is basically good. Rather, it means that human beings, like God (and unlike animals), know good from evil and have moral free will. In Genesis 1:27, Rashi, author of the most influential Jewish Bible commentary ever written, explains "in God's image" as "the power to comprehend and to discern." Second, it means that human life (again, unlike animal life) is infinitely precious. It also means that man has a G-dly and holy soul but that does not mean that he doesn't have a negative side so the sum total is a person who is a mixture of good, mediocre and evil. But not fundamentally good. The soul alone is fundamentally good but it is attached to the rest of him which has a dark side.
If people are basically good, what is the Torah for? What are all the commandments for? If people are basically good, why would God need to command us not to murder? Don't basically good creatures know this?
Tanach is replete with stories of the failings and fallings of man. From Adam - through the Dor Hamabul and Dor Haflaga, the warring kings, Yishmael, Esav, the saga of Yosef and his brothers etc. etc. etc.
Chazal enacted so many decrees to distance man from his darker side. Man, left alone, can't be trusted to do the right thing.
This is not to say that man doesn't have a יצר הטוב, a נשמה אלוקית, a string desire to be good and righteous, a moral conscience etc. etc. But there is another side to him which must be acknowledged and of which we must be mindful.
The pasuk says [Iyov 11-12] "כי עיר פלא אדם יולד". The Alter of Kelm explained: From the wild donkey we are born - we must create a man. The way to do that is with constant vigilance and learning a lot of Torah and Mussar.
Based on an article in Jewish World Review
