Sometimes a single story or anecdote can give a broader insight into a subject of interest.
I received a video from a friend. The narrator tells of his friend’s son who just started at Harvard. The narrator says that his friend’s son has had a great beginning at the school. When pressed if the young Jewish student had experienced any antisemitism, the father admitted that some thugs from outside of campus came around and ripped off 50 “mezuzot” from the door frames on campus. A mezuzah is a box that includes parchment with several Torah verses that Jews are commanded to put on a doorpost. In response, the local Chabad rabbi put up new ones: 50 were ripped down and 100 were put up, as additional Jews asked the Chabad staff for mezuzot for their doors.
The story is emblematic of several things. The ones who tore down the Jewish symbols were probably Palestinians and/or their rabid supporters. Tearing down the mezuzot provided them with nothing: they are not going to sell them or in any other way benefit from what they did. Their whole purpose—as with the Palestinian people in general—is to make life worse for others. While they gain nothing, their pleasure and joy is in seeing other people suffer. This has been the whole theme of the Palestinians ever since Yasir Arafat invented them as a people in the 1960s. They are not yearning for statehood; they are dreaming of the elimination of the state of Israel and the Yehud—the Jew—who has made the desert bloom and has turned the sands of Tel Aviv and Herzliya into high tech powerhouses. If they had a state, they would not know what to do with it other than kill one another.
And there is what to learn on the other side of the story. As in much of the world, it was Chabad to the rescue. The mezuzot were replaced and more were put up as additional Jews also wanted to participate in this special commandment. If you will, the Jews and Judaism only grew stronger and more united through the actions of our demented enemies. And this too is a story of Judaism. General Patton described the Jews he saw on a visit with Eisenhower a month after the war. His description is quite mean-spirited to the point of being antisemitic. If General Patton were to be told that these people and their descendants would be Nobel laureates, leaders of industry, builders of a nation—he would have thought it impossible. So the final score: the Palestinians gained nothing but the joy of making others’ lives worse and the Jews gained another 50 doing a mitzvah—commandment.
Looking now at the bureaucratic blob, I will relate an experience that too would seem to represent a much larger issue. My business partner and I have developed a rapid water quality sensor. The sensor never touches the water and it gives a response in 2 seconds. The sensor works as a screen—it can detect a wide range of contaminants from heavy metals to biological residues at parts-per billion concentrations, but it does not discriminate between them. We see our technology as a first screen—if there is a problem it will alert a user who can then do a more detailed—an expensive—test to determine what specifically is present. We have spoken with many U.S. water utilities and while supportive, they point out that our device does not fit into any EPA category. We spoke to several top people at the EPA and they explained the situation this way: The EPA is a federal department. It receives its mandates from Congress. If Congress tells it to test drinking water for E. coli, then it looks for and approves E. coli tests for drinking water. Any test that does not fall exactly into the congressionally mandated program cannot receive EPA approval for use. And though our test would allow for much more water testing and fewer of the more expensive and slow tests, they cannot do a thing until Congress mandates a water testing screen. We estimate that for us to get Congress to pass legislation that would include a description of our sensor category, it would take several years and $2 million in lobbying and lawyer fees. And with that, our sensor cannot be used formally by the thousands of American water utilities.
Many years ago, a college roommate worked at Pratt and Whitney. He told me that for any engine test, only a union member could carry tools and perform any modifications on an engine undergoing static testing. As the testing site was far from the main building, anything that was required involved sending a union member back to pick up the needed tool or part and then return. In one test of an F-16 F100 engine, a union member who was at the time high on drugs threw up into the engine. The engine was a total loss for the company, but the employee could not be held responsible or fired as per the terms of the agreement between management and labor. Around the same time, it was reported that every Ford car had $2,000 worth of employees’ medical insurance expenses as part of the actual price of the vehicle.
If America wishes to succeed, people need to be rewarded and also punished. If you have a situation where tenure or union job security prevents the removal of bad apples or ineffective employees, the companies—and the government—cannot become more efficient and successful. Most historians believe that when John F. Kennedy gave federal employees the right to form unions and collectively bargain, it was a major disaster for the country. A union facing a company realizes that if it pushes too hard, they all go out of business. Government employees that push too hard simply have the Treasury Department print more money. There must be rewards for employees who perform, but there must be a mechanism to remove employees—including tenured professors—who do not perform or otherwise violate employer policies.
With his son’s pardon last week, Joe Biden told the American people what he thinks of them and the rule of law. His son had already been found guilty on gun and tax charges; he was only awaiting sentencing. Our senile president showed 335 million Americans that family comes first and that all of the high-falutin praise of “the rule of law” is noise when the stakes are high enough. If Biden had not pardoned his son, he would have been lionized for putting country first and letting his son await a potential jail sentence. Joe would have also left himself exposed for his pay-to-play activities during his vice-presidential years. He wasn’t going for any of it. As they say, “Better a live dog than a dead lion.”
Oftentimes, events in our world can give us a view into much bigger issues. The Palestinians do not want peace, only for Jews—and Westerners—to suffer. The U.S. has become a country where there is no responsibility for failure, so failures abound. And finally, much of the political class holds contempt for the rest of the nation. May Donald Trump and his team make the U.S. a more competitive and successful country. It’s high noon in DOGE City.