Inflation by the ounce

On the day I was born -- November 2, 1931 -- my father could have bought an ounce of gold for $21. (Dad didn't have $21 to spare, of course. He was the typical American laborer, earning 35 cents an hour for a 60-hour week.) On the Dollar Times website, I see that inflation over my lifetime has averaged 3.21%, meaning that a 1931 dollar today equates to $20.13. That bit of gold should be worth $423!

In fact, gold passed $5,300 an ounce the other day. That's what the smart money thinks it's worth, since gold's value, unlike the dollar's, ought to keep increasing as the years go by.

The least-remembered "Day"

This is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and of the half-dozen newspapers and magazines I check every morning, only Commentary bothered to remember it. There, Seth Mandel argued that today's antisemites are doing their best to erase the Holocaust from our memory by replacing it with "genocide".

A primer: the word "genocide" was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew teaching at Duke, a haven he reached after fleeing Warsaw in September 1939 as Hitler and Stalin divided Poland between them. His great interest during the war years was what he then termed the crime of "barbarity," from the Roman persecution of Christians (he'd read Quo Vadis as a boy), through the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1915, to the persecution of Jews by Nazi Germany. The last led in 1944 as Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, the first time "genocide" was defined in print.

Lemkin became an adviser to Justice Robert Jackson in the postwar Nuremberg Trials. In the 1950s, at his urging, the UN formally recognized genocide as a crime, and he helped Arab lawyers build a case against the 19th century French genocide in Algeria. Of interest today, as Vladimir Putin tries to extinguish Ukraine, Lemkin also argued that Stalin's mass starvation of Ukrainian peasants -- the Holdomor of 1933-34 -- constituted a genocide.

Yes, capitalism works!

On Monday, Trump was ready to seize Greenland by military force. Our unpronouncable Pituffik Space Base has 150 Americans in residence, so we already outnumber the troops recently deployed by Denmark and other NATO countries. But our Space Force isn't trained for combat, so the occupation would certainly require the real US Army.

As a result, on Tuesday the Dow Jones Industrial average shed 871 points, the US dollar weakened, the Swiss franc strengthened, and gold soared to $4,760 an ounce.

And on Wednesday, Trump chickened out. Oh, never mind; there'll be no invasion, after all!

Among my morning reading is National Review, the conservative magazine Bill Buckley founded in 1951. It has offered a Modest Proposal to end the fuss. United Airlines now has nonstop flights from Newark to Nuuk each summer, so why don't 60,000 Americans move there, acquire citizenship, and vote to become a US territory?

Trump has lost it

I live in a college town, so I'm surrounded by people with Trump Derangement Syndrome. And oh, what gifts the President is giving them! He favors despotic Russia over the imperiled democracy of Ukraine; he announces a red line in Iran and promptly chickens out; and now he threatens war against NATO if Denmark won't give him Greenland, whose Thyng or parliament legislated for more years (roughly 950-1350) than the US Congress has sat in Washington.

Brilliant. And who wins from all this? Well, Vladimir Putin, of course, and the ayatollahs in Tedran. And behind them: the smirking Xi Jinping, sewing up trade agreements in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and announcing that China is a "near-Arctic" power with navigation rights across the northern frontiers of Russia, Greenland, Canada, and the US.

Trump began his insulting letter to the Norwegian prime minister with the salutation "Dear Jonas" and signed off as "President DJT". (Why send it to Norway instead of Denmark? The very first sentence explains: "Considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize....") Somebody must rein him in, and it won't be our Vice-President, who if anything thinks less of Europe than his boss. That leaves the Secretary of State. Marco Rubio? Past time for you to speak up!

An American fighting for Ukraine

Putin's atrocities in Ukraine are nearing their fifth year, and already have lasted longer than Stalin's "Great Patriotic War" against Nazi Germany. Early on, idealistic and adventure-seeking foreigners volunteered for the Ukrainian Army, in numbers sufficient to form them into a Foreign Legion of their own. Many have since gone home, but the Kyiv Independent today has the story of an American code-named (and perhaps actually named) Ryan. He signed up in March 2022, took off a year to visit his family in the Pacific Northwest, and now had returned to the fight. Read his plea, and take the opportunity to subscribe to the newspaper that for nearly four years has been the first thing I read every morning.

So long, Mr Maduro, and good riddance

Appaently the former president of Venezuela is incarcerated in an American warship en route to the United States on charges of drug smuggling and playing about with weapons. No US troops were killed in the hoist, which Donald Trump in his trademark humility termed "a brilliant operation, actually." (There were injuried aboard an American helicopter hit by defensive fire.) A good job, and congratulations to the Seals or Green Berets or Delta Force commandos who went into Caracas and did the job. Oh, and also the CIA officers on site who fingered Maduro's location.

Wake up, Mr Trump!

It's hard to know what President Trump actually thinks, because so much of what he says is just noise that amuses him at the moment he uttters it. But he seriously seems to believe the liar who currently occupies the Kremlin, who most recently claimed that Ukraine launched 91 drones against his residence in an attempt to murder him. In the first place, we have to believe that Ukraine's spies in Russia are good enough to know where Putin happens to be sleeping on any given night -- a challenge that Mossad might be good enough to meet, but not many other intelligence agencies, including our own. Ninety-one drones! That's a lot of explosions and a lot of debris, though none has emerged. No matter. Trump is angry!

We're almost a year into Trump's second and final term as president -- almost a year since he first grumbled that Trump was "tapping him along." Tap, tap, tap.... He's still playing you for a fool, Mr President. When are you going to wake up to reality? That Nobel prize is looking ever more far out of your reach.

Rest in peace, sex kitten

My goodness, Brigit Bardot has died at the super-age of 91. I wonder if she, like me, ever had occasion to say, "Ah, to be ninety again!"

She was of course the prime sex object of my hormonal years. Such a face! Such a body! Such a saucy minx! She even melted the frosty eminence of Charles de Gaulle, who in 1969 chose her as the new "Marianne," the mythical French Amazon who has symbolized the country since the Revolution of 1789. ("Her sculpted bust" -- what else? -- "is displayed in town halls across the country," the Wall Street Journal solemnly tells us.)

At the age of 39 she transferred her affections from men to animals, not such of a change. "I am very, very alone, and I like it,” she said in a 2014 interview. “I am not happy.... But I’m not unhappy either... I have no regrets or remorse over anything,”