Wednesday Potpourri

First, you have certainly noticed that anti-Semitism has returned to Columbia University and Barnard College. It has manifested itself in yet another pro-Hamas encampment. As we await the administration response, we  bring you an observation from Shoshana Aufzien:

EVERY SINGLE core faculty member in @BarnardCollege's Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department participated in the encampment. For a department that prides itself on diversity, it sure is ideologically homogenous...

Second, meanwhile the latest news from Javier Milei’s Argentina is good, economically speaking. 

Mario Nawfal reports:

ARGENTINA'S ECONOMY SURGES—MILEI'S POLICIES DRIVE 7.1% GDP GROWTH PROJECTION GDP is expected to grow 7.1% interannually in Q2 2025. After a tough 2024, Milei’s austerity measures and economic freedom reforms are restoring confidence—just in time for the 2025 electoral cycle. Milei’s bold strategy is proving to be the right call.

Third, a series of footnotes on the fireworks between Ukraine and the Trump administration. They come from Conrad Black:

Trump referred to French, British and possibly American peacekeepers in a postwar Ukraine. Zelinski ignored it. 

Trump referred to the deterrence against Russian attack inherent in the existence of an extensive and sophisticated American mining operation in Ukraine. Zelinski ignored it. 

Trump said that once a peace agreement was in place, further security measures could be taken. Zelinski ignored it. Instead, the Ukrainian president repeatedly contradicted his host, slagged off Putin (justly, but unadvisedly), preemptively refused to make any compromises, vowed to "never accept a cease fire," and undermined Trump's proposed strategy to secure an enduring peace. 

Zelenski put on a perplexing spectacle of statecraft incompetence. Yet the media, the Democrats, and the hanging chad remnants of the neocon NeverTrumper contingent have all spun it, in unison, in a manner that is not recognizable to anyone who watched the 50-minute exchange with their own eyes.

Fourth, Steven Rattner is a true believing Democrat. He has worked in Democratic administrations. He also has good contacts on Wall Street.

We pay close attention to the Wall Street opinion of the Trump administration. Rattner does not agree, but we applaud him for reporting it in the New York Times:

Over lunch last week with a friend of mine — a major technology investor who has been an ardent Democrat — the talk quickly turned to politics. Like many businessmen, he refuses to air his views publicly to avoid drawing fire. In private, he’s more forthcoming.

“I’m willing to sacrifice small things for larger gains,” he told me, referring to President Trump. “I’m a fan of the ideas; I’m not always a fan of the execution.” For him, the “macro trumps the micro.”

The “macro” was a reference to the main factor that drove centrist businessmen toward Mr. Trump in 2024: a belief that both the spending and the regulatory tilt of the Biden administration were out of control. And they resented how Joe Biden kept bashing big companies. This animus was so intense that even the strong economic gains of the past four years couldn’t get most of them to back Kamala Harris.

While very few businessmen have been publicly praising the president and his actions, in private, many of them voice support for him. I thought the chaos of the past month — the unqualified cabinet appointments, the cozying up to Russia, and perhaps most of all, the tariffs — might cause regret in the business community. I’ve certainly seen concerns.

It wasn’t just that this group resented Mr. Biden’s intrusive regulatory policies. They didn’t like diversity, equity and inclusion policies either — or anything they derisively described to me as “woke stuff.” Now executives and bankers alike (my circles tilt a bit toward Wall Street) are celebrating early signs of a reversal.

The business community is also heartened by the number of corporate executives who have been brought into the administration, in stark contrast to the Biden team, which was almost bereft of such individuals. That includes Mr. Musk, one of the most successful entrepreneurs in history (although his personal qualities, like Mr. Trump’s, are often considered distasteful). Of course, for some, like the crypto crowd, there’s a lot of money at stake.

To be clear, many of these businessmen’s move to Mr. Trump is more out of unhappiness with his predecessor than enthusiasm for him. A number reluctantly chose him after championing other candidates, such as Nikki Haley, and Mr. Trump’s continued flood of appalling actions, like his abrupt firing of several top military officers or embrace of Vladimir Putin of Russia, may well undermine approval of the administration in the business community. Among some prominent chief executives, it already has.

Fifth, on the transmania front, Senate Democrats just shot down a bill-- by refusing to break a filibuster-- that would have protected women’s sports, by excluding males from competition.

Libs of TikTok report:

Giant male in a MA school injured 3 girls during a girls basketball match. They ended the game early before he can hurt more girls and had to forfeit the game due to injuries. Every single Democrat Senator just voted against keeping men out of women’s sports. Democrats don’t care about your daughters’ safety.

True enough, this is madness. The last recourse will be for girls to boycott these events… until adults develop a semblance of sanity.

Sixth, to add a little perspective to the mix, our analysis of the situation in the Middle East would not be complete unless we noted that not a single signatory of the Abraham Accords has withdrawn their deal with Israel.

To take it a step further, the Abraham Accords Institute offers this commentary:

Despite regional tensions, Abraham Accords ties remain strong.

The Abraham Accords Peace Institute’s analysis shows that in 2024, economic relations and trade continued to grow between Israel and all of its peace partners in the Arab world.

• Trade between Israel and the UAE reached $3.24 billion in 2024, an increase of 10% from 2023.

• Trade between Israel and Bahrain reached $108.5 million in 2024, an increase of 843% from 2023.

• Trade between Israel and Morocco reached $109.9 million in 2024, an increase of 40% from 2023.

• Trade between Israel and Egypt reached $579 million in 2024, an increase of 31% from 2023.

• Trade between Israel and Jordan reached $477.6 million in 2024, an increase of 7% from 2023.

Now is the time to deepen and expand the Abraham Accords, and shape a future of peace, prosperity and partnership for the entire region.

Why Do Women Talk So Much?

Back in the day, several decades ago, when feminism was insinuating its way into the American mind, the word went out. Women needed to advance their careers, even if this meant that they would be spending less time with their progeny.

The formula du jour asserted that quality time, not quantity time mattered the most.

And then, along came a University of Chicago physician, by name of Dana Suskind, who wrote a book in 2015 explaining what she called the 30,000,000 word rule. 

Suskind’s research showed that a child’s cognitive development depended in some part on the number of works he heard, especially spoken words that were directed at him. Ideally, that meant 30,000,000 words through age three. Children who heard significantly fewer words ended up cognitively limited.

Development does not take place in a vacuum. It requires stimulation from spoken words. But it does not require the child to be able to understand the words being spoken. Presumably, this does not include the radio or television. It requires human beings talking to infants and babies.

If Suskind is correct-- we have no reason to think she is not-- some recent research becomes more cogent. The research shows that women tend to talk more than men, that they tend to utter far more spoken words than men do.

Perhaps this is a maternal instinct, not limited to dealings with babies, but cultivated within the age range when women are likely to have children or grandchildren.

David Nield reports for Science Alert:

The study found that between the ages of 25 and 64, early to middle adulthood, women average 3,275 more words per day than men – or 20 more talking minutes. Across the other age ranges, the figures were more or less the same.

For instance, in early and middle adulthood, women were found to say between 1,500 and 3,600 more words per day compared to men. That's quite a large spectrum, with the bottom range representing just 10 minutes or so of normal-paced talking and the upper range representing 23 minutes. 

Now, we have a new theory. Women talk more than men because they are exercising a maternal instinct. The more they talk the more their small children will have normal cognitive development.

Fireworks in the Oval Office

By now you know most of the facts. The Ukrainian president was supposed to sign a deal to share the nation’s rare earth minerals with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in Kiev. 

When the Trump administration sent Bessent to Kiev, the Ukrainians refused to sign. And treated him badly.

Then, the Ukrainians were going to sign the deal in Munich with Marco Rubio and JD Vance. Again, they did not do so, but insisted on having a grand  signing ceremony at the White House. Before the blow-up between Zelensky and Trump, all was in order to facilitate the signing.

It did not happen.

And yet, consider this. Before the fateful meeting with President Trump, President Zelensky met with a group of Democrat politicians. 

The group included:

… Anthony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, Susan Rice, and Alexander Vindman. [They]  advised Zelensky to reject Trump’s deal in violation of the Logan Act.

The Logan Act prohibits private citizens to conduct foreign policy. The important point here is that Zelensky was primed to reject the deal with Trump, doubtless because the Democrats had told him that he could get a better deal, one that contained security guarantees.

Everyone knows that including the United States in a rare earth minerals deal would have provided something like security guarantees. Asking for more, and doing so in public was clearly a deal breaker.. It would have scuttled the deal, and thus depriving Donald Trump of a victory.

Zelensky allowed himself to be manipulated by leftist politicians who did not really care about Ukraine.

Mollie Hemingway offered a commentary about the performance:

 I think their goal was to have a wonderful performance by Zelensky, an angry Trump appearing to scuttle the deal, and the support of the neocon portion of the GOP to start applying pressure on Trump to have US Troop commitments as part of the "security guarantee." It was a set-up, in Susan Rice's interesting choice of words. Instead, Zelensky had one of the worst stage performances of his acting career, and Trump was statesmanlike (against all odds) throughout. Zelensky followed Team Obama's advice to be hostile to a tee, but it didn't land how they thought it would. Surprisingly, one of the most important aspects of it not working out might have been Lindsay Graham's reaction. Had he and other neocons thought Zelensky was being reasonable, Trump would be having to fight (even moreso) the neocon portion of the GOP in addition to Team Obama's dirty tricks. Even the "conservative" neocon pundits on TV last night were admitting Zelensky had royally messed up. 

Ian Miles Cheong describes the lost deal.

Trump was pursuing a policy of strategic ambiguity with the Ukraine minerals deal. There wouldn’t be a concrete security guarantee but Russia would know better than to attack de facto American resources in Ukraine. It really was that simple. It would’ve ended the war. Russia would’ve been able to agree to it, keep the territory they’ve already fought and bled for, and save face.

Victor Davis Hanson offers a footnote:

Zelensky could have accepted a draft peace deal signed in the first month of the war, the Istanbul Accords, under which Ukraine would have kept all of its territory in exchange for neutrality. A deal now will likely be modeled on Istanbul but require Ukraine to recognize realities on the ground (ie loss of territory). Acknowledging that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have died only to get a worse deal may be too bitter a pill for Zelensky to swallow, now or ever. 

In the matter of public opinion, the anti-Trump forces have seized the moment to insist that Trump made a grievous mistake, and that he was a Russian stooge.

The public did not see it quite that way:

More people now think the U.S. is helping Ukraine too much—up from 7% to 41%. 

On top of that, trust in Zelensky fell from 72% to under 48%

Batya Ungar-Sargon elaborates:

62% of Americans found Zelensky's behavior offensive. Trump is an extremely unifying president if you tune out the noise coming from the elite punditry/foreign policy/expert caste. The American people are done with the mass fleecing of the post war international order.

As a coda, this comes from John Kass, a description of Zelensky:

He boasted, he insulted, he gestured like a stupid, pushy, peasant in a bazaar haggling over the price of vegetables, like a greedy turnip merchant. And he got his ass kicked out of the White House."

Zelensky was offended at the notion of striking a cease fire deal with Moscow. He believed that we could not count on Putin to keep his word.

And yet, on two occasions leading up to the Oval Office blow up, Zelensky himself had gone back on his word to sign the deal. Now, he has aligned himself with his European allies, the better to impose a deal on the American president.

Obviously, this is not going to work. NATO depends very largely on American money and American arms. The assembled European leaders will not be able to survive without America. They know it and they are trying to take charge of the situation. Good luck with that.

Sunday Fundraising

With a warm welcome to new subscribers. 

Being as today is Sunday, we take the day off from opining in order to request donations. They are the fuel that keeps this work going. 

Not to be overly obvious, but it takes time and effort to put up a new post daily. Not very many others manage to do so. Thus, it’s a job, one that is worthy of compensation. 

If you would like to donate please make use of the Paypal button on this page. If you prefer, you can mail a check to 310 East 46th St. 24H. New York, NY 10017.

I’m counting on you. 

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Thank  you in advance.

Saturday Miscellany

First, in the matter of the measles outbreak. The outbreak has been widely reported, along with the notion that the fault lies with HHS Secretary Kennedy.

Kevin Bass ran the numbers:

[Some people] often claim that measles is making a comeback because of "antivaxers". So I plotted measles cases as a ten-year rolling average using CDC data. And I found that measles is actually not making a comeback. These "doctors" and "experts" are simply lying to everyone.

What a shock.

Second, hedge fund tycoon Bill Ackman expressed the government’s fiscal problems succinctly:

Our government has operated like a trust fund kid that never had to earn a dollar, doesn’t understand the value of money, and therefore wastes trillions of other peoples’ money until someday the trust fund goes dry. @DOGE operates like a fiduciary where every dollar matters, working on behalf of American taxpayers to do what’s best for the country. Thank you DOGE.

Third, the great state of Maine has recently been in the news, thanks to its inept governor. In a meeting with POTUS and other governors, she declared that she was going to defy the executive order about trangendered athletics.

That’s not all, folks.

Writing on Zero Hedge Tyler Durden explains that Maine’s schoolchildren have had their educational opportunities reduced because the state has let in so many illegal migrants.

Maine’s public schools are seeing their worst test scores in 30 years, with student performance in reading and math ranking among the lowest in the nation.

According to the latest data from the National Center for Education Statistics, only 33% of fourth graders are proficient in math, while just 26% meet reading standards. Older students fare even worse, with only 25% proficient in math and 26% in reading, placing Maine 38th nationwide.

The decline comes as schools prioritize the children of illegal migrants, a group welcomed by the state’s politicians and employers, according to Brietbart.

The Democrat-led state has embraced sanctuary policies, contributing to a surge of mostly illegal migrants, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Over the past decade, the number of students with limited English proficiency has skyrocketed.

In Portland, 70% of new enrollees require special language instruction before tackling other subjects. Schools are diverting funds to hire multilingual staff, with classrooms now accommodating speakers of 57 different languages.

It goes beyond virtue signalling. Sacrificing your children’s education on the alter of wokery is frankly unforgivable.

Fourth, you might be surprised to discover that Republicans are far more supportive of Israel than are Democrats.

The New York Post reports the results of a recent Gallup poll:

More than half of Democrats are anti-Israel, according to a shocking new poll.

Only 33% of Dems surveyed by Gallup said they had a favorable view of Israel, while a whopping 60% said they viewed the Jewish State unfavorably and 4% had no opinion.

It’s the first time ever that a Gallup survey showed a majority of members of a main US political party had a negative opinion of the Jewish state, with the question being asked since 1989.

By comparison, 83% of Republicans said they had a favorable view of Israel, and just 13% unfavorable, with 4% not offering an opinion, the poll found.

Fifth, it’s the feelgood story of the day. It shows the cost of virtue signalling. The Daily Mail reports on some leftist theatre managers in great Britain who invited a group of migrants to a free show. Then the ungrateful migrants chose not to leave the venue. It has been three months.

Left-wing theatre managers who invited 200 migrants to a free show will abandon the building and face bankruptcy as refugees still refuse to leave after three months and spark a wave of sex-related violence.

It recalls the old line: no good deed goes unpunished.

Sixth, I am hardly alone in suggesting that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is in way over his head. The spectacle that took place in the White House yesterday showed what that looks like. It shows the importance of decorum and the problems you create when you dispense with it. 

A journalist who was in the room during the conflagration asked Zelensky this question:

“Why don’t you wear a suit?! You’re in the highest level of this country’s office and you refuse to wear a suit. Do you own a suit?!”

“A lot of Americans have problems with you not respecting this office.”

Seventh, Jordan Schactel offers a succinct summary of Zelensky’s mistakes:

Zelensky errors today: 1) Shows up in costume, not a suit 2) Has n0 awareness about his geopolitical standing 3) Blackmails POTUS w "Russia will be at your doorstep" talk 4) Ambassador emotes in front of press, humiliating delegation 5) No respect, demands more money What a mess.

Eighth,  more than a few denizens of the political left have declared that the fault lies with President Trump. As a rule, they believe that when anything goes wrong the fault lies with Trump.

They have no sense of the simple fact that the president of Ukraine insulted POTUS and the United States. 

Trump offered Zelensky a deal. In exchange for shared rights to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, he would bring peace to the region.

Zelensky rejected the deal because it does not offer sufficient security guarantees. He had already been told that such guarantees, especially NATO membership, were not going to happen. 

He chose to create a spectacle over nothing. Sometimes we need to reject it when a foreign leader comes along to insult the president. 

Within a few days two left-leaning European leaders, Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer met with President Trump, without incident. That ought to be a hint as to who is at fault.

Ninth, from the Journal of Sexual Medicine, the least surprising fact of the day:

 NEW STUDY: "Gender-affirming surgery" is associated with INCREASED risk of mental health issues. Study of 100k+ patients found those with surgery had significantly higher rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation & substance use disorder vs matched controls w/o surgery

Has History Ended?

It happens on a fairly regular basis now. From time to time someone trots out the tired and shopword thesis proposed by one Fancis Fukuyama and declares it to be truth. This time, the author is one Michael Cohen, writing in The New Republic.

The thesis was that history has ended and that we won. Assuming that history was a struggle between authoritarianism and liberal democracy, the end of history occurred when the latter emerged victorious. Excuse the simplification, but Fukuyama’s Neo-Hegelian spirit is basically warmed over Biblical eschatology. 

In truth, it’s an old Enlightenment idea, described clearly by Carl Becker in a book called The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers. The great thinkers might have thought that they were overcoming religion. In truth, they were simply describing it in different terms.

The end of history is like the stories of the end of days. The result, to Fukuyama, is that everyone now believes that liberal democracy is the best way to govern human beings.

Which is manifestly untrue.

One feels obliged to remark that, in the world of subliminal suggestion, if you are told that liberal democracy is the future you are more likely to believe that you should be a liberal democrat.

One also feels compelled to note that, as Michael Cohen remarks in his essay, that liberal democracy has not arrived in Russia or China or the Muslim world. That is, the majority of people on the planet have not embraced liberal democracy.

Cohen notes this fact:

Then there is the case of China, a “market-oriented authoritarian state.” in which widespread demands for recognition have largely failed to materialize. Fukuyama has argued that China’s lack of democratic accountability has led to corruption, mismanagement of the economy, and government crackdowns intended to suppress political dissent. Similar phenomena have occurred in other authoritarian states like Russia and Iran. All that is true, and more than three decades after publication of “The End Of History?” China has become less free and more authoritarian and is not remotely close to adopting the tenets of liberal democracy. The perpetuation of Chinese market authoritarianism is a direct rebuttal to Fukuyama’s optimism.

As you know, China increased its per capita GDP by 3000% over the past four decades. It did not do so while having elections and ensuring human rights. As for the notion that the people of China might be yearning for democratic elections, we can examine the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989. 

Not so much because the regime crushed the student rebellion mercilessly but because all of those who insisted, according to good Hegelian thinking, that the repressed impulse toward democracy would necessarily lead to the overthrow of the authoritarian regime, were manifestly wrong.

Rumor has it that the people of China, while they witness the American political system, express happiness with their own.

As Donald Trump is wont to declare, the people running China are seriously intelligent and competent people. We cannot say as much about all of our own recent democratically elected leaders.

Fukuyama was wrong. He has every right to be wrong, but let’s get over our jejune attraction to liberal democracy and liberal democrats.

Friendship

We Americans have fewer and fewer friends. We are socially disconnected and increasingly isolated. Being as we function best in society, the loneliness epidemic is compromising our mental health.

Karol Markowicz isolates and analyzes the problem in a recent New York Post column. She is not the first to do so. And she is not the first to blame it on social media and smart phones. As the reasoning goes, people are too attached to their gadgets; they spend too much time online, and do not have the time to make and keep friends.

 

She writes:

Loneliness is a silent killer. A US surgeon general’s report from 2023 found it as dangerous as smoking, “associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death” — while upward of 60% of Americans feel lonely on a regular basis, surveys have found.

Along with the impact on personal well-being, the trend is dangerous for America itself. A nation that lacks interpersonal relationships is a lower-trust society, more prone to crime and unrest.

As for the causes, let us try one unrecognized cause-- therapy culture. As it happens, the great theories in the therapy world have very little use for friendship.

Beginning with Freud, they emphasize family relationships or personal growth and development. Whether Freud’s Oedipus complex or theories of maturation, the therapy world cares mostly for blood ties, familial connections. Even when it recognizes social ties, it tends to see them as a replay of family ties. In many other cases it focuses on the individual, as a self=contained autonomous monad.

We consider this to be normal. And yet, we recall that Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, offered two important chapters on friendship. That is, on social ties that had nothing to do with blood ties. Thus, with the kinds of social ties that produced a community.

The difference is clear and stark. If blood ties are all that matter, you are connected to your blood relatives by biology. Only in the most extreme circumstances does one break off blood ties. There are no specific behaviors, no codes of conduct that connect people who are blood relatives.

When there is no blood tie, then good behavior becomes more important. How you conduct your life either connects you to other people or disconnects you. It produces community or dissolves community.

So, making friends requires ethical behavior. So said Aristotle, and we are certainly not going to object. Thus, blaming it on smart phones is insufficient.

True enough, smart phones are the bane of the existence of young people today, but even if they put away their phones, they still do not have an instruction manual for making and keeping friends.