The Transgender Racket

Whyever should it be necessary to do extensive scientific research to demonstrate that you cannot turn boys into girls or girls into boys? Wishful thinking has its limits. Was it arrogance or stupidity or perversity that made serious medical organizations support and foster transgender transitions?

One reason is a pseudoscientific report, produced by Dutch researchers, that purports to show that transitioning improves mental health.

Now, thanks to the Free Press, we read the results of a study performed by a Finnish adolescent psychiatrist, a distinguished woman of science, by name of Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala. 

In a long and detailed article Dr. Kaltiala sheds some serious light on the controversy. Hopefully, her work will tamp down on the madness, though one imagines that it will require a blizzard of lawsuits to rescue the children who have been mutilated and sacrificed to this pseudoscience.

Initially, the population of the transgendered was comprised mostly of adult men who had been treated with estrogen to allow them to live as women. 

The science shifted in 2011 when a Dutch research group published a paper touting the virtue of treating children with puberty blockers and opposite sex hormones.

She explains:

It became known as the “Dutch protocol.” The patient population the Dutch doctors described was a small number of carefully selected young people—almost all male—who, from their earliest years, insisted they were girls. These patients, apart from their gender distress, were mentally healthy and high-functioning. The Dutch clinicians reported that following early intervention, these young people thrived as members of the opposite sex. The protocol was quickly adopted internationally as the gold standard treatment in this new field of pediatric gender medicine.

Not to be left behind, the Finnish national health service adopted the practice. In time Finnish clinics started seeing an increased demand for gender-affirming care. And yet, the patient population was not what the Dutch protocol would have projected:

But the ones who came were nothing like what was described by the Dutch. We expected a small number of boys who had persistently declared they were girls. Instead, 90 percent of our patients were girls, mainly 15 to 17 years old, and instead of being high-functioning, the vast majority presented with severe psychiatric conditions.

Some came from families with multiple psychosocial problems. Most of them had challenging early childhoods marked by developmental difficulties, such as extreme temper tantrums and social isolation. Many had academic troubles. It was common for them to have been bullied—but generally not regarding their gender presentation. In adolescence they were lonely and withdrawn. Some were no longer in school, instead spending all their time alone in their room. They had depression and anxiety, some had eating disorders, many engaged in self-harm, a few had experienced psychotic episodes. Many—many—were on the autism spectrum.

This confirms the research performed by Lisa Littman at Brown, to the effect that transgenderism became a social contagion. Moreover, it also affirms the views of Abigail Shrier, in her book Irreversible Damage. 

These girls had not been dysphoric until their mothers told them that that was their problem and that transitioning could cure what ailed them:

Remarkably, few had expressed any gender dysphoria until their sudden announcement of it in adolescence. Now they were coming to us because their parents, usually just mothers, had been told by someone in an LGBT organization that gender identity was their child’s real problem, or the child had seen something online about the benefits of transition.

But the foundation on which the Dutch protocol was based is crumbling. Researchers have shown that their data had some serious problems, and that in their follow-up, they failed to include many of the very people who may have regretted transition or changed their minds. One of the patients had died due to complications from genital transition surgery. 

One does not want to skip over the point too quickly, but apparently LGBT groups have been promoting transgenderism.

When it came to reversing the transition, to detransitioning, the children who changed their minds after undergoing biochemical and surgical mutilation, the Dutch report and its avatars was simply false:

There is an oft-repeated statistic in the world of pediatric gender medicine that only one percent or less of young people who transition subsequently detransition. The studies asserting this, too, rest on biased questions, inadequate samples, and short timelines. I believe regret is far more widespread. For example, one new study shows that nearly 30 percent of patients in the sample ceased filling their hormone prescription within four years. 

Dr. Kaltiala suggests that this was not the first time that medicalized groupthink produced something like mass hysteria. It was also responsible for the recovered memory craze:

Medicine, unfortunately, is not immune to dangerous groupthink that results in patient harm. What is happening to dysphoric children reminds me of the recovered memory craze of the 1980s and ’90s.

During that period, many troubled women came to believe false memories, often suggested to them by their therapists, of nonexistent sexual abuse by their fathers or other family members. This abuse, the therapists said, explained everything that was wrong with the lives of their patients. Families were torn apart, and some people were prosecuted based on made-up assertions. It ended when therapists, journalists, and lawyers investigated and exposed what was happening.

We need to learn from such scandals. Because, like recovered memory, gender transition has gotten out of hand. When medical professionals start saying they have one answer that applies everywhere, or that they have a cure for all of life’s pains, that should be a warning to us all that something has gone very wrong. 

Point well taken. Throw some serious doubt on snake oil salespeople, on pseudoscientists who pretend to have the solution to all of your problems. But, what about the political activists who have made this into their own private cause? Should we also start questioning their motives and their truth?

Please subscribe to my Substack. 

Anti-Semitism on Campus

In the late 1960s a brand new philosophy began to invade American graduate studies. It offered itself as a new way to read texts. Graduate students in the humanities thought it was the latest in radical thinking and they flocked to it in droves.

Its name was deconstruction. Its leading proponent was a French philosopher named Jacques Derrida. As everyone knew, it had originated with a German philosopher named Martin Heidegger. Though he had called it Destruktion. 

From which we conclude that deconstruction is destruction with a con. Of course, in French, the word con has a slightly different connotation.

Everyone knew that Heidegger had been a fervent member of the German Nazi Party. While he was rector at the University of Freiberg, Heidegger had militated in favor of Adolph Hitler.

Yet, Heidegger’s followers believed that his philosophy had nothing to do with his fervent embrace of Nazism. And they knew that Heidegger had ceased his militancy in 1934 after what has been called The Night of the Long Knives.

On that fateful evening, Hitler and his henchman liquidated the Storm Troopers led by Ernst Rohm. This group was responsible for public attacks against Jews, among other monstrosities.

Anyway, Heidegger preferred the Storm Troopers to the more organized and less theatrical and more mechanical SS led by Heinrich Himmler. 

Still, serious graduate students did not take Heidegger’s association with Nazism very seriously, until 1987. Then, a Venezuelan scholar, named Victor Farias, wrote a book about Heidegger and Nazism. He dug up materials that showed Heidegger to be an avid anti-Semite. He suggested that Heidegger’s efforts to deconstruct certain cultures were directed against Jewish, as well as Anglo-Saxon cultures.

Funnily enough, some of the leading deconstructionists decided at that time to abandon their new discipline, the better to work on post-colonial studies.

In any event the Farias book caused a significant ruckus in the academic world. Among those who argued for the close association between Heidegger and Nazi thinking was a New York Professor by the name of Richard Wolin.

As for what it all meant, I have suggested that deconstruction is a euphemism for pogrom. It aims at a cultural cleanse, designed to identify and eliminate all traces of Western empiricism, the kind associated with the religion of the patriarchs and the religion of Moses-- not to mention its Anglo-Saxon manifestation.

Of course, Nazi thinking was all about race. It valued or devalued people by their race, not by their contributions. It derided merit in favor of racial purity. Does that sound vaguely familiar?

And it insisted on uniform belief, of groupthink. With that you are approaching the basis for the Third Reich.

So, when the current crisis in the Middle East exposed anti-Semitism in America’s universities, it should not have come as a surprise.

Of course, it had entered leftist thinking through deconstruction. Many leftist Americans, in and out of the university systems, had decided that since fascism and Naziism were right-wing movements, they could bnest be combatted by fighting every right wing thinker and politician.

Americans who were consumed with the war against Donald Trump missed the point. Christian Schneider explained in National Review that the media, having repressed conservative analysis of the academic mind, was shocked by the anti-Semitism that it had been incubating on college campuses.

As for how the universities became overrun with anti-Semites, Niall Ferguson suggests that it has been a long time coming.

He offers three basic reasons. 

First, the old liberals decided to hire faculty on the basis of ideological purity, not of achievement. 

Second, students who were admitted to fulfill diversity quotas did not feel like they belonged. They resented those students who had arrived on the basis of merit-- like white, Asian and Jewish students.

Third, the disruptions caused by diversity and affirmative action quotas made it necessary for universities to hire more administrators. Their wish to produce a multicultural paradise caused them to disparage and disdain merit.

If we extend our analysis we can argue that multiculturalism represents a return to pagan idolatry. It proposes a society organized around multiple cults to multiple pagan deities. An early version was the Egypt of the pharaohs.

Evidently, Moses led his people out of a world of pagan idolatry toward a nation founded on monotheism. But it was also founded on a single set of rules applied equally to all members of the group.

This is to say that the Egyptian model prefigures what we call Empire. In German one of the terms for empire is Reich.

An empire does not cohere by having people speak the same language, observe common customs and play by the same rules. It can contain multiple cults, but it can also join together a multitude of nations, each with its own language, customs and rules. It coheres because the different constituent parts all unite to extol the glory of a human idol, the emperor.

The more multicultural we become the more we will be searching for a new emperor. 

The Mosaic alternative involved One God, not many gods. It produced a nation, not an empire. And it offered a single set of rules, a common language and one group of customs and mores. Its first manifestation was the creation of Judea, now called Israel.

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Some of My Favorite Themes

These are a few of my favorite themes-- to coin a phrase.

At the risk of being slightly repetitious, I devote this column to some of the themes I have used in my analysis of the situation in Israel and Gaza. These themes become more salient as other writers employ them. 

So, readers of my blog or my Substack can consider themselves to be ahead of the game. They had a chance to deploy analytic tools before many others did. 

In a New York Post column yesterday, Richard Lowry offers one of my favorite themes. That is, however much the reaction to the Hamas massacre manifests anti-Semitism, it also involves a fundamental hatred of Western civilization. 

The American university system has been systematically deriding and defaming Western civilization for decades now. The result has been bands of crazed students manifesting for a terrorist group that has committed unspeakable atrocities.

Worse yet, students who believe that they are fighting the good fight against fascism suddenly, when faced with real fascism, join together to praise it. And join together to ensure that those who committed the abominations not be punished.

Lowry points out the following point, one that we have made ourselves:

This point of view loves Gaza for its failure and hates Israel for its success; loves Gaza for its terror and hates Israel for its self-defense; loves Gaza for its vicious anti-Western sponsors and hates Israel for its Western allies, especially the United States.

Lowry calls it perverse, and surely that is the least you can say about the attitude.

Obviously, none of it represents a struggle against colonialism, because Jews inhabited the region well before Islam existed.

But then, there is the struggle between Israel and Hamas, yet another chapter in the clash of civilizations. This concept, introduced by Samuel Huntington, was intended to provide a counterweight to the thesis, propounded by Francis Fukuyama that liberal democracy was the best form of governance and would prevail-- because the arc of history was pointing in that direction.

Of course, we can spend some considerable time debating what constitutes the end of history. Fukuyama made it a question of belief. People all believe, he suggested, that liberal democracy was the best form of governance.

This implies that a society that is based on liberal ideals, ideals about democracy, free expression and human rights, will win out over one that disparages those values?

Then again, we ought to understand that the value system based in Western idealism is not the same as the value system based on Western empiricism. Over the past several decades China has adopted something of a capitalist economy. It did so on pragmatic, not idealistic grounds. It has not, however, embraced ideals concerning democracy, free expression and human rights.

As for the question of whether free enterprise requires free elections and free speech, dare we say that the question remains open.

So, has Israel succeeded because it is democratic or has it succeeded because it is capitalistic?

And then, there is another issue, hinted at in these pages. When one culture outcompetes another, will the losing culture adopt the habits that produced the winning culture? And, given the example of China, can you adopt some aspects of Western culture and ignore others?

To the chagrin of many, Saudi Arabia is currently modernizing, in economic terms, but without very much democracy or free expression. 

As I have pointed out, Hamas, through Iran, represents a refusal to adopt to the modern world, a refusal to emulate one’s betters, with an effort to destroy it. In other terms, to deconstruct it. 

Joel Kotkin raised the issue:

In Clash, Huntington predicted the Ukrainian conflict as well the resurgence, at the expense of the West, of many cultures, including Indian, Chinese, Arab and Turkish. He noted all seek recompense for steep declines during the period of European predominance. Rather than a world shaped by the logic of markets and the rule of law, this is engendering the ascendency of autocrats and intensifying tribalization and primitivist religious movements.

So, seeing other cultures emerge victorious in the clash of civilizations, some cultures have chosen to return to what I would call pharaonic and multicultural Egypt. They have employed the tactics of primitive religions, as in the human sacrifice practiced by Hamas. They have been trying to assert their own power, or a perverse version of same, by showing that they can be more brutal than the most brutal. They have been trying to out-Nazi the Nazis.

To be fair, the acolytes of Islamic culture, facing a choice between a reformation led by Saudi Arabia and the raw brutality of Hamas, are rallying to the cause of Hamas.

Of course, murdering babies and raping women count as cowardly actions. And yet, they are far easier to commit than building a modern nation. Committing atrocities makes people feel powerful without their having to compete in the arena. It's a self-esteem boost.

One suspects that, behind this terrorism lies a suspicion that if one is playing fair by civilized rules one cannot compete. Better to destroy what others have built than to try to build something oneself and to fail.

Besides, if you reform your traditional culture you run the risk of offending the spirits of your ancestors. And, we cannot have that.

Please subscribe to my Substack.

Saturday Miscellany

 First, Erin Burnett on CNN praises Hamas for the way they are presumably caring for their hostages:

We know these tunnels have ventilation. We know that they've been known to have air conditioning. There was shampoo. There was antibiotics. [...] There were medics and paramedics. [...] They had tampons and things, OK?!"

How about that? Not just AC, but tampons, too.

Second, much to the surprise of many, the Hamas massacre brought a vast outpouring of anti-Semitism on American college campuses. Including Brandeis, founded by Jews after World War II.

The student government at Brandeis University, founded after the Holocaust by the U.S. Jewish community, this week voted down a resolution to condemn Hamas. “It’s absolutely infuriating,” said a Jewish student who resigned over the 6-10-5 vote.

Third, at Princeton university, recently declared to be the best of the best:

Students at a Palestine rally at Princeton University are chanting "Intifada intifada, long live the Intifada" 

That is code for-- kill the Jews.

Fourth, Frank Bruni, formerly of the New York Times, currently teaching at Duke University, offered some perspective about today’s college students.

Many students now turn to the colleges they attend for much more than intellectual stimulation. They look for emotional affirmation. They seek an acknowledgment of their wounds along with the engagement of their minds. And that’s in significant measure because many schools have encouraged that mind-set, casting themselves as stewards of students’ welfare, guarantors of their safety, places of refuge, precincts of healing.

For us professors, the surrogate-parent paradigm means regular emails and other reminders from administrators that we should be taking our students’ temperatures, watching for glimmers of distress, intervening proactively and fashioning accommodations, especially if there has been some potentially discomfiting global, national or local news event. The coronavirus pandemic in 2020 reinforced that approach — and rightly so. Students who were locked down in their dormitories or homes, denied social interaction and estranged from the usual rhythms and rituals of college life, undeniably needed special attention.

As I have suspected and have long argued, today’s young people have been therapied within an inch of their sanity. As hedge fund billionaire Leon Cooperman said the other day-- they have “shit for brains.” 

He added that he will no longer contribute to his alma mater Columbia University.

Fifth, when you’ve lost Tom Friedman:

The fourth front is the intellectual/philosophical struggle between the international progressive movement and Israel. I believe that some elements of that progressive movement, which I realize is big and diverse, have lost their moral bearings on this issue. For instance, we’ve seen numerous demonstrations on American college campuses that essentially blame Israel for the barbaric Hamas invasion, arguing that Hamas is engaged in a legitimate “anticolonial struggle.” These progressive demonstrators seem to believe that all of Israel is a colonial enterprise — not just the West Bank settlements — and therefore the Jewish people do not have the right either to self-determination or self-defense in their ancestral homeland, whether it’s within post-1967 borders or pre-1967 ones.

Sixth, just in case you haven’t had enough, try this compilation of campus anti-Semitism, from Nellie Bowles, on The Free Press:

Nearly 2,000 sociologists signed a letter that Israel was committing “genocide” and anything Hamas does is justified by the “context.” The University of California, Berkeley Ethnic Studies Faculty Council released a statement condemning anyone who describes what Hamas did as “terrorism,” which is offensive. The student leader of a Wellesley residential house wrote to the entire dorm she oversees: “We firmly believe that there should be no space, no consideration, and no support for Zionism within the Wellesley College community.” Harvard launched a task force to help ensure the pro-Hamas protesters feel safe and can get jobs while also berating any Jews they might find. At George Washington University, students projected onto the side of the school library: GLORY TO OUR MARTYRS and FREE PALESTINE FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA. At Stanford, students are asking the school to pay for round-trip tickets for Muslim students to visit home: “Full round trip covered by University upon the signing of a ceasefire for students to visit their family and friends and grieve properly.” (Okay, fine, that one’s funny; just think of the Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine president calmly trying to explain preferred pronouns to a jihadi upon arrival. On second thought: TGIF will personally sponsor any queer activist who wants to fly to Iran. Honestly, I’m curious what would happen.)

Seventh, philosopher John Gray this in The New Statesman:

October 7 will be remembered as a day in which a new epoch of barbarism was born. In ethical terms, it will be a time when atrocities were accepted as legitimate weapons in human conflict. In its geopolitical dimension, it was the point at which the post-Cold War order finally ­fractured.

Eighth, the country is in the best of hands. The adults are in charge in the White House. Witness the witless Jake Sullivan. He wrote these words in a serious journal of foreign affairs, before the Hamas massacre.

Does he get an award for prescience or being obtuse or lying?

The Israeli-Palestinian situation is tense, particularly in the West Bank, but in the face of serious frictions, we have de-escalated crises in Gaza and restored direct diplomacy between the parties after years of its absence.

The region is quieter than it has been for decades. The progress is fragile, to be sure. But it is also not an accident. . . [Biden’s] approach returns discipline to U.S. policy. It emphasizes deterring aggression, de-escalating conflicts, and integrating the region. . . 

Amazingly, there are people who buy this swill.

Ninth, from Dennis Ross in the New York Times. 

Over the past two weeks, when I talked to Arab officials throughout the region whom I have long known, every single one told me that Hamas must be destroyed in Gaza. They made clear that if Hamas is perceived as winning, it will validate the group’s ideology of rejection, give leverage and momentum to Iran and its collaborators and put their own governments on the defensive.

Tenth, meanwhile back in Oregon, the State Board of Education has decided to hand out diplomas to students who were illiterate and innumerate. 

Erielle Davidson has the story:

High schoolers in Oregon won’t need to demonstrate basic competency in reading, writing or math in order to graduate for at least five more years because, according to education officials, such requirements are unnecessary and disproportionately harm students of color.

“At some point … our diploma is going to end up looking a lot more like a participation prize than an actual certificate that shows that someone actually is prepared to go pursue their best future,” former Oregon gubernatorial candidate Christine Drazan told Fox News.

Eleventh, on a somewhat lighter note, a comely married special education teacher in Missouri was arrested for propositioning a sixteen year old student. Her husband was away on a trip, so she decided to take advantage of the situation:

The Daily Mail has the story:

Rikki Lynn Laughlin, 24, reportedly exchanged nudes with a student at St. James High School - where Laughlin worked a special education teacher. The teacher, who is married with a one-year-old daughter, faces six felony charges for pursuing the 16-year-old, sending him pornographic images and soliciting ones from him. She married Grant Laughlin, 23, in June 2022 and the Missouri couple share a one-year-old daughter together. The teacher posted frequently on her social media accounts - where she shared snaps of her spending time with her daughter and husband, in her classroom and posing in front Trump 2020 flags.

Now she has been indicted and faces up to two decades of hard time.

It used to be called courtly love; now it’s a felony.

Twelfth, I don’t need to tell you, but the pronoun wars aim at forcing people to use bad grammar, among other things. Giving  the pronoun “they” a usage as singular is just the beginning. Now, we learn, thanks to the University of Birmingham in England, that listening to someone using bad grammar will damage your brain.

The Daily Mail has this story.

For many, bad grammar can be maddening. 

Now experts have discovered it really does cause a physical reaction – and even affects our heart rate.

Instances of bad grammar can include mixing up tenses within a sentence, confusing the singular and plural, using a double negative or misusing a comma.

Examples of the pet peeve include 'We don't need no education', 'I ate porridge for breakfast and drink milk' or 'Anna and Mike is going skiing'.

Analysis revealed the more errors a person heard, the more regular their heartbeat became – a sign of stress.

The researchers said grammatical errors appear to activate a 'fight or flight' response within the human body.

Thirteenth, on a more personal note, I am looking for a literary agent or a publisher for my new book, entitled “Can’t We All Just Get Along?” Please send any suggestions or recommendations to my personal email: StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.

Please subscribe to my Substack.

First, Erin Burnett on CNN praises Hamas for the way they are caring for their hostages:

We know these tunnels have ventilation. We know that they've been known to have air conditioning. There was shampoo. There was antibiotics. [...] There were medics and paramedics. [...] They had tampons and things, OK?!"

How about that? Not just AC, but tampons, too.

Second, much to the surprise of many, the Hamas massacre brought a vast outpouring of anti-Semitism on American college campuses. Including Brandeis, founded by Jews after World War II.

The student government at Brandeis University, founded after the Holocaust by the U.S. Jewish community, this week voted down a resolution to condemn Hamas. “It’s absolutely infuriating,” said a Jewish student who resigned over the 6-10-5 vote.

Third, at Princeton University, recently declared to be the best of the best:

Students at a Palestine rally at Princeton University are chanting "Intifada intifada, long live the Intifada" 

That is code for-- kill the Jews.

Fourth, Frank Bruni, formerly of the New York Times, currently teaching at Duke University, offered some perspective about today’s college students.

Many students now turn to the colleges they attend for much more than intellectual stimulation. They look for emotional affirmation. They seek an acknowledgment of their wounds along with the engagement of their minds. And that’s in significant measure because many schools have encouraged that mind-set, casting themselves as stewards of students’ welfare, guarantors of their safety, places of refuge, precincts of healing.

For us professors, the surrogate-parent paradigm means regular emails and other reminders from administrators that we should be taking our students’ temperatures, watching for glimmers of distress, intervening proactively and fashioning accommodations, especially if there has been some potentially discomfiting global, national or local news event. The coronavirus pandemic in 2020 reinforced that approach — and rightly so. Students who were locked down in their dormitories or homes, denied social interaction and estranged from the usual rhythms and rituals of college life, undeniably needed special attention.

As I have suspected and have long argued, today’s young people have been therapied within an inch of their sanity. As hedge fund billionaire Leon Cooperman said the other day-- they have “shit for brains.” 

He added that he will no longer contribute to his alma mater Columbia University.

Fifth, when you’ve lost Tom Friedman:

The fourth front is the intellectual/philosophical struggle between the international progressive movement and Israel. I believe that some elements of that progressive movement, which I realize is big and diverse, have lost their moral bearings on this issue. For instance, we’ve seen numerous demonstrations on American college campuses that essentially blame Israel for the barbaric Hamas invasion, arguing that Hamas is engaged in a legitimate “anticolonial struggle.” These progressive demonstrators seem to believe that all of Israel is a colonial enterprise — not just the West Bank settlements — and therefore the Jewish people do not have the right either to self-determination or self-defense in their ancestral homeland, whether it’s within post-1967 borders or pre-1967 ones.

Sixth, just in case you haven’t had enough, try this compilation of campus anti-Semitism, from Nellie Bowles, on The Free Press:

Nearly 2,000 sociologists signed a letter that Israel was committing “genocide” and anything Hamas does is justified by the “context.” The University of California, Berkeley Ethnic Studies Faculty Council released a statement condemning anyone who describes what Hamas did as “terrorism,” which is offensive. The student leader of a Wellesley residential house wrote to the entire dorm she oversees: “We firmly believe that there should be no space, no consideration, and no support for Zionism within the Wellesley College community.” Harvard launched a task force to help ensure the pro-Hamas protesters feel safe and can get jobs while also berating any Jews they might find. At George Washington University, students projected onto the side of the school library: GLORY TO OUR MARTYRS and FREE PALESTINE FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA. At Stanford, students are asking the school to pay for round-trip tickets for Muslim students to visit home: “Full round trip covered by University upon the signing of a ceasefire for students to visit their family and friends and grieve properly.” (Okay, fine, that one’s funny; just think of the Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine president calmly trying to explain preferred pronouns to a jihadi upon arrival. On second thought: TGIF will personally sponsor any queer activist who wants to fly to Iran. Honestly, I’m curious what would happen.)

Seventh, philosopher John Gray this in The New Statesman:

October 7 will be remembered as a day in which a new epoch of barbarism was born. In ethical terms, it will be a time when atrocities were accepted as legitimate weapons in human conflict. In its geopolitical dimension, it was the point at which the post-Cold War order finally ­fractured.

Eighth, the country is in the best of hands. The adults are in charge in the White House. Witness the witless Jake Sullivan. He wrote these words in a serious journal of foreign affairs, before the Hamas massacre. Of course, they have since been deleted.

Does he get an award for prescience or being obtuse or lying?

The Israeli-Palestinian situation is tense, particularly in the West Bank, but in the face of serious frictions, we have de-escalated crises in Gaza and restored direct diplomacy between the parties after years of its absence.

The region is quieter than it has been for decades. The progress is fragile, to be sure. But it is also not an accident. . . [Biden’s] approach returns discipline to U.S. policy. It emphasizes deterring aggression, de-escalating conflicts, and integrating the region. . . 

Amazingly, there are people who buy this swill.

Ninth, from Dennis Ross in the New York Times. 

Over the past two weeks, when I talked to Arab officials throughout the region whom I have long known, every single one told me that Hamas must be destroyed in Gaza. They made clear that if Hamas is perceived as winning, it will validate the group’s ideology of rejection, give leverage and momentum to Iran and its collaborators and put their own governments on the defensive.

Tenth, meanwhile back in Oregon, the State Board of Education has decided to hand out diplomas to students who were illiterate and innumerate. 

Erielle Davidson has the story:

High schoolers in Oregon won’t need to demonstrate basic competency in reading, writing or math in order to graduate for at least five more years because, according to education officials, such requirements are unnecessary and disproportionately harm students of color.

“At some point … our diploma is going to end up looking a lot more like a participation prize than an actual certificate that shows that someone actually is prepared to go pursue their best future,” former Oregon gubernatorial candidate Christine Drazan told Fox News.

Eleventh, on a somewhat lighter note, a comely married special education teacher in Missouri was arrested for propositioning a sixteen year old student. Her husband was away on a trip, so she decided to take advantage of the situation:

The Daily Mail has the story:

Rikki Lynn Laughlin, 24, reportedly exchanged nudes with a student at St. James High School - where Laughlin worked a special education teacher. The teacher, who is married with a one-year-old daughter, faces six felony charges for pursuing the 16-year-old, sending him pornographic images and soliciting ones from him. She married Grant Laughlin, 23, in June 2022 and the Missouri couple share a one-year-old daughter together. The teacher posted frequently on her social media accounts - where she shared snaps of her spending time with her daughter and husband, in her classroom and posing in front Trump 2020 flags.

Now she has been indicted and faces up to two decades of hard time.

It used to be called courtly love; now it’s a felony.

Twelfth, I don’t need to tell you, but the pronoun wars aim at forcing people to use bad grammar, among other things. Giving  the pronoun “they” a usage as singular is just the beginning. Now, we learn, thanks to the University of Birmingham in England, that listening to someone using bad grammar will damage your brain.

The Daily Mail has this story.

For many, bad grammar can be maddening. 

Now experts have discovered it really does cause a physical reaction – and even affects our heart rate.

Instances of bad grammar can include mixing up tenses within a sentence, confusing the singular and plural, using a double negative or misusing a comma.

Examples of the pet peeve include 'We don't need no education', 'I ate porridge for breakfast and drink milk' or 'Anna and Mike is going skiing'.

Analysis revealed the more errors a person heard, the more regular their heartbeat became – a sign of stress.

The researchers said grammatical errors appear to activate a 'fight or flight' response within the human body.

Thirteenth, on a more personal note, I am looking for a literary agent or a publisher for my new book, entitled “Can’t We All Just Get Along?” Please send any suggestions or recommendations to my personal email: StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.

Please subscribe to my Substack.

Is Civilization at Risk?

Elon Musk is worried. Not so much about how he is going to turn X back into Twitter, but about the possibility that we might be on the verge of another World War. By his lights, if we fall into World War III civilization might not recover.

I trust that that gained your attention.

Interestingly, Musk believes that we made a crucial and critical error when we weaponized the dollar. Long time readers of my blog will not be surprised. I thought as much myself and dutifully expressed my view in these pages. 

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the rough and tough Biden administration decided that it would punish Russia with sanctions. Among those sanctions were the confiscation of the Russian wealth that had been held in Western banks. That meant, bank accounts in American assets and dollar denominated securities.

Obviously, other countries got the message and started moving their assets out of dollars. 

So, Russia could no longer transact business with dollars. The result has not been a flight from the dollar. Some nations still wanted to do business with Russia. They wanted to buy Russian energy. If they could not do it with dollars, they were obliged to use other currencies.

This apparently threatens the status of the dollar as a reserve currency.

Musk comments:

With this weaponization of the dollar, I think we've overplayed our hand. Weaponizing the dollar with sanctions. You're now seeing a lot of countries de-dollar their transactions because we've sort of forced it. This goes beyond Russia, China, and Iran because countries like Brazil or India still want to transact with Russia and they can't do it with dollars, so we've forced them to de-dollarize their transactions, thus weakening the strength of the dollar in the world.

For Musk the great danger is World War III. He wants us to improve relations with Russia, as a way to reduce the likelihood. If Russia and China are forming an alliance to counter American influence, we should improve relations with the one or the other.

So, these actions are strategically foolish. Like I said, we should stand back and ask what is the most important thing. The most important thing is avoiding World War Three because we may never recover from World War Three. And I think we currently have the risk of World War Three increasing rapidly. I think if relations are re-normalized with Russia, the probability of World War Three is dramatically lower.

We're not fighting small fry here, the potential is not a small fry battle, it is a massive battle where the industrial capacity is of comparable size to the Western alliance.

As for how difficult such a war would be, Musk points out that we do not have a very great advantage in manufacturing capacity.

… the point is we don't have an overwhelming advantage on industrial might and the foundation of war is economics. This should be obvious to everyone but it is often lost at this point, the foundation of war is economic power. Especially industrial output. How many tanks, guns, and drones can you make relative to the other side? That's what it comes down to. And it may be the case, if not now, in the future it probably will be, that a Russia-China-Iran alliance can outproduce the Western alliance.

As for the alliance between Russia and China, together they have massive industrial capacity. If our capacity is roughly comparable, then neither side will bring a potential war to an early and decisive end:

Unfortunately, our policy has been forcing Russia and Iran to ally with China, it's been forcing them. What choice have we given them?

Russia has the raw materials, and China has the industrial capacity. It’s frankly, a perfect match from a war standpoint. So I think we need to stop doing that. It's unwise, and I think it will lead to an immense risk to civilization.

I want to emphasize there’s a civilizational risk -- there are tragedies on an individual level, tragedies on a community level, and then there's civilizational risk. We just need to make sure that we’re not putting civilization itself at stake, which is World War Three.

So, a new concept-- civilizational risk. Then again, does Musk mean that Western civilization is at risk? Does he believe that liberal democracy might lose out in competition with the Russia/China axis?

Surely, it is worth some thought.

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