Wednesday Potpourri

First, on the political front, the most influential voice on the political right, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, has a few choice words about how a small band of Republicans allied with a united Democratic Party to oust House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

A band of eight Republicans succeeded in ousting Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker on Tuesday, and we trust they’re happy. They now have the chaos they wanted, though it isn’t clear what else they hope to achieve. Their clever plan seems to be to cut off their own heads.

If all Democrats voted with the renegades, one finds it difficult to see that it was anything other than an effort to undermine the Republican Party in Congress.

The Journal concludes:

The putative GOP majority is weaker, and its ability to gain any policy victories has been undermined. Oversight of the Biden Administration will slow or stop. Republicans in swing districts who are vulnerable in 2024 will be especially wary of trusting the Gaetz faction, and regaining any unity of purpose will be that much harder. The crazy left and right are cheering, but no one else is.

Second, in the matter of Carl Jung’s Nazi affinities, one Nathanial Lehrman sent this letter to the New York Times in 1988. 

Immediately after taking power, Hitler and his followers sought to reorganize the German Society for Psychotherapy. Its president, Professor Kretschmer, immediately resigned. Jung was brought from Switzerland to take over the presidency and editorship of the journal.

His first issue ran an article by the society's new political leader, Dr. M. H. Goring, Hermann Goring's cousin, proclaiming the new society's ''task of unifying all German physicians according to the Weltanschauung of the National Socialists.'' Jung's statement introducing the journal declared that ''the factual and well-known difference between Germanic and Jewish psychology should no longer be blurred,'' and went on to exalt the first and denigrate the sec-ond, Freud's ideas especially. One product of the Nazification of psychia-try was the Third Reich's first mass murders - of mental patients by the psychiatrists sworn to care for them.

Third, in Larry Krasner’s Philadelphia, Josh Kruger, a journalist who had announced that he felt perfectly safe from crime, was murdered last week.

A left-wing Philadelphia journalist who mocked concern over rising crime in Democrat-run cities was shot to death in his home.

Fourth, from Andy Ngo’s Twitter, a leftist radical was murdered by a black male in Brooklyn:

NYPost has obtained footage of radical leftist NYC activist Ryan Carson being confronted by a black male who stabbed him to death on a Brooklyn street on Oct. 2. The suspect remains at large. Carson became celebrated for his advocacy for more drug injection sites. He identified himself as a member of Antifa on his social media.

Fifth, do you believe in fish oil? Are you taking fish oil supplements? If so you will be happy to learn that they are useless. That is, there is no evidence that they improve your health.

New York Post reports:

A recent study from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, found the labels on fish oil supplements make health claims that are completely unsubstantiated by any research. 

Sixth, as General Mark Milley retired from service, the following story popped up. Apparently, military barracks are disgustingly filthy. From Patty Nieberg  in Task & Purpose

A bipartisan group of Congress members blasted the Pentagon over “reprehensible” conditions in military barracks, citing troops living amid mold and contaminated water and, in some instances, forced to clean up “biological waste” left behind by the suicides of fellow servicemembers.

In a scathing letter addressed to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, lawmakers accused the Pentagon of failing to “provide the most basic oversight and care” of barracks at 10 installations cited in a recent report and called it a “failure of leadership” by Austin “that cannot be ignored.”

As for Milley’s claim that he saved democracy from Donald Trump, consider the following elements in the Milley record:

Would that instead Milley had at least explained the 2021 historically disastrous flight from Kabul and defeat in Afghanistan, or the radical implementation of woke agendas into the Pentagon retention and promotion policies, or why he felt the illustrious and renown Professor Kendi, of current Boston University “Center for Antiracist Research” infamy, should be required reading for the U.S. military at time when its recruitment is descending into historical lows and its deterrent reputation is seriously questioned. So what about Milley’s own “constitutional" legacy? Is it that an officer who deems his civilian President and Commander in Chief dangerous—as diagnosed by 4-star psychiatrist, state department diplomat, and now theater commander Milley—has a right to commandeer the chain of command, usurp powers that are expressly by law denied to him, and then take it on himself in a time of Chinese-American tensions to freelance, by contacting his communist counterpart to warn him about his own president’s diagnosed volatility,  and to reassure the hardened Stalinist that Dr/Gen. Milley will inform him first of any precipitate action from the White House. Dictatorial much? 

Seventh, from the world of high school debating, the indoctrination of young people is ongoing and terrifying. Thought police, anyone?

The New York Post reports:

High school debate teams are being policed by lefty censors who penalize students who dare to use a word or phrase that challenges a woke world view, critics told The Post.

The censorship, which has been ramping up for years, is accelerating as competitors are penalized, and students in classrooms are reprimanded for saying anything deemed politically incorrect.

“If you have a judge who says that if you defend capitalism, defend the police, or defend Israel, you will lose, no questions asked, think about what that represents,” said James Fishback, founder of Incubate Debate, which hosts free-speech debate tournaments in Florida.

“If you use the words ‘illegal immigrant’ in reference to the 10,000 illegal immigrants coming over the border, you will automatically lose.”

Eighth, in the horrifying world of sex reassignment surgery, the poster child for mutilation is one Jazz Jennings. Born a boy, he was transformed into something like a girl, thanks to surgery.

Wesley Yang reports on how Jennings is being presented to kindergartners as a role model:

… glorifying Jazz Jennings as a "girl brain in a boy body" to Kindergartners is bad is that the book elides the fact that Jazz was castrated and had his penis removed on television in a botched operation that required three additional surgeries and left him sterile and anorgasmic for life at 17 before he had ever had an adult relationship. He is now 50 pounds overweight and severely depressed but forever committed to pretending that his mother, the TV producers, and the surgeon who castrated him helped him discover his "true self" because he liked the color pink and lip synching to pop songs as a six year old. There can really be no other purpose to parading around this "celebrity" than to induct other six year old boys who like the color pink and doing cartwheels into a lifetime of medicalized self-harm. Schools should not be recruitment organs for a cult of medicalized self-harm.

Ninth, returning to greatness and to sanity, the government of Great Britain has refused to allow trans women-- aka, men-- to be housed with women in same-sex hospital wards. It also declared that it would ban the practice of having people identify by their pronouns. 

Tenth, as you know, Germany’s leftist government has been destroying its economy by implementing something of a Green New Deal.

The eminently sober Economist magazine has the story about the latest Green initiative:

When Robert Habeck, co-leader of the Green party and the economy tsar in Germany’s ruling coalition, floated a bill last spring that mandated replacing gas and oil boilers with cleaner heat pumps, he got more heat than he bargained for. Tabloids screamed his “heat hammer” would push millions into debt. Whipped-up fury against “Green fascism” boosted ratings for the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. The minister spent much of the summer tweaking his bill. His patience paid off. In early September the Bundestag passed it by a cosy 397-275 votes.

The magazine proposes more nuclear power. Unfortunately the last center-right government, led by one Angela Merkel, shut down the last functioning nuclear power plants.

Eleventh, in the world of higher education, Clemson University has removed tampon dispensers from men’s restrooms. None dare call it misogyny.

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