Wednesday Potpourri

First, if you have been wondering why the citizenry has not been embracing the fictions about Bidenomics, we would notice, after market strategist David Rosenberg, that:

all the jobs created in the past year have been part-time.

By the numbers:

In the past year, the US has created 921,000 part-time jobs and lost 284,000 full-time jobs.

Second, meanwhile in Germany, a leftist politician offered some counsel about the situation in Ukraine.

Sahra Wagenknect said this:

Our grandiose military experts from the Greens have been telling us for two years now what 'game changer' we have to deliver next so that Ukraine can win this war." The hawks "dream" about using German missiles to "destroy ministries in Moscow," she said. "And when the pope speaks out against this madness, saying that Kiev should negotiate rather than drive the country to suicide, he was called a 'Putin troll'." She then emphasized, "The whole world outside the German political bubble knows that Ukraine cannot with this war. For a long time there has been no winning in Ukraine. There has only been.. bloody dying day in and day out. And Taurus missiles won't change any of that.

As it happens, the Biden administration has not gotten this message. It favors throwing more money into a lost cause.

Third,  from Finland-- where else?-- the bad news is that the woke mind virus, as Elan Musk calls it, damages your mental health. From the Zero Hedge blog:

A new study from psychological researchers in Finland, published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, finds a positive correlation between an individual's commitment to social justice beliefs, including "intersectionality," "antiracism," and "wokeness," and experiencing a life full of anxiety and depression. 

Fourth, from the Epoch Times, by Keri Ingraham, a concise and succinct response to transmania. Let’s stop calling it gender affirming care:

It is past due time to stop calling puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries that remove the breasts and genitalia of minor-aged children “care.” Affirming mental illness or the rejection of biological reality in any individual, let alone a minor is the opposite of care. Consider that therapists and medical professionals do not affirm and advise self-harm with other mental illness conditions. For example, people struggling with anorexia are not affirmed in their false thinking that they are overweight. Mental and healthcare professionals do not advise behaviors, drugs, or procedures — such as reducing calorie intake, prescribing diet pills, or conducting surgeries to remove body fat — that would aid in further self-harm.

And that’s not all:

Rather than helping put the brakes on a harmful social contagion, schools, libraries, and the entertainment industry throw gas on the fire by exposing children to radical gender ideology that defies the biological reality of male and female and seeks to breed confusion concerning a child’s basic identity.

Alarmingly, what starts as promoting social “transition” (the individual changing name and pronouns, cross-dressing, and using the bathroom of the opposite biological sex) almost inevitably leads to seeking harmful medical interventions, including irreversible castrating surgeries.

Legal bans on these practices are needed to protect children. Healthcare providers, be warned. Medical malpractice lawsuits will grow rapidly in the coming years as more parents and individuals who have “de-transitioned” (many of whom have experienced irreversible physical damage) courageously take a stand. Lawsuits aimed at therapists, counselors, and school personnel who have encouraged children and teens toward social and medical “transitioning” at odds with, or in secret from, parents and legal guardians are also coming.

Fifth, Kurt Schlichter fills us in on the latest goings-on at the Republican National Committee:

We’re not used to hearing it, but for the last week or so, the RNC has done everything right. The organization has totally failed for seven years under the rule of the dumbest member of the Romney family. People like RedState’s own Jennifer van Laar and superlawyer Harmeet Dhillon would point out how she was wasting tons of money on useless fluff, donors would stop giving, and she would just continue wasting tons of money on useless fluff. She studiously ignored the grassroots and imagined that her role was to go on TV and talk about policy as if anyone cared what some party bureaucrat thought. But now she’s gone, and good riddance.

Now, today’s trick question: who promoted the dumbest member of the Romney family lead the Republican National Committee?

Sixth, John Cody writes in Remix News of a new way that some German political parties are trying to tamp down on immigration.

They want to block the transfer of funds from Germany to their home countries. Better yet, they want especially to crack down on welfare payments, the source of many of these transfers:

Every year, migrants and refugees transfer billions of euros from Germany to family members in their home countries, with the Bundesbank estimating this to be at least €6.8 billion per year.

Now, some German political parties want to crack down on this development, with the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) seeking to “reduce poverty migration to zero” with restrictions on cash payments and social benefits.

Some of the money sent abroad is earned from work, but a substantial amount is likely from social welfare payments transferred to migrants, who then send it out of the country to support their families across the world. Since many of these social welfare benefits are distributed as cash, there is little oversight in how this money is used and transferred by migrants.

These foreigners have a substantial incentive to send this money overseas, where due to exchange rates and different standards of living, the euro can go far further than it can in Germany. However, these social welfare payments were never designed to be sent overseas, and are meant to provide the necessary support for migrants within Germany.

The debate on these remittances is only growing, with pro-migration parties working to stop efforts to disburse social welfare through electronic cards rather than cash. There is an awareness that if migrants stop receiving this money in cash, it may even serve as an incentive to leave the country. Not only would cash remittances become far more difficult, but prostitutes, drugs, and alcohol could also face restrictions.

Seventh, among the most idiotic concepts floated about transmania is the attempt to make the male body sufficiently female to breastfeed a child. They call it chest-feeding.

The Daily Mail reports on the story, explaining that it does not work in the Netherlands. And if it does not work in the Netherlands, obviously, it cannot work:

A trans woman who tried 'chestfeeding' had to give up after a fortnight, according to a case report that challenges claims biological men can breastfeed successfully. 

The unidentified 37-year-old, from the Netherlands, failed to produce enough liquid to feed her newborn. She was making only 7ml a day, 100 times less than what the NHS says is needed by that point.

Medics in Amsterdam, who treated her, documented how she wanted to breastfeed in tandem with her partner to help with 'bonding' and share the workload. 

Experts are also concerned by how little we know of the long-term impacts of the process on children, given how some of the medications and hormones taken by trans women to induce lactation can leak into milk produced. 

Eighth, what would we do without the New York Times. Reporter Dana Rubenstein tells us that New Yorkers are largely agreed on the proposition that the quality of life in the city has been declining:

But if there’s one thing that New Yorkers can agree upon, it’s that the quality of life in New York City has suffered.

Only half of New Yorkers plan to stay in the city, according to the survey of more than 6,600 New York City households conducted in the second half of 2023 by the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission — a follow-up to similar studies in 2017 and 2008.

Only 39 percent are content with the state of public education. Only 37 percent are happy with the level of public safety in their neighborhood, and only 34 percent are satisfied with their neighborhood’s cleanliness. Less than a third rate the city’s quality of life as excellent or good. Less than a quarter are content with the overall quality of government services.

Ninth, is Google going the way of Bud Light? Francesca Block and Olivia Reingold paint a discouraging picture of the tech behemoth. They argue that the recent mess caused by Google’s AI Chatbot-- where searches for notable white Americans produced pictures of non-white Americans-- was not an accident. 

The Google corporate culture had been promoting it for some time now.

They write on The Free Press:

These ex-Googlers, as they’re called, said that they were discouraged from hiring white, male employees; that DEI “is part of every single thing” in the company; and that engineers even had to list the “DEI impact” for the tiniest of software fixes. All of them agreed that the Silicon Valley giant entered the artificial intelligence race with an upper hand but has squandered it by cowing to an activist faction in the company that’s more committed to advancing social justice than making world-class products.

It is good to respect your clients and customers. Most people do not like being lied to. And, that is the bottom line here. If you did a search for Nazi generals and saw pictures of native Americans, you would naturally think that you were being lied to, even deceived purposefully.

Tenth, you might have heard that the Olympic Games will be held in Paris this year. The city of lights is also, apparently, the city of love, so the authorities are handing out some 300,000 condoms, for slightly more than 10,000 participants.

Does this mean that these games are promoting a new competition?

Do the math.

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