Wednesday Potpourri

First, apparently the solar eclipse caused a certain number of incredibly stupid people to come crawling out of the woodwork.

Now you know what happens when you turn your country into an idiotocracy.

Anyway, near the top of any list of idiots is Amanda Marcotte. Writing for Salon.com, she noticed that more and more random men are walking up to random women on the streets of New York and punching them in the face.

How does the mentally challenged Marcotte explain it? She says that it’s all a manifestation of MAGA rage, ginned up by a certain presidential candidate and directed misogynistically at all women. 

In truth and in reality, as a number of commentators have pointed out, the perpetrators of this unacceptable behavior are never Christian white supremacists or even Trump supporters. I will not say which social group is mostly responsible for it, but you can guess. 

We feel compelled to add that these miscreants have figured out that committing felonies in New York City will not get you arrested or imprisoned. Thank District Attorney Alvin Bragg for this horror, but don’t call him a MAGA supporter.

Second, runner-up in our idiocy derby is one Sunny Hostin, a co-host of a television program called The View.

To her feeble mind, the solar eclipse, the New York earthquake and the arrival of trillions of cicadas are signs of climate change.

They are really signs that Sunny Hostin did not get her job because of what she has going on between her ears.

Third, the United States Navy has dedicated itself to diversity initiatives. And yet, going all-in for equity does not seem to facilitate the Navy’s more important tasks.

Here is a response to Daniel Greenfield, from Twitter: 

A damning Navy report released Tuesday outlining the sweeping failure of the Navy and its industrial partners to make expected progress on two submarine programs, an aircraft carrier and a new class of frigates.

Aware of the issues for years, the Navy is still unsure how to fix them. “We don’t have detailed plans of action, milestones, initiatives,” Nickolas Guertin, the Navy’s senior acquisition executive, told reporters at the Pentagon.

The country is in the best of hands.

Fourth, it doesn’t happen every day, so we should take special note of the constructive advice offered by Harvard Business School Professor Martin Norman.

He has just written a book about the value of routines. Therapists tell you to get lost in your mind. They tell you to tell yourself to calm down. They even offer medication to help you to control your anxiety.

And yet, Norman suggests, in a Wall Street Journal essay, great performers, whether athletes or opera singers, resort to private rituals and routines. They help us to manage performance anxiety and its attendant stresses.

We are surrounded by motivational mantras (“Keep Calm and Carry On”) aimed at keeping us placid. But those efforts are trying to suppress a strong human mechanism known as arousal—a psychological and physical state of high tension that includes activation of the limbic and sympathetic nervous systems. Imagine telling yourself to “calm down” while a bear chases you, as you experience an arousal cocktail of stress and perhaps see your life flash before your eyes.

He continues:

We reach for performance rituals to reach for that elusive more—to try to overcome our anxiety and perform to our potential. We mere mortals rely on them to prepare ourselves in countless areas of daily life: when we need to lead a meeting, nail a job interview, make our case before the town council or otherwise step into the spotlight.

And finally,

No ritual has the power to make rock stars or savants out of us. We still have to contend with the realities of aptitude and proficiency and the discipline of daily practice. But rituals can give us a way to manage our nerves, dial into the skills we’ve worked so hard to achieve and give us that elusive something more that allows us to step into the spotlight and shine.

And we might even take it a step further. Routinizing your relationships will give them a stability and a solidity that you would lose if your behavior becomes unpredictable.

No one is going to live with another human being very long if he or she is threatened by everyday shocks and surprises. People are more comfortable when most areas of their lives are consistent and predictable. Otherwise, they will be wasting time trying to figure out which cereal to eat for breakfast.

So, routinize your life and forget about empathy.

Fifth, on the transmania front, Gerald Posner has summarized the most recent British study. It will not make trans activists happy. Thankfully.

The Telegraph has a leaked copy of the full Cass report, due to be released this Wednesday. For those not following gender news closely, that is the UK’s “independent review of gender identity services for children and young people.” 

An interim report released last year was a major reason the UK banned puberty blockers for minors last month. The final report evidently concludes that social transitioning has gone from ‘not a neutral act’ to ‘risk of grave psychological harm.” 

Social transitioning includes using the child’s preferred pronouns and names and allowing them to dress in the clothes of an opposite gender. 

Many people forget that the Dutch clinicians who pioneered puberty blockers for children in 1998, were worried about false positives, i.e. children whose desire to change their birth sex was a “transient phase” that would pass before they reached 18. 

In order to avoid medicalizing those children for whom ‘gender dysphoria’ was a fleeting stage of adolescence, the original Dutch researchers discouraged early social transitioning of minors. However, American clinics, and many U.S. school districts have embraced social transitioning. The UK’s Cass report this week will again demonstrate the extent to which the radical American approach to gender.

Sixth, children in Ontario, Canada are not learning anything in school. Naturally, the grandees from the local educational establishment are blaming social media.

Does it sound familiar? This, from the National Post:

Over the past couple decades, Ontario school boards have chosen experimental teaching methods over the safe and proven, embraced mandated diversity over merit and have sometimes failed to secure the safety of students and staff. It’s no wonder that students are learning less. But, because it’s easier to scapegoat than to fix oneself, these school boards are taking to the courts to pin their failings on social media, specifically Facebook/Instagram, SnapChat and TikTok.

Seventh, Christopher Caldwell offers an interesting essay in the New York Times. He asks whether we should follow the advice of those who are calling on us to seize Russian assets, the better to punish Putin and to finance the Ukraine war.

This is a popular solution, held by people on the left and right. Caldwell demurs:

The very act of seizing Russian assets would pose dangers to the U.S. economy, because other countries, not just Russia, would view it as an act of brigandage. This could weaken the dollar’s status as the main global reserve currency.

The dollar is probably the most valuable strategic asset the United States has. We exercise a degree of control over the world economy because the world, for trading purposes, allows its transactions to pass through our currency. This leaves us with cheaper transaction costs and lighter financial burdens. It gives us leeway to run up debt ($34 trillion of it so far) that other countries lack.

If Russia, China and other diplomatic rivals were to decide that their dollar assets were vulnerable and that they could no longer trust the dollar as a means of exchange, we would feel the pain of that $34 trillion in debt in a way that we don’t now. Retaining the advantages of a reserve currency depends on our behaving as a trustworthy and neutral custodian of others’ assets. If we start stealing people’s money, that could change.

Admittedly, this is a complex issue, one that I am hardly qualified to discuss. And yet, from the beginning of the war in Ukraine we have seen various tough guys recommend that we seize all Russian assets, parked in American or European banks.

From the beginning I have suggested that this was a dangerous course of action. And yet, the mere suggestion has caused more than a few countries to start doing business in alternative currencies.

Eighth, it is not all a lot of crazy thought. Consider this from the Russian media, RT:

The share of the Chinese yuan on Russia’s foreign exchange market hit an all-time high in March, the Bank of Russia (CBR) reported in its financial risk review on Monday.

Russia’s shift away from major Western currencies started with the US and EU sanctions imposed on the country over the Ukraine conflict. The financial restrictions made cross-border trade in euros and dollars more difficult and their presence on the domestic foreign exchange market less important.

Ninth, American Muslims have been spewing anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism for the past several months. In so doing they are branding themselves as less than sane and less than patriotic. 

If it is any consolation, the situation in Great Britain is the same. A poll gave us a snapshot of the minds of British Muslims:

46% of British Muslims sympathise with Hamas. 

75% do not believe Hamas committed atrocities on Oct 7 (40% among the university-educated). 

32% want to see Shariah law implemented in the UK.

Failing to assimilate, considering themselves the vanguard of an army designed to overtake Western Christian culture, British Muslims are consigning themselves to the margins of national life.

Tenth, as for the problem of civilian casualties in Gaza and the wildly unrealistic notion that we can fight wars without injuring civilians, Gerard Baker has this to say in the Wall Street Journal.

We will pass on the simple fact that the people who are militating to save Hamas had nothing to say when Hamas massacred Israelis on October 7.

If Israel can somehow be bullied into forgoing victory over this enemy, our own capacity to wage wars inflicted on us will be dramatically diminished. We will have allowed a coalition of armchair media critics, far-left agitators and Islamist-sympathizing activists and governments to hold Israel to a standard no nation taking necessary measures to protect itself would ever be able to meet, a standard to which our enemies will certainly never hold themselves.

And also,

In World War II the British political and military leadership decided on a strategy they called—in what must rank as one of the most cynical euphemisms in history—“dehousing” German civilians: bombing cities to a level of destruction that would demoralize their inhabitants and make them turn on their Nazi government. The British people tolerated this morally doubtful approach because they had fresh in their minds the memory of the Blitz, when the Nazis successfully “dehoused” many British citizens.

I hope you have enjoyed reading these notes. If so, please subscribe to my Substack.