Wednesday Potpourri

 First, A. J. Edelman, proud Yale graduate, received a request for a donation to his alma mater-- to commemorate his class reunion.

He responded:

Last year I faced suspension and a trespassing charge if I returned to campus without proof of a 5th COVID shot. Perhaps you can ask one of the fine Yalies bravely harassing their Jewish peers instead. They're easy to find; they're hosting a Jew hatred festival in the middle of campus and calling for violent intifada.

Second, Andrew Ross Sorkin offers one strategy for American corporations. It’s the Google solution. He highlights the fact that corporate America has mostly kept silence about the demonstrations in favor of gang rape and baby killing.

He wrote:

Controversial thought experiment: What would happen if companies told universities that they wouldn’t hire ANY of their students unless the schools take decisive action to end blatant antisemitism on campus. After all, no company would use an executive search firm with even one employee who openly engaged in antisemitism.

We expect that Congress will-- sooner rather than later-- pass legislation to punish schools who have allowed anti-Semitism to fester on their campuses.

As I have often mentioned, anyone who gets caught up in this madness will almost assuredly pay a price. Children who are demanding amnesty fail to recognize that it is a futile gesture. 

Companies might not say it. They probably will not say it. But they are more likely to reject job candidates who might have been part of the anti-Semitism madness. How will they know who was more likely to be storming the quad, I leave you to conclude.

Third, the polls are looking bad for Joe Biden. Aside from wanting to play both sides against the middle in the Gaza conflict, the administration has tended to criticize Israel and to soft-pedal its criticism of Hamas.

And yet, the American people have not been fooled. The New York Post reports the results of the latest polls:

Four out of five voters (80%) back the Jewish state in its nearly seven-month-old war against the Islamic terrorist group, with the highest levels of support concentrated among older age groups, according to a Harvard CAPS/Harris survey released Monday.

Meanwhile, 72% of voters say they back an Israel Defense Forces military operation in Rafah to “finish the war,” with 28% saying Israel should “back off now and allow Hamas to continue running Gaza.”

Fourth, most citizens understand that the Biden shuffle, the way that the president walks, signals cerebral decline. Administration flunkies have decided that the best way to cover up the boss’s deficiencies is to surround him with other people, not to let him walk alone.

Zero Hedge has the story:

With the presidential election still more than six months away, President Biden's handlers are under increasing pressure to divert Americans' eyes from his obvious and accelerating mental and physical decline. 

Where his deteriorating mental abilities are concerned, we've already seen them using tactics like drastically minimizing his spontaneous interactions with reporters and excessively stage-managing his rare press conferences -- down to furnishing him with answers to questions submitted in advance. 

Now comes news that Team Biden's latest stage-management innovation is focused on obscuring his frailty: Uncomfortable with the way Biden looks as he unsteadily shuffles across the White House lawn, one or more staffers now walk at his side, helping to prevent close scrutiny of his gait. 

The country is in the best of hands. I bet you feel better already.

Fifth, a sidelight, perhaps only telling for those of us who live in Manhattan, but one of the nicer quarters in the city, the Flatiron district, has been hollowed out and nearly destroyed by criminals.

The New York Post has the story:

Flatiron is in shambles.

The once-thriving Manhattan business district is now a virtual wasteland littered with empty storefronts — with locals blaming spiking crime and the Big Apple’s disastrous post-pandemic retail real estate market.

“Big Box” retailers — including Lowes, Bed Bath & Beyond and Staples — have fled in the last few years, leaving one of the city’s shopping meccas peppered with Businesses who are trying to hang on have been plagued by rampant shoplifting and thefts, according to workers and city crime statistics.

Sixth, on the transmania front the Biden administration has been trying to enshrine delusional beliefs into law. And a federal court declared yesterday that states could not refuse to pay for what is falsely called “gender affirming care.”

The Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine brings us up to date on what is happening in Europe, where sanity is taking hold:

The European Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (ESCAP) published a policy statement on child and adolescent gender dysphoria, calling on healthcare providers to "not to promote experimental and unnecessarily invasive treatments with unproven psycho-social effects and, therefore, to adhere to the "primum-nil-nocere" (first, do no harm) principle. " ESCAP pointed to the "poor reliability and instability of a gender dysphoria diagnosis in a specific child over time" and the "possible effects of the decisions to block puberty or preventing medical transitioning on a child's psychosocial development." 

ESCAP allowed for the possibility that some children may benefit from gender reassignment but acknowledged the current lack of quality research to determine the risk-benefit ratio. It provided several key recommendations that focus on generating quality research in the area of gender dysphoria management for youth, with a call to differentiate between experimental practices of established medical treatments. 

ESCAP also insisted that "research findings are published solely on the grounds of quality criteria and not based on their findings," suggesting it is aware of the significant current publication bias, whereby studies reporting favorable transition outcomes are routinely published even if they are deeply methodologically flawed. 

ESCAP reminded everyone of the core ethics principles, putting them in the context of gender dysphoria treatments in youth: 

1. The principle of non-maleficence: do not use outside the research environment any experimental interventions with potentially irreversible effects, or interventions with unknown long-term consequences; do not adopt new practices prematurely without sufficient evidence; do not continue with outdated practices that might not be in the best interest of the patient. 

2. The principle of beneficence: adopt medical interventions with favorable benefits-to-harms ratio; consider benefits- to-harms ratio of not providing medical interventions; ensure adequate diagnosis and treatment of co-existing psychiatric disorders; ensure comprehensive diagnostic assessment of gender dysphoria instead of only relying on the self-assessment of children and adolescents 

3. The principle of autonomy: involve minors in the decision-making processes around their care in an age- and development-appropriate manner, assessing their capacity to consent; adopt an adequate informed consent process for possibly lifelong and irreversible decisions, securing that children and adolescents fully understand the potential risks, benefits, and irreversible nature of the treatments; consider the rights of their parents and guardians to consent to any major intervention or for participation of their children in research on experimental treatments; consider the rights of their parents and guardians to be fully informed about the current care for their children; offer adequate support and resources to those who decide to de-transition to their assigned sex, and respect their decision to do so. 

4. The principle of justice: ensure access to reliable and up-to-date information, assessment, and treatment for gender dysphoria, and during transition or de-transition; adopt equal precautionary measures for all; and protect the rights of children and young people as a group in a particularly vulnerable developmental phase. 

Seventh, Great Britain, with its National Health Service, is leading the march against transmania. Steve Watson reports:

The UK government is updating the constitution of the National Health Service specifically to expunge the creeping effort to ‘transition’ medical language by radical gender ideologists.

The move is being taken to ensure hospitals use language that is medically accurate and based in biological science.

It means that terms such as ‘Chestfeeding’ as a replacement for breastfeeding will be effectively banned.

Referring to ‘people with ovaries’ instead of women will also no longer be considered acceptable.

Eighth, and then there is egg freezing. Anna North has written an interesting article about it, for Vox.

Naturally, it has to do with feminism. Women who follow feminist dicta and place career before family often end up failing to have children. In some cases, it’s the biological clock, which apparently does not conform to feminist ideology. In other cases, it’s the problem of reaching a certain age and discovering that all of the good men are taken.

Feminism promises women that after they prioritize career over family they will find themselves irresistibly attractive, because they will be economically self-sufficient and do not need a man for anything other than siring children. 

It is not true. It was always a lie, but more than a few women believed it.

Meantime, Anna North writes this:

Despite the eye-popping cost of the procedure, experts predicted it would usher in a new era of gender equality and career advancement for women. A now-famous 2014 Bloomberg BusinessWeek cover story promised a new option for professional women: “Freeze Your Eggs, Free Your Career.”

And yet, egg freezing is a risky venture, one that more often than not does not work out as planned:

the chance of a live birth from frozen eggs was 39 percent. 

And that, of course, assumes that the refrigerator where the eggs are stored does not suffer a power outage.

But then, North continues, women choose to freeze their eggs, not because they want to advance their careers, but because they want to take the time and put in the effort to find a suitable mate.

Ten years ago, egg freezing was seen as a path to economic and social empowerment for women. But most people aren’t freezing their eggs so they can work; they’re freezing their eggs so they can date.

Eliza Brown, now a sociology professor at the University of California Berkeley, and her team interviewed 52 women who had frozen or were considering freezing their eggs in 2016 and 2017. None of them cited a desire to climb the corporate ladder. Instead, almost all were interested in egg freezing because they lacked a romantic partner. “Most of our participants understood egg freezing as a way to actually temporarily disentangle romantic and reproductive trajectories,” Brown tells Vox.

One does not know whether the problem lies in the fact that women are outcompeting men in worldly achievement and that men do not find such women to be very attractive. Men seem not to be enamored of the idea of marrying a woman who is going to ask them to do half the housework and half the diaper changing.

Egg freezing doesn’t change the fact that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, nor that social norms still fetishize the male-breadwinner family, pressuring women and men alike to look for something that may no longer fit them or the times they live in. It also doesn’t change the fact that many women find dating men to be a frustrating and demoralizing experience, as Anna Louie Sussman writes in the New York Times. Daniel Cox, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has surveyed more than 5,000 Americans about dating, told the Times that many men were “limited in their ability and willingness to be fully emotionally present and available” and that dating today “requires a level of emotional sensitivity that I think some men probably just lack.”

Some feminists blame men for the results of their own choices:

“Maybe men are going to need to get more comfortable marrying women who are more educated than they are and make more money than they do,” Harwood said. “Maybe the change happens there, in our gender ideologies and how we think of family.”

Back in the day, a woman named Susan Patton, who had a son who was a Princeton student and another son who was a Princeton graduate, wrote to the university’s student newspaper to recommend that young women marry young, that they seek out prospective mates while in college.

Naturally, the feminist intelligentsia exploded with outrage. Patton had wanted to consign women to the kitchen and the laundry. How ignoble can you get?

But, if the alternative is to miss out on family and marriage, and to live for the moment when you can take your frozen eggs and attempt to turn them into a baby-- knowing that the moment is more likely than not never to come-- it seems not to be such a bad idea.

Ninth, the Biden administration is trying to shower Hamas with empathy. It keeps saying that the Israeli military operation cannot succeed. It knows this because it read Tommy Friedman’s columns in the New York Times.

And yet, the Financial Times reports a change of heart among Gazans. It has been largely ignored, so it is worth noting:

Palestini­ans in Gaza are increas­ingly will­ing to voice their anger against Hamas, accus­ing the mil­it­ant group of fail­ing to anti­cip­ate Israel’s fero­cious retali­ation for its Octo­ber 7 attack that sparked the dev­ast­at­ing six-month war.

Hamas rules Gaza with a tight grip, but as Israel’s offens­ive has reduced the enclave to rubble, killed tens of thou­sands and brought the pop­u­la­tion close to fam­ine, res­id­ents such as Nas­sim — a retired civil ser­vant — have begun speak­ing out against the Islam­ist group.

“They should have pre­dicted Israel’s response and thought of what would hap­pen to the 2.3mn Gazans who have nowhere safe to go,” Nas­sim said from the south­ern city of Rafah, which teems with intern­ally dis­placed fam­il­ies from across the shattered ter­rit­ory. “They [Hamas] should have restric­ted them­selves to mil­it­ary tar­gets.”

Mohammed, another Gazan, went fur­ther by dir­ectly blam­ing Yahya Sin­war — the leader of Hamas in Gaza and the mas­ter­mind of Octo­ber 7 — for the dev­ast­a­tion Israel’s offens­ive has wrought in the strip. “I pray every day for God to pun­ish the one who brought us to this situ­ation,” Mohammed said. “I pray every day for the death of Sin­war.”

The next time someone says that you cannot defeat an idea militarily, recall these testimonies.

Tenth, whereas yesterday I wrote a column about face, and especially about the virtue of interacting with other humans face to face, the Wall Street Journal affirms my theory today:

Prof. Jeffrey Hall reports:

Although all social interactions reduced loneliness and built connections compared with being alone, face-to-face interactions and phone calls were the best.

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