Wednesday Potpourri

First, the cerebrally challenged Alexander Vindman, of Trump impeachment fame, said this:

What did Trump do during his four years to end the Russia-Ukraine war? Nothing. Trump is full of shit.

To which someone who calls himself Comfortably Smug responded on Twitter:

Well you see, Russia didn't invade Ukraine until after Trump left, you absolute moron Dems are in total disarray

Second, our vaunted military cannot build a pier in Southern Gaza. And it cannot stop the Houthis from terrorizing shipping in the Red Sea.

But, it is all-in with diversity training.

The New York Post reports on a study conducted by Center for American Institutions at Arizona State University.

Herewith, some words from the executive summary:

“The massive DEI bureaucracy, its training and its pseudo-scientific assessments are at best distractions that absorb valuable time and resources,” the executive summary states. “At worst they communicate the opposite of the military ethos: e.g. that individual demographic differences come before team and mission.”

Third, in the meantime American corporations have been touting the virtues of diversity and inclusion because a consulting firm, McKinsey told them to do so. 

It turns out that the correlation was incorrect. The Wall Street Journal reports:

When management consulting firm McKinsey declared in 2015 that it had found a link between profits and executive racial and gender diversity, it was a breakthrough. The research was used by investors, lobbyists and regulators to push for more women and minority groups on boards, and to justify investing in companies that appointed them.

Of course, the companies have been trying it out. They have discovered that it doesn't work:

Since 2015, the approach has been tested in the fire of the marketplace and failed. Academics have tried to repeat McKinsey’s findings and failed, concluding that there is in fact no link between profitability and executive diversity. And the methodology of McKinsey’s early studies, which helped create the widespread belief that diversity is good for profits, is being questioned.

Fourth, speaking of diversity hires, the ultimate version is the Chairman of the European Commission, one Ursula von der Leyen.

It turns out, she is something of a plagiarist and a fraud. This comes from George Georgiou, at Naked Capitalism:

Questions about VDL’s lack of probity first surfaced in 2015 when she was accused of plagiarising her doctoral dissertation. She was eventually cleared of the accusations but as the BBC reported on 9 March 2016, the president of the Hannover Medical School, Christopher Baum, conceded that “Ms von der Leyen’s thesis did contain plagiarised material”, but he added “there had been no intent to deceive”. Her first lucky escape.

VDL’s lack of probity continued while she served as Germany’s Minister of Defence between 2013 and 2019. During her tenure at the ministry, she became embroiled in a scandal regarding payments of €250 million to consultants related to arms contracts. Germany’s Federal Audit Office found that, of the €250 million declared for consultancy fees, only €5.1 million had been spent. Furthermore, one of the consultants was McKinsey & Company, where VDL’s son was an associate, thus raising a possible conflict of interest. It also emerged that messages related to the contracts had been deleted from two of VDL’s mobile phones. Although she was eventually cleared of corruption allegations, questions over her probity during that period remain to this day.

Of course, there’s more to this story, but that should suffice.

Fifth, we have followed this story from the onset, but now everyone seems to understand that shutting down schools during the pandemic was extremely damaging for young children. 

The New York Times reports:

The pandemic’s babies, toddlers and preschoolers are now school-age, and the impact on them is becoming increasingly clear: Many are showing signs of being academically and developmentally behind.

Interviews with more than two dozen teachers, pediatricians and early childhood experts depicted a generation less likely to have age-appropriate skills — to be able to hold a pencil, communicate their needs, identify shapes and letters, manage their emotions or solve problems with peers.

A variety of scientific evidence has also found that the pandemic seems to have affected some young children’s early development. Boys were more affected than girls, studies have found.

“I definitely think children born then have had developmental challenges compared to prior years,” said Dr. Jaime Peterson, a pediatrician at Oregon Health and Science University, whose research is on kindergarten readiness. “We asked them to wear masks, not see adults, not play with kids. We really severed those interactions, and you don’t get that time back for kids.”

The pandemic’s effect on older children — who were sent home during school closures, and lost significant ground in math and reading — has been well documented. But the impact on the youngest children is in some ways surprising: They were not in formal school when the pandemic began, and at an age when children spend a lot of time at home anyway.

The early years, though, are most critical for brain development. Researchers said several aspects of the pandemic affected young children — parental stress, less exposure to people, lower preschool attendance, more time on screens and less time playing.

Yet because their brains are developing so rapidly, they are also well positioned to catch up, experts said.

The youngest children represent “a pandemic tsunami” headed for the American education system, said Joel Ryan, who works with a network of Head Start and state preschool centers in Washington State, where he has seen an increase in speech delays and behavioral problems.

Naturally, minority children were the most damaged. This should not come as news.

As for recovering the loss, the psycho professionals interviewed by the Times suggest that it can be done. And yet, one suspects that they have a stake in optimism.

Sixth, meanwhile on the West Bank…. You will recall that those who have been trying to save Hamas by hobbling the Israeli military have proposed an alliance with the Palestinian Authority, the group that does not rule Gaza, but that does rule the West Bank.

As for the chances that the Palestinian Authority will be a partner for peace, you cannot be serious. In fact, the notion is so unserious that the New York Times reports on terrorist infiltration into the West Bank. And it reports that the PA has ceded authority to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Tommy Friedman should read the New York Times:

I recently met a local commander of these young militants, Muhammad Jaber, 25, in one of those dusty, shattered alleyways. One of Israel’s most wanted men, he and other fighters like him say they have switched allegiances from the relatively moderate Fatah faction, which dominates the Israeli-occupied West Bank, to more radical groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7.

More weapons and explosives are being manufactured in the West Bank, according to both the fighters themselves and Israeli military officials. They say the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, which runs parts of the West Bank, is losing ground to the more radical Palestinian factions, who are actively fighting Israel and gaining more support from Iran in the form of cash and weapons smuggled into the territory.

Fatah recognizes Israel’s right to exist and cooperates with its army. But some of the militants affiliated to Fatah, part of the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades crucial to the second intifada of the early 2000s, have never respected the Palestinian Authority and its compromises with Israel and the occupation. Some have, like Mr. Jaber, simply declared their new allegiance to the more hard-line Islamist factions.

As I said, taking the Palestinian Authority as a partner for peace is a fool’s errand.

Seventh, as for the American insistence on Israeli restraint, the result of this restraint, enforced by refusing to send certain weapons, is the resurgence of Hamas.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Palestinian militants fired one of the largest barrages toward Israel in months on Monday while Israeli forces reengaged with Hamas fighters in a Gaza City neighborhood they had previously invaded, signs the conflict risks becoming a protracted war of attrition as militants regroup and rearm.  

Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an ally of Hamas, said it fired rockets at southern Israel. The Israeli military said the attack was largely intercepted, caused no damage and consisted of 20 projectiles that came from the area of Khan Younis. Israel carried out a monthslong operation there against militant groups that ended in early April. 

The barrage reinforced the challenge for Israel as it seeks to pursue a counterinsurgency campaign against militants who retain rocket and mortar firing capabilities almost nine months into the Israeli campaign to destroy them. 

“We are nearing the end of the stage of the destruction of Hamas’s terror army and will have to target its remnants going forward,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech on Monday, in a sign that Israel is preparing to move to a new phase in the fighting.

Eighth, follow the money, isn’t that the correct phrase. Now The College Fix reports on the contributions made to American universities by Arab countries. Surely, this has an influence on university policy.

About one in four foreign dollars donated to American universities in the past four decades have come from Arabic countries, many of whom are hostile to Israel.

A total of $13 billion have come from Arabic countries, out of about $55 billion total.

The latest report from the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise “documents the substantial sums contributed by donors from Arab states and the resulting pressure on universities to avoid teaching or research that might offend them.”

A Department of Education February 2024 report “lists 24 donations worth $11,618,000, all from ‘Palestinian territories,’” according to the group. However, the United States does not official recognize a separate Palestinian state.

“It also flags transparency issues and the potential influence of Arab governments on U.S. universities,” the report states.

Mitchell Bard, the report’s author and AICE’s executive director, provided further commentary to The College Fix via email.

“Funding can be an incentive/disincentive to take a particular position. E.g., Qatar would want positive research about its government and be upset over research on Al Jazeera, radical Islam, or corruption in its World Cup bid,” Bard (pictured) told The Fix. “Faculty may teach skewed versions of history, downplaying for example terrorism.”

He said, “universities should be required to report what foreign funds are specifically used for and their sources and this information should be published by [the Department of Education].”

“Departments should be policed so they do not take political positions,” Bard told The Fix. The ‘academic’ needs to be put back into academic freedom,” he said.

His group does not want to “vilify Arab funding sources,” according to the report. Rather, it wants to see “transparency measures to safeguard academic integrity, foster a health exchange of ideas,” and “ensure” funding is not being used to “sway” research, curriculum, and “faculty recruitment.”

The top four recipients of Arab donations since 1981 are all prestigious research universities – Cornell University, Georgetown University, Texas A&M University, and Carnegie Mellon University, top the list.

Ninth, the most shocking part of this diagnosis is that the mainstream media does not seem very interested. A retired neurologist wrote to The Free Press to offer-- anonymously-- his diagnosis of our president:

Neurologists frequently make diagnoses by observation. In fact, most movement disorder diagnoses are made by direct observation or description by patients and families. Mr. Biden has Parkinsonism, an umbrella term that refers to neurologic conditions that cause slowed movements, rigidity, and tremors. By observation, he has a masked face, reduced blinking, stiff and slow gait, hunched posture, low volume voice, imbalance, freezing, mild cognitive disturbance, and difficulty turning. I have seen one video of tremor. All these diagnose Parkinsonism. 

He would need further investigation by experts to determine which specific disease within the broad term he has, such as idiopathic Parkinson’s disease or another specific disease.

While there is no cure for the many conditions comprising Parkinsonism, there are effective treatments for many of the symptoms. By failing to get a diagnosis, the president is denying himself such treatments, and so worsens his own situation.

Meanwhile, I have some free consulting hours in my life coaching practice. Please contact me at StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com.

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France Votes

I am not going to pretend that I know what it all means, because I do not know what it all means. For the moment, the Western world, comprising the United States, France and Great Britain is consuming itself with politics. And especially with radical political transformations.

The day before yesterday, it was France’s turn at the ballot box. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, by all indications an intelligent man, was swamped by the right wing party led by Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella. 

Macron’s party came in third, behind the leftist socialist party of Jean Luc Melanchon. As we have noted Melanchon did his party ill by supporting Hamas and Palestinian terrorism. 

Now, while everyone is predicting the advent of a right wing parliamentary majority, led by Prime Minister Bardella, an alliance between Macron’s center-left party and Melanchon’s radical party might surprise a few of the prognosticators.

Apparently, the people of France are punishing their leaders for having opened their countries to migrants. And to migrants who have not assimilated and who have brought crime and other social pathologies.

So, it's a return to nationalism and a rejection of what is called globalism. That is, a rejection of anything that resembles open borders. Does that have an air of familiarity? 

In France, the issue of Muslim migrants weighed on the election. The Daily Mail wrote this:

According to statistics office INSEE, immigrants constituted 5% of the population in 1946. This figure increased 3.5 percentage points to 8.5% in 2010.

But net migration has soared since then and jumped even higher after Macron came to power in 2017. Now more than 10% of the French population is made up of immigrants. 

And the migrants have brought crime with them. Among the high profile murders was that of Samuel Paty:

The murder and beheading of history teacher Samuel Paty in 2020 by a Chechen Muslim refugee sparked national outrage, but many more attacks have happened since then. 

Late last year, another French schoolteacher was stabbed to death and several others injured by an Islamist knifeman in Arras, and a German tourist was killed by a 26-year-old man who had previously been sentenced to a four-year prison sentence for planning to join the Islamic State in Syria. 

President Macron is aware of the problem. He gave a speech about it. He has proposed new policies to shut down immigration. And yet, French citizens have not been giving him credit for his words. 

They have considered that he has done too little too late. And surely, right wing leaders like Le Pen and Bardella have been stronger on the issue.

Recently, when Marine Le Pen was scheduled to meet with a Muslim cleric, she was invited to put on a headscarf. She refused, thereby making clear her insistence on assimilation.

Bardella has proposed cutting back on social welfare benefits offered to non-citizens. And he proposed ending birthright citizenship, a point that is part of the American political debate:

Bardella himself has declared he will wage a 'cultural battle' against Islam if his party emerges victorious from parliamentary elections.

If he is made Prime Minister in the case of an RN absolute majority, the party will seek to pass legislation to 'combat Islamist ideologies' in France that would grant the government enhanced powers to shutter mosques and deport imams suspected of being associated with extremist ideologies.

Besides the commitment to reduce the influence of Islam in France, another RN proposal being pushed by Bardella would see the abolition of free health care for foreigners and the 'droit du sol' law which affords anyone born on French soil the right to citizenship. 

Other problems involve a burgeoning national debt and very high taxes. Call it fiscal irresponsibility. The following from Daniel Lacalle on Zero Hedge:

France never had austerity. It has the world’s largest government relative to the size of the economy. Government spending to GDP exceeds 58%, the highest in the world. Unions are exceedingly powerful. Their ability to organize paralyzing strikes gives them a level of economic power that far exceeds their actual representation. France’s state is so large that the public sector employs 5.3 million people (21.1% of the active population), a ratio of civil servants to inhabitants of 70.9/1,000, according to Eurostat. France has one of the highest taxation systems in the OECD. 

In France, income tax and employer social security contributions combine to account for 82% of the total tax wedge, according to the OECD. Corporate tax rates in France are also extremely high, at 26.5%, with companies with profits of more than €500,000 paying a rate of 27.5%. 

The labor market regulations in France are so restrictive that the number of companies with forty-nine employees is 2.4 times higher than those with fifty, primarily due to the significant burdens businesses face once they reach the fifty-employee threshold. According to Bloomberg, a 50-employee company must create “three worker councils, introduce profit sharing, and submit restructuring plans to the councils if the company decides to fire workers for economic reasons”.

All things considered, the solution must be something like an injection of Javier Milei. The Argentine president has  been taking a buzz saw to the bloated government in his country. 

Considering that most people in Argentina wish they are French, it might be the case they they have gotten it backwards. If the Milei reforms continue to work, perhaps the French should learn from them.

And then there is this. Young Emmanuel Macron is simply not very likable. One is not sure what to make of this notion, but it seems to be accurate.

But the author of this article would be remiss were he not to point out that, at the end of the day, most French people simply do not like their president. 

Macron, a talisman of Europeanism, is well-liked across the EU, with an Ipsos poll in March 2024 ranking him as the second most popular European leader behind Volodymyr Zelensky - who, it must be said, has a rather unfair advantage.

But the French electorate does not harbour such affection for Emmanuel.  

A week before Sunday's first round elections, Macron's approval rating was mired at just 26% - a historic low equal only to the weeks following the introduction of his detested pension reforms. 

Macron's party is fully aware of the nation's perception of the president. 

His face has been removed from election posters and flyers being touted by MPs from his party, who have implored him to allow his prime minister Gabriel Attal to take the lead in running the legislative campaign. 

And then there is the French love of democracy. When the results of the first round of voting came in, and when it seemed that the Le Pen party had won a plurality, masses of French people rioted. 

The Daily Mail reported:

Rioting engulfed the streets of Paris last night as thousands of enraged left-leaning voters set light to rubbish, smashed up shop windows and launched fireworks after Marine Le Pen's RN steamed to victory with 33% of the first round vote. 

It is difficult at this distance to know who was rioting. Keep in mind the right wing Le Pen Party has had a long and disgraceful association with anti-Semitism, even with Naziism. As it happens Marine Le Pen has worked to rid her party of such associations, even expelling her Nazi-loving father, the party founder.

And, we must also note that the leftist party of Melanchon has stepped forth to affirm its commitment to the Palestinian cause and its rejection of the state of Israel. So, the rioters might have been opposing right wing anti-Semitism. Or they may have been asserting left wing anti-Semitism.

In any case, French politics will be in flux for another ten days, when a second round of voting will finalize the results and name the new prime minister. At the least, the first round of voting has shown us that President Macron is the biggest loser.

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What Isn't the Matter with Kansas

I will venture that the most offensive and insulting book title in recent years was Thomas Frank’s, What’s the Matter with Kansas?

Frank argued that rural voters, especially those in Kansas, did not know what was good for them. The Democratic Party was defending their interests and they were voting for Republicans.

Clearly, they had a problem. They had a mental health problem. Frank wanted to help them out.

Naturally, once the book garnered a lot of attention, other journalists chimed in. Last February journalist Paul Waldman and political scientist Tom Schaller wrote a book called White Rural Rage.

Writing in the New York Times Emma Goldberg-- one of the better young Times writers-- explained it thusly:

 Mr. Frank, a historian, argued that the Republican focus on social issues, like abortion and guns, persuaded rural voters to put aside their economic interests and vote on cultural values rather than for candidates who supported unions and corporate regulation.

Published in February, “White Rural Rage,” by the journalist Paul Waldman and the political scientist Tom Schaller, is an unsparing assessment of small-town America. Rural residents, the authors argued, are more likely than city dwellers to excuse political violence, and they pose a threat to American democracy.

As you can see, the authors have taken their leave from their rational faculties. As for who commits political violence or who condones political violence, people who dwell in rural areas are certainly not on the list.

We can see that these books belong to a genre of blame shifting, indicting Americans in the heartland for crimes and chaos perpetrated by Americans on the coasts. 

But then, the insults leveled against rural Americans provoked a series of counterarguments. Nicholas Jacobs and Dan Shea offered the most intriguing counter-argument, one that does not rely on concepts like resentment.

Mr. Jacobs, with the political scientist Dan Shea, conducted surveys of 10,000 rural voters, from Gambell, Alaska, to Lubec, Maine. The pair were struck by a commonality: Rural residents tend to focus less on their own economic circumstances and more on their community’s prosperity.

Rural Americans define themselves as members of a community. Urban and coastal Americans see themselves as radical individuals, people whose well-being involves overcoming community standards and mores.

The difference is clear; it feels accurate. One might also say that urban America is more multicultural. Different cultures, like different cults to different pagan deities, vie for supremacy. In rural America there is a single encompassing culture. 

Even individuals who are thriving are attuned to whether their community as a whole is being left behind by economic changes like automation or the decline of coal.

That sense of “shared fate,” as the scholars put it, arises in part because rich and poor tend to cross paths often, which Mr. Jacobs has noticed even in his own rural community, Vassalboro, Maine, population 4,520.

“If you go down my street in Vassalboro, the nicest house on the street is right across from the least nice house on the street,” Mr. Jacobs said. “Their kids go to the same school because there’s only one school.”

Such interconnectedness means that pollsters sometimes miss how rural voters are really feeling, he added. “It’s not enough to simply ask: Are you doing better than you were last year?”

Some years ago Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam addressed these issues. He wrote an important paper, entitled, “E Pluribus Unum.”

The summary explains why in multicultural communities people lose social capital and tend to hunker down, avoiding each other:

Ethnic diversity is increasing in most advanced countries, driven mostly by sharp increases in immigration. In the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits. In the short run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one's own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer. In the long run, however, successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities. Illustrations of becoming comfortable with diversity are drawn from the US military, religious institutions, and earlier waves of American immigration.

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