Saturday Miscellany

First, naturally, as the proprietor of a blog called “Had Enough Therapy?” I was totally intrigued by a New York Times article on therapy ruts.

I have to admit that my concept is largely more concise and articulate than is that of the Times. But, what did you expect?

The Times sums it up:

There are many reasons a rut can happen, the experts said:

• You’ve made as much progress as you can in therapy at this time.

• You would benefit from a different therapist or approach.

• You need a new therapy goal.

• You don’t need sessions as frequently as you did in the past.

• Your expectations aren’t aligned with those of your therapist.

• You’re not ready to explore past trauma or a difficult issue.

According to the army of experts collected by the Times, therapy should teach you new coping skills or give you a better understanding of your problem.

It recommends that you speak up and express your dissatisfaction

But if after three or four sessions you feel like you haven’t learned any new coping skills or gained a better understanding of your problem, then it’s time to speak up, either during the session or in an email.

One remarks that this is clearly directed to relationships between women. How many men do you know who want to develop more coping skills?

Second, from Cillian, remarks by Italy’s Prime Minister, Georgia Meloni:

Italian PM Giorgia Meloni: “The Left predicted that I would destroy Italy, but they were wrong. Employment is at a Record High, our Economy is Growing, Illegal Immigration has decreased by 60%, and we are expanding freedom in every aspect of Italians’ lives.”

Third, just in case you were looking for another reason to hate DEI programs, consider the situation of a high school student by name of Stanley Zhong. The New York Post reports:

Stanley Zhong was a near perfect college applicant.

Out of the more than two million kids who take the SAT annually, he’s one of roughly 2,000 to score a 1590 or higher.

His high school GPA was a 4.42 on a 4.0 scale. He even had an offer in hand to work a PhD level job at Google before graduating high school.

Stanley, who intended to study computer science, also managed his own startup, e-document signature platform Rabbit-Sign, while still a high schooler.

By anyone’s expectations the Palo Alto, Calif., teen should have been Harvard or MIT bound. And yet Stanley, now 19, was met with disappointment after disappointment in 2023 when college admissions letters started trickling in.

In fairness, Zhong was accepted by the University of Texas and the University of Maryland.

But, the story has a happy ending. He might not have been good enough for the nation’s top universities, but Zhong was good enough for Google:

“[Stanley’s admissions] results stand in stark contrast to his receipt of a full-time job offer from Google for a position requiring a PhD degree or equivalent practical experience,” the lawsuit claims. “Stanley’s experience is emblematic of a broader pattern of racial discrimination against highly qualified Asian-American applicants at UC.”

Stanley decided to take up Google’s job offer and has been working as a full-time software engineer since October. Google first tried to recruit him when he was just 13 because his online coding was so advanced the company figured he must be an adult.

Though he hasn’t ruled out college in the future, he’s decided to step back from media attention after facing blowback over his lawsuits on the internet.

“We haven’t seen more cases like Stanley’s, because the kind of open hostility towards Asian students standing up for their rights is unbelievable,” his father said.

Fourth, today’s Democratic Party is circling the drain. It is about to be flushed into oblivion. Think-- the Whigs.

Anyway, Sen. John Fetterman has a few choice remarks, from X, via Newsmax:

A sad cavalcade of self owns and unhinged petulance. It only makes [President Donald] Trump look more presidential and restrained.

We're becoming the metaphorical car alarms that nobody pays attention to — and it may not be the winning message."

Tuesday, he posted a graphic on his X account showing what he said depicted the increase in illegal immigrant entries into the United States with the comment, "This is when we became the party for chaos. Telling people to invalidate their eyes or experiences and WE LOSE. Equivalent size of Pittsburgh showing up every month at our border was true chaos."

Fifth, Ben Appel reports that the gender cult is trying to make inroads in the mental health profession.

Therapists are being asked to sign a letter telling professional associations to warn “therapy consumers” about a new form of conversion therapy called “Gender Identity Change Efforts (GICEs).”

Now, gender change efforts are being disguised as talk therapy.

Good-bye, Department of Education

Today, the Trump administration is beginning to put the Department of Education out of its misery. Nearly five decades old, that department has been a conspicuous failure. If we examine the academic performance of American schoolchildren over the past few decades we discover that our children are doing worse than most of the civilized world.

Surely, it is worth worrying about. For all the investments that companies are making in American industrial capacity, one needs to keep in mind that we need to provide the human capital to make them function. In many cases, we do not have it.

As for the state of American education, we can see the problem by opening yesterday’s newspaper.

The New York Post reports:

More than one-third of New York City public schoolkids — or some 300,000 students — were “chronically absent” last year, according to a blockbuster study out Thursday.

The bombshell findings come as New York students’ test scores in math and reading remain mediocre, despite the state funneling more money into education than any other in the nation.

The number of K-12 students deemed chronically absent — or out for 10 days or more in the 180-day school year — has spiked from 26.5% in the 2018-19 term preceding the COVID-19 pandemic to 34.8% in 2023-24.

That means more than 300,000 students out of roughly 900,000 in the country’s largest public school system are frequently missing in action, according to the analysis conducted by the Manhattan Institute.

The rest of New York State was just as bad, or even worse.

The results were even more dreadful in upstate school districts, where extensive absenteeism skyrocketed from 41% to 62.2% in Buffalo — Gov. Kathy Hochul’s hometown.

Severe absenteeism shot up from 44.7% to 59.2% in Rochester and 34.7% to 46.8% in Syracuse.

Apparently, one of the culprits is work-from-home. Parents who are working at home are more comfortable keeping their children home from school.

According to Eva Moskowitz, the Covid-Era school shutdowns, produced through the aegis of the teachers’ unions, told parents and students that attending school, being in class in person, was not really all that important.

She writes in the New York Post:

Despite the fact that the danger to children from COVID was minimal, regulators imposed absurdly restrictive measures on schools at the behest of the teachers union, which resulted in school closures.

Parents got the message that regular attendance wasn’t important.

Although parents bear some blame for failing to get their kids to school, so do the schools these children attend.

The report notes there are many schools that have low rates of absenteeism despite serving primarily minority and low-income students.

For those who do not live in New York City, students at the Success Academy charter schools run by Moskowitz have consistently shown excellent performance in standardized tests. The students are chosen by lottery and normally come from disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Given that they are conspicuously successful at educating children, the teachers’ unions are violently opposed to Success Academies and other charter schools.

This to say, Eva Moskowitz knows what she is talking about:

We insist that our educators model good attendance by rarely being absent themselves.

We celebrate “Zero Heroes” — students with perfect attendance — as well as classrooms that achieve 100% attendance on any given day.

We communicate with parents every time a scholar is late or absent with a phone call or text.

If a student’s attendance is poor, we’ll have an “upstairs dismissal” in which we require the parent to come into the building when they pick up their child to discuss the attendance issue.

The key to all of this is holding educators accountable.

We track attendance rates at each of our schools daily.

If attendance is lagging, we’ll work with the principal of that school to improve it.

We refuse to accept chronic absenteeism as an inevitable reality — because it isn’t.

It’s also important to remember that some children stay home because they feel school is unsafe or that it’s a waste of time because instruction is constantly interrupted by disruptive students.

We need to provide students with schools that they want to attend.

If we allow COVID to permanently reset expectations for school attendance, it will be one of the saddest legacies of this terrible episode in our nation’s history.

We mustn’t let this happen.

The Education Department was created by Jimmy Carter to privilege the teachers’ unions. It’s time to recognize its failure and, by the by, to abolish teachers’ unions.

The Stupid Party

The polls were uniformly positive. The large majority of citizens liked the speech that President Trump gave before Congress Tuessday.

The only group that did not like it was Congressional Democrats. It did not matter who Trump singled out for a positive achievement. The Democrats were having none of it. They could not honor a child who had overcome cancer. They were certainly  not going to stand and applaud for women athletes militating to keep males out of their sports and out of their locker rooms.

A day earlier the United States Senate took a vote to end a Democrat filibuster Democrats against a bill guaranteeing that girls’ sports would be uniquely for girls. The bill protects girls and women. It allows females to win competition. It keeps boys out of girls locker rooms. 

Every single one of the Democrat senators in attendance voted to maintain the filibuster, effectively killing the bill for now.

The striking part of the Democrat Party behavior at the presidential address on Tuesday was how juvenile it all was. An absence of decorum, a failure to show respect. Strictly speaking, they had no shame. And they had nothing to say. They had nothing to contribute. They are devoid of ideas.

The Democratic Party has become the stupid party. Its politicians have manifested a singular lack of intelligence. Everyone seems to think that the party has no message. In truth, it has no one who is capable of formulating a message.

How did it become the stupid party? It did not happen all at once. In 2020 it nominated a presidential candidate who was cognitively impaired. It lied about Biden’s mental faculties and most people do not like being lied to. 

Among the other lies that Democrats have been peddling, is transmania. If all senate Democrats want to die on the hill of transmania, and cannot bring themselves to prohibit men from participating in women’s sports, they are clearly all embracing a lie.

Forcing people to embrace a manifest falsehood insults their intelligence. And most people do not like it when you insult their intelligence.

And then, after Biden, the Democrats nominated, as their presidential candidate and party leader, a subliterate reformed courtesan. Democrat politicians and their media satraps insisted that Kamals was brilliant. Everyone saw clearly that Kamala was an imbecile and that they were being lied to, yet again.

When your byword is diversity you are going to end up with an idiotocracy, not a meritocracy. It is embarrassing to everyone who has an ounce of sense.

And then, recall the Senate committee hearings for Trump’s cabinet appointees. How could you not be struck by the intellectual superiority on display, from each and every nominee? How could you not be struck by the idiocy of the Democratic senators? What do you think of when you think of Maizie Hirono? 

Not all of them were preachy females, as James Carville said, but most Democrats were ranters suffering from an advanced case of emotional incontinence.

After the notably wealthy dolt named Mark Cuban opined that Trump did not surround himself with strong, intelligent women, the world could see that Donald Trump surrounded himself with many strong, intelligent women. 

From Pam Bondi to Tulsi Gabbard to Brooke Rollins to Kristi Noem to Karoline Leavitt to Suzie Wiles… Trump world is not lacking in intelligent women. The Democratic Party, beginning with Kamala herself, is suffering an absence of brain power, male or female.

Wednesday Potpourri

First, you have certainly noticed that anti-Semitism has returned to Columbia University and Barnard College. It has manifested itself in yet another pro-Hamas encampment. As we await the administration response, we  bring you an observation from Shoshana Aufzien:

EVERY SINGLE core faculty member in @BarnardCollege's Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department participated in the encampment. For a department that prides itself on diversity, it sure is ideologically homogenous...

Second, meanwhile the latest news from Javier Milei’s Argentina is good, economically speaking. 

Mario Nawfal reports:

ARGENTINA'S ECONOMY SURGES—MILEI'S POLICIES DRIVE 7.1% GDP GROWTH PROJECTION GDP is expected to grow 7.1% interannually in Q2 2025. After a tough 2024, Milei’s austerity measures and economic freedom reforms are restoring confidence—just in time for the 2025 electoral cycle. Milei’s bold strategy is proving to be the right call.

Third, a series of footnotes on the fireworks between Ukraine and the Trump administration. They come from Conrad Black:

Trump referred to French, British and possibly American peacekeepers in a postwar Ukraine. Zelinski ignored it. 

Trump referred to the deterrence against Russian attack inherent in the existence of an extensive and sophisticated American mining operation in Ukraine. Zelinski ignored it. 

Trump said that once a peace agreement was in place, further security measures could be taken. Zelinski ignored it. Instead, the Ukrainian president repeatedly contradicted his host, slagged off Putin (justly, but unadvisedly), preemptively refused to make any compromises, vowed to "never accept a cease fire," and undermined Trump's proposed strategy to secure an enduring peace. 

Zelenski put on a perplexing spectacle of statecraft incompetence. Yet the media, the Democrats, and the hanging chad remnants of the neocon NeverTrumper contingent have all spun it, in unison, in a manner that is not recognizable to anyone who watched the 50-minute exchange with their own eyes.

Fourth, Steven Rattner is a true believing Democrat. He has worked in Democratic administrations. He also has good contacts on Wall Street.

We pay close attention to the Wall Street opinion of the Trump administration. Rattner does not agree, but we applaud him for reporting it in the New York Times:

Over lunch last week with a friend of mine — a major technology investor who has been an ardent Democrat — the talk quickly turned to politics. Like many businessmen, he refuses to air his views publicly to avoid drawing fire. In private, he’s more forthcoming.

“I’m willing to sacrifice small things for larger gains,” he told me, referring to President Trump. “I’m a fan of the ideas; I’m not always a fan of the execution.” For him, the “macro trumps the micro.”

The “macro” was a reference to the main factor that drove centrist businessmen toward Mr. Trump in 2024: a belief that both the spending and the regulatory tilt of the Biden administration were out of control. And they resented how Joe Biden kept bashing big companies. This animus was so intense that even the strong economic gains of the past four years couldn’t get most of them to back Kamala Harris.

While very few businessmen have been publicly praising the president and his actions, in private, many of them voice support for him. I thought the chaos of the past month — the unqualified cabinet appointments, the cozying up to Russia, and perhaps most of all, the tariffs — might cause regret in the business community. I’ve certainly seen concerns.

It wasn’t just that this group resented Mr. Biden’s intrusive regulatory policies. They didn’t like diversity, equity and inclusion policies either — or anything they derisively described to me as “woke stuff.” Now executives and bankers alike (my circles tilt a bit toward Wall Street) are celebrating early signs of a reversal.

The business community is also heartened by the number of corporate executives who have been brought into the administration, in stark contrast to the Biden team, which was almost bereft of such individuals. That includes Mr. Musk, one of the most successful entrepreneurs in history (although his personal qualities, like Mr. Trump’s, are often considered distasteful). Of course, for some, like the crypto crowd, there’s a lot of money at stake.

To be clear, many of these businessmen’s move to Mr. Trump is more out of unhappiness with his predecessor than enthusiasm for him. A number reluctantly chose him after championing other candidates, such as Nikki Haley, and Mr. Trump’s continued flood of appalling actions, like his abrupt firing of several top military officers or embrace of Vladimir Putin of Russia, may well undermine approval of the administration in the business community. Among some prominent chief executives, it already has.

Fifth, on the transmania front, Senate Democrats just shot down a bill-- by refusing to break a filibuster-- that would have protected women’s sports, by excluding males from competition.

Libs of TikTok report:

Giant male in a MA school injured 3 girls during a girls basketball match. They ended the game early before he can hurt more girls and had to forfeit the game due to injuries. Every single Democrat Senator just voted against keeping men out of women’s sports. Democrats don’t care about your daughters’ safety.

True enough, this is madness. The last recourse will be for girls to boycott these events… until adults develop a semblance of sanity.

Sixth, to add a little perspective to the mix, our analysis of the situation in the Middle East would not be complete unless we noted that not a single signatory of the Abraham Accords has withdrawn their deal with Israel.

To take it a step further, the Abraham Accords Institute offers this commentary:

Despite regional tensions, Abraham Accords ties remain strong.

The Abraham Accords Peace Institute’s analysis shows that in 2024, economic relations and trade continued to grow between Israel and all of its peace partners in the Arab world.

• Trade between Israel and the UAE reached $3.24 billion in 2024, an increase of 10% from 2023.

• Trade between Israel and Bahrain reached $108.5 million in 2024, an increase of 843% from 2023.

• Trade between Israel and Morocco reached $109.9 million in 2024, an increase of 40% from 2023.

• Trade between Israel and Egypt reached $579 million in 2024, an increase of 31% from 2023.

• Trade between Israel and Jordan reached $477.6 million in 2024, an increase of 7% from 2023.

Now is the time to deepen and expand the Abraham Accords, and shape a future of peace, prosperity and partnership for the entire region.

Why Do Women Talk So Much?

Back in the day, several decades ago, when feminism was insinuating its way into the American mind, the word went out. Women needed to advance their careers, even if this meant that they would be spending less time with their progeny.

The formula du jour asserted that quality time, not quantity time mattered the most.

And then, along came a University of Chicago physician, by name of Dana Suskind, who wrote a book in 2015 explaining what she called the 30,000,000 word rule. 

Suskind’s research showed that a child’s cognitive development depended in some part on the number of works he heard, especially spoken words that were directed at him. Ideally, that meant 30,000,000 words through age three. Children who heard significantly fewer words ended up cognitively limited.

Development does not take place in a vacuum. It requires stimulation from spoken words. But it does not require the child to be able to understand the words being spoken. Presumably, this does not include the radio or television. It requires human beings talking to infants and babies.

If Suskind is correct-- we have no reason to think she is not-- some recent research becomes more cogent. The research shows that women tend to talk more than men, that they tend to utter far more spoken words than men do.

Perhaps this is a maternal instinct, not limited to dealings with babies, but cultivated within the age range when women are likely to have children or grandchildren.

David Nield reports for Science Alert:

The study found that between the ages of 25 and 64, early to middle adulthood, women average 3,275 more words per day than men – or 20 more talking minutes. Across the other age ranges, the figures were more or less the same.

For instance, in early and middle adulthood, women were found to say between 1,500 and 3,600 more words per day compared to men. That's quite a large spectrum, with the bottom range representing just 10 minutes or so of normal-paced talking and the upper range representing 23 minutes. 

Now, we have a new theory. Women talk more than men because they are exercising a maternal instinct. The more they talk the more their small children will have normal cognitive development.

Fireworks in the Oval Office

By now you know most of the facts. The Ukrainian president was supposed to sign a deal to share the nation’s rare earth minerals with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in Kiev. 

When the Trump administration sent Bessent to Kiev, the Ukrainians refused to sign. And treated him badly.

Then, the Ukrainians were going to sign the deal in Munich with Marco Rubio and JD Vance. Again, they did not do so, but insisted on having a grand  signing ceremony at the White House. Before the blow-up between Zelensky and Trump, all was in order to facilitate the signing.

It did not happen.

And yet, consider this. Before the fateful meeting with President Trump, President Zelensky met with a group of Democrat politicians. 

The group included:

… Anthony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, Susan Rice, and Alexander Vindman. [They]  advised Zelensky to reject Trump’s deal in violation of the Logan Act.

The Logan Act prohibits private citizens to conduct foreign policy. The important point here is that Zelensky was primed to reject the deal with Trump, doubtless because the Democrats had told him that he could get a better deal, one that contained security guarantees.

Everyone knows that including the United States in a rare earth minerals deal would have provided something like security guarantees. Asking for more, and doing so in public was clearly a deal breaker.. It would have scuttled the deal, and thus depriving Donald Trump of a victory.

Zelensky allowed himself to be manipulated by leftist politicians who did not really care about Ukraine.

Mollie Hemingway offered a commentary about the performance:

 I think their goal was to have a wonderful performance by Zelensky, an angry Trump appearing to scuttle the deal, and the support of the neocon portion of the GOP to start applying pressure on Trump to have US Troop commitments as part of the "security guarantee." It was a set-up, in Susan Rice's interesting choice of words. Instead, Zelensky had one of the worst stage performances of his acting career, and Trump was statesmanlike (against all odds) throughout. Zelensky followed Team Obama's advice to be hostile to a tee, but it didn't land how they thought it would. Surprisingly, one of the most important aspects of it not working out might have been Lindsay Graham's reaction. Had he and other neocons thought Zelensky was being reasonable, Trump would be having to fight (even moreso) the neocon portion of the GOP in addition to Team Obama's dirty tricks. Even the "conservative" neocon pundits on TV last night were admitting Zelensky had royally messed up. 

Ian Miles Cheong describes the lost deal.

Trump was pursuing a policy of strategic ambiguity with the Ukraine minerals deal. There wouldn’t be a concrete security guarantee but Russia would know better than to attack de facto American resources in Ukraine. It really was that simple. It would’ve ended the war. Russia would’ve been able to agree to it, keep the territory they’ve already fought and bled for, and save face.

Victor Davis Hanson offers a footnote:

Zelensky could have accepted a draft peace deal signed in the first month of the war, the Istanbul Accords, under which Ukraine would have kept all of its territory in exchange for neutrality. A deal now will likely be modeled on Istanbul but require Ukraine to recognize realities on the ground (ie loss of territory). Acknowledging that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have died only to get a worse deal may be too bitter a pill for Zelensky to swallow, now or ever. 

In the matter of public opinion, the anti-Trump forces have seized the moment to insist that Trump made a grievous mistake, and that he was a Russian stooge.

The public did not see it quite that way:

More people now think the U.S. is helping Ukraine too much—up from 7% to 41%. 

On top of that, trust in Zelensky fell from 72% to under 48%

Batya Ungar-Sargon elaborates:

62% of Americans found Zelensky's behavior offensive. Trump is an extremely unifying president if you tune out the noise coming from the elite punditry/foreign policy/expert caste. The American people are done with the mass fleecing of the post war international order.

As a coda, this comes from John Kass, a description of Zelensky:

He boasted, he insulted, he gestured like a stupid, pushy, peasant in a bazaar haggling over the price of vegetables, like a greedy turnip merchant. And he got his ass kicked out of the White House."

Zelensky was offended at the notion of striking a cease fire deal with Moscow. He believed that we could not count on Putin to keep his word.

And yet, on two occasions leading up to the Oval Office blow up, Zelensky himself had gone back on his word to sign the deal. Now, he has aligned himself with his European allies, the better to impose a deal on the American president.

Obviously, this is not going to work. NATO depends very largely on American money and American arms. The assembled European leaders will not be able to survive without America. They know it and they are trying to take charge of the situation. Good luck with that.