Wednesday Potpourri

First, as the race for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination begins, among the contenders is one Tulsi Gabbard. Considering that Mark Cuban managed to make a fool of himself by declaring that Donald Trump does not relate to strong, intelligent women, one cannot help but relish the irony in his naming Gabbard to be the Director of National Intelligence.

And then there was Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz-- who is evidently not a strong, intelligent woman-- declared that Gabbard was a “Russian asset.”

But then, surprisingly, Sen. Bernie Sanders replied to the effect that she Debbie should stifle herself.

In his words:

Tulsi Gabbard has put her life on the line to defend this country. People can disagree on issues but it is outrageous for anyone to suggest that Tulsi is a foreign asset. 

Second, speaking of cabinet member qualification, Liz MacDonald recites the qualifications of Biden’s cabinet secretaries. It is a rather sad bunch indeed:

Xavier Becerra, HHS - not a doctor, he’s a lawyer, ex-attorney general of California 

Jared Bernstein, Chair of Council of Economic Advisors - not an economist, Bachelor’s degree in music, masters in sociology. 

Pete Buttigieg, Transportation Secretary - no transportation background, Mayor of Indiana, “pothole Pete” 

Mayorkas, DHS Secretary - no security background, lawyer, Asst U.S. attorney, Obama transition team. 

Jennifer Granholm, Energy Secy - no energy background, Michigan Governor. 

Gina Raimondo, Commerce Secretary - No trade background. 

Gov of Rhode Island Deb Haaland, Interior Secy - New Mexico Congressman And just for kicks…

Bill Nye, the environmentalist “Science Guy” — no background in environmentalism or science, he’s a mechanical engineer and comedy writer.

Third, it’s bad enough that Joe Biden was trying to assert a moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas. He was also trying to manage the IDF. It was perfidy at the highest level. Let’s not keep saying that Biden was a friend of Israel.

Marina Medvin reports:

Netanyahu just revealed how Biden was trying to keep Israel from retrieving the hostages from Rafah, including American hostages. 

“Biden called me before entering Rafah and said to me: Prime Minister Netanyahu - you will be left alone!” 

“I answered him, ‘then we will do it alone!’” 

“Two days later, Blinken was sent to threaten me — ‘You will not receive any armaments.’” 

“I answered him, ‘We will fight with our hands and claws. We will not compromise on Rafah.’” 

“The Americans estimated that 20,000 people would be killed in Rafah. It turned out to be an absolute lie.” 

Palestinians were holding many hostages in Rafah, including American hostages. The leader of Hamas was also hiding out in Rafah.

Fourth, we recall the pogrom mounted in Amsterdam by anti-Semites. And we were wondering where the anti-Semites got the idea that they could do it and get away with it. Apparently, they read the city’s mayor correctly.

Dutch News reports:

Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema has said she would not again use the word “pogrom” when talking about the violence surrounding the Ajax-Maccabi Tel Aviv football match earlier this month, saying the word was now being used as propaganda.

Halsema also told current affairs show Nieuwsuur on Sunday evening that she should have mentioned the trouble caused by Maccabi supporters before and after the Europa League game in the Dutch capital. It emerged later than 10 Maccabi fans were arrested on the evening of the match and several more are included on a police “wanted” list.

“What I wanted to emphasise was the sadness and fear experienced by Jewish Amsterdammers,” she said. “But I have to say that in the following days, I saw how the word pogrom became politicised, to the level of propaganda.

“The Israeli government spoke of a ‘Palestinian pogrom on the streets of Amsterdam’ and in The Hague the words were used to discriminate against Moroccan Amsterdammers, Muslims. That is not what I meant or what I wanted.”

As for which groups are defending Amsterdam’s Jews, the answer is conservative Christians:

And ahead of last week’s parliamentary debate on the violence, Israel’s minister for the diaspora Amichai Chikli sent a 27-page special report to The Hague with its own analysis of the situation to politicians.

The report, which purported to outline links between Dutch organisations and Hamas, was used by the fundamentalist Christian SGP to draw up a motion stating that all Dutch organisations considered to be pro-Hamas by Israel should be put on a terrorism sanctions list.

The Telegraaf newspaper quoted Chikli as saying that “the Dutch authorities should take legal and economic measures against the criminals and as Geert Wilders suggests, deport those involved”.

The mayor declared that they were merely dealing with individuals who had behaved badly.

Now you know the attitude that sustains anti-Semitism.

Fifth, as for the feminization of the publishing world, it is proceeding apace. 

The following is from Helen Andrews:

University faculties went from being 32% female in 1987 to over 50% female in 2020...The majority of New York Times employees are female. The publishing industry is 77% female...coincided with a drastic cultural shift in the direction of feminine values.

Could it be that the results of the most recent election represented a repudiation of said feminization?

Sixth, Hitler lives. Or, at least, his dream of ridding the world of Jews lives on. Nowadays it’s called the Palestinian cause. 

According to Gerfried Ambrosch the current anti-Israeli mania was produced by melding of Nazi ideology with traditional Muslim attitudes towards Jews. From his Quillette article:

Anti-Israel activists in Germany who call on the country to “free Palestine from German guilt” not only downplay our Holocaust responsibility but also ignore the significant role that German antisemites played in shaping anti-Zionism in the Middle East. Their influence reflects a deep-rooted and enduring anti-Zionist strain within German antisemitism that predates even the rise of Nazism.

However, as historian Matthias Küntzel points out, while Islam traditionally treated Jews “with contempt or condescending toleration,” imported antisemitic conspiracy theories escalated this animosity by vilifying Jews as agents of diabolical evil.

Seventh, on a more positive note, it is good to be polite. Emma Jacobs writes in the Financial Times that rudeness is bad for business:

… rude­ness can demo­tiv­ate col­leagues and lead to a dys­func­tional work­place. Research in the Applied Psy­cho­logy Journal found rude­ness dimin­ished indi­vidu­als’ per­form­ance and their abil­ity to work in a team, which “may even have life-threat­en­ing con­sequences”.

Eighth, a few words from Peachy Keenan, about the august body called the American Academy of Pediatrics. You may know that this body has supported transmania transitions:

Of all the sulphuric, corrupt, evil institutions I want to see turned to ash, the one I most long to see getting leveled is the AAP. The American Academy of Pediatrics is the reason my doctor felt empowered to make me leave the exam room so she could ask my devout Catholic 16 yo son if he "felt comfortable with his gender," and then give him a lecture on using condoms. 

The AAP is the organization that twisted medicine and science to give cover to gender orcs seeking to ragdoll vulnerable young children for their dastardly political purposes. They gave the OK to trans surgeries. Chemical castrations. "Puberty blockers" (no such thing).

They're the ones who give new parents the option in the labor and delivery room to check "no gender" on their baby's intake form. They have lost the thread. Parents and children are not patients to them anymore: they are just dumb cannon fodder for their Quixotic political schemes. Dismantle, defund, and destroy it. Bring real medicine back to families. We need it!

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Cry-Bullies

Famed British essayist Julie Burchill is especially proud that she invented the term-- cry-bully. If I had invented it, I would be proud too.

How do you get to be a cry-bully? You begin with emotional incontinence, as you choose to advertise your emotions, preferably as a sign of superior spiritual and mental health. 

And then,you will insist that your emotional incontinence is a constructive contribution to the ambient conversation. At times, not just constructive, but definitive. 

After all, if you feel it that deeply, it must be the truth. Don’t we believe, as an article of our new secular faith, that an individual who believes that he is really a she is really a she?

Rather than argue the point or to present a rational argument, the cry-bully harasses and abuses other people, forcing them to believe what he wants them to believe.

Deliberative democracy does not support cry-bullies.

Now, Burchill suggests that people become cry-bullies when reality thwarts their expectations. They were sure that a certain candidate could not win an election and then, when he won, they went fully cry-bully and tried to ensure that he could not govern. All in the name of democracy.

Burchill wrote:

But just as fame is a mask that eats the face, emotional incontinence is a poison that eats the brain. It’s possible that these people are suffering from an actual thing called ‘disconfirmed expectancy’, a type of cognitive dissonance produced when new information directly contradicts an individual’s existing beliefs. This causes disciples to double down on the trounced worldview, much as followers of apocalyptic religious cults, disappointed when the aliens fail to land, say it’s going to happen next year instead.

One must also note that bullying is sadistic. It feels like it came to us from the world of therapy. People feel permitted to diminish and demean someone for failing to have the right opinions or even the right feelings because they think that it represents a higher stage of consciousness. 

Cry-bullying is not designed to persuade, but to force an opinion on someone else. In a strange sense the tactic seems indigenous to people who define themselves as victims. 

‘This is the age of the cry-bully, a hideous hybrid of victim and victor, weeper and walloper.

You cannot earn your way, so you explain it away by saying that you have been subjected to abuse and prejudice. Surely, it is better than taking personal responsibility.

Thus, the world owes you a living. It owes you payment to make you stop the whining and leave the rest of us alone. It is not excessive to call it moral extortion.

Think of it this way. When you are emotionally incontinent you lose face. In the most literal sense of the term. When your face is contorted to express an emotion it becomes less recognizable and you become less identifiable. 

In normal circumstances anyone who witnesses your dereliction, your failure to exercise the minimum of self-control, will immediately attempt to cover your face, to cover for you.

If you cannot save face someone will surely try to take up the slack.

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Speaking Liberalese

I trust Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh on this. I am confident that he hangs out with more liberals than I do. So, when he suggests that liberals have their own special language, I can only assent. He calls it liberalese. Do you speak it?

If Ganesh is right, it explains why liberal Democrats failed so conspicuously to communicate with the American people. It also tells us that the American left has become a cult, with its own special passwords. If you speak the language, presumably you belong. But you also exclude all of those who are not fluent in liberalese. 

I am even more intrigued by Ganesh’s analysis when he links it all to therapy. The cult followers of the American left seem to have seen the same therapist. They speak the same psychobabble, and they use the proper therapeutic terminology to signify that they have survived the same initiation ritual, and are now fully fledged members of the cult.

The new language is chock full of therapy jargon:

What char­ac­ter­ises the dia­lect that we might call Lib­eralese? First, psy­cho­thera­peutic jar­gon. The spray­ing around of such con­cepts as inten­tion­al­ity is an attempt to give things a sci­entific and even med­ical ven­eer by people who mostly stud­ied com­par­at­ive lit­er­at­ure. Second, an unbe­com­ing obses­sion with tran­si­ent pop cul­ture. Ref­er­ences to the “Bey­hive” and to “Brat sum­mer” are lost on much more of the pop­u­la­tion than lib­er­als think.

For the record, and considering that I spent more than a few years in a Freudian cult that has its own special language, my own experience makes this perfectly plausible.

One might even take it a step further and remark that the screaming ninnies who refuse to let you forget how much they hate the Donald are following instructions that their therapists gave them. Express your feelings, openly, honestly and shamelessly.

Then you can go off your meds.

As Ganesh points out, it is not just vocabulary. When Joe Biden took over the White House a new wave of liberals moved to Washington. They had their own mannerisms, their own dress codes, and of course their own language.

This tells us, rather vividly, that this group does not belong to the same nation as its opponents. For all the ranting about the Trump cult, these liberals are even more cult-like than the more Trumpian or Republican faction. 

As for the new liberal language, Ganesh describes it thusly:

Well, you were like­lier to hear someone vow to be “inten­tional”. Or use the phrase “redemp­tion arc”. Or accuse a third per­son of hav­ing “main char­ac­ter syn­drome”. Or of doing something “per­form­at­ive”. You were like­lier to hear “toxic” and “cos­play” and “nar­ciss­ism” and — more on this in a bit — “gas­light­ing”. Your date was like­lier to say, “I’m an empath”.

I defy anyone to explain what a “redemption arc” is? As for empaths, I have long since opined on the sadistic empaths among us. 

In truth, you do not need to know what any of this means. The terms are empty signifiers, roughly equivalent to passwords. How many of those who toss around the term performative have even heard of J. L. Austin.

Anyway, after four years of Biden, this liberalese has infested the culture. We see it on television ads and even in football games. I will take his word on that one.

Again, none of it means anything. Those who do not belong understand that the special liberal language is designed to exclude them. It all explains the Democratic Party failures during the last election.

In fairness, Ganesh continues, Kamala herself did not run around using this language. And she did not make diversity a pillar of her new policies. 

And yet, it does not matter. Her proxies spoke perfect liberalese and, as for diversity, she was the ultimate diversity candidate. She did not have to say it. She was it.

It was ultimately a pathway to the right.

Mean­while, the right is out there, in people’s ears, on their screens and all too easy to under­stand.

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Requiem for the Democratic Party

The great minds of the American left are applying themselves to their new challenge. Writing a Requiem for the Democratic Party.

Mozart they are not. However intelligent they are, they are having considerable difficulty explaining how and why the nation rejected their superior wisdom and brilliant thought. 

Thomas Frank, known from his musing about what happened to Kansas, suggests that the problem is that the Democratic Party because an elitist enterprise filled with scolds. As he and many other Democrats pointed out, the party lost touch with the working class. And also with the middle class. It was so self-important that it imagined that it could say anything and get away with it. 

The Democratic Party became the province of a guardian class of philosopher kings, inhabiting the academy and the media, and lately even corporate America, who believed that their superior intellect made them worthy of being in charge and telling everyone what to think. 

It was bad enough that the academy was infested with groupthink. It became far worse when the corporate world decided to embrace DEI, thus discriminating actively against white males. At that point, academic theories became practical prejudice. 

The incredible irony of choosing a certifiable imbecile as a leader for a party of philosopher kings  seems to have escaped these great thinkers. The otherwise intelligent David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, declared that Kamala had an “appealing intelligence.” 

In truth, the more America saw of Kamala’s intelligence, the more they chose to vote for Trump. A guardian class that had been therapied to within an inch of its sanity could not muster enough rational thought to figure out how to compete against Donald Trump. They just assumed that name calling would win the day.

The indignity of it all. A dimwitted champion of the philosopher kings. A sensible soul would have concluded that Kamala was trying out for a spot on The View.

In truth there was nothing appealing about Kamala’s serial failures to speak coherently, without using a teleprompter. She was the embodiment of a DEI hire, at a moment when the nation had had its fill of DEI. 

All the nation needed was a few word salads from Kamala, and they recognized that they were being defrauded, that the guardian class was led by a fool. It was like the moment when Dorothy tears back the curtain and we discover the true identity of the wizard of Oz-- not a wizard and not Dr. Oz.

So, Democrats have become self-important scolds. They not only look down on their constituents. They assume that the poor pathetic souls who vote for them will accept just about anything as true just because they have said it. They imagine that their voters will not apply critical judgment to the party line. Especially if the alternative is Hitler.

Do you grasp how insulting it is to imagine that the nation will accept, as fact, without critical judgment, that Trump is Hitler?

The extent of it is breathtaking.  Simon van Zuylen-Wood offered a litany of falsehoods that the Democrats expected their voters to accept unthinkingly. He wrote in New York Magazine:

A partial catalogue of progressive denialism, listed in no particular order: that alienating progressive positions or rhetoric were confined to college campuses; that the externalities of pandemic shutdowns, such as grade-school learning loss, were overblown; that the rapid adoption of new gender orthodoxies, especially in settings involving children, was not a popular concern; that the “defund the police” movement would be embraced by communities of color; that inflation was overstated; that the pandemic crime wave was exaggerated; that concerns over urban disorder represented a moral panic; that Latinos would welcome loosened border restrictions. 

So, who are you going to believe, your philosopher kings or your own eyes? And besides, the defamation of Donald Trump eventually lost its potency. If you had nothing to offer beyond trash talk and illusions, why would anyone want to vote for you? Why would they think that you cared about the nation or even about them?

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Saturday Miscellany

First, remember Laura Helmuth, editor-in-chief of the previously august journal, Scientific American. As we reported here, she managed to make some appalling and vulgar remarks about the election results last week.

“Solidarity to everybody whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high-school classmates are celebrating early results because f–k them to the moon and back,” she wrote in one post on the social media platform Bluesky on Nov. 5.

In another post, Helmuth wrote, “I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is full of f–king fascists.”

“Every four years I remember why I left Indiana (where I grew up) and remember why I respect the people who stayed and are trying to make it less racist and sexist. The moral arc of the universe isn’t going to bend itself,” she also wrote on election night.

When I first reported the story I was wondering why she still has her job. Well, the moral arc of the universe has responded and has forced Helmuth to resign her position.

Good news for Scientific American.

Second, for those who are questioning Pete Hegseth’s qualifications to lead the Pentagon-- not entirely unreasonable, as it happens-- we recall the qualifications of a senior Obama and Biden official, one Wendy Sherman. She was one architect of the Iran nuclear deal. Before that, she helped North Korea gain access to nuclear weapons:

Wendy Sherman, one of Obama’s primary negotiators for the Iran Deal and deputy Secretary of State, had a master’s degree in social work. No foreign policy background whatsoever. She was bad at her job—abysmal, actually. I don’t want to hear the left’s complaints about Pete Hegseth, who, in contrast, is eminently qualified for the position of SecDef.

Third, what will Donald Trump do to combat the anti-Semitism that the Biden administration has allowed to fester in American universities.

Well, here is Trump, addressing the issue:

My first week back in the Oval Office, my administration will inform every college president that, if you do not end antisemitic propaganda, they will lose their accreditation and federal taxpayer support.

Fourth, an incidental remark by a German citizen, namely Ole Lehmann:

I'm German. 16 years ago, the EU and US economies were neck and neck. Today, the US economy is 50% larger than the entire EU combined. 

One suspects that the culprits here are mass migration and environmental regulation.

Fifth, in the aftermath of the election, ratings on CNN and MSNBC have cratered. The New York Times reports:

MSNBC has averaged 550,000 viewers since Election Day, a 39 percent decline compared with the network’s average in October. In prime time, MSNBC’s audience has declined 53 percent, according to the Nielsen data.

CNN, which has struggled with ratings for months, has also had falling viewership since the election. The cable news network has averaged 413,000 viewers since last Wednesday, a 22 percent decline from its October averages. In prime time, its viewership declines stand at 43 percent, Nielsen said.

Where did all the viewers go? Apparently, they went to Fox News:

The opposite has happened at Fox News, MSNBC’s conservative rival. Fox’s audience in prime time has grown 21 percent since last Wednesday, with an average of 3.3 million viewers, according to Nielsen. Its total day audience has jumped 38 percent.

Sixth, meanwhile, on the China front, President Biden is meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Peru. It is worth noting that China is building a major port facility in that nation, the better to enhance trade between South America and China. Also, that the port will be fully automated, making it far more efficient than the American ports whose union workers refuse to allow more automation.

According to David Goldman, a sane and sensible source for these matters, China is building trade relations with the global South.

Here is what Goldman said at the National Conservatism Conference on July 8:

In 1979 China took a nation of farmers and turned them into industrial workers, and multiplied GDP per capita 30 times. 

Now it plans to turn a nation of factory workers into a nation of engineers — think of South Korea. That’s a messy and costly transition. But China is doing it.

In 2020 I wrote of China’s plan to Sino-form the Global South. It knows a lot about getting people who make $3 a day to make $10 or $20 a day….

China’s population has been in decline, but its highly educated population is growing:

Ten and a half million university graduates, up 60% in 10 years, 2X our total – and a third are engineers. That’s more engineering graduates than the rest of the world combined. 

The Deng Xiaoping economic reforms were a rousing success, surely among the most successful reforms in human history.

We should give credit to capitalism, which was the engine that produced the reforms. But we are obliged to point out that China did it without the benefit of liberal democracy. Hopes for democratic liberalization died in Tiananmen Square in June of 1989.

One understands that the party line around here is that China will naturally fail because it does not have democratic elections and free expression. We are perhaps a bit overconfident about how well we will be able to compete against the Middle Kingdom.

We can’t produce enough artillery shells to supply Ukraine. China can make as many ship-killer missiles as it wants. That’s the biggest change in relative firepower since muskets replaced crossbows. A US destroyer can carry 100 missile interceptors. There’s no limit to how many missiles China can launch from the mainland. We talk about prioritizing China: With what?

We’re just rearranging the deck guns on the Titanic.

China has 3 million 5G base stations. We have 100,000. China dominates key industries—telecom infrastructure, EVs, solar power, drones, steel and shipbuilding — and it’s aiming at semiconductors. Biden’s Treasury Secretary goes to China and says, “Please, you’ve got too much industrial capacity, don’t export so much!” What about OUR capacity?

He continues:

The other big thing China got right is the transformation of the Global South. It doubled exports to the Global South since Covid – now exports more to the Global South than to all developed markets. Assimilates billions of people into its economic sphere. It did this with 200 soldiers deployed outside China versus our 230,000. 

We spent $7 trillion on forever wars. China spent $1 trillion on Belt and Road Initiative investments. Who got more influence?

Seventh, news from dystopia. That is, news from the Labour Party’s war against free expression in Once-Great Britain.

From Eyal Yacoby:

DISGUSTING: A British man wrote on social media that he doesn’t want to see Palestinian flags all over the UK. The police then showed up to his house at 4am to arrest him. You can take over the streets of the UK, chant in support of terrorism, but be arrested if you oppose it.

Prof. Norman Fenton also provides some information:

So the police allow thugs to disrupt the whole of Central London and attack Jewish owned buildings but if you tweet that you don’t like seeing Palestinian flags on the streets then you get arrested at home in the middle of the night.

Eighth, one Sheralynn Ifill called Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth a white supremacist. She obviously has a very limited vocabulary and precious few IQ points.

Now, the good news. 

Former Jill Biden Press Secretary Michael LaRosa responded:

This shit has to stop. Opposing DEI initiatives does not make you a white supremacist. Conversations and demonization of this kind are a big reason we got our asses kicked….

Voices like this on the left are turning the Democratic Party into a joke. … Name calling, vilifying and defaming nominees you oppose, even if you have good reason to oppose them, represents everything the Democratic Party should be running away from.

Well said, worthy of attention.

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How to Corrupt Science

You would think that science is the one place we can overcome the tendency to divide the world into different sexes. You would imagine that a scientific fact is a scientific fact, regardless of whether the scientist is a man or a woman.

Of course, we are not dealing with particle physics or string theory here. We are dealing with what is gingerly called social or psychological science. 

William Briggs was drawn to consider the issue when he read a Twitter comment, by one Thanatos Savehn (via Maggie’s Farm):

I’ve noted many Science articles claiming that empathy is surely the cure for our ills, so I looked into it. I wonder if a significance test might shed some light on whether there’s an association between the frequency of girlboss scientists and the frequency of empathy papers?

So, empathy is a buzzword, denoting a female scientist. As I have noted in these pages, a pregnant woman’s empathy circuits are enhanced, thus preparing her for caring for an infant. 

Briggs discovered that the word has become ubiquitous over the past several years, corresponding to the increased number of female scientists. It shows how science is being feminized. 

Another word that signals the presence of a feminine sensibility is: feelings. How many men do you know who tell you that they want to share feelings or that they care about how you really feel? Now, the more women become scientists, the more their so-called scientific studies emphasize the importance of feelings.

Needless to say, the opposite of feelings is fact, not to mention rationality. The more you insist that human beings are not rational animals, but are emotional creatures who are defined by their feelings, the closer you are to a feminine mindset.

And then there are certain woke phrases, phrases that have crept into science and that one hopes will soon creep out of science.

Among them, “sex assigned at birth,” “pregnant men” and “chestfeeding.”

Of course, this is a sign of corruption. It tells us that objectivity is being compromised in favor of ideology. It attempts to change reality by forcing enough people to define it differently. 

And then there is another favorite buzzword: empower. You hear it constantly, from men and women, from the woke and the not-so-woke.

It’s no longer about doing science or even uncovering the secrets of the universe. It’s about normalizing a certain ideology. Now that the electorate has repudiated said ideology, we will soon see whether science follows suit.

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