She Is Bottling Up Her Emotions; or Is She?

It’s difficult to imagine that New York Magazine columnist, Ask Polly, can get any more stupid, but here she is, this week, outdoing herself. She is advising a woman who is clearly in pain. What is Polly’s advice: become an emotional basket case. Don’t just be an emotional basket case: show the world that you are totally unhinged. Rant, rave, yell, scream, abuse, confront… tell everyone what a complete mess you are. Tell them that you can’t hold it together… and lo and behold, Polly suggests you will free yourself from repression and walk bravely into the light of day. In truth, this road leads straight into a ditch.

In short, Polly reaches down into the depths of her ignorance and decides that the woman in question is suffering because she is bottling up her emotions. The letter writer seems to have alienated just about everyone around her… from which we can easily conclude that she has let them all know how miserable and dysfunctional she is. Thus, they have walked away from her, not because she is charming and functioning, but because she is wearing her emotions on her sleeve. Polly does not see it. As always, that does not deter her.

In truth Polly is advising this woman to have a nervous breakdown. The result will almost surely be commitment to a psychiatric institution, a rehab facility. And some serious medication. Polly does not think about this because Polly does not know how to think.

As for whether I am exaggerating her response, here are some excerpts, without even sharing the letter:

But for you to tell the truth about how angry you are, you’re going to need to accept that you have things to say that fly in the face of your fun, upbeat-seeming, perfectionist former self. That girl is gone. She might reappear in some other form in the future, but if you want to feel your feelings and be an authentic person in the world moving forward, you’re going to have to reckon with just how disappointed you are in the life you’ve created for yourself and the people you’ve pulled close and the successful, charming, exhausting DIY strategies that landed you here. You were raised by withholding ghosts who don’t want to face themselves or address what’s real. You were raised among smaller ghosts who mimicked their parents and wound up with drinking problems (and many other maladies, I’m sure). And now you have a choice. You can become a contemptuous, withholding ghost who never has sex with her husband and never tells her friends or co-workers the whole truth, or become something new: a ragged, ineffectual, melting woman who tells everyone everything.

That’s right: tell everyone everything. Forget about your self-respect. Forget about your dignity. Let it all hang out. In the normal course of human events, this tactic is self-defeating and self-destructive. If  the letter writer is suffering from an absence of human connections, Polly has told her how to have fewer human connections.

Polly continues:

If you’re going to save yourself, you need to start melting out in the open. Right now you are tidying. Stop it. This is no time to seem fine. This is no time to be good. This is no time to play along with our culture of weak substitutes and tenuous connections and fake friendships and imaginary alliances and never-ending, around-the-clock bullshit.

She advises the woman to become “an authentic raging, sobbing mess.” Seriously? How better to get yourself committed than to follow this advice:

This is a moment to be an authentic raging, sobbing mess. This is a moment to say to someone, anyone, “I am falling apart. I need you.” This is a moment to show up, in all of your wretchedness and fear, and ask — no, actually, demand — that your brand-new spouse very quickly learn to show up, too. He will express disappointment, too, of course: My brand-new wife is mean and sad and won’t fuck me. Prepare to hear that. When he begins to peel off the layers of how he feels, the top layers will be gross and you’ll hate him even more. Be patient with that part, knowing that there’s something underneath that you want.

As for the letter itself, I will now offer some excerpts. Because it is uncommonly long and detailed. This does not make it uninteresting, but here are some of its highlights. As it happened, this woman lost her brother, presumably to alcohol, while he was imprisoned and at roughly the same time that she was getting married. Evidently, she was facing a death and a birth at the same time… which confused her.

My husband and I were married five months ago. A lot of my family couldn’t make it to the wedding, most notably my older brother, who reported to county jail on the morning before we walked down the aisle. When I finally did get to see my brother, just after Thanksgiving, it was at his funeral. He died of alcoholism a few days before his birthday. The proximity of these two events — our marriage and the death of my closest sibling — has had the effect of blurring the lines between grief and the “marital adjustment period,” after a year of family drama and mind-numbing, reluctant wedding planning.

Apparently, she is the only functioning member of her family, so everything fell on her shoulders:

My parents are scatterbrained, secular baby-boomers with few family traditions and no aptitude for modern technology, and my other siblings are distant and self-absorbed, so after planning the bulk of our wedding, it was then up to me to plan my brother’s viewing and memorial service, write his obituary, field questions from friends and family, make a photo board, and buy cheese platters at Costco. I had to remind my husband that we needed a cat-sitter while we were both out of state for the funeral. Meanwhile, a friend asked if I could still perform in a show we had booked that weekend, and my father convinced me to scoop out some of my brother’s ashes into an old makeup bottle for his estranged alcoholic girlfriend. I became bitter and hopeless in the face of other people’s incompetence, selfishness, and inability to grasp the weight and significance life events such as marriage or death.

Do you really believe that no one noticed that she was bitter and angry at everyone else’s incompetence? Polly does, but Polly’s mind has been occupied by psychobabble.

The letter writer’s problem is clear: no one has reached out to her. No one has offered to help. The reason might be that she is so overwhelmed by emotion and is showing herself thusly that they are avoiding her:

No one in my family checked in to distract or comfort me, and friends I saw at work couldn’t be convinced to visit me at home where I might be safe to shed a tear on their shoulder without embarrassment. All I wanted was someone who would give me permission to be real with them without having to travel to a church or after-hours support group in the middle of winter, but the thought of asking for these things felt selfish and entitled. The fact that no one would take it upon themselves to extend an unsolicited caring gesture of friendship or familial concern left me simultaneously disillusioned and disgusted with myself for wallowing in self-pity. By conventional standards, one would consider me a popular person — a former model and sometime performer with flattering Google results and a successful career — but now I was a cliché whose entourage turned out to be comprised of vapid, indifferent acquaintances. After a few weeks, I felt confident enough to host a New Year’s Eve party, and that night I had to ask my husband kindly not to finish the fourth drink that he was spilling all over the floor, reminding him how my brother died.

Friends and family knew that if they saw her alone she would implode. Thus, they avoided her. If you care, it all means that she feels sorry for herself. She feels sorry that her brother died and ruined her wedding and her marriage. She feels bad and put upon that she must do everything. The solution is for her to get over herself, certainly not for her to show the world that she is emotionally overwrought.

Since Polly was babbling about how this woman is bottling up her emotions, you can feel confident that the woman did succeed in expressing her feelings. About what, you might ask? Why about her husband’s failure to cook dinner. That’s right, folks. She is also a true believing feminist and she threw a tantrum over her husband's inability to cook dinner. Neither she nor Polly consider that to be a problem in her marriage:

Then I got angry. To be fair, I had been angry the whole time, but for some reason it all came out after I asked my husband if he felt like spearheading dinner some time and he described his disinterest in cooking. In general, my husband is objectively a very kind and sentimental person, but I know now that he is not thoughtful and probably never will be. I let out a wail and sobbed something about how no one does anything just to be nice anymore, and then lectured him about how spouses who don’t like to cook subconsciously just want a maternal caregiver to take for granted for the rest of their lives. I recalled the last time I blew up at him, just after the wedding. I had asked him why he didn’t help me plan anything; why he took more time and spent more money for his bachelor party than he did for our honeymoon, and why he didn’t try harder to spend time with me on our wedding day. He gave me a sullen hug.

Yes, indeed. She needs her husband to support her, so she pushes him away. Brilliant strategy.

I will spare you the rest. Clearly, the woman has a problem. Just as clearly, Polly has offered just the wrong advice. The letter writer should get over herself, should stop indulging her negative emotions, should stop letting everyone know how miserable she is, and should start making kind gestures of her own. When you sit around looking sullen, angry and depressed, people will avoid you. When you ask them to spend time with you, they will demur. The solution is to start making kind gestures toward them. And to ignore everything Polly said.

Did Russia Steal the Presidential Election?

The point is so obvious that I’m sure it’s been made before. I might even have said something about it myself, though I cannot recall.

The issue is this: amid the hue and cry about Russian election meddling, how may people have asked exactly what it is that the Russians were supposed to have done. And whether that constitutes real meddling. Two days ago White House advisor and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner declared that the Mueller investigation and the media screeching about collusion had done more to delegitimize the election than a few Russian Facebook ads.

The point is too obvious to bear repeating. Since it came from Kushner it was widely denounced by the collusion-obsessed media.

Be that as it may, Dartmouth professor Crispin Sartwell throws some light into our national darkness. He asks precisely what it means to make an election illegitimate. You would have thought that the great minds of the mainstream media would have taken a step back from their unprocessed rage … to ask this question. That they did not speaks volumes about their intellectual dishonesty.

Sartwell explains what it means to rig an election:

It’s worth pondering what really would throw an election’s legitimacy into question. Directly compromising the vote by hacking voting machines or disposing of absentee ballots does the job—the latter triggered the invalidation of a North Carolina House race last year. So does jailing opponents, banning political parties, or threatening or bribing voters.

I am confident that I did mention, at one time or another, that the 1960 presidential election in Illinois was probably rigged by members of organized crime and local labor unions… at the behest of Joseph Kennedy, father of the candidate. At the time Richard Nixon could have called for an investigation, but chose not to do so. Today’s Democratic Party, consumed with McCarthyite rage, has no such compunctions. They are much more interested in claiming that Donald Trump was a Russian agent. Isn’t this just a return of McCarthism? When you make Richard Nixon look like a moral beacon, you have some serious problems.

Sartwell then tells us what does not constitute rigging an election:

But a social-media campaign, even coordinated by a foreign government, does not. Divisive, misleading or bizarre stuff was coming from every direction at once in 2016. Of the allegedly Russian-generated material, I myself retweeted the “Satan: If I win, Clinton wins” meme because I found it hilarious. It’s true I didn’t vote for Mrs. Clinton (I wrote in Vietnam Veterans Memorial designer Maya Lin), but I don’t blame the Russians for that.

You will notice that the mini-minds of the American left cannot imagine that they failed to persuade enough people to think as they think. The issue is mind control. The left craves it. What with the Obama administration it thought that it had achieved it.

If you prefer some context, consider the episode within the context of the story of the Emperor’s new clothes. The problem arises when a little boy screams out that the emperor and his local subjects have been duped into thinking that the emperor is decked out in the finest of imperial finery. In the fictional world inhabited by the American left, the little boy must be shut up and shut down. Thus, they are unfazed by the fact that the Russians spent so little money. A mere whisper sufficed to destroy the illusion they had created. 

Which illusion was that? Why the illusion that Hillary Clinton was a highly qualified presidential candidate. In truth, Hillary Clinton was an incompetent fraud, a woman who owed her erratic and failed career to her husband… and to nothing else. This means, to put a finer point on it, that when Obama said that HRC was the most qualified candidate in American history, he was joking. It was irony, stupid. Her post-election behavior is a constant reminder of why she lost. She lost because she is a loser decked out in raiments that bespeak winning. 

The other illusion was that Barack Obama was a great president, who had saved the nation from the Bushes, who had restored American standing in the world, who had rid the world of bigotry, who had saved the economy and whose derelictions in selling out Egypt, Libya, Syria and Iraq were for nothing considering how charming he was. And let’s not forget that Obama saved the planet with the Paris Climate Accord and the Iran Nuclear Deal. Anyone who says otherwise, who sees through the cant, must be shut down.

Anyway, Sartwell asks about the rust belt voters who were apparently targeted by the Russian propaganda machine. How much were they really subject to nefarious influence? And besides, weren’t they capable of questioning the information that was being thrown at them, and not just by the Russians:

Likewise, that Wisconsin and Michigan voters were targeted by Russian propaganda or nefarious Instagram accounts does not mean their votes were invalid. The same internet that shipped Russian misinformation makes it easy to double-check its veracity through independent sources. If citizens are too busy or lazy to do that, they still have the right to vote. The hacking and publication of John Podesta’s emails was criminal and should be prosecuted—but even that does nothing to throw the election’s legitimacy into question. It was emails, not votes, that were stolen.

The founders of the American Republic had confidence in the intelligence of the American people. To which we feel obliged to add that, at the moment the founders wrote the Constitution, they only allowed a very small percentage of the people to vote. Now that suffrage is universal, could it be that the less educated products of America’s defective educational system cannot tell the difference between news and propaganda?

America’s Founders rested the legitimacy of government on the will of the people, mediated through institutions such as the Senate and the Electoral College. They knew voters could be ignorant, gullible or manipulated by demagogues. To mitigate those concerns, they recommended education and free expression, so that false or dangerous claims could be exposed or refuted. They did not prohibit foreigners access to the American press. Soon enough, they were dealing with propagandists and would-be dictators, foreign and domestic, such as Aaron Burr and Napoleon. But whatever the drawbacks of the electorate and of a free press, they reposed their trust in the people to come to their own conclusions.

Is it all, as Sen. McCarthy would have said, the fault of Russian influence and interference. Sartwell dismisses the claim:

If we were able to quantify the effect of the Russian social media campaign, I suspect we’d find it to be infinitesimal. But even if it wasn’t, the election was free and fair.

Jordan Peterson vs. Slavoj Zizek: Clash of the Midgets

It was billed as the clash of the titans. It ended up being a bland discussion between overhyped intellectual midgets. People were paying absurd prices for tickets to the show down—not at the OK Corral—between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek. The Canadian Jungian psychologist was going to face off against the Slovenian philosopher clown. Why anyone thought that anything was going to come of it, I have no idea.

At the least, it received very little press attention. When push came to shove nothing really happened. Nothing was said of very much interest. The two men are symptoms of the general degradation of our educational system. They are, as Stephen Marche writes in the Guardian, defined by their enemies. Peterson has courageously confronted the police state scolds of political correctness. Zizek, radical leftist to his roots, has been taken to task for not supporting identity politics and political correctness.

Marche explains:

Peterson has risen to fame on the basis of his refusal to pay the usual fealtiesto political correctness. The size and scope of his fame registers more or less exactly the loathing for identity politics in the general populace, because it certainly isn’t on the quality of his books that his reputation resides. Žižek is also defined, and has been for years, by his contempt for postmodern theory and, by extension, the more academic dimensions of political correctness.

And they are both redolent of psychoanalytic theories, the kind that have basically gone out of style and favor. Peterson is a self-proclaimed Jungian, thus, a supporter of a man who was an anti-Semite and Nazi sympathizer, someone who happily promoted pagan idolatry. Peterson pretends to derive his theorization from Judeo-Christianity, but you cannot be a good Jungian and accept Biblical teaching. It is self-contradictory and embarrassing. 

In truth, Jung has been such an embarrassment that his work has found its way into the dustbin of history. The only living Jungian today is Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales. That should tell you all you need to know about Jung.

If you are curious to read an effective takedown of Peterson, check on the essay by Nathan Robinson. True enough, Robinson is a man of the left, but his critique gains value from the fact that he quotes extensively from Peterson himself. It’s one thing for Robinson to dismiss Peterson’s ramblings as gibberish. It’s quite another to quote extended passages of Petersonian gibberish. Anyone who thinks that this is great thinking does not know how to think.

Zizek derives his theorization from famed French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Given that I was once a disciple of the great French obfuscator, I feel qualified to tell you that Zizek is bitterly clinging to a great deal of double talk and mumbo jumbo. Not because Lacan was always wrong—far from it—but his legacy has been largely superseded, except perhaps in France and South America, where anyone who rejects Anglo culture is a hero. In any event I wrote about Zizek and about Lacan in my book The Last Psychoanalyst.

As for the substance of the debate, Marche was largely disappointed. Neither man seemed very well prepared and neither had very much to say about the topic: Marxism, capitalism and happiness.

He summarizes Peterson’s opening statement:

Peterson’s opening remarks were disappointing even for his fans in the audience. They were a vague and not particularly informed (by his own admission) reading of The Communist Manifesto. His comments on one of the greatest feats of human rhetoric were full of expressions like “You have to give the devil his due” and “This is a weird one” and “Almost all ideas are wrong”.

I’ve been a professor, so I know what it’s like to wake up with a class scheduled and no lecture prepared. It felt like that. He wandered between the Paleolithic period and small business management, appearing to know as little about the former as the latter. Watching him, I was amazed that anyone had ever taken him seriously enough to hate him.

He said things like “Marx thought the proletariat was good and the bourgeoisie was evil”. At one point, he made a claim that human hierarchies are not determined by power because that would be too unstable a system, and a few in the crowd tittered. That snapped him back into his skill set: self-defense. “The people who laugh might do it that way,” he replied. By the end of his half-hour he had not mentioned the word happiness once.

In short, Peterson had nothing to say. As I say, it was disappointing. As for Zizek, a fully fledged man of the radical left, Marche was no more charitable:

Žižek didn’t really address the matter at hand, either, preferring to relish his enmities. “Most of the attacks on me are from left-liberals,” he began, hoping that “they would be turning in their graves even if they were still alive”. His remarks were just as rambling as Peterson’s, veering from Trump and Sanders to Dostoevsky to the refugee crisis to the aesthetics of Nazism. If Peterson was an ill-prepared prof, Žižek was a columnist stitching together a bunch of 1,000-worders. He too finished his remarks with a critique of political correctness, which he described as the world of impotence that masks pure defeat.

The great surprise of this debate turned out to be how much in common the old-school Marxist and the Canadian identity politics refusenik had.

One hated communism. The other hated communism but thought that capitalism possessed inherent contradictions. The first one agreed that capitalism possessed inherent contradictions. And that was basically it. They both wanted the same thing: capitalism with regulation, which is what every sane person wants. The Peterson-Žižek encounter was the ultra-rare case of a debate in 2019 that was perhaps too civil.

Marche continues:

“We will probably slide towards apocalypse,” he said. And Peterson agreed with him: “It is not obvious to me that we can solve the problems that confront us.” They are both self-described “radical pessimists”, about people and the world. It made me wonder about the rage consuming all public discussion at the moment: are we screaming at each other because we disagree or because we do agree and we can’t imagine a solution?

Both of these men know that they are explicitly throwbacks. They do not have an answer to the real problems that face us: the environment and the rise of China as a successful capitalist state without democracy. (China’s success makes a joke out of the whole premise of the debate: the old-fashioned distinction between communism and capitalism.) Neither can face the reality or the future. Therefore they retreat.

Quite frankly, at the risk of triggering masses of people, I find this remark to be cogent and useful. It’s not so much that the two disagree. The more salient point is that they see no solutions to the current dissolution of the Western world. Forget about the mewling over the environment, Marche makes clear that the problem lies in how best to respond to the only real threat to democracy: Chinese-style authoritarian capitalism. It does not make sense. It is not our way. And yet, it seems to be the wave of the future.

If you want to know what was said, substantively, the only live blog of the event was offered by Nathan Robinson. Like Marche he is anything but enamored of the two combatants. He opens his live blog with this expression of personal feeling:

You may have your own personal idea of Hell. Mine is an eternity trapped in a room with Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek. I do not like these men. I consider Peterson a toxic charlatan and Žižek a humiliating embarrassment to the left. I believe they both show how far you can get in public life without having anything of value to say, if you’re a white man with a PhD who speaks confidently and incomprehensibly. In fact, this is not really a debate at all, because these men are nearly identical as far as I am concerned. I sincerely believe that history will look back on this moment as a dark human low point. 

You might not like anything that Robinson says, but he is very smart and very clever. He is a graduate student, and a man of the left, which means that he spends far too much time trying to figure out why Communism failed, but still, he is worth taking seriously.

Is Charlize Theron Mother of the Year?

Just in case you missed the story, famed actress Charlize Theron is bringing her son up as though he were a girl. Why so? Well, the boy, when he was aged three, announced that he was a girl, not a boy. And after all, we all respect the absolute truths uttered by three year olds. The child is apparently now seven years old.

Lucianne links to the story (via Maggie’s Farm):

Actress Charlize Theron has been raising her biologically-male son as a girl even since the child told her he wasn’t a boy when he was three years old.

That’s all it took for Theron to start raising her son Jackson, now seven, as a girl, the actress told The Daily Mail:

'Yes, I thought she was a boy, too,' Charlize agrees, briskly. 'Until she looked at me when she was three years old and said: 'I am not a boy!'

'So there you go!'”

Theron clothes young Jackson in dresses because “Who they (children) want to be, is not for me to decide.

I am not reporting on this story to show, yet again, that Hollywood celebrities are functional idiots. I am not suggesting, though I am sorely tempted, to recommend that the child be removed from an abusive home and put into foster care. I am not even recommending that Theron be indicted for child abuse. 

Not for today, I am not. I am reporting the story because Theron recently complained that she is having trouble getting dates.

In her words:

I've been single for 10 years, it's not a long shot. Somebody just needs to grow a pair and step up. I'm shockingly available.

Considering that Theron is shockingly attractive and even famous, it is somewhat surprising that so many men have shown such good judgment. Considering the propensities and proclivities of some men—why we even have a fetishist, a hair sniffer, as a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination—it is shocking that so many men have had enough good sense to avoid getting involved with Charlize Theron.

Just when you were losing faith in men.... 

Should We Allow Felons to Vote?

Uncle Bernie is at it again. The leading Democratic candidate for president, a man who is not really a Democrat anyway, was caught lying about his affection and support for the Soviet Union. In truth, it’s not just that he supported the Soviet Union; he even spent his honeymoon there. Uncle Bernie has gone on the record to support Castro’s Cuba and the Chavez and Maduro catastrophe unfolding in Venezuela.

Evidently, this makes him catnip to Democratic voters.

Or course, Uncle Bernie will look for incipient Democratic voters anywhere he can. Including in prison. Now the leading Democratic presidential candidate supports giving convicted felons the right to vote. That would include: murderers, rapists, gang bangers, serial killers, child molesters and terrorists. Presumably, Uncle Bernie will also extend the right to non-citizens, because we certainly do not want to discriminate, do we?

By our laws people who commit heinous crimes are deprived of their right to vote. If they do their time, the state of Florida has decided that they can have their right restored. As you might have guessed, it's a Democratic Party program.

But, the real question is this. Democratic politicians are now promoting the idea of giving convicted felons the right to vote for one basic reason. They are totally confident that said felons will be voting for Democrats. They will constitute a voting bloc that vastly prefers Democrats. 

You know as well as I do, that Uncle Bernie and his satraps would never support giving felons the right to vote if they had the least inkling that these hardened criminals would vote Republican.

So, how do they know that felons are natural born Democrats? What is there about the Democratic Party that elicits such universal support from the worst lowlifes in American society? Why does the Democratic Party attract the detritus of humanity?

And, consider this: the Democratic Party keeps telling us that white supremacists are the problem in today’s America. It keeps telling us that white people are criminal bigots, persecuting minorities. If such is the case, why are these nefarious folk so grossly underrepresented in America’s prisons? It doesn't seem just to me. 

As you know, if the prison system was a hotbed of conservative thought, Uncle Bernie and his Democratic comrades would be fighting to the death to keep convicted felons off the voter rolls. 

Medicaid for All

Thanks in part to Republican ineptitude the debate on Obamacare seems to have morphed into a debate about Medicare for All. Since Republicans cannot come up with a replacement for Obamacare the nation seems to have decided that it is not only here to stay, but that it should be expanded.

Obviously, Medicare for all is a dodge. It is really about Medicaid for all. It’s about providing substandard medical treatment for everyone, and that includes citizens, non-citizens and illegal immigrants. The plan, touted by Uncle Bernie, promises the world and assures us that we can afford it. After all, we are rich so we can afford anything. One can only gasp in disbelief at a nation with over $22 trillion in debt claiming to be rich.

In truth, for the benefit of those who think that the sky is falling or that climate change will bring about the Apocalypse, the truth is, if anything does us in, it will be the national debt. We are assured, by the best minds, that it's not a problem. That means, according to the laws of black swandom, that it's a big problem.

The surest way to increase the debt is to pretend that we are really, really rich, that we can care for everyone, and that we can provide all the latest and best medical treatment to anyone who shows up on our side of the border.

Beyond the obvious fact that putting the health insurance industry out of business will cause massive disruption, we must also point out that Medicaid for all will produce a two tiered medical system, where the poor and the middle class receive substandard treatment provided by overworked physicians, while the rich will pay out of pocket for the best care. Obviously, the best physicians will opt out of Medicaid for all. They do it already; why would they not do it in Uncle Bernie’s world.

Then again, when the medical delivery system comes to resemble the post office, why do you imagine that the same people will choose to be physicians? Why do you assume that the best people will opt for a system where the government decides how much they are going to be paid. Even today, under the Medicare system that everyone loves so much, the system reimburses far less than doctors normally charge. Perhaps private insurance is more generous, but we do not have infinite sums of money, regardless of what Uncle Bernie thinks.

A number of years ago a cardiac surgeon explained to me that he could no longer make a living doing open-heart surgery because Medicare reimbursement rates do not cover his overhead, the cost of his office, hiring a nurse, and paying malpractice premiums. Worse yet, whereas he, a highly capable heart surgeon wanted a second surgeon involved in every operation, Medicare would only pay for a backup RN.

The man was moonlighting in an ER in order to make ends meet.

If you think that you are going to receive the same medical care when we go to Medicaid for all, you are not living in the real world. Anyone who wants to control for the costs of medical care should begin by getting the lawyers out of the business. Naturally, this is not going to happen, since the Democratic Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of the trial lawyers bar.

Anyway, we now have a new report about the success of Obamacare. (via Maggie's Farm) Or better, what Obamacare is doing to physicians. The study tracks physician attitudes from 2011 to 2014. It does not cite Obamacare in particular, but since those were the first years that it cast its ugly shadow over the medical profession, I do not feel that I am taking too many liberties by saying that the study judges Obamacare.

Anyway, what hath Obamacare wrought? Why, it has wrought far more physician burnout. More and more physicians now want to chuck it all, to leave the profession. Surely, this will also make it more unlikely that the best and the brightest of America’s youth will opt for this career path. Thus, Obamacare is going to diminish the quality of medical care, because it will dumb down the medical profession.

Here is a summary of the report:

Physicians may be more stressed than ever — one recent survey found that half were thinking about hanging up their stethoscopes for good. New research continues to demonstrate the demise of doctors, with burnout levels jumping dramatically over just a three-year span.

According to researchers at the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine, physician burnout increased from 45.5% to 54.4% between 2011 and 2014. The researchers say doctors aren’t more depressed or exhausted by their home life, but rather at their jobs.

Drs. Andrew G. Alexander and Kenneth A. Ballou isolated three factors for physician burnout, according to their research:

• The traditional doctor-patient relationship has been dwarfed by the relationship between health insurance providers and patients, with companies standing in the way of fast and appropriate treatments ordered by physicians.

• Doctors are feeling more cynical as a whole, because patients don’t expect continuity of care anymore and routinely change doctors.

• General lack of enthusiasm for their work.

“It should be a treat to care about another person, but I see that too many of our seasoned physicians are frustrated with medicine, and it rubs off onto the physicians in training,” Alexander says in a university release. “Doctors have a wonderful job, yet they are inundated with numerous extraneous burdens that collectively rob them of the joy of medicine.”

Whatever could they mean by extraneous burdens? You probably know already: it’s all about the new Obamacare requirement, forcing physicians to keep electronic medical records. I imagine that this seemed like a great idea to the MIT economists who dreamt it up. But, MIT economists are not physicians. They do not practice medicine. They excel in abstract thinking… the kind that often produces calamities when translated into reality.

The story continues, explaining what is chasing physicians out of the profession:

“These are hospital purchases of medical groups, rising drug prices, the Affordable Care Act, ‘pay for performance’ in which providers are offered financial incentives to improve quality and efficiency, and mandated electronic health records,” explains Alexander. “Doctors now spend more time with electronic health records than they do with patients. Electronic health records were pushed by the government at great expense and without regard to the effects upon patient or physician health. Go into any hospital and look for the nurses and the doctors. You will find them sitting in front of computers. They are not happy, and their patients are not healthier.”

Of course, the government does not always know best. The government does not know how much time and at what expense physicians need to keep records. One physician told me that he would either need to hire staff to enter data about each patient, or quit practicing.

He chose to quit practicing.

Oppressing Women in Iran

When a madman shot up a mosque in New Zealand, the land of millions of sheep, prime minister Jacinda Ardern beclowned herself by donning a hijab. She supposedly did it in solidarity with Muslim victims. In truth, she was legitimizing an instrument of female oppression. Forcing women to wear the hijab is oppressive. Those of us who are opposed to female oppression are also opposed to forcing women to wear the hijab.

In Iran, of course, a woman who takes off her hijab can be imprisoned. And likely tortured. One rarely reads stories of Iranian injustice and brutality, because the Obama administration chose to side with Iran and anti-Semitic terrorism, as against Saudi Arabia and Israel. Thus, the bien pensant leftist media has shut down the story... because it does not fit the narrative of Russian collusion.

So, we hear a lot about the brutality of the Saudi regime. We just heard, from Democratic senate candidate Bernie Sanders that Israeli prime minister Netanyahu is a racist… which is presumably worse than the anti-Semitic slobber that leading Democrats are putting out on a daily basis.

Naturally, we are heartened by the Trump administration efforts to right the balance of powers, especially its most recent efforts to shut down the Iranian oil export market. For which Trump will get absolutely no credit.

Anyway, Amnesty International is reporting on the case of Nasrin Sotoudeh, an Iranian human rights activist who has been sentenced to decades in prison for defending women who choose to take off the hijab, among other things.

Here is the story:

Nasrin Sotoudeh was arrested at her home on 13 June 2018. This week, she was informed by the office for the implementation of sentences in Tehran’s Evin prison where she is jailed that she had been convicted on seven charges and sentenced to 33 years in prison and 148 lashes. The charges, which are in response to her peaceful human rights work, include “inciting corruption and prostitution”, “openly committing a sinful act by... appearing in public without a hijab” and “disrupting public order”.

To its credit, Amnesty International is on the case:

The sentencing of prominent Iranian human rights lawyer and women’s rights defender Nasrin Sotoudeh to 33 years in prison and 148 lashes in a new case against her is an outrageous injustice, said Amnesty International today.

The sentence, reported on her husband Reza Khandan’s Facebook page, brings her total sentence after two grossly unfair trials to 38 years in prison. In September 2016, she had been sentenced in her absence to five years in prison in a separate case.

“It is absolutely shocking that Nasrin Sotoudeh is facing nearly four decades in jail and 148 lashes for her peaceful human rights work, including her defence of women protesting against Iran’s degrading forced hijab (veiling) laws. Nasrin Sotoudeh must be released immediately and unconditionally and this obscene sentence quashed without delay,” said Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Research and Advocacy Director.

“Nasrin Sotoudeh has dedicated her life to defending women’s rights and speaking out against the death penalty - it is utterly outrageous that Iran’s authorities are punishing her for her human rights work. Her conviction and sentence consolidate Iran’s reputation as a cruel oppressor of women’s rights.”

We await the voice of Jacinda Ardern, and of all the feminist flunkies who were proclaiming her the voice of a new kind of world leadership. Hah!