Saturday Miscellany

First, David Goldman correctly calls this a scary thought.

Here's a scary thought: US manufacturers can't find skilled workers (you need "proficient" high school math to operate a digital machine tool). 24% of US high schoolers are "proficient" in math, or fewer than 1 million graduates/year. China's number of math-proficient HS grades is more like 10m/year.

Second, remember sustainable investing. It was of a piece with the Green New Deal. It allowed money managers to invest in environmentally sensitive and woke companies. It also rewarded companies that cared more about diversity quotas than about profits. 

Well, the fad has outlived its usefulness. Stephen Green has the story:

ESG was supposed to be the future of smart investing, but the future looks increasingly politically incorrect, according to a new Axios report on the "exodus" of money from "sustainable investment funds."

To put it bluntly, ESG was meant to be a money bludgeon for beating corporations into toeing the Progressive line. Maybe best exemplified by the BlackRock investment firm, the smart money would flow to firms with the best "green energy" records, the most left-wing public relations (and donations, natch), and the most buttinsky DEI (DIE?) departments.

The free market has pronounced its verdict on ESG investing. Investors are voting with their money and are pulling it out of these funds:

And the money did rush in. Until now. Because there's an inevitable response when the returns fail to materialize: investors bail. Last quarter, sustainable investment funds (including EFTs) "saw $8.8 billion in net outflows, per new data from Morningstar." The outflow was the biggest ever and is just the latest in a negative trendline that began a year ago. 

The Green New Deal Lite's efforts to spark our "transition to a clean energy economy" haven't accomplished much except for higher energy prices. Even the market for heavily subsidized electric vehicles appears to be plateauing much sooner and lower than expected.

Third, you might have noticed that President Biden finally roused himself sufficiently to utter a few words about the anti-Semitism engulfing American campuses.

Caroline Glick offered this commentary on Twitter;

It took Biden over 2 minutes into a 3 minute speech on anti-Semitism to use the term anti-Semitism. He then  immediately condemned "Islamophobia" and discrimination against Arab and Palestinian Americans.

Who is discriminating against them? Who is denying them the right to walk across campus?

No one. They're the ones attacking Jewish Americans and trampling Jewish American civil rights.

But as with Israel and Palestinians, Biden is accusing American Jews of doing to American Arabs what the Arabs are doing to them.

If this is what support looks like now, in the midst of the greatest onslaught against American Jews since the 1930s, just think what a second Biden term will look like.

Unbelievable.”

Fourth, do you want to follow the money? It’s an old but useful notion. Follow the money and see where it leads you.

So, when you ask who American universities have become infested with Jew hatred and Islamism, the answer come to you when you follow the money.

Ace of Spades writes:

How have America's universities become hotbeds of rabid Islamist rhetoric, foaming-at-the-mouth Jew-hate, and flat-out anti-American insanity?

It's simple. It was purchased with Arab money. Oh, Academia was primed for that sort of crap, since those beliefs are its default, but for a long time was some rough balance. Academia actually had a vibrant, if small conservative/libertarian presence. They also had brains, so their influence was out of proportion to their numbers.

But oceans of oil money began to flood the hallowed halls of our elite (and not so elite) institutions. It paid for endowed chairs for anti-American and anti-Israel professors. It paid for embedded Islamic Studies departments. It paid for university-affiliated NGOs carefully putting forth the pro-Islam/anti-West cant. And it paid for full-fare students from those oil-rich countries, plumping the coffers of these schools with cash that had a catch.

That catch was simple. Make Islam and the savage authoritarians in the Arab world objects of admiration rather than disgust. The Emir of Qatar isn't funding classes examining the vile treatment of women in the Muslim world, or the regular, state-sponsored murder of homosexuals, or the destruction of Jewish minorities within many of those countries. And of course some of that funding went to call into question the legitimacy of the state of Israel by framing the "Palestinian Question" as the pinnacle of post-modern victim-hood.

So a generation of mush-brained undergraduates were taught to see the savage terrorists of Gaza and the West Bank as Jeffersonian freedom-lovers whose highest aspirations were to live in peace and harmony on the land that was stolen from them by those pesky Jews.

Fifth, Lionel Shriver keeps us up to date on the latest from PEN America, a writers’ guild of sorts. PEN just canceled its literary festival because too many writers refused to participate because PEN had not denounced Israel. No word on whether they wanted PEN to denounce Hamas also.

Shriver wrote, on Unherd:

Another day, another opportunity for huffy, hypocritical “progressive” posturing. PEN America has now been forced to cancel its World Voices literary festival in New York and LA, on the heels of also cancelling its 2024 awards ceremony. Too many authors had withdrawn from both events to make going ahead with staging either practicable. The reason for so many writers flouncing from these programmes? PEN’s failure to publicly denounce Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza. But you had probably guessed the point of indignation already, because as of October 2023, the Anglosphere’s far-Left has neatly pivoted from the infantilisation of black people to the Palestinian cause with the coordinated grace of a synchronised swimmer.

Nicely put, dare we say. 

Sixth, I know you have been wondering about this, but the Daily Mail has its nominee for the most dysfunctional state in America. The answer is: Illinois. So much for the political future of Governor J. B. Pritzker:

The state is grappling with a string of crises which have seen residents leave en masse - and earned it the unwanted title of one of the 'most dysfunctional' in America. The state has struggled to add jobs and its public pension debt has ballooned to nearly $150 billion. Meanwhile, its population has declined by hundreds of thousands, hurting tax income.

Seventh, if students are unhappy about having their education hijacked by fanatics, imagine how their parents feel. The Wall Street Journal reports on the parental backlash to the current degradation of the educational experience:

Parents paying as much as $90,000 for their sons and daughters to attend elite universities are angry and frustrated with colleges’ responses to the Gaza protests—on both sides of the political divide. Whether their kids are protesting, counterprotesting or trying to stay out of it, parents are demanding that schools do more to keep them safe and learning.

And also:

Parents are preparing to push back financially. They are requesting tuition refunds where classes have been canceled and contacting college counselors to ask how to get their money back. Parents are also threatening not to donate in the future. 

Eighth, on the transmania front, recent research has shown that people who undergo gender reassignment surgery are far more prone to commit suicide. 

Considering that unscrupulous counselors have been telling parents that if they refuse to allow their children to transition, said children will kill themselves, the new information will hopefully contribute to a new wave of honesty.

Yes, I know, but we can always hope.

The following tweet is from Ian Miles Cheong:

STUDY: Gender-affirming surgery found to be highly associated with significantly elevated depression rates, leading to an increase in su*cidal ideation and attempts, showing a 12.12-fold higher rate than those who did not proceed with the surgery.

Ninth, the latest in political prognostication comes to us from Andrew Sullivan. The British conservative now believes that the election is Trump’s to lose. Biden, he suggests, is toast.

The Daily Mail reports:

Andrew Sullivan says Biden's lackluster approach to campus chaos is enough to see him booted from the White House.

This combined with 'chaotic' border policies and Biden's stance on transgender rights will be enough to snuff out any chances of re-election, according to Sullivan, a gay conservative journalist.

'Biden is losing this election, deservedly,' he wrote on his Substack. 'And if he cannot pull off an almighty pivot — and I suspect at this point, he really can't — this election really is Trump's to lose.' 

Outlining his reasoning, he pointed to the student protests over the Vietnam war in 1968 which are largely blamed for costing the Democrats in the election of Richard Nixon.

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.

Medical Pseudoscience

It ought to be the case that everyone knows that diversity quotas are a bad idea. The insistence on including people because of their race or ethnicity or even sex does not produce efficient functioning. It does not even produce good science.

That does not mean that its proponents have ceased trying. They are trying even harder. If the case of Case Western Reserve Medical School Dean Stan Gerson is noteworthy, the reason is that he is a man of science. Apparently, scientists are now joining the chorus of those who propose dumbing down their field, the better to promote diversity.

Since the Supreme Court has cast a rather cold eye on discrimination based on race and ethnicity, those who promote diversity have gone looking for a new rationale-- nothing like keeping failed policy alive by subterfuge. 

In her new City Journal article Heather Mac Donald offers Dean Gerson a few lessons in science. She especially wants to shut down the new nonsense about “inclusive scholarship.”

Inclusive scholarship is judged by the race or ethnicity of the scientist. Clearly, the notion comes to us from multiculturalism, whereby all cultures are created equal and whereby the next time you need to see a physician you should try out the shaman or the medicine man.

If there is a less scientific means of discovery, I have not heard of it. Nor has Mac Donald: 

Under traditional scholarship, anyone with scientific insight will be included in knowledge-building. Under “inclusive scholarship,” however, merely having a previously unrepresented “voice” entitles you to a place in the ladder of discovery.

She continues:

 “Inclusive excellence” is judged by a different standard than excellence, namely, the extent to which a given endeavor includes members of different “backgrounds, races, cultures, and socioeconomic classes.”

This is an original thought. Of course, if no one has thought of it before that might be because no one has been that stupid before.

The excellence of science has never before been evaluated by that criterion. The plane either flies or it does not; the bridge either stands or it does not; the doctor either detects the tumor or he does not. The race and class of engineers and oncologists have heretofore had nothing to do with our judgments of their success.

You knew all of that already. If anyone needs to say it, this shows how degraded our intellectual discourse has become.

True enough, some groups are underrepresented in the halls of science. Is it racism or something else?

Science is a colorblind meritocracy (or was before the diversity virus hit). Research labs are stunningly multinational and multiethnic. The underrepresented groups—blacks and American Hispanics—are underrepresented because of their (on average) lower skills levels, not because of race-based exclusion, as demonstrated here.

In truth, many schools, like MIT, have tried to be more inclusive. With rather discouraging results:

The low academic skill level that racially preferred blacks brought with them into competitive schools handicapped them from competing, and they remained behind. A black professor of mechanical engineering at MIT recently described MIT’s sad history of failed racial preferences. Students who had been chosen based on their skin color “left MIT, ashamed, bewildered, and without a degree,” recounts James H. Williams Jr. “This was an annual heartbreaking humiliation for black undergraduates at MIT, and it went on year after year.” No one at MIT or elsewhere was allowed to acknowledge these predictable consequences of academic mismatch.

Unfortunately, when blacks and whites of significantly different abilities are thrown together, they tend to self-segregate. As famed sociologist Robert Putnam discovered, and reported in a paper entitled “E Pluribus Unum,” people who live in multicultural communities tend to hunker down. They do not interact or relate-- because they do not speak the same language or follow the same customs.

Better yet, educators want scientists to live in diverse communities because this will teach them about their white privilege. Since when has this become the pathway to scientific excellence.

Artificially engineered “diversity,” they argued, would educate white students about nonwhiteness and about their own white privilege. But such education of white students, whether or not a legitimate goal, was handicapped by black self-segregation on campuses, due to wide gaps in academic preparedness.

Whereas Gerson pretends that diversity will improve the quality of scientific work, Mac Donald points out correctly that it will do just the opposite. 

Contrary to Gerson, deliberately selecting participants in science based on their identities will not “help us break through to the next generation of discovery and improvements in health.” Quite the opposite: it will encumber that process of discovery and ensure that the global center of scientific gravity shifts to China, which cares only about its scientists’ competence, not their color.

So, there is a national security angle to this effort at dumbing down medical science. The nation is not going to compete against China or against other nations in the world by going to war against white supremacy. After all, companies are now discovering that they do not have the trained manpower capable of building semiconductor factories. They are obliged to import it from overseas. And, lest we forget, if you go to Silicon Valley the tech staff of the great companies is laden with people from China.

And, if Mac Donald is correct, the quality of medical care will eventually suffer.

Sadly, Gerson is not an outlier. He speaks for the entire medical establishment—the AMA, the Association of American Medical Colleges, the federal funding agencies, the science-publishing industry—in his willingness, for the sake of racial virtue-signaling, to undermine the enterprise that has freed humanity from so much suffering.

The wages of guilt, having now infested the medical establishment, will be looking for other conquests.

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.

Masking Palestinian Shame

Compared with the rousing success that is Israel, Palestinian failure, in Gaza and on the West Bank, has rankled.

Shame befalls those who have wasted their resources building terror tunnels and rockets designed to kill Jews, that is, to make the Jewish state look weak and ineffectual.

And yet, the October 7 attack on Israeli civilians, especially on women and children, must count as a new low, a new disgrace for the people of Gaza.

By using rape as an instrument of war and massacring children, the cowards of Hamas pretended to be strong. It was designed to hide the Palestinian shame from the world. In truth, it redoubled the disgrace that now hangs over all Palestinians.

But, America’s schoolchildren and college students have been coming to the rescue. Not so much because they want to fly over to Gaza and fight the war. Their jejune protests resemble childish rants, unworthy of supposedly intelligent students. 

They are doing it to distract and to cover up the disgrace that Palestinians earned by their appalling actions on October 7.

It’s one thing to win and one thing to lose. To attack women and children because you cannot compete is a new low.

The children protesting on American campuses are making incoherent noises in order to attract more attention to their riotous behavior, and thus, to obscure the fact that they are really trying to mask Palestinian shame. They do not know that they are not saving anyone’s face, but obscuring the truth about Palestinian failure. The more people try to make sense of the din, the more they are distracted from thinking about October 7.

If you want to save face, you need to build something yourself. If you cannot do more than to destroy what others have built, you might feel that you have saved face, but in truth you have not.

In truth, the protesters and rioters have no coherent agenda. Perhaps it signals stupidity, but seriously, their beliefs are incoherent. If they had wanted Palestinians to save face they would have recommended joining the Abraham Accords and working to build a nation. Evidently, the cowardly attack on Israeli women and children masks shame, but does not enhance their reputation as an honorable group.

Walter Russell Mead sums up the incoherent agenda promoted by college students  in a Wall Street Journal column:

Many of Hamas’s most passionate campus supporters believe that the organization wants to establish a secular Palestinian state. They also believe that Israeli Jews are European immigrants displacing an indigenous population—white settlers who should go home to Poland.

They think that Israel survives only because America supports it and that an American president who “gets serious” with Israel can make it do almost anything he wants. They see Hamas as part of a global coalition of “progressive” movements advancing causes such as climate change, democracy and LGBTQ rights against global capitalism. People who share these perceptions can organize a march or build an encampment, but the wisest heads in the world all working together couldn’t craft a feasible diplomatic strategy based on such an incoherent and unrealistic view of the world.

As we and everyone with an ounce of sense has pointed out, the Hamas agenda rejects all things gay. Go to Gaza and proclaim your binariness and they will hang you from a lamp post. As for their concern for the climate, there is none. These students are being manipulated to form a distraction from the atrocities that Hamas committed and the shame that would rightly befall them.

You might know that one Sheryl Sandberg, of Facebook fame, was so horrified at what happened on October 7 and so appalled at the effort to cover it up that she produced a video about it.

It was not that difficult. The dimwitted Hamas terrorists filmed themselves committing atrocities. They were proud of the gang rapes and mutilating children. Only after the fact did they discover that they had miscalculated.

Of course, proponents of the so-called Palestinian cause pretend that the cowardly actions of October 7 did not happen. When they did admit to what they had done, they insisted that the Israelis had it coming to them.

As for what happened on that day, Elizabeth Stauffer reports on the Sandberg video for the Washington Examiner:

First responder Rami Davidian said, “I saw girls tied up with their hands behind them to every tree here. … Their legs were spread. … Someone stripped them. Someone raped them. They inserted all kinds of things into their intimate organs, like wooden boards, iron rods. … I had to close their legs and cover their bodies so no one else would see what I saw.”

And also,

Amit Soussana, who was kidnapped on Oct. 7 and held hostage for 55 days, described her experience in captivity: “[The Hamas member] started touching me, and I resisted, and then he dragged me to the bedroom, and then he forced me to commit a sexual act on him. And I remember, the entire time, I was thinking: ‘Amit, OK, you knew it’s going to happen. It’s really happening.’ I said to myself: ‘OK, you can handle this. You just want to survive.’”

A male survivor of the Supernova Music Festival told Sandberg he witnessed a semicircle of terrorists surround a young woman and take turns raping her. He said the rapes continued even after she had been shot dead.

An unidentified volunteer for disaster victim identification organization ZAKA choked up as he described the aftermath of the Nova massacre to Sandberg. He said, “We’re on Route 232. The street is full of cars. Some are burnt and some aren’t. With dead people inside. Young people who were shot and murdered in cold blood. Everywhere we go, there are bodies on the road. 

“There are bodies everywhere, everywhere. It’s an indescribable catastrophe.”

His colleague told Sandberg, “I don’t have words to explain what we saw.”

On that note, it’s time to lift our eyes from adolescent rants and grant to Hamas the shame it has earned.

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.

Wednesday Potpourri

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

He responded:

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

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

He wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zero Hedge has the story:

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

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

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

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

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

The New York Post has the story:

Flatiron is in shambles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meantime, Anna North writes this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prof. Jeffrey Hall reports:

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

I hope you have enjoyed reading these notes. If so, please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.