RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-season-for-swamp-draining-21cf59f5?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Two weeks ago this column shared the cheery news that the 118th Congress had so far managed to avoid doing anything of consequence to us. The lucky streak continues and this welcome respite from the misguided frenzy of Biden lawmaking could be just the start. Now some taxpayers are beginning to dream that Beltway lawmakers might be able to achieve even less than nothing—an actual reduction in the burdens Washington imposes on the citizenry.

Lisa Rein and Jacqueline Alemany report for the Washington Post:

At a House hearing this month on fraud and waste in pandemic aid, some Republicans zeroed in on one group in particular for criticism: the federal employees overseeing the money.
“Fire people if they don’t do things they’re supposed to do,” Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) said. “That is our biggest problem in the federal government. Nobody can be held accountable.”
That sentiment is animating a newly empowered GOP House majority eager to ramp up scrutiny of the army of civil servants who run the government’s day-to-day operations. The effort includes seeking testimony from middle- and lower-level workers who are part of what Republicans have long derided as the “deep state,” while some lawmakers are drafting bills that have little chance of passing the Democrat-led Senate but give Republicans a chance to argue for reining in the federal bureaucracy of 2.1 million employees.

Why not take the chance, especially given the surging cost of maintaining this vast unproductive enterprise? The Post report continues:

…House Republican leaders have told almost all of their committees to come up with plans by March to slash spending and beef up oversight of federal agencies in their jurisdiction.

https://www.aei.org/op-eds/social-justice-shrinks-how-identity-politics-infected-therapy/

In winter 2019, Leslie Elliott enrolled as a graduate student in Antioch University’s Mental Health Counseling program. At first, she found it to be a stimulating master’s program — informative and clinically relevant. Then she took a required course in “multicultural counseling.”

“We were taught that race should be the dominant lens through which clients were to be understood and therapy conducted,” says Elliott, a mother of four who’d majored in psychology.

Elliott’s professors taught her, for example, that if clients were white, she was supposed to help them see how they unwittingly perpetuate white supremacy. “We were encouraged to regard white clients as ‘reservoirs of racism and oppression.’” White women, one professor told a class, were “basic bitches,” “Beckys” and “nothing special.”

If the client were black, Elliott was told to ask how it felt to sit with her, a white counselor. If the client felt at ease, “my job — regardless of what brought him to therapy — was to make him more aware of how being black compounded, or perhaps caused, his problems.

After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, the three-year program intensified its emphasis on race and oppression, making clear that counselors were to be foot soldiers in the culture wars. “Incredible as it sounds,” says Elliott, “we were encouraged to see ourselves as activists and remake ourselves as social change agents.”

“Critical social-justice therapists” is what Aaron Kindsvatter and others call this new breed of mental health professional graduating from programs across the country. Last year, Kindsvatter le his tenured position at the University of Vermont to pursue private practice in Burlington, where he has treated a handful of clients who were, in his words, “victims of indoctrination attempts” by their “authoritarian” therapists. To be clear, Elliott and Kindsvatter are not talking about a mismatch in sociopolitical views wherein, say, a client is conservative and the therapist is liberal or progressive. To be sure, such a
discrepancy can — though by no means inevitably does — create tension. Studies have shown, in fact, that therapeutic relationships were stronger when clients felt comfortable disclosing their political views to the therapist and when the therapist was accepting of those views.

https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic?utm_medium=email

A big story last week was the partial release of the CDC’s bi-annual Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which showed that most teen girls (57%) now say that they experience persistent sadness or hopelessness (up from 36% in 2011), and 30% of teen girls now say that they have seriously considered suicide (up from 19% in 2011). Boys are doing badly too, but their rates of depression and anxiety are not as high, and their increases since 2011 are smaller. As I showed in my Feb. 16 Substack post, the big surprise in the CDC data is that COVID didn’t have much effect on the overall trends, which just kept marching on as they have since around 2012. Teens were already socially distanced by 2019, which might explain why COVID restrictions added little to their rates of mental illness, on average. (Of course, many individuals suffered greatly). 

Most of the news coverage last week noted that the trends pre-dated covid, and many of them mentioned social media as a potential cause. A few of them then did the standard thing that journalists have been doing for years, saying essentially “gosh, we just don’t know if it’s social media, because the evidence is all correlational and the correlations are really small.” For example, Derek Thompson, one of my favorite data-oriented journalists, wrote a widely read essay in The Atlantic on the multiplicity of possible causes. In a section titled Why is it so hard to prove that social media and smartphones are destroying teen mental health? he noted that “the academic literature on social media’s harms is complicated” and he then quoted one of the main academics studying the issue—Jeff Hancock, of Stanford University: “There’s been absolutely hundreds of [social-media and mental-health] studies, almost all showing pretty small effects.”

In this post, I will show that Thompson’s skepticism was justified in 2019 but is not justified in 2023. A lot of new work has been published since 2019, and there has been a recent and surprising convergence among the leading opponents in the debate (including Hancock and me). There is now a great deal of evidence that social media is a substantial cause, not just a tiny correlate, of depression and anxiety, and therefore of behaviors related to depression and anxiety, including self-harm and suicide.

First, I must offer two stage-setting comments:

Social media is not the only cause; my larger story is about the rewiring of childhood that began in the 1990s and accelerated in the early 2010s. 

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/fact-check-pete-buttigieg-is-a-capable-and-competent-leader/

Claim: Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, sometimes referred to as Alfred E. Neuman, is a “capable and competent” leader who can stand up to former president Donald Trump.

Who said it: The Lincoln Project, sometimes referred to as the Lincoln Pervert Project. “Until capable and competent leaders stand up to Trump, he will continue to deflect,” the controversial super PAC wrote in a tweet that linked to an article about Buttigieg blaming Trump for the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.

Context: The Lincoln Project is comprised of Democratic activists and extremely online “former Republicans” who enjoy grifting almost as much as they enjoy acting like boorish man-children. They will support any politician who appeals to their donors—rich liberals driven insane by Trump—and Buttigieg is one of the most beloved Democrats among this particular demographic.

Analysis: We couldn’t find any evidence to support the claim that Buttigieg is a “capable and competent” leader, just as we couldn’t find any evidence to support claims that the transportation secretary is a “star of Biden’s cabinet.” There has been a multitude of transportation-related scandals on his watch, and he has handled each one of them with the political deftness of a humanoid McKinsey consultant who learns Norwegian in his spare time.

This should not come as a surprise. Riding a bicycle and wanting to be president after serving eight years as mayor of South Bend, the fourth-largest city in Indiana, do not make someone qualified to run the U.S. Department of Transportation

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/26780/words-matter-so-do-accurate-posting-dates

goudsmit.pundicity.com  lindagoudsmit.com 

Since the 2020 election a great deal has been written about information, disinformation, and misinformation. Very little attention is being paid to the newest threat in the information wars––omission of the year in online posting dates. We live in the 21st-century age of digitized, computerized information technology. In the beginning, articles posted online followed established journalistic practices, and journalism’s classic 5W + H formula. Articles answered six questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Today, online journalism is eliminating the When. I began asking the question, Why? 

For print journalism, the When has two components––the dateline and the actual events described in the article. The dateline refers to when the story was filed or written, not necessarily the dates of events described in the article. Datelines followed the month/day/year date convention, and appeared on the first line of an article before the text. 

In online reporting, especially blogs and websites, the dateline often refers to the posting date. In the summer of 2022, I began noticing the year was MISSING in the dateline. Sometimes the date was presented as an equally useless and ridiculous “3 hours ago” or “3 days ago.” At first I assumed it was a typo, but soon realized there was a change to the default date convention. As a writer, researcher, and political analyst, the change was so egregious, I assumed the new date conventions had to be a form over content esthetic decision, made by the same foolish designers who decided hard-to-read gray font was superior to easy-to-read black font! I was wrong.

I lodged my first complaint directly with WordPress, on June 4, 2022. WordPress is a free and open-source content management system used by 42.8% of the top 10 million websites as of October 2021. The message read:

I am a researcher, author, and political analyst. It is absolutely maddening that articles are being published with a date that does not include the YEAR. Every event happens in its historical context. “3 hours ago” or “3 days ago” or “3 months ago” is meaningless without the year. Equally meaningless is “April 10” if the article has been saved and used for reference two years after publication. Information is rendered useless without an accurate posting/publishing date that MUST include the YEAR. Please address this extremely exasperating error on all the platforms you service – the problem is becoming ubiquitous.  

WordPress.com is the hosted version of WordPress. Its customer support “Happiness Engineers“ answered:

Hi there,

Your support request has been submitted to our team of Happiness Engineers. Rest assured that your email arrived safely and our support team will be in touch as soon as we can.

If you have any new details, or happen to find the answer yourself in the mean time, just reply to this email directly to keep us updated. Additionally, you might want to check out our daily webinars – https://wordpress.com/webinars – and our support documentation – https://wordpress.com/support.

Thank you for your patience and we’ll be in touch soon!

– The WordPress.com Support Team

This email is a service from Automattic.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2023/02/25/joe-and-jill-went-up-the-hill-n1673867

“Ultimately, this is the Biden trademark: a corrupt and geriatric incompetent in the White House, and a vain First Lady devoid of intellectual substance who passes herself off as a scholar. Everything about such people is meretricious, or in popular parlance, “fake.” Such is current American leadership in both politics and education, a tale of broken crowns and failed policies hurtling down the historical gradient.”

Joe and Jill went up the hill, and who knows when they’ll come tumbling down. The nation may careen well before they do. Much has already been said about the devastating policies and tenure of Joe Biden. Simply put, he is unarguably the worst president the U.S. has ever suffered, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama notwithstanding. Here I will focus on the other half of the Biden tandem, a woman of scholarly pretensions without foundation, the ineffable Dr. Jill.

The adulation Jill Biden has received for so flimsy a dubious accomplishment as a paper doctorate in a derelict field like Education Studies is utterly misplaced, whether it is the mentally impregnable Whoopi Goldberg thinking that Jill Biden was a medical doctor and should be considered for Surgeon General or a sports announcer for an NFL game, as Megyn Kelly notes, ingratiatingly remarking that “Dr. Jill Biden” was in attendance. I watched that game between the Eagles and the 49ers and nearly turned off the set when the fawning announcer asserted his bona fides.

The title of Dr. linked to Jill Biden certainly seems inappropriate. Recently, my wife Janice Fiamengo posted a Substack article critical of the First Lady’s doctoral thesis from the University of Delaware, Student Retention in the Community College: Meeting Students’ Needs, a document running to a risible 80 pages, not counting reference pages and appendices. Additionally, the Literature Review does not identify disagreements and contrary viewpoints in the education literature, as is standard practice, nor does her Methodology section indicate the limits of her analytical procedure, also standard practice. These, as well as thin citation, inadequate research, and generally poor writing, as Wall Street Journal film critic Kyle Smith has shown, are crucial problems.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/s-o-s-for-the-u-s-electric-grid-pjm-interconnection-blackout-supply-renewables-subsidy-report-fossil-fuel-4cbdd56e?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The warnings keep coming that the force-fed energy transition to renewable fuels is destabilizing the U.S. electric grid, but is anyone in government paying attention? Another S.O.S. came Friday in an ominous report from PJM Interconnection, one of the nation’s largest grid operators.

The PJM report forecasts power supply and demand through 2030 across the 13 eastern states in its territory covering 65 million people. Its top-line conclusion: Fossil-fuel power plants are retiring much faster than renewable sources are getting developed, which could lead to energy “imbalances.” That’s a delicate way of saying that you can expect shortages and blackouts.

PJM typically generates a surplus of power owing to its large fossil-fuel fleet, which it exports to neighboring grids in the Midwest and Northeast. When wind power plunged in the Midwest and central states late last week, PJM helped fill the gap between supply and demand and kept the lights on.

That’s why it’s especially worrisome that PJM is predicting a large decline in its power reserves as coal and natural-gas plants retire. The report forecasts that 40,000 megawatts (MW) of power generation—enough to light up 30 million households—are at risk of retiring by 2030, representing about 21% of PJM’s current generation capacity.

Most projected power-plant retirements are “policy-driven,” the report says. For example, the steep costs of complying with Environmental Protection Agency regulations, including a proposed “good neighbor rule” that is expected to be finalized next month, will force about 10,500 MW of fossil-fuel generation to shut down.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/25/why-bother/

To what purpose? That is the question of each individual life; one that is asked at least 8 billion times a day. Said in a less cosmetic manner: why bother?

The answer is visible in the way that each of us lives. The religious among us may strive to meet the commandments of our faiths, where our failures may be more visible than our successes, but at least there is a theme to our lives. 

Some of us follow our own codes of conduct. This can be interesting to observe, and perhaps more exciting in outcome, but it’s sometimes dangerous. Some have secular philosophies as broadly encompassing as most religions. These can be very persuasive to the bewildered and to those who have lost faith when an older belief has failed. 

There are many who simply follow others, letting someone else determine their course in life. This, of course, is the way of children. And there are always some who follow impulse, or the corporal demands of hunger, shelter, pain and pleasure. These are often the first victims of circumstance.

To this mix of philosophies, now there is an added ingredient, the nature of which has only just been plumbed, and that only at the shallow end. Those who say that there is nothing new under the sun ought to take notice. Artificial intelligence—AI—is not only something mankind has not encountered before, but something that offers new perspectives on the human predicament. 

For instance, what would be the moral philosophy of such machine intelligence? Is preservation a matter of importance when a specific device can be exactly replicated? What part does identity play for a contrivance that can add to its very being as easily as plugging in an extra hard drive? Meanwhile, human beings cannot change the genetic code that drives us. 

Into this brave new world we now go. Efficiency has already been set as the standard measure. We have been chasing that chimera for centuries now. Speed is also a mark of distinction. Cost is certainly a criterion. And it appears already that the mere human being is not up to snuff. 

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/25/bidens-ukraine-serenade/

Once again, Elon Musk nailed the zeitgeist, or a least a hefty portion of it, in a meme he tweeted. The image shows a soda dispenser. Two spigots are visible, blue on the left, red on the right. The index and middle fingers of someone’s right hand are pushing buttons to dispense blue and red fluid, respectively, into a single cup. A label on the left dispenser reads, “Laughing at WWIII memes.” On the right, the label reads, “Kinda being worried about WWIII.” Is there any sane person who, contemplating what is happening in Ukraine, does not share that ambivalence? 

Until recently, worries about nuclear Armageddon seemed so 1950s and ’60s. Ancient history. The era of “duck and cover.” That “public service” film started life in earnest but in time became a joke. A comment on an internet posting of the clip summed up the attitude: “When I watched this film in grade school in the ’50s, I believed I’d soon be dead, crispy-fried. I just watched again here and laughed so hard I couldn’t finish.”

Why the laughter? Partly because everyone realizes that crouching under a desk with your hands over your head will not afford much protection against a nuclear blast. (Hence the frequent, somewhat rude addendum to the precautionary instructions: “Crouch down under your desk; put your head between your legs; kiss your ass goodbye.”)

Decades went by. There was no nuclear attack. Therefore there would never be a nuclear attack. That was the unspoken if faulty logic. 

There are several different currents of thought and sentiment that make up the dominant consensus. One flowed from the doctrine of deterrence and “mutually assured destruction.” That seems to have worked for decades, bolstering both faith in the doctrine and the widespread forgetfulness about the stakes behind the policy. 

At the same time, critics have pointed out that “MAD” was an appropriate acronym for a doctrine that seriously contemplated incinerating tens or hundreds of millions of people. Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film “Dr. Strangelove” (with its biting subtitle “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”) gave a darkly humorous voice to that recognition. Most people, I suspect, are divided in their minds, recognizing the potential enormity of the doctrine while appreciating the wisdom of Benjamin Jowett’s comment that “Precautions are always blamed. When successful, they are said to be unnecessary.”

https://www.city-journal.org/html/tomorrow%E2%80%99s-wars-13258.html

Can big battles, then, haunt us once more? If the European Union were to dissolve and return to a twentieth-century landscape of proud rivals, or if the former Soviet republics were to form a collective resistance to an aggrandizing Russia (as they did for much of the nineteenth century), or if the North Koreans, Pakistanis, or Chinese were to gamble on an agenda of sudden aggression (as they have on previous occasions when they were confident of achieving political objectives), then we might well see a return of decisive battles. The U.S. military still prepares for all sorts of conventional challenges. We keep thousands of tanks and artillery pieces in constant readiness, along with close-ground support missiles and planes, in fear that the People’s Army of Korea might try to swarm across the Demilitarized Zone into Seoul, or that the Chinese Red Army might storm the beaches of Taiwan.

Waterloos or Verduns may revisit us, especially in the half-century ahead, in which constant military innovation may reduce the cost of war, or relegate battle to the domain of massed waves of robots and drones, or see a sudden technological shift back to the defensive that would nullify the tyranny of today’s incredibly destructive munitions. New technology may make all sorts of deadly arms as cheap as iPods, and more lethal than M-16s, while creating shirts and coats impervious to small-arms fire—and therefore making battle cheap again, uncertain, and once more to be tried. Should a few reckless states feel that nuclear war in an age of antiballistic missiles might be winnable, or that the consequences of mass death might be offset by perpetuity spent in a glorious collective paradise, then even the seemingly unimaginable—nuclear showdown—becomes imaginable.

In short, if the conducive political, economic, and cultural requisites for set battles realign, as they have periodically over the centuries, we will see our own modern version of a Cannae or Shiloh. And these collisions will be frightening as never before.