RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/11/new-confessionalism/

Hardly a week goes by without some famous person or other revealing one detail or other of his disreputable personal life, whereupon there is an outpouring of praise for his candour and an avalanche of similar confessions. We have given up fortitude and replaced it with psychobabble.

Dr Christina Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault when he was seventeen and she was fifteen years old, initially claimed that a fear of flying made it difficult for her to come to Washington to testify. It emerged, however, that she flew regularly to places as far apart as Tahiti and Delaware.

President Trump mocked her claim to suffer from fear of flying. I am not sure that it is the place of a president to mock a citizen of his country in this fashion, but I couldn’t help smiling nonetheless. “I’m no psychology professor,” he wrote, “but it does seem weird to me that someone could have a selective fear of flying. Can’t do it to testify but for vacation, well it’s not a problem at all.”

I was familiar with this selective type of fear from my medico-legal practice. People would claim to have been rendered agoraphobic by some negligent act or omission such that they could no longer leave the house and go to work, and therefore were entitled to large sums in compensation, but when I examined their medical records I would discover that they had been immunised against yellow fever for a holiday in Brazil. The man in the street might think that this discovery would have put paid to the claim. If you can leave your home to go to Brazil (64,000 murders last year), surely you can catch the Number 17 bus to go to the office twenty-five minutes away?

But the man in the street would be wrong. The apparent discrepancy would be explained away by a psychologist, and this is precisely what a psychologist did in the case of Dr Blasey Ford. He said that it was not uncommon for a fear of flying to wax and wane according to destination. In other words (though he did not pronounce them), it was the destination, not the flying, that created the anxiety. But oddly enough courts never seemed to draw this conclusion, perhaps because it would have threatened the lucrative livings provided by the tort system. That is why practically no claim was too outrageous to be entertained.

Gender neutral language and pronouns?

What have we come to? Will the classic musical “Guys and Dolls” have to change its title to “Zeys and Shims”????

Will we no longer hear the wonderful “There is Nothing Like a Dame” from South Pacific? Instead “There is Nothing Like a Hir” ????

And what about “I Enjoy Being a Girl”???? It will definitely be banned…buy your Peggy Lee copy now.

I’m a girl and by me that’s only great
I am proud that my silhouette is curvy
that I walk with a sweet and girlish gait
With my hips kind of swivelly and swervey
I’m strictly a female female
And my future I hope will be
In the home of a brave and free male
who’ll enjoy being a guy, having a girl like me.

Oh Puleez!!!!rsk

“I knew by the time I was eight that I didn’t want to be a boy,” says Melissa. “But I didn’t know what I wanted to be.” Born in a provincial English town in the early 1970s and brought up by evangelical Christians, the boy had never heard of a transsexual (a term that was widely used in the decades before “transgender” entered common usage in the 1990s). As for gay men, “they were all going to hell.” As soon as he could, he moved to London and “experimented,” presenting himself as a man at work and a woman in the evenings. In the early 2000s, his gender dysphoria—the distress caused by the feeling that your body is the wrong sex—came to a head. “The thought of being buried as an old man became simply unbearable.”

But even as Melissa came to that bleak realization, a new future for her was opening up. Britain, like many other countries, was planning to grant gender-dysphoric people a route to legal recognition as members of the opposite sex. Under the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) of 2004, after a psychological evaluation and two years presenting themselves in their preferred sex role, they could change the sex on their birth certificates. Melissa, who takes female hormones and has undergone surgery to refashion her genitals into a female form, is now legally a woman. “People take me for what they see,” she says. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

The motive for such laws was largely compassion. Gender dysphoria was viewed as a rare and distressing condition that could be alleviated by accommodating sufferers as legal exceptions to the rules of biology. But a decade and a half later, a more radical notion is sweeping across the Western world, with English-speaking countries in the vanguard. The brainchild of a few sexologists, trans-activists and academics, it has spread via lobby groups and the internet, and on liberal campuses. It is now becoming consolidated in practice and codified into law, with profound consequences—not just for people who wish they had been born the opposite sex, but for everyone.

That notion is the deceptively simple, quasi-mystical idea that everyone is born with a “gender identity”—an innate sense of being a man or woman that usually, but not always, aligns with biological sex. If the two are in conflict, the person is “transgender” and it is their gender identity, not their biological sex, that indicates who they truly are. The theory has been expanded to include people who regard themselves non-binary, “agender,” gender-fluid or a host of other terms, meaning that they belong to neither sex or feel located at some indeterminate (and possibly shifting) point between the two. According to this theory, no one can determine a person’s gender identity except that person, and no one else can challenge it. As with religious belief, it is entirely subjective. A simple declaration—“gender self-identification”—is all it takes to override biology.

One consequence is a huge increase in the number of people who say they do not identify with their natal sex. In Britain, for example, since the GRA came into force, just 5,000 people have used its provisions. Now the government reckons that approximately 1% of the population is transgender—around 650,000 people.

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/topic/politics/

Let’s start with some brief statistics about the explosion of pornography online: porn sites receive more hits than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined – 35% of all downloads are porn related; 90% of boys and 60% of girls have seen internet porn before the age of 18; 83% of boys and 55% of girls have seen same-sex intercourse online; child-porn is one of the fastest growing businesses; pornography is a global $97 billion industry.

Now let’s go to the NYT article of Dec 4th detailing Sally Quin acting as hostess to Stormy Daniels at Politics & Prose, a Wash DC bookstore co-owned by a former Hillary adviser. The occasion was a coming-out party for the porn star’s new book, whose title I won’t mention, because unlike Sally and the NYT, I am averse to increasing the interest in pornography and the financial benefits to its performers and producers. But Sally and the Times go by the adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and Stormy was hailed by Ms. Quin as a woman who has “…turned ethics and values and morals around, upside down in this country. You – Stormy Daniels the porn star – are the one who is the ethical person.”

The Times didn’t stop there – its journalist went on to interview some in the audience: “attractive woman, I was hoping she might remove her clothes. Write that down,” by Dan Schwartz, 73, and Marjorie Perloff, 75 thought Stormy was “an articulate porn star, that’s what makes her special.” Some might claim the enormous size of her breast implants might be more responsible for that but Sally summed it up with her vote of approval: “I’ve watched Stormy’s porn and it’s really good.”

This little event attended by Washington liberals took place while the country is in spasms over male sexual harassment of females, toppling celebrities and moguls with charges dating back to the last century, agonizing over the supposed increase in rape and harassment on college campuses and castigating Victoria’s Secret for setting up beautiful women as unrealistic standard bearers for young women. It would take a psychiatrist to parse this cognitive dissonance but Sally and the people who agreed to be quoted were trounced by the reaction of the guest of honor herself whose comment was “how –cked up is that? Yo.” Indeed

https://www.city-journal.org/california-wild-fires

California was, until recently, clouded under a blanket of smoke for weeks. Stanford University, where I work, sent students and faculty home early for Thanksgiving. The campus is more than 200 miles southwest of the 150,000-acre Camp Fire that just incinerated the Sierra Nevada foothill town of Paradise, and yet the entire Bay Area has been buried under collateral haze for days. I am a fifth-generation native Californian and remember many horrific Sierra Nevada fires, but never anything remotely comparable to the blazes of 2018.

Here in Fresno County, in the San Joaquin Valley, positioned between the Coast Range and Sierra Nevada mountains, the stagnant air for weeks has remained as polluted as China’s. When the normal northerlies blew, we were smoked in from the Camp Fire, 250 miles to the north. When the rarer southerlies took over, some of the smoke from the 100,000-acre Woolsey fire in the canyons of Malibu arrived from 230 miles distant.

July and August were nearly as incendiary as November. The huge, 450,000-acre Mendocino County conflagrations, the horrific Shasta-area Carr fire (nearly a half-million acres), and the nearby Ferguson fire in the Madera foothills all combined to make the air nearly unbreathable for two months throughout the Central Valley. Yet Californians in the irrigated center of the state were the lucky ones, breathing smoke rather than seeing fires overwhelm their homes and communities.

What is going on in California? Governor Jerry Brown, most of the Democratic-majority state legislature, the academy, and the administrative state have rushed to blame man-made global warming for the undeniable dry spell from May to mid-November that turned mountain canyons into tinderboxes. Usually autumn rains keep hillsides wet enough to prevent sudden combustions when the late autumn winds kick up. Not this year. Yet, if California has been arid and rainless these past months, two years ago we experienced near-record snow and rain that started in early fall and continued into late spring. Last year, we saw near-normal levels of precipitation.

If our life-giving reservoirs of the state’s vast California Water Project and federal Central Valley Project are currently not full, it is mostly because millions of acre-feet of stored water were released to flow into the San Francisco Bay estuaries and the delta — contradicting most of the original mandates of the water projects of providing flood control, power generation, lake recreation, and irrigation for California residents. Our ancestors rightly had assumed that two-thirds of the state’s people would continue to live where one-third of the state’s precipitation fell, requiring vast water transfers aimed exclusively for municipal and irrigation needs, admittedly at the expense of nineteenth-century whitewater rivers, flood plains, and riparian landscapes. Protecting the delta smelt population in San Francisco Bay, or restoring ancient salmon runs in the San Joaquin River, were not the concerns of these farseeing water engineers, who never imagined that their envisioned third-generation water projects would either be cancelled outright or would fail to keep pace with California’s burgeoning growth.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/02/the-impending

“Unless or until social science shows a more robust and successful track record, it should be left to theoretical musings of its adherents. Applied social science, of course, should be avoided at all costs. For it is little more than tyranny by another name.”

There were approximately 2.5 million scientific papers published last year. Think about that. A researcher would have to read nearly 300 papers an hour, non-stop, just to keep up. And that is not accounting for the more than 50 million scientific papers that have been published since the 17th century. If the researcher somehow managed to read 600 papers an hour (that’s 10 scientific papers each minute) in order to catch up with the established scientific literature, it would still take him 20 years to consume all the papers written. Once again, this is assuming that he didn’t eat or sleep, and was somehow able to read and absorb 10 technical papers each minute.

Needless to say, the readership of any particular paper is abysmally low.

Now imagine taking the time to test and reproduce the results of each paper. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that scientific inquiry has suffered from a “reproducibility crisis” over the past few years. Some surveys have suggested that more than 70 percent of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments. In one of the largest replication studies conducted, 60 percent of psychology studies examined failed the reproducibility test. A research project attempting to replicate social science experiments failed eight out of 21 times to obtain any observed effects consistent with the original findings. These findings deliver a devastating blow to the credibility of the current literature in both the natural and social sciences.

In theory, science has mechanisms in place to safeguard the knowledge it cultivates. But an overly bureaucratic and esoterically compartmentalized academia with perverse funding incentives will doom the practice of science no matter the methodological guardrails. These theoretical guardrails mean very little if they are not practically enforced. After all, the Soviet Union’s constitution had some beautiful, yet ignored, language about freedom of expression and the press.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/02/does-make-x-great-again

The short answer: Sometimes.

Here’s one example. By 527 A.D., the Eastern Roman Empire at Constantinople seemed fated to collapse like the West had a near century prior. The Persian Sassanids were gobbling up Byzantine lands in the east. Almost all of old Rome west of Greece had already been lost.

A growing and unsustainable administrative state exercised near control of Constantinople. Christianity was splintering into irrelevant factionalism. The law was a selective mess.

Justinian was certainly an unlikely emperor: an outsider of peasant stock from the northern frontier, an Eastern Latin rather than Greek speaker (and likely the last native Latin-speaking emperor), who would marry an infamous but shrewd courtesan, Theodora.

Yet in some 38 years of sometimes brutal rule, Justinian through the leadership of his brilliant generals, Belisarius and Narses, stabilized the eastern borders. He reclaimed for eastern Rome North Africa, Sicily, much of Italy, and some of Spain, often through small, well-organized armies and prudent alliances. He reformed the bureaucracy, systematized Roman law (Codex Justinianus), and built the magnificent Christian cathedral of Hagia Sophia—the largest church in the world for a thousand years.

Justinian might have done even far more had not a devastating three-year epidemic of bubonic plague spiked and wiped out a quarter of the empire’s population. The millions of losses created a permanent manpower shortage that left the Byzantines vulnerable to relentless Gothic enemies in Western Europe—and ultimately, a century and a half later, the conquests of new Islamic armies in the Middle East and North Africa.

The outsider Justinian’s agendas were those of many past reformers and restorers: apply the law equally and rationally, control government finances, restore the value of the currency, unite and inspire the population with iconic buildings and new infrastructure, reform and enhance religious practice, and offer predictable and steady rule.

He was a patriot, a patrician, a World War 2 hero, a capable diplomat, and a lucky man to whom too much is attributed. The Cold War ended because of President Reagan’s tough talk and policy on the “evil empire” and President Bush adroitly navigated the formalities.

While a candidate for the 1980 primaries he ridiculed Ronald Reagan’s economic policies by referring to them as “voodoo economics.” Inexplicably, Ronald Reagan chose his vitriolic and less than conservative opponent as his Vice President- thus paving the way for his election as President. When elected he appointed the odious James Baker as his Secretary of State. Baker was a harsh critic of Israel and an obsequious admirer of the Arabs, particularly the Saudis.

Furthermore the first President Bush broke his first campaign promise…”read my lips….no new taxes….” for which he lost re-election.

He was the second American President whose son also became President. However he was no John Adams and his son was no John Quincy Adams.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/opinion/antisemitism-europe-j

This is a good column marred by a specious claim : “The biggest threat is on the far right. This is the anti-Semitism of “Jews will not replace us” marchers in Charlottesville, Va., and the killer at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh who ranted against globalists and the “kike infestation.” It is the anti-Semitism of Representative Steve King of Iowa and of alt-right Reddit boards and some of Donald Trump’s supporters.”

“Paris. Toulouse. Malmo. Copenhagen. Brussels. Berlin.

For most people, they are lovely cities where you might happily take a holiday. But for the world’s Jews, they are something else, too. They are place names of hate.

Paris for us doesn’t mean just baguettes and Brie but also this year’s murder of a Holocaust survivor in her apartment in the 11th arrondissement and the 2015 siege of a kosher supermarket during which four people were killed. Toulouse is the place where in 2012 three Jewish children and a teacher were murdered at school.

Malmo doesn’t call to mind the Swedish coast so much as fire bombs planted outside a Jewish burial chapel. Copenhagen? Copenhagen is where a 37-year-old Jewish economist and voluntary security guard was gunned down as he was guarding a bat mitzvah at the city’s main synagogue in 2015. (The notion that synagogues require armed guards has long since stopped making us flinch.)

Brussels is where in 2014 four people were murdered at the Jewish museum. Berlin is a dateline we associate with news of people getting pummeled or harassed, for the sin of wearing a kippah or speaking Hebrew.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/29/is-there-

President Trump’s challenges are not really his economic policies and foreign affairs agendas. For the most part, they are supported by the American people and are resulting in prosperity at home and security abroad.

The economy continues to deliver near-record-low unemployment, wage gains, strong growth and unmatched energy production.

No nation can remain sovereign and secure with insecure borders. There are few ways to stop massive illegal immigration other than building a wall, insisting on employer sanctions and recalibrating legal immigration to be measured, diverse and meritocratic.

For all the hysteria over Trump’s foreign policy, many observers quietly concede that the U.S. is far tougher on Vladimir Putin and Russia now than Obama was in 2016: stronger sanctions, more help to the Ukrainians and greater NATO expenditures.

America had reached a point of no return with China. It either had to renegotiate its enormous trade imbalances and confront regional Chinese aggressions or simply acquiesce to China’s agenda of predetermined global superiority. Yet there were few levers other than temporary trade tariffs to force China to trade equitably and to follow global commercial norms.

The status quo that Trump inherited with North Korean nuclear-tipped intercontinental missiles was an unsustainable proposition. So was an Iran deal that would have guaranteed eventual Iranian nuclear capability.

Yet Trump cannot consistently reach 50 percent approval in the polls. And, like most presidents, he experienced a rebuke in the House during his first midterm elections.